2024-03-19T09:02:54Zhttps://keep.lib.asu.edu/oai/requestoai:keep.lib.asu.edu:node-1292412021-12-09T18:34:17Zoai_pmh:all129241
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.30253
<p>Cassell, Paul (2014). Rappaport, Revisited. METHOD & THEORY IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION, 26(4), 417-438. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341322</p>
10.1163/15700682-12341322
0943-3058
1570-0682
2013-11-30
27 pages
eng
Cassell, Paul
Barrett, The Honors College
This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Brill Academic Publishers for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in THEORY IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION, 26(4), 417-438. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341322
<p>In Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Roy Rappaport misses an opportunity to more tightly theorize the synergistic relationship between concepts of the divine, the psyches of ritual participants, and the adaptive dynamics of religious sociality. This paper proposes such a theory by drawing on implicit features of Rappaport’s account, fulfilling his goal of a “cybernetics of the holy.” I argue that concepts of the divine, when made authoritative for participants through ritual, have three important effects: they invite intense and meaningful reconstructions of personal identity according to paradigmatic examples; they act as a form of encoded social memory by organizing human relationship according to a “spiritual map”; and they provide the cognitive framework that make religious community organization robust, adaptive, and reproductive. We can characterize divine concepts as “specified absences” that ground each of these effects and link them together in a mutually-reinforcing set.</p>
Text
Rappaport, Revisited
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