Understanding Religious Ritual

Theoretical approaches and innovations

John Hoffmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136889912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Although numerous studies of religious rituals have been conducted by religious studies scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists, it is rare to find a work that brings scholars from different disciplines together to discuss the similarities and differences in their research. This book represents contributions by leading scholars from several disciplines that show the diversity of approaches to religious rituals, while also providing cross-disciplinary perspectives on this topic.

The goals of the chapters are to consider where the field currently stands in understanding religious rituals and what novel ideas can improve our knowledge about these practices; and furnish innovative applications of theory by discussing particular examples which are drawn from the authors' fieldwork. The chapters cover Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, and Islamic rituals, thus providing a view of how ritual practices vary across the globe, but also how they share some important characteristics.

1 Introduction

Improving our understanding of
religious ritual

John P. Hoffmann

A controversy that may have been missed by researchers of religion involves recent claims about the world's oldest rituals. As reported in several science magazines, archaeologists working in the Tsodilo Hills in the Kalahari of Botswana claimed that they had found 70,000 year old evidence that spearheads were ritually destroyed in the presence of a rock figure of a python. Other archaeologists who have worked in this area disputed this claim, arguing that finding a presumed python in the rock carving was stretching the imagination much too far (Robbins et al. 2007). Besides, evidence from sites such as Sima de los Hueso in northern Spain indicate that ritual burials occurred at least 400,000 years ago (Carbonell and Mosquera 2006). This seemingly arcane archaeological dispute is relevant for several reasons: it shows that ritual is not a novel or noncontroversial phenomenon; and it suggests more broadly that how ritual is defined, approached, and explained are vital issues. For example, although it may be expedient to our contemporary minds to view the burials at Sima de los Hueso as religious ritual, it is certainly not known whether corpses were thrown into a stone pit for supernatural or simple pragmatic reasons.

This volume is designed to address some of these general issues and, thus, improve our understanding of religious ritual. Not surprisingly, much of the scholarly attention to ritual has focused on religious behavior. In fact, classic studies published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tended to elevate ritual behavior so that it literally defined religion.¹ Subsequent years have seen numerous scholars attempting to broaden this line of thinking. For example, some have expanded the boundaries of ritual to include many types of social interaction that individuals and groups engage in, from visits to art museums to dog walking (e.g., Collins 2004; Duncan 1995; Liénard and Boyer 2006). Others, however, continue to examine rituals among specific religious groups or as expressions of religious sensibilities. One goal is to observe certain types of religious behaviors so that the social organization, cultural underpinnings, and communicative styles of groups and their members can be understood better. This has motivated many fascinating studies of Catholic mass, Evangelical spirituality, Pentecostal glossolalia, bar mitzvahs, Hindu string ceremonies, Muslim purification practices, Buddhist healing ceremonies, and other ritual behaviors.

This volume brings together the work of a diverse group of scholars to enhance our understanding of what religious rituals are, how they operate, and what effect they have on individuals, groups, and even societies (see, for example, Chapter 12, this volume). I invited notable scholars from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, psychology, and family studies to consider several motivating questions, such as, how do you approach the study of religious ritual? What does contemporary theory tell us about this topic? How does it help us make sense of them? What are some shortcomings of contemporary theorizing? What needs to be done to surmount these deficiencies? Are there disciplinary boundaries that should be challenged? If there are, how have they impeded the study of religious ritual and how might they be overcome? I also asked them to offer innovative ways of looking at religious ritual based on their own research. The result of this inquisitive exercise is offered here and, I contend, provides fresh insight into an issue that continues to draw significant attention. Moreover, the breadth of theoretical attention is matched by the scope of attention to various religions and religious groups from across the globe, including those representing Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodox Christianity.

Why understanding religious ritual is important

My interest in this topic germinated when I was conducting fieldwork in Hokkaido on members of minority religious groups. Since the umbrella of Buddhism and Shintoism continues to exert an influence on many Japanese people, I wondered whether the group members I interviewed continued to practice traditional Japanese religious rituals. Many reported that they still attended attend Shinto festivals, especially at New Year's, or had butsudan in their homes. Yet, the rituals they practiced – some of which were denounced by their religious group – were not seen as religious. Rather, they were nationalistic or what some participants referred to as “bunka” (cultural) acts (Hoffmann 2007).² Although I was willing to accept this explanation, I could not escape the nagging feeling, even after a period of saturation in the literature, that we need a better understanding of ritual, and that ideas about religious ritual could use some theoretical invigoration. Much of the literature that I read was fragmented along disciplinary, ontological, and epistemological lines. There was some overlap, especially among theorists in anthropology and religious studies, but there was little innovation in the theories used to understand this form of human activity or engagement across disciplines.³ Of course, one argument is that we abandon attempts to define or perhaps even understand ritual, since it is both ubiquitous and elusive (Goody 1977). Yet, as I'm sure the authors who contributed to this volume (and hopefully many readers) will agree, such abandonment would be unfortunate. Definitional issues in the social and behavioral sciences abound, yet few argue that we should discard the study of symbols, culture, social structure, or myriad other topics due to their elusive definitional nature.

What is needed is not simply a better definition of religious ritual, although, as Timothy Nelson's chapter demonstrates (Chapter 2), this would be helpful. Rather, theoretical innovation and application would go far to help us not only comprehend why ritual is important to so many people around the world, but also what continues to attract people to religious groups and practices. For all the discussion of secularization that has occurred over the last few decades, it is now undeniable that many religious groups are thriving and millions, if not billions, of people worldwide are involved regularly in religious rituals of many stripes. Some argue that this is not surprising because religion and, derivatively, religious ritual, is, at its core, a cognitive necessity (Barrett 2000), perhaps an evolutionary residual or something more fundamental to human existence. Whatever the case may be, religious rituals, of many sorts, will not disappear anytime soon.

Thus, in addition to the “what is religious ritual?” question, it is equally important to ask what religious ritual does and why. As the chapters in this volume attest, religious ritual serves numerous purposes.⁴ And I hope that this is one, but not the only, contribution the contributors’ work can make to our understanding of ritual. To summarize broadly, though, we may consider the following crude list of what religious ritual does. Among its overlapping effects, religious ritual

• communicates

• teaches/socializes; generates beliefs

• separates and creates boundaries

• transforms social statuses and other characteristics

• creates sacred spheres; sacralizes

• establishes identities (individual and group) and a sense of belonging

• builds relationships

• cleanses

• produces social order and bonds; organizes

• controls or oppresses

• generates or sustains power

• resolves conflicts

• creates or promotes emotional energy

• embodies

• genders

• performs

• encourages and creates memories and narratives (Bell 1992; Collins 2005; Durkheim 1912; Rappaport 1999; McCauley and Lawson 2002; Nelson 2005; Seligman et al. 2008; Swenson 1999; Tambiah 1979; Turner 1969).

I'm certain that scholars of ritual could come up with a more complete list. Some may even reject such a list as missing the point. Nevertheless, as outlined in the next section, many of these effects are represented in the following chapters.

Chapter overviews

This book is organized in what may seem an unusual way. I initially planned to have two sections: the first on theoretical innovation and the second on theoretical application. However, this proved to be unsatisfactory. Although I was socialized to see the development and application of theory as distinct exercises,⁵ my colleagues who contributed the following chapters taught me an important lesson. That is, the most fruitful and intriguing scholarly work stems from the wedding and mutual reinforcement of theoretical development, innovation, and application. Nonetheless, for heuristic reasons, I attempted to organize the chapters so that they move from an emphasis on innovation toward an emphasis on application. This is not clear-cut, however, since each chapter has attractive qualities drawn from each and all have important things to say about the preferred direction of ritual studies.

Timothy J. Nelson (Chapter 2) begins by providing an excellent review and critique of several definitions of religious ritual. He notes that we have moved away from defining ritual simply by its formal or expressive characteristics. Instead, inspired by Jonathan Z. Smith and Catherine Bell, he emphasizes how religious ritual is about making a distinction, of “asserting a difference.” In general, it is a boundary producing activity. Nonetheless, an additional task is to theorize how ritual produces or is produced by these distinctions. Although the place in which it occurs may have this effect, there is something more that needs to be described. Nelson recognizes how important this is as he draws on Erving Goffman's frame analysis to further our understanding of the “distinction of a distinction.” Goffman (1974) proposed that frames are predetermined cultural scripts or understandings; whereas transformation devices are boundary-setting temporal and spatial phenomena that serve as signals that a movement into ritual action is occurring.⁶ This can involve different clothes, music, and words or phrases (e.g., “let us pray”). Some of these devices are described in detail in Nelson's (2005) study of an Evangelical church in South Carolina. Transformational devices can take on a number of different faces; the key is how they are experienced and enacted by group members. It seems clear, then, that research on ritual must give credence to an “insider's” understanding of frames and transformations.

In Chapter 3, Douglas A. Marshall examines how developments in evolutionary and cognitive science allow us to elaborate Durkheimian views of religion and ritual. He begins by discussing the evolutionary development of religion, with an emphasis on the role of the conscious and the nonconscious. He points out that nonconscious “modules” affect myriad capacities and motivations, which thus affect some often misunderstood ritual aspects of human behavior. Marshall then explains some ingredients that go into rituals – copresence, attentional control, effort, rhythm, ecstatic substances, and symbolic content – and how these allow belief and belonging to emerge out of religious ritual. He demonstrates how his ingenious theory can be tested and the ways in which it elaborates our understanding of these religious activities.

Géraldine Mossière (Chapter 4) draws on anthropological theory to address ritual performance, with an emphasis on the body. Ritual production and the emotional energy that emerges rely on the body's capacities to act and interact. Mossiére shows this by drawing on her fieldwork among a Pentecostal group in Montreal. Her vivid descriptions of ritual action through dance, music, and discourse show that the body provides a language that transforms religious experience into an area where senses are blurred while shared perceptions produce communal feelings. Social activities are performed and grasped through individual bodies and also engage communal and communicative dimensions of the self.

In Chapter 5, Jørgen Podemann Sørensen takes us in a new direction by addressing ritual texts. Using the perspective of textual studies, he engages in a comparative study of some common hymns and prayers from ancient Egyptian religion, Christianity, and Hinduism, including their contribution to the union of dromena (“the things done”) and legomena (“the things spoken”). His overview of some key ritual texts demonstrates how they can create a momentum that makes the production seem uniquely real. In this sense they are illocutionary acts, but they also use considerable rhetoric apparatuses and non-verbal action.

Elizabeth A. Gassin reviews psychological, sociological, and anthropological work on the psychological effects of religious ritual (Chapter 6). She laments the relative inattention of psychologists to the study of religious ritual and offers a synthesis of the literature that may provide some guidance for future research. She then applies the techniques of “psychological functionalism” to bette...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Understanding Religious Ritual
• Routledge advances in sociology
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: improving our understanding of religious ritual
• 2 Transformations: the social construction of religious ritual
• 3 The ritual production of belonging and belief: Darwinian flesh for Durkheimian bones
• 4 Experience, subjectivity and performance: an anthropological approach to Pentecostal rituals based on the body
• 5 Ritual texts: language and action in ritual
• 6 A psychological functionalist perspective on a forgiveness ritual
• 7 Making it look right: ritual as a form of communication
• 8 Applying practice-oriented approaches to Islamic purification and prayer
• 9 Centered in time: a sociological phenomenology of religious rituals
• 10 Mongolian livestock rituals: appropriations, adaptations, and transformations
• 11 “Don’t forget home”: the importance of sacred ritual in families
• 12 The ritual economy in modern Malaysia
• Index