European Churches and Chinese Temples as Neuro-Theatrical Sites

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.