Download Reason and Belief in the Societies of Knowledge

Reason and Belief in the Societies of Knowledge
Barcelona, 5th - 6th July 2011
Place
Laboratori d’Antropologia Social
1st Floor. Facultat de Geografia i Història.
Universitat de Barcelona
C. Montalegre, 6
08001 Barcelona
Scientific Committee
Carles Salazar (University of Lleida) [email protected]
Joan Bestard (University of Barcelona) [email protected]
Gerard Horta (University of Barcelona) [email protected]
Maria Coma (University of Barcelona) [email protected]
Participants
Michael Blume [email protected]
Postdoctoral research fellow in Religious Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Friedrich-SchillerUniversity Jena. Research interests: comparative study of religion; evolutionary approaches to religion.
Simon Coleman [email protected]
Professor of Religious Studies at the Jackman Humanities Institute of the University of Toronto.
Research interests: evangelical and charismatic Christianities; religion in mega-cities; creation science;
pilgrimage; chaplaincies and intersections between religious and medical discourses; ritual, language,
aesthetics, material culture; intersections and tensions between religious and political discourse.
Tom Inglis [email protected]
Professor of Sociology at the University College of Dublin. Research interests: globalisation of Irish
society, particularly in terms of its influence on everyday life, identity, the realisation of self, and the way
in which the local interacts with the global; secularisation in Western society, particularly in terms of
developing a new theory, but also in terms of how it applies to contemporary Irish society.
Tim Jenkins [email protected]
Assistant Director of Research in the Study of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity of the University of
Cambridge. Research interests: European, particularly French and British, ethnography;
Anthropological Theory; Anthropology of Religion.
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Heonik Kwon [email protected]
Professor of Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Research interests: global
studies; comparative ethnographic knowledge; death rituals and politics of memory; religious norms in
political process and development; kinship in political history and theory, and the role of creative
cultural practice in conflict resolution.
Robert McCauley [email protected]
William Rand Kenan Jr. University Professor of Philosophy and Director, Center for Mind, Brain, and
Culture of the Emory University. Research interests: naturalistic approach to epistemology, the
philosophy of science, and the philosophy of psychology; psychological foundations of cultural forms;
cognitive foundations of religion and of religious ritual.
Marit Melhuus [email protected]
Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. Research interests: Morality, kinship,
religion, personhood, gender; legal anthropology, legislative processes; biopolitics, understandings of
nature; social change, anthropological theory and method, comparison, history.
João de Pina-Cabral [email protected]
Coordinator Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. Research
interests: the relation between symbolic thought and social power; family and kinship in a comparative
perspective; ethnicity in colonial and post-colonial contexts.
Roger Sansi-Roca [email protected]
Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Goldsmiths College of London. Research interests: AfroBrazilian religion, art, and cultural policy in Bahia; the notion of the fetish and sorcery in the Black
Atlantic; Contemporary art and the politics of cultural production in Barcelona.
Jesper Sørensen [email protected]
Associate Professor at the Department of the Study of Religion of the Aarhus University, Denmark.
Research interests: cognitive science of religion, mainly focusing on ritual behavior in general and
magic in particular; cognitive aspects of charisma and religious authority.
Program
The purpose of this seminar is to reflect upon the possible articulations and/or contradictions between
religion and scientific culture that surface in the so-called ‘knowledge societies’. Our hypothesis is that
scientific knowledge has become increasingly relevant in the ordinary life of many populations, beyond
the institutional public spaces where it traditionally developed. We wish to identify the possible
tensions that this new development of scientific knowledge is likely to produce as regards modes of
thinking that have historically been hegemonic both in public spaces and individual consciousness,
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specifically, religious beliefs. Thus, our purpose is to flesh out this reflection with theoretical and
ethnographic researches on different manifestations of scientific and religious cultures in the
contemporary world. Instances of these manifestations would be the persistence of traditional forms
of religiosity in the private sphere in contexts wherein the public space has been secularised, the
articulation of religious knowledge and new technologies of communication, the relationship between
religious morality and new family forms and family ideologies, moral dilemmas that originate from the
use of certain techno-scientific knowledges such as biotechnology (genetic engineering, assisted
reproduction, etc.), new conceptualisations of the person (birth, death, identity, etc.) that emerge from
scientific researches (mapping of the human genome, etc.) and their relationship with traditional
religious conceptions. All in all, the object of this seminar is to hammer out a set of theoretical tools
that will enable us to rethink the concepts of religiosity, rationality and secularisation in our
contemporary world on the basis of concrete researches and the comparison of their results.
1st day: 05.07.2011
9:45-10:15 Presentation
Carles Salazar (University of Lleida)
10:15-11:00 Maturationally Natural Cognition Hinders Science and Facilitates Religion
Robert N. McCauley (Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, Emory University)
Natural cognition, which operates instantly, intuitively, and (largely) unconsciously, comes in two
varieties. Practiced naturalness concerns abilities resulting from extensive experience in some domain.
Maturational naturalness concerns cognition that arises spontaneously, that does not depend upon
instruction, artifacts, or culturally distinctive inputs, and that addresses fundamental problems for
survival. Maturationally natural cognition plays very different roles in science and religion, whether we
focus on their cognitive products or the cognitive processes each engages. Science’s cognitive
products reliably traffic in representations that are incompatible with maturationally natural cognition.
Science requires cognitive tools that are hard to acquire and employ, and maturationally natural
predilections persistently intrude in human judgement. By contrast, religious thought and action arise
as by-products of opportunistic cuing of maturationally natural dispositions, which motivate and
shape religious materials the world over. Thus, maintaining the social arrangements necessary for
science is difficult and expensive, and it poses no threat to religion’s persistence.
11:00-11:30 Discussion
11:30-12:00 Coffee break
12:00-12:45 Two realms, one winner? Scientific vs. Religious 'Knowledge' in Evolutionary
Perspective
Michael Blume (Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena)
Throughout the 20th century, evolutionary and religious explanations of life have mostly been
discussed as conflicting and exclusive. Even those models that tried to separate these perspectives
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into non-overlapping magisteria frequently indicated that religious lore would lose parts of its
functionality. But during the last years, new and interdisciplinary evolutionary studies of religiosity and
religions yielded empirical findings supporting a hypothesis first formulated by Friedrich August von
Hayek in 1982: Religious beliefs in superempirical agents may be adaptive even if they clearly conflict
with modern scientific knowledge. For example, religious demography has been able to explain a
central factor in the ongoing struggles between proponents of evolutionary theory and advocates of
religious creation mythologies in the US, Israel and other countries: Although Evolutionists
emphasizing empirical methodology tended to bring up far more scientific arguments, Creationists
believing in a God endorsing community and family life tended to bring up far more children. This
holds true even if other variables such as education, income or urbanization are controlled for. And the
philosophical weight of these findings is indicated by a central assumption of evolutionary theories of
cognition and evolutionary epistemology: All of our senses are assumed to have been evolved by
approximating aspects of reality, with “better” informations resulting in higher chances of survival and
reproduction. Therefore, recent evolutionary and cognitive studies indicate the need to reassess our
established perspectives on the functionality of scientific and religious ‘knowledge’.
12:45-13:15 Discussion
13:15-15:00 Lunch
15:00-15:45 Ritualized practice in an age of science
Jesper Sørensen (Aarhus University)
Many theories have prophesized the end of ‘religion’ and/or ‘magic’ as scientific progress expand
human control of its environment. Secularization hypotheses have claimed that religion in general
should decline in modernity, even if some aspects might remain as basic identity markers in globalized
world. Others, for instance Stark & Bainbridge, have argued that modernization will not influence
religion, as it is a so-called “general compensator” solving non-technological problems such as eternal
life. In contrast it was argued that magic, as a “specific compensator” addressing particular pragmatic
concerns, should decline as a result of technological control. In this paper I will argue that (a)
modernity brings new pragmatic dangers not easily fixed by technology; (b) that this elicit ritual
behavior; (c) that magic is therefore not a thing of the past, but a behavioral response grounded in
universal cognitive capacities; and (d) that focusing on cognition and concrete behavior will ground
competition / interaction between ‘magic’, ‘religion’ and ‘science’ in a institutional and contextual
framework related to the creation of knowledge, social status groups and control of human behavior.
15:45-16:15 Discussion
16:15-17:00 Superstition or the margins of belief
João de Pina-Cabral (University of Lisbon)
The concept of “belief” has always been taken seriously by anthropologists and philosophers;
nevertheless, it has led to a long series of perplexities. On the other hand, the concept of
“superstition” has simply been discarded as ethnocentric. The first has been pushed aside for its
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logical uncertainty; the second for its ethical uncertainty. Yet, the two concepts seem to be
surprisingly resilient in face of the continued exercise of anthropological questioning. Furthermore,
their capacity for survival appears to be connected precisely to that which connects them:
superstition is unfounded belief but the issue of the foundation of belief is at the centre of the
anthropological and philosophical perplexities that have haunted the concept of belief. If we follow the
well-trusted method of marginality to examine these concepts in the light of ethnographic research,
we might be able both to find new paths for the concept of belief and to find a safer place for
superstition at its margins.
17:00-17:30 Dicussion
17:30-18:15 Moral employments of scientific thought
Tim Jenkins (Jesus College, Cambridge)
Modern sciences share a number of characteristics concerning the kind of knowledge they produce,
the communities of scientists who produce such knowledge, and the relation of the motivation to
research to the discoveries made. From the social scientific point of view, the interesting question is
how the discoveries of science are recaptured by the categories of common sense, and put to work
in moral descriptions of the world, mappings that are very selective in which characteristics of
scientific practices they choose to notice. These ‘moral’ employments of science fall under two broad
heads. First, there are hybrids of various moral authorities – scientific and religious – that allow us to
offer a description of the historical development of ‘non-standard’ religious forms (Fundamentalisms,
New Religious Movements, New Age…) in the last century. And second, there is a spectrum of
literature, from Fantasy and Science Fiction to popular science, which plays on the same materials
and issues, again in a strictly time- and context-bound fashion. This latter material (which includes,
among others, Dawkins’ discussions of faith and science) may be said to represent an urban folklore,
and is both diffuse and influential.
18:15-18:45 Discussion
2nd day: 06.07.2011
10:15-11:00 The Social Life of Concepts: Public and Private ‘Knowledge’ of Scientific
Creationism
Simon Coleman (University of Toronto)
Our understanding of scientific creationism, and of the more recent development of ‘intelligent
design’, has been moulded largely by the intense public debates generated by these concepts. Social
scientific models of conflict between ‘science’ and ‘religion’ have been developed through observing
the resulting antagonism between religious and secular interest groups, particularly in the US. In this
paper, I look instead at the UK context, and at the understandings of scientific creationism held by
British evangelicals. Rather than focusing on instances of overt conflict between science and religion, I
begin my analysis by looking at creationism as an ‘everyday’ concept, integrated into congregational
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life and wider forms of worship, religious narrative and belief. I juxtapose such ‘everyday’ life of
creationism with its construction by its opponents, and argue that ironically it is often the secular
critics of creationist discourse who are moving it into public realms, indeed making it look more like
conventional ‘religion’ than evangelical believers themselves. How, then, as anthropologists are we to
analyse such debate, and the ‘social’ life of concepts relating to knowledge and belief?
11:00-11:30 Discussion
11:30-12:00 Coffe Break
12:00-12:45 The human embryo: human life/human being?
Marit Melhuus (University of Oslo)
While scientists are claiming the human embryo for research into what is presented as one of the
most promising fields in modern biomedicine – stem cell research – the embryo is being subjected to
philosophical, theological and ethical examination world wide. At issue is what kind of entity the
human embryo is – and hence what purposes it can be made to serve. Working at the interface
between politics, science and religion, the human embryo brings together opposing views, even belief
systems. In the Euro-American worldview, which draws largely on a Christian heritage, there appears
to be an exceptional pre-occupation with the embryo. So much so, that within contemporary
biomedicine and biopolitics, the embryo represents an especially controversial site. There are many
different voices that converge on the embryo and one challenge is to find adequate ways to do justice
to these different perspectives, while paying attention to the positions from which they emanate.
Another is to isolate relevant instances of convergence that are ethnographically revealing and in
some sense productive of meaning.
12:45-13:15 Discussion
13:15-15:00 Lunch
15:00-15:45 Religion, Magic and Practical Reason: Meaning and everyday life in
contemporary Ireland
Tom Inglis (University College, Dublin)
Everyday life is dominated by science and technology that emerges within an instrumental rationality
based on an interest in mastery and control of people, objects and the environment. Religion in the
West has been steadily removed from public life and has become confined to what is private and
individualistic (Hervieu-Leger 1990). And yet everyday life also revolves around a practical reason
(Sayer 2011) that emerges from a human need to share, care, and create meaning. They still use
language, symbols and icons from their cultural heritage, they still engage in practices, that are
outside the realm of logic, science and rationality but which provide meaning, comfort and
consolation. I will argue that magical thinking manifests itself in three main ways: (1) in the form of
devotional Catholicism, particularly in terms of religious experiences and seeking divine intervention
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through God and the saints, (2) in non-institutional forms of faith-healing beliefs and practices, and (3)
in superstitions.
15:45-16:15 Discussion
16:15-17:00 Vietnam War’s Wounds to the Soul Heonik Kwon (London School of Economics)
This paper examines the different ways in which the traumas of war are understood and publicly
recognized, with reference to the experience of the Vietnam War. In the United States, according to
Allen Young, this experience resulted in the rise of a powerful clinical paradigm known today as the
PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). In postwar Vietnamese society, however, the communal and
public actions relating to the wounds of war mainly concerned, rather than the somatic symptoms of
survivors, the sufferings that the souls of the tragic war dead were believed to endure in their
afterlives. This paper will consider these two radically divergent ways to conceptualize the wounds to
the human soul caused by modern warfare, asking what issues of comparative historical sociology
they raise.
17:00-17:30 Discussion
17:30-18:15 Do the Gods have a "Mind"? Bodies, Persons, and Knowledge in Candomblé.
Roger Sansi-Roca (Goldsmiths College, London)
In this paper I will address recent cognitive theories of religion, specially in relation to spirit possession
in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. In particular, I will address the contention that a certain theory of the
"mind" is at play in the phenomena of spirit possession. My certain argument is not just a criticism the
idea that Candomblé people have a theory of the mind. I will argue for an understanding of
“possession” not just as a “phenomenon”, but a life process, of which each event of possession is
just an instance. This is a process of knowledge (“deep knowledge”) in the mysteries of the religion,
but also a process of becoming, in which the person and the spirit are increasingly indistinguishable.
In this sense, in Candomblé “knowing” and “being” are two sides of the same coin.
18:15-18:45 Discussion
18:45-19:30 General discussion
21:00 Dinner
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