The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

questions on how much disease there is, who gets it and what specific factors put individuals
at risk” (Silman & Macfarlane 2002: 3). The central concern is therefore risk factors. In
epidemiology transmission is covered in the term exposure. Sometimes exposure is the most
important factor, as is the case in very virulent diseases such as some forms of viral
gastroenteritis, where the briefest exposure to a microscopic virus can transmit the disease.
Here exposure is the most important risk factor. Other times exposure is not very important,
such as certain forms of cancer, e.g. lung cancer where it is possible to smoke for decades
and still not develop lung cancer.
Let us consider a cultural analogue: suicide terrorism. Most people have been exposed to it
on the news, yet not so many practice it anyway. This is clearly a case where transmission is
not sufficient to understand the spread of the phenomenon. If we instead focus on risk factors
we can identify several: being male, 18-38 years, unmarried, and of average socio-economic
status in Palestine are factors that significantly increase the risk of the suicide terrorism
(Atran 2003: 1537). Therefore, the central concern of a cultural epidemiology should not be
transmission, but risk factors. Transmission is only one such and often very important.
Second, the epidemiological metaphor has functioned as a way to shift the entire focus to
cognition. One could be cynical and claim that it has primarily functioned as a way to change
career to psychology. It seems that Sperber’s original claim that local factors are important
has been entirely forgotten in practice. All research done has the purpose to discover
universal characteristics (Atran & Norenzayan 2004; Boyer 2003; Sperber & Hirschfeld
2004b). This is the opposite focus of epidemiology which seeks to understand local
characteristics in populations.
Third, no one has ever applied a more sophisticated understanding of epidemiology than
the folk version presented by Sperber in the original formulation. Epidemiology as a
discipline has an enormous unexplored potential. There are many analytical principles and
models that could be applied if the original idea of Sperber was taken seriously, that is, to
identify the factors and processes that stabilize cultural phenomena. 90
Fourth, the focus on the cognitive basis has resulted in too many sleight of hand
assumptions about what would be the large scale effect of these small scale properties in a
population. It is never enough to focus on the mind to understand culture. It is necessary to
model the properties to find out how the interactions influence the large scale phenomena
90 There are notable exceptions outside the cognitive science of religion (Aunger 2002; Cavalli-Sforza &
Feldman 1981; Guglielmino et al. 1995).
115