Nationality British | Name Harvey Whitehouse | |
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Institutions London School of Economics, University of Cambridge, Queen’s University Belfast, University of Oxford Fields Anthropology, History, Archaeology, Cognitive science, Evolution Books Modes of Religiosity, Arguments and Icons, The Debated Mind, Inside the cult, Theorizing Religions Past | ||
Harvey whitehouse
Harvey Whitehouse is Chair of Social Anthropology and Professorial Fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford.
Contents
- Harvey whitehouse
- New atheism ritual and identity fusion dr harvey whitehouse on religion part i
- Education and early career
- Later research and career
- Selected publications
- e also
- References
New atheism ritual and identity fusion dr harvey whitehouse on religion part i
Education and early career
Whitehouse received his B.A. Degree in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics in 1985. He completed his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 1990.
Whitehouse is generally regarded as one of the founders of the Cognitive Science of Religion field. After carrying out two years of field research on a 'cargo cult' in New Britain, Papua New Guinea, in the late 1980s, he developed a theory of ‘modes of religiosity’ that has been the subject of extensive critical evaluation and testing by anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and cognitive scientists.
The theory of modes of religiosity seeks to explain the role of ritual in processes of group bonding and in the evolution of social complexity. Two modes are distinguished: imagistic and doctrinal. In the imagistic mode, collective rituals are infrequent and highly emotional, giving rise to tightknit local groups. In the doctrinal mode, rituals are frequent and relatively tame, producing indefinitely expandable communities with standardized beliefs and practices.
Whitehouse’s published corpus includes a trilogy of books outlining his theory of Modes of religiosity.
Later research and career
Since the turn of the millennium, Whitehouse has focused increasingly on developing trans-disciplinary collaborations using methods as diverse as ethnographic fieldwork, experiments, interviews, and surveys in lab, field, and online settings, database construction, semantic network analysis, brain imaging, and agent based modeling. In the process, Whitehouse’s research programme has gradually expanded beyond religion to examine the role of rituals of all kinds in binding groups together and motivating inter-group competition, including warfare. Together with John Alderdice, Scott Atran, and Richard Davis, Whitehouse is a founding fellow of Oxford’s Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Harris Manchester College. He is also a founding editor of Seshat: Global History Databank, together with Peter Turchin and Pieter Francois. Whitehouse’s other long-term collaborators include Quentin Atkinson, Amy Bogaard, Michael Buhrmester, Thomas Currie, Michael Hochberg, Ian Hodder, Jonathan Jong, Jonathan Lanman, Cristine Legare, Ryan McKay, William B. Swann, and David Sloan Wilson.
Whitehouse was founding director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture (Queen’s University Belfast) and the Centre for Anthropology and Mind (University of Oxford). While Head of the School of Anthropology at the University of Oxford (2006-2009) he established the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology. Whitehouse has been principal investigator on several large collaborative initiatives including: the Explaining Religion project, funded by the European Commission, the Ritual, Community and Conflict project funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, and the Ritual Modes project funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council.