For decades, economists paid minuscule attention to culture, but this is changing rapidly. One view of culture emphasizes “values that ethnic, religious, and social groups transmit fairly unchanged from generation to generation” (Guiso et al., 2006: 23), and one way to model such values is to enrich the arguments of an actor’s utility function to include actions by others in the actor’s social ...

In his article "Radical Theology and the Reorganization of the US-American Religious System," Philippe Codde uses the example of the highly popular movement of death-of-God theology in the 1960s to demonstrate the wide applicability for cultural research of Itamar Even-Zohar's polysystem theory and to illustrate the validity of Even-Zohar's assertion that peripheral elements in any system can y...

Increasing evidence suggests that religious practice induces systematic biases in attentional control. We used Navon's global-local task to compare attentional bias in Taiwanese Zen Buddhists and Taiwanese atheists; two groups brought up in the same country and culture and matched with respect to race, intelligence, sex, and age. Given the Buddhist emphasis on compassion for the physical and so...

the religious testaments and presentday statements on human personality. The schism is only partly due to the need for specialisation of knowledge, and even as late as the twelfth century Moses Maimonides, living in Spain and writing in Arabic, was physician, philosopher, mathematician, and biblical commentator. The ghettos in Central Europe, in contrast, were created in a culture which separat...

This paper argues that our sociological explanations of the historical advent of gender stratification in the Occident has given too much attention to techno-economic causes and too little attention to religious, cultural and ideological causes. Evidence for this claim is taken from archeology, mythology and anthropology for the relevant historical period (4500 and 3000 BC) in Eurasia. I assert...

Religious beliefs and institutions are central to Senegalese society and culture, and their outward and visible manifestations are omnipresent. A 2010 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study found that 98 percent of Senegalese surveyed said that religion is ‘very important’ in their daily lives.1 Contemporary roles of religious leaders and communities are intricately interwoven into society...