704881 MCU0010.1177/1359183517704881Journal of Material CultureMcGraw and Krátký research-article2017 Journal of Article Ritual ecology MATERIAL CULTURE Journal of Material Culture 1–21 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183517704881 DOI: 10.1177/1359183517704881 journals.sagepub.com/home/mcu John J McGraw CSU Northridge, CA, USA Jan Krátký LEVYNA Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion and HUME lab - Experimental Humanities laboratory, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic Abstract In agreement with ‘the material turn’ in the humanities and social sciences and informed by psychological studies of priming, the authors argue that human action can be deeply influenced by objects and other features of the environment coordinated by ritual practices. They suggest that the moods and behaviors catalyzed by an effective ritual result from a ‘mangle’ of human and material agencies. But this mangle is not the result of an accidental fusion of disparate elements; rather, they consider it a complex adaptive system in which the organic and inorganic interact in such a way that each component provides some of the necessary conditions for the others’ activities. In line with this, there is a need to identify the reciprocally causal relationships among people, places, plants, animals, stones, relics, icons and idols that constitute ritual, an approach they call ‘ritual ecology’. Keywords enaction, material agency, objects, priming, ritual Introduction Like so many cultural phenomena, especially the most basic and important kinds, ritual is notoriously difficult to define. This is not because ritual cannot be defined; it is because ritual can be defined and conceptualized – with justification – in so many different ways. Wave upon wave of ritual theories have washed across academic shores: ritual has been conceived of as communication (Leach, 2000[1954]; Lévi-Strauss, 1963), as a form of social control and ecological necessity (Rappaport, 1979), as a tool for group solidarity Corresponding author: Jan Krátký, Department for the Study of Religions, Masaryk University, Brno 60200, Czech Republic. Email: jan.kratky@mail.muni.cz 2 Journal of Material Culture 0(0) (Durkheim, 1965[1912]; Smith, 1889), as performance (Turner, 1982), as individual and collective neurosis (Freud, 1989), as ‘contingency management’ or alleviation of stress (Malinowski, 1984: 8–18), and even as meaningless (Staal, 1979), among many other theoretical approaches. Depending on the time, place and society, any number of these approaches may be more or less salient – again, showing the multiplicity and depth of these collectively-patterned actions. What follows is not so much another theory of ritual, although this piece is informed throughout by theory, but a developing methodological approach. For what so many theories of ritual have minimized or failed to address, the immediate context and environment of ritual – including the importance of objects, animals, places, colors, and time/ timing – is here asserted to be essential rather than ancillary or derivative. Too many theoretical approaches to ritual begin and end with a focus on relatively abstract aspects of human subjectivity when, in fact, ritual is one of the most concrete, action-oriented cultural processes in which humans involve themselves. Ritual is, at base, a ‘worldinvolving’ set of cultural practices. The ecological perspective Taking pointers from the science of ecology, and inspiration from Bateson and his successors (Bateson, 1972, 1979), we suggest ‘ritual ecology’, a system approach of description and explanation of ritual in its natural context. Ritual ecology involves tracing the linkages between various ‘actants’ in ‘sociotechnical assemblages’ very much in line with the approaches of actor-network theory (Farías and Mützel, 2015; Latour, 2005; Law, 2008); it is the delineation and characterization of a ritual ecosystem with the understanding that a sufficiently thorough description sometimes constitutes an explanation (Latour, 2005: 137; McGraw, 2015a). A ‘sense of the whole’ must be first and foremost in ritual ecology rather than the privileging of any particular part. Ritual needs to be studied holistically, as embodied, embedded practices, in their typical contexts. Studying a ritual abstracted from context is like attempting to understand the dynamics of the cardiovascular system by excising the heart from its organism. In such a case, one destroys both organism and heart, and is left to study a living system by investigating its inactive, and decoupled, components. But, on their own, components do not make a system. In fact, many complex systems, especially those based in biology, have the capacity to reorganize and even replace components as necessity requires (Kelso, 1995; Maturana and Varela, 1980; Stephen and Van Orden, 2011; Van Orden et al., 2009), demonstrating how emergent patterns of activity (e.g. order parameters) can come to dominate the components that make them up (Haken, 1984). In sum, patterns of activity, although based in constitutive components, begin to have ‘a life of their own’. Once they emerge, many cultural processes exhibit this sort of momentum – enduring through time – even though their components fall apart and die away, only to be replaced by successive generations of people and things. Another aspect of this ecological perspective is appreciating the coupling, at the most basic levels, of the living and the nonliving. Living things and systems are not separate or separable from their abiotic components. Life typically requires such things as oxygen (or carbon dioxide), minerals, and particular frequencies of electromagnetic radiation McGraw and Krátký 3 (e.g. light). Similarly, ritual, although pivotally based in human action and experience, is impossible to conceive of without the objects (e.g. costumes, instruments, foods, stones, metals), animals, meteorological and astral phenomena, landscapes, and roles that make it up. Even percepts and abstractions – such as colors, shapes, music, and types of motion – can end up being essential. It is the contingent peculiarities of each of these items, and all their interactions, that characterize a particular ritual ecosystem. For instance, a ritual may become increasingly necessary in times of an actual or an anticipated crisis when a plague, a famine, or a drought occurs, when a meteor passes through the night sky or an eclipse approaches, or when a community prepares for a risky venture (Malinowski, 1922). Time and timing are of critical importance for ritual, as is place; when a ritual is called for, going to some places, but not others, may be required to enact it correctly. And in the ‘ritual enaction’ (McGraw, 2011, 2015a), particular states of mind, patterns of song and dance, aromas, fires or sacrifices, and objects may be necessary to effect the changes hoped for, whether those changes be experiential or environmental, illusory or actual. How such varied components and phenomena, often diverse in their nature of being and modes of agency (Swenson, 2015), end up existing simultaneously and ‘bundled’ together (Pauketat, 2012), condensed (Houseman and Severi, 1998) and materialized in time and place, gets to the heart of ritual action. Perhaps the most central feature of this ecological perspective is its basis in the causality implicit to complex adaptive systems, that of ‘continuous reciprocal causation’ (Clark, 1997a, 1997b, 2008). Ritual ecology assumes that human agency does not exhaust the ritual process, agency referring to the ability to determine action or affect an outcome nontrivially in some set of causal relations (see Juarrero, 1999; Knappett and Malafouris, 2008; Pickering, 1995). Through time, the varied components and actions involved in ritual reciprocally shape one another in both structure and function. This breaks through simpler accounts of agency and causation by demonstrating how ritual, when conceived of as a complex adaptive system, is based in all its participating factors. Indeed, it is all these participating factors that make the system something more than a collection of passive items, at best driven by a single causal force (e.g. human agency). It is from the play of heterogeneous agencies that ‘emergent properties’ (Agazzi and Montecucco, 2002; Capra and Luisi, 2014; Kelso, 1995) of the system may come into existence, in the same way that, for example, the various types of cells in the human body – from microbes in the gut to neurons in the brain – produce the experiences and capacities of the well-functioning whole. No understanding of any type of cell that makes up a person can predict or explain systemic level properties, such as digestion or consciousness. Similarly, no single aspect or component of ritual is sufficient to explain its emergent properties, like alterity (Csordas, 2004; McGraw, 2015a), communitas (ELB Turner, 2012; V Turner, 1995), the sense of the holy (Otto, 1936), or the cybernetic regulation of human–environmental relations (Rappaport, 1984). Additionally, these sorts of emergent phenomena – surely part of the motivation that have led people to ritual practices time and again – are likely to be multiply realizable (see Putnam, 1967, 1988), meaning that even if one could scientifically explain how a given ritual leads to a given event or experience, such an explanation is probably not the only way such a phenomenon can come about, again suggesting the complex adaptive nature of ritual ecology. To take steps to an ecology of ritual, then, one first needs a more expansive sense of the term ‘agency’. 4 Journal of Material Culture 0(0) Material agency Many thinkers have conceived agency to be a nucleus of dynamic activity located within the individual alone (e.g. Descartes, 1961[1641]). In such frameworks, agency is exerted by a forceful human volition acting upon a typically inert world. The notion of agency as an internal characteristic of the individual imposed – inside/out – upon the world is one more consequence of a long tradition of dualistic metaphysics that proceeds from the assumption that mind is separate from world (Descartes’ res cogitans/res extensa distinction). But even a long-standing tradition of such ideas has not been enough to render them fully sensible and free from reproach. Confusions about agency abound and occasionally erupt into public discourse as policies are debated in predictably obtuse ways: do people kill people, do guns kill people, or a bit of both (see Latour, 1999: 174–215)? For example, human agency, as the improper regulation of one’s exposure to sunlight, may be operative in causing a sunburn, but so is the sun, the current atmospheric conditions, and the presence in one’s body of certain hormones or medications. On some days, one’s actions may lead to the sunburn, although those same actions may not lead to the sunburn on other days, given a slightly different set of conditions. To the extent that human agency and a variety of environmental conditions come together in precise ways to cause sunburn, these varied factors may all be considered agentive in the production of that outcome. But this does not mean they have the same type of agency, since varieties of human agency (e.g. intentional, unintentional, and ‘nonintentional’ (see McGraw, 2015a) and nonhuman agency (e.g. intentional, unintentional, nonintentional, or nonsentient) may be qualitatively different. Additionally, agency needs to be analyzed contextually since presuming beforehand what possesses or does not possess agency raises the question. In ritual, human agency is necessary, but it is not sufficient; ritual is shaped by nonhuman agencies as well and cannot be comprehensively treated without an appreciation of these various agencies. Recent developments in the philosophy of mind, regarding the active externalism of the extended mind (Clark and Chalmers, 1998), and in cognitive science, regarding cognition as embodied (Barsalou et al., 2003; Shapiro, 2014), embedded (Brooks, 1991; Kirsh, 1995), enactive (Stewart et al., 2010; Thompson, 2007; Varela et al., 1992), distributed (Hutchins, 1995; Sutton, 2006), and situated processes (Lave, 1988; Robbins and Aydede, 2009) enable radical reappraisals of agency. These innovations are bringing attention to the many ways that agency may be distributed between people, how it may inhere in artifacts, and how people, objects, and the cultural practices that coordinate them into meaningful flows of activity are part and parcel of human life in all times and places. Clearly, objects play essential causal roles in all manner of activities (Hutchins, 1999; Krátký, 2012; Malafouris and Renfrew, 2010; Pickering, 1995). Modern astronomy would not exist without a variety of telescopes, contemporary warfare depends on guns, drones, and other advanced weaponry, while the medical therapies needed to heal war’s injuries require a host of imaging technologies, surgical instruments, and biocompatible materials, from sutures to prosthetics. But certainly the causal roles that such material objects play are not the same as agency? In fact, a number of researchers have been promoting just such an approach for some years now (Gell, 1998; Knappett and Malafouris, McGraw and Krátký 5 2008; Robb, 2010). According to them, the fact that agency is typically conceived of from the point of view of human subjects acting in the world, rather than, say, from the ability of architecture, tools, or climate to alter human experience and action, is nothing more than an anthropocentric chauvinism born from tradition and biases. Yet, this chauvinism is also a product of our deeply rooted psychological intuitions about the world. Humans are purpose-seekers with an enormous ability to mentalize beings, objects and occurring events (Baron-Cohen, 1995). As Dennett (1989) clearly points out, the intentional stance, as he calls the explanatory framework centered on seeking and sensing intentional agent behind the acts, excels over the other two, rather analytical and causation-seeking explanatory models (i.e. design and physical stance) in its speed, frugality, and automaticity. However inaccurate or utterly wrong this mental mechanism sometimes may be, such as when ascribing agency to objects that are merely endowed with agency by means of some external elements or forces, the preference for this model of explanation has its origins in our evolutionary history. Enemies of our ancestral worlds who were able to think and intentionally act, that is mostly other humans and some higher animals, were also the primary sources of potential threats. Human minds became highly efficient in decoding intentions of others to the extent that this detecting mechanism became oversensitive to traces of agency, often detecting intentional agents where, in fact, there were none – in inanimate objects and natural occurrences such as storms or clouds (see Guthrie, 1995). While one could greatly reduce agency by limiting its definition to those properties of activity that also include intentionality – not in the strict philosophical sense of the term (e.g. Brentano, 1973), but in the folk psychological sense of ‘goal-directedness’, that is, performing an action ‘on purpose’ – then a great deal of human activity would also disappear, since people routinely act in the world without employing intentionality, or employing different degrees of intentionality in different situations at different times. In sum, the one framework seems impossibly narrow while the other may seem impossibly broad. How can this impasse be resolved? Conceptualizing agency as constituted by, and for, particular contexts is one potential resolution as is pursuing agency not as a single concept but as a heterogeneous set of influences on outcomes and events. In either case, then, agency should always be understood as context specific rather than assumptive or universalistic. Following pointers from Johannsen’s (2012) work on the ‘inanimate agency proposition’ and from Pickering’s (1995) approach to science as a ‘mangle of practice’, it is important to make a principled distinction between human agency and material agency while still crediting them both as interdependent and irreducible to one another. However, it may be strenuous to credit the material objects with agency when judging them from our mundane intuitive perspective. At this level, the materiality seems to serve as a medium, as a silent backdrop of our actions, as something that either helps us to complete the task or as an obstacle that prevents us from meeting our goal. At this level, it is always our personal use of the thing that is situated at the core of our interest. In contrast, it is only from a bird’s-eye view where discrete elements merge into a system and where contributions of system elements become visible. From this point of view we can appreciate the entire system to be composed of equally important entities – the person, the task, and the artifact (Norman, 1991). Indeed, it is the complementarity of their differences that leads 6 Journal of Material Culture 0(0) to their emergent dynamism when human agents and material agents are together (see Clark, 2010; Menary, 2010; Sutton, 2010) for similar discussions in relation to distributed cognition and the extended mind). The ecological approach aims at developing exactly this point of systemic view (Zhang and Patel, 2006). Material agency is not simply, or only, the fossilization of prior human agency into an artifact. The qualities and characteristics of objects exceed any of their particular interactions or uses (Harman, 2002, 2005) which is at the base of many unforeseen consequences (Merton, 1936), whether that be the serendipitous discovery of a new phenomenon or technology (Merton and Barber, 2004; Roberts, 1989) or the bidirectional influence of a cataclysmic disaster on human society (Barry, 1997). But neither is human agency, when it is intentional, equivalent to any form of material agency that we know of. While material objects do not possess sentience or intentionality, they do exert agency in our events and practices. Human agency only exists within particular landscapes of causal possibilities due to the constraints on or amplifications of our uncoupled capacities by material objects (Tylén and McGraw, 2014). To alter the language in a significant way, material objects may in particular contexts resist our agency to do some things and favor our capacity to do other things (see Gibson, 1977). ‘Things shape the mind’ (Malafouris, 2013); they actively, rather than passively, alter what we can do and how we can do it, what we can feel and how we can feel it. Humans have an unparalleled ability, and alacrity, to couple with things external to the body in order to transform our experiences and capacities: we are shapeshifters (McGraw, 2015b). Things become essential to and indistinguishable from the context-dependent patterns of practice that define human society at a particular time and in a particular setting (Roepstorff et al., 2010): we are cyborgs (Clark, 2003; Haraway, 1991). Take the example of an optical telescope. Our limitations relative to the physics of light transmitted across great distances constrain our capacity to perceive the universe beyond the most favorable conditions of a dark sky. Had no telescope ever been invented, our understanding of the universe, and thus our capacity to achieve a great many scientific achievements – from interplanetary exploration to satellite communication – would be significantly hampered. The material agency of the telescope, though, greatly extends our capacities by employing particular optical configurations to vastly improve light gathering and to direct visual magnification of heavenly bodies to the human eye (Pugh, 2009). Astronomy could not have proceeded as the science it is without the agentive capacity of telescopes. But neither does astronomy derive only from such instruments, it develops over time as the ratcheting, interdependent effects of the material agency of instruments on humans and of human agency on the further development of those instruments. It is this interdependence of human agency and expertize and precision of material artifacts that advances the development and production of ever more technically elaborate artifacts (Sterelny, 2003; Tomasello, 2001). Features of the environment – which may entail specific cues or the entire gestalt registered by the sensorium – can shift human cognition so rapidly and thoroughly, attuning it to the immediate circumstances – without instrumental reasoning, intentionality, or awareness – that we typically fail to appreciate the significance of context and the outside/in nature of our actions and action possibilities. McGraw and Krátký 7 As an example central to the religious ritual, consider the role of a giant Buddha statue. In fact, the gigantic and spectacular appearance of such a statue is in stark contrast with the actual stories from Siddhārtha Gautama’s life, which usually depict him as an ordinary mortal being with rather ordinary features. Why is it so? The statue was produced much later in the Buddhist tradition and brought forward those divine aspects deemed to be important for the emergence and preservation of the right kind of religious sentiments. The Buddha statue is constructed for religious devotees as a tangible representation to deal with the invisible supernatural agent (Day, 2004) but also to convey, in time and space, and over generations, the important features and meanings to be spread among the devotees – to remind us of Buddha’s great powers and his role as an agentive force in the lives of his devotees and to promote the sentiments of unimportance, smallness and modesty in the observer. In every sense of the term, the world exceeds us. Like the great filter feeders swimming and drifting through fathomless seas, humans continuously sample only an infinitesimal of the information flow in which we are constantly immersed, relying on the predictable stability of the world’s structure to direct perception and action (see Clark, 2013). Our cognitive processes, hinged on the constant coupling of organism and environment, have been sculpted by the miserly processes of evolution to be informationally efficient. As Brooks (1991: 15) observed, ‘the world is its own best model’, so the sampling that each of us idiosyncratically engages in is constituted by the fusion, in skillbased activity derived from experiential priors, of what earlier theorists conceived to be separate – perception, action, and cognition. Psychological studies of priming demonstrate some of the dynamics of this sampling process, illustrating how subtle cues – typically operating outside of awareness – ready us for the demands of the setting, alter our perception, change our moods and dispositions, and even drive our behavior. Material priming Priming – a psychological phenomenon and a research method in which exposure to a stimulus is thought to prime (as in ‘priming a pump’) associated words, concepts, or behaviors, is an excellent illustration of material agency. Priming usually operates below the threshold of awareness (Frith and Frith, 2008), perhaps drawing on ‘fast and frugal’ heuristics (see Gigerenzer, 2007; Kahneman, 2011). For instance, in a classic study by Bargh and colleagues (1996), subjects who were primed (using a scrambled-sentence task) with an ‘elderly stereotype’ (e.g. ‘worried, Florida, old, lonely, grey, wise, retired, bingo’) walked significantly slower down the corridor when exiting than did subjects who were not primed with those stimuli. Somehow, then, exposure to the kinds of words associated with elderly people led to an emulation of elderly behavior by the non-elderly subjects involved in the experiment. Findings from investigations of priming (e.g. Bargh and Williams, 2006; Meyer and Schvaneveldt, 1971; Williams and Bargh, 2008) and implicit social cognition (Gawronski and Payne, 2010; Ross, 1977) would seem to endorse the agentive role of features of the environment on human cognition and behavior, giving an even more expansive sense to Clark and Chalmers’ (1998) notion of ‘active externalism’. A number of experiments (Bargh et al., 2001; Bateson et al., 2006; Francey and Bergmüller, 2012; Kay et al., 2004; 8 Journal of Material Culture 0(0) McNamara, 2004; Xygalatas, 2013) increasingly support the case that environmental cues direct a great deal of behavior. This canalization of experience and choice by the environment underscores the importance of the ‘material turn’ in the humanities and social sciences (e.g. Bennett and Joyce, 2010; Miller, 2005). In studying these kinds of psychological phenomena, more careful descriptions of the interior of the organism are insufficient; what is needed is an improved psychology of context (Mesquita et al., 2010), a more comprehensive account of the ways that settings and roles affect physiology and situated human action (see Lang et al., 2015; Robbins and Aydede, 2009; Ross, 1977; Zimbardo et al., 1971). The term ‘priming’ was coined by Lashley (1951: 119) who noted that ‘there are indications that, prior to the internal or overt enunciation of the sentence, an aggregate of word units is partially activated or readied’ which is to say that when one engages in conversation it is rarely the case that one plans entire sentences before uttering them; rather, during the flow of conversation, meaningfully crafted utterances – often relying on stock phrases, clichés, and necessary pauses – proceed fluently but without much conscious deliberation beforehand. The same could be said about any number of behaviors based on recurrent experience. One has only to recognize that the constancy and ubiquity of such processes in the way one walks, talks, rides a bicycle, drives a car, eats a meal, blinks/winks, breathes, and puts to use any number of skills and behaviors that once required conscious awareness, can elicit conscious awareness, but generally do not require sustained attention for their accomplishment. If one needed to constantly pay attention to each and every word, each and every step, each sensation on one’s backside while sitting in a chair, or each mouthful of food during a meal, daily activities would come to a standstill: those behaviors that can be automated, typically are automated. This includes a surprisingly wide range of behaviors for which our awareness and attention, at best, flickers on and off as we turn and return to other activities. And most importantly for this discussion, how one walks, talks, and eats are differently enacted in, and by, different environments: the ‘stiff’ manners on display at a wedding or when talking to one’s superior are likely to be quite different from those enacted among old friends during an informal gathering, just as the gait, tones, and emotions elicited by one’s work environment veer significantly from those behaviors at home or on a festive weekend. Priming is plausibly modelled by connectionism, or parallel distributed processing (see Clark, 1989; Hebb, 1949; Marcus, 2001; Rumelhart et al., 1986). The idea is that memory systems are based on associative neural networks that exhibit ‘spreading activation’ (Anderson, 1983; Collins and Loftus, 1975). When a given node in a network is stimulated (e.g. when one sees or hears the word ‘monster’), its semantic near neighbors (e.g. Frankenstein, vampires, Loch Ness) are partially activated as well; it is likely from the implicit activation of a network of semantically-related instances that the term ‘monster’ is made sensible. While much priming research has focused on the semantics of language and used linguistic primes, a growing trend is the investigation of ‘material primes’ (Kay et al., 2004) related to objects or other aspects of context. The notion that features of the environment might serve to prime particular sets of dispositions and behaviors is found even in basic processes of perception, action, and cognition (Clark, 2013). As Tulving and Schacter (1990: 302) observe: ‘a person perceiving a familiar object is not aware that what is perceived is as much an expression of McGraw and Krátký 9 memory as it is of perception.’ What a given environment means to a person is based on earlier exposure to similar environments. Even the idea that people can distinguish settings and recognize the affordances they permit (e.g. kitchens for food preparation, office spaces for work) is related to stereotypic objects and configurations of objects in those settings: ‘familiar objects and the meaning systems they activate may help to define and disambiguate potentially ambiguous situations, thereby providing people both with common psychological interpretations and with overlapping behavioral inclinations’ (Kay et al., 2004: 84). The transparency and automaticity of such recognition and the subtle shifts in behavior that accompany these processes are evidence of their centrality to human cognition: exposure to material objects may even, without our awareness, help us to define situations, recognize operative situational norms, activate appropriate roles, and interact in ways that are congruent with those norms and roles (especially among members of the same organization or institution, who are likely to hold highly similar object-meaning associations). (p. 93) The power of such priming effects are suggested in Lhermitte’s (1986) discussion of the ‘environmental dependency syndrome’ evinced by patients who suffered damage to their prefrontal cortices. In Lhermitte’s study, patients with large lesions in their left prefrontal cortices were taken to distinctive settings – including a doctor’s office, a buffet, a lecture hall, and a museum – and had their behaviors carefully monitored using a variety of recording devices. What emerged as a pattern across the patients was an automatic, script-like (see Schank and Abelson, 1977; Shore, 1996) set of routines germane to those environments; it was as if the environments ‘reached into’ the organism to engage a set of typical behaviors. For instance, Lhermitte brought a patient into his office and set out some medical instruments on his desk. The patient proceeded, unbidden, to perform a complex, and seemingly proficient, diagnosis of the good doctor using these instruments; checking his blood pressure with the sphygmomanometer, inspecting his throat using a tongue suppressor, and checking his reflexes with a reflex hammer. When Llhermitte asked the patient what she thought about what she had just done, she said she was satisfied with his state of health. It is as if, in the absence of frontally mediated behavioral inhibition, stereotypic routines – dictated by each setting and its objects – ‘take over’ and lead such patients to perform highly relevant, though seemingly ‘unwilled’, actions (see Cisek and Kalaska, 2010; Haggard, 2008; Schurger and Uithol, 2014; Thelen and Smith, 1994: 217). Lhermitte (1986: 335) noted that the ‘patients’ behavior was striking, as though implicit in the environment was an order to respond to the situation in which they found themselves’. In the paper, Lhermitte mentions that Luria (1973) had also related similar anecdotes in an earlier publication, describing these sorts of routines as ‘unconscious reflexes’, relating how a patient who needed to catch a train went to the station and took the first one available, without concern for its destination, while another patient ‘involuntarily’ pressed a call button in a hospital without being able to explain why he had summoned the nurse: ‘the train implied the order to get on it, and the call button implied the order to press it’ (Lhermitte, 1986: 341). While using patients with dysfunctions to understand normal behavior is problematic, these instances, in tandem with the aforementioned power of 10 Journal of Material Culture 0(0) environmental cues on implicit cognition, suggest a pattern in which settings strongly define the complex routines and expectations appropriate to them. The effect of material priming is particularly suggestive for the study of ritual. As ‘world-involving’ cultural practices, rituals are defined by their careful coordination of people, objects, settings, and behavioral repertoires. Rituals are strongly constrained, and constructed, ‘behavioral environments’ (Hallowell, 1955). Priming studies of relevance to ritual theory include work by Xygalatas (2013), who demonstrated the power of a religious setting (a Hindu temple) versus a secular setting (a restaurant) to alter one’s level of charitable contributions in a common-pool resource game. And a study by Bateson and colleagues (2006) has shown that representations of eyes in a secular environment can alter prosocial behavior, as if stimulating/simulating the sense of ‘being watched’ (see Fehr and Schneider, 2010; Gervais and Norenzayan, 2012; Haley and Fessler, 2005; Shariff and Norenzayan, 2007). Inspired by this work, particularly because ritual settings are commonly populated by anthropomorphic icons and idols – sometimes gazing down upon the devotees, often exhibiting provocative postures of affection, devotion, or suffering (see Whitehead, 2013) – we have initiated a series of behavioral experiments to investigate how anthropomorphic and zoomorphic representations, in both two-dimensional version as depictions and three-dimensional version as statues (see Figure 1) may raise reputational concerns in observers and promote fair behavior. Our first study’s results suggest that three-dimensional anthropomorphic representations have a stronger effect on the participants’ prosociality than the two-dimensional Figure 1. Stimuli used in our studies of material priming. McGraw and Krátký 11 representation of the same target stimuli (Krátký et al., 2016). Possibly, dimensionality allows the object to fit well within the public niche where our study took place; consequently, the material object affects our participants without them being consciously aware of it (a critical factor granting the effect of all priming studies). Thus material representation of human agent, together with other humans actually present at the place, becomes a part of local ecology and a source of normativity. Ultimately, we intend to ratchet up from discrete stimuli operationalized in quasinaturalistic settings, to the increasingly complex, real-world environments of religion and ritual, in an attempt to discern what contextual features contribute which influences on human action and experience. The use of anthropomorphic or zoomorphic representations as primes, in fact, offers an extraordinary insight into ways in which the objects enter our minds and affect our behavior. Awareness and control, two out of four horsemen of automaticity (Bargh, 1994) are at play here. The naturalness of the appearance, the fit of an object within the context is a most crucial criterion behind the effect of material agents. Strikingly, anthropomorphic depictions and statues represent living beings of our environments in an artificial way. Met and perceived without awareness, in right situations where behavior choices are narrow, they may elicit the right sorts of sentiments and select for socially desirable behavior outcomes. In contrast, spotted consciously and decoded for their artificial nature, they enable us to slip out of automatism and trigger opposing or simply random effects. Thus artificial representations of alive target entities contrast in their inherent ambiguity with ‘ordinary’ material objects – tools, solid materials, architectural structure, etc. – whose nature is in this respect plain. Lhermitte’s (1986) study shows the causal dependence of behavior on context in a highly rigid way, as if human behavior would be the result of just a dull automatism, whereas nothing is less true than this. There is always a certain dialogue between conscious and non-conscious components and the result is the outcome of these two layers of mental processing. Doing ritual ecology Although the preceding has appeared to be a theoretical piece, its chief aim is to suggest methodological innovations in the study of ritual. So how does one do ritual ecology? The kind of thorough case study necessary for this task is beyond the scope of this article, but some ‘first principles’ of ritual ecology can be touched upon here. Before discussing or analyzing a ritual (which is to say, before going into the ‘ritual enaction’), the analyst needs to make a ‘laundry list’ of all the intricate details that go into the ritual, whether or not they seem relevant at the time. In fact, it is the prefiguring of relevance – the conscious or unconscious ‘setting-aside’ of a set of elements involved in the ritual – that speaks to the importance of this approach. For a notorious problem in academic studies is the circular, top-down, reach of theory into methodology and data collection (Bauer, 2014; Hahn, 2011; Kuhn, 1970: 94). Such a bias is difficult to overcome (and may even be constitutive for consolidating or working within a given scientific paradigm), but at least with a sufficiently detailed itemizing of the ritual ecosystem, the kind of data that may be necessary for further analyses and interpretations can be preserved for other analysts. In essence, this is akin to constructing the ‘materials and methods’ section of a 12 Journal of Material Culture 0(0) scientific paper with an emphasis on the former rather than the latter, although, in this case, the materials and methods of a ritual constitute a significant portion of its data as well. Without properly reviewing what is involved, and how it is put into effect, a scientific study lacks a centrally important means for achieving reliability across studies. Moreover, by comparing and contrasting the details of a ritual ecosystem observed by multiple scholars or observed by a single scholar over multiple enactments of the ritual, what is essential to the ritual enaction may be glimpsed and the subtle details of a particular component’s role in a given ritual ecosystem may be more easily determined. However odd or irrelevant the details may seem to be upon first review, as much of the context as possible should be captured in the inscriptions (including audio, video, photos, notes, sketches, and other illustrations) of the careful analyst. A simple heuristic to follow is detailing the ‘who, what, where, and when’ of a ritual; the ‘how and why’ should be treated in subsequent interpretations and discussions. To illustrate the ‘who, what, where, and when’ approach, Krátký (2012) provides an analysis of the shift in the ritual practice of the Maha mantra chanting among the Gaudiya Vaishnava devotees by seemingly insignificant variations in the use of an artifact – replacement of the traditional prayer beads, used to manually count the number of chanted rounds throughout the day, with a mechanical clicker informing the devotees instantly about the number of rounds completed. By providing the devotees with this external memory prompt (Donald, 2010), thus easing the cognitive load, the mechanical clicker altered the way the worship was performed throughout the day (i.e. chunking it into parts and performing it without the right level of mental awareness). As a result, in the eyes of its opposers, the mechanical clicker contributed to the corrosion of this highly important ritual in the religious tradition. Studies of ‘languaging’ (Bottineau, 2010; Maturana, 1978; Maturana and Varela, 1987) and ‘multimodal communication’ (Kress, 2010) provide good templates for the kinds of features that might be noted in characterizing a ritual ecosystem (see Goodwin, 1994, 2000; Hutchins, 2010; Senft and Basso, 2009). Everything from diagrams to frame captures enable the compression of a great deal of evidence into an efficient form for ‘microanalysis’ of key moments and action sequences in the ritual (see Alač and Hutchins, 2004; Goodwin, 2007): for example, the diagram in Figure 2, constructed from notes and photos (including Figure 3), that helps to situate many of the various items in a given ritual ecosystem, in this case, that of tz’ite’ seed divination (see McGraw, 2011, 2015c, 2016). Tz’ite’ divination ritual rests on a complex decision-making ecology. It includes ritual specialists, a ritual calendar which is a compendium of cultural themes and values, and special beings who inhabit the physical and spiritual terrain. Mayan beliefs and practices are inscribed in a calendar and mnemonically encoded in patterns of tz’ite’ seeds and quartz crystals. All these elements are brought together in order to resolve a particular problem, for a particular person, at a particular time. This type of decision-making process can be well understood as a transparent and tangible manipulation with material tokens. By employing randomness, divine forces are allowed to enter the process and absolve the diviner and the recipient from the responsibility and relocate this responsibility for decision-making into the patterns of seeds and quartz crystals visibly organized on the table. By using a divination technique that exploits chance, the diviner creates novel combinations of seeds; the resulting combinations allow the person to see his dilemma anew. McGraw and Krátký 13 Figure 2. Ritual ecosystem (partial) of a divination consultation. Additionally, such components as music, colors, and a myriad of aromas are the typical features in these sorts of Mayan rituals. All this, and more, must be accounted for in the study of ritual ecology. As glimpsed in the photo in Figure 3, for example, smoke from fire and incense, and specific clothes and features of costuming need to be described. Conclusion Theories about material agency, investigations of material priming, and research into the ‘environmental dependency syndrome’ converge on a singular point: human cognition is strongly affected by the contexts in which people find themselves. Features of the environment guide what we do and feel, often without our knowledge of these influences. What does this have to do with ritual? Ritual ecology is a methodological orientation that takes these influences for granted, supposing that ritual is more about action and experience than it is about symbolism and conscious reflection. All of this highlights the importance of more carefully attending to the environment in which ritual takes place. Additionally, ‘environment’ is a misleading abstraction since it is a single word denoting the complicated assemblage of people, places, objects, and conditions that frame human action. To better understand the significance and efficacy of ritual, scholars need to systematically look to the material world, and all its heterogeneous features and phenomena, 14 Journal of Material Culture 0(0) Figure 3. Don Francisco (face concealed) and his altar in a smoke-filled room. rather than turning, once again, to the ‘Cartesian theater’ for all the answers (Dennett, 1991). It seems as if the history of ritual studies, if not the study of culture more generally, has ignored half, or more, of the data that may reveal why, and how, people do the things they do. Ultimately, related approaches – informed by the latest theories regarding materiality and agency – may remind us that the divisions and dichotomies that philosophic and scientific traditions have endorsed and naturalized are, primarily, sociocultural constructions rather than inevitable features of human biology. At its most basic, the point is this: extension matters. Without the mediation of res extensa – structures in the world – there is no interaction, no sociality, no religion, and no ritual. By adopting an ecological perspective, though, we begin to see human beings as fully embodied, fully embedded creatures continuous with the environments they have inherited from their ancestors and bequeath to their progeny. The significance of these recent findings about human cognition cannot be underestimated. Adapting a famous passage from Freud (1963: 284–285), Brown (1959: 16) asserted that: True humility … requires that we learn from Copernicus that the human world is not the purpose or the center of the universe; that we learn from Darwin that man is a member of the animal kingdom; and that we learn from Freud that the human ego is not even master in its own house. If Freud is to be credited with harvesting the first fruits of research into the power of the unconscious, contemporary work on priming and environmentally situated cognition is McGraw and Krátký 15 scientifically gleaning the many details required to demonstrate the importance of implicit cognitive processes for all aspects of human experience, past and present. 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His publications included articles in Intellectica (2015) and Journal of Consciousness Studies, a co-authored article in Frontiers of Psychology (2014) and a co-authored chapter in Perspectives on Social Ontology and Social Cognition (ed. Mattia Gallotti and John Michael, Springer, 2014). Jan Krátký is currently a PhD student at the Department for the Study of Religions, Masaryk University, Brno and a research fellow at the Laboratory for the Experimental research of religion and HUME lab. He conducts experimental research both in the laboratory and in the field. Key areas of interests comprise the role of materiality in cognition, ritual and religious behaviour; effects of contextual cues on prosocial behavior and research of extreme rituals. Recent publications include co-authored articles in Communicative & Integrative Biology (2016), PLOS ONE (2016) and Current Biology (2015).