Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

by Edward Slingerland

Durkheim, viewed music, ritual, and dance as the key cultural technologies employed to create the “collective effervescence” that bound together traditional cultures. The influential theorist Roy Rappaport similarly argued that “the ritual generation of communitas often rests in considerable degree on ritually-imposed tempos, on their repetitiveness and, more fundamentally, on their rhythmicity.”99 More recent work in the cognitive science of ritual has followed this lead, with researchers focusing on ritual components such as physical synchrony. One study, for instance, found that getting strangers to dance in sync with one another—as opposed to conditions where their dancing was partially or completely asynchronous—boosted their pain thresholds (a good proxy for endorphin activation) and reported feelings of social closeness. Other studies have found that tapping in synchrony with another person increases feelings of liking, interpersonal trust, willingness to help, and sense of similarity with another,100 and that these feelings of prosociality might be quite expansive, extending beyond the in-sync partner to include others not involved in the activity.101