Daily rituals - development and meaning

A translation of one of the essays that i wrote for my oral exam of my Masters degree:

In science, at first rituals have only been connected with the religious area. But by now there is a number of theories and definitions on what a "ritual" is supposed to be, how they are developed and what usage they might have. David J. Krieger collected some of them in his handbook "Ritualtheorien (ritual theories), written in 1998. The amount of essays ranges from theories of the construction of rituals to visualizing the rituals by means of cultural and social events, for example, soccer play. Still, even today rituals are mainly asssosiated with big events, and less with our daily lives. But even here rituals can surely be found.

To further discuss this, there first has to be shown how rituals can be developed and how theoretical constructions of them are understood. Durkheims theory, that has been shown in the handbook, tells that rituals are ways, to socially appropriate and condition individual perception and behaviour. Rituals are supposed to construct common ideals and therefore to confirm and validate society. Thus,  they are used as a mediation device between individuals, to connect them as a group and society. In this, there is a differentiation between three levels: Micro, meso and makrolevel, which all have different functions.

While the macrolevel indeed is connected with "big ceremonies", the mesolevel is directed to the behaviour and conduction and the microlevel is relatead to speech. In daily life, the last two are of meaning, behaviour as well as speech. To conclude, daily rituals can be put into the micro- as well as mesolevel.

But still, through this levels alone, rituals still cannot be defined completely. Before it has been noted that rituals can help to confirm society. But for this confirmation to happen, rituals need to have a symbolic meaning. If rituals are overstepped, be it on purpose or unknowingly, the society and its order is questioned. But whether there is also a practical usage behind rituals, is another matter. This is more likely in daily life than in big events. 

Most rituals develop through habit, as well as the opposite, rituals can develop habits. Routiniued daily activities are not neccessarly rituals. But they will be transformed to ritual acts, if they are followed with a certain ritual attitude. Surely in daily life these boundaries are interchangeable, and for a surveillours point of view it will always be hard to determine whether someone is making a ritual or simply a routinized task. It cannot be seen purely on the practical benefit.

If rituals in daily life are developed through socialisation and habitualisation, it is not possible to withdraw from them, be it with interhuman communications or when using objects. Even making coffee in the morning, or the way of greeting when arriving at work already can be rituals. Even if the original meaning behind an action has been lost, it still is possible to continue to conduct a ritual. It is not only the action itself that makes the ritual, but the routinized and ritualised partial steps of a task.

When rituals are developed, they can determine unwritten roules in interhuman behaviours and relationships. Through the internalized knowledge of these rituals the living together between people is made easier. The conduction of rituals does not need to be done consciously, but still rituals can give security and confidence. The breaking of rituals can also disrupt old structures and give possibilities to see new points of views. Therefore rituals are purposeful, but it can be just as important to consciously divert from them.

Rituals are strongly connected with their related cultures. As example, there are different daily rituals in Japan, Germany or America. The rituals of the own culture usually are so internalized that they can be done without thinking, and this is an even stronger impression when being in a different culture. This breaking of habits and knowledge is not only negative: it gives possibility to see and reflect on ones own culture and its daily ritual habits.

Therefore, the knowledge about rituals in day to day life can indeed have a practical usage in (inter)cultural education and the mediation and exchange between cultures.

The original one is in German language, so please bear with writing or grammar mistakes.

Scientifical news..

I've not been able to write much this past month, so what should be a habit turned out to be impossible for a while, but I will try to keep you posted for at least the monthly news about education, psychology, sociology and so on...

How we form habits, change existing ones

"Studies show that about 40 percent of people's daily activities are performed each day in almost the same situations. Habits emerge through associative learning. "We find patterns of behavior that allow us to reach goals. We repeat what works, and when actions are repeated in a stable context, we form associations between cues and response," Wendy Wood explains in her session at the American Psychological Association's 122nd Annual Convention."

This short essay by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology explaines how habits are formed in our minds, why we need them, and how we might be able to change or get new ones.

Stronger early reading skills predict higher intelligence later

"A new study of identical twins has found that early reading skill might positively affect later intellectual abilities. The study, in the journal Child Development, was conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh and King's College London."

In this study they have tested reading skills and intelligence of twins repeatedly in different ages. With this, they've seen a link between good early reading skills and later higher intelligence.

New insights into how young and developing readers make sense of words

This news is about a study made by the University of Leicester.

"The study found that while developing young readers and skilled adult readers had similar difficulty correctly recognising anagrams that can form another word by switching the order of only the inside letters, both age groups found it equally easy to recognise anagrams when the outside letters also had to be switched around to form another word.
This is because the brain has difficulty keeping track of the position of inside letters when recognising words but assigns special importance to the outside letters."

"The findings are important for understanding the role of letter position in children’s word recognition, including in dyslexia."

Part of brain stays as active in old age as it was in youth

"At least one part of the human brain may be able to process information the same way in older age as it does in the prime of life, according to new research conducted at the University of Adelaide."

"Both younger (aged 18-38 years) and older (55-95 years) adults had the same responses for spatial attention tasks involving touch, sight or sound."

This study shows, that while some cognitive and reaction times are slowed down during the aging process, other types of awareness, e.g. spatial attention tasks are staying more agile even in an old age.

Stress during pregnancy can be passed down through generations, rat study shows

"To better understand problems during pregnancies today, we should look to the experiences of our ancestors, research published in the open access journal BMC Medicine suggests. Scientists investigating pregnancies in four generations of rats show that inherited epigenetic effects of stress could affect pregnancies for generations."

"Gerlinde Metz, senior author of the article, says: "We show that stress across generations becomes powerful enough to shorten pregnancy length in rats and induce hallmark features of human preterm birth. A surprising finding was that mild to moderate stress during pregnancy had a compounding effect across generations. Thus, the effects of stress grew larger with each generation.""