Routines, rituals and the post-identity moment

 

The early twentieth century was the heyday of both colonialism and the anthropological obsession  with ritual, with observations of “native peoples” flooding into the metropoles. Rituals seemed both omnipresent and irrational; thus, they provided a tempting form and object for the modernist author.

But what was a ritual? And how was it different from any other step by step organization of activity? Marcel Mauss, in an essay on prayer, puts the onus on the organizing irrationality of the ritual:

“It isn’t after the nature of acts and their real effects that it is possible to distinguish the two orders of fact. From this point of view, all that it is possible to say about rituals is that they cannot produce the results one attributes to them. According to this way of judging, one can’t distinguish rituals from erroneous practices. One knows, however, that an erroneous practice is not a ritual. Thus, it is not in considering the efficacity in itself, but the manner in which the efficacity is conceived that we can discover the specific difference. Thus, in the case of technique, the effect produced is supposed to arise entirely from the effective mechanical labor. And this besides has right on its side (a bon droit), for the effort of civilization has precisely consisted in reserving to industrial techniques and the science on which they repose that useful value that one attributed in the past to rituals and religious notions. On the contrary, in the case of a ritual practice, other causes completely are supposed to intervene, to which is wholly imputed the expected result. Between the movements that constitute the sacrifice and those that solidly construct the house that the former is supposed to insure, there is not even from the point of view of the sacrificer any mechanical link. The efficacity lent to the ritual has nothing in common with the efficacity proper to the acts which are materially accomplished. It is represented mentally as completely sui generis, for one consideres that it comes entirely from special forces that the ritual has the property of putting in play. Thus even if the effect actually produced would result in fact in executed movements, there would be a ritual if the believer attributed it to other causes. Thus the absorption of toxic substances produces physiologically a state of ecstasy, and yet it is a ritual for those who impute this state not to its true causes, but to special influences.”

The notion of efficiency, here, silently displaces an older notion of necessity – of the play of necessity and chance. The efficiency of the mechanical acts (if we can, for a moment, separate out the mechanical from the efficient) consists in the fact that the first step in the routine is necessary for and necessitates the second step. The measure of its efficiency is in the narrowing or the elimination of alternatives and options for the second step, and so on. Putting together the pieces that make an Ikea table, we follow instructions that spatialize the temporal arrangement and unroll it as a series of attachments and adjustments of the various (but sorted) bits and parts. Even so, it is not uncommon to find the term ritual attached to certain routines, as for instance in sales, or in driving, or making a meal. What this shows, to the anthropologist trying to make sense of ritual, is that it can attach itself, parasitically, to the technical acts that produce a given commodity or service.

Victor Turner, in Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, returns to the ritual as it was conceived by the turn of the century anthropologists – and in particular, Van Genep’s notion of a rite de passage:

“Van Gennep demonstrated that many types of rituals, notably initiation rites, have three distinguishable stages, of varying relative duration within and among cultures, which he described as (1) separation, (2) margin or limen, and (3) reaggregation. Sometimes he simply called these: “preliminal,” “liminal,” and “postliminal.” He had noticed that rituals are often performed, in societies at all levels of social complexity, when individuals or groups are culturally defined as undergoing a change of state or status.”

Is this three stage process a sort of routine within the ritual? Or is it that within every routine, from the assembly line to the salesman’s coffee break, the subject, that sensitive object, tends towards ritual? Tends, that is, as something earlier, something primitive.

Did I mention the colonial shadow that falls over this discussion?

Turner’s first interest, as a college student, was literature. He changed to anthropology, and did field work with his wife, Edith, in Africa, and observed ritual there – then began to theorize about comparative symbology during the Cold War period of the fifties and sixties, when ritualism as a universal dissolvent was past its fad expiration date. What Turner got from Genep was a way of talking about the symbolic structure of ritual without grounding it in some appeal to our lost pieties – the reactionary move of a certain group of modernists. That use of ritual was timely – it was absorbed into the fascination with identity that came out of the civil rights movements.  It carried into identity remnants of a rhetoric that was once about the sacred.

We are entering, I think, in what I would call, ludicrously and awkwardly, a post-identity moment. I wonder how ritual and routine will be reconfigured within those parameters.