Ritual: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Barry Stephenson

Author:Barry Stephenson [Stephenson, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780199943524
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-01-28T05:00:00+00:00

Ritual criticism

In the 1980s, as cultural and critical theories rose to prominence, the theorizing of how ritual works gave way to critique of both theory and practice. Granted, ritual transforms. The new question was not so much how does it transform? but rather what are we to make of ritual transformations? The new direction was marked by Ronald Grimes’s 1990 work Ritual Criticism, which called for examining the political and normative nature of rites and ritual theory, but also, following Victor Turner, for awareness of the critical dimensions of ritual—ritual itself as a way of doing criticism, encouraging reflexivity, and creatively responding to social and individual needs and concerns. In subsequent works, Grimes applied his notion of  “ritual criticism” to the rising phenomenon of ritualizing passage rites (initiation, weddings, births, funerals) and problems associated with the appeal to classical rites of passage theorists—whose ideas were principally drawn from a selective reading of male initiation rites—for justification.

Vincent Crapanzano’s work on Moroccan circumcision rites is a case in point. Crapanzano questions the assumptions of transformational models of initiation. The Moroccan rite “declares passage … [but] there is no passage whatsoever—only the mark of passage, the mutilation that is itself an absence, a negation.” In Crapanzano’s analysis, the rite creates not communitas but fear and submissiveness; it is not linear but circular; there is no actual transformation from boyhood to manhood. Circumcision does not move male children forward but simply returns them scarred (physically and emotionally) to the world of women. Van Gennep and other classical theorists gave little attention to the fact that initiation may be exploitive, and it may not always do what practitioners or even ritual theorists say it does. Purpose and function are not always neatly in synch. Transformation may be claimed, but not actualized.

Crapanzano’s work exemplifies an attitude of suspicion toward initiation, critically examining the secrecy, deception, and violence found in many rites as tools in the maintenance of privilege and power. Is circumcision, for example, to be spoken of as “marking” or as “abuse”? Hazing rites, which tend to receive public condemnation, are a form of initiation. Hazing, which involves violence and acts of transgression, aims to inculcate submission to authority and build solidarity on a unique experience outside the bounds of social norms, an experience not to be revealed to a wider public. In this regard, hazing has similarities to the violence and secrecies of domestic abuse, where the victim, paradoxically enough, often remains loyal to the abuser. In hazing, shame and disgust are generated and then transformed by the ritual process into a dark loyalty, trust, and esprit de corps. In gangs and in military contexts, another function of hazing is to create the willingness and dispositions necessary to torture and kill human beings.

Robbie Davis-Floyd, in her analysis of the ritualization of hospital birth, argues that societies use life-cycle passages to literally inscribe their most fundamental values and assumptions into the body. Davis-Floyd treats the medical procedures of Western hospital birth as a principal initiation

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