Paper short abstract:

Synchronised action, such as in music and dance, often results in a social bonding effect. This may arise from the brain's drive to reduce uncertainty, as synchronised movement is a highly predictable social interaction, and the same principle may be applied to social coordination across timescales.

Paper long abstract:

Research both in the field and in the lab has observed a social bonding effect arising from synchronised action. It has been suggested that synchronised movement may engage the same reward systems associated with social grooming in other primates, allowing humans to utilise synchrony as a more efficient behaviour for bonding. The precise mechanism through which synchrony engages our reward systems is poorly understood, but one theory is that we find synchrony rewarding because it is more predictable and thus easier than non-synchronised social interactions. This draws upon a general principle that the brain is a predictive engine, aiming to reduce uncertainty in the environment. Synchronised action - being typified by repetitive, periodic movements in the other that can be predicted from those performed by the self - is then highly rewarding.

This theory may be extended across multiple timescales. In the case of musical performance, a common example of synchrony across cultures, people may synchronise their movements and breathing at the rhythmic level. In addition, they may harmonise their voices, which mechanically involves synchronisation of vibrations in the vocal folds, which is perceived as musical pitch. Finally, they may synchronise their behaviour at the scale of days and weeks, by coming together to sing at regular intervals in a doctrinal ritual mode. In this way, ritualised and synchronised actions may serve to increase predictability within a social group, creating social bonds through the rewards generated by prediction fulfilment, while a lack of multiscale synchrony may be socially disruptive.

Paper short abstract:

Enhanced prestige and social position are key to ritual healing. I extend classic "status syndrome" research in ways that better account for the relationship between social status and health in cross-cultural contexts and situations of social complexity.

Paper long abstract:

I argue that enhanced "social status" is central to how and why ritual participants find health benefits in their practices. Weber distinguished three dimensions of stratification: prestige, property, and power. Here, I suggest that enhanced prestige—loosely, one's level of respect and honor—combined with one's social position—a fourth dimension of social status—are key to ritual healing. Specifically, via ritual practice, worshippers can magnify their prestige, which in turn produces positive psychosocial states such as felt social connection and security, leading to both mental and physical health benefits. Further, I point to the utility of Dressler's notion of cultural consonance—the extent to which individuals approximate in their own lives culturally sanctioned beliefs and behaviors—for operationalizing prestige cum social position in a culturally sensitive manner in ritual (or other) contexts. To ground my analysis, I draw on past and current work that explores how involvement in Hindu ritual, in the way it allows low status community members in particular to enhance their social value and position, can lead to health-favorable changes in the experience of stress and in immune system gene regulation. Finally, I connect my thinking to foundational health disparities work: Marmot's "status syndrome," which points to a persistent connection between high social status and improved health. I argue that the perspectives on ritual healing highlighted in this paper extend Marmot's work in ways that allow it to better account for the relationship between social status and health in cross-cultural contexts and situations of social complexity.

Paper short abstract:

By using the Burmese democracy movement as a case study, I unpack the complex relationship between extreme bodily self-sacrifice, the elicitation of sublime, self-transcendent emotions, such as awe, and what I describe broadly as individual and community-level “resilience.”

Paper long abstract:

Over the last seven years, as a part of a long-term ethnographic project, I have been documenting the lives of former political prisoners in Burma who took part in a non-violent movement for democracy. Those who rise as gaungzaungs (leaders) in this movement are known not only for having survived extreme experiences of torture, dehumanization, and deprivation at the hands of the military state, but for their ability to endure such states for unusually long periods of time—sometimes living through imprisonment for upwards of twenty years. Once released from prison, these gaungzaungs retain their leadership roles in the movement, exercising both political power and interpersonal agency, as well as commanding a unique moral authority. Indeed, it is through their extreme acts of bodily self-sacrifice, that gaungzaungs inspire both devotion and emulation on the part of their supporters. In this paper, I unpack the complex relationship between extreme bodily self-sacrifice, the elicitation of sublime, self-transcendent emotions, such as awe, and the relative “resiliency” of the Burmese democracy movement. I synthesize empirical findings from the science of human flourishing with anthropological theories that emphasize the beneficial effects and functional properties of rites of terror and passages. I discuss my ethnographic findings not only in terms of universalizing psychological models, but situate them both historically and culturally within a moral and cosmological universe that draws heavily upon Theravada Buddhist epistemology and folk beliefs.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my current research on cultural evolution, smartphone addiction and political polarization, I present different case studies on the rise of extreme beliefs and practices, which I argue need to be understood as attempts to recreate meaning, ritual, and predictability in a fragmented world

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists have documented different forms of rituals as key mechanisms in the building and maintenance of sociality. “Imagistic” modalities entail rarely performed, extreme rites of passages that etch autobiographical memory and create strong bonds among small groups of people Frequently performed “doctrinal” rituals, in turn, (like going to mass), build semantic memory while fostering common goals, belief systems, and a sense of belonging across large and ‘anonymous’ imagined communities. The socio-cognitive function of cyclically-performed rites like feasts and Holy Days has received less anthropological attention. By some accounts, the advent of cyclical rites enabled the spread of a shared sense of time through the coordination of daily, weekly, and yearly schedules. While accounts of the disintegration of social ties and shared systems of meaning that arose with modernity have been commonplace in social science for over a century, the ritual and temporal dimensions of these problems have been under-theorized. I propose to describe the multiple levels at which contemporary deritualization and temporal fragmentation brought about by the Internet contributes to increasingly fragile, distressed, and polarized societies. In recent years, the erosion of religious and secular rites of passages (like proms or military service) has been argued to coincide with a decline in resilience and increasingly poor mental health among millennials and Generation Z . I argue that the final blow to collective strengths came about with the rise of cellphones, (then smartphones), which brought about a historically unprecedented rupture from collective time, attention, and action. Drawing on my current research on cultural evolution, smartphone addiction and political polarization, I present different case studies on the rise of extreme beliefs and practices, which I argue need to be understood as attempts to recreate meaning, ritual, and predictability in a fragmented world.