OBJECTIVE To provide an overview of the current global status of female genital mutilation (FGM) or female circumcision practised in various countries. DATA SOURCE Major published series of peer reviewed journals writing about female genital mutilation (FGM) over the last two decades were reviewed using the index medicus and medline search. A few earlier publications related to the FGM ritual...

Extreme rituals (body-piercing, fire-walking, etc.) are anecdotally associated with altered states of consciousness-subjective alterations of ordinary mental functioning (Ward, 1984)-but empirical evidence of altered states using both direct and indirect measures during extreme rituals in naturalistic settings is limited. Participants in the "Dance of Souls", a 3.5-hour event during which parti...

INTRODUCTION Waterpipe tobacco smoking (WTS) is an increasingly prevalent form of tobacco use in the United States. Its appeal may stem from its social, ritualistic, and aesthetic nature. Our aim in this study was to understand WTS as a social ritual with the goal of informing prevention efforts. METHODS We conducted a covert observational study consisting of 38 observation sessions in 11 WTS...

Sacred or protected values have important influences on decision making, particularly in the context of intergroup disputes. Thus far, we know little about the process of a value becoming sacred or why one person may be more likely than another to hold a sacred value. We present evidence that participation in religious ritual and perceived threat to the group lead people to be more likely to co...

Palms (Arecaceae) are prominent elements in African traditional medicines. It is, however, a challenge to find detailed information on the ritual use of palms, which are an inextricable part of African medicinal and spiritual systems. This work reviews ritual uses of palms within African ethnomedicine. We studied over 200 publications on uses of African palms and found information about ritual ...

Researchers have recently proposed that "moralistic" religions-those with moral doctrines, moralistic supernatural punishment, and lower emphasis on ritual-emerged as an effect of greater wealth and material security. One interpretation appeals to life history theory, predicting that individuals with "slow life history" strategies will be more attracted to moralistic traditions as a means to ju...

The nurse-to-nurse handover is not taught formally during training, yet it is one of the most important rituals of the nursing shift. This article focuses on the structure and function of change-of-shift reports and lists the events that occur within them, describing the locations of the handover process and the mode of communication involved. The problems that can occur during handover are dis...

Over the years, research in ethno-linguistics contributed to gather corpora in a wide range of languages, cultures and topics. In the present work, we are investigating ritual speech in Yucatec Maya. The ritual discourse tends to have a cyclic structure with repetitive patterns and various types of parallelisms between speech sections. Previous studies have revealed an intricate connexion betwe...

Turner's suggestive analysis of African ritual symbolism (1) enhances one's appreciation of the complexity of expressive phenomena. There are, however, methodological and theoretical cautions to be raised. First, the approach he advocates attacks the problem of representations at the most difficult point of analysis. Symbols of the kind singled out by this method are repositories of many, highl...