Reestablishing feelings of control after experiencing uncertainty has long been considered a fundamental motive for human behavior. We propose that rituals (i.e., socially stipulated, causally opaque practices) provide a means for coping with the aversive feelings associated with randomness due to the perception of a connection between ritual action and a desired outcome. Two experiments were c...

Do human beings need rituals? Have they become an obsolete “evolutionary appendix” in the modern world, or are they an indispensable part of the human condition? Right at the start, I wish to adopt a clear stance with regard to this repeatedly controversial discussion in ritual studies: From the perspective of cultural anthropology, I assume that human beings need rituals, that they are an anth...

Disabling phobias and phobia like compulsive rituals are surprisingly common in the general population, though only a minority ask for help. Behavioural treatment (exposure) and antidepressants are the most helpful approaches. Most patients can help themselves if they use a self exposure approach systematicaily under the guidance of a clinician. The method seems weli suited for use by general p...

The article interrogates the grievability of military lives by studying female next kin as subjects post-colonial Pakistan and suggests that these non-masculine non-military bodies act a symbolic embodiment grief associated with soldier death, its material benefactor. A study their affective management, traces national local commemorative practices around death instituted Military during War on...

This paper looks at healing performances as ethnographic expressions of local knowledge and culture embedded within the Malay psyche and gemeinschaft. As society develops and progresses, these healing performances are caught within conflicting trajectories which become compounded by the contestations of tradition, religious concerns, locality and modernity. As exemplifications of the Malay etho...

A major role of culture is to imply the expansion spatial and temporal borders being with aim abolish them completely. The meaning death disappearance occupies a special place in many works. Marie Darrieussecq, Christian Boltanski Sophie Calle, artists exploiting imaginary possibilities letters but also installations, give us some visions mortuary rituals adapted accordance changing contemporan...

Traditionally, ritual has been studied from broad sociocultural perspectives, with little consideration of the psychological processes at play. Recently, however, psychologists have begun turning their attention to the study of ritual, uncovering the causal mechanisms driving this universal aspect of human behavior. With growing interest in the psychology of ritual, the current paper provides a...

OBJECTIVE Our goal was to identify and describe types of meaning-making processes that occur among parents during bereavement meetings with their child's intensive care physician after their child's death in a pediatric intensive care unit. METHODS Fifty-three parents of 35 deceased children participated in a bereavement meeting with their child's physician 14.5 ± 6.3 weeks after the child's ...