What is Ritual for?

Human rituals are puzzling, as they typically involve obvious expenditures of effort, energy and resources without equally obvious payoffs. Evolutionary theorists have long proposed that such costly behaviors would not have survived throughout human history unless they conveyed certain benefits to their practitioners. But how can such benefits be operationalised and measured? In this talk, I will present a series of studies that combined laboratory and field methods to explore and quantify the effects of ritual at the individual and social level.

Dr. Xygalatas’ areas of expertise include ritual, religion, and cognition. His research focuses on the application of scientific methods and technologies in ethnographic field research. He has conducted several years of fieldwork in Southern Europe and Mauritius. Before coming to UConn, he held positions at the universities of Princeton, Aarhus, and Masaryk, where he served as Director of the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion (LEVYNA). He currently holds a joint position between Aarhus University and the University of Connecticut, where he is directing the Experimental Anthropology Lab.

Dimitris Xygalatas, Ass.Professor, University of Concecticut (UCONN), Anthropology Department