In today's healthcare environment, characterized by downsizing, restructuring, mergers, and acquisitions, organizational cultures and employees are experiencing rapid--and often tense--changes. Ritual can facilitate change by acknowledging it and allowing the grieving process to take its course. The success of an organizational culture change can depend on whether the organization and its membe...

BACKGROUND Conservation of biodiversity is primary important of today's critically vulnerable environment. Efficient conservation can be possible only with the long-term participation and understanding of the communities. Ritual beliefs of the indigenous people are one of the important tools to understand the local communities and aid the nature conservation. In this paper, we documented contem...

How do people feel during extreme collective rituals? Despite longstanding speculation, few studies have attempted to quantify ritual experiences. Using a novel pre/post design, we quantified physiological fluctuations (heart rates) and self-reported affective states from a collective fire-walking ritual in a Mauritian Hindu community. Specifically, we compared changes in levels of happiness, f...

The concept of “ritual syntax” is developed by relating it to cognitive studies of ritual, providing a fuller theoretical basis. Developing theoretical grounding requires differentiating between the members of five pairs of concepts: production is not the same as analysis, syntax is not the same as semantics, ritual is not the same as the mental, cognition is not the same as the mental, and syn...

The Kambô ritual consists of various types of skin scarification and subsequent application of Phyllomedusa bicolor secretion to the fresh wounds. In Europe, the ritual of Kambô is becoming more popular, but its use can lead to serious multiple organ damage, sometimes life-threatening. Our manuscript shows a patient with toxic liver damage probably associated with the Kambô ritual.

This article works with theory of ritual in order to begin addressing a series of questions raised by Brazilian spirit possession rituals (in Kardecism and Umbanda). Four contributions to theory of ritual highlight relevant conceptual issues: Humphrey and Laidlaw on non-intentionality; Bloch on deference; Houseman and Severi on social relations; and Kapferer on virtuality. Strawson’s philosophi...

The social construction of identity and memory can be expressed through public ritual. The organization of mortuary practices, the repetitive use of imagery and figurines, and the long-term reuse of human skulls in the near Eastern Neolithic illustrate how household ritual linked the living to the dead. Secondary mortuary practices and the plastering and painting of human skulls as ritual heirl...

Anthropologists have long noted that one of the primary functions of religion is to promote group solidarity, and most have recognized ritual as the mechanism through which this solidarity is achieved. Guided by Durkheim (1995 [1912]), who was among the first to appreciate the unifying nature of religious ritual, functionalists have explored how ritual sustains the social order within a communi...

Objective. There is mounting evidence that more elaborate treatment rituals trigger larger nonspecific effects. The reasons for this remain unclear. In a pilot field study, we investigated the role of psychophysiological changes during a touch-based healing ritual for improvements in subjective well-being. Methods. Heart rate, respiratory rate, and skin conductance levels (SCL) were continuousl...

Collective rituals are biologically ancient and culturally pervasive, yet few studies have quantified their effects on participants. We assessed two plausible models from qualitative anthropology: ritual empathy predicts affective convergence among all ritual participants irrespective of ritual role; rite-of-passage predicts emotional differences, specifically that ritual initiates will express...