INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

itual theorists in recent decades have come to perceive ritual primarily as action
which assumes certain qualities. This action is always acted out by humans within a
social and situational context. Starting from the questions of what distinguishes ritual
acts from ordinary act in the everyday life, and under which circumstances ritual
activities differ from other human activities, many theorists of today would rather
talk of rituals as a process by which the properties of ordinary acts are transformed.
In the move from an essence-oriented view to a process-directed approach,
Catherine Bell (1988, 1992, 1997) familiarized the word ritualization, which according
to her signfied the ways by which action gradually assumes a ritualized character.
Ritualization becomes “a way of acting that distinguishes itself from other ways of
acting in the very way it does what it does.” 67 In her view there seem to be at least six
typical traits of acts which have been exposed to the process of ritualization: ritual
acts have a character of being formal, traditional, regular and recurrent, rulegoverned,
pregnant with symbols, and performative. Bell has illustrated the qualitative
spectrum which characterizes ritualized acts and the ways by which cultures
ritualize and de-ritualize activities in strategies to create and maintain power relations
and social acts. 68
Focusing more explicitly on the properties of ritual action and human agency,
Humphrey & Laidlaw (1994) define ritualization as a “distinctive character”, which
any kind of act can assume when the actor takes up, what they call, “the ’ritual commitment’
‒ a particular stance with respect to his or her own action.” 69 This commitment
or acceptance involves four interdependant aspects which indicate that action
has become ritualized:
(1) Ritual action is non-intentional, in the sense that while people performing
ritual acts do have intentions (thus the actions are not unintentional),
the identity of a ritualized act does not depends, as in the case
with normal action, on the agent’s intention in acting.
(2) Ritualized action is stipulated, in the sense that the constitution of
separate acts out of the continuous flow of a person’s actions is not accomplished,
as is the case with normal action, by processes of intentional
understanding, but rather by constitutive rules which establish
an ontology of ritual acts.
(3) Such acts are perceived as discrete, named entities, with their own
characters and histories, and it is for this reason we call such acts elemental
and archetypal.
(4) Because ritualized acts are felt, by those who perform them, to be
external, they are also ‘apprehensible’. That is, they are always avail-
67
Bell 1997: 81.
68
In Bell’s view ritual practice is a situational strategy, in the sense that action must be understood
from its particular social situation and practice is often directed towards purposes or can
be associated with individual intentions. See Bell 1992, 1997.
69
Humphrey & Laidlaw 1994: 88.
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008