To do so, need to consider historical development of issues, engagement with our cultural categories, extend this to real examples 5. Catherine Bell — 23 May was an American religious studies scholar who specialised in the study of Chinese religions and ritual studies. From until her death she worked at Santa Clara University 's religious studies department, of which she was chair from to Returning to the United States, she began work at Santa Clara in , devoting her research to Chinese ritual, resulting in her most prominent publication, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice In she became the Bernard Hanley Professor of Religious Studies, before becoming chair of the religious studies department in Retiring due to persistent health problems in , she continued to research until her death.
This chapter offers a guide to the reader for understanding the nature of ritual studies as an emerging interdisciplinary field, with particular emphasis on its relevance to the study of the history of early Christianity. Three characteristics are singled out. The chapter also responds to the criticism that has been raised against using the concept of ritual and ritual theory in the study of past rituals and argues that ritual theory enriches historical and textual analysis of early Christian materials in a number of ways.
Ritual theory contributes to drawing a more complete picture of early Christian history and offers a corrective to a biased understanding of early Christianity as a system of beliefs and practices. Finally, examples from the present Handbook are taken to demonstrate how the ritual perspective creates a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration and integrative approaches which both stimulate new questions and enrich old ones.
Includes bibliographical references and index. Catherine Bell. Oxford University Press , 20 nov - pagine. From handshakes and toasts to chant and genuflection, ritual pervades our social interactions and religious practices. Still, few of us could identify all of our daily and festal ritual behaviors, much less explain them to an outsider.
Similarly, because of the variety of activities that qualify as ritual and their many contradictory yet, in many ways, equally legitimate interpretations, ritual seems to elude any systematic historical and comparative scrutiny. In this book, Catherine Bell offers a practical introduction to ritual practice and its study; she surveys the most influential theories of religion and ritual, the major categories of ritual activity, and the key debates that have shaped our understanding of ritualism.
Bell refuses to nail down ritual with any one definition or understanding. Although most people were extremely poor, a an excellent introduction guide to the current state of scholar- small, slightly better-off elite and a few enterprising local peo- ship on ritual, as well as a comprehensive history of ritual study, ple successfully organized an agricultural cooperative and for those with some background in anthropology or religious raised funding for a school.
El Mozote prior to the war, Binford studies. It raises questions thathave been with us, as anthropolo- tells us, was a heterogeneous community "on the move" in a re- gists, for a long time, but also provides much provocative and gion long abandoned by the state.
Some had gone to the mountains and joined the guerrillas. Others supported the government. Yet Rights. Leigh Binford. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, many people continued to reside in El Mozote and surrounding Philip army arrived?
The answer to this question is complex. Binford Gourevitch. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. American University Many residents also had an unwarranted trust in a local store owner. This man, after receiving a false tip from the army, as- Leigh Binford and Philip Gourevitch have written two excel- sured villagers that nothing would happen to them if they re- lent books about political violence in El Salvador and Rwanda mained in El Mozote during an anticipated army attack.
Perhaps respectively. Binford, an anthropologist, examines a army most important, however, was that El Mozote represented a massacre of approximately one-thousand Salvadoran peasants, place where people's lives and livelihoods had become inter-.
Tracing ritual practices in late Mesolithic burials. By Liv Nilsson Stutz. Rituals in the modern world - applying the concept of ritual in media ethnography By Thomas Tufte. At the risk of making the reading more difficult than it needs to be, I have tried to quote or paraphrase terms and descriptions as much as possible, since much of my argument rests on the subtle ways in which language is used. Fredric Jameson introduced a recent study by calling attention to its "organizational fiction," the textual ploy that implies the existence of a problem the study will resolve.
This book is organized around a problem it first constructs and then solves— the problem of how the notion of ritual orders a body of theoretical discourse. This is a strategy of scholarly production, aspects of which are common to other forms of socially effective action. It is my hope that this book, by virtue of its arguments about ritual theory as well as its own performance as a piece of theoretical practice with all its schemes, feints, and blind spots , will contribute to a discussion of the activities of understanding.
Notes Epigraphs i. Roy A. Emphasis in the original. Jonathan Z. Robert G. George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, , p. Edmund R. David L. Sills New York: Mac- millan, , p. Preface 8. Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, , pp. Rappaport also talks of rituals as "public work" and "spirit work" p.
A number of writers provide useful overviews of ritual. Others have explored this issue, even contending that anthropology and ethnology constitute two distinct disciplines. In their critique of anthropological writing, George E. Marcus and Michael M. Fischer Anthropology as Cultural Critique [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ] find the gap between fieldwork and writing to be the object of much reflection pp.
In his analysis of theory in the hard sciences, Wolfgang Stegmuller The Structure and Dynamic of Theories [New York: Springer-Verlag, ] also distinguishes two distinct "languages," one theoretical and the other observational p. Marcus, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ; and Fabian.
Thomas Lawson and Robert N. The stage of application does not necessarily imply a holistic structure of understanding of the type that has been criticized as a matter of "totalizing" explanations reaching for "absolutism.
These three features of a critical theory are based in part on Geuss, pp. Goody, "Against 'Ritual'," pp. Goody, "Against 'Ritual'," p. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. Whether ritual is depicted as a universal phenomenon or merely an applied theoretical construct, the concept of ritual both ex- emplifies and supports the discourse within which it is elabo- rated. As a tool, it must be kept from slipping out of the analyst's hand and into the objective data he or she is trying to interpret.
Yet it has be- come increasingly obvious that a tighter hold on the term does not seem to prevent such "slippage" or maintain the clarity of the boundary between theory and data.
In the last quarter of a century scholars have discovered that theoretical categories are more than mere tools that can be wielded with control or carelessness. Thomas Kuhn's reappraisal of para- digms in scientific inquiry, for example, began to disclose how analytical categories serve more embracing models of the universe and of knowing.
Subsequent attempts to relegitimate knowledge have made even more apparent the dynamics involved in the production of particular bodies of knowledge based on particular relationships between subject and object. They will not stay neutral. Rather, they will conform to whatever subtle purposes the larger analysis serves. We have learned that such categories are merely the most visible of those pieces put into play within discourses whose boundaries, objectives, and rules retreat from our conscious grasp.
To challenge the adequacy of our categories today, scholars must attempt to track the dynamics of the discourse in which they operate and the discursive logic by which they function. The term expressed, therefore, the beginnings of a major shift in the way European culture com- pared itself to other cultures and religions.
Since then many other definitions of ritual have been developed linked to a wide variety of scholarly endeavors. Many myth-and-ritual theorists, for ex- ample, looked to ritual in order to describe 'religion'. Later social functionalists, in contrast, explored ritual actions and values in order to analyze 'society' and the nature of social phenomena.
More recently symbolic anthropologists have found ritual to be funda- mental to the dynamics of 'culture'. From W.
Robertson Smith to Clifford Geertz, the notion of ritual has been meaningful precisely because it functioned as much more than a simple analytical tool. Rather, it has been integral to the mutual construction of both an object for and method of analysis.
In debates about the relationship of myths or beliefs and rites, ritual was used to elucidate the social existence and influence of religious ideas. James, among others, all stressed the primacy of religious ideas, born of pseudoscientific explanations or emotional experiences, as the basis of religion.
Ritual, as exemplary religious behavior, was the necessary but secondary expression of these mental orienta- tions. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, who demonstrated how ritual activities effectively sacralize things, people, or events, in- verted earlier perspectives by tracing how religious phenomena and ideas derived from social activities.
In the development of the legacy of Mauss and the other Annales theoreticians, ritual's effect on social cohesion and equilibrium came to be interpreted in terms of other, seemingly more basic functions such as symbolization and social communication.
This perspective coincides with the emergence of culture as a category of analysis. The analysis of culture, as opposed to society and religion per se, gave a particularly critical place to ritual. The prominence of ritual in the work of cultural anthropologists such as Victor Turner, Clif- ford Geertz, Edmund Leach, and Marshall Sahlins fueled the emer- gence of a focus on ritual itself in the cross-disciplinary endeavor of ritual studies.
The prominence of ritual in cultural theories has also occa- sioned some speculation. George Marcus and Michael Fisher note that description and analysis of ritual have been a popular device for organizing ethnographic texts.
This is due, they rea- son, to ritual's public nature, whereby rituals are "analogous to culturally produced texts" that can be systematically read to en- dow "meaning upon experience. A recent consensus has emerged that rit- ual, aside from its role in illuminating religion, society, or cul- ture, should be studied in itself and for itself. Moreover, despite the variety of avowed methodological per- spectives and ramifications, there is a surprising degree of con- sistency in the descriptions of ritual: ritual is a type of critical juncture wherein some pair of opposing social or cultural forces comes together.
Examples include the ritual integration of belief and behavior, tradition and change, order and chaos, the indi- vidual and the group, subjectivity and objectivity, nature and culture, the real and the imaginative ideal.
Whether it is defined in terms of features of 'enthusiasm' fostering groupism or 'for- malism' fostering the repetition of the traditional , ritual is con- sistently depicted as a mechanistically discrete and paradigmatic means of sociocultural integration, appropriation, or transfor- mation.
Given the variety of theoretical objectives and methods, such consistency is surprising and interesting. The following chapters analyze this consistency in the theoretical depiction of ritual. I will show theoretical discourse on ritual to be highly structured by the differentiation and subsequent reintegra- tion of two particular categories of human experience: thought and action.
An exploration of the internal logic of this differentiation and reintegration of thought and action in ritual theory suggests that the recent role of ritual as a category in the study of culture has been inextricably linked to the construction of a specifically 'cultural' methodology, a theoretical approach that defines and ad- dresses 'cultural' data. The implicit structure of ritual theory, while effective in identifying a distinctive phenomenon for cultural analysis, has imposed a powerful limit on our theoretical flexibility, our divisions of human experience, and our ability to perceive the logical relations inscribed within these divisions.
In some cases added qualifications may soften the distinction, but rarely do such de- scriptions question this immediate differentiation or the usefulness of distinguishing what is thought from what is done. Likewise, beliefs, creeds, symbols, and myths emerge as forms of mental con- tent or conceptual blueprints: they direct, inspire, or promote ac- tivity, but they themselves are not activities.
Sometimes the push for typological clarity will drive such differ- entiations to the extreme. Ritual is then described as particularly thoughtless action—routinized, habitual, obsessive, or mimetic— and therefore the purely formal, secondary, and mere physical expression of logically prior ideas.
Just as the differentiation of ritual and belief in terms of thought and action is usually taken for granted, so too is the priority this differentiation accords to thought. For example, Edward Shils argues that ritual and belief are inter- twined and yet separable, since it is conceivable that one might accept beliefs but not the ritual activities associated with them. He concludes that logically, therefore, "beliefs could exist without rit- uals; rituals, however, could not exist without beliefs.
This second pattern describes ritual as a type of functional or structural mechanism to reintegrate the thought- action dichotomy, which may appear in the guise of a distinction between belief and behavior or any number of other homologous pairs.
Both of these structural patterns—the differentiation of ritual as action from thought and the portrayal of ritual as a mechanism for integrating thought and action—can be demonstrated in several representative approaches to ritual. Durkheim argued that religion is composed of beliefs and rites: beliefs consist of representations of the sacred; rites are determined modes of action that can be characterized only in terms of the representations of the sacred that are their object.
Hence, ritual is the means by which individual per- ception and behavior are socially appropriated or conditioned. There ritual is provisionally distinguished as the synchronic, continuous, traditional, or onto- logical in opposition to the diachronic, changing, historical, or so- cial.
However, ritual is also subsequently portrayed as the arena in which such pairs of forces interact. It is the mediating process by which the synchronic comes to be reexpressed in terms of the diach- ronic and vice versa. Turner, also portrays these two patterns. However, when subsequently portrayed as em- bodying aspects of both structure and antistructure, he describes rituals as those special, paradigmatic activities that mediate or or- chestrate the necessary and opposing demands of both communitas and the formalized social order.
Each of these examples employs the two structural patterns de- scribed previously: ritual is first differentiated as a discrete object of analysis by means of various dichotomies that are loosely anal- ogous to thought and action; then ritual is subsequently elaborated as the very means by which these dichotomous categories, neither of which could exist without the other, are reintegrated.
These two structural patterns are rarely explicit and the first, in particular, in which ritual is differentiated from conceptual categories, is routinely taken for granted.
However, the relationship that develops between these two patterns when they are simultaneously operative in a theoretical description of ritual is even less acknowledged and much more powerful. In effect, the dichotomy that isolates ritual on the one hand and the dichotomy that is mediated by ritual on the other become loosely homologized with each other.
Essentially, as I will demonstrate, the underlying dichotomy between thought and action continues to push for a loose systemization of several levels of homologized dichotomies, including the relations between the ritual observer and the ritual actor. It is this invisible process of 'homo- logization', driven by the implicit presence of an opposition between conceptual and behavioral categories, that begins to construct a persuasive and apparently logical body of discourse.
Dichotomies and Dialectics Jameson analyzes a type of logical structure within linguistical the- ory that is similar to the two patterns sketched out earlier for ritual theory.
Specifically addressing Ferdinand Saussure's system of lin- guistics, Jameson shows that an initial distinction between structure and history synchrony and diachrony enables Saussure to focus upon and systematically elucidate one aspect of language, the syn- chronic or structural aspect.
In reaction against historicism in linguistics, Jameson explains, Saussure attempted to talk about the nonhistorical aspects of lan- guage. On a primary level, he distinguished between diachrony and synchrony, thereby providing himself a clear focus on the syn- chronic side of linguistics as opposed to the other side, where, he argued, everyone else was working.
On a second level, and therefore within the synchronic system itself, Saussure also distinguished be- tween langue and parole in order to further differentiate synchronic language from speech.
He therein had his first internal replication of the original opposition. On yet a third level, Saussure took langue as a system and within it distinguished two ways in which signs are related, the syntagmatic and the associative or paradigmatic , replicating his original dichotomy for a second time within the system as a whole. Z4 The original differentiation between diachrony and synchrony was applied, through various pairs of categories, to three levels of analysis.
In other words, the continual application of the dichotomy between synchrony and diachrony systematically generated successive and homologous levels of analysis. At this point, Jameson suggests that it becomes quite "proble- matical to what degree the object of study is the thought pattern of the linguist himself, rather than that of the language.
Saussure's "initial repudiation of history," remarks Jameson, "which at the very outset resulted in an inability to absorb change into the system as anything but a meaningless and contingent datum, is now reproduced, at the very heart of the system itself, as an inability to deal with syntax as such. This is the first structural pattern noted previously. Ritual, however, becomes in turn a new starting point at which to differentiate once again between conceptual and behavioral com- ponents.
This is the second structural pattern described earlier. However, ritual theory goes on to do something that Saussure, in the rigor of his focus and logic, according to Jameson, failed to do, namely, provide a stage of synthetic integration. Differentiated from belief in the first structural pattern, ritual becomes a second point at which to distinguish thought and action.
Yet at this second stage ritual is seen as synthetic, as the very mechanism or medium through which thought and action are integrated. The elaboration of ritual as a mechanism for the fusion of opposing categories simultaneously serves both to differentiate and unite a set of terms.
That is, the second structural pattern in ritual theory, in which ritual mediates thought and action, posits a dialectical relation between the differ- entiated entities instead of replicating an unmediated dichotomy.
Ritual emerges as the means for a provisional synthesis of some form of the original opposition. Saussure generated his linguistic system by positing an initial distinction, the successive and systematic replication of which ren- dered the distinction an ahistorical, nondialectical, or pure oppo- sition. The three representative theories of ritual briefly described clearly present ritual as just such a medium of integration or synthesis for opposing sociocultural forces. These are not isolated examples.
There is a strong impetus within theoretical studies of religion and culture for this type of dialectic. This impetus can be seen, for example, in contemporary evaluations of Durkheim's theory of rit- ual. Some argue that his notion of ritual contains a dialectical me- diation of the social and the individual; others argue that its fundamental weakness is precisely that his notion of ritual lacks such a dialectic.
Evans-Pritchard has pinpointed Durkheim's theory of ritual as the central but "most obscure" and "uncon- vincing" part of his notion of society and religion. Sahlins has also looked for a synthetic reintegration of thought and action, self and society within Durkheim's theory and not found it.
He argues that Durkheim's collective representations fail to me- diate at all. Rather, as idealized representations of social values and structures, they merely act upon subjective states to mold them. For Sahlins, Durkheim's collective representations are unable to mediate or rearticulate individual experience within social categories; all they can do is simply appropriate and organize it into a "metalan- guage.
Some concern themselves with the external and material world; others, with an ideal world to which we attribute a moral superiority over the first.
Indeed, given any initial avowal or assumption of such differentiated processes, a theoretician would have to come up with some phenomenon structured to mediate them if it did not already exist. Hence, I am suggesting that descriptions of how rituals work have been constructed according to a logic rooted in the dynamics of theoretical speculation and the unconscious manipulation of the thought—action dichotomy is intrinsic to this construction.
Saussure could not see how his initial distinctions radically limited the descriptive power of his system. Likewise, we do not see how such dichotomies as continuity and change, individual experience and social forms, and beliefs and behavior invoke an assumption about thought and action that runs particularly deep in the intel- lectual traditions of Western culture.
We do not see that we are wielding a particularly powerful analytical tool, nor do we see how our unconscious manipulation of it is driven not only by the need to resolve the dichotomy it establishes, but also simultaneously to affirm and resolve the more fundamental opposition it poses—the opposition between the theoretician and the object of theoretical discourse. In other words, we do not see how such dichotomies contribute to the relational definition of a knower, a known, and a particular type of knowledge.
Geertz and the Window of Ritual To clarify the relationship between dichotomies and dialectics within the structure of ritual theory, a fuller example is needed to demonstrate how a coherent discourse on ritual is generated. The work of Geertz provides an excellent extended illustration for this purpose. Geertz has been a major influence in the study of religion and ritual, as well as a navigator for many through the shoals and reefs of various methodological issues.
Geertz maintains that the thrust of his theoretical approach is the explanation of "meaning" in cultural phenomena. Such dispositions are, in turn, further dif- ferentiated into two kinds: moods and motivations.
At times Geertz explicitly correlates religious ritual with ethos and religious belief with worldview, thus invoking the first struc- tural pattern in which ritual is taken for activity in contrast to belief as thought. Geertz argues with regard to ritual that "any religious ritual no matter how apparently automatic or conventional The dialectical nature of this fusion of ethos and worldview is made clear in Geertz's related discussion of symbolic systems, such as religion, which involve both "models for" and "models of" real- ity.
These systems are "culture patterns. For Geertz, this opposition of conceptions and dispositions, or the world as imagined and the world as lived, con- stitutes cultural life per se. Moreover, our perception and analysis of their opposition and resolution constitute a theoretical expla- nation of 'meaning' in culture.
Indeed, failure to grasp the inter- action of these two fundamentally differentiated categories— conceptions and dispositions—is tantamount to the reductionism that Geertz specifically decries, the reductionism of the social to the cultural or the cultural to the social. The temporary resolution of a dichotomy is cast as the central dynamic of cultural life. So far this analysis of Geertz has simply invoked the two struc- tural patterns discussed earlier.
However, Geertz also reveals a third pattern and the further implications of his model of ritual. Since ritual enacts, performs, or objectifies religious beliefs action gives expression to thought and in so doing actually fuses the conceptual and the dispositional as- pects of religious symbols ritual integrates thought and action , Geertz must be concluding that ritual offers a special vantage point for the theorist to observe these processes.
Why and how, we might ask, does ritual work to facilitate the theorist's project? To answer explicitly, we need to retrace the homologizations that silently push his argument forward. Outsiders, states Geertz, will see in ritual only the mere presen- tation of a particular religious perspective which they may appre- ciate aesthetically or analyze scientifically.
For participants, on the other hand, rites are "enactments, materializations, realizations" of a particular religious perspective, "not only models of what they believe, but also models for the believing of it.
Par- ticipants, in contrast, actually experience in the rite the integration of their own conceptual framework and dispositional imperatives. In this argument, Geertz is setting up a third structural pattern and a third permutation of the thought-action dichotomy. That is, ritual participants act, whereas those observing them think. In ritual ac- tivity, conceptions and dispositions are fused for the participants, which yields meaning.
Meaning for the outside theorist comes dif- ferently: insofar as he or she can perceive in ritual the true basis of its meaningfulness for the ritual actors—that is, its fusion of con- ceptual and dispositional categories—then the theorist can go be- yond mere thoughts about activity to grasp the meaningfulness of the ritual. By recognizing the ritual mechanism of meaningfulness for participants, the theorist in turn can grasp its meaningfulness as a cultural phenomenon.
Ritual activity can then become mean- ingful to the theorist. Thus, a cultural focus on ritual activity renders the rite a veritable window on the most important processes of cultural life.
Herein lies the implicit structural homology: the fusion of thought and action described within ritual is homologized to a fusion of the theoretical project and its object, ritual activity. Both generate meaning—the first for the ritual actor and the second for the theorist. Constructing Ritual 2. Both of these dimensions of ritual act as a "point of contact" between the rite and the attempt by outside observers to grasp a "theoretical-critical understanding of it.
Bourke "witnessed among the Zuni Indians extreme and simultaneous violations of the codes governing food and waste, and hence experienced extreme disgust. Geertz and Jennings, in contrast, would have us depend on the essential congruity or likeness of doing ritual and generating theoretical interpretations of ritual to establish both our difference from and access to the "other.
What is this meaning exactly? What does it render meaningful and meaningless? Citing Milton Singer, Geertz suggests how the convergence effected in ritual enables one to un- derstand the way in which people regard their religion as "encap- sulated" in specific performances that can be performed for visitors and themselves.
Re- flecting on this in the course of my interviews and observations I found that the more abstract generalizations about Hinduism my own as well as those I heard could generally be checked, directly or indirectly, against these observable performances. They are also, however, an excellent example of the naturalness of the thought—action dichotomy in ritual discourse.
First, in regard to Hinduism, he says that the Hindus have rites which they can enact or exhibit, whereas the researcher has con- cepts which can be thought or talked about. As a consequence of this distinction, the particularity of any one local ritual is con- trasted with the more embracing, abstract generalizations of the researcher. Third, because enactment of the rite is already implicitly con- strued as effecting an integration for participants between a sup- posed conceptual totality Hinduism and the practical needs of a particular time and place the dispositions within the ritual context , the researcher easily sees in the exhibition of these rites for theoretical interpretation an equally effective convergence of theory and practice on another level—our conceptual abstrac- tions integrated with their specific practices.
Thus, a model of ritual based upon our two structural patterns— in which ritual is both activity and the fusion of thought and ac- tivity—ultimately involves a third pattern, one in which the di- chotomy underlying a thinking theorist and an acting actor is simultaneously affirmed and resolved.
It is this homologization that makes ritual appear to provide such a privileged vantage point on culture and the meaningfulness of cultural phenomena. To question Geertz's or Singer's appreciation of the way that ritual obliges the detached observer is to discover that ritual does so by virtue of those very features with which it has been theoret- ically constituted in the first place.
Again we are faced with the question raised by Jameson: To what extent is the object of study the thought pattern of the theorist rather than the supposed object, ritual? We have seen in Geertz's work not only the two patterns of the thought-action dichotomy described here but a third one as well.
First, ritual was said to dramatize, enact, materialize, or perform a system of symbols. This formulation invokes the notion that activity is a secondary, physical manifestation or expression of thought. Second, by enacting the symbolic system, ritual was said to integrate two irreducible aspects of symbols, the conceptual worldview and the dispositional ethos.
0コメント