Servage ritual “bread walking”: mythosemantics and cultural context

The cultural morphospace of ritual form

Ethnographic, historical, archaeological and experimental work suggests the existence of two basic clusters of ritual dynamics or ‘modes of religiosity’ — a low-frequency, high-arousal cluster linked to the formation of small cohesive communities (imagistic mode) and highfrequency, low-arousal cluster associated with larger, more centralized social morphology (doctrinal mode). Currently, howeve...

Ideology, Ritual Practice, and Cultural Heritage: an Introduction

Cultural Pragmatics The Cultural Pragmatics of Social Performance: Between Ritual and Rationality

Rituals are episodes of repeated and simplified cultural communication, in which the direct partners to a social interaction, and those observing it, share a mutual belief in the descriptive and prescriptive validity of the communication’s symbolic contents and accept the authenticity of one another’s intentions. It is because of this shared understanding of intention and content, and in the in...

Bringing Ritual to Mind Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms

Bringing Ritual toMind explores the cognitive and psychological foundations of religious ritual systems. Participants must recall their rituals well enough to ensure a sense of continuity across performances, and those rituals must motivate them to transmit and re-perform them. Most religious rituals the world over exploit either high performance frequency or extraordinary emotional stimulation...

Mindfulness in cultural context.

Mindfulness meditation and other techniques drawn from Buddhism have increasingly been integrated into forms of psychotherapeutic intervention. In much of this work, mindfulness is understood as a mode of awareness that is present-centered and nonevaluative. This form of awareness is assumed to have intrinsic value in promoting positive mental health and adaptation by interrupting discursive th...