Pascal Boyer
Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist and cognitivist, is a scholar on the study of how people and communities perceive features of their culture, such as religions. His work centers on the human brain and how its evolutionary biases and functions have resulted in or encouraged apparent cultural phenomena. His research thus involves the cognitive processes requisite for acquiring, storing, and transmitting cultural knowledge, norms and preferences, showing how the organization of the human mind influences human cultures by making certain types of ideas or norms extremely easy to acquire and communicate. Boyer's early career included anthropological and psychological research on the transmission of oral epics in Africa. He then worked on the transmission of religious concepts, arguing that cognitive mechanisms, such as agency detection devices or intuitive ontological sets, make the acquisition of "religious" themes, like god-concepts, highly transmissible within a community. Currently, Professor Boyer is doing cognitive experimental work on young children's concepts of animate beings and number.
Major Works
Religion Explained (2001)
The Naturalness of Religious Ideas (1994)
Tradition as Truth and Communication (1992)
Quotation
"In my work I combine experimental (laboratory) studies with field research to answer the following question: What cognitive processes are engaged in the acquisition, use and transmission of cultural knowledge? One way to answer this is to study cognitive development, the period during which initially similar brains receive information that will make them conversant with a particular set of cultural norms and concepts. In the past I have used such developmental studies, combined with fieldwork, to describe and perhaps explain some aspects of the transmission of religious concepts. More generally, the aim of all this is to show how human brains, by virtue of their evolutionary history, share certain conceptual dispositions which in turn make certain kinds of cultural concepts particularly easy to learn and transmit, and therefore very frequent in otherwise diverse human cultures. I also use these psychological and anthropological techniques to describe the interaction between "collective memory," how people in a group remember their past, and "individual memory," in particular autobiographical memory. My most recent work bears on the early development of concepts of agency and personhood (what makes persons and animals different from inert objects) and on early mathematical concepts, as well as on the specifically human neural structures that support such competencies. "
Select Web Resources on Boyer
Faculty Page at Washington University, St. Louis
"Religious Thought and Behaviour as By-products of Brain Function" (.pdf)
"Why is Religion Natural?" by Boyer, published in The Skeptical Inquirer
"Functional Origins of Religious Concepts: Ontological and Strategic Selection in Evolved Minds"