The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

formulation Sperber describes the purpose of the epidemiology of representations as “(..) not
to describe in any detail the actual causal chains that stabilize (..) a particular cultural
representation (..) but to identify factors and processes that help explain the existence and
effect of these causal chains. For instance, showing that a particular folktale has an optimal
structure for human memory and that there are recurring social situations in a given society in
which people are motivated to tell it or to have it told, helps explain why the tale is told again
and again with little or no distortion of content in that society” (Bloch & Sperber 2002:
727). 89 Sperber has later made some more precise suggestions to the mechanisms behind this,
but not investigated it in any great empirical detail (Sperber 2006).
Pascal Boyer was the first to apply the insights of Sperber in a concrete research program.
He argued that religious ideas are universally widespread in all cultures because they are
counterintuitive (Boyer 1994). Counterintuitive ideas are distinguished by having one
counterintuitive feature, a breach of expectations, such as a mountain that needs to eat, a
person who is invisible, or statues that sweat. The counterintuitive feature makes them more
attention demanding and therefore more memorable. When they are more memorable they
have a higher probability of being transmitted. The implications of this theory have been
investigated in controlled psychological experiments about the transmission of
counterintuitive ideas (Barrett & Keil 1996; Barrett & Nyhof 2001) and cross cultural
investigations of the enhanced memory of counterintuitive ideas (Boyer & Ramble 2001).
The epidemiological idea of focusing on cognitive biases to understand cultural forms has
subsequently become the dominant approach in the cognitive science of religion. It can be
seen in Boyer’s theory of religion (Boyer 2001; Lienard & Boyer 2006), in Harvey
Whitehouse’s theory of modes of religiosity (Whitehouse 1996), in Thomas Lawson’s and
Robert McCauley’s theory of ritual (McCauley & Lawson 2002c) and in Scott Atran’s theory
of religion (Atran 2002). Although this has been a very fertile approach, there are still some
points of criticism to be leveled against this approach.
First, the idea that epidemiology primarily deals with transmission on the model of
infectious disease, is not accurate. Key epidemiological areas such as cancer, diabetes,
cardiovascular diseases and obesity have little or no transmission aspect. A text book in
epidemiology defines it thus: “Epidemiology can be defined as the study of the distribution of
disease and its determinants in human populations. In other words, it provides the answers to
89 For recent research on folktales along these lines see (Lisdorf 2004a; Norenzayan, Atran, Faulkner, &
Schaller 2006b)
114