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Nutrients Mar 2020Cocoa has been used as a ceremonial and hedonistic food for thousands of years in the tropical parts of America and for hundreds of years in the western world. […].
Cocoa has been used as a ceremonial and hedonistic food for thousands of years in the tropical parts of America and for hundreds of years in the western world. […].
Topics: Cacao; Chocolate; Feeding Behavior; Health Status; Humans
PubMed: 32151002
DOI: 10.3390/nu12030698 -
Emergencias : Revista de La Sociedad... Apr 2022
Topics: Ceremonial Behavior; Humans
PubMed: 35275468
DOI: No ID Found -
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal... Aug 2020This paper argues that rituals are mechanisms of resource management. The argument is based on four observations: (i) over the course of hominin evolution, fitness... (Review)
Review
This paper argues that rituals are mechanisms of resource management. The argument is based on four observations: (i) over the course of hominin evolution, fitness became contingent on psychological states; (ii) these psychological states can be understood as 'resources', not unlike material resources such as energy, food or fuel; (iii) ritual 'manages' these psychological resources-meaning that it cultivates, builds and directs them; and (iv) ritual management can be analytically decomposed, providing a new descriptive tool for understanding rituals and predictions about ritual survival. This article is part of the theme issue 'Ritual renaissance: new insights into the most human of behaviours'.
Topics: Ceremonial Behavior; Humans
PubMed: 32594870
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0429 -
Transcultural Psychiatry Oct 2023This issue of presents selected papers from the McGill Advanced Study Institute on "Cultural Poetics of Illness and Healing." The meeting addressed the cognitive...
This issue of presents selected papers from the McGill Advanced Study Institute on "Cultural Poetics of Illness and Healing." The meeting addressed the cognitive science of language, metaphor, and from embodied and enactivist perspectives; how cultural affordances, background knowledge, discourse, and practices enable and constrain poiesis; the cognitive and social poetics of symptom and illness experience; and the politics and practice of poetics in healing ritual, psychotherapy, and recovery. This introductory essay outlines an approach to illness experience and its transformation in healing practices that emphasizes embodied processes of metaphor as well as the social processes of self-construal and positioning through material and discursive engagements with the cultural affordances that constitute our local worlds. The approach has implications for theory building, training, and clinical practice in psychiatry.
Topics: Humans; Psychiatry; Disease; Culture
PubMed: 37933139
DOI: 10.1177/13634615231205544 -
Frontiers in Sociology 2023By relating conversation analysis (CA), in particular CA research on institutional interaction to such research traditions as sociological institutionalism, new... (Review)
Review
By relating conversation analysis (CA), in particular CA research on institutional interaction to such research traditions as sociological institutionalism, new materialism, and ritual theory, the article illustrates how CA scholarship can contribute to macrosociological theorizing. This argument is illustrated by how national parliaments are organized as institutions. The main point made in the article is that occasions of what CA calls institutional interaction should be considered as rituals. Although those occasions are scripted ceremonial performances wherein social pressure, material conditions, or avoidance of punishment make actors conform, they still play a role in constituting social order by making participants honor the rules and principles codified in an organization's frontstage events. The article also underlines that organizational arrangements do not determine what actors can say or do, but they impose limits and conditions on people's conduct. Finally, the paper suggests that it is through such arrangements of institutional interaction that social structure is created, maintained, and naturalized.
PubMed: 37881646
DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2023.1146448 -
Annals of Palliative Medicine Jul 2023Bereavement, a specific kind of grief in response to a death, has been embedded in human history, in cultural patterns, with ritual, ceremony, and community kindness...
Bereavement, a specific kind of grief in response to a death, has been embedded in human history, in cultural patterns, with ritual, ceremony, and community kindness being the mainstay of grief support. The advent of professionalised grief counselling has seen the increasing domination of professional support as the best way to support someone bereaved, with a consequent loss of the varied forms of community support. The availability of professional grief counselling is limited, with only a small percentage of bereaved people accessing it or needing to access it. In this article, we argue for a realignment of professional grief services, strengthening community actions, and reorientation of health care in keeping with the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion. Community sources of grief support are being reinvented in multiple ways. Professional services can develop links and relationships with these communities of support. A population-based public health approach to bereavement care is needed. This can only be achieved through communities and professionals working together. This partnership working underlines three implications for practice. These are (I) love and friendship must be the bedrock of support for grief and loss and the strengthening of these supports should be the priority for all therapeutic and social actions, (II) the multiple and varied community and civic sector sources of grief support should be the mainstay of the bereaved, and (III) bereavement professionals should work in the context of community, linking their clients with sustainable community supports.
PubMed: 37355805
DOI: 10.21037/apm-23-24 -
Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma Sep 2020A substantial minority of Americans have religious beliefs against one or more medical treatments. Some groups promote exclusive reliance on prayer and ritual for...
A substantial minority of Americans have religious beliefs against one or more medical treatments. Some groups promote exclusive reliance on prayer and ritual for healing nearly all diseases. Jehovah's Witnesses oppose blood transfusions. Hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren have religious or conscientious exemptions from immunizations. Such exemptions have led to personal medical risk, decreases in herd immunity, and outbreaks of preventable disease. Though First Amendment protections for religious freedom do not include a right to neglect a child, many states have enacted laws allowing religious objectors to withhold preventive, screening, and, in some states, therapeutic medical care from children. Religious exemptions from child health and safety laws should be repealed so that children have equal rights to medical care.
PubMed: 33052253
DOI: 10.1007/s40653-020-00323-z -
Frontiers in Psychology 2021The cultural project is a therapeutic melding of emotion, symbols, and knowledge. In this paper, I describe how spiritual emotions engendered through encounters in... (Review)
Review
The cultural project is a therapeutic melding of emotion, symbols, and knowledge. In this paper, I describe how spiritual emotions engendered through encounters in imaginative culture enable fixation of metaphysical beliefs. Evolved affective systems are domesticated through the social practices of imaginative culture so as to adapt people to live in culturally defined cooperative groups. Conditioning, as well as tertiary-level cognitive capacities such as symbols and language are enlisted to bond groups through the imaginative formats of myth and participatory ritual. These cultural materializations can be shared by communities both synchronically and diachronically in works of art. Art is thus a form of self-knowledge that equips us with a motivated understanding of ourselves in the world. In the sacred state produced through the arts and in religious acts, the sense of meaning becomes noetically distinct because affect infuses the experience of immanence, and one's memory of it, with salience. The quality imbued thereby makes humans attentive to subtle signs and broad "truths." Saturated by emotions and the experience of alterity in the immanent encounter of imaginative culture, information made salient in the sacred experience can become the basis for belief fixation. Using examples drawn from mimetic arts and arts of immanence, I put forward a theory about how sensible affective knowledge is mediated through affective systems, direct perception, and the imagination.
PubMed: 34925160
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.757234 -
Frontiers in Psychology 2019Even though religious extremism is currently a hotly debated topic, it is often reduced to a unidimensional construct that is linked to religious violence. We argue that... (Review)
Review
Even though religious extremism is currently a hotly debated topic, it is often reduced to a unidimensional construct that is linked to religious violence. We argue that the contemporary use of the term "extreme" fails to capture the different interpretations, beliefs, and attitudes defining extreme religious identity. To address this issue, we unpack the meaning of the term "extreme" in religious contexts and answer the call by scholars to provide a more comprehensive framework that incorporates the many different dimensions that constitute religion. We develop a model of religious extremism in theological, ritual, social, and political dimensions of religion based on the variety of Islamic groups in Indonesia. Going beyond an analysis that equates Muslim extremism with violence, we argue that Muslims (or indeed any religious group) may be extreme in some dimensions but moderate in others, e.g., extreme in ritual and moderate in political. Interpreting extremism relative to these four dimensions provides new insights when examining the global issue of religious extremism and helps to better predict how religious extremism is expressed. More generally, our framework helps to develop an understanding of radicalism that goes beyond a focus on violence.
PubMed: 31803105
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02560