Ritual
An Avatar.Global Resource
Ritual
A Ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in an isolated location, according to set sequence. Rituals are designed to focus Intent, direct Will, and motivate action towards the accomplishment of a political, productive, spiritual, or creative end, like voting a specific party. Rituals create a groups symbols.[1]
Concept Map
Ritual >
- Collective Effervescence
- Consecration
- Exchange Ritual
- Governance Ritual
- Identity Ritual
- Interaction Ritual
- The Harvest
Syncretic Terms
Ritual >
Related LP Terms
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Non-LP Related Terms
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Notes
A note on typology. Sorted by function, rituals fall into four essential types. Identity rituals affirm group membership; they are the mechanism through which a group periodically recharges its solidarity frames, the shared knowledge and moral feelings that bind members together. Governance rituals regulate conduct and constitute authority; they legitimate power, mark status, and install the rule-set inside the person. Exchange rituals mediate reciprocity; they circulate goods, obligations, and loyalties among members and between members and the sacred.[2] Each type answers a distinct question: identity rituals ask who are we?, governance rituals ask who is in charge?, and exchange rituals ask what do we owe each other? Most actual rituals blend all three modes — the Eucharist is simultaneously an exchange with the divine, an identity marker, and a governance instrument (who may administer it is a governance question that has split churches) — and all three may be analysed with Collins's (2004) ingredients-and-outcomes model.
A Typology of Intent, Not Features
The ritual typology offered here — Identity Ritual, Governance Ritual, Exchange Ritual — is a typology of intent, not a typology of features. No surface characteristic stamps a ritual as one type or another: the same chanting crowd, the same banners, the same synchronized bodies can serve belonging (identity), command (governance), or obligation (exchange), depending on what the ritual is *for* — where the raised energy is aimed and whose interests it serves. Classifying rituals by features is the code-seeking error: "an underlying circularity in the method: positing a code that is then taken as explanation of the ritual behavior that is seen as evidence for the code."[3] Intent, by contrast, is empirically discernible: follow the energy. That is where The Harvest comes in — the typology names the destination of raised power, and the Harvest asks who captures it, and to what ends.
Symbols as Intent Made Visible
Rituals create symbols, and symbols are intent made visible: "solidarity prolonged and stored in symbols," charge that fades if the ritual is not repeated.[4] Consider two symbol-systems with opposite intents but equally deliberate design. The harsh black and reds of Nazi symbology — the blood banner, the stark angular runes, the massed uniforms — were engineered to intimidate, to signal aggression, and to raise and aim energy toward domination: fear made graphic. The Frutiger-Aero aesthetic of mid-2000s technology marketing — glossy bubbles, translucent glass, dew on grass, utopian blue skies wrapped around consumer devices — was engineered with the opposite intent: to soothe, to raise optimism and awe, and to aim that energy toward consumption, selling technology as benevolent ecological harmony.[5] In each case the symbol does not merely mark membership; it telegraphs the direction of the harvested energy before the ritual even begins.
Quotes
The sociology of ritual is thus a sociology of gatherings—of crowds, assemblies, congregations, audiences. Through Goffman’s eyes, we can see that these gatherings can also be quite small scale: a couple of acquantainces stopping to talk, or merely nodding in passing, or even strangers avoiding each other’s glance on the street; or, at the intermediate level, a small group eating and drinking around a table. The point is not merely the banal one that people interact best when they are together; there is the much stronger implication that society is above all an embodied activity.21 When human bodies are together in the same place, there is a physical attunement: currents of feeling, a sense of wariness or interest, a palpable change in the atmosphere. The bodies are paying attention to each other, whether at first there is any great conscious awareness of it or not. This bodily inter-orientation is the starting point for what happens next.[6]
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Footnotes
- ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 26.
- ↑ The typology builds on the Durkheim–Goffman–Collins lineage of ritual theory: Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1995 [1912]); Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual (New York: Anchor, 1967); Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). The exchange type draws on Marcel Mauss, The Gift (New York: Norton, 1990 [1925]).
- ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 33–34; on the code-seeking program generally, 25–30.
- ↑ Ibid., 17, 81–87.
- ↑ On the Frutiger-Aero aesthetic as a named, periodized vernacular style of roughly 2004–2013 tech marketing, see the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute's documentation; the term is internet-aesthetic historiography rather than academic scholarship, and is used here descriptively.
- ↑ Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 34.