1 THE RITUAL PARADOX
what drives us all to engage in these behaviours, which have tangible costs without any directly obvious benefits? And why are these activities often held to be so deeply meaningful, even as their purpose is so often obscure? (Location 136)
ritual is a true human universal. Without a single exception, all known human societies–whether past or present–have a range of traditions that involve highly choreographed, formalised and precisely executed behaviours that mark threshold moments in people’s lives. These behaviours, which we call rituals, either have no explicit purpose at all, or, even when they do, their stated goals are causally disconnected from the actions undertaken to achieve them. (Location 152)
These features distinguish ritual from other, less special acts such as habits. Although both can be stereotypical behaviours, in that they involve fixed and repetitive patterns, in the case of habits these actions have a direct effect on the world, while in ritual they have symbolic meaning and are often performed for their own sake. (Location 162)
While habits help us organise important tasks by routinising them and making them mundane, rituals imbue our lives with meaning by making certain things special. (Location 174)
Perhaps partly because of this difficulty in studying such meaningful activities in the laboratory, ritual never became a popular subject of research among psychologists. It was regarded either as a mundane aspect of human behaviour, a mental glitch that would eventually go away, or as an elusive topic that was all but impossible to investigate scientifically. (Location 190)
social scientists from various disciplines began working together and learning from each other. The development of new methods and technologies has allowed them to explore questions that were previously out of reach. Wearable sensors have made it possible to study what goes on in people’s bodies as they take part in real-life rituals; advances in biochemistry and brain imaging have allowed researchers to peer into people’s brains in the lab and in the field; innovations in the cognitive sciences have provided new ways of assessing what goes on in their minds; and increased computing power combined with new software packages have allowed statisticians to make sense of those complicated data sets. For the first time, a scientific study of ritual is in full development. We are at last able to start piecing together the solution to an age-old puzzle: what is the point of all this bizarre stuff? (Location 196)
when I asked him why the ceremony mattered so much to him, he seemed puzzled. He stared at me and after a long pause repeated the question, seeming at a loss for words. ‘Why we do it? … Well, I can’t really say why. I guess it’s something I’ve seen since my childhood. My father did it, and my grandfather did it, so since I was a little kid, I’ve always wanted to cross that fire.’ Time and again, anthropologists come across such statements. When they ask people why they perform their ceremonies, the most typical reactions involve perplexed looks, long pauses and eventually something along the lines of the following: ‘What do you mean, why do we do our rituals? We just do them. It is our tradition. It is who we are. That’s what we do.’ This is the ritual paradox: people often swear on the importance of their rituals, although they are not always sure why they are so important, other than that they are time-honoured. Ritual seems pointless, yet it is experienced as something truly vital and sacred. But much like other deeply meaningful areas of human activity–think of music, art or sport–what might initially appear bizarre or futile can actually have transformative power. (Location 286)
Biometric sensors and hormonal sampling allowed me to explore the neuro-physiological effects of various rituals; behavioural measurements helped me study how these bodily processes affect the way people interact with one another; psychometric tests and surveys revealed some of the motivations behind ritual practices; and participant observation provided insights into how people experience these practices and how they find meaning in them. (Location 301)
My findings, as well as convergent discoveries from a variety of scientific disciplines, reveal that ritual is rooted deep in our evolutionary history. In fact, it is as ancient as our species itself–and for good reason. Although ritual actions have no direct influence on the physical world, they can transform our inner world and play a decisive role in shaping our social world. (Location 304)
2 THE RITUAL SPECIES
What they learned is that the most skilled dancers–that is, those who had the largest repertoire and the most varied combinations of moves–had much higher chances of finding a mate.1 (Location 328)
Other birds, such as magpies, ravens and crows, appear to have death rituals. They flock over corpses of deceased members of their group as if standing vigil, and have been observed fetching sticks and other objects and arranging them around the corpse.3 (Location 344)
many of the traits previously thought to be uniquely human have now been found in other animals. Until recently, favourite candidates for this human uniqueness included emotions, personality, using and making tools, empathy, morality and warfare, to name a few. But as soon as scientists started studying other animals systematically in their natural environments they realised that, in one form or another, all of these traits can be found in other species. Similarly, until recently there was barely any evidence of ritual behaviour among mammals. Today there is plenty, and mounting. Dolphins engage in a form of group dance, breaching out of the water in synchrony; humpback whales perform collective songs; and various marine mammals seem to have mourning rituals, carrying their dead around for days or swimming around them in unison. Dolphins have even been observed pushing a dead calf towards a boat and waiting for the boat crew to pick up the corpse, then forming a circle around the vessel before swimming away.4 (Location 357)
In species that form fission-fusion societies, individuals may split off from their group for a long time before meeting again. When they are reunited, they perform greeting rituals that help reaffirm the bonds between them. Humans shake hands, kiss or hug. Chimpanzees, bonobos and spider monkeys also do all of these things.9 They embrace, they kiss, they groom each other and they pant-hoot (which looks a bit like a group of teenagers screaming ‘Oh my God!’ in excitement). Chimps perform a ‘handclasp’, a secret handshake that is unique to each chimpanzee group. And male baboons perform a stereotyped ‘scrotum grasp’, which is exactly what it sounds like and functions as a trust-building ritual.10 The anthropologist Mervyn Meggitt observed a similar ritual among the Walbiri, an Australian tribe of aborigines who used a penis-holding ritual to defuse tensions between men. ‘If the matter is serious, however, one concerning a previous killing or a death from putative sorcery, the aggrieved person may refuse to hold the visitor’s penis.’ Such a refusal, Meggitt reported, was a grave insult that could lead to bloodshed.11 (Location 401)
These observations suggest that ritual is widespread in the animal world. But they also point to another interesting pattern: it seems that some of the most intelligent animals are also the ones that have the richest repertoire of rituals. (Location 415)
This may seem paradoxical. Why would such intelligent creatures waste so much time and energy on apparently pointless activities when they could be finding more straightforward solutions to their problems? But this is exactly the power of ritual: it is a mental tool that allows its users to achieve a desirable outcome through obscure means. It is for this reason that intelligent organisms engage in these seemingly wasteful behaviours: not simply because they cannot help it, but because they can afford it. Those animals have the mental surplus required to engage in behaviours that function as cognitive gadgets, essentially allowing them to outwit themselves. When the situation requires it, they are able to turn their attention away from directly functional tasks, focusing instead on behaviours that are indirectly but reliably beneficial to them. This is because ritual allows those animals to deal with some of the challenges that come with having a complex psychology, such as mating and pair-bonding, coping with loss and anxiety, and achieving cooperation and social organisation. From this point of view, it should come as no surprise that the most intelligent of animals is also the most ritualised of them all. (Location 431)
The earliest evidence of ritual in our own evolutionary lineage, which separated from chimpanzees 6 to 7 million years ago, comes from burials. In the region of Atapuerca, in northern Spain, archaeologists found skeletal remains of at least twenty-eight individuals in a cave that they named Sima de los Huesos (the ‘Pit of Bones’). Although the location is part of a vast cave system, all the skeletons were packed together in a small chamber far away from the entrance, and a finely carved quartzite hand axe was also deposited with them. There is no evidence of habitation anywhere in the cave, which suggests that the bodies were carried and laid there on purpose. DNA extracted from over 7,000 bones revealed that the skeletons belonged to members of Homo heidelbergensis, the earliest known relatives of Neanderthals, who lived 430,000 years ago. (Location 455)
Less controversial evidence comes from our extinct close relatives the Neanderthals. Burial sites have been found in various places in Iraq, Israel, Croatia, France and elsewhere, and it is clear that these groups did not merely dump their dead. They carefully deposited the remains of their dead in graveyards, especially the bodies of young children, often placing them in the foetal position, and went to great lengths to protect those graves from scavengers. (Location 472)
These two different phases, Durkheim argued, constitute two very different realms: the sacred and the profane. The profane includes all those ordinary, mundane and monotonous activities of everyday existence: labouring, procuring food and going about one’s daily life. In contrast, the realm of the sacred, which is created through ritual, is dedicated to those things that are deemed special. (Location 490)
By coming together to enact their ceremonies, practitioners ceased to be an assortment of individuals and became a community with shared norms, rules and values. This is why the anthropologist Roy Rappaport declared ritual to be ‘humanity’s basic social act’.17 It is how society itself comes into being. And in fact, this may be, in a literal sense, historically true. (Location 495)
The most astonishing aspect of this site, however, is neither its enormous size nor its elaborate artwork. It is its age. Göbekli Tepe was built more than 12,000 years ago, making it the earliest known ceremonial structure anywhere in the world. It is three times the age of the Egyptian pyramids, and more than twice as old as Stonehenge. In fact, it pre-dates every single one of the hallmarks of civilisation, including farming, writing, pottery and the wheel. This colossal structure seems to have been used as a pilgrimage site by hunter-gatherers who travelled enormous distances to visit it–from as far as Israel, Jordan and Egypt, according to Schmidt. There does not seem to have been any permanent habitation in the area. No traces of domesticated plants or animals have been found, and the first dwellings to appear around the temple were built almost a thousand years later. (Location 507)
Göbekli Tepe changed everything we thought we knew about prehistoric humans. Not only did it push back the birth of civilisation by thousands of years, but it also seems at odds with the widespread idea that agriculture was the reason for permanent settlements and organised societies. (Location 514)
We now know that the so-called Agricultural Revolution in fact had a devastating impact on those first farmers. Anthropological evidence from both contemporary and ancient societies suggests that the shift from a nomadic way of life to sedentism led to a sharp decline in living conditions.18 (Location 527)
The decline in health and life expectancy and increase in child mortality that the advent of farming brought about is rather astonishing. The average height dropped by 10 centimetres (4 inches) and did not return to pre-Neolithic levels until the twentieth century. (Location 539)
favorite efectos salud agricultura
In Schmidt’s words, ‘First came the temple, then the city.’ (Location 561)
Philosophers and political theorists have long engaged in fierce disagreements about whether the transition from foraging to a settled life was a good idea. There are those, like Thomas Hobbes, who see it as a pivotal moment that elevated the human race to a more moral and meaningful existence. For others, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Karl Marx, it was a terrible mistake that led to the corruption of human nature and paved the way for the exploitation of the masses. But all of them agree that it was the material base, the conditions relating to the means of economic production, that gave birth to the emergence of a superstructure, a society’s norms, religious beliefs, artistic endeavours and ritual practices. Schmidt’s interpretation turns this orthodoxy on its head. If it is true, then a major chapter in the history of our species needs to be revised. What if the irresistible drive that created the first great civilisations was not hunger for food but the urge for ritual? (Location 568)
The anthropologist Alan Fiske and his colleagues examined historical and ethnographic records from numerous cultures, ranging from ancient states to contemporary hunter-gatherers and industrial peoples. They found that, across those cultures, the content and form of OCD-related actions were similar to those of the locally prevalent rituals. Both revolved around precautionary behaviours such as acts of cleansing and purification (dealing with contamination), repetition and redundancy (checking for dangers) and rigidity (aversion to novelty and emphasis on precision). (Location 580)
neurosis favorite cita ritual obsesión rigidez psicopatología
Ritual, however, is not like junk food. Throughout history it has served some of the same functions for our ancestors as it does for us today. And the more we study it scientifically, the more evidence we find that these functions are important enough to outweigh the costs. Rather than ritual being the accidental misfiring of an adaptive system, Fiske argues, it is the other way around: OCD is simply an exaggerated, pathological manifestation of the basic human capacity to perform and be moved by rituals. According to this theory, our species has an innate proclivity to invent, enact and transmit rituals. This deep-seated need for ceremony is evident in the myriad ways in which human cultures around the world celebrate the most important moments of their members’ personal and public lives. (Location 596)
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In half of the cases the puzzle box was opaque, so participants could not see exactly how each action affected the outcome. In this case, both chimps and children copied the actions precisely and got the reward. The other half of the participants saw exactly the same demonstration, except that the box was now made of transparent acrylic glass. This revealed that the first two steps in the process were in fact irrelevant to the goal: the top of the box had a false ceiling and therefore inserting the stick through the top hole had no impact on the subsequent steps. When they realised this, the shrewd chimps cut to the chase. They skipped the unnecessary actions and immediately jumped to the final steps, which were all that was needed to get to the treat. When it comes to food, there is no room for etiquette. The children, by contrast, still copied the whole sequence faithfully, including the steps that were irrelevant to the end goal. Other studies found that even when children are specifically told to copy only the actions that are relevant to the task, they still imitate the entire procedure faithfully, including the non-functional actions.31 (Location 625)
This over-imitation is thought to be an adaptive strategy that humans evolved to facilitate social learning.34 Because we rely on cultural knowledge more than any other animal, copying the behaviours of those around us can be a very convenient strategy, even when we don’t fully understand their meaning. (Location 643)
Children who had been excluded by their in-group in the game imitated the demonstration with higher fidelity than the children who had been included. They also showed higher fidelity than those who had been excluded by the out-group. It was specifically being shunned by one’s own group that led to the most faithful adherence to the group’s norms. Other experiments found that even watching a cartoon about characters who were ostracised by their in-group led children to engage in over-imitation. This suggests that young children may use behavioural imitation as a means of strengthening important social bonds. (Location 664)
Comportamiento ritualizado aumenta frente a nsiedad generada por exclusión social.
exclusión rigidez comportamiento ansiedad infancia cita
a funeral helps the deceased become an ancestor. Rites of passage do not merely celebrate the transition to a new state–they create this new state in the eyes of society. (Location 686)
in the Indian town of Solapur babies are tossed from the rooftop of the Baba Umer Dargah shrine, with the hope that the people holding a bedsheet 50 feet below will manage to catch them. (Location 691)
Every society has wedding ceremonies, which tend to be among the most lavish of all rites of passage. (Location 706)
Death is not the only domain in which this happens. As we will see, there is rather a more general pattern: rituals can help us deal with intensely worrying prospects that only a certain level of social sophistication can make us aware of in the first place. Across various areas in which our evolved mechanisms are somewhat ill fitted to the challenges of life, rituals may serve as mental tools that help us to overcome those challenges by bypassing or recalibrating those mechanisms. Thanks to this utility, the thirst for ritual runs deep in the human psyche. We are drawn to perform them not merely because we like to, but because we need to. (Location 736)
3 ORDER
Malinowski was one of the first anthropologists to step off the veranda and live among the people he was studying. Although he had the opportunity to stay in the house of a British trader in the Trobriands, he decided to give up the comforts of the mansion and pitch a tent in the forest, where he could live among the natives and get first-hand experience of their culture and demeanour. (Location 786)
Ritual also permeated the construction of the vessels. Before felling the tree chosen for the canoe, magical spells and food offerings were used to exorcise the tokway, evil wood spirits that dwell in trees. During transportation the log was twice beaten with a bunch of dry grass, which was meant to make it lighter. (Location 821)
Ritos presentes en la preparación de la ayahuasca, que sirven para calmar al viajero.
efectos predicción ritual ansiedad incertidumbre control
After surveying various other domains of life in the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski began to discern a clear pattern. In general, rituals were largely absent from domains that had predictable outcomes but abundant in areas associated with danger and uncontrollable circumstances such as warfare, illness, love and natural phenomena. (Location 835)
‘We find magic wherever the elements of chance and accident, and the emotional play between hope and fear, have a wide and extensive range,’ he wrote. ‘We do not find magic wherever the pursuit is certain, reliable, and well under control of rational methods and technological processes.’5 Based on these observations, Malinowski proposed that magical rituals served an important psychological function in the life of Trobrianders. Ritual, he argued, stems from the same deep-seated need to control our world that leads us to pursue scientific discoveries. This need motivates us to perceive causal relationships between phenomena in the world and to seek ways to influence those relationships. In the case of ritual, the causal links may be illusory, but the action may still have therapeutic value: It enables man to carry out with confidence his important tasks, to maintain his poise and his mental integrity in fits of anger, in the throes of hate, of unrequited love, of despair and anxiety. The function of magic is to ritualise man’s optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear. Magic expresses the greater value for man of confidence over doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over pessimism.6 And this, he realised, was not very different from what we find in our own societies. Although the content of our beliefs and practices may vary widely across cultures, people all over the world think and behave in fundamentally similar ways, and members of all cultures use ritual to cope with the stresses and uncertainties of life. (Location 839)
The law of similarity is the idea that ‘like causes like’, or that physical resemblance also implies similar functions. (Location 867)
The law of contagion is the idea that things carry immutable essences that can be transmitted through contact. (Location 870)
One might expect that top athletes would rely more on their skill and less on superstition. In fact, we see the opposite. As elite athletes face higher stakes, they engage in more superstitious behaviours than average athletes.15 Sports people often develop elaborate routines that they enact before and during games. (Location 900)
Strangely enough, the athletes who become obsessed with such rituals often do not see themselves as superstitious.16 In his autobiography, Nadal wrote: ‘Some call it superstition, but it’s not. If it were superstition, why would I keep doing the same thing over and over whether I win or lose? It’s a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.’17 (Location 922)
In any case, Nadal’s actions constitute what we call ritualised behaviour: they are stereotypical actions that are seen as indispensable (they must be performed), although they have no clear causal outcome. (Location 929)
These observations confirm that rituals abound in those areas of life that are stressful and uncertain. But all these findings are correlational: they tell us that two things tend to occur around the same time. They don’t tell us whether one of those things causes the other to happen. (Location 939)
Anthropologists have long been aware that even rituals that seem very different and that take place in entirely unrelated domains can still have remarkable similarities. It’s not just that they involve causally opaque actions with no obvious relation to a specific outcome. The daily routines of little children, the superstitions enacted by gamblers and athletes, the prayers directed at various deities, religious and secular collective rituals, and even the pathological hyper-ritualisation of those who suffer from Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder, all seem to share some key structural elements.21 (Location 963)
First of all, ritualisation is characterised by rigidity: ritual actions must always be performed in the same way (the right way). Fidelity is crucial; deviations from the script are not acceptable. (Location 967)
A second hallmark of ritualisation is repetition. (Location 1000)
Finally, another characteristic of ritualisation is that it involves redundancy. That is, even when ritual actions can be said to have a direct causal effect, they often go above and beyond what might be normally expected for practical purposes. (Location 1005)
Observing the frequency and duration of a ceremony is fairly straightforward. But how can we measure things like rigidity and redundancy, and what counts as repetition? The traditional way of doing this would be to observe or film people’s behaviour and make a note each time a new movement or sequence of movements occurred. But this requires great effort, constant attention and many subjective decisions, so there is a lot of room for error. Luckily, technological advances now allow us to automate this process. In our study, we used motion-capture technology to measure ritualisation in people’s actions.22 (Location 1010)
Before they made their presentations we asked our participants to clean the artefact with a piece of cloth, although it was already clean when they entered the room. This was the time during which we used our motion sensors to analyse their actions. We found that those who were more stressed displayed more ritualised behaviour: their hand movements became more repetitive and predictable, engaging in the same action patterns again and again. And the more anxious people felt during the experiment, the more time they spent cleaning the object. Under the stress of the situation they began to clean obsessively even when there was nothing left to clean. (Location 1023)
Ritualisation, then, seems to come as a natural response to anxiety. (Location 1029)
ritual favorite conducta rigidez ansiedad cita efectos
Skinner decided to introduce some uncertainty and see what happened. He placed a hungry pigeon inside the box and programmed the release mechanism to deliver the food pellets randomly, no matter what the bird did. The results astounded him: much like gamblers and athletes, the birds began to develop elaborate rituals. (Location 1039)
The researchers found that rituals that were more repetitive, rigid and strictly defined were also perceived to be more effective in dealing with everyday problems.25 (Location 1057)
These findings suggest that ritualisation is a natural way to try to control the world around us. We spontaneously engage in ritualised behaviours when we face stressful and uncertain situations, and we intuitively expect those ritualised actions to have an effect. But if this sense of control is illusory, what could possibly be the benefit of it? Why would this cognitive glitch persist rather than being weeded out by natural selection? (Location 1077)
To see whether some of the traditional local rituals helped people reduce anxiety, we measured a property of the autonomic nervous system known as heart-rate variability. (Location 1144)
As we predicted, the ritual had beneficial results. Reflecting on natural disasters caused a rise in anxiety for both groups. But those who performed the ritual were faster to recover from that anxiety. Their heart-rate variability increased by 30 per cent, suggesting that they were better able to cope with the stress. This was also consistent with how they felt: subjective ratings of anxiety were twice as high for those who had not performed the ritual. These are no trivial differences: clinical studies have documented effects of similar magnitude between healthy individuals and people suffering from major depression.35 Ritual, it turns out, can be as effective in reducing stress as some of our best anxiety medications. How can we explain these findings? (Location 1165)
Rituals are highly structured. They require rigidity (they must always be performed the ‘correct’ way), repetition (the same actions performed again and again) and redundancy (they can go on for a long time). In other words, they are predictable. This predictability imposes order on the chaos of everyday life, which provides us with a sense of control over uncontrollable situations. Studies show that, when people experience uncertainty and lack of control, they are more likely to see patterns or regularities where there are none. (Location 1171)
ritual función predicción estructura control orden favorite cita
Under these circumstances people are also more likely to turn to ritualised behaviours. This is known as the compensatory control model: we compensate for lack of control in one domain by seeking it in another.37 (Location 1176)
Because our brain never stops making these kinds of predictions, we tend to look for patterns and statistical regularities everywhere around us. This is extremely important, because any computational device (and the human brain is no exception) becomes dramatically more efficient when it can build on prior knowledge. This way, we do not have to learn everything from scratch. But one consequence of this cognitive architecture is that when our predictive potential is limited–that is, when there is high uncertainty–we experience anxiety. Our predictive brain does not like unpredictability. This is where ritual comes in. (Location 1209)
Ritual es la forma del ser humano de lidiar con la ansiedad que genera la incertidumbre.
ansiedad incertidumbre predicción ritual cerebro cita favorite
To an outsider those rituals too would seem irrational. But our cognition did not evolve to be rational; it evolved to be efficient in dealing with the kinds of problems that our ancestors faced in their environment. Rituals are found in every human culture because they help solve some of those problems and satisfy some of our basic human needs. We rely on time-honoured traditions and practices not because they are logical but because they work for us. Even if these ritualised practices cannot directly manipulate our environment, they can bring changes in ourselves, and those changes can have real and important effects on our world. (Location 1228)
4 GLUE
‘The fact that all members of a group participate personally in this effort accounts for much of its psychic and emotional efficacy. The dance is perhaps the central unifying force in bushman life, binding people together in very deep ways which we do not fully understand.’1 (Location 1248)
By their very nature, rituals are causally opaque: there is no obvious causal connection between the specific actions they involve and their purported end goal. As we have seen, many rituals are also goal-demoted, lacking an external goal altogether: performing the rite is the goal itself. (Location 1258)
Los rituales, por definición, son causalmente opacos.
while causal opacity may look like a bug, it is in fact essential to ritual’s ability to create special and meaningful experiences. (Location 1264)
características concepto efectos ritual
Developmental research suggests that from an early age humans are adept at learning both instrumental skills and cultural conventions, thanks to their ability to pursue two distinct strategies of acquiring information. Psychologists have called these two learning mechanisms the instrumental and the ritual stance.8 Using the instrumental stance is what allows us to recognise and interpret actions that rely on physical causation to achieve specific goals, such as using a broom to clean the floor, chopping vegetables to make a meal or working together to build a boat. The ritual stance, on the other hand, allows us to recognise and assimilate cultural conventions, such as burning incense to purify a room, chopping fruit to make a sacrifice or coming together to perform a collective prayer. (Location 1325)
The causally opaque nature of conventional behaviours signals that these behaviours are normative, and thus socially meaningful.9 (Location 1331)
Psychological experiments have documented the ritual stance even in toddlers. In one study, sixteen-month-old children viewed videos of two people performing ritualised actions together. (Location 1336)
the children expected people who performed the same rituals (but not those who performed different rituals) to be socially affiliated, and indicated surprise by staring longer when these people appeared to be socially disengaged in the videos.10 (Location 1342)
For some reason, it seems that we are cognitively and culturally prepared to adopt the rituals of those around us.14 (Location 1349)
What does it take to produce the idea of a group in those people’s minds? As it turns out, not much. In a series of experiments, Tajfel and his colleagues found that even the most arbitrary group markers may be sufficient to make people feel that they have more in common with other group members than with outsiders. (Location 1371)
All of these studies led to the same conclusion: the minimal requirement to feel attached to one’s group is the existence of the group itself.15 (Location 1380)
rituals are uniquely potent markers because they involve not just abstract but also embodied symbols, enacted in behaviour. (Location 1412)
Soon, however, he realised that despite the apparent futility of the exercise, the soldiers did not mind strutting around in unison. Neither did he. In fact, he described the rhythmic ritual as bringing about a feeling of exaltation and a sense of personal enlargement shared by all participants. ‘Obviously, something visceral was at work; something, I later concluded, far older than language and critically important in human history, because the emotion it arouses constitutes an indefinitely expansible basis for social cohesion among any and every group that keeps together in time, moving big muscles together and chanting, singing, or shouting rhythmically.’ McNeill called this visceral feeling ‘muscular bonding’, an emotional response that allows an assortment of individuals to feel like a unified group: those who move together bond together. Long before the formation of modern armies and other formal institutions, our ancestors used drill, music, dance and ritual as the foundations of social solidarity, and the utility of those social technologies is as relevant to us today as it was to them. (Location 1425)
A number of studies have shown that the coordination of movement increases interpersonal rapport and promotes bonding. (Location 1433)
coordinación movimiento vínculo comunidad evidencia
Other studies showed that performing synchronous activities such as chanting and dancing, and even trivial tasks like finger-tapping to the same beat, can have similar outcomes.20 (Location 1437)
After each session we used an algometer, a device that records a person’s pain threshold by applying mechanical pressure until they feel pain. We found that people in the high-sync group were better able to tolerate pain, suggesting that their bodies had ramped up the production of endorphins. Those neurohormones are part of the endogenous opioid system, which plays an important role in regulating motivation by elevating mood, reducing discomfort and anxiety, boosting self-esteem and alleviating pain. Crucially, endorphins are also associated with social bonding by creating feelings of safety, trust and rapport when we are around other people. This is why they surge during some of the most intimate interpersonal interactions, including physical contact, sex, laughter, gossip and, in our primate relatives, grooming.22 (Location 1449)
the high-sync group was more trusting, endowing their partners with 30 per cent more money in the economic game than the other two groups. Synchrony had a profound impact at the biological, the psychological and, most importantly, the behavioural level. (Location 1460)
sincronía efectos evidencia experimento altruismo
Our brain is so adept at discerning those patterns of affection and cooperation that it extends those inferences to our own behaviours. When we act like others, we perceive ourselves as being more similar to them, and as a result we like them more. This is why dancing, music, chanting and moving in tandem are such common parts of collective rituals. (Location 1466)
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Performing a ritual in the same way as it has always been done makes us part of something not only greater than ourselves but greater even than our entire social world, connecting us to a society of fellows that transcends place and time. (Location 1529)
pertenencia comunidad cita favorite ritual
While traditions in general are considered important, rituals have a special status. In a series of studies led by Daniel Stein at Berkeley University, a group of researchers examined how people react when traditions are altered. They found that such alterations provoke moral indignation because they are perceived as an affront to sacred group values. (Location 1551)
tradición defensa ritual emociones
Most of the world’s rituals primarily rely on one of two basic strategies to increase their efficacy. On the one hand, there are rituals that are performed with high frequency–monthly, weekly or even several times a day. These rituals are typically not very spectacular or exciting. On the other, there are those ceremonies that are performed less frequently (once a year, once a generation or even once in a lifetime) but which are emotionally intense and extravagant. There seem to be two diametrically opposite cultural attractors: one centred around repetition and the other relying on arousal. (Location 1578)
cita estrategia ritual arousal favorite repetición
It is primarily these rituals that are characteristic of Whitehouse’s imagistic type. Since those personally meaningful experiences are shared with other participants, their memories are at once private and communal, and as a result the boundaries between oneself and one’s group become blurred. By creating an exclusive experience that can only be understood by those who have undergone the ordeal, imagistic rituals forge an inner circle of initiates who share powerful bonds. Whitehouse describes this as a form of kinship: family members often go through the hardships of life together, and those shared tribulations play a crucial role in bringing them closer. Going through a traumatic ritual may have similar effects by creating shared experiences that trigger psychological notions of kinship. This may also be reflected in the language people use in reference to their fellow participants, whom they often refer to as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’. (Location 1651)
5 EFFERVESCENCE
The sociologist Émile Durkheim, argued that collective ceremonies can produce unique experiences by triggering the alignment of emotional states, a phenomenon he called ‘collective effervescence’. (Location 1683)
Efervescencia Colectiva
Everyone stressed the tremendous importance of this tradition. Participating made them feel ‘very San Pedran’, they told me time and again, and San Pedro would never be San Pedro without this ritual. They talked about the sense of pride that came with being the custodians of this tradition and expressed their great anticipation at attending the ceremony again the next year, and the one after that. When asked just how important this ritual was in his life, a man told me: ‘On a scale of one to ten, this would be a twenty.’ Several others went as far as to say that it was the single most important occasion in their lives. (Location 1768)
When I asked San Pedrans what it was like to walk on the burning embers, people described an exhilarating–ecstatic, even–feeling of energy permeating them, and a sense of oneness with the crowd of spectators. (Location 1776)
‘You feel part of the village, it’s a sense of belonging, being one with the group,’ a woman told me. It sounded very much like the phenomenon that Durkheim had called ‘collective effervescence’: the electrifying feeling that is shared between participants in the context of high-arousal rituals, resulting in the alignment of their affective states and the creation of strong social bonds between them. (Location 1780)
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When the results of the tests came in, they confirmed what Zak had expected: the ceremony had caused a spike in oxytocin levels, but this spike was not the same for everyone. Just like in our study of the Spanish fire-walkers, levels of oxytocin could be predicted on the basis of social relatedness, with the bride recording the largest increase, followed by the couple’s parents, the groom, then other close friends and relatives, and finally some of their less intimate friends. (Location 1922)
What is the personal experience of a fire-walker who feels (or, more precisely, remembers) being blissfully calm, while in reality their heart is pounding 200 times per minute? The truth is that we don’t know. But this sharp discrepancy between physiology (the inner workings of our bodies) and phenomenology (our lived experience) shows that when we rely on one method alone, we risk missing the big picture. It is only by using a combination of methods that we can even become aware of puzzles like this. (Location 1938)
This narrowing of perception resembles what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow: a mental state in which we become so fully immersed in an action that our mind filters out all peripheral details, allowing us to become unconditionally absorbed into the experience.9 (Location 2051)
Common to these experiences is the feeling of losing the sense of time, being focused entirely on the present moment to the extent that nothing else matters, and a sense of empowerment and effortlessness, as if being carried by a water current–which is where the term ‘flow’ comes from. This transcendental feeling of losing oneself lies at the core of some of the most meaningful human activities. (Location 2055)
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Fighter pilots, athletes, chess players, musicians and other artists often describe flow as a state of total involvement where the self becomes indistinguishable from the action. (Location 2059)
what these and other transcendental experiences have in common is that they restrict the sense of self to the point of dissolution. The self becomes lost in the action, and this is experienced as bliss. Moreover, as is clear from many of these examples, flow states do not require emotional arousal. (Location 2063)
Some collective rituals, in contrast, seem to create a different, more elevated experience. These rituals involve strong emotional and physiological arousal and, crucially, this arousal is shared between participants. The resulting emotional communion creates a dynamic system in which each individual’s experience is affected and amplified by those of others, like a thousand streams of water merging to form a river that is faster and more powerful than any single stream could ever be. When this interactive kind of flow is present, the sense of self is expanded and the individual experiences a transcendental oneness with the group. (Location 2065)
A successful haka performance is said to elicit ihi, which is a hair-raising feeling of exhilaration experienced by performers and observers alike. (Location 2085)
Collective rituals are powerful social technologies that can excite, elevate and unite individuals into cohesive units, and even inspire them to create myth, religion and other meaningful pursuits. But, like all technologies, they can be used for better or for worse. (Location 2101)
In many ways, sports fandom is not unlike religion, nationalism or other forms of ideology. In such contexts most people copy the preferences of their parents and peers, or simply support whatever team is popular in their area. But what begins as an arbitrary preference or mere adherence to tradition can turn into deep ideological commitment. The effervescent rituals performed in stadiums, temples and rallies act as a catalyst for this transformation. (Location 2122)
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other than my own intuitions, I still had no concrete evidence that these effects really translated into increased social cohesion. Do such intense rituals actually have the power to change people’s behaviour? And how can we find out? (Location 2136)
As the piercings are being made, loud cries begin to ripple through the crowd. Although those who undergo the physical trauma certainly seem to be in agony, it is the women who scream the loudest as they watch their sons, husbands or brothers being tormented. These empathic reactions are an important component of painful rituals. As we saw in our study of the Spanish fire-walk, social connectedness facilitates emotional contagion. When devotees go through painful acts, their loved ones vicariously share their suffering, and as they do so the entire community becomes more bonded. (Location 2273)
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In recent decades we have learned a lot about human nature by using these kinds of games. For example, the long-prevailing wisdom in many branches of economic theory argued that people make decisions based on rational and narrowly selfish cost-benefit calculations, driven purely by their wish to maximise utility–a model known as Homo economicus. However, when researchers started using behavioural experiments to look at how people make decisions, they found that Homo economicus only exists as a theoretical construct. In real life, our instincts, emotions, unconscious biases and social expectations often sway our behaviour in numerous ways. (Location 2344)
When we analysed the data, we found that those in the control group (who had not attended any ritual) gave on average 26 per cent of the money they had earned to charity.6 This is a sizeable portion, considering that they could have kept the entire amount for themselves, but similar to the typical allocations made by those who play Dictator Games in the lab. In comparison, those who took part in the collective prayer (the low-intensity ritual) gave significantly more: about 40 per cent on average. Still, participants in the kavadi ritual donated almost twice as much as that, their average contribution reaching over 75 per cent of their earnings. So, after engaging in this painful ritual people gave three-quarters of their entire endowment to charity. (Location 2385)
But the pro-social effects of this ritual were not limited to those who experienced the painful activities at first hand. Those who accompanied them in the procession also made comparable donations. Those observers stood by their kith and kin as they were getting pierced, walked alongside them as they were carrying their burden, supported them and cried for them. And in doing so, they vicariously experienced their sacrifice. Not only did they feel like the active performers did, but they also behaved like they did. On the day of the kavadi the entire community became more generous. (Location 2392)
Los efectos prosociales del ritual extremo también afectan a familiares espectadores.
empatía emociones contagio prosocialidad altruismo ritual dolor
The strong bonds forged in the face of shared suffering may be an evolutionary adaptation that helped early human communities pull together and overcome adversity when faced with existential threats such as war, predators or natural disasters. This is why some of the most extraordinary examples of human cooperation are to be found in the midst of such existential threats. (Location 2409)
extreme rituals appear to simulate these conditions to reap their pro-social benefits. Rather than wait for warfare or some other disaster to occur, many communities are able to galvanise their members by proactively providing them with powerful ritual experiences. (Location 2430)
membership of a social group requires some kind of trade-off between our personal identity (our sense of who we are as individuals) and our social identity (the things that we share with other group members). Our personal self is formed through our unique life experiences, those key moments in our lives that have shaped our personality. In contrast, collective identities are typically based on more abstract ideas, ideals and doctrines–for example, about one’s nation or religion–and generalisations about other group members. As a result, there can be a hydraulic relationship between those two selves: activating one’s collective identity requires downplaying one’s personal self and vice versa. (Location 2436)
What makes a group of initiates feel like a unit is not so much the doctrines they have been taught: first and foremost, it is their shared experiences of initiation. Rather than suppressing their sense of individuality, imagistic rituals make it more salient but at the same time indistinguishable from their social self. (Location 2454)
By handicapping itself, the animal is in fact advertising its fitness rather than its vulnerability, for it is only the strongest animals that can afford to squander such valuable resources. Zahavi called this the handicap principle, which can explain the evolution of physical or behavioural traits that advertise an individual’s fitness by assuming seemingly unnecessary costs. (Location 2546)
In nature, these kinds of signals are bound to evolve when they provide benefits to both receivers and transmitters. As long as it sees them coming, a healthy adult gazelle can normally outrun or outmanoeuvre any of the big cats, so a predator is better off focusing its energy on younger, older or injured gazelles. For the predators, the great majority of strikes do not end in success, and in the unforgiving heat of the African savannah each encounter results in great expenditure of energy, leaving both predator and prey exhausted. Big cats often need hours to recover their strength before initiating a new hunt, so haphazardly pursuing unattainable targets carries the risk of starvation. By engaging in this kind of communication, it is therefore not only the prey but also the predator that is spared a lot of unnecessary trouble. What is more, other receivers may also benefit from the transmission of these signals. For example, members of the same species may use these cues to gauge the fitness of potential mates, the strength of potential competitors or, in social species, the value of potential allies. (Location 2557)
This strategy is what the sociologist Thorstein Veblen described as ‘conspicuous consumption’. In engaging in spending behaviours that seem to be without any utility, conspicuous consumers are effectively using their financial capital to buy social capital. The reason they are able to do this is precisely that the items they are purchasing lack the added utility that could reasonably be justified by their cost: a 20 handbag, and driving a million-dollar sports car in the city will not get you to work any faster than a more spacious (and quieter) $20,000 runaround. What consumers are really paying for with the purchase of such luxury items is prestige, because in order for financial capital to be converted into social capital it must first become publicly visible. (Location 2593)
homo_sapiens estatus consumo concepto
Thanks to this ability to communicate information about important but otherwise hard-to-observe qualities of their practitioners, costly rituals can help solve a number of problems related to social living. One of the most important problems any sexually reproducing organism must face is choosing a mate. The reason this is a problem is that some of the most desirable traits in a sexual partner are not always easy to observe. These include physical attributes such as health, fertility and physical prowess, material and social capital, and personality traits such as loyalty, generosity and adherence to social values. Throughout human history a variety of rituals have helped to solve this problem by providing clues about who might genuinely possess such desirable traits. (Location 2601)
Dancing is so ubiquitous in courtship rituals not only because it creates bonding but also because it allows observers to make judgements about the biological fitness of the dancer. Good dancers are perceived as more attractive, and studies show that the moves that are considered to be the sexiest are different for males and females. (Location 2642)
No matter the age, education or religiosity of those making the judgement, they saw ritual practitioners as higher-quality material. Not only was ritual the most important predictor of mating quality, but the more effort invested in those rituals the better, as those who participated in the painful ritual were judged even more favourably. (Location 2676)