By Victoria Jaggard, SCIENCE executive editor, January 13, 2021
PHOTOGRAPH BY DIANA BAGNOLI/LAIF, REDUX
As a proud science geek, I’ve never been particularly superstitious. I spill salt with abandon; I married a man born on the 13th of a month; I let a black cat cross my path for almost 17 years. And yet, I instinctively say “bless you” when someone sneezes. That’s not being superstitious—I certainly don’t think I’m preventing someone’s soul from escaping their body. It’s just polite.
As it turns out, a lot of the social norms we practice today may have had their roots in various attempts to ward of disease and disasters. As Tim Vernimmen reports for Nat Geo, for a long time, the shrouded origin of a ritual was one of its defining characteristics. “Rituals can reinforce a sense of community and common beliefs,” he writes. However, the diversity of these kinds of cultural practices “can also alienate and separate people, particularly when the valued rituals of one culture strike another as bizarre.” It’s tough to defend a treasured practice when you can’t rationally explain why you’re doing it.
For many rituals, this enigmatic nature will endure. But sweeping research from a number of disciplines now shows that various human cultures today practice certain behaviors because people once thought it would keep them safe, even if the initial reason for the behavior has long been forgotten. For instance, cognitive scientist Cristine Legare of the University of Texas at Austin documented 269 rituals associated with pregnancy and birth that are still practiced in the Indian state of Bihar, where maternal and infant mortality is high. Crucially, a significant proportion of these rituals are perfectly consistent with modern medical advice, Legare says.
Today, the COVID-19 pandemic has us adopting behaviors that, for all we know, could be mysterious but omnipresent rituals in a few hundred years. People of the future may be singing a 20-second handwashing song or giving each other elbow bumps long after COVID-19 has been conquered. And while I certainly hope they won’t be the only potential legacies of this pandemic, the ‘90s girl in me loves the prospect of my far-flung descendants lightly humming the chorus to Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” without any real idea why. (Pictured at top, celebrants of the Hindu Vedic festival of Chhath Puja often bathe in holy water, abstain from food and drink, and stand in the water for at least one hour to seek protection for their families.)
(Sources: National Geographic)
Đăng nhận xét