Continuing my train of thought from the previous post, more or less, yesterday I heard on The Moth Radio Hour a description of a traditional West African ceremony used to treat depression. The specifics of the ceremony are a bit nonsensical, and in roughly the ways you might guess. Andrew Solomon mentions, though, that some of its features probably are genuinely helpful, especially that the ceremony involves the village as a whole expressing support for the person involved. So, if that’s the part that’s important, why all the other parts of the ceremony that don’t really make any sense? And why, especially, ritual sacrifice of a ram? It occurred to me that, well, all the people involved have to be doing something. A bunch of people sitting around awkwardly doing nothing in particular wouldn’t be very helpful. They need some activity that serves as an expression of their support and there isn’t an obvious option that has a direct relationship to mental illness of itself, so the activity is necessarily going to have a somewhat arbitrary relationship to the actual task at hand. And, so long as you’ve got all these people together needing to occupy themselves, well, why not pick an activity that rather naturally lends itself to a lot of roast meat at the end?

There are two very opposite ways you can conceptualize and use ritual and its more bureaucratic or scientific procedural equivalents. It can be employed to try to control behavior, and so, as the one subjected to it, you naturally view is as constraint and imposition. Freedom them comes from avoiding or relaxing the procedural requirements. It can also reduce the attentional requirements of uninteresting tasks, or the less interesting aspects of a task. This is related to “muscle memory”. If there is an established set of actions that you can simply follow, you don’t have to make any decisions. Your mind need not be occupied with the mundane details of accomplishing your task, but can be directed elsewhere. This, also, is freeing. It’s not clear to me how much of the difference is in the events themselves vs. one’s psychological relationship to them.