Animal Ritual

Rituals are a universal aspect of vertebrate life; they mediate interactions that range from routine to stressful. Rituals enable conspecifics (members of the same species) to reproduce successfully and to interact socially. Rituals feature repetitive, stereotyped behaviors that signal an animal’s disposition and catalytically enhance its capacity to act. That is, rituals are fundamentally communicative and performative. Through rituals, animals communicate their interests and perceive and perhaps acknowledge the interests of conspecifics—whether to mate or to fight, or to socialize and participate in an overarching social order. Our understanding of animal ritual has changed significantly over the last century, reflecting shifting theorizations of culture, evolution, and communication. Early ethologists and sociobiologists promoted a view of ritual as a set of evolved, innate behaviors, even evident in humans’ large-scale, collective ceremonies. Social theorists largely reject the evolutionary dimension of ritual behavior in humans and insisted that our species’ rituals are distinctive because they feature meanings—conventional forms of culturally imbibed signification. These contrasting perspectives are currently being synthesized as ethologists recognize that animals (at least social species) also have culture—socially learned and transmitted behavioral repertoires that are not genetically inherited. As animals are increasingly recognized as having forms of behavioral plasticity and large communicative capacities, the question is no longer whether meaning distinguishes between human and nonhuman forms of rituals; it’s whether or how the more developed theorization of ritual in humans pertains to and is applicable in analyzing other social species. There will be more than one answer to this question, depending upon the species but also the type of ritual under consideration. The most familiar and common rituals involve mating, with another related set featuring forms of fighting. In contrast with these often dramatic, energetic displays, rituals also manifest in mundane forms such as greetings and leave-taking. These communicative interactions signal a willingness by individual animals to comport themselves in accord with their shared social conventions. For ethologists, the underlying function of rituals is to diffuse or contain aggression. But this assumption leaves out a vast range of affiliative behaviors between conspecifics, such as grooming, which has shared features of rituals. Extending and deepening current understandings of animal rituals will require ethologists to engage with social theorists’ efforts to define and analyze rituals in humans. This extension of social theory to other species began in primatology and gradually is being extended to other taxa.