[RETRACTED ARTICLE] Complexity theory and the historical study of religion

navigating the transdisciplinary space between the Humanities and the Natural Sciences

Autores

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15848/hh.v14i36.1669

Palavras-chave:

Interdisciplinaridade, Metodologia, Humanidades Digitais

Resumo

This article advocates for a set of recent transdisciplinary options for the History of Religion, combining methods from the Natural and Human Sciences, through a special focus on the study of so-called “complex systems”. We elucidate their theoretical bases and limitations while assuming a pragmatic positioning between a defense of the historical-scientific study of religion and the promotion of groundbreaking methodological outlooks emerging from the Digital Humanities. From this background, throughout the text, we argue for a complementation of historiographical “close reading” with both “distant reading” techniques and interdisciplinary research, using computer-based methods and a diversity of formal modeling techniques. In short, we conclude that such methods offer novel ways for data representation and are best understood not only as creative schemes for solving issues in historiography, but also as a springboard for new inquiries arising from the transdisciplinarity between the Humanities and the Natural Sciences.

Downloads

Não há dados estatísticos.

Biografia do Autor

Thales Silva, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora

Bacharel em História e Especialista em Antropologia pela Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas da UFMG.

Mestrado e Doutorando em Ciência da Religião pelo Instituto de Ciências Humanas da UFJF.

Candidato a doutoramento em História Social pela Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas da USP.

Membro do Projeto Psicologia da Religião e do Núcleo de Estudos Religião e Psicologia (NERELPSI), Linha de Pesquisa Abordagens Filosóficas e Psicológicas da Religião, do Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciência da Religião da UFJF.

Membro associado ao Grupo de Estudos de Ciência Cognitiva da Religião, Laboratório de Estudos Psicossociais, do Instituto de Psicologia da USP.

Referências

AMBASCIANO, Leonardo; COLEMAN, Thomas. History as a Canceled Problem? Hilbert Lists, du Bois-Reymond’s Enigmas, and the Scientific Study of Religion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Philadelphia, v. 87, n. 2, p. 366-400, 2019.

AMBASCIANO, Leonardo. Achilles’ Historiographical Heel, or the Infelicitous Predominance of Experimental Presentism in Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods. SMSR, Roma-Brescia, v. 82, n. 2, p. 1045-1068, 2016.

AMBASCIANO, Leonardo. An Unnatural History of Religions: Academia, Post-truth and the Quest for Scientific Knowledge. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

ATRAN, Scott. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

BARABÁSI, Albert-László. Network Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

BERGENDORFF, Steen. Simple Lives, Cultural Complexity: Rethinking Culture in Terms of Complexity Theory. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009.

BLUM, Jason. The Question of Methodological Naturalism. Leiden: Brill, 2018.

BOX, George. Science and Statistics. Journal of the American Statistical Association, Boston, v. 71, n. 356, p. 791-799, 1976.

BOYER, Pascal. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

BRAUDEL, Fernand. Histoire et science sociales: la longue durée. Annales HSS, Paris, v. 13, p. 725-753, 1958.

BRAUDEL, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II: Volume II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

BRUGHMANS, Tom; COLLAR, Anna; COWARD, Fiona. The Connected Past: Challenges to Network Studies in Archaeology and History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

BULBULIA, Joseph; SLINGERLAND, Edward. Religious Studies as a Life Science. Numen, Leiden, v. 59, p. 564-613, 2012.

BURKE, Peter. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-89. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2015.

COLLAR, Anna. Religious Networks in the Roman Empire: The Spread of New Ideas. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

DRUCKER, Johanna. Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, Providence, v. 5, n. 1, p. 1-23, 2011.

EIDINOW, Esther; MARTIN, Luther. Editor’s Introduction. JCH, Sheffield, v. 1, n. 1,

p. 5-9, 2014.

EPSTEIN, Joshua; AXTELL, Robert. Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996.

EPSTEIN, Joshua. Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

EPSTEIN, Joshua. Why Model? Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, Guildford, v. 11, n. 4, p. 1-12, 2008.

FRANEK, Juraj. Naturalism and Protectionism in the Study of Religions. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

FREEMAN, Linton. The Development of Social Network Analysis: A Study in the Sociology of Science. Vancouver: Empirical Press, 2004.

FRIGG, Roman; HARTMANN, Stephan. Models in Science. In: ZALTA, Edward (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition). Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2020. E-book. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/models-science/. Accessed: 15 Aug. 2021.

GAVIN, Michael. Agent-Based Modeling and Historical Simulation. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, Providence, v. 8, n. 4, p. 1, 2014.

GEERTZ, Armin. Too Much Mind and not enough Brain, Body and Culture: On What Needs to Be Done in the Cognitive Science of Religion. Historia Religionum, Pisa-Roma, v. 2, p. 21-37, 2010.

GLOMB, Tomas, et al. Ptolemaic military operations were a dominant factor in the spread of Egyptian cults across the early Hellenistic Aegean Sea. PLos ONE, San Francisco,

v. 13, n. 3, p. e0193786, 2018.

GRAHAM, Shawn; MILLIGAN, Ian; WEINGART, Scott. Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope. London: Imperial College Press, 2016.

GREEN, Sara. Philosophy of Systems and Synthetic Biology. In: ZALTA, Edward (ed.).

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition). Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2019. E-book. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/systems-synthetic-biology/. Accessed: 15 Aug. 2021.

JÖRG, Ton. New Thinking in Complexity for the Social Sciences and Humanities: A Generative, Transdisciplinary Approach. Dordrecht: Springer, 2011.

KAPLAN, Frédéric. A map for big data research in digital humanities. Frontiers in Digital Humanities, Lausanne, v. 2, n. 1, p. 1-7, 2015.

KONOPÁSEK, Zdeněk. Making Thinking Visible with Atlas.ti: Computer Assisted Qualitative Analysis as Textual Practices. Historical Social Research, Supplement, Leibniz,

v. 19, p. 276-298, 2007.

LANE, Justin. Method, Theory, and Multi-Agent Artificial Intelligence: Creating computer models of complex social interaction. JCSR, Sheffield, v. 1, n. 2, p. 161-180, 2014.

LANG, Martin. The Cognitive Science of Religion: Connecting the Humanities and the Sciences in the Study of Ritual Practice, Prosociality, and Anxiety. Brno: Masarykova univerzita, 2016.

LÜNEN, Alexander; TRAVIS, Charles. History and GIS: Epistemologies, Considerations and Reflections. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013.

MAGNANI, Lorenzo; NERSESSIAN, Nancy. Model-Based Reasoning: Science, Technology, Values. New York: Kluwer Academic, 2002.

MANDELBAUM, Maurice. A Note on History as Narrative. History and Theory, Middletown, v. 6. N. 3, p. 413-419, 1967.

MANNING, Patrick. Big Data in History. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

MARTIN, Luther, WIEBE, Donald. Religion Explained? The Cognitive Science of Religion after Twenty-Five Years. London: Bloomsbury Academic 2017.

MCCAULEY, Robert; LAWSON, Thomas. Philosophical Foundations of the Cognitive Science of Religion: A Head Start. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

MCCULLAGH, Behan. Justifying historical descriptions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

MITCHELL, Melanie. Complexity: A Guided Tour. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

MITTAL, Saurabh; DIALLO, Saikou; TOLK, Andreas. Emergent Behavior in Complex Systems Engineering: A Modeling and Simulation Approach. Hoboken: Wiley, 2018.

MORETTI, Franco. Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013.

MULLENEM, Lincoln; ROBERTSON, George. Digital History and Argument. Fairfax: Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, 2017.

NIELBO, Kristoffer; NICHOLS, Ryan; SLINGERLAND, Edward. Mining the Past: Data-Intensive Knowledge Discovery in the Study of Historical Textual Traditions. JCH, Sheffield, v. 3, n. 1-2, p. 93-118, 2016.

PETERSON, Anders; et al. Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion: A New Synthesis. Leiden: Brill, 2019.

SHRYOCK, Andrew; SMAIL, Daniel. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

SILVA, Thales, SANTOS, Lucas. Ciências cognitivas, história e o estudo comparativo das religiões: pela definição de um conceito formal e historicamente tangível de “religião. Sacrilegens, Juiz de Fora, v. 14, n. 2, p. 25-44, 2017.

SILVA, Thales. Simulando as “mentes passadas”: a Historiografia Cognitiva entre a História e as Ciências Cognitivas. Temporalidades – Revista de História, Belo Horizonte, v. 11, n. 3, p. 185-216, 2019.

SLINGERLAND, Edward; COLLARD, Mark. Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

SLINGERLAND, Edward; et al. The Distant Reading of Religious Texts: A “Big Data” Approach to Mind-Body Concepts in Early China. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Philadelphia, v. 85, n. 4, p. 985-106, 2017.

SLINGERLAND, Edward. Toward a Second Wave of Consilience in the Cognitive Scientific Study of Religion. JCH, Sheffield, v. 1, n. 1, p. 121-130, 2014.

SMAIL, Daniel. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

SMITH, Jonathan. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago:

The University of Chicago Press, 1982.

TURCHIN, Peter. Arise ‘cliodynamics’. NATURE, London, v. 454, n. 3, p. 34-35, 2008.

TURCHIN, Peter. Toward Cliodynamics: an Analytical, Predictive Science of History. Cliodynamics, Riverside, v. 2, n. 1, p. 167-186, 2011.

TWEED, Thomas. Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

WALLERSTEIN, Immanuel. Historical systems as complex systems. European Journal of Operational Research, Amsterdam, v. 30, p. 203-207, 1987.

WATTS, Fraser; TURNER Léon. Evolution, Religion, and Cognitive Science: Critical and Constructive Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

WILENSKY, Uri; RAND, William. An Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling: Modeling Natural, Social, and Engineered Complex Systems with NetLogo. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015.

Downloads

Publicado

2021-08-31

Como Citar

SILVA, T. [RETRACTED ARTICLE] Complexity theory and the historical study of religion: navigating the transdisciplinary space between the Humanities and the Natural Sciences. História da Historiografia: International Journal of Theory and History of Historiography, Ouro Preto, v. 14, n. 36, p. 167–196, 2021. DOI: 10.15848/hh.v14i36.1669. Disponível em: https://revistahh.emnuvens.com.br/revista/article/view/1669. Acesso em: 23 nov. 2024.

Edição

Seção

Dossiê: História como (In)disciplina