Ritual (Hardback)
How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living
Buy from
A radical anthropologist takes readers on a journey through the shadow-side of human civilisation
Shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize 2023
'A gripping guide to rites and customs around the world' New Scientist
'Fascinating ... pacy, adventurous' Mail on Sunday
Ritual is the oldest, and certainly the most enigmatic, thread in the history of human culture. And it presents a profound paradox: people ascribe the utmost importance to their rituals, but few can explain why they are so important. Apparently pointless ceremonies pervade every documented society, from handshakes to hexes, hazings to parades. Before we ever learned to farm, we were gathering in giant stone temples to perform elaborate rites and ceremonies. And yet, though rituals exist in every culture and can persist nearly unchanged for centuries, their logic has remained a mystery - until now.
In Ritual, pioneering scientist Dimitris Xygalatas leads us on an enlightening tour through this shadowy realm of human behaviour. Armed with cutting-edge technology and drawing on discoveries from a huge range of disciplines, he presents a powerful new perspective on our place in the world. In coronations, in silent prayer, in fire-walks and terrifying rites of passage, in all the bewildering variety of human life, Ritual reveals the deep and subtle mechanisms that bind us together.
Ritual (Ebook)
How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living
Buy from
A radical anthropologist takes readers on a journey through the shadow-side of human civilisation
Shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize 2023
'A gripping guide to rites and customs around the world' New Scientist
'Fascinating ... pacy, adventurous' Mail on Sunday
Ritual is the oldest, and certainly the most enigmatic, thread in the history of human culture. And it presents a profound paradox: people ascribe the utmost importance to their rituals, but few can explain why they are so important. Apparently pointless ceremonies pervade every documented society, from handshakes to hexes, hazings to parades. Before we ever learned to farm, we were gathering in giant stone temples to perform elaborate rites and ceremonies. And yet, though rituals exist in every culture and can persist nearly unchanged for centuries, their logic has remained a mystery - until now.
In Ritual, pioneering scientist Dimitris Xygalatas leads us on an enlightening tour through this shadowy realm of human behaviour. Armed with cutting-edge technology and drawing on discoveries from a huge range of disciplines, he presents a powerful new perspective on our place in the world. In coronations, in silent prayer, in fire-walks and terrifying rites of passage, in all the bewildering variety of human life, Ritual reveals the deep and subtle mechanisms that bind us together.
Ritual (Audiobook)
How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living
Buy from
A radical anthropologist takes readers on a journey through the shadow-side of human civilisation
Shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize 2023
'A gripping guide to rites and customs around the world' New Scientist
'Fascinating … pacy, adventurous' Mail on Sunday
Ritual is the oldest, and certainly the most enigmatic, thread in the history of human culture. And it presents a profound paradox: people ascribe the utmost importance to their rituals, but few can explain why they are so important. Apparently pointless ceremonies pervade every documented society, from handshakes to hexes, hazings to parades. Before we ever learned to farm, we were gathering in giant stone temples to perform elaborate rites and ceremonies. And yet, though rituals exist in every culture and can persist nearly unchanged for centuries, their logic has remained a mystery – until now.
In Ritual, pioneering scientist Dimitris Xygalatas leads us on an enlightening tour through this shadowy realm of human behaviour. Armed with cutting-edge technology and drawing on discoveries from a huge range of disciplines, he presents a powerful new perspective on our place in the world. In coronations, in silent prayer, in fire-walks and terrifying rites of passage, in all the bewildering variety of human life, Ritual reveals the deep and subtle mechanisms that bind us together.
Reviews for Ritual
New Scientist
Alister McGrath TLS
'Books of the Year 2022' Daily Telegraph
Nicholas Harris Mail on Sunday
Geographical
Dr Jane Goodall, DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute & UN Messenger for Peace
Paul Bloom, author The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning
Professor Mark Solms, author The Hidden Spring: A Journey To The Source of Consciousness
Richard Wrangham, author Catching Fire, The Goodness Paradox
Joe Henrich, Professor and Chair of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, and author The WEIRDest People in the World
Tanya Marie Luhrmann, author How God Becomes Real
Why do people walk on hot coals, scarify themselves, pierce their bodies with sharp objects, fast, kneel, handle poisonous snakes, endure hours of boring sermons on their days off? Like the question of how dosing ourselves with alcohol, a low-grade neurotoxin, has persisted and endured so long as a practice among human cultures, the prevalence of pragmatically useless and yet often costly and painful rituals across human cultures is a mystery hiding in plain sight. Armed with new tools, such as biometric sensors and hormone sampling, Xygalatas reveals the inner workings and crucial functions of ritual, which explain both its antiquity and ubiquity ... An entertaining and engaging introduction to the cognitive science of ritual by one of the pioneers of the field
'
Edward Slingerland, author Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
We are ritual beings; we surround ourselves with rituals - at birth, death and everywhere in between. But why do rituals matter to us when they so often bring so few obvious benefits? In this striking, wonderfully written, and original new book, Dimitris Xygalatas unravels the mystery of how rituals - from the mundane to the bizarrely violent - can be the source of transformative power
'
Michael Patrick Lynch, author The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data
Jesse Bering, Professor of Science Communication at the University of Otago and author Suicidal
Nicholas A. Christakis, author of Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
Geographical
Dimitris Xygalatas
Dimitris Xygalatas is an anthropologist and cognitive scientist. He runs the experimental anthropology lab at the University of Connecticut. This is his first trade book.
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