The Ties That Bind Us: Ritual, Fusion, and Identification

Slone and W. McCorkle, The Cognitive Science of Religion: A Methodological Introduction to Key Empirical Studies. Bloomsbury, 163–172, 2019

Ritualized behavior is a specific way of organizing the flow of action, characterized by stereotypy, rigidity in performance, a feeling of compulsion, and specific themes, in particular the potential danger from contamination, predation, and social hazard. We proposed elsewhere a neurocognitive model of ritualized behavior in human development and pathology, as based on the activation of a specific hazard-precaution system specialized in the detection of and response to potential threats. We show how certain features of collective rituals—by conveying information about potential danger and presenting appropriate reaction as a sequence of rigidly described precautionary measures—probably activate this neurocognitive system. This makes some collective ritual sequences highly attention-demanding and intuitively compelling and contributes to their transmission from place to place or generation to generation. The recurrence of ritualized behavior as a central feature of collective ceremonies may be explained as a consequence of this bias in selective transmission. [Keywords: ritual, cognition, evolution, epidemiology, cultural transmission]

Slovak Ethnology, 2022

Although ritual has been a subject of interest in the social sciences since their inception, it remains a fruitful topic, rich in new insights. However, rituals have been primarily studied within social anthropology, religious studies and sociology. Only in the last few decades have psychologists begun to focus on rituals more significantly. In this context, the evolutionary and cognitivist approach, of which the work included in this volume is a sample, is novel not only for the empirical insights it provides but also for its scientific interdisciplinarity and integration. For an illustration, one need only look at two recent books on rituals written by renowned anthropologists Harvey Whitehouse (2021) and Dimitris Xygalatas (2022) to realize to what extent psychological research is being integrated into the study of ritual. It has long been characteristic of the social sciences that new approaches have meant a rejection of the previous ones. Thus, scholarly paradigms have changed almost like architectural or artistic styles over time. The cognitive-evolutionary approach, though, not only integrates science across disciplines but also integrates social scientific knowledge and theories throughout the history of the discipline. Hence, recent research informed by the insights of psychology or biology is directly related to the great names of anthropology and sociology, such as Émile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, Victor Turner and many others.

Ritual is not a proper scientific object, as the term is used to denote disparate forms of behavior, on the basis of a faint family resemblance. Indeed, a variety of distinct cognitive mechanisms are engaged, in various combinations, in the diverse interactions called "rituals"-and each of these mechanisms deserves study, in terms of its evolutionary underpinnings and cultural consequences. We identify four such mechanisms that each appear in some "rituals", namely 1) the normative scripting of actions; 2) the use of interactions to signal coalitional identity, affiliation, cohesiveness; 3) magical claims based on intuitive expectations of contagion; 4) ritualized behavior based on a specific handling of the flow of behavior. We describe the cognitive and evolutionary background to each of these potential components of "rituals", and their effects on cultural transmission.

Fieldwork in Religion, 2015

Human Nature, 2013

Collective rituals have long puzzled anthropologists, yet little is known about how rituals affect participants. Our study investigated the effects of nine naturally occurring rituals on prosociality. We operationalized prosociality as (1) attitudes about fellow ritual participants and (2) decisions in a public goods game. The nine rituals varied in levels of synchrony and levels of sacred attribution. We found that rituals with synchronous body movements were more likely to enhance prosocial attitudes. We also found that rituals judged to be sacred were associated with the largest contributions in the public goods game. Path analysis favored a model in which sacred values mediate the effects of synchronous movements on prosocial behaviors. Our analysis offers the first quantitative evidence for the long-standing anthropological conjecture that rituals orchestrate body motions and sacred values to support prosociality. Our analysis, moreover, adds precision to this old conjecture with evidence of a specific mechanism: ritual synchrony increases perceptions of oneness with others, which increases sacred values to intensify prosocial behaviors.

Slovak Ethnology, 2022

is one of the leading anthropologists and one of the co-founders of the research field called the cognitive science of religion (CSR) and is a tenured professor at the University of Oxford. He is one of those scholars who have dedicated a big part of their careers to the cumulative development of one theory. In his case, it is the modes of religiosity theory, which he outlined in three previous books (Whitehouse, 1995, 2000, 2004) and numerous articles and book chapters. is also applies to his most recent book, which follows a long 17-year gap since the last one. However, it is needless to assume that this is to be a tedious repetition. On the contrary, it is an engaging, thought-provoking and rich investigation that combines psychological experiments, ethnography, big-data mining, historical and archaeological data and computer modelling. Compared to Modes of Religiosity (Whitehouse, 2004), e Ritual Animal is, in a sense, also a picture of how the discipline of CSR has changed over the past 15-20 years, moving from cognitivist theorizing and the first shy experiments to fully blown multidisciplinary and methodological diverse endeavours. In this respect, e Ritual Animal is a synthesis of the work of not just Harvey Whitehouse but also a wider group of his collaborators. ose who have followed his work on a regular basis will hardly be surprised. On the other hand, 15 years ago, one only had to follow the work of some 30 or so scholars to have an almost complete picture of what was going on in CSR. Today, something like that is virtually impossible. Synthesizing the works of concrete research programmes is, therefore, both essential and refreshing. I think Whitehouse's theory is relatively known even outside of CSR but, for the sake of this review, I will briefly outline its main claim, namely that the cross-cultural variability of collective rituals is not arbitrary but tends to cluster around two divergent positions: highly arousing (mostly dysphoric) but not so often performed rituals and frequent and emotionally rather flat rituals. The former ritual mode is typical of the so-called imagistic mode, which is also associated with episodic memories, individually generated meanings, passive or absent leadership, intense social cohesion, small scale, noncentralized structure and low degree of uniformity, while the latter mode is typical of the doctrinal mode, which, in contrast, relies on semantic schemes and socially learned ritual meanings, high levels of uniformity, centralized structure and diffuse social cohesion, to mention some of the main psychological and socio-political features of the divergent modes. The crucial point of the theory is not just the existence of these two modes but its claim to predict the transition between these two modes. For instance, one such prediction is dealing with imagistic splinter groups that emerge within doctrinal religions, which, under the right conditions, are later reintegrated. A major focus is pointed towards predictions of the theory, which relate to historical increases in population size. The theory argues that the scale of cooperation under the imagistic mode is limited by the size of the ritually bonded groups, while the doctrinal mode enables much wider forms of cooperation both in size and variety. This connects the modes theory to human social evolution and the growth of social complexity of human societies associated. Using historical and archaeological evidence, Whitehouse shows that the Neolithic rise of agriculture was accompanied by the emergence of rituals with doctrinal features

Numen, 2008

Birds do it. Bees do it. Rituals are common in nature. In our own lineage rituals runs rampant. Why this is so, and how best to examine human rituals, remains some of the most intriguing and contested questions facing scholarly inquiry.

Evolution and Human Behavior, 2011

Ethnographic, historical, archaeological and experimental work suggests the existence of two basic clusters of ritual dynamics or 'modes of religiosity'a low-frequency, high-arousal cluster linked to the formation of small cohesive communities (imagistic mode) and highfrequency, low-arousal cluster associated with larger, more centralized social morphology (doctrinal mode). Currently, however, we lack a large-scale survey of ritual variation on which to test such predictions. Here, we compile data on 645 religious rituals from 74 cultures around the globe, extracted from the Human Relations Area Files, revealing that the cultural morphospace of ritual form favours rituals that are indeed either low-frequency and highly dysphorically arousing or high-frequency with lower arousal and that these ritual dynamics are linked to group size and structure. These data also suggest that low dysphoric arousal, high-frequency rituals may have been tied to the advent of agriculture and subsequent emergence of the first large-scale civilizations.

RELIGION, BRAIN & BEHAVIOR, 2019

Rituals are thought to bind individuals together. Rituals that are perceived high in pain and behavioral synchrony increase social bonding, but the relative contribution of perceived pain vs. synchrony is unexplored. In addition, gender differences are rarely investigated in experimental studies of ritual, despite known gender differences in ritual participation, emotional processing, social bonding and pain processing. The current study uses data from 137 participants in a naturally occurring high ordeal ritual lasting 10 days. Because all individuals participated in multiple rituals varying in perceived pain and synchrony, it was possible to separate the unique and joint effects in a natural context. We found strong bonding effects for rituals perceived as painful, but not for synchrony. Rituals rated as higher in level of pain (involving cuts, piercings and burns) were associated with greater self-reported social bonding. Gender moderated these effects: Women reported stronger bonding after participating in non-synchronous rituals perceived higher in pain, whereas men reported greater bonding after synchronous activities with more perceived pain. These findings suggest that pain-related processes are a more potent social bonding mechanism than synchrony in naturally occurring high ordeal rituals, but that perceived pain may have different signaling functions depending on the gender of performers. ARTICLE HISTORY Collective rituals pose interesting questions from an evolutionary perspective, especially those rituals in which individuals voluntarily inflict pain, suffer injuries, or undergo extended periods of chanting or praying. These activities involve costs for participants that may seem to not have any immediate benefits, especially when considering the risks of injuries or involving costly taboos such as foregoing food, drink or sleep for extended periods of time. Recently, a number of studies have demonstrated that both discomfort or behavioral synchrony as specific features of collective ritual increase proso-ciality and social bonding (e.g., Xygalatas et al., 2013). Anthropolo-gical records indicate that many collective rituals involve both discomfort 1 (including states that outsiders would consider as painful) and synchrony 2 elements, with participants often singing, chanting and dancing while performing high ordeal activities (e.g., Turner, 1969; Whitehouse, 2004; Xygalatas, 2012a). Previous research has studied these effects in isolation, but most rituals vary along both dimensions. We address to what extent physical discomfort/high physical ordeal and