Ritual Syntax and Cognitive Theory

Buddhist Ritual from Syntax to Cognition: Insight Meditation and Homa

The concept of “ritual syntax” is developed by relating it to cognitive studies of ritual, providing a fuller theoretical basis. Developing theoretical grounding requires differentiating between the members of five pairs of concepts: production is not the same as analysis, syntax is not the same as semantics, ritual is not the same as the mental, cognition is not the same as the mental, and syn...

The Importance of Being “ Ernest ”

1. Introduction In a scene in " The Importance of Being Earnest " Oscar Wilde pinpoints an array of properties of religious ritual systems that cognitive theorizing about religious rituals, viz., the theory of religious ritual competence, has subsequently systematized (Lawson and McCauley 1990; McCauley and Lawson 2002). To the amusement of hundreds of audiences, Wilde's play also identifies a ...

The Cognitive Representation of Religious Ritual Form : A Theory of Participants ' Competence with their Religious Ritual Systems

Cognition, Religious Ritual, and Archaeology

1 Introduction The emergence of cognitive science over the past thirty years has stimulated new approaches to traditional problems and materials in well-established disciplines. Those approaches have generated new insights and reinvigorated aspirations for theories in the sciences of the socio-cultural (about the structures and uses of symbols and the cognitive processes underlying them) that a...

The Position of Myth in Frazer’s Anthropological Theory

George James Frazer (1854-1941), the spiritual father of myth-ritual school, was bred up in the British tradition of empiricism. Believing in the evolutionary process of culture, Frazer mainly focused his attention on explaining such epistemic forms of thought as magic, religion and science. Accordingly, while interpreting the processes through which magic leads to religion and finally evolves ...