Ritual

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A ritual is a formal, often repeated sequence of words and actions, usually performed in a set way and set apart from everyday behaviour. Rituals are found in almost every religion, and scholars have argued for well over a century about what rituals are, why they take the form they do, and whether they "work". There is no single agreed theory. This article sets out some of the main positions, each credited to the scholar who holds it.

Repetition and form

The scholar of religion Robert Yelle points out that ritual and repetition are almost the same word in many cultures. Spells, chants and liturgies are full of repetition, rhyme, alliteration and mirrored phrases, and they often coordinate several senses at once. Yelle argues that older theories paid too little attention to these formal features.

Yelle surveys a range of rival explanations:

• Sigmund Freud compared repetitive religious acts to obsessive behaviour that wards off anxiety.
• Mircea Eliade saw rituals as re-enactments of the creation of the world, or of the deeds of gods and ancestors, which serve as models for sacred action.
• Frits Staal argued that Vedic chants and ritual sequences repeat because they are "syntax without meaning", rather like birdsong.
• Émile Durkheim held that sacred symbols have no power of their own; their force comes from the social group they stand for.
• Catherine Bell argued that ritual cannot be defined by a fixed list of features. For her it is a way of acting that marks itself off from ordinary acts, to a greater or lesser degree. Yelle criticises this because it does not explain why the same formal features keep turning up.

Ritual as performance

Some theorists treat ritual as a kind of action done with words. The philosopher J. L. Austin described "performative" utterances, in which saying something is doing it, as when a promise is made. The anthropologist Stanley Tambiah built on this, describing ritual as a system of symbolic communication marked by formality, stereotyped repetition and redundancy, performed in several media at once so that it intensifies the participants' experience. Other scholars, such as Harvey Whitehouse, link repetition to memory: repeating something helps people learn it and pass it on.

Yelle's own view is that ritual works as heightened poetic language. Its repetitions and patterns make it a persuasive, effective performance, rather than meaningless noise.

Does ritual "work"?

Nineteenth-century scholars such as E. B. Tylor and James Frazer thought magic rested on a mistaken association of ideas: things that look alike, or have once been in contact, were wrongly believed to affect each other. Yelle notes that many anthropologists later dropped "magic" as a dismissive label, but he defends keeping it because such practices are widespread and practitioners often do believe in their effect.

Jonathan Z. Smith, as summarised by Yelle, argued that ritual is a way of working through the gap between how things are and how they ought to be, and that performers act from recognition rather than from a belief that the ritual causes results. Yelle disagrees: he thinks this projects modern scepticism onto people who explicitly claim their rituals are effective, though he accepts that Smith's idea of the "gap" is useful.

Yelle also reports a debate about timing. Godfrey Lienhardt observed that the Dinka people of South Sudan hold their rain rituals at the end of the dry season, so the ritual follows the natural rhythm rather than trying to force it. Yelle replies that the ritual still builds anticipation by riding on the natural cycle.

Suspicion of ritual in the modern West

Yelle traces part of the modern Western distrust of ritual to Protestant theology. The verse in Matthew 6:7 warning against "vain repetitions" was read, in a tradition Yelle links to Calvin, as condemning repeated prayers such as the Catholic Hail Mary. That attitude favoured the meaning of words over their form, and belief over ritual. British missionaries and officials later criticised Hindu mantras in the same terms. Yelle suggests that "ritual" as a category was itself shaped in the modern period as the opposite of science and rationality.

Several historians have described a "decline of ritual" as a mark of modern life. Yelle notes that Peter Burke and Catherine Bell found little evidence for an actual decline, and thought it better to study changing attitudes to ritual instead.

Ritual and the senses

Many rituals engage smell, sight and sound as well as words. The historian Susan Ashbrook Harvey argues that early Christian writers taught that worship trained the body's senses to experience God, using incense, perfumed oil, lamps and candles. In Zoroastrianism, Jenny Rose describes daily prayers and seasonal festivals as what gives most Zoroastrians their sense of continuity, with the idea that ritual and ethical action strengthen both people and the cosmos. In Wicca, Joanne Pearson describes the casting of a circle to create sacred space, and the use of candles, incense and altars to engage the senses.

Ritual and food

Ritual and eating are closely linked. The scholar Afe Adogame argues that in African traditions food is "more than just sustenance", and that shared meals with gods and ancestors express identity and bind communities together. Among the Oza of Nigeria, offerings and libations go to the deities and ancestors before every meal, and the New Yam Festival cannot begin until the first yams have been given to the god of harvest and the ancestors. See Feeding the gods in Yoruba religion. Ritual also shapes travel: see Pilgrimage.

Ritual meals

Shared meals are among the most widespread rituals. In the Sikh langar everyone sits in the same rows and eats the same food, a deliberate reversal of older purity rules about who may eat with whom. The Dawoodi Bohras' Faiz al-Mawaid al-Burhaniyah delivers a daily meal to about 135,000 households and treats feeding others as worship.

See also

• Langar
• Faiz al-Mawaid al-Burhaniyah
• Kali and food
• Feeding the gods in Yoruba religion
• Pilgrimage
• Prayer
• Worship
• Sacrifice
• Incense
• Candles in religion
• Altar
• Fasting
• Sacred