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Do you ever feel like you’re just going through the motions? Day in and day out, our lives are filled with routines and habits that, while efficient, can feel uninspired and mundane. These routines often operate outside our conscious awareness, lacking purpose, meaning, or intention.
But what if there’s a way to transform these monotonous patterns into something more? Enter the world of rituals. A few years ago, my academic collaborators and I created a unifying model on the psychology of ritual….Continue reading….
By: Nick Hobson
Source: Ritualize Your Routines to Reduce Anxiety, Connect More Deeply, and Find Greater Meaning | Inc.com
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Critics:
There are hardly any limits to the kind of actions that may be incorporated into a ritual. The rites of past and present societies have typically involved special gestures and words, recitation of fixed texts, performance of special music, songs or dances, processions, manipulation of certain objects, use of special dresses, consumption of special food, drink, or drugs, and much more.
Catherine Bell argues that rituals can be characterized by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism and performance. Ritual uses a limited and rigidly organized set of expressions which anthropologists call a “restricted code” (in opposition to a more open “elaborated code”). Maurice Bloch argues that ritual obliges participants to use this formal oratorical style, which is limited in intonation, syntax, vocabulary, loudness, and fixity of order.
In adopting this style, ritual leaders’ speech becomes more style than content. Because this formal speech limits what can be said, it induces “acceptance, compliance, or at least forbearance with regard to any overt challenge”. Bloch argues that this form of ritual communication makes rebellion impossible and revolution the only feasible alternative.
Ritual tends to support traditional forms of social hierarchy and authority, and maintains the assumptions on which the authority is based from challenge. Rituals appeal to tradition and are generally continued to repeat historical precedent, religious rite, mores, or ceremony accurately. Traditionalism varies from formalism in that the ritual may not be formal yet still makes an appeal to the historical trend.
An example is the American Thanksgiving dinner, which may not be formal, yet is ostensibly based on an event from the early Puritan settlement of America. Historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger have argued that many of these are invented traditions, such as the rituals of the British monarchy, which invoke “thousand year-old tradition”
But whose actual form originate in the late nineteenth century, to some extent reviving earlier forms, in this case medieval, that had been discontinued in the meantime. Thus, the appeal to history is important rather than accurate historical transmission.
Catherine Bell states that ritual is also invariant, implying careful choreography. This is less an appeal to traditionalism than a striving for timeless repetition. The key to invariance is bodily discipline, as in monastic prayer and meditation meant to mold dispositions and moods. This bodily discipline is frequently performed in unison, by groups.
Rituals tend to be governed by rules, a feature somewhat like formalism. Rules impose norms on the chaos of behavior, either defining the outer limits of what is acceptable or choreographing each move. Individuals are held to communally approved customs that evoke a legitimate communal authority that can constrain the possible outcomes.
Historically, war in most societies has been bound by highly ritualized constraints that limit the legitimate means by which war was waged. Activities appealing to supernatural beings are easily considered rituals, although the appeal may be quite indirect, expressing only a generalized belief in the existence of the sacred demanding a human response.
National flags, for example, may be considered more than signs representing a country. The flag stands for larger symbols such as freedom, democracy, free enterprise or national superiority.Anthropologist Sherry Ortner writes that the flag. Particular objects become sacral symbols through a process of consecration which effectively creates the sacred by setting it apart from the profane.
Boy Scouts and the armed forces in any country teach the official ways of folding, saluting and raising the flag, thus emphasizing that the flag should never be treated as just a piece of cloth. The performance of ritual creates a theatrical-like frame around the activities, symbols and events that shape participant’s experience and cognitive ordering of the world, simplifying the chaos of life and imposing a more or less coherent system of categories of meaning onto it. As Barbara Myerhoff put it, “not only is seeing believing, doing is believing.”
Anthropologist Victor Turner defines rites of affliction actions that seek to mitigate spirits or supernatural forces that inflict humans with bad luck, illness, gynecological troubles, physical injuries, and other such misfortunes. These rites may include forms of spirit divination (consulting oracles) to establish causes—and rituals that heal, purify, exorcise, and protect.
The misfortune experienced may include individual health, but also broader climate-related issues such as drought or plagues of insects. Healing rites performed by shamans frequently identify social disorder as the cause, and make the restoration of social relationships the cure. Turner uses the example of the Isoma ritual among the Ndembu of northwestern Zambia to illustrate. The Isoma rite of affliction is used to cure a childless woman of infertility.
Infertility is the result of a “structural tension between matrilineal descent and virilocal marriage” (i.e., the tension a woman feels between her mother’s family, to whom she owes allegiance, and her husband’s family among whom she must live). “It is because the woman has come too closely in touch with the ‘man’s side’ in her marriage that her dead matrikin have impaired her fertility.”
To correct the balance of matrilinial descent and marriage, the Isoma ritual dramatically placates the deceased spirits by requiring the woman to reside with her mother’s kin. Shamanic and other ritual may effect a psychotherapeutic cure, leading anthropologists such as Jane Atkinson to theorize how.
Atkinson argues that the effectiveness of a shamanic ritual for an individual may depend upon a wider audiences acknowledging the shaman’s power, which may lead to the shaman placing greater emphasis on engaging the audience than in the healing of the patient.
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