Rituals

Seven Defining Characteristics of Ritual

The view of ritual taken here has several parts. First, ritual is always performed; that is, it always involves action and does not simply exist in the imagination. Second, in the view of the group of people who perform this ritual, the action makes something happen—people graduate from high school, a single man and a single woman become a married couple, justice is done in a courtroom, a religious obligation to the deity is fulfilled, a child's birthday is recognized, sins are forgiven, and so on. Third, these actions are symbolic. That is, they stand for something else; they have meanings assigned to them that go beyond the actions themselves. For example, when people in a courtroom in the United States stand when the judge enters, it is not because they want to see her more clearly or because they are tired of sitting. The action indicates respect for the judge, for the U.S. Constitution, for the rule of law, and perhaps for the power of the government. What these symbols mean comes from people's experiences growing up at a particular time, in a particular place, with a particular group of people. These meanings are historical and communal; through the ritual, these meanings are acted out and kept alive. They are given a physical shape and become the property of the people who practice them. It is important to recognize that rituals express things that are already important to the community that practices them, but at the same time, the importance of these things to the community is maintained and heightened because they are part of ritual. The relationship between symbols and rituals is mutually reinforcing.

Fourth, these actions are sequenced. That is, they regularly occur in a particular order, and this order itself has meaning. In rites of passage (rituals that transform the social position of the people engaged in them, such as initiations that turn boys into men or girls into women) the sequence of activities begins by separating the ritual participants from their old position, followed by a phase in which they are “betwixt and between” (neither in the old position nor yet in the new one), and then ending with actions that bring the participants back into their community, but in the new position. Sometimes, by changing the order, one group of people distinguishes itself from other groups of people. For example, differences in the sequence and set of practices in a bar mitzvah (the ritual that marks a Jewish child's coming of age as an adult in religious contexts) serve to distinguish not only different traditions (Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism), but also to distinguish among different congregations within each tradition. In this way, the ritual can actually emphasize divisions between groups of people, dividing as it also unifies.

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