How can we explain the elevation of an ancient pagan ritual into a month-long, billion-dollar holiday in what is supposedly an advanced, modern civilization?
Different scientists claim that it is Halloween rooted in human biology, especially fear—an emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous or a threat. In fearful situations, adrenaline and other hormones are released as the body prepares for fight or flight.
However, by constructing artificial threatening scenarios, we can control fear in a safe, socially acceptable way. Much the same thing happens during scary movies and television shows.
Costumes additionally function to provide Halloween for the experience to be fictional – an imaginative form of play or theatrical event. That large amounts of free candy are distributed through this fictional process figuratively and literally sweetens the deal.
Scholars have also analyzed semiotics Halloweenseeing contemporary meanings embedded in a two-thousand-year-old holiday. In his 2000 article “Toward a Theory of Public Ritual” published in Sociological Theory, for example, American sociologist Amitai Etzioni argued that Halloween functioned as a “ritual of tension management” through which collective fears, anxieties and fantasies were played out.
Dr. Jason Parker, a senior lecturer in the psychology department at Old Dominion University, thought much the same. “We get a physical response and then the realization of ‘I conquered that fear,'” he said in 2002, stating that Halloween “stimulates your entire emotional system.”
In his 2008 article published in Ethos: The Journal of the Society for Psychological AnthropologySindi Del Clark introduced them Halloween as a complex process in which “inversions of meaning” were highlighted. Adults endorse “anti-normative themes” throughout Halloweenshe found in her research, and children gained “elevation” through costume tricks. In other words, a holiday is the one day of the year during which we are not only allowed, but encouraged to, as David Byrne put it, stop making sense.
Death, whether articulated as skeletons, ghosts, zombies, cemeteries, or some other post-life form or venue, is a fundamental element of experience. Halloweenbecause it may represent our greatest fear.
In his 1997 Anxiety and Clinical Practice, Robert Langs argued that death is a “pervasive yet elusive fear,” vividly depicting how many of us feel when we one day disappear from the planet.
“The existential mix of human existence combines the celebration of life with the terrible awareness of eventual death,” he wrote, noting that the inevitable awareness that life will eventually end is grounded in the foundations of human evolution.
Going further, Langs hypothesized that anxieties about death lurk in our minds but, for various reasons, have been neglected in psychotherapy. (The fact that the subject was largely taboo in Western societies has a lot to do with it.)
Psychological defenses like denial and repression were common around death, as were communicative defenses (meaning we just didn’t like talking about it). With Halloweenhowever, we have the opportunity to acknowledge and perhaps even celebrate death (and in a much more fun and social way than psychotherapy).
Tamar Kusnir, a professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, also offered thoughts on why we turn deep fears into trick or treating. In situations that do not pose a real danger, “simulated fear is a way of practicing and enjoying the experience of fear,” she explained in 2019, adding that such behavior is “a way of playing with emotions without real cost.”
I think they are Halloween and other illusory or magical expressions of fear have gained cultural importance as science and technology have become more ingrained in our daily lives, says Lawrence R. Samuel, Ph.D. Psychology Today. The rise of the Internet, the decoding of the human genome, the emergence of virtual reality and now the foray into artificial intelligence, in other words, have accelerated our desire to experience phenomena that defy logic and rationalism and are outside the known universe.
It is, after all, a matter of science and technology that presents truly terrifying scenarios, making devils, witches, goblins and other such otherworldly entities relatively welcome, even friendly sights. Boo!
Source: www.sitoireseto.com
