#719 Dimitris Xygalatas - Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living
The Dissenter
The Importance of Rituals in the Maintenance of Institutions
In modern democracies, ritual is just as important. Obama first stumbled and then eventually uttered the wrong version of the oath. So all of our social institutions have all of these rituals embedded in them.
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Dr. Dimitris Xygalatas is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Psychological Sciences and head of the Experimental Anthropology Lab at the University of Connecticut. He has also served as President of the International Association for the Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religion. He is the author of Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living.
In this episode, we focus on Ritual. We first ask what is a ritual, and how common it is. We talk about the functions of rituals, and how they relate to meaning. We discuss the hypothesis that rituals drove the evolution of civilization. We talk about the individual and social benefits of rituals, and causal opacity as a feature of rituals. We discuss modes of religiosity theory, and get into fire-walking rituals, and the psychological effects of costly rituals. We also talk about the relationship between ritual and sexual selection, and the role that drugs play in some rituals. Finally, we discuss the benefits and obstacles to an interdisciplinary approach in the social sciences.
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