Harvey Whitehouse
Harvey Whitehouse is a professor of anthropology and director of postgraduate studies in the Faculty of Humanities at Queen's University, Belfast. Whitehouse’s early career included research on a “cargo cult” in Papua, New Guinea. More recently, he has focused his research on cognition and culture, and in 2004, he set up the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University Belfast. Whitehouse served as the Director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture until 2006. He has also established a corresponding institute at Oxford, the Centre for Anthropology and Mind. Professor Whitehouse has developed a well-cited theory of “modes of religiosity” that has undergone critical evaluation and analysis by scholars of various disciplines, including anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and cognitive scientists.
Major Works
Inside the Cult: Religious Innovation and Transmission in Papua New Guinea (1995)
Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity (2000)
Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission (2004)
The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology Versus Ethnography (2001; ed.)
Ritual and Memory: Towards a Comparative Anthropology of Religion (2004; ed. with James A. Zaidlow)
Theorizing Religious Past: Archaeology, History, and Cognition (2004; ed. with Martin H. Luther)
Mind and Religion: Psychological and Cognitive Foundations of Religiosity (2005; ed. with Robert N. McCauley)
Quotation
"Modes of religiosity constitute tendencies towards particular patterns of codification, tranmission, cognitive processing, and political association. The imagistic model consists of the tendency, within certain small-scale or regionally fragmented ritual traditions and cults, for revelations to be transmistted through sproadic collective action, evoking multivocal iconic imagery, encoded in memory as distinct episodes and producing highly cohesive and particularistic social ties. By contrast, the doctrinal mode of religiosity consists of the tendency, within many regional and world religions, for revelations to be codified as a body of doctrines, transmitted through routinized forms of worship, memorized as part of one's 'general knowledge,' and producing large anonymous communities. These fundamentally contrasting dynamics are often to be found within a single religious tradition, where they may be associated more or less strongly with different categories or strata of religious adherent. For instance, the religious practices of social elites and literati may have a noticeably 'doctrinal' character, whereas 'little traditions' (Redfield 1955) and 'cults of the little community' (Werbner 1977) are often more distinctively 'imagistic.' However pronounced the tendencies toward one or other mode of religiosity may be within a particular field of religious activity, they remain tendencies and nothing more."
Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity
Select Web Resources on Whitehouse
Faculty Page at the Institute of Cognition and Culture
The Cognitive Parsing Model: Nuclear and Global Psychological Systems in the Transmission of Culture (.pdf)
Journal of Cognition and Culture (co-edited by Whitehouse)