Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission

Religions_whatever else they may be_are configurations of cultural information reproduced across space and time. Beginning with this seemingly obvious fact of religious transmission, Harvey Whitehouse goes on to construct a testable theory of how religions are created, passed on, and changed. At the center of his theory are two divergent ’modes of religiosity: ’ the imagistic and the doctrinal

Harvey Whitehouse is professor of anthropology and director of postgraduate studies in the Faculty of Humanities at Queen’s University Belfast. He is co-editor, with Luther H. Martin, of the AltaMira ’Cognitive Science of Religion Series’. His previous books include Inside the Cult: Religious Innovation and Transmission in Papua New Guinea (1995, OUP), Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity, (2000, OUP), and The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology versus Ethnography (2001 Berg).