News
The Useful Ritual
The pandemic has disrupted many aspects of daily life, including rituals both sacred and mundane. At the same time, it has opened a unique opportunity globally to adapt rituals to meet new needs and respond to new challenges.
Rituals are social conventions that range from religious ceremonies like baptisms and bat mitzvahs to simple greetings like handshakes, and serve critical social functions such as welcoming newborns into families, celebrating graduations and marriages and mourning loved ones who’ve died. Rituals also promote solidarity by allowing communities to express their shared goals and values.
Over the past year, people have used electronic media to rapidly transform routine social rituals. Like the in-person rituals they replaced, these new interactions – such as virtual happy hours, Zoom business meetings and distance-learning classrooms – strengthen social ties. They are essential to meeting our physical, social and psychological needs in the face of adversity.
But societies also use rituals for practical reasons, such as improving health and avoiding illness. There are good reasons people spend time, money and energy engaging in rituals in the face of COVID-19 restrictions.
Many religious rituals concern cleansing and purification. For example, it is obligatory for Muslims to wash their face, arms, head and feet before praying.
Anthropologists believe such rituals may be part of a hazard-precaution system, a psychological system geared toward responding to threats in the environment such as pathogens or contamination. Since reducing contamination and promoting hygiene is essential to health and survival, having rituals to spread these practices within a population is useful.
Rituals are social conventions that range from religious ceremonies like baptisms and bat mitzvahs to simple greetings like handshakes, and serve critical social functions such as welcoming newborns into families, celebrating graduations and marriages and mourning loved ones who’ve died. Rituals also promote solidarity by allowing communities to express their shared goals and values.
Over the past year, people have used electronic media to rapidly transform routine social rituals. Like the in-person rituals they replaced, these new interactions – such as virtual happy hours, Zoom business meetings and distance-learning classrooms – strengthen social ties. They are essential to meeting our physical, social and psychological needs in the face of adversity.
But societies also use rituals for practical reasons, such as improving health and avoiding illness. There are good reasons people spend time, money and energy engaging in rituals in the face of COVID-19 restrictions.
Many religious rituals concern cleansing and purification. For example, it is obligatory for Muslims to wash their face, arms, head and feet before praying.
Anthropologists believe such rituals may be part of a hazard-precaution system, a psychological system geared toward responding to threats in the environment such as pathogens or contamination. Since reducing contamination and promoting hygiene is essential to health and survival, having rituals to spread these practices within a population is useful.