Overview
Connects concepts from social sciences, information theory, complex systems theory and cognitive science
Gives a unique, interdisciplinary framework for understanding religion
Is a participant observation in exotic research fields, from a Japanese Zen Buddhist temple to Mongolian urban Shamanism
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book provides an original and challenging perspective of religions as abstract complex adaptive systems, using an interdisciplinary approach to try to understand what religions are and how they function, two fundamental issues which, despite an intense struggle from several fields, have not yet been resolved. What is the source of religious belief? How do religions work and what are they made of? Why is religion so important for us that it has survived centuries of scientific progress and secularization? Why are people religious even outside religion? The book addresses these questions using an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to untangle the Gordian knot of defining religion. In short, they can be considered entropy-reducing technologies. What differentiates them from other meaning-producing systems is their configuration which employs specific building blocks as tools for mitigating entropy, which are also subsystems and combine in various ways to build a unique configuration: rituals, myths, taboos, supernatural agents, authority, identity, superstitions, moral obligations, afterlife beliefs and the sacred. As a reaction to perturbances or pressure, systems can collapse. Inspired by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, it is, in this book, referred to as fragility—the negative reaction of systems to random events, and four parameters can be used to evaluate it in religious systems: monotonicity (the inability to learn from past mistakes), coupling (linking with other systems: such as political or economic), centralization and stress starvation.
Several case studies are provided in order to test the theoretical claims made in this book, based on the author's field research in Romania, Japan, North Korea and Mongolia, and offering details that could be of interest to casual readers, students and researchers of religion.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Andrei-Razvan Coltea is an anthropologist and historian with an intense curiosity regarding religions, which has guided his academic interests since observing their spectacular post-communist resurgence in his country, Romania. After graduating the ‘Global Studies’ Ph.D. program at Shanghai University, he decided to publish all the results of his research throughout the years in this monograph, hoping, by an intensely interdisciplinary approach, to shed some light on the dynamic nature of religious phenomena.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Complexifying Religion
Authors: Andrei-Razvan Coltea
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4701-0
Publisher: Springer Singapore
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-99-4700-3Published: 01 August 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-99-4703-4Due: 15 August 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-981-99-4701-0Published: 31 July 2023
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVII, 324
Number of Illustrations: 7 b/w illustrations, 20 illustrations in colour
Topics: Philosophy, general, Sociology of Religion