Calvin, who introduces this collection of essays on ritual in its own right, understands ritual as well as many anthropologists. Calvin is dramatizing thematics that I am trying to avoid. Complaining about the peanut butter, spoiled because his mother did not observe the proper ritual for scooping it out, he is telling us: do the ritual correctly. It exists because it has a function-control. Perform control in your ritual, and you will have control in your life. The ritual of how to scoop out peanut butter is a representation of life. Living produces its own symbols, its own reflections, and these are the ritual, existing to Social Analysis, Volume 48, Issue 2, Summer 2004, 1-32 CALVIN AND HOBBES ©1993 Watterson. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. All rights reserved. enact themes of living-here that of control. The ritual has meaning, otherwise why the argument between Calvin and his mother over its importance for living? For Calvin, scooping out peanut butter is akin to a Geertzian model of and model for living-you scoop peanut butter the way you live your life. One thing is certain: to understand the peanut butter ritual, one begins with life, not with a jar of peanut butter. First, though, let's have a look at the peanut butter in the jar … Some three decades ago, Claude Lévi-Strauss called for the study of ritual "in itself and for itself … in order to determine its specific characteristics" (1981, 669). Lévi-Strauss's concern was to distinguish ritual from myth, his overriding focus of study. He identified myth with mind and thinking, and ritual with living and the attempt to overcome any break or interruption in the continuity of lived experience, the discontinuous made continuous (674)(675). Ritual, he wrote, "turns back towards reality" (680) in that " [i]t is not a direct response to the world, or even to experience of the world; it is a response to the way man thinks of the world" (681). Lévi-Strauss worried that ritual commonly is conflated with myth-in other words, that ritual too becomes a repository of beliefs and representations connected to cultural philosophies about the world. In a more Turnerian, Geertzian, or, for that matter, Leachian idiom, ritual is perceived and made into a storehouse of symbols and scripts originating in the world outside ritual, activated within ritual in prescribed ways on predicated occasions, in order to inform and to somaticize participants with appropriate meanings and feelings related directly to their cultural worlds outside ritual. In Geertz's terms, borrowed from the philosopher, Max Black, ritual acts as a model of and model for cultural worlds, yet never ritual in itself and for itself, but always ritual as representation-the hegemonic modality for the study of rite in anthropology. A second, powerful modality, whose logic parallels the first, is ritual understood as functional of and functional for social order, a line of inquiry whose interior logic is no different from that of ritual as representation. A third modality, close to t...