Larsson et al./Building Blocks, 1. The Building Block Approach

The chapter provides a basic overview of the building block approach to “religion” and other complex cultural concepts. It introduces the basic vocabulary of the approach, provides definitions, and a few examples of how the approach has been applied to address specific problems in the field. The chapter also reflects on how the authors came to develop the approach, and discusses the most important philosophical and scientific influences that helped shape it.

The building block approach (hereafter BBA) is a method for analysing – and explaining – complex cultural phenomena in terms of the constitu- ent parts that interact to produce them. By constituent parts, we refer to all the cognitive, psychological, and biological processes that guide human interaction with the environment (natural, built, and social) from percep- tion and affect to memorization, categorization, and strategizing. While many scholars of religion are likely to agree that culture cannot emerge apart from the biological organisms that create it, it is often far less clear how one can relate the cultural to the biological in a meaningful way. This has created a methodological chasm between the “holistic” appre- ciation of cultural complexity and the “reductionist” explanatory efforts of the natural sciences that we are attempting to bridge with our BBA. In particular, the approach is designed to solve two related questions: (1) what terminology should we use when analysing and explaining cultural phenomena (such as “religions”), and (2) how can we achieve consilience between natural, behavioural, and humanistic sciences? Or, to put it in epistemological terms, how can we bridge the divide between naturalists and constructionists?