The Rituals That Hold Us Together with Dimitris Xygalatas

Dimitris Xygalatas Well, I always start my day with my coffee ritual. I will make my coffee in exactly the same way. I have to use a very specific mug, and I will make my coffee and half of the time I won’t even drink it. So it is the process that counts, not the outcome, that’s why I would call this a ritual.

Michael Feigelson You described to me that your son when he was really little watched this particular ritual of your coffee very carefully, and didn’t like when you deviated from it. What was the scene in the morning? What did it look like?

Dimitris Xygalatas So this started happening when he was about, I don’t know, one and a half, two years old, barely could say a few words, and I would take him to daycare every morning and he observed that I made my coffee every day, whether I drank it or not. And in the few occasions where I would be in a rush and I didn’t have time to do it, he would point at the coffee maker And you could see, here we get annoyed, and if I said something like, No, we have to rest, he would say, No, no, no. Papa, cafe, cafe. You just have to do it. That’s what we do every morning.

Michael Feigelson Whether he drank it or not, didn’t matter. You just have to do it. That’s what we do every morning. Why would a toddler care so much if his dad made coffee or not? Well, by Dimitris’ explanation, this wasn’t actually about coffee. It was about something much deeper.

Michael Feigelson When he was saying “papa café”, did you, as an anthropologist, immediately realize what was going on and adapt? Or were you more the dad who said, “no, we have to get to school.”

Dimitris Xygalatas Oh, well, of course, I realize, but it was both. Your instinct wants to say, “no, we have to get to school.” But at the same time, you get this flash of, of insight and excitement when you realize what is, what is happening.

Michael Feigelson Someone, in this case Dimitris’ two-year-old son, decides that a thing matters. Not because it’s efficient, not because it is logical, just because it is what we do. And suddenly, something ordinary becomes sacred. It becomes ritual.

This podcast begins with a simple idea: when a baby is born, a parent is also born. And in that transition, just like their babies, parents’ brains and bodies team up to help them learn and adapt at high velocity, developing a set of skills and perspectives valuable for their kids and for society as a whole.

This is Birth of a Parent. Today’s guest is Dimitris Xygalatas. An anthropologist, field researcher, writer, teacher, and one of the world’s leading experts on ritual.

In this conversation, Dimitris makes the case that we need ritual more than we think, and that nowhere does it show up more intensely than in the lives of new parents.

Michael Feigelson And what did he think would happen if you didn’t do it? I mean, what was the underlying fear or why was it so important?

Dimitris Xygalatas Well, this started happening with him already before he could actually articulate any answer to this, but it’s a very good question because it points to the fact that across the societies that have studied, and other anthropologists have noted this, there is this sense of urgency and there is the sense of anxiety that if we don’t perform our rituals, something bad will happen. But then if you ask people specifically what would happen, very often they just look at you puzzled and they say, well, I don’t know, something terrible will happen.

Michael Feigelson And is this what you mean when you say “ritual paradox”?

Dimitris Xygalatas Yes, this is very much related to the ritual paradox. This is a term I’ve used to describe the fact that I’ve seen across cultures that people attribute tremendous significance to their rituals, but don’t necessarily have a good justification for why they do those rituals.

Michael Feigelson That idea lands immediately, because in families, some things just matter. And if someone asks why this particular cup or this exact order or this bedtime sequence has to happen, the answer is just because. And that answer, just because, is a crucial part of what distinguishes a ritual from a routine.

Dimitris Xygalatas The lack of any kind of causal outcome is fundamental for the ritual. Or, in other words, the lack between a causal connection between the actions that you perform and any outcome if there even is a stated outcome. Also there is another layer in ritual and I think that’s a very crucial layer is that of meaning. Rituals have this sense of importance, they take something and they demarcate it as being special. And if someone were to disrupt our rituals, we would get upset.

Michael Feigelson Routine is something we do. Ritual signals something matters. I’m eager to learn what rituals Dimitris grew up with and if he liked them as a kid.

Dimitris Xygalatas Not really. So as a child, I grew up in a context where religion was everywhere. There was no separation between the public sphere and to this day, Greece has a state religion. So I was forced to engage in morning prayer. And we would be punished if we didn’t, there was a point system. And if you missed too many of those, you could even fail and miss your year. And we would have to go to church once a year with our teachers and that wasn’t fun for me as a child because I wanted to mess around. And of course, if you’ve ever been in an Orthodox Greek church, it’s very austere and you have to be absolutely quiet and there’s no interaction between the priest and the congregation. So I found those rituals a bit oppressive and I couldn’t really understand why people were engaging of them.

Michael Feigelson It’s a nice arc, from a kid who couldn’t understand why people were engaging in these rituals to an anthropologist trying to answer exactly that question. Why do humans keep doing things that seem inefficient, irrational, or unnecessary? Dimitris thinks the answer begins with the fundamental feature of the human brain.

Dimitris Xygalatas So we used to think of the brain as a basic, early computer, basically what it does, it computes information. There’s a certain input, it processes this input and it produces an output. Today we think of the brain as a more sophisticated device and in fact we’re trying to build contemporary computers to mimic that architecture now. Where the main function is not passively processing stimuli, it is actively anticipating what’s going to happen, making predictions. So some people call this the Bayesian brain or the predictive brain. One byproduct of this cognitive architecture is that because prediction is so fundamentally important to us, uncertainty is very stressful. When we have low predictive capacity, when we don’t know what’s gonna happen in a few seconds, in a few minutes, in few years, that’s when we experience stress. And at times where people experience high uncertainty and high stakes, they turn to ritual. And if ritual is anything, it is structure. It is entirely predictable. It’s the same thing that we’ve been doing again and again, both as individuals and often for generations. So by engaging in these very predictable, very structured actions, you give yourself a sense that you’re in control of the situation and you know exactly what’s going to happen.

Michael Feigelson So is it too much to say that ritual helps us feel like we’re in control when we’re not and it’s scary?

Dimitris Xygalatas Absolutely, that’s exactly what it does.

Michael Feigelson This is why new parents become masters of ritual. Babies’ and toddlers’ brains are working hard to develop a predictive model of the world to understand what matters. As parents, we instinctively turn to ritual to help them, to signal things that are important.

This is when rituals are disrupted, like Dimitris’’ morning coffee, it can make them feel unsafe. And it’s also why the ritual of a bath or a bedtime story when performed in the right way, “the way we do it”, can be so grounding. But before we hone in on how and why new parents become masters of ritual, I wanted to spend some time on one of the most exciting features of Dimitris’ work. Unlike most anthropologists, he doesn’t just describe how ritual makes us feel, he measures what that feeling looks like inside our bodies.

Dimitris Xygalatas It went back to the work of Bronisław Malinowski, one of the most famous founding figures in anthropology, who noticed in his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands that the local fishermen would perform a lot of rituals before going out to the open sea that was very uncertain and scary to fish, but not before fishing in the calm waters of the lagoon. So he proposed for the first time that ritual serves this function to soothe anxiety. So we started a whole research program to investigate this. First, we began with a lab study where we brought people into the lab and we induced stress on them. We gave them a scenario where we’d have to prepare a public speech in front of a panel of experts and we know this stresses people up and we knew it stressed them because we measured this in their body, looking at their heart rates. And when we stress people up, the more stressed they became, the ritualized their behavior as we operationalized it. So the more repetitive, the more patterned it became. So, that was the first indication that this relationship is there. But now this raises the question, does ritual actually help these people alleviate anxiety? And to answer this question, we went into a real life context on the island of Mauritius and we used the same kind of physiological monitors to look at heart rate variability among people going to local Hindu temples and the control group who did it. They went to a similar structure, which was not a religious structure. And they were just given the opportunity to lay down and relax, and you would think that they would experience less stress. But in fact, we see that going to that temple and performing these repetitive rituals, these offerings to various statues, led to a decrease in physiological stress.

Michael Feigelson This is one of my favorite things about Dimitris. He wants the texture of real life, but he also wants the data, which means he’s not just watching rituals happen, he’s wiring them up, listening to their heartbeat, measuring their sweat, collecting saliva, even looking inside their hair.

Dimitris Xygalatas There are various things we can measure and many ways to approach this. For example, in many of my studies I’ve used autonomic nervous system responses. And those include things like heart rate as well as electro-dermal activity. So when we get stressed, our skin will slightly sweat immediately, very quickly, and that increases the conductivity on our skin. Another measure we can get is heart rate, and also from heart rate we can look at the time it takes between one beat and the next, we can look at heart rate variability. So high heart rate variability is an indicator of lower stress, and when we get stressed, our system reverts to this rigid mode, the fight and flight response, so there’s very little variability. Our heart beats closer to what a metronome looks like.

Michael Feigelson Okay, so let me just make sure I understood. So if I’m stressed out, my heart rate variability goes down, but practicing ritual may make it go back up. If I am stressed out there’s slight sweat on my skin, which makes the electrical signals travel faster or slower?

Dimitris Xygalatas Yes. So your electrodermal activity goes up.

Michael Feigelson It goes up. But if I practice virtual, it’ll slow down the electrical activity?

Dimitris Xygalatas This is generally what we’re seeing. And also in the long term, we have done studies where we see that people who take part in more collective rituals, they tend to have lower levels of cortisol. And we see that both in their saliva, which is closer to being momentary, related to the last few minutes, but also in their hair, which now indicates what happens in the term.

Michael Feigelson Which brings us to yet another important finding from Dimitris’’ work. Ritual doesn’t just regulate individuals, it is incredibly effective at co-regulating groups, and Dimitris has a very cool way of showing this.

Dimitris Xygalatas This was the first field experiment that I did. I was studying these fire-walking rituals and I realized that my participants kept bringing up this sense of togetherness that they had. When you go up there, you feel like one with a crowd, there are hundreds or thousands of people, but you feel connected, your emotions align. And this to me, it reminded me of early anthropological claims about this phenomenon called ‘collective effervescence’. So what we did is that we used portable wearable heart rate monitors, worn under the clothes, and we put them on people who we knew were going to do the fire walk, but also people who were among the spectators. And in that crowd there were also people outside of the village. So this is a small 600 people village, but 3,000 people will come, will flood to the village to see this fire walking ritual. It’s a very intense ceremony. And what we found there was that there was an astounding physiological synchrony. So their hearts began to beat in synchrony, as some people were doing the ritual and others were just merely watching. And for that matter others were preparing or waiting for their turn, there were very different behaviors there. So this was synchronizing the entire village’s emotional reaction. But this synchrony did not hold for the outsiders. Those who would come there as curious tourists, for them it was a spectacle. For the locals, it was sacred.

Michael Feigelson I just want to make sure, you have the people doing the ritual, you have the people from the village and then you have the tourists or people not from there and you’re measuring everybody’s heart rate let’s say and if you put a graph up of everyone’s heart rate you can tell me who the tourists are?

Dimitris Xygalatas That’s exactly what we found. We were able to predict people’s interpersonal proximity because another thing we did is that we mapped interpersonal relations in the village. So we asked everybody to name their closest friends and family members, both genetic relationships but also social relationships. And we’ll see that the closer two people are in that chart, the greater the synchrony.

Michael Feigelson I instantly recognize this idea of collective effervescence, the sensation of synchronizing with a large group of people. And I love the idea that our brains and bodies are playing along, harmonizing under the skin. But most examples of collective effervescence I can think of in my own life happen with a lot of strangers at a concert or a sports event.

I find myself thinking about our topic, a different kind of fire walking, the transition to parenthood, and, at least in my case, the conspicuous absence of any kind of communal ritual when I was born as a father.

Michael Feigelson In this podcast, we’re interested in the radical transformation that comes with parenthood. And we have this phrase, when a child is born, a parent is also born. So I wanted to ask if you could take me back to the moment that you were born as father.

Dimitris Xygalatas It’s a very clear moment and it was slightly after the hospital. It was the moment when I walked into the house and it was also the context of the pandemic and the biggest lockdown was the week he was born. So there was this element of social isolation, it’s just us and nobody else. When I walked into the house holding this little creature in my hands and thinking okay, now I have this responsibility, I am a different person. This is not the old me. Now I have a whole other world to worry about.

Michael Feigelson This is not the old me. You walk out of your house one person, and when you walk back in with a baby, suddenly you’re someone else. You would think there would be some kind of collective ritual for that, something to mark the shift. But, at least in the parts of the world where Dimitris and I had our kids, we mostly just get handed the baby and figure it out from there. Solo fire-walking, no collective effervescence.

Michael Feigelson Did you have any ritual to- recognize or celebrate your birth as a father or your wife’s birth as mother.

Dimitris Xygalatas It wasn’t any specific ritual, and I actually think that our society needs more of those rituals. But the one thing I noticed immediately was the need for ritualization. So there was a series of rituals that I never engaged in before, I never felt the necessity to do so, that as soon as my son was born, I started leaning on those rituals. And I’m talking about things like, for example, my wife and I had never had a Christmas tree in the house. Since my son was born we always have a Christmas tree in the house and sometimes it stays up until February. The whole suite of traditions that surround the holiday periods, we were never big on those. We would opt to travel, especially since we live in countries that are different from our own, we didn’t have this cultural circle that would pull us in. But now we intentionally engage in those rituals.

Michael Feigelson I recognize this too. No one said, now that you’re a father, here are the rituals. And yet, the hunger for ritual is so deep that it just starts happening anyway. We look for ways to re-engage or recover ritual practices from our own communities or for those of us who are fans of anthropology, we get super interested in how other cultures mark the birth of a parent.

Michael Feigelson Do you have favorite rituals around pregnancy, birth, early childhood, either great or just really interesting examples?

Dimitris Xygalatas So as we’re sitting here as two fathers having this conversation, I think one of the most interesting ritual traditions is the Kuvod and this is something that is found across several cultures from Papua New Guinea to Honduras. It’s fascinating because it is described both in some cases as a syndrome but also as a cultural practice. When it’s described as syndrome, it refers to the fact that many men, a significant proportion of men report symptoms that are similar to those of pregnancy when their partner is pregnant. They might feel nauseous or they might have symptoms of depression, they might develop preferences for food, they may have back pain, very similar to what mothers go through. They might have increased fears about the future and nightmares about what will happen to the baby. We know today that even at the hormonal level our body changes with parents who, For example, your testosterone levels drop when you become a father. Now this is also reflected in certain cultural traditions that would have practices like the father engaging in something like the quarantine. So after a baby being born, the father staying in bed and also being pampered by the community alongside the mother, or in some cases even taking over. And I think that’s an important ritual that helps fathers internalize their new role, much like a mother has to do, but of course, the mother has a more direct physical involvement with the baby through the childbirth, that fathers miss out on. But today it seems to have been entirely lost, certainly in the West.

Michael Feigelson A way of saying, this change isn’t just happening to the baby, it’s happening to you. But ritual doesn’t have to be something ancient or elaborate, it can be something much smaller.

Michael Feigelson So you suggest that we sacralize bedtime stories, for example, how does one do that and why?

Dimitris Xygalatas I think, again, speaking of ritual, ritual is one of the main mechanisms by which we create meaning in the world. And when we create meaning, we can turn things into something sacred. So this idea of the sacred is not a religious idea. I’m not willing to constrain it to that sphere. We see that people, there are things we deem sacred that have to do with our country or our sports team or our family that have nothing to do with religion. And one of the best ways to create those fears is through ritual. Now, so ritual has to be done with intention, with mindfulness, and with acknowledgement that there’s something important in the act. So by insisting that we engage in the same activity at the same time every day or every week. By signaling our excitement and our sense of importance for this activity, we convey to our children that this is a sacred activity and I think children are very good at picking that up. It’s not a chore, it’s a ritual, it is something fundamentally different.

Michael Feigelson And once you start to see it that way, it doesn’t just change how kids feel about bedtime, but how parents feel about it as well.

Dimitris Xygalatas We have done a study where we gave people different scenarios of exactly the same actions, in one case being performed in a ritual context, in the other case being performed in a non-ritual context. The exact same actions. Let’s say somebody has to walk five miles in order to get to work, and somebody else has to walk five miles, in the context of a pilgrimage. In every single one of those cases, we see that when we ask people to estimate the effort each action takes and how difficult it is and how pleasant it might feel to do that, identical actions are seen as less effortful and more rewarding when performed in a ritual context. And I think that could be the greatest insight we could give to parents. So if you manage to ritualize and sacralize daily activities, you’re going to have a much better time, much easier time convincing your children to do things like homework or go to bed earlier.

Michael Feigelson It also sounded to me like you were saying, if we sacralize these activities, it’ll be easier for us to stay motivated ourselves.

Dimitris Xygalatas Of course, it’s both, absolutely. In a sense, you’re becoming the priest of your own ritual, so yes, it helps motivate yourself as well.

Michael Feigelson Same actions, different meaning. And somehow that changes everything. Which, depending on the day, may also apply to a very ordinary glass of wine.

Michael Feigelson Hello?
Mom Hi Mike. How are you?
Michael Feigelson I’m good. How are you?
Mom I’m fine, honey.
Michael Feigelson What are you up to?
Mom Right now?
Michael Feigelson Yeah?
Mom At the end of the day, I’m having a glass of wine.
Michael Feigelson Okay, where are you at? At home?
Mom I’m at home. I’m at home. Yeah. End of the day ritual.
Michael Feigelson So, speaking of rituals, I’m actually talking to the guy who studies them. His thesis is rituals help us to reduce anxiety.
Mom Well that make sense to me, sure.
Michael Feigelson How does it help you, or what do you mean?
Mom For example, my ritual glass of wine at sunset is very soothing.
Michael Feigelson Okay, but how do you know if it’s the ritual or the wine?
Mom Well, it’s probably both, but as long as it works, you know, I don’t care.
Michael Feigelson And today, how’s it working?
Mom Well, I’ve had a better days.
Michael Feigelson Better days or better wine?
Mom Better wine, I’ve had better wine.

Michael Feigelson Ritual doesn’t have to be ancient. It doesn’t have to be religious. Sometimes it’s just a glass of wine at the end of the day. The point is that the action becomes meaningful. And once you start looking for it, you see the same process everywhere in family life.

A child arrives and suddenly adults who claimed they weren’t holiday people are now online comparing tree lights and discussing whether the annual cinnamon roll is now in fact canon. And the point is not nostalgia. It’s architecture, structure, continuity, shared time, motivation.

The feeling that this family does things in a certain way. And children, Dimitris says, are especially alert to this. They don’t just copy what works. They copy what seems socially important, even when the action has no obvious practical function.

Dimitris Xygalatas I knew from all the literature about how much little kids care about ritual and about conventions, and also how easy it is to get them into performing a ritual and how much they enjoy that. But seeing this firsthand is another story altogether.

Michael Feigelson So you told me about a study about birthdays and ritual and children?

Dimitris Xygalatas Yes, there was a study that shows that children seem to have this impression that there’s a causal link between birthdays and growing older. So they did this very cute study where they asked kids, well, they gave them different scenarios and they said, what would happen if this kid was going to celebrate their fifth birthday, but then something happened and the family was not able to have a birthday party. How old are they now? And the kids would, most kids would say, well, there’s still four. They haven’t had the birthday party. Time is not the factor here, it’s the actual ritual.

Michael Feigelson In other words, children sense something adults often forget. Ritual isn’t decoration. It’s what tells you this matters.

Michael Feigelson In the Netherlands, one of the traditions that I’ve noticed as sort of the place that I raised my daughters at birthday parties, people congratulate you, your child’s birthday party. They don’t congratulate the kid, they congratulate the parent very explicitly. How would you interpret that as a cultural practice?

Dimitris Xygalatas I think that’s wonderful. Today very few societies have parenthood rituals. In all societies we have these rituals that we call rites of passage, and that means that every major life transition is accompanied by a ritual that signals the person’s new status to the community but also importantly to themselves. Now that I’m a parent, I can’t think of any life transition that is as meaningful, as important as becoming a parent. So losing those kinds of traditions sometimes might leave people a little bit baffled as to what they’re supposed to be doing now. It’s often hard to leave our old selves behind and admit to ourselves or embrace our new roles, both within our social circle, but also directly our relationship with our family members, with our kids.

Michael Feigelson One of the reasons parenthood can feel so disorienting is because it feels enormous. But that feeling is not met with an equally enormous sense of recognition. You transcend yourself and society mostly responds by handing you a car seat and a pamphlet.

So, parents innovate, they take routines, and they make them into sacred rites. A bedtime story, a lullaby, a holiday meal, a very specific coffee mug.

Not because they are quaint, but because they give meaning. Not because they like them, but because they need them.

Michael Feigelson How would you articulate the use cases of ritual for new parents? What problems is it solving for us?

Dimitris Xygalatas So these two levels of functions that we have been describing, – so at the personal level, its role in soothing anxiety, and at the cultural, at the social level, its ability to forge social bonds – I think those apply to parenthood as well. When you become a new parent, you immediately notice elevated anxiety, but you also begin to worry about the future. When you become a new parent, one of the most useful resources is the knowledge that comes from other parents, the types of social support that these traditions would have strengthened, things like having somebody to leave your kids with, or organize informal play dates just in the context and the periphery of those rituals. That’s what ends up happening, these spheres of interaction that we’re enabling by having those rituals, so again, these two things soothing our deepest anxieties and helping us connect with other people, ultimately, that’s most of what we care about as human beings.

Michael Feigelson Ritual is one of the oldest tools we have for dealing with uncertainty, for steadying ourselves, for staying connected, for getting through moments that don’t come with instructions. And parenthood, maybe more than anything else, puts you right there, where you don’t quite know what you’re doing and it feels like it matters more than everything has ever mattered before.

This might explain why people who once insisted they weren’t that kind of person suddenly care very deeply about how the tree is decorated, or whether the story is told in exactly the same way. This might explain why new parents, under the close supervision of their kids, become masters of ritual.

Dimitris showed us how rituals help us navigate uncertainty. But what if uncertainty isn’t something to be managed? What if it’s something to embrace? Next time on Birth of a Parent, Radiolab’s Lulu Miller on the mystery at the heart of raising a child, and why some of the most important things in parenthood resist explanation altogether.

Lulu Miller And my theory was that with the advent of language, we begin telling ourselves this lie that we can know and master and even maybe control or understand our universe. And it made me think about that babies have this wisdom where they’re not afraid of the unknown. They’re not afraid of chaos because for that first year or so of life before they have language. The unknown is their friend, it just is.

Michael Feigelson If you’d like to support this series, the best way is simply to follow Birth of a Parent on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. It really helps more people discover the show. Thanks for listening.