Harvey Whitehouse

Harvey Whitehouse is a statutory Chair in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and a founding figure in the cognitive science of religion field. He is best known for his theory of 'modes of religiosity,' which explains how ritual frequency and emotionality shape the scale and structure of religious organizations. His research spans ritual, social cohesion, morality, and the evolution of social complexity, supported by fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and large-scale cross-cultural surveys.