The Power of Ritual
Episode Stats
Summary
Demetrius Ziggaladas is an anthropologist and the author of Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. He shares how a greater understanding of ritual is upending our theories of human civilization and the idea that first came the temple and then the city.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Our lives are populated by rituals, baptisms, funerals, graduations, singing happy birthday,
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chanting cheers at a sports event, saying grace before dinner.
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When we perform rituals, there's no causal link between the behavior and the hope for
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For example, there's no causal connection between exchanging rings on an altar and becoming
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But my guests would say that doesn't mean that rituals are useless and irrational.
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In fact, doing two decades of research on rituals caused him to do a 180 on his perception of
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He's an anthropologist and the author of Ritual, How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth
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Today on the show, Demetrius explains what defines a ritual and how a ritual is different
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He shares how a greater understanding of ritual is upending our theories of human civilization
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and the idea that first came the temple and then the city.
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Demetrius describes how rituals can be seen to have their own kind of logic and purpose
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as they build trust and togetherness, serve as an effective way to deal with stress, signal
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someone's commitment to a group, and ultimately contribute to people's overall well-being.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash rituals.
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So you work in the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut, but your approach
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to anthropology is different from a lot of other anthropologists.
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You study the cognition of people and also their physiology of how it interacts with their
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So your approach is almost, it seems like it intersects with the field of psychology.
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How did you land on this approach to anthropology?
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Yeah, it's true that I am an unusual anthropologist or an unusual anything for that matter.
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See, in academia, we have these strictly defined disciplines and they approach human nature from
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very different perspectives. But at the end of the day, we are studying the same thing,
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which is human nature. So in my case, I guess it felt natural to me because growing up, the kinds
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of heroes that I had, that I was watching on television were people like Jane Goodall, people
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like David Attenborough, people like Jacques Cousteau. And what these people were doing is that they
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were going into the field and they were combining firsthand personal experience with scientific
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measurement and scientific explanation. So it always felt natural to me that to study human
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nature, you should apply this holistic perspective. Now, of course, we're not always able to do this
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in academia. I was just lucky enough that as a graduate student and later as a faculty member,
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I was always part of institutions that just allow me the creative freedom to do that.
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So one thing you've focused your area of study on is the influence of ritual on individuals,
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psychologically, physiologically. How did you end up studying rituals? Did you have a
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personal experience with ritual where you thought, well, I want to explore that even more?
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I was always puzzled by ritual. Growing up in Greece, I was reading National Geographic magazine and I
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would read about all of those exotic or seemingly exotic rituals that were happening in faraway places,
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initiation ceremonies, some of them really painful, really flamboyant, really extravagant.
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And I always considered them as relics of the past, something very distant that you couldn't find in
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Western societies. So at some point as an adolescent already, I had this realization, which for me was
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a big revelation, that these types of rituals were also happening in my own backyard, in my home country.
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There were people who walked on fire and who engaged in these long pilgrimages that were very painful.
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They were crawling on hands and knees and they were bloody and bruised and all that.
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And suddenly the switch flipped and I started seeing ritual everywhere. I realized that my life too was
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extremely ritualized. This is not something that only exotic people do. This is something that is
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Well, I think, you know, in the book, in one ritual you noticed that happened on a daily or
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regular occurrence, but if you don't look at it right, you don't think of it as rituals, like sports,
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like soccer games in Europe are very ritualistic.
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Absolutely. And this is in a sense, the essence of anthropology, the kinds of things, the kinds of
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cultural patterns that happen right in front of our eyes. Sometimes we can't see them. We're just too
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close to them or to see them. So we need to, to go to another society to realize sometimes something
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So as an anthropologist, how do you define a ritual? Like what makes an activity ritualistic?
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So anthropologists like to disagree about most things. So you will find many definitions of
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ritual, but in my book, figuratively and literally, when I talk about ritual, I mean, those repetitive
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sequences of action that we consider to be very special. And yet, either we have no explicit
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reason for doing them, or even when we do, there's no connection between the means and the goals.
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So for example, if I perform a rain dance, there's no causal link between my dancing about and
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So what makes a ritual different from a habit? You know, say someone who brushes their teeth
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every day. I mean, someone like an anthropologist or an alien could look at that. Well, that's some
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kind of weird ritual that these humans take part in, but you'd say, no, it's not a ritual.
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Yeah, exactly. And that's a good, and brushing your teeth is a good example because it has a clear
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utilitarian function and the actions are causally connected to the outcome. So I'm brushing my teeth
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in order to cleanse them. Now, if I were to brush, to wave my toothbrush in the air, with a belief
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that that cleanses my teeth, or with no belief at all, now that would be a ritual.
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Okay, and so that's interesting. So ritual activity, they have no effect on the external world,
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That is correct. So even though, and that's my perspective in this book, that's the perspective on
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ritual, that even though it has no direct causal outcome, that is not to say that it has no impact
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Gotcha. So yeah, like, so a ritual, like pledging allegiance to the flag,
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it doesn't have an effect on the external world, but it does something to the person or people taking
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Correct. These types of rituals will help us internalize social norms by getting us to
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align our appearances, if we all dress the same, our movements, if we all march together,
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our symbols, our sensory input, our emotions. They also get us to feel like one. If we behave like
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one, we feel like one. So these rituals help us essentially integrate into society.
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Well, another good example of just a regular activity that has an effect on the external world,
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but it can become ritualistic, right? That's another interesting thing is you talk about
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Japanese tea ceremonies. So you can make tea and it has a purpose, right? All the things you do is to
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make the tea, but you can change it up so that it becomes a ritual. So what, how can you make an
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activity that does have an effect on the external world ritualistic?
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So one of the effects of ritual is that they create special experiences. In a sense, our brain recognizes
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those kinds of special experiences by their very structure. So ritualized activities, they tend to be
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extremely repetitive. They tend to be very rigid. They have to be performed in the right way, the same
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way, always. They're very redundant. They might go on for a very long time. They are typically loaded with
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sensory pageantry. They might arouse our sense of smell or sense of touch, or they have colors and bells and
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whistles. All of those things, they signal to our brain that something of value is happening.
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So it sounds like a habit or a practice becomes a ritual when it's not just repetitious, but you do the
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thing with an exactitude, with a formal exactitude that goes above and beyond what's necessary. If you were just
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doing something for a practical purpose, like if you're just making tea to drink it, ritual also
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stimulates your senses. And it sounds like there's an intent to make it special and above the ordinary.
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You know, there's like a certain mindset you have to bring to an activity to, to make it a ritual.
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Something else you talk about in the book is that there's this idea of the paradox ritual.
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The paradox is that if you look at all human societies across time and space, people have
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always spent an enormous amount of time, effort, and even material resources in practicing all kinds
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of rituals. And yet when we ask people why they do that, the most common answer is just puzzled looks.
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People look at you and they say, what do you mean? That's just what we do. It's our tradition.
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They might often refer to some, some myth or some ancestor, but generally what they're saying is
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that, well, we just do them because that makes us who we are.
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So your job as an anthropologist, try to figure out, well, why do they do these things? Why do
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Well, okay. Let's talk about this. Are humans the only species that engage in ritual or do other
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Yeah, not at all. We're not the only animal who does that. Of course, we all know about the
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mating rituals for birds. But the more we look in nature, the more ritual we find. We will see
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that, for example, giraffes have these elaborate mating dances where they wrap their necks together.
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We know that chimpanzees, they will visit trees that seem to be special to them and they will
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carry rocks that they pile in front of those trees. So they use them to drum on them. They perform
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what Jane Goodall called a waterfall dance. They have this, in the presence of a waterfall,
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sometimes they get into this seemingly trance mode. We know that elephants have mourning rituals.
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So sometimes they will travel long distances to visit the bones of their dead relatives,
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especially if it's some matriarch and so on and so forth. So ritual is everywhere in nature.
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Yeah. Another one I've learned about recently is magpies, the bird. They'll do like a funeral
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ritual. Like when there's a dead magpie, they'll all just line up in front of the bird and it looks
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A lot of animals seem to have these kinds of mourning rituals. We see it in magpies and it's
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been observed in species like geese and dolphins and whales and of course elephants and also in humans.
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Archaeologists very often pinpoint the beginnings of our own species. One of the hallmarks,
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the behavioral hallmarks for defining our species is the presence of these death rituals.
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What makes a human ritual different from animal rituals?
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So what makes us different is that we have taken this behavior that is very common in nature and we
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just run with it. So human rituals, first of all, they're full of symbolism. They go beyond merely
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engaging in these stereotypical behaviors. They have all kinds of layers that involve wearing similar
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clothes or wearing all kinds of markers from body paint to waving flags. And of course, also in their
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sheer quantity, ritual pervades all aspects of our lives. And also the fact that we have taken
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what feels intuitive at the individual level and turning into a social technology. So every human
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group has these very elaborate rituals that other animals lack.
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So yeah, you just mentioned earlier that anthropologists and archaeologists show that
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humans engaging in ritual was like a turning point, right? Where you start seeing this as
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a collective and it's spreading. You also talk about there's this theory that your research and
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other research is suggesting that about ritual that could potentially upend how we think about the
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development of civilization. Can you walk us through that idea?
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Yes, it's a very provocative hypothesis, which has gained ground recently. It seems that it is
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possible that everything we thought we knew about the origins of civilization may actually be wrong.
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And evidence in favor of that hypothesis comes from sites like Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. This is the
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oldest known ceremonial structure. In fact, the oldest known structure of any kind. It goes back 12,000
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years, which means that it's not just twice as old as stone heads and three times older than the pyramids,
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but it actually predates all of the things that we consider as the hallmarks of civilization. It predates the
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invention of writing. It predates farming and permanent settlement, the wheel, and so forth.
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And this site is just gigantic. It took so much effort to build. It consists of these circular
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structures, I would call them temples, that are surrounded by monolithic pillars, each one of
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them about 15 tons. And they have all been carved by a nearby quarry. Now, if you think about how a group of
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people who are living in the stone age were able to carve those stones and transport them those distances
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and use them to build those megalithic sites, this must have taken them years. And it must have taken
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hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals working together. And the most astonishing thing about that
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is that those individuals were hunter-gatherers. It looks, for all intents and purposes, that
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these individuals just came together just to build this temple and then only use it for these ceremonies.
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And they traveled sometimes thousands of miles to visit that temple. And further excavations in the
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area show that permanent settlement only begins several centuries later. So this raises the very
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provocative hypothesis that despite what we might have thought, it is not permanent settlement and
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farming and the creation of a food surplus that allowed us to create things like art and elaborate
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social organization or religious rituals. It might've been the other way around. It might've been the
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human thirst for ritual that led those individuals to congregate there, to work together, to build this
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temple, and then by necessity to establish a permanent settlement in order to support it. In the words of
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Klaus Schmidt, who is the archaeologist who discovered this site and excavated it, first came the temple,
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So that's interesting. So why does ritual exist? Because from an evolutionary perspective, it seems
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pretty wasteful, right? I mean, you're doing these activities. Okay, so take these Stone Age guys you're
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talking about. They're building these giant temples. They're traveling long distances to get to this
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temple. They're using lots of resources, spending a lot of time. And they may believe their rituals have an
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effect on the world, but that effect, it's not, it's not clear or immediate. You know, it's, they're
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doing these things based on a belief. So why do humans spend all this energy and time on ritual?
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So this is exactly the question that this book is asking. And I've spent about two decades trying to
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answer that question. And the more we look, the more we realize that ritual actually has tangible
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functions that can be studied scientifically and can even be measured. So at the collective level,
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for example, for over 100 years, anthropologists have argued that ritual serves to boost social
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bonding and create social cohesion. But beyond that, there wasn't much scientific research to
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support those claims. And in recent decades, we know from experimental work, both mine and by other
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people, that this seems to be true. For example, we have conducted field experiments in Spain and in
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Mauritius and in other places. And we find that when people take part in those rituals, their emotional
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reactions are aligned, and that is predictive of their social sentiments. So they feel closer to each
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other. So their experience changes, they have a more transformational experience, and then their
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behavior changes. For example, we use economic experiments, and we see that people become more
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generous towards each other after the performance of those rituals. We also see that their status
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increases. They begin to trust each other more. And we can see this even at the level of hormones.
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Well, how do you, so I'm curious, how do you measure that stuff? So when someone's engaging in a
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ritual, like, do you stop and take blood tests? Like, how are you able to see these physiological
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changes take place? So just a few decades ago, this, these types of studies would not be possible
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just because we didn't have the right equipment to do them. But now we have things like wearable
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sensors. So now we can go into a context, as you said, these are some of the, some of these people's
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most important moments in their lives. So you can't just interrupt the ritual to take your samples.
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What you have to do is use wearable devices that are going to record continuously throughout the
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ritual. And you have to use devices that are small enough so that they're unintrusive, that they're
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worn under the clothes and nobody can see them and so on and so forth. And today we have the ability
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to do that. For example, we have measured, we have used these types of devices to measure heart rate
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responses in the context of a fire walking ritual. And in that context, we see that people's heart
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rates begin to synchronize and they do that no matter what they're doing. So it's not just that they're
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dancing together and their heart rates are synchronized. Some of them are walking on fire,
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others are watching, but they have the same emotional reaction. And in further studies that
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we conducted in sports stadiums, we see that this heart rate synchrony is predictive of both how they
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experience those events and how they feel towards each other.
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Interesting. So rituals can bring people together. You also talk about, there's this chapter where you
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talk about how ritual plays a part in just human development and that even kids at a pretty early
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age, they're able to recognize when an activity is a ritual. What's the research say there?
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So it seems that some of the mental mechanisms involved that allow us to acquire and use ritual
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throughout their lives are already there in early childhood. For example, I have a two-year-old
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in my house and he already has very strict, very rigid routines. He'll wake up in the morning and he
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wants his specific little toy car. And then he will want to sit in the specific chair in a specific
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way. And even if he doesn't need the belt on that chair, he insists that he has to wear it because
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that's the right way to do it and so on and so forth.
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So already from the age of two, we see that children are obsessed with structure, with order,
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and they're also very good at imitating. And these are very useful things for a human being
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because we are a hyper-social animal. We're social learners. So it's very useful to us at an early
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age to start imitating others and to start doing the things the way we have been taught to do them.
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And these are some of the traits that really allow us to be very good at ritual.
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No, I've noticed that with my own kids. They get really hung up on traditions. So it's like,
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you know, once Christmas rolls around, it's like we have to do these things. And sometimes,
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you know, as parents are like, oh, geez, I don't want to do that. It's going to take a lot of work.
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I'm tired. Like, no, we have to do it. It's tradition. And I think it's interesting that as a kid,
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they get really focused on that. Okay. So early on, kids are able to see ritual. And then you just
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make, you make this case that cultures use ritual as a way to inculcate societal norms and what's
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important to the culture to children. Yes. We're going to take a quick break for your word from
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our sponsors. And now back to the show. So let's talk about, well, you've done research is like,
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okay, when is it that humans take part in ritualistic behavior? Because we don't do it
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all the time. So what does your research say? Like, when are we more likely to take part in
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ritualistic behavior? So if you look at ritualization, so our tendency to behave in
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ritualistic ways, in repetitive behavioral patterns, or to just fall back to our familiar
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cultural patterns, that tendency really increases when we're under some of the most stressful
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situations. So what are some of the most stressful contexts that we can find humans in? Those are
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situations like warfare, illness, when they're gambling in the context of sports. What those
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scenarios have in common is that all of them include a lot of uncertainty. And a lot of the time,
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the stakes can be very high there. And in fact, we know that the higher the stakes, the more ritual
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we observe. For example, athletes are very famous for their superstitions and their rituals.
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Now, you might expect that better athletes would rely less on ritual and more on their skill. In fact,
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studies show the opposite. They show that the better the athlete, the more rituals they have.
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And that, my interpretation of that is that it's because the stakes are higher in their,
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Yeah, I thought the research on sports and superstition was interesting because you highlight
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that they don't do it all the time. And in not all sports, and there's some sports that are more
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likely to encourage superstitious behavior. And it's basically sports where there's a lot of
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uncertainty and there's like a lot of luck. So in baseball is a perfect example that you have
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batters have this, have a lot of superstitious behavior because there is skill involved, but a lot
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of it is, is luck. And so there, there's a tendency where there's, since there's uncertainty,
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they're going to do these certain things in order to get a hit. Yes. And of course, some sports also
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might encourage or allow for more ritualistic behavior just because of their structure,
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just because of the fact that they, there are a lot of breaks. That's why it was, so we see
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basketball players, for example, they engage in a lot of rituals before shooting free throws.
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Tennis players, they have a lot of rituals because there are a lot of breaks in tennis and so on.
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So, I mean, so is ritual just a way to soothe our feelings of worry and anxiety?
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So that is the idea that has been proposed for over a hundred years by anthropologists.
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And until very recently, nobody had tested it. So me and my colleagues were among the first teams to
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test that theory. And we went about in, in several steps. So we started in the lab and in a laboratory
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experiment, we induced anxiety. We brought people in inside the lab and we stressed them up by telling
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them they had to prepare for a public speech, which really tends to stress people up. And we were
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monitoring their physiology. So we know they were stressed and we were also monitoring their behavior.
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So we had motion detectors and we see that the more stress they get, the more ritualized their behavior.
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So the more patterned and rigid and repetitive it becomes. So this was the first step.
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For the second step, we went out to the real world and we studied Hindu rituals in the island of
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Mauritius. And we saw that when people go into the temple to perform those rituals, their heart rate
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variability increases, which shows that they're better able to cope with stress. And we followed up with
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other studies. We found that people who take part in more collective rituals, they have lower cortisol
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levels. And we found that they are electrodermal activity. Another indicator of stress is reduced
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after performing ritualized behaviors and so on and so forth. So from all this evidence and from other
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studies, we know that ritual can actually work as a coping strategy to soothe anxiety.
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So yeah, it sounds like what we do with rituals, we're creating order out of chaos.
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Exactly. So our brain is a predictive machine. It makes active inferences about the state of the
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world all the time. We don't just passively absorb stimuli. We use our prior knowledge to expect what's
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going to happen. If I see a tiger out there, I don't wait to see if it's aggressive. I have some
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assumptions about it, which come from my prior knowledge. So because our brain does this all the
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time, when it has no ability to make predictions, which means when the situation is very uncertain,
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when we don't know what to make of it, what to expect, that's when we experience anxiety.
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And that's where ritual comes in. If ritual is anything, it is structure and order. When we
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participate in a ritual, we know exactly what's going to happen. And we know exactly when and how.
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And this gives us a sense of control over the world. And it doesn't really matter if that control is
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is real or illusory. All that matters is that it has actual, tangible, measurable effects on our
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ability to reduce stress. Yeah. It increases our sense of agency. I feel like we have more control
00:25:38.400
of the situation. And that makes sense, like why death would have rituals, not only in humans,
00:25:43.420
but in animals. It gives you, like, that's the most uncertain thing there is. And so it gives you a
00:25:47.800
sense of discomfort engaging those rituals around death. Absolutely. We might be tempted to think
00:25:54.980
that death rituals are for the dead. And of course, they're addressed to the dead, but their most
00:26:01.220
important function is for the living. It helps them cope with their anxiety. It helps them part
00:26:07.280
with their dead through a more gradual process. It allows them to say goodbye. And that's why in
00:26:12.060
some societies, we have mortuary rituals that involve keeping the dead around for sometimes even for
00:26:17.720
months to perform those rituals. What countries? That's an Asian country, right? Where they'll make like,
00:26:22.840
basically, they'll just treat them like they're still alive, like dress them up for a long time.
00:26:27.520
Yeah. So there's an Indonesian tribe called the Taraja. And in that context, when somebody dies,
00:26:34.080
they will keep their body in a room, in their house, on a bed for months. And as the body gets
00:26:42.080
dried up, they prepare for this elaborate ceremony that sometimes can require tons of material resources,
00:26:50.180
things like the sacrifice of buffalo. And during that time, they treat the dead as if they were
00:26:56.600
living. They bring them food, they bring them the latest gossip, they chat with them. And you can
00:27:02.120
really see that this is a process that allows the family members to gradually come to terms with the
00:27:07.380
new reality. And even after they lay them to rest, once a year, they will take them out of their tomb,
00:27:13.480
and they will parade those desiccated bodies around the village for everybody to see.
00:27:19.680
Okay. So ritual can make us feel calm and soothe our anxiety in a world of uncertainty.
00:27:25.180
And I think that's why we like to do rituals, even if it's like, not even like things you do on a
00:27:30.040
daily basis, but like you have holidays, you celebrate, you're like, at least there's Christmas,
00:27:33.520
or at least there's Thanksgiving I can look forward to in my life. That gives me some stability.
00:27:36.960
Going back to this idea of how ritual encourages group cohesion, your study showed that individuals
00:27:44.520
who take part in rituals, they sync up emotionally, their hormones, oxytocin is released, and there's
00:27:50.080
sort of a sense of togetherness. But you also talk about the type of ritual can influence whether a
00:27:57.540
group feels more or less cohesive. You talk about that there are two modes of ritual. What are those
00:28:02.700
modes and which promotes group cohesion more? Yeah. So this is an idea that comes from Oxford
00:28:08.120
anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse, who was my doctoral advisor. And he says there, if you look at the
00:28:16.380
rituals that are practiced around the world, you might get the impression at first that there's
00:28:23.880
infinite variability. But when you study them more systematically, you see that they fall into
00:28:28.380
patterns. So when you look at what types of rituals are out there, they almost invariably
00:28:34.020
fall into one of two types. One type is those rituals that are performed very frequently. For
00:28:40.000
example, Islamic prayer five times a day, Christian mass may take place every week, and so on and so
00:28:45.760
forth. Those rituals will tend to be low key, low arousal, even on the boring side, because they rely on
00:28:53.300
repetition to drill in the sense of identity and similarity with others. On the other hand of the
00:29:02.540
spectrum, you have these rituals that are very high in arousal. And those rituals, they don't tend to
00:29:08.300
take part very frequently. They will happen once a year, sometimes once a generation. Think of a wedding
00:29:15.360
or a presidential inauguration, those types of rituals. Now, those types of rituals, if they are to have the
00:29:21.880
same kind of impact, because they cannot rely on repetition, they have to rely on arousal. And arousal
00:29:29.040
creates a scar, if you will, in our brain. It creates those episodic memories that do not come
00:29:37.900
through doing the same thing again and again and again. They just come through doing this one big,
00:29:45.080
very impactful, and sometimes even traumatic thing. And if you think about the kinds of situations
00:29:51.020
in which we experience those kinds of traumatic events and the kinds of people that we tend to be
00:29:56.880
with, so who are you more likely to cry with? Who are you more likely to experience pain and suffering
00:30:03.220
and sorrow with? Typically, that's your closest relatives. So by engaging in those rituals with
00:30:09.920
other people, you get this sense of kinship. You get this strong sense of bonding that is stronger than
00:30:19.460
than the type of bonding that you can get through those low-key rituals. And one example of this
00:30:24.380
is going to war. So a lot of people have pointed out to the fact that when soldiers are willing to
00:30:31.360
sacrifice their life in the battlefield, they don't do it for any higher ideals, or they don't do it for
00:30:38.320
the flag. They don't do it for their country. They do it for their comrades. And the reason they do it for
00:30:44.180
their comrades is that those are the people they have experienced those highly intense, often traumatic
00:30:49.980
moments in the battlefield. Now, these high arousal rituals, rather than waiting for something like
00:30:55.940
war to happen, they proactively put participants through those painful experiences or stressful
00:31:03.240
experiences in order to create that sense, that strong sense of kinship and bonding.
00:31:08.300
Yeah. And that's why the military, they put recruits through this really arduous bootcamp
00:31:14.800
experience because it builds a sense of camaraderie and commitment to the group. And the more intense
00:31:21.420
the training, I'm thinking like buds for Navy SEALs, the more transformative the ritual is.
00:31:27.780
And as you were talking about those high arousal rituals, the type of thing that happens maybe
00:31:32.740
once a lifetime, it made me think of like rites of passage rituals from different cultures.
00:31:38.160
They're like that. Were there any that stood out to you that were high arousal and really left an
00:31:43.880
impact on the participants? Yeah, absolutely. Some of the rituals that I have studied can be
00:31:49.020
extremely painful. For example, in Mauritius, I study some of the rituals of the local Tamil community.
00:31:56.740
And those are rituals that are very widespread. They're performed in Southern India and Sri Lanka,
00:32:01.480
but wherever else you have members of the Indian diaspora, especially Tamils. And some of those
00:32:07.860
rituals involve piercing the body with hundreds of needles and skewers and even rods the size of
00:32:16.020
broomsticks that are pierced through the cheeks. And you can imagine that people have to hold them
00:32:21.360
with both hands and bite down at them because if they don't, just by the weight and the size of them,
00:32:25.940
they will rip their faces off. And as they do this, they will also carry these large miniature shrines
00:32:32.860
that can weigh up to a hundred pounds. And they're called kavadi, which literally means burden.
00:32:38.800
And they carry this burden throughout the entire day until they reach the temple of Murugan. And when
00:32:45.000
they do that, they also have to carry them up the hill. So it's an excruciatingly painful ritual.
00:32:50.240
We have studied this over many seasons. And we also see that this type of ritual can create very strong
00:32:57.580
bonding effects and it can play a fundamental role. It can leave an indelible mark on people's
00:33:04.320
individual and collective identity. Well, you also talk about these painful rituals. So the one you
00:33:09.740
just described and other ones, they serve as a strong signal to those in the community that you are
00:33:17.360
your potential ally. So how do these like painful rituals serve as a strong signal?
00:33:22.360
Yes. So ritual can have a communicative value. It can signal some things that are otherwise very
00:33:29.940
hard to observe. In a lot of human rituals, we see that what people are signaling is their
00:33:35.960
commitment to the community. Now, commitment is very tricky to discern. Of course, you can always say
00:33:43.100
that you're committed to a group, but that's a cheap signal, right? Anybody can say that they're
00:33:46.760
loyal to the group. But the only way to know is through observing other people's behavior. And
00:33:53.000
of course, when can you observe other people's behavior? When can you observe loyalty? Well,
00:33:57.960
when you go to the battlefield, for example, but that might be too late. So that's what these
00:34:03.260
rituals do. They preemptively put people into a situation where they have to signal their commitment.
00:34:08.400
So let's take, for example, a gang initiation ceremony. In those initiations, a lot of the time
00:34:14.920
people are asked to do something either extremely painful or psychologically horrible, something
00:34:20.580
like murdering somebody. Now, if you're willing to do this just to be one of us, then we can
00:34:26.740
be pretty certain that you really want to be one of us. That's the underlying logic of that
00:34:32.240
type of communicative signal. So if you're willing to put a skewer through your cheeks to take part
00:34:39.740
in that ceremony, then we can be pretty certain that you're a committed, loyal member of our group.
00:34:45.680
And it's a very effective device because it helps both those who send the signal and those who
00:34:51.500
receive the signal. So those who send the signal, their status increases in their community. And we
00:34:56.580
know this from a lot of studies that show that people who perform these acts of devotion, they're
00:35:02.140
seen as more moral, they're seen as more hardworking, more trustworthy, and so on and so forth.
00:35:07.740
And to those who receive the signal, that's also very valuable because they can discern the most
00:35:14.120
trustworthy individuals and the best cooperators, and then they can preferentially relate to them.
00:35:22.400
Okay. So it can build cohesion in multiple ways. I'm curious, when people are taking part in these
00:35:27.700
really painful, intense rituals, what's going on physiologically? Are they under stress or have
00:35:35.660
they somehow be able to separate mind from body where they can no longer feel the pain of the ritual?
00:35:42.040
So our measurements show that people are under extreme stress. We see that their levels of
00:35:46.700
electrodermal activity are higher than anything else they experience in their lives. We see that their
00:35:51.920
heart rates can sometimes reach 230, 240 beats per minute, levels that I never thought were possible,
00:35:57.880
actually, before I went into this. At the same time, we see that in some of those rituals,
00:36:03.360
people might experience a state of dissociation, so they don't necessarily remember their stress. So when
00:36:08.340
we ask them to describe their state of arousal during those rituals, in some cases, people have
00:36:13.700
told me that they felt as calm as they had ever been. And they thought that during the far walking
00:36:19.500
ritual, for example, their heart rates would be lower than any other part of the ceremony. Well, in fact,
00:36:24.300
it was the exact opposite. Invariably, we found that people had 200, 220 beats per minute
00:36:29.980
at that time. So it is both extremely stressful, but at times, because of that stress, perhaps,
00:36:37.020
it can lead to these states of dissociation where people do not at least remember their stress.
00:36:43.320
It's interesting. So the sociologist Emil Durkheim talked a lot about this idea of collective
00:36:47.880
effervescence that happened during rituals. What is collective effervescence and what role does that
00:36:53.960
So Durkheim described this as a jolt of electricity running through a group of people when they
00:36:59.760
congregate to enact one of those highly emotional ceremonies. The best way I would describe
00:37:05.520
it is if you've ever felt goosebumps at the back of your neck while you were in the middle
00:37:11.620
of a large concert or sports stadium or a large demonstration where you have a large number
00:37:21.040
of people congregating and joined for a common cause and engaging in all those ritualized behaviors
00:37:27.340
like chanting. For Durkheim, that's one of the ways by which these rituals, they transform
00:37:34.020
a group of individuals into a cohesive whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
00:37:41.940
And for over a hundred years, this was a very elusive term.
00:37:46.780
Nobody knew what to do with it. Nobody knew how to measure the alignment of emotional states.
00:37:51.600
Nobody knew how to measure this togetherness that people are set to feel in the context
00:37:57.440
of those rituals. So my team and I were the first ones to try to quantify collective effervescence.
00:38:03.640
So we looked at people's physiology during those rituals and we see that when they take part
00:38:07.380
in highly arousing rituals, their heart rates begin to synchronize. And that physiological
00:38:14.060
synchrony in turn is predictive of social bonding. So Durkheim was right.
00:38:21.360
Yeah, I can. So yeah, I experienced that collective effervescence whenever I go to a University of
00:38:26.600
Oklahoma football game. And it's really interesting because like over, I've gotten kind of cynical
00:38:31.000
about collegiate sports. I just think it's, I go and I see these big giant stadiums like, man,
00:38:35.480
we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on sports. What's going on here? But then when I go
00:38:40.920
to a game, because my kid loves football, so we'll go to a game and they start doing the chants and
00:38:46.800
like the bands coming out and the drum majors got his head tilted back and I start getting the chills
00:38:53.040
down my neck. I'm like, this is great. I mean, even like the most cynical person can experience that
00:38:58.060
collective effervescence. Absolutely. And you know, American universities might be unique in the world
00:39:03.820
in terms of how much attention they pay to sports. And a lot of people think that might be just a
00:39:10.760
waste of resources. But at the same time, they might also be unique at the level of loyalty
00:39:15.960
they induce in their alumni. And that can be seen by the levels of donations that they receive.
00:39:24.040
So we've talked about how ritual can help us soothe their anxiety. It can give us order in our life
00:39:30.000
when everything seems crazy. It can bring us together with people. It can signal to others
00:39:35.000
that we are committed to the group. You've also looked at how ritual can influence just our overall
00:39:40.220
well-being, like our well-being in general. What does the research say there?
00:39:45.180
So there are a lot of correlational studies that mostly focus on religion. And they often find
00:39:51.380
a positive relationship between religiosity and well-being. But if you probe a little bit deeper,
00:39:59.600
you begin to see that it's not really about belief. This is more about ritual. So it's people who go to
00:40:05.980
a lot of ceremonies, who take part in those collective ceremonies. Those are the ones that reap the benefits
00:40:11.160
of those religious systems. And I believe this happens at at least two levels.
00:40:18.740
So at the psychological level, taking part in those ceremonies, as we discussed, gives you a sense
00:40:24.840
of order and control and helps you reduce anxiety. At the social level, it helps create bonds and helps
00:40:32.980
elicit, create and elicit networks of social support. And we know from other studies that social support networks
00:40:39.860
are probably the best buffer against anxiety. So rituals are these very efficient social technologies
00:40:47.080
that manage to harness different types of mechanisms in our psychology in order to produce
00:40:57.100
So I'm curious, you've been studying ritual for over two decades. How has your research
00:41:02.100
changed how you approach ritual? I mean, do you try to incorporate ritual in your own life?
00:41:09.220
It might be a ritual since completely. It was a 180 because I grew up in Greece where the types of rituals
00:41:16.920
that I would take part in, at least the collective ones, were all forced upon me. So at school,
00:41:23.000
we had morning prayer and we had compulsory church attendance once a month and we had to take part in
00:41:28.920
parades. And if we didn't, we would get penalized. So I despised those kinds of rituals. I couldn't
00:41:36.040
understand why they made us do them. And now through after two decades of studying rituals, I've come to see that
00:41:42.620
those types of behaviors have very tangible effects. And I've also come to see that in my own life, I do have
00:41:50.740
a lot of rituals and I too consider them very important. So for example, if you see me prepare my morning
00:41:57.780
coffee and the level of detail that goes into that and the fact that I have to have it in a specific cup and in a
00:42:03.640
specific way, and if I don't do that, I feel that my day is not starting very well. Or the types of
00:42:09.920
collective rituals, for example, whenever I go back to my home country, whenever there's a game, I have to
00:42:15.680
visit that football stadium and I have to engage in those collective rituals, the group chanting, and I
00:42:20.820
still get those goosebumps at the back of my neck. And one important thing to note here is that I've been in
00:42:28.160
bigger stadiums. I've seen presumably bigger teams, although my team, of course, is the best,
00:42:34.580
but I don't get goosebumps there. So going back to Durkheim's view, he said that those types of
00:42:41.760
rituals, they don't just create social emotions out of thin air. They bring those who share them
00:42:47.700
into a closer communion. And that's exactly what I see in myself.
00:42:52.780
Well, Dimitris, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and
00:42:56.380
your work? You can go to my website, which is my last name. This is a perk of having a very rare
00:43:02.840
last name. So it's zigalatis.com and the links will lead you from there.
00:43:08.420
All right. Well, Dimitris Zigalatis, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:43:13.520
My guest is Dimitris Zigalatis. He's the author of the book, Ritual, How Seemingly Senseless Acts
00:43:17.860
Make Life Worth Living. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more
00:43:21.980
information about his work at his website, zigalatis.com. And that's spelled X-Y-G-A-L-A-T-A-S.com.
00:43:29.780
Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash rituals, where you can find links to resources,
00:43:42.220
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at
00:43:46.160
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00:43:49.820
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