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tradition. To traditionalize in this way can be as simple as adding a few verbal references to the acts and words of “our ancestors” and as subtle as the mere act of teaching a new generation how to raise their hands to their hearts the way older people do it. Nothing more needs to be explained. The meaning and purpose are thought to be obvious, and the assumption that it has always been done this way slips in without official pronouncement. The anthropologist who inquires why the natives of an American small town or an Indonesian village perform certain gestures is likely to be told, “We have always done this.” True or not, the direct appeal to traditionalism is often answer enough for those attempting to live within a coherent and enduring set of values and assumptions.

Invariance

One of the most common characteristics of ritual-like behavior is the quality of invariance, usually seen in a disciplined set of actions marked by precise repetition and physical control. For some theorists, this feature is the prime characteristic of ritual behavior.47 The emphasis may be on the careful choreography of actions, the selfcontrol required by the actor, or the rhythm of repetition in which the orchestrated activity is the most recent in an exact series that unites past and future. While traditionalism involves an appeal to the authority of the past that subordinates the present, invariance seems to be more concerned with ignoring the passage of time in general. It appears to suppress the significance of the personal and particular moment in favor of the timeless authority of the group, its doctrines, or its practices. The component of discipline certainly suggests that one effect of invariance is generally understood to be the molding or shaping of persons according to enduring guidelines and conditions.

Much human activity can be sufficiently repetitious to afford ready if trivial comparisons to ritual. A famous spoof on the elaborate daily routines of Americans obsessed with rigid codes of hygiene, grooming, and beauty describes them as the

“body rites” of an exotic people called the “Nacirema.” But it is not repetition alone that makes these acts ritualistic; more important is the punctiliousness with which the “natives” attend to the mouth, skin, and hair while standing in front of an altarlike box set into the wall above an ablution basis in the one or more shrine rooms found in every house. This is also true of Freud’s characterization, examined earlier, of obsessive-compulsive disorders as ritual-like: repetition is part of this attribution, but the repetition is inseparable from a fixation on non-utilitarian thoroughness and exactitude. In a somewhat different example, the well-known format of the weekly meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, often deemed ritual-like because of the unvarying program, suggests that in some contexts punctilious concern with repetition may have great utility.48

Activities that are merely routinized are not the best examples of the ritual-like nature of invariance unless they are also concerned with precision and control. The

Nacirema routines of washing and brushing described by Miner are usually performed with care but not controlled precision. Yet the movements of factory workers on assembly lines have been described as ritualistic due to their robotlike precision. A

more comprehensive example might be the routines of monastic life, which are governed by close attention to detail, discipline, and self-control. Indeed, traditional monastic life specifically encouraged the ritualization of all daily activities—dress- ing, eating, walking, working, and, in some places, even the humbler acts of defecation. In this environment, ritual is not meant to be separated from the rest of life; all of life is made as consistently ritual-like as possible in the service of a religious goal.49

One possible goal of the discipline of invariance comes across clearly in the daily routine of a typical Zen Buddhist seminarian. He rises at four or five in the morning, dresses in the uniform of the seminarian, and proceeds to the meditation room (zendo) to take up his particular place for the morning session of sitting meditation (zazen), the first of several throughout the day. While meditating, each monk sits cross-legged in silence in accord with traditional models. When the session is finished, breakfast is served in a precise order and without a sound. The monk must unpack his eating bowls in a specific way. He receives the food with particular gestures, eats slowly and completely, and rinses and dries the bowls before repacking them in their original order. The monk concentrates on the perfection of each act. His movements should be slow and smooth, deft and precise. The goal of Zen action—variously stated as “no self “ or “mindfulness”—is thought to be served as much by the way one goes about eating as the way one meditates or interacts with others. As Grimes points out, the precise gestures used in this Zen meal do not refer to anything in particular, certainly not historical models, or symbolize any explicit doctrinal ideas. The precision is simply to make each gesture as “mindful” as possible, which is part of the general cultivation of a spontaneous mental and physical state of mindfulness.50 Scholars remind us that this picture of Zen monastic practice is rather idealized.51 In fact, few Zen priests meditate after leaving the seminary, when lay-oriented ritual duties take up much of their energy, time, and attention. Nonetheless, such monastic experiences do exist, and they revolve around the special type of training and cultivation afforded by disciplined invariance.

The invariant routines of Alcoholics Anonymous or Zen monasticism are understood to be necessary to the reshaping of the individual. For the first, the discipline of weekly attendance and public testimony encourages and supports the self-control needed to face the daily difficulties of avoiding alcohol. For the second, the control of one’s physical self that is promoted by the monastic routine is designed to subordinate the demands, desires, and indulgences of the body and thereby encourage the greater discipline needed to control the mind. Many similar activities that have ritual-like tendencies toward routine and discipline are also concerned with more than molding or encoding certain dispositions within the body and mind. They specifically seek to foster holistic and integrated experiences that close the distance between the doer and the deed, and transform the precise and deliberate gesture into one of perfect spontaneity and efficacy. Some strategies of invariance envision, implicitly or explicitly, a process of training by which studied mindfulness molds the actor’s basic disposition so as to foster action that is inherently anonymous, unattached to the particularities of the self.52

The practice of meditation, even more than the monastic lifestyle, is a better example of the way in which invariant practice is meant to evoke disciplined control for the purposes of self-cultivation, although some spokespersons for various tradi-

verses to the same melody. The image: unisonance. Singing the Marsellaise, Waltzing Matilda, and Indonesian Raya provide occasions for unisonality, for the echoed physical realization of the imagined community. . . . How selfless this unisonance feels!55

Although invariance is not always corporate, since the solo yogin or Zen practitioner also invokes it, its association with ritual lies in the simple means by which precise duplication of action subordinates the individual and the contingent to a sense of the encompassing and the enduring.

Rule-Governance

The novelist Joyce Carol Oates once introduced an essay on boxing and the career of Mohammed Ali with the following observation: “Though highly ritualized, and as rigidly bound by rules, traditions, and taboos as any religious ceremony, [boxing] survives as the most primitive and terrifying of contests . . . [it] is a stylized mimicry of a fight to the death . . . a Dionysian rite of cruelty, sacrifice and redemption . . .

[a] romance of (expendable) maleness—in which The Fight is honored, and even great champions come, and go.”56 Aside from the appeals to repetition and traditionalism, these observations reflect another major characteristic accorded ritual-like activity, rule-governance. Rule-governed activity is often compared to ritual, particularly rule-governed contests in which violent chaos is barely held in check by complex codes of orchestration. This tendency has led some analysts to talk about driving a car as ritualistic, although others find such a comparison absurd. There is greater consensus around rule-governed activities that engage the rapt attention of an audience, as in the “ritualized combat” readily identified in sports, martial arts, traditional duels, feuds, or such cultural specialties as the bullfight. Yet both the scholar and the unschooled observer are apt to appreciate something ritual-like in many other games and forms of play, such as stylized displays of sexual sadomasochism, the controlled suicide of hara-kiri, or the chesslike lineup of traditional armies on both sides of a battlefield. Examples of controlled engagements of violence and disorder also include the highly coded forms of dress, speech, and gestures that identify rival teams, gangs, political parties, or armies. Should sheer brute force or the chaos of personal self-interest override the rules of controlled engagement, then the ritual-like nature of the event would certainly evaporate.57

People have long appreciated the similarities imposed by rule-governance across rather different classes of activity, such as sports and warfare. The highly stylized quip attributed to the Duke of Wellington, that “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” is echoed in the less elegant remarks of the Notre Dame football coach Frank Leahy, who said, “Ask yourself where our young men developed the qualities that go to make a good fighting man. . . . It is on the athletic fields.”58 While some people have always argued that greater emphasis on sports would channel aggression and eliminate war, others have countered that competitive sports reinforces the mind-set conducive to war.59 For the most part, scholars tend to develop this second perspective by exploring how sports and games can strengthen basic

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cultural values and desirable forms of social behavior, such as the importance of male teamwork and the efficacy of aggressive competition.60

Much interest and conjecture attend the question of how sports may have originally emerged from religious ritual or been closely linked to it, as in the MayanAztec ballcourt game or the Greek Olympic games.61 Whether or not any such lineage is relevant to understanding modern sports, some observers are fascinated by the way in which sports attract various taboos, pollution beliefs, and “magical” practices. They point to the enormous number of patently nonutilitarian gestures used, such as pitchers who tug their caps in a particular way before each throw or the team taboo against crossing bats.62 Such miniature rituals, defined as prescribed behavior that is scrupulously observed in order to affect an outcome, may not be part of the game in itself but on close examination seem nearly inseparable from real participation in sports.63 For others, like Joyce Carol Oates, the ritualism of sports derives from the importance of the more encompassing sets of rules that define and regulate the activity. These rules constrain the contenders and force them to follow very controlled patterns of interaction. In the tension between the brute human energy being expended and the highly coded means of engagement, the sports event seems to evoke in highly symbolic ways a fundamental conflict or experience at the core of social life. While this perception about sports overlaps features discussed in the next sections, there is a real stress on how the rules create the event and hence its meaning and dramatic spectacle.

Similar considerations are behind the tendency to describe some forms of play as ritual. While the chess match is more like a sports contest than not and thus shares in some of the ways in which sports can appear ritual-like, most characterizations of play as ritual-like focus on examples that are communal, repetitive, and culturally patterned. These characterizations see in play a social license to manipulate, invert, or ridicule cultural symbols and patterns, even though such manipulations can effectively reinforce deeply embedded social assumptions about the way things are and should be.64

War is another social analog to the rule-governed expressive activities of sports and play that also appears ritualistic in many circumstances. Naturally, as with the previous examples, war usually involves many explicit rites and ceremonies, but observations concerning the ritual-like nature of war itself point to the role of rules in channeling, constraining, and simultaneously legitimating the violent interaction of opposed groups. Thus, the pageantry and costume of Roman or Napoleonic armies, as well as their rules of military engagement, often evidenced sufficient orchestration to appear heavily ritualized. Rules governed the formation of firing lines, charges by standard bearers, and battle cries but also prohibited indiscriminate barbarity, shooting someone in the back, killing civilians and prisoners, and looting and raping the defeated. Whether observed or merely given lip-service, such rules have helped to make the activities of killing appear civilized, humane, and expressive of important values such as loyalty, freedom or definitions of manhood. On more than a few occasions, scrupulous concern with ritual-like rules of engagement have helped to rationalize war as in the service of the greater glory of God.

The ritual-like dimensions of war are not hard to see in related practices like tribal feuds, where acts of aggression can include highly formalized exchanges of bullets or verbal insults. There is a long tradition in the Middle East, for example, of