The Role of Subtle Signals Linked to Religious Rituals in the Evaluation of Newcomers by a Village Community

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to explore the role of religious rituals in assessing the behaviour of new people who come to live in their locality. It presents ethnographic data collected in a village in western Slovakia to demonstrate that participation in rituals plays an important role in the old settlers’ descriptions of newcomers. To interpret their statements, we refer to the signalling theory which was applied in the cognitive and evolutionary approach to the study of socio-cultural phenomena. Empirical work in this field has shown that participation in low-frequency and high-cost religious rituals is perceived as an honest signal of group commitment. We argue that if such rituals are absent in a particular locality, then trustworthiness, commitment to the group, and compliance with group norms are communicated by other types of signal, in particular high-frequency low-cost subtle signals, such as participating in various activities related to religious life, in particular regular religious rituals. This paper is a preliminary study which aims to draw attention to subtle religious signals in particular socio-cultural settings.