Paths to meaning and connection

Dimitris Xygalatas has investigated the power of rituals through scientific research and fieldwork and found that rituals are particularly important today as a source of connection and finding meaning.

‍

evolve: In our post-modern society there seems to be a new interest in rituals, also in the search for meaning. What do you think is the reason for this?

Dimitris Xygalatas: Rituals are such successful social technologies, because they're able to trigger different psychological mechanisms at the same time. For example, they provide a sense of stability, a sense of tradition. When we know that we engage in the same practice that other members of our group have engaged, sometimes for generations, it gives us a sense of community.

At the same time, due to their highly structured nature, rituals provide a sense of control. Our brain is designed for structure, it's fundamentally a predictive device. Our brain needs to make predictions. A simple example is language processing. Before I finish my sentence, you have a particular expectation of what my next word is going to be. That's a very efficient cognitive architecture because we can use prior knowledge to predict future events. That means, when I experience uncertainty, when I cannot make predictions, I experience anxiety. So, we're driven by the very architecture of our brain to seek patterns. When we stress people in laboratory conditions, their behaviors become more ritualized. And when we measure people's physiological responses when they perform rituals, we see that they reduce anxiety. So, by offering us regularity, and continuity, ritual creates a sense of control.

Through the combination of these effects, it helps us cope with anxiety and makes us feel that we're part of something bigger than ourselves.

e: What do you see as the characteristics of a ritual?

DY: One characteristic of ritual is that it is causally opaque. Most of the time when we ask people why they perform rituals, they say, “I don't know, we just do them”. Either there's no stated purpose or if there is a purpose, there's no connection between the actions we undertake and the expected outcome. If I perform a rain dance, there's no causal link between me dancing and water falling from the sky.

Another characteristic of ritual that distinguishes it from habits and routines, is that rituals delineate the domain of the sacred. You can see this when rituals get interrupted. Sometimes we use the term ritual loosely. You might say, I go to this gas station, it became a habit, a ritual. But if you drive up to that gas station and it's closed, you’re not going to get upset. On the contrary, when our rituals get interrupted, we find this disturbing and morally upsetting. People perceive rituals fundamentally differently than ordinary actions because they delineate the domain of the mundane of the ordinary from the domain of the sacred.

In the West, we abuse the term ritual. Sometimes we say, my coffee is my ritual, brushing my teeth is my ritual. I've asked a lot of people all over the world to list rituals that are important to them and nobody has ever mentioned coffee or brushing their teeth.

e: In the history of Western culture, there is a distancing from ritual in the last 200 years. And in our postmodern culture ritual and also the relationship to the sacred is only allowed in an ironic relationship.

DX: Yes, but among the people rituals are alive. In my early field work, I went back to my home country, and did ethnography in rural Greek villages. There's the tension between the way theologians and priests would like people to worship and the way people actually worship. Even as the church has tried to distance itself from hyper ritualization, people have resisted this. They have all these beliefs that the church would call pagan. But people keep believing them and eventually the church gives up. This is what happened in Greece with beliefs in the evil eye. The church eventually accepted it in its theology. But they said, you can only heal it with a ritual performed in church, you're not allowed to treat it at home. Which is, of course, what everybody does, they treat it at home with their own rituals.

Especially Protestantism tried to put an end to this hyper ritualization. The phenomena that we're seeing today, like the New Age spirituality, are predominantly occurring in Protestant contexts. They're precisely a reaction to that trend and an attempt to reclaim the sense of the sacred. For example, in the United States, the most intense ecstatic religious rituals are occurring within offshoots of the Protestant church like the evangelical churches. They are a predictable reaction to the attempt to de-ritualize the church.

e: Rituals seem to perform a function in our meaning finding that we don't find in a more rationalistic relatedness to our environment. Because what you're describing with Protestantism is true for our Western enlightened culture in general.

DX: The enlightenment, with everything wonderful that is brought, also missed fundamental aspects of human existence, the importance of tradition, family, and community. Our social support networks are fundamental ways in which we find meaning. Our sense of self is based on our sense of who we are as a group member. Rituals are very good at creating and reinforcing that sense of self as a collective being.

One way in which they do this is by creating phenotypic matching. We observe cues about who we are related to. There are a lot of studies that show that we treat people who look more like us better – with all the negative implications. We feel more connected to people who are part of our group. By engaging in rituals we're getting all of these cues: we dress similarly, we move similarly, we chant the same chants, we use the same words, we wear the same clothes, we go through the same emotional experiences. That's one of the fundamental ways in which we create phenotypic matching.

Another way is through the sharing of emotions. When we go through a traumatic experience together, let's say if we went to the battlefield together or we survived a terrible accident, we feel a bond that is hard to describe. It connects us for the rest of our lives. A lot of traditional rituals that involve high arousal, like initiation ceremonies, seem to be particularly designed to bring people together to engage in highly emotional behaviors. This way, they create a sense of kinship.

e: So, rituals are an ancient human technology to create familiarity. In a globalized society many people have the experience of losing the traditional rootedness in a culture, including the rituals, and are exposed to an undefined, technological oriented global reality. How does ritualization work in this new environment? Do you see new forms of ritualization that respond to this global life?

DX: One of the best examples was the Covid pandemic, when people were deprived of rituals, which created a conundrum. The main functions of ritual are to soothe our anxieties and create a sense of social connection. During the pandemic, people had a higher level of anxiety and lost connection. And at that very moment, they were deprived of one of the fundamental human means of alleviating anxiety and feeling connected, which is ritual. Immediately as the pandemic started, you saw that people created new forms of ritual or found new ways of engaging in old rituals. There were drive-through birthday parties, or remote graduation ceremonies through avatars and virtual reality. Or people were defying the rules and risking fines, their own health and potentially their life to attend a funeral. In purely rational terms, it's a silly thing to do. But we are humans, we're not robots. These things are deeply meaningful to us. So, the pandemic was a clear demonstration of this, but it is a reflection of a more general phenomenon.

In the West we see a rise of new forms of spirituality. A lot of it is borrowed from the East, like meditation or yoga. Even when we create new rituals, we try to anchor them onto some ancient tradition. And there are also entirely new forms, like Burning Man, musical concerts or people getting together to perform reenactments. When I lived in Denmark, they were people who would dress up as Vikings and go camping for a week and engage in massive collective rituals that were reenactments of ancient battles.

e: The new environment that we're living in we could call the globalized social media environment becomes a big part of the relation fields that we are connected to. The social fabric of our relatedness is transforming to this new social media reality. Does this also has an impact on how we create rituals?

DX: Yes, this is going to be one of the biggest challenges and a potential threat to our sense of meaning. We're already seeing this in young generations, the levels of anxiety are skyrocketing.

Rituals are very hard to recreate in an online setting, as they largelywork through embodied collective interactions. There will be a point where our technology allows us to do that better, but nothing will substitute that feeling of awe that you get from standing in front of a gigantic waterfall.

When I think of transcendent experiences in my life, I remember the first time I saw another primate in the wild. Being eye to eye with another ape was for me a transcendent moment. These experiences are very hard to get through virtual technologies. The same is true for chanting in a stadium with 30,000 people, at a concert or at a megachurch.

e: Our relationship to nature has been a source for ritual since ancient times. Is the revival of rituals related to the ecological crisis we are in?

DX: There is currently a major challenge in our relationship to nature. People are getting disconnected from nature for many reasons. But one of those reasons is that we're losing our ability to create the sense of sacredness for nature. For the last 15 years I do fieldwork in the Indian Ocean and the island of Mauritius. At the center of that island is a sacred lake. There's a legend about how it became sacred. It is said that this lake was connected to the Ganges and that's why it was sacred. During the 70s local politicians flew to India, took a bottle of water from the Ganges, brought it back and organized a big public ceremony and poured it into the lake. They reinforced this sense of the sacred through this ceremony. In Mauritius, pretty much all the fisheries are depleted, there's overfishing everywhere. But in this sacred lake, there are enormous fish. People respect the rules because the lake is sacred. And I keep wondering, how can we use this sense of the sacred in order to re-sacralize nature and get people to change their relationship with our lived environment?

‍