The Ties That Bind Us Ritual, Fusion, and Identification
The Ties That Bind Us Ritual, Fusion, and Identification
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DOI：
10.1086/678698
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发表时间：
2014-12-01
影响因子：
2.2
通讯作者：
Lanman, Jonathan A.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Whitehouse, Harvey;Lanman, Jonathan A.
大多数社会科学家都赞同某种说法，即参与集体仪式可以促进社会凝聚力。然而，由于对“仪式”和“社会凝聚力”的本质缺乏精确性，以及社会科学和进化科学的理论和发现之间缺乏整合，阻碍了对这一主张的系统测试和评估。通过直接解决这些挑战，我们认为对仪式促进社会凝聚力的主张进行系统的调查和评估是可以实现的。我们提出了一种关于仪式、凝聚力和合作之间关系的通用且可检验的理论，该理论更精确地将“仪式”的特定元素（例如因果不透明和情感唤醒）与“社会凝聚力”的两种特定形式：群体认同和身份融合联系起来。此外，我们将这一理论建立在进化论的基础上，解释为什么特定的仪式实践模式会适应具有特定资源获取策略的社会。在制定我们的概念框架时，我们报告了许多正在进行的调查，这些调查根据来自受控心理实验以及人种学、考古学和历史记录的数据来检验我们的假设。
Most social scientists endorse some version of the claim that participating in collective rituals promotes social cohesion. The systematic testing and evaluation of this claim, however, has been prevented by a lack of precision regarding the nature of both "ritual" and "social cohesion" as well as a lack of integration between the theories and findings of the social and evolutionary sciences. By directly addressing these challenges, we argue that a systematic investigation and evaluation of the claim that ritual promotes social cohesion is achievable. We present a general and testable theory of the relationship between ritual, cohesion, and cooperation that more precisely connects particular elements of "ritual," such as causal opacity and emotional arousal, to two particular forms of " social cohesion": group identification and identity fusion. Further, we ground this theory in an evolutionary account of why particular modes of ritual practice would be adaptive for societies with particular resource-acquisition strategies. In setting out our conceptual framework, we report numerous ongoing investigations that test our hypotheses against data from controlled psychological experiments as well as from the ethnographic, archaeological, and historical records.