Thoughtful Rituals: A Methodological Preface

Sometimes the word ritual sounds like an old-fashioned term evoking the great performances of the past. Yet, rituals are also contemporary religious acts that draw the attention of anthropologists, historians, psychologists, sociologists, and theologians, especially when the past and present meet in the gestures, utterances, chants, and prayers that take place during ritual sessions, festivals, private worship, or public ceremonies. More recently, embodied cognition theorists embraced the position that «cognition is physically interactive, embedded in physical contexts, and manifested in physical bodies» (Shapiro 2021), and thus suggested that the conventional distinction between action and belief, body and mind, and eventually, between ‘empty’ and ‘meaningful’ actions can be often misleading. In the humanities, scholars agree that religious acts are different from non-religious acts in that the formers presume forms of interaction between human and extra-human actors and agents: therefore, the same scholars argue, the repetition of religious acts, as well as their efficacy and correctness, are considered to hold collective importance or value. In the book In the footsteps of the cows. The ritual of gavāmayana between ancient and contemporary India, Igor Spanò brings the readers to the textures of the Vedic past and provides the keys to watching the ritual stage and its actors from off stage with the help of Sanskrit literature and anthropological and historic-religious theories.