Why Ritual in Its Own Right? How So?

Abstract

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...

Scripting development through formalization: accounting for the diffusion of village savings and loans associations in Tanzania

“…In contrast to the more usual anthropological positioning of ritual solely within frameworks of domination, it draws attention to the agentive potentiality of ritual as a form of action through which people can create autonomous organizations. This potentiality arises from the extent to which the principles through which a ritual is organized are contained within the ritual form itself, what Don Handelman refers to as its ‘self‐organizing’ properties (: 11). This, of course, is a property not of ritual but of the ways in which people in specific historical and social contexts use ritual to enact particular institutional forms, and the extent, or otherwise, of their disjuncture from existing social orders (Singleton & Law : 264).…”

“…Savings groups practices comprise repeated sequences of standardized actions of separation and calculation which structure a rhetorical performance generative of a distinction between practices inside and outside the frame (Callon : 246; Joseph ; Poovey : 38). Device making through repetition is characteristic of ritual, which makes use of formulaic sequences of actions and utterances to discipline participants into required behaviours and to realize distinct and replicable institutional forms across a range of contexts (Asad ; Bloch ; Handelman ; Kapferer ; Singleton & Law : 265, 269). Aspects of savings group practice replicate the social effects of ritual, enabling the reproduction of their practice and its reiteration (Robbins : 62‐4) as the rules which comprise the formal order of accounting are embodied in practical routines.…”

“…It is the means through which groups organize themselves and the financial system which produces the effects of saving. The partial autonomy of ritual comes into play here as a device through which diverse social orderings can be enacted and, through repetition, re‐enacted (Handleman : 13). Savings associations which exploit ritual forms exhibit similar potentialities (Rodima‐Taylor : 570).…”

“…An ethnographically situated analysis of the extension of village savings associations provides an opportunity to explore how people organize new social arrangements in emergent institutional fields created through the conjunction of development programming and financialization (Hart & Oritz : 476). Self‐organized savings associations adopt the organizational properties of ritual to generate and sustain autonomous local institutions (Handelman : 9).…”

High School Graduation Ceremonies: Intergenerational Relations and Models of Social Order

“…They have a structural core that survives differences in time and place. This structural approach is expressed more radically in Handelman's (2005) introduction to the volume Ritual in Its Own Right, in which he studies the ceremony first and foremost in detachment from its cultural context. Even if at first glance this insistence seems somewhat stringent, it should be understood as a methodological strategy through which Handelman hopes to identify an irreducible structural core.…”