WHAT MAKES A SYSTEM OF RITUALS INTERESTING?

Religious rituals proliferate throughout the world. Why is it so? Anthropologists and scholars of religion have been offering answers to this question for more than a century. Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley (1990), after having reviewed previous approaches, advanced their own solution, which would become the opening chapter in the new research paradigm called the cognitive science of religion. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, I shall present the linguist's perspective on the Lawson-McCauley model of religious rituals. My argument is that such an analysis sheds new light on the model, replacing it into its unduly forgotten original context, but also paving a new way to developing the model further. Second, I shall apply the Lawson-McCauley model to several Jewish rituals. By demonstrating the limits of the original model and suggesting revisions, I hope to also make the first steps on this new way.

We begin by reviewing some ideas that played a central role in the Chomskyan generative syntax in the 1980s, the dominant paradigm in linguistics in those days. Although left somehow implicit by Lawson and McCauley, and not recognized by most contemporary cognitive scholars of religion, their model of religious rituals is crucially based on these concepts.