Modern trail-blazers, 1950s-1990s: The slow Renaissance of science

The 1950s showed some signs of slow, scientific resurgence for the Humanities and social sciences, but the shared consensus of researchers highlighted in the previous paragraph remained largely unscathed.

which favoured environmental causes and their ontogenetic effects on newborns and infants [, and advanced] a nativist viewpoint: he posited that external stimuli were not sufficient to account for the acquisition of language, whose mastery and richness by infants rapidly exceed any possible received environmental information (Chomsky 1959). Thus, Chomsky hypothesized the existence of a Universal Grammar (UG), i.e. the innate knowledge of language as an independent mental module: cultural differences may shape the differential traits, but language domain and its complex rules in their entirety (grammar, syntax, etc.) are something that does not need to be taught to an infant.

Ambasciano 2016a: 168

Although initially based on rigid anti-evolutionary positions, Chomsky’s thesis was later reformulated to become a seminal theory in the newborn cognitive sciences (Ambasciano 2016a).

In the following years, steady advances in cybernetics fuelled a cross-disciplinary integration and an epistemological consilience between Artificial Intelligence, psycholinguistics, neuroscience and philosophy of mind. This fruitful collaboration resulted in a new scientific paradigm for cognitive sciences (Bechtel, Abrahamsen and Graham 2001). Mental mechanisms that process information in the brain slowly came back as the focus of scientific investigation. Two examples relevant to the study of religion and culture might suffice here (cf. Stausberg 2009 for a more comprehensive panorama). In 1975 French social and cognitive scholar Dan Sperber (1942—) proposed a critical re-evaluation of semiotics, that is, the study of symbols and other signs as vehicles of meaningful communication, anchoring mental mechanisms to cognitive psychology and thus moving away from the blank-slate paradigm and from the non- explanatory cultural reinterpretation of symbolism (Sperber 1975). Twenty years later, Sperber's book Explaining Culture collected articles published between the 1980s and the 1990s and offered a comprehensive scientific framework to study both human universals and the diffusion of ideas which proved highly influential: in brief, the transmission of ideas entails (a) the imperfect copy of the content, due to specific cognitive constraints, and (b) the shift of such content towards certain intuitive and stabilizing attractors (Sperber 1996). Sperber's thesis also built on massive modularity,

i. e. the idea that cognitive processing of information is due to a system of many specialized, encapsulated, domain-specific computational devices, which in turn built on further elaborations of Chomsky's UG (Barrett and Kurzban 2006: 631; cf. Ambasciano 2016a: 168-9; for a wider methodological description, see Sperber 2011).

In 1980, US anthropologist Stewart E. Guthrie (1941-) published a thought­provoking article entitled A Cognitive Theory of Religion' in which he proposed anthropomorphism, that is, the intuitive, inborn identification of human-like agentive intentions and actions in nonhuman environments, as the major trigger behind human reasoning in general, and religious thinking in particular, thus reviving Tylor's animism as an evolutionary strategy evolved to deal with potential threats and updating Frazer's repository of cross-cultural examples (Guthrie 1980). According to Guthrie, ‘ “Religion”, then, means applying models to the nonhuman world in whole or in part that credit it with a capacity for language (as do prayer and other linguistic, including some “ritual”, action) and for associated symbolic action (as do, e.g. sacrifice for rain and other “rituals”)' (Guthrie 1980: 189). With Guthrie's work the distinction between religious and nonreligious behaviour (such as the one posited by the very hypothesis of the homo religiosus) becomes cognitively useless: a better definition for our taxon would be homo semioticus, because we are bound by ‘nature and nurture to interpret and influence the world through language, [and thus] we search for signs, symbols and meanings everywhere' (Guthrie 1993: 198). Guthrie's theory, later expanded in a dedicated monograph (Guthrie 1993), provided the foundational stone for the cognitive science of religion (CSR), with religion intended as an aggregated system of many different components (i.e. social, cognitive, institutional, etc.) put together in distinctive ways in particular cultural and historical settings (cf. Whitehouse 2013a).

In the meantime, specific historico-religious attempts at scientific theorizing remained extremely rare while other approaches flourished (cf. Stausberg 2009: 8-9). Among the few forerunners, and apart from the names that I have already recalled in the previous chapter (e.g. J. Z. Smith's plea for numerical taxonomy dating from the late 1970s), at least the following scholars might be recalled here:

1.

2. US historian of religions William E. Paden (1939—) started in the late 1980s to update some of the classic notions of the Chicago School of the HoR as cultural and cognitive niche construction and imaginary world-making of H. sapiens in a way that closely resembled the proposals by White and Binford recalled above (i.e. religion as an evolutionary means of cultural adaptation and an ethological way of organizing human life; see Paden 2016; Ambasciano 2018a).

3. Swiss historian Walter Burkert (1931-2015) began to investigate the similarities between religious rituals and ethological behaviours from a sociobiological perspective in the mid-1990s. In particular, he focused his research on the cultural elaboration of an inborn primate heritage directed at managing social hierarchical relationships between dominant individuals and subordinates (Burkert 1996) - an approach independently adopted earlier by Culianu and recently by Hector A. Garcia (2015).

4. Around the same period, US historian of religions Luther H. Martin (1937-) started showing that evolutionary theory and the cognitive sciences might be successfully combined with the sociological devices of poststructuralism (in particular, Foucault’s) to provide a more comprehensive frame for the identification of power dynamics and Active kinship within religious groups (Martin 1997; L. H. Martin 2014; Martin and Wiebe 2016).

All the aforementioned scholars outgrew the antireductionistic d iktat of the HoR and moved away from the phenomenological focus on belief, and thus remained more or less isolated in their field.

culture is the manufactured product of evolved psychological mechanisms situated in individuals living in groups. Culture and human social behavior is complexly variable, but not because the human mind is a social product, a blank slate, or an externally programmed general-purpose computer, lacking a richly defined evolved structure. Instead, human culture and social behavior is richly variable because it is generated by an incredibly intricate, contingent set of functional programs that use and process information from the world, including information that is provided both intentionally and unintentionally by other human beings.

Tooby and Cosmides 1992: 24; from Geertz 2015: 389

Psychology slowly re-entered the social sciences via biology, and evolution was again the main engine behind evolved cognitive abilities. Eventually, learning was decoupled from hard behaviourism, and deconstructed into a series of cognitive mechanisms: ‘under closer inspection, “learning” is turning out to be a diverse set of processes caused by a series of incredibly intricate, functionally organized cognitive adaptations, implemented in neurobiological machinery' (Tooby and Cosmides 1992: 123). By challenging directly the main assumptions of the behaviourist research programme, some of the liveliest actors on the humanistic stage were ready to welcome again new and updated scientific approaches.