Disease stimulated cultural change

We ought to adjust our rituals in light of science and abandon or update those that harm us.

In his classic 1954 work, The Gift , the anthropologist Marcel Mauss described an unusual practice of gift-giving in the Māori people. People who didn’t reciprocate gifts were believed to be vulnerable to illness—and possibly death. In this way, rituals of giving and receiving were linked with beliefs about sickness, giving disease a central position in cultural interactions.