Very Short Introductions - Ritual: A Very Short Introduction
This document is a summary of all the articles to read for the course The Ceremonial Society, including the book Ritual: a very short introduction (B. Stephenson) from the introduction to chapter 7.
The Ceremonial Society
Index
Ritual: a very short introduction – B. Stephenson (2015) Introduction...........................................................................1
Ritual: a very short introduction – B. Stephenson (2015) Chapter 1: Ritualization.........................................................2
Ritual: a very short introduction – B. Stephenson (2015) Chapter 3: Ritual and Society.................................................3
Ritual: a very short introduction – B. Stephenson (2015) Chapter 4: Ritual and Transformation....................................4
Ritual: a very short introduction – B. Stephenson (2015) Chapter 5: Definitions, Types, Domains.................................5
Ritual: a very short introduction – B. Stephenson (2015) Chapter 6: Ritual as Performance..........................................7
Ritual and Society – C. Bell (2010) Chapter 2: Ritual and Society....................................................................................9
Ritual and Society – C. Bell (2010) Chapter 4: Basic Genres of Ritual Action.................................................................15
Deeply into the Bone – R. Grimes (n.d.) Introduction...................................................................................................19
Deeply into the Bone – R. Grimes (n.d.) Chapter 4: Living with the Dead.....................................................................21
Ritual Selectivity: Commemorating the November 2015 Terrorist Attacks in Paris and Beirut – W. Arfman (2019).....24
Ritual: a very short introduction – B. Stephenson (2015) Chapter 7: The Fortunes of Ritual........................................26
Sacralising the city: Sound, space and performance in Hindu ritual practices in London (2012) – A. David..................29
Marching for God in the global city: Public space, religion and diasporic identities in a transnational African church
(2012) – D. Garbin.........................................................................................................................................................29
Video Lecture: Death and Burial in the history of humanity.........................................................................................29
“Spectacular Death”—Proposing a New Fifth Phase to Philippe Ariès’s Admirable History of Death – (2016) M.
Jacobsen........................................................................................................................................................................ 30
Wiring Death: Dying, Grieving and Remembering on the Internet– T. Hutchings (2012) Chapter 4.............................32
Ritual Self-Disclosure in The Coming-Out Process - (1997) D. Garrick...........................................................................33
“Yes, I’m gay” The Mediality of Coming Out – (2020) S. Jandle.....................................................................................35
Inventing Rituals for the Digital World – A. Samuel (2016)...........................................................................................36
Rituals in a Digital Society – S. Van der Beek, M. Hoondert (2019) Introduction...........................................................36
Media Rituals: A Critical Approach – N. Couldry (2003) Chapter 1................................................................................38
Conceptual toolbox.......................................................................................................................................................41
Ritual: a very short introduction – B. Stephenson (2015)
Introduction
Ritual, like language, tool use, symbolism and music, is one of the constituent elements in the mix of what it means
to be human:
Cultural: persistence and pervasiveness of ritual.
Archeological: ritual was present at the dawn of humanity.
Biological: ritualization is a fundamental feature of animal behavior and contributes to evolutionary
processes.
To think about ritual is to reflect on human nature, sociality and culture.
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,Even if we do not consider ourselves ritual beings or our society ritually based, an encounter with ritual in the course
of a lifetime is as sure as the rising and setting of the sun à eg. weddings, funerals, birthdays, graduations, festivals,
etc.
Ritual = a doing (we learn about ritual through the doing of it). Ritual is a way of thinking and knowing. Our ideas and
feelings about ritual are shaping not only within ritual itself but also through texts and other media.
Ritual: a very short introduction – B. Stephenson (2015) Chapter
1: Ritualization
Ritual is often associated with religion and therefore with the sacred, with matters heavenly, transcendent, of
ultimate importance. There has been a tendency to identify ritual as among those activities and capacities that
distinguishes and separates human beings from other animals.
Ritual is not only something that people engage in; it is also a way of regarding things. Ritual is both action and idea.
On one hand, in order to think critically about ritual we need to keep these 2 dimensions (action and idea)
distinct.
On the other hand, the category or idea of ritual shapes the kinds of behaviors and actions we identify as
ritual.
Ritual has been widely theorized as communicative action, with gestures and acts (ritual as a form of discourse). This
means that ritual, like verbal communication, requires interpretation and is subject to ambiguities,
misunderstandings and deceptions. As with linguistic forms of communication, it is not easy to say precisely how
ritual works.
‘Dance of bees’ as an example of ritualization.
Instrumental behavior = favorably modifies an organism’s environment.
Communicative behavior = transmits information between the members of a species for their mutual
benefit.
Ritualization theory attempts to explain the presence and development of anatomical features and behavioral
repertoires in animals. 2 questions:
1. How did these behaviors come to be?
2. What are these behaviors for?
Ethology postulates that ritualization is a selective process that allows for the enhanced communication
of evolutionary advantageous information and emotional states. In ethology, ritualized behavior is
functional; it improves communication in potentially troublesome situations associated with mating,
feeding, etc.
Ritualization theory is based on conflict models of inner emotional states. Ethologists and biologists understand
ritualization as a remarkably flexible evolutionary process, which builds upon convenient behavior patterns and
morphological structures. In calling these behavior patterns ‘ritualizations’, ethologists are drawing on certain
features of the rites human beings perform, in particular the stylized, repetitive, performative and stereotyped
nature of many rites and ceremonies.
Human behavior is the least instinctually determined of all animals. We make our way in the world not merely on the
basis of our biological endowment but through the range of signifying practices that constitute culture. In some
societies, ritual plays a greater cultural role than in others.
The ritualization of conflict situations and aggression through contests and duels is generally understood
as a social control mechanism. The ritualization of aggression puts the brakes on runaway aggression
that can lead to a destructive escalation of innate aggressive tendencies.
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,For war to take place, biological inhibitions against killing (articulated through ritualizations) need to be overcome so
that combatants no longer respond to these ritualized signals of submission, appeasement, bonding and sympathy.
During WOI, there were incidents of sharing food and conversations across trench-lines, acts that made killing all the
more difficult. For this reason, troops were regularly rotated so that bonds of sympathy could not be developed.
Further, the enemy must be ‘dehumanized’, a process that places the enemy outside one’s group, making them a
different species, thus eliminating biological inhibitions against killing conspecifics.
Ritualized violence is intentional bodily harm that has been encoded with meanings and used as a tool to
communicate values, narratives and beliefs.
An ethological perspective on ritual places limits on ‘culturalism’, the tendency to frame and explain all human
behavior as the product of relatively arbitrary cultural forms. The ethology of ritual demonstrates that we are the
product of both nature and culture.
Ritual: a very short introduction – B. Stephenson (2015) Chapter
3: Ritual and Society
Ritualization has a function: it increases the likelihood of species survival. Ritual, whether secular or sacred, binds
groups together, ensuring their harmonious functioning by generating and maintaining orders of meaning, purpose
and value.
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) – Emile Durkheim:
Religion is the basic ‘social fact’.
Durkheim argued that religious ideas, beliefs and values arise from social practices, in particular from a
society’s principal rites and ceremonies. Ritual plays a fundamental role in establishing that very
sacred/social order, with its corresponding group membership, social roles, status systems and hierarchies.
Ritual is about tradition; ritual is an inherently conservative institution that joins people into a collective and
encourages them to look to the past for models and guidance.
The role of ritual can be found in solidarity.
The existence of society is something demanding explanation. Society is solidarity and is the outcome of
ritual enactment à no ritual, no society.
Rappaport suggests there are 2 obvious features of ritual:
1. Ritual has a formal, invariant structure. People, if they engage in ritual, must necessarily assent and conform
to that structure.
2. There is not ritual if it is not performed. To consider ritual as an alternative, secondary medium for
expressing what could otherwise be expressed is to miss what is distinctive about ritual: a rite requires
performance.
In the tradition of Durkheim, a group of people become a society through a shared experience of the sacred, that
objects/idea/belief that is fundamentally valued. Rappaport argues that the binding of people around a shared sense
of the sacred is best and perhaps only achieved through ritual.
Clifford Geertz wrote about the ritual genre of ‘royal progresses’. Royal progresses are one of a wide range of
institutional rites and ceremonies serving the interest of political power.
People need to be affirmed in their beliefs by enacting them, and ritual is a source of collective identity
for many, while upholding various dimensions of social order.
Ritual can be the glue to a society, but what if it is holding together a system of domination, oppression
and exploitation?
Not only do certain ritual genres contribute to cultural and religious processes of negotiation, but the negotiating
power of ritual and performance become especially important at certain sociohistorical moments (‘social dramas’). A
social drama unfolds when there is a breach of normative modes of social life that can lead to a state of crisis
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, capable of splitting the social fabric into 2 or more contending groups. In response to this situation, redressive action
arises.
Ideas and attitudes about ritual’s relation to society revolve around several dualities:
Confirmatory action or creative force?
Generating the experience of solidarity or reinforcing hierarchies and inequities?
Deployed in the interests of solidifying power or is it an instrument of resistance?
Rites need to be evaluated in their social contexts; change is not always for the better and tradition is
not always oppressive.
Ritual: a very short introduction – B. Stephenson (2015) Chapter
4: Ritual and Transformation
Change is natural. But societies also create cultural forms and institutions designed to actively promote change à
transformation. There are many rites that traffic in symbols and processes of transformation (eg. healing rites,
sacrifice, etc.) Ritual is sometimes distinguished from technical, instrumental activity; yet ritual too aims to get things
done.
To a results-oriented culture, for any activity to be of value it needs to be useful. The discussion of ritual efficacy is
partly driven by the valuing of utility in contemporary culture. A distinction is made:
Separating ritual in a narrow sense (defined by its transformative power)
From ceremony, with its more socially conservative mood.
Transformations of the self through ritual means may be ontological, cognitive, biological, status-related or
combinations of these. What a rite precisely accomplishes will depend on who is asked.
Initiation
Initiation = any ritual means of taking on a new role (a beginning or entrance).
Eg. an oath at the start of your new job
Initiation in the simplest and commonest use of the term transforms boys into men and girls into women
(how societies weave together the biological changes of adolescence with the attitudes and expectations
of adulthood).
Initiation involves mentorship and has a pedagogical dimension in which initiates generally assume a
posture of obedience toward elders.
Van Gennep:
In classifications of rites, initiation is considered as one of the ‘rites of passage’.
Initiation is principally an instrument for the transformation of an individual’s social status.
Ritual is not mere re-enactment of beliefs, narratives or values but en-actment; a rite of passage does not
simply mark a transition in the life cycle but affects it.
Van Gennep advanced the reasonable idea that rites must be understood in their social contexts and argued
that the elements of any particular rite need to be analyzed and understood in relation to the larger ritual
systems in which they are embedded à sequential method: studies rite in relation to both what preceded it
and followed it.
Both the life cycle of an individual and social organization are composed of a set/sequence of recognized status
positions, and the task of initiation is to move people through these positions, which are generally age related. Social
transformation is also accompanied by an inner transformation of state. How does initiation work?
An ethologist would answer by pointing to the mechanism of natural selection; to say ritual works is to
say that a particular behavioral repertoire has a survival value.
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