"Voting is a collective ritual," he said.

But people vote because they like to participate in a collective ritual.

So an ideal system would minimize error while retaining the collective ritual.

In any hunter-gatherer society, the basic mechanism for establishing trust in symbolic cultural facts is collective ritual.

This is a collective ritual in which everyone plays a part.

As a result, lay women primarily participate in religious life either as lay participants in collective merit-making rituals, or by doing domestic work around temples.

The ancient tragedy as we understand it today, was not merely a show, but rather a collective ritual of the polis.

Therefore the problem of the origins of society boils down to the problem of the origins of collective ritual.

On one hand, we go through life dramatizing ourselves: all the world's a stage, never more so than at a collective ritual like a trial or an execution.

From ancient times, people have engaged in collective rituals of regeneration by building artful bulwarks against fear.