Religious Rituals

This project was implemented to preserve Tibetan folk culture activities that are rapidly vanishing. We thank individuals and organizations who supported us. We also extend sincere appreciation to the United States Embassy in Beijing for sponsoring the project (the Ambassador's Fund for Cultural Preservation Program). Finally, we hope more people will join in the important task of preserving a record of traditional culture. Introduction. Friend of Rural Community Development is a local NGO registered in China, whose work focuses on improvement of rural education, culture, and environment. All the staff are locals dedicated to achieveing sustainable development for local people. Mr. Lugyal (Li Jia) is a native of Muhong Village, Daowei Tibetan Township, Xunhua Salar Autonomous County, Qinghai Province, China. These cultural materials were collected from Xunhua Tibetan communities from 2008-2010. Disc Number 3: Religious rituals. Including Mani Bumdrub, fasting festival, water offering festival, Ngamchod, and stone tent offering festival are filmed, respectively, in Muhong, Dortse, Muhong, Ningba, and Horonbo villages in Daowei Township. Such rituals in many local communities are held annually to avoid bad luck. Tibetan and Chinese descriptions available in 'Xunhua DVD Set Tibetan - description of the 9 DVDs.pdf'

Anonymous Rituals

Religion and ritual have been characterized as costly ways for conditional cooperators to signal their type, and thus identify and interact with one another. But an effective signal may be prohibitively expensive: if the cost of participation is too small, freeriders may send the signal and behave selfishly later. However, if the ritual reveals only the average level of signaling in a group, free-riders can behave selfishly without being detected, and even a low cost signal can separate types. While individuals cannot be screened out, members can learn the group�s profile of types. Under specified conditions, this information gain leads to greater cooperation and hence increases expected welfare. Furthermore, if crowding is unimportant relative to the conditional cooperation term, anonymous rituals will be preferred to ones which reveal individuals� behavior. Examples of anonymous institutions include church collections, voting, music, dance, and military customs.

Childhood rituals and executive functions

Repetitive and ritualistic behaviours (RRBs) are a feature of both typical and atypical development. While the cognitive correlates of these behaviours have been investigated in some neurodevelopmental conditions these links remain largely unexplored in typical development. The current study examined the relationship between RRBs and executive functions in a sample of typically developing children aged between 37-107 months. Results showed that cognitive flexibility, and not response inhibition or generativity, was most strongly associated with the frequency of RRBs in this sample. In younger children (<67.5 months) cognitive flexibility was significantly associated with “Repetitive Behaviours” but in older children (>67.5 months) cognitive flexibility was associated with both “Just Right” and “Repetitive Behaviour”, suggesting that the association between EF and RRBs may become stronger with age in typically developing children

Medical rituals and media rituals

In the present article the author examines the ritual elements of theprofessionalization during medical studies, and its interference with media content of medical significance, comparing the role of medical and media rituals on the way of becoming a doctor. It is to be explored how these medical soap operas, medical dramas, medical thrillers or crime stories do exert influence on medical identity and role expectations. Do medical students and their relatives (withmedical expertise frequently) identify themselves with these roles? Is their way of reception critical or naïve? How media rituals are organizing, modulating the students’ medical perception and expectations. Is there a mediated “shadow initiation” via media or it is excluded and denied? Does it perfuse the common social experience of becoming a doctor via peer communication and peer shapingof model behavior? We search the answers in the context of a theory of media rituals

“This stinckyng idoll”: the origins of some English Mayday traditions

This paper considers some of the traditions of the May Day festival, which might have had their roots in the Celtic celebrations of Bealtaine. Many pamphleteers and puritans expressed their displeasure at the performing of the rituals including the gathering of the May, and Queen and maypole veneration, all of which are linked with fertility rituals. There are suggestions that the Mayday rituals are also linked with the Roman fertility celebration of Floralia. These celebrations also developed to include dances of milkmaids and chimney sweeps and were linked with the procession of the Jack-in-the-Green and the Lord and Lady of the Ma

Entrusting the Witches to Ḫumuṭ-tabal: the ušburruda Ritual BM 47806+

The hitherto unpublished Late Babylonian fragment BM 47806 + adds another example to the group of rituals which counteract witchcraft by banning sorcerers to the netherworld. Šamaš is asked to hand them over, on his journey to the netherworld, to Ḫumuṭ-tabal, the ferryman of the dead. The edition of BM 47806 + is preceded by a brief overview of rituals of this type, including a discussion of the relationship between ritual burial of figurines – symbolising the dismissal of sorcerers to the netherworld – and their ritual burning, the other single most important technique of figurine magic deployed to kill warlock and witch