Capturing Imagination: A Cognitive Approach to Cultural Complexity

Abstract

With few exceptions, it has been assumed that the production of a generalizing anthropological theory of human cognition must necessarily entail a reduction of ethnographic complexity. No case‐centred analysis has been offered to show that a cognitive approach to cultural complexity is possible. In this article, I want to show that a different cognitive perspective can improve our understanding of ethnographic facts and help us critically to revise a number of traditional anthropological concepts. In order to do so, I will discuss the example of a messianistic religious movement born among the Western Apache of San Carlos and White Mountain (Arizona).

Entre a infância e o sonho: pedagogia guna da autonomia (Panamá)

“…Boyer, 1994;Sperber, 1985Sperber, , 1996. A propagação de uma ideia cultural ou "representação saliente" (Severi, 2004) depende de sua inserção em um quadro contraintuitivo de comunicação.…”

The friend, the enemy, and the anthropologist: hostility and hospitality among the Parakanã (Amazonia, Brazil)

“…The song he chants is the dreamed ‘enemy's double’ ( akwawa ‐ ra'owa ) and the vocal act a homicide. In the synthetic language of the ritual, the terms of the predatory relation merge: the pairings of killer‐victim and hunter‐game are amalgamated in a single person, producing a complex ritual personage (Houseman & Severi 1998; Severi 2004).…”

Liquid sight, thing‐like words, and the precipitation of knowledge substances in Cuban espiritismo

“…The anthropology of religion has recently devoted some much‐needed attention to the question of learning (e.g. Barrett ; Berliner & Sarró ; Boyer , Luhrmann ; McCauley & Lawson ; Severi ; Whitehouse ), reviving, albeit with a predominantly cognitive slant, Fredrik Barth's call for a sociology of knowledge (), articulated in his classic work on Papua New Guinean rituals and cosmology (). As David Berliner and Ramon Sarró note, the question of how knowledge transmission occurs, in religious contexts, is far from clear; certainly, the ‘acquisition’ of religion ‘is not merely a cold‐blooded technical process of cognitive downloading’ (: 10), but indeed involves a variety of socialization processes, contexts, cues, as well as competences.…”