Ritual : How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living
Highlights
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In the midst of a high-speed chase that requires all the lung power the little bird can muster, such a waste of energy would seem to be disadvantageous. Nonetheless, falcons tend to give up on larks that sing during the chase.
Looking at this evidence, Zahavi proposed that such displays, which might otherwise seem irrational, function as signals that convey important information to the predator about the individual’s qualities that might otherwise be hard to observe. 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.
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If you challenge someone to a fist fight by declaring that you agree to have one hand tied behind your back, you are sending a strong signal of confidence in your superior physical strength. This is a costly signal, because a bluff that is called may result in serious injury. Therefore, weaker individuals who falsely advertise their fighting skills have more to lose than stronger ones, who might indeed be up to the task. For this reason your opponent will probably think twice before accepting the challenge. After all, if you are willing to enter the fight with such a severe handicap, you must be really fit – or perhaps really crazy, which might be an equally effective deterren
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Humans, too, can and do benefit from the use of costly signals, and nowhere is this more evident than in the domain of ritual. The performance of public ceremonies often involves substantial costs. The most common costs paid by ritual practitioners come in the form of time and energy investments.
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In 1885 the Canadian government enacted a ban on potlatch ceremonies because they saw them as wasteful behaviour that went against Christian views on the virtue of frugality, and out of fear that the redistribution and destruction of wealth would undermine capitalist values. For precisely the same reasons, the potlatch was hailed by twentieth-century Marxist groups as an example of a non-market economy.
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A potlatch is an opulent feast held by wealthy and powerful members of a community on important occasions. This can be the birth or naming of a child, a wedding or funeral, or the passing of chiefly privileges to one’s eldest son. During these feasts the hosts present those in attendance with expensive gifts – the word potlatch itself means ‘to give’ in the Chinook language.
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In the 1950s Potlatch became the name of a leading French avant-garde publication. This publication could not be bought: it could only be gifted from one person to the next.
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Ironically, however, the potlatch exemplifies one of the hallmarks of the modern capitalist consumerist society: the ability of the upper classes to use their wealth in order to manifest and reaffirm their power and social status through the public squandering of resources. This can involve purchasing luxury items such as designer cars or expensive paintings, paying for extravagant services such as flying in private jets or making donations in exchange for naming rights.
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In engaging in spending behaviours that seem to be without any utility, conspicuous consumers are effectively using their financial capital to buy social capital.
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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. Similarly, the only way to judge the relative wealth of a chief is through observing his ability to spend it in public. Only a very wealthy chief can afford to destroy valuable coppers, so destroying coppers functions as a reliable signal of his underlying financial power.
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included artefacts from ancient Mediterranean cultures, I came across a group of archaeology students visiting from the USA. They were gathered around their professor, a tall, energetic, middle-aged woman who was commenting on the exhibits. Her enthusiasm seemed contagious, and the students appeared attentive and interested in everything she had to say. I decided to follow them and take advantage of the free guided tour.
The professor was using what is known as the Socratic method: rather than merely lecturing the students, she would ask them questions to probe the knowledge they already possessed and help them make new inferences.
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it is one of the most special of all human activities, deeply imbued with meaning and importance.
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
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Despite this puzzling discrepancy between actions and goals, rituals of all sorts have persisted for millennia
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highly choreographed, formalised and precisely executed behaviours that mark threshold moments in people’s lives. These behaviours, which we call rituals
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Rituals, on the other hand, are causally opaque. They command focus and attention because they involve symbolic actions that must be remembered, for they must be executed precisely
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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.
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‘ritual actions do not produce a practical result on the external world – that is one of the reasons why we call them ritual’. In fact, among many religious communities, rituals that are practised with an explicit goal in mind are often regarded as sorcery. ‘But to make this statement is not to say that ritual has no function […] it gives members of the society confidence, it dispels their anxieties, it disciplines their social organizations.’3
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The doctor said that if I do the fire-walking ritual, something terrible might happen to my heart. But does he know what will happen to my heart if I don’t do the ritual?’
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ritual is rooted deep in our evolutionary history. In fact, it is as ancient as our species itself
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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.
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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
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Most primates are social species, and as such they have social rituals. Some of those species live in what anthropologists call ‘fission-fusion’ societies, where individuals have a flexible affiliation with their group, breaking into smaller parties to forage and later merging together again. This is similar to what humans do.
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it seems that some of the most intelligent animals are also the ones that have the richest repertoire of rituals
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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.
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archaeologists often consider ritual to be one of the core defining features of behaviourally modern humans, because it is related to the capacity for symbolic thought
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We humans appear to be unique in our ability to communicate complex abstract ideas and concepts, not only about the here and now but also about other times and places – even imaginary ones. We do this not just through art, narrative and myth but also through ritual.
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Through the symbolic re-enactment of collective narratives, ritual functioned as an embodied proto-language that provided an ‘external support system’ to individual cognition – a crucial step on the road towards language itself.13
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ritual was a mental foundation stone for the evolution of social cognition, allowing early hominids to align their minds with social conventions. By establishing a shared system of collective experiences and symbolic meanings, ritual helped to coordinate thought and memory, allowing a group of humans to function as a single organism.
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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.
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anthropologist Roy Rappaport declared ritual to be ‘humanity’s basic social act’.17 It is how society itself comes into being
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The domestication of plants, the story went, allowed humans to settle into a more sedentary life. This facilitated rapid population growth and the development of large collaborative communities that were able to produce a surplus of food and tools and to engage in new, specialised forms of labour. This in turn provided the necessary time, resources and organisation to support complex social structures, develop advanced technologies, formulate religious ideas and build monumental temples. Because of these epochal transformations, the period is often called the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ or the ‘Agricultural Revolution’. The discovery of Göbekli Tepe poses a serious challenge to this narrative.
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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 Hunter-gatherers exploited a wide range of environments, which ensured a relatively balanced diet and a healthy and active lifestyle. As their constant travelling precluded the hoarding of resources, those societies were strikingly egalitarian. They worked fewer hours to meet their dietary needs and enjoyed more free time
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In contrast, farming brought reliance on a much more limited diet largely restricted to a few staple crops and, in those populations which developed lactose tolerance or discovered cooking methods such as fermentation, dairy. This made the first settlers vulnerable to natural disasters and caused serious nutritional deficiencies. Farmers had to work much more to meet their basic needs, partly because agrarian life was hard and partly because the production of a food surplus required extra resources to defend that surplus from raids. The accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few elites and the formation of armies brought inequality and created the conditions for the exploitation of the masses. As people lived in close proximity to others as well as to their livestock, they became susceptible to diseases, and epidemics often wiped out entire populations. They were now having over twice as many children, but only a few of them made it to adulthood.19
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Indeed, 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. Agriculturalists experienced diseases, severe vitamin deficiencies and various deformities and pathologies.20 Fossil evidence reveals that their bones decreased in density and strength and that they regularly suffered from osteoporosis, osteoarthritis and degenerative conditions. The crowns of their teeth had more pits and grooves as their enamel became thinner, which indicates nutritional deficiencies. The increased consumption of starchy plants resulted in dental caries and tooth loss. Skeletal inflammations betray the prevalence of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, syphilis and leprosy. Their skulls became porous as a result of iron deficiency and anaemia. Excavations of Neolithic settlements show that their soil and water were heavily contaminated with animal faeces and their dwellings infested with parasites.21 And so the Neolithic Revolution was not accompanied by any immediate population increase, or the flourishing of big cities and advanced civilisations. For thousands of years the life of the early farmers looks to all appearances as though it was simply worse than that of hunter-gatherers.
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The discovery of sites such as Göbekli Tepe offers one intriguing explanation: the driving force behind this transition was a social rather than an economic one. People were coming together from various places in order to perform large collective rituals that were held in massive temples. But the building of those temples would have necessitated cooperation on a scale that was entirely unprecedented at that point in human history
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Extracting, carrying, sculpting and placing those monoliths without any sophisticated technology would have required large groups of individuals working together for years, laying the foundation for the development of complex societies. Once completed, the temple would have provided an incentive to start farming in order to provide for a permanent priesthood and the large numbers of visiting pilgrims. Sure enough, genetic evidence shows that within 500 years of the construction of Göbekli Tepe, the world’s oldest domesticated strains of wheat are found not too far from that location.
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In Schmidt’s words, ‘First came the temple, then the city.’
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Humans are obsessed with ceremony. In some cases this fixation can even become pathological. Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a condition characterised by intrusive thoughts and fears and the urge to perform highly ritualised actions in order to alleviate those worries. These actions have some of the core attributes of cultural rituals: they are characterised by rigidity, repetition and redundancy, and they have no obvious purpose. Nonetheless, those who suffer from OCD feel the compulsion to perform them and become intensely anxious if they are unable to do so.
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evolutionary glitches are not uncommon, especially when environmental conditions change too fast for natural selection to catch up. Our craving for junk food is a good case in point. Before processed foods became available, sugar, salt and fat were sought-after scarcities that were essential to our ancestors’ survival. In that environment, if you found a honeycomb, you’d better gobble all of it up in one sitting, because there was no telling when you would get another opportunity. Today, sugar, salt and fat are for most of us very easy to find, often in the same dish, but our brains are still inclined to obey the same age-old urge to overindulge.
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From around the age of two, children typically develop a variety of rules and routines that they follow compulsively. They may insist, for instance, on fixed household schedules, often requiring specific mealtime and bedtime rituals such as listening to the same story every night, kissing their favourite toy or saying goodnight to the moon. They become attached to specific toys and other objects that are treated as special – and seem to have their ‘favourite’ version of everything. They develop rigid food preferences and like to eat their meals in particular ways. They are obsessed with repetition, acting out the same things over and over again. They like arranging and reordering objects in specific patterns. And they require strict adherence to rules, never satisfied until an action has been performed in just the right way.26
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Remarkably, children also appear to believe that rituals have a causal influence on the external world: studies of pre-school children in Israel and the USA, for example, found that they often believe that having birthday parties actually causes people to grow a year older
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To become functioning members of society, children must quickly learn to adhere to the norms and conventions of their social groups.28 For this reason, they eagerly adopt normative rules and prescriptions and are quick to protest when social norms are violated.29 They imitate the behaviours of other people, especially members of their own social groups. In fact, they are so good at copying behaviours faithfully that they are willing to do it even when those behaviours are not relevant to the task at hand.
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A group of psychologists at the University of St Andrews compared imitative behaviour in children and young chimpanzees.30 They built a puzzle box that released a gummy bear when solved – a reward that both children and chimps coveted. The researchers demonstrated the solution, which involved four steps: 1) opening a bolt to reveal a hole at the top of the box; 2) inserting a stick into the hole and tapping it three times; 3) sliding a door at the front of the box to reveal a second hole; and 4) using a metallic rod to pull the treat out of the hole. Then they offered the box to the participants.
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
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So it appears that apes do not mindlessly ape, but that human children do. In fact, a follow-up study found that children’s tendency to over-imitate actually increased with age.32 The researchers expected that, as they became more cognitively developed and better able to understand causality, children would be more selective about which actions they copied. The results showed just the opposite: while all children imitated the actions with a high degree of fidelity, three-year-olds often omitted some of the irrelevant tasks rather than carrying them out. Five-year-olds, on the other hand, copied the demonstration to the letter, including the non-causal actions.
There is, however, a wrinkle here that deserves note. It seems that increased maturity may have allowed the five-year-olds to appreciate that those steps were intentional and needed to be carried out with precision. Indeed, research shows that children copy intentional actions even if they don’t make much sense, but they do not copy mistakes. When researchers indicated that some of the actions where unintended by saying ‘Whoops!’ as they executed them, children in those experiments omitted those actions from the sequence.33
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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
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even when we don’t fully understand their meaning. We may often not know why people do things the way they do, but the fact that they do feels like sufficient justification. After all, when it comes to learning a craft, no amount of theory can take the place of experiential learning through apprenticeship. For the same reasons, neither do we bother to question each step of the process. When we follow a recipe or traditional remedy, we copy the entire sequence. We don’t know why it is important to use arborio rather than basmati rice or to cook the pasta in a pot that is only half-filled with water, but we trust that there is a reason, and we do as instructed.
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Even as adults, most of what we need to know is based on understanding social convention rather than any deep grasp of causation. Imitation therefore continues to play important social roles for us throughout our lives. We are, nonetheless, rather picky about who we imitate.
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Children and adults alike are more prone to copying their fellow group members and those who look like themselves. For example, they prefer to learn from those who share their own language, accent or ethnicity. Studies show, for example, that when minority college students are taught by instructors who have similar backgrounds to their own, they get better grades and are more likely to graduate.35
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researchers recruited five- and six-year-old children to examine how they would behave when they felt socially excluded.36 The children were told that there were two groups of people in the experiment, the yellow group and the green group, and that they would be part of the yellow group. They were given yellow hats, shirts and wristbands to wear as their insignia. Then they played a virtual game that involved tossing around a ball with other players, who were members of either the yellow or the green group. Studies show that players who do not receive the ball in this game feel excluded and ostracised. But the children acted out more frustration and reported more anxiety when they were being excluded from their own group.
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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.37 This suggests that young children may use behavioural imitation as a means of strengthening important social bonds.
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features of every human society. The anthropologist Donald Brown compiled a list of human universals. ‘What do all people, all societies, all cultures, and all languages have in common?’ he asked. He provided the answer in the form of a description of what he called the Universal People. ‘Theirs is a description of every people, or of people in general.’ The list includes language, cooking, kinship, music, dancing, art and many other aspects of human expression for which there are no known exceptions. It also includes numerous ceremonial acts: marriage rites, childbirth customs, burials, oaths and more: ‘The Universal People have rituals, and these include rites of passage that demarcate the transfer of an individual from one status to another.’
Ritual scholars use the term ‘rites of passage’ to describe ceremonies that mark major life stages and changes.
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cutting or shaving one’s hair is a common part of many rites of passage (think of initiation into the army or a religious community), which symbolises leaving part of oneself behind in order to become a new person.
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Rites of passage do not merely celebrate the transition to a new state – they create this new state in the eyes of society.
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As ultra-social animals, we have a number of adaptations for social living. These include particularly strong forms of attachment and bonding, which start with the core family but also extend to more distant relatives, sexual partners and social companions and friends. When young children are separated from their parents, they often experience an acute stress reaction known as separation anxiety, as do parents who lose track of their offspring. This is because our brains trigger the release of stress hormones that serve an obvious adaptive function: they motivate parents and offspring to stay close to each other. Lovers may experience similar stress after a break-up, and so can good friends that have had a falling out. This stress incentivises them to seek reconciliation in order to keep their social networks from disintegrating.40 But when death occurs, the anxiety of separation cannot serve its intended purpose, as reunion is no longer possible, which only exacerbates the pain. This view seems to be supported by the fact that all those non-human animals that appear to mourn their dead, such as elephants and chimps, are also highly social creatures.
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grief itself may not be adaptive. The reason it persists is that separation occurs much more frequently than death, and so the cumulative benefits of this anxiety are greater than the cost of grief. To cope with such debilitating emotions as the experience of loss and the fear of mortality, all human cultures have developed death rituals.