Examining Special Patient Rituals in a Chinese Cultural Context: A Research Report

Abstract

Is reasoning about religious ritual tethered to ordinary, nonreligious human reasoning about actions? E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley’s ritual form hypothesis (rfh) constitutes a cognitive approach to religious ritual – an explanatory theory that suggests people use ordinary human cognition to make specific predictions about ritual properties, relatively independent of cultural or religious particulars. Few studies assess the credibility ofrfhand further evidence is needed to generalize its predictions across cultures. Towards this end, we assessed culturally Chinese “special patient” rituals in Singapore. Our findings strongly supportrfhpredictions for special patient ritual repeatability, reversibility, sensory pageantry and emotionality.

Ritual Forms and Ritual Stuff: Implications of Lawson and McCauley's Ritual Form Hypothesis for Material Culture

“…These descriptions were then coded and analyzed, using each ritual generated as the unit of analysis, and conformed to RFH predictions to a significantly greater degree than would be expected by chance. Using a similar methodology, Hornbeck, Bentley, and Barrett (2015) found that the Taoist, Buddhist, and traditional Chinese rituals described by ethnically Chinese informants in Singapore likewise almost perfectly conformed to RFH predictions concerning repeatability and reversibility. Similarly, Barrett et al.…”

“…A limited number of studies have assessed RFH empirically (e.g., Barrett and Lawson 2001; Malley and Barrett 2003; see also Barrett 2004; Hornbeck, Bentley, and Barrett 2015; Barrett et al. 2017) and used it to analyze historic patterns (e.g., Vial 2004).…”