A Missed Opportunity. A review on Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, London: Profile Books, 2022.

Abstract

This review recognizes that Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living has many good qualities and relates a story of scholarship that, according to the assertions of the author, heralds a brave new world of interdisciplinary examination of research objects heretofore the traditional and exclusive province of anthropology, comparative religion, and the humanities in general. But despite the seemingly broad sense of acceptance this book claims for the Cognitive Science of Religion, the decades-old field upon which the tenets of this book are based, in reality it betrays itself as a microcosm of a niche-driven interpretation often found in the social sciences and humanities, i.e. dismissing some and ignoring other extant work in order to claim unique subject matter expertise. Unfortunately, that exercise results in the sacrifice of (1) parsimonious explanatory claims and (2) veritable engagement with the already existing and robust interdisciplinary and well-funded research programs addressing ritualized behavior, all to the detriment of the ostensible claims the book makes championing a robust, interdisciplinary epistemological pluralism.