E. Thomas Lawson

Ritual Intuitions: Cognitive Contributions to Judgments of Ritual Efficacy

Lawson and McCauley (1990) 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 specie c action to be performed. These three predictions were tested in two experiments with 128 North American Protestant college students who rated the probability of various e ctitious rituals to be effective in bringing about a specie ed consequence. Results support Lawson and McCauley’ s predictions and suggest that expectations regarding ordinary social actions apply to religious rituals.

Theory and the new comparativism, old and new

From infancy human beings are by necessity engaged in the act of compar ison This fact is not only a matter of common sense but of sophisticated theoretical work Psychologists engaged in research on cognitive structure and development are increasingly discovering the very complex cognitive resources which human beings possess from the earliest moments of life For example, not only does the very young child have the cognitive equipment which enables her to know the difference between animate and inanimate

Review Feature: A review of The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002. ISBN 0-500-05117-8 hardback £18.95 & US

David Lewis-Williams 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. In the present volume, Lewis-Williams takes the argument further, and combines the shamanistic hypothesis with an interpretation of the development of human consciousness. He thus enters another contentious area of archaeological debate, seeking to understand west European cave art in the context of (and as a marker of) the new intellectual capacities of anatomically modern humans. Radiocarbon dates for the earliest west European cave art now place it contemporary with the demise of the Neanderthals around 30,000 years ago, and cave art, along with carved or decorated portable items, appears to announce the arrival and denote the success of modern humans in this region. Lewis-Williams argues that such cave art would have been beyond the capabilities of Neanderthals, and that this kind of artistic ability is unique to anatomically modern humans. Furthermore, he concludes that the development of the new ability cannot have been the product of hundreds of thousands of years of gradual hominid evolution, but must have arisen much more abruptly, within the novel neurological structure of anatomically modern humans. The Mind in the Cave is thus the product of two hypotheses, both of them contentious — the shamanistic interpretation of west European Upper Palaeolithic cave art, and the cognitive separation of modern humans and Neanderthals. But is it as simple as that? Was cave art the hallmark of a new cognitive ability and social consciousness that were beyond the reach of previous hominids? And is shamanism an outgrowth of the hard-wired structure of the modern human brain? We begin this Review Feature with a brief summary by David Lewis-Williams of the books principal arguments. There follows a series of comments addressing both the meaning of the west European cave art, and its wider relevance for the understanding of the Neanderthal/modern human transition.