Attia-krieger, Sharon
(2014)
Sacrifice scripts: the role of context in the transmission of counter-cultural religious representations of sacrifice and commitment. Israeli-Jewish culture.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
This thesis explores transmission of religious representations of sacrifice and commitment within modern Jewish-Israeli culture. The thesis begins with a focus on the domain of religious representations and then explores the empirical plausibility of a context-based approach for studying their transmission patterns using recently emerging perspectives within cognitive science of religion. On that basis, the thesis turns the attention to religious representations that violate shared cultural assumptions
(counter-cultural), through a review of the possible differences between these and religious representations that violate innate intuitions ( counterintuitive ). It is argued that without further expanding of the context-based view to include violations of
cultural kind, new advances in this approach will not be convincing. A theoretical model of the effect of context on the spread of counter-cultural religious representations is therefore developed through a conceptual integration of aspects of script theory. The socio-cognitive model presented here is based on the potential connection between emerging accounts for cultural transmission and script theory.
The first study involves an empirical investigation of media representations of sacrifice and commitment scripts within Jewish - Israeli culture. A second study, involving 1,005 participants, seeks to operationalize the investigation of religious representations, and does so by an online research tool that allows structured insight into mental representations of sacrifice and commitment scripts, based on representation elicited from the previous media analysis. This dynamic technology facilitates the investigation of the different qualities of recurrent representations over time and under different contextual conditions.
In conclusion, this thesis attempts to explore the potential connections between the context in which counter-cultural representations are spread and the degree to which they spread by suggesting that under some conditions representations that maximally deviate from cultural assumptions can turn minimal, becoming optimal for transmission, as long as they can be justified in that context.
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