The Problem Of Ritual Efficacy

How do rituals work? Although this is one of the first questions that people everywhere ask about rituals, little has been written explicitly on the topic. In The Problem of Ritual Efficacy, nine scholars address this issue, ranging across the fields of history, anthropology, medicine, and biblical studies. For "modern" people, the very notion of ritual efficacy is suspicious because rituals are widely thought of as merely symbolic or expressive, so that - by definition - they cannot be efficacious. Nevertheless people in many cultures assume that rituals do indeed "work," and when we take a closer look at who makes claims for ritual efficacy (and who disputes such claims), we learn a great deal about the social and historical contexts of such debates. Moving from the pre-modern era-in which the notion of ritual efficacy was not particularly controversial-into the skeptical present, the authors address a set of debates between positivists, natural scientists, and religious skeptics on the one side, and interpretive social scientists, phenomenologists, and religious believers on the other. Some contributors advance a particular theory of ritual efficacy while others ask whether the question makes any sense at all. This path-breaking interdisciplinary collection will be of interest to readers in anthropology, history, religious studies, humanities and the social sciences broadly defined, and makes an important contribution to the larger conversation about what ritual does and why it matters to think about such things.

This collection of ten contributed essays explicitly addresses the question of ritual efficacy. The authors do not aspire to answer the question 'how do rituals work?' in a simplistic fashion, but rather to show how complex the question is.

One question which yet bedevils the study of ritual is this: "How are rituals ever efficacious?" Or, put another way, "How is anyone ever persuaded that a ritual does or makes what it claims to do or make?" This book addresses the question by proposing a cognitive model for ritual as information processors (participants) instantiating information processes (rituals). Ritual participants use cognitive technologies to create cultural objects. A cognitive technology is a change we make in the environment to bolster our native cognitive skills; shopping lists are cognitive technologies to bolster memory. A cultural object is a thing in the world that is what it is by virtue of the combination of what it is physically and a culture's agreement on what it is; biscuits in the U.K. and cookies in the U.S. are cultural objects. Rituals, the book proposes, are effective inasmuch as they make or manipulate cultural objects. Pictures Making Beliefs expands its proposal by comparing rituals to kindred cultural technologies: pictures and make-believe. The premise is that the study of ritual as cognition can be expanded, enlightened and improved by the use of concepts and methods prevalent in investigations of the cognitive underpinnings of these kindred cultural achievements. From these comparisons emerges the idea of worlds as a quasi-technical explanation of pictures, make-believe, the here and now and rituals as information streams flowing through body, brain and environment. Finally, the book situates the cognitive technological model within the wider landscape of religious studies by placing it within a chain of correlations from lower level descriptions (e.g. in neuro-science) to the higher levels (e.g. in sociology) by presenting the objects created and manipulated in ritual as essentially contested. The claim is that, in the performance of rituals, participants structure the world in ways to create boundless and obscure objects whose proper function in the world outside their ritual relies upon their being, in their essence, contestable. This book is part of the Ritual Studies Monograph Series, edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh. "The author writes in a skillful and fluid style, and the book is remarkably accessible given its level of technical and scholarly information. This is not a book about debunking religious faith; it attempts to explain how rituals work, not why they do. Its goal is to describe how people's minds operate on levels from neurobiology to group social behavior. The book is interesting, unusual, strongly researched, and well written." -- Book News, Inc. (December 2012)

Ritual is part of what it means to be human. Like sports, music, and drama, ritual defines and enriches culture, putting those who practice it in touch with sources of value and meaning larger than themselves. Ritual is unavoidable, yet it holds a place in modern life that is decidedly ambiguous. What is ritual? What does it do? Is it useful? What are the various kinds of ritual? Is ritual tradition bound and conservative or innovative and transformational? Alongside description of a number of specific rites, this Very Short Introduction explores ritual from both theoretical and historical perspectives. Barry Stephenson focuses on the places where ritual touches everyday life: in politics and power; moments of transformation in the life cycle; as performance and embodiment. He also discusses the boundaries of ritual, and how and why certain behaviors have been studied as ritual while others have not. Stephenson shows how ritual is an important vehicle for group and identity formation; how it generates and transmits beliefs and values; how it can be used to exploit and oppress; and how it has served as a touchstone for thinking about cultural origins and historical change. Encompassing the breadth and depth of modern ritual studies, Barry Stephenson's Very Short Introduction also develops a narrative of ritual's place in social and cultural life. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

A classic question in studies of ritual is how ritual performances achieve-or fail to achieve-their effects. In this pathbreaking book, Matt Tomlinson argues that participants condition their own expectations of ritual success by interactively creating distinct textual patterns of sequence, conjunction, contrast, and substitution. Drawing on long-term research in Fiji, Ritual Textuality presents in-depth studies of each of these patterns, taken from a wide range of settings: a fiery, soul-saving Pentecostal crusade; relaxed gatherings at which people drink the narcotic beverage kava; deathbeds at which missionaries eagerly await the signs of good Christians' "happy deaths"; and the monologic pronouncements of a military-led government determined to make the nation speak in a single voice. In each of these cases, Tomlinson also examines the broad ideologies of motion which frame participants' ritual actions, such as Pentecostals' beliefs that effective worship requires ecstatic movement like jumping, dancing, and clapping, and nineteenth-century missionaries' insistence that the journeys of the soul in the afterlife should follow a new path. By approaching ritual as an act of "entextualization"-in which the flow of discourse is turned into object-like texts-while analyzing the ways people expect words, things, and selves to move in performance, this book presents a new and compelling way to understand the efficacy of ritual action.

Michael Ing's The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism is the first monograph in English about the Liji--a text that purports to be the writings of Confucius' immediate disciples, and part of the earliest canon of Confucian texts called ''The Five Classics,'' included in the canon several centuries before the Analects. Ing uses his analysis of the Liji to show how early Confucians coped with situations where their rituals failed to achieve their intended aims. In contrast to most contemporary interpreters of Confucianism, Ing demonstrates that early Confucian texts can be read as arguments for ambiguity in ritual failure.

Collection of papers on ritualistics in religion, including the study of shamans in various cultures, the Norse myths and Scandinavian rituals.

In Rituals and Symbolic Communication in Medieval Hungary under the Árpád Dynasty (1000 - 1301) Dušan Zupka examines rituals as means of symbolic communication in medieval political culture focusing on the Hungarian Kingdom under the rule of the Árpáds.