p. 193
“Rituals involve repetitive movement.”
This is notwithstanding the advice of the Bigelow Tea Company, written on the outside of their tea bags (one of which I am steeping in a cup right now), to “indulge in the ancient ritual of drinking green tea.” Drinking tea may be a habit, it may even be part of some ceremonies, but it doesn’t qualify as a
ritual
in the strict sense.
“. . . Rappaport defined ritual as ‘acts of display through which one or more participants transmit information . . .’ ”
Rappaport, R. A. (1971). The sacred in human evolution.
Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics
2, p. 25.
p. 196
“Most children enter a stage of development . . . in which they show phases of ritual behaviors . . .”
Boyer, P. and P. Liénard. (2006). Why ritualized behavior? Precaution Systems and action parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
29(6): 1-56.
p. 197
“. . . many children connect their ad hoc rituals to the supernatural or to magic . . .”
See: Evans, D. W., M. E. Milanak, B. Medeiros, and J. L. Ross. (2002). Magical beliefs and rituals in young children.
Child Psychiatry and Human Development
33(1): 43-58.
p. 198
“. . . ritual adds a sense of order, constancy, and familiarity . . .”
Dulaney, S., and A. P. Fiske. (1994). Cultural rituals and obsessive-compulsive disorder: Is there a common psychological mechanism?
Ethos
22(3): 243-283. Zohar, A. H., and L. Felz. (2001). Ritualistic behavior in young children.
Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology
29(2): 121-128.
“Oxytocin . . . has been found to be connected to the performance of ritual . . .”
Leckman, J. F., R. Feldman, J. E. Swain, V. Eicher, N. Thompson, and L. C. Mayes. (2004) Primary parental preoccupation: Circuits, genes, and the crucial role of the environment.
Journal of Neural Transmission
111(7): 753-771.
“From an adaptation perspective, this order makes any intrusion by an outsider immediately and clearly visible.”
Boyer, P., and P. Liénard. (2006). Why ritualized behavior? Precaution Systems and action parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
29(6): 10.
p. 199
“The basal ganglia store chunks or summaries of motor behavior . . .”
Canales, J. J., and A. M. Graybiel. (2000). A measure of striatal function predicts motor stereotypy.
Nature Neuroscience
3(4): 377-383. Graybiel, A. M. (1998). The basal ganglia and chunking of action repertoires.
Neurobiology of Learning and Memory
70(1-2): 119 -136. Rauch, S. L., P. J. Whalen, C. R. Savage, T. Curran, A. Kendrick, H. D. Brown, et al. (1997). Striatal recruitment during an implicit sequence learning task as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging.
Human Brain Mapping
5(2): 124-132. Saxena, S., A. L. Brody, K. M. Maidment, E. C. Smith, N. Zohrabi, E. Katz, et al. (2004). Cerebral glucose metabolism in obsessive-compulsive hoarding.
American Journal of Psychiatry
161(6): 1038-1048. Saxena, S., A. L. Brody, J. M. Schwartz, and L. R. Baxter. (1998). Neuroimaging and frontal-subcortical circuitry in obsessive-compulsive disorder.
British Journal of Psychiatry
(Suppl. 35): 26-37.
p. 200
“All higher animals have a ‘security-motivation’ system . . .”
Szechtman, H., and E. Woody. (2004). Obsessive-compulsive disorder as a disturbance of security motivation.
Psychological Review
111(1): 111-127.
“The display aspect of single rituals . . .”
Fiske, A. P., and N. Haslam. (1997). Is obsessive-compulsive disorder a pathology of the human disposition to perform socially meaningful rituals? Evidence of similar content.
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
185(4): 211-222.
p. 201
“. . . the fear-security-motivation system was ‘built’ thousands or tens of thousands of years ago . . .”
Boyer, P., and P. Liénard. (2006). Why ritualized behavior? Precaution systems and action parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
29(6): 1-56. See also: Sapolsky, R. (1994).
Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers
. New York: Henry Holt.
p. 205
“. . . the ancient
Devr
ritual of the Kotas . . .”
Wolf, R. K. (2006).
The Black Cow’s Footprint: Time, Space, and Music in the Lives of the Kotas of South India
. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. I thank Bianca Levy for finding and summarizing this ritual.
p. 206
“. . . fifth in Kyrie of the Catholic Mass . . .”
Missa Jubilate Deo.
(XI-XIII cent.) Kyrie from Mass XVI, 200. Audio and score available at
http://www.adoremus.org/Kyrie.html
.
p. 210
“For the Mbuti people, the forest is benevolent and powerful, and their music is the language with which they communicate with the spirit of the forest . . .”
Feld, S. (1996). Pygmy POP: A genealogy of schizophonic mimesis.
Yearbook for Traditional Music
28
:
1-35. Turnbull, C. (1961).
The Forest People.
New York: Simon and Shuster. Turnbull, C. (1965).
Wayward Servants: The Two Worlds of the African Pygmies.
Garden City, NY: Natural History Press.
“ ‘Its [Pygmy music’s] most striking features, apparently common to all groups . . .”
Cooke, P. (1980). Pygmy music. In
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
15th edition p. 483.
p. 211
“The pygmies famously resisted efforts by a few unwittingly condescending anthropologists to render them as ‘primitives.’ ”
Feld, S. (1996). Pygmy POP: A genealogy of schizophonic mimesis.
Yearbook for Traditional Music
28: 1-35.
p. 215
“ ‘Even religion today has lost its ability to pull us out—now it’s all warrior gods.’ ”
Joni added: “The Genesis story, originally, was about the Earth Mother; all the primitives believe this, and I’m a primitive at heart too. It’s the smarter myth, the original one. They’re all myths, but of all of the myths, that’s the one that is most intelligent for living on this planet: ‘Earth Mother gives birth to Creation without a sire.’ Then that evolved into ‘Earth Mother gave birth to the planet
with
a sire,’ which devolved into—these are all
de-
evolutionary—‘Earth Mother is killed.’ Eventually, it comes down to the last one, which is ‘Father gives birth to the planet without a mother.’ So here we are in this goddessless situation; out of balance, no more Mother Earth or Father Sky. Mother Earth got killed off and what we ended up with is a narcissistic, war-loving, woman-hating religion, and that’s what Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are. They try to teach it otherwise, but they aren’t. It’s a fundamental hatred of the feminine principal and a domination of it.”
p. 220
“Every human society that historians and anthropologists have uncovered has had some form of religion . . .”
Rappaport, R. A. (1971). The sacred in human evolution.
Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics
2: 23-44.
pp.222
“Three emotions in particular are associated with religious
ec--23
stasy: dependence, surrender, and love.”
Otto, R. (1923).
The Idea of the Holy,
translated by J. W. Harvey. London: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1917.)
p.223
“[Dependence, surrender, and love] are believed innately present in animals and human infants.”
Erikson, E. (1968). The development of ritualization. In
The Religious Situation,
edited by D. Cutler. Boston: Beacon, pp. 711-733. Rappaport, R. A. (1971). The sacred in human evolution.
Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics
2: 23-44.
“. . . the details of musical syntax remain to be worked out . . .”
An ambitious effort to do so began with the landmark publication of: Lerdahl, F., and R. Jackendoff. (1983).
A Generative Theory of Tonal Grammar
. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
p. 227
“[Psalm 131’s] Middle Eastern, minorish sound, with odd, exotic intervals, evokes stone buildings and walled cities.”
The melody of the original has been lost, but in a synagogue service in a small, remote village of Israel—Bet Shemesh—I heard it sung by Moroccan Jews who have lived as a close community for many centuries. The melody sounded to be as ancient as the song itself, a beautiful, harmonic minor with delicate ornamentation. This may have been quite close to what David himself had written.
p. 228
“ ‘. . . But because He designed us, He knows what
we
need.’ ”
The scientist or atheist will ask then, “If God was truly not an egotist, why would he create in us a need for him?” This debate is beyond the scope of this book, but the interested reader may wish to read Daniel Dennett’s
Breaking the Spell
. Dennett, D. C. (2006).
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.
New York: Viking.
CHAPTER 7
p. 229
“ ‘Romantic love songs are a sham that perpetuate a lie on unsuspecting young kids . . .’ ”
The first part of this quote is from a telephone interview I conducted with Frank in 1980; the second part is from his biography: Zappa, F., and P. Occhiogrosso. (1999).
The Real Frank Zappa Book
. New York: Touchstone, p. 89.
p. 231
“ ‘I have had some experiences with love, or think I have . . .’ ”
Vonnegut, K. (1976).
Slapstick: Or Lonesome No More!
New York: Delta Books, pp. 2-3.
p. 233
“. . . love can make you do things you might not otherwise do . . .”
As Gabriel García Márquez writes in
Love in the Time of Cholera:
“Fermina Daza, his wife . . . was an irrational idolator of tropical flowers and domestic animals, and early in her marriage she had taken advantage of the novelty of love to keep many more of them in the house than good sense would allow.” García Márquez, G. (1989).
Love in the Time of Cholera,
translated by E. Grossman. London: Penguin, p. 21. (Original work published 1985.)
p. 235
“Because romantic love is what gets written about, talked about, filmed and sung about so much, we can temporarily forget that love comes in many different forms . . .”
The ancient Greeks had already classified these different forms of love, and in fact, distinguished ten forms of love, and the psychologist John Alan Lee reduced these to six; see: Lee, J. A. (1976).
The Colours of Love
. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Either formulation confounds the way people act (playful, generous) with the way they feel (jealous, passionate) and the underlying, unifying principles (attachment, longing, lust). In her book
Why We Love,
Helen Fisher claims that these can be reduced to three: romantic love, attachment, and lust: Fisher, H. (2004).
Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love
. New York: Henry Holt. I think including lust as its own form of love is odd, as opposed to including it as an element in certain forms of attachment love. I find Robert Sternberg’s triangular theory of love more compelling, that the various forms of love are all combinations of three basic elements: passion, intimacy, and commitment: Sternberg, R. J. (1986). A triangular theory of love.
Psychological Review
93(2): 119-135. Sternberg, R. J. (1988).
The Triangle of Love: Intimacy, Passion, Commitment
. New York: Basic Books. But Sternberg’s system doesn’t easily account for love of an ideal (like justice), or love of country—both of which he would probably describe as “commitment and passion,” but that, to me, fails to capture the different phenomenology, the different
feeling,
we have of love for our hometown than we do of love for our romantic partner. More importantly, I think they all miss the fundamental common point that love
is
caring.
p. 236
“ ‘Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, already lost in the mists of death . . .’ ”
García Márquez, G. (1989).
Love in the Time of Cholera,
translated by E. Grossman. London: Penguin, p. 14 (Original work published 1985.)
p. 237
“. . . foodstuffs are redistributed equitably among neighboring tribes, eliminating what could be deadly food-jealousy wars.”
Ford, R. I. (1971). An ecological perspective of the eastern pueblos. In
New Perspectives on the Eastern Pueblos,
edited by A. Ortiz Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
p. 238
“. . . rather than building into genes and brains information that is ubiquitous and readily available in the environment, brains are configured such that they can incorporate regularities . . .”
Deacon, T. W. (1997). What makes the human brain different?
Annual Review of Anthropology
26: 337-357.
p. 240
“. . . males don’t pair-bond with the mothers of their offspring and they don’t provide paternal care.”
Diamond, J. (1997).
Why Is Sex Fun?
New York: Basic Books. Exceptions include male zebras and gorillas (who are polygynous), male gibbons (who form single pair-bonds with females), and saddleback tamarin monkeys (in which a female keeps two males).
“Even in the most social mammals . . . there is no evidence that males even recognize their own offspring.”
Diamond, J. (1997).
Why Is Sex Fun?
New York: Basic Books.
“In humans . . . the dominant mode of relationships is of monogamy . . .”
Diamond, J. (1997).
Why Is Sex Fun?
New York: Basic Books.