Rituals

Rituals are a challenge for political science. They can be found in a great variety of forms and are multifunctional to such an extent that science has been unable to find an unambiguous definition up to now. Already the term ritual was used in antiquity in a double sense—with a primarily religious meaning (religious cult) or modally (the type and manner of carrying out the ceremonies of the cult). In Roman religion, ritual denotes an ordered ceremonial activity. Theology and religious studies adhere to this day to the concept of ritual as a collective term for religious ceremonies as well as for individual sequences therein. It includes the cults and worshipping customs of Jews and Christians as well as those of various peoples in different times and places, from the Egyptian Isis cult or the Roman priestly authority of the Vestal Virgins to the religious forms of contemporary Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam. Early on, Confucian philosophers investigated the legitimate role of ritual (in Chinese, li) in the guidance of a society. This entry will discuss the impact of such traditions on recent developments in the social sciences and the renewed importance of the study of rituals.

From the perspective of religious studies, ritual is a matter of cultic actions that follow fixed rules for the purpose of worshipping God, the gods, or figures considered to be holy. Religious rites express explicit wishes for propitiation, solace, recognition, and order. They refer to a transcendental power. Their rules, texts, and notes are gathered in Christian churches into official liturgical books. For instance, in the Roman Catholic Church they are described in the Rituale Romanum dating from 1614 (Pope Paul V), which in 1918 became obligatory for all dioceses. Anthropology, ethnology, anthropological religious research, sociology, and psychology attach great significance to the conceptual-theoretical recording, collection, and classification of religious and profane ceremonies.

The founder of anthropological religious research, Edward Bernett Tylor (1873), distinguished religious rites as an expressive-symbological gestural language of theology from those that serve for communicating with and influencing [Page 2326]spirits. With his investigation of the religion of the Semites, William Robertson Smith created an initial foundation for the systematic investigation of rituals. He developed the thesis that religions essentially consist of beliefs and rites, with rites and practical customs being dominant. Arnold van Gennep's Les Rites de Passage recognizes the rhythm-creating function of rituals as a reflection of natural rhythms. A phase pattern serves for classifying rites or individual sequences. Transitional rites are intended to allow individuals and groups to transcend spatial, temporal, and social borders. For Gennep, rites are “compelling actions.” Thus, the acceptance of a gift has an obligatory effect on the recipient. Gennep's conceptualization gained lasting recognition for the anthropological investigation of initiatory rites.

The social sciences speak of rituals as a collective designation with which, however, individual scientists relate different categories and theories. Ritual and rite are frequently used as synonymous terms. Émile Durkheim and his students Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss developed, with regard to the sociology of religion, a theory later taken up by social anthropology and French structuralism. Durkheim defined religion as a system of beliefs and practices that are united in a single moral community. For the Durkheim school, rituals bring about social integration; they are mechanisms that produce social conformity and solidarity. Whenever people come together, there is, according to Durkheim, a natural tendency to coordinate, standardize, and repeat their actions. Durkheim designated the feeling of participating through group activity in something transcendent as “the sacred,” which is represented in symbols.

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