 Why do humans spend valuable resources on mortuary rituals? Evidence from fieldwork in a Romanian village and ethnographic literature suggests that costly signals of generosity activate intuitions about cooperation with the dead represented by an enduring “person-file system” (Boyer 2002). Performers use rituals to increase their reputation as cooperators as well as powerful and wealthy people (Hayden 2009). Family, relatives, friends, and other consociates perceive such investments as mutualistic cooperation (Baumard 2016) calibrated according to partner value. The model explains some recurrent features: fear of ancestor vengeance and peer moralization for ritual omission or underinvestment, the preferential treatment of the dead’s partners, variable but finite timescale of mortuary dues, overinvestment for high-status dead, the irrelevancy of grief, and the role of inheritance. Cultural attraction (Sperber 1996) can explain similarities and variability in ritual expenditure across societies.

Mortuary ritual investment as cues of mutualistic cooperation beyond death

Biocultural social sciences 3

technical paper

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The field of cultural evolution is growing in size and scope; its theories, methods and applications - both academic and applied - are getting ever more robust. Do join us in what promises to be an exciting exchange of ideas and a celebration of our field.

Radu Umbres

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Mortuary ritual investment as cues of mutualistic cooperation beyond death