You are on page 1of 20

part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.

Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms




ritual
theory
ritual for the
Body Politic

on ritual politics, the how and why;
Victor Turners The Ritual Process:
Structure and Anti-Structure, Catherine Bells Ritual:
Perspectives and Dimensions, Lisa Luceros The Politics of Ritual
and Ritual, Politics, and Power, David I. Kertzer.

curated by amma birago
for zora neale hurston



Kertzer's book on the relationships among ritual,
politics and power could not have come at a better time to enliven social-scientific debate on the fascinating theme
of legitimacy. What is it, for example, that keeps people in different societies firmly united, despite their individual
differences in belief? What keeps most post-colonial African leaders in power, despite their lack of appeal among
the rural masses, who constitute the bulk of the population? These questions, and others, Kertzer attempts to
answer by investigating the socialization role of ritual in different political systems.
Ritual, Politics, and Power, David I. Kertzer, A review by Francis B. Nyamnjoh
Lisa Luceros The Politics of Ritual
Ritual has an enduring life because it demands a time outside of time, where ones focus, often a collective focus, is
magnified. It is an opportunity to qualify some of the ineffable qualities of human existence in more material,
observable and practicable ways. And in this sense, it is hard to imagine humanity without ritual. In my more recent
research I have been less focused on the canonical forms of ritual and more interested in the ritualized aspects of
political performance and how these may intersect with different forms of spectacle.

part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Victor Turner, The Ritual Process:
Structure and Anti-Structure.
Since societies are processes responsive to change, not fixed structures, new rituals are devised or borrowed, and old
ones decline and disappear. Nevertheless, forms survive through flux, and new ritual items, even new ritual
configurations, tend more often to be variants of old themes than radical novelties.

Ritual, Politics, and Power. By David I. Kertzer.
Kertzer's book on the relationships among ritual, politics and power could not have come at a better time to enliven
social-scientific debate on the fascinating theme of legitimacy. What is it, for example, that keeps people in different
societies firmly united, despite their individual differences in belief? What keeps most post-colonial African leaders
in power, despite their lack of appeal among the rural masses, who constitute the bulk of the population? These
questions, and others, Kertzer attempts to answer by investigating the socialization role of ritual in different political
systems.

a history of rituals is a history of reproduction, contestation, transformation,
and-if we accept carnival as a ritual-deconstruction of authority. How can a new church, school, kingdom, colony,
nation, party, "Common Market," or other "imagined community" come into being except through its own
characteristic rituals? Can a state be unmade by a carnival?
History, Structure, and Ritual,
John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan

In tribal societies, as Turner argued, religion, economy, law, politics, and other cultural domains are essentially
interwoven. Tribal rituals, therefore, must have some religious component, since tribal religion in both mythology
and ritual practices has not (yet) split off from other sectors of tribal culture. In industrial societies, on the other
hand, the several institutions have become independent of each other, each of them dealing with certain needs and
questions which these societies face (law, politics, economy, religion, etc.).
Mathieu Deflem, Ritual, anti-structure, and religion
A discussion of Victor Turner's processual symbolic analysis



Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions:
Catherine Bell


A ritual "is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and
performed according to set sequence." Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a
religious community. Rituals are characterized by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral
symbolism and performance.


A ritual is a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered
place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interests. Rituals
may be seasonal, hallowing a culturally defined moment of change in the climatic cycle or the inauguration of an
activity such as planting, harvesting, or moving from winter to summer pasture; or they may be contingent, held in
response to an individual or collective crisis. Contingent rituals may be further subdivided into life-crisis
ceremonies, which are performed at birth, puberty, marriage, death, and so on, to demarcate the passage from one
phase to another in the individual's life-cycle, and rituals of affliction, which are performed to placate or exorcise
preternatural beings or forces believed to have afflicted villagers with illness, bad luck, gynecological troubles,
severe physical injuries, and the like. Other classes of rituals include divinatory rituals; ceremonies performed by
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

political authorities to ensure the health and fertility of human beings, animals, and crops in their territories;
initiation into priesthoods devoted to certain deities, into religious associations, or into secret societies; and those
accompanying the daily offering of food and libations to deities or ancestral spirits or both. - Victor Turner

ritual as traditional, collective representation, implying that the notion of individual
or invented ritual was a contradiction in terms.

The tendency to think of ritual as essentially unchanging has gone hand in hand with the equally common
assumption that effective rituals cannot be invented. Until very recently, most peoples commonsense notion of
ritual meant that someone could not simply dream up a rite that would work the way traditional ritual has worked.
Such a phenomenon, if it could happen, would seem to undermine the important roles given to community, custom,
and consensus in our understanding of religion and ritual.

The fundamental efficacy of ritual activity
lies in its ability to have people embody assumptions about their place in a larger
order of things.
This new ritual paradigm has more subtle ramifications as well. Traditionally, for example, the legitimate authority
and efficacy of ritual were closely intertwined. For invented rites, which are not deeply rooted in any shared sense of
tradition, however, legitimacy and authority tend to be construed more lightly and on quite different grounds. For
that reason, perhaps, much greater weight appears to fall on the dimension of efficacy.

The fundamental efficacy of ritual activity
lies in its ability to have people embody assumptions about their place in a larger
order of things.

Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions:
Catherine Bell

Human beings have been involved in ritual activities of some sort since the earliest hunting bands and tribal
communities about which we have information. Yet it is only in the late nineteenth century that people began to
perceive all such activities under the rubric of ritual and identify them as data against which to test theories
concerning the origins of religion and civilization. In doing so, people were asking new types of questions about
history and culture and beginning to look for new forms of evidence.

Ritual is a form of nonverbal communication, but, like linguistic communication, its signs and symbols have
meaning only by virtue of their place in systems of relationships with other symbols. Although ritual conveys
information about the most basic conceptual categories and ordering systems of the social group, it is used primarily
to transform one category into another while maintaining the integrity of the categories and the system as a whole.
In other words, only ritual can transform a boy or girl into an adult, an animal into a gift to the gods, and the realm
of the gods into a presence responsive to human needs while still maintaining all the boundaries that enable these
categories to organize reality.

Political Rites
As a particularly loose genre, political rituals can be said to comprise those ceremonial practices that specifically
construct, display and promote the power of political institutions (such as king, state, the village elders) or the
political interests of distinct constituencies and subgroups.

In general, political rites define power in a two-dimensional way: first, they use symbols and symbolic action to
depict a group of people as a coherent and ordered community based on shared values and goals; second, they
demonstrate the legitimacy of these values and goals by establishing their iconicity with the perceived values and
order of the cosmos. As such, political ritual is something very different from the use or threat of coercive physical
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

force, although those who claim power can do so with both weapons and ritual, and ritual itself can include the
display of weapons.

It is through ritual, however, that those claiming power demonstrate how their interests are in the natural, real, or
fruitful order of things. When effective, the symbolic imagery and structural processes of political ritual - what Roy
Rappaport calls its sanctity - can transform the arbitrary and conventional into what appears to be necessary and
natural.128

When ritual is the principal medium by which power relationships are constructed, the power is usually perceived as
coming from sources beyond the immediate control of the human community. For this reason, more ritual attended
the coronation of Louis XVI, who claimed the divine right of kings, than usually accompanies the inauguration of
an American president or a British prime minister.

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 phenomenafor example, in the way a sons role in
continuing the family lineage is attached to experiences of procreation and childbirtha societys 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 biological- cultural passage, as natural as greetings to the
newborn and farewells to the dead.
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.
Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions:
Catherine Bell


Victor Turner, The Ritual Process:
Structure and Anti-Structure.
All rituals, it seems, are in Turner's perspective religious; they all "celebrate or commemorate transcendent powers"
(V. Turner and E. Turner 1982:201). Still, Turner did view rituals in modern industrial society as having some
characteristics different from the tribal rituals he studied in Ndembu society. In tribal societies "all life is pervaded
by invisible influences" (Turner 1976a:507). In this way, tribal societies are wholly religious, and ritual actions
surrounding their religions are "nationwide"; they are oriented towards "all members of the widest effective
community" (Turner 1977b:45). In modern societies, on the other hand, religion is "regarded as something apart
from our economic, political, domestic and recreational life.
Mathieu Deflem, Ritual, anti-structure, and religion
A discussion of Victor Turner's processual symbolic analysis

What roles might the concept of ritual play in the study of contemporary society and culture? As one of the founding
concepts of our discipline, ritual has long been a cornerstone of anthropological thought: from the works of Emile
Durkheim through Gregory Bateson, Claude Levi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, and Victor Turner, countless classics have
been built upon this infinitely perplexing and thus fascinating aspect of human life. In recent decades, however,
ritual has undergone a rapid retreat from the forefront of anthropological consideration. Although rituals role in the
initial formation of anthropology does not grant it permanent immunity to transitions in scholarly interest, its recent
departure also should not be casually interpreted as proof of irrelevance.
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Ritual, Kevin Carrico
Online journal, Cultural Anthropology

Denis Fleurdorge
Online journal, Cultural Anthropology
My approach is not intended to present the political field as an autonomous and closed social domain, but to retain
the idea that political practices, in this case ritual, participate to a great extent in a larger whole, as one of the
dimensions of a given society (cultural labeling/marking). Rituals are not situated alongside but rather within
society, along with a number of other social dimensions: religion, beliefs, institutions, social practices, economy, art,
etc.
Finally, in general throughout my research, I consider it important to identify a system, namely political ritual, in
which the various elements or components can be considered as recurring ritual structures, and can thus underpin a
functional and permanent frame for understanding the ritual phenomenon. By reaching an understanding of the
different modes of expression and representation of presidential practices, it is not only possible to establish an
inventory of the composite elements of this system, but also to develop an interpretation of the relationships
between these different elements, as well as their relationship to other social systems.
Denis Fleurdorge
Online journal, Cultural Anthropology


Danny Kaplan
Online journal, Cultural Anthropology
why and in what ways they sustain and nourish national sentiments,
particularly as social rituals could offer myriad alternative forms of collective identification.
My main research interest is in how rituals provide a sense of social belonging, which transforms into a sense of
national identification. My engagement with ritual as a mechanism of national solidarity came from a practical
question. My approach to ritual follows the elementary Durkheimian view of ritual as a cyclic, recurrent activity that
provides symbolic confirmation of collective values and emotions shared by members of the community and
reinforces their sense of stability, security, and belonging.

Kalman Applbaum, Survival of the Biggest:
Business Policy, Managerial Discourse, and Uncertainty in a Global Business Alliance
Part of the process of trying to fix social reality involves representing it as stable and immutable or at least
controllable to this end, at least for a time. Rituals, rigid procedures, regular formalities, symbolic repetitions of all
kinds, as well as explicit laws, principles, rules, symbols and categories are cultural representations of fixed social
reality, of continuity. They represent stability and continuity acted out and re-enacted: visible continuity. By dint of
repetition they deny the passage of time, the nature of change, and the implicit extent of potential indeterminacy in
social relations. They are all part of what we have called the "process of regularization." Whether rituals, laws, rules,
customs, symbols, ideological models, and so on are old and legitimized by tradition, or newly forged and
legitimated by a revolutionary social source, they constitute the explicit cultural framework through which the
attempt is made to fix social life, to keep it from slipping into the sea of indeterminacy (1975: 221).
Kalman Applbaum on Sally Falk Moore's processual approach (1975, 1978)



Myron Joel Aronoff,
Culture and Political Change

part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Rituals shape public perceptions of ongoing reality
through the dramatic enactment of myths, not through the construction of detailed
rational models of objective reality.

Mythic thinking is projective and condensational. It is a process in which private concerns become translated into
public images that acquire meaning on multiple levels. This translation process is facilitated in rituals by the
presence of powerful figures with whom the individual can identify. The pronouncements of an attractive or
respected figure become models for the individuals thinking. More importantly, the actors in rituals literally act out
the possible concerns of the audience. The struggle between candidates becomes the struggle between groups, or the
battle of good and evil, or the representation of such life concerns as economic security or social harmony. Rituals
shape public perceptions of ongoing reality through the dramatic enactment of myths, not through the construction
of detailed rational models of objective reality.



Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions:
Ritual and Society. Theory, the history of interpretation
Catherine Bell

The failure to recognize the enduring role played by redundant communication, drama, personalization, and
stylized choice in political rituals risks a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of political processes like
elections. The tendency to regard defining properties of rituals as unfortunate departures from true political norms
only results in unworkable reform proposals.

Rituals are the means for changing and reconstituting groups in an orderly and sanctioned manner that maintains the
integrity of the system. These groups include religious associations, totem clans, phratries (exogamous kinship
groups), castes, professional classes, age groups, families, the political and territorial community, the world of the
living, the world before it, and the world of the dead after it. Life itself, wrote van Gennep, means to separate
and to reunite, to change form and condition, to die and to be reborn. These changes can occur smoothly
and meaningfully as part of a larger, embracing, and reassuring pattern only by means of their orchestration
as rites of passage.

Ritual, Kevin Carrico
Online journal, Cultural Anthropology
How does ritual frame our social experiences?
What are the relationships between ritual symbols
across social fields? Who exercises control in rituals;
or do rituals exercise control upon their actors?
Ritual is arguably a universal feature of human social existence: just as one cannot envision a society without
language or exchange, one would be equally hard-pressed to imagine a society without ritual. And while the word
ritual commonly brings to mind exoticized images of primitive others diligently engaged in mystical activities,
one can find rituals, both sacred and secular, throughout modern society: collective experiences, from the
Olympics to the commemoration of national tragedies; cyclical gatherings, from weekly congregations at the local
church to the annual turkey carving at Thanksgiving to the intoxication of Mardi Gras; and personal life-patterns,
from morning grooming routines to the ways in which we greet and interact with one another. Ritual is in fact an
inevitable component of culture, extending from the largest-scale social and political processes to the most intimate
aspects of our self-experience. Yet within this universality, the inherent multiplicity of ritual practices, both between
and within cultures, also reflects the full diversity of the human experience. It was then neither pure coincidence nor
primitivist exoticization that placed ritual at the center of the development of anthropological thought: it was instead
rituals rich potential insights as an object of sociocultural analysis.
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

Toward this goal, we aim to raise a number of questions for reflection and discussion: What, in fact, is ritual? Where
does ritual originate? What forms does ritual take, and how do these various forms constitute ritual? What are
rituals effects, and how are they achieved? How does ritual frame our social experiences, and how does actors
input in turn re-frame ritual? What are the relationships between ritual symbols across social fields (religious,
political, sexual)? Who exercises control in rituals; or do rituals exercise control upon their actors? And how, in the
end, does the study of ritual processes contribute to an understanding of contemporary sociocultural processes?
Ritual, Kevin Carrico
Online journal, Cultural Anthropology


A review of Kertzers Ritual, Politics, and Power
Michael S. Kimmel SUNY at Stony Brook
Durkheim theoretical meaning of ritual events,
in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life that "it is by uttering the same cry,
pronouncing the same word, or performing the same gesture in regard to
some object that they become and feel themselves to be in unison."

In Ritual, Politics, and Power, his interesting examination of the role of ritual in political life, David Kertzer, an
anthropologist, argues that ritual is the social glue that holds society together and provides a symbolic mechanism
for sustaining a political opposition. The study of ritual has a long lineage in sociology, from Durkheim's pioneering
efforts to understand the origins of religion in social ritual to Edward Shils's description of the latent content of the
coronation ceremonies and Erving Goffman's brilliant deconstruction of the ritual enactments of the self. Kertzer
embraces an essentially Durkheimian position about the function of ritual in social life, seeing a functionalist
symmetry between the need of the individual for rituals that tie her or him to the larger community and the "need" of
a society for symbolic mechanisms to express harmony and consensus.
Kertzer surveys the function of ritual in a variety of cultures, ranging from underdeveloped nations seeking to
appropriate the symbols that have long been used to keep them down to the advanced capitalist nations, which offer
a highly differentiated set of rituals to meet specific political needs. One gets a good sense of the commonalities
among a disparate set of cases: President Reagan at Bitburg cemetery, Parisian communards in 1871, Lenin's
exhortations to Russian workers, the Palio of Siena, Italy, Louis XIV laying hands on seriously ill 17th-century
Frenchmen. Kertzer makes three important arguments from this wide range of cases, two that involve the function of
ritual and one that concerns its structure. Structurally, Kertzer insists that solidarity, maintained by ritual, is
experiential and not cognitive, not an event in a society's history that simply happens but a constant process of
renewal.
Ritual builds solidarity
without requiring the sharing of beliefs. Solidarity is produced by
people acting together, not by people thinking together.

"Ritual may be vital to reaction but it is also
the lifeblood of revolution. David Kertzer
Solidarity is not based on shared beliefs or ideas, Kertzer argues:
"Ritual builds solidarity without requiring the sharing of beliefs. Solidarity is produced by people acting together,
not by people thinking together" (p. 76). Functionally, Kertzer argues that ritual serves both individual and social
requirements. Individuals require ritual to identify with the polit- ical regime, an identification that is possible only
in symbolic form, as the individual experiences a nonrational connection with the community. This "identification of
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

the local with the national can take place only through the use of symbols that identify the one with the other" (p.
21).

it may also be a weapon in political struggle. Ritual is vital to challenging,
as well as maintaining, the political regime. "Ritual may be vital to reaction," he writes,
"but it is also the lifeblood of revolution" (p. 2). In a cleverly titled chapter,
"Rite Makes Might," he emphasizes the use of ritual as a resource
in political struggle among contenders for power

Equally vital, Kertzer argues, is that ritual is functionally necessary for the ruling regime to maintain its grasp on
political power. By stressing the "importance of ritual in legitimating political systems and political power holders"
(p. 38), Kertzer underscores the difficulty of distinguishing be- tween the manipulation of symbols to evoke false
consensus that is based on an obscuring of power and a genuine expression of the Rousseauian general will that
comes from a political community incapable of self- expression without political leaders. In fact, Kertzer seems to
think that each political regime has a mixture of the two motives for ritual. Both arguments lead to Kertzer's most
interesting claim: that ritual is politically neutral, independent of the ideology of political values. Thus ritual may not
simply be, as functionalists would have had it, a vehicle for creating or expressing consensus; it may also be a
weapon in political struggle. Ritual is vital to challenging, as well as maintaining, the political regime. "Ritual may
be vital to reaction," he writes, "but it is also the lifeblood of revolution" (p. 2). In a cleverly titled chapter, "Rite
Makes Might," he emphasizes the use of ritual as a resource in political struggle among contenders for power. What
is more, the political neutrality of ritual means that rituals created in one context can be appropriated and used in
other contexts.
A review of Kertzers Ritual, Politics, and Power
Michael S. Kimmel SUNY at Stony Brook


Ritual, Politics, and Power, David I. Kertzer
A review by Francis B. Nyamnjoh
Kertzer's book on the relationships among ritual, politics and power could not have come at a better time to enliven
social-scientific debate on the fascinating theme of legitimacy. What is it, for example, that keeps people in different
societies firmly united, despite their individual differences in belief? What keeps most post-colonial African leaders
in power, despite their lack of appeal among the rural masses, who constitute the bulk of the population? These
questions, and others, Kertzer attempts to answer by investigating the socialization role of ritual in different political
systems. Kertzer takes issue with a number of assumptions and misconceptions in the West about the political
significance of ritual in the procurement, consolidation, and perpetuation of power in different polities. According to
Kertzer, some Western intellectuals, rendered myopic by excessive Cartesian rationalism, have tended to associate
ritual exclusively with the political universe of so-called "primitive," "nonliterate," "simple," "nonstate,"
"traditional," or "underdeveloped" societies, thus giving the term a restricted and preponderantly religious definition.
In the same way, anthropology has been made to appear as the study of backward societies lacking the complexity
of modern states, while sociology has often been restricted to the study of industrialized or Western-type societies.

Thus, while reactionaries "design and employ rituals to arouse popular emotions
in support of their legitimacy and to drum up popular enthusiasm for their policies,"
revolutionaries are interested in rituals that "elicit powerful emotions to mobilize
the people to revolt."
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms


Defining ritual broadly as "symbolic behavior that is socially standardized and repetitive" or as "action wrapped in a
web of symbolism," Kertzer argues convincingly that the political action and power of all societies are enveloped in
ritual, and he maintains that it would be difficult to imagine any society functioning otherwise. Using various
examples selected from different parts of the world or points in history, he shows how politi- cal systems have
employed and continued to employ ritual to create or rein- force their symbolically constructed versions of reality.
As he observes, it is our symbols and rituals, not rational debates, that build our political understanding and permit
us to make sense of the world around us. Symbols and rituals are responsible for our picture of the world, which,
because of its "emotionally compelling" nature, discourages any critical reexamination or debate. Kertzer disagrees
with those who argue that ritual can only serve as a conservative force and never as an impetus for change, and he
sees it as having the potential for both legitimation and delegitimation. As he observes, "Ritual may be vital to
reaction, but it is also the lifeblood of revolution." Thus, while reactionaries "design and employ rituals to arouse
popular emotions in support of their legitimacy and to drum up popular enthusiasm for their policies,"
revolutionaries are interested in rituals that "elicit powerful emotions to mobilize the people to revolt." Kertzer's
contribution is an alternative interpretation to Durkheim on ritual, one that, unlike the traditional perspective,
recognizes social conflict, thus providing for political and religious pluralism. Thanks to ritual, he argues, bonds of
solidarity are possible in any political organization or movement, whether or not there is consensus or uniformity of
belief. Viewed in this way, there is no reason why the impact of ritual should be limited only to small-scale
societies, religious organizations, or movements with common values and shared beliefs.
Ritual, Politics, and Power, David I. Kertzer
A review by Francis B. Nyamnjoh


Victor Tuner. Symbols in African Rituals.
The Continuing Efficacy, African Ritual Symbols
Nevertheless, from the comparative viewpoint, there are remarkable similarities among symbols used in ritual
throughout sub-Saharan Africa in spite of differences in cosmological sophistication. The same ideas, analogies, and
modes of association underlie symbol formation and manipulation from the Senegal River to the Cape of Good
Hope. The same assumptions about Africa. Yet the needs and dangers of social and personal survival provided
suitable conditions for the development of rituals as pragmatic instruments (from the standpoint of the actors) for
coping with biological change, disease, and natural hazards of all kinds. Social action in response to material
pressures was the systematic and systematizing factor.


Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions:
Catherine Bell

Of course, the expectations of what it means to work are also not the same as for traditional rituals, for which no one
asked whether the rite worked, just whether it was done correctly. In some societies and cosmologies, correct
performance of a ritual made it effective whether you wanted it to be or not.

This new ritual paradigm has more subtle ramifications as well. Traditionally, for example, the legitimate authority
and efficacy of ritual were closely intertwined. For invented rites, which are not deeply rooted in a any shared sense
of tradition, however, legitimacy and authority tend to be construed more lightly and on quite different grounds. For
that reason, perhaps, much greater weight appears to fall on the dimension of efficacy. There is increased pressure
for the invented rite to show that it works; this is what legitimates the rite since there is no tradition to do this.
Of course, the expectations of what it means to work are also not the same as for traditional rituals, for which no one
asked whether the rite worked, just whether it was done correctly. In some societies and cosmologies, correct
performance of a ritual made it effective whether you wanted it to be or not.
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms


The ritualized body produced in ritualization brings what it has come to possess during ritual into social life. Bell
introduces the term ritual mastery, based on Bourdieus practical mastery (schemes for ordering the world used
by social agents that come to be embodied during practice), to refer to practical mastery in the context of
ritualization. Bell writes, I use the term ritual mastery to designate a practical mastery of the schemes of
ritualization as an embodied knowing, as the sense of ritual seen in its exercise (107). With the term, Bell
emphasizes that ritual is not a static, existing object but something embodied in specific contexts through work.
Ritual mastery involves a circularity, where a ritualized person uses ritualization schemes to affect non-ritualized
parts of life and to make them more coherent with the ritualized. Along with circularity, ritualization also relies on
constant deferral of meaning and purpose.
Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions:
Catherine Bell



Victor Turner, The Ritual Process:
Structure and Anti-Structure.
Since societies are processes responsive to change, not fixed structures, new rituals are devised or borrowed, and old
ones decline and disappear. Nevertheless, forms survive through flux, and new ritual items, even new ritual
configurations, tend more often to be variants of old themes than radical novelties.
A ritual is a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered
place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interests. Rituals
may be seasonal, hallowing a culturally defined moment of change in the climatic cycle or the inauguration of an
activity such as planting, harvesting, or moving from winter to summer pasture; or they may be contingent, held in
response to an individual or collective crisis. Contingent rituals may be further subdivided into life-crisis
ceremonies, which are performed at birth, puberty, marriage, death, and so on, to demarcate the passage from one
phase to another in the individual's life-cycle, and rituals of affliction, which are performed to placate or exorcise
preternatural beings or forces believed to have afflicted villagers with illness, bad luck, gynecological troubles,
severe physical injuries, and the like. Other classes of rituals include divinatory rituals; ceremonies performed by
political authorities to ensure the health and fertility of human beings, animals, and crops in their territories;
initiation into priesthoods devoted to certain deities, into religious associations, or into secret societies; and those
accompanying the daily offering of food and libations to deities or ancestral spirits or both. Africa is rich indeed in
ritual genres, and each involves many specific performances.

Each rural African society (which is often, though not always, coterminous with a linguistic community) possesses a
finite number of distinguishable rituals ... At varying intervals, from a year to several decades, all of a society's
rituals will be performed, the most important being performed perhaps the least often. Since societies are
processes responsive to change, not fixed structures, new rituals are devised or borrowed, and old ones decline and
disappear. Nevertheless, forms survive through flux, and new ritual items, even new ritual configurations, tend more
often to be variants of old themes than radical novelties. Thus it is possible for anthropologists to describe the main
features of a ritual system, or rather ritual round (successive ritual performances), in those parts of rural Africa
where change is occurring slowly.
The ritual symbol is ''the smallest unit of ritual which still retains the specific properties of ritual behavior . . . the
ultimate unit of specific structure in a ritual context." This structure is a semantic one (that is, it deals with
relationships between signs and symbols and the things to which they refer) and has the following attributes: (i)
multiple meanings (significata) -- actions or objects perceived by the senses in ritual contexts (that is, symbol
vehicles) have many meanings; (ii) unification of apparently disparate significata -- the essentially distinct
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

significata are interconnected by analogy or by association in fact or thought; (iii) condensation-- many ideas,
relations between things, actions, interactions, and transactions are represented simultaneously by the symbol
vehicle (the ritual use of such a vehicle abridges what would verbally be a lengthy statement or argument); (iv)
polarization of significata--the referents assigned by custom to a major ritual symbol tend frequently to be grouped
at opposed semantic poles. At one pole of meaning, empirical research has shown that the significata tend to refer to
components of the moral and social orders -- this might be termed the ideological (or normative) pole of symbolic
meaning; at the other, the sensory (or orectic) pole, are concentrated references to phenomena and processes that
may be expected to stimulate desires and feelings.

To understand the meaning of any ritual, it is important to consider it
in relation to the other symbols and beliefs found in the society.

Victor Turner. The Ritual Process:
Structure and Anti-Structure
In several African cultures, particularly in West Africa, a complex system of rituals
is associated with myths. These tell of the origins of the gods, the cosmos, human types and groups,
and the key institutions- of culture and society. Some ritual episodes reenact primordial events, drawing on their
inherent power to achieve the contemporary goals of the members of the culture
(for example, adjustment to puberty and the healing of the sick).
In this section, Turner discusses the relationship of myth and ritual. Some anthropologists have argued that myth and
ritual are very closely related, and that every ritual is the acting out of a myth. However, in the part of Africa Turner
studied, there are rituals for which the culture does not know a myth. It could be argued that such rituals once were
related to a myth that has been forgotten by the society. Turner does not comment on this issue.
In several African cultures, particularly in West Africa, a complex system of rituals is associated with myths. These
tell of the origins of the gods, the cosmos, human types and groups, and the key institutions of culture and society.
Some ritual episodes reenact primordial events, drawing on their inherent power to achieve the contemporary goals
of the members of the culture (for example, adjustment to puberty and the healing of the sick). Ritual systems are
sometimes based on myths. There may coexist with myths and rituals standardized schemata of interpretation that
may amount to theological doctrine. But in wide areas of East and Central Africa, there may be few myths
connected with rituals and no religious system interrelating myths, rituals, and doctrine. In compensation, there may
be much piecemeal exegesis of particular symbols.
Rites of passage represent one group of rituals that first allowed Turner to notice the importance of liminality, a
concept he defines below. Van Gennep defined rites of passage as "rites which accompany every change of place,
state, social position and age." He has shown that all rites of passage are marked by three phases: separation, margin
(or limen, signifying "threshold" in Latin), and aggregation. The first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic
behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group from an earlier fixed point in the social structure.
During the intervening liminal period, the characteristics of the ritual subject are ambiguous; he passes through a
cultural realm that has none or few of the attributes of the past or coming state. In the third phase (reaggregation or
reincorporation), the passage is consummated. The ritual subject is in a relatively stable state once more and by
virtue of this, has rights and obligations vis--vis others of a clearly defined and structural type.
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (" threshold people ") are necessarily ambiguous, since this
condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and
positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions
assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate
attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

transitions. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to
bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.
I prefer the Latin term "communitas" to "community," to distinguish this modality of social relationship from an "
area of common living." The distinction between structure and communitas is not simply the familiar one between
"secular" and "sacred," or that, for example, between politics and religion. Certain fixed offices in tribal societies
have many sacred attributes; indeed, every social position has some sacred characteristics. But this "sacred"
component is acquired by the incumbents of positions during the rites of passage, through which they changed
positions. Something of the sacredness of that transient humility and modelessness goes over, and tempers the pride
of the incumbent of a higher position or office. Liminality implies that the high could not be high unless the low
existed, and he who is high must experience what it is like to be low.
Victor Turner. The Ritual Process:
Structure and Anti-Structure

Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions:
Catherine Bell
The implicit dynamic and end of ritualization - that which it does not see itself doing - can be said to be the
production of a ritualized body. A ritualized body is a body invested with a sense of ritual. This sense of ritual
exists as an implicit variety of schemes whose deployment works to produce sociocultural situations that the
ritualized body can dominate in some way. This is a practical mastery, to use Bourdieus term, of strategic
schemes for ritualization, and it appears as a social instinct for creating and manipulating contrasts. This sense is
not a matter of self-conscious knowledge of any explicit rules of ritual but as an implicit cultivated disposition.
Ritualization produces this ritualized body through the interaction of the body with a structured and structuring
environment. It is in the dialectical relationship between the body and a space structured according to mythico-
ritual oppositions, writes Bourdieu, that one finds the form par excellence of the structural apprenticeship which
leads to the embodying of the structures of the world, that is, the appropriating by the world of a body thus enabled
to appropriate the world. Hence, through a series of physical movements ritual practices spatially and temporally
construct an environment organized according to schemes of privileged oppositions. The construction of this
environment and the activities within it simultaneously work to impress these schemes upon the bodies of
participants. This is a circular process that tends to be misrecognized, if it is perceived at all, as values and
experiences impressed upon the person and community from sources of power and order beyond it. Through the
orchestration in time of loose but strategically organized oppositions, in which a few oppositions quietly come to
dominate others, the social body internalizes the principles of the environment being delineated. Inscribed within the
social body, these principles enable the ritualized person to generate in turn strategic schemes that can appropriate or
dominate other sociocultural situations (98-99).
[R]itualization cannot be understood apart from the immediate situation,
which is being reproduced in a misrecognized and transformed way through the production
of ritualized agents.
[R]itualization not only involves the setting up of oppositions, but through the privileging built into such an
exercise it generates hierarchical schemes to produce a loose sense of totality and systematicity. In this way, ritual
dynamics afford an experience of order as well as the fit between this taxonomic order and the real world of
experience.
Ritual mastery is the ability - not equally shared, desired, or recognized - to take and remake schemes from the
shared culture that can strategically nuance, privilege, or transform, deploy them in the formation of a privileged
ritual experience, which in turn impresses them in a new form upon agents able to deploy them in a variety of
circumstances beyond the circumference of the rite itself.



Political Rites
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

As a particularly loose genre, political rituals can be said to comprise those ceremonial practices that specifically
construct, display and promote the power of political institutions (such as king, state, the village elders) or the
political interests of distinct constituencies and subgroups.

In general, political rites define power in a two-dimensional way: first, they use symbols and symbolic action to
depict a group of people as a coherent and ordered community based on shared values and goals; second, they
demonstrate the legitimacy of these values and goals by establishing their iconicity with the perceived values and
order of the cosmos. As such, political ritual is something very different from the use or threat of coercive physical
force, although those who claim power can do so with both weapons and ritual, and ritual itself can include the
display of weapons.

It is through ritual, however, that those claiming power demonstrate how their interests are in the natural, real, or
fruitful order of things. When effective, the symbolic imagery and structural processes of political ritual - what Roy
Rappaport calls its sanctity - can transform the arbitrary and conventional into what appears to be necessary and
natural.128

When ritual is the principal medium by which power relationships are constructed, the power is usually perceived as
coming from sources beyond the immediate control of the human community. For this reason, more ritual attended
the coronation of Louis XVI, who claimed the divine right of kings, than usually accompanies the inauguration of
an American president or a British prime minister.

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.





Lisa J. Lucero, The Politics of Ritual
The Emergence of Classic Maya Rulers

The Acquisition of Political Power
How competing interest groups acquire and maintain sociopolitical control.
For Mann (1986) the four sources of social power are economic, ideological, military, and political. Earle
(1997) views economy, ideology, and the military as of political power expressed in the expansion and
domination of the political economy. While there are alternative pathways to power (e.g., Flannery 1972), more
centralized political systems develop when more sources of power are controlled and integrated (Earle 1997:
21011). The ultimate success and duration of different strategies depend on local circumstances (cf. Fried 1967:
3738; Trigger 1991)how people interact with other people and their surroundings.

Leach (1966) has argued that ritual pervades all aspects of human existence, and this is a claim that anthropologists
generally accept. This being the case, it is not surprising that ambitious people transform ritual action into political
fortune. Ritual can integrate religious, social, economic, and political life, for example, creating and maintaining
alliances through marriage and longdistance trade (e.g., Friedman and Rowlands 1978), warfare (e.g., Carneiro
1970), and such integrative events as the construction of public works (e.g., Service 1975:96), religious ceremonies,
political rallies (e.g., Kertzer 1988), and feasts (e.g., Hayden 1995, Hayden and Gargett 1990).
Through ritual, political actors can incorporate people as active participants in political change. Leaders
lineage elders and heads of military societies, kinship groups, and religious sodalitiesoften promote political
change because through ritual they can claim that their actions benefit all members of society (Godelier 1977:111
19; Kertzer 1988:30). They organize the building and maintenance of religious structures, subsistence technology
including irrigation systems, and canoes or roads for trade and craft production facilities and lead raiding parties
all activities that typically involve ritual.

In sum, while there are various ways of acquiring political power, an economic foundation, namely, surplus
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

goods and labor, is required. Ritual expansion occurs in tandem with political change, both funded by surplus
goods and services. Rituals express and explain the changes that are occurring. Ritual is not a source of political
power in the same manner as the military, the economy, and ideology but rather advances political
agendas based on these intersecting sources of power. It allows ambitious people to modify the worldviews and
codes of social behavior that explain why specific rights and obligations exist (Earle 1997:8, 14358; see Blanton
et al. 1996; Wolf 1999:55).3

Most social processes of historical importance are at the same time strongly self-determined (internally
determined by the structure of the social group itself). . . . The self-determination of sociohistorical events is here
understood in the sense that factors external to the human group concerned (natural environment and contacts with
neighbor cultures) are effective solely insofar as they succeed in changing the essential processes . . . those of
material production, social relations, and spiritual life.




Lisa J. Lucero, The Politics of Ritual
The Emergence of Classic Maya Rulers

The decisions of the individuals participating in a given historical event are motivated by biological, psychological,
intellectual, and other factors - but they will be effective solely provided they fit a social scheme (Bunge
1959:276). Bourdieu (e.g., 1977, 1990), Giddens (e.g., 1979, 1984), and others emphasize the importance of the
dynamic relationship between structure (material and social) and practice. Structure provides choices and constraints
or limits within which individuals practice or act but does not determine behavior. This leaves the door
open for variability and change. Such behavior feeds back into the structure, transforming it, and as a result the
process of social change is often incremental and frequently comes from within a social group (Giddens 1979:
223; 1984:247). As actions are reproduced, it is possible for agents to affect change. Traditional rituals are an ideal
way for emerging rulers to insert and justify their own political agendas just because of [their] conservative
properties. New political systems borrow legitimacy from the old by nurturing the old ritual forms, redirected
to new purposes (Kertzer 1988:42). Memories associated with . . . earlier ritual experiences color the experience
of a new enactment of the rites. Rites thus have both a conservative bias and innovating potential (p.
12). Thus, such strategic rituals are successful because they incorporate familiar, traditional beliefs and practices
into more elaborate forms that situate the growing political power of particular interest groups (cf. Bourdieu
1990:10910; Flannery 1972; Weber 1958[1930]:55).

Political aspirants incorporate existing principles of legitimation (Earle 1989) but do not expropriate them.
The successful application of acceptable, albeit reinterpreted, family or domestic ritual activities increases the
prestige of sponsors and legitimizes political authority, including rulers control of critical resources and their
ability to acquire surplus from others. Such rituals integrate larger numbers of people than the small-scale household
or community rites from which they derive. For example, when Enga big men of precolonial Papua New Guinea
became increasingly involved in external exchange networks, the growing economic differences were situated
within traditional ancestor and bachelor cult rituals (Wiessner and Tumu 1998:369): Equality, reaffirmation of group
structure, and improvement of group fortunes remained at their core, counteracting the inequalities and
individualism fostered by growing exchange networks. As ancestral cults became linked to networks of exchange,
however, tribal leaders did restructure them from inwardly oriented rituals to events that had bearing on issues of
broad regional significance. Sacred rites for an exclusive circle of men were then reduced in proportion to public
celebration, and the interdependence of male and female principles were more overtly expressed. Overall, though
bachelors and ancestral cults did much to alter values and structure group relations, they never ruptured the ethics
of potential equality of male clan members or the principles of symmetrical reciprocity between those who engaged
in exchange.

When rulers sponsor public events (e.g., feasts and ceremonies), they touch emotions (Rappaport 1999:49, 226), but
these events are temporary and soon forgotten. Political actors need strategies that result in long-termbenefits.
Therefore they typically associate themselves with rituals that revolve around vital elements of life (e.g., rain,
agricultural fertility, and ancestor veneration) conducted according to set schedules in special places (Cohen
1974:135). Their association with traditional or social conventions leads to the sanctification or uncritical acceptance
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

of their special powers (Rappaport 1971; 1999:281; see also Geertz 1980:12931; Webster 1976) because subjects
believe that the holders of exclusive knowledge and skill are closer to the supernatural realm (Friedman and
Rowlands 1978). In time they become directly involved in the continuity of natural forces (e.g., Helms 1993:7879).
Participation in public rites does not mean that people are being hoodwinked: acceptance is not belief. . . .
Acceptance . . . is not a private state, but a public act (Rappaport 1999:11920). Public ceremony thus promotes
solidarity, not to mention political agendas.


Lisa J. Lucero, The Politics of Ritual
The Emergence of Classic Maya Rulers


As is illustrated by the Tang rites mentioned above, however, domestic rituals never leave the home. Rulers
replicate and expand them but do not replace or restrict them. While all members participate in the larger-scale
ceremonies, everyone still performs the domestic rituals from which former ceremonies derived. Royal rites are
superimposed on traditional ones (e.g., Godelier 1977: 188).

The fact that everyone, high and low, performs the same rites promotes solidarity and a sense of belonging
(e.g., Kertzer 1988:19). For example, in 19th-century Madagascar, all members of Merina society conducted
new-year renewal ceremonies in which they called upon their ancestors to bless them, and the same ritual bath
was repeated in every household, from commoner to royal (Bloch 1987). These rituals, which took place at the
beginning of the agricultural season, involved blessings from superior to junior: master to servant, ancestors to
elders to children, father to son, and king to subjects.
They not only served to legitimize authority but, more significant, also provided a forum for advancing royal
power, particularly after the often violent succession of a new king. In addition, gifts were presented from junior
to senior, resulting in the kings receiving large amounts of tribute. Kus and Raharijaona (1998, 2000) discuss the
traditional rites and other features (e.g., palace layout, cardinal directions, sacred places, and objects) co-opted
by Merina royals to emphasize their sanctified right to rule and their ties with their subjects.
Once in power, rulers can create new rituals for public as well as private or restricted consumption. For example,
early Frankish kings in the Middle Ages were anointed with the same oil used to baptize the first Christian Frank, St.
Clovis (Giesey 1985). The kings first entrance into Paris was celebrated by enactments of Cloviss baptism along
his route. After 1550, however, the content of celebrations in Paris shifted to the king himself. In the 18th century
the entrance into Paris was dropped, to be replaced by another set of rites revolving around the cult of the Sun
King. Traditional rites were initially replicated, then expanded, and later transformed. When the French kings had
acquired enough economic power they could replace earlier rites with both public and private/restricted ones.


Lisa J. Lucero, The Politics of Ritual
The Emergence of Classic Maya Rulers

Identifying Ancient Ritual


The most promising prehistoric evidence of the relationship between ritual and politics is the social variability
resulting from the dynamic relationship between structure and practice and the way in which political aspirants
expanded upon that variability (Walker and Lucero 2000). Variability and expansion leave telling evidence in the
archaeological record (Schiffer 1976:7). For example, Flannery (1976) proposes that during the more egalitarian
period in Oaxaca, all members of society practiced bloodletting using stingray spines. By the Middle Formative,
however, chiefly individuals appear to have used jade spines, community leaders stingray spines, and the rest
imitation spines made from mammal bones. Chiefs conducted bloodletting rites in increasingly public arenas. The
temporal variability in artifacts and location may indicate the expansion of traditional rituals for larger-scale
religious and presumably political activities. GUNNERY AND SLAVERY
A similar scenario is observed in western Europe from the Neolithic through the Iron Age. The contexts of ritual
deposits did not change through the millennia, but the types of materials used and the quality of manufactured goods
increased and what started as an informal transaction between the living and the gods was transformed into one of
the central political activities in prehistoric society (Bradley 1990:202).
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms


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.


History, structure, and ritual.
John D. Kelly
the definitions of ritual that have been offered have tended to share a presupposition about their object. In part
because many rituals are indigenously represented as "ancient" and unchang-ing, rituals unlike riots, for example-
carry an albatross of connections to "tradition," the sacred, to structures that have generally been imagined in stasis.
While riots are obviously events in history [it took an E. P. Thompson (249) to demonstrate that they also exist as
types of events in cultural fields], scholars have had a great deal of difficulty conceiving of rituals as anything more
concrete than types of events. Until recently the unique ritual event has been an anomaly, understood only when the
function or transformation is discovered that identifies its place in structure. It is the possibility that rituals are
historical events that now intrigues many anthropologists. To review these changes in problematics, fascinations,
and agendas in the anthropology of ritual, we examine powerful images that have come to stand for ways of
connecting ritual, structure, and history. the reconsiderations of the nature of "ritual." In this review, we
examine the fate of only three important anthropological images of ritual, in the turn to history: the divine king, the
cargo cult, and carnival. We choose each for particular problems that have come to surround the image. Recent
reconsiderations of the rituals and histories of kingship have reopened basic questions about the power of rituals to
structure society. Do the rituals of kings make structureo r superstructure?D o rituals make structure only in some
societies, or in all? The questions about divine kings changed when anthropology abandoned evolutionary historical
models, and they have changed again as anthropology returns to history. Next, the cargo cult is important in the
anthropological imagination as an image of ritual in social change among "others" who are not simply different
from, but also connected to a colonizing Europe. In the turn to history, anthropologists now ask, what is the role of
ritual in a terrain of first encounters, missionization, colonized societies, exploitation, and nationalist struggles?
Finally, carnival is of interest especially as a favorite image of anti-structure, from the Manchester school to the
postmodemists. How does carnival anti-structure relate to structure and to history?



Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion:
A Discussion of Victor Turner's Processual Symbolic Analysis (Mathieu Deflem)

Rituals as Symbolic Action
Turner (1967:19) defined ritual as "prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine,
having reference to beliefs in mystical beings and powers." Likewise, a symbol is the smallest unit of ritual which
still retains the specific properties of ritual behavior; it is a "storage unit" filled with a vast amount of information
(Turner 1968a:1-2). Symbols can be objects, activities, words, relationships, events, gestures, or spatial units (Turner
1967:19). Ritual, religious beliefs, and symbols are in Turner's perspective essentially related. He expressed this
well in another definition: Ritual is "a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects,
performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors'
goal and interests" (Turner 1977a:183). Rituals are storehouses of meaningful symbols by which information is
revealed and regarded as authoritative, as dealing with the crucial values of the community (Turner 1968a:2). Not
only do symbols reveal crucial social and religious values; they are also (precisely because of their reference to the
supernatural) transformative for human attitudes and behavior. The handling of symbols in ritual exposes
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

their powers to act upon and change the persons involved in ritual performance. In sum, Turner's definition of ritual
refers to ritual performances involving manipulation of symbols that refer to religious beliefs.


The tendency to think of ritual as essentially unchanging has gone hand in hand with the equally common
assumption that effective rituals cannot be invented. Until very recently, most peoples commonsense notion of
ritual meant that someone could not simply dream up a rite that would work the way traditional ritual has worked.
Such a phenomenon, if it could happen, would seem to undermine the important roles given to community, custom,
and consensus in our understanding of religion and ritual. As Ronald Grimes notes, Psychologists have treated
private ritual as synonymous with neurosis. Theologians have regarded self-generated rites as lacking in moral
character because they minimize social responsibility. And anthropologists have thought of ritual as traditional,
collective representation, implying that the notion of individual or invented ritual was a contradiction in terms.



Lisa J. Lucero, The Politics of Ritual:
The Emergence of Classic Maya Rulers.
When rulers sponsor public events (e.g., feasts and ceremonies), they touch emotions (Rappaport 1999:49, 226),
but these events are temporary and soon forgotten. Political actors need strategies that result in long-term benefits.
Therefore they typically associate themselves with rituals that revolve around vital elements of life (e.g. rain,
agricultural fertility, and ancestor veneration) conducted according to set schedules in special places (Cohen
1974:135). Their association with traditional or social conventions leads to the sanctification or uncritical
acceptance of their special powers (Rappaport 1971; 1999:281; see also Geertz 1980:12931; Webster 1976)
because subjects believe that the holders of exclusive knowledge and skill are closer to the supernatural realm
(Friedman and Rowlands 1978).

domestic rituals never leave the home. Rulers replicate and expand them but do not replace or restrict
them. While all members participate in the larger-scale ceremonies, everyone still performs the domestic rituals
from which former ceremonies derived. Royal rites are superimposed on traditional ones (e.g., Godelier 1977:
188). The fact that everyone, high and low, performs the same rites promotes solidarity and a sense of belonging
(e.g., Kertzer 1988:19).

Identifying Ancient Ritual
The most promising prehistoric evidence of the relationship between ritual and politics is the social variability
resulting from the dynamic relationship between structure and practice and the way in which political aspirants
expanded upon that variability (Walker and Lucero 2000).

A similar scenario is observed in western Europe from the Neolithic through the Iron Age. The contexts of ritual
deposits did not change through the millennia, but the types of materials used and the quality of manufactured goods
increased and what started as an informal transaction between the living and the gods was transformed into one of
the central political activities in prehistoric society (Bradley 1990:202).
The material aspects of ritual that leave traces in the archaeological record include ceremonial and religious
structures, temples, caches of ritual objects, and burials (e.g., Bradley 1990:1014). Because the Maya performed
rituals for nearly every construction phase during the building and rebuilding of houses, palaces, and temples, events
in the life histories of structures result in the creation of interconnected sequential deposits including fill, artifacts in
fill, floor features, and artifacts on floors (Walker and Lucero 2000). Ceramic vessels smashed and burned on floors
differ ritually from whole vessels found in fill under floors. The pots themselves became part of the life history of
the structure (e.g., Gillespie 2001) as their roles changed from domestic vessel to ritually deposited item, whole or
broken (Thomas 1991:57, 63).


a history of rituals is a history of reproduction, contestation, transformation,
and-if we accept carnival as a ritual-deconstruction of authority. How can a new church, school, kingdom, colony,
nation, party, "Common Market," or other "imagined community" come into being except through its own
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

characteristic rituals? Can a state be unmade by a carnival?
History, Structure, and Ritual,
John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan

In tribal societies, as Turner argued, religion, economy, law, politics, and other cultural domains are essentially
interwoven. Tribal rituals, therefore, must have some religious component, since tribal religion in both mythology
and ritual practices has not (yet) split off from other sectors of tribal culture. In industrial societies, on the other
hand, the several institutions have become independent of each other, each of them dealing with certain needs and
questions which these societies face (law, politics, economy, religion, etc.).
Mathieu Deflem, Ritual, anti-structure, and religion
A discussion of Victor Turner's processual symbolic analysis

Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions:
Catherine Bell
The goal of ritualization is a strategic way of acting ritualization of social agents. Ritualization endows these agents
with some degree of ritual mastery. This mastery is an internalization of schemes with which they are capable of
reinterpreting reality in such a way as to afford perceptions and experiences of a redemptive hegemonic order.
Ritualization always aligns one within a series of relationship linked to the ultimate sources of power. Whether ritual
empowers or disempowers one in some practical sense, it always suggests the ultimate coherence of a cosmos in
which one takes a particular place. This cosmos is experienced as a chain of states or an order of existence that
places one securely in a field of action and in alignment with the ultimate goals of all action. Ritualization is
probably an effective way of acting only under certain cultural circumstances.
In brief, it is my general thesis here that ritualization, as a strategic mode of action effective within certain social
orders, does not, in any useful understanding of the words, control individuals or society. Yet ritualization is very
much concerned with power. Closely involved with the objectification and legitimation of an ordering of power as
an assumption of the way things really are, ritualization is a strategic arena for the embodiment of power relations.
Hence, the relationship of ritualization and social control may be better approached in terms of how ritual activities
constitute a specific embodiment and exercise of power.
The deployment of ritualization, consciously or unconsciously, is the deployment of a particular construction of
power relationships, a particular relationship of domination, consent, and resistance. As a strategy of power,
ritualization has both positive and effective aspects as well as specific limits to what it can do and how far it can
extend.
ritual as a form of activity that relies on strategies to render certain
ritual activities distinct, relies on the body which is shaped by and shapes
the environment, and generates traditions, and defines, empowers,
and constrains agents.

Ritual, Politics, and Power. By David I. Kertzer.
Kertzer's book on the relationships among ritual, politics and power could not have come at a better time to enliven
social-scientific debate on the fascinating theme of legitimacy. What is it, for example, that keeps people in different
societies firmly united, despite their individual differences in belief? What keeps most post-colonial African leaders
in power, despite their lack of appeal among the rural masses, who constitute the bulk of the population? These
questions, and others, Kertzer attempts to answer by investigating the socialization role of ritual in different political
systems. Kertzer takes issue with a number of assumptions and misconceptions in the West about the political
significance of ritual in the procurement, consolidation, and perpetuation of power in different polities. According to
Kertzer, some Western intellectuals, rendered myopic by excessive Cartesian rationalism, have tended to associate
ritual exclusively with the political universe of so-called "primitive," "nonliterate," "simple," "nonstate,"
"traditional," or "underdeveloped" societies, thus giving the term a restricted and preponderantly religious definition.
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

In the same way, anthropology has been made to appear as the study of backward societies lacking the complexity
of modern states, while sociology has often been restricted to the study of industrialized or Western-type societies.
Defining ritual broadly as "symbolic behavior that is socially standardized and repetitive" or as "action wrapped in a
web of symbolism," Kertzer argues convincingly that the political action and power of all societies are enveloped in
ritual, and he maintains that it would be difficult to imagine any society functioning otherwise.

Religious Movements and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa
Terence O. Ranger
In this concrete situation of contemporary Africa we are asking what the possibilitiesa re for the powerlessa nd
impoverished masses to participate in the kind of [liberation] theology we described... People at the grassroots react
in face of a growing sense of powerlessness and exploitation. The preponderant reaction is that of people
everywhere who... become convinced that indeed they are... powerless, ignorant, or out of touch with the
mainstream of history. They develop reflexes of inferiority... They try to insulate themselves in a little world of their
own.... [They] are likely to develop strategies of survival that in the long run prove self-defeating. Sometimes they
take refuge in... some type of religious cults, or other distracting hobbies.... People get used to living in a dream
world. It becomes difficult for them to analyse events and realities soberly.... And yet it is the people at the
grassroots that have the potential for meaningful change. Kalilombe remarks that "history has demonstrated time and
again that peasants' potential for bringing about meaningful and lasting change is rarely activated from within
themselves alone.... As a rule the decisive factor comes from outside." But from whom? Not from local African
prophets, living in their dream world; not from leaders of mass nationalism, "who themselves belong to the powerful
classes" and who now oppress the people in their turn; not even from leaders of armed revolution who have all too
often used "the masses to further their own selfish aims [which] has led the people to become suspicious of any
revolutionary firebrands claiming to join with them for liberation." What is needed is true religious liberation
(Kalilombe, 1984): capable of unleashing a power among those who have hitherto been powerless.... People
begin to think for themselves in a critical way....

". . . Kertzer argues convincingly that the political action and power of all societies are enveloped in ritual, and he
maintains that it would be difficult to imagine any society functioning otherwise. Using various examples selected
from different parts of the world or points in history, he shows how political systems have employed and continued
to employ ritual to create or reinforce their symbolically constructed versions of reality. . . .
- Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Political Psychology

Culture, Ideology, and Their Materialization.
Each human being, influenced by experience, has an individualized reality.
To exist outside of an individual's mind, culture is created in daily practice
(Bourdieu I977, Giddens 1984).
Materialization is the transformation of ideas, values, stories, myths, and the like, into a physical reality-a
ceremonial event, a symbolic object, a monument, or a writing system. If we think of culture as norms and values
held in people's heads, it is difficult to understand how culture could be broadly shared at all. Human societies are
inherently fragmented, representing many voices that reflect differences of age, sex, occupation, locality, class, and
individuality (Keesing 1985). Each human being, influenced by experience, has an individualized reality. To exist
outside of an individual's mind, culture is created in daily practice (Bourdieu I977, Giddens i984). Creating material
representation is a central part of this process. Small groups, living closely together as in an extended family, might
have the intimacy and communication to share, to some degree, a particular understanding of the world. Beyond the
family group, however, values and norms are materialized to be shared more broadly. The forms of this
materialization range from storytelling and other performances through the making of symbols and the construction
of mounds and pyramids to writing in all its forms. In speaking of materialization we emphasize the on- going
process of creation and do not assume the primacy of ideas. In fact, ideas and norms are encapsulated as much in
their practice and in the conditions of daily life as in individuals' minds. To materialize culture is to participate in the
part of the ongoing process by which the community was continually redefining and renewing itself.
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, on Victor Turner, Rituals & social equilibrium.

Nature yields nothing without ceremonies. -
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

active, ongoing process of creating and negotiating meaning. Because ideology is part of culture, materialization of
ideology is a similar process, usually undertaken by dominant social segments. Its goal is to facilitate shared
experiences of political culture such as those described by Kus (1989

Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions:
Catherine Bell


The fundamental efficacy of ritual activity
lies in its ability to have people embody assumptions about their place in a larger
order of things.

When new forms of capitalism develop in local communities, do expressive and mutual modes of behavior
expand or decline? When the demands of efficiency increasingly drive material life, do social bonds and
ceremonial moments deteriorate or increase?
But it could also be claimed that economic motivations are heightened by the promise of social prestige gained
through expenditures in support of public rituals; a more subtle argument might suggest that ritual has positive
spillovers to economy by the employment it generates and the materials it requires, some of which are destroyed and
must be replenished. Through the social relationships they generate, rituals also can provide a framework of trust
within which self-interested trade and material acquisition may be conducted.


ritual
BodyPolitic

on ritual politics, the how and why;
Victor Turners The Ritual Process:
Structure and Anti-Structure, Catherine Bells Ritual:
Perspectives and Dimensions, Lisa Luceros The Politics of Ritual
and Ritual, Politics, and Power, David I. Kertzer.

curated by amma birago
for zora neale hurston

You might also like