This is a Thinking Aloud Podcast from the BBC and for more details in our terms of use and much,

much more about thinking aloud. Go to our website at BBC.co.uk. Hello. I got out of the wrong dot UK.

Hello, I got out of the wrong side of bed this morning, deliberately, and had instant coffee as my first drink of the day instead of breakfast tea,

again deliberately, and then I walked to work on the

opposite side of the street the one I normally use bought a telegraph instead of a

times and opted for a neutral breakfast bar rather than a panosocular. I was in a minor way emulating the

hero of Luke Reinhart's dice man who constructs ritual breaking days in order to

free himself from the constraints of biography and habit.

And there's no better way to appreciate the power of ritual.

Walking on the other side of the road, behind the other newspaper feels unnatural, awkward, irreverent, almost sinful.

But all I did today was subvert my own rituals.

Imagine how much more deviant I'd have felt if I'd ignored calendar rituals, if I chose

to ignore the rituals of Christmas. Well, to expand upon the nature and the compulsion of ritual,

I can now bring in my three distinguished guests.

Here in the studio I have Adam Cooper, Centennial Professor of Anthropology at the LSE,

and Marina Warner, Professor of English and Creative Writing, Birkbeck College, University of London.

And on the line from Boston in the States, I'm joined by Elizabeth Pleck, who is Professor Emerita of History

at the University of Illinois.

Adam, let's have a go at this word ritual what we mean by it.

It's a word with both common sense as well as anthropological meanings.

How would you define it?

Well first of all, it's not the same as

...