INTRODUCTION Waterpipe tobacco smoking (WTS) is an increasingly prevalent form of tobacco use in the United States. Its appeal may stem from its social, ritualistic, and aesthetic nature. Our aim in this study was to understand WTS as a social ritual with the goal of informing prevention efforts. METHODS We conducted a covert observational study consisting of 38 observation sessions in 11 WTS...

Palms (Arecaceae) are prominent elements in African traditional medicines. It is, however, a challenge to find detailed information on the ritual use of palms, which are an inextricable part of African medicinal and spiritual systems. This work reviews ritual uses of palms within African ethnomedicine. We studied over 200 publications on uses of African palms and found information about ritual ...

Horses are often kept in individual stables, rather than in outdoor groups, despite such housing system fulfilling many of their welfare needs, such as the access to social partners. Keeping domestic stallions in outdoor groups would mimic bachelor bands that are found in the wild. Unfortunately, the high level of aggression that unfamiliar stallions display when they first encounter each other...

On the basis of ethnographic and historical material this article makes a comparative analysis of the relationship between public events, ceremonies and academic rituals, institutional identity, and processes of transition and power at two universities, one in Mexico and the other in South Africa. The public events examined here play a major role in imagining and bringing about political shifts...

Over the years, research in ethno-linguistics contributed to gather corpora in a wide range of languages, cultures and topics. In the present work, we are investigating ritual speech in Yucatec Maya. The ritual discourse tends to have a cyclic structure with repetitive patterns and various types of parallelisms between speech sections. Previous studies have revealed an intricate connexion betwe...

Turner's suggestive analysis of African ritual symbolism (1) enhances one's appreciation of the complexity of expressive phenomena. There are, however, methodological and theoretical cautions to be raised. First, the approach he advocates attacks the problem of representations at the most difficult point of analysis. Symbols of the kind singled out by this method are repositories of many, highl...

Drosophila performs elaborate well-defined rituals of courtship, which involve several types of sensory inputs. Here, we report that Or47b-neurons promote male-mating success. Males with Or47b-neurons silenced/ablated exhibit reduced copulation frequency and increased copulation latency. Copulation latency of Or47b-manipulated flies increased proportionately with size of the assay arena, wherea...

The core beliefs, type of emotional energy and action tendencies of “hope groups” that engae in the policy process to advance their shared goals and “hate groups” that seek to expose the conspiratorial tendencies of a policy elite are compared and contrasted. The patterns of rhetoric and interaction rituals that charcterize interaction within these groups are then considered. The contribution t...

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...

GROWTH OF THE METROPOLITAN AREA (MAP) E N T R I E S M Multicentered Chicago Next Chicagoans like to think of their home as “multiethnic,” or as “the city of neighborhoods.” Indeed, the celebration of neighborhood is one of the binding rituals of Chicago culture. The shelves of local bookstores are crammed with neighborhood guides of various sorts, and in the 1990s Mayor Richard M. Daley harness...