Rites of Disruption and Technologies of the Self: An Investigation of Ritual as Cultural Immune Reactivity
Jesper Sørensen (Professor, Department of the Study of Religion, Aarhus University)
Tuesday, March 3, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)
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It is an old insight that ritual behavior plays a central role in the formation and maintenance of social groups. Whether we attempt to ‘shake’ together a group of new students, or commemorate a special occasion in the history of an existing social formation, ritual is one of the prime cultural technologies employed. The questions are, why ritualized behavior is an effective mean of aligning members of social groups, and whether ritual performance can tell us something about basic social formations and their internal relation. In this talk, I will address these questions through a framework of cultural immune systems. Similar to the role of immune regulation in biological organisms of various sizes and complexities, social groups are regulated by cultural immune systems seeking to preserve the integrity of a social sphere. Following a short introduction to a predictive processing account of human cognition, I will focus on how ritual facilitates the formation of cognitive alignment between individuals and hence the gradual formation of cultural models able to ease coordination and coordination within groups. Ritual is seen as the primary method to disrupt nepotistic loyalties directed towards the kin-group in favor of loyalty towards the community at large. I will then focus on how, in modernity, this social function of ritual has gradually transformed into a technology supporting the formation, preservation and optimization of ‘an autonomous self’ that emerges in reaction to the disarticulation of social roles in modern (post-)industrial society.
Jesper Sørensen is Associate Professor in Comparative Religion at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research focuses on magic, ritual, and cognitive and evolutionary aspects of religion. He has recently published a monograph, Why Cultures Persist: Toward a Cultural Immunology, investigating how culture contributes to the stabilization of various social aggregates.
This talk was organized by Richard Sosis (Anthropology, UConn) and is presented as part of the Humanities Institute’s current theme: Connections & Disconnections. It is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the James Barnett Endowment.
Access note
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