Ritual

How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

Read by: Neil Gardner

Author: Dimitris Xygalatas

Write A Review

At a Glance

Format
Digital Audiobook

Duration
09:14.20

Published: 9th June 2022

Digital Audiobook

$44.99

or 4 interest-free payments of $11.25 with

Instant Digital Delivery to your Kobo Reader App

A radical anthropologist takes readers on a journey through the shadow side of human civilisation

Shortlisted for The 2023 British Academy Book Prize

From fire walking to funerals, the hidden science of the rituals that give life meaning

Ritual is perhaps the oldest, and certainly the most enigmatic, thread in human culture. Apparently pointless ceremonies pervade every documented society: from handshakes to hexes, hazings to parades. Before we learned to farm, we were gathering in giant stone temples. And yet, though rituals exist in every culture and can persist nearly unchanged for centuries, their logic has remained a mystery until now.

Today, a fearless new generation of anthropologists is venturing into this shadowy realm. Armed with cutting-edge technology and drawing on discoveries from a huge range of disciplines, they emerge with a powerful new perspective on our place in the world. Join the pathfinding scientist Dimitris Xygalatas on a tour of human culture at its strangest. In coronations, in silent prayer, in fire-walks and in all the bewildering variety of humanity's ritual life, Xygalatas reveals the deep and subtle mechanisms that bind us together.

About the Author

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