266 Contexts: The Fabric of Ritual Life

as a force for global good is not likely to garner the support of empiricists, this sort of vision is tied to practices that could construct as concrete a phenomenon as any empiricist might wish, by encouraging people everywhere to begin to understand their practices as cultural variations on an underlying, universal phenomenon. Certainly the construction of interpretive categories and the propensity to reify them are among the ways by which people have always shaped their world. Abstractions like freedom, human dignity, evil, or true love have had powerful and concrete effects on human affairs. A global discourse on ritual, understood as a transcultural language of the human spirit, is more likely to promote a sense of common humanity and crosscultural respect than the view that one set of religious rites are the revealed truth itself and the idols worshiped by all other peoples must be destroyed. Yet it is clear that this discourse is being constructed not without violence, loss, and deeply rooted assumptions of cultural hegemony.

In a purely methodological vein, such concerns suggest the need for revised methodologies. The practice theories examined at the close of chapter 3 attempt to focus on activities in such a way as to minimize the amount of preliminary selecting and framing of the data in terms of such powerful categories as ritual, religion, technology, ideology, and so on. There are also attempts to formulate elements basic to “reflexive” and “self-critical” forms of scholarly analysis.44 There may be other alternatives as well, perhaps even a reconstructed phenomenology—a phenomenology for the post-postmodern era, so to speak—in which the scholar and the conditions of the scholarly project itself are systematically included as part of the total phenomenon under scrutiny. In any case, the links between the emergence of ritual as a category of analysis and the shifts in how people in European and American society ritualize make very clear that ritual cannot be approached as some transparent phenomenon out there in the world waiting to be analyzed and explained. It exists only in sets of complex interactions that we are just beginning to try to map.

Conclusion

The contexts in which ritual practices unfold are not like the props of painted scenery on a theatrical stage. Ritual action involves an inextricable interaction with its immediate world, often drawing it into the very activity of the rite in multiple ways.

Exactly how this is done, how often, and with what stylistic features will depend on the specific cultural and social situation with its traditions, conventions, and innovations. Why some societies have more ritual than others, why ritual traditions change or do not change, and why some groups abstract and study “ritual” as some kind of universal phenomenon when others do not—these are questions of context that are at the heart of the dynamics understood as religion and culture.

The way that European and American scholars generate questions about ritual reflects and promotes basic elements of their cultural worldview. The notion of ritual has become one of the ways in which these cultures experience and understand the world. So what does this interest in ritual tell us about ourselves? Most readily, it tells us that we do not live with a seamless worldview; what we do and what we think or believe are routinely distinguished, separated out, and differently weighted. It

suggests a certain drive toward transcending the particularities of place, time, and culture by means of the “higher learning” embodied in scientific, artistic, historical, and hermeneutical forms of analysis. This interest in transcending the particular suggests a fundamental drive toward world transformation and self-determination. It suggests an eagerness to find or forge spiritual-cultural commonalities among the heterogeneity of beliefs and styles in the world, but primarily in terms that extend our historical experiences as nearly universal. The hubris is not unconstructive, but it now comes face to face with a fresh set of challenges. Whether it can address and solve them is not clear, but these are the issues that ritual and the study of ritual will struggle with in the near future.

The central concern of this study has been to introduce systematically all of the issues, debates, and areas of inquiry that comprise the modern study of ritual. In most cases, this has meant raising open-ended issues, rather than presenting an authoritative consensus. Of course, the topic of ritual is not unique in this regard. Without sacrificing any of the complexity and convolutions involved in these issues, this study has also tried to impose some minimal order on them for the purpose, at least, of suggesting other orderings and contexts. If it was not clear at the beginning, it should be clear by now that “theories,” “activities” and “contexts” can be only provisional frameworks. Theories and contexts affect what is seen as ritual and by whom, while those activities deemed to be ritual in turn have theoretical and contextual consequences.

In the end, “ritual” is a relatively new term that we have pressed into service to negotiate a variety of social and cultural differences, including the differentiation of scholarly objectivity and generalization as distinct from cultural particularism and parochialism. The work and hopes of many theorists and practitioners today are pinned to it, and there is no doubt that ritual has become one of the ways in which we structure and interpret our world. As an interpretive tool, it inevitably corrects a bit here and distorts a bit there, or, in terms of practice theory, it addresses problems by shifting the very terrain on which they appeared. In the future, we may have better tools with which to understand what people are doing when they bow their heads, offer incense to a deity, dance in masks in the plaza, or give a lecture on the meaning of ritual. Yet all these acts are ways of dealing with the world and its perceived forces and sources of power. The form and scope of interpretation differ, and that should not be lightly dismissed, but it cannot be amiss to see in all of these instances practices that illuminate our shared humanity.

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