Rituals Kneaded with Societies, Societies Kneaded with Rituals: Social Regulation and Collective Rituals

Although ritual has been a subject of interest in the social sciences since their inception, it remains a fruitful topic, rich in new insights. However, rituals have been primarily studied within social anthropology, religious studies and sociology. Only in the last few decades have psychologists begun to focus on rituals more significantly. In this context, the evolutionary and cognitivist approach, of which the work included in this volume is a sample, is novel not only for the empirical insights it provides but also for its scientific interdisciplinarity and integration. For an illustration, one need only look at two recent books on rituals written by renowned anthropologists Harvey Whitehouse (2021) and Dimitris Xygalatas (2022) to realize to what extent psychological research is being integrated into the study of ritual. It has long been characteristic of the social sciences that new approaches have meant a rejection of the previous ones. Thus, scholarly paradigms have changed almost like architectural or artistic styles over time. The cognitive-evolutionary approach, though, not only integrates science across disciplines but also integrates social scientific knowledge and theories throughout the history of the discipline. Hence, recent research informed by the insights of psychology or biology is directly related to the great names of anthropology and sociology, such as mile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, Victor Turner and many others.