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.