Religious Ritual and Cooperation: Testing for a Relationship on Israeli Religious and Secular Kibbutzim.

The article attempts to correlate collective rituals as an expression and reaffirmation of shared beliefs, norms and values and communal stability and group harmony. Despite having achieved the status of conventional anthropological wisdom, the relationship between ritual performance and group solidarity has not been demonstrated empirically. The kibbutz was originally conceived as a small collective farming settlement in which members based their social and cultural lives on the collective ownership of property and wealth. The kibbutz developed out of an egalitarian ideology. This article seeks to find a reason as to why women are not allowed to participate in certain religious practices. These gender differences in ritual practice provide an opportunity to examine directly how group ritual performance impacts cooperative behavior hypotheses. The article also discusses challenges faced by kibbutzim in promoting and maintaining cooperation among its members.