Roy Rappaport

Roy Rappaport was an American anthropologist and a leading figure in ecological anthropology, known for his study of the Tsembaga Maring people of highland New Guinea in Pigs for the Ancestors (1968). He argued that the Tsembaga ritual cycle, in which pigs were raised, accumulated, and then ceremonially slaughtered and redistributed at a great feast, functioned as a homeostatic mechanism that regulated the relationship between human population, pig population, and the surrounding environment, periodically releasing ecological and social pressure that had built up between cycles. Rappaport's argument that religious ritual could serve a measurable ecological regulatory function, expressed in the technical language of systems ecology, became one of the most influential and debated attempts to give a materialist, functionalist account of religion within anthropology, and his later work turned to the broader theoretical question of ritual's role in maintaining the sanctity and stability of cultural systems generally.