Ritual How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living Dimitris Xygalatas by Dimitris Xygalatas 9780316462600, 0316462608 instant download after payment.

Ritual is one of the oldest, & certainly most enigmatic, threads in the history of human culture. It presents a profound paradox: people ascribe the utmost importance to their rituals, but few can explain why they are so important. Apparently pointless ceremonies pervade every documented society, from handshakes to hexes, hazings to parades. Before we ever learned to farm, we were gathering in giant stone temples to perform elaborate rites and ceremonies. And yet, though rituals exist in every culture & can persist nearly unchanged for centuries, their logic has remained a mystery—until now.

In Ritual, pathfinding scientist Dimitris Xygalatas leads us on an enlightening tour through this shadowy realm of human behavior. Armed with cutting-edge technology & drawing on discoveries from a wide range of disciplines, he presents a powerful new perspective on our place in the world. In birthday parties & coronations, in silent prayer, in fire-walks & terrifying rites of passage, in all the bewildering variety of human life, Ritual reveals the deep & subtle mechanisms that bind us together.

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Dimitris Xygalatas is a pioneering anthropologist & cognitive scientist who runs the experimental anthropology lab at the University of Connecticut. He has been interviewed about his groundbreaking work by the New York Times, the Guardian, PBS, the History Channel, & many other outlets.