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Ritual book of the Order of the Eastern Star, 1909

A ritual is a traditional set of actions imbued with symbolic meaning, cosmic significance or magical potency within a particular cultural context. It may be prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of a community. The term usually excludes actions which are arbitrarily chosen by the performers, though rituals may contain a predetermined period of improvisation.

One definition of ritual, given by Kyriakidis (2007), is that "ritual" is an outsider's or 'etic' category for a set activity (or set of actions) which to the outsider seems irrational, non-contiguous, illogical. The term can be used also by the insider or 'emic' performer as an acknowledgment that this activity can be seen as such by the uninitiated onlooker.

A more liberal use of the term includes traditions such as school "rushes" and graduations, club meetings, sports events, Halloween parties, veterans parades, Christmas shopping and more. Even common actions like hand-shaking and saying hello may be termed rituals. This type of broad categorization has been criticized by scholars such as Jack Goody for disutility resulting from its infinite expandability.

It should be noted that the term has seen a number of conflicting or non-contiguous definitions, with varied uses between fields: in psychology, the term ritual is sometimes used in a technical sense for a repetitive behavior systematically used by a person to neutralize or prevent anxiety; it is a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder; in anthropology, it may refer variably to sets of actions performed for social, religious, educational, or political purposes; informally, "ritual" may refer to almost any repetitive or habitual behavior.

Performance

The formalized movements of Japanese tea ceremony are called temae.

A ritual may be performed on specific occasions, or at the discretion of individuals or communities. It may be performed according to prescribed ritual forms or in a loosely structured manner; by a single individual, by a group, or by the entire community; in arbitrary places, or in places especially reserved for it; either in public, in private, or before specific people; with utilitarian, symbolic or magical objects, arbitrarily chosen objects, or no objects at all. A ritual may be restricted to a certain subset of the community, and may enable or underscore the passage between religious or social states.

Due to their symbolic nature, there are hardly any limits to the kind of actions that may be incorporated into a ritual. The rites of past and present societies have typically involved special gestures and words, recitation of fixed texts, performance of special music, songs or dances, processions, manipulation of certain objects, use of special dresses, consumption of special food, drink, or drugs, and much more. Religious rituals have also included animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, and ritual suicide.

In many cases, rituals have undergone a process of formalization: the establishment of prescribed sets of specific actions, or "forms," which are transmitted between generations of ritual practitioners for continued practice and posterity. These include ritual traditions such as the whole of Japanese tea ceremony, the rites of Freemasonry, or many coronations andinaugurations. These structured forms variably do or do not serve practical purposes and, in the case that they do, are often slower, more elaborate, or otherwise impractical for the purpose of mere function. Regardless, considerable human effort has been and continues to be invested in the practice and transmission of such forms since pre-historical times. Rituals can also be loosely structured, however, requiring only one or a few essential elements to be successfully performed.

The codification, preservation and transmission of ritual forms allows practitioners within a tradition to record and perpetuate the shared ideas and values of their practitioner-community. At the same time, novices are allowed to enter into these communities, learn, and share in the values of the group, who are perceived to have something desirable to offer. For example, martial arts masters use the choreographed combat of kata to codify and teach their particular, martial style and philosophy; novices learn these styles in order to learn and practice combat skills. In this way, the formalization of ideas and values ensures their continuity within practitioner-communities.

Purpose

The purposes of rituals are varied between religious obligations or ideals, satisfaction of spiritual or emotional needs of the practitioners, strengthening of social bonds, social and moral education, demonstration of respect or submission, stating one's affiliation, obtaining social acceptance or approval for some event — or, sometimes, just for the pleasure of the ritual itself. Alongside the personal dimensions of worship and reverence, rituals can have a more basic social function in expressing, fixing and reinforcing the shared values and beliefs of a society. For this reason, rituals have in some cases been exploited for political ends, as with the rallies of Nazi Germany.

Social rituals have formed a part of human culture for tens of thousands of years. The earliest known undisputed evidence of burial rituals dates from the Upper Paleolithic. Older skeletons show no signs of deliberate 'burial', and as such lack clear evidence of having been ritually treated. Anthropologists see social rituals as one of many cultural universals. Alongside the personal dimensions of worship and reverence, rituals can have a more basic social function in expressing, fixing and reinforcing the shared values and beliefs of a society.

Rituals can aid in creating a firm sense of group identity. Humans have used rituals to create social bonds and even to nourish interpersonal relationships. For example, most fraternities and sororities have rituals incorporated into their structure, from elaborate and "secret" initiation rites, to the formalized structure of convening a meeting. Thus, numerous aspects of ritual and ritualistic proceedings are ingrained into the workings of such societies.

Types of Ritual

Rituals of various kinds are a feature of all known human societies, past or present. They include not only the various worship rites and sacraments of organized religions and cults, but also the rites of passage of certain societies, atonement and purification rites, oaths of allegiance, dedication ceremonies, coronations and presidential inaugurations, marriages and funerals. Many activities that are ostensibly performed for concrete purposes, such as jury trials, execution of criminals and scientific symposia, are loaded with purely symbolic actions prescribed by regulations or tradition, and are thus partly ritualistic in nature. For example, the presidential inauguration ceremony of the United States requires the President-elect to officiate his inauguration by swearing an oath to protect the United States Constitution on a Christian Bible, although the country's government is officially secular.

Religious or Cosmic Rituals

Urarina shaman, 1988

Among anthropologists, and other ethnographers, who have contributed to ritual theory are Victor Turner, Ronald Grimes, Mary Douglas, and the biogenetic structuralists. Anthropologists from Émile Durkheim through Turner and contemporary theorists like Michael Silverstein (2004) treat ritual as social action aimed at particular transformations, often conceived in cosmic terms. Though these transformations can also be thought of as personal (e.g. the fertility and healing rituals Turner describes), they becomes a sort of cosmic event, one stretching into "eternity". In The Ritual Process, Turner focuses this understanding on ritual transformations insofar as they are related participants' place in social hierarchy and their movement between levels of the social strata.

In religion, a ritual can comprise the prescribed outward forms of performing the cultus, or cult, of a particular observation within a religion or religious denomination. Although ritual is often used in context with worship performed in a church, the actual relationship between any religion's doctrine and its ritual(s) can vary considerably from organized religion to non-institutionalized spirituality, such as ayahuasca shamanism as practiced by the Urarina of the upper Amazon. Rituals often have a close connection with reverence, thus a ritual in many cases expresses reverence for a deity or idealized state of humanity.

Other rituals conceived of in cosmic terms include those ritual events which are believed to have a direct, co-dependent relationship to the continuum of time and the universe. This can be either causal events, such as with Vedic rituals performed to perpetuate cosmic order, or recurrent events, where the rituals performed are believed to be the actual reoccurence of historically or cosmically significant events. For instance, the Navajo base every ritual erection of a four-posted house on the first such event by First Man and First Woman, but their performance is considered the literal recurrence, not a reenactment, of the beginning of human domesticity in cyclical time (Brown 2001, p. 15). The Puebloan peoples similarly re-emerge from the underworld through “Earth-navels” (centers of the world, of which there are more than one) each year in an ever-repeating ritual-present (Brown 2001, p. 37-38).

Social-Transformation Rituals

Rites of passage, inaugurations, coronations, and other rituals in which a participant or participants are divested of their station in society and invested with a new station may be considered rituals of social transformation. Among those who have done work on such ritual traditions are anthropologists Monica Wilson and Victor Turner.

Victor Turner is well established in the area of ritual studies through his work with the Ndembu tribe of northwest Zambia, discussed in his 1967 title The Forest of Symbols. In his follow-up The Ritual Process (1969), Turner explores the relationship between social hierarchy and ritual. From this research, Turner presents his theories of “liminality” and “communitas." Turner’s theory of liminality is concerned with those members of a society who are without rank or status, neither high nor low, and reside outside the social infrastructure—-or as Turner describes them, “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by [society.]” (1969, p. 95). His theory of communitas, conversely, describes a sense of undifferentiated societal communion which builds group cohesion and solidarity. Both liminality and communitas are couched in ritual and arise in ritual situations, but are primarily concerned with the interactions between ritual participants and the significance of those interactions to their relationship in the overall society.

This treatment of ritual practices can also be found in the work of British anthropologist Monica Wilson. Wilson, in her 1954 Nyakyusa Ritual and Symbolism, declares “I see in the study of rituals the key to an understanding of the essential constitution of human societies.” (p. 241) and is later quoted approvingly by Turner in the opening pages of The Ritual Process (1969, p. 6). Wilson also regards ritual as a process of social transformation inextricably linked to hierarchy and status.

These groups are not mutually exclusive; rituals may contain characteristics pertaining to of some or all of these categorizations.

Critique of Ritual Studies

The anthropologists in the field of ritual studies have drawn criticism for their theories from scholars such as Jack Goody (1977), who has questioned the efficacy of the categorization of ritual by leading anthropologists in the field. Goody identifies the problem with the contemporary categorization of ritual as being “the broadness of the category of ritual and the impossibility of falsification” (p. 30). In Goody’s view, “any analytic approach that cannot (or does not) discriminate between performances of [plays], the State Opening of Parliament and the Mass is wasting [scholars’] time by trivializing the study of social behaviour.” (p. 28-39). Goody also argues that defining “ritual” in a way which allows the addition of social activities ad infinitum (p. 27) while at the same time trying to form a category requiring interpretation is counterproductive (p. 29) and creates an infinitely expanding, unresearchable category that must be deconstructed anew (p. 27) and is useless for analysis (p. 26). As evidence of the “disutility of ritual” (p. 27), Goody refers to contemporary psychologists, who found that they made little progress and grew unsatisfied with global, vague terms before narrowing them to the point of some usefulness; he goes on to recommend a similar narrowing of terms in anthropology, though he expresses some wonder if such a paradigm shift would cause “the whole edifice [to] fall to the ground.” (p. 34-35).

See also

• Ceremony
• Rite
• Rite of Passage
• Kata
• Liturgy
• Ritualism
• Religion
• Superstition

• Fraternities
• Sororities
• Ritualization
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder
• Japanese Tea Ceremony
• Inauguration
• Coronation

• Myth and ritual
• Religious symbolism
• Formality
• Victor Turner
• Monica Wilson
• Bronislaw Malinowski
• Max Gluckman

References

Bell, Catherine. (1997) Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bloch, Maurice. (1992) Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

D'Aquili, Eugene G., Charles D. Laughlin and John McManus. (1979) The Spectrum of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structural Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press.

Douglas, Mary. (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.

Durkheim, Émile. (1912) The Elementary Forms Of The Religious Life.

Erikson, Erik. (1977) Toys and Reasons: Stages in the Ritualization of Experience. New York: Norton.

Gennep, Arnold van. (1960) The Rites of Passage. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Grimes, Ronald L. (1994) The Beginnings of Ritual Studies. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

Malinowski, Bronisław. (1948) Magic, Science and Religion. Boston: Beacon Press.

McCorkle Jr., William W. (2010) Ritualizing the Disposal of Dead Bodies: From Corpse to Concept. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Rappaport, Roy A. (1999) Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith, Jonathan Z. (1987) To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Staal, Frits (1990) "Ritual and Mantras: Rules Without Meaning". New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Turner, Victor W. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.

Durkheim, E. 1965 [1915]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: The Free Press.

Fogelin, L. 2007. The Archaeology of Religious Ritual. Annual Review of Anthropology 36:55–71.

Kyriakidis, E., ed. 2007 The archaeology of ritual. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology UCLA publications

Seijo, F. 2005. The Politics of Fire: Spanish Forest Policy and Ritual Resistance in Galicia, Spain. Environmental Politics 14 (3): 380-402

Silverstein, M. 2003. Talking Politics :The Substance of Style from Abe to "W". Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press (distributed by University of Chicago). —. 2004. "Cultural" Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus. Current Anthropology 45:621-652.

Tolbert, E. 1990a. Women Cry with Words: Symbolization of Affect in the Karelian Lament. Yearbook for Traditional Music 22:80-105. —. 1990b. "Magico-Religious Power and Gender in the Karelian Lament," in Music, Gender, and Culture, vol. 1, Intercultural Music Studies. Edited by M. Herndon and S. Zigler, pp. 41–56. Wilhelmshaven, DE.: International Council for Traditional Music, Florian Noetzel Verlag.

Turner, V. W. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Wilce, J. M. 2006. Magical Laments and Anthropological Reflections: The Production and Circulation of Anthropological Text as Ritual Activity. Current Anthropology 47:891-914.