Director, Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford

Professor Harvey Whitehouse is the Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford. His research interests focus on the evolution of social complexity, the cognitive science of religion, experimental anthropology.

Following two years of field research on a ‘cargo cult’ in New Britain , Papua New Guinea in the late eighties, Professor Whitehouse 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 theory explains the scale and structure of religious organizations in terms of the frequency and emotionality of rituals.

Professor Whitehouse is currently director of the Ritual, Community, and Conflict project funded by a five-year Large Grant from the ESRC (2011-2016) which examines the role of ritual in the evolution of social complexity. This project, involving 15 collaborating universities around the world, examines the emergence of the ritual stance in childhood, the psychological and behavioural effects of performing different kinds of rituals in groups, and the consequences of this for the scale and structure of human social systems. Studying how children learn the rituals of their communities is helping us understand the various ways in which rituals promote social cohesion within the group and distrust of groups with different ritual traditions.