Ritual Between Anthropology and the Science of Religion

EUROPEAN HUMANITIES STUDIES: State and Society

The paper addresses the importance of crosscultural notions' studies in terms of anthropological paradigm development. In the focus of a research lies the notion of a ritual as an interdisciplinary issue hence the fact of it being utilized by the range of various scientific branches. Ritual is analyzed from its anthropological, ethological, historical, sociological, philosophical, lingual, cultural, religious, cognitive and psychological aspects. The work explicates the original value of ritual performance. Moreover, the research crystallizes the issues of myth-ritual relation. The genesis of language and culture and the process of worldview formation are viewed with respect to their ritualized character.

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

International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 2018

As a postscript to this special issue, the author reflects on the difference between religion and ritual by drawing a comparison with culture and nature. In the same way that culture and nature are entangled yet distinct, so too religion and ritual are best understood as a paradoxical configuration of spiritual deliberation and unconscious desire. It is argued that religion and ritual exceed and depend on each other in equal measure as the organism explores new modes of living.

Theorizing Rituals: Vol I: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, edited by Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek and Michael Stausberg, xiii–xxv. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006

It is unclear when rituals first originated. Some assume that ritual, like dance, music, symbolism, and language, arose in the course of the evolution of primates into man, 1 or even prior to it. 2 Thus rituals may also have facilitated, or even stimulated, processes of adaptation. Be that as it may, biologists and behavioral scientists argue that there are rituals among animals, and this has important implications for our understanding of rituals. 3 Unlike animal rituals, however, sometime in the course of the evolution of (human) ritual, and in specific cultural settings, rituals have partly become the business of experts (priests). These ritual specialists, it can safely be assumed, often not only developed a ritual competence in the sense of performative skills but also began to study the rituals of their own tradition. Hence, one may assume that within this process of specialization, social differentiation, and professionalization, 4 indigenous forms of the study of rituals evolved. In contrast to the modern, mainly Western academic study of rituals, these indigenous forms of ritual studies can be referred to as 'ritualistics'. 5 * A first draft of this introduction was written by Michael Stausberg. It was then jointly revised and elaborated upon by the editors of this volume. We wish to thank Ingvild S. Gilhus (Bergen) and Donald Wiebe (Toronto) for helpful comments on a previous draft. 1 See also Bellah 2003. (Here, as throughout the volume, works listed in the annotated bibliography are referred to by author and year only. Those items not listed in the bibliography will be provided with full references in the notes.) 2 Staal 1989, 111 states: "Ritual, after all, is much older than language." See also Burkert 1972. 3 See Baudy in this volume. 4 See Gladigow 2004. 5 See Stausberg 2003. Although a small group of us began using the term at American Academy of Religion meetings, today it has wide currency in a large number of disciplines" (p. 1). See also Grimes 1982 and his bibliography, Research in Ritual Studies (Grimes 1985). In terms of the establishment of a new field of research, see also his article on ritual studies in the Encyclopedia of Religion from 1987. 8 See, e.g., Grimes 1990; Bell 1997. 9 Over the last five years, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council) funded two large-scale research programs on rituals: Kulturen des Performativen (Sonderforschungsbereich 447 [http://www.sfb-performativ.de] since 1999) and Ritualdynamik (Sonderforschungsbereich 619 [http://www.ritualdynamik.uni-hd.de] since 2002). Some contributors to the current volume are members of the former (Christoph Wulf) or the latter (Dietrich Harth, Axel Michaels, William S. Sax, and Jan A.M. Snoek). 10 The editors themselves were members of a junior research group, Ritualistik

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.

The study tries to explain a clear understanding of rituals, religion and secular practices in society. It begins by stating the meaning of Ritual, Religion, and Secular; Ritual Too often, the word "ritual" is abused because a ritual considers that it does not rely on the repetition of action but also needs other factors. The definitions provided by anthropologists of the word "rite" are often very contrasting. The rite has the prerogative of being plastic and adapting to social change, and for this reason, every author has a distinct definition. The concept of ritual, if it was only part of the primitive and exotic societies that are now part of the contemporary world, rites are part of the communities because they need a lot of symbolization.The term "rite" comes from the Latin word ‘ritus’ that mean ritual. It is from this that many anthropologists have developed different definitions.

Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 1997

Journal of Ritual Studies , 2020

The present paper aims to investigate the role of anthropology in the development of Ritual Studies as an interdisciplinary platform, with a focus on ritual dynamics by using a historiographic description, focusing on the transition of Greco-Roman to Christian culture. This study attempts to shed light not only on the contribution of anthropology to Ritual Studies and how rituals are constantly changing, but it also underpins exploratory analysis on how religion and rituals have been researched by the first generation of scholars, like Edward Burnett Tylor, William Robertson Smith, James Frazer and Jane Ellen Harrison to scholars like Victor Turner, Ronald Grimes and more recent authors like Gil Renberg, Hedvig von Ehrenheim, Risto Uro and Richard DeMaris. Further, the goal is to clarify how anthropologists examined Christianity in Late Antiquity, thematized by the healing ritual temple sleep and stipulated by the examples used, to conclude how anthropological theories, like the liminality model of Arnold van Gennep, are applied to ritual healing. This study is innovative and challenging through the application of Ritual Studies to the transition from Greco-Roman culture to Christian culture, with emphasis on ritual and change.