Ritual Forms and Ritual Stuff: Implications of Lawson and McCauley's Ritual Form Hypothesis for Material Culture

Abstract

Lawson and McCauley's ritual form hypothesis (RFH) appeals to natural cognition to capture several commonly observed features of religious rituals in one explanatory theory: (1) their repetition in the life of a participant tends to be distributed in bipolar fashion (typically only once in a lifetime or repeatedly, on the order of annually, monthly, weekly, or even daily); (2) their effects may or may not be reversed through other rituals; (3) their range in centrality to a religious tradition (from peripheral to essential); and (4) their range from dull, tedious affairs to evocative, emotional, life‐changing events high in sensory pageantry. In this article, we summarize RFH and then turn to its potential application to material culture. If RFH can partially explain which sorts of religious rituals will be religiously frequent, central, and high in sensory pageantry, then it may also probabilistically predict the sorts of materials used in these rituals.