‘Bringing it all back home’: mentalities, models and the historical study of religions

Authors

• Tom Sjöblom University of Helsinki

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30674/scripta.67256

Keywords:

Methodology, Interdisciplinary study, Cognition, Religion -- Study, Cognitive science, Linguistics

Abstract

If historians of mentalities are studying cultural models of the past, the cognitive historians of religions are in their turn studying religious model.  A more useful definition for religious mentalities would be those cultural models which involves representations based on counterintuitive claims. The history of religions would methodologically be something like a specialized branch of the history of mentalities, and it would be necessary for them to work in close relationship, as applying cognitive approaches to cultural materials always relies on the principle of holism, that is, that all cultural representations should be viewed as parts of the cognitive network system they are found in.