Keiji Nishitani - "Religion and Nothingness"

Introduction:

Keiji Nishitani attempts in this book to reformulate the question “What is religion?” away from attempts to amass historical evidence from a variety of traditions in order to create a universal definition of religion based on certain shared characteristics, from using an objective viewpoint to encounter religion as some type of object whose characteristics can be catalogued and compared. Instead, Nishitani seeks the home-ground of religion, its existence as it is lived by people. The question of religion is to be approached by a person questioning what religion is specifically to them, how they live what they call religion, treating that practice as religion’s sole existence, “where religion emerges from man himself, as a subject, as a self living in the present.” (xlviii) So Nishitani is uninterested in what religion “has been,” but in what it “ought to be,” how it can be understood and practiced in such a way as to carry personal conviction.

In so reformulating the question of religion, Nishitani attempts to engage not only with the Zen Buddhist tradition in which he has been raised and practiced, but also with Western philosophies of religion (comparisons of Eastern vs. Western thinking/society are all over this book – I’m too lazy to put scare quotes over all of them…). Nishitani regards the contemporary situation of Western culture (this book was written in 1982) as one whose primary disease is nihilism, the loss of lived belief in personal deities and an ordered cosmos, replaced by what he sees as empty worship of human capacities. In order to overcome this situation, Western thought must come to recognize the Buddhist standpoint of sunyata, and the perspective it opens on human affairs and the natural world.

Nishitani insists that his account is meant to be non-doctrinal, equally applicable to all religions, but he ultimately criticizes Christianity and Judaism for embodying a pre-nihilistic viewpoint, that of a personal deity and of individual chosenness and election by God, a fundamentally self-centered viewpoint, which he argues can only be overcome, along with the nihilism to which it has succumbed, by adoption of certain Buddhist concepts and perspectives, heavily inflected with concepts taken from Heidegger, Hegel, and Kierkegaard.

Chapter 1: “What is Religion?”

The question “What is religion?” or, more importantly, the question “Why do we need religion?” is ambiguous: asking the question is a demonstration that religion has not yet become a necessity for the questioner, but religion should be necessary even for one who does not yet see its value. This ambiguity arises from the fact that religion cannot be defended in terms of its utility: “a religion concerned primarily with its own utility bears witness to its degeneration.” (2) Utility is a form of evaluation that is fundamentally self-centered; when I ask what purpose religion serves I really ask what purpose it serves for me.

The question of religion opens up, for Nishitani, at the point where we no longer understand utility as a viable form of evaluation, in what are called limit experiences such as death, illness, poverty, etc., undermines “the roothold of our existence and bring[s] the meaning of life into question – become[s] pressing personal problems for us.” (3) The value of all our previous projects undertaken for our own sakes is dissolved in these limit experiences, and we recognize that “not one of all the things that had made up the stuff of life until then is of any use.” (3) Nishitani argues that, following Kierkegaard and Heidegger, “that abyss is always just underfoot,” and that the nihility, “that which renders meaningless the meaning of life,” always underlies the projects we create for ourselves (3-4). Religion arises at these moments of crisis where nihility has overcome our self-centered existence and called the meaning of our lives into question, such that we are force to asked for what purpose we exist. Religion, then, for Nishitani, is the practice, the lived experience, of an individual’s answering this question for herself, the overcoming of self-centered living through the replacement of self-love by life lived for a purpose which becomes the new object of live, which he will later compare to love of one’s neighbor.

Nishitani, noting that there are many different perspective by which one can view religion, chooses to focus on religion as the “real self-awareness of reality,” which refers both to our awareness of reality and reality’s realizing (actualizing itself and coming to its self-awareness) itself within our awareness and actions (5). Reality realizes itself in us by appropriating us to reality, thus altering not only our thoughts, but also our actions and practices to take up their “essential determination,” thus bringing us to live in the fullest sense of the term according to our real being (6).

Reality for Nishitani is unrelated to bare physical existence, as the nihility representing the meaninglessness of physical things and the death representing the negation of life are equally real phenomena. When Nishitani speaks of reality, he refers to “a great harmony among all things in the universe that brings them into being and sustains them in mutual dependence and cooperation, a mystical order that rules over all things so that God can be seen in the most trivial of things.” (8-9) In other words, reality constitutes that perspective whereby we can see within each individual thing, in its course of changes and ultimately its inevitable death, its essential relationship and harmony with all other things in the universe. Reality realizes itself in us when we not only see the universe according to this perspective, but actively take it up in our practices of living, behaving and becoming a harmonious being in relationship with all other things, described in more detail in later chapters.

Two types of self-centeredness, however, prevent us from living within what Nishitani calls the field of reality: the first, already described above, is the self-centeredness of our intentions and interests, understanding all of our activities in terms of their utility for us. The second is a conceptual self-centeredness, or the “subjective autonomy of the ego” that arises from Cartesian philosophy (10). Modern philosophy regards the ego as a separate individual, cut off from the world which it represents to itself and thus comprehends as a set of objects. This egocentric perspective prevents us from comprehending the pre-Cartesian view of the universe, as an organic whole whose parts are in sympathy with each other, connected by the souls of each thing.

The modern egocentric perspective sees only its own intentions and representations, its forms of knowledge and emotions, reflected back to it when looking into the universe. The egocentric subject is closed within its own self-understanding, such that “ego means self in a state of self-attachment.” (14) Nishitani opposes what he refers to as the elemental self to this form of encountering the world, where one recognizes and therefore lives within one’s roots or grounds within universal harmony. The passing-over from the self-attached to the elemental selves begins in the limit experiences outlined above, which create in the individual “the Great Doubt,” a Zen phrase Nishitani uses to express the “fundamental uncertainty about the very existence of oneself and others.” (16) The Great Doubt involves recognizing that nihility not only is present as a threat amongst our everyday existence, but is fundamentally at its root, that nihility, meaningless and formlessness, lies “concealed at the ground of all that exists, at the ground of the world itself,” a recognition that does not negate the reality of the world, but “nullifies” it, bringing us face-to-face with the impermanence and evanescence of our own existences, along with that of all things (16).

Nishitani compares the experience of the Great Doubt to the Christian recognition of sin and evil. An individual’s recognition of his or her own sinful state is connected with recognizing the sinfulness of all humanity, that in the very ground of humanity’s existence as humanity, it is in essence sinful. True recognition of sin is deeper than secular definitions of evil as the latter only isolate instances of evil actions, whereas the former recognizes the transtemporality and essentiality of sin to humanity as such, in other words that humanity is in itself corrupt. In Christianity, faith must exist within this experience of sin, beginning in the recognition that sin, the shunning of divine love, is only possible inasmuch as humanity is essentially a receptacle for divine love, such that the “point of contact” between humans and God is found within “the very awareness of the fact of complete corruption itself.” (25)

Nishitani labels this realization the “Great Reality,” which follows from the Great Doubt in Zen Buddhism. In both religions, faith comes upon the recognition that humanity, in its state of nihility/sinfulness, is in reality essentially connected by its point of contact with some form of divine love. It follows that humanity is transtemporally and essentially connected not only in its sinfulness, but also in its relationship with the divine, the “‘Power of the Original Vow’ (that is, the saving will) of the Tagatha (Buddha) in the direction of all sentient beings,” or God’s agape. (26) Our recognition of our relationship with all other sentient beings and thus also with the divine is the only way to fully overcome our egocentric selfhood, fully break apart our solitude, and actualize our true elemental selfhood through faith.

Modern atheism in fact provides the key to start each individual’s personal journey towards faith. Nishitani chooses Sartre as his representative for modern atheistic humanism, basing his understanding of the ego on “subjective nothingness,” where no transcendent meaning grounds human existence, such that humans are capable of choosing “an image of what he believes man ought to be” and living that image out (31). In place of the imago Dei as the transcendent ground of human ethics, Sartre has humans create an “image of man” by which they model themselves. In this way, Nishitani argues, humans become fully closed within their ego’s projections of who they ought to be, blinded to the nihility that underlies their projections.

Modern atheism does not, however, liberate humanity from nihility, but rather brings it closer to it. Limit experiences will still call into question an individual’s existence, but this time with no grounding meaning to their lives outside of that which they have created and has just been called into question. In response, religion must reassert itself by coming to terms with two issues that have traditionally hampered it. First is a paradox regarding the ontological status of humanity vis a vis God. God has in traditional Christianity been understood as creator ex nihilo, meaning that God is ultimately more real than creation, being its archetype and architect. At the same time, however, creation is seen as imbued and sustained by divine love, and so the exact ontological status of creation is unsettled. Second, religion must come to terms with the problem of evil, of theodicy. Religion must finally be able to answer the problem of how a good and omnipotent God can allow evil and, for Nishitani, nihility, in the world.

Chapter 2: “The Personal and the Impersonal in Religion”

The two great intellectual crises of our time, Nishitani argues, are the resolution of the debate between religion and science, and the overcoming of philosophical nihilism, seen most prevalently in the form of modern atheism described above. The twin forces of science and philosophical nihilism began to challenge religion as the classical view of a teleologically ordered universe collapsed. The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake (destroyed lots of the city, churches destroyed, brothels not, etc., the idea that natural disasters were divine punishment was shattered) demonstrated that God and humanity do not have a personal relationship with each other, such that God responds to and ultimately supports human interests. In its wake a materialistic and mechanistic view of the universe, “a world cold and dead, governed by laws of mechanical necessity, completely indifferent to the fact of men.” (48) Without the idea of soul or spirit, the world now began to be seen as a collection of matter that followed impersonal rules.

This materialistic and mechanistic view of the physical universe was accompanied by a social vision of human progress. Under this vision, humans were viewed as the subjugators of nature, making the world conform to its own will and conceptions of justice and rationality. These three ideas, materialism, mechanism, and progress, are for Nishitani the three poles of modern atheism. The problem of nihility, however, was not resolved in the modern atheistic view of the world, but in fact was made into a presupposition of it. Humans became the masters of their own destiny with no structure of transcendent meaning (ie. metaphysics or religion) to ground their self-understanding, thus making them free to self-define.

The nihility underlying the modern atheistic subject, however, is not overcome by this kind of freedom, as limit experiences will always call into question whatever self-definition the subject gives itself. The only appropriate response to nihilism, for Nishitani, is to affirm the indifference of nature, but “not a cold and insensitive indifference, but an indifference of love. It is a non-differentiating love that transcends the distinctions men make between good and evil, justice and injustice.” (58) This type of love for Nishitani is the common denominator between Christian agape and Buddhist non-ego, both ways of indifferently appreciating all things, regardless of individual differences.

Nishitani explains the link between non-ego and agape in his reading of Meister Eckhart. For Eckhart, the essence of God is “absolute nothingness,” equated with the “Godhead” as opposed to the personal God, and a transcendence of any mode of divine being (61). When humans are made in the image of God, then, this includes the Godhead as well, such that each human has an element of absolute nothingness in his or herself. Union with God, then, requires that individual subjectivity be transcended in order to attain the divine element of absolute nothingness in the depths of the individual soul, such that “the element of self is broken through again and again” in mystic ascent (62). The individual in mystic ascent dies to his or her individual subjectivity, but begins to live a divine life having found and taken up his or her absolute nothingness, entering a condition Nishitani calls “death-sive-life,” the unity of death and life in mystic union (63). Having reached this union, Eckhart warns against rapture and self-intoxication in divine perfection, but advocates living everyday life with a higher sense of the value of all activities, each inspired with divine perfection. In fact, for Eckhart there is no divine soul beyond this everyday activity, such that Nishitani concludes that the mystic soul “bears witness to God as present in the Dasein of the soul itself.” (64) God does not stand in some transcendent ground beyond human experience, but in fact only exists as the Existenz, existence without essence, only through activity, of humans, the point of intersection between human and divine nature in the godhead which reveals itself as perfect practices of living.

In order to achieve this state, however, the subject must overcome the self-centered view of personhood implied in modern atheism. Modern atheistic subjects create and define themselves against a backdrop of nihility. Mystic ascent begins by affirming this nihility, recognizing that nothing underlies human subjectivity. There is no thing that models human existence, and the recognition of this opens the possibility of awareness of absolute nothingness: “true nothingness means that there is no thing that is nothingness, and this is absolute nothingness.” (70) Absolute nothingness can only be experienced as this lack of grounding of human subjectivity, experienced in succumbing to the experience of nihility in limit situations. Grounding subjectivity, in other words, is absolute nothingness, which opens up therefore as an individual’s true self:
The ‘nothing at all’ behind the person comes out into the open on the side of the self, the original self. If person [ie. modern atheistic subjectivity] be regarded as the sheer mode of self-being itself, ‘behind’ which there is nothing, this is so because the matter is being looked at from the side of the person. […] When the ‘nothing at all’ opens up on the near side of the personal self, however, and is seen as the sheer self itself, then nothingness really becomes actualized in the self as the true self. (70-71).

Instead of living as a “person,” an independent subject, we find ourselves, when recognizing that absolute nothingness is our ground, to be a “persona,” a role we play and nothing more. We are actors playing out roles that absolute nothingness delimits: our true nature is absolute nothingness, and so we merely embody the nature of absolute nothingness. Nishitani compares this situation to a wave and water. The wave is water and behaves as water does, but it an individual unit of it. There is no water that is not a wave, just as there is no ideal “humanity” that exists without individual humans, such that humans are the form and its instantiation at the same time. So it is not that humans are formless, but have no-form, have nothingness as their form, such that we are not “personal” beings, but are impersonal in our existence: “Seen from that aspect, every man, such as he is in the real Form of his suchness, is not man. He is impersonal. In other words, he is ‘man’ as an appearance with nothing at all behind it to make it an appearance,” and is “impersonal-sive-personal,” or beyond the duality of personality and impersonality. (74)

Chapter 3: “Nihility and Sunyata”

The similarity between religion and science/modern atheism is that each religion, and modern science as well, is grounded on a particular ontology or worldview. Each worldview acts as a basis for the truths expounded by the religion or science, and science, no less than religion, “seems to regard its own scientific standpoint as a position of unquestionable truth from which it can assert itself in all directions.” (78) Nishitani has already argued that modern science possesses a worldview of mechanism and materialism, or that the matter comprising the universe follows predictable laws. Each event in the universe, then, is an instance of those laws of nature.

Human freedom, then, follows a peculiar course for the scientific subject. Humans begin already appropriated to particular laws of their nature, those of human instincts. However, the ideal of progress requires transcendence of mere instinct to gain knowledge. At the same time, though, “knowledge advances and develops through the technological labors of man; and the advance of knowledge in turn advances technology.” (81) As humans free themselves from their bondage to instinct, they ultimately submit to the mechanistic rules of nature through technology. The condition of modern life is one of increasing impersonalization and mechanization of everyday human activity, so that just as humans liberate themselves from instincts often described as “animal,” they re-enslave themselves to their technology, causing the “mechanization of man, toward the loss of the human.” (85)

At the same time as human everyday life has become increasingly mechanized and routinized, however, humans themselves have become increasingly hedonistic. Humans see themselves as unbound by any laws whatsoever, free only to follow their personal desires, engaged in what Nishitani calls “crypto-nihilism,” the denial of any transcendent grounding of human subjectivity but without the Sartrean “image of man” or the Nietzschean drive toward self-transcendence that provided some guide to and impetus for subjective aspirations.

The standpoint that allows for movement beyond the mechanistic and hedonistic lives of modern subjects living by scientific atheism is the standpoint of sunyata, which in Buddhism refers to emptiness. Sunyata is the standpoint where each individual person becomes manifest as they are “as concrete human beings, as individuals with both body and personality. And at the same time, it is the point at which everything around us becomes manifest in its own suchness.” (90) The standpoint of sunyata is accessed through nihility. As one experiences the Great Doubt described above, all things in the world begin to appear meaningless and inessential, and beings become eclipsed by the absolute nothingness that not only serves as our ground, but the ground of the entire world. Sunyata, then, is the way of interpreting experience from the standpoint of absolute nothingness, how the world appears when being has been transcended.

Here the wave metaphor comes in handy again. Whereas classical Christianity would see God as inaccessibly transcendent to humanity, sunyata recognizes that each thing is like a wave in the ocean, where no ocean exists outside of the waves, but the waves themselves have no essential independent existence. “Rather, at the point that water and waves are self-identical (as water-waves), this flowing wetness emerges into reality for what it is, water there being water and waves there being waves.” (103) All things are absolute nothingness, but absolute nothingness has no existence (is nothing) apart from the things in the world which are groundless and inessential.

Attaining the standpoint of sunyata requires giving up conceptions of subject and object. Understanding the world as an object, or as a collection of objects, presumes an observing subject separated from those objects, particularly one who can represent the world to his or herself. In sunyata, contrastingly, each thing appears in its elemental existence as an appearance of absolute nothingness, “the point at which the self is truly on its own home-ground. Here plants and trees have penetrated to the bottom to be themselves; here tiles and stones are through and through tiles and stones; and here, too, in self-identity with everything, the self is radically itself.” (110) Sunyata understands each thing in its own selfhood as an appearance of absolute nothingness, thus revealing it not only its original nature but also its essential harmony with other things.

Chapter 4: “The Standpoint of Sunyata”

In classical Western philosophy, however, objectivity has traditionally taken the form of understanding individual things in terms of concepts like “substance” or “essence.” An individual existence is said to be an outgrowth of some form of true essence that explains the individual thing in its particular way of being. In classical philosophy, things are not seen on their home-ground, here defined as their existence as revealed by their particular activities, but rather as mediated through some more general concept that obscures the existenz of those things. In order to reach the standpoint of sunyata, individuals must transcend logical reason which categorizes objects and understands them in terms of universal concepts such as substance, etc.

The standpoint of sunyata regards things not as species within higher levels of logical genera, culminating with universalities such as “substance” or “matter,” but as they appear “with nihility at [their] ground, as lacking roots from the very beginning.” (122) In other words, rather than deriving the activity of things from a ground in universal concepts and laws, the standpoint of sunyata attends to the be-ing of things, their activity or in Nishitani’s terms, their virtus: “that individual capacity that each things possesses as a display of its own possibility of existence. The pine tree is returned to the virtus of the pine, the bamboo to the virtus of the bamboo, man to the virtus of his humanity.” (123-124) So rather than thinking of being as some kind of material base that differentiates itself to produce the myriad of existent things, things are grounded on nihility, and so only exist insofar as they are made visible in their virtus.

The conclusion Nishitani reaches is that being is only a coherent concept when united with emptiness. To explain this paradoxical conclusion, Nishitani gives the example of fire. Fire burns, but it burns something other than itself (ie. oxygen, wood, etc.). In fact, fire’s activity is in burning things other than itself, and not burning itself up in the process. So if we called the virtus of fire combustion, then the being of fire as combustion is dependent on its negation, its not combusting itself, so that fire is grounded on nothingness, non-combustion. The same goes with attributes as with substance. When we say that fire is hot, we do not say that the heat of fire itself is hot, because that statement would presuppose some deeper conception of heat that allows us to say that heat is hot, and so on ad infinitum. Heat is only an intelligible concept because of the existence of non-heat, the negation of heat as a concept, that heat is not itself hot. In both cases, being is grounded upon nothingness, such that being is only intelligible from the perspective of nothingness or sunyata.

For Nishitani, that being is grounded upon nothingness justifies its being labeled an illusion, an appearance that can only exist by virtue of its dependence on nothingness. Thus, the standpoint of sunyata allows us to see things in their truly elemental existence, in the sense described above. Since, furthermore, this standpoint allows things to reveal themselves in their activity, their virtus, rather than as a species within a category, taking up sunyata allows us to affirm the existence of all things as they are in their elemental natures. Things are as they reveal themselves when viewed from the standpoint of sunyata, and so are nothing but their own activity, and are thus radically affirmed, giving Nishitani cause to apply the Nietzschean title “Great Affirmation” to sunyata (131).

The standpoint of sunyata also breaks through the limitations of Enlightenment and German Idealist conceptions of human subjectivity, both sharing the notion of an isolated individual human subject standing apart from the world, representing it to itself as a set of objects. For Nishitani, this conception of subjectivity naturally bleeds into modern atheism, with an independent subject who is able to represent and order the world and himself according to his own faculties of reason and imagination. The Enlightenment/German Idealist subject, then, fails to confront its nihility as with the modern atheist subject. The standpoint of sunyata, however, allows subjects to see themselves as grounded in the same absolute nothingness as all other beings, finally overcoming their isolation and allowing them to affirm themselves and their own virtus in elemental existence. To this state of affairs of interconnectedness of all things by virtue of being grounded in absolute nothingness Nishitani applies the term circumincession, originally a Christian term used to describe the mutual indwelling of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of the Trinity. Nishitani also likens it to Leibniz’s monads, each “reflecting one another like living mirrors of the universe.” (150)

Realizing the circumincession of ourselves with the rest of the world allows us to finally overcome the self-centeredness and self-attachment of our everyday lives. All of our activity is grounded on nothingness, such that the absolute nothingness we share with the rest of the world is closer to our true selves than our egos. Sight is only sight because it is also non-sight, the eye does not see itself or it would be eternally lost in itself viewing itself viewing itself, etc., and the same goes for consciousness. By recognizing one’s own grounding in nothingness, we can cease to cling to our ego-based self-recognition that inevitably succumbs to nihility, and rather take up the absolute nothingness that connects us with the rest of the world, thus answering the question of how to overcome the essential nihility at the heart of the human experience posed at the end of chapter 1. Religion also answers the problem of the ontological status of humanity by arguing that humanity is indeed essentially nothingness, but a nothingness that connects it will all things, including the godhead as per Eckhart.

Chapter 5: “Sunyata and Time”

The question of theodicy, however, still remains open, and Nishitani spends the rest of the book dealing with it by reconceptualizing time and history from the perspective of sunyata. Nishitani begins by stating the basic principle of samsara, describing the way sentient beings exist, condemned to a constant cycle of births and deaths of their selves and their projects, or in other words, “the awareness of an unfathomable nihility and “nullification.” (169) Samsara is the state of our being as always threatened by nihility underlying our activity. Nishitani connects samsara with karma, where humans are bound to experience the consequences of their past actions that condition their present possibilities, such that “everyone without exception reaps only the fruits of his own acts.” (169)
Nishitani argues that the recognition of samsaric suffering in the face of constant nihility and our imprisonment to the causal conditions of karma that continually renew our commitment to actions underlain by nihility constitutes Buddhism’s mythos, its fundamental awareness of humanity’s subjective experience. From the mythic perspective of Buddhism, our struggle against suffering and to overcome nihility is fundamentally a search for liberation from samsara and eventually for Nirvana, a state of absolute freedom unbound by karmic conditioning. Buddhism’s mythos provides the interpretive ground to understand human suffering as fundamentally a struggle to overcome the despair brought on by nihility.

Even if, however, we succeed in finding our original selves on the elemental ground of our existence described in the previous chapters, that attainment does not constitute the end of our struggle against despair. Nirvana cannot be considered some paradisiacal state outside of human experience, or only existing after death, but must be lived within ordinary life, as liberation from samsaric suffering while still enduring the “anxious, petty troubles of daily life,” or in Nishitani’s terms, “samsara-sive-Nirvana.” (182) Keeping in mind that samsaric suffering is truly suffering at the nihility grounding all existence, affirming nihility allows us to see the wheel of birth and death in each thing or event in the world as a microcosm of the absolute nothingness that pervades the entire universe, of the godhead that is imbued into all things.

Zen Buddhism refers to the ability to recognize absolute nothingness in any event or object as meditation, zazen, or in other words, religious practice. Through meditation, which in Zen takes the form of “just sitting,” one releases one’s interests and desires that keep one chained to karmic conditions, allowing oneself to experience the godhead hidden within each moment. Nishitani compares the experience of religious practice to opening oneself to the “atom of eternity” Kierkegaard sees in temporality, where every moment may open up transcendence from the despair of everyday life (189). In each moment one can find absolute nothingness, allowing one to view the universal harmony of elemental existence within its microcosm contained in the present moment. Viewing eternity and the fullness of universal harmony within the present moment is, for Nishitani, the standpoint opened and represented by all “religions that have their base in myth,” in recognition and interpretation of our subjective existence. (206)

Chapter 6: Sunyata and History

The standpoint of religion allows us to see eternal and universal harmony among the meaninglessness and suffering of samsara by coming to terms with and ultimately affirming nihility. The problem of theodicy is thus resolved inasmuch as it is only through a recognition of the suffering that is inherent to the samsaric condition of all sentient beings that the ability to see eternity and universal harmony in each moment is opened. Nishitani also seeks, however, to demonstrate that sunyata provides a standpoint to justify ethical behavior and action against suffering and in favor of love, so that religion does not achieve liberation by merely ignoring concrete suffering by seeking eternity within people’s pain.

The Buddhist conception of time is as an infinite system of simultaneous kalpas, closed and complete temporal systems that coexist. These kalpas exist overlain upon “an infinite openness at the bottom of time, like a great expanse of vast, skylike emptiness that cannot be confined to any systematic enclosure.” (219) Thus time is truly irreversible and unique in the Buddhist scheme, as each “now” in one kalpa only exists in the context of an infinite set of other “nows” in other kalpas. Each moment is thus truly impermanent, as no moment could ever be conceivably repeated, unlike a circular system of time, or even Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence. This system of infinite time, always opening onto newness, is both profoundly liberating and profoundly burdensome. For, at the same time as each moment is necessarily and truly new and unrepeatable, the constant becoming of time continually pushes us into having to confront ever-renewed realities, such that the “obligation to unceasing newness makes our existence an infinite burden to us.” (220) The infinite nature of time signifies that we are always caught within karma, that our actions will necessarily feed back upon us in the future and keep us chained to causality.

The Buddhist conception of time also escapes the illusion that time has a beginning and an end, a key grounding of both classical religious and modern atheist histories. The idea of divine election seeks the ground of time in a transcendent being that can create time and give it a sense and purpose. Modern atheist historicism grew in revolt against this notion, affirming instead that there is no ground transcendent to time, that all things exist only within time, not recognizing that “the time that provides it with its field, a time unrestrictedly open to both past and future, can only come about by virtue of an infinite openness lying at the ground of the present.” (227) Progress narratives merely posit a point where history will culminate and fulfill itself, rather than grasping the infinite openness the Buddhist conception of time understands as grounding any temporal system.

While both classical religious and modern atheist understandings of time are future-oriented, however (with the exception of scientific time seeking the causes of things, thus being past-oriented), Nietzsche’s Eternal Return provides a way to come to the Buddhist understanding of time as present-oriented. As time for Nietzsche bends and meets at the extremes of past and future it returns at the beginning of the cycle to now, the present, where in the Great Affirmation one sees the significance of all past and future things in the present moment. The Great Affirmation brings us back to the present moment, where nihility inevitably comes to overthrow whatever sense of meaning we build, thus opening the ground for absolute emptiness to appear in the present moment.

The Buddhist affirmation of nihility allows for the burden of existence to be interpreted in another way than as the field for the pursuit of self-centered endeavors based on our self-definition. Modern atheistic time also contains a form of infinite time, inasmuch as “each of the various facets of human existence becomes autotelic, each as it were becomes autonomous. Each begins to contain a kind of infinity, an infinite finitude.” (235) Each moment can become the fulfillment of human desires inasmuch as one acts exactly according to one’s self-definition at every moment. At this point, however, human activity ceases to serve anything other than its own desires and interests, bringing us back to the beginning of the book where nihility calls into the question the meaning of our projects.

The burden of existence from the perspective of sunyata appears instead as a mission or a debt towards all others with whom we are essentially connected in elemental existence. As discussed last chapter, entering the infinity of the present moment allows to see our connection with all other things in the universe, effecting a liberation from karmic conditioning. The moment of time and the present moment, then, appears from this perspective as instead one unit of time, the present moment, “spreading out endlessly before and after with the present at its point of origin.” (267) This conception of time as one moment spreading out infinitely into the past and future correlates with the understanding of the elemental existence of the universe as one harmony, a single whole. Understanding the universe as essentially connected makes self-love ignoring others impossible, as loving ourselves necessarily entails loving all other sentient beings, such that loving thy neighbor “as thyself” “comes about where each and every ‘other’ has its being as other, namely, at its own home-ground; or again, where all things are gathered into one circumcessional interpenetration as a ‘world’ and ‘All are One.’” (279) Self-centeredness gives way in religion to understanding the entire world as its own center, such that love must be directed towards all others. Thus, only from the perspective of religion can we grasp our ethical purpose in loving all others, seen most clearly for Nishitani in Boddhisattvahood in Buddhism and love of one’s neighbor in Christianity.

So hopefully religion would help you avoid situations like this prime example of samsara:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjio-F47IfM

Bell's Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice

Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice

Catherine Bell

Introduction

“[R]itual has simultaneously become an object, a method, and even something of a style of scholarship on the American academic scene” (3).

“This book undertakes such an analysis in two ways: first, through a critical reading of how the notion of ritual has been used in the study of religion, society, and culture; second, through an attempt to carve out an approach to ritual activities that is less encumbered by assumptions about thinking and acting and more disclosing of the strategies by which ritualized activities do what they do” (4).

The book analyzes the work that has been done with ritual as a category to get to where the scholarship is and suggests other places to take the category of ritual (4). The starting point of the study is consideration of what causes certain acts to be called ritual, how the category affects knowledge about other cultures, and what the assumptions are that limit how we think of ritual (4).

The book also seeks to understand how theoretical knowledge is formed and “theoretical activity is differentiated from other forms of social activity” (5). To do so, need to consider historical development of issues, engagement with our cultural categories, extend this to real examples (5).

The book is organized into 3 parts:

Part I: “[T]he chapters in Part I take up the initial task of a critical theory of ritual by addressing the construction of the category itself and the role this construction has played in organizing a broad discourse on religion, society, and culture. Despite the differences among historians of religion, sociologists, and anthropologists, their theories of ritual all similarly function to resolve the complex problems posed by an initial bifurcation of thought and action. Indeed, theoretical discourse about ritual is organized as a coherent whole by virtue of a logic based on the opposition of thought and action. This argument suggests that, historically, the whole issue of ritual arose as a discrete phenomenon to the eyes of social observers in that period in which ‘reason’ and the scientific pursuit of knowledge were defining a particular hegemony in Western intellectual life” (6).

Bell argues against Goody, who proposes to throw out the term ritual, which carries with it associations of universality. Bell proposes to retain but modify the term: “I do intend to modify the term ritual to function as something other than a ‘global construct’ or ‘a key to culture.’ Yet my close reliance upon current and preceding scholarship ensures continuity with the commonsense notion of ritual while making explicit some of the assumptions and perspectives built into it” (7). Namely, she questions the universality (7).

Part II: “I propose a focus on ‘ritualization’ as a strategic way of acting and then turn to explore how and why this way of acting differentiates itself from other practices. When analyzed as ritualization, acting ritually emerges as a particular cultural strategy of differentiation linked to particular social effects and rooted in a distinctive interplay of a socialized body and the environment it structures. The confusions that accompany attempts to distinguish clearly between rite and non-rite—those perennial obstacles to neat definitions and classification—are revealed to be highly significant for understanding what ritualization does” (7-8).

Part III: is on theories of ritual as social control. “The main argument suggests that ritualization is a strategy for the construction of a limited and limiting power relationship. This is not a relationship in which one social group has absolute control over another, but one that simultaneously involves both consent and resistance, misunderstanding and appropriation. In exploring how ritualized ways of acting negotiate authority, self, and society, I attempt to delineate something of the social dynamics by which all activity reproduces and manipulates its own contextual ground” (8).

Her argument relies on analysis of how language is used (8).

“This book is organized around a problem it first constructs and then solves—the problem of how the notion of ritual orders a body of theoretical discourse” (8).

Part I: The Practice of Ritual Theory

Introduction to the section:

Ritual theories are embedded in larger discourses, and how ritual is conceived reflects and supports the discourse that is its frame. This makes including ritual as objective data instead of analytic tool problematic, and it is hard to prevent a slippage from the latter to the former (13); after Kuhn and Foucault it is problematic to simply suggest ritual is a neutral category by recourse to claims that ritual is merely an analytic tool (14). Bell then goes on to outline a brief genealogy of ritual as an analytic term, starting in the 19^th century when it emerges as a universal category to the more recent transformation of ritual into both an object of and a method of analysis (14). Ritual has been paired with belief as the component of religion by a range of theorists: Max Müller, Herbert Spencer, William James and others suggested that religion (centered around the sacred) is about ideas while ritual/behavior were secondary and expressive of belief (14). Durkheim and others analyzed religion as a combination of belief and rites, where the former is primary; Hubert and Mauss inverted this, suggesting rites are primary. Moving beyond religion after Mauss, ritual came to be associated not just with religion but with the more basic structures of symbolization and social communication, as well as the emerging category of culture (key to Geertz and Turner among others) (15). Ritual studies has emerged which studies ritual in its own right as both universal experience and analytic tool; in it, ritual has come to be a site where opposed social forces are brought back together again (16). She then lays out her argument for the section:

“I will show theoretical discourse on ritual to be highly structured by the differentiation and subsequent reintegration of two particular categories of human experience: thought and action. An exploration of the internal logic of this differentiation and reintegration of thought and action in ritual theory suggests that the recent role of ritual as a category in the study of culture has been inextricably linked to the construction of a specifically ‘cultural’ methodology, a theoretical approach that defines and addresses ‘cultural’ data. That is, the problems we face in analyzing ritual, as well as the impetus for engaging these particular problems, have less to do with interpreting the raw data and more to do with the manner in which we theoretically constitute ritual as the object of a cultural method of interpretation” (16-17).

Chapter 1

Summary: Bell’s major argument for this chapter is that a pattern emerges in ritual theory whereby thought and action are dichotomized and then subsequently reintegrated. This happens for a number of homologous pairs besides thought and action, like synchrony and diachrony, communitas and formalized social order (Turner), or ritual observer and actor (Geertz). The basic thought/action dichotomy is a model for this bifurcation and reintegration in this series of homologous pairs, which is driven because a logic of behavioral versus conceptual categories is set up which carries throughout work on ritual.

One pattern in theory of ritual: Ritual theory generally distinguishes action from conceptual parts of religion like belief, symbol, and myth. The latter may promote the former, but they are distinct. Sometimes ritual is described as action which is done without thought, an extreme bifurcation (19).

A second pattern: “This second pattern describes ritual as type of functional or structural mechanism to reintegrate the thought-action dichotomy, which may appear in the guise of a distinction between belief and behavior or any number of other homologous pairs” (20).

Bell shows that these two patterns are evident in several theories of ritual, including Durkheim’s.

There is a related pattern whereby ritual is portrayed as “synchronic, continuous, traditional or ontological in opposition to the diachronic, changing, historical, or social” but ritual is also portrayed as the nexus of these forces (20).

A third pattern is seen in Turner’s work, ritual is related to communal unity as opposed to friction and competition, but then it is also the site of mediation between communitas and the formalized social order (21).

Bell uses these three patterns to show how prevalent the bifurcation and then reunification at the site of ritual is: “Each of these examples employs the two structural patterns described previously: ritual is first differentiated as a discrete object of analysis by means of various dichotomies that are loosely analogous to thought and action; then ritual is subsequently elaborated as the very means by which these dichotomous categories, neither of which could exist without the other, are reintegrated” (21).

“In effect, the dichotomy that isolates ritual on the one hand and the dichotomy that is mediated by ritual on the other become loosely homologized with each other. Essentially, as I will demonstrate, the underlying dichotomy between thought and action continues to push for a loose systemization of several levels of homologized dichotomies, including the relations between the ritual observer and the ritual actor. It is this invisible process of ‘homologization’, driven by the implicit presence of an opposition between conceptual and behavioral categories, that begins to construct a persuasive and apparently logical body of discourse” (21).

Bell draws on Jameson to note parallel in linguistic theory of differentiation of two terms that come up in subsequent levels of analysis. The example of this is Saussure’s repeated pattern replication of the distinction between synchrony and diachrony that infuses levels of analysis with this artificial distinction (21-22). A similar thing happens in ritual, though unlike Saussure, in ritual, there is a reintegration not just serial differentiations (23). Ritual is DIALECTIC unlike Saussure’s linguistic theory which is based on dichotomy: “[R]itual is a dialectical means for the provisional convergence of those opposed forces whose interaction is seen to constitute culture in some form” (23).

The example is given of those analyzing Durkheim and Durkheim himself, there is a tendency to see two sociocultural processes and then try to find a theory that reintegrates them (25). Theorists speculating on ritual have tended to manipulate the thought-action dichotomy in constructing theories of ritual (25): “Hence, I am suggesting that descriptions of how rituals work have been constructed according to a logic rooted in the dynamics of theoretical speculation and the unconscious manipulation of the thought-action dichotomy is intrinsic to this construction” (25).

Bell turns to Geertz to illustrate the dichotomy/dialectic relationship in ritual theory. Geertz, who is focused on meaning, polarizes ethos and worldview, which is parallel to the analogous to the split between action and belief, respectively. He also presents them as synthesized at other times, making the ethos-worldview relationship into a dialectic (there is a related argument for “models for” and “models of”) (26). “Thus, the dichotomous nature of conceptions of order (worldview) and dispositions for action (ethos) is fundamental to Geertz’s approach, as is their resolution in such symbolic systems as ritual. The temporary resolution of a dichotomy is cast as the central dynamic of cultural life” (27).

A third pattern, too, emerges in Geertz, in addition to the dichotomy and synthesis pattern. He brings in the relationship between observer and participant of ritual: for Geertz, “ritual offers a special vantage point for the theorist to observe these processes” (27).

There is a dichotomy between what the outside observer has to analyze ritual, which is conceptual categories, and what the participant has, which is his own “conceptual framework and dispositional imperatives.” “In this argument, Geertz is setting up a third structural pattern and a third permutation of the thought-action dichotomy. That is, ritual participants act, whereas those observing them think. In ritual activity, conceptions and dispositions are fused for the participants, which yields meaning. Meaning for the outside theorist comes differently: insofar as he or she can perceive in ritual the true basis of its meaningfulness for the ritual actors—that is, its fusion of conceptual and dispositional categories—then the theorists can go beyond mere thoughts about activity to grasp the meaningfulness of the ritual. By recognizing the ritual mechanism of meaningfulness for participants, the theorist in turn can grasp its meaningfulness as a cultural phenomenon. Ritual activity can then become meaningful to the theorist. Thus, a cultural focus on ritual activity renders the rite a veritable window on the most important process of cultural life” (28). Thus, theoretical explanation of meaning “is itself a fusion of thought and action,” the former the theorist’s and the latter the participant’s. “Herein likes the implicit structural homology: the fusion of thought and action described within ritual is homologized to a fusion of the theoretical project and its object, ritual activity. Both generate meaning—the first for the ritual actor and the second for the theorist” (28).

Chapter 2

Summary: In this chapter, Bell argues that a circular logic arises when theorists base their theories of ritual on depictions of a social order that is derived from assumptions brought in by the theorist. The basic assumption is the differentiation of thought and action, and layers of homologous pairs are built on that. The theory of ritual that results is built on these introduced assumptions. Using examples of Geertz, Marxian/Hegelian concept of contradiction, Turner and Gluckman, and performance and other analogy-based theories like ritual as text, Bell suggests that what is presumed at the beginning (the discontinuity or the analogy to performance, for example) comes to dictate the conclusion about ritual that the theorist comes to at the end.

Bell opens with examples from Milton Singer and Geertz which she uses to argue that the theorist imposes his thought pattern on ritual (30-31)

She lays out the main argument up front: “Most simply, we might say, ritual is to the symbols it dramatizes as action is to thought; on a second level, ritual integrates thought and action; and on a third level, a focus on ritual performances integrates our thought and their action. The opposition of the theorist and the ritual object becomes homologized with two other oppositions, namely, the opposition that differentiates ritual (beliefs versus activities) and the opposition of two fundamental sociocultural forces that is resolved by ritual (conceptual versus dispositional forces). This homology is achieved by a hidden appeal to a type of common denominator, the opposition of thought and action. In the end, a model of ritual that integrates opposing sociocultural forces becomes homologized to a mode of theoretical discourse that reintegrates the dichotomy underlying the identification of a thinking theorist and an acting object. This type of expedient logic carries another inevitable corollary, however. That is, theories of ritual which attempt to integrate thought and action in any guise simultaneously function to maintain their differentiation” (32).

Bell goes on to show the circular logic that results from theories that start by differentiating thought and action and build layers of homologies (32)

Geertz is a primary example: Geertz distinguishes between cultural and social system, where the former is symbolic and the latter is action-based (33). After he sets up these separate categories, he suggests that ritual that fails is ritual in which culture and social system are discontinuous. Bell argues his reasoning is circular: “Ultimately, the discontinuity affirmed in the conclusion is a direct replication of the differentiation established in the beginning” (34). He fails to do better than the functionalists he critiques for not being able to explain change (33-34).

A second set of examples of circularity from homologized patterns within ritual theory is drawn from the group of theorists who describe ritual as an arena where social conflicts are worked out (Max Gluckman and Victor Turner). These arguments lead to circularity, too, because the conclusions seem to result from what the theorist has imposed on the system: “As with Geertz’s approach, these theories see ritual as designed to address fundamental conflicts and contradictions in the society, and there is similarly little evidence that the conflicts so addressed are not simply imposed through the categories of the observer” (35-6).

Another example of the same circularity of explaining the fundamentals of culture such that the theoretical tool solves puzzles that the theorist tries to explain is the Marxian and Hegelian idea of contradiction. That ritual solves fundamental social contradiction is a constructed myth, as is the idea that there’s something fundamental (36-7)

The last example is of “Performance” theory and other related analogical theories like text:

Bell claims that performance theory is guilty of presenting activity as dramatizing prior conceptual entities in order to affirm them. A system for how society works is presumed and then ritual is seen to play out in that way, i.e. Grimes suggest that the human body is primary to ritual but explains this because the body can enact social roles and cultural meanings.

Performance theory fails to break out of the dichotomy pattern. It also relies on the theorist-observer to be a participant (because a performance needs an audience) (39).

Bell critiques Turner’s late work for remaining dialectical and Stanley Tambiah’s theory of ritual as communication for falling into the dialectic pattern, too (41-42).

In her overall critique of performance theory, Bell criticizes how it rests on a slippery extended metaphor, which leads to naturalization of observer, the slippage from performance as metaphor to idea that that is the actual nature of the activity, there is no way to distinguish between different types of performance (42).

Some theorists have tried to build on and improve performance theory, but they are still vulnerable to critiques, such as the fact that sometimes ritual isn’t a performance but is intended to cause change in the outside world (43).

Geertz looks at ritual by other metaphors, including game, drama, or text (43). For example, in “Deep Play,” ritual is depicted like a text which can be decoded but also acknowledges the difficulties of using text as a metaphor, which is echoed by Tambiah (44).

Some of the problems with text as a metaphor for ritual: assumption that text is “autonomous and unified” and that it has a hidden meaning which is “fully accessible to a close reading” (45). “As the foregoing thought-action argument illustrated, the assumed existence of such a ‘something,’ the latent meaning of the act, once again devalues the action itself, making it a second-stage representation of prior values” (45). Though there are some merits to performance theory, it is problematic because it easily slips from tool to feature of reality (46).

Chapter 3

Summary: After a thorough summary of what she has covered so far—the homologized oppositions between thought and action, the thinking subject and non-thinking subject, theorist and actor, as well as the way that ritual serves a function of reintegrating these oppositions—Bell emphasizes how the discourse of ritual has been overdetermined by the initial dichotomy and rejects the thought-action dichotomy as a basis for understanding ritual. She suggests that the subordination of actors to thinkers is more damaging than the bifurcation itself. The activity of separating categories is used to imply an inequality between two things (black and white, male and female), and such an activity is harmful, but she also suggests that to understand differentiation as an activity is to understand the basis of theory-making. There are two parts to generating a theoretical discourse: identify a distinct level or mode of analysis and then identify an object of analysis, which is not independent of the mode. The two are co-constructed, each implying the naturalness of the other. After a series of examples, Bell discusses a debate in anthropology over whether there’s been a move away from grand social theory about culture and society to a discipline that is more narrowly focused on specific contexts and experiences in the field. As Quentin Skinner points out, against such arguments, those who wish to move away from object and discourse construction are actually generated “architechtonic theoretical frameworks” (52) that only appear anti-theoretical and committed to cultural self-reflection by the West. Bell provides examples of how postmodern conceptions of anthropology are engaged in self-critique, and briefly theorizes on why this discourse of cultural knowledge has come about (changes in the humanities, “the natives” freed from colonial assumptions and being educated abroad). She suggests that within this discourse of cultural knowledge, there may be attempts to deal with the traditional relationship between subject and theorist which needs to be reevaluated within this new context. Yet, domination has not disappeared, and is in fact maintained in the thought-action dichotomy.

“In the final analysis the results of such a differentiation between thought and action cannot be presumed to provide an adequate position vis-à-vis human activity as such. Naturally, as many others have argued before, the differentiation tends to distort not only the nature of so-called physical activities, but the nature of mental ones as well. Yet the more subtle and far-reaching distortion is not the obvious bifurcation of a single, complex reality into dichotomous aspects that can exist in theory only. Rather, it is the far more powerful act of subordination disguised in such differentiation , the subordination of act to thought, or actors to thinkers” (48-49).

“To generate theoretical discourse on culture, or almost any theoretical discourse for that matter, it is necessary to do two things: first, to specify a distinct level or mode of analysis, in this case a ‘cultural’ level; and second, to identify an object or phenomenon that exists as a ‘meaningful totality’ only on such a level of analysis. This object will act as the natural object of the specified mode of analysis, although the object so identified is not independent of this analysis; it is constituted and depicted as such in terms of the specified mode of analysis. That is, the object and the method are actually intrinsic to each other, one demonstrating the naturalness and validity of the other. As we have seen with ritual, particularly in the extended example drawn from Geertz, the structure of the constituted object is a veritable model of the method of analysis and vice versa” (49).

Example from Mauss of the method/subject reliance in work on gifts (49-50), Geertz on culture and meaning (50), and Ricoeur on text and social action (50-51).

“In this very abbreviated summary, Ricoeur can be seen to lay out the steps for creating an object amenable to a certain type of scrutiny; insofar as the object so constructed and scrutinized is een to yield a higher, fuller, truer meaning (indeed, its only real meaningfulness), it simultaneously constructs and legitimates that method of scrutiny” (51).

“Skinner finds that despite themselves the major ‘anti-theorists’ of the last few decades have generated comprehensive and architectonic theoretical frameworks. Different from the ‘laws-and-instances’ mode of theorizing, as Geertz put it, the more recent style of object-and-discourse construction can appear to its participants as antitheoretical and committed to cultural self-reflection. Indeed, the cultural knowledge constituted in this type of discourse tends to see itself as both salvaging other cultures from Westernization and serving as the basis for the West’s own cultural critique” (52).

“Cultural knowledge constituted through the study of ritual and performance appears to experiment with a new sense of community between theorists and actors, characterized by modest, mutual dependence and shared problems of meaning, epistemology, and critical self-reflection. Yet the domination of the theoretical subject is neither abrogated nor transcended. This domination is maintained and disguised by virtue of the implicit structuring of the thought-action dichotomy in its various forms” (54).

“I have tried to suggest that ritual is an eminently suitable device for organizing a theoretical conversation that wishes to uncover cultural meanings through the interpretation of ‘texts’ that ‘reek of meaning.’ The construction of ritual as a decipherable text allows the theorist to interpret simply by deconstructing ritual back into its prefused components. The theoretical construction of ritual becomes a reflection of the theorist’s method and the motor of a discourse in which the concerns of theorists take center stage” (54).

Part II: The Sense of Ritual

“By building on specific aspects of practice theory, however, I will lay out an approach to ritual activities that stresses the primacy of the social act itself, how its strategies are lodged in the very doing of the act, and how ‘ritualization’ is a strategic way of acting in specific social situations. The framework of ritualization casts a new light on the purpose of ritual activity, its social efficacy, and its embodiment in complex traditions and systems” (67).

Chapter 4

Summary: Bell first sets up the problem with ritual theories that have been created thus far. Most attempts to define ritual do so by setting up a universal, and therefore incomplete, definition of ritual. Such definitions define what can be called ritual and what cannot and lead to categories of ritual. While taxonomy of ritual has been important for organizing the study of ritual, it has led to several problems: a “dizzying” number of types arise that leads theorist to talk in circles, categories undermine indigenous distinctions and blurs the particulars into unnuanced generals. Theories of ritual have tended to fall into one of two categories: rituals are a distinctive form of activity or rituals are congruous with other human actions. Within the distinctiveness group, there is a tendency to distinguish the ritual/magical (symbolic and noninstrumental) from the technical/utilitarian (practical and instrumental). The distinction between symbolic and instrumental has a tendency to collapse into emotional versus logical, which itself often leads to ritual described as cathartic and dealing with anxiety. She also notes that the symbolic vs practical distinction is not a native, but an imposed one. The other group, the one that sees “ritual as an aspect of all activity” is a newer set of theories. In this group are theories that see ritual as a type of routinization or communication. This group runs the risk of analyzing all parts of human life as ritual. She then introduces her approach, based on the idea of ritualization, which involves analyzing how certain social actions differentiate themselves from others.

To explore the dynamics of social actions, Bell turns to the concept of practice, one that has been used since Marx “to transcend dichotomies that ‘wrongly divide’ human experience” (75). She explains Marx’s two usages, one that is descriptive and one that is prescriptive. The former deals with human nature and activity, responding to problems from Hegel and Feuerbach (I will not detail them, but see page 75 if you are interested). The latter deals with how to use theory. Bell then outlines how later people follow or diverge from Marx in the use of practice, followed by a list of problems with how practice has been used (sometimes encourages slippage between levels of the argument, privileges terms afforded by positing fundamental oppositions which leads terms to become derivative, mediating role of practice can lead to synthesis of categories to be unstable and therefore not effective at mediation). Bell then gives the examples of Jameson, Bourdieu, and Ortner on practice, pointing out their limitations. She closes the section by suggesting that a theory of ritual practice should not construct a model of ritual practice but instead “describe the strategies of the ritualized act by deconstructing some of the intricacies of its cultural logic” (80-81).

Bell then outlines the features of practice, which include that it is situational, strategic, “embedded in a misrecognition of what it is in fact doing” (81), and “able to reproduce or reconfigure a vision of the order of power in the world, or what I will call ‘redemptive hegemony” (81). Situational refers to the fact that context is key, and an activity is not the same if taken out of or abstracted from the context. Strategic refers to the fact that there is a logic to practice, not an intellectualist logic, but still “a play of situationally effective schemes, tactics, and strategies” (82). Misrecognition is misrecognition of what a practice is doing: for example, Bourdieu describes gift giving as a practice which is really reciprocal exchange but what is experienced is a singular act of generosity. The last characteristic is the most complex, and “has to do with the motivational dynamics of agency, the will to act, which is also integral to the context of action” (83). Bell describes redemptive hegemony as a synthesis of Burridge’s “redemptive process” and Gramsci’s “hegemony.” She writes: “In sum, a redemptive hegemony is not an explicit ideology or a single and bounded doxa that defines a culture’s sense of reality. It is a strategic and practical orientation for acting, a framework possible only insofar as it is embedded in the act itself. As such, of course, the redemptive hegemony of practice does not reflect reality more or less effectively; it creates it more or less effectively. To analyze practice in terms of its vision of redemptive hegemony is, therefore, to formulate the unexpressed assumptions that constitute the actor’s strategic understanding of the place, purpose, and trajectory of the act” (85). Bell then compares redemptive hegemony to similar concepts like Althussor’s problematique (see 86-88), which highlights the extent to which there is a certain blindness to practice, it “does not see itself do what it actually does” (87).

In the last section, Bell returns directly to ritualization. After describing Gluckman’d and Huxley’s uses of the term, Bell describes her own, which emphasizes how practices that count as ritualization distinguish themselves from other practices and what such a distinction accomplishes. Two key concepts are relationality and differentiation. Ritualization derives its significance from its relation to other practices as well as from strategies that differentiate a ritualized practice from its “conventional counterparts” (90). The sacred and profane are also key categories: ritualization creates sacred by differentiating it from profane. There are common features to ritualization like fixity and repetition but there are no necessary, intrinsic features of ritualization. Instead, ritualization differs in different contexts, acting as “a practical way of dealing with some specific circumstances” (92). She concludes, “Hence, ritualization can be characterized in general only to a rather limited extent since the idiom of its differentiation of acting will be, for the most part, culturally specific” (93).

Summary of the problem: “With these objections [described in the summary above] an impasse appears to loom. On the one hand there is evidence that ritual acts are not a clear and closed category of social behavior. On the other hand many problems attend the attempt to see ritual as a dimension of all or many forms of social behavior” (74).

Approach: “Rather than impose categories of what is or is not ritual, it may be more useful to look at how human activities establish and manipulate their own differentiation and purposes—in the very doing of the act within the context of other ways of acting. With this approach in mind, I will use the term ‘ritualization’ to draw attention to the way in which certain social actions strategically distinguish themselves in relation to other actions. In a very preliminary sense, ritualization is a way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian, activities. As such, ritualization is a matter of various culturally specific strategies for setting some activities off from others, for creating and privileging a qualitative distinction between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane,’ and for ascribing such distinctions to realities thought to transcend the powers of human actors” (74).

Moving past other uses of practice that have failed: “Confronting the ritual act itself, and therein eschewing ritual as some object to be analyzed or some subjectivity to be fathomed, would involve asking how ritual activities, in their doing, generate distinctions between what is or is not acceptable ritual. From this perspective one could not seek to construct a theory or model of ritual practice. Rather one could attempt to describe the strategies of the ritualized act by deconstructing some of the intricacies of its cultural logic. This is the perspective that will be developed in the rest of Part II. This exploration of the distinctive strategies and cultural logic that lie behind ritual activities may also begin to illuminate the distinctive strategies of theoretical practices” (80-81).

Redemptive hegemony: “As a practical construal or consciousness of the system of power relations and as a framework for action, redemptive hegemony suggests that human practice is characterized by relations of dominance and subjugation. These relations, however, are preset in practice by means of the practical values, obligations, and persistent envisioning—as both an assumption and an extension of the system—of a state of prestige within this ordering of power. This vision exists as a practical consciousness of the world (common sense) and a sense of one’s options for social action. It is also a vision of empowerment tat is rooted in the actor’s perceptions and experiences of the organization of power. Although awkward, the term ‘redemptive hegemony’ denotes the way in which reality is experienced as a natural weave of constraint and possibility, the fabric of day-to-day dispositions and decisions experienced as a field for strategic action. Rather than an embracing ideological vision of the whole, it conveys a biased, nuanced rendering of the ordering of power so as to facilitate the envisioning of personal empowerment through activity in the perceived system” (84).

“In sum, a redemptive hegemony is not an explicit ideology or a single and bounded doxa that defines a culture’s sense of reality. It is a strategic and practical orientation for acting, a framework possible only insofar as it is embedded in the act itself. As such, of course, the redemptive hegemony of practice does not reflect reality more or less effectively; it creates it more or less effectively. To analyze practice in terms of its vision of redemptive hegemony is, therefore, to formulate the unexpressed assumptions that constitute the actor’s strategic understanding of the place, purpose, and trajectory of the act” (85).

Sacred and profane: “Whereas Durkheim defined religion and ritual as that which is addressed to the sacred, the approach presented here is an inverse of his, showing how a particular way of acting draws the types of flexible distinctions that yield notions and categories like ‘ritual’ or ‘religion.’ The relative clarity and flexibility of the boundaries, of course, are also a highly strategic matter in a particular cultural community and are best understood in terms of the concrete situation” (91).

Chapter 5

Summary: The body is the focus of this chapter. Producing a ritualized body, one that has a “sense” of ritual and works to shape the sociocultural environment so that it has control, is the implicit ends of ritualization. Ritualization does so “through the interaction of the body with a structured and structuring environment” (98). A circular process takes place where ritualization, through interaction with the environment, produces a ritualized body and that body shapes the environment. The person involved misrecognizes this process: the person perceives that the values and experiences come from a place of power beyond the person and her ritual activity. In this process of ritualization, “the production of a ritualized agent via the interaction of a body within a structured and structuring environment” (100), the context is key though not completely determinative of the ritualized agent. However, even if one claims to repeat a ritual exactly as it has been done for thousands of years, no ritual is autonomous from its context.

Bell outlines three basic dynamics of ritualization strategies: binary oppositions, hierarchization, and “the generation of a loosely integrated whole in which each element ‘defers’ to another in an endlessly circular chain of reference” (101). Durkheim (sacred vs. profane), J.Z. Smith (ritual as “assertion of difference”), and others have highlighted the role of opposition in ritual; Bell points out, however, that the oppositions aren’t symmetric but create hierarchies based on asymmetries in the opposed terms (for example, right and left side of the body are not equal, as shown by Hertz). Sets of oppositions get linked together, generating whole systems of ritual symbols and actions (right/left linked to good/evil and inside/outside). Bell uses Derrida’s concept of difference to explain how oppositions do not find resolution by organization into hierarchies, but instead form a network of oppositions that nuance each other and deferred meanings. Such a network eludes resolution: “This process yields the sense of a loosely knit and loosely coherent totality, the full potential of which is never fully grasped and thus never fully subject to challenge or denial. One is never confronted with ‘the meaning’ to accept or reject; one is always led into a redundant, circular, and rhetorical universe of values and terms whose signification keeps flowing into other values and terms” (106). The ritualized environment can translate social problems into the terms of the ritual, not resolving them but diffusing them in this network. This is the “internal strategy” of ritualization.

The ritualized body produced in ritualization brings what it has come to possess during ritual into social life. Bell introduces the term “ritual mastery,” based on Bourdieu’s “practical mastery” (schemes for ordering the world used by social agents that come to be embodied during practice), to refer to practical mastery in the context of ritualization. Bell writes, “I use the term ‘ritual mastery’ to designate a practical mastery of the schemes of ritualization as an embodied knowing, as the sense of ritual seen in its exercise” (107). With the term, Bell emphasizes that ritual is not a static, existing object but something embodied in specific contexts through work. Ritual mastery involves a circularity, where a ritualized person uses ritualization schemes to affect non-ritualized parts of life and to make them more coherent with the ritualized. Along with circularity, ritualization also relies on constant deferral of meaning and purpose.

Part of this circularity is misrecognition, seeing and not seeing. Bell explains what ritualization sees: ritualization sees itself as the correct way of acting to respond to a particular context or situation. It does not see the extent to which “it redefines or generates the circumstances to which it is responding” (109). Bell further explains: “And yet what ritualization does is actually quite simple: it temporarily structures a space-time environment through a series of physical movements (using schemes described earlier), thereby producing an arena which, by its molding of the actors, both validates and extends the schemes they are internalizing. Indeed, in seeing itself as responding to an environment, ritualization interprets its own schemes as impressed upon the actors from a more authoritative source, usually from well beyond the immediate human community itself” (109-110). Related to seeing and not seeing is use of language and communicative function of ritual as well as the comparison of ritual to text, which are both controversial and differ widely between a range of theorists.

Bell concludes the chapter with a discussion of redemptive hegemony and misrecognition. The practice of ritualization has an object-unity characteristic that ritual mastery makes evident. The agents produced in ritualization experience and relate to the world through certain strategies. A sense of fit between the environment and the socialized body ensues. Furthermore, ritualization makes this coherence seem as if it is for the person or group, empowering them.

“The implicit dynamic and ‘end’ of ritualization—that which it does not see itself doing—can be said to be the production of a ‘ritualized body.’ A ritualized body is a body invested with a ‘sense’ of ritual. This sense of ritual exists as an implicit variety of schemes whose deployment works to produce sociocultural situations that the ritualized body can dominate in some way. This is a ‘practical mastery,’ to use Bourdieu’s term, of strategic schemes for ritualization, and it appears as a social instinct for creating and manipulating contrasts. This ‘sense’ is not a matter of self-conscious knowledge of any explicit rules of ritual but as an implicit ‘cultivated disposition.’ Ritualization produces this ritualized body through the interaction of the body with a structured and structuring environment. ‘It is in the dialectical relationship between the body and a space structured according to mythico-ritual oppositions,’ writes Bourdieu, ‘that one finds the form par excellence of the structural apprenticeship which leads to the em-bodying of the structures of the world, that is, the appropriating by the world of a body thus enabled to appropriate the world.’ Hence, through a series of physical movements ritual practices spatially and temporally construct an environment organized according to schemes of privileged oppositions. The construction of this environment and the activities within it simultaneously work to impress these schemes upon the bodies of participants. This is a circular process that tends to be misrecognized, if it is perceived at all, as values and experiences impressed upon the person and community from sources of power and order beyond it. Through the orchestration in time of loose but strategically organized oppositions, in which a few oppositions quietly come to dominate others, the social body internalizes the principles of the environment being delineated. Inscribed within the social body, these principles enable the ritualized person to generate in turn strategic schemes that can appropriate or dominate other sociocultural situations” (98-99).

“[R]itualization cannot be understood apart from the immediate situation, which is being reproduced in a misrecognized and transformed way through the production of ritualized agents” (100).

“[R]itualization not only involves the setting up of oppositions, but through the privileging built into such an exercise it generates hierarchical schemes to produce a loose sense of totality and systematicity. In this way, ritual dynamics afford an experience of ‘order’ as well as the ‘fit’ between this taxonomic order and the real world of experience” (104).

“What we might call the ‘external strategy’ of ritualization, the very drawing of a privileged distinction between its activities and others, parallels what can be called its ‘internal strategy,’ the generation of schemes of opposition, hierarchization, and deferral by which the body has impressed upon it the schemes that effect the distinctive privileging and differentiation of ritualizing acts themselves. This manner of producing a ritualized agent, as I will argue next, can be seen to be the basic and distinctive strategy of so-called ritual behavior” (106-7).

“Ritualization sees its end, the rectification of a problematic. It does not see what it does in the process of realizing this end, its transformation of the problematic itself. And yet what ritualization does is actually quite simple: it temporarily structures a space-time environment through a series of physical movements (using schemes described earlier), thereby producing an arena which, by its molding of the actors, both validates and extends the schemes they are internalizing. Indeed, in seeing itself as responding to an environment, ritualization interprets its own schemes as impressed upon the actors from a more authoritative source, usually from well beyond the immediate human community itself. Hence, through an orchestration in time of loosely and effectively homologized oppositions in which some gradually come to dominate others, the social body reproduces itself in the image of the symbolically schematized environment that has been simultaneously established” (109-110).

“Ritual does what it does through the privileged differentiations and deferred resolutions by which the ritualized body structures an environment, an environment that in turn impresses its highly nuanced structure on the bodies of those involved in the rite. Strategies, signification, and the experience of meaningfulness are found in the endless circularity of the references mobilized, during the course of which some differentiations come to dominate others. Ritual mastery is the ability—not equally shared, desired, or recognized—to (1) take and remake schemes from the shared culture that can strategically nuance, privilege, or transform, (2) deploy them in the formation of a privileged ritual experience, which in turn (3) impresses them in a new form upon agents able to deploy them in a variety of circumstances beyond the circumference of the rite itself” (116).

Chapter 6

Summary: This chapter explores ritual traditions and systems in historical, territorial/calendrical, and organizational/expert-based dimensions. Bell first summarizes the way theorists have dealt with the relationship between tradition, continuity, and change, pointing out that several scholars suggest a flexibility or oral culture and rigidity of written culture; also, ritual can be fixed activities and also have aspects that adapt. Bell suggests, as others have too, that these conclusions miss the fact that ritual can construct tradition (example: Bloch’s concept of formalization of speech to form an oratory code). Constructed tradition is key to community identity formation; such construction from ritual is a powerful strategy based on authoritative precedents and perceptions of consensus on historically rooted values. Bell emphasizes that tradition is not static but is “constantly produced and reproduced, pruned for a clear profile, and softened to absorb revitalizing elements” (123). Ritual is not just blind reenactment of ritual precedent but is subject to constant reinterpretation and renegotiation.

Groups across spatial territories are also linked through systems of ritual practice, built from “a complex orchestration of standard binary oppositions [including vertical, horizontal, and central/local oppositions] that generate flexible sets of relationships both differentiating and integrating activities, gods, sacred places, and communities vis-à-vis each other” (125). These oppositions differentiate and integrate communities, largely based on ritual activities being organized temporally either to differentiate or synchronize groups. Bell emphasizes that ritual systems do not just control social systems, but constitute those systems.

The ritual specialists section is based, in large part, on Weber’s theory of rationalization, whereby different forms of religious authority (magician, priest, charismatic prophet) come with increasing rationality. Marxists built on this theory, tying rationalization to development of institutions with specialists, reducing the need for public ritual. Goody reanalyzes Weber in terms of writing, missing oral societies. Bell lists several common features to ritual specialists, including authority resting on importance of ritual for creating networks of people and the supernatural; stabilization and control of religious power; and ranking ritual activities in importance, which is a dynamic and ambivalent process. Bell then discusses orality and literacy, and the different strategies of ritualization each entails. Authority in oral societies is based on memory, seniority, and practical expertise while in written societies it is based on access to texts (136). Textual traditions have the challenge or reconciling the past with the present textual tradition—changes must somehow be sanctioned, which enhances authority of the interpreters. Textual traditions are also often connected with the assertion of universal values instead of the local. Bell then suggests that Weber’s model of inevitable rationalization. She concludes by reflecting on the framework of ritualization (see below, 140-141).

“Ritual can be a strategic way to ‘traditionalize,’ that is, to construct a type of tradition, but in doing so it can also challenge and renegotiate the very basis of tradition to the point of upending much of what had been seen as fixed previously or by other groups. […] As with the invented traditions described by Hobsbawn and Ranger, various attempts in American society in the last two decades to create new rituals deemed more appropriately symbolic and representative involve renegotiating a repertoire of acknowledged ways of acting ritually. Such innovations may be subtle or dramatic; they may radically reappropriate traditional elements or give a very different significance to standard activities; they may overturn meanings completely through invented practices. The continuity, innovation, and oppositional contrasts established in each case are strategies that arise from the ‘sense of ritual’ played out under particular conditions—not in a fixed ritual structure, a closed grammar, or an embalmed historical model” (124).*

“It is important to emphasize a conclusion implicit in the many examples cited so far: ritual systems do not function to regulate or control the systems of social relations’, they are the system, and an expedient rather than perfectly ordered one at that. In other words, the more or less practical organization of ritual activities neither acts upon nor reflects the social system; rather, these loosely coordinated activities are constantly differentiating and integrating, establishing and subverting the field of social relations. Hence, such expedient systems of ritualized relations are not primarily concerned with ‘social integration’ alone, in the Durkheimian sense. Insofar as they establish hierarchical social relations, they are also concerned with distinguishing local identities, ordering social differences, and controlling the contention and negotiation involved in the appropriation of symbols” (130).

“These examples suggest that textualization is not an inevitable linear process of social evolution, as Weber’s model of rationalization may seem to imply. The dynamic interaction of texts and rites, reading and chanting, the word fixed and the word preached are practices, not social developments of a fixed nature and significance. As practices, they continually play of each other to renegotiate tradition, authority, and the hegemonic order. As practices, they invite and expect the strategic counterplay” (140).

“I have not proposed a new theory of ritual because I believe that a new theory of ritual, by definition, would do little to solve the real conundrums that the study of ritual has come up against. Instead, I have proposed a new framework within which to reconsider traditional questions about ritual. In this framework, ritual activities are restored to their rightful context, the multitude of ways of acting in a particular culture. When put in the context of purposive activity with all the characteristics of human practice (strategy, specificity, misrecognition, and redemptive hegemony), a focus on ritual yields to a focus on ritualization. Ritualization, the production of ritualized acts, can be described, in part, as that way of acting that sets itself off from other ways of acting by virtue of the way in which it does what it does. Even more circularity, it can be described as the strategic production of expedient schemes that structure an environment in such a way that the environment appears to be the source of the schemes and their values. Ritualizing schemes invoke a series of privileged oppositions that, when acted in space and time through a series of movements, gestures, and sounds, effectively structure and nuance an environment. In the organization of this environment some oppositions quietly dominate others but all also defer to others in a redundantly circular, and hence nearly infinite, chain of associations. The coherence, continuity, and general scope of these associations naturalize the values expressed in the subtle relationships established among oppositions. This environment, constructed and reconstructed by the actions of the social agents within it, provides an experience of the objective reality of the embodied subjective schemes that have created it. Ritualization as a strategic way of acting does not see the social agent’s projection of this environment or his or her reembodiment of the sets of schemes constitutive of it. When these schemes are embodied in a cultural sense of reality and possibility, the agent is capable of interpreting and manipulating simply by reclassifying the very relationships understood as constitutive of reality. The goal of ritualization is a strategic way of acting ritualization of social agents. Ritualization endows these agents with some degree of ritual mastery. This mastery is an internalization of schemes with which they are capable of reinterpreting reality in such a way as to afford perceptions and experiences of a redemptive hegemonic order. Ritualization always aligns one within a series of relationship linked to the ultimate sources of power. Whether ritual empowers or disempowers one in some practical sense, it always suggests the ultimate coherence of a cosmos in which one takes a particular place. This cosmos is experienced as a chain of states or an order of existence that places one securely in a field of action and in alignment with the ultimate goals of all action. Ritualization is probably an effective way of acting only under certain cultural circumstances” (140-141).

Part III

“Part I addressed the basic question, What is ritual? Part II, How does ritual do what we say it does? This third part engages yet another fundamental query: When and why do the strategies of ritualization appear to be the appropriate or effective thing to do?” (169).

“In brief, it is my general thesis here that ritualization, as a strategic mode of action effective within certain social orders, does not, in any useful understanding of the words, ‘control’ individuals or society. Yet ritualization is very much concerned with power. Closely involved with the objectification and legitimation of an ordering of power as an assumption of the way things really are, ritualization is a strategic arena for the embodiment of power relations. Hence, the relationship of ritualization and social control may be better approached in terms of how ritual activities constitute a specific embodiment and exercise of power” (170).

Chapter 7

Summary: This chapter outlines the theories of ritual and social control coming out of Durkheim. There are four theses: “the social solidarity thesis, the channeling of conflict thesis, the repression thesis, and definition of reality thesis” (171). The solidarity thesis, characteristic of the work of Robertson Smith, Evans-Pritchard, Fortes, and Munn, “suggests that ritual exercises control through its promotion of consensus and the psychological and cognitive ramifications of such consensus” (171). Stephen Lukes critiques this position for not adequately dealing with political rituals. The second thesis is forwarded by Gluckman and Victor Turner, who argue that ritual is a way to deal with conflict and restore social equilibrium. She critiques this position for viewing individuals as entirely under group control. People in the Turner-Gluckman have also added a psychological focus. The third thesis deals with repression of human violence and aggression and is characteristic of Burkert, Girard, and Heesterman. The last thesis, the one that Bell thinks is best but still problematic, is the definition of reality thesis of Geertz, T. Turner, Douglas, and Lukes. Instead of ritual acting to control, it models society: “[P]roponents of the definition of reality thesis seek to find in ritual a single central mechanism for the communication of culture, the internalization of values, and the individual’s cognitive perception of a universe that generally fits these valies” (176). Bell appreciates the “more subtle understanding of social control” (176) but critiques that it treats “rite as a nearly magical mechanism of social alchemy by which the irksomeness of human experience is transformed into the desirable, the unmentionable, or the really real” (176). While this theory does recognize that there are not such clear cut differences between primitive and modern societies, she emphasizes that context is essential, and not all groups’ rituals can be described by the same theories, which the theory does not deal with adequately.

Bell closes the chapter by outlining the relationship between ritualized activities and modes of social organization. She is particularly focused on Douglas’ theory, which emphasizes that ritual works for social control effectively in some but not all societies (those that are closed groups, have restricted communication codes, emphasis on hierarchical social position, and a system based on social consensus). Bell critiques her for emphasizing the difference between social and physical bodies. Bell also raises V. Turner’s body-centered thesis and Valeri’s intellectualist thesis, which contrast Douglas’ functionalist thesis. The latter two are noteworthy for their recognition is more complex than simple Durkheimian affect.

“In the sections that follow I will work out an alternative interpretation of the social functions of ritual, namely, how the strategies of ordering and reproduction embodied through ritualization relate to the larger questions of the organization of power relations in a society. Hence, I will attempt to demonstrate that ritual does not control; rather, it constitutes a particular dynamic of social empowerment” (181).

Chapter 8

Summary: Bell first addresses the question, what is belief? She lays out a range of theoretical work on belief and its relation to ritual, discussing whether it is social or mental and the extent to which communities share beliefs and symbolic meanings associated with ritual (Fernandez suggests suggests communities do not share common meanings of symbols, thus ritual is not a means to communicate common meanings). Bell then discusses what symbols do: many analyses suggest that symbols serve a purpose of creating solidarity and community integration. Bell emphasizes how the literature points to ambiguity of symbolism, as well as the instability of religious beliefs. She also points to research that notes that systematic formulations of beliefs suggest no cohesion but stratification. She concludes, “These studies give evidence for the ambiguity and instability of beliefs and symbols as well as the inability of ritual to control by virtue of any consensus based on shared beliefs. They also suggest that ritualized activities specifically do not promote belief or conviction. On the contrary, ritualized practices afford a great diversity of interpretation in exchange for little more than consent to the form of the activities. This minimal consent actually contrasts with the degree of conviction frequently required in more day-to-day activities…” (186). Yet, other literature shows that “ritual has an important social function with regard to inculcating belief” (186).

Bell turns next to ideology. There are two definitions of ideology, one that is akin to a cultural worldview (critiqued for implying a one dominant ideology in a society, holism) and the other is ideas promoted by the dominant classes for self-interest (criticized by asking, why would people who do not benefit buy into this?). Rejecting the holism of these definitions of ideology, Merquior draws on Gramsci’s notion of consent and negotiation: subordinate classes negotiate and accept a negotiated version of dominant values. Bourdieu argues that the subordinate classes’ acceptance is based on misrecognition of values, where the subordinate class thinks the values are good for them. Ideologies are practices where people (active agents) struggle and negotiate as opposed to a set of ideas; according to Merquior, Thompson, and Bourdieu ideology is a strategy of power.

The final section is on legitimation. Ritual is a powerful tool for legitimation, especially when power is understood as more than brute force or threats of violence. There are three main points out of Geertz, Cannadine, and Bloch with respect to rituals of legitimation: such rituals draw on traditional symbols in a way that distinguishes the current from what preceded; ritual constructs an argument; political rituals do not refer to but in fact are politics.

“In the following sections I will argue that the projection and embodiment of schemes in ritualization is more effectively viewed as a ‘mastering’ of relationships of power relations within an arena that affords a negotiated appropriation of the dominant values embedded in the symbolic schemes. To analyze the relationship of ritualization to belief, therefore, I will focus on the tension and struggle involved in this negotiated appropriation, rather than on the production of doctrines neatly internalized as assumptions about reality” (182).

“Complicity, struggle, negotiation—these terms all aim to rethink ideology as a lived and practical consciousness, as a partial and oppositional process actively constructed by all involved and taking place in the very organization of everyday life. Hence, ideology is not a coherent set of ideas, statements, or attitudes imposed on people who dutifully internalize them. Nor are societies themselves a matter of unitary social systems or totalities that act as one. Any ideology is always in dialogue with, and thus shaped and constrained by, the voices it is suppressing, manipulating, echoing. In other words, ideologies exist only in concrete historical forms in specific relations to other ideologies” (191).

Although each pursues independent analyses, Merquior, J.B. Thompson, and Bourdieu similarly conclude that ideology is best understood as a strategy of power, a process whereby certain social practices or institutions are depicted to be ‘natural’ and ‘right.’ While such a strategy implies the existence of a group or groups whose members stand to gain in some way by an acceptance of these practices, it also implies the existence of some form of opposition. Thus, ideologization may imply an unequal distribution of power, but it also indicates a greater distribution of power than would exist in relationships defined by sheer force. It is a strategy intimately connected with legitimation, discourse, and fairly high degrees of social complicity and maneuverability” (192-3).

“In sum, it is a major reversal of traditional theory to hypothesize that ritual activity is not the ‘instrument’ of more basic purposes, such as power, politics, or social control, which are usually seen as existing before or outside the activities of the rite. It puts interpretive analysis on a new footing to suggest that ritual practices are themselves the very production and negotiation of power relations. In the following chapter I will attempt to demonstrate this alternative position more fully by showing how ritualization as a strategic mode of practice produces nuanced relationships of power, relationships characterized by acceptance and resistance, negotiated appropriation, and redemptive reinterpretation of the hegemonic order” (196).

Chapter 9

Summary: Bell begins with a discussion of the term power, which is understood as influence or as force, the former “inherent, nonspecific, and inherent” and the latter “intentional, specific, and threatening” (197). The distinction between symbolic and secular power is also made, the former relating to ritual and ideology and the latter to institutions. Bell traces discussions of power from Hobbes to Lukes (who writes of three dimensions of power); another lineage of discussions of power runs from Machiavelli to Foucault, the latter being the dominant voice Bell discusses in the chapter. Bell emphasizes Foucault’s theories of power as local, working indirectly on actions, embedded in networks of relations, and exercised on those who are free and who can resist. Bell also clarifies Foucault’s use of the term ritual with respect to power. Bell explains, “‘Ritual’ is one of several words he uses to indicate formalized, routinized, and often supervised practices that mold the body” (201). She also emphasizes the importance of the body as a site of local social practices meeting large-scale institutions. She also discusses power relations and how they act in the social body for Foucault. Bell concludes, “The language of this analytics of power…enables us to begin to answer the question of this chapter: Under what general conditions is ritualization an effective social strategy? It is in ritual—as practices that act upon the actions of others, as the mute interplay of complex strategies within a field structured by engagements of power, as the arena for prescribed sequences of repetitive movements of the body that simultaneously constitute the body, the person, and the macro- and micronetworks of power—that we can see a fundamental strategy of power. In ritualization, power is not external to its workings; it exists only insofar as it is constituted with and through the lived body, which is both the body of society and the social body. Ritualization is a strategic play of power, of domination and resistance, within the arena of the social body” (204).

What are the effects and limits of ritual empowerment? Ritualization cannot be defined universally, but is about placing different limits and using different culturally specific strategies to differentiate activities that are ritualized from activities that are not. Ritualization entails the acting out of power relations, whose limits are defined by context. Bell explains two dimensions of ritualization. The first is “the dynamics of the social body, its projection and embodiment of a structured environment” that happens “below the level of discourse” and which goes on without agents recognizing their participation. The second is a level at which those who appear to be disempowered are actually empowered by ritualization through “consent, resistance, and negotiated appropriation” (207). Bell concludes by outlining four perspectives on how ritual strategies create situations of domination and resistance: ritual empowering people with various degrees of control of a rite, how their power is constrained, how those who participate are dominated, and how domination can also lead to empowerment. She ends by writing, “The variety of evidence examined here has attempted to demonstrate that ritualization necessitates and engenders both consent and resistance. It does not assume or implement total social control; it is a flexible strategy, one that requires complicity to the point of public consent, but not much more than that. Ultimately, the resistance it addresses and produces is not merely a limit on the rite’s ability to control; it is also a feature of its efficacy. It is not totally inappropriate, or unexpected, that the end of this exploration of ritual should return to one of the original questions with which it began, however altered the relationship with it may be. In Part I of this book I demonstrated the coherent, closed, and circular discourse that results when ritual is cast as a mechanism for the integration of thought and action, or self and society. In this final part I find a coherent and circular closing in the suggestion that ritual practices themselves can generate the culturally effective schemes that yield the categories with which to differentiate self and society, thought and action. This is not to say that ritualization is the only form of practice that defines the self. Hardly. It is that form of practice where the definition is simultaneously embedded in the social body and its environment, negotiated, and rendered prestigious by the privileged status that ritualized activities claim” (218). She concludes by reiterating her main arguments about ritual as a form of activity that relies on strategies to render certain ritual activities distinct, relies on the body which is shaped by and shapes the environment, and generates traditions, and defines, empowers, and constrains agents.

“The argument of this chapter is essentially a simple one: ritualization is first and foremost a strategy for the construction of certain types of power relationships effective within particular social organizations. I will attempt to develop a fuller description of the strategy of ritualization in order to return to the question with which Part III began, Why and when is ritualization an appropriate and effective way of acting? This question and its answer should be understood as an alternative to the view that ritual is a functional mechanism or expressive medium in the service of social solidarity and control. A focus on activity itself as the framework within which to understand ritual activity illuminates the complex nature of power relations” (197).

“The evocation of ritualizing strategies by activities that do not wish to be considered religious ritual is a very common feature particularly in the secularism of American society” (205).

“The deployment of ritualization, consciously or unconsciously, is the deployment of a particular construction of power relationships, a particular relationship of domination, consent, and resistance. As a strategy of power, ritualization has both positive and effective aspects as well as specific limits to what it can do and how far it can extend” (206).