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January 16, 2015

Miss Ae-Soh Raheem

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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 tá ("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

Uthammy Lizza

NPM: 146224034


The Tragedy of King Hamlet
by William Shakespeare

Originally titled The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, this tragedy has been reproduced more times than any other play written by William Shakespeare. Prince Hamlet also has the lengthiest appearance of any character in all of Shakespeare's plays. In the play, Prince Hamlet is caught between balancing his need to avenge his father's death, dealing with the disgust he felt for Gertrude and Claudius' love affair, and maintaining the relationship he has with Ophelia without exposing his plans to kill his uncle Claudius for the murder of King Hamlet.

During the first act, Prince Hamlet meets the ghost of his father, King Hamlet. His father's ghost tells Hamlet that Claudius poured poison in his ear while he slept. The spirit also explains that he wishes for Hamlet to avenge his death, but not to punish Queen Gertrude for marrying Claudius. He tells Hamlet that she will have to answer to her conscience, and eventually God for her incestuous actions. It was believed during these times that when a person died, especially in such a tragic fashion, that their spirit lingered about while suffering in Purgatory. This could cause a normally virtuous person's spirit to become filled with malevolence and begin to meddle in living men's affairs. This belief caused Prince Hamlet to want to investigate his father's spirit's claims to ensure that they were indeed true. In order to do this, Prince Hamlet feigns madness in order to remain hidden from members of the court's suspicions while he plots his revenge on King Claudius. He also takes advantage of a group of actors who come to Elsinore Castle to perform by rewriting a play to recreate the scene of his father's murder. He does this with the hope of flushing a confession out of Claudius' guilty conscience. When Claudius sees the play, he stands up and leaves the room After many more events, Claudius' guilt becomes more obvious. Claudius then begins to change his focus towards killing Hamlet, as he is beginning to become aware of the Prince's plans to kill him. Claudius then arranges a fencing match between Hamlet and Polonius' son Laertes and has Laertes poison the blade of one of his swords to be used in the match (Hamlet). Hamlet scores the first hit during the match, and Claudius offers Hamlet a congratulatory drink from a goblet of wine that Claudius had previously poisoned without anyone's knowledge. Hamlet declines to drink, but his mother Gertrude accepted the poisoned wine for him. Hamlet is then wounded by Laertes' poison sword and continues the match unaware of his impending death. During the match, Gertrude dies after telling Hamlet that she had been poisoned by Claudius' wine. Hamlet then stabs Claudius through with the poisoned sword and forces him to drink down the rest of the poisoned wine. Claudius dies, and Hamlet dies shortly after finally avenging King Hamlet.

During Hamlet's first soliloquy we learn that he does not approve of King Claudius taking Queen Gertrude as his wife so quickly after King Hamlet's death. Not only did Hamlet disapprove of Claudius' and Gertrude's marriage, but at that time, the Church of England also considered a widow's marriage to her deceased husband's brother to be an incestuous affair. Queen Gertrude is somewhat saved from Hamlet's lust for vengeance, as his father's ghost told Hamlet to spare her from persecution for her actions. However, this does not stop Hamlet from verbally berating her from time to time throughout the play. Hamlet does not understand his mother's need for protection and comfort, and this hurts him. He feels that her marriage to Claudius so quickly after King Hamlet's death dishonors his father's memory (Hamlet).

Many things helped prevent Ophelia and Hamlet from being able to express their love for each other openly. In Act I, Ophelia's brother Laertes warns Ophelia not to fall in love with Hamlet, as he states she would only be hurt by the relationship Shortly after this, Ophelia's father Polonius tells her not to show Hamlet any affection, as he is only using her for his own benefit During the second act, Polonius is told by Ophelia that Hamlet came to her with his clothes ragged, and then he anxiously studied her face and quickly left. Polonius then assumes Hamlet is behaving this way because he is mad with love for Ophelia, and he cannot bear that she is no longer acknowledging Hamlet's love. In Act III, King Claudius and Polonius listen in on a private conversation between Prince Hamlet and Ophelia while hiding out of sight. During the conversation, Hamlet grows suspicious of Ophelia's intentions. He seems to have no love for Ophelia whatsoever when he orders her away to a nunnery and denounces marriage in general. Prince Hamlet later tries to tell Ophelia that he is only pretending to be mad during the performance being put on by the visiting actors. He hopes that she will be able to wait for him until after he avenges his father's murder. This however, never happens as Ophelia becomes insane after her father is killed at the hands of Hamlet, and somehow drowns herself shortly thereafter (Hamlet). 


Throughout this play, Hamlet fully devotes himself to avenging his father's death while trying to hold together the pieces of his life that matter to him. He focuses on holding onto his love for Ophelia while keeping her far enough away from him to protect her from any misguided retribution that might have occurred while he plotted to assassinate King Claudius. At the same time, Hamlet was fighting an inner struggle between his own view of his mother as a frail, needy woman who cares nothing of her own image as long as she has a man to share her bed with, and the order his father gave to him to not seek vengeance upon her for what she had done. In the end, it might have been better for Hamlet had he not tried to seek revenge at all. When he did finally accomplish his goal, he had traded everything he loved for it, including his own life.      

Uthamy Lizza

NPM: 146224034


Mikhail Bakhtin

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin ( 1895–1975) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language. His writings, on a variety of subjects, inspired scholars working in a number of different traditions (Marxism, semiotics, structuralism, religious criticism) and in disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and psychology. Although Bakhtin was active in the debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, his distinctive position did not become well known until he was rediscovered by Russian scholars in the 1960s.

The Bakhtin Circle, centered on the work of Bakhtin, addressed philosophically the social and cultural issues posed by the Russian Revolution and its degeneration into the Stalin dictatorship. Their work focused on the centrality of questions of significance in social life in general and artistic creation in particular, examining the way in which language registered the conflicts between social groups. The key views of the circle are that linguistic production is essentially dialogic, formed in the process of social interaction, and that this leads to the interaction of different social values being registered in terms of reaccentuation of the speech of others. While the ruling stratum tries to posit a single discourse as exemplary, the subordinate classes are inclined to subvert this monologic closure. In the sphere of literature, poetry and epics represent the centripetal forces within the cultural arena whereas the novel is the structurally elaborated expression of popular ideologiekritik, the radical criticism of society. Members of the circle included Matvei Isaevich Kagan (1889-1937); Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev (1891-1938); Lev Vasilievich Pumpianskii (1891-1940); Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinskii (1902-1944); Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov (1895-1936); Mariia Veniaminovna Iudina (1899-1970); and others. (Craig Brandist, IEP)

Definition Carnivalesque is a term used in the English translations of works written by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, which refers to a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos. Bakhtin traces the origins of the carnivalesque to the concept of carnival, itself related to the Feast of Fools, a medieval festival originally of the sub-deacons of the cathedral, held about the time of the Feast of the Circumcision (1 January), in which the humbler cathedral officials burlesqued the sacred ceremonies, releasing "the natural lout beneath the cassock." Also Bakhtin derives carnival and the carnivalization of literature from the reign of the “Seriocomical” with the examples of Socratic dialogues and Menippean satire. Within the Socratic dialogue carnival affects all people into the behavior and rituals in to the carnivalistic life, as in every individual is affected by carnival, meaning everyone is a constant participant of carnival. In the base of examples from the Menippean satire, the relativity of joy that subverts and creates a syncretic pageant that with humor and grotesque it weds and combines the sacred with the profane.


Carnival – M. Bakhtin

In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin presents us both with a theory of carnival, andwith an account of the historical decline of the carnivalesque since the Renaissance. This thesis uses Bakhtin's work as a point of departure for an analysis of particular moments in the history of post-Renaissance comic theory. It is argued both Bakhtin's account of carnivalesque decline provides us with a potent framework within which to perform such an analysis, and that this in turn facilitates a thorough interrogation of, and engagement with, Bakhtin's theory of carnival. (Ben Taylor, BA.MA,1995).

Since the mid 1990s, many anarchists and Marxists, drawing on the writings of Hakim Bey, the Situationist International and Mikhail Bakhtin, have increasingly articulated the concept of 'carnival' as a valuable form of resistance that merges the political and the aesthetic. This essay looks at these writings and the cases they make, and examines the extent to which they form a coherent body of thought. The central texts under discussion will be Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and fIis World, Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life and Hakim Bey's TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. It's a sunny afternoon, and I find myself between two uniformed groups of people, pressed nose to nose (or rather helmet to helmet) against each other, neither side apparently much willing to move. On one side are the police, equipped with the latest in riot gear. Pushing against them are a group of men and women dressed in white overalls, equipped with cycle helmets, rubber rings, bubblewrap and stuffed toys sellotaped together into what seems a surprisingly effective parody of the officers' protective clothing. Behind them, in the space they're keeping the police from entering, are a crowd made up of dancing punks, fairies, stilt-walkers, ravel'S, feminists, anarchists and Marxists of every hue, people in fancy dress, people completely undressed, and a noisy meeting of street drummers, samba bands, and a pedal-powered sound system. There is an equal cacophony of ideologies in this space; black flags, red flags, green flags, flags with stars, multicoloured gay pride flags and banners demanding liberation for diverse human and animal groups.

This is a carnival against capitalism, as if thousands of people had decided to take Emma Goldman's famous attributed proclamation that 'if I can't dance, it's not my revolution' quite literally. It is a cultural and political phenomenon that has been growing rapidly since its conception in the early 1990s. This phenomenon has a modem lineage stretching back to the 'No MIl Link Road' campaign and the carnivalesque occupation of Claremont Road in London in 1993.

1.      After Claremont Road, carnival appeared as a conscious form of action 147 ANARCHIST STUDIES throughout the 1990s, most noticeably with Reclaim the Streets, a group who drew heavily on the ideas put forward in Hakim Bey's The Temporary Autonomous Zone. These events coalesced into the first 'global street party' held in cities across the world on 16 May 1998 the day of a G8 summit meeting in Birmingham. These 'parties' in tum developed into the more general 'carnivals against capitalism' which have marked the form of protest against globalisation and neoliberalism (amongst other things) since.

Between the works of Bakhtin, the Situationist International and modern anarchist theory, particularly the writing of Hakim Bey, there is a continual return to a shared constellation of ideas, which makes a comparative analysis of their ideas productive. Each theoryses joy and desire as the basis of a culturally and politically radical event wInch they variously term as a 'carnival', 'festival', 'situation' or a 'temporary autonomous zone'. In each case this event embodies a number of related qualities.
2.      It is seen as a politicalIy radical fusion of life and art, a realisation of joy and desire in the form of a broadly anarchistic micro-society.

The popular cultures of the Middle Ages and early modernity have proven to be an exceptionally rich subject of research that attracted great minds such as Umberto Ecoʼs, Peter Burkes (1978), and Piero Camporesi 1994. the carnival culture is understood as an inversion of the prevailing order; a challenge to the ruling elites in Rabelais period in which is contained a universalization of the culture of laughter that makes it relevant  for the historical reality in which Bakhtin lives and works: the 930s Soviet Union ruled by Stalin, where Bakhtinʼs study questions Stalinʼs homogenization of politics and culture, the purges, the increasing strangling of the Russian avantgarde by the workings of a monolithic censorship. Because according to Bakhtin laughter is universal it is also ambivalent, and thus censorable only at the price of being ludicrous to the point of being tragic (some yearsago, at Houston airport passengers were reminded that “joking about the security measures will lead to your arrest”, Echavarría/Koppensteiner 2008). Bakhtin and Carneval Culture Twentieth-century  Russian literary critic and semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin developed an epistemology that linked carnival, authority, and laughter. Drawing on his work, the author investigates hidden parent-child interactions and children’s discourse in early-childhood play. She argues that Bakhtin’s ideas of carnival and its discourses apply to young children’s pretend play. Early-childhood play, she holds, bridges the gap between authoritative and internally persuasive discourse, much as does the mockery of hierarchical order during the carnival festivals described by Bakhtin.

Bakhtin wrote about the carnivals and popular festivals of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, tracing the history of class distinction as expressed in mono-logic versus dialogic modes of communicating. He viewed carnival as an act of rebellion, one of satire and playfulness. He suggested that an individual in the Middle Ages lived two lives an official life subjected to the hierarchy of the social order and everyday existence and an unofficial carnival life freed of daily social norms and restrictions. In his prologue to Rabelais and His World, Michael Holquist urges the reader to approach Bakhtin’swork as double voiced as a scholarly account of a long tradition of folk culture reaching its fullest expression in the Middle Ages and as a subversively satirical attack on many specific aspects of official Stalinist repression in force in the 1930s Soviet Union at the time of Bakhtin’s writing (1984 b). Bakhtin suggests that the ambivalence of the carnival experience manifests itself in laughter, feasts, and images of the grotesque body.For Bakhtin “the unofficial carnival is people’s second life, organized on the basis of laughter” (1984b, 8).

Carnival is a way of breaking down barriers, of overcoming power inequalities and hierarchies. Festive life is achieved through the playful mockery of hierarchical order by individuals oppressed by it. Through free and familiar interactions, carnival offers a temporary way of experiencing the fullness of life. (Bakhtin’s Carnival and Pretend Role Play, Lynn E. Cohen).

The Carnival, then, is sanctioned, permitted revelry in which the rigid order of the world during the rest of the year is thrown off.  Inverted power relationships are temporarily celebrated.  Carnivalesque imagery in fiction draws on the qualities mentioned below.  These qualities are indicative of the traditions and the spirit of this celebratory nature of the Carnival, and in turn wrestles with the capacity of such imagery to truly upset power.  

One of the qualities of the Carnival was that everyone would temporarily dress up as something they were not the rest of the year.  This is true of our Halloween where you can dress up as something you would never be otherwise.  Because of this, there was a spirit of possibility in the Carnival; one could be anything, one was not bound by any limits.  It is this spirit of possibility that most characterizes the Carnival. The Carnival was characterized by laughter, by celebration, by a throwing off of seriousness.  If the rest of the year was dedicated work or serious devotion in church, then the Carnival was a time of laughter and celebration.  But there was also a certain type of laughter, typically open public mocking laughter directed towards authority. (Francois Rabelais (1532-1564), Rabelais and His World).

Carnival festivities and the comic spectacles and ritual connected with them had an  important place in the life of medieval man. Besides carnivals proper, with their long  and complex pageants and processions, there was the 'feast of fools' (festa stultorum) and the 'feast of the ass'; there was a special free 'Easter laughter' (risus paschalis), consecrated by tradition. Moreover, nearly every Church feast had its comic folk  aspect, which  was also traditionally recognized. (Passages taken from Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. Trans. by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1984).

Bakhtin (1984a) argues that the most inquisitive and challenging Socratic dialogues are rooted inancient, medieval traditions of carnival. In carnival, normal life is suspended, including hierarchical distances between people produced by family, groups, associations,  institutions, traditions, and the society, and what Bakhtin (1984a, p.130) calls a ‘‘frank’’ exchange occurs, or an exchange, governed by internally persuasive discourse (‘‘internal’’ to the discourse, not to the person’s psyche) that is outside of any social propriety and convention. Authority is decrowned, we become aware of the laughing side of things, apart from fear, and there is a profound and collectiveengagement with alternative ‘truths’ to the officious, the convention, and the tradition – e.g. to see such monolithic concepts as death or religion as serious as well as humorous and open to parody. As such carnival should not be read onlyas moments of complete disorganisation but much more as an epistemology – one where we sensuously interact with truth from many angles, e.g. with the laughing side of things. In carnival, three-dimen-sional truth emerges.

The Socratic dialogues emerge out of this tradition for a number of reasons, Bakhtin (1984a) explains. In contrast to monologism, such as the monologism of official dogma, truth is notready-made but is born in a discourse between people, often assisted by Socrates. In his own carnivalesque description, Socrates is a ‘midwife’ to truth. Nothing is taken for granted and instead concepts have the ambivalence of carnival – e.g. courage is both foolish and seriously admirable.

(Bakhtin, Socrates and the carnivalesque in education, Paul Sullivan, Mark Smith, Eugene Matusov).

Bakhtin sees carnival as a great social leveler, bringing together  people from all echelons of society in a “free and familiar” way. “People who in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free familiar contact on the carnival square.”This attitude of temporary equality and familiarity permeates through carnival life and allows and instigates carnival profanities and carnivalesque mergings of “the lofty and the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid. This carnivalistic mésalliance accommodates and introduces another of the major hallmarks of carnival laughter. Carnival laughter is, yet again, deeply ambivalent. “Combined in the act of carnival laughter are death and rebirth, negation (a smirk) and affirmation (rejoicing laughter).” It is one of  the key forces that allows the high to become low, and enables the sense of community and “free and familiar” contact that defines the relational distances of carnivalesque literature. It “is directed toward something higher toward a shift of authorities and truths, a shift of world orders” and drags it down, in order for it to be renewed and reaffirmed as high when the carnival is over and the laughter has stopped. (Beneath Lowry’s Carnival: The Abject in Under the Volcano)

The Russian critic and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin is once again in favor, his influence spreading across many discourses including literature, film, cultural and gender studies. This book provides the most comprehensive introduction to Bakhtin’s central concepts and terms. Sue Vice illustrates what is meant by such ideas as carnival, the grotesque body, dialogism and heteroglossia. These concepts are then placed in a contemporary context by drawing out the implications of Bakhtin’s writings, for current issues such as feminism and sexuality. Vice’s examples are always practically based on specific texts such as the film Thelma and Louise, Helen Zahavi’s Dirty Weekend and James Kelman's How late it was, how late.(sue vice, Introducing Bakhtin).

The true Carnival is possible only in intelligent recognition of texts. A valid probability of Carnival consists in the realized creative perception, reading between lines, turning the senses upside down, in synchronous understanding of the text and simultaneous process of replacement of meaning and building of a metaphor. It provides pluralism and tolerance to innovative comprehension of a reality by others. The process of journalistic ingenuity and reception of pleasure from creation of the text, and from its consumption consists in the use of metaphors and original stylistic construction (selection of forms and ideas). (Dr. Anna Sosnovskaya St.Petersburg State University Russia, Representations of National Identity)     
   
Mikhail Bakhtin’s thematization of humor and the comic has made him popular in postmodern critical circles precisely because his studies expand the theory of carnival beyond a single folk event and identify the carnivalesque as a semiotic cultural code, signifying more than just texts which focus on the specific popular tradition in medieval Europe. Bakhtin’s theory of carnival, manifest in his discussions of Rabelais and “forbidden laughter” in medieval folk culture, argued that folk celebrations which allowed for rowdy humor and the parody of authority offered the oppressed lower classes relief from the rigidity of the feudal system and the church and an opportunity for expressing nonconformist, even rebellious views. The carnivalesque spirit, therefore, is a form of popular, “low” humor which celebrates the anarchic and grotesque elements of authority and of humanity in general and encourages the temporary “crossing of boundaries” where the town fool is crowned, the higher classes are mocked, and the differences between people are flattened as their shared humanity, the body, becomes subject of crude humor. Bakhtin saw in carnivalesque humor a social force that allowed a text to enter asociopolitical discourse, while enjoying impunity, and thus bring about cultural transformation.

(Nehama Aschkenasy, Ruth and Bakhtin’s Theory of Carnival )



PREFERENCES

Ben Taylor, BA.MA,1995. Bakhtin. carnival and comic theory. (Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy)
Gavin Grindon , 1990. Carnival against capital: a comparison of Bakhtin, Vaneigem and Bey .   (http://1000littlehammers.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/grindon-gavin-carnival-against-capital-comparison-bakhtin-vaneigem-and-bey.pdf)
Paul Sullivan, Mark Smith, Eugene Matusov,2009.  Bakhtin, Socrates and the carnivalesque in education. (Department of Social Sciencesand Humanities, University of Bradford, University of Bradford, Richmond Building, Bradford BD71DP, UK University of Delaware, USA)
Andrew McLeod, Beneath Lowry’s Carnival: The Abject in Under the Volcano. (http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/colloquy/files/2014/12/mcleod-28.pdf)
Helene, 1984 Passages taken from Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. Iswolsky. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press)
Nehama Aschkenasy, Ruth and Bakhtin’s Theory of Carnival. (http://home.nwciowa.edu/wacome/Aschkenasy%20BakhtinforSBLNov07.pdf)

Francois Rabelais,1532-1564. Rabelais and His World (http://www.longwood.edu/staff/miskecjm/314carnival.html)