According to most theories, ritual either involves different forms of action from everyday life, or at least different purposes. For example, in Christian ritual, the act of ingesting bread during holy communion is different from eating bread at any other time. The difference relates to the meaning attached to the ritual act, which is suggested by the use of symbols. Paraphrasing Clifford Geertz’s definition of culture, David Kertzer defines ritual as ‘action wrapped in a web of symbolism’ (1988: 9). This assumes that ritual has a communicative role. Thus, despite the idea that ritual denies the everyday relationship between an action and its purpose, it is assumed that this denial is not gratuitous. There is assumed to be a purpose, a function and a meaning behind ritual action. This has implications for the relationships between ritual, politics and social structure.
Accounts vary as to the purpose, function and meaning of ritual. As Kelly and Kaplan have pointed out, unlike a riot for example, ritual is habitually connected to ‘tradition’, the sacred, to structures that have been imagined in stasis’ (1990: 120). This has led to the synchronic pursuit of an inevitable and generalized ritual form. Appeals to a universal ritual form imply a generalized ritual function; the assumption being that what looks the same is the same. Attempts to define this function have generally seen ritual as either supporting social structure by directly representing it, or legitimizing social authority by concealing it. Thus ritual’s social role is either to bolster, or conceal, the prevailing political order.
The turn towards an anthropology of practice has drawn attention to the diachronic study of particular rituals as they are performed and experienced by their participants. Rather than playing out of eternal pattern, the actors in ritual are seen as conscious agents in the reproduction of that pattern. This means that rather than directly representing, or even concealing, social structure, ritual itself becomes part of the political process.
Ritual and social integration
Taking their lead from Emile Durkheim, the British functionalist anthropologists of the 1950s and 1960s concentrated on the integrative function of ritual. Durkheim had argued that because the apparent function of ritual is to strengthen the bonds attaching the believer to god, and god is no more than a figurative expression of society itself, so ritual in fact serves to attach the individual to society (Dur-kheim 1915: 226). Because ritual is a direct representation of society to itself, studying ritual tells us important things about society.
In many societies, god comes in the form of a king or chief. The strengthening of bonds between king and subjects is a most clear demonstration of the strengthening of social bonds, or the legitimation of authority. A celebrated example of this process at work is provided by fMax Gluckman, who examined the incwala ritual performed by the Southern African Swazi people. This was an annual ritual which reaffirmed the relationship between the king and the nation by deliberately drawing attention to the potential conflict his authority could cause. Gluckman called such rituals ‘rituals of rebellion’,the power of which lay in ‘exaggerating real conflicts of social rules and affirming that there was unity despite these conflicts’ (Gluckman 1963: 18).
A similar conclusion was drawn by Victor Turner, although with rather different implications. In his seminal account of The Ritual Process (1969), Turner examined the installation ritual of an Ndembu senior chief, in Northwest Zambia. The ritual involved the building of a small shelter a mile from the chief s capital village. The chief was taken there and systematically jostled and insulted by ritual functionaries, before his installation was finally celebrated with great revelry. The central part of the ritual, which Gluckman would have seen as a structured rebellion, was for Turner a ritual phase of ‘anti-structure’, that lay outside social structure altogether. He argued, after van Gennep (1960), that such installation rituals, as rites of passage, involve three phases; separation, liminality and reaggregation.
Separation involves the physical detachment of the participant from normal life, and entry into a liminal, transcendent phase. Liminality, which Turner sees as by far the most important phase, involves a prolonged period in which the participant is both literally and symbolically marginalized. Reaggregation is when the participant returns to society.
During liminality, the status of the participant is deliberately made ambiguous, so as to separate the ritual process from normal social life. The symbolism of the installation ritual suggested that the Ndembu chief was dead, and his identity was negated. For Turner, this period of liminality was critical in the ritual process. He argued that long periods of liminality lead to the development of a transcendent feeling of social togetherness, which he called communitas.
This is a generalized and eternal social bond, which transcends social structure, and brings the ritual participant under the authority of the community. It is represented by symbolic inversion during the liminal phase. During this phase of the installation, the Ndembu chief becomes like a slave, and is therefore forced to confront the mutual dependence of different strata of society. Because he becomes literally nobody, he can be abused and insulted by anybody. He therefore submits to the authority of nothing less than the total community. With all structural relations abandoned, he becomes a tabula rasa for the group knowledge that reconstructs him as chief.
Thus, where Durkheim saw ritual as a representation of social structure, Turner saw it as a process that transcends it. Turner’s model of ritual has been used in a variety of contexts, particularly by anthropologists who see ritual as performance or play. Liminality is seen as a creative phase of anti-structure, to which activities such as riots do conform, despite not explicitly appealing to tradition. Thus Richard Schechner (1993) argues that the pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing in 1989 can be seen as a type of political theatre, or ritual performance, because they involved communitas.
Despite appeals to the creativity of liminality, the centrality of communitas still sees ritual participants submitting to the communal will, and a universal ritual form. This means that the Turnerian scheme is still essentially conservative. No matter how revolutionary the intention of the ritual performance at Tiananman Square, it is still seen as a representation of political will which conformed to a determinate ritual form.
Ritual as mystification
In his broadly Marxist critique of theories of ritual, "Maurice Bloch (1989) sees it as a form of ideology, which provides an alternative to, or gloss on, everyday life. Because it is highly formalized, ritual restricts debate or contestation, and there is a certain predictability to the ways in which people construct ritual across different social and cultural contexts. In Prey into Hunter (1992), Bloch argues that the archetypal form of ritual is to demonstrate the power of the transcendental over the everyday. The transcendental may take the form of a sacred king or an eternal community, but it need not necessarily. Thus Bloch’s irresistible ritual form is more ambiguous than those of Durkheim or Turner, though no less determinate. For Bloch, ritual is a dramatic process through which the vitality of everyday life is conquered by the transcendence of death and the eternal. This is played out in a process he calls ‘rebounding violence’. He maintains the same three-phase model as Turner and van Gennep, but argues that the phases are inseparable. Where Turner privileges the liminal phase, Bloch merely sees this as part of an overall process that involves people entering the transcendental only to return to and conquer the vital, through the use of literal or symbolic violence.
Bloch uses many examples to furnish his theory. One of these is of a Ladakhi marriage ritual, which involves the symbolic capture of a bride in one household by the groom of another. The event is surrounded by the symbolism of sexual, military and cosmological conquest; a violence that only becomes recognizable as rebounding violence when seen in the context of the enduring household group. For whilst the symbolism of a single marriage sees the vital, reproductive bride and her household conquered by the transcendental groom, the process rebounds when a groom from the original bride’s household, himself marries. When this occurs, the transcendental conqueror becomes the household itself:
This is because submission to the conquest of native vitality, in this case represented by the young women who were born in the house, is followed by the conquest of external vitality, represented by incoming brides. This is the pattern of rebounding violence which in this case … creates an apparently supra-biological, transcendental and immortal existence for a human group.
This model of a universal archetype of ritual pits the official ideology of a society against people’s experiences of it in everyday life, and through the act of rebounding violence ensures that the former conquers the latter. This, in turn, inhibits contestation, which means that in Bloch’s formulation, rituals are essentially conservative or mystifying.
But if mystification is a function of ritual, then ritual can be argued to characterize all forms of action which mystify. This is revealed in contexts in which one might say that an activity is ‘mere ritual’, in comparison to more significant social action. An example is provided by Kertzer in the form of the ‘ritual elections’ staged in El
Salvador ‘to demonstrate to the world that El Salvador was indeed ruled by the democratic masses’ (Kertzer 1988: 49).
It might be argued that this example does conform to Bloch’s model, in that the ritual served to demonstrate the power of transcendent democracy over the dangerous (and violent) vitality of everyday life. However, it is assumed that the ‘audience’ for such rituals are inevitably convinced. The continued political struggle in El Salvador would suggest otherwise.
Ritual and practice
Practice-oriented approaches to ritual focus precisely on the potential disjunction between different interpretations of ritual by different participants in particular situations. This depends in turn on the assumption that the symbols involved in ritual can be read and interpreted in a variety of different ways, depending on one’s point of view. Rather than determining the ritual experience, the symbols of a ritual become the media through which participants themselves define their own experiences of the ritual. Reading different meanings into the symbols of ritual can entail the modification of that ritual, because different interpretations suggest possible alternatives for the structuring of ritual. These in turn suggest alternatives for the structuring of society.
The focus on practice, and the power of different interpretations of rituals, has been developed particularly through anthropological approaches to carnival. Rather than seeing the chaos of the carnival atmosphere as a moment of confirming communitas, or a part of a process whereby vitality is conquered by transcendence to maintain the status quo, such approaches see carnival as a moment of genuine potential dissent with very real political consequences.
Abner Cohen (1993) has investigated these consequences in the Notting Hill carnival in London. In this context, carnival became the means by which different constituencies involved in the ritual became agents in its restructuring. Carnival came to represent different ethnic groups, with different political agendas. Over time, this affected the form the carnival took, as it changed with the political agendas of different groups. But the political agendas themselves were changed, as the carnival became not only the medium, but also the object of political, ethnic and racial conflict. It was a means of expressing these differences, but also the means by which these differences were constructed.
This approach sees ritual and social structure as part of the same process, mutually informing each other. Ritual does not merely represent social structure, nor conceal it, but acts upon it, as social structure acts upon ritual. Put this way, rituals can be seen as the significant sites of political contest between different social groups. Because they involve symbols, rituals are particularly evocative, but they are also particularly malleable. They can therefore lead to change, as much as they evoke tradition and continuity. As Kelly and Kaplan put it, ‘rituals in ongoing practice are a principal site of new history being made, and [the] study of the plural formal potentialities of rituals could be basic to efforts to imagine possibilities for real political change’ (1990: 141).
