Viva Brighton Issue #50 April 2017

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RITUAL .................................... Prof Jon Mitchell Why do we have rituals? “I don’t think society can exist without rituals,” says Jon Mitchell, Professor of Social Anthropology at Sussex University. “The idea of human beings without ritual is a non-starter.” There is a caveat, though. Ritual is a very broad term. As well as the religious kind, there are secular rituals - which can be anything from a stag do to the State Opening of Parliament. Then there are personal rituals: superstitious habits, for example. Anything which is done partly for symbolic reasons can be called ritual - and even that broad definition doesn’t cover everything, apparently. Ritual, in this wider sense, is “absolutely central” to what it is to be human, Mitchell says. So why are we a ritualistic species? Is it a social thing, to do with bonding? “That’s an argument that comes from Emile Durkheim, a 19th-century sociologist-anthropologist who was interested in religion. He argued that at the core of religion is ritual activity, and ritual activity is about social bonding. It’s about bringing people together in the worship of something bigger. And that something bigger, he said, is simultaneously god and society. That when people come together to celebrate what they think is god, they’re actually celebrating the social bond that brings them together. A very influential view. “In some contexts, ritual is helping us to understand that we’re part of something bigger, and what the dynamics of that are. In the classic religious ‘rites of collectivity’, it’s about recognising that we’re all a part of a group, worshipping the same god. “I think that translates into [secular] ‘rituals of state’ as well, which are about recognising that we are part of something bigger: the state which is presiding over us... For example, the ritualization which goes into legal proceedings is about recognising that we’re subject to a legal framework which is shared and collective. “More recently, people have tweaked Durkheim’s idea, and started to recognise that ritual can be about challenging social cohesion, as well as constructing it. Ritual activity can be about protesting; it can be about going against the established social order. The kind of ways in which some of the alter-globalisation movement has started protesting in the last, say, 20-30 years, is often highly ritualistic. “And things like the Orange parades in Northern Ireland; to what extent are they about creating a cohesive group of unionists, and to what extent are they actually about communicating with the Catholics, and creating antagonism in relation to the Catholics? So it [can be] as much about out-groups as about in-groups. “Ritual is partly, I’d say, a search for an understanding of the social bonds in which we are located... It goes back to the basic Durkheimian idea that ritual is about constructing an idea of what ‘the social’ is, and how are we are placed as individuals within it. “We assume that, as humans, we are individual, separated, psychological beings. And so ‘the social’ then becomes a problem. Actually ritual is about, precisely, dealing with that issue.” Steve Ramsey ....85....
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THIS MONTH’S COVER ARTIST .......
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The season to sell Thinking about s
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Viva Brighton Issue #50 April 2017

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