The name is absent

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Malafouris, L., 2007. The Sacred Engagement: Outline of a hypothesis about the origin of
human ‘religious intelligence’. In Barrowclough, D.A. and Malone C. (eds) Cult in
Context, Reconsidering Ritual in Archaeology. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 198-205.

Chapter 26

THE SACRED ENGAGEMENT: OUTLINE OF A HYPOTHESIS ABOUT
THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN ‘RELIGIOUS INTELLLIGENCE’

Lambros Malafouris

McDonald Institute, University of Cambridge

Introduction: why religion needs material culture?

The question that motivates the central hypothesis advanced in this paper regarding the
emergence of early religious thinking is the following: ‘why does religion need material
culture?’ What basic functional or symbolic need renders material culture an
indispensable and universal component of religion and ritual activity? A common
temptation, obvious in a number of recent archaeological and anthropological studies, is
to seek an answer in the field of memory (Boyer 1993; 1996; 1998; 2001; McCauley and
Lawson 2002; Whitehouse 2000; 2004; Mithen 1998a). This paper argues that material
culture does much more than simply offer a symbolic channel for the externalization,
communication, and thus successful cultural transmission, of religious ideas. Although
the mnemonic significance of the ritual object is not denied, it is proposed that the
argument from memory, as traditionally premised, fails to provide a cognitively adequate
account of the complex affective ties and multimodal interactions that characterise the
distinctive phenomenology of religious experience. Moreover, and from a long-term
evolutionary perspective, it is argued that the commonly implied ontological priority of
the religious idea, over its material expression, leaves us with no explanation about why,

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