Ritual can be studied as nonverbal communication disclosing its own structure and semantics. Scholars have only recently turned to a systematic analysis of this important aspect of human behaviour; and progress in kinesics, the study of nonverbal communication, may provide new approaches to the analysis of ritual. This development may well parallel the progress in linguistics and the analysis of myth as an aspect of language.
A complete analysis of ritual would also include its relation to art, architecture, and the specific objects used in ritual such as specific forms of ritual dress. All of these components are found in ritual contexts, and all of them are nonverbal in structure and meaning.
Most rituals mark off a particular time of the day, month, year, stage in life, or commencement of a new event or vocation. This temporal characteristic of ritual is often called “sacred time.” What must not be forgotten in the study of ritual is a special aspect of ritual that is often described as “sacred space.” Time and place are essential features of ritual action, and both mark a specific orientation or setting for ritual. Time and space, whether a plot of ground or a magnificent temple, are ritually created and become, in turn, the context for other rituals. Examples of ritual time and ritual space orientation can be found in the rituals for building the sacrifice in Brahmanic Indian ritual texts, for the building of a Christian cathedral, and for consecrating those structures that symbolize a definite space–time orientation in which rituals are enacted. The shape, spatial orientation, and location of the ritual setting are essential features of the semantics of ritual action.
In recent years there has been little consensus among scholars on an adequate theory, or framework, for explaining or describing ritual. Though the term has often been used to describe the determined, or fixed, behaviour of both animals and human beings, the future study of ritual may disclose both that this behaviour, found throughout history and cultures, is as unique to human beings as is their capacity for speaking a language and also that change in ritual behaviour is parallel to, or correlated with, change in language. Although great progress has been made in the analysis of humanity as the species who speaks, the syntax and semantics of ritual man are yet to be discovered. Hans H. Penner
Citation Information
Article Title: Ritual
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 07 December 2016
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/ritual
Access Date: August 13, 2019
Additional Reading
William Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, Reader in Comparative Religion, 3rd ed. (1971), is a good general anthology on classical and modern positions on religion, ritual, and myth (mainly concerned with nonliterate cultures), with an excellent bibliography. Gods and Rituals, ed. by John Middleton (1967), contains a good collection of essays on ritual practices in nonliterate cultures, also with a fine bibliography. Among the classic texts dealing with the origin of ritual and religion, there are three authors who have enduring influence: W. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889); Émile Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912; Eng. trans., The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1965); and Sigmund Freud, Totem und Tabu (1913; Eng. trans., Totem and Taboo, 1918). Among the classic positions on a functional approach to ritual are those of Bronisław Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic, 2 vol. (1935); and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders (1922). More recent examples of the functional approach are the anthropological texts of E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (1956); and Edmund Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954). Melford E. Spiro, Burmese Supernaturalism (1967), is one of the best critical texts using data from Burmese Buddhism as support for a revised approach. Victor W. Turner, The Forest of Symbols (1967), represents a novel analysis of dominant symbols in belief and ritual. Among valuable approaches by theologians and historians of religion are Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige (1917; Eng. trans., The Idea of the Holy, 1923); and Joachim Wach, The Comparative Study of Religions (1958). Jane E. Harrison, Themis, 2nd ed. rev. (1927); and S.H. Hooke (ed.), Myth, Ritual and Kingship (1958), are good examples of the myth-ritual school. An excellent critique of this school may be found in Joseph E. Fontenrose, The Ritual Theory of Myth (1966). Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Essai sur la nature et le fonction du sacrifice (1899; Eng. trans., Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, 1964), remains a standard analysis of sacrifice as ritual. Arnold van Gennep, Les Rites de passage (Eng. trans., The Rites of Passage, 1960), although written in 1909, continues to be an important work on ritual as a marker of passage. Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth (1958), is an excellent historical study of ritual as initiation, with a good bibliography. See also Bruce Lincoln, Emerging from the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Women’s Initiation (1981).