Ritual Studies and Ritual Theories: A Guide for the Perplexed

Review Essay

Ritual Studies and Ritual Theories: A Guide for the Perplexed

Joseph Bulbulia
School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, P.O. Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand
Joseph.Bulbulia@vuw.ac.nz

Theorizing Ritual: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concept. Edited by Jens Krienath, Jan Snoek, Michael Stausberg. Leiden: Brill, 2006. ISBN (10) 900415342 .

Birds do it. Bees do it. Rituals are common in nature. In our own lineage rituals runs rampant. Why this is so, and how best to examine human rituals, remains some of the most intriguing and contested questions facing scholarly inquiry.

The editors of this impressive collection of 35 articles (plus preface and epilogue) survey a range of contemporary and classic perspectives. In my view, the book succeeds in its aim to limn the major theoretical initiatives in this increasingly prominent interdisciplinary field. A handful of chapters in this book are of poor quality - opaque, verbose, inconsistent or uninformative. Culling these would have strengthened the volume. Moreover there are significant omissions. For example, there are no chapters devoted to rational choice theory, arguably one of the most important theoretical innovations in the past forty years. Only one chapter mentions evolutionary biology (Dorthea Baudy’s “Ethology,” 345-350). And though thought-provoking, Baudy nevertheless fails to engage with the latest in evolutionary theory (for example signalling theory and group selection [Irons 2001; Sosis 2004; Wilson 2002]). Yet I do not wish to overstate the book’s shortcomings. These are relatively minor. Moreover on the heels of this volume the editors have published an annotated bibliography with over 400 references to recent work in the

field (see below for bibliographic details.) Yet even without its companion, there is enough excellent material in this 777-page collection to make it well worth a careful reading.

The first of five major sections of the book cover “Methodological and Meta-theoretical Issues.” The term “Meta-theoretical” will appear doubly worrying to those already allergic to “theory.” This worry is misplaced. The editors could equally have used the less daunting and more descriptive “foundational questions.” Indeed, my hunch is that the opening section will prove most appealing to those most sceptical of theoretical discourse. For irrespective of your taste for theory the most empirically interesting materials appear in Chapter 4: “Ritual”: a lexicographic survey of some related terms from an emic perspective" (37-100.) Here, Michael Stausberg (an editor) raises the question of whether analogues to the term “ritual” can be found outside the scholarly world. This is an important question. As Stausberg notices, “the modern theoretical discourse about ‘rituals’ tacitly starts from the premise that ‘rituals’ can be found in each and every society, culture, and religion” (52). We begin by assuming the term refers to something definite in the world? Yet what if the term is purely an artefact of academic discourse? For Stausberg, “An analysis of… the very mechanisms of constructing ‘ritual’… could help to move beyond the Euro-American legacy of discourse about ritual” (53). Crucially, the phrase “move beyond” remains ambiguous. For placing “ritual” on all fours with a much wider cultural-linguistic context exposes it to improvement - that context might refine it. But it also exposes it to the gallows. There is no guarantee that we will want to keep “ritual” as a theoretical concept if it proves arbitrary.

Eighteen languages, living and dead, are surveyed in this chapter, ranging from Akkadian, to Chinese to Arabic to Old Norse to Greek and beyond. The verdict? It turns out that most languages have a multiplicity of terms to describe what scholars lump together under “ritual.” In some languages, for example, Sanskrit, that number ranges into the hundreds or thousands. Moreover, even where aggregate concepts can be found - the Hopis for example adjust their suffixes to restrict or generalize the range of terms over a set of practices - there seems to be no instance of any naturally occurring expression approximating the meaning of the scholarly term “ritual,” except of course where the language in question is populated with academics. Indeed, Armin Geertz

notes that for the Hopis, even the general term wimi turns out to be more wide-ranging than “ritual,” because wimi also applies to everything we might want to call “religion.”

The utter lack of symmetry between academic and non-academic discourse will no doubt fuel the anxieties of readers already suspicious about ritual studies as an explanatory or comparative enterprise. There is a legitimate worry whether “ritual” carves social practice at any joint whether there are, in the end, any common objects to explain or compare with this locution. It seems to me that ethnographers and historians working within Ritual Studies who remain uncomfortable with theory must be sensitive to this question. Without an answer, it will be tough to justify these scholarly trades.

Let’s explore this foundational question more closely in a moment. For now, observe two virtues of this chapter, which flow from its organization. First, the question about meaning is not one that we can answer well merely by retiring to the philosophical antechamber and meditating. Rather, it is one that gets a lot of help from careful empirical study - in this case, ethnographic and lexical studies drawing on a large sample of natural languages. The chapter therefore illustrates a methodological point about the benefits of collaboration between theorists/philosophers of language and science, on the one side, and ethnographer/histories familiar with far-ranging data, on the other. Here we find no sharp distinction between empirical and conceptual investigations (more on this in a moment.) Moreover, efficient, well-directed teams of researchers are able to enhance the precision with which we can ask such foundational questions. For few lone scholars could competently manage the linguistic virtuosity necessary to tackle such a massive survey. Stausberg and his squad were able to raise the bar of comparative understanding through coordinating their efforts thoroughly and precisely.

Returning to our question: what shall we make of the scholarly concept “ritual?” Should we despair given the demonstrable lack of connection between what scholars call “ritual” and the language of the folk? Stausberg himself concludes: “‘ritual’ does not constitute a trans-cultural referential unity … the conceptual category ‘ritual’… is a specific modern Western tool of self-reflection and intellectual modus operandi” (98). That is, Stausberg concedes that “ritual” is indeed, fully, a scholar’s invention. But Stausberg himself isn’t worried about this contingency,

noting that economics works irrespective of how non-scholars speak about exchange. I take it that similar points could be made about the study of infectious disease, radiation, or plate tectonics - indeed, for any discipline where common experience is a poor guide. Here we can see that while the languages of the natural sciences are unambiguously an artefact of bourgeois North Atlantic academic culture, we may nevertheless consider them valid means for describing and explaining the world. Contingency alone cannot damage a concept. For we judge academic concepts by their fruits, not their causes.

Hardened sceptics might nevertheless press the analogy to the natural sciences, noting that it is incomplete. There is a sense in which “ritual facts” do not look anything like geological, physical, economic, or biological facts. This can be readily seen when we consider the diversity of “ritual” concepts within the field of ritual studies. Gunter Thomas’s excellent chapter “Communication” (429-470) makes this point well. Thomas shows that some researchers conceive of ritual as language, others as an alternative to language. Notice however that it cannot be that both P and Not-P are simultaneously true. Yet because “ritual” is inherently ambiguous it is hard to how to bring evidence to bear on the question of whether ritual is a language. Indeed, the lack of conceptual uniformity among scholars over the meaning of “ritual” is a point that is born out repeatedly in this volume. Unlike “quark,” “nucleotide” or “Nash equilibrium,” the term “ritual” may well turn out to be inherently arbitrary. There may not be any conceptual convergence at the limit of inquiry in the terms meaning because the term does not describe a natural kind.

Shall we throw up our arms in despair? Return to the basis of Stausberg’s analogy to other social sciences. It seems to me that at its most basic level, Stausberg’s analogy does not turn on convergence in meaning at the limit of inquiry. Rather the point seems to be, in essence, that scholarly concepts should be assessed pragmatically, for how well they clarify or explain that to which they apply. Let us consider the fundamentally practical nature of justifying concepts with some care.

First, we can observe, as W. V. Quine did long ago, that the meaning of a theoretical term is intrinsically connected to the theory in which it appears (Quine 1964). “Electron” means nothing without the quantum theory of electrodynamics. But this holism remains true of non-scientific

disciplines. Hilary Putnam urges that we think of Wittgenstein - an Austrian - as an “American Pragmatist” (Putnam 1994). There is no fact of the matter here because “American Pragmatist” is not a natural kind - for example a subspecies of Homo sapiens (“American Pragmatist” isn’t like a “Neanderthal.” We can’t tell from Wittgenstein’s skull whether he should be grouped with James and Dewey). But Putnam’s construal may nevertheless prove helpful, illuminating, or edifying. We may come to understand Wittgenstein’s thought better by placing him in this new light. More generally, we can better understand why it would be a bad idea to seek to regiment conformity by bearing in mind why it would be a bad idea to regiment disciplinary monism. For all scholarly discourses are inherently partial. Without some narrowing there is simply nothing to say.

Consider a passage from Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded:
“What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”
“About six inches to the mile.”
“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of them all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “The farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So now we use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.” (Carroll 2000 [1889])

Once we consider scholars of ritual to be mapmakers of social practice, the problem of theoretical uniformity begins to loose its hold. For maps are models, not duplicates. This partiality, surely, is a virtue. For models are useful precisely because they ignore features irrelevant to understanding. (We could not carry them in our pockets otherwise.) Different maps will ignore different features, and exaggerate others, for varying interests and purposes (see McElreath and Boyd 2007, ch.1).

For example, suppose we were interested in the biological roots of ritual (as I am). It would be unsurprising if our models were to employ biological theory. We might talk about “indirect reciprocity” or “cultural evolution.” Our models might even become mathematical or experimental,

extracting away from common sense, as we (say) examine the habits of baboons for comparative insight. But such baboon gazing probably would not help us to understand rituals if our aim was to give “a thick description” of the Whirling Dervishes or to discuss their phenomenology or to explore colonialism and its effects. Adopting a biological stance would cause us to omit or exaggerate the wrong elements for such interests and purposes. With respect to the diversity of meanings associated with “ritual” it is critical that authors stipulate the range of social phenomena they seek to examine with this term. And they benefit readers by explicitly stating their interests and purposes, and by clarifying how these relate to their methods.

Different models - just as different maps - can safely coexist. No one holds it against chemistry that it does not address matters dealt with by evolutionary ecology. And such remains true, more generally, of disciplinary approaches to ritual study.

Notice, however, that pluralism about models does not mean that anything goes. To begin with, standards of excellence are relative to a model’s interests and purposes. Even one error or omission in a subway map can make you late to the airport or place you in a terrifying neighbourhood. So we can grade models according to how well they succeed by their own aims and purposes. Moreover any model in principle remains open to revision, extension or replacement.

There is another principle we can use to judge models apart from their utility. Observe that ritual studies aims to be, in the broadest sense, a practice of non-fiction. Because all ritual models describe the same, actual world, all models must be in principle reconcilable. Chemistry is not ecology but both must be consistent. Thus, where the claims or commitments of any two models conflict, one or both need to be revised. Theoretical pluralism does not entail pluralistic indifference! A model that posits a mechanism that is fundamentally at odds with what we know to be true will need to be adjusted. Conceptual integration, then, must always remain possible. (In a moment, we shall examine the revisions to learning required by recent cognitive models.)

Finally, it is worth emphasizing that because models are useful for what they leave out, we can safely conclude that all models will be, in an important sense of the word, reductive. There will always be something omitted, as William James recognized long ago:

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. (James [1908] 1928:457)

I will not pursue this point further, other than to note that the standard complaint that scientific theories of human behaviour are reductive applies to any approach, including phenomenological approaches. For example, any phenomenological study will inevitably leave out much phenomenology. Again, without omission there is nothing to say, just as there are no maps without scales.

Let us return to the second section of the book, entitled: “Classical Topics Revisited.” Here the editors gather historical overviews, grouped under headings such as “Ritual and Society” (U. Rao, 143-160) and “Structure, Process, Form” (T. S. Turner, 207-246). In a fascinating chapter entitled “Myth and Ritual” (101-122) Robert Segal traces the history of reflection on the relationship of these two concepts, beginning with the writings of William Robertson Smith and tracking through Tylor and Frazer down to C. Lévi-Strauss, R. Girard and Walter Burkert. Segal closes by advising that contemporary cognitive approaches to ritual should consider the cognitive aspects of mythological thinking as well. For if mythological cognition is closely related to ritual cognition - as so many observers have noticed - then ritual cannot be understood in isolation from the systems that support mythological thought.

I’m willing to back Segal’s horse, which is already being played in a scattering of works (see for example Pyysiäinen [2003]). But the very fact that Segal is able to make this suggestion demonstrates the extent to which scholars from one domain - in this case philosophy/history can speak constructively to those in another - here, cognitive scientists. Conceptual integration need not prioritise the status quo in the natural sciences. Segal’s chapter shows us how it may stimulate those sciences, by offering data or observations that current approaches leave poorly explained.

Of course, the lines of communication run in two directions. For it is equally clear that enhancing the cognitive understanding of fictional and ritual thinking may bring new and unexpected understanding to historians and ethnographers. Those bridges largely remain to be built (though see Martin and Whitehouse [2004]).

The third section of the book covers “theoretical approaches.” Each chapter here is devoted to a particular aspect of ritual, for example, “action,” “gender,” and “relationality.” It was striking to me that of the ten chapters in this section, only two discussed ritual from the vantage point of the natural sciences. One of these, E. Thomas Lawson’s “Cognition” (307-320) introduces readers to the cognitive approach that Segal mentions.

Before examining Lawson’s claims, consider some relevant background. Philosophers since the 17th century have urged that thought must be structured by concepts and assumptions. The cognitive revolution of middle part of the 20th century regimented and formalized these insights, initially (and most notably) with respect to language. Chomsky famously urged that the gap between what children perceive and what they know (the so-called “poverty of stimulus”) is so great that, with the exception of the pronunciation of words and a few grammatical settings, the knowledge of any human language must be substantially instinctive. That is, our knowledge of language is largely a feature of biological rather than cultural endowment. Indeed, for Chomsky, all languages are essentially same, with variation only at the margins. This striking claim has formed the cornerstone of generative linguistics for over fifty years. And the basic idea - that we know more than we learn - applies to many features of thought, from vision, to probabilistic inference, to folk physics, to how we interpret and predict other minds. The question Lawson raises in this chapter is whether it should also apply to ritual.

Clearly much of our knowledge or ritual is taught - indeed some rituals are so elaborate their precise orchestration and sequencing requires long training and effortful concentration to remember. Leaving this variation to the side, we can ask: how much of our understanding of ritual is implicit? Lawson urges: quite a lot. Indeed, Lawson contends that, as with language, all rituals exhibit structural elements and relationships that belie manifold, largely tacit cognitive similarities. Variation is tightly constrained by panhuman features of the mind. “It is as if the structural descriptions that the human mind was processing were a system with empty slots or envelopes just waiting to be filled with specific contents” (312).

One of the models principal claims is that the (alleged) causal effects of a ritual (for example, “reversible” or “irreversible”) will always vary

pair wise with a counterintuitive agent’s particular location in the structural description of the ritual. (By “counterintuitive agent” Lawson means, roughly, a god.). Thus, if the counterintuitive agent is invoked via an instrument to affect a natural agent or object, the default interpretation is that the ritual is irreversible. Otherwise, the default assumption is that it is reversible.

Lawson cites data supporting the view that no one teaches us to make these inferences. They appear to arise naturally from panhuman aspects of mind. We should not be surprised, for again, such is true of so much of linguistic knowledge. No one teaches children not to ask: “Who did John see Mary and.” This utterance violates what linguists call “the coordinate structure constraint.” If Lawson’s data do indeed support his thesis on causation, as they seem to, then it would appear that Lawson and colleagues have indeed found a panhuman interpretative feature for human ritual cognition. (See McCauley and Lawson [2002]).

Let us grant the model. Many readers will wonder, so what? Cognospeak causes vastly many properties essential to making sense of any particular ritual to be obscured. For example, if we look to what is common in say, the interpretation of all circumcision practices (irreversible, surprised?) then we miss exactly everything that is unique to any particular tradition. Telescoping inquiry further, we miss all that is unique to any particular episode in a tradition; say the horrifying rites associated with John’s pious adult conversion to Judaism. We furthermore miss the differences between say, the Khoisa and the Lemba practices. We thus lose any basis for comparison.

Models are incomplete, and as Carroll reminds us, this is a virtue. To some extent one’s particular approach will be guided by taste, interest, and expertise. It is hardly fair to expect everyone to cheer cognitive science if their heart isn’t in it - much as we do not require generative linguistics of Shakespeare scholars. But we go badly wrong in thinking that cognitive science has no bearing on work in other domains.

For example, notice that if Lawson is correct, the process of acquiring ritual knowledge is one of a triggering and shaping of understandings that agents largely already possess. This thesis has startling implications for developmental studies. The view that learning is acquiring - so commonly assumed among anthropologists - is unhelpful and needs to be revised (for discussion see Boyer [1994]). We do not “acquire” a ritual any

more than we acquire our lungs. On Lawson’s model, transmission is a probabilistic non-linear affair, a function of how conceptual materials, variously formatted, interact with entrenched panhuman psychological architecture. Thus the dynamics of learning are far more complicated, and interesting, than the platitude “children learn from their parents” would suggest.

Indeed, Whitehouse’s chapter “Transmission”, which appears in the fourth section of the book (“Paradigmatic Concepts”), draws some of these conceptual threads together. Here Whitehouse summarizes his “modes theory,” a model for religious cognition that combines mainstream cognitive science with ritual studies to produce a novel theory of ritual acquisition. Whitehouse portrays learning as a dynamic interaction between ritual practices that are emotionally powerful but rare, on the one hand, and those that are repetitive, routine-bound but unstimulating, on the other. The emotional events trigger a ritual agent’s episodic memory system yielding vivid, detailed, autobiographical representations (in particular, knowledge of cohort). Such low frequency high arousal rituals are in what Whitehouse calls “the imagistic mode.” On the other side, often repeated low arousal routines activate a ritual agent’s semantic memory systems, yielding schematic, encyclopaedic, impersonal understandings (in particular, knowledge of rules.) These practices are in what Whitehouse calls “the doctrinal mode.” Whitehouse urges that over time these memory effects produce stable religious commitments, interpretations and institutions. On this view, rituals combine with structural features of the human mind to cause religions, and these in turn support rituals, as each elaborates the other over time.

Though indebted to the natural sciences, neither Lawson nor Whitehouse draw on contemporary evolutionary biology for insight into the mental and cultural conditions that support and modify rituals over time. Lawson writes: “Nothing in such a capacity is a special property of the human mind/brain” (315). In my view lack of attention to biology is a mistake. For as Segal observes, most rituals are bound up with stories about the gods. The fact that these beliefs and the social practices that inspire and flow from them endure is nature’s harsh economy is, from a biological perspective, utterly astonishing. Dorthea Baudy’s chapter “Ethology” notices that in the rest of the biological world, ritual behaviours, and in particular, the emotional expressions they prompt and

project, serve core communicative functions. Though Baudy does not explore the recent literature on religious signalling, there is an impressive and growing body of evidence that ritual practice effectively fosters cooperative commitments in groups by enabling agents to reliably signal their social intentions to each other in ways that are hard to fake, and so hard to subvert by cheats and defectors (see Alcorta and Sosis [2005]; Bulbulia [2007]; Sosis and Ruffle [2003]). That is, the costs of religious ritual themselves function as adaptations that secure solidarity among large-scale cooperative bands. This adaptationist stance meshes nicely with Whitehouse’s modes theory, for it appears that an essential biological function of religion is to convey information about whom to trust (who is one of “us” - activated through the “imagistic mode”) and which norms will guide our interactions (semantic information adumbrated in law and lore - activated through the “doctrinal mode”). If the adaptationist stance proves fruitful, then it would be unsurprising if we found ritual capacities to be supported by “special” architectural features of the human/mind brain. Moreover it would be unsurprising if cultural evolution working over time generated social practices effective at triggering and shaping these features during development, and maintaining them through adulthood. Yet to consider these prospects we need to think about rituals as evolutionary strategies.

A final, fifth section to the book contains an Epilogue with one chapter by Florian Jeserich on how to use his very thorough, and organized “Indices.” Jeserich makes some good points about how the indices can help readers get a feel for important figures and concepts in the field, by tracking both the frequency and diversity of author citations. For example, the 19th century Dutch scholar Cornelis P. Tiele is mentioned 88 times (high frequency) but only by one writer (zero diversity.) If we were to judge Tiele merely by his number of mentions we might mistake him for an important theorist, rather than see him for the marginal figure that his is. Hence Jeserich devises a convention for tracking both variables in the index. He also makes some larger claims about “indexical theorizing” which enables readers to understand the “internal discourse” among scholars in the field. I wasn’t persuaded by these claims, however, because we cannot tell without further information whether the sampling techniques are valid and whether the sample sizes large enough to draw generalizations about a scholarly discourse as a whole.

For example the oversight of Rational Choice Theory might give the mistaken view that it is marginal. Nevertheless, the index is excellent, and it is easy to look past these methodological quibbles.

Summing it up, Theorizing Rituals is a fascinating work. In spite of the odd dud chapter and some important omissions, it is well-worth reading. Many of the major movers and shakers in Ritual Studies are represented: Bell, Bloch, A. Geertz, Grimes, Humphrey, Laidlaw, Lawson, Segal, Whitehouse, and others. Moreover the volume includes several lesser-known scholars who have fronted with superior work. The book’s comprehensive scope and its concise articles on a range of subjects make for enlightening reading. Given its breadth and clarity, the book would function well as a textbook for advanced university courses.

Finally, it is worth noting that Brill has recently published a sister volume also edited by Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek and Michael Stausberg: Theorizing Rituals, Volume 2 Annotated Bibliography of Ritual Theory: 1966-2005 (2007) (ISBN-13 (i) 9789004 15343), which compiles summaries of over 400 references to volumes, collections, and articles that have structured and invigorated the field of Ritual Studies.

References

Alcorta, Candace, and Richard Sosis. 2005. “Ritual, Emotion, and Sacred Symbols: The Evolution of Religion as an Adaptive Complex.” Human Nature 16(4):323-359.
Boyer, Pascal. (1994. The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Bulbulia, Joseph. 2007. “Evolution and Religion.” In R. I. Dunbar and L. Barrett (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, New York: Oxford University Press.
Carroll, Lewis. 2000 [1889]. Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. NSW, Australia: Classic Books.
Irons, William. 2001. “Religion as Hard-to-Fake Sign of Commitment.” In R. Nesse (ed.), Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 292-309.
James, William. [1908] 1928. The Varieties of Religious Experience. London: Longmans, Green and Co.
Martin, Luther, and Harvey Whitehouse (eds.). 2004. Theorizing Religions Past: Archaeology, History, and Cognition. Lanham MD: AltaMira Press.
McCauley, Robert N. and E. Thomas Lawson. 2002. Bringing Ritual to Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.
McElreath, Richard, and Robert Boyd. 2007. Mathematical Models of Social Evolution: A Guide for the Perplexed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Putnam, Hilary. 1994. Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pyysiäinen, Ilkka. 2003. “True Fiction: Philosophy and Psychology of Religious Belief.” Philosophical Psychology 16(1):109-125.
Quine, W. V. 1964. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Sosis, Richard. 2004. “The Adaptive Value of Religious Ritual.” The American Scientist 92:166-172.
Sosis, Richard, and Bradley J. Ruffle. 2003. “Religious Ritual and Cooperation: Testing for a Relationship on Israeli Religious and Secular Kibbutzim.” Current Anthropology, 44(5):713-722.
Wilson, David Sloan. 2002. Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.