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ANTH Colloquium: Rituals as Social Technologies

Anthropology Colloquium with Dr. Dimitris Xygalatas, whose research focuses on cultural practices that soothe, excite, unite and divide humans, such as ritual, sports, and music.

10/25/2024
12:30 pm – 1:30 pm
Haldeman 031
Intended Audience(s): Faculty, Postdoc, Students-Graduate
Categories: Arts and Sciences, Lectures & Seminars
Around the world, people engage in ritual activities that involve obvious expenditures of effort, energy and resources without equally obvious payoffs. Anthropologists have long proposed that such costly behaviors persist because they convey certain benefits to their practitioners and their communities. But how can we study these ostensible benefits, given the contextually sensitive nature of such cultural practices? This talk will present an interdisciplinary research program that combines laboratory and field methods to explore the puzzle of extreme rituals in real-life settings. Drawing on recent empirical evidence on high-arousal rituals, I argue that ritual is a social technology that extends far beyond religion, into sports, politics, and other domains of human life.
 
About the speaker: Dimitris Xygalatas is an Associate Professor in the departments of Anthropology and Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut.  His research primarily focuses on cultural practices that soothe, excite, unite and divide humans, such as ritual, sports, and music.
For more information, contact:
Julie Gilman
julie.b.gilman@dartmouth.edu
Permanent URL to this event: https://anthropology.dartmouth.edu/events/event?event=75908

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.