1. Introduction In a scene in " The Importance of Being Earnest " Oscar Wilde pinpoints an array of properties of religious ritual systems that cognitive theorizing about religious rituals, viz., the theory of religious ritual competence, has subsequently systematized (Lawson and McCauley 1990; McCauley and Lawson 2002). To the amusement of hundreds of audiences, Wilde's play also identifies a ...

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...

Costly signaling of commitment to a group has been proposed as an explanation for participation in religion and ritual. But if the signal’s cost is too small, freeriders will send the signal and behave selfishly later. Effective signaling may then be prohibitively costly. If the average level of signaling in a group is observable, but individual effort is not, then freeriders can behave selfish...

Although the discussions in the Netherlands on ritual circumcision of girls, ritual circumcision of boys and hymen construction started more than ten years ago, these discussions about rituals of blood are not connected and offer a range of very diverging views. The significance of this article is to make clear that these diverging views and separated discussions fail to make distinctions. As a...