Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word ritual entered the English language in 1570. It initially referred to a book of prescriptions for religious services before its scope expanded to encompass everything from the sacred to the secular.
The architecture of ritual is built upon four pillars: formalism, traditionalism, invariance, and rule-governance. Formalism is the rigid organization of expressions, traditionalism appeals to history, invariance is the striving for timeless repetition, and rule-governance imposes norms on the chaos of behavior.
Arnold van Gennep defined the three stages of a rite of passage as separation, transition, and incorporation. In the separation stage, initiates are separated from their old identities, in the transition stage they experience the liminal phase, and in the incorporation stage they are symbolically confirmed in their new identity.
Max Gluckman, a South African functionalist anthropologist, coined the phrase rituals of rebellion. He described this type of ritual as one in which the accepted social order was symbolically turned on its head to function as an institutional pressure valve.
Ethnographic descriptions of cultural rituals contain around 5 times more hazard precaution content than descriptions of other activities such as work. This suggests that collective rituals are often performed in the context of perceived collective risk to control danger.