Davis-Floyd, Robbie, and Charles D. Laughlin. 2022. Ritual What It Is, How It Works, and Why, New York: Berghahn Books, 322pp., ISBN 978-1-80073-530-9

Key Words: Ritual, Belief System, Human Behaviour, Performance, Cognition

Ritual What It Is, How It Works, and Why is designed for both academic and lay audiences. The book begins by clearly defining how the term ‘ritual’ will be used and an outline of its key characteristics. The authors identify and elaborate on eight core characteristics of ritual. Ritual is defined “as a patterned, repetitive, and symbolic enactment of enactment of cultural (or individual) beliefs and values. More simply put, ritual enacts cultural (or individual) beliefs and values” (p. 256). Using multiple examples, the book details how ritual works on the human body and brain to produce its often profound effects. These include enhancing courage, effecting healing, and generating group cohesion by enacting cultural or individual beliefs and values. It also shows what happens when ritual fails. Appendix One and Two provide great support to the book and are invaluable for all readers. 

The authors organize the book into twelve sections. Chapter One focuses on symbols and the authors describe a process they call “symbolic penetration.” This process they argue is where symbols enter individual conscious and generate a strong emotional reaction based on their belief systems. Chapters Two and Three expand on these core concepts introduced in chapter One. The discussions center around the “cognitive matrix,” a system of meaning and belief that rituals are designed to express, enact, and transmit. In Chapter Two the authors draw on commonly known stories such as The Three Little Pigs and Adam and Eve to demonstrate how rituals are enacted and then spread through myths, paradigms, and belief systems and the individual or group values they contain. Chapter Three investigates the nature of belief systems paying particular attention to the great degree of variation these systems have across cultures.

Chapter Four discusses the characteristics of ritual as the authors demonstrate the impacts ritual drivers have on the brain. This is achieved through a discussion on states of consciousness and altered states of conscious. The authors provide a wide range of ritual examples and their associated intrinsic drivers. Chapter Five analyses ritual techniques and technologies investigating both how rituals are technologized in a modern world but also how ancient techniques are deeply embedded into ritual that operate in the modern high-tech world. Chapter Six explores how rituals are framed and set apart from ordinary reality. The authors also investigate the possibilities when rituals fail. This concept is important to discuss as not all rituals (both informal and formal) are successful. As the next chapters discuss the successful elements of ritual through performance, cognition, and adaptation to question of failure needed to be addressed.

Chapter Eight discusses ritual and cognition, viewing the four stages of cognition with a connection to the anthropological concepts of realism, fundamentalism, fanaticism, ethnocentrism, cultural relativism, and global humanism. Chapter Nine investigates the way rituals both conserve and transmit the cognitive matrix and belief systems. This chapter is one that I found to be most interesting as the cultural significance of ritual is addressed. While this chapter views some historical examples such as prohibition there is also an assessment of how COVID has changed greeting rituals. Chapter Ten is an interesting and practical entry as it provides examples on designing ritual. The authors explore the idea of adaptive ritual strategy explaining how traditional rituals can be combined or adapt