Remembering religious rituals: autobiographical memories of high-arousal religious rituals considered from a narrative processing perspective

ABSTRACT

Autobiographical memory and religion both have the ability to guide us in our understanding of the world. One place where memory and religion intersect is in religious rituals, which have the potential to generate important memories. Religious rituals with high levels of arousal are expected to generate especially vivid memories. In this article, previous experimental anthropological work on memory and religious rituals will be discussed within the context of an extensive background of autobiographical and episodic memory research (including aspects like episodicity, emotionality, valence, and specificity), accompanied by recommendations for future research in the cognitive science of religion. Moreover, a novel perspective, based on the literature of narrative processing, memory reconstruction, and reflection, will be proposed. In this article, it is suggested that the experience of the ritual itself may be the goal of high-arousal religious rituals, giving rise to memories with high levels of emotionality. The subsequent narrative processing of these memories, in which interpretation rather than accuracy is pivotal, allows the memories to become an important part of the participants’ life narratives, thus contributing to the participants’ identities and sense of coherence and purpose.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiographical memory
• episodic memory
• ritual
• religion
• emotion
• arousal

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful for the comments of the editor and two anonymous reviewers, which have benefitted the manuscript greatly. The author is also grateful for comments on the manuscript by Armin Geertz, and for funding provided by the Religion, Cognition and Culture unit and the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark, and for the stay in Aarhus during which a large part of this manuscript was written.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Valerie van Mulukom http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0549-7365

Notes

1. Religious rituals will be defined here as formal, traditional performances, governed by rules and subject to invariance, and as including sacral symbolism (Bell, 1997).

2. High-arousal religious rituals are taken to refer to those religious rituals that comprise strong arousal or a strong emotional component for the participants or individuals who experience the ritual (Russell, Dunbar, & Gobet, 2012).

3. I would like to point out that I appreciate Xygalatas et al.’s (2013) study as great pioneering work that paves the way for future research on memory and ritual, and that I realize that such studies are a highly challenging endeavor. In this article, I mainly bring forward results from years of laboratory work, whereas in fieldwork settings complications are likely to arise. I have to leave these adjustments to experts (i.e., anthropologists such as Dimitris Xygalatas), and would instead like to present the perspective of experimental psychologists specializing in autobiographical memory. Please refer to the discussion for further considerations of this approach.

4. That is not to say, however, that memories of religious events are fundamentally different from other memories. Rather, the experiences on which the memories are based might be different in the features noted here.

5. Note that in this case I make no reference as to where these contextual details come from – they might follow from self-reflection but also in part be gathered from religious authorities’ narratives, fellow ritual participants, and other individuals with whom the ritual has been discussed, such as friends or family.

6. This is not an easy endeavor, however. While a ritual may be euphoric or dysphoric (which in itself may be hard to define; one could take it to broadly reflect “experienced as giving pleasure or pain”), the resulting evaluation of the memory may be positive or negative. The way that memories are assessed to be positive or negative in the literature is through participants’ self-report; it is suggested that the same procedure is adhered to in the study of memories of religious rituals.

7. Explicit emotional memories are reconstructed just like neutral memories (for a review, see Levine & Pizarro, 2004). Knowledge acquired after the event, or changes in the evaluations of and feelings towards the events, can lead to changes as to which emotional details are remembered (Levine & Safer, 2002).

8. These ideas are in line with Whitehouse’'s suggestion that memories of high-arousal rituals may trigger prolonged reflective processes (Whitehouse, 2002).

9. This is likely also partly due to the self-serving bias (Larson, 1977): we attribute positive events or success to ourselves, but negative events or failures to external factors. Thus, in the case of negative events, a search for the external factors that contributed to the negative event might be initiated.

10. While this article has focused primarily on the individual and his/her narratives, it has also been suggested that these narratives are based on contextual information, interpretations and life goals that are likely gathered socially, at least in part.

11. It may take time, during which reflection and discussion can take place, before the (personal) meaning of a ritual is established by a participant.

12. Intuitive thinking is hypothesized to occur during the ritual; when some time has passed after the ritual, it is possible that the participant returns to an analytic mode of thinking regarding the ritual.

Additional information

Funding

The author was funded by Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant RES-060-25-0085 at the University of Oxford where the manuscript was finalized.