http://genealogyreligion.net/horton-hatches-spirit-eggs

Horton Hatches Spirit Eggs

In a 2012 Current Anthropology article with a daunting title (“A Hyperreal God and Modern Belief: Toward an Anthropological Theory of Mind”), Stanford professor Tanya Luhrmann has provided us with an excellent summary of Robin Horton‘s work. Because some readers do not have access to the article and others may not have time to read the whole thing (it’s one of those long feature articles with Comments followed by an author Reply), I want to share her précis of Horton:
In a famous series of papers, the anthropologist Robin Horton contrasted African traditional thought with Western science. His first goal was to rescue African religious thought from the charge of irrational confusion and incoherence that generations of interpreters, some of them anthropologists, had laid at its door. They are brilliant, audacious papers, laying out side by side with ex nihilo grandeur what Horton took to be the basic principles of African traditional thought and Western secular scientific philosophy. He pointed out that neither the African accounts of gods, ancestors, and spirits nor the Western scientific accounts of atoms and electrons are commonsense models of the world.

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