Professor Harvey Whitehouse

Background

Professor Whitehouse received his BA from London University (LSE) and his PhD from Cambridge University (King’s College), before taking up a Research Fellowship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. From there he went to Queen’s University Belfast where he became founding director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture. He came to Oxford in 2006 to take up a newly created Chair in the School of Anthropology.

Research Interests

Harvey Whitehouse is generally regarded as one of the founders of the Cognitive Science of Religion. In recent years, Harvey Whitehouse’s work has expanded beyond religion to examine the role of rituals of all kinds in binding groups together and motivating inter-group competition, including warfare. This research has involved data collection in many countries in Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, Europe, Asia and Oceania using a range of methods including surveys, experiments, and ethnographic fieldwork. Whitehouse is also a founding director of Seshat: Global History Databank, which contains a huge volume of data on historical societies going back 10,000 years and is being used to test various hypotheses concerning the role of religion in the evolution of social complexity.

Selected Publications

For a full list see harveywhitehouse.com

Selected books:

• Harvey Whitehouse(2024). Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World. Penguin Random House & Harvard University Press.
• Harvey Whitehouse(2021). The Ritual Animal: Imitation and cohesion in the evolution of social complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN9780199646364
• Harvey Whitehouse(2004). Modes of Religiosity: A cognitive theory of religious transmission, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 208pp, ISBN 0-7591-0614-2 (cloth), 0-7591-0615-0 (paper).
• Harvey Whitehouse (2000). Arguments and Icons: Divergent modes of religiosity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 204pp, ISBN 0-19-823414-7 (cloth), 0-19-823415-5 (paper).
• Harvey Whitehouse(1995). Inside the Cult: Religious innovation and transmission in Papua New Guinea, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 234pp, ISBN 0-19-827981-7 (cloth), 0-19-828051-3 (paper).

Selected articles:

• Whitehouse, H. (2025), Against interpretive exclusivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14244
• Whitehouse, H. (2024), Rethinking ritual: how rituals made our world and how they could save it. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 30: 115-132. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14048
• Whitehouse H. Dying for the group: Towards a general theory of extreme self-sacrifice. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 2018;41:e192. doi:10.1017/S0140525X18000249
• Whitehouse, H., Jong, J., Buhrmester, M. et al. The evolution of extreme cooperation via shared dysphoric experiences. Sci Rep 7, 44292 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep44292