Another New “Ritual”?

According to the book’s discussion, previous studies on ritual are generally flawed with “a search to clarify the meanings of ritual, to show how the symbols encode and evoke systems of cultural discourse”, as well as an overly subjectivist and individualist emphasis that the external ritual only embodies the essential arena of action within the social actor. (see p.4) The two ways of study take ritual as a symbolic expression of 1) cultural meaning, and 2) personal intention. These views lead to the misunderstanding of ritual as “religious” or authoritarian control and to the substitution of it with “sincerity” in contemporary society.

It is against these currents and “consequences” that the authors are swimming, and their arguments can be summed up with the following paragraphs:

We argue that such traditions (Judaism and Confucianism) understand the world as fundamentally fractured and discontinuous, with ritual allowing us to live in it by creating temporary order through the construction of a performative, subjunctive world. (11)

The ability to play with boundaries is a crucial feature of the ritual worldview that is missing in a world of pure sincerity. (13)

By asking what ritual does instead of what it means, the authors define ritual as a special way of framing actions in which to create a temporary subjunctive world; and to posit as well as to transcend the boundaries between the subjunctive and the real worlds is an ability and a necessity of human beings, which, however, is missing in today’s world of “sincerity”. The whole book can be read as an effort to reestablish the values of ritual as a counterforce against the dominant “sincerity”, in order to solve current social problems typified by “absolutism”.

While criticizing Radcliffe and Geertz, the authors befriend Bell and several others in seeing ritual as an orientation to “action” instead of “meaning”, and they specially points out their theoretical contribution of seeing ritual as “the frame of actions, not actions themselves.”(5) However, I see much similarity in this view of ritual to that of Bell’s “ritualization” which takes ritual as a way of differentiation between social activities. Both are to create difference, and both are pervasive. And the “subjunctive world” somehow resembles Bell’s “ritualized space”.

A major difference between them, as I have identified, is that while Bell explains the ritual performer as ritualized agent, this book discusses the agent’s individual autonomy in ritual performance, which can be best understood in Confucius’ description “following my heart’s will and yet not violating the rules”.

Further, this book develops the view of ritual as a mode of framing actions by explaining the significance of ambiguity, the establishing and simultaneous breaking of boundaries, the pervasive of both ritual and sincerity, the self control and defined role in ritual and play, as well as the practical implications of these understandings.

As I learn a lot from the book, I feel it hard to synthesize the chapters into a coherent argumentative logic. For example, chapter two discusses the significance of ambiguities and boundaries, chapter three ritual, play and boundaries—they seem complementary but meanwhile overlapping. Perhaps this is a shortcoming of co-authoring which is hard to avoid.