ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author draws a picture of ritualizing activity as something quite basic to the human condition. Human beings share with other animals a communicative world that depends upon gestural routines. Ethologists, who study animal behavior, have learned that animals of many different species engage in behaviors so highly patterned and so necessary for the animals' communication with each other that the scientists view them as akin to the rituals that humans perform. Humans use realizations to communicate both with their own kind and with aliens. Some ritual pathways are so much a part of everyday life that they pass largely unnoticed, thought of simply as normal behavior: shaking hands, saying "Hello" and "Goodbye," and waiting for others at table before eating. In some animals many behaviors are learned by imitation and by trial and error.
