Ritual

I

Introduction

Ritual, particular type of formal performance in which the participants carry out a series of relatively stereotyped actions and make a series of relatively standardized statements largely prescribed by custom and sanctioned by precedent. Historical evidence suggests that rituals tend to be much more stable and invariable than most human customary activity. The capacity of the participants to modify the form and content of ritual activities is usually much less than would be the case if the activities were primarily focused on political, economic, or recreational concerns.

II

Significance

Drama resembles ritual, and certainly sometimes is historically derived from it, but differs from it in two main respects. First, dramas have audiences while rituals have congregations who participate—who dance and sing, kneel and bow, or join in prayer and other standardized utterances. Second, unlike dramas, rituals are not primarily recreational. For their congregations they are serious affairs, which do not merely communicate but also, through the intervention of a god or spirits or other invisible beings or forces, accomplish something. Coronations and other installation rituals sanctify, define, and legitimize transfers of power and authority. Marriage and other life-cycle rituals bless, mark out, and sanction significant transitions in the lives of individuals. Calendrical rituals provide an established, ordered, and meaningful pattern for the changing seasons, and the productive and other activities associated with them.

III

Development and Endurance

In the increasingly secularized societies of much of the modern urbanized and industrialized world, elaborate rituals now seem strange to many people. However, this is a relatively recent phenomenon, which has gathered pace in the last generation or two. Until then almost everybody in the world, from members of non-literate nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to highly literate members of societies with access to complex technologies, participated from time to time in elaborate ritual activities that were in general regarded as meaningful and important. Such activities are among the most universal of all human social activities. They remain extraordinarily widespread and remarkably persistent.

These activities are also surprisingly similar in form and content, far more so than was recognized in the past. The great increase in research into religion and ritual in tribal societies has revealed the intricacy and sophistication of tribal rituals and the inappropriateness of the crude evolutionary schemes that used to be, and sometimes still are, used to categorize and to denigrate them. When seen in their full cultural and social context, tribal rituals can no longer be regarded as bizarre, as different in their essentials from rituals in more complex societies.

Rituals of initiation, rare in urbanized industrialized societies, consistently impose an ordered framework on the often unruly transition from childhood through adolescence into adulthood. In these rituals the initiates are first dramatically separated from their mothers, from the households in which they have been brought up, and symbolically from their childhood. They enter a liminal or threshold phase of the ritual in which their joint equality, their separation from normal society, and their lack of status are stressed. They are subject to various ordeals or tests of endurance, often including circumcision or other painful operations, which may stress in a most dramatic way their subjection to those organizing the ritual, who represent the force of politically organized society. At the same time such ordeals give opportunities to the initiates to stress their bravery and their ability to take on the responsibilities of adult life. It is not accidental that the ordeals at initiation are so often genital, as initiation is commonly specified as a qualification for marriage and responsible sexuality as locally defined. In the final phase of the ritual the initiated are formally welcomed back into society and reincorporated into normal productive activities as adults. At initiation, initiates are also commonly inducted into shared new knowledge, labelled as a privilege of adulthood, marked as important by the pain of the associated ordeals and “sacralized” by association with invisible beings or powers. (See also Rites of Passage)

These and other rituals invariably involve the carrying out of actions and the manipulation of objects that carry complex symbolic meanings that are not easily translated or understood but which are somewhat similar to the symbols inherent in art and architecture, and in myth and poetry. The meanings of such symbols, in the contexts of the cultural values and belief systems of the societies in which they occur, can be elicited by careful enquiry combined with comparison of the variety of settings in which particular symbols are used. Substances such as blood, used in rituals all over the world, invariably carry with them a whole series of complex multi-layered meanings and associations that make them powerful for the participants. What initiation rituals, like all rituals everywhere, accomplish is to give structure, order, and meaning to people’s lives and to do this through periodic, formal, sequential, participatory performances associated with powerful symbols.

Many rituals have important political effects. They tend to act to maintain the status quo, to perpetuate social differentiation, to invest the powers that be with sanctified legitimacy. Historically, ritual has played a particularly significant role in the maintenance of inequality between men and women.

Emphasis on equality in ritual is much rarer. It is particularly characteristic of the liminal period in transition rituals, in which the solidarity and the sharing of the participants may establish long-standing egalitarian bonds between them. As a pervasive influence throughout rituals, egalitarianism occurs in the rituals of a few strikingly undifferentiated societies of hunter-gatherers and the innovative rituals of some groups challenging traditional authority. The rituals of some of the early Christians and some radical sects through the ages fall into this category. Ritual activity, whether emphasizing equality or inequality, is not a passive expression of underlying political and economic realities, but is an active force for the maintenance and, at times, the creation of social identity.

The term “ritual” is also now often used more loosely for other types of formal repetitive or stereotyped behaviour without any religious content, such as shaking hands or saluting an officer. It is used by psychologists to refer to abnormal repetitive behaviour, such as repeated hand-washing. Those studying animal behaviour use the term for stereotyped behaviour sequences such as courtship displays.