Placebo studies and ritual theory: a comparative analysis of Navajo, acupuncture and biomedical healing

Using a comparative analysis of Navajo healing ceremonials, acupuncture and biomedical treatment, this essay examines placebo studies and ritual theory as mutually interpenetrating disciplines. Healing rituals create a receptive person susceptible to the influences of authoritative culturally sanctioned 'powers'. The healer provides the sufferer with imaginative, emotional, sensory, moral and aesthetic input derived from the palpable symbols and procedures of the ritual process-in the process fusing the sufferer's idiosyncratic narrative unto a universal cultural mythos. Healing rituals involve a drama of evocation, enactment, embodiment and evaluation in a charged atmosphere of hope and uncertainty. Experimental research into placebo effects demonstrates that routine biomedical pharmacological and procedural interventions contain significant ritual dimensions. This research also suggests that ritual healing not only represents changes in affect, self-awareness and self-appraisal of behavioural capacities, but involves modulations of symptoms through neurobiological mechanisms. Recent scientific investigations into placebo acupuncture suggest several ways that observations from ritual studies can be verified experimentally. Placebo effects are often described as 'non-specific'; the analysis presented here suggests that placebo effects are the 'specific' effects of healing rituals.     

The Materiality of Relational Transformations: Propositions for Renewed Analyses of Life-Cycle Rituals in Melanesia and Australia

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces this special issue and analyses Papua New Guinea and Australian initiation and death rituals as moments of relational transformations. Although the general argument is not completely new, it has often remained an undemonstrated statement. The paper hence focuses on the specific ways people make these changes effective and express them in their rituals. It is suggested that an invariant modus operandi is in play in which, for a relation to be transformed, its previous state must first be ritually enacted. Towards the end of the ritual, the new state of the relationship is itself publicly enacted through a manifestation of the form the relation takes after the ritual. The paper suggests that a relationship cannot be transformed in the absence of the persons concerned. The relational components need to be either directly present, such as in initiations, or mediated through objects, such as in death rituals.     

Aesthetics, Intuition, and Reference in Fijian Ritual Communication: Modularity in and out of Language

The ethnographic interpretation of "meaningless" ritual—ritual in which participants are not able to give verbal accounts of the symbolic meanings involved—poses basic questions about the relationships among language, culture, and meaning. Along with verbal meaning expressible in language, rituals are often observed to have important practical meaning outside of language. Aside from basic how-to, facilitating dimensions, practical meaning systems can also constitute metaphor and accomplish reference in ways that are parallel to, yet distinct from, verbal and gestural language functions. Techniques of language analysis are useful in interpreting practical meaning in ritual if language meaning is viewed from the perspective of Wittgensteinian use-based semantics and language is seen in context of a more general multidomain meaning system module that supports the communicative aspects of culture. [Keywords: ritual, aesthetics, communication, ethnography, Fiji]     

How Do Rituals Affect Cooperation?

Collective rituals have long puzzled anthropologists, yet little is known about how rituals affect participants. Our study investigated the effects of nine naturally occurring rituals on prosociality. We operationalized prosociality as (1) attitudes about fellow ritual participants and (2) decisions in a public goods game. The nine rituals varied in levels of synchrony and levels of sacred attribution. We found that rituals with synchronous body movements were more likely to enhance prosocial attitudes. We also found that rituals judged to be sacred were associated with the largest contributions in the public goods game. Path analysis favored a model in which sacred values mediate the effects of synchronous movements on prosocial behaviors. Our analysis offers the first quantitative evidence for the long-standing anthropological conjecture that rituals orchestrate body motions and sacred values to support prosociality. Our analysis, moreover, adds precision to this old conjecture with evidence of a specific mechanism: ritual synchrony increases perceptions of oneness with others, which increases sacred values to intensify prosocial behaviors.     

Painful Memories: Ritual and the Transformation of Community Trauma

This paper explores the question of how ritual can heal community pain or trauma. Drawing together recent insights into the ideological nature of healing with a focus on ritual process, I argue that in cases of social violence and healing, ritual's ability to assuage pain is linked to the ways in which it draws pain into the process of reconstructing memory. The argument is illustrated through an examination of how the Betsimisaraka of east Madagascar used rituals of cattle sacrifice to transform the pain they experienced during an anticolonial rebellion that took place in 1947.     

Dialectics of the Bowerbird: An Interpretative Account of Ritual and Symbolism in the Udabe valley,Papua New Guinea

The association of men and women with birds, as expressed in dance, is a common theme in Melanesian ritual. Often, this is seen as a means by which humans attain some relation with a transcendental reality. But this is only part of the picture. Pigs, in contrast to birds, represent an opposite sort of reality. It is argued here — by an interpretation of the gab — that through such rituals, men and women symbolically situate themselves between the two. The rituals are performed to overcome the precarious nature of human sexuality, appearance and aging associated with the life-cycle process, which contrast with that of both birds and pigs.     

Name Rituals And Acts Of Feeling Among The KayapÓ (Mebengokre)

This article analyses great name rituals among the Gê-speaking Kayapó (Mebengokre) of central Brazil. Ritual organization compels a temporal and spatial co-ordination of exchanges between diverse categories of relations so that nuclear family ties are differentiated. As the fundamental site of this process of differentiation, the House undergoes various transformations in its organization during the ceremonial period and its centrality in Kayapó social thought derives from this, rather than from the attribution of an enduring corporate identity. Analysis of Kayapó ritual allows us to extend Rappaport's ideas about the relation between the invariant and variant messages in ritual, since the production of sentiment is a central task of ritual activity and such sentiments are necessary for the reproduction of formal order in ritual.     

The Maleny ‘Fire Event’: Rehearsals Toward Neo-liminality

Although the anthropological literature on ritual is extensive, little theoretical attention has been paid to recent attempts to (re)create rituals among mainstream groups in post-industrial, secularised societies. The authors address this issue by examiuning the annual Fire Event, which is constructed as a ritual climax to the Maleny Folk Festival in southern Queensland, Australia. Using the work of Victor Turner and John MacAloon as a point of departure, we argue that at best such celebrations constitute a neo-liminal framework within which participants can achieve a consensus of belief and action. By showing that some Fire Events have been more successful ‘rituals’ than others, we also highlight the factors which tend to impede participation and ‘con-subjectivity’ in such settings. In the process we identify some of the cultural divisions at Maleny, such as those between artists and ‘folk’, feral hippies and ‘hoons’, Aboriginals and Anglos, and begin to reflect on how these may relate to more general patterns of interaction in Australian society at large.     

A relational approach to a Papua New Guinea male ritual cycle

The article analyses the male ritual cycle of the Ankave‐Anga in Papua New Guinea. In the 1980s, male initiations in this region were interpreted as institutions for the reproduction of male domination. And yet, looking at the ritual gestures performed at the same time by the men in the forest and by the women in the village, it becomes possible to offer another interpretation, one that, following Marilyn Strathern, underscores a relational dimension. But, whereas Strathern saw these rituals as times when boys went from a ‘cross‐sex’ state to a ‘single‐sex’ state capable of reproduction, following a process of extraction, the article argues that the Ankave ritual cycle can be read as an ordered series of transformations of the relations between the boys and their mothers and sisters, in the presence of these female relatives. At the heart of these initiations lies the boys' accession to the capacity to act for others. Such an analysis of specific ethnographic Melanesian material makes possible a critical appraisal of the Strathernian notions of partibility and detachability, which have often been taken as given by researchers outside the region.     

Applying Signaling Theory to Traditional Cultural Rituals

The branch of evolutionary theory known as signaling theory attempts to explain various forms of communication. Social scientists have explained many traditional rituals as forms of communication that promote cooperative social relationships among participants. Both evolutionists and social scientists have realized the importance of trust for the formation and maintenance of cooperative social relationships. These factors have led to attempts to apply signaling theory to traditional cultural rituals in various ways. This paper uses the traditional ritual of mumming in small Newfoundland fishing villages to evaluate alternative hypotheses about the connection between rituals, communication, trust, and cooperation. Mumming is found to be most consistent with the hypothesis that it is a ritual of trust wherein participants take a specific type of risk: the risk of harm at the hands of other participants. Individuals who take this risk actively signal their trust. Conversely, individuals who restrain themselves from inflicting harm on other participants actively signal their trustworthiness.

Social inequality and signaling in a costly ritual

Evolutionary perspectives suggest that participation in collective rituals may serve important communicative functions by signaling practitioners' commitment to the community and its values. While previous research has examined the effects of ritual signals at the individual and collective level, there has been limited attention directed to the impact of socio-environmental factors on the quality of ritual signaling. We examined this impact in the context of the Thaipusam Kavadi, a collective ritual performed by Tamil Hindus worldwide that involves body piercings and other costly activities. We show that participants' relative position in the social hierarchy systematically affects the form of ritual signaling. Specifically, we found that low-status participants are more likely to engage in signaling modalities that require somatic and opportunity costs in the form of body piercings and cumulative effort, while high-status individuals are more likely to use financial capital, in the form of more elaborate material offerings to the deity. Moreover, signaling in each particular modality is stronger among individuals who participate in more public (but not private) rituals, corresponding to their long-term commitment to the community. In sum, our results demonstrate that social hierarchies exact unequal requirements on ritual participants, who in turn modify their signaling strategies accordingly.     

Classic Maya Bloodletting and the Cultural Evolution of Religious Rituals: Quantifying Patterns of Variation in Hieroglyphic Texts

Religious rituals that are painful or highly stressful are hypothesized to be costly signs of commitment essential for the evolution of complex society. Yet few studies have investigated how such extreme ritual practices were culturally transmitted in past societies. Here, we report the first study to analyze temporal and spatial variation in bloodletting rituals recorded in Classic Maya (ca. 250–900 CE) hieroglyphic texts. We also identify the sociopolitical contexts most closely associated with these ancient recorded rituals. Sampling an extensive record of 2,480 hieroglyphic texts, this study identifies every recorded instance of the logographic sign for the word ch’ahb’ that is associated with ritual bloodletting. We show that documented rituals exhibit low frequency whose occurrence cannot be predicted by spatial location. Conversely, network ties better capture the distribution of bloodletting rituals across the southern Maya region. Our results indicate that bloodletting rituals by Maya nobles were not uniformly recorded, but were typically documented in association with antagonistic statements and may have signaled royal commitments among connected polities.

No longer can evolutionists dismiss such works [of ritual sacrifice] as scholarly, but irrelevant, esoterica–explorations of the bizarre but insignificant elements of Precolumbian culture…we must address this ideological data base with the same interest that we would give to studies of settlement patterns, subsistence systems, or political institutions [1].

     

The Sociodrama of Presidential Politics: Rhetoric, Ritual, and Power in the Era of Teledemocracy

In this paper I examine the American presidential campaign cycle as a series of ritualized sociodramas. Examples are used from the campaigns of 1988, 1992, and 1996 to illustrate the role of ritual, rhetoric, symbol, and media in the process of presidential power acquisition. These political processes are analyzed utilizing the concepts of sociodrama and rituals of rebellion extant in the literature of political anthropology. Specific cases such as the bus tours of the Clinton campaign, the Willie Horton commercials of the Bush campaign, and the case of Murphy Brown are examined in detail. The goal of the paper is to render an anthropological perspective on the process of choosing the American President in the era of teledemocracy. [American presidential campaign, ritual, rhetoric, symbol, media]     

(Re)Creating Rituals through Contemporary Dance

After fieldwork on the ten-hour performance “Insomnia 2–In Memoriam” about rituals and death, the author asks how the deRothfils company makes life meaningful through audience interaction with this dance creation. She explores the notion of ritual for performance analysis, drawing on Catherine Bell’s framework. She examines four dimensions of the performance, each showing how various aspects of ritual are generated: reviving esthetic features, fulfilling social needs through collective encounters, experiencing strong affects, and offering a space for existential reflection. The article concludes with a more general question of how this artistic process produces knowledge.     

Reinscribing the birthing body: homebirth as ritual performance

In this article, I examine the clinical practices engaged in by U.S. homebirth midwives and their clients from the beginning of pregnancy through to the immediate postpartum period, deconstructing them for their symbolic and ritual content. Using data collected from open-ended, semistructured interviews and intensive participant-observation, I describe the roles ritual plays in the construction, performance, and maintenance of birth at home as a transgressive rite of passage. As midwives ritually elaborate approaches to care to capitalize on their semiotic power to transmit a set of counterhegemonic values to participants, they are attempting, quite self-consciously, to peel away the fictions of medicalized birthing care. Their goal: to expose strong and capable women who "grow" and birth babies outside the regulatory and self-regulatory processes naturalized by modern, technocratic obstetrics. Homebirth practices are, thus, not simply evidence-based care strategies. They are intentionally manipulated rituals of technocratic subversion designed to reinscribe pregnant bodies and to reterritorialize childbirth spaces (home) and authorities (midwives and mothers).     

Why aren’t we all hutterites?

In this paper I explore the psychology of ritual performance and present a simple graphical model that clarifies several issues in William Irons’s theory of religion as a “hard-to-fake” sign of commitment. Irons posits that religious behaviors or rituals serve as costly signals of an individual’s commitment to a religious group. Increased commitment among members of a religious group may facilitate intra-group cooperation, which is argued to be the primary adaptive benefit of religion. Here I propose a proximate explanation for how individuals are able to pay the short-term costs of ritual performance to achieve the long-term fitness benefits offered by religious groups. The model addresses three significant problems raised by Irons’s theory. First, the model explains why potential free-riders do not join religious groups even when there are significant net benefits that members of religious groups can achieve. Second, the model clarifies how costly a ritual must be to achieve stability and prevent potential free-riders from joining the religious group. Third, the model suggests why religious groups may require adherents to perform private rituals that are not observed by others. Several hypotheses generated from the model are also discussed. Richard Sosis is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut. His research interests include the evolution of cooperation, utopian societies, and the behavioral ecology of religion. In collaboration with Bradley Ruffle (Ben Gurion University) he is currently investigating the impact of privatization and religiosity on intra-group trust within Israeli Kibbutzim.     

On religious ritual as deference and communicative excess

I shall argue that most religious ritual is a performance that not only invokes but also performs communication. The ethnographic material from which I derive this argument is from China, in particular the temple rituals of local festivals. My argument is that a deep obeisance of welcome and departure that is both like and not like the normal ritual of greeting marks a religious from a non-religious ritual occasion and place. It is a ritual doubling that makes the honoured guest also a host. Religious ritual is a medium, and as a medium it is double in another sense. It is deference and deferral, a repeated transmission of obeisance to authority that has the authority of repetition. As well as doubling, religious ritual is excessively communicative. The medium is a performance not only of invitation and departure but also of communicative response, and it repeats this communication as a test of communicative response over and over again. Religious ritual performs both the opening and closing of communication, both the seeking and the responsive reciprocation of gift offerings with bounteousness. It is shadowed by the possibility of no response, of giving offence, of being abandoned. This possibility is acknowledged by being prevented, while the possibility that the performers are their own responders is disavowed.     

Sexuality and Garden Ritual in the Trobriands and Tikopia: Tudava meets the Atua I Kafika

There are remarkable parallels between the rituals performed over the yam gardens by the Trobriand Islanders and those performed by the Tikopia. The strikingly similar garden rituals appear to be dramatizations, not simply of the mythic origin and structure of the gardens, but of the mythic origin and structure of society itself. The metaphor used in both cases is that of human reproduction. Many of the differences between the two ritual systems appear to relate, in the first place, to differing theories of human reproduction and, behind them, to differing rules of descent.     

Establishing mutual misunderstanding: a Buryat shamanic ritual in Ulaanbaatar

This article discusses a strange case of shamanic ritual performed for a Buryat family in Mongolia's capital city Ulaanbaatar. This performance not only differs from those described in the regional literature, but it also seems to challenge some of the models used to account for ritual efficacy. Indeed, while the cathartic use of Buryat traumatic history to deal with a patient's misfortune in shamanic rituals is quite well documented, this performance stands out for the uncompassionate hopelessness with which spirits spoke of the family's fate as exiles in Mongolia. Meanwhile, the ever‐growing tension between participants, which culminated in an open crisis, would be a sure sign of a ritual failure had it not been the clear result of the shaman's own efforts to establish mutual misunderstanding between the spirits, the patients, and herself. Drawing on a pragmatic approach to ritual efficacy, this article ponders on the specific purpose of a performance which seems to be aimed at creating a context of miscommunication between participants.