There is a story like that with a preserved Bronze Age hut where knifes were found stashed in the thatched roof. A historian proposed it was a spiritual ritual surrounding their hunting weapons.
The first parent that took a look knew what it really was: simple childproofing.
Given the incredibly high value of any knife in such a society, I'd suspect it was just an anti-theft measure. You can't really climb up on someone's thatch roof while they are sleeping, rustle about until you find their knife, then slip away into the night.
Historians always think everyone from more than a century ago was a dour fun-hating worker drone. Everything that existed just because it was fun or cool gets classified as "ceremonial".
Ritual /= ceremonial. Lots of people have rituals just for fun. The morning coffee ritual is one. Another common ritual is when athletes get ready for a game, but ritual need not be accompanied by superstition or indeed any belief whatsoever.
There are all sorts of rituals embedded in children’s play. Has anyone played “red rover”? [1] Heck, even video games and indeed computer use in general are full of rituals. The “three-finger salute” of control-alt-delete is a classic one.
I see this mistake made a lot on HN (and elsewhere). The term ritual connotes solemn religious practice but it doesn’t strictly mean that anymore. Language evolves! And in academic historical and archaeological contexts, the secular use of ritual pervades as a term of art (and may actually be a major contributor to the relaxation of the term in an etymological sense).
Edit: how could I forget?! The birthday party! Long devoid of religion (at least for most people in the west), the birthday party, complete with song and candle-blow, is one of the most storied (and dreaded) rituals of all!
I’m not sure I see how alt+control+delete is a ‘ritual’ - is it a ritual to tell people to “stop” when you want them to stop? Or to reply “yes” to indicate an affirmative response when someone asks you a question? alt+control+delete is a command, like pulling a lever to operate any appliance - is it a ritual to open the door of a refrigerator before you pull something out? Or to disengage the parking break before you start driving your car? Or is it simply a mundane utilitarian interaction with a tool?
Pulling a lever isn’t necessarily ritual but it can be part of a ritual, such as for operating a machine that requires you to pull a series of levers in a particular order. Control-alt-delete is a ritual because it has multiple parts to it that must be done properly or it doesn’t work.
Disengaging the parking brake (which is usually done by pushing a lever, sometimes accompanied by a button press) is part of the ritual of starting to drive your car. It’s not strictly necessary (you can drive the car with the parking brake engaged though it’ll damage the car) but it is part of a multi-step process that becomes ritualized in your subconscious. Pilots learn to formalize the pre-flight check ritual because they tend to die if something goes badly wrong in the air. Japanese train conductors [1] have even incorporated ritual pointing gestures into their routine checks.
All of this is to say that rituals play psychological and cultural roles in our behaviour. They’re an excellent memory aid! And that may be their original evolutionary raison d’être.
I think it's strongly indicative of ritual when people greet others with "hi, how are you?" and are annoyed with any answer other than "fine, and you?".
I think the point is that if we used the language of museum displays and pop-sci books about antiquity to describe the modern world, the results would be comical.
In all likelihood, big-bosomed stone pendants dug up in Mesopotamia had as much to do with "fertility rituals" as truck nuts do.
Although magical thinking seems to be alive and well in all corners of life. Maybe we still have those kind of behaviours, just expressed in different ways.
As the grandparent points out, ritual literally/etymologically does mean a religious practice, but the use of ritual as metaphor in broader context in academic writing is weakening the religious portion of the meaning.
The first linked paper defines a ritual as "(a) predefined sequences that are characterized by rigidity, formality and repetition that are (b) embedded in a larger system of symbolism and meaning, but (c) contain elements that lack direct instrumental purpose".
Doing ctrl-alt-delete to get the attention of a Windows computer certainly fits (a) but it doesn't fit (b) without a considerable stretch and it doesn't fit (c) at all.
(The second linked paper quotes the first paper's definition, or something basically indistinguishable from it; the paper itself isn't about saying what rituals are, it's about exploring why they exist. Very little of what it says about that is applicable to ctrl-alt-delete.)
It's absolutely true that "ritual" doesn't just mean religious ritual. But it's also not as broad as "anything that people repeatedly do in more or less the same way".
You replied to me and I didn't advance CTRL-ALT-DEL as an example of a ritual. But, I'll bite.
A ritual doesn't need to be ineffective for it to be a ritual. Indeed, a whole lot of rituals have an indirect purpose that is attained because of social convention.
CTRL-ALT-DEL is arbitrary. The reasons for their existence (can't be accomplished by one hand or unlikely to be activate on accident) are no longer meaningful. The individual keys are meaningful, but they have no direct instrumental purpose. Because of convention, they do something.
Now, technical legacy makes some weird things stick. And I will say that technical legacy is a bit different of a thing than other types of social convention, so that's the one piece that makes CTRL-ALT-DEL feel different.
(chongli used CAD as an example of a ritual. now__what asked "is that really what ritual means?". You said yes. Of course you are not obliged to agree with chongli, but I thought that was what you were doing by saying yes.)
I didn't claim that a ritual has to be ineffective; only that (1) it needs to have symbolic significance, which CAD plainly does not, and that (2) it needs to have elements that are there for purposes other than what they actually do, which I claim CAD also plainly does not.
(Sure, the keys could have been different, but what of it? The individual letters in the word "keys" could have been different too -- it could have been spelt "kees" or "quays" or whatever -- and those letters, taken individually, "have no direct instrumental purpose" just as if you separate out CTRL from ALT and DEL you can't identify a separate purpose that key has in the gesture -- but that doesn't mean that writing the word "keys" is a ritual.
> (chongli used CAD as an example of a ritual. now__what asked "is that really what ritual means?". You said yes.
It was one of two examples, being the latter one after "heck" which indicates it's probably not a perfect fit.
It was the weakest but it still works.
> I didn't claim that a ritual has to be ineffective; only that (1) it needs to have symbolic significance
It does. Perhaps less now. You mash these keys when your computer isn't doing what you want.
> it needs to have elements that are there for purposes other than what they actually do
It used to be something that the BIOS would perform a soft reset in response to a keyboard interrupt and those keys being down. It was chosen to be across the keyboard (to prevent activation by mistake). All of the functional aspects of it are dead and the original meaning is gone (including the location of keys). For unclear reasons this ritual got appropriated for other purposes (the original reasons for it don't relate to the new uses).
If "you mash these keys when your computer isn't doing what you want" counts as "symbolic significance" then so does anything you do for any reason. You turn this knob when you feel thirsty and want to drink water! You turn this lever and push on this thing when it's too warm and you want to let air in from outside! You say these syllables when someone's asked you a question and you want to answer in the affirmative!
The components of the CAD gesture are still there for the purpose of what they do: you hit those keys because those are the ones Windows recognizes as indicating that you want to get its attention. Yes, the reason why those particular keys is kinda arbitrary these days, but (1) that isn't what the authors of that paper meant by "lacking overt instrumental purpose" -- of course there's an overt instrumental purpose: you hit those keys to get the OS's attention in ways that let you do particular things -- and (2) "there are elements that are kinda arbitrary" does not a ritual make because, again, everything has elements that are kinda arbitrary.
I don't want to claim that the use of the term "ritual" to describe hitting C-A-D is 100% indefensible. Only like 99.5%. If you generalize "ritual" far enough then eventually it will cover this case. Along with writing the word "duck", opening a window, or eating breakfast cereal. I don't think a generalization that goes that far is useful: the things that are "at least as ritual-like as C-A-D" are too broad a class to say much about that's useful, and the class isn't much different from that of "all human actions that recur at all".
> The components of the CAD gesture are still there for the purpose of what they do: you hit those keys because those are the ones Windows recognizes as indicating that you want to get its attention. Yes, the reason why those particular keys is kinda arbitrary these days
How would you feel about it if the only way were to get the computer's attention was to enter the Lord's Prayer?
It's complicated and qualitative. There's not a quantitative test for "ritual." There's all kinds of things that are very much ritualized (the motions a batter makes when at-bat; the changing of the guard), but they still have purpose. They are read by others as social cues; they are used to show membership in tribe; etc. They just don't have a direct instrumental purpose and have taken on a rigid form.
I would be extremely annoyed if the only way to get the computer's attention were to enter the Lord's Prayer (or any other text of similar length) :-). I might well express my annoyance using the word "ritual". But it would still feel much much less ritual-y than if I were using the Lord's Prayer in a more conventional manner, because there would still be no element of psychological/spiritual/social significance to the person performing the action.
(And, although it would still be the case that you have to enter all those words in order to get the computer's attention, and therefore they have instrumental purpose, it seems to me like that's a harder argument to make with a straight face when the arbitrary complexity of the actions you're taking becomes very large.)
I agree (of course) that it's complicated, and not an all-or-nothing affair. As I said, I consider C-A-D only about 99.5% not a ritual. The Lord's Prayer version might be only 90% not a ritual.
Curiously, in one respect using the Lord's Prayer to try to get God's attention is less ritual-y than using it to try to get a computer's: everything in that prayer is there for an actual instrumental purpose! Someone praying it sincerely isn't just saying "forgive us our sins" because those are the traditionally mandated words[1], but also because they would like their sins forgiven and they at-least-kinda-think that saying those words will make that happen a bit more reliably.
[1] Well, depending on what sort of traditional you want to be you might have to say "trespasses" instead.
Ctrl-alt-delete definitely fits (b). The larger system of symbolism and meaning would be the complete set of keyboard shortcuts (and other commands) for the operating system. It also fits (c) because of the presence of the delete key. Nothing about the ctrl-alt-delete combo has anything to do with deleting something! The choice of the delete key for this shortcut was arbitrary, it could have been ctrl-alt-insert instead, so I would call it an element that lacks "direct instrumental purpose."
Before I go into any detail about why, note that to whatever extent your argument here justifies called CAD a ritual, it likewise justifies calling writing the word "duck" a ritual. The word is part of a larger system of symbolism and meaning, namely the whole English language. The letter "c" in the word is technically unnecessary in at least as strong a sense as that in which the DEL key in CAD is. It could have been omitted, or the "k" could have been, or the word could have been something like "ducq". Just as much arbitrariness.
And of course that all goes for pretty much any word at all.
A definition of "ritual" according to which everyone is performing a ritual every time they write any word is too broad. If everything is a ritual, then calling something a ritual tells you nothing interesting about it.
OK, so that's why I want your arguments to be wrong :-). Where are the actual disagreements? Well, on (b) I claim that that's not the sort of symbolism the paper is talking about.
"In rituals, the most ordinary of actions and gestures become transformed into symbolic expressions, their meaning reinforced each time they are performed". The symbolism of a ritual is supposed to have psychological or spiritual significance for the participant(s). The fact that CAD is one of a number of other keyboard shortcuts recognized by Windows is simply not an example of this.
The words I quoted a moment ago are followed by a few examples. Compare them with the alleged "symbolism and meaning" of CAD. "The repeated kneeling and bowing of religious prayer signals commitment to God and provides solace" (it signals an important fact about the person doing it, and it has a psychological effect on them); "a team's pregame ritual of putting equipment on from left-to-right (and not right-to-left) empowers athletes to perform at their best" (it has a psychological effect on them); "marriage rites during the wedding ceremony seal the bond between two people" (it constitutes a commitment they are making and it has a psychological effect on them). The so-called ritual of CAD has nothing in it that parallels any of this.
(If someone has a computer that frequently gets wedged, and has adopted a specific procedure where they first hold down CTRL and ALT, then say loudly and clearly "F### you, Microsoft", then hit DEL three times rhythmically, in order to express their hatred -- then that, for sure, is a ritual. It expresses something that matters to them and it has the psychological effect of helping them let off steam.)
So much for (b). What about (c)? Here's another quotation from the paper. "That is, rituals either lack overt instrumental purpose, or their constitutive actions themselves are not immediately causally linked to the stated goal of the ritual." Doing CAD has an overt instrumental purpose: it gets Windows into a particular state that you may find useful. Its constitutive actions -- holding down CTRL, holding down ALT, hitting DEL -- are immediately causally linked to the stated goal: if you do all those things, then Windows will (barring bugs, hardware failure, etc.) do what you are telling it to do; if you omit any of those things, it will not.
(In my example above of how someone could perform the CAD gesture in a manner that is ritualistic, note that I suggested that they hit DEL three times in rhythm. That's an unnecessary constitutive action. You only need to hit DEL once to get the effect; if you choose to do it multiple times, what happens doesn't depend on whether you do it rhythmically.)
You’d have to ask a historian. My sister did a master’s degree in archaeology and this is what she told me. Opinions may still differ and I’m sure some historians still operate under the religious connotation. The history of academia is inextricably linked with the church (universities were originally built to educate the clergy) and many schools still carry religious charters.
Unfortunately, social sciences don’t use mathematically rigorous definitions the way “hard sciences” do, even as they begin to adopt more rigour in their practices (statistical methods, radiometric dating).
Yes, this is the common meaning in all of the humanities and social sciences. In that context if you mean a ceremony or a religious ritual, you'd need to say that specifically.
For a great satire of this tendency see David Macaulay's amazing graphic book Motel of Mysteries[1] where a motel is unburied thousands of years in the future and everything in it is classified as part of some ceremonial burial rite.
I'm probably speaking to the choir here, but the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz [0] involves a monastery that forms around an electrical engineer's design documents.
It was a lot more than just his design documents. There were enough technical books stashed that it took centuries for the survivors to work through (and saved them centuries re-climbing the tech ladder as they did).
You see a similar phenomenon in ethology, the reason many animals "play" is a mystery but there are all sorts of loose explanations like "helps train to hunt" that are probably too quick to dismiss the idea that maybe some things simply feel good.
Those could very well be the same thing. Evolution makes it so that the things which help us survive and reproduce feel like fun. I suspect all of our emotional responses are driven by evolution, and are really our top level instruction on how to live. Then afterwards we come up with rationalizations why we do the things we do.
"Generally speaking, an analysis of animal behavior is not considered scientific unless the animal is assumed, at least tacitly, to be operating according to the same means/end calculations that one would apply to economic transactions. Under this assumption, an expenditure of energy must be directed toward some goal, whether it be obtaining food, securing territory, achieving dominance, or maximizing reproductive success—unless one can absolutely prove that it isnt, and absolute proof in such matters is, as one might imagine, very hard to come by.
I must emphasize here that it doesn’t really matter what sort of theory of animal motivation a scientist might entertain: what she believes an animal to be thinking, whether she thinks an animal can be said to be “thinking” anything at all. I' m not saying that ethologists actually believe that animals are simply rational calculating machines. I' m simply saying that ethologists have boxed themselves into a world where to be scientific means to offer an explanation of behavior in rational terms—which in turn means describing an animal as if it were a calculating economic actor trying to maximize some sort of self-interest—whatever their theory of animal psychology, or motivation, might be.
That’s why the existence of animal play is considered something of an intellectual scandal. It' s understudied, and those who do study it are seen as mildly eccentric. As with many vaguely threatening, speculative notions, difficult-to-satisfy criteria are introduced for proving animal play exists, and even when it is acknowledged, the research more often than not cannibalizes its own insights by trying to demonstrate that play must have some long-term survival or reproductive function."
"Animal "play" isn't any sort of "scandal" -- we know that many young animals "play" by fighting with each other -- this is obviously good training for their adult lives. At the end of the day, all animal behavior evolved somehow and so self-interest must be involved, unless you want to bring some sort of creator god into the explanation. Like Graeber's distorted view of Apple's history, I suspect he knew very little of evolutionary biology.
I think you're cutting to the heart of why fun is even a thing. We do fun things, and find them fun, because they help us mentally prepare for critical real-world scenarios. We don't know this going in, but it feels good and we reap the benefits. Just like adults find sex pleasurable so they have the urge to do it and reproduce, children and adults find play pleasurable so they have the urge to do it and build up our brains.
Like, armed conflict isn't fun unless you're a psychopath (in which case militaries are probably very interested in recruiting you). But a de-risked simulation of armed conflict -- anything from chess to sportsball to a modern FPS -- is an almost archetypal fun activity.
This is something to keep in mind when considering the ruinous effects of the removal of recess and free play from American schools.
This is a reasonable and somewhat popular theory but evidence to support it is harder to find than you might imagine. People have spent their entire lives studying animal behavior and still don't have much more than a shrug to show for evidence supporting play as a survival or evolutionary mechanism. Some play does look like hunting (cat and dog owners will notice this), but there's a good amount that also doesn't align with anything else an animal regularly does.
I have a hard time with the study of history. Often it feels self-serving to make exciting and interesting-to-study claims. But I imagine the overwhelming majority of the time, the actual explanations for things are mundane.
Swings are fun and are a technology that have been enabled for a very long time.
I think what you're describing is archaeology. History is more of a scholarly endeavor while archeology is the one digging up sites and trying to explain things without context from contemporary writings.
Kind of, yeah! I definitely feel it strongly with archaeology. But let me posit this:
The further back into history you go, the harder it is to definitively figure out what, where, why, when, how. And the larger the blind spot, the easier it is to get creative with your explanations. Ie. it's a function of time. And archaeology is the study of history from a long time ago.
I agree, although to be fair magical thinking was often the only explanation people had for why things happened. It is inexplicable now because we have much better explanations. So an element of ceremony may have been mixed into other things like fun. And we still hold onto things like that which have an element of pleasure or fun whilst having some other abstract ideas. Just look at Easter or Christmas.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an archaeologist when I was hiking in Spain. We were in Burgos and looking at the beautiful cathedral.
Archaeologist <drinking a sip of beer>: “see we find really good precision work on parts of cathedrals that nobody would ever see - this is because they had a deep relationship with good and we’re convinced they had to do a good job.”
Me: “or you know, they were craftsmen and prided themselves on quality craftsmanship and doing a good job.”
People back in the day probably didn’t think any different than we do - I don’t only do a good job when I know someone is watching and I reckon people building cathedrals didn’t either.
And just like that you basically disregard the whole text with but a sentence and no supporting argument.
It was the point of the author that it was not fun but scary and weird, no? What do you think was happening in the heads of people around the time ancient myths were written? Probably something different eh? Different enough that I would not assume making yourself feel weird and almost high was considered fun
For example, I am not taking any drugs except coffee and nicotine. They sound scary and weird even though younger progressive people seem to consider them just fun. That seems similar enough
I feel like this probably explains a lot of seemingly "bizarre and backwards" practices? Like if they were to examine how we do Halloween it would be like "they dressed the children up to disguise them among the spirits lest they be TAKEN AWAAAAAY"
