Whitewash Harvey. Modes of religiosity: A cognitive theory of religious transmission

Altamira Press, 2004. — 631 p. — ISBN 978-0759-115-60-6This book sets out a testable theory of how religions are created, reproduced, and transformed. Parts of this theory have been published in two recent monographs, one focusing on a single religious tradition (Whitewash 1995), and the other seeking to generalize the theory to a wider range of cases (Whitewash 2000a). Both of these books focused primarily on the consequences of particular psychological processes for patterns of religious dissemination and political association. This was in keeping with the fact that both studies drew mainly on ethnographic evidence. This book, by contrast, concentrates more heavily on the underlying psychological processes themselves. The kinds of theories and evidence examined are, consequently, rather different. The central tenets of the theory advanced in my earlier books will not be abandoned in what follows, but the theory’s cognitive foundations will be substantially enriched and extended. My further aim is to distinguish clearly between what we can now say with confidence on the subject of religious transmission and what we still need to find out.