Suchergebnisse

Copying rituals has allowed cultural groups to proliferate over time. Rare, traumatic rituals produce strong cohesion in small relational groups, whereas daily/weekly rituals produce cohesion in expandable communities. This study presents a theory of how these two ritual modes have influenced history over thousands of years.

Copying rituals has allowed cultural groups to proliferate over time. Rare, traumatic rituals produce strong cohesion in small relational groups, whereas daily/weekly rituals produce cohesion in expandable communities. This study presents a theory of how these two ritual modes have influenced history over thousands of years.

AbstractIn this Henry Myers Lecture, I summarize several decades of collaborative research on the role of ritual in group bonding and co‐operation, ranging from psychology experiments in university laboratories to field research among indigenous groups, and from surveys with armed revolutionaries to extended interviews with religious adherents. This body of work is helping to clarify the mechanisms by which social cohesion and prosocial behaviour are generated in a variety of groups, such as mothers experiencing traumatic births, football fans suffering defeat at crucial matches in Brazil and Australia, and Muslim fundamentalists in Indonesia contemplating insults to Islam in faraway conflicts. These findings also shed light on changes in ritual life from the palaeolithic to the first farmers and from archaic states to the first moralizing religions. In keeping with the forward‐looking theme of the 2022 RAI conference, I consider the implications of these findings for various practical problems facing humanity today, such as how to reduce crime and to prevent violent extremism and how to foster more inclusive forms of leadership and motivate action on environmental issues.

Ethnographers of religion have created a vast record of religious behavior from small-scale non-literate societies to globally distributed religions in urban settings. So a theory that claims to explain prominent features of ritual, myth, and belief in all contexts everywhere causes ethnographers a skeptical pause. In Ritual and Memory, however, a wide range of ethnographers grapple critically with Harvey Whitehouse's theory of two divergent modes of religiosity. Although these contributors differ in their methods, their areas of fieldwork, and their predisposition towards Whitehouse's cogniti