Benjamin G. Purzycki: Morality and the gods: Rethinking the role of cognition and culture

Описание: Benjamin Purzycki's keynote lecture during the Religion and The Mind conference at the Institute of Religious Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków (25-27.05.2023).

Abstract:
Researchers have offered various ideas about the relationship between religion and morality. At the individual level, some point to evolved cognition as its locus while others emphasize cultural learning. Furthermore, at the level of human societies, longstanding debates make claims about the global ubiquity of the so-called “moralistic” traditions. Yet, increasing evidence suggests that “moralistic supernatural punishment” is quite common in the ethnographic world. Moreover, a considerable amount of the variation we see in religious systems corresponds to the kinds of local challenges that communities face. Drawing from this evidence, this talk shows how “morality” and “religion” are inextricably linked and suggests that the quest for identifying the cognitive locus of this link has been misguided. Sacrificing neither culture nor cognition, this talk will argue that the relationship between morality and religion is distributed across the defining features of religions and the socioecological systems in which they are situated.

Bio:
BENJAMIN PURZYCKI is an anthropologist who engages in the cognitive, evolutionary, and ethnographic sciences of sociality and cultural variation. The general topic of interest he works mostly on is religion; he studies when, why, and how religious beliefs and ritual behaviors correspond to local problems and whether or not religion mitigates those problems’ effects. He has conducted fieldwork in the Tyva Republic to address these concerns, and also managed large cross-cultural studies (https://bgpurzycki.wordpress.com/)