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In this Henry Myers Lecture, I summarize several decades of collaborative research on the role of ritual in group bonding and co‐operation, ranging from psychology experiments in university laboratories to field research among indigenous groups, and from surveys with armed revolutionaries to extended interviews with religious adherents. This body of work is helping to clarify the mechanisms by which social cohesion and prosocial behaviour are generated in a variety of groups, such as mothers experiencing traumatic births, football fans suffering defeat at crucial matches in Brazil and Australia, and Muslim fundamentalists in Indonesia contemplating insults to Islam in faraway conflicts. These findings also shed light on changes in ritual life from the palaeolithic to the first farmers and from archaic states to the first moralizing religions. In keeping with the forward‐looking theme of the 2022 RAI conference, I consider the implications of these findings for various practical problems facing humanity today, such as how to reduce crime and to prevent violent extremism and how to foster more inclusive forms of leadership and motivate action on environmental issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Melanesian initiation cults frequently incorporate rites that instil a profound and lasting terror in the initiates. This article surveys several contemporary theories of these traumatic ordeals, and argues that these theories establish generalities only at the cost of adequate engagement with the cognitive and affective processes entailed in ritual performance. I propose a new approach, based on theories of 'flashbulb memory', which penetrates more deeply the religious experiences engendered in traumatic ritual, and also accounts for certain recurrent patterns of political association in initiation systems. 'Rites of terror' are here envisaged as part of a nexus of psychological and sociological processes, dubbed the 'imagistic mode of religiosity'., Terror is an integral component of religious experience in many of the societies of Papua New Guinea. Following a hair-raising account of penis-bleeding among the Ilahita Arapesh, Tuzin observes that [...]

Sperber argues that humans are susceptible to certain representations and not others as a result of genetically specified mental devices, and that this helps to explain the global recurrence of certain cultural concepts. Nevertheless, Sperber argues that other representations, to which we have no innate susceptibility, may become widespread for sociological reasons. Against the notion of genetic 'programming', I argue that all mental processes are socially constructed. Based on a synthesis of recent theories in neurology, artificial intelligence, psychology and anthropology, I argue for an integrated cross-disciplinary theory of cultural transmission., In his Malinowski Memorial Lecture, Sperber (1985) claimed that culture consists of widely transmitted representations. The question which an 'epidemiology of representations' seeks to answer, he argued, is why some [...]

Looks at the impact of Christianity to the political consciousness of the people in Papua New Guinea. Teachings of Christian missionaries on human brotherhood; Social transformation in Papua New Guinea.