<figure class="alignright size-full"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">LISTEN TO DIMITRIS XYGALATAS NOW!
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Most of us recognize the presence of ritual, whether in a religious observance, an athlete’s weird pre-competition tics, or even the cadence of our own morning ablutions. In general, most of these rituals are seen as harmless and probably a little unnecessary (or even silly). But according to cognitive anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas, ritual often serves a positive purpose for individuals – synchronizing them with their communities or relieving their stress.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Xygalatas defines for host David Edmonds what his research considers ritual, citing two important characteristics of ritual: causal opacity (such as rain dances not actually creating precipitation) and that the ritual matters, often greatly, to the participants. What isn’t ritual, he notes, is habit – although habits can veer into ritual/

“Utilitarian actions can become ritualized,” Xygalatas says, “and to that extent, they can be considered as rituals. So .. because I am a very avid consumer of coffee, when I get up in the morning, I always have to make a cup of coffee – [and] it always has to be in the same cup.”

Xygalatas then describes fieldwork he’s done on “high-intensity” rituals, ranging from firewalking in Spain or an “excruciating” annual religious procession in Mauritius. These efforts – part ethnography and part lab experiment – have given him unique insight into the results of jointly experienced ritual, much of which he detailed in his recent book, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. (In a blurb, Jane Goodall wrote the book shows “how and why our most irrational behaviors are a key driver of our success.”)

An associate professor in anthropology and psychological sciences at the University of Connecticut – where he heads the Experimental Anthropology Lab – Xygalatas also discusses the transdisciplinary scope of his work. This reflects his own roots in both anthropology and religious studies (he is a past president of the International Association for the Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religion).

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.

TRANSCRIPT

David Edmonds: Tennis player Rafael Nadal takes a freezing cold shower shortly before a match, carries one racket onto the court with five in his bag, carefully places two drinking bottles just to the left of him, one behind the other, jumps at the net during the coin toss, and has numerous other rituals. It seems bizarre. Why does he do it?

Rituals are what Dimitris Xygalatas investigates. He’s an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut and author of Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. Dimitris Xygalatas, welcome to Social Science Bites.

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Dimitris Xygalatas: Hi there. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Edmonds: We’re talking today about rituals. Tell me what is a ritual? Can you give us some examples of rituals?

Xygalatas: Of course, it’s important to define ritual, because this is a word that we use in everyday life, and a lot of the time we tend to use it very loosely. In my book, figuratively and literally, I define ritual on the basis of two key characteristics There are other structural characteristics of ritual that we can talk about, but there are two features, I think that are central to my definition. One of them is causal opacity. That means that ritual actions are different than utilitarian actions, because there is no clear connection between the actions that we undertake, and the goals that they mean to achieve — if there is a goal to begin with. Because a lot of the time, when you ask people why they perform the rituals, they just shrug and they go, “I don’t know, that’s just what we do.” But even if they do state some purpose, let’s say, “We perform this ritual to bring about rain,” then there is no causal relationship between my dancing around and water falling from the sky.

Another characteristic of ritual that is useful to distinguish it from things that we call habits, is that rituals tend to demarcate the domain of the sacred. And that means that ritual actions are important, they matter to us. And if somebody interrupts our rituals, we then get stressed, we then get upset. So they seem to be very meaningful, very important.

Edmonds: Give us some examples. When I think about rituals, I think about ones that are associated with major life events like birth, adulthood, marriage, death.

Xygalatas: There are certainly a wide range of rituals in all human societies that are associated with these key life stages. Obviously, birth and marriage and the end of life but also in, in all of our secular institutions. When we graduate from university, there’s typically a ceremony when people retire, they might throw a big party, or birthday celebrations. There are lots of rituals associated with other kinds of state functions, in the courtroom, for example, or the inauguration of a new president or prime minister, or the coronation of a king, and so on, so forth.

But there are also the kinds of rituals that we perform in our individual life. For some people, those can be culturally informed rituals, things like praying at home. For others, those can be simpler and more idiosyncratic actions. And those are the kinds of things that we sometimes call superstition, although that’s not a good term, in my opinion, because superstition is just a value-laden term that means whatever the dominant religious establishment does not approve of. But basically, when we look at individual rituals of that kind, those are things that, for example, we might perform under duress. And you see a lot of those rituals performed by athletes, by gamblers, and by all of us when we feel stressed, perhaps when we knock on wood, or we start engaging in sequences of actions that we just have to perform compulsively for no particular reason.

Edmonds: I want to come on to the athlete example later, but it’s interesting. You mentioned how vital it is that they are sacred. Every morning, I have a cup of coffee. And I guess it’s a habit, but it feels like a ritual to me. I can’t really start working until I’ve had my coffee. I enjoy the coffee, so it does have a function. But it seems like there’s a ritualistic element to my coffee drinking. Where would you categorize that?

Xygalatas: Yes. And coffee is something that commonly comes up in my discussions with people because it is a good example of how these categories — ritual and habit — can be blurred. So in my view, drinking a cup of coffee just because you do it every morning, does not in itself constitute a ritual. That will be a habit, because the direct function of that is to keep you caffeinated to boost your energy or to give you some level of nutrition if it includes milk or whatever.

But in many cases, those things become rit