Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice by Bell Catherine;

Author:Bell, Catherine;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 1992-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

Rethinking Ritual as Practice

I have not proposed a new theory of ritual because I believe that a new theory of ritual, by definition, would do little to solve the real conundrums that the study of ritual has come up against. Instead, I have proposed a new framework within which to reconsider traditional questions about ritual. In this framework, ritual activities are restored to their rightful context, the multitude of ways of acting in a particular culture. When put in the context of purposive activity with all the characteristics of human practice (strategy, specificity, misrecognition, and redemptive hegemony), a focus on ritual yields to a focus on ritualization.

Ritualization, the production of ritualized acts, can be described, in part, as that way of acting that sets itself off from other ways of acting by virtue of the way in which it does what it does. Even more circularly, it can be described as the strategic production of expedient schemes that structure an environment in such a way that the environment appears to be the source of the schemes and their values.

Ritualizing schemes invoke a series of privileged oppositions that, when acted in space and time through a series of movements, gestures, and sounds, effectively structure and nuance an environment. In the organization of this environment some oppositions quietly dominate others but all also defer to others in a redundantly circular, and hence nearly infinite, chain of associations. The coherence, continuity, and general scope of these associations naturalize the values expressed in the subtle relationships established among oppositions.

This environment, constructed and reconstructed by the actions of the social agents within it, provides an experience of the objective reality of the embodied subjective schemes that have created it. Ritualization as a strategic way of acting does not see the social agent’s projection of this environment or his or her reembodiment of the sets of schemes constitutive of it. When these schemes are embodied in a cultural sense of reality and possibility, the agent is capable of interpreting and manipulating simply by reclassifying the very relationships understood as constitutive of reality.

The goal of ritualization as a strategic way of acting is the ritualization of social agents. Ritualization endows these agents with some degree of ritual mastery. This mastery is an internalization of schemes with which they are capable of reinterpreting reality in such a way as to afford perceptions and experiences of a redemptive hegemonic order. Ritualization always aligns one within a series of relationship linked to the ultimate sources of power. Whether ritual empowers or disempowers one in some practical sense, it always suggests the ultimate coherence of a cosmos in which one takes a particular place. This cosmos is experienced as a chain of states or an order of existence that places one securely in a field of action and in alignment with the ultimate goals of all action.

Ritualization is probably an effective way of acting only under certain cultural circumstances. But what counts as ritual can rarely be pinned down in general

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