Ritualization

Lore & Background

Konrad Lorenz, working with greylag geese and water shrews, showed that ritualization was an important process in their development. He demonstrated that geese obsessively displayed a reflexive motor pattern of egg retrieval when stimulated by the sight of an egg outside their nest. In shrews, once they had become used to jumping over a stone in their path, they continued jumping at that place after the stone was removed. This behavior is analogous to obsessive-compulsive disorder in humans.

Oskar Heinroth in 1910 and Lorenz from 1935 onward studied the triumph ceremony in geese, which Lorenz described as becoming a fixed ritual. It involves rolling behavior of the head and neck and cackling with the head stretched forward, occurring only among geese that know each other—within a family or between mates. The ceremony appears in varied situations, such as when mates meet after separation, when disturbed, or after an attack. This behavior is also known in other species, such as the Canada goose.

In humans, ritualization is associated with Catherine Bell, who drew on the Practice Theory of Pierre Bourdieu to take a less functional view of ritual. More recently, scholars in the cognitive science of religion—Pascal Boyer, Pierre Liénard, and William W. McCorkle, Jr.—have conducted experimental, ethnographic, and archival research on how ritualized actions inform the study of ritualization. They argue that ritualized compulsions relate to an evolved cognitive architecture where social, cultural, and environmental selection pressures stimulate hazard-precaution systems such as predation, contagion, and disgust. McCorkle argued that these ritualized compulsions, especially regarding dead bodies in mortuary behavior, were turned into ritual scripts by professional guilds only several thousand years ago with advancements in technology such as domestication of plants and animals, literacy, and writing.

Reader's Guide

Ritualization is significant as a concept bridging ethology and the cognitive science of religion. In non-human animals, the work of Konrad Lorenz and Oskar Heinroth on greylag geese and water shrews established ritualization as a stereotyped, reflexive behavior independent of direct physiological function, analogous to human obsessive-compulsive disorder. The triumph ceremony in geese—a fixed ritual involving head rolling and cackling among familiar individuals—illustrates how such behaviors become embedded in social contexts. In humans, Catherine Bell applied Practice Theory to offer a less functional view of ritualization, while later scholars like Boyer, Liénard, and McCorkle linked ritualized compulsions to evolved hazard-precaution systems. McCorkle’s work on mortuary behavior suggests that these compulsions were formalized into ritual scripts only with the advent of agriculture, literacy, and writing. The concept thus provides a framework for understanding how stereotyped actions arise across species and how they may become culturally elaborated in humans.

Did You Know?

• Konrad Lorenz showed that greylag geese obsessively displayed a reflexive motor pattern of egg retrieval when stimulated by the sight of an egg outside their nest.
• Water shrews, after becoming used to jumping over a stone in their path, continued jumping at that place after the stone was removed.
• The triumph ceremony in geese involves rolling behavior of the head and neck and cackling with the head stretched forward, occurring only among geese that know each other.
• William W. McCorkle, Jr. argued that ritualized compulsions regarding dead bodies were turned into ritual scripts by professional guilds only several thousand years ago with advancements in technology such as domesticati