Ritual
A ritual, in the broadest definition, is a repeated and structured sequence of actions that alters the internal or external state of an individual, group, or environment. That change happens regardless of conscious understanding, emotional context, or symbolic meaning. The definition is striking because it does not require belief, or even a human being. Elephants mourn their dead. Corvids leave objects behind. These too are counted as rituals.
The word itself is first recorded in English in 1570. It came into use in the 1600s to mean the prescribed order of performing religious services, or a book holding those prescriptions. From that narrow start it has stretched to cover almost everything humans do together. Worship rites and coronations, marriages and funerals, oaths of allegiance and presidential inaugurations all qualify. So, some argue, does shaking a hand or saying hello.
That reach raises hard questions. If a handshake and a coronation belong to the same family, what actually holds the category together? Why do some scholars call ritual a tool of conformity while others call it a path to liberation? And why do anthropologists keep comparing sacred ceremonies to the repetitive checking of someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder? The answers run through power, the body, the calendar, and the structure of the human brain.
Kyriakidis offered a definition built around the outsider's eye. A ritual, in this view, is an etic category: a set activity that, to an onlooker, seems irrational, non-contiguous, or illogical. The insider, the emic performer, may use the same label, acknowledging that the uninitiated would see it that way. The category is partly a matter of who is watching.
The Latin roots reach further back than English. Ritual derives from ritualis, that which pertains to rite, or ritus. In Roman juridical and religious usage, ritus was the proven way of doing something, the correct performance or custom. The concept may connect to the Sanskrit rta, the visible order of Vedic religion, the lawful and regular structure of cosmic, worldly, human, and ritual events.
Psychology gives the word a sharper, narrower edge. There, ritual can mean a repetitive behavior a person uses systematically to neutralize or prevent anxiety. It can be a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder, though such ritualistic behaviors are generally isolated activities. The field of ritual studies has never settled these competing meanings, which is why a single word can hold both a synagogue Mass and a private compulsion.
Catherine Bell argued that rituals can be characterized by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance. There are hardly any limits to the actions a ritual may absorb. Special gestures and words, fixed texts, music and dance, processions, the handling of objects, special dress, and the consumption of special food, drink, or drugs have all served.
Formalism gives ritual its restricted code, a term anthropologists set against the open elaborated code of ordinary speech. Maurice Bloch argued that ritual obliges participants to use a formal oratorical style, limited in intonation, syntax, vocabulary, loudness, and order. Speech becomes more style than content. Because that style limits what can be said, it induces acceptance, compliance, or at least forbearance toward any overt challenge. Bloch claimed this makes rebellion impossible and revolution the only feasible alternative.
Invariance points the other way, toward timeless repetition rather than historical appeal. Bell saw its key in bodily discipline, as in monastic prayer and meditation meant to mold dispositions and moods, often performed in unison by groups. Traditionalism, by contrast, leans on historical precedent, even invented precedent. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger argued that many traditions are invented, such as the rituals of the British monarchy. These invoke thousand year-old tradition but took their actual form in the late nineteenth century, partly reviving discontinued medieval forms.
Arnold van Gennep described rites of passage as marked by three stages: separation, transition, and incorporation. In the first, initiates are cut from their old identities by physical and symbolic means. In the third, they are symbolically confirmed in a new identity and community. These rites carry a person from one status to another, through adoption, baptism, coming of age, graduation, inauguration, engagement, and marriage.
Victor Turner gave the middle stage its lasting name. The transition is marked by liminality, a condition of ambiguity or disorientation in which initiates are betwixt and between. They have been stripped of their old identities but have not yet acquired new ones. Turner wrote that the attributes of liminal personae, his threshold people, are necessarily ambiguous. In this anti-structure, role ambiguity creates communitas, an emotional bond of community, sometimes through ritual ordeals or training.
Rites of affliction work on different misfortunes. Turner defined them as actions seeking to mitigate spirits or supernatural forces that inflict bad luck, illness, gynecological troubles, or physical injuries. To show this, he used the Isoma ritual among the Ndembu of northwestern Zambia, a rite meant to cure a childless woman of infertility. The cause was a structural tension between matrilineal descent and virilocal marriage. Because the woman had come too closely in touch with the man's side in her marriage, her dead matrikin had impaired her fertility. To correct the balance, the Isoma rite required her to reside with her mother's kin.
Mircea Eliade said that calendrical rituals recall and commemorate the basic beliefs of a community. Their yearly celebration links past and present, as if the original events happen again: thus the gods did, thus men do. These rites give social meaning to the passage of time, building repetitive weekly, monthly, or yearly cycles. Some mark a culturally defined moment of change in the climatic cycle, such as planting, harvesting, or moving to summer pasture.
The calendar itself splits these rites in two. Those fixed by the solar calendar fall on the same Gregorian day each year, such as New Year's Day on the first of January. Those calculated by the lunar calendar fall on different dates each year, such as Chinese lunar New Year. In this way calendrical rites impose a cultural order on nature.
Death demands its own rituals across cultures. The last rites and wake belong to Christianity, shemira to Judaism, the antyesti to Hinduism, and the antam sanskar to Sikhism. In Tibetan Buddhism, the Bardo Thodol guides the soul through the stages of death toward liberation. In Islam, the Janazah prayer is a communal act of grief. The Australian Aboriginal smoking ceremony is meant to cleanse the spirit of the departed. Behind many lies a single belief, captured in Genesis: the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. At death the body returns to earth, while the soul returns to its heavenly creator.
Clifford Geertz argued that political rituals actually construct power. Analyzing the Balinese state, he held that ritual is not an ornament of political power. Instead the power of political actors depends on their ability to create rituals, and the cosmic framework in which the king's social hierarchy appears natural and sacred. As a dramaturgy of power, such systems can set a ruler apart as divine, as in the divine right of European kings or the divine Japanese Emperor.
Max Gluckman coined a phrase for the opposite motion. He called them rituals of rebellion, rites in which the accepted social order was symbolically turned on its head. He pointed to the first-fruits festival, the incwala, of the South African Bantu kingdom of Swaziland. There the king was publicly insulted, women asserted domination over men, and the authority of elders over the young was turned upside down. Gluckman argued the ritual was an institutional pressure valve, relieving tensions so they did not become actual rebellion.
Ritual can also become a weapon of the colonized. The various Cargo Cults of the South Pacific developed against colonial powers, with Islanders using ritual imitations of western practices, such as building landing strips, to summon manufactured goods from the ancestors. Carnival works as a leveller too. Its practice of masking lets people be what they are not, erasing tense social hierarchies, while outside the festival tensions of race, class, and gender persist.
Maurice Bloch and Victor Turner reached opposite conclusions about what ritual does to a person. Bloch argued that ritual produces conformity. Its communication uses a special restricted vocabulary, few permissible illustrations, and a restrictive grammar, making utterances highly predictable and the speaker anonymous. The restrictive syntax strips away propositional argument, leaving utterances that cannot be contradicted, such as I do thee wed. These performatives are typical of what Weber called traditional authority.
Thomas Csordas resisted the idea that ritual language forecloses creativity. He looked at genres of ritual sharing a poetics, arranged along a spectrum of formality. Innovations, he argued, enter through the less formalized rituals first. As they become accepted and standardized, they migrate slowly into the more formal ones, so even the strictest rite remains a potential avenue for creative expression.
Talal Asad shifted the ground from meaning to discipline. Studying articles on ritual in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he found that from 1771 to 1852 ritual was defined as a book directing the order of divine service. No article followed until 1910, when a long entry recast ritual as routine behaviour that symbolizes or expresses something. Asad pushed back on the symbolic turn. Drawing on medieval monastic life, he argued that apt performance involves abilities to be acquired, not symbols to be interpreted. Monks were disciplined in the Foucauldian sense, learning skills and appropriate emotions, since developing moral capabilities is not the same as inventing representations.
Dulaney and Fiske set ethnographic descriptions of ritual beside clinical descriptions of obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD behavior often involves constantly cleaning objects, concern or disgust with bodily waste, repetitive actions to prevent harm, and heavy emphasis on the number or order of actions. They found that ethnographic descriptions of cultural rituals contained around five times more such content than descriptions of other activities like work. Fiske later repeated the analysis across more cultures, contrasting ritual with other behavioral disorders, and found that only OCD-like behavior, not other illnesses, shared properties with rituals.
Lienard and Boyer carried the finding toward the brain. They proposed that the overlap between individual obsession and collective ritual may stem from a shared mental process they call hazard precaution. People seem to pay more attention to information relevant to avoiding hazards. That bias, they suggest, helps explain why collective rituals displaying hazard precaution stay popular and persist for long periods in cultural transmission.
Douglas Foley found ritual binding people together in a more ordinary setting. Between 1973 and 1974 he studied public high school culture in North Town, Texas, for his ethnography Learning Capitalist Culture. He treated football games and Friday Night Lights as a community ritual that united the school weekly through pep rallies and the game itself. Amid judgement and segregation by class, status, wealth, and gender, he described football's gentler side as an emphasis on camaraderie, loyalty, friendship between players, and pulling together.
Common questions
What is a ritual?
A ritual is a repeated, structured sequence of actions or behaviors that alters the internal or external state of an individual, group, or environment, regardless of conscious understanding, emotional context, or symbolic meaning. Rituals are a feature of all known human societies and range from worship rites and coronations to marriages, funerals, and even common acts like hand-shaking.
Where does the word ritual come from?
The word ritual derives from the Latin ritualis, meaning that which pertains to rite, or ritus, which in Roman usage was the proven and correct way of doing something. The concept of ritus may relate to the Sanskrit rta, the visible order of Vedic religion. The word ritual was first recorded in English in 1570.
What are the three stages of a rite of passage?
Arnold van Gennep stated that rites of passage are marked by three stages: separation, transition, and incorporation. In separation, initiates are cut from their old identities; in transition they are betwixt and between; and in incorporation they are symbolically confirmed in a new identity and community.
What is liminality in ritual?
Liminality is the condition of ambiguity or disorientation Victor Turner identified in the transition stage of a rite of passage, when initiates have been stripped of their old identities but have not yet acquired their new one. Turner called these initiates threshold people, and argued the role ambiguity creates communitas, an emotional bond of community.
How do anthropologists connect rituals to obsessive-compulsive disorder?
Dulaney and Fiske found that ethnographic descriptions of cultural rituals contained around five times more OCD-like content, such as cleaning objects and emphasis on the number or order of actions, than descriptions of other activities like work. Lienard and Boyer suggested the overlap stems from a shared mental process they call hazard precaution.
What did Catherine Bell say characterizes rituals?
Catherine Bell argued that rituals can be characterized by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance. She also shifted attention from ritual as a fixed category toward the process of ritualization, a way of acting designed to distinguish and privilege what is being done compared to ordinary activities.
All sources
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