Page 7: Events | Department for the Study of Religions

21 Jan 2022

State doctoral examination and defense of dissertation – Mgr. Peter Maňo, M.A.

9:00 AM

Invitation to the public meeting of the state doctoral examination and defense of dissertation which takes place on Friday 21 January, 2022, 9.00 AM (CET - Prague), online (using Zoom meeting).

In front of the commitee in the field of Study of Religions will defend Mgr. Peter Maňo, M.A. doctoral thesis on Ritualization effects and the impact of ritual costs on efficacy judgments, religious signaling strategies, and prosocial behavior.

12 Jan 2022

CEDRR talk: "Materialising Religions in Secret Police Archives: Methodological Insights and Results of the Hidden Galleries ERC project"

12:00 PM – 2:00 PM lecture

Let us invite you to the talk by James Kapaló from University College Cork, Ireland, who will present the theoretical and methodological approaches of the Hidden Galleries project (ERC Project no. 677355), give an account of the research process and principal outputs.

10 Dec 2021

Workshop: Manvir Singh - Building and analyzing large, cross-cultural databases to understand global patterns

10:00 AM – 12:00 PM workshop

For over a century, fieldworkers have recorded the rich cultural products of the world’s societies, including people’s songs, stories, and visual art. New computational methods and much easier access to these collections allow researchers to study universality and diversity in cultural behaviors on a scale that was hitherto impossible. In this workshop, we will discuss building and analyzing large, cross-cultural databases. I will focus on two projects: the Natural History of Song, a database of the song structure and behavior, and Anansi, a database of myth, folktales, and legends. I will discuss how we built these projects, some techniques for analyzing them, and some of the main issues that arise, ranging from guaranteeing quality data to managing collaborations and ownership.

9 Dec 2021

Invited lecture: Manvir Singh - The social and psychological origins of religious super-attractors

4:00 PM – 5:00 PM lecture

Human societies reliably develop “cultural super-attractors”, or complex practices and beliefs that exhibit striking similarities. In this talk, I will present research on the nature and origins of three religious super-attractors: shamanism, religious self-denial, and beliefs in supernatural punishment. These cultural practices appeared in the vast majority of human societies, predated doctrinal religions, and persist even when doctrinal religious authorities try to quash them. Drawing variously on cultural evolutionary theory, cross-cultural comparative projects, and studies conducted among the Mentawai people of Indonesia, I will characterize these practices, present hypotheses for why they recur, and test those hypotheses against anthropological data. The findings of these projects suggest that religious super-attractors recur as people iteratively develop traditions that appear to satisfy proximate psychological ends.

22–23 Oct 2021

Marking 10 years of LEVYNA

5:00 PM – 1:00 PM lecture

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the LEVYNA laboratory, we cordially invite you to the streaming of Radek Kundt's lecture (Friday 22.10. 17:00 - 18:00, and panel discussion (Saturday 23.10. 10:00 - 13:00).

19 Oct 2021

Computational approaches in the study of pre-modern religion

10:00 AM – 1:00 PM lecture workshop

Would you like to learn more about digital humanities techniques focused on premodern sources? Participate in our workshop with several members of the Dissident Network Project and guests. The event is part of 100th anniversary of the Faculty of Arts and will be streamed on Zoom.

15 Oct 2021

Workshop: Joshua C. Jackson - Alternative Methods in the Science of Culture and Religion

4:00 PM – 6:00 PM workshop

The scientific study of culture and religion has a long history filled with deep theoretical questions. However, we are just now gaining the methodological tools to properly answer these questions. In particular, techniques involving language analysis and ethnographic analysis give us access to samples that cannot be accessed with traditional survey and experimental methods, either because they are located in remote geographical regions or because they existed in an earlier period of history.

14 Oct 2021

Lecture: Joshua C. Jackson - The New Science of Religious Change: Theory, Method, and an Application

6:00 PM lecture

Research on human culture is adopting a more dynamic approach, with a rise in longitudinal studies focused on cultural change and development over short-term and long-term human history. However, most research on culture and religion focuses on one-shot dilemmas and cross-sectional results, despite the cultural evolutionary implications of the field’s findings. Here I outline the recipe for a new science of religious change. I argue that studying religious change would benefit from a cultural evolutionary focus and a broader set of methods. I demonstrate how these theoretical and methodological tools can be used together by describing new research on how ecological threats and cultural tightness change people’s views of gods in both one-shot designs and over hundreds of years.