Antistructure and the Roots of Religious Experience

Abstract

The cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion offer a standard model of religious representations, but no equivalent paradigm for investigating religiously interpreted altered states of consciousness (religious ASCs). Here, I describe a neo-Durkheimian framework for studying religious ASCs that centralizes social predictive cognition. Within a processual model of ritual, ritual behaviors toggle between reinforcing normative social structures and downplaying them. Specifically, antistructural ritual shifts cognitive focus away from conventional affordances, collective intentionality, and social prediction, and toward physical affordances and behavioral motivations that make few references to others' intentional states. Using synchrony and dance as paradigmatic examples of antistructural ritual that stimulate religious ASCs, I assemble literature from anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy of language to offer fruitful empirical predictions and opportunities for testing based on this framework. Among the empirical predictions is that antistructural ritual may provide for cultural change in religions when religions are construed as complex adaptive systems.

Forgiveness and the Naturalistic Approach to Religion: A Contextual View of the Problem of Evil

“…One might argue that for cohesion and cooperation to occur, the norms in the form of a punishment and reward system must have a sufficient impact on social cohesion. However, in the anthropological vision we are presenting, externally imposed obligations are a necessary condition for building social relations, but not a sufficient one (Wood 2020). From the point of view of morality, our relationships do not merely function in terms of punishment and reward.…”

Autism and Religion

“…Through these embodied spiritual experiences, one can attain an “anti-structural” state of consciousness that facilitates social bonding. Thus, ToM plays a role in religious belief and practice related to social synchronization during altered states of consciousness [ 66 , 67 , 68 ].…”