New item in the Archive for Religion and Cognition:


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Author(s): Lisdorf, Anders
Title: Acting as a Way of Thinking
Category: conference paper
Length:
Keywords: Ritual, Divination, Embodied Cognition, Performance

Abstract: Performance is a central factor in religions around the world,
especially religious ritual. This has been duly noted in anthropological
treatments. The basic question which has baffled anthropologists, is why perform
at all? Why not just say it? The traditional textual paradigm has answered it
with a focus on the meaning or “utterances” produced in ritual, thus reducing
ritual to just another “code” among others that express a symbolic meaning
derived from the cultural system. This does not explain why it should be
performed, since it is just another way of speaking.
I would like to suggest that part of the explanatory gap of why rituals are
performed as opposed to read or spoken, can be filled by realising that ritual
performance also achieves cognitive effects, that could not have been achieved
through mere talking. This will be done by considering the case of the most
obviously information-procesing type of ritual : divinatory ritual, whose main
function is to produce knowledge of what is hidden. By integrating the new
insights it can hopefully shed new light on the performative processes involved
in religious ritual.

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