Education and Early Career
Whitehouse received his B.A. Degree in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics in 1985. He completed his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 1990 under the supervision of Ernest Gellner and Gilbert Lewis.
After carrying out two years of field research on a 'cargo cult' in New Britain, Papua New Guinea in the late nineties, he developed a theory of ‘modes of religiosity’ that has been the subject of extensive critical evaluation and testing by anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and cognitive scientists.
The modes of religiosity theory seeks to explain the role of ritual in group formation and social and cultural evolution. Two modes are distinguished: imagistic and doctrinal. In the imagistic mode, important rituals are infrequent, highly emotionally arousing, and tend to generate tight knit local groups with low levels of orthodoxy and dynamic leadership. In the doctrinal mode, rituals are frequent, relatively tame, and produce larger, anonymous but expandable communities with higher levels of orthodoxy and dynamic leadership.
Read more about this topic: Harvey Whitehouse
Famous quotes containing the words education and, education, early and/or career:
“Until we devise means of discovering workers who are temperamentally irked by monotony it will be well to take for granted that the majority of human beings cannot safely be regimented at work without relief in the form of education and recreation and pleasant surroundings.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“The most general deficiency in our sort of culture and education is gradually dawning on me: no one learns, no one strives towards, no one teaches—enduring loneliness.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)