12.1 The Cascading Benefits of a Ritual Lens

Many of the benefits of a ritual lens come as consequences of trying to document what rituals do and how they work. The previous Chapter focused on perinatal ritual content, experience, and associated beliefs and behaviors. Here we focus on these indirect consequences of ritual; the many facets of life one learns about as a function of adopting the ritual lens.

Engineering a new ritual as part of an intervention would be a tricky task, but there are many ways that ritual tools can help diagnose where key friction points might present barriers or suggest where behaviors need to be affected indirectly or as part of a constellation of behaviors. Some behaviors are more rooted in norms than others and these may also have more elaborate or deep connections to tightly held beliefs.

In many cases, traditional or normative beliefs will have little or no conflict with the target of an intervention. In other cases there may be a subset of behaviors that are traditional and normative, or particularly tightly held, that conflict with biomedical advice. The messaging requirements and the nature of the challenges to the intervention design will be different in each case.