Dual role

One concept noted repeatedly in this study is the mystification of agency found in causative and particularly in hybrid speech acts. In the namburbis and Text 3, the agency responsible for the magical effect is either attributed to the gods or obfuscated through ambiguous verbal forms. The double illocutionary force of the hybrid speech acts fits particularly well with the role of the Mesopotamian ritual practitioner as recently described by both Maul and Rüdiger Schmitt. Both scholars claim that ANE practitioners “slip into” the role of a god when carrying out magical rituals, actively bringing the gods’ powers into the ritual context. As a human, the practitioner can only petition the gods for help, but as one acting the part of a god, the practitioner can actually enact the desired transformation with speech. Such dual action results from the practitioner’s double role in the blended space of the ritual, both drawing on divine power while retaining his or her human identity as a servant of the gods.—Forestalling Doom pages 238–39

<idle musing>
This is actually very common; if you read much anthropology and/or history of religions, you'll see it repeatedly. The line between the divine and the human is bridged by the ritual practitioner. Eliade called it illud tempus (that time) in his writings.

Now the question to ask is, how do we fall into this trap as Christians? How do we think we can control God and circumstances? I would venture to say that we do it without realizing it...

As always, just an
</idle musing>

Summary

When returned to the context of human activity in general, so-called ritual acts must be seen first in terms of what they share with all activity, then in terms of how they set themselves off from other practices. Ritualization is fundamentally a way of doing things to trigger the perception that these practices are distinct and the associations that they engender are special. A great deal of strategy is employed simply in the degree to which some activities are ritualized and therein differentiated from other acts. While formalization and periodization appear to be common techniques for ritualization, they are not intrinsic to 'ritual' per se; some ritualized practices distinguish themselves by their deliberate informality, although usually in contrast to a known tradition or style of ritualization. Hence, ritual acts must be understood within a semantic framework whereby the significance of an action is dependent upon its place and relationship within a context of all other ways of acting: what it echoes, what it inverts, what it alludes to, what it denies.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 220

<idle musing>
That's the final snippet from this book. I hope you learned something from it. I found it very interesting, but then...well, we won't go there : )

Not sure what I'll be extracting from next. I got a whole bunch of great books at AAR/SBL that I can't wait to dig into. We'll see what happens. I'm also in the middle of editing two books, plus working for Eisenbrauns part-time, so I don't have a lot of free reading time right now. And the books I'm editing don't lend themselves to extracts very well—Syriac grammar anyone?

Maybe this one:

America and Its Guns
A Theological Expose
BY James E. Atwood
FOREWORD BY Walter Brueggemann

But are we really one?

Ritualization both implies and demonstrates a relatively unified corporate body, often leading participants to assume that there is more consensus than there actually is. It leads all to mistake the minimal consent of its participants for an underlying consensus or lack of conflict, even when some conflict is objectified and reembodied. Most of all, ritualization leads participants to mistake the group's reformulation of itself as a straightforward communication and performance of its most traditional values.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 210

<idle musing>
Yep. Social commentators fall prey to this all the time. Think of the way Muslims are stereotyped. And conservative Christians too, for that matter.
</idle musing>

But it doesn't count

Wuthnow has explored what he calls the "ritual aspects" of left-hand turn signals and the mass viewing of the television series "Holocaust." Given the analysis advanced in this chapter, however, the first case is not one of ritualized activities, merely regularized (rule-bound) behavior that functions as a signal of intentions in the context of driving. Why? The answer is cultural. In this culture, such legally articulated modes of regularized behavior are insufficient to count as 'ritual' for most people. In the second case, the network and general media undoubtedly used a variety of strategies to heighten the sense that people were viewing a unique and profound event, that the television was a medium of communal participation with other viewers for witnessing an important simulation of reality, and to dramatize the solemnity of the broadcast in contrast to the usual television fare. Indeed, there was sufficient evocation of ritual ways of acting that many people probably reacted with some of the conventions of consent used in ritual—"If it is this unique and important I should watch and accept," and the like. Nonetheless, in this culture, viewing the series was not likely to be judged ritual for those involved due to cultural distinctions among ways of acting, distinctions vital to any analysis of social action.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 205

<idle musing>
That's refreshing to hear. So many people count just about everything that is regularized as ritual that it has been emptied of its meaning. I agree with her that the cultural distinctions have to be maintained in order for an understanding of what ritual is and what it does.
</idle musing>

How it does what it does

[R]itualization involves the differentiation and privileging of particular activities. Theoretically, these activities may differentiate themselves by a variety of features; in practice, some general tendencies are obvious. For example, these activities may use a delineated and structured space to which access is restricted; a special periodicity for the occurrence and internal orchestration of the activities; restricted codes of communication to heighten the formality of movement and speech; distinct and specialized personnel; objects, texts, and dress designated for use in these activities alone; verbal and gestural combinations that evoke or purport to be the ways things have always been done; preparations that demand particular physical or mental states; and the involvement of a particular constituency not necessarily assembled for any other activities. These are not universal features, however. At best, ritualization can be defined only as a 'way of acting' that makes distinctions like the foregoing ones by means of culturally and situationally relevant categories and nuances. When such culturally specific strategies are generalized into a universal phenomenon, much of the logic by which these ritual strategies do what they do is lost. This becomes particularly clear in recalling that the situational and strategic nature of ritualization affects even the degree to which such ritualized acts differentiate themselves at all from other forms of activity. In other words, an essential strategy of ritualization is how it clarifies or blurs the boundaries that identify it as a specific way of acting.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, pages 204–5

<idle musing>
As she keeps saying throughout the book, when you try to analyze ritual, you destroy its power. When it becomes an object of intellectual inquiry, it ceases to be effective—for you, not for the ones participating in it!

I must say, now that I'm almost through with the book, that this is a dense book and difficult to get through. It might be that I'm not familiar enough with the field, or it might be just plain difficult! But, I didn't always follow her arguments and frequently felt she was being convoluted; maybe that's the nature of ritual—to be difficult to describe clearly...I dunno, just an
</idle musing>

Not necessarily

Any ideology is always in dialogue with, and thus shaped and constrained by, the voices it is suppressing, manipulating, echoing. In other words, ideologies exist only in concrete historical forms and in specific relations to other ideologies. Similarly, people do not simply acquire beliefs or attitudes imposed on them by others. If the manipulation of bias is a matter of unarticulated dispositions (e.g., "Stand up straight!"), then these dispositions must be embodied and reproduced in many activities that actively support them without much contradiction.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 191

<idle musing>
In other words, it's complicated! That's why those people who say, "Do it this way, and you'll have perfect kids!" are wrong. It's complicated! There are so many factors interacting in so many ways that you are never in control of the results. Praise God for that! He is in control, and I find that reassuring.
</idle musing>

Broken record

Despite the evidence for the ambiguous, unstable, and inconsistent nature of belief systems, recent literature persists in the view that ritual has an important social function with regard to inculcating belief.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 186

<idle musing>
Yep. Just like I said yesterday. And this was written in 1992!
</idle musing>

The limits of ritual, or how I launch into a rant

These studies give evidence for the ambiguity and instability of beliefs and symbols as well as the inability of ritual to control by virtue of any consensus based on shared beliefs. They also suggest that ritualized activities specifically do not promote belief or conviction. On the contrary, ritualized practices afford a great diversity of interpretation in exchange for little more than consent to the form of the activities.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 186 (emphasis original)

<idle musing>
When was this book written? Hmmm...1992! Over 20 years ago. And I'm still reading books written this year that claim that ritualized activities form a community around shared beliefs! What's with that? I even edited a book earlier this year that had that claim as a centerpiece of the argument!

Get a grip folks! It doesn't work that way! </rant>
</idle musing>

Illogical? Yep!

Hinduism for Hindus is not a coherent belief system but, first and foremost, a collection of practices. It is the collection of practices as such that needs to be explored further in order to understand their sense of religious action. Converse's conclusion about formal beliefs in comparison to particular practices also recalls the story of one exasperated foreign missionary in China. He could successfully convince the Chinese that they were foolish to bow to statues, he asserted, only to have them giggle shyly and admit that they would continue to do it anyway.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 185–86

<idle musing>
Of course. Why not? After all, we don't act from our logic most of the time anyway. We'd like to think that we are logical beings, you know, homo sapiens and all that stuff, but the actual truth is we are emotional beings. And we want to cover our bases, too. After all, that statue just might have some power, and I don't want to anger it! And what harm will it do to bow just a little bit to it? It's cheap insurance...so goes the justification anyway. But it's all just trying to justify to our minds what we wanted to do anyway.

We need the transforming power of the Holy Spirit, working from the inside out. That's the only way we will get deliverance!
</idle musing>

Don't expect consistency or coherence

In addition to the evidence for the fundamental ambiguity of symbols, there is also evidence that religious beliefs are relatively unstable and unsystematic for most people. Instead of well-formulated beliefs, most religions are little more than "collections of notions." Philip Converse demonstrated this point quite graphically in a study of belief systems among elites in contrast to such systems among the mass public. With regard to political beliefs, he found that systems of ideas, beliefs, or ideological attitudes do not filter down much beyond the class of professionals who deal with them on a regular basis. Among the public at large, beliefs and opinions become increasingly incoherent with each other as the level of sophistication and education decreases. That is to say, beliefs or attitudes are increasingly less constrained by logic on the one hand while becoming more affected by local group interests on the other. The dissociation of logically related ideas proceeds down the social ranks to such an extent that it is impossible to find any significant public participation in the belief systems found among elites. In addition, nonsystematic clusters of ideas, so much more prevalent than wide-ranging systems of beliefs, show great instability over even short periods of time. Converse concluded that the factors affecting the juxtaposition of beliefs were most likely to be social (group affiliations), then psychological (expressive of individual idiosyncratic orientations); the logical coherence of beliefs was the least likely factor to affect which beliefs were juxtaposed.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 184–85

<idle musing>
Yep. I agree 100% with that. Don't expect consistency or coherence in people's belief system. I am repeatedly amazed that people don't recognize the logical contradictions in things they claim to believe. When I bring it up, they say they just hadn't thought about it. Which reminds me of a post that I read this morning on Christians and philosophy. Here's a good little snippet:

Maybe we do not find many people interested in anything philosophical because of the growing anti-intellectual sentiment around us. Maybe cultural pressure from bite-size pieces of information delivered rapid-fire via digital media has conditioned our minds in such a way that we cannot think deeply. My concern is not so much with the culture-wide absence of philosophical conversation, but how a lack of thinking has grown among Christians and kept so many followers of Christ underdeveloped. It seems like many who call themselves evangelicals living in twenty-first century America typically find little or no interest in philosophy, theology, or engaging the intellect.

Mark Noll made this observation over twenty years ago when he declared, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” (emphasis original)

"Lack of thinking has ... kept so many followers of Christ underdeveloped." Quite the accusation! But, I think he's correct. Now, what do I do to counteract that? Give me wisdom, Lord! I'd like to think that this blog (now over 10 years old!) is part of my attempt to counteract the lack of thinking. So, a question for both of you who read it: Does it stimulate thinking on your end?
</idle musing>

We hide it

In brief, it is my general thesis here that ritualization, as a strategic mode of action effective within certain social orders, does not, in any useful understanding of the words, 'control' individuals or society. Yet ritualization is very much concerned with power. Closely involved with the objectification and legitimation of an ordering of power as an assumption of the way things really are, ritualization is a strategic arena for the embodiment of power relations. Hence, the relationship of ritualization and social control may be better approached in terms of how ritual activities constitute a specific embodiment and exercise of power.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 170

<idle musing>
I like that nuancing. If it were blatant, we might/would see it. Peter Leithart has a post today about what he calls our "double consciousness" in these types of things. Here's the relevant paragraph, but the whole thing is worth a read:

The double consciousness is most evident in the fact that we won’t admit that we have a double consciousness...He [Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?] offers a simple illustration: “when students scoff at the idea of a magical relation between a picture and what it represents, ask them to take a photograph of their mother and cut out the eyes” (9). And he offers the image of the destruction of the World Trade towers as a more complex example. The images we saw were layered, since the event itself was meant to be a message more than a strategic military action. And the images of the event are living symbols that are part of the ongoing aftermath of the event they depict. Pictures of the billowing fire and smoke against the deep blue Manhattan sky live because they crystallize a form of life that is feared and despised.

With pictures as with so much else, we really haven’t escaped our pre-modern past. We have never been modern.

Ain't that the truth!
</idle musing>

How past is the past?

A textually constituted tradition must continually and simultaneously create both the gap and the authority structures that can bridge it. Goody suggests that priestly control of literacy and sacred texts promotes the codification and standardization of 'orthodox' ritual practices in textual form, which in turn establishes a basis for a type of interpretive and exegetical discourse. Such discourse works to constitutes a class of experts and vice versa. These experts maintain both the pastness of the past and their access to it through the elaborate medium of a discipline of interpretation with its methods, skills, first principles, institutions, and credentials.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 137

<idle musing>
A kind of warped hermeneutical spiral, eh? And self-reinforcing at that. I suspect that only the Holy Spirit can deliver us from it. What do you think?

Deliver us from confirmation bias, Lord!
</idle musing>

Where does the power lie?

Some features appear to be basic to systems of ritual specialists with or without literacy. Most obvious, of course, is how their authority rests on the intrinsic importance of ritual as a means of mediating the relations between humans and nonhuman powers. Yet correct performance of the ritual tends to be critical to its efficacy. An emphasis on the correctness of performance promotes and maintains expertise, but it is not uncommon that other groups, such as the general audience or another lineage of experts, have the right to pass judgment on the performance's correctness. Moreover, the power to do the ritual correctly resides in the specialist's officially recognized or appointed status (office), not in the personhood or personality of the specialist. In this way, the institutionalized office can control, constrain, and pass judgment on a specialist. The separation of the person and the office not only stabilizes the specialist's power and legitimizes it through the social sanctions by which the office is given and recognized; it also controls that power by requiring its conformity to establish models. Indeed, various studies have suggested that the emergence of a priesthood—religious specialists by virtue of holding an office—provides a stabilization and control of religious power not possible with shamanic or mediumistic mediators.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 134

The same but different

Theories that have defined ritual activity as first and foremost the reenactment of historical or mythical precedents, such as those formulated by Eliade, risk a certain blindness to a group's constant reinterpretation of what constitutes these precedents and the community's relationship to them. As I indicated earlier, the evocation of tradition differs significantly in the early Christian eucharistic meal, the Roman rite codified by the Council of Trent, and the post-Vatican II folk mass of liturgical renewal. These liturgies display not only different formulations of the significance of Christ's last supper but also different understandings of the relationship existing between the ritual and the original event. Similarly, in each case a different type of community is constituted around different values and forms of authority—and all within a relatively stable liturgical tradition that presents itself as quite fixed.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, pages 123–24

<idle musing>
There's a saying in anthropology that two people doing the same thing aren't necessarily doing the same thing! This illustrates that truth. The actions might look the same, but they aren't being done for the same reason or with the same understanding of what is happening.

I love reading Eliade; I find him stimulating—even though I think he is wrong about 80% of the time! I think part of the reason he's wrong so often is because he offers a "flat" reading of the rituals, which is what Bell is getting at here. The community is formed by the rituals, sure. But, just as importantly, the community forms the rituals. It goes both ways, and that is something Eliade never considered. For that matter, do we?
</idle musing>

Problem? Simple, redefine it and conjure it away...

What does ritualization see? It is a way of acting that sees itself as responding to a place, event, force, problem, or tradition. It tends to see itself as the natural or appropriate thing to do in the circumstances. Ritualization does not see how it actively creates place, force, event, and tradition, how it redefines or generates the circumstances to which it is responding. It does not see how its own actions reorder and reinterpret the circumstances so as to afford the sense of a fit among the main spheres of experience—body, community, and cosmos.

Ritualization sees its end, the rectification of a problematic. It does not see what it does in the process of realizing this end, its transformation of the problematic itself. And yet what ritualization does is actually quite simple: it temporally structures a space-time environment through a series of physical movements (using schemes described earlier), thereby producing an arena which, by its molding of the actors, both validates and extends the schemes they are internalizing. Indeed, in seeing itself as responding to an environment, ritualization interprets its own schemes as impressed upon the actors from a more authoritative source, usually from well beyond the immediate human community itself. Hence, through an orchestration in time of loosely and effectively homologized oppositions in which some gradually come to dominate others, the social body reproduces itself in the image of the symbolically schematized environment that has been simultaneously established.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, pages 109–10

<idle musing>
That's a bit complicated, isn't it? But I think she's spot-on with it. It all boils down to control. We respond to a problem of some kind by redefining it and then dealing with it in a way that has worked in the past...

That's why walking in the Spirit is so difficult for us; we're not in control. And that's why legalism appeals to us so much. We're in control; even if we fall short, at least we have something to hang on to that's shows us where we stand.

At least, that's my take, but maybe it's just an
</idle musing>

But what are you doing?

Ritual practices are produced with an intent to order, rectify, or transform a particular situation. Ritualized agents would see these purposes. They would not see what they actually do in ritually ordering, rectifying, or transforming the situation. Foucault implies a similar principle when he notes that people know what they do and they know why they do what they do, but they do not know what what they are doing does. For Althusser, this constitutes the intrinsic "blindness" of practice. For our purposes, it is a strategic 'misrecognition' of the relationship of one's ends and means.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 108

Endless iterations

People do not take a social problem to ritual for a solution. People generate a ritualized environment that acts to shift the very status and nature of the problem into terms that are endlessly retranslated in strings of deferred schemes. The multiplication and orchestration of such schemes do not produce a resolution; rather, they afford a translation of immediate concerns into the dominant terms of the ritual. The orchestration of schemes implies a resolution without ever defining one.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 106

Esoteric knowledge

In sum, ritualization not only involves the setting up of oppositions, but through the privileging built into such an exercise it generates hierarchical schemes to produce a loose sense of totality and systematicity. In this way, ritual dynamics afford an experience of 'order' as well as the 'fit' between this taxonomic order and the real world of experience.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 104

<idle musing>
OK, looking at the page views, it's obvious that this book isn't appealing to people! But I find this stuff fascinating. It helps explain why we do what we do—and why we don't even realize that we are doing it! But, you see, that's the "magic" of ritualization! We hide it from ourselves. We convince ourselves that we are doing something. So, again, as always, it is about control. By ritualizing something, we create the illusion that we are actually influencing the outcome. Can you say sin? Can you say pride? Can you say rebellion against God?

And that is why I find books like this fascinating and important. But, I don't expect the page views to increase just because I find it fascinating and important! Let me assure you, I don't blog for page views! If I did, I certainly wouldn't have chosen to blog about obscure things like this! And Hebrew and Greek grammar. Instead, I would be using words that scream for hits; you know the ones I mean. Every time I use them, the page views climb, but the interaction is usually mean-spirited. I don't need or want that. So, I'll be content with obscure stuff that only a few people care about. I've been doing this for nearly 10 years now; I'm not about to change : )

Just an
</idle musing>

Subconsciously effective

The strategies of ritualization are particularly rooted in the body, specifically, the interaction of the social body within a symbolically constituted spatial and temporal environment. Essential to ritualization is the circular production of a ritualized body which in turn produces ritualized practices. Ritualization is embedded within the dynamics of the body defined within a symbolically structured environment. An important corollary to this is the fact that ritualization is a particularly 'mute' form of activity. It is designed to do what it does without bringing what it is doing across the threshold of discourse or systematic thinking.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 93

<idle musing>
In other words, it sneaks through the backdoor to be effective...Interesting thought, isn't it? And I think she's correct. What about you?
</idle musing>

But it's informal...

If ritual is interpreted in terms of practice, it becomes clear that formality, fixity, and repetition are not intrinsic qualities of ritual so much as they are a frequent, but not universal strategy for producing ritualized acts. That is to say, formalizing a gathering, following a fixed agenda and repeating that activity at periodic intervals, and so on, reveal potential strategies of ritualization because these ways of acting are the means by which one group of activities is set off as distinct and privileged vis-a-vis other activities. Yet in a different situation, informality might be stressed to dominate other ways of acting. For example, the formal activities of gathering for a Catholic mass distinguish this 'meal' from daily eating activities, but the informality of a mass celebrated in a private home with a folk guitar and kitchen utensils is meant to set up another contrast (the spontaneous authentic celebration versus the formal and inauthentic mass) which the informal service expects to dominate. It is only necessary that the cultural context include some consensus concerning the opposition and relative values of personal sincerity and intimate participation vis-a-vis routinized and impersonal participation.— Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, page 92

<idle musing>
An excellent insight! An informal gathering can be just as much a ritual as a formal one—and to think otherwise is just deceiving ourselves...which we seem to be only too good at!
</idle musing>