Robert N. McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of
Cultural Forms
Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms by Robert N.
McCauley, ; E. Thomas. Lawson,
Review by: Gustavo Benavides
The Journal of Religion, Vol. 85, No. 1 (January 2005), pp. 174-175
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The Journal of Religion
As an advocate for inclusivity, he has long complained that fruitless sectari-
anism among Muslims produces few dividends.
Outraged by his audacious courage and advocacy of pluralism, bigoted ele-
ments within the North American Shi i establishment in 1998 tried to muzzle
his voice and petitioned an ayatollah to issue an edict to ban him from speak-
ing to Muslim audiences. That crisis was his turning point, he notes, one that
convinced him  that the time had come to state my firm beliefs in the Koranic
notions of human dignity and the inalienable right to freedom of religion and
conscience (p. xi). Oscar Wilde was dead wrong when he said that  conscience
and cowardice are really the same things. They are not when humans act on
the choices they face, pay the price for making difficult decisions, and then
are also fortunate enough, like Sachedina, to reap the harvest of a greater and
more inclusive human fellowship.
EBRAHIM MOOSA, Duke University.
MCCAULEY, ROBERT N., and LAWSON, E. THOMAS. Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psy-
chological Foundations of Cultural Forms. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2002. xiii 236 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $23.00 (paper).
In this book Robert McCauley and Thomas Lawson pursue the research they
initiated in Rethinking Religion (Cambridge, 1990), a book that also dealt pri-
marily with ritual. The work of scholars working within a cognitive framework,
among whom McCauley and Lawson play an influential role, is significant for
a number of reasons. First, it attempts to lay bare the psychological mecha-
nisms whereby ideas (or ideologies, values, representations, and so forth) are
transmitted and kept in place in human populations. In this particular case,
instead of simply claiming, as most social scientists do, that a given cultural
item plays a role within a group, without being concerned with how this ac-
tually happens, McCauley and Lawson try to show the processes, involving pri-
marily attention and memory, that make possible the appearance, transmission,
and persistence of representations. Equally significant from the point of view
of the study of religion is their insistence upon the fact that the psychological
mechanisms at work in a religious context whether this involves ritual prac-
tices or the related belief in  culturally postulated superhuman agents  do
not differ from the ones employed in everyday life. Especially valuable is the
section devoted to discussing the mechanisms that lead to religious innovation,
on the one hand, and to sensory overload as a result of increased stimulation,
on the other. In terms of transmission and persistence, McCauley and Lawson
compare Harvey Whitehouse s frequency hypothesis, according to which  the
amount of sensory stimulation (and resulting emotional excitement) a ritual
incorporates is inversely proportional to its performance frequency, to their
own richer ritual-form hypothesis,  which holds that aspects of the represen-
tation of ritual form . . . explain and predict the comparative level of sensory
pageantry religious rituals incorporate (p. 6). Their goal, stated more than
once, is to show the superiority of the ritual-form hypothesis. Based on their
extended analyses of Whitehouse s and Fredrick Barth s data, it can be said
that they have accomplished their aim; in fact, on page 202 they provide (un-
wittingly?) an illustration of the interplay among repetition, tedium, and pag-
eantry, for, after having repeatedly stated that their theory is superior to White-
house s, and perhaps aware of the tedium caused by the reiteration of that
174
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Book Reviews
statement, they resort to typographical pageantry and repeat their assertion,
this time using italics!
A book whose stated aim is  no less than delineating the cognitive architec-
ture of Homo religiosus (p. 8) invites close scrutiny, a task impossible to accom-
plish in the limited space available here. In general, it can be said that Mc-
Cauley and Lawson are not sufficiently concerned with change in the practice
or in the doctrinal underpinnings of religious rituals. For example, in their
discussion of the differences among special agent, special patient, and special
instrument rituals they claim that a Catholic wedding is a special agent ritual
owing to the fact that the performer is a priest that is, someone who has a
relatively direct ritual connection with a god (p. 118, cf. p. 28). But it must be
noted that it was only in the tenth and eleventh centuries that the Roman
Catholic Church began to assert exclusive jurisdiction over marriage. In terms
of their theory, therefore, given that the priest was not central before that
time, marriage was not a  special agent ritual before the eleventh century.
What are, then, the theoretical implications of the coital theory of marriage,
defended by Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, in the late ninth century, accord-
ing to which the ritual agents are the man and the woman being married? Still
dealing with marriage rituals, McCauley and Lawson write, not without levity,
 If you truly want to go through with it, it is not a good idea to miss your own
wedding (p. 33). But, once again, they neglect situations in which one can
indeed miss one s wedding: for example, in Florence in the late Middle Ages
the bride received the nuptial blessing alone, since the groom usually did not
accompany her to the church (see J. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society
in Medieval Europe [Chicago, 1987], p. 502). One is aware that the authors did
not intend to provide a history of a particular ritual; nevertheless, in order to
do justice to ritual practices it is necessary to pay attention to historical change
as well as to doctrinal controversies. This is indeed the main problem with the
book under review: illuminating as their rigorous analyses of the data found
in Barth s and Whitehouse s ethnographies are, one wishes for a greater variety
of examples, especially from literate traditions. It is precisely because of the
rigor with which Lawson and McCauley proceed that the reader may lose track
of the purpose of the rituals being analyzed. From time to time, in fact, despite
statements such as  of course, sensory pageantry is only a means to an end
(p. 102), one gets the impression not intended by the authors, to be sure
that rituals are remembered simply in order to be remembered. It can be said,
to conclude, that those who, after working through Bringing Ritual to Mind s
minute dissection of psychological processes, want to have a glimpse of the
forest may want to read Ilkka Pyysiäinen, How Religion Works (Leiden, 2001),
and Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust (Oxford, 2002). In fact, those unacquainted
with the cognitive approach may be advised to start with those books or with
Pascal Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas (Berkeley, 1994), before tackling
McCauley and Lawson s analyses.
GUSTAVO BENAVIDES, Villanova University.
HUGHES, RICHARD. Myths America Lives By. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2003. xv 203 pp. $29.95 (cloth).
Like many college professors, Richard Hughes believes that the events of 9/11
should prompt Americans to reexamine their fundamental assumptions about
175
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