Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living is the latest ethnographic offering of Dimitris Xygalatas, an anthropologist and cognitive scientist based at the University of Connecticut. It seeks to answer some basic human questions about “ceremonies pervade every documented society”. By engaging with what Dr Xygalatas calls “all the bewildering variety of human life”, Ritual teases out “the deep and subtle mechanisms that soothe, excite, divide and unite us”.
Much of Dr Xygalatas’s work focuses on religious ritual; in particular he emphasises various rites and ceremonies of the Greek Orthodox Church. He is an authority on the Anastenaria – the fire-walking festivals which either have their origins in pious medieval legend or may instead be Christianised vestiges of the cult of Dionysus – and wrote about them in depth in The Burning Saints. Ritual of all kinds involves a certain amount of blurring at the edges: we only have to think of Easter’s relationship with Passover, or the appropriation of Saturnalia by Christmas.
