1. Introduction 2. Tradition in the Making 3. The Ethnographic Setting 4. Fire-walking in Agia Eleni 5. Knowledge and Revelation Among the Anastenaria 6. Ritual and Mind 7. Costly Rituals 8. Arousal, Emotion, and Motivation 9. The Physiology of High-Arousal Rituals 10. Putting it all Together Bibliography
Dimitris Xygalatas is an anthropologist at the MINDLab and the Department for the Study of Religion at Aarhus University, Denmark. He received his PhD from the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queens University Belfast and has held postdoctoral positions at the universities of Princeton and Aarhus. His main interest is in the anthropology of religion, and much of his work has focused on the practice of fire-walking rituals around the world. He has conducted several years of ethnographic research in Greece, Bulgaria, Spain, and Mauritius. Over the last few years, he has been concerned with integrating ethnographic and experimental methods in the field.
"In conclusion, Xygalatas offers the most well-presented, defended, and empirically backed, overview of “extreme rituals” available. His attention to historical, anthropological, and scientific detail will hopefully become a prototype for future publications and research programmes in the field. Throughout its chapters the book offers valuable new insight to specialists of similar historical, anthropological, cognitive, and physiological topics. The book ultimately is a contribution to many fields but above all else, it is a contribution to interdisciplinary and scientific approaches to complex phenomena." Justin E. Lane, Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, Journal of Cognitive Historiography
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