Ritual Catherine Bell PDF

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Ritual - Catherine Bell Question: F Focus ocus your appr approach oach of the rreeading b byy seeing the read reading’s ing’s conception of i) text, ii) interpr interpretation, etation, iii) the individual, iv) comm community, unity, v) practice. Summary: “The history of scholarship on ritual long took the nature of ritual for granted. Only in the last few decades have scholars regularly asked just what is ritual and proposed new definitions or classifications. Yet we frequently wonder: ● why these public acts are performed ● how much religion is the key motivation, ● and how innovation figures in ritual traditions.” Definitions of ritual: ● Most stress the formality and traditionalism of ritual action. ● Some attempt to articulate the elusive quality that can make even quotidian activities seem ritualistic, such as a routine for brushing one’s teeth or a precisely timed trip to the pub to meet friends. ● Today the emphasis is on how people ritualize, that is, on: ○ how they set apart some activities in striking ways ○ then make those activities distinctive for what is done, ○ for when and where it is done ○ for how it is done, ○ and by whom it is done. ● While this approach to ritual is better able to address changes in how people ritualize, it also suggests that the exact repetition of a supposedly age-old ceremony is unlikely, even though claims of scrupulous faithfulness to an ancient prototype is among the commonest ways of differentiating ritual activities from other activities. Classification of a Ritual: ● Famous categorization French sociologist Emile Durkheim distinguishes between negative rites (taboos) and positive rites (communion rites) (see Durkheim 1965, p. 337). ● A pragmatic approach suggests six open-ended categories: ○ calendrical rites ○ rites of passage ○ rites of exchange and communion ○ rites of affliction ○ feasting, fasting and festivals

○ political rites (see Bell 1997, p. 94). Origin of the term: ● The term “ritual” comes from the Latin words ritus and ritualis, which refer, respectively, to the prescribed ceremonial order for a liturgical service and to the book that lays out this order. ● Interchangeable in English with ceremony or liturgy, the term “ritual” began to be used in an anthropological sense early in the twentieth century as part of the exploration of the origin of religion. Ritual vs Religion ● While ritual was taken to be as something common to all religions, most of these early discussions of ritual focused on so-called “primitive” religion. ● Therefore while the term “ritual” began to evoke a more even-handed appreciation of the commonalities in all religions, the focus on primitive ritual helped to distance these studies from Christianity, which was assumed to be superior. Nevertheless, some early scholars wrote about primitive ritual in a way that made the parallelism with the rites of Christianity hard to overlook (see Beidelman 1974). ● Among the many attitudes toward ritual in the history of religion is the Protestant distrust of rites. ● Even today, a self-consciously “modern” attitude tends to equate a full ritual system with a “primitive” form of religiosity. This cultural continuation of a Protestant aversion to ritual tends to equate heavily ritualized practices with Catholic excesses and with the Catholic corruption of a prior, pristine period (see Douglas 1968). ● These inconsistent assessments of ritual – ritual as a merely primitive activity versus ritual as excessively priestly pomp – avoided expose by being applied to different religions in different parts of the world. ● Hence primitive religion was to be found in illiterate Africa and corrupted Buddhism in literate Asia. Despite sensitivity to these tendencies, some argue that there remain subtle biases. “Ritualistic” still connotes thoughtless and dogmatic. Approaches to Ritual ● Today theoretical approaches to ritual cut across these disciplines. ● The approaches include functionalism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, structuralism, culturalism, performance studies, and practice theory, as well as cognitive, ethological, and sociobiological methods. Models ● Both William R Robertson obertson Sm Smith ith (1846–94) and James Georg Georgee Frazer (1854–

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1941) argued for the centrality of ritual in religion, or at least in “primitive” religion. Robertson Smith ○ Saw religion, and civilization itself, as originating in the communal bond instilled by participation in the ritual sacrifice of community’s divine totem. ○ He saw ritualistic sacrifice as centered not on gifts of homage, as had previously been assumed, but on the expression of love between humans and their totems, who were eaten by their worshipers. James Geor George ge Frazer ○ Followed Smith in making sacrifice the key religious ritual. He argued that the fundamental sacrificial ritual was that in which the god of fertility, who had been killed, was resurrected. Through his rebirth came the rebirth of crops. The “myth and ritual” school of clas classicists sicists known as the Cambridge Ritualists proceeded to use Frazer’s “dying and rising god” pattern to analyze literature. Ritual meant activities communally organized and executed, the script and meaning of which could later float free to create literature. Most myth ritualists, who professionally were largely classicists and anthropologists, did not examine the rituals of their own day. These early scholars saw ritual not simply as a religious activity but also as a central social activity. Subsequent scholars no longer focused on the social origin of religious rituals but instead on the

social function of religions rituals. ● Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) ○ Rituals are the rules of conduct governing human activity in the face of the sacred, or those “things set apart and forbidden”. ○ Durkheim proposed that periodic gatherings to venerate symbols of the sacred enabled people to experience a “collective effervescence,” an emotional state through which they came to identify themselves with their gods. In actuality, their gods were a “figurative expression of the society” itself, which was internalized through the ritual. ○ For Durkheim it is through ritual activities directed to the sacred that the society becomes simultaneously a moral community, the heart of the individual’s sense of self, and a fundamental assumption about reality.

● Ritual is explained by how it ritual functions to maintain society. ● Mary Dougla Douglas: s: The British anthropologist (b. 1921), a Durkheimian who nevertheless moved beyond simple functionalism. ○ She helped retire notions of a distinctively primitive form of religion by showing that standard European analyses of so-called magical (primitive) rituals were shaped by a distinctly Protestant disdain for ritual in general. ○ Douglas argues that symbolic activities reflect particular forms of social organization. Rituals act as a form of communication that has a constraining effect on social behavior. ● Two students of Durkheim, Henri Hubert (1872–1927) and Durkheim’s nephew, M Marcel arcel M Maus aus ausss (1873–1950) (1873–1950), wrote a short monograph, that offered a provocative new element to the sociology of ritual. ○ For Hubert and Mauss, it is not the effervescence of the ritual experience that is important, but the structured sequence of the rite itself. ○ The sacrificial ritual consecrates (declare something to be sacred) the offering, enabling it to act as a medium of communion between the human and the divine realms. After this communion, everything must be desacralized in order to re-establish the necessary distinctions between the human and the divine, the profane and the sacred. orm of ritual, for it alone ○ For Hubert and Mauss, sacrifice is a special fform involves such sacralization and the all important sense of union with the sacred. ○ They demonstrated that ritual is fundamental to the creation and maintenance of a sacred realm distinct from the human – the very foundation of religion. ● Sacrifice and Ritual ○ Sacrifice has traditionally meant killing an animal and then offering it to the gods and to those present. It figures prominently in the Bible, where there is the classification of sacrifices in Leviticus, the sacrifice sealing the covenant with Abraham (Genesis 15 : 9–18), and even the representation of Christ’s death (Hebrews 9 : 12–14). ○ Well before Hubert and Mauss, and even before the classicists began studying Greek rites of animal offerings, sacrifice was taken as the pre-eminent form of ritual. ○ For Robertson Smith, ritual is the heart of religion and sacrifice the

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heart of ritual. Ritual represents “a unique process, time, and place in which desire and order, the individual and the universal, are conjoined”. ○ In this view sacrifice mediates relations between human beings and the gods. See vedic ritual traditions - book René Girard (b. 1923), trained as a literary theorist, has incorporated the approaches of both Frazer and Freud in focusing on a primordial sacrifice. ○ But he argues that religion arose to counter the violent social effects of “mimetic desire,” or the desire for what someone else has. ○ In effect, primordial rites of collective violence achieved social cohesion by involving everyone in the killing of a designated scapegoat. ○ Girard’s “generative” theory of the ritual expulsion and killing of the scapegoat evokes Freud’s attempt to root his Oedipal theory in supposed patricide at the dawn of humanity and also depends on Frazer’s claim of the killing of a human for the sake of the community. ○ For Girard, even more than for the others, violence is really the subject of ritual, the function of which is nevertheless reconciliation (see Girard 1987). Walter Burkert: German classicist (b. 1931) suggests that the origins of society lie in hunting – a pre-agricultural stag – that is recalled, and perpetuated, in all rituals. ○ For Burkert, sacrifice is not one category of ritual. Rather, all rituals are disguised sacrifices and are acts of aggression. Burkert invokes the work of etiologists like Konrad Lorenz, who attempted to demonstrate the roots of human aggression in animal behavior such as the ritual-like patterns found in animal courtship and the pack’s hunting activities. ○ Using sociobiology, or biological anthropology, Burkert has described the “creation of the sacred” in human evolution, suggesting that ritual was a pre-verbal form of communication and a matter of fixed behavioral patterns characterized, as Freud suggested, by obsessive repetition. Phenomenologists such as Mir Mircea cea Eliade (1907–86) and Jonathan Z. Smith (b. 1938) hav havee contributed a distinctiv distinctivee angle on ritual experience. ○ In ritual, Eliade argued, people symbolically perform the acts of the

gods that are recounted in myths about how they brought order (cosmos) to the primordial chaos. Myth recounts these divine acts, and ritual re-enacts them. Every time the creation is repeated in ritual, there is a fresh victory over the forces of chaos since “the ritual makes creation over again”. ○ Breaking with those who argued for the priority of ritual, Eliade also broke with Frazer’s view that the primitive or archaic ritual is concerned only with fertility. ○ He argued for the importance of the complete cosmogonic myth with its “models” for many levels of ritualistic activity, such as the preparation of medicinal agents. Eliade’s influential analysis of New Year rituals paid particular attention to the distinction between the old and the new that is overcome by ritually created experiences of chaos followed by order – chaos and cosmos. ○ He also gave fresh significance to the repetition of ritual through the renewal bestowed by the cosmogonic myth – a welcome alternative to the harsher, psychological judgments of Freud’s theory of neurotic obsession. ● Jonathan Z. Smith ○ Ritual is a dramatization of how things should be, not of how they actually are. To keep chaos from overwhelming cosmos, ritual regularly reaffirms the right order of things. Ritual acts as an opportunity, a kind of “focusing lens,” for seeing what is of value. ○ Like Eliade, Smith does not conc concern ern himself with how ritual functions in society. He is concern concerned ed instead with how the rreligious eligious imagination understands what it is doi doing ng in perf performin ormin ormingg a rite. ○ In particular, Smith suggests that ritual is a mechanism for repairing the fragmentation of human experience and the breakdown of cosmic coherence. ● Arnold van Gennep Gennep: The ethnologist (1873–1957) was one of the first theorists of ritual not to focus on sacrifice. ○ He addressed life crisis rites, or those rites accompanying a change in social status, such as initiation and marriage. ○ He argued that rites of passage orchestrate a change in status by means of a three-part structure: ■ First, separation, in which the person is removed from the person’s immediate social group, such as that of young girls; ■ Second, transition, in which the person is kept in a temporary,

in between, “liminal” state, such as a cohort group of girls being confined in an isolated, womblike hut at the far edge of the village. ■ Third, incorporation, in which the person is given a new status in another social grouping – for example, that of marriageable adult women. ○ Van Gennep found that this three part structure could be as simple as passing through gates and portals, or as complicated as one involving multiple sub-rites and long transition periods. ● Bruce Lincoln (1991): Working with van Gennep’s model, has provided examples of women’s coming-of-age rites, and Ronald Grimes (2000) has written about life crisis rites in America today. ● Victor T Turner: urner: The British anthropologist (1920–83) ○ modified van Gennep’s three-part structure theory to develop a view of ritual as a social process with a dramatic structure. ○ The “ritual process” puts structural elements of society, such as its hierarchical associations and kinship relations, into dialectical interplay with society’s anti-structural elements, such as various egalitarian groupings of men or women as well as symbols of paradox or transgressive playfulness. ○ Van Gennep’s stages of separation, transition, and reincorporation become Turner’s stages of structure, anti-structural liminality, and revised structure. The liminal, transitional stage, marked by experiences of what he calls communitas, both differentiates changes in structure and facilitates them. ○ In other words, ritual simultaneously affirms the social order and changes it. Chaotic inversions of the social order found in the symbols and activities of the liminal phase of communitas maintain the structure that they invert in the same way that a door maintains the boundaries of one room by creating passage to another one. ○ Turner depicted communitas in terms of symbols that invert or subvert the social structure. For example, in the course of his coronation, a king is deliberately humbled. Turner turned to exploring the performative aspects of ritual and in turn the links between ritual and theater. ● During the same period the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (b. 1935) formulated a description of religion as a “cultural system.” ○ Symbols and symbolic actions influence people’s attitudes by

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formulating coherent conceptions of the general order of existence. ○ “In a ritual the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turns out to be the same world”. ○ Ritual is the way that people at once affirm and embody social values. These values of coherence make experiences beyond the rite more manageable and meaningful. Like Turner, Geertz encouraged thinking of ritual not only in terms of examples from established religious traditions, such as the Javanese communal feast known as the slametan, but also in terms of the ritual-like qualities of a secular activity, such as cock fighting. ○ While Turner has been influential for his analysis of what happens within a ritual event. ○ Geertz has been influential for his articulation of the role of ritual within an elastic definition of religion. create eate a consensus that the system Both Turner and Geertz have helped to cr of meanings embodied in a ritual can be related to larger larger social and psychological pr processes. ocesses. Ritual can no longer be taken as it had initially been taken – as a wholly discrete, isolated event. In what is apt to be called a linguistic appr approach oach oach, the focus is on how the symbolic action of the ritual – primarily but not exclusively the verbal action of speaking – does not simply communicate, but also accomplishes specific goals. ○ For example, a marriage ceremony does not simply communicate a change in the social status of the man and woman but actually produces this change. ○ This focus on linguistic “performatives” makes clear that ritual is more than the simple acting out of beliefs. Other recent studies have been concerned with the relationship of belief and ritual, arguing that the “sacred postulates” of a community emerge within performative aspects of ritual. What is claimed is that the oral and bodily gestures performed in the ritual generate “statements” about reality that communicate both information and attitudes, especially acquiescence to the reality so defined. Practice theory and performance theory attempt to articulate how what is done in a ritual – the gestures, words, and physical delineations of space and time – actually accomplishes what a ritual is thought to do, namely,

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shape attitudes. Anthropologist Sherry Ortner (1978) has analyzed the symbols and rituals of the Himalayan Sherpas. Theater scholar Richard Schechner has painstakingly explored the body language of ritualized performances and performed rituals, ranging from cross-cultural facial expressions to the elaborate dramas of the Ram lila in Northern India (see Schechner and Appel 1989; Hughes-Freeland and Crain 1998). In my own work I look at ritual in the context of social action in general, not as something set apart either in theory or in actuality (see Bell 1992, 1997). I attempt to determine what is distinctive about this way of acting when compared with other ways of acting. Several ideas emerge from this new perspective. All action is strategic and situational – that is, construes its context or situation in ways that are advantageous to the actors. Ritualized action construes its situation for the advantages of promoting images and relationships in which there is overt deference to the authority of otherworldly sources of power as well as of those of human beings believed to speak for these powers. Central to the strategy of ritualizing activity is deft bodily movement. As the body moves about, marking off space and time, it defines even the most complex ritual envir environ on onment ment b byy simple acts such as kneeling, cir circumambulation, cumambulation, and pro procession. cession. These bodily movements of gesture and sound generate a series of oppositional schemes that structure the environment in a redundant sequence of analogies: upper/lower, inner/outer, right hand/left hand, divine/human, older/younger, male/female, pure/impure, and so on. Mobilizing or deploying these oppositions, the body first defines the ritual space and then more dramatically reacts to it. The shaped and qualified environment gives those in it an experience of the objective reality of the schemes that have defined it. Participants do not so much see how they and their ritual leaders have generated this environment as feel its impact as them. Taken as a form of social practice, ritual has as its ultimate goal the creation of a ritualized body (ritual mastery), a body in which the ritual schemes (higher is divine, lower is humble; inner is soul, outer is corporeal body) are fully absorbed, enabling a person to mold situations that occur outside the rite itself (see Bell 1992). A practice approach attempts to answer t...