(Sorry for this being so late. For some reason blogger wouldn't let me copy and paste from my parents windows 95)
Ritual, like religion, is one of those ‘things’ that is easy to recognize but difficult to define. This was certainly obvious while reading the articles this week, with Bell and Grimes summarizing and bickering about how ritual should be studied and what its function was, and Mamoud discussing the blurring of lines between mundane and ritual action. Do we look at the movements of the participants? Do we focus on the performance? The emotions invoked? The intention? What is the difference between ‘ritually’ playing a slit-gong and a Rush concert? Lastly, what is the place of the observer? Are we just there to describe what we see, or are we searching to explain the ‘blindspots’ and ‘misrecognitions’ of the ritual performer? Can we do that? Obviously, I have a lot of questions about the study of ritual, and since it really isn’t something that has come up reading policy and population data, it is not an area I’ve put a significant amount of thought into. I’ll look at the issue of ‘ritual’ by looking at a few case studies, including something that happened to me recently, a ‘social drama’ from Turner’s Schism and Continuity and the story of Mona from the Mahmood article.
A few Saturdays ago, I attended the funeral of someone I knew at a local Anglican church. Since this was the first such event I’ve experienced, I made sure to take the time to digest the pomp and ‘ritual’ that was going on around me. In my pew, I (not religious) was bordered by my parents (semi-religious) cousin (too young to be religious) and grandfather (self-described fundamentalist). It was all the standard fair of speeches, hymns, scripture reading and a homily. The service ended with the Eucharist. The minister did the normal ritual actions, waving his arms about and saying his prayers, and then dedicated the Host/Wine not to Jesus, but to the deceased. This shift in ritual intention caught me off guard, and really ticked off my grandfather. When he took the Eucharist, he made up for the ministers lack of attention to tradition by audibly praying to Christ. Since I’m not Christian or even baptized, I really had no intention of taking part in the ritual, but since I have a healthy fear of my grandfather’s wraith I went up and crossed my arms to receive a blessing. My cousin went up, went through all the motions of ritual, got back and commented on how delicious the cracker was. My parents, although both Christian, decided not to take part and stayed in the pew.
What would an ethnographer, sitting in the back row, have taken away from this spectacle? Hopefully he/she had some background knowledge on Christian ritual, or else they would come away thinking this ‘deviant’ form of the Eucharist was correct. Is it even right to regard the ministers shift of meaning as deviant, since all he intended was to make the ritual fit the situation he was in? How would the ethnographer react to my cousin, who has certainly been socialized into Christianity, but doesn’t understand the significance of the ritual aside from it being a tasty treat. Would my parents come off as atheistic for not participating? Would the ethnographer believe that I saw significance in what I was doing? Again, I don’t have the answers. I lean towards the idea that intent in ritual is what differentiates it from other activities, more so then its choreography or traditional value. As the minister showed, tradition and meaning can be changed from situation to situation, and I don’t believe my cousin was taking part in a ‘ritual’ performance despite mimicking the motions since he did not understand what he was doing.
Turner first proposed the importance of “Social Drama” in the book Schism and Continuity in an African Society. This ethnographical method, mentioned in all three articles, is based on the idea that people will use ritualized action in order to provide redress in times of conflict. In the Ndembu society that Turner studied, there lived a fear sorcerer named Sandombu. Sandombu was the village scapegoat, and many deaths were blamed on his foul magic and he is eventually run out of town (to about 500 feet away, where he makes his own town of misfits). This seems like an unfortunate situation, but in Turner’s discussions with Sandombu it becomes obvious that he was a willingly participant in his victimization. Since he was infertile, he had no means of creating a legacy for himself other than by becoming the headman of the village and in order to do that he had to be feared. He purposely acted out taboo ritual behaviour (shouting curses, performing magical rites etc.) in order to build up this reputation. Is village counter-part, Kasonda, also actively promoted Sandombu’s sorcery in the hopes that he would be driven out of the village. After a death in the village, he actively sought out a diviner in order to incriminate Sandombu. Both these men used the rituals and traditions that they were socialized into as a means of attaining power. Both, in discussions with Turner, held reservations about the magic’s true effectiveness but both went through the motions in order to convince others of their legitimacy. In this case, the actors involved had their own agency. They had clear intentions with their use of ritual, but may not have actually believed in their traditional power. Is agency required for ritual participants? Is belief in the tradition required? Is ritual simply a means of communication or a way of sorting out a crisis?
Lasting, Mahmood tells us of the advice that an Islamic woman named Mona gave to another woman that was having difficulty in getting up for morning prayers. Mona said that as long as this woman thought of God in her every day actions, and directed her energy and emotions towards him at all times, she would no longer find it difficult to wake up for morning prayer (831). This story again points to intention as part of ritual. Is the only difference between a mundane act and a ritualized one the intention of the participant? In Mona’s life, is everything she does considered ritual? I can assume there is no traditional basis for making daily chores a ritual act, but if she believes that all her actions are significant beyond their ‘mundane’ function than isn’t it something more?
I apologize for this stream of consciousness, and I hope that it is not too disjointed in thought. I left this week’s readings with many more questions concerning “what is ritual” then on the best way to study it. These few stories that I immediately thought of while reading all regard the actor as a knowing participant within the activity and that it is the significance they attach to a task that is more important than any ‘tradition’. The variety of ritual is astounding and its definition difficult to come by, at least for myself.
5 comments:
Hey Mike,
I really enjoyed reading your blog! I love how you were able to use a personal experience and relate it to our discussion this week on ritual and performance theory. I particularly liked when you wrote about intentionality. You asked what an ethnographer would conclude after observing the Eucharist ceremony at the church service you attended. I think that you are completely right that it is almost impossible to tell what is going on within someone's head. Does a ritual contain meaning or are the participants merely going through the motions? And if it is impossible to differentiate between the two, how can we know anything about ritual without being inside the community or at least being informed by the community?
Lots of questions.
Hey Mike,
Great post, your church experience really resonated with me. This week’s readings left me with a similar feeling, with more questions than answers and the sense that any single definition of ritual could not account for all the particularities that are brought to ritual acts by the individuals who participate in them.
My brief exposure to studying ritual was in an introductory Comparative Religions class, where a point was made to look a few rituals for each tradition we studied. So my understanding of ritual theory is pretty elementary I’d say, but in my own experience where for a long time I didn’t consider myself to be particularly religious one way or another, the likely intended effects of the various rituals I’d participate in (to keep the familial peace!) were lost on me. On the other hand I did always feel a sense of calm after partaking in them, and while I didn’t ascribe to the beliefs that my family did, there was something humbling and meaningful to me about pausing to punctuate the day with remembrance of my own minuteness in the face of something greater: God, the universe, the beyond.
In that sense, the sort of prescriptive tones in Bell and Grimes’ articles with regard to how ritual should be studied made me wonder about the efficacy of ritual studies and how closely it can mirror the very individual experiences (like yours with the crossing arms to receive a blessing) held by those who partake in these actions. Another thing that sort of irks me about ritual studies is the possibility of a normative experience arising from the observers’ standpoint in what seems like a look at ritual as a spectacle. The prospect to me is a scary one, since I’d like to consider my previous experiences from when I was not so religious to be legitimate ones, even if they didn’t quite fit with the attitudes of those who would have identified as devout. So, I don’t think there’s anything inherent to ritual that necessitates any effect on the participant, but the outcomes of rituals are varied per individual. Can there be a study of ritual then? I’m really not sure…
At this point I should probably apologize for my little stream of consciousness…maybe some our questions will be taken up in the class discussion. See you then!
hi mike,
i enjoyed your thoughts about ritual - esp. the anecdote about the gradient of rituality in your family.
is ritual neccessarily religious in nature? why can't the action of me waking up every morning and turning on the coffee pot even before i've found my glasses be considered ritualistic? what about if i have a study time ritual of brewing a pot of tea, drinking it from the same mug, and listening to chopin while i do this? is this ritual? or is ritual only ritual when there's meaning attached through the divine?
Hey Mike,
I like the different aspects of ritual study you brought up, especially the position of the observer. The observer is problematic, what kind of authority do we exert? And do we change the nature of the ritual by our expectations, by our very act of observation?
I really liked your stream of consciousness, very thought provoking.
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