LESSONS FROM Extreme Rituals

Dimitris Xygalatas, PhD, runs a unique lab at the University of Connecticut that gathers data from around the world to answer a very big question: Why do so many ordinary people regularly participate in painful religious rites?

- STEPHEN KIESLING

We caught up with Dr. Xygalatas while he was doing research on the island of Mauritius, a remote former British colony where devotees of the world’s major religions go to extremes.

Your Experimental Anthropology program sounds like a lot of fun. I think so. We work both in and out of the lab. The purpose of the lab is to develop the methods and the technologies that we can apply in real-life situations. We have done studies in football stadiums in Brazil, basketball stadiums in the US, at fire-walking rituals in Spain, and at religious temples in Turkey—and of course lots of studies here on Mauritius. I have a big team of students with me now, both an educational program for undergraduates to learn the methods and a group of graduate students doing research.

Why Mauritius?

I did my doctoral fieldwork in Greece and Spain on fire-walking rituals. In Greece, they dance for the better part of three days at the brink of collapse, and at the end of that they walk on fire—repeatedly. It’s extremely stressful. When I placed physiological monitors on these people, I saw heart rates of 240 beats per minute before going into the fire. So, 240 beats per minute was just the anticipation—which seems crazy.

After that, I wanted to explore rituals that were even more extreme, more painful. I wanted to find the most extreme rituals because of the biggest question I was asking: Why do people engage in things that appear to be pointless, wasteful, or risky? This is a puzzle for any ritual you look at, but it’s a bigger puzzle with a very painful ritual. Why do people do things that involve so much suffering and that might be dangerous?