ORDEN I KLASSIFIKATIONEN: Om repræsentationen og udbredelsen af religiøs viden

Abstract

Christian Kordt Højbjerg: The Order of

Classification. On the Representation and

Distribution of Religions Knowledge

The purpose of the article is to present and

discuss the apparent contradiction between

differentiated cognition and cultural

consensus with regard to the religious

category sale among the Loma people in

Guinea and Liberia. Opposing traditional

classificatory approaches to cultural

knowledge in anthropology, it is argued that

the complex religious category is more

adequately rendered through a cognitive and

distributive approach. The first part of the

article identifies three different, although

frequently coexisting mechanisms of distribution

and acquisition of sale knowledge,

which are labeled respectively continuous

(semantic memory), discontinuous (episodic

memory), and esoteric (secret knowledge

acquisition). In the second part, an analysis

of a sacrificial ritual leads to the conclusion

that the sale category is an awkward

classificatory case, which helps to build

cognitive bridges between separate domains

of reality. This general cognitive quality of

the sale category serves to apprehend sale as

a collectively shared representation,

irrespective of its multi-vocality and

differentiated cognition.