Religious Ritual and Extended Cognition

GAELIN MEYER

Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa email: gaelin@7degrees.co.za

AbstractThe theory of extended cognition, which describes aspects of cognition as both extended

into and reliant on the external environment, provides a new framework for understanding

religious ritual. Religious ritual behaviour can be viewed as an extended cognitive

process, in which the initiating stance of the ritual subject allows for cognitive coupling

with ritual artifacts, through the maintenance of a specific intention of non-intentionality.

The ritual subject and the ritual artifacts form an extended cognitive system during the

process of ritual performance. This emergent system can be described by systems

dynamics, an approach which allows us to frame religious ritual in terms of dissipative

structures and inherent patterns of information. These new frameworks provide new tools

for analysing and understanding both religious behaviour and religious experience.

�1

1. Introduction 3 1.1 The cognitive science of religion 3 1.2 Cognition and systems theory 4

1.2.1 Self-organising systems 5 1.2.3 Interactive and interdependent networks 5 1.2.4 Attractors in the space of human thought 6

1.3 The study of ritual 7 1.3.1 Ritual as a fundamental social act 7 1.3.2 Ritual artifacts as repositories of meaning 8

2. Cognitive Theories of Ritual 8 2.1 Ritual behaviour is naturally acquired 9 2.2 Ritualised action requires a certain ritual commitment 10 2.3 Ritual involves complex agency dynamics 11 2.4 Ritual modes correspond to human memory capacities 11 2.5 Ritual communicates particular information 13

3. Embodied Cognition 14 3.1 The human mind emerges through bodily experience 14 3.3 Ritual involves active embodiment of religious beliefs 14

4. Rethinking Cognition 15 4.1 Cognition as a distributed, systemic phenomenon 15 4.2 Cognition as an extended process 17

4.2.1 Epistemic action augments cognitive capacity 17

4.2 External artifacts become a functioning part of the cognitive loop 18 4.4 Cognitive connections are achieved through coupling 20

5. Ritual and Extended Cognition 21 5.1 Religious ritual makes use of cognitive artifacts 21

5.1.1. Ritual performers couple with ritual artifacts 22 5.1.2 Ritual cognitive artifacts are a material anchor for the cognitive load 22

5.2 Ritual can be analysed as an unfolding process 23 5.3 Successful ritual engagement 26

6. Conclusion 28 7. References 31

�2

1. Introduction

The turn towards interdisciplinary thinking in the 21st century gives religious studies scholars access to tools from many other disciplines, and allows new modes of enquiry into religious phenomena. The cognitive science of religion is one such cross-disciplinary endeavour, and has given rise to many promising theories for analysing the origin and function of religious behaviour. Religious ritual behaviour is uniquely human. Human minds naturally generate meaning, allowing for the development of conceptual thought, language, and complex self-identity. Current models of human cognition recognise the situated and embodied nature of the human mind. The process of cognition, which was once understood as brain-bound, is not only extended into the body, but in some instances, also into the environment within which the body cognitive finds itself. Extended Mind Theory, or the theory of extended cognition, approaches cognition as a process that arises within a larger system constituting various interacting parts, both inside and outside the body. In this paper I will explore the phenomenon of religious ritual as an extended cognitive process. This method of analysis allows a theoretical construction of ritual as a complex system, giving religious studies scholars access to tools developed by systems theorists, tools which can be used to better understand religious behaviour and experience. General systems theory, the interdisciplinary study of complex systems and their emergent properties, provides many new metrics for assessing complex system dynamics. Once establishing ritual performance as an extended cognitive act, I will attempt a brief overview of the utility of systems theory for analysing the extended cognitive system of religious ritual.

1.1 The cognitive science of religionAttempts to understand the human mind, up until the late 1950’s, were dominated by behaviouralist approaches. The behaviourist insists that measurable, physical constructs are more relevant and worthy of study than subjective accounts of mind, in terms of explaining how and why the mind functions as it does. This changed with a mid-century turn in the sciences towards integrative, cross-disciplinary thinking. With the advent of computers, the notion that machines could simulate the information processing capacity of the human mind pointed away from the behaviouralist approach, towards a model of mind as an “all-purpose processing machine” working with information (Barrett 2007: 769). The computational theory of mind frames beliefs and memories as patterns of information stored in the brain, governed by the wants and needs which arise from embodiment

�3

(Pinker 2003: 183). The new disciplines of computer science and neuroscience initiated conversations which gave credence to this ‘cognitive revolution’, already bolstered by ideas from cognitive anthropology, evolutionary psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence research (Lawson 2000: 338). While ‘mind as machine’ yields many useful new constructs in our attempt to understand human cognition, it has become clear that the human mind more than merely mechanical. Cognition is embodied in a physical locus, and functions as part of a larger system. Postmodern thought points to the notion of mind as socially constructed, allowing the debate to move beyond the notion of the human mind as a blank slate, ready to be formed at will, or the mind as a mere machine, processing informational input. In the turn towards integrative thinking, human cognition is instead recast as a complex system, composed of many interacting and necessary parts. Religious experience and behaviour can also be recast in this framework. Research showing how “cognitive explanations of socio-cultural facts” were not only possible, but could generate new and powerful theories of human behavior (Lawson 2000: 339) boosted the cognitive study of religion. Many scholars began working towards this end (Sperber 1975, Guthrie 1980, Boyer 1994) in an attempt to uncover a cognitive foundation for “why religious thought and action is so common in humans and why religious phenomena take on the features that they do” (Barrett 2007: 766). It may be that “religion is a predictable side effect of the human cognitive engines performance” as Matthew Day suggests (2005: 86). In this case, understanding the cognitive process becomes paramount for those who hope to better understand religious phenomena.

1.2 Cognition and systems theoryPhilosophical thought adds to the conversation in the form of new approaches to materialism, approaches which forge a conceptual bridge between the subject and the object, perhaps transcending the lens of the human subject entirely. Existing phenomena in the new materialism are described from a systems view, as hybrid formations “that do not cleave to the putative subject/object divide” (Hazard 2013: 65). These “assemblages” (DeLanda 2006) can best be described as “unruly tangles of heterogeneous things that we usually regard as discrete or dialectically opposed entities” (Hazard 2013: 65), which come together in a functional capacity. In this view, “humans and things are fundamentally co-constitutive” (Hazard 2013: 65), lacking cohesive boundaries, and engaging continually in an interdependent relationship. This perspective relies on an understanding of the self-organisational capacities of complex systems.

�4

1.2.1 Self-organising systemsIn simple terms, systems are groups of things with functional relations. Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian physicist and chemist working in thermodynamics, was one of the first people to describe a kind of order that arises naturally within systems that are in a state of non-equilibrium. Prigogine’s theories revolutionised systems thinking. The classic Newtonian model focuses on the stability, order and equilibrium to be found within closed systems, or in other words, systems which are isolated from their environments and thus easily predictable. Prigogine discovered that red and blue coloured gas pumped into a closed chamber at a certain rate began to exhibit a cyclical pulsing pattern, rhythmically shifting from red to blue states within the system like a chemical clock. As he wrote at the time, if this emergent order “had not been observed, no one would have thought it was possible” (Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 148). Prigogine’s work paved the way for the study of open systems, systems which exchange energy and matter with their environments. He showed the formation of a highly structured yet intrinsically dynamic “state of matter” (1977: 265) which he called a dissipative structure. Dissipative structures take the form of dynamic patterns, which arise as a consequence of the complexity of the underlying system. They form spontaneously depending on the energy throughput of the system as a whole. Take for example a gently flowing stream, running along a smooth waterway. The gentle movements that the water makes as it flows are unstructured and non-repeating. Now imagine increasing the flow of the water, and adding a few rocks to the riverbed. With this phase shift, the flow of the water begins to show aspects of emergent structure. Whirlpools form as the water interacts with the rocks in its course. These whirlpools are standing waves, patterns which are evident as taking form, yet arise from within a highly dynamic medium (Shulman 1997: 105). More force, more water, and the structural pattern of the whirls collapse, and now the water rushes furiously down the waterway. This particular dissipative structure arises as a form of order from the complexity of the open system of which it is part. Water, rocks and riverbed, given the correct conditions, act coherently to form a discernible, structural pattern.

1.2.3 Interactive and interdependent networksFrom this perspective, the human mind can also be seen as an emergent part of a complex, self-organising system, a system we call life. Systems thinking supposes that the phenomena of life can best be described by interactive and interdependent networks. In other words, life itself is best described by complex adaptive systems in a state of non-equilibrium, which give rise to structurally coherent phenomena though complex feedback

�5

loops, structures which emerge and then dissipate according to the dynamics of the whole system (Prigogine 1977, Bohm 1980, Weinberg 2001). Contributions made by research into complex adaptive systems continues to push the boundaries of our conceptions of the human mind. The mind and body are themselves complex dissipative structures, with the dynamics of the mind continually emerging “from the non-linear and circular causality of continuous sensorimotor interactions, involving the brain, the body, and the environment” (Thompson 2007: 10-11). Conceiving of human cognition as a networked, interrelated phenomenon gives rise to a new direction in cognitive science, namely the notion that cognition itself is a distributed process, which relies on many aspects other than the human brain (Thompson and Varela 2001, Clark and Chalmers 1998, Hutchins 2000). Human thought, from a systems theory point of view, is “a circuit along which information flows and is transformed” and is seen as “embracing both that which is perceived, and that which is perceiving” (Macy 1991: 123). In this paper I will argue that there is a realm of new data available to us if we explore religious ritual as part of a distributed and extended cognitive process. As Harvey Whitehouse writes, in his attempt to better understand religious phenomena: “restricting the cognitive project to the identification of causes internal to organisms impoverishes the explanatory potential of psychological models” (Whitehouse 2001: 208). Extended Mind theory is a psychological model which allows for environmental variables to be re-considered when attempting an analysis of religious ritual experience.

1.2.4 Attractors in the space of human thoughtIn his book Modes of Religiosity, Whitehouse describes a ‘universal attractor’ in the space of human thought, around which religious concepts appear to cluster. Here he uses language straight from systems theory. An attractor is a dissipative structure which arises within a complex system, and comprises a set of values or properties towards which the system eventually evolves. As per my previous example of water dynamics, whirlpools are a good visual example of an emergent attractor, informing the flow of the water as an aspect of the emergent structure. Whitehouse’s proposal that religious ideas flow around a universal attractor is pointing towards a systems analysis of religious behaviour. This attractor is “a cognitive optimum position in the domain of religion”, one which informs the domain in a particular way, and leads people to “acquire certain similar kinds of information about supernatural agents, rituals and myths”(Whitehouse 2004: 29). The notion of a cognitive optimum is further developed by Pascal Boyer, who looks to evolutionary psychology as an explanatory framework for religious behaviour. His theory of ‘minimally

�6

counterintuitive concepts’ rests on the idea that much of religious thought is inherently intuitive. If we view the mind as a neural map of associations, a successfully maintained religious idea usually fits the form of a minimally counterintuitive concept. These are concepts which introduce new counterintuitive and thus intriguing ideas, but which still fit into the pattern of preexisting conceptual structures. From this, Boyer developed his theory of religious transmission, explaining that in order for religious concepts to be successfully transmitted, they needed to fit into existing conceptual frameworks, while also being unusual enough that they are remembered.

1.3 The study of ritual

1.3.1 Ritual as a fundamental social actReligious behaviour, and in particular religious ritual behaviour, is often one of the first points of analysis when approaching the study of religion. Although religious expression differs from culture to culture, some form of ritual behaviour is “present in every culture and amongst every people” (Whitehouse 2004: 03). A concise definition of ritual is difficult to formulate. Traditions, actions and customs differ. In his book Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, anthropologist Roy Rappaport argues for the socio-ontological primacy of ritual, with his theory that ritual constitutes the first fundamental social act. He describes ritual as a form of emergent structure, involving “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers” (Rappaport 1999: 24). He argues that this performance itself entails the establishment of a social convention. As such, ritual actions are instances of social consensus which lay the ground for social cohesion. As people come together and invest in shared ritual behaviour they are constructing and encoding a consensual morality, and “generating the concept of the sacred” (Rappaport 1999: 27). He writes, “ritual contains within itself not simply a symbolic representation of social contract, but tacit social contract itself” (Rappaport 1999: 138). Based on this view of ritual, he argues that religious behavior and experience is “generated in and integrated by ritual” (Rappaport 1999: 24). This concept was initially introduced by Emile Durkheim, who posited a relationship between ritual behavior and the formation of social order. According to Durkheim, social solidarity is organized around ritual (Durkheim 1965) This sociological approach emphasises the role ritual plays in maintaining and creating social ties between individuals.

�7

1.3.2 Ritual artifacts as repositories of meaningAnthropologist Clifford Geertz describes the material aspects of religious ritual as repositories for religious meaning. He suggests that human culture can be understood as “an ordered system of meaning and of symbols, in terms of which social interaction takes place” (Geertz 1957: 33), and classifies religion as cultural phenomenon, a system of symbols shared amongst people. Religious ritual on this view is an physical re-enactment of pertinent religious truths, which bring a community into a sense of shared investment in social commitments, through the use of shared religious symbology. In ritual "the world as lived and the world as imagined turn out to be the same world” (Geertz 1973: 90). The world of the religious symbol, and all that it suggests, is grounded in the experiential reality of the ritual performer through interaction with ritual artifacts.

Cognitive theories of religious ritual generally focus on the particular aspects of cognition that give rise to this type of behaviour. Boyer discusses ritual as a naturally acquired behavioural modality, comparable with dance or song (Boyer 1994). Whitehouse develops a theory of distinct religious modes based on two recurrent types of ritual performance (Whitehouse 2004), and McCauley and Lawson focus on general features of religious ritual form, which correspond to human cognitive capacities (McCauley, Lawson 2002). Rappaport identifies information content in ritual, which he suggests is a form of communication, relying on both internal and external representations (Rappaport 1999). In the next section, I will discuss these cognitive theories in more detail. This will be followed by a brief overview of extended mind theory, which opens up the cognitive theory of religious ritual to a new form of enquiry.

2. Cognitive Theories of Ritual

For the purpose of this analysis, it is useful to view ritual performance through the lens of the cognitive process. Philosopher Mark Rowlands suggests a set of basic conditions for defining an act of cognition:

A process P is a cognitive process if:

1) P involves information processing - the manipulation and transformation of information-bearing structures. Religious ritual practice involves information processing as Rappaport (1999) discusses in his work on Canonical and Indexical messages within

�8

religious ritual. Ritual communicates values, mores, and doctrinal content. Ritual artifacts are themselves information bearing structures, manipulated as part of the ritual performance.

2) This information processing has the proper function of making available either to the subject or to subsequent processing operations information that was, prior to this processing, unavailable. Religious rituals “link the sacred and the profane, the visible and the invisible” (Schmidt 1988: 392). The information inherent in the sacred is made available through ritual interaction. Ritual engagement initiates and maintains the process of social memory which is stored and retrieved in ritual form (Durkheim 1965)

3) This information is made available by way of the production, in the subject of P, of a representational state. The experience of the ritual is apprehended by the participants, and particular representational states are made available through ritual practice. The devotee successfully engaged in ritual cognition experiences affective transformation (Norris 2005).

4) P is a process that belongs to the subject of that representational state. The cognitive process belongs to the devotee as she engages ritual space. It is her intentional cognitive stance of the that creates the conditions necessary for successful ritual enactment (Humphrey, Laidlaw 1994).

The cognitive process of ritual is not being set up as a distinct construct, separate from its behavioural or procedural aspects. The domain of human cognition works as an umbrella category for crafting a framework within which behaviour and belief are dynamically related to the workings of the human mind. Behaviour in this view is understood as an aspect of the process of cognition as mind interacts with the world.

2.1 Ritual behaviour is naturally acquiredPascal Boyer suggests that ritual is best understood as a particular behavioural modality, one made distinct by the involvement of repetition and rigid sequencing of elementary actions (Boyer 1994: 189). A behavioural modality is a naturally acquired behavioural repertoire, and different modalities provide for the broad range of human functioning evident today. Boyer theorises that ritual is a naturally acquired behaviour, and gives evidence that ritual behaviour can even be found amongst animal species. In this case,

�9

what sets human ritual behaviour apart is the representations humans attach to ritual actions, representations based on meanings which emerge from a shared social world. He writes that “ritual is to social interaction what song is to speech and dance is to gesture” (Boyer 1994: 189). In other words, he suggests that the ritual behavioural mode is intrinsic to our experience as social human beings. He uses the phenomenon of dance as an example, which is an intuitively understood experience, recognised in most human groups. A categorical definition of dance is not necessary in order to appreciate it. We intuit the emotional, social and physical experience of dance, an intuition which is available to us based on our already extensive ability for gesture and movement within our environment. The many and varied forms of dance don’t limit us conceptually with the idea that only one kind of dancing is ‘true’ dancing, because we understand that the outward form of the dance serves to express a more universal aspect of the human capacity for co-ordinated movement. Our natural ability to walk, move and gesticulate is refined in dance. An action is understood as part of a dance based on our overall understanding of what dance is. As this pertains to ritual, Boyer submits that we have an intuitive understanding of ritual behaviour, in that “we observe that certain acts, gestures, utterances, and so on seem to be of a particular mode, which sets them off from acts performed in other contexts or situations” (Boyer 1994: 188). Observing ritual behaviour we are aware of it’s distinction from other everyday actions. This mode of behaviour gives rise to actions which are based in our natural abilities, yet which we discern as ritualistic due to our overall intuitive understanding of what the ritual process entails.

2.2 Ritualised action requires a certain ritual commitment In accord with Boyer, Humphrey and Laidlaw point out “there is something invariant in the difference between ritualised and everyday action” (Humphrey, Laidlaw 1994: 13). They suggest that ritual be understood, not as an event involving specific actions, but as “a quality which action can come to have, a special way in which acts can be performed” (Humphrey, Laidlaw 1994: 64). In this case, ritualised action requires a certain ritual commitment. The initiator of a ritual act must have a “particular stance with respect to his or her action” (Humphrey, Laidlaw 1994: 88). This stance entails a specific intention of non-intentionality. The actions taken during ritual performance do not allow for the individual will of the participant to express in an idiosyncratic manner. The intention when engaging ritual is to initiate a sequence of actions which involve the external will of the tradition. They are stipulated actions, and in this way are experienced as apprehensible events, available for reassimilation by performers, even as they are in the process of

�10

performing them. Intentional ritual action bridges the gap between the participant and the institutional structures of his faith in a performance which requires the active intention of ‘giving over’ to the structural agency of the ritual tradition. Thus the cognitive process of intentional non-intentionality is inherent in ritual performance, and observable by others as action in a particular mode, the mode of ritual commitment.

2.3 Ritual involves complex agency dynamicsMcCauley and Lawson, in their book Rethinking Religion (1990), note that “just as speakers have robust intuitions about numerous features of linguistic strings, participants in religious ritual systems possess similar intuitive insight into the character of ritual acts” (1990: 77). They suggest that this intuitive insight originates within the functioning of a cognitive ‘action representation system’. This mental system develops during interaction with the world, and involves a cognitive framework for establishing roles of action and agency. The human mind understands itself and others to be agents, capable of intentional action, based on the cognitive framework of the action representation system (McCauley, Lawson 2002: 08). This framework also provides a cognitive basis for representations of supernatural agency. According to Lawson and McCauley, religious rituals are those which involve an assumption of supernatural agency.

These assumptions are explored in Justin Barrett’s work, as he points to the role of a ‘hypersensitive agency detection device’ which “delivers false-positives in the case of detecting spirits, ghosts, and gods” (Barrett 2007: 773). Barret argues that our tendency to over-ascribe agency is an evolutionary adaptive strategy. A strange rustle in the grass may be the wind, but it may also be an enemy. This hypersensitivity to possible agents creates the cognitive foundations for conceiving of the “Culturally Postulated Superhuman” agents which are implicated in religious ritual (McCauley, Lawson 2002: 08). Religious ritual’s efficacy “depends upon the cooperation of these superhuman agents” which “populate the religious conceptual process” (Lawson, McCauley 1990: 125). They also argue that rituals where a superhuman agent is directly involved are more essential to religious systems than rituals where superhuman agents are on the periphery. The greater, or more direct, the role of the superhuman agent, the more the ritual is identified as essentially religious.

2.4 Ritual modes correspond to human memory capacitiesIn keeping with the cognitive approach, Whitehouse presents ritual as based on an established set of “embodied skills and habits” (Whitehouse 2004: 89) which are

�11

“managed by implicit memory systems (and) driven by empirically based learning” (Whitehouse 2004: 103). In an attempt to bring cognitive theory to the analysis of religion, he explores the role that memory plays in our ability to conceive of and perform ritual actions. His theory of religion finds foundation in the human memory system, which is broadly divided into two functional categories, the explicit and the implicit. Implicit memory encompasses the things we know without having to think about, for example, the “procedural competence involved in successfully riding a bicycle” (Whitehouse 2004: 65). Explicit memory, on the other hand, requires conscious awareness, and can be divided into short term memory, i.e. temporary storage of details (like a new phone number) and long term memory. Finally, long term memory has two distinct subdivisions, semantic and episodic, which according to Whitehouse correspond to two distinct modes within our experience of religiosity.

Most information stored in long-term memory is semantic, that is, encoded by the meaning of words (Sternberg 2009: 219). Much of our semantic memory is based on socially maintained general knowledge, and it is this memory store which is responsible for our understanding of how to behave in social situations. Episodic memory, on the other hand, is the long-term memory of specific events and particular moments of life experience. These memories are encoded into storage when we experience “elevated arousal and personal consequentiality” (Whitehouse 2004: 110) and as a result are often vivid and enduring. According to Whitehouse, our capacity for semantic and episodic memories underlie two divergent modes in our religious ritual practices. He describes a ‘doctrinal mode of religiosity’ which relies mainly on semantic memory, and which is associated with ‘high frequency ritual action’, that is, rituals which tend to be regularly and frequently repeated. The doctrinal mode of religiosity is formalised and highly routinised, “facilitating the storage of elaborate conceptually complex religious teachings in semantic memory” (Whitehouse 2004: 65). This mode of religiosity is sustained and legitimised by frequent repetition, which eventually leads to “implicit memory for religious rituals” (Whitehouse 2004: 68) and lays social foundation for religious authority. In contrast, the ‘imagistic mode of religiosity' relies on the vivid dynamics of episodic memory, and gives rise to religious rituals which are infrequently repeated, and highly emotionally engaging. These rituals are physically and emotionally immersive, and have a significant impact on those who participate in them. Whitehouse writes that “especially vivid episodic memories trigger a search for meaning” (2004: 105). Therefore the imagistic mode of religiosity is often associated with “spontaneous exegetical reflection” and lays foundation

�12

for experiences of “personal inspiration or revelation” (Whitehouse 2004: 72). That said, no religious ritual belongs exclusively to one mode or the other. Rather, religious traditions make use of a mixture of the two ritual modes, which over time ensures successful transmission of religious concepts and practices.

2.5 Ritual communicates particular informationRoy Rappaport begins his ritual theory by establishing ritual as the basic social act, and then works to further build the idea of ritual as an informational structure, one which conveys and transmits particular information. In this view, ritual is inherently a form of communication. He describes the process of transmitting information, as a phenomenon involving “representing form to, transmitting form to, injecting form into, more simply transmitting messages to, receivers.” (Rappaport 1999: 51). The act of informing is an act of communicative doing, which has efficacious outcomes in the real word. From this perspective, the ritual mode of communication creates a particular medium “suited to the transmission of certain messages and certain sorts of information” (Rappaport 1999: 53). He discerns two kinds of information transmitted through religious ritual. Firstly canonical information which is “conceptual and abstract in nature, and can only be founded upon symbols” (Rappaport 1999: 54). This information forms the basis of liturgical practices, and transmits the symbols and ideas associated with invariant, underlying doctrinal frameworks. Canonical information is presented as unchanging and externally located, and as such does not represent the current personal states of the ritual performers. This form of information transferral is implicit in Whitehouse’s doctrinal mode of religiosity.

In contrast, ritual performers also bring a degree of subjectivity to the ritual space. Self-referential, or indexical information also plays an important role in religious ritual. The decision to take part in a religious ritual transmits information about personal states and intentions. The ritual performer “reaches out of his private self” (Rappaport 1999: 106) to engage in the canonical order of the ritual. In this sense, ‘there is transmitted an indexical message that cannot be transmitted in any other way and, far from being trivial, is one without which canonical messages are without force” (Rappaport 1999: 58). The self-referential information content of ritual is emotionally engaging, and as such resembles Whitehouse’s imagistic mode, without the graphic connotations associated with Whitehouse’s examples of extreme imagistic ritual behaviour. Rather, in as much as ritual performance involves personal intentional stances, the possibility for imagistic religious experience is present.

�13

3. Embodied Cognition

3.1 The human mind emerges through bodily experienceThe body as our medium of experience has been thoroughly explored in recent times. Cognitive linguist, George Lakoff, reminds us that “the disembodied mind was not an empirical discovery, but rather a philosophical creation” (Lakoff 2012: 748). Consciousness itself is a bodily experience, arising “when the physical structure of the object interacts with the body,” and taking form as a “unified mental pattern that brings together the object and the self” (Damasio 1999: 11) The act of cognition is no longer understood mainly as mere symbol manipulation. Frazer Watts, a Fellow of Queens’ College Cambridge, writes that “from the point of view of embodied cognition, the body is not just the origin of mental capacities; it is the context within which those capacities operate” (Watts 2013: 748). Research in linguistics shows that much of our language is structured by our bodily experience (Lakoff 2012: 776). Our conceptual metaphors emerge from our physical experience of reality; when we’re depressed we are feeling down or blue. We are either running out of time or catching up on work or reaching a point of restfulness after a heavy day (Gibbs 1994).

The mind and the body form a complex, interrelated system. Researchers at the University of Toronto have shown how the act of thinking about a past emotional experience can change actual physical perceptions in the present moment. Subjects involved in the research were asked to recall a social exclusion experience, and then to estimate the ambient temperature of the room they were in. They consistently reported lower temperature estimates than the control group, who were asked to recall instances of social inclusion (Zhong et.al. 2008). Subjects with different recall tasks experienced the temperature of the room differently. This example of complex mind-body feedback raises the question of the objective primacy of bodily experience. In classic phenomenological methodology, bodily experience is granted a prima facie validity. From the embodied cognitive perspective, bodily experience is better approached as a variable aspect of an embedded cognitive system, rather than a static ground of awareness from which to draw objective and conclusive data.

3.3 Ritual involves active embodiment of religious beliefsReligion has long recognised the role of the body in religious experience. Beliefs are “learned through the body” (Norris 2005: 182). Many instances of memory are stored

�14

externally, and accessed through the body. For example, memory can be stored in text form, on computer files, or within photographs, which allows for easy retrieval when needed. Our memories are not only stored externally as “passive chunks of text” also as narratives, which are “retrieved as embodied enactments” (Menary 2010: 24). Through the process of ritual enactment, certain religious memories and concepts become salient. Religious ritual is then an embodied process of retrieving religious memory through scripted interaction with the external environment in which it has been stored. Richard Menary suggests that this narrative, meaning based interaction may be a necessary condition for a functioning religious belief system (Menary 2010: 24).

Our bodies are the grounds of our emotional experience (Fogel 2000: xxi). An embodied retrieval of memories is an emotional retrieval of memories. “Religious emotions are often established and recalled through ritual gestures or postures and often associated with religious images” (Norris 2005: 190). The feeling of having a body is deeply related to the human sense of identity. Charlotte Wolff, a 19th century physician and psychotherapist, writes that “sensory impressions have the ability, although existing in the present moment, to evoke memories so strongly that the boundary between present and past becomes transparent” (Wolff 1972: 25). An embodied ritual action holds associations to images, ideas and emotions (Norris 2005: 191). Rebecca Sachs Norris theorises that ritual gestures and postures allow emotions to be refelt, to be recalled as a present experience. This builds up a complex association of religious feelings, as new emotional memories are layered upon old ones (Norris 2005: 193). She suggests that religion makes use of this process “to educate the feeling toward certain qualities and to develop religious experience through the use of sacred images, ritual posture and gesture, and repetition of ritual acts” (Norris 2005: 196). Ritual as an embodied act is thus constitutive of religious feeling.

4. Rethinking Cognition

4.1 Cognition as a distributed, systemic phenomenonThe current discussion on embodied cognition can be located within the broader framework of the theory of situated cognition. Just as the mind is intimately connected to the body, so the body is intimately connected to the environment in which it finds itself, and from which it emerges. Edwin Hutchins takes the notion of situated cognition a step further, in a paper entitled ‘Distributed Cognition’, where he reminds us that “treating memory as a

�15

socially distributed cognitive function has a long history in sociology and anthropology” (Hutchins 2000: 02). He points to Durkheim who, in his book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1965), introduced the idea of memory as a social construction, reflecting not only the subjective qualities of the individual mind, but also the ways in which society is structured, and how people work together. Durkheim’s student Halbwachs writes that “it is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localise their memories” (Halbwachs 1992, p. 38). This kind of distributed memory relies on people joining physically in a group ritual context. While the physical environment has long been recognized as a support for human memory, Hutchins writes that the environment is more than just a static cache, peopled by subjects. Rather the environment plays an intrinsic role in cognitive functioning; “cognitive activity is sometimes situated in the material world in such a way that the environment is a computational medium” (Hutchins 2000: 07). He suggests that cognition is a distributed process, involving the mind and body in tandem with the environment, as they combine to form functional patterns of association. The trend continues away from the atomistic conception of an essential and static reality, towards a process view, which describes the constant flux inherent in natural phenomenon.

Cognition as a process need not be confined merely to the brain, and can be distributed in a number of ways. Hutchins gives the simple example of a complex docking manoeuvre performed in the course of Navy duty. The manoeuvre relies on the full cognitive capacities of a number of people, coordinating in a precise and calculated manner. The distributed cognitive processing capacities of the individual minds, coupled as they are with their tools and machines, allows for an emergent cognitive system to arise. This new system is a hybrid of minds and tools, working together as a whole to ensure a successful manoeuvre. He suggests that this kind of temporary assemblage is a common form of spatially distributed cognition. From this perspective, certain cognitive processes occur as distributed phenomenon, relying on artifacts outside of the body and mind. While this is a new topic of discussion for cognitive scientists; religion, in as much as it is an aspect of culture, has long been considered by scholars to be a distributed, systemic phenomena. As such, “the problem of explaining religion is therefore a problem of explaining a particular type of distributed cognition” (Whitehouse 2004: 16). The transmission of religious ideas over many centuries, the ritual performances common to global humanity, these are aspects of a distributed cognitive process which spans cultures, ideologies, and historical ages.

�16

4.2 Cognition as an extended processA team at the University of Notre Dame decided to explore memory as a situated phenomenon, in an attempt to better understand how the environment effects cognition. They studied what happens to memory when we pass from one room to another. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the experience of passing from one room to another can cause local memory loss. One gets up to do something important in another part of the house, only to forget completely what it was upon arrival. This is because passing through a doorway is often enough for our minds to wipe our ‘mental slate’, in readiness for the next set of possible experiences. Their research showed that we use the external, environmental cue of a new room to ‘parcel’ our attentional awareness. “Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away” (Radvansky et. al. 2011: 1635). Here we have evidence of a mental process relying on, and arising within, particular environmental structures. Clark and Chalmers, in their seminal work ‘The Extended Mind’ explore this idea further. They launch their paper with the question “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” (Clark & Chalmers, 1998: 01). To understand the answer to that question, they propose an active externalism, “based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes” (Clark & Chalmers, 1998: 02).

4.2.1 Epistemic action augments cognitive capacityResearch by David Kirsh and Paul Maglio (1994) involving the computer game, Tetris, points to a particular type of action they call epistemic action. The game involves rotating and aligning geometric shapes with the use of a button, as they fall to the bottom of the screen. The aim is to fit the shapes snugly together in a structured pile, leaving no spaces. Gamers must think quickly. How do they determine that the orientation of the shape is compatible with the rest of the pile? Kirsh and Maglio show that the process of mentally rotating the shape alone is orders of magnitude slower than when gamers can physical rotate the shape using a button. This physical action speeds up the cognitive process, as it can “help determine whether the shape and the (pile) are compatible” (Clark & Chalmers, 1998: 03). This kind of action is epistemic, in that it acts to “alter the world so as to aid and augment cognitive processes” (Clark & Chalmers, 1998: 03).

In their first formulation of what they later came to call ‘the parity principle’, Clark & Chalmers write:

�17

Epistemic action, we suggest, demands spread of epistemic credit. If, as we confront some task,

a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no

hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we

claim) part of the cognitive process. (Clark & Chalmers, 1998: 03)

The idea that “cognitive processes are not restricted to structures and operations instantiated in the brain” (Rowlands 2010: 59) is a unusual proposition for many thinkers. In Extended Mind theory, the human agent couples with external features of the environment, in a process of extended cognition where “the relevant parts of the world are in the loop, not dangling at the other end of a long causal chain” (Clark, Chalmers 1998: 05). In this formulation, the subject, through the act of extended cognition, is cognitively co-continuous with aspects of her environment. A new cognitive system emerges. The biological brain has “evolved and matured in ways which factor in the reliable presence of a manipulable external environment” (Clark, Chalmers 1998: 09). Cognition is a process which involves mind, body and environment in a complex adaptive system, having evolved as an embedded phenomenon, concurrent and co-extensive with an environment. Jan Kratky, working from the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, proposes that cognition can be understood as a set of tools which have evolved naturally as adaptations to environmental and social inputs, and “in concert with various features that the environment expressed throughout evolutionary and ontogenetic stages of human development” (Kratky 2010: 59). He uses this argument to forward his theory that religious behaviour is a set of naturally adapted cognitive techniques developed in concert with the environment. In this case, parceling the embodied mind as intrinsically separate from its environment is not tenable.

4.2 External artifacts become a functioning part of the cognitive loopReligious thought relies on many different structures and systems for its form and substance. Matthew Day suggests that much of religious belief and behaviour depend on “particular forms of external cognitive scaffolding” (Day 2005: 101). In a paper entitled “Extended Mind and Religious Thought” (2004) he suggests that when we treat cognition as something that happens only inside the head, “we run the risk of habitually overestimating the biological brain’s natural computational prowess and underestimating the consequences of non-neural cognitive resources” (Day 2004: 106). He introduces the idea of a cognitive scaffold, an environmental artifact that aids in the cognitive process. This builds on Donald Norman’s description of cognitive artifacts, which are “carefully

�18

designed devices that maintain, display or operate upon information and change our cognitive performance” (2010: 30). These artifacts augment the cognitive process. The process of being human entails engaging with these cognitive artifacts through “webs of cognitive scaffolding that participate in the extended machinery” (Clark 2007: 176) of human thought and reason. This view frames human cognition as relying on an external environment in order to substantiate itself. While this may seem like a redundant assertion, it comes to bear on those who would separate the cognitive process from the systems within which it arises.

4.2.1 On-line and off-line cognitive functionsCognitive artifacts enable us to perform tasks that would otherwise be too computationally challenging. Day offers an analogy, the idea that some cognitive tasks can be thought of as either on-line or off-line cognitive functions. On-line cognition deals with actual problems and actions in an environmental context (Day 2004: 110), for example, making a sandwich or driving through traffic. Online cognition is common amongst all animals with cognitive capacity. During off-line cognition, “thought is detached from the epistemic constraints of the here and now in such a way that creatures can think about absent and even non-existent objects and phenomena” (Day 2004: 111). This kind of cognition is possible due to our ability to store long-term memories, which allows us to consider external objects long after they are no longer present in our environment, based on their internal representations. Day offers religious thinking as a conspicuous example of off-line cognition. He suggests that for off-line thought to be possible, the human mind makes “strategic use of non-biological artifacts to scaffold and augment” the brains processing capacity (Day 2004: 112). By appropriating our environment as an extended range of available mind tools, we have “overcome some of the brain’s native cognitive limitations and conquered new territories in the Space of Reason” (Day 2004: 112). In other words, our tendency to use our environment to augment our cognitive processes (the abacus being an example) is what allows us to overcome the cognitive limitations native to the brain, and begin entertaining off-line, counter-intuitive thoughts and concepts. Day suggests that our ability to think ‘off-line’ thoughts about supernatural agents arises from a distributed cognitive process, and that “religious cognition is computationally impossible without the external cognitive scaffolding that supports it” (Day 2004: 113). In this case, certain forms of religious experience would also be reliant on a conducive cognitive environment. This proposal leads to an examination of the necessary conditions for religious cognition from an extended and systemic perspective.

�19

Steven Mithen, a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading, takes the evolutionary view, introducing the term cognitive fluidity to describe the process whereby primate minds evolved towards modern civilisation. He theorises that by combining tool use with information processing structures in the brain, early humans where able to embrace an extended medium from which the modern human mind emerged. He writes that “non-neural components of the human mind” exponentially increase “the range of conceptual spaces available for exploration and the manner in which this could be undertaken” (Mithen 1998, 181). The human mind is thus evolved within the constraints of body and environment, and bootstrapped from interactive relations between the two, in which aspects of the environment are necessary components of human conceptual space.

4.4 Cognitive connections are achieved through couplingRichard Menary, editor of the book The Extended Mind (2006) proposes that the organism becomes a cognitive agent by being coupled to the external environment. Successful coupling ensures the two way interaction necessary for a networked system of cognition to arise. The concept of ‘coupling’ or “intentional connections that arise in the course of interactions” (Dourish 2001: 138) is a fundamental concept in this approach to understanding the networks which substantiate complex systems. In the process of an act of extended cognition, a cognitive agent successfully couples with her environment, allowing an extended cognitive system to emerge. This coupling takes place within a cognitive medium of sorts. The essence of a medium is that it can be manipulated, transformed in some way to carry information. The identity and substance of the medium remains the same, the dynamic action of modulation (transformation) is the actual carrier of information. Mediums are shared spaces, they join subject to object. The medium of air between us allows the modulation of sound waves to reach from me to you, and so information is transferred mechanically. The medium itself does not change, in as much as the substance of the air stays the same, yet the manner in which the air is engaged by the vibration of sound allows informational content to be transferred. Paul Dourish, in his book Embodied Interaction (2001) establishes the idea that the phenomenon of computation itself can be understood as a medium for the transfer of information (2001: 170). As we have seen, framing the process of cognition as a form of computation (albeit an embodied and situated form) is a fruitful endeavour in our attempt to understand human cognitive capacities. In this case, the idea of cognition as a medium for communication allows us to ground the cognitive as a means for the intersubjective. The cognitive medium is modulated through thoughts, actions, and coupling with environmental objects or

�20

constraints. In the moment of coupling, the cognitive agent reconfigures her relationship with the world, by establishing a dynamic connection to the coupled object (Dourish 2001: 142). In this way, aspects of the environment are functionally appropriated.

In a real world example of extended cognitive coupling, researchers in Japan found that using a tool for long periods of time has an physiological effect on the neural mapping of bodily boundaries. Brains display a quality called plasticity, meaning they can grow and adapt in response to the world around them. Neurons adapt in tandem with experience, and as the tool is used, over time it becomes part of the brain’s neurological body map, an extension of the conceptual range of selfhood and agency in the world (Obayashi et. al. 2001). The plasticity of the brain is perfectly suited to the concept of embodied and extended cognition. The neural substrates that underlie our conscious self-experience are highly adaptable, and through tool usage we regularly transform our mental representations of what constitutes bodily agency. This points to a neurological model of real-world cognitive extension.

5. Ritual and Extended Cognition

5.1 Religious ritual makes use of cognitive artifactsMatthew Day proposes that the many different non-neural resources that are involved in religious activities in fact help to sustain these particular activities (Day 2005: 97 ed. Whitehouse, McCauley). He suggests that the “rituals, music, relics, scriptures, statues and buildings typically associated with religious traditions…could represent central components of the relevant machinery of religious thought” (Day 2007: abstract). In this case, the cognitive artifacts involved in ritual make it possible to engage religious thinking. Kevin Reimer discusses the example of the candle ritual at La’Arch, an association of homes for the developmentally disabled in France. He writes that the ritual artifact (candle) and ritual actions (request for prayer when holding the candle) “serve to assemble religious meaning in a collectively ratified acknowledgement” (Reimer 2005: 132). In other words, as the group “interacts with a representational medium that externally scaffolds their religious experience” they have access to “the full weight of the candle's theological meaning” (Reimer 2005: 132).

�21

5.1.1. Ritual performers couple with ritual artifactsThe ritual performer couples with cognitive ritual artifacts in the extended cognitive process of ritual. As attention is focused on the ritual artifact, so the information associated with the artifact is made available. The idea of coupling in this regard is a useful term for understanding the momentary transformation of the cognitive medium as the initiating cognitive agency (the individual) interacts with the cognitive artifact. Jan Kratky, at the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion, further explores the idea of ritual cognitive artifacts. He writes that the ritual object serves as a cognitive scaffold, a “culturally evolved answer for the computational, attentional, mnemonic or conceptual problems posed by religious tasks” (Kratky, 2012: 53). The ritual object helps to maintain and create the sacred space, and carries symbolic relevance, with which a wealth of information is associated. The agent in the extended cognitive process of ritual behaviour is able to engage aspects of religious experience in a more streamlined, computationally less expensive manner, by including cognitive artifacts.

McGraw, in his unpublished Phd thesis, gives us another perspective on the information processing properties of the outside world. “By stabilising representations from both natural and supernatural domains, religious ritual objects facilitate cognition by providing it with a content. The artifact enacts and materialises the conceptual blend that comes from both intuitive and counterintuitive domains” (McGraw, 2011: 236). A ritual object can be viewed as a place holder, a ‘hyperlink’ if you will, for the counterintuitive data associated with the deity, making it easier for the embodied and extended mind to interact with, and navigate through, ritual space. A greater counterintuitive load can be maintained, as the information content of the ritual object is not limited by the in-head processing capacity of the person involved.

5.1.2 Ritual cognitive artifacts are a material anchor for the cognitive loadRitual behaviour is an aspect of an extended cognitive process, and as such, Kratky offers the example of the use of prayer beads, which can be viewed as the use of a cognitive tool. The beads act as an anchor in time and space for the devotee as she works through her ritual chants. They are an ‘attention-mediating device’ as well as a material anchor for the cognitive load of personal religious commitment and belief (Kratky 2010: 57). Manually moving each bead, the devotee is preparing for the next mantra as the previous one draws to a close. The beads lead her through her chanting, focus her attention, and reduce the overall computational load of the ritual.

�22

Religious ritual practice involves working with information. Ritual objects are cognitive load bearers, and when coupled with the intentionality of the devotee, create the conditions for the state of the devotee to be transformed. In the example of the Christian ritual of the Eucharist, the wafer carries the cognitive load of the Host, the intangible made tangible. The believer need not hold that wealth of information in working memory. She can manipulate the cognitive load through engaging the ritual object as an interface, by manipulating the ritual object, she works directly with the information it holds. Religious rituals “link the sacred and the profane, the visible and the invisible” (Schmidt 1988: 392). The artifact is the repository of all the symbolic associations which make up belief in the sacred. The information inherent in the sacred is made available through ritual interaction with sacred cognitive artifacts. These symbolic associations hold information content, data which is made available to the devotee during the course of the ritual though successful coupling. The devotee successfully engaged in extended ritual cognition is experiencing affective transformation.

5.2 Ritual can be analysed as an unfolding processA systemic and extended analysis of ritual cognition and behaviour does not destroy the integrity of the subject. Instead, the subject is redefined as locally distributed during certain cognitive processes. The extended cognitive act of ritual is initiated and guided by the intentionality of the subject. Engaging in ritual can be understood as an embodied and extended cognitive activity, taking place within the medium of the ritual space. This view gives credence to Sonia Hazard’s assertion that “without hard boundaries, membranes, or containers to divide them, humans and things continuously enter into a coextensive, interdependent, and integrative relationship” (2013: 65). The objects that substantiate religious practice, and the subjects who instantiate it, are part of a more complex, more cohesive, system. On this view, we understand religious ritual cognition as a system of action involving many distributed processes, something that Whitehouse alludes to when he writes that “the causes of all mental activity are located simultaneously with and among organisms” (2001: 209). The foundations are being laid for a new understanding and analysis of religious behaviour in light of the turn towards systems thinking in the 21st century.

According to philosopher Henri Bergson, life is best described as a process of interconnected systems, emerging and dissipating within the constant flow of the material

�23

universe. Structure drives process, and process informs structure. Process philosophy regards the necessity of change and process as fundamental to reality. The real, far from being an unchanging and essential substance, is better described as a continual process of unfolding and becoming. Bergson sees reality as a system with properties of constant generation and growth (Bergson 1944: xxiv). As such, exploring the complex dynamics of processes gives us language for discussing reality as we experience it. The act of ritual cognition can be understood as a cognitive process unfolding in the world. Based on philosopher Henri Bergson’s categories of becoming, I suggest that ritual as a process can be further explored with Bergson’s dynamic qualities of difference, duration, intention and becoming. These four aspects serve to locate and describe the extended cognitive process of ritual.

Duration, which Bergson posits as “the ‘field’ in which difference lives and plays itself out” (Grosz 2006: 04). In Bergson’s philosophy of creative evolution, duration is the first structural category, the ground which makes all description, and any differentiation of reality possible. He writes “the more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of new forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new” (Bergson 1944: 14). Duration allows for human experience to unravel sequentially within the process of engagement with the world. This sequential unraveling builds up within the span of duration, giving rise to character and structure. Human experience, “as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration it accumulates” (Bergson 1944: 04). In regards to ritual, the duration of ritual space is specified and bounded by the actions and intentions of the subject within the established framework of the ritual. All rituals have a beginning and an end, a definite, temporally bounded space within the overall religious framework. A ritual structure emerges, takes form, and then dissipates over the duration of the ritual performance.

Difference as Bergson defines it is “not a concept bound up with units, entities, or terms….[it] is an ontological rather than a logically, semiological, political or historical category” (Grosz 2006: 06). Bergson’s understanding of difference as a category is not limited to the binary difference of perceived dichotomy. Rather, he understood the structural quality of difference to be the very distinction by which life was possible, given the substrate of a duration within which to proliferate. As Elizabeth Grosz reminds us in her commentary of Bergson, “underlying the dualistic structure by which difference has come to be represented is a fundamental continuum, a movement of degrees, a movement of

�24

differentiation that elaborates a multiplicity of things” (2006: 06). With this understanding of difference in mind, we can describe the difference between the cognitive agencies and the cognitive artifacts that engage within ritual cognitive space. We can also understand that this differentiation is not based on binary opposites of self and other, but rather a relational understanding of difference as it arises within multilevelled, multifunctional processes. This is not a difference that sets apart, it is a difference that denotes embedded functionality, and allows for information load within the cognitive system to be distributed. This in turn boosts the capacity of the system, which creates potential for optimising information exchange. In terms of ritual theory, the devotee engaged in ritual cognition is able to experience a cognitive process which has been augmented by the different aspects of the ritual cognitive space.

For Bergson, intuition is a “rigorous philosophical method for an attunement with the concrete specificities of the real”. Intuition is “that mode of (internal) transport into the heart of a thing such that it suits that thing alone, its particularity in all its details” while at the same time it is “an attuned empiricism that does not reduce its components and parts but expands them to connect this object to the very universe itself” (Grosz 2006: 07). According to Mircea Eliade, the basis of ritual is the enactment of myth, which usually centres round an institutionalised recalling of a theophanic revelation. We could argue that this initial theophany is of the same order as the intuition to which Bergson refers, in which case, ritual can be conceptualised as the embodied enactment of an original intuition, an original insight into the nature of the real. Bergson believed these instances of intuition were rare, and involved a measure of transcendence, the “capacity to understand natural differences beyond a monistic or dualistic model” (Bergson 1988: 99). This is in keeping with Eliade’s perspective on original heirophany as the basis for religion, myth and ritual. “The Experience of Sacred Space makes possible the "founding of the world": where the sacred Manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence” (Eliade 1961: 63).

Finally, Bergson’s conception of becoming provides the dynamical aspect of self-experience within the extended mind paradigm. Understanding this particular use of the word becoming involves “the replacement of static conceptions of things through the creation of dynamic conceptions of processes in continual transition” (Grosz 2006: 10). In other worlds, reality itself is engaged in a process of continual transition. For Bergson, “what is real is the continual change of form, form is only a snapshot of

�25

transition” (Bergson 1944: 328). The self in a ritual context is engaged continually in the process of becoming, the same process that the whole of reality finds substance in. The intentionality of the subject focuses the process of becoming within the framework of the ritual space, and the extended ritual cognitive system is engaged. Becoming, in Bergson’s view, is the continual engagement of differentiated aspects of reality with a temporal duration. Becoming in ritual theory is a term we can give the overall process of engagement, coupling, information exchange and representational state transformation experienced by the ritual performer.

5.3 Successful ritual engagementIt has become impossible to separate the experiencer from the experience. Taken as a totality, as a system, the whole phenomenon of ritual experience is just that, a whole phenomenon. That said, personal emotional states are aspects of our experience which are indeed localised and discrete, in as much as they are forms of communication which arise within our own bodies (Norris 2004). Embodied emotion can be shared and augmented by religious technologies, but our sense of emotional experience remains a personal and distinct phenomenon. The complex set of formative experiences which shape a person’s emotional range also shape tendencies towards further patterns of engagement. Engaging in religious ritual can be a rote mode of engagement, wherein the ritual performer subscribes to the ritual actions with little emotional involvement in the process. As Humphrey and Laidlaw (1994) point out, this is still valid ritual performance. Validity is constructed here as unambiguous and determined ritual action (Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994: 95). Is a valid ritual act the same as a successful ritual act? To answer that question, we need to better understand the intention of the ritual participant. Those approaching ritual with the intention of transmitting canonical information regarding doctrine, and self-referential information regarding religious commitment, are able to do so without much emotional involvement. A successful ritual experience for such a candidate is almost guaranteed, as long as ritual form is respected and religious tradition is maintained.

5.3.1 Ritual and transformative religious experienceOn the other hand, those who approach ritual with the intention of begetting transformative religious experience are expecting a form of emotional engagement to be made possible through ritual participation. Inherent in this personal ritual commitment is the willingness to experience affect, to have one’s emotional state transformed. That many walk away from religious ritual encounters with little satisfaction in this regard is testament to the skill

�26

necessary for successful emotional engagement with religious ritual technology. As we have made clear through the lens of extended cognition and systems theory, a coupling takes place between the subject and artifactual aspects of the environment within which the ritual process is situated. This coupling potential is present in many different forms, depending on the willingness and ability of the ritual subject to engage. A subject willing for emotional engagement will couple emotionally with the ritual space, and thus be more available for affective transformation during the course of the ritual. Yet even willingness to engage is not sufficient for predicting transformative religious ritual experience. Emotional coupling is necessary but not sufficient. During the process of ritual engagement, the emotional dynamics that created the conditions for the initial ritual intention are also instrumental in disrupting the coupling process. Engaging in ritual requires an intention of non-intentionality (Humphrey, Laidlaw 1994). While this is easy to maintain when successful outcomes are guaranteed, as in the case of the ritual performer who acts merely to convey a standard message, it becomes more difficult when transformative outcomes are expected. The attachment to the hoped-for affective transformation becomes a block to engaging successfully in the extended aspects of religious ritual. This is because the practitioner yearning for a religious experience is performing religious ritual action with very little ‘non-intentionality’. Emotionally charged intention takes hold of the non-intentional aspects of ritual performance and attaches personal significance, thus rendering them deeply intentional. In so doing, the emotional motivation behind the ritual performance acts as a limit to successful ritual engagement. It is as if a particular form of alienation is experienced by some practitioners when faced with the transformative potential of ritual.

Rahel Jaeggi tackles the concept of alienation, in her book by the same name (Jaeggi 2014). She writes that an alienated self is a self who is not successfully appropriating his or her experience. This act of appropriation can be described as a continual unfolding of a personal stance akin to Humphrey and Laidlaw’s intention of non-intentionality inherent in ritual performance. To appropriate one’s life experience is not to control it, but to allow it. In this way, one develops an intentional stance that is able to respond effectively to non-intentional experience. The shift is subtle, but distinctive. To appropriate ritual engagement, the willingness to allow the experience to unfold is intrinsic to the ability to generate affective transformation. This is not to say that appropriation lies through submission to an external process. The intentional stance of the ritual participant is one of active engagement. This active and intentional engagement is what defines the possibility for

�27

appropriating the experience, with all it’s ‘non-intended’ aspects intact. A ritual participant who is willing to engage emotionally with the ritual process, and yet is able to appropriate the experience by allowing it to unfold in an intentionally non-intentional manner, is better equipped to make use of religious ritual technology for affective transformation.

6. Conclusion

As human beings engaging the system of life, we have established cognitive optimums and behavioural modalities that allow us to navigate a world of continual change. We have developed cognitive and behavioural technologies. Technology, from the Greek ‘skill, cunning of hand’ is a word most commonly used to refer to machine aided processes, but any tool usage or collection of techniques for the purpose of accomplishing an objective can be understood as a technology. In terms of adaptive behaviour, the technology of religious ritual draws communities together, and establishes social and moral boundaries (Durkheim 1965, Tavor 2013). The personal impact of ritual participation can also be considered to offer a positive affective outcome, for which we have adapted in order to maximise our intended ends. Emotional experience is integral to the transmission of religious culture (Norris 2004: 187). Religious ritual can be used “to educate the feeling toward certain experiences” (Norris 2004: 195), towards religious emotions associated with ritual gestures and artifacts, and thus easily retrieved through ritual performance. As Ori Tavor discusses in his article on ritual as a corporal technology, “ritual is the most efficacious tool for…balancing and harmonising emotions and desires” (Tavor 2013: 320). From an evolutionary perspective, in as much as we are able to chose sustainable strategies for development we are able to continue developing. That there are optimal practices for engaging religious experience is thus understood as natural outworking of an adaptive system.

The notion of cognition as distributed, or even more radically, extended, provides us with a new framework for analysing ritual behaviour. Pascal Boyer proposes that “a ‘theory of ritual’ could be a general account of the processes, cognitive and otherwise, whereby the ritual mode is triggered and directs action or interaction” (Boyer 1994: 189). This ritual mode corresponds to the initial intention, or stance, of the ritual performer, a commitment to coupling with the ritual space in such a way that the ritual enactment is . Humphrey and Laidlaw’s theory of intentional ‘ritual action’ paves the way for looking at the role of intention in establishing a ritual mode of behaviour, setting the conditions for effective

�28

coupling, i.e. successful participation in the extended cognitive space of the ritual act. It is intention of non-intentionality that “sets up the relationship between embodied action and meaning” (Dourish 2001: 138), and initiates the coupling. A deeper understanding of the dynamics involved in this emergent ritual system could furnish us with new theories of ritual action and interaction. Whitehouse’s religious modes, with their concomitant high and low arousal features, may correlate with  the affective impact of coupling during the ritual process. Emotional involvement in the process of coupling facilitates a more immersive experience of the extended system.

From another perspective, if we view ritual as a formalised example of an extended cognitive process, Rappaport’s theory of ritual as a basic social act points towards distributed and extended cognition as a basic social act. The emergent system that arises during the extended cognitive act of ritual involves information dynamics which, as a starting point, can be described by Rappaport’s work on ritual as communication. The information age is one in which we are apprehending the information inherent in all phenomena; the process of taking form, of in-forming, of receiving structure through systemic coupling. This view is of structure which is itself informed, and patterned, according to information processes. A such, the meaning inherent in religious ritual is in-formed by flows of communication, both canonical and indexical. The flows of information that are established in a coupled ritual system describe the system from an informational and relational perspective. With this insight we can analyse religious ritual with a new set of metrics, as an emergent structure comprised of intentional and extended, relational cognitive dynamics.

McCauley & Lawson’s ritual forms theory raises questions of agency within emergent ritual systems. The properties of these systems may give rise to natural agentic dynamics, which casts a different light on Boyer’s hypothetical ‘hypersensitive agency detection device’. Hutchins observes that “the cognitive properties of such distributed systems can differ radically from the cognitive properties of the individuals that inhabit them” (Hutchins 1995b, 265). Approaching the extended cognitive ritual process in terms of systems dynamics can allow us to recognise emergent structures and patterns within ritual behaviour. Using work done in the field of complex adaptive systems, a wealth of data becomes available to us as we explore how extended cognitive ritual systems develop, and the emergent properties associated with these systems.

�29

We are living in the age of the hybrid. Disciplines are crossing paths and interacting like never before. As a scholar of religion, there are a wide range of tools available from a number of other fields which aid further enquiry into religious phenomena. From a philosophical standpoint, the domain of the subject is once again being re-examined, and it is in this environment that aspects of systems theory and extended cognition really come to the fore. Lambros Malafouris, in his paper for the Journal “Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences”, describes the cognitive subject in terms of interactions with the world, “a self or a person cannot emerge (ontogenetically or phylogenetically) aside from a process of material engagement” (Malafouris 2008: 1998). Religious experience, as an aspect of the human subject, is as much a natural phenomenon as any other experiential modality, and as such can also be described as a process of material engagement. However, the term ‘material’ appears to stand at odds with our intuitive understanding of flow dynamics and a universe in flux. Our cognitive experience seems non-material, in as much as we have defined material nature as rooted in the solid, physical object. For the human mind, it appears that antithesis establishes the experiential continuum. For every ‘up’ there is a ‘down’ and an infinity of positions in between. Using polarisation as a lens, the human being is able to navigate wide territories in the Space of Reason. Ultimately however, we are discussing a holistic phenomenon. On this physics and philosophy can agree. Religious Studies as a discipline has just begun to seriously approach the analysis of the interrelated, holistic nature of religious experience. Conceptions of the distinct subject and the necessary supernatural agent are relatively inviolable, taken as a given when addressing religious phenomena. The turn towards a subject that is co-constitutive with the environment may at first appear to put paid to theological speculation entirely. Yet this is not the case, as instead we are presented with a new framework for understanding religious experience, one which allows for the possibility that this kind of experience is a naturally arising dynamic within an extended cognitive system, and one which can be accessed through ritual practice. Religious ritual is comprised of gestures, words and artifacts which help us to embody and retrieve information necessary for establishment of religious tradition and which give us access to the possibility for affective transformation. From this view, successful ritual engagement is a skill, like dance or song, which both stems from a natural behavioural mode, and which can be honed through practice. The theory of extended cognition gives us insight into these religious ritual dynamics, and paves the way for further study of intentionally generated religious phenomena.

�30

7. References

Barret, Justin. 2007. “Cognitive Science of Religion: What Is It and Why Is It?” Religion Compass 1/6 (2007): 768–786

Barret, Justin. 2011. “Cognitive Science of Religion: Looking Back, Looking Forward”. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (2011) 50(2):229–239

Bergson, Henri. 1988. Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books

Bohm, David and Hiley, Basil. 1993. The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory. London: Routledge

Boyer, Pascal. 1994. The naturalness of religious ideas: a cognitive theory of religion. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Clark, Andy. 2007. “Curing Cognitive Hiccups: A Defense of the Extended Mind”. The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 104, No. 4 (Apr., 2007), pp. 163-192

Clark, Andy and Chalmers, David. 1998. "The Extended Mind". Analysis 58 (1): 7–19

Chemero, Anthony. 2009. Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. A Bradford Book. The MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

Damasio, Antonio. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Day, Matthew. 2004. “Religion, Off-Line Cognition and the Extended Mind”. Journal of Cognition and Culture 4.1 101-121

DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory And Social Complexity. London: Continuum

Dourish, Paul. 2001. Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

Dourish, Paul. 2004. Embodied Interaction. A Bradford Book. The MIT Press

Durkheim, Émile. 1965. The elementary forms of the religious life. New York: Free Press.

Eliade, Mircea. 1961. The Sacred and the Profane : The Nature of Religion: The Significance of Religious Myth, Symbolism, and Ritual within Life and Culture, translated from the French by William R. Trask. A Harvest Book. Harcourt, Inc.

Geertz, Clifford. 1957. “Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example”. American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Feb., 1957), pp. 32-54 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books

�31

Guthrie, Stewart E. 1980. “A cognitive theory of religion”. Current Anthropology 21(2):181–94.

Gibbs, Raymond W.. 1994. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. Cambridge University Press

Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. “Bergson, Deleuze and the Becoming of Unbecoming”. Parallax, 11:2, 4-13

Hutchins, Edwin. 2000. “Distributed Cognition”. International Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier

Humphrey, Caroline. & Laidlaw, James. 1994, The archetypal actions of ritual : a theory of ritual illustrated by the Jain rite of worship. Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press Oxford : New York

Hazard, Sonia. 2013. “The Material Turn in the Study of Religion”. Religion and Society: Advances in Research 4 (2013): 58–78

Jaeggi, Rahel. 2014. Alienation, trans. Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press

Kirsh, David. & Maglio, Paul. 1994. “On distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic action”. Cognitive Science 18: 513 - 549.

Krátký, Jan. 2012. “Cognition, material culture and religious ritual”. The Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religions. Diskus 13: 49-62

Lakoff, George. 2012. “Topics in Cognitive Science”. Topics in Cognitive Science 4: 773–785

Lawson & McCauley. 1990. Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture. Cambridge University Press

Lawson, Thomas. 2000. “Towards a Cognitive Science of Religion”. Numen Vol 47. 338 - 349

McCauley, Robert N., and Lawson, E. Thomas. 1990. Rethinking Religion. Cambridge University Press.

McCauley, Robert N., and Lawson, E. Thomas. 2002. Bringing ritual to mind: psychological foundations of cultural forms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Mithen, Stephen. J. 1998. Creativity in human evolution and prehistory. New York : Routledge

Malafouris, Lambros. 2008. “Between Brains, Bodies and Things: Tectonoetic Awareness and the Extended Self Source: Philosophical Transactions” Biological Sciences, Vol 363, No. 1499

�32

McGraw. 2011. “Divination & Decision-Making: Ritual Techniques of Distributed Cognition in the Guatemalan Highlands.” Unpublished PhD. thesis, University of California, San Diego

Menary, Richard. 2006. “Attacking the Bounds of Cognition”. Philosophical Psychology Vol. 19, No. 3, June 2006 329–344

Menary. Richard (ed.). 2010. The Extended Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Norman, Donald A. 1990. The design of everyday things. New York: Doubleday.

Norris. Rebecca. 2005. “Examining the structure and role of emotion: contributions of neurobiology to the study of embodied religious experience”. Zygon, vol. 40, no. 1 (March 2005)

Obayashi S, Suhara T, Kawabe K, Okauchi T, Maeda J, Akine Y, Onoe H, Iriki A. 2001. “Functional brain mapping of monkey tool use”. Neuroimage. 2001 Oct;14(4):853-61.

Pinker, S. 2003. The Blank Slate. Penguin.

Prigogine, Ilya and Nicolis, G. 1977. Self-Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems. Wiley.

Prigogine, Ilya and Stengers, Isabelle. 1984. Order out of chaos: man's new dialogue with nature. Boulder, CO: New Science Library.

Radvansky, Krawietz and Tamplin. 2011. “Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations.” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. Volume 64, Issue 8, 2011

Rappaport, Roy. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reimer, Kevin. 2005. “Fiat Lux: Religion as Distributed Cognition”. Journal of Psychology and Christianity. Vol. 24, No. 2, 130 - 139

Rowlands, Mark. 2010. The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology. A Bradford Book. The MIT Press.

Shulman, Helene. 1997. Living at the edge of chaos: complex systems in culture and psyche. Einsiedeln: Daimon.

Sperber, Dan. 1975. Rethinking Symbolism. Cambridge University Press, 1975

Sternberg, Robert J. 2009. Cognitive Psychology: Fifth Edition. Wadsworth Cengage Learning

Tavor, Ori. 2013. “Xunzi’s Theory of Ritual Revisited: Reading Ritual as Corporal Technology”. Dao 12:313–330

Thompson, Evan, Varela, Francisco. 2001. “Radical Embodiment: Neural Dynamics and Consciousness,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5(10) : 418-425.

�33

Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in life: Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University

Watts, Fraser. 2013. “Embodied cognition and Religion” . Zygon, vol. 48, no. 3

Weinberg, Gerald. 2001. An Introduction to Systems Thinking. Dorset House.Whitehouse, Harvey 2001. “The Cognitive Foundations of Religiosity”. In “Religion and Mind” (eds.) Whitehouse, H & McCauley, R. Altamira Press

Whitehouse, Harvey. 2004. Modes of Religiosity. Altamira Press.

Whitehouse, Harvey & McCauley, . 2005. Mind and religion: psychological and cognitive foundations of religiosity. Altamira Press.

Whitehouse, McCauley, Robert N. 2005. Mind and Religion. Altamira Press

Wolff, Charlotte. 1972. A Psychology of Gesture. New York: Arno.

Zhong, Leonardelli. 2008. “Cold and Lonely: Does Social Exclusion Literally Feel Cold?” Psychological Science. Volume 19—Number 9

�34