Search Results (13)

The origin of life has previously been subject to numerous studies and hypotheses. Typically, related models focus on the emergence of chemical networks such as the RNA world or the Krebs energy cycle. Here, the onset of life is described as a symmetry-breaking kinetic phase transition. The novel symmetry of life is the arbitrariness of code that is fundamental to symbolic information processing, coining all forms of life from the very beginning. Symbols evolved from non-symbolic, structural information of the inanimate physical world. The responsible transition process was discovered a century ago in behavioural biology, regarded as ‘ritualisation’. The physical properties of this transition include neutral Lyapunov stability and critical fluctuations in the associated Goldstone modes. As a conceptual model, a hypothetical simple molecular ritualisation process is suggested, along with the emergent semiotics of symbolic information processing. Full article

The ritualised commemoration of the deceased belongs to the most common forms of communication with the dead. The meaning that people ascribe to a religious commemoration ritual is determined by a concrete religious doctrine, although it can be influenced by a broader cultural tradition. However, in the context of alternative spiritual currents, there can be many possible interpretations of communication with the dead, as there is no “official” doctrine supported by established institutions. In addition, alternative spirituality is marked by the emphasis on individuality, which results in the predominance of solitary practice. Yet, in various contexts, the tension between individuality and community can be manifested in different forms of ritualised behaviour, ranging from strictly private performances to prescribed group rituals. The paper addresses different levels of individual and collective practice in the context of alternative spirituality in Slovakia, a post-socialist country with a predominantly Christian, mostly Catholic, population. It makes use of the theoretical tools of Mary Douglas’ theory relating to the connection between cosmological beliefs and particular forms of social life. Rituals and ritualised behaviour are considered in the case of the triduum of All Saints’ Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day. The results of ethnographic research on spiritual circles operating in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, have shown that these holidays are perceived and practiced differently by people with different religious or spiritual affiliation. The individual interpretation and the degree of associated ritualised behaviour depend on personal background, as well as the social organisation of a circle to which a practitioner belongs. Full article

This article addresses the making of heritage and the processes of sacralisation involved by investigating the heritage created after the rescue of the “Wild Boars”, a Thai youth football team, from a flooded cave in July 2018. The unfolding story of this “epic rescue operation” was followed with tremendous engagement, locally, nationally and worldwide, an example of what I capture as “high-density events”. Cave diver specialists and rescue equipment were flown in. Thousands of volunteers, mainly from Thailand but also from abroad, assisted. In Thailand, schools participated massively in nationwide Buddhist prayer sessions. Renowned holy monk Khruba Bunchum Yansangwaro directed his prayers to the boys and predicted they would be found alive. The massive involvement with the 18-days rescue operation generated a multiplicity of memes, photographs, books, documentaries, paintings, and statues. As religious and national heritage, this material lives on in various forms and exhibitions, including the cave, which was declared to become a “living museum” immediately upon the completion of the rescue. The analysis concerns three interrelated issues: First, I focus on the “instantaneous heritagization” of the event, asking: how to understand the processes that transform people, objects, and places into heritage overnight? Second, I bring in the role of emotions and moral imagination to shed light on the secular and religious sacralities produced and reproduced in the making of heritage. Third, I am interested in the impact of the heritage on the cave and its vicinity, bringing in issues of ownership and power over the event’s legacy. Full article

Throughout human history, individuals, communities and societies have always had to confront and tackle the problem of death. Consequently, death remains a topic of social scientific relevance, highlighting the need for its study and for theorising around it. This article analyses the development of the social scientific study of death and dying, taking inspiration from Philippe Ariès’s historical stages to discuss the recent developments in the field, namely the study of digital death. The article begins with a discussion of the visibility of death in modern society in the context of spectacular death. The analysis emphasises its four dimensions: mediatisation, commercialisation, re-ritualisation and the revolution in end-of-life care. The article moves on to discuss the emergence of digital death as the current stage and reflects on its similarities to spectacular death and its transformation of public imaginaries around death in contemporary society. The article concludes with a reflection on future developments in the field, specifically the emergence and study of artificial intelligence (AI) in digitalised death culture. Full article

Living organisms are active open systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. The ability to behave actively corresponds to dynamical metastability: minor but supercritical internal or external effects may trigger major substantial actions such as gross mechanical motion, dissipating internally accumulated energy reserves. Gaining a selective advantage from the beneficial use of activity requires a consistent combination of sensual perception, memorised experience, statistical or causal prediction models, and the resulting favourable decisions on actions. This information processing chain originated from mere physical interaction processes prior to life, here denoted as structural information exchange. From there, the self-organised transition to symbolic information processing marks the beginning of life, evolving through the novel purposivity of trial-and-error feedback and the accumulation of symbolic information. The emergence of symbols and prediction models can be described as a ritualisation transition, a symmetry-breaking kinetic phase transition of the second kind previously known from behavioural biology. The related new symmetry is the neutrally stable arbitrariness, conventionality, or code invariance of symbols with respect to their meaning. The meaning of such symbols is given by the structural effect they ultimately unleash, directly or indirectly, by deciding on which actions to take. The early genetic code represents the first symbols. The genetically inherited symbolic information is the first prediction model for activities sufficient for survival under the condition of environmental continuity, sometimes understood as the “final causality” property of the model. Full article

Both Tulous (土楼) and Weilong Houses (围龙屋) are important types of traditional Hakka (客家) dwellings whose architectural morphology is closely related to the historical origin, social organisation, and cultural values of Hakkas. Previous studies focused on the influence of Chinese traditional etiquette systems and ritual values on the physical morphology of Hakka traditional dwellings, where ancestral halls are often the core of the entire building. This article selects six typical case studies of Tulous and Weilong Houses and launches a comparative study on their spatial configurations through quantitative analysis of space syntax. This study found that compared to Tulous, Weilong Houses exhibit decentralisation and gridification in their spatial structure, in addition to a decrease in defence capability and an increase in residential privatisation. The ancestral hall of the Tulou is still the spiritual and living centre of Tulou residents, located in the geometric centre and possessing high spatial configurational values. However, although the ancestral hall of the Weilong House is still located in the geometric centre of the entire building, it does not exhibit the highest spatial configurational values, indicating that the increase in secularisation and the decrease in ritualisation of Hakka communities inhabiting Weilong Houses resulted in the separation of secular space and ritual space. It coincides with the “Centre–Periphery” distribution characteristics of Hakka communities related to Tulous and Weilong Houses, reflecting the different community existence paradigms of the Hakkas “landed” and “rooted” in the Guangdong–Fujian–Jiangxi border area. Full article

This study investigated how observing the ritualisation of objects can influence children’s encoding and defence of supernatural beliefs. Specifically, we investigated if ritualising objects leads children to believe those objects might be magical, buffering against favouring contrary evidence. Seventy-nine children, aged between 3 and 6 years, were presented with two identical objects (e.g., two colour-changing stress balls) and tasked with identifying which was magical after being informed that one had special properties (e.g., could make wishes come true). In a Ritual condition, an adult acted on one of the objects using causally irrelevant actions and on the other using functional actions. In an Instrumental condition, both objects were acted on with functional actions. The children were given a normative rule relating to the use of the objects and an opportunity to imitate the actions performed on them. A second adult then challenged their magical belief. Ritualistic actions increased the likelihood of children attributing magical powers to the associated object but did not affect resistance to change or adherence to normative rules. However, children who engaged in ritual actions protested more when the magical belief was challenged. Our findings suggest that rituals can play an important role in shaping children’s perception and defence of supernatural beliefs. Full article

With the world facing an ecological crisis, Hindus are challenged to reflect on the ways they impact their environment. The last few decades witnessed a rise of theological reflections on Hindu traditions—especially scriptures and concepts (not least by western scholars)—that advocate environmentally friendly perspectives. This stands in sharp contrast with the multiple examples of how Hindu ritual practices cause harm to the environment. Ganesha Chaturthi is a festival that due to the public element of immersion of Ganesha idols, has led to severe pollution of waterbodies. Because of the attention that has been paid to this lately, the festival now calls for ecofriendly alternatives. This article analyses how recently, environmental awareness is ritualized and materialized in the festival of Ganesha Chaturthi. For this, fieldwork was conducted during Ganesha Chaturthi in Chennai and Mumbai in 2022. The focus of the article lies on the ecofriendly material and ritual innovations of the festival—for instance the variety of Ganeshas made of biodegradable materials—and the dynamics of interaction with (alleged) traditions to validate a Green Hindu identity in general and the development of a Green Ganesha in particular. Full article

The flourishing society envisioned by the South African government’s National Development Plan 2030 is based on nation-building and social cohesion. With the recent civil unrests, calls for healing a nation characterised by poverty, inequality and violence through social cohesion have again been made. Community music engagement is uniquely positioned to achieve social cohesion since the discipline engages disparities of power and privilege whilst aiming to cultivate an environment of unconditional welcoming. The purpose of this theoretical framework is to explain how community music engagement can facilitate social cohesion through community music engagement. Community music engagement promotes spiritual experiences since it fosters relationships. This relational theoretical framework will be derived from a thematic analysis of the 21 chapters in the book Ritualised Belonging: Musicing and Spirituality in the South African Context and related theories. Our findings indicate that joyful musicking rituals serve as the catalyst for hope. Hope, in turn, motivates people to engage in community musicking, which requires a bodily co-presence, fosters mutual focus of attention and promotes cooperation and trust. Musickers who share values, challenges, culture, and identity experience a joyful sense of belonging. Furthermore, joy is key to spirituality since it is self-expansive, self-transcendent and other-embracing and transcends different religions. Joy moves musickers to build bonding and bridging social capital. Social capital improves individuals’ and communities’ quality of life and ultimately promotes social cohesion. Full article

This paper addresses the ritual of Neolithic Malta in its island context drawing on recent research by the FRAGSUS project. Ritualised club houses placed in horticultural enclosures formed the focal point of the prehistoric Maltese landscape in the fourth and third millennia BC, providing a stable exploitation of the islands by the small populations of the period. This was a period when connectivity was more challenging than in the Bronze Age which followed, when Malta became part of the wider ritual patterns of the central Mediterranean and beyond. The paper provides discussion of the leading issues and arguments applied to this rich case study of island ritual. Full article

During the last decade, local celebrations of winter solstice on the 21st of December have increased all over Denmark. These events refer to the Old Norse ritual of celebrating the return of the light, and their appeal is very broad on a local community level. By presenting two cases of Danish winter solstice celebrations, I aim to unfold how we can understand these new ritualisations as non-religious rituals simultaneously contesting and supplementing the overarching seasonal celebration of Christmas. My material for this study is local newspaper sources that convey the public sphere on a municipality level. I analyse the development in solstice ritualisations over time from 1990 to 2020. Although different in location and content, similarities unite the new solstice celebrations: they emphasise the local community and the natural surroundings. My argument is that the winter solstice celebrations have grown out of a religiously diversified public sphere and should be understood as non-religious rituals in a secular context. Full article

Comparative behavioural studies help reconstruct the phylogeny of closely related species. In that respect, the serows Capricornis spp. occupy an important position as they have been assumed to be the closest forms to the ancestors of Caprinae. In spite of that, information on the behavioural repertoire of the mainland serow Capricornis sumatraensis is exceedingly poor. In this paper, we report data on the activity rhythms and social behaviour of rutting mainland serows in captivity (Central Thailand, January 1986; January–February 1987). Activity was bimodal with peaks in mid-afternoon and late night. Resting and ruminating peaked at noon and twilight. Four patterns of marking behaviour were observed out of a total of 1900 events. Males and females were found to use different marking sites and frequencies. A total of 33 social behaviour patterns were observed: 18 patterns concerned agonistic behaviour, whereas 15 patterns were relevant to courtship behaviour. A comparison across Caprinae species with unritualised piercing weapons (i.e., Capricornis, Naemorhedus, Rupicapra, Budorcas, and Hemitragus) has shown that inter-sexual direct forms of aggressive behaviour are used significantly more often than indirect ones, but for chamois, confirming Rupicapra spp. as the most advanced genus among them in terms of an early ritualisation of weapons. Conversely, horns of the goral Nemorhaedus spp. and the serow lie on the same plane of the frontal bones, thus making possible the usage of a dominance display through frontal pushing. Full article

Although ritual participation in Christian churches is decreasing in the Netherlands, one of the most secularised countries in the world, monasteries are increasingly attractive to people not committed to a life in an abbey, but who rather transfer monastic practices to their personal life. Guesthouses are full, reading groups conduct meditative reading, and monastic time management is applied in professional arenas. Obviously, the ritual practices conducted beyond abbey walls have a different character than the ritual repertoire of monks and nuns. The ritual transfer is a challenge, as monasteries are secluded spaces, separated from the world. In its history, monasticism has turned out to be especially capable of this process. What does the transfer from one context to the other imply when people ritualise prayer, reading and everyday practices without being monastic? A specific group of people who conduct this transfer intensively are Benedictine oblates, laypersons affiliated to a particular monastery. This article addresses the following main question: which monastic ritual practices do Benedictine oblates in the Netherlands perform, and how do they transfer these to their personal context? To explore this question, the results of a qualitative research among 53 respondents are presented—oblates of three Benedictine abbeys in the Netherlands. The results demonstrate experiences on a new ritual field, with practices that seem to be ‘out of place’ but are highly vivid to the practitioners. Full article