Dimitris Xygalatas, "Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living" (Little, Brown Spark, 2022)

Dimitris Xygalatas, "Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living" (Little, Brown Spark, 2022)

Ritual is one of the oldest, and 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 and can persist nearly unchanged for centuries, their logic has remained a mystery—until now. In Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living (Little, Brown Spark, 2022), pathfinding scientist Dimitris Xygalatas leads us on an enlightening tour through this shadowy realm of human behavior. Armed with cutting-edge technology and drawing on discoveries from a wide range of disciplines, he presents a powerful new perspective on our place in the world. In birthday parties and coronations, in silent prayer, in fire-walks and terrifying rites of passage, in all the bewildering variety of human life, Ritual reveals the deep and subtle mechanisms that bind us together. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(1000)

Francesca Sbardella, "Inhabiting Silence: An Anthropologist in the Cloister" (Berghahn Books, 2025)

Francesca Sbardella, "Inhabiting Silence: An Anthropologist in the Cloister" (Berghahn Books, 2025)

Monasteries are typically characterized by physical and symbolic limitations on access as they are usually known through written texts and accounts by nuns who live in that world but do not allow othe...

7 Sep 38min

Janaka Jayawickrama and Jerome Wright, "Under the Gaze of Global Mental Health: A Critical Reflection" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

Janaka Jayawickrama and Jerome Wright, "Under the Gaze of Global Mental Health: A Critical Reflection" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

What went wrong with global mental health? Under the Gaze of Global Mental Health: A Critical Reflection (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) critically examines how the globalisation of mental health through ...

6 Sep 1h 3min

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer et al eds., "Mapping Medical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century" (Rutgers UP, 2026)

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer et al eds., "Mapping Medical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century" (Rutgers UP, 2026)

What does medical anthropology look like in the twenty-first century? That is the central question of Mapping Medical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century, a new edited volume by Matthew J. Wol...

6 Sep 57min

Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference

Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference

Examining how memory, intergenerational transmission, and kinship work together, Relative Strangers (U Toronto Press, 2024) sheds light on Romani life in Palestine. Arpan Roy presents an ethnographic ...

5 Sep 56min

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, "Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier" (U Arizona Press, 2025)

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, "Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier" (U Arizona Press, 2025)

In the Anthropocene, a question has become increasingly urgent: What does it mean to be human? Set against the backdrop of southern Chile’s conservation frontier, Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a ...

4 Sep 58min

Chika Watanabe, "Play to Survive: Disaster Preparedness Along the Ring of Fire" (Stanford UP, 2026)

Chika Watanabe, "Play to Survive: Disaster Preparedness Along the Ring of Fire" (Stanford UP, 2026)

We live in a fragile world. This much is evident as stories abound of natural disasters that wipe out communities in an instant. How can we survive the future on such a planet, amid intensifying cli...

4 Sep 55min

Sarah M. Rios, "Diseases Have No Eyes: Valley Fever and Environmental Health Justice" (Temple UP, 2026)

Sarah M. Rios, "Diseases Have No Eyes: Valley Fever and Environmental Health Justice" (Temple UP, 2026)

Diseases Have No Eyes: Valley Fever and Environmental Health Justice (Temple University Press, 2026) investigates how communities in Central Valley, California deal with Valley Fever, a painful illn...

3 Sep 26min

Linguistic Unease in Healthcare

Linguistic Unease in Healthcare

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick chats with Dr. Nicole Marinaro, a sociolinguist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg. Her work explores how languag...

2 Sep 39min

Populært innen Vitenskap

fastlegen
tingenes-tilstand
romkapsel
liberal-halvtime
jss
rekommandert
vett-og-vitenskap-med-gaute-einevoll
tomprat-med-gunnar-tjomlid
villmarksliv
forskningno
fjellsportpodden
sinnsyn
rss-paradigmepodden
tidlose-historier
dekodet-2
rss-rekommandert
rss-overskuddsliv
nevropodden
rss-inn-til-kjernen-med-sunniva-rose
nordnorsk-historie