Publication details
Utilizing complexity : from thinking religion top-down as complex-adaptive-system towards a bottom-up practice of local null-model building
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In recent years, the scientific study of religion has seen the rise of the call for the formal modelling & simulation methods of complexity science, which would allow research of religious phenomena as complex adaptive systems. The projects which subscribe to this call advocate a transdisciplinary view of religious phenomena, which understands religion ecologically as a vast natural and cultural entanglements merging individual people, their cognition, bodies, society, culture and environment. The utility of such views allows putting back the fractionalized field of the scientific study of religion. Such projects usually call for focus not only on the constitutive parts studied in isolation but mainly on the function of a possibly irreducible whole(s) and want to gain the scientific ability to tractate such wholes. In this talk, critically address the concept of religion as a complex adaptive system. The central axis of the paper is an exploration of the usefulness of modelling & simulation as not the gate for such big integrative theorizing about religion but as a pragmatic research tool for local integration and theory building in big data projects with diverse and scarce sources of evidence with a lot of missing data. Such situation is typical for the study of historical religions. I want to utilize the case study of medieval religious dissent implemented in Dissident Networks Project (DISSINET, https://dissinet.cz) as an example of a large comparative enterprise, where the source-oriented modelling (using computational tools as a platform for generating historical big data) benefits from parallel theoretical phenomenon centred modelling. I want to propose “null-model thinking” of religion as possibly general practice of local theory-crafting aiming for making the heterogenous evidence comparable and interoperable and 2) as conservative bottom-up “complexation of religion” in contrast to the notion of religion as a complex adaptive system. |
| Related projects: |