JON P. MITCHELL
The Foucauldian turn in the humanities and social sciences led, by the 1980s, to a new, genealogical approach to theoretical debate. As much as focusing on the detailed content of particular theoretical argument, theorists began to examine the discursive conditions under which particular sets of theoretical assumptions became possible. Both Talal Asad1 and Catherine Bell2 take this genealogical approach to the theorization of ritual, arguing that ritual theory has been dogged by the central and problematic assumption that the role of ritual is communicative. This in turn is premised on a separation of action from meaning that sees the former as a vehicle for the latter. Such an assumption not only is ethnocentric—because rooted in a particular, European understandings of the self3—but also fails to capture the significance of ritual action: its “action-ness.” A focus on action in and of itself suggests a movement, in ritual theory, away from definitional questions—concerned with identifying the formal and functional properties of ritual—toward processual ones. As a result, we shift from a primarily semiotic theory of ritual toward a theory of embodiment. We also shift from “ritual” to “ritualization” as our primary object—the contextual processes through which action becomes “ritual action.” Finally, we shift from a conception of ritual as something that is done to people, to one of ritual as something that people themselves do. This in turn opens up the possibility of theorizing ritual change.
A GENEALOGY OF THE CONCEPT OF RITUAL
Asad argues that early modern European changes in conceptions of the self made possible contemporary understandings of ritual as a universal category. He observes a shift, from “ritual” considered as a script or instruction manual for the regulation of everyday practice, particularly in monastic contexts, to ritual “as a type of routine behavior that symbolizes or expresses something, … a type of practice that is interpretable as standing for some further verbally definable, but tacit, event.”4 This distinction between ritual action and its meaning, as outward sign and hidden or inner meaning, establishes a principle whereby ritual is seen as a primarily communicative act. To this extent, ritual action is opposed to more mundane or everyday action geared toward utilitarian or practical ends. Ritual action is action + symbol, or “action wrapped in a web of symbolism.”5
This view of ritual displaced medieval monastic notions of disciplined practice—as exemplified in the Benedictine Rule—which saw liturgical action (ritual) not as a separate class of action, differentiated from the technical or utilitarian, but as “a practice among others essential to the acquisition of Christian virtues.”6 This conception saw no disjunction between outer behavior and inner sentiment, and so no communicative role for ritual—its meaning, such as we can talk about meaning at all, was inherent in practice. This changed in the early modern period—what Asad calls the Renaissance—which saw an emergent individualism generating concern over the nature of “character,” “proper behavior,” and “manners”:7
In this early modern world, the moral economy of the self in a court circle was constructed very differently from the ways prescribed in the medieval monastic program. Created and re-created through dramas of manipulative power, at once personal and political, the self depended now on the maintenance of moral distance between public forms of behavior and private thoughts and feelings.8
The resultant parallax between action and meaning, or action and thought, is a precondition for more contemporary theories of ritual, which, as Catherine Bell has pointed out, frequently see ritual’s role as mediating or collapsing this dichotomy. For example, Clifford Geertz, for whom ritual was the “clinching” factor in religious symbolism, making it “uniquely realistic,”9 saw ritual as action that unites a culture’s worldview—its system of everyday knowledge—with its ethos, or emotional orientation, or “feel.” In doing so, it also unites culture with social system, and thought with action.10
This is one of a number of interrelated manifestations of the action-thought dichotomy that Bell identifies within ritual theory. Such theory has it, first, that ritual “acts out, expresses or performs the beliefs, world view or values of a group.”11 Second, and consequently, the theory has it that ritual integrates individual perception and behavior with socially conditioned, collective conceptions. This is central to Durkheimian understandings of ritual, and indeed his overall theory of religion. Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life figures the person as homo duplex: caught in enduring and inherent tension between the individual and the collective, body and soul:12 “In this model, ritual activity constitutes the necessary interaction between the collective representations of social life (as a type of mental or meta-mental category) and the individual experience and behavior (as a category of activity).”13
Third, the theory has it that ritual is therefore aligned with structure, “provisionally distinguished as the synchronic, continuous, traditional, or ontological in opposition to the diachronic, changing, historical, or social.”14 As a consequence, ritual functions to affirm social unity and transcendence in contrast to the everyday competitions and frictions of social life. In Turnerian terms, it generates enduring communitas—a sense of transcendent communal solidarity that, ultimately, contributes to social stability.15
To Geertz, Durkheim, and Turner, one might add Bloch, Rappaport, and others, for whom the starting point of ritual theory is a dichotomization of action and thought. For Bloch, ritual accomplishes a symbolic conquest of “vitality”—mundane, everyday, corporeal features of existence—by the “transcendental.”16 Immediate, immanent features of action are pitted against transcendent and conceptual features of thought to ensure the primacy of the latter over the former and, ultimately, the continuity of socioreligious institutions.17 The theory rests on a prior separation of action from thought, which is then resolved, with thought triumphant, in ritual.
For Rappaport, the action-thought distinction is expressed in terms of form and substance. While they are inseparable in ritual performance, he argues, they are nevertheless distinguishable analytically, and should be distinguished, if only in order to give priority to the role of form in our definition of ritual.18 He argues contra Kertzer, for example, but also Turner and La Fontaine,19 that symbolism is a definitional feature of ritual action. Other types of action are equally—and perhaps better—suited to symbolic communication, and yet there are certain types of message that are best—and perhaps only—communicable through ritual. The reason for this, argues Rappaport, must lie in its formal rather than substantive qualities: “The ritual form, to say the least, adds something to the substance of ritual, something that the symbolically encoded substance by itself cannot express.”20
While Rappaport is clearly trying to move toward an analysis of ritual action as action, looking at the “surface” or “obvious” aspects of ritual,21 he nevertheless falls back into the central assumption, identified by Asad, that ritual is primarily communicative of a set of linguistically expressible and structurally “prior” messages that are encoded into the formal and repeated actions of ritual:
Messages, although transmitted by the participants [in ritual], are not encoded by them. They are found by participants already encoded in the liturgy. Since these messages are more or less invariant obviously they cannot in themselves reflect the transmitter’s contemporary state.… In recognition of the regularity, propriety, and apparent durability and immutability of these messages I shall refer to them as “canonical”22
This understanding of ritual—like those of Geertz, Durkheim, and Bloch—sees the participants in ritual as objects, rather than subjects, of ritual action, in that even as they perform, they are recipients rather than generators of ritual’s messages. As such they are reified, analytically separated out from the practical contexts in which they are performed.
FROM RITUAL TO RITUALIZATION
Humphrey and Laidlaw have questioned the assumption that ritual form is a conduit for canonical messages preencoded in the liturgy. Coming close to Frits Staal’s conclusion that the essence of ritual is its meaninglessness, rather than its ability to convey messages,23 they conclude that if it does convey messages, these messages are not ideas, expressible in language, but, for example, “mental-emotional states conveyed by music and gesture.”24 In other words, the formal aspects of ritual, the action of ritual, does not defer to a deeper-seated repertoire of thought, but generates its own significance by, through, and within action itself.
Similar conclusions are reached by both Asad and Bell, in their attempt to transcend the action-thought dichotomy. Asad enlists the help of Marcel Mauss, who although normally thought of as going hand in hand with Durkheim—he was, after all, Durkheim’s nephew—provided a means of resolving the problem of homo duplex. In his essay on “Techniques of the Body,”25 Mauss emphasizes the primacy of the body as both object and means, or subject, of human social competence. He develops the concept of habitus, some forty years before Bourdieu’s popularizing of the term,26 to describe the socially derived regularities of “body techniques,” which, as Asad points out “are linked to authoritative standards and regular practice.… the concept of habitus invites us to analyze the body as an assemblage of embodied aptitudes, not as a medium of symbolic meanings.”27 This approach to ritual might transcend the action-thought dichotomy as it transcends the Cartesian dualism of body and mind: “Thus, the possibility is opened up of inquiring into the ways in which embodied practices (including language in use) form a precondition for varieties of religious experience. The inability to enter into communion with God becomes a function of untaught bodies. ‘Consciousness’ becomes a dependent concept.”28
This effectively turns Rappaport on his head. Action, not thought, becomes analytically “prior” and in no way subordinate to the conceptual processes of meaning-making or the symbolic messages of liturgy. Rather, it generates or reproduces its own “practical reason”—or “reason of practice”—not in the ethical sense described by Kant, but as a form of reasoned knowledge transmitted by and through bodily practice.29
Mauss’s notion of habitus, though, was not reserved for the analysis of what we might want to call “ritual.” On the contrary, the opening passages of “Techniques of the Body” focus on a range of mundane and everyday techniques—swimming, digging, walking—that we would not normally regard as ritual activities. Yet this brings up the question once more of how we are to define ritual activities—or perhaps more suggestively, as Humphrey and Laidlaw suggest, what is done to action to make it “ritual action.” They suggest that what is done to action is that it is “ritualized”—turned into ritual—and that we should shift our focus, in the analysis of ritual, from ritual per se to processes of ritualization: “ ‘Ritual’ can be specified: not as a kind of event or as an aspect of all action, but as a quality which action can come to have—a special way in which acts may be performed. From this perspective theoretical attention focuses on ritualization, the process by which normal, everyday action is endowed with this quality and becomes ritual.” Ritualization begins with a particular modification of the normal intentionality of human action. Action that has undergone this modification is ritual action.30
This move from ritual to ritualization enables us to focus on action as action, rather than mere epiphenomenon, or vehicle of “deeper” symbolic messages. It also enables us to position human actors as the subjects of ritual action, rather than its objects—ritualization is something people do, rather than something people have done to them. Finally, it enables us to formulate a theory that accounts for ritual change. Within accounts that polarize thought and action, it is difficult to see how rituals might be changed through their performance. If their purpose is to reproduce preexisting symbolic messages, then for their form to correspond to this fixed substance, it must also be fixed.
Alongside formality—in the sense of “decorum”—and repetition, the notion of fixity lies at the center of most definitions of ritual. Catherine Bell, who also proposes moving from “ritual” to “ritualization” as our object of study, argues that rather than being definitional features of ritual, conceived as a specific type of action, formality, fixity, and repetition should rather be seen as strategies of ritualization—things people do to action to make it ritual action.31 This opens out Humphrey and Laidlaw’s rather narrow and politically neutral definition of ritualization, to focus on the “texture” of ritualizing practices, seen as fundamentally interested, in a political sense. To this extent, Bell locates ritualization within broader social practice. Ritualization involves “strategies of differentiation through formalization and periodicity, the centrality of the body, the orchestration of schemes by which the body defines an environment and is defined in turn by it, ritual mastery, and the negotiation of power to define and appropriate the hegemonic order.”32 Bell’s account of practice is drawn primarily from Bourdieu’s theoretical outline, and his own notion of habitus: an acquired system of dispositions, which organize perception and classification, but also have a generative aspect, “constituting the social agent … as practical operator of the construction of objects.”33 Action that emerges from the habitus is interested action, though not necessarily consciously so. It is geared toward the reproduction of the social order, but does not straightforwardly “perform” or “act out” social messages or liturgy. It is “objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being the product of obedience to rules.”34 In other words, it is action in and of itself, not as a representation or proxy for some other, deeper meaning. Ritualization, for Bell, is practice in this sense.
Bell goes on to identify the central features of ritualization-as-practice. First, ritualization is always situational. Although ritual is frequently presented, one might say it “presents itself,” as transcendent, set apart from the sociopolitical and historical context in which it takes place, the ritualization practices that achieve this “setting aside” emerge directly from that context. Second, ritualization is always strategic. While Humphrey and Laidlaw see ritualization as a process of stripping action of its intentionality, for Bell the intentionality is merely shifted, from the straightforward intentionality of instrumental utility to the practical intentionality inherent in the reproduction of the habitus. Such practical and strategic intentionality is as present in ritual contexts that exhibit formal continuity as those that change. The practical “decision” to reproduce past ritualizations is as strategic as the decision to innovate. Third, ritualization is always embedded in a “misrecognition” of what it is doing. Thus, although ritualization is both situational and strategic, it is thought not to be. What appears to drive ritual action is a system of symbolic meanings of which it is both representation and vehicle. This system has acquired a number of different labels—from Rappaport’s liturgy, to “tradition” and even “culture.” Yet these systems do not exist outside their reproduction in and through action itself. Ritual action is a modus operandi, not the product of an opus operatum:35 “By abstracting the act from its temporal situation and reducing its convoluted strategies to a set of reversible structures, theoretical analysis misses the real dynamics of practice.”36
Fourth, ritualization is always characterized by a form of “redemptive hegemony”—an ability to reproduce or reconfigure a vision of the order of power in the world.37 It is redemptive, because despite reproducing habitus—which is itself rooted in structures of power, as the means by which they are generated—it nevertheless also affords the actor a vision of an emancipatory sphere of action. It enables actors to “discharge their obligations in relation to the moral imperatives of the community”38—and to view their own and society’s interests and motivations as one and the same. It is hegemonic, because through it are reproduced the conditions within which the structures of power are naturalized as “common sense”:
As a practical construal or consciousness of the system of power relations and as a framework for action, redemptive hegemony suggests that human practice is characterized by relations of dominance and subjugation. These relations, however, are present in practice by means of the practical values, obligations, and persistent envisioning … of a state of prestige within this ordering of power. This vision exists as a practical consciousness of the world (common sense) and a sense of one’s options for social action. It is also a vision of empowerment that is rooted in the actor’s perceptions and experiences of the organization of power.39
This vision of ritual practice as both empowered and empowering enables us to develop a theory of ritual that can handle ritual change. If ritual’s role is to communicate a preexisting system of meanings, then it is difficult to see how ritual—or indeed thought—changes over time. If, on the other hand, the systems of meanings, such as they exist, are immanent properties of ritual action itself, reproduced through the practice of ritualization, then change can occur in and through the act. If ritual participants are the objects of ritual action, they are doomed to represent messages of which they are not the authors. However, if they are the subjects of ritualization—agents of ritual process—they become shapers of their own destiny.
NOTES
1. Talal Asad, “Toward a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
2. Catherine Bell, “Discourse and Dichotomies: The Structure of Ritual Theory,” Religion 17 (1987): 95–118; Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
3. Asad, “Toward a Genealogy,” 67.
4. Ibid., 57.
5. David Kertzer, Ritual, Politics and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 9.
6. Asad, “Toward a Genealogy,” 63.
7. Steven Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973); Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Peter Stallybrass, “Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text,” in Cultural Studies, ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. A. Treichler (London: Routledge, 1992).
8. Asad, “Toward a Genealogy,” 67.
9. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
10. Bell, “Discourse,” 108.
11. Ibid., 98.
12. Asad, “Toward a Genealogy,” 74–75. See also Anne Warfield Rawls, Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim’s “The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
13. Bell, “Discourse,” 98.
14. Ibid.
15. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969).
16. Maurice Bloch, Prey Into Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
17. David Gellner, “Religion, Politics and Ritual: Remarks on Geertz and Bloch,” Social Anthropology 7, no. 2 (1999): 135–53.
18. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Roy A. Rappaport, “The Obvious Aspects of Ritual,” in Ecology, Meaning, Religion (Richmond, Calif.: Northatlantic Books, 1979).
19. Jean La Fontaine, “Introduction,” in The Interpretation of Ritual, ed. J. La Fontaine (London: Tavistock, 1972).
20. Rappaport, Religion and Ritual, 31.
21. Ibid.; Rappaport, “Obvious Aspects.”
22. Rapport, “Obvious Aspects,” 179.
23. Frits Staal, “The Meaninglessness of Ritual,” Numen 26, no. 2 (1979): 2–22.
24. Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
25. Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” Economy and Society 2 (1973): 70–88.
26. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
27. Asad, “Toward a Genealogy,” 75.
28. Ibid., 76–77.
29. Ibid.
30. Humphrey and Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions, 64, 71.
31. Bell, Ritual Theory, 92.
32. Ibid., 220.
33. Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), 13.
34. Bourdieu, Outline, 72.
35. Ibid.
36. Bell, Ritual Theory, 83.
37. Ibid., 81.
38. Kenelm Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activity (New York: Schocken, 1969), 6.
39. Bell, Ritual Theory, 84.