The Frazerian question of murder turned into ritual sacrifice is foundational to cultural anthropology. Frazer described the antinomian figure a king, who was, at once, priest and murderer. Generations anthropologists have studied in ethnographic contexts theorized about its religious significance. But itself may turn problem, René Girard wrote “the sacrificial crisis”, when real issue failure ...

INTRODUCTION Ritual is intimately connected with the mask, either in the wearing that hides the true face, or in the adoption of a public face. The mask makes the disengagement from ordinary time and the connection to the ancient and repetitive, which is the heart of ritual, psychologically acceptable. Together, ritual and mask facilitate the apprehension of identity and its connections with pa...

Sometimes problems are only hard when the numerical quantities are arbitrary, complicated large integers. When these numerical quantities are limited to being small integers, the problems become efficiently solvable. (One way to formalize this is to consider these quantities as being specified in unary, and ask if the problem becomes polynomial-time solveable.) This is called being “hard in the...