Comparative Religion

This dissertation analyzes the pluralist religious claims that ethnically and racially diverse Muslim American communities make on the public and political culture of Hamtramck, Michigan. These claims include appeals for recognition, such as in a campaign for municipal approval to issue the call to prayer. They involve bids for resources, such as the use of public funds to establish alternative Muslim majority public education institutions. They entail struggles for representation, such as political interventions into LGBTQ-rights debates to safeguard a "traditional" moral order in the city. The study also examines how transnational Islamic frameworks for organizing gender and public space influence the civic engagement strategies of South Asian and Arab American Muslim women respectively, in ways that sometimes challenge dominant gendered spatial norms. With this, the study explores women's leadership in mosques and religious study circles, examining how gender and generation shape female religious authority, and also present opportunities for women to cross racial, class, and ethnic lines within the city. Postulating a charged, dynamic and mutually constitutive connection between the development of religious, racial, and ethnic identities and the production urban space, the study analyzes how individual and collective forms of minority identity find expression in urban public and political projects, and how liberal secular frameworks in turn condition the production of minority religious sensibilities, affiliations, and practices in American cities. In analyzing how these dynamics shape civic life and local politics, the study approaches Hamtramck as a "post-secular city," or a zone of xi interchange and heterogeneity in which religious, secular, and humanistic frames of reference converge to configure new possibilities for urban change. This work advances interdisciplinary scholarship on how religion impacts the civic engagement of immigrants and minorities; on how gender systems are preserved, challenged, or transformed in migration; and on how diverse communities living in close proximity negotiate conflicting ideas about the common good. xii

Based on fieldwork in a small Michigan city, this study examines a contestation over the right for Muslims to broadcast the Islamic call to prayer, or adhan, into the streets. At stake in such contestations over public space is a struggle over conflicting citizenship agendas, or ideological formations seeking to advance particular models for good citizenship and the acceptable integration of minorities. Some Hamtramck citizens who identified themselves as interfaith actors advocated a citizenship agenda to support the call to prayer based on a material and spatial conception of shared civic culture that challenged assumptions about political differences between religious communities. To forward these aims, interfaith actors organized public ritual events that offered opportunities for visceral and experiential investments into the sights, sounds, and ceremonies of Hamtramck’s religiously diverse public arena. This strategy encouraged people to a cross boundaries into previously exclusive religious spaces and presented opportunities to expand the cultural boundaries of municipal belonging.

In the weeks following the Orlando nightclub shooting on June 12, 2016, thousands of people across the United States took part in vigils to mourn the 49 victims. I attended a vigil in Kalamazoo, the Western Michigan city where I live and teach, a few days after the tragedy. As the sun set over a park in front of City Hall, several hundred people assembled to hear speeches from civic and religious leaders, to light candles and to recite the names of the dead. LGBTQ activist Jay Maddox addressed the crowd:

have argued that non-cultural regularities in how actions are conceptualized inform and constrain participants' understandings of religious rituals. This theory of ritual competence generates three predictions: 1) People with little or no knowledge of any given ritual system will have intuitions about the potential effectiveness of a ritual given minimal information about the structure of the ritual. 2) The representation of superhuman agency in the action structure will be considered the most important factor contributing to effectiveness. 3) Having an appropriate intentional agent initiate the action will be considered relatively more important than any speci c action to be performed.

The scholarly and eventually scientific study of religion comes with complicated origins and includes intricate multi-and interdisciplinary features. Historians, philosophers, theologians, psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists have all found "religion" to be a subject worthy of interpretation and explanation. The discipline of comparative religion developed within the context of theological schools but in the twentieth century broadened to include departments of religion within secular academic institutions. This essay will focus primarily on the relationship between comparative religion and the newly, but rapidly developing cognitive science of religion which was initially suggested in a secular academic context but soon attracted the attention of scholars in a number of disciplines such as cognitive anthropology and cognitive psychology and eventually evolutionary psychology. Recently neuroscientists have also joined the discussion. This essay will focus on the emergence of the cognitive science of religion by focusing on a series of questions, the first of these being… What problem was the discipline of comparative religion trying to solve? Every inquiry, whether scientific or not, begins with a puzzlement. In the case of the scientific study of religion from cognitive and evolutionary perspectives, the puzzlement was recognized long before scientifically minded scholars developed the means to solve it. The initial form of the problem emerged as soon as people, eons ago, recognized that certain forms of their own thought and behavior, which they took for granted, differed in both form and content from their

It has been said more than once that the past is gone for good and that the cognitive science of religion, at least in its experimental garb, is of little help in illuminating us about past religious thought and behavior because the subjects under consideration are dead. We are given a friendly reminder that we are anchored firmly in the present. At most we receive gracious permission to speculate. While there is some wisdom in this claim, I aim to show that the problems of studying the past experimentally are not insurmountable and, if pursued with dedication and integrity, promise interesting and even important knowledge. All experiments start with a problem that calls for a solution, a hypothesis to test, a protocol or procedure to test the hypothesis and a knowledge of statistics to evaluate the results. I will look at five disciplines that are relevant to the issue of studying the past. History, the study of information from the past, primarily texts, Archaeology, the study of artifacts from previous eras, Evolutionary Biology, the study of adaptations built in the past but relevant for the emergence of subsequent organisms, Paleontology and Geology, the study of the history of the earth as well as its interred inhabitants, and Astrophysics and Cosmology, the study of the very distant past including the origins of the universe. The light that strikes our eyes now from that shiny object in the sky may have begun its journey billions of years ago These disciplines, to a greater or lesser extent, employ rigorous and well-understood scientific methods. Even historians solidly in the humanities tradition have no qualms about

is well-known in rock-art circles as the author of a series of articles drawing on ethnographic material and shamanism (notably connected with the San rock art of southern Africa) to gain new insights into the Palaeolithic cave art of western Europe. Some 15 years ago, with Thomas Dowson, he proposed that Palaeolithic art owed its inspiration at least in part to trance experiences (altered states of consciousness) associated with shamanistic practices. Since that article appeared, the shamanistic hypothesis has both been widely adopted and developed in the study of different rock-art | traditions, and has become the subject of lively and sometimes . . heated controversy.

This study presents an attempt to integrate two theories about ritual: the theory that McCauley and Lawson developed in Bringing Ritual to Mind; Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms and the theory that Boyer and Lie´nardLie´nard presented in a target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 'Why ritualized behavior in humans? Precaution systems and action-parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals' and in another article published in the American Anthropologist, 'Whence collective rituals? A cultural selection model of ritualized behavior'. The two theories Cultural rituals present vexing problems for psychology and anthropology. Why are these forms of human behavior so ubiquitous? Even more enigmatic are religious rituals. In fact, are there such things as religious rituals? If so, what are they? Lawson and McCauley (1990) define religious rituals as cultural rituals in which social agents with special qualities play prominent roles. These agents are regarded as special because of some purported 'connection' to postulated supernatural entities such as gods, spirits, ancestors and the like. 1 (P. Lie´nardLie´nard), t.lawson@qub.ac.uk (E.T. Lawson).. 1 For a thorough analysis of the notion of counterintuitiveness and its relationship to superhuman beings, see Pyysiaïnen (2001). 0048-721X/$-see front matter Ó

Creative writing is a multifaceted endeavor requiring verbal skills, extensive content knowledge and the motivation to persist in spite of obstacles. In this chapter we focus particularly on creative writing in the form of science fiction and fantasy. We begin with a presentation of a particular view of creativity, namely the creative cognition approach that emphasizes knowledge and how it is used. We then consider ways in which access to that knowledge can, on the negative side limit, and on the positive side guide the originality and believability of new stories that authors generate. Along the way, we also make suggestions about ways in which novice and experienced writers can produce texts that are more engaging as well as informative and compelling.

Cognition is the set of processes by which we come to know the world. Cognitive science is the set of disciplines which investigate these processes and propose explanatory theories about them. What cognitive science is discovering is that the relationships of these processes to each other are quite complex and the route to their products intricate. The resulting picture of cognition that emerges from the study of cognitive processes belies any simplistic views of the mind either as a blank slate needing only external input to establish knowledge, or as a general, all-purpose learning mechanism that acquires knowledge in simple, lockstep stages. Instead cogni-tion is thought to involve various predispositions or biases to acquire knowledge in complex ways, and to involve intricate relationships between cultural input and the mechanisms which process it. For some students of religion it is becoming increasingly clear that cognitive science promises to contribute to an explanatory understanding of aspects of religious ideas and the practices such ideas inform. In fact some cognitive scientists seem to have discovered in the course of their inquiries into the set of processes by which we come to know the world that religion is worth keeping in mind

The emergence of cognitive science over the past thirty years has stimulated new approaches to traditional problems and materials in well-established disciplines. Those approaches have generated new insights and reinvigorated aspirations for theories in the sciences of the socio-cultural (about the structures and uses of symbols and the cognitive processes underlying them) that are both more systematic and more accountable empirically than the recently available alternatives. Without rejecting interpretive proposals, projects in both the cognitive science of religion and in cognitive archaeology seek to redress imbalances within those disciplines favoring the interpretive over the explanatory. (See Lawson and Renfrew, 1994a, respectively.) Both projects aim to reinvigorate scientific aspirations without reviving any sort of scientistic or explanatory exclusivism. Both have arisen, in part, in response to the science-bashing crusades that have enjoyed such prominence in both disciplines over the past twenty years.

Like the term "religion," the notion of "culture" has a controversial history in cultural anthropology and has fueled the fires in debates about its meaning and application. It clearly has both scientific and ordinary uses. Its ordinary uses involve such notions as erudition, eliteness, and a range of intellectual achievement. "She is a cultured person". I will focus, however, on its scientific uses where it is always driven by particular theoretical perspectives, for example, when it is contrasted with "nature". In this context it is often played out as "nature versus nurture" where the former term refers to necessity and the latter to contingency. Put quite simply: from this contrastive perspective what is "natural" is what must be the case because it is governed by laws which determine specific outcomes, while what is "nurtured" is conditional; consequences could be one way or another depending upon contingent or random factors. In the latter case everything depends upon particular contexts rather than upon universal principles. The emphasis upon contingency has led to the notion of cultural relativism which has played a significant role in anthropologythe social sciences. In fact, cultural relativism has been a key notion in the development of cultural anthropology and provided a conceptual framework for an over-emphasis on learning at the expense of biological elements that scientists consider essential to any understanding of human behavior. Some