BACKGROUND: The Hani people, who reside in Yuanyang County, Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan Province, rely on rice terrace farming as their primary livelihood. They utilize plants in various traditional ritual practices. The Hani people have categorized the value of plants based on their natural attributes and have refined the ways of using different plants in specific rituals through practical observations and experiences derived from their agricultural culture. Although the plants used in these rituals hold significant cultural value, they have yet to be studied from the perspective of ethnobotany. This study aims to approach the ritual plants using ethnobotanical methods.
METHODS: Ethnobotanical fieldwork was conducted in 10 villages in Yuanyang County between 2021 and 2023. Data were collected from the local Hani people through semi-structured interviews and participatory observations and 41 informants were interviewed during the field investigations. The frequency of citation (FC) and relative frequency of citation (RFC) were utilized to evaluate the relative importance of ritual plants among the local communities.
RESULTS: A total of 36 plant species, belonging to 18 families and 34 genera, were recorded as being used in 11 ritual practices by the Hani people. Rosaceae, Poaceae, and Fabaceae were found to have the highest number of species. Most of the ritual plants used by the Hani people were collected from the wild. FC and RFC analysis showed that the preferred plants for Hani rituals were Rhus chinensis Mill, Oryza sativa L., Phyllostachys sulphurea (Carr.) A. et C. Riv. and Musa basjoo Siebold & Zucc. ex Iinuma. The 11 rituals are all centered around the performance of people, crops and livestock. The Hani people use plants in different rituals mainly based on their biological attributes.
CONCLUSIONS: Many rituals of the Hani people are closely related to their production and livelihood, and the plants used in these rituals are deeply rooted in Hani\'s traditional ecological knowledge and beliefs. The Hani people\'s reverence for nature, respect for life, gratitude towards ancestors, and seeking blessings and disaster prevention for their families, crops, and livestock are all reflected in these rituals and their utilization of ritual plants. The Hani people showcase their agricultural culture in the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces through plant-based ritual performances. Studying ritual plants in the core area of the Hani Rice Terraces is of great significance for protecting the Hani Terrace farming culture. In the future, it is essential to pay more attention to the role of traditional knowledge in biodiversity conservation.

Rituals are fundamental social acts that structure relationships and enable the filtering of important cognitive attributes (e.g. working memory and inhibitory control) that make humans what they are today. This study investigated the influence of model age and familiarity on the reproduction of ritual behaviour in five-year-old children. Through an exploration of these factors, this study sheds light on the cognitive mechanisms children use to comprehend and replicate rituals. Ninety-eight five-year-old children were divided into two groups: an experimental group, which observed an adult or child model, either familiar or unfamiliar to them, demonstrating eight ritual acts; and a control group, which received no video demonstration. The results revealed that children who observed an adult reproduced more ritual acts than those who observed a child, and children who observed unfamiliar models reproduced ritual acts more frequently than those who observed familiar ones. Additionally, when exposed to unfamiliar models, children\'s reproductive fidelity was higher. These findings suggest that children have the ability to address new adaptation challenges by participating in rituals at an early age and that they generate suitable solutions depending on the model\'s characteristics. This provides evidence for the adaptive bias in children\'s cultural learning from a ritual perspective.

I present a detailed ethnographic study of magic and divination of the Nuosu people in southwest China and offer a cognitive account of the surprising prevalence of these objectively ineffective practices in a society that has ample access to modern technology and mainstream Han culture. I argue that in the belief system of the Nuosu, ghosts, divination, and magical healing rituals form a closely interconnected web that gives sense and meaning to otherwise puzzling practices, and such a belief system is importantly supported and reinforced by individual\'s everyday experiences. Contemporary Nuosu people overwhelmingly treat these practices as instruments for achieving specific ends and often entertain considerable uncertainty regarding their efficacy, which may be overestimated for a number of reasons, including the following: (1) the intuitive plausibility of divination for ghost identification and exorcist rituals is enhanced by the belief in the existence of ghosts as a result of abductive reasoning, (2) negative instances (divinatory or healing ritual failures) are underreported, and (3) people\'s misperception of the probability of uncertain events\' occurrence often prevents them from realizing that the efficacies of magical/divinatory practices do not outperform chance. I conclude with some comments on the generalizability of the psychological and social mechanisms discussed.

Contrary to the author\'s proposed classification scheme, I argue that most magical practices are better viewed as \"instrumental\" rather than \"ritualistic.\" Much ethnographic and historical evidence shows that magicians and ritual experts often have elaborate causal theories regarding how magic actions lead to the putative outcome, and the \"physical/mechanical\" versus \"supernatural\" distinction in causal mechanisms needs serious reconsideration.

Although researchers have indicated that individuals with depleted self-control resources have lower self-control behavior and exhibit more deceptive behaviors, recent psychological studies have shown that ritual can improve self-control and increase the likelihood that the individual makes prosocial decisions. However, little is known about whether ritual can regulate an individual\'s engagement in deceptive behavior when their self-control resources are depleted. This study adopted the spot-the-difference task to investigate the influences of ritual and self-control resources depletion on simple self-control behavior and deceptive behavior (Experiment 1 and Experiment 2); furthermore, relevant neural processes were explored using event-related potentials (Experiment 3). Experiment 1 showed that individuals with depleted self-control resources had lower self-control behavior and individuals performing a ritual had higher self-control behavior. Experiment 2 showed that individuals with depleted self-control resources exhibited more deceptive behaviors and individuals performing a ritual exhibited fewer deceptive behaviors; furthermore, ritual reduced deceptive behaviors in individuals with depleted self-control resources. Experiment 3 found that individuals with depleted self-control resources had larger P2 amplitudes after performing a ritual. Moreover, individuals with depleted self-control resources had larger LPP amplitudes over parietal sites after performing a ritual. These findings suggested that performing ritual may be an effective measure of inhibiting individuals with depleted self-control resources from engaging in deceptive behavior. Our findings verify the ego-depletion model and provide a new perspective for reducing deceptive behaviors in individuals with depleted self-control resources. We provide evidence that rituals could modulate deceptive behaviors in individuals with depleted self-control resources. This reveals that performing rituals may be an effective measure for inhibiting individuals with depleted self-control resources from engaging in deceptive behavior.

Situated at a geographic crossroads, the eastern Tianshan Mountain region in northwest China is crucial to understanding various economic, social, and cultural developments on the Eurasian Steppes. One promising way to gain a better knowledge of ancient subsistence economy, craft production, and social change in the eastern Tianshan Mountain region is to study the artifact assemblages from archaeological contexts. Here, we present an analysis of 488 worked animal bones from the large site of Shirenzigou (ca. 1300-1 BCE), to date the largest assemblage of this kind uncovered in the eastern Tianshan Mountain region. We classified these worked bones into six categories, including \"ritual objects\", \"ornaments\", \"tools\", \"worked astragali\", \"warfare and mobility\", and \"indeterminate\". The identification of animal species and skeletal elements indicates that worked bones from Shirenzigou are characterized by a predominance of caprine products, particularly worked astragali, which is consistent with the large proportion of caprine fragments found in animal remains associated with food consumption. This demonstrates the contribution of caprine pastoralism to bone working activities at Shirenzigou. The making of most worked bones does not appear to have required advanced or specialized skills. Considering the absence of dedicated bone working space, alongside the variability in raw material selection and in dimensions of certain types of artifacts, we infer that worked bone production at Shirenzigou was not standardized. In terms of raw material selection and mode of production, Shirenzigou differed from their settled, farming counterparts in the Yellow River valley of northern China. In addition, along with the evidence for violence and horseback riding, the increasing use of bone artifacts associated with warfare and mobility during the late occupation phase of Shirenzigou reflects growing social instability and implies the likely emergence of single mounted horsemen, equipped with light armors, in the region during the late first millennium BCE. Our results provide new insights into animal resource exploitation and changing lifeways of early pastoral societies in the eastern Tianshan Mountain region, expanding our knowledge of the economic, social, and political milieu of late Bronze Age and early Iron Age eastern Eurasia.

Ritual healing is one of the core topics in anthropology and is also important in psychology. The key aim of this study is to investigate and explore the understanding of religious perspectives of ritual healing and trance practices in Muslim shrines in Pakistan. Several studies have been conducted to highlight the shrines in Muslim countries to demonstrate the Sufi tradition in Islam, where the followers seek healing and use the Sufi saints as intermediaries for the fulfillment of their desires. In Pakistan, the shrine of Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar provides a vital cultural, religious, psychological, and social resource where people get involved in religious rituals and trances. A sample of 70 devotees was randomly interviewed with the help of qualitative research methods such as semi-structured and in-depth interviewed, key informants included observation were used for data collection. The major focus of this study is on the religious rituals of healing and the overall assumption that people engage in this practice according to their socio-cultural needs, and followers of the shrine in the living community seek healing rituals to address their social ailments as well as physical and emotional problems. They engage in different types of rituals, including trances, with different objectives. The research goal is to discover the chief motive of devotees who visit the shrine for the rituals and religious practices. These findings of this study propose that shrine ritual healing is powerful not so much because of the specific practice of exorcist rituals, but because the practice is associated with sacred activities and religious rituals performed by thousands of people throughout the years.

The present study is aimed to monitoring the ecological indicator and pathogenic microorganism diversity in pilgrimage places beach sand on the Bay of Bengal coast. The samples were collected from three locations and four different sites, and were analyzed by following standard methods. The results clearly indicates, ritual activities were highly contaminated in the beach sand qualities, and exceeded with the standard permissible limit of WHO, USEPA, EU, CPCB beach sand recreational and other contacts activities including pH (11%), TBC (100%), TCB (97%), FCB (88%), TEB (75%), E. coli (75%), disease-causing possible level of Klebsiella (84%), Shigella (75%), Salmonella (63%) and Vibrio (56%). The statistical tools were applied to find the strong evidence. The current study pointed out the major effects on the diffusion of potentially pathogenic microorganisms along the shoreline provided useful information for the setup of measures for public health protection in the Bay of Bengal coast.

Cannabis is one of the oldest cultivated plants in East Asia, grown for grain and fiber as well as for recreational, medical, and ritual purposes. It is one of the most widely used psychoactive drugs in the world today, but little is known about its early psychoactive use or when plants under cultivation evolved the phenotypical trait of increased specialized compound production. The archaeological evidence for ritualized consumption of cannabis is limited and contentious. Here, we present some of the earliest directly dated and scientifically verified evidence for ritual cannabis smoking. This phytochemical analysis indicates that cannabis plants were burned in wooden braziers during mortuary ceremonies at the Jirzankal Cemetery (ca. 500 BCE) in the eastern Pamirs region. This suggests cannabis was smoked as part of ritual and/or religious activities in western China by at least 2500 years ago and that the cannabis plants produced high levels of psychoactive compounds.

BACKGROUND: Fleagrass, Adenosma buchneroides, is an aromatic perennial herb that occupies an important position in the life of the Akha people. They regard it as a tribal symbol and a gift of love. Fleagrass also has many medicinal uses, and there is considerable potential for its development as an insect repellent. Traditionally, Akha people plant it in swidden fields, but there are few swidden fields in China now. Therefore, the first question this study aims to answer is as follows: how is fleagrass planted and utilized now? At present, fleagrass is only reported to be used by Akha people in Mengla. We also try to understand the following questions: Is fleagrass used in nearby area? If so, how is fleagrass used in nearby area? Furthermore, why is fleagrass used in that way?
METHODS: From August 2016 to July 2018, field surveys were conducted six times. The ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological uses of A. buchneroides in 13 Akha villages were investigated by means of semi-structured interviews. We assessed the responses of a total of 64 interviewees (32 men and 32 women; mean age, 58.6) from the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, southwest China, and from Phongsaly Province, Laos. To explain the bases for the ethnobotanical uses of fleagrass, we used Google Scholar, Web of Science, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure to review the bioactivities of the chemical constituents of A. buchneroides.
RESULTS: With the vanishing of swidden agriculture and the development of modern products, fleagrass cultivation is disappearing in China. However, most Akha people in Xishuangbanna still remember and yearn for its traditional uses, and Akha people in a nearby area (northern Laos) continue to plant and utilize it. We documented ten uses of A. buchneroides within five discrete categories. The whole plant of fleagrass has a distinct strong aroma, of which Akha villagers are particularly fond. Akha villagers mostly use this aromatic property as a decoration, perfume, and insect repellent. A. buchneroides is also used as a condiment and for medicinal and ritual purposes, including its use as a cure for insect bites, headaches, influenza, and diarrhoea, and as a part of pray ritual for a bumper harvest. From our literature review, we identified many major chemical compounds contained in the essential oil of A. buchneroides, including thymol, carvacrol, 3-carene, and p-cymene, which have insecticidal or insect-repellent, antimicrobial, and anti-inflammatory properties.
CONCLUSIONS: Fleagrass is an aromatic plant that is widely used by Aka people. Its chemical composition also has a variety of biological activities. With the vanishing of swidden agriculture and the development of modern products, fleagrass utilization in China is disappearing and its cultural importance is reduced. However, its economic and medicinal value is assignable.