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There may have been other reasons for it, but I have a really hard time believing people in ancient times didn’t just also think it was fun.
There is a story like that with a preserved Bronze Age hut where knifes were found stashed in the thatched roof. A historian proposed it was a spiritual ritual surrounding their hunting weapons.
The first parent that took a look knew what it really was: simple childproofing.
Given the incredibly high value of any knife in such a society, I'd suspect it was just an anti-theft measure. You can't really climb up on someone's thatch roof while they are sleeping, rustle about until you find their knife, then slip away into the night.
I read this as them being stashed from the inside. At least if you want to go with the theory of childproofing.
So many other alternatives.
Hiding from thieves, someone playing around and simply losing it. Or maybe someone was fixing something and lost it.
Everything aside from thieves seems unlikely if multiple knives were stashed there. And thieves are way less common than children.
In Ireland, even now, there is a folk saying which refers to keeping a "pike in the thatch".
So that is a literal survival of the concept of hiding weapons in the thatch.
See e.g. https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/translation-of-irish-words-...
Historians always think everyone from more than a century ago was a dour fun-hating worker drone. Everything that existed just because it was fun or cool gets classified as "ceremonial".
Ritual /= ceremonial. Lots of people have rituals just for fun. The morning coffee ritual is one. Another common ritual is when athletes get ready for a game, but ritual need not be accompanied by superstition or indeed any belief whatsoever.
There are all sorts of rituals embedded in children’s play. Has anyone played “red rover”? [1] Heck, even video games and indeed computer use in general are full of rituals. The “three-finger salute” of control-alt-delete is a classic one.
I see this mistake made a lot on HN (and elsewhere). The term ritual connotes solemn religious practice but it doesn’t strictly mean that anymore. Language evolves! And in academic historical and archaeological contexts, the secular use of ritual pervades as a term of art (and may actually be a major contributor to the relaxation of the term in an etymological sense).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Rover
Edit: how could I forget?! The birthday party! Long devoid of religion (at least for most people in the west), the birthday party, complete with song and candle-blow, is one of the most storied (and dreaded) rituals of all!
I’m not sure I see how alt+control+delete is a ‘ritual’ - is it a ritual to tell people to “stop” when you want them to stop? Or to reply “yes” to indicate an affirmative response when someone asks you a question? alt+control+delete is a command, like pulling a lever to operate any appliance - is it a ritual to open the door of a refrigerator before you pull something out? Or to disengage the parking break before you start driving your car? Or is it simply a mundane utilitarian interaction with a tool?
Pulling a lever isn’t necessarily ritual but it can be part of a ritual, such as for operating a machine that requires you to pull a series of levers in a particular order. Control-alt-delete is a ritual because it has multiple parts to it that must be done properly or it doesn’t work.
Disengaging the parking brake (which is usually done by pushing a lever, sometimes accompanied by a button press) is part of the ritual of starting to drive your car. It’s not strictly necessary (you can drive the car with the parking brake engaged though it’ll damage the car) but it is part of a multi-step process that becomes ritualized in your subconscious. Pilots learn to formalize the pre-flight check ritual because they tend to die if something goes badly wrong in the air. Japanese train conductors [1] have even incorporated ritual pointing gestures into their routine checks.
All of this is to say that rituals play psychological and cultural roles in our behaviour. They’re an excellent memory aid! And that may be their original evolutionary raison d’être.
[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-j...
I think it's strongly indicative of ritual when people greet others with "hi, how are you?" and are annoyed with any answer other than "fine, and you?".
They’re all rituals as long as you do those things on the same schedule (and especially if multiple people do them on the same schedule).
I think the point is that if we used the language of museum displays and pop-sci books about antiquity to describe the modern world, the results would be comical.
In all likelihood, big-bosomed stone pendants dug up in Mesopotamia had as much to do with "fertility rituals" as truck nuts do.
Although magical thinking seems to be alive and well in all corners of life. Maybe we still have those kind of behaviours, just expressed in different ways.
Are you saying truck nuts aren't part of a fertility ritual?
This may be true from a strictly linguistic standpoint, but is this what historians mean by "ritual?"
Yes. For an overview of how "ritual" is used in the social sciences--
https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/jschroeder/Publications/Ho...
or
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7423255/
As the grandparent points out, ritual literally/etymologically does mean a religious practice, but the use of ritual as metaphor in broader context in academic writing is weakening the religious portion of the meaning.
The first linked paper defines a ritual as "(a) predefined sequences that are characterized by rigidity, formality and repetition that are (b) embedded in a larger system of symbolism and meaning, but (c) contain elements that lack direct instrumental purpose".
Doing ctrl-alt-delete to get the attention of a Windows computer certainly fits (a) but it doesn't fit (b) without a considerable stretch and it doesn't fit (c) at all.
(The second linked paper quotes the first paper's definition, or something basically indistinguishable from it; the paper itself isn't about saying what rituals are, it's about exploring why they exist. Very little of what it says about that is applicable to ctrl-alt-delete.)
It's absolutely true that "ritual" doesn't just mean religious ritual. But it's also not as broad as "anything that people repeatedly do in more or less the same way".
These are very good links, and I feel I have a better understanding of "ritual" now. Thank you!
You’d have to ask a historian. My sister did a master’s degree in archaeology and this is what she told me. Opinions may still differ and I’m sure some historians still operate under the religious connotation. The history of academia is inextricably linked with the church (universities were originally built to educate the clergy) and many schools still carry religious charters.
Unfortunately, social sciences don’t use mathematically rigorous definitions the way “hard sciences” do, even as they begin to adopt more rigour in their practices (statistical methods, radiometric dating).
Yes, this is the common meaning in all of the humanities and social sciences. In that context if you mean a ceremony or a religious ritual, you'd need to say that specifically.
For a great satire of this tendency see David Macaulay's amazing graphic book Motel of Mysteries[1] where a motel is unburied thousands of years in the future and everything in it is classified as part of some ceremonial burial rite.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/WeirdLit/comments/sy8pt2/motel_of_m...
I'm probably speaking to the choir here, but the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz [0] involves a monastery that forms around an electrical engineer's design documents.
It was a lot more than just his design documents. There were enough technical books stashed that it took centuries for the survivors to work through (and saved them centuries re-climbing the tech ladder as they did).
If you don't know what fun is, having fun is the same as a ceremony. It's some dumb thing rubes do because "nobody knows why!"
You see a similar phenomenon in ethology, the reason many animals "play" is a mystery but there are all sorts of loose explanations like "helps train to hunt" that are probably too quick to dismiss the idea that maybe some things simply feel good.
Those could very well be the same thing. Evolution makes it so that the things which help us survive and reproduce feel like fun. I suspect all of our emotional responses are driven by evolution, and are really our top level instruction on how to live. Then afterwards we come up with rationalizations why we do the things we do.
Reminds me of the essay "Whats the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?" by David Graeber (https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-hav...):
"Generally speaking, an analysis of animal behavior is not considered scientific unless the animal is assumed, at least tacitly, to be operating according to the same means/end calculations that one would apply to economic transactions. Under this assumption, an expenditure of energy must be directed toward some goal, whether it be obtaining food, securing territory, achieving dominance, or maximizing reproductive success—unless one can absolutely prove that it isnt, and absolute proof in such matters is, as one might imagine, very hard to come by.
I must emphasize here that it doesn’t really matter what sort of theory of animal motivation a scientist might entertain: what she believes an animal to be thinking, whether she thinks an animal can be said to be “thinking” anything at all. I' m not saying that ethologists actually believe that animals are simply rational calculating machines. I' m simply saying that ethologists have boxed themselves into a world where to be scientific means to offer an explanation of behavior in rational terms—which in turn means describing an animal as if it were a calculating economic actor trying to maximize some sort of self-interest—whatever their theory of animal psychology, or motivation, might be.
That’s why the existence of animal play is considered something of an intellectual scandal. It' s understudied, and those who do study it are seen as mildly eccentric. As with many vaguely threatening, speculative notions, difficult-to-satisfy criteria are introduced for proving animal play exists, and even when it is acknowledged, the research more often than not cannibalizes its own insights by trying to demonstrate that play must have some long-term survival or reproductive function."
"Animal "play" isn't any sort of "scandal" -- we know that many young animals "play" by fighting with each other -- this is obviously good training for their adult lives. At the end of the day, all animal behavior evolved somehow and so self-interest must be involved, unless you want to bring some sort of creator god into the explanation. Like Graeber's distorted view of Apple's history, I suspect he knew very little of evolutionary biology.
This is really good, thank you for sharing it.
Isn't making things feel good/hurt the way we are pushed towards stuff like training to hunt by evolution, though?
I think you're cutting to the heart of why fun is even a thing. We do fun things, and find them fun, because they help us mentally prepare for critical real-world scenarios. We don't know this going in, but it feels good and we reap the benefits. Just like adults find sex pleasurable so they have the urge to do it and reproduce, children and adults find play pleasurable so they have the urge to do it and build up our brains.
Like, armed conflict isn't fun unless you're a psychopath (in which case militaries are probably very interested in recruiting you). But a de-risked simulation of armed conflict -- anything from chess to sportsball to a modern FPS -- is an almost archetypal fun activity.
This is something to keep in mind when considering the ruinous effects of the removal of recess and free play from American schools.
This is a reasonable and somewhat popular theory but evidence to support it is harder to find than you might imagine. People have spent their entire lives studying animal behavior and still don't have much more than a shrug to show for evidence supporting play as a survival or evolutionary mechanism. Some play does look like hunting (cat and dog owners will notice this), but there's a good amount that also doesn't align with anything else an animal regularly does.
I have a hard time with the study of history. Often it feels self-serving to make exciting and interesting-to-study claims. But I imagine the overwhelming majority of the time, the actual explanations for things are mundane.
Swings are fun and are a technology that have been enabled for a very long time.
I think what you're describing is archaeology. History is more of a scholarly endeavor while archeology is the one digging up sites and trying to explain things without context from contemporary writings.
Kind of, yeah! I definitely feel it strongly with archaeology. But let me posit this:
The further back into history you go, the harder it is to definitively figure out what, where, why, when, how. And the larger the blind spot, the easier it is to get creative with your explanations. Ie. it's a function of time. And archaeology is the study of history from a long time ago.
I agree, although to be fair magical thinking was often the only explanation people had for why things happened. It is inexplicable now because we have much better explanations. So an element of ceremony may have been mixed into other things like fun. And we still hold onto things like that which have an element of pleasure or fun whilst having some other abstract ideas. Just look at Easter or Christmas.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an archaeologist when I was hiking in Spain. We were in Burgos and looking at the beautiful cathedral.
Archaeologist <drinking a sip of beer>: “see we find really good precision work on parts of cathedrals that nobody would ever see - this is because they had a deep relationship with good and we’re convinced they had to do a good job.”
Me: “or you know, they were craftsmen and prided themselves on quality craftsmanship and doing a good job.”
People back in the day probably didn’t think any different than we do - I don’t only do a good job when I know someone is watching and I reckon people building cathedrals didn’t either.
And, whoever was ordering/paying/monitoring work probably had much more power to get it right. And not accept shoddy work.
Something you these days likely only see in building nuclear powerplants.
And just like that you basically disregard the whole text with but a sentence and no supporting argument.
It was the point of the author that it was not fun but scary and weird, no? What do you think was happening in the heads of people around the time ancient myths were written? Probably something different eh? Different enough that I would not assume making yourself feel weird and almost high was considered fun
For example, I am not taking any drugs except coffee and nicotine. They sound scary and weird even though younger progressive people seem to consider them just fun. That seems similar enough
I feel like this probably explains a lot of seemingly "bizarre and backwards" practices? Like if they were to examine how we do Halloween it would be like "they dressed the children up to disguise them among the spirits lest they be TAKEN AWAAAAAY"
I don't know if anyone else here has encountered the Mystic Swing while at a festival or fairground:
https://coasterpedia.net/wiki/Mystic_Swing
http://ribtickler.free.fr/msideshow/millenium_sideshow.htm
They used to have it at a cider festival i sometimes attend, and several of my friends have certainly been near-universally transgressed by it.
> To swing is not only to play, but to open disorienting passages into transgressive spaces.
What does this even mean?
Has anyone seen a really big version of a swing designed for grown-ups? I'm wondering if a longer chain might be a little more thrilling for adults.
I sort of think if I had easy access to swings maybe I would not have picked up smoking.
The article author just bought a thesaurus and wants everyone to know about it.
What a load of BS sprinkled with a light topping of historical anecdotes.