Rituals and ritualization

Structural Ritualization

The idea that rituals are crucial to human behavior is consistent with the arguments of different social scientists who have used this concept to analyze and examine society such as Durkheim, Goffman, Collins, Douglas, Rappaport, Kertzer, Myerhoff, Alexander, Warner, and Bellah. However, despite the work of scholars such as these the concept of ritual has been underutilized, if not often ignore...

D. ONTOGENY OF RITUALIZATION Ontogeny of ritualization in man BY E. H. ERIKSON

Ritualization and the Process of Knowledge Transfer

We analyze interactions among members of rural communities in Ghana and agriculture development specialists. We find that these participants in the knowledge transfer process are separated by deep knowledge boundaries, as well as by diverging worldviews (one centered on community relations, the other on market relationships). In this context, knowledge transfer is enabled through ritualized int...

Reproductive rituals

TEIZO OGAWA (editor), History of obstetrics (Proceedings of the Seventh International Symposium on the Comparative History of Medicine-East and West), Tokyo, Division of Medical History, Taniguchi Foundation, 1984, 8vo, pp. viii, 283, illus., [no price stated]. ANN OAKLEY, The captured womb. A history of the medical care of pregnant women, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1984, 8vo, pp. x, 351, illus.,...

Anonymous Rituals

Religion and ritual have been characterized as costly ways for conditional cooperators to signal their type, and thus identify and interact with one another. But an effective signal may be prohibitively expensive: if the cost of participation is too small, freeriders may send the signal and behave selfishly later. However, if the ritual reveals only the average level of signaling in a group, fr...