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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

What’s a little odd to me is we don’t call it “rituals” when applied to modern people, we call it “religious services”.

“Rituals” does have a bit of a connotation beyond religion don’t you think?

I'm partially trained in anthropology and would love to provide some insight. While terms like 'ritual' and 'ceremonial' certainly indicate religious undertones, they are delineated in an anthropological context.

For example, an anthro operational definition for 'ritual' would be "actions with intentional symbolic meaning undertaken for a specific cultural purpose", where the cultural purpose could be childhood development (rites of adulthood), religious as previously mentioned, or perhaps just a fun activity within the society.

I say all of this but understand that this article isn't necessarily geared towards only anthropologists, and operational definitions may be in order. Just my 2cents

Maybe that's the point. Unlike with today's people, you can't know for sure the intentions behind archeological finds. Calling something "ritualistic" in archeology seems more likely to be correct, as not all social rituals are religious in nature.

Sure, we tend to forget that things like Independence Day fireworks are also modern rituals. I don't see how that's super relevant to my original point, though? Religion is not the only ritual system, but it does seem to be the one with the most consistent track record of inciting huge non-economically-motivated resource expenditures (at least superficially; the economic impact of social cohesion is one of small-change-in-the-exponent things that's easy to underestimate). Anyway, I really just wanted to push back on the idea that "ritual purposes" is an implausible explanation for these kinds of things.

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