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the event itself. From this perspective, it has been a logical step for some analysts to go on to describe the ritual-like nature of television and other forms of media in modern society. Some have called attention to how the television industry creates “media events” by defining special occasions and creating a “meta-narrative” about national life that is grounded in sharing dramatizations of these occasions.91 Some analysts emphasize how the features of performance described here—multifaceted sensory experience, framing, and a totalizing objectification of values—enable television to transport a viewer into experiential situations of incredible diversity and intensity.92 While one may not taste and smell the Serbian bombardment of the city of Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia, or actually touch the children dying of starvation in Somalia, television provided an incredibly direct and emotionally compelling experience of these distant events. While the ability of ritual and television to shape social attitudes may sometimes be exaggerated, there is little doubt that this is a particularly widespread understanding of what the experiential aspects of rituallike performance can do.

Conclusion

The spectrum of rituals and ritual-like activities in the preceding sections reveal basic ways in which people ritualize, that is, create, deploy, and reproduce rites. The most clear-cut examples of ritual, those depicting various genres of ritual, tend to be a matter of communal ceremonies closely connected to formally institutionalized religions or clearly invoking divine beings. However, the examples of ritual-like activity suggest that what goes on in ritual is not unique to religious institutions or traditions. There are many ways to act ritually and many situations in which people have recourse to these ways, and degrees, of ritualizing. The survey of genres and ways of acting demonstrates that there is no intrinsic or universal understandings of what constitutes ritual. Indeed, few cultures have a single word that means exactly what is meant by the English word “ritual”—and part I made clear that even the English term has meant a number of things. For historical and social reasons, many cultures do not make the same distinctions that lie behind the English term. For example, although European and American societies are apt to describe table etiquette, sports, theater productions, and political rallies as ritual-like, there is still a general consensus that they are not the best examples of what we usually mean by ritual. No matter how ritual-like sports and theater might appear to be at times, we are not apt to consider them the same thing as a church wedding ceremony. We have found it appropriate to see some basic distinctions among these ways of acting even if we occasionally note how blurred those distinctions can become. Other cultures also draw and blur various distinctions. What a culture distinguishes and with what degree of clarity can reveal interesting aspects of the ways in which people in that culture are likely to experience and interpret the world.

The anthropologist Barbara Ward argued, “There is no reason why anyone attempting an outsider’s analysis of another culture—or his own as if from the out- side—should not erect whatever categories seem to him to be the most useful.”

However, she continued, “if one is to interpret the native insiders’ understanding of

their own culture one must try to comprehend—and use—their categories, not impose one’s own.”93 Ward demonstrates this principle in a close analysis of traditional

Chinese theater and makes clear that Chinese categories do not distinguish ritual and theater in the same way that European and American cultures do. First of all, traditional Chinese theater, often called Peking opera, is quite different from any contemporary forms of Euro-American theater. More like the Italian Commedia dell’

Arte tradition that was so popular throughout Europe from the 16th through the 18th centuries, Chinese theater has no realism. There are standardized roles with clear conventions for depicting heroes and villains. For example, in accordance with traditional Chinese color symbolism, red-faced characters are always good and brave, black-faced ones are honest and strong, but white-faced characters are understood to be evil, crafty, and cunning. Chinese theater also has little sense of interpreting a written script; performance itself remains the dominant medium. Ward finds that traditional staging is “not opera, not play, not ballet, but all three together with musichall and acrobatics too” and it adds up to “a simultaneous assault upon nearly all the senses.”94 It may be this feature in particular that makes Chinese theater appeal to all social levels and classes, not just the cultured or affluent elite courted by most Euro-American theater productions.

There are several ways in which Chinese notions of theater and ritual appear to overlap. Like most traditional theater, Chinese opera performances are often part of a temple festival, usually held to honor the birthday of the temple deity. The stage is carefully placed where the deity can watch the show, and the most important performances during a festival are those that start late at night after the human audience has retired. From about two or three in the morning until dawn, the actors perform just for the god. Exacting rules for the orientation of the stage and the dressing rooms follow traditional geomantic and cosmological theories concerning fengshui (windwater), yin and yang, and the five directions. The space demarcated by the temple and stage becomes “a kind of ritual precinct” for the duration of the festival: “the south-facing gods and the north-facing actors are each flanked by the Yang and Yin influences of east and west respectively and the audience sits, as it were, in the centre . . . of the cosmos under Heaven.”95 In addition to orienting the stage as an extension of the temple and offering the performances to the deity housed there, the whole acting troupe participates in the public offerings that accompany the temple festival. It is also customary for each actor to pay respects to a backstage shrine for the troupe’s patron deity before he or she steps out on to the stage.

The ritual dimensions of traditional theater are also apparent in the “magical plays” and “shamanic roles” frequently performed. For example, whenever a theater is erected in a place for the first time, it is the actors who ritually exorcise any demonic forces in order to ensure the safety of the troupe and the audience. They do this by performing “The White Tiger,” in which an actor dressed as a tiger is chased around the stage and dressing area by a black-faced deity who eventually subdues, chains, and rides the tiger away. Not only does this performance lack an audience— in fact, they are kept at a distance for their own protection—but it is also accompanied by various taboos, such as not speaking after the actor has donned the tiger mask. Both actors and local people take this exorcist performance very seriously. Many also believe that traditional theater performances can bring good fortune; that is, they are

turn in thy mind to the light, and wait upon God singly, as if none were present but the Lord; and here thou art strong. And the next that comes in, let them in simplicity of heart, sit down and turn in to the same light, and wait in the Spirit: and so all the rest coming in, in the fear of the Lord, sit down in pure stillness and silence of all flesh, and wait in the light.”97

Hence, to ritualize silent sitting, whether one is a Quaker or a Zen monk, one first evokes a history of practices and beliefs as the context for this action. This is usually done simply by going to a place that, as defined by the tradition and current practice, is differentiated from other places and uses, either a meeting house or a meditation hall. One can, of course, ritualize quiet sitting alone in one’s own home, and the techniques for doing so are versions of those used in the public gathering: one chooses a spot with some care and makes plans for remaining undisturbed; then one settles in with deliberate attention to body posture and mental discipline for a definite period of time. Both public and private rituals are usually performed according to a schedule, such as once every week on the same day at precisely ten o’clock in the morning or at the same time every day. Such scheduled periodicity not only facilitates the assembling of a community but also helps differentiate the activity as deliberate and meaningful in comparison to all other activities.

It is central to many practices and strategies of ritualization that people do not always see themselves as actually constructing such events. They are more apt to perceive themselves as simply responding to circumstances—whether the circumstances are a birthday party, a death in their midst, or the gathering of Friends at a Quaker meeting house. While the theories examined in part I formulate many different reasons for why people ritualize, these are not the explanations that most ritual participants themselves would give for their actions. For participants, the most common reasons given for joining in a ritual activity tend to be answers such as “we have always done this,” “it’s our tradition,” or “we do it because it makes such-and-such positive thing happen.” Although these explanations may not be particularly satisfying to the outsider, it would be wrong to conclude that most people do not know why they are involved in a ritual situation. Explaining why they do rites in terms an outsider would understand is not the same thing as a reflective self-awareness of ritual symbols, meanings, aesthetics, styles, rules, and oddities. Nonetheless, it has been suggested, and with good reason, that ritualized activities are ways of acting that do not particularly encourage a great deal of immediate and overt explaining. As these typical answers imply, ritualization gives people the sense that these activities do not need a lot of justification. They appear to address a very specific and obvious need, or have a sufficiently long history that in itself justifies them. Indeed, it is more common in most communities to need a good reason not to participate in ritual activities.

As with ritual action, people tend not to see how they construct tradition and meaning. They see the chanting of a medieval Latin litany, the recitation of the story of Exodus around the seder table at Passover, and the performance of a historical pageant celebrating the founding of their town. They do not usually see themselves selecting among practices, heightening their archaic prestige, and generally polishing a past that primarily acts to shape the significance of the present. In ritualization, people tend to see themselves as responding or transmitting—not creating. The highly

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orchestrated activities of ritualization appear to be the appropriate thing to do, if not the easiest.

This naturalization of ritual activity seems to be an effect of the performative and traditionalizing features of ritualization—as well as the strategic degree to which these and other features are developed. The performative dimension frames a particular environment—such as an altar, arena, or stage—usually as a type of totalizing microcosm. Given the construction of this specific environment, which is readily assumed and rarely noticed as such, the activities conducted within are perceived as natural and appropriate responses to that environment. At an altar created with steps, lamps, central table, offerings, and consecrating invocations, a priest naturally addresses God. In a purified arena precisely measured out with a circle of rice straw, the sumo wrestler from the team of the West faces off against the wrestler from the team of the East. On a stage telescoped by ever-widening rings of seats, a curtain is lifted, as if from a large window, and there in the circles of lights, framed tightly by false walls and horizons, we await a concentrated portrayal of distilled human experience. Ritualization quietly creates an environment within which quite distinctive symbolic behaviors can appear to be proper and effective responses.

The naturalness of ritualized activities is also promoted in part by traditionalism, the assumption that what is being done derives its legitimacy from precedents vaguely rooted in the past. Most theories of ritual have pointed out the nearly ubiquitous tendency of ritual action to invoke both the past and present, long-standing tradition as well as current concerns, or the larger cosmic order and the specific immediate situation. Roy Rappaport, for example, couches this observation in terms of the “canonical” elements of ritual, those more or less invariant messages already encoded that refer to things done before, in contrast to the “indexical” elements that transmit information concerning very immediate social, psychic, or physical states.98

Similarly, A. L. Becker points out that the more spontaneous an action is, the more it is taken to express the present. In an absolute sense, no action can be completely spontaneous because we do not exist totally in the present; we carry categories and modes of expression acquired in our past and shared with others, and it is through these that we express ourselves in ways that others can understand. In contrast to the significance of spontaneity, Becker suggests that the least spontaneous activities, those dictated not by the current situation but by inherited or preshaped dispositions and concerns, tend to express the past.99 While most effective action appeals to some balance of spontaneity and cultural repetition of the past, ritual action is especially characterized by such traditionalization and deliberate appeals to the past, even though it does not intend to ignore the current moment. Ritual repetition and redundancy, formal language and gestures, and direct and indirect references to an idealized tradition all effectively posit the existence of powerful forces understood as rooted in the past. These forces are invoked in ways that contextualize and subordinate the current moment, thereby ordering the relations of past and present and establishing a sense of continuity, security, and direction. Some methods of ritualizing even allow a participant to adjust understandings of the past in the light of new situations and a more promising sense of direction.

The naturalness of ritual action is also dependent on the coherence and degree of ritualization invoked. The greater the number of ritual features invoked, the more

“set off,” imposing, authoritative, and even traditional the event appears to be. The more spontaneity incorporated within the sequence and style of events, the more immediate, personal, and casual it seems. If the speeches are highly formal but the food and eating arrangements are very informal, the effect is quite different from the reverse situation. Greater formality in the speeches would attest to the authority and prestige of those talking, emphasizing hierarchical relationships and the power of their particular wisdom. Greater formality given to the shared meal would attest to the relative equality of the community, while casual speeches would further imply that power and wisdom are the collective possession of the immediate community and their traditions. If too elaborately ritualized, an event like a graduation ceremony might express an arrogant or even impersonal ethos. If, however, the occasion is too casually or haphazardly ritualized, it may not effectively evoke any sense of tradition or respect for the solemnity of the passage and the dignity of the community.

The degree to which activities are ritualized—for instance, how much communality, how much appeal to deities and other familiar rites, how much formality or attention to rules, and how much emphasis on performance or appeal to traditional precedents—is the degree to which the participants suggest that the authoritative values and forces shaping the occasion lie beyond the immediate control or inventiveness of those involved. It may be assumed that these values and forces are lodged in divine beings, in a historical models, or even in the natural superiority of some people over others. Fundamental to all the strategies of ritualization examined previously is the appeal to a more embracing authoritative order that lies beyond the immediate situation. Ritualization is generally a way of engaging some wide consensus that those acting are doing so as a type of natural response to a world conceived and interpreted as affected by forces that transcend it—transcend it in time, influence, and meaning, if not in ontological status. Ritualization tends to posit the existence of a type of authoritative reality that is seen to dictate to the immediate situation. In many sociological analyses, this is one of the most basic social acts in the construction of reality.100

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PART III

CONTEXTS

The Fabric of Ritual Life

Aritual never exists alone. It is usually one ceremony among many in the larger ritual life of a person or community, one gesture among a multitude of gestures both sacred and profane, one embodiment among others of traditions of behavior down

from one generation to another. In other words, for each and every ritual, there is a thick context of social customs, historical practices, and day-to-day routines that, in addition to the unique factors at work in any given moment in time and space, influence whether and how a ritual action is performed. The warp and weft of handed-down customs and real-life situations form the fabric from which specific rites are constructed and found meaningful. Hence, most of the activities surveyed in part II were presented quite unnaturally, removed from the general and specific contexts that would very much affect any particular performance and interpretation. The purpose of this section is to provide some discussion of the context of ritual action by introducing both the major analytic tools that have been used to define and characterize this context and the issues that have been central to debates on the place of ritual in sociocultural life.

Studies of ritual have addressed a number of the more obvious features of this ritual context, such as issues of density and style—why some societies have more or less ritual than others and why the general style of ritual can differ so clearly from one culture to another. Attempts to answer these questions have given rise to various analytic distinctions, such as typological schemes that differentiate primitive, classical, and modern styles of ritual, or contrasts between “orthodoxic” societies (where more emphasis is put on proper doctrinal beliefs) and “orthopraxic” ones (where more emphasis is placed on proper performance of ritual obligations). Deeply implicated in both types of schemes is yet a third one, the conventional if imprecise distinction between traditional societies and secular societies. In traditional societies, ritual tends to be regarded as a robust dimen-

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sion of shared communal life, while in secular societies it is routinely described as constrained by the antireligious forces presumed to underlie modernity. Older distinctions between “church” and “sect” have also been used to explain aspects of ritual density, while more recent comparisons of the place of ritual in oral and literate societies have begun to track yet another set of significant factors.

These attempts to categorize and explain various types of ritual context, laid out in chapter 6, are closely connected to another major issue, ritual change, which is the focus of chapter 7. One’s viewpoint on the usefulness of a number of the distinctions mentioned here will directly affect one’s outlook on how and why ritual activity changes. Many religious, civic, and ethnic communities today are exploring various forms of deliberate change; they face anxious questions about the degree to which people can tamper with ritual traditions before the authority and dignity of these traditions are undermined. Other groups, in confronting either the creativity or the failure of newly invented rituals, wonder how a community goes about evaluating whether a ritual is working. The issue of ritual change also encompasses questions concerning the impact of tourism on the ritual life of traditional communities and the influence of televised rites and ritualized television on mass culture. As the context of ritual life in the twentieth century unfolds, it is providing unexpected evidence for new forms of ritualizing and new ways of thinking about ritual.

Many popular and scholarly books today address questions about ritual. In no small measure, questions about the place and nature of ritual are now the medium through which people are apt to talk about theological issues, religious institutions, the quality of modern spiritual life, and efforts for the future. Of course, there are no definitive judgments or answers. No one is even sure that the questions we are asking are the best ones. Yet the fact that these are our questions suggests a great deal about the role given to ritual in current understandings of religion and culture. Some people speak of an enduring human “need” for ritual, while others characterize human progress and social development as nothing less than a gradual escape from the social and ideological constraints of ritualism. Some see a historical rejection of ritual now being followed by a redemptive return to ritual; others, however, have heralded the definitive death of ritual while working heroically to stave off its total loss with archival film footage and recordings. Some have reidentified ritual in terms of a panhuman instinct for performance that is teetering on the edge of an unprecedented evolutionary leap into new modes of creative expression; others have begun to scavenger among any and all traditions to find novel bits and appealing pieces for dramatizing a new spiritual bricolage. Chapter 8 attempts to sort out these voices and perspectives. It traces the way in which the concept of ritual has functioned in our approaches to religion and to the ethnographic “other.” It concludes with an analysis of the way in which the idea of a universal propensity for ritual has affected the way we both ritualize and theorize.