CHAPTER I
BACKGROUND
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.
Rituals
of various kinds are a feature of almost[citation needed] all known human
societies, past or present. They include not only the various worship rites and
sacraments of organized religions and cults, but also the rites of passage of
certain societies, atonement and purification rites, oaths of allegiance,
dedication ceremonies, coronations and presidential inaugurations, marriages
and funerals, school "rush" traditions and graduations, club
meetings, sports events, Halloween parties, veterans parades, Christmas
shopping and more. Many activities that are ostensibly performed for concrete
purposes, such as jury trials, execution of criminals, and scientific symposia,
are loaded with purely symbolic actions prescribed by regulations or tradition,
and thus partly ritualistic in nature. Even common actions like hand-shaking
and saying hello may be termed rituals.
The
field of ritual studies has seen a number of conflicting definitions of the
term. One given by Kyriakidis is that a ritual is an outsider's or
"etic" category for a set activity (or set of actions) that, to the
outsider, seems irrational, non-contiguous, or illogical. The term can be used
also by the insider or "emic" performer as an acknowledgement that
this activity can be seen as such by the uninitiated onlooker.
In
psychology, the term ritual is sometimes used in a technical sense for a
repetitive behavior systematically used by a person to neutralize or prevent
anxiety; it is a symptom of obsessive–compulsive disorder.
CHAPTER II
DISCUSSION
Etymology
The
English word "ritual" derives from the Latin ritualis, "that
which pertains to rite (ritus)". In Roman juridical and religious usage,
ritus was the proven way (mos) of doing something, or "correct
performance, custom". The original concept of ritus may be related to the
Sanskrit ṛtá ("visible order)" in Vedic
religion, "the lawful and regular order of the normal, and therefore
proper, natural and true structure of cosmic, worldly, human and ritual
events". The word "ritual" is first recorded in English in 1570,
and came into use in the 1600s to mean "the prescribed order of performing
religious services" or more particularly a book of these prescriptions
Characteristics
Of Ritual
There
are hardly any limits to the kind of actions that may be incorporated into a
ritual. The rites of past and present societies have typically involved special
gestures and words, recitation of fixed texts, performance of special music,
songs or dances, processions, manipulation of certain objects, use of special dresses,
consumption of special food, drink, or drugs, and much more
Formalism
Ritual
utilizes a limited and rigidly organized set of expressions which
anthropologists call a "restricted code" (in opposition to a more
open "elaborated code"). Maurice Bloch argues that ritual obliges
participants to use this formal oratorical style, which is limited in
intonation, syntax, vocabulary, loudness, and fixity of order. In adopting this
style, ritual leaders' speech becomes more style than content. Because this formal
speech limits what can be said, it induces "acceptance, compliance, or at
least forbearance with regard to any overt challenge." Bloch argues that
this form of ritual communication makes rebellion impossible and revolution the
only feasible alternative. Ritual tends to support traditional forms of social
hierarchy and authority, and maintains the assumptions on which the authority
is based from challenge.
Traditionalism
The
First Thanksgiving 1621, oil on canvas by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1863–1930).
The painting shows common misconceptions about the event that persist to modern
times: Pilgrims did not wear such outfits, and the Wampanoag are dressed in the
style of Plains Indians.
Rituals
appeal to tradition and are generally concerned to repeat historical precedents
accurately. Traditionalism varies from formalism in that the ritual may not be
formal yet still makes an appeal to historical. An example is the American
Thanksgiving dinner, which may not be formal, yet is ostensibly based on an
event from the early Puritan settlement of America. Historians Eric Hobsbawm
and Terrence Ranger have argued that many of these are invented traditions,
such as the rituals of the British monarchy, which invoke "thousand
year-old tradition" but whose actual form originate in the late nineteenth
century, to some extent reviving earlier forms, in this case medieval, that had
been discontinued in the meantime. Thus, the appeal to history is important
rather than accurate historical transmission
Invariance
Catherine
Bell states that ritual is also invariant, implying careful choreography. This
is less an appeal to traditionalism than a striving for timeless repetition.
The key to invariance is bodily discipline, as in monastic prayer and
meditation meant to mold dispositions and moods. This bodily discipline is
frequently performed in unison, by group
Rule-Governance
Rituals
tend to be governed by rules, a feature somewhat like formalism. Rules impose
norms on the chaos of behavior, either defining the outer limits of what is
acceptable or choreographing each move. Individuals are held to communally
approved customs that evoke a legitimate communal authority that can constrain
the possible outcomes. War in many societies, for example, is bound by highly
ritualized constraints that limit the legitimate means by which fighting can be
conducted.
Sacred
Symbolism
Activities
appealing to supernatural beings are easily considered rituals, although the
appeal may be quite indirect or subtle, expressing only a generalized belief in
the existence of the sacred demanding a human response. National flags, for
example, may be considered more than signs representing a country. In the
United States no one argues the flag is holy, but it stands for larger symbols
such as freedom, democracy, free enterprise or national superiority. Anthropologist
Sherry Ortner writes that the flag does not encourage reflection on the logical
relations among these ideas, nor on the logical consequences of them as they
are played out in social actuality, over time and history. On the contrary, the
flag encourages a sort of all-or-nothing allegiance to the whole package, best
summed [by] 'Our flag, love it or leave.'
Particular
objects become sacral symbols through a process of consecration which
effectively creates the sacred by setting it apart from the profane. Boy Scouts
and the armed forces, for example, teach the "official" ways of
folding, saluting.
Performance
The
performance of ritual creates a theatrical-like frame around the activities,
symbols and events that shape participant's experience and cognitive ordering
of the world, simplifying the chaos of life and imposing a more or less
coherent system of categories of meaning onto it. As Barbara Myerhoff put it, "not only is
seeing believing, doing is believing
Genres
Of Ritual
“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.
Rites
Of Passage
A
rite of passage is a ritual event that marks a person's transition from one
status to another, including birth, coming-of-age, marriage, death as well as
initiation into groups not tied to a formal stage of life such as a fraternity.
Arnold van Gennep stated that rites of passage are marked by three stages:
separation, transition and incorporation. In the first stage, the initiates are
separated from their old identities through physical and symbolic means. In the
transition phase, they are "betwixt and between." Victor Turner
argued that this stage is marked by liminality, a condition of ambiguity or
disorientation in which initiates have been stripped of their old identities,
but have not yet acquired their new one. Turner states "The attributes of
liminality or of liminal personae ("threshold people") are
necessarily ambiguous." In this stage of liminality or
"anti-structure" (see below) the initiates role ambiguity creates a
sense of communitas or emotional bond of community between them. This stage may
be marked by ritual ordeals or ritual training. In the final stage of
incorporation, the initiates are symbolically confirmed in their new identity
and community.
Calendrical
And Commemorative Rites
Calendrical
and commemorative rites are ritual events marking particular times of year, or
a fixed period since an important event. Calendrical rituals give social
meaning to the passage of time, creating repetitive weekly, monthly or yearly
cycles. Some rites are oriented towards seasonal changes, and may be fixed by
the solar or lunar calendar. Those fixed by the solar calendar fall on the same
day (of the Gregorian, Solar calendar) each year (such as New Years Day on the
first of January) while those calculated by the lunar calendar fall on
different dates (of the Gregorian, Solar calendar) each year (such as Chinese
lunar New Year). Calendrical rites impose a cultural order on nature. Mircea
Eliade states that the calendrical rituals of many religious traditions recall
and commemorate the basic beliefs of a community, and their yearly celebration
establishes a link between past and present, as if the original events are
happening over again: "Thus the gods did; thus men do."
Rites
Of Exchange And Communion
This
genre of ritual encompasses forms of sacrifice and offering meant to praise,
please or placate divine powers. According to early anthropologist Edward
Tylor, such sacrifices are gifts given in hope of a return. Catherine Bell,
however, points out that sacrifice covers a range of practices from those that
are manipulative and "magical" to those of pure devotion. Hindu puja,
for example, appear to have no other purpose than to please the deity.
According
to Marcel Mauss, sacrifice is distinguished from other forms of offering by
being consecrated, and hence sanctified. As a consequence, the offering is
usually destroyed in the ritual to transfer it to the deities.
Rites
Of Affliction
Anthropologist
Victor Turner defines rites of affliction actions that seek to mitigate spirits
that inflict humans with misfortune. These rites may include forms of spirit
divination (consulting oracles) to establish causes—and rituals that heal,
purify, exorcise, and protect. The misfortune experienced may include
individual health, but also broader climate-related issues such as drought or
plagues of insects. Healing rites performed by shamans frequently identify
social disorder as the cause, and make the restoration of social relationships
the cure.
Turner
uses the example of the Isoma ritual among the Ndembu of northwestern Zambia to
illustrate. The Isoma rite of affliction is used to cure a childless woman of
infertility. Infertility is the result of a "structural tension between
matrilineal descent and virilocal marriage" (i.e., the tension a woman
feels between her mother's family, to whom she owes allegiance, and her
husband's family among whom she must live). "It is because the woman has
come too closely in touch with the 'man's side' in her marriage that her dead
matrikin have impaired her fertility." To correct the balance of
matrilinial descent and marriage, the Isoma ritual dramatically placates the
deceased spirits by requiring the woman to reside with her mother's kin.
Masquerade
At The Carnival Of Venice.
Shamanic
and other ritual may effect a psychotherapeutic cure, leading anthropologists
such as Jane Atkinson to theorize how. Atkinson argues that the effectiveness
of a shamanic ritual for an individual may depend upon a wider audiences
acknowledging the shaman's power, which may lead to the shaman placing greater
emphasis on engaging the audience than in the healing of the patient.
Rites
Of Feasting, Fasting And Festivals
Rites
of feasting and fasting are those through which a community publicly expresses
an adherence to basic, shared religious values, rather than to the overt
presence of deities as is found in rites of affliction where feasting or
fasting may also take place. It encompasses a range of performances such as
communal fasting during Ramadan by Muslims; the slaughter of pigs in New
Guinea; Carnival festivities; or penitential processions in Catholicism.[30]
Victor Turner described this "cultural performance" of basic values a
"social drama." Such dramas allow the social stresses that are
inherent in a particular culture to be expressed and worked out symbolically in
a ritual catharsis; as the social tensions continue to persist outside the
ritual, pressure mounts for the ritual's cyclical performance. In Carnaval, for
example, the practice of masking allows people to be what they are not, and
acts as a general social leveller, erasing otherwise tense social hierarchies
in a festival that emphasizes play outside the bounds of normal social limits.
Yet outside carnival, social tensions of race, class and gender persist, hence
requiring the repeated periodic release found in the festival.
Political
Rituals
According
to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, political rituals actually construct power;
that is, in his analysis of the Balinese state, he argued that rituals are not
an ornament of political power, but that the power of political actors depends
upon their ability to create rituals and the cosmic framework within which the
social hierarchy headed by the king is perceived as natural and sacred. As a
"dramaturgy of power" comprehensive ritual systems may create a
cosmological order that sets a ruler apart as a divine being, as in "the
divine right" of European kings, or the divine Japanese Emperor.
Ritual
can be used as a form of resistance, as for example, in the various Cargo Cults
that developed against colonial powers in the South Pacific. In such
religio-political movements, Islanders would use ritual imitations of western
practices (such as the building of landing strips) as a means of summoning
cargo (manufactured goods) from the ancestors. Leaders of these groups
characterized the present state (often imposed by colonial capitalist regimes)
as a dismantling of the old social order, which they sought to restore.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL
THEORIES OF RITUAL
Functionalism
Nineteenth
century "armchair anthropologists" were concerned with the basic
question of how religion originated in human history. In the twentieth century
their conjectural histories were replaced with new concerns around the question
of what these beliefs and practices did for societies, regardless of their
origin. In this view, religion was a universal, and while its content might
vary enormously, it served certain basic functions such as the provision of
prescribed solutions to basic human psychological and social problems, as well
as expressing the central values of a society. Bronislaw Malinowski used the
concept of function to address questions of individual psychological needs; A.
R. Radcliffe-Brown, in contrast, looked for the function (purpose) of the
institution or custom in preserving or maintaining society as a whole. They
thus disagreed about the relationship of anxiety to ritual.
Malinowski
argued that ritual was a non-technical means of addressing anxiety about
activities where dangerous elements were beyond technical control: "magic
is to be expected and generally to be found whenever man comes to an
unbridgeable gap, a hiatus in his knowledge or in his owes of practical
control, and yet has to continue in his pursuit. Radcliffe-Brown in contrast,
saw ritual as an expression of common interest symbolically representing a
community, and that anxiety was felt only if the ritual was not performed.[38]
George C. Homans sought to resolve these opposing theories by differentiating
between "primary anxieties" felt by people who lack the techniques to
secure results, and "secondary (or displaced) anxiety" felt by those
who have not performed the rites meant to allay primary anxiety correctly.
Homans argued that purification rituals may then be conducted to dispel
secondary anxiety.
A.R.
Radcliffe-Brown argued that ritual should be distinguished from technical
action, viewing it as a structured event: "ritual acts differ from
technical acts in having in all instances some expressive or symbolic element
in them. Edmund Leach, in contrast, saw ritual and technical action less as
separate structural types of activity and more as a spectrum: "Actions
fall into place on a continuous scale. At one extreme we have actions which are
entirely profane, entirely functional, technique pure and simple; at the other
we have actions which are entirely sacred, strictly aesthetic, technically
non-functional. Between these two extremes we have the great majority of social
actions which partake partly of the one sphere and partly of the other. From
this point of view technique and ritual, profane and sacred, do not denote
types of action but aspects of almost any kind of action.
Ritual
As Social Control
The
Functionalist model viewed ritual as a homeostatic mechanism to regulate and
stabilize social institutions by adjusting social interactions, maintaining a
group ethos, and restoring harmony after disputes.
Although
the Functionalist model was soon superseded, later "neofunctional"
theorists adopted its approach by examining the ways that ritual regulated
larger ecological systems. Roy Rappaport, for example, examined the way gift
exchanges of pigs between tribal groups in Papua New Guinea maintained
environmental balance between humans, available food (with pigs sharing the same
foodstuffs as humans) and resource base. Rappaport concluded that ritual,
"...helps to maintain an undegraded environment, limits fighting to
frequencies which do not endanger the existence of regional population, adjusts
man-land ratios, facilitates trade, distributes local surpluses of pig
throughout the regional population in the form of pork, and assures people of
high quality protein when they are most in need of it. Similarly, Stephen
Lansing traced how the intricate calendar of Hindu Balinese rituals served to
regulate the vast irrigation systems of Bali, ensuring the optimum distribution
of water over the system while limiting disputes.
Rituals
Of Rebellion
While
most Functionalists sought to link ritual to the maintenance of social order,
South African functionalist anthropologist Max Gluckman coined the phrase
"rituals of rebellion" to describe a type of ritual in which the
accepted social order was symbolically turned on its head. He observed, for
example, how the first-fruits festival (incwala) of the South African Bantu
kingdom of Swaziland symbolically inverted the normal social order, so that the
king was publicly insulted, women asserted their domination over men, and the
established authority of elders over the young was turned upside down. Gluckman
argued that the ritual was an expression of underlying social tensions (an idea
taken up by Victor Turner), and that it functioned as an institutional pressure
valve, relieving those tensions through these cyclical performances. The rites
ultimately functioned to reinforce social order, insofar as they allowed those
tensions to be expressed without leading to actual rebellion. Carnival is
viewed in the same light.
Structuralism
Claude
Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, regarded all social and cultural
organization as symbolic systems of communication shaped by the inherent
structure of the human brain. He therefore argued that the symbol systems are
not reflections of social structure as the Functionalists believed, but are
imposed on social relations to organize them. Lévi-Strauss thus viewed myth and
ritual as complementary symbol systems, one verbal, one non-verbal.
Lévi-Strauss was not concerned to develop a theory of ritual (although he did
produce a four-volume analysis of myth) but was influential to later scholars
of ritual such as Mary Douglas and Edmund Leach.
Structure
And Anti-Structure
Victor
Turner combined Van Gennep's model of the structure of initiation rites, and
Gluckman's functionalist emphasis on the ritualization of social conflict to
maintain social equilibrium, with a more structural model of symbols in ritual.
Running counter to this emphasis on structured symbolic oppositions within a
ritual was his exploration of the liminal phase of rites of passage, a phase in
which "anti-structure" appears. In this phase, opposed states such as
birth and death may be encompassed by a single act, object or phrase. The
dynamic nature of symbols experienced in ritual provides a compelling personal
experience; ritual is a "mechanism that periodically converts the
obligatory into the desirable.
Mary
Douglas, a British Functionalist, extended Turner's theory of ritual structure
and anti-structure with her own contrasting set of terms "grid" and
"group" in the book Natural Symbols. Drawing on Levi-Strauss'
Structuralist approach, she saw ritual as symbolic communication that
constrained social behaviour. Grid is a scale referring to the degree to which
a symbolic system is a shared frame of reference. Group refers to the degree
people are tied into a tightly knit community. When graphed on two intersecting
axes, four quadrants are possible: strong group/strong grid, strong group/weak
grid, weak group/weak grid, weak group/strong grid. Douglas argued that
societies with strong group or strong grid were marked by more ritual activity
than those weak in either group or grid (see also, section "Ritual as a
Methodological Measure of Religiosity" below).
Anti-Structure
And Communitas
In
his analysis of rites of passage, Victor Turner argued that the liminal phase -
that period 'betwixt and between' - was marked by "two models of human
interrelatedness, juxtaposed and alternating": structure and anti-structure
(or communitas). While the ritual clearly articulated the cultural ideals of a
society through ritual symbolism, the unrestrained festivities of the liminal
period served to break down social barriers and to join the group into an
undifferentiated unity with "no status, property, insignia, secular
clothing, rank, kinship position, nothing to demarcate themselves from their
fellows. These periods of symbolic inversion have been studied in a diverse
range of rituals such as pilgrimages and Yom kippur.
Social
Dramas
Beginning
with Max Gluckman's concept of "rituals of rebellion", Victor Turner
argued that many types of ritual also served as "social dramas"
through which structural social tensions could be expressed, and temporarily
resolved. Drawing on Van Gennep's model of initiation rites, Turner viewed
these social dramas as a dynamic process through which the community renewed
itself through the ritual creation of communitas during the "liminal
phase". Turner analyzed the ritual events in 4 stages: breach in
relations, crisis, redressive actions, and acts of reintegration. Like
Gluckman, he argued these rituals maintain social order while facilitating
disordered inversions, thereby moving people to a new status, just as in an
initiation rite.
Symbolic
Approaches To Ritual
“Arguments,
melodies, formulas, maps and pictures are not idealities to be stared at but
texts to be read; so are rituals, palaces, technologies, and social formations”
Clifford
Geertz also expanded on the symbolic approach to ritual that began with Victor
Turner. Geertz argued that religious symbol systems provided both a "model
of" reality (showing how to interpret the world as is) as well as a
"model for" reality (clarifying its ideal state). The role of ritual,
according to Geertz, is to bring these two aspects - the "model of"
and the "model for" - together: "it is in ritual - that is
consecrated behaviour - that this conviction that religious conceptions are
veridical and that religious directives are sound is somehow generated.
Symbolic
anthropologists like Geertz analyzed rituals as language-like codes to be
interpreted independently as cultural systems. Geertz rejected Functionalist
arguments that ritual describes social order, arguing instead that ritual
actively shapes that social order and imposes meaning on disordered experience.
He also differed from Gluckman and Turner's emphasis on ritual action as a
means of resolving social passion, arguing instead that it simply displayed
them.
Ritual
As A Form Of Communication
Whereas
Victor Turner saw in ritual the potential to release people from the binding
structures of their lives into a liberating anti-structure or communitas,
Maurice Bloch argued that ritual produced conformity.
Maurice
Bloch argued that ritual communication is unusual in that it uses a special,
restricted vocabulary, a small number of permissible illustrations, and a
restrictive grammar. As a result, ritual utterances become very predictable,
and the speaker is made anonymous in that they have little choice in what to
say. The restrictive syntax reduces the ability of the speaker to make
propositional arguments, and they are left, instead, with utterances that
cannot be contradicted such as "I do thee wed" in a wedding. These
kinds of utterances, known as performatives, prevent speakers from making
political arguments through logical argument, and are typical of what Weber
called traditional authority instead.
Bloch's
model of ritual language denies the possibility of creativity. Thomas Csordas,
in contrast, analyzes how ritual language can be used to innovate. Csordas
looks at groups of rituals that share performative elements ("genres"
of ritual with a shared "poetics"). These rituals may fall along the
spectrum of formality, with some less, others more formal and restrictive.
Csordas argues that innovations may be introduced in less formalized rituals.
As these innovations become more accepted and standardized, they are slowly
adopted in more formal rituals. In this way, even the most formal of rituals
are potential avenues for creative expression.
Ritual
As A Disciplinary Program
Scriptorium-monk-at-work.
"Monks described this labor of transcribing manuscripts as being 'like
prayer and fasting, a means of correcting one's unruly passions.
In
his historical analysis of articles on ritual and rite in the Encyclopedia
Britannica, Talal Asad notes that from 1771 to 1852, the brief articles on
ritual define it as a "book directing the order and manner to be observed
in performing divine service" (i.e., as a script). There are no articles
on the subject thereafter until 1910, when a new, lengthy article appeared that
redefines ritual as "...a type of routine behaviour that symbolizes or
expresses something. As a symbolic
activity, it is no longer confined to religion, but is distinguished from
technical action. The shift in definitions from script to behavior, which is
likened to a text, is matched by a semantic distinction between ritual as an
outward sign (i.e., public symbol) and inward meaning. The emphasis has changed
to establishing the meaning of public symbols and abandoning concerns with
inner emotional states since, as Evans-Pritchard wrote "such emotional
states, if present at all, must vary not only from individual to individual,
but also in the same individual on different occasions and even at different
points in the same rite. Asad, in contrast, emphasizes behavior and inner
emotional states; rituals are to be performed, and mastering these performances
is a skill requiring disciplined action. "In other words, apt performance
involves not symbols to be interpreted but abilities to be acquired according
to rules that are sanctioned by those in authority: it presupposes no obscure
meanings, but rather the formation of physical and linguistic skills. Drawing on the example of Medieval monastic
life in Europe, he points out that ritual in this case refers to its original
meaning of the "...book directing the order and manner to be observed in
performing divine service." This book "prescribed practices, whether
they had to do with the proper ways of eating, sleeping, working, and praying
or with proper moral dispositions and spiritual aptitudes, aimed at developing
virtues that are put 'to the service of God. Monks, in other words, were
disciplined in the Foucauldian sense. The point of monastic discipline was to
learn skills and appropriate emotions. Asad contrasts his approach by
concluding "Symbols call for interpretation, and even as interpretive
criteria are extended so interpretations can be multiplied. Disciplinary
practices, on the other hand, cannot be varied so easily, because learning to
develop moral capabilities is not the same thing as learning to invent
representations.
Ritual
And Ritualization
Asad's
work critiqued the notion that there were universal characteristics of ritual
to be found in all cases. Catherine Bell has extended this idea by shifting
attention from ritual as a category, to the processes of
"ritualization" by which ritual is created as a cultural form in a
society. Ritualization is "a way of acting that is designed and
orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to
other, usually more quotidian, activities.
Ritual
And Religion
In
religion, a ritual can comprise the prescribed outward forms of performing the
cultus, or cult, of a particular observation within a religion or religious
denomination. Although ritual is often used in context with worship performed
in a church, the actual relationship between any religion's doctrine and its
ritual(s) can vary considerably from organized religion to
non-institutionalized spirituality, such as ayahuasca shamanism as practiced by
the Urarina of the upper Amazon. Rituals often have a close connection with
reverence, thus a ritual in many cases expresses reverence for a deity or
idealized state of humanity.
Ritual
As A Methodological Measure Of Religiosity
According
to the sociologist Mervin Verbit, ritual may be understood as one of the key
components of religiosity. And ritual itself may be broken down into four
dimensions; content, frequency, intensity and centrality. The content of a
ritual may vary from ritual to ritual, as does the frequency of its practice,
the intensity of the ritual (how much of an impact it has on the practitioner),
and the centrality of the ritual (in that religious tradition).
CHAPTER III
CONCLUSION
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.
REFERENCES
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual
