Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

"This book about rituals is close to my field. As an anthropologist, I used to teach a course on the anthropology of religion, and ritual is an important part of studying religion. In fact, to academics of the 19th century, such as Émile Durkheim, we can only access religion as a field of study through observing ritual. Ritual, by its own nature, is a condensed event where there is high symbolism. Somebody watching a ritual that he or she is not familiar with might see some acts that look ‘bizarre’. But once you start doing field work and looking at these ‘bizarre’ acts, you begin to understand the meaning of symbols and then, at another level, of the religion itself. Xygalatas explains to us, in a very accessible way, the significance of rituals. We are yet to find a human society that doesn’t have rituals. We all have them. We, in the West, might think that we have abandoned rituals. We don’t do that kind of thing anymore. We don’t walk on fire. We don’t organise events where people put swords or metal objects through their bodies. But we still retain some aspects of ritualistic behaviour. Xygalatas looks at rituals in a new way. In anthropology and sociology, there is a whole body of solid scholarship on ritual. The novelty of this book is that the author combines this classical literature with neuroscience. It might appear a bit farfetched, but he successfully explains to us what rituals do to our brain, and our human psychology. What ritual does to us explains its persistence and why we do it year after year, season after season, and at particular moments in our lives, such as those rituals associated with life cycles: marriage, birth, death, and so on. Xygalatas looks at the emerging field of the study of ritual combined with neuroscience, to allow us to understand the universality of rituals and why human societies continue to engage in organising rituals. It’s very interesting how he uses his personal story, as someone with Greek origins who is fascinated by what people in a Greek village do. He travels from Greece to Spain and other parts of the world. You can feel that he was there, observing the rituals he studies, specifically the ones that we might feel uncomfortable about, such as walking on fire. Why would people organise a ritual, annually, to walk on fire? Some people would volunteer to carry their grandmother or grandfather on their back during the ritual. It may appear a bit exotic, but far from exoticising the people the author studies, we find that he humanises them and makes them legible to us, the outsiders. What is so important about this book is that it has that global character. It is very unusual for anthropologists to move from one field site to a second one, and a third one, because that kind of research is very time-consuming and difficult, but Xygalatas does exactly that. He practices what we call multi-sited ethnography—that is, doing research in multiple locations—and also relies on reading secondary literature about faraway places that he has not visited or done in-depth research in, such as for example in India."

"I happened across Ritual somewhat randomly, but was glad that I did. Xygalatas wants to explore, understand, and explain the curious fact that so much of what we do in life is guided by ritual, and some of these rituals are very painful. People cut themselves or starve themselves or walk up hills on their knees. And after, they describe themselves as happy . Xygalatas suggests that part of the reason is that ritual helps us become part of a community. As in Táíwò, it occurs because of a shared vulnerability, but in this case done within a purposive social context. During a fire walk ritual, for example, Xygalatas and his team even found that people’s heart rates synchronized. But what really made me think of this book in this context is how Xygalatas discusses how rituals positively inform our daily lives—whether it’s religious, or cultural like a hug or handshake, or personal like many athletes have. These rituals can help us feel grounded in an overwhelming world and reduce our anxiety. In his tests, he’s found that people who have stage fright, for example, can remarkably reduce it through creating a simple ritual. There were lots of other interesting tidbits. Overall, I found that reading this book helped me better understand various aspects of my life in ways I hadn’t expected, and I think that’s a big part of self-help."