Where Gods Dwell? Part II: Embodied Cognition Approach and Children’s Drawings of Gods

Abstract

Empirical demonstrations of the embodied and grounded cognition approach, involving diverse areas and phenomena, have increased exponentially in recent years. However, little research has been done in the religious domain. To the best of our knowledge, no study based on this theoretical framework has explored spatial dimension in pictorial representation of the divine in children’s drawings or in religious art in general. The present study represents the very first attempt to investigate if and how spatiality is involved in the way children depict the divine in their drawings. Drawings collected from four groups of participants (n = 1156, ages 6–15) characterized by different cultural and religious environments: Japanese (Buddhism and Shinto), Russian-Buryat (Buddhism, Shamanism), Russian Slavic (Christian Orthodoxy), and French-speaking Swiss (Catholic and reformed Christianity) were annotated using the Gauntlet annotation tool and then analysed. The main result indicates that children from all four groups generally depict god (the centre of the annotated representation) in the upper part of their drawings. Further testing indicates that the type of composition (for instance, god depicted alone or as standing on the ground where the sky is also depicted) did not serve as a major influence on the child’s placement of god.