Music and Rituals: a Complexity Science Perspective

 We will bring together top experts in musicology, anthropology, religious studies and ritual studies in order to create a new “Ritual” poll for the Database of Religious History (DRH). The new proposed poll would allow the gathering of much more detailed, granular data on the specifics of religious ritual practices around the world and throughout history: the size and frequency, the setting, the purpose, and supernatural beings involved, as well as the details of the music, art, mind-altering substances, foods, and movement/dance employed. This ritual data, all grounded in space and time and marked with both religious group and linguistic tags, can then be used to test hypotheses about the role of ritual in human cultural evolution, or even the relationship of human cultural evolution to the evolution of other organisms.