Modelling Ritual Dynamics against the Data: Early Christian Meal Practices as a Test Case
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Any invention, modification and selection of a ritual practice in a group and its stabilization over time or transmission of it from one group to another depends on a lot of factors. Method of agent-based modelling enables to consider relative influence of them in an explicit way and to “re-grow” particular processes of interest in an artificial computational environment. Despite of its artificialness, a comparison of simulation results with real world data can help to demonstrate probability of some suggested historical trajectories and, in that respect, to test particular hypotheses. Drawing on recent experimental evidence concerning intuitive evaluation of ritual efficacy, this paper takes into consideration relative influence of the so called cognitive attraction of a ritual behavior. One agent-based simulation is discussed and compared to the data derived from literary sources concerning early Christian meal practices in the first four centuries CE. |
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