Trauma, Tedium and Tautology in the Study of Ritual

Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2003

International Journal for The Psychology of Religion, 2012, 22, 89-92

This study presents an attempt to integrate two theories about ritual: the theory that McCauley and Lawson developed in Bringing Ritual to Mind; Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms and the theory that Boyer and Lie´nardLie´nard presented in a target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 'Why ritualized behavior in humans? Precaution systems and action-parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals' and in another article published in the American Anthropologist, 'Whence collective rituals? A cultural selection model of ritualized behavior'. The two theories Cultural rituals present vexing problems for psychology and anthropology. Why are these forms of human behavior so ubiquitous? Even more enigmatic are religious rituals. In fact, are there such things as religious rituals? If so, what are they? Lawson and McCauley (1990) define religious rituals as cultural rituals in which social agents with special qualities play prominent roles. These agents are regarded as special because of some purported 'connection' to postulated supernatural entities such as gods, spirits, ancestors and the like. 1 (P. Lie´nardLie´nard), [email protected] (E.T. Lawson).. 1 For a thorough analysis of the notion of counterintuitiveness and its relationship to superhuman beings, see Pyysiaïnen (2001). 0048-721X/$-see front matter Ó

Journal of Cognition and …, 2006

Justin Barrett and E. Thomas Lawson (2001) were among the first to operationalize experimentally a traditional topic of anthropology: ‘ritual’. Using a similar experimental protocol, the authors further investigate the cognitive underpinning of representations of ritual actions. Participants were asked to judge the likelihood of success of variants of a series of prototypical ritual actions. In line with Barrett and Lawson’s findings, it was expected that specific intuitions would guide participants’ judgements about the well- formedness of ritual actions; that representation of superhuman agency would be piv- otal in those judgements; and that the role of the ritual agent would be conceived as fundamental. The present study was particularly focused on the effect of changing Agent or Instruments in descriptions of a set of prototypical ritual actions. Following a second line of inquiry, contexts in which the prototypical actions were set were systematically manipulated. It was expected that this would affect patterns of answers. No such con- textual effect was found, but the study revealed significant differences in how partici- pants appraised different changes affecting Agent and Instrument. The authors finally speculate that specific systems dedicated to the processing of information about Agent and Instrument might explain these findings.

One of the most obscure and recalcitrant of the subjects with which religion is associated is that of the meaning of ritual forms. Research particularly in Anthropology in the last generation has helped to transform our understanding of this, but this has also strongly misled students of ritual, for it has tended not to take ritual and religion themselves seriously on their own terms, but to be reductionistic, i.e., reducing religion and ritual with it merely to socio-cultural values. This omits the very foundation of ritual in experiential spiritual realms. This essay is therefore a meditation on ritual that attempts to take it seriously as the embodied enactment of religious meaning, existing simultaneously on a multitude of levels, physical, personal, social and spiritual, and therefore as revealing meaning and levels of reality in the world that can be discovered, fully experienced and properly explored in no other way. We seek to clarify in this meditation, in short, what ritual "does" as such, in all religious cults, and so we focus on its foundational implications that appear in and underlie any particular expression of it. Our approach is phenomenological, but our reflections lead us to question and modify many common assumptions about the role of will, personhood and ethical encounter, and the nature of the holy, not only as developed in Anthropological studies both English and French, but also in the philosophical writings of Kant, Buber, and even leading phenomenological theorists such as Merleau-Ponty.

2003

Ritual, obsessional neurosis and bureaucracy have in common the characteristic of being a reply to a situation of mistrust towards the Other. By mistrust the author means the opposite of religious faith, but not this alone: it's not the certainty that the other is lying, but the doubt and diffidence towards the other, with the consequence that one doesn't know if he's lying or not. Bureaucracy becomes exasperating when it's based on a prejudiced mistrust towards the citizen and expresses a reluctance to concede any gift. Obsessional neurosis puts a fundamental mistrust towards the loved other (but to what extent is s/he loved?) into play, which leads the subject into perplexity regarding the debt which s/he should or should not pay to the other. Ritual, in the final analysis, at one and the same time expresses and tries to resolve the mistrust towards the Other, since one doesn't know if the Other wishes to concede the fundamental gift of her/his friendship and benevolence. Even in this brief exchange one can find the essence of the theoretical problem of ritual. Ritual is always connected to a suspicion: when certain types of repeated acts ought to be efficacious, but there are serious doubts whether they really are, then we are dealing with "just rituals". The trade-union protest was being proposed as pragmatic action. But was this really the case? A possible difference arises here between rite and ritual, which I will not deal with here. In the present common + linguistic use of these two terms, we define a rite as something which is above all an act-usually religious, but not always-which is believed to explain and display an action, while the ritual is simply the external form of the rite 2. >From this derives the negative connotation that often, in our daily language, is associated with the term "ritual": as the pure and simple exteriority of the rite. We will therefore seek here to define a theory not of rites, but of that which is ritual in every rite. Indeed, those who believe in a rite usually imagine that it is an efficacious act. The Catholic Mass comes to mind. For the believer it certainly is a ritual, but one that always becomes a miraculous act: the wine is transformed into the blood and the bread transformed into the body of Christ. But is it really transformed? Or is it, in the interviewer's words, only a ritual? The believer would say that the rite of Mass makes a transcendental event possible; the non-believer instead would say that the event is the rite itself 3. Here we again find the same doubt and suspicion that we referred to in the tradeunion protest. The rite designates a passage The human being, according to Wittgenstein (1967), is "a ceremonial animal". Thus every attempt to explain ritual as a form of ceremonial life cannot ignore the fact that ritual, as the form of a rite, is always connected in a problematic way with an act-magical, miraculous, political, spiritual, or other-which is presumed to be efficacious. A ritual is an act which has its meaning in another act of which it is supposed to be the condition, the frame or the external expression. Every ritual is an ante-act or a pre-act or cum-act. It is

Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 1997

Ethnos, 2019

That rituals are ambiguous phenomena has been long established in anthropology. However, while this ambiguity is often assumed to be resolved in one way or another through the course of a ritual and taken as contributing to the efficacy of rituals, we propose in this introduction that much can be gained by studying ritual ambiguity apart from its relevance for efficacy. We argue that while rituals often depend on and helps create a sense of ambiguity, this ambiguity is far from always resolved. Rituals can instead highlight and intensify ambiguity, making it an enduring feature. While rituals often are seen as potential problem solvers, by participants and many anthropologists alike, we argue that much can be gained by look at rituals as highly problematic phenomena.