Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture Paperback – 14 Jan 1993

First, a confession: I was a student of Tom Lawson's when this book first came out, and I came to it with a favorable predisposition and was willing to put in the work required to master its contents. Only someone very well educated to begin with would find this an easy read, but it repays close study.

This book has remained one of my favorites, however, because it lays out--better than I have seen anywhere else--the philosophical and methodological considerations involved in studying the interaction of individual minds with social/cultural systems. The authors really make three major points:
(1) Explanation and interpretation are complementary endeavors in the study of human behavior.
(2) One way of illuminating cultural systems is by studying their representation in individual minds.
(3) There are some rather unexpected universal principles of religious ritual that play a vital role in structuring how people think about rituals.
Lawson & McCauley's Ritual form hypothesis (as they later named it) has held up (surprisingly) well under subsequent empirical study.

I find that when I need to think about these issues, this book is a key resource. McCauley & Lawson have since published a further development of this theory, in Bringing Ritual to Mind (2002), but I still find Rethinking Religion, where they lay out the foundations, to be my go-to resource for the theory.

Note: There are some really significant omissions in the rules they provide for the action-representation system. If you look carefully at them, you will notice that some of them omit possibilities that other rules imply. They did not develop these rules further elsewhere, so take the ones in the book as illustrative only.