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:
“In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“One of the benefits of a college education is, to show the boy its little avail.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)