Extending Cognitive Science of Religion on Ethnographic Field Notes from the Archive of G.M. Vasilevich

The article offers a new perspective on field materials collected by an outstanding ethnographer and Tungus studies specialist Glafira Vasilevich. The author of the article draws attention to the ideas in the field materials that are directly related to the thinking of the Evenks. During the work in the archives of the MAE RAS, it was noted that field materials relating to the Evenki imagination can be analyzed via cognitive anthropology and psychology. The article takes a variety of materials for analysis that refers to the thinking of the Evenks: hunting amulets, names, ideas of the appearance of birds and the image of fire. Ideas on implicit meanings (Douglas), the theory of mind (Gervais and others) and promiscuous teleology (Banerjee, Bloom and others) are taken as the methodological basis for the analytical commentary. Each of the selected concepts and all of them together allow to look at the imagination of the Evenks, which generates ideas about the supernatural based on everyday thinking. The article shows how linguistic, logical and moral categories are extended to the animal and natural world through misattribution.