Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Ever since the work of Émile Durkheim religious rituals have been at the forefront of research in social and cultural anthropology. They have been studied from various theoretical perspectives. The cognitive and evolutionary approach to the study of religion as a distinctive field started to form in the 1990s. The signalling theory of religion and ritual has been applied in several studies cognitive and evolutionary of religion. It has been argued that through participation in religious rituals and activities related to religious life individuals signal to other group members commitment to group membership, devotion to group norms, willingness to cooperate and contribute to activities beneficial to the group; and they also signal (communicate) their honesty and trustworthiness. In recent years several studies switched attention from signal transmitters to signal receivers and drew attention to the different contents, contexts, and costs of various signalling strategies. The aim of the study is to analyze religious signals and signals made in a religious context in a concrete community. The ethnographic data presented were collected by the methods of ethnographic interview and participant observation. The research was conducted in eastern Slovakia, in a village in which the majority of residents are affiliated with the Greek Catholic faith. Analysis of the ethnographic data showed that participant observation and ethnographic interview are effective methods to describe and analyse content, cost, and context, of signals of various kinds appearing in religious behaviour and to add a contextual dimension to the theoretical concepts.