Report
Discussion meeting – CompCog Network
Ritual and ritualized behavior: animal and human cognition
Organizer: Henrik Høgh-Olesen, Professor Social- & Personality psychology
Head of department of psychology, Aarhus University, Denmark.
Venue: Department of Psychology, Aarhus University, 15-16 April 2010
Jens Chr. Skous vej 4, 8000 Aarhus c, Denmark
Abstract
Ritual and ritualized actions are central concepts in both studies of human and animal behavior. But does these different modes of ritual and ritualization have anything in common, or are they just a result of more or less strained analogies with no common core? The expert meeting attempt to open this field of inquiry by connecting researchers working in science of religion, anthropology, archeology, psychology, psychiatry, brain imaging, animal researcher and ethology. The meeting is planned to be explorative in relation both to possible lines of research as well as the methodologies involved. Further, the meeting attempts to bridge a gap between different research tradition in a spirit of mutual inspiration and cross-disciplinary engagement.
Scientific Summary
Ritual and ritualized actions are central concepts in both studies of human and animal behavior. As cognate forms of the Latin ritus, ritual and ritualization traditionally designate types of human behavior associated with more or less organized religion. As such both are central concepts within anthropology, ethnology, sociology and science of religion that specifies behavioral patterns related to interaction with gods, spirits, ancestors or other superhuman agents and can generally be characterized as being highly stipulated, traditional and often paradoxical modes of action. Throughout the centuries, the concepts have expanded its reference. Not only are magical practices included (not surprisingly, as these often contain reference to superhuman agents) – references are also made to so-called ‘secular’ or ‘profane’ rituals that contain no (explicit) reference to superhuman agents or religion in general. Instead, the primary characterizing features are that the actions are stipulated, recurrent, traditional and causally underdetermined, i.e. not instrumentally connected to a particular goal. What has emerged is a rather broad concept of a behavioral form characterized by a range of particular features held together by ‘family resemblance’, but devoid of any strict conceptual definition.
During the last century the concept was adopted into a least two technical usages and thus further broadened. First, in biology and ethology the concepts have been used as a way to describe the phylogenetic development of certain behavioral patterns from an instrumental means-action sequence to a non-instrumental sequence with a communicative function (Huxley 1966; Lorenz 1966 Eible-Eiblesfelt 1989). Mating, greeting, warning and other fixed behavioral repertoires are described as ‘rituals’ or ‘ritualized’ insofar as these are genetically specified (hence traditional and stipulated), and by their use of instrumental actions in a non-instrumental context can function as communicative devices. Biological approaches adopted a range of particular perceptual features (repetition, stipulation, non-instrumentality) and related these to a particular function, that of communication.
Second, psychology adopted the concept of ritual and ritualizations as means to designate a broad range of symptomatic behaviors diagnosed under the heading of Obsessive Compulsory Disorder (OCD). Emerging with Sigmund Freud’s (1907) observation of the obvious phenomenological similarities between the private rituals of neurotic patients and cultural ritual, psychologists have utilized the concepts of ritual and ritualization to designate the broad range of involuntary, idiosyncratic, repetitive and non-instrumental actions apparently performed in order to alleviate a range of undesirable or even catastrophic events. This is all the more attention-demanding as most OCD patients on a reflective level see no connection between the obsessive actions performed and the events they are felt to alleviate.
Does these different modes of ritual and ritualization have anything in common, or are they just a result of more or less strained analogies with no common core? The expert meeting attempt to open this field of inquiry by connecting researchers working in science of religion, anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, brain imaging, animal researchers and ethologists.
Content and impact of the discussion meeting
Questions discussed
· What possible connections can we find between ‘animal ritualization’ and human cultural ritual? Is there a connection or is a mere analogy?
· Do we find ‘animal’ rituals in humans and ‘cultural rituals’ among animals?
· If the connection is merely an analogy in some respects, can we still discern common neuro-cognitive structures underlying the process of human and animal ritualization?
· What are the roles of action-parsing systems and procedural memory in performing ritual actions?
· In what sense can rituals and ritualized action be said to be communicative?
· Why do we find common themes (e.g. pollution, repetition, stranger avoidance) in cultural rituals and OCD?
· What is the short and long term effects of performing ritual actions in relation to anxiety, memory?
· Why is ritual behavior commonly related to human endeavors with uncertain outcome?
· How does ritual behavior relate to judgment of success of uncertain endeavors?
· Why is joint performance of ritual commonly related to the creation of strong social cohesion?
· Why does rituals in both humans and animals often entail apparently mal-adaptive behavior?
The meeting was planned to be explorative in relation both to possible lines of research as well as the methodologies involved. Further, the meeting attempted to bridge a gap between different research tradition in a spirit of mutual inspiration and cross-disciplinary engagement.
All in all the meeting was most successful. Future collaborations were sketched and projects already in progress was reviewed and improved by careful supervision by the participants. After the meeting the discussions have continued on the internet, projects, proposals and papers are mutually send out and commented on by the participants.
List of participants
Dr. Mikkel Arendt: Aalborg Psychiatric Hospital.
Prof. Donald M. Broom: Department of Veterinary Medicine, Cambridge University.
Dr. Sheila Coulson: Department of Archeology, University of Oslo.
Prof. Armin W. Geertz: Department of Theology/Scientific study of religion, Aarhus University.
Prof. Henrik Høgh-Olesen: Department of psychology, Aarhus University
Dr. Pierre Lienard: Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Dr. Richard Sosis: Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut.
Dr. Jesper Sørensen: Mindlab/The scientific study of Religion. Aarhus University.
Dr. Jeppe. S. Jensen: The scientific study of Religion. Aarhus University.
Dr. Dimitris Xygalatas. Mindlab/The scientific study of Religion. Aarhus University.
Ph.d student. Niels H. Jensen. Department of psychology, Aarhus University.
Ph.d student. Line Hesselberg. Department of psychology, Aarhus University.
Program and abstracts for Seminar on Ritual and Ritualization, Aarhus 15-16 April 2010
Thursday:
9:00 Coffee
9:30
Ritual and ritualized behavior: animal and human cognition – an introduction.
Henrik Høgh-Olesen, Department of Psychology, Aarhus University, Denmark
Ritual and ritualized action patterns are central concepts in both studies of human and animal behavior. But does these different modes of ritual and ritualization have anything in common, or are they just a result of more or less strained analogies with no common core, and how are we going to understand these behaviors from an evolutionary and cognitive point of view ?
In this short introduction, I will view some of the different understandings and conceptualizations we have of ritualization, from ethology to evolutionary psychology.
The Sacrifice – as a sacred human universal – will be given a special treatment, and I will argue that we in this ritual find an imprint of one of man’s most basic exchange programmes: The reciprocity programme. Finally the question of continuity is raised in a short discussion of ritualistic behaviors and religious sentiments in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).
10:30 Coffee
11:00
Rituals and ritualised behaviour. A biological basis for rituals
Donald M. Broom, Cambridge University
Stereotypies are extreme forms of ritual shown by humans and many other species of animals in situations where they lack control over important aspects of their environment. They occur as a result of certain disease conditions, e.g. neurological disorders, autism, dementia, sheep scab which involves skin and other damage. The best known stereotypies are those shown by closely confined animals such as stall-housed pregnant sows, crate-reared calves, individually-stabled horses, caged birds and many animals in zoos. Some repeated movements involve self-harm. We know some of the brain changes associated with the occurrence of stereotypies.
Many other sequences of movements that could be called rituals are shown by animals, for example prior to resting or defecation, as a feeding/prey-catching method, as a defence procedure, as an indicator of activity commencement in social species, and during courtship or other displays.
Some of these sequences of movements, and some non-ritualised movements, serve important functions in minimising the chances that a social group will break down. This is one of the most important things in life for social animals, including humans. Hence moral behaviour and religion, which is a structure for moral behaviour, has evolved by natural selection in socially living animals.
Human rituals during religious or pseudo-religious events, help the people present to feel comfortable in the community or meeting group or place, i.e. in the church. The ‘church’ may be a place of religion, or a pub/bar/eating place, or location where other regularly occurring sporting, intellectual or other social activities take place. They tend to preserve the social group as a consequence. In many cases, the ritual can be linked to sources of uncertainty but the link is sometimes temporally distant so often will not be causal.
The distinction between human cultural and animal ritualisation seems invalid to me. Rituals have more than one cause and the causes exist in humans and other species.
12:00 Lunch
13:00
Pathological rituals exemplified by OCD
Mikkel Arendt, cand.psych.aut., Ph.D., Klinik for Angstlidelser
Ritualized behaviour is manifest in a number of psychiatric disorders. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is characterized by intrusive thoughts, images or impulses as well as compulsive acts in the form of stereotyped behaviours that are repeated again and again. In general, the ritualized behaviour is aimed at preventing some objectively unlikely event, often involving harm to or caused by the OCD sufferer. The presentation will provide an overview of common ritualistic behaviours encountered in OCD sufferers. Also, OCD-like rituals occurring during normal human development will be reviewed. Finally, the rationale behind exposure and response prevention, the best-documented psychotherapeutic treatment for OCD, will be outlined. It will be hypothesized that OCD symptoms can be regarded as a pathological manifestation of otherwise adaptive human thought processes and behaviours.
14:00
Coping mechanisms, adaptations or… Why do we find so many rituals being performed at critical phases of the life cycle?
Pierre Liénard, Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada
We see that many rituals are typically being performed at specific, critical and transitional life stages of individuals. Why do we see across cultures such overwhelming numbers of those rituals, more so than at any other time? We explain such typical association between ritual endeavors and phases of the life cycle by adopting a bi-product argument. The fact that rituals focused on such “moments” are more likely to be adopted in diverse cultural traditions can be explained by how they elicit aspects of human precaution psychology. Additional potential social effects of such rituals are seen as secondary phenomena and probably not very important in the explanation of the survival of those ritual practices.
15:00 Coffee
15:30
Ritualized behavior and action parsing: How ritualization affects action representation.
Jesper Sørensen, Religion, Cognition and Culture Research Unit, Department of the Study of Religion, Aarhus University
Kristoffer L. Nielbo, Religion, Cognition and Culture Research Unit, Department of the Study of Religion, Aarhus University
Ritualized behavior is generally characterized by a number of features that distinguishes it from ordinary, instrumental actions. Thus, iteration, redundancy, goal-demotion, stipulation and causal underspecification are often considered as defining characteristics. However, few experimental studies have directly addressed ritualization and attempted to operationalize these features in order to investigate their effect on cognitive processing. In contrast to this lack, numerous studies have investigated ordinary action representation in order to elicit the cognitive processes involved when humans process actions. In two recent experiments we have attempted to explore one such paradigm, the unitization paradigm of Newtson and colleagues, in order to investigate how different features of ritualization influence cognitive processing. This will lead to a discussion of (a) further possibilities of experimental investigations of ritual and ritualization; (b) how computer simulation and neural networks can help develop predictions concerning ritualized behavior.
16:30 Round up for the day
18:00 Dinner at “Villy’s Vinbar”
Friday:
9:00 Coffee
9:30
The field as a lab: Towards an experimental ethnography.
Dimitris Xygalatas, Post.doc at MINDLab, Aarhus University.
This presentation will discuss the introduction of laboratory (i.e. experimental) methods in ethnographic fieldwork, and some of the methodological implications of such a pursuit for the study of ritual. Two case studies will be mentioned, based on fieldwork conducted by researchers at Aarhus University: A study of a Spanish fire-walk, where we used biometric measurements (heart rate) to study arousal and synchronization in a collective ritual; and a recent ethnographic study conducted in the island of Mauritius, where the use of game-theoretical models in the field was explored as a paradigm for further experimental field research.
10:30 Coffee
11:00
Ritual behaviour in the Late and Middle Stone Age: archaeological evidence from Tsodilo Hills, Botswana
Sheila Coulson, Department of Archaeology, University of Oslo, Norway
It has been proposed that collective ritual – with its formal characteristics of amplified, stereotypical, redundant display – might be expected to leave a loud archaeological signature (Watts 2009:62). Investigations of behavioural patterns of early modern human populations, dating to approximately 100000 years ago, demonstrate that the archaeological record of red ochre use provides such a signature (for example, Knight 1999, 2009, Power 1999, 2009, Power and Aiello 1997, Watts 1999, 2002). In this presentation it will be suggested that on the basis of results of recent research at Tsodilo Hills, Botswana, additional characteristics, such as costly signalling strategies and attention-grabbing behaviours, should also be included in this archaeological signature.