Overview

"Compares monumental designs and performance spaces of Christian, Buddhist, and related sanctuaries, exploring how brain networks, animal-human emotions, and cultural ideals are reflected historically and affected today as ""inner theatre"" elements. Integrating research across the humanities and sciences, this book explores how traditional designs of outer theatrical spaces left cultural imprints for the inner staging of Self and Other consciousness, which each of us performs daily based on how we think others view us. But believers also perform in a cosmic theatre. Ancestral spirits and gods (or God) watch and interact with them in awe-inspiring spaces, grooming affects toward in-group identification and sacrifice, or out-group rivalry and scapegoating. In a study of over 80 buildings – shown by 40 images in the book, plus thousands of photos and videos online – Pizzato demonstrates how they reflect meta-theatrical projections from prior generations. They also affect the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended (4E) cognition of current visitors, who bring performance frameworks of belief, hope, and doubt to the sacred site. This involves neuro-social, inner/outer theatre networks with patriarchal, maternal, and trickster paradigms. European Churches and Chinese Temples as Neuro-Theatrical Sites investigates performative material cultures, creating dialogs between theatre, philosophy, history, and various (cognitive, affective, social, biological) sciences. It applies them to the architecture of religious buildings: from Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant in Europe, plus key sites in Jerusalem and prior “pagan” temples, to Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and imperial in China. It thus reveals individualist/collectivist, focal/holistic, analytical/dialectical, and melodramatic/tragicomic trajectories, with cathartic poetics for the future."

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Reviews

This book is a feast for both the mind and the senses. The 'theatre of the mind' is a provocative and useful concept which will find its way into many texts. * T. M. Luhrmann, Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology (and Psychology), Stanford University, USA, and author of How God Becomes Real (2020) * Mark Pizzato’s work comparing European and Chinese religious buildings uses the latest in the evolutionary, cognitive, and neuroscience findings on the religious brain and is a tour de force in integration and synthesis. Pizzato takes the reader on a tour of some of the most beautiful sites on earth and opens them up for us in ways that illuminate both the sacred and ourselves. * Patrick McNamara, Professor of Psychology, National University, USA * In this awe-inspiring comparative study of Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, Mark Pizzato moves elegantly from Christian churches to Buddhist temples—read in light of anthropology, psychology, performance studies, and the latest discoveries in the neurosciences—and sets up an illuminating mirror to the inner theatre of the human soul. An original contribution to mimetic studies that reflects nothing less than the psychic life of religious buildings, beyond East and West. * Nidesh Lawtoo, Professor in the Humanities, Leiden University, and author of Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation (2022) *

Author Information

Mark Pizzato is Professor of Theatre and Film at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA. His publications include Mapping Global Theatre Histories (2019), Beast-People Onscreen and in Your Brain (2016), Inner Theatres of Good and Evil (2011), Death in American Texts and Performances (with Lisa Perdigao; 2010), Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain (2006), Theatres of Human Sacrifice (2004), and Edges of Loss (1998).

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