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HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
Front. Soc. Psychol.
Sec. Intergroup Relations and Group Processes
Volume 3 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsps.2025.1477404
Arts, secular ritual, and health: Combining (micro)sociology and the social cure to link the arts to health through interaction ritual
Provisionally accepted- University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
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Despite the early roots of arts and health as grounded within rituals and interest in ‘community’– a term that is deeply laden with a history of rituals - the role of ‘ritual’ in modern arts and health is largely untheorised. Yet, ‘secularised’ rituals can teach us about contemporary life, beliefs, and practices, playing a role in our understanding of how and why the arts connect to health and wellbeing. In this article, I draw on published literature and insights from my experiences in the field of arts and health to make the case that incorporating ‘ritual’ as a concept within arts and health research serves to expand existing thinking in social psychology. Specifically, I link Collins’ (2004) theory of Interaction Ritual Chains (IRCs) and the social cure approach (a social identity approach to health) to theorise that arts activities may enable the construction of group identities through participation in interaction rituals, whereby ritual outcomes across chains of interactions may be considered as expressions of health and wellbeing. The article makes an original contribution to social psychology by connecting IRC theory to a social identity approach to health, laying a new theoretical foundation for researchers working in arts and health.
Keywords: interaction ritual chains, social cure approach, Social identity approach, arts and health, Secular ritual
Received: 07 Aug 2024; Accepted: 13 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Warran. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Katey Warran, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
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