Invisible Rituals

Dimitris Xygalatas’s Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living (2022) provides a much-needed ethnographically informed cognitive science of rituals. Among other things, the book tries to outline common cognitive grounds for such diverse practices as the calm Japanese tea ceremony and the emotionally arousing, physically painful Thaipusam ritual in Mauritius. Acknowledging the hallmark features of prototypical rituals discussed by Xygalatas, this paper further discusses the common grounds. Specifically, I suggest that prototypical rituals are continuous with cultural models. That is, much of the internalized cultural models contain the same cognitive features of ritualized behaviour and are the source of silent rituals of everyday life. More specifically, at its deeper cognitive core lies normative cognition, which might be a source of much of the compulsive urge to act properly and in a scripted, rigid manner. To illustrate the point, an ethnographic example from Mongolia will be briefly described.