Ritual Imbalance in Contemporary China: A Ritual Form Theory Analysis

Barrett, Justin L.; Hornbeck, Ryan G.; Bleeker, Brianna D.; Barrett, Skylar T.; Hao, Chenfeng

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-62954-4_7

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…Similarly, Barrett et al. (2017) found that Taoist, Buddhist, and traditional Chinese rituals described by Mainland Chinese participants strongly conformed to RFH predictions with the exception that descriptions of special agent rituals did not conform to reversibility predictions (though this failure may stem from a unique feature of this particular data set, in which special agent rituals were largely limited to death rites involving corpses and therefore facing biological constraints on reversibility). These studies, then, representing 84 ritual descriptions and the aforementioned religious traditions, offer some support for RFH's predictions.…”

Section: Rfh Summarizedmentioning

confidence: 67%

“…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). For example, Malley and Barrett (2003) tested RFH (then termed the “Lawson‐McCauley Hypothesis”) in a North American context.…”

Section: Rfh Summarizedmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Hornbeck¹,

Barrett²

2020

Ethos

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Lawson and McCauley's ritual form hypothesis (RFH) appeals to natural cognition to capture several commonly observed features of religious rituals in one explanatory theory: (1) their repetition in the life of a participant tends to be distributed in bipolar fashion (typically only once in a lifetime or repeatedly, on the order of annually, monthly, weekly, or even daily); (2) their effects may or may not be reversed through other rituals; (3) their range in centrality to a religious tradition (from peripheral to essential); and (4) their range from dull, tedious affairs to evocative, emotional, life‐changing events high in sensory pageantry. In this article, we summarize RFH and then turn to its potential application to material culture. If RFH can partially explain which sorts of religious rituals will be religiously frequent, central, and high in sensory pageantry, then it may also probabilistically predict the sorts of materials used in these rituals.

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Section: Rfh Summarizedmentioning

confidence: 67%