Recent years have seen the growing promise of cultural evolutionary theory as a new approach to bringing human behaviour fully within the broader evolutionary synthesis. This review of two recent seminal works on this topic argues that cultural evolution now holds the potential to bring together fields as disparate as neuroscience and social anthropology within a unified explanatory and ontological framework.
Anthropologists and religious scholars have long debated the relationship between doctrinal Theravada Buddhism, so-called ‘animism’, and other folk practices in southeast Asian societies. A variety of models of this relationship have been proposed on the basis of ethnographic evidence. We provide the first psychometric and quantitative evaluation of these competing models, using a new scale developed for this purpose, the Burmese Buddhist Religiosity Scale. Having tested existing hypotheses in our first study (n = 2285) we formulated an alternative model, which was then tested in our second study (n = 3377). We argue that this model provides support for a two-dimensional distinction between great and little traditions, shedding light on decades-old theoretical debates. Far from being in conflict, the transnational religious tradition of the literati and the variegated religious practices of locals appear to be reflected in two complementary dimensions of religiosity. This distinction has been heretofore neglected in psychometric research, but arguably merits attention beyond Buddhism, in the psychology of religion more generally. Our findings suggest that, insofar as research on religiosity relies on doctrinal pronouncements denigrating little traditions as mere superstition, it may be blinded to a crucial dimension of religious life.
Anthropologists and historians of religion have commonly contrasted "great" (literate, authoritative, and centrally regulated) traditions with "little" (popular, unauthorized, and locally variable) traditions. These two dimensions of doctrinal religion are thought to be a product of divergent patterns of learning and cultural transmission. It is common for the official representatives of doctrinal religions to portray the unauthorized practices of little traditions pejoratively as amoral superstitions. Here, we consider an alternative theory, that great and little traditions are a product of distinct forms of cooperation: the one focused on loyalty to large-scale categories evolving via cultural group selection, the other focused on advancing the interests of kin-based relational ties evolving via intra-group selection. To investigate this theory further, we carried out a series of studies with followers of great and little traditions within Burmese Theravada Buddhism, showing overall that great tradition affiliation involves stronger alignment with categorical large-scale groups, while little tradition affiliation involves stronger alignments with relational kin-based groups. We propose an empirically-grounded general theory of the evolutionary processes and psychological mechanisms underlying the bifurcation between great and little traditions in the world's doctrinal religions.
Here, we present two case studies which combine ethnographic fieldwork with quantitative methods to describe religious behaviour in two ecologically valid settings. Case Study 1 describes the use of mixed methods to explore whether different types of supernatural agents are associated with different categories of moral transgression in Burma, a syncretic and multi-religious environment which naturally lends itself to this question. In this case study, ethnography plays a key role in designing appropriate questionnaire measures, generating hypotheses, and interpreting the behaviour of experimental participants. Case Study 2 describes the use of mixed methods to investigate the interrelationships between religious scandals and the emergence of ex-Catholicism in Ireland, a country noted for its recent and rapid secularization. Here, ethnography plays a key role in elucidating the limitations of early experimental designs and generating further hypotheses, while surveying in turn addresses issues of representativeness in the fieldwork. Together, these case studies serve to illustrate a number of advantages and challenges that come with adopting a mixed methods approach. We close by outlining four reasons for mixing qualitative and quantitative methods when studying religious cognition in the field, using the case studies above as examples. These are: 1) methodological triangulation, 2) assessment of instruments and procedures, 3) qualitative/quantitative iteration, and 4) capturing the current context in scenarios where existing ethnographic research is sparse or deficient.
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