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.