Okay, shall I begin? Okay, great. Well, thank you very much for having me. Apologies again
for getting the time wrong, and thank you for that warm welcome. So yeah, I'm going to talk
today about cosmology and cognition and use examples from ancient Chinese and Roman divination,
or ways of thinking about divination and the cosmos to illustrate a wider idea. So
what I want to concentrate on today is the relationship between cognition and cross-cultural
comparison, okay, and to do this looking at cosmology is understood as theories of the cosmos,
the things that exist within it, and how those things interact. I will be talking about divination
as examples, but my aim today really is not so much to illustrate particular divination practices,
but to use them as examples to argue for a certain kind of comparative approach to understanding
cultural differences in cosmology. And I'm happy to talk about specific practices and so on afterwards
in the Q&A. So through my work on contemporary and historical Chinese divination and cosmology,
I've become interested in how cosmological perspectives come about. So what I'm interested
in here is what leads to the development of certain relationships between, for example,
cosmology and politics as manifest in divination as a practice, and how does this pan out in
different kinds of socio-cultural contexts. So concerning the examples today, the question
I'm interested in is what about early Chinese and Roman empires is relevant to the role played by
divination, and how can we explain that relationship in terms of cognition and cultural transmission.
So, spoiler or disclaimer, I'm not going to answer that question today because it's
a really big, difficult question, okay. So what I'm actually going to do though is
try to frame a way in which we could approach that question successfully, you know. And so what do we
need to do conceptually so that a question like that might become manageable with focus paid to
the relevant different disciplines and so on. So, first I want to just go over some
points about some terminology that I'm going to use, and I am trying to avoid any sort of jargon
as far as possible, but there's a few sort of concepts that will come up, so it's best to kind
of explain them first. When I say cosmology here, I'm talking in quite a broad sense about
theories of the cosmos or the world, what is in it, how it all relates to one another, okay. You can
most of the time when I'm using this term, you can also understand it as meaning something like
a worldview, you know. When I talk about cognition, I'm talking about mental processes of judgment and
deliberation, okay. Now these can be conscious processes, which I'm going to call reflection,
and they can be unconscious, and those I will call intuition. So, I'm going to talk about
cognitive thinking and I'm going to talk about mental thinking and I'm going to talk about
physical intuition, okay. So, when I say cognition, the most important thing is that I'm not just
talking about kind of exclusive reasoning, I'm talking about various different ways that people
make judgments, okay. Now, when I say culture, I just mean ideas and practices that are transmitted
through the complex. In the last few centuries BCE, two empires, the Roman Republic and Empire and
the Chin and Hand entities in China, consolidated themselves as empires on a new kind of state,
forged through conquest, governed by complex sets of institutions, and founded on ideological
principles, which have continued to frame cultural and political discourse for millennia after those
regimes and political organizations have themselves ceased to exist. Now, a fair amount has been written
comparing China and Rome as early empires in terms of things like the political and economic
organization of empire, okay. Now, when we compare large-scale features of societies, we readily find
that there are different kinds of differences in areas such as political or bureaucratic structure,
in these cases, the role of the military, the importance of currency, and so on.
Now, in this case, we also find a similarity in that divination and an associated cosmology was
an important element to state ideology and power. Now, of course, we also find differences. The
differences in understanding of how divination worked. As it was a central activity of both the
Roman and early Chinese states, it's quite a good example to then sort of look at how these various
similarities and differences in other areas of society sort of come together to produce different
cultural effects, okay. Now, it is also worth focusing on divination because unlike, for example,
currency or policy or military conquest or something like that, it seems to be intuitively
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00:53:41 Min
Aufnahmedatum
2021-01-28
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2021-03-04 13:37:23
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en-US
Researchers engaged in cross-cultural comparison inevitably face the problem of how to analyse cultural differences in thought, rooted in a tension between the relative and the universal. This talk will focus on how to reconcile this tension by looking at the relationship between culture and cognition in divination. Frequently, and not least in the study of divination as a culturally variable way of knowing, cross-cultural comparison leads to an emphasis on deeply-ingrained differences in understandings of the basic things that exist in the world and how they can be known. These cosmological and epistemological conceptions are often understood as a basis for thought and action. For example, forms of divination that developed in the early Chinese empires were based on a naturalistic conception of the universe, governed by constant laws of transformation. In contrast, forms of divination which arose in comparable societies and occupied similar social roles elsewhere, as in the Roman Republic and empire, relied on conceptions of gods communicating divine truth. At first glance this comparison suggests a fundamental divergence in how basic aspects of the world are understood, which is often causally attributed to ‘culture’.
But what can we actually conclude about cultural differences from such comparisons? The danger of emphasising ‘culture’ as a causal factor in such comparative analysis is reliance on an intuitive, but inaccurate, account of how humans behave. If we consider central features of human cognition, in particular a distinction between rapid intuitive judgements and slower, deliberate reflection, we find that apparently coherent ‘cultural’ worldviews don’t in fact underlie behaviour, but are reflectively constructed in specific circumstances. Examples from divination practices illustrate that the relationship between cognition and cosmology in practice is more complex than it first appears, and that to understand it, we need to take account of various scales of causation, from individual cognition to wider socio-political context. Using divination as an inspiration, this talk presents an approach to cross-cultural comparison which accommodates cultural similarities and differences coherently as functions of different scales of human behaviour.