e-rhizome 2022, 4(1):18-28 | DOI: 10.5507/rh.2022.003

An adventurous expedition into the land of naturalistic ritual research.
A review on Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, London: Profile Books, 2022.

Andrej Mentel
Comenius University in Bratislava, Bratislava, Slovakia

The book under review provides an overview of various aspects of ritual within evolutionary and cognitive religious studies. The almost exclusive focus on a naturalistic research program may, at first glance, appear as an inappropriate narrowing of perspective. However, it has the advantage that the different theoretical approaches within this program speak essentially the same language, allowing for productive discussion. The content of the book is based on a careful selection of both ethnographic and experimental research but is delivered in a lively narrative style. This makes the book pleasant to read even for the committed lay person.

Keywords: Ritual, Evolution, Solidarity, Synchronization, Signalling Theory

Accepted: January 21, 2023; Published: January 22, 2023  Show citation

ACS AIP APA ASA Harvard Chicago Chicago Notes IEEE ISO690 MLA NLM Turabian Vancouver
Mentel, A. (2022). An adventurous expedition into the land of naturalistic ritual research.
A review on Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, London: Profile Books, 2022. e-rhizome, 4(1), 18-28. doi: 10.5507/rh.2022.003
Share...
Download citation
  • BibTeX (.bib)
  • Bookends (.ris)
  • EasyBib (.ris)
  • EndNote (.enw)
  • EndNote 8 (.xml)
  • ISI WoS (.isi)
  • Medlars (.medlars)
  • Mendeley (.ris)
  • MODS (.xml)
  • Papers (.ris)
  • RefWorks (.txt)
  • RefManager (.ris)
  • RIS (.ris)
  • MS Word (.xml)
  • Zotero (.ris)
    • Open full article

    References

    1. Dulaney, Siri, and Alan P. Fiske. "Cultural rituals and obsessive-compulsive disorder: Is there a common psychological mechanism?" Ethos 22, no. 3 (1994): 243-283. Go to original source...
    2. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. London: Allen & Unwin, 1915.
    3. Fiske, Alan P., and Nick Haslam. "Is obsessive-compulsive disorder a pathology of the human disposition to perform socially meaningful rituals? Evidence of similar content," The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 185, no. 4 (1997): 211-222. Go to original source...
    4. Freud, Sigmund. "Zwangshandlungen und Religionsübungen [1907]." In Zwang, Paranoia und Perversion. (Studienausgabe) Bd. 7, edited by Alexander Mitscherlich, 13-21. Frankfurt am Main: S Fischer, 1989.
    5. Gelfand, Michele J., Caluori, Nava, Jackson, Joshua C., and Morgan K. Taylor. "The cultural evolutionary trade-off of ritualistic synchrony," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 375, no. 1805 (2020). 20190432. Go to original source...
    6. Henrich, Joseph. "The evolution of costly displays, cooperation and religion," Evolution and Human Behavior, 30, no. 4 (2009), 244-260. Go to original source...
    7. Lyons, Derek E. , Damrosch, Diana H., Lin, Jennifer K., Macris, Deanna M., and Frank C. Keil. "The scope and limits of overimitation in the transmission of artefact culture." Philosophical Transactions of the Biological Society B: Biological Sciences 366, no. 1567 (2011): 1158-1167. Go to original source...
    8. McNeill, William H. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.
    9. Mentel, Andrej. "Rituals and Group Solidarity: An Ethnographic Case Study," Slovenský národopis 70, no. 2 (2022), 228-247. Go to original source...
    10. Nielsen, Mark, Tomaselli, Keyan, and Rohan Kapitány. "The influence of goal demotion on children's reproduction of ritual behavior." Evolution and Human Behavior 39, no. 3 (2018): 343-348. Go to original source...
    11. Tian, Allen Ding, Schroeder, Juliana, Häubl, Gerald, Risen, Jane L., Norton, Michael I., and Francesca Gino. "Enacting rituals to improve self-control," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 114, no. 6 (2018), 851-876. Go to original source...
    12. Xygalatas, Dimitris. The Burning Saints: Cognition and Culture in the Fire-walking Rituals of the Anastenaria. Sheffield: Equinox, 2012.
    13. Xygalatas, Dimitris, and McCorkle Jr., William W. (eds.). Mental Culture: Classical Social Theory and the Cognitive Science of Religion. London: Routledge, 2013.
    14. Xygalatas, Dimitris, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. London: Profile Books, 2022.
    15. Wilson, David S., Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. Go to original source...
    16. Wiltermuth, Scott. "Synchrony and destructive obedience," Social Influence 7, no. 7 (2012), 78-89. Go to original source...
    17. Zahavi, Amotz. "Mate Selection: A selection for a handicap," Journal of Theoretical Biology 53, no. 1 (1975), 205-214. Go to original source...

    This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0), which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original publication is properly cited. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.


    Return to the content