Ritual and myth are often discussed in the same breath in introductory cultural anthropology textbooks (e.g., Rosman et al. 2009). Indeed, it is striking how–in so many cultural traditions–myths evoke or claim to explain the existence of certain rituals. Or how myths and rituals alike share sets of interrelated symbols, narrative arcs that challenge our everyday sense of time and geography, a general feature of symbolic richness, or emotional intensity. What is it that ritual and myth really share? And even when they don’t share formal similarities, why do they seem to be systemically interlinked in the process of culture, ultimately influencing how we think and act?
Category Archives: Human Sociality, Culture, and Power
Oh, The Drama …
… Of Ritual
Anthropology and Sociology–two disciplinary identities with intellectual roots that became intertwined in the 19th century and have remained so ever since–have a fundamental interest in figuring out how social groups can have regular, structured, predictable, comparable features … and yet be composed of individuals with complex, all-too-often conflicting interests. What is the relationship between the individual and the group?
Part of the interconnection between Anthropology and Sociology has involved thinking about ritual. How can ritual–something we recognize in all human societies, however constituted and identified–explain why individuals subsume their own personal interests within those of the larger group? In this post I review and clarify some key ideas and developments in the study of ritual, in order to explain why ritual emerged in human biocultural evolution as an especially important component in diverse extant cultural systems.
Ritual exerts a critical non-nested hierarchical filtering function on the individuals, cliques, and factions that constitute the cultural system of which a set of ritual practices is part. More simply, ritual is not a static part of culture and can be influenced by individual or factional agency, BUT … and this is an important “but” … ritual is particularly effective at durably guiding and constraining how individuals think and act and feel. So … how does ritual have this effect on us? What is ritual, really? How could ANYTHING we do come back to influence our sense of identity and our patterns of decision-making, our habits and bodily techniques?
First things first. Some background. Much of the early work on ritual came from French Sociology and Ethnology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Four works continue to have substantial influence on how anthropologists and sociologists explain ritual and religion in human social life. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss’s work on sacrifice (1964 [1898]), Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss’s work on so-called primitive classification (2009 [1903]), Arthur van Gennep’s classic synthesis of rite-of-passage or life-crisis rituals (2011 [1908]), and Durkheim’s highly influential, comprehensive work Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1995 [1913]). The main enduring insight from Hubert, Mauss, and Durkheim’s work is that ritual makes concrete key communal concepts about how society itself is subsumed by a larger sacred or sphere. This concretization of the sacred–otherwise only an abstract notion–provides a way for different members of the group to focus and experience a shared, dramatized, specific form of the supra-societal and supernatural. Ritual recreates a sense of the individual as inextricably part of society, which is in turn inextricably part of a cosmological order.
Culture Unites, Not Just Divides Us
But It is the Structure of Ritual that Moves and Shapes Us … and Shapes Our Social Boundaries
American culture’s violent streak isn’t unique; it’s just striking as a contradiction to the otherwise peaceful, deliberative values inherent in democratic rule and decision-making. The reason that symbols of violence can be effective in creating common identity in any community–at pretty much any scale–is that these symbols add drama to rituals and myths that move us. Of course, rituals and myths that move us–creating strong shared emotional associations, memories, and the basic embodied know-how and understanding for acting effectively in society in the future–do not require violence. Thus, in contemporary entertainment media, professional sports and competitive elimination-based reality shows incorporate various degrees of staged or symbolized violence and exclusion into ritualized settings, which we experience as marked excursions from the normal humdrum or challenge of everyday life and responsibilities. Because we can return from witnessing violence and exclusion, however aware we are that it is staged, we go about our lives again with a bit more resolve, ease, sense of security, or humor. Indeed, rituals in any form can shape our symbolic worlds AND our emotional engagement with them, essentially giving us the symbolic tools and emotional associations to make daily experience seem meaningful and worthwhile. Traditional rituals or ritualized entertainment that are peaceful, inclusive, redemptive, or cleansing can have just as strong an emotional and symbolic effect on us and the way we deal with the world.
Disciplining Discourse of Overwhelming Political Reaction
Or: Why Is there Still So Much Symbolic Violence in American Political Culture?
Trepidation is the word … I’m not terribly politically outspoken, but having dived into the problem of symbolic violence in American political culture, I have to continue swimming. Because what is at stake, in my view, is whether anthropological analysis and inquiry can really contribute to constructive dialogue and mutual understanding, rather than adding to the usual mutual inflammation with which critical academic, “progressive,” or “left-wing” voices and conservative, religious, “patriotic,” “right-wing” voices afflict each other. My trepidation comes from the fact that I have described the violence in the narratives that have moved Americans and shaped power relations, directly in contradiction to the values logically inherent in participant, deliberative democracy. It is clear that conservative political positions will tend to be those that support status quo power relations already historically shaped by violent narratives of exclusion–of Black people, Native Americans, poor immigrants of all sorts, the poorest and neediest in general. (Again, if you think I’m exaggerating, remember how George Washington’s military suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 resonated so strongly in symbolically legitimizing the early Presidency, Federal power, and the very constitution of the United States as a sovereign nation, within and without its borders.) Thus, in focusing on narratives of violence, I am bringing out into the open symbols and stories that reinforce conservative taken-for-granted positions. What I want to underscore, though, is that all humans have a tendency to be moved by dramatic, emotionally charged narratives of exclusion, as these have a mythologizing effect of defining the boundaries of ordered society. Defining certain people as outside of the cultural realm is dramatically constitutive of the boundaries of the cultural, civilized realm. To be sure, contemporary American conservative identities–from Tea Party conservatives vigorously seeking to scale back the role of government and taxation on every level, to evangelist Christians working to limit access to abortion or repeal Obamacare for purposes of defending religious freedom–are also strikingly shaped by violent narratives involving exclusion of others, especially involving the criminal justice and healthcare systems and the national security apparatus. Yet, the non-partisan albeit secular ritual–staged nightly on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report–satirizes hypocrisy, political expediency, and the absurdities of ideological political rhetoric, and in this ritualized context, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and their colleagues do not so much raise public consciousness and change daily engagement in democratic life, as they provide a shared experience in which the audience gets taken on a little, entertaining vacation from concerning political realities that many of us are just trying to deal with. These are rituals of political resilience that can create apolitical identity as much or more effectively as they can generate a symbolic focus on critical, thoughtful democratic engagement. Although Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have made extraordinary attempts to mobilize political engagement for a more reflective, critical approach to democratic participation and decision-making, they tend to constitute a small part of a the everyday lives of, at most, a minority of Americans. Secular rituals of exclusion in sports, however, get amplified in 24-hour sports media, on television, online, and on radio, paralleling the media rituals of exclusion in conservative and major progressive outlets alike. The other side is irrelevant or a threat to legitimate orderly, civilized democracy. I’ll admit up front that I certainly find myself on the side of many Democratic, progressive politicians, activists, and policy commentators when it comes to immigration, law enforcement, criminal justice and the prison system, voting rights, foreign and military policy, access to public education, and health care. This is because of the very reasons I’ve already outlined, that so much of our society is driven by violent narratives of exclusion, which have formed unjust ideologies of overwhelming political reaction. Yet, I can understand how and why many conservative Tea Party activitists, for instance, are so thoroughly shaped and moved by the narratives of exclusion in current immigration debates. I think we need a more comprehensive shift of engagement, one which may be ritually structured, but which must use contemporary electronic media in a creative, more effective way, emphasizing deliberation, respect, listening and a concern for mutually understanding the very basis by which diverse people create meaning in their worlds. How can we both invert the narrative from violence to compassionate inclusion and also increase awareness of how such narratives–whether inclusive or violently exclusive–tend to move our practices and beliefs, shaping our political values and engagement. Listen and be more aware of why you’re acting the way you do.
Marked as Bare Life … or Cut Dead
Can structural shunning–ghetto-izing someone so thoroughly that they are EITHER invisible to you OR relevant to you only as a reminder that you’re part of the in-group, powerful enough to keep the ghetto walls high enough–be even more dramatic that ethnic cleansing, ritual murder, or genocide? Greg Ellison, of Emory’s Candler School of Theology, points us toward taking this concern very very seriously.
As I’ve argued now in a series of posts, Trayvon Martin’s violent death has been part of a public ritual re-legitimizing the right to use lethal violence, to exclude in order to be included in the realm of safe, ordered democracy … revealing a cultural problem in the way that American democracy itself is constituted in practice, with society based on an excess of power, from local to international scales. What Greg Ellison suggests is that the expression “cut dead” refers to something we do all too often, whether we realize it or not; but the effects on those we exclude by shunning are simultaneously dramatically cruel, yet–and here’s the important thing–often sufficiently redeemable so as to create new, living social ties with them. While Ellison focuses on young Black men as all-to-often cut dead by the broader American society, he points out that “four fundamental needs—having a sense of belonging, control, self-esteem and meaningful existence—are phenomena that affect all humanity, regardless of race, nationality or faith background.”
I have not yet read his new book Cut Dead But Still Alive (Ellison 2013), but the theme is compelling. Because we need to stop and think about how “cutting someone dead” from wider society’s social, material, and emotional resources slowly, cruelly vitiates them. (From a biocultural perspective, this cruelty stems from the resilience and longevity of the evolved human life history strategy.) Moreover, Ellison describes his “mantra” as: Once you see, you cannot not see. It is not necessary to exclude in order to legitimate our own inclusion in the group and its resources. Moreover, it is important to highlight Ellison’s own projects of engagement, how he builds on seeing. As assistant professor of pastoral care and counseling, Ellison “plans to launch a grassroots community movement, titled Fearless Dialogues, led by a team of experts he has recruited from healthcare, politics, education, community organizing and the arts. Plans include intensive work in five cities …”
I would only add that getting involved in acts of restoring and rehabilitating the “cut-dead,” as hard and difficult and emotionally fraught as that may be, can dramatically invert the cultural symbolic structure of violent exclusion, emphasizing instead compassionate inclusion.
You can see Ellison talk about his work here:
He has also participated in a recent discussion, hosted on the great Michel Martin’s radio program Tell Me More, on how Trayvon Martin’s death relates to the wider situation of young Black men in America today.
REFERENCES
Ellison, G. C. (2013). Cut dead but still alive: caring for African American young men. Abingdon Press.
The Biocultural Evolution Blog 