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Monday, February 28, 2011

Ritual

I have been talking about structured and patterned behavior, such as Sports and Dance. I think these all can be subsumed under a heading of "Ritual". Ritual would cover a wide range of phenomena, but they would have in common their structure of bodies moving in patterns.
Sports is more chaotic than Dance; the probability of the sequence of movements in Dance is fairly rigid, whereas Sports is very much random at times.
Religious ritual is highly rigid, but it depends on its outcomes: if its outcomes are perfectly predictable, it is not much more than Sunday morning service.

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