Product Description: Tradition is a central concept in the social sciences, but it is commonly treated as unproblematic. Dr. Boyer insists that social anthropology requires a theory of tradition, its constitution and transmission. He treats tradition "as a type of interaction which results in the repetition of certain communicative events," and therefore as a form of social action...read more

Product Description: Why do people have religious ideas? And why thosereligious ideas? The main theme of Pascal Boyer's work is that important aspects of religious representations are constrained by universal properties of the human mind-brain. Experimental results from developmental psychology, he says, can explain why certain religious representations are more likely to be acquired, stored, and transmitted by human minds...read more

Draws on research from anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary biology to explain the origins of religion and human religious thought, offering a scientific explanation who what religious feeling is really about and where it comes from. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Product Description: How are religious ideas presented, acquired and transmitted? Confronted with religious practices, anthropologists have typically been content with sociological generalizations, informed by vague, intuitive models of cognitive processes...read more