I haven't seen a lot of articles about Pascal Boyer's book Minds Make Societies, but then I happened upon Mark Athitakis review, which is fairly good, although he was mistaken when he wrote:
on Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create, by Pascal Boyer
"What’s missing from Minds Make Societies is a sense that humanity could educate or adapt its way out of its worst activities, rather than simply regress toward them. But if we are intelligent enough to comprehend these processes, we’re theoretically capable of addressing their worst outcomes. This isn’t an impossible goal: Societies have fought their way out of tribalism before, even without warfare."As a counterexample he refers to Kwame Anthony Appiah who in his book The Honor Code discussed "dueling, foot-binding, slavery in the British Empire." However, this critique doesn't affect Boyer, who wrote about how foot-binding was overcome when opponents made a pact that they would not let their children marry a women with bound feet. So it is not true that Boyer leaves us without hope of changing oppressive cultures.
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