Culture and Hope: Reflections on Bellah's Unfinished Project

  1. Ana Marta González
Llibre:
Challenging Modernity

Editorial: Columbia University Press

ISBN: 978-0-231-56051-1

Any de publicació: 2024

Pàgines: 159 - 181

Tipus: Capítol de llibre

Resum

In both Religion in Human Evolution and in the long prologue to his unfinished and unpublished book, Robert Bellah quotes Merlin Donald as follows: “Narrative and theory are the two highest cultural capacities that humans have attained, making use of language to culminate a history of new cultural capacities that began with episodic culture, the capacity to know what kind of episode one is in, followed by mimetic culture, by which one enacts or embodies meaning non-linguistically.” Then, complex narratives first emerged in the stage that he calls “mythic” and did not necessarily disappear with the onset of theoretic culture.