sored legislation for moral reform and periodically cleaned the building’s toilets. As

Nishida and his followers established themselves as an organized community, the original teachings turned into institutionalized regimens that implicitly supported the social status quo instead of challenging it. Today, for example, most Japanese who go on retreat at Itt>en have been sent by their companies, which hope that the disciplined training in humble service will improve job performance. Members of the Itt>en community now go out to clean toilets only a few times a year, although modern flush toilets have also helped to make this ritual increasingly symbolic.147

Political rituals display symbols and organize symbolic action in ways that attempt to demonstrate that the values and forms of social organization to which the ritual testifies are neither arbitrary nor temporary but follow naturally from the way the world is organized. For this reason, ritual has long been considered more effective than coercive force in securing people’s assent to a particular order. Reflecting on Chinese writings on ritual, the political scientist J. G. A. Pocock has mused that rites, since they are non-verbal, “have no contraries. They can therefore be used to produce harmony of wills and actions without provoking recalcitrance.” When one is playing one’s appointed role in a ritual, he continues, disturbing the harmony is nearly unthinkable, as unthinkable as a dancer suddenly deciding to move to a rhythm other than the one being played by the orchestra.148 Of course, rituals do have contraries, as the Papuans and the Ghost Dancers found out, but contraries of brute destruction and blind weaponry are also what makes ritual appear to invoke quite different types of power.

Conclusion

Although these genres of ritual activity are not exhaustive, they illustrate some of the most prominent types of ritual situations and demonstrate some of the ways that ritual characterizes the social-cosmic order. The repetition of seasonal rites year after year creates a cyclical rhythm that may not exactly obliterate history, as Eliade has suggested, but can balance the unforgiving quality of historical change with tangible experiences of cyclical renewal and continuity. Even rituals that commemorate historical events subject those unique occurrences to a cyclical rhythm by returning each year to founding events and basic values. Naturally, the rituals that have marked the anniversary of Bastille Day have changed in conjunction with how the French have reinterpreted the significance of that day in their history. Yet the annual return to the Bastille—whether it be a matter of intellectual reconsideration, emotional identification, or just the hype of Independence Day advertising and consumerism— creates a steady rhythm of imagery that helps to define French national life.

Rites of passage have a similar effect on cultural understandings of human life.

The biological processes of birth, maturation, reproduction, and death are rendered cultural events of great significance. By attaching cultural values to such natural phenomena—for example, in the way a son’s role in continuing the family lineage is attached to experiences of procreation and childbirth—a society’s worldview appears nonarbitrary and grounded in reality. The ritual observation of other life-cycle events, such as circumcision or marriage, makes them intrinsically natural parts of biologi- cal-cultural passage, as natural as greetings to the newborn and farewells to the dead.

136 Rites: The Spectrum of Ritual Activities

Human life is given organization and direction when people participate in a cycle of passages that links generations and roots the value system with people’s most intimate experiences of living and dying.

Rites of exchange and communion help articulate complex systems of relationships among human beings, gods, demons, ancestors, and animals. Such rites call attention to an order in these relationships that all depend upon for their well-being. Offerings to ancestors, gifts from the spirits, or sacrifices in which the object and the god become one all create a profound sense of cosmic interrelatedness and of human responsibility for more than one’s own immediate needs. Similarly, rites of affliction that attempt to redress disorder in the cosmos explicitly demonstrate the rightness of the harmonious order underlying human affairs. A Korean widow grieving over the death of her spouse and frightened about how to manage alone in the world invites a ritual that demonstrates the continuation of relations after death, the subordination of her loss to an enduring value system, and a catharsis of her anger that enables her to reassume control of her life.149 Fasting, feasts, and festivals are extended rituals that can overlay the religiosocial value system with nuanced experiences of relative holism and hierarchy. Whether the social order is overturned and inverted or paraded in strict visual ranks, such symbolic embodiments of the community suggest its powerful ability to reshape itself. Indeed, perhaps more than any other form of ritual, the alternative order implicit in such rites as the fast of Ramadan or the festival of Holi suggests that the most powerful forces of the cosmos cannot be reduced to and contained in the daily duties of cultural life, no matter how religiously and socially important these might be. By deconstructing the routines for a period of time, these rites appear to recognize sources of power outside the system. As Victor

Turner tried to illustrate, such rites can facilitate and legitimate changes in the system. Religion and ritual do not just serve the status quo; they can also articulate major upheavals of it.

Political rituals, the last category explored in this section, indicate the way in which ritual as a medium of communication and interaction does not simply express or transmit values and messages but also actually creates situations. That is, rites of subordination to royal power, from bowing to the passing entourage of the Javanese king to watching the formal torture and execution of a convicted criminal, are not secondary reflections of the relationships of authority and deference that are structuring interactions between rulers and ruled. They create these relations; they create power in the very tangible exercise of it.

In most societies, rituals are multiple and redundant. They do not have just one message or purpose. They have many, and frequently some of these messages and purposes can modify or even contradict each other. Nonetheless, ritual practices seek to formulate a sense of the interrelated nature of things and to reinforce values that assume coherent interrelations, and they do so by virtue of their symbols, activities, organization, timing, and relationships to other activities. Yet rituals seem to be invoked more in some situations than others. What might these situations have in common? It appears that ritual is used in those situations in which certain values and ideas are more powerfully binding on people if they are deemed to derive from sources of power outside the immediate community. A young Hindu boy’s rite of passage, for example, both assumes and reiterates a total social order in which there are hier-

archies of children, adults, castes, females and males, students and teachers, clients and ritual experts; likewise, it assumes a cosmic order of spiritual substance, purity and pollution, human and divine relationships, and the direction of human existence. When expressed in ritual, this sociocosmic order is implicitly understood as neither human nor arbitrary in its origins; rather, it is natural and the way things really are or ought to be. As a medium for expressing values in this way, participants see their ritual activities as simply the appropriate response to the existence of God, the presence of ancestors, the demands of tradition and history, status, and destiny. They do not see how acting ritually creates a sense of these entities, a type of sphere and power of the sacred. Since ritual acknowledges powers beyond the invention of the community and implies correct and incorrect relations with these powers, it is often more likely to generate a social consensus about things. A lecture about the power of the ancestors will not inculcate the type of assumptions about ancestral presence that the simple routine of offering incense at an altar can inculcate. Activities that are so physical, aesthetic, and established appear to play a particularly powerful role in shaping human sensibility and imagination.