individual well-being (or competitive selective advantage), musical
aspects of mother-infant engagement suggest a different inference.In
premodern societies all members of a social group generally participate
in making music,thereby sharing the creation of its emotion and
meaning.In almost every instance music is a means of group coordina-
tion and unification,recalling the emotional regulation and conjoinment
in mother-infant engagement.Affiliative Ritual and the Temporal Arts
I suggest that the interactive affiliative communicative mechanisms that
evolved between human mothers and their altricial infants—based in
sequentially organized,multimodally produced and processed signals
that create sympathetic attunement and communion—developed sensi-
tivities and competencies,incipient in other primates,that provided a
foundation for and impetus to creating and responding to the temporal
arts of music,dance,and mime.In combination,these arts compose what
is termed ceremony,ritual,or ceremonial ritual.For example,in Oceania,
preparations for war entail elaborate self-decoration and performance
such as,music,oratory,dance,paintings,and carved artifacts as elements
of larger sacred precincts,“not isolated art forms”(Thomas 1995:30).
For the Australian Yolngu of Arnhemland,mardayin(“sacred law,”the
means of becoming directly involved with the ancestral past) consists of
sets of songs,dances,paintings,sacred objects,and ritual incantations
associated with ancestral beings (Morphy 1992:186).
Anthropologists customarily describe the material and behavioral
components and belief systems coded in specific rituals,or discuss the
general religious and social functions of ritual,but not the psychobe-
havioral means by which ritual beliefs and benefits are accomplished.
Rarely is it emphasized that ritual achieves its enculturating and unify-
ing effects by means of “producing changes in or structuring feelings”
(Radcliffe-Brown 1922/1948:234).^6 I suggest that this happens,as in
mother-infant interactions,through organized or patterned temporal
sequences,both in unison and antiphonally,of exaggerated and regular-
ized,graded,dynamic,multimodally presented,emotionally evocative
kinesic,visual,and vocal behaviors that engender and sustain affiliative
emotion and accord;that is,through the temporal arts of dance,mime,
chant,and song.Ritualization and Ritual
Tinbergen (1952) introduced the concept of “derived”activities that
during evolution arise and become emancipated from earlier functional399 Antecedents of the Temporal Arts