Religious Ritual
(mostly À la Victor Turner)
20 October 2009

• Ritual
  • Any patterned and usually repeated behavior that lies outside daily routine
  • Some rituals are cultural, not religious
    • Giving the car keys to a new driver
    • Going to a party to watch the SuperBowl or World Series game
  • Ritual as play/performance (drama) both reflects and orders a culture's world
  • When repetitive actions refer to essential structures of the universe and paradigmatic modes of being, then we have genuine ritual. (Turner, 59)

• Religious ritual touches the foundation of the real and sacred
  • The act of doing religion, living religiousness
• The power of ritual, religion lived out in concrete action
• Belief/conviction is expressed in and emerges out of ritual
• Ritual has transformative power with respect to the individual (e.g., psychological power), the society (e.g., creating/reinforcing specific social structures and patterns of relationship), and the cosmos

• Types of rituals
• Calendar Rituals
  • Those associated with ecological cycles (e.g., planting, harvesting)
  • Those associated with liturgical calendar cycles; these may or may not line up with the cycles of the natural universe
• Crisis Rituals done on demand to address specific needs (e.g., fertility rituals, curative rituals, divination techniques)
• Human Lifecycle Rituals ("Rites of Passage") associated with key "moments" in a person's life (birth, naming, initiation, maturatation, marriage, death)
• Sacrifice-Communion Rituals
  • Involve killing something, either literally or metaphorically, and offering it to the deity
  • The offering may be a portion of the sacrifice or the entire sacrifice
  • If the entire sacrifice is offered to the deity, it is called a "holocaust" because it is totally consumed by fire
• The Ritual Process
  1. Participants' normal state is "societas," the (hierarchically) structured society marked by age, rank, gender, and other divisions
  2. Ritual begins with "separation," in which individuals are dissociated from such hierarchical social structures
  3. The state during ritual is "communitas," the "moment" in communal relations when the marks of hierarchy and rank are (temporarily) suspended
  • This is the "liminal" phase of ritual, the point "between" positions in the social structure
    • Participants are in "limbo"
    • This experience is likened to death, or to pre-birth existence in the womb
    • The participant is a tabula rasa on which to be written by the rite itself and the person(s) performing the rite
  • All participants are at the "same" level
    • Marked by ambiguity, indeterminacy, sexlessness, agelessness, anonymity
    • Restrictions on behaviors include silence, sexual continence, and submissiveness to the instructions of the performers
  • The rite is designed to impress the proper "form" of the society to which the individuals will return at its conclusion
  • An ontological value is attributed to the communal wisdom, which "refashions" the neophyte
    • Pedagogies of livability foster connections and condemn separation from generic bond of communitas
  • Ritual ordeals and humiliations destroy former status and prepare the neophyte for new privileges, so they are properly used
    • E.g., the liminal phase of rites of status elevation includes condemnation of two common kinds of separation from generic bond of communitas
      1. Action exclusively in terms of the rights of office, without considering factors such as the duties of that office or communal impact
      2. Action on one's psychological and sexual urges at others' expense
  4. The ritual ends with "re-aggregation," in which individuals are returned to their "place" in those same hierarchical social structures as existed in #1; however, depending upon the type of ritual, an individual may or may not return to the same place in that structure
     • Rites of Status Elevation (e.g., initiation) mark someone's move from a lower to higher status in societas
     • Rites of Status Reversal (e.g., retirement) mark someone's move from a higher to lower status in societas
       

• Distinctive features of rites of passage to adulthood
  • Physically rigorous
    • Usually require higher degree of asceticism than other rites
    • Include some sort of "ordeal"
  • Intentional disillusionment of participant
    • Protectors now turn against her/him
    • Religious techniques that previously were secret are now revealed
  • Deal with issues of relationships:
    • Independence, dependence, and interpendence
    • Individual person and community/society
    • Reality and illusion
    • Cultural mores and ultimate values