Ritual Theory

In their 1994 The Archetypal Actions of Ritual, Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw attempt a philosophically sophisticated definition of ritual. 

Through a survey of the existing literature on ritual, the authors seek to determine what kind of theory or ritual is needed. They reject theories that claim that ritual is a quality of every action (e.g., Leach) or a particular class of actions (most anthropological theories of ritual), and propose instead to focus on “ritualization.” 

Ritualization can theoretically happen to any action; it is a particular quality of an action. In their usage, the word “ritual” thus is analogous to the adjective “red.” An action may be repetitive, religious, ecstatic but none of these and no combination of them renders the action “ritualized.” Ritualization is one attribute of a particular action, but not the only attribute; “ritual” is thus always adjectival, qualifying actions that can also be performed in a non-ritualized manner (e.g., eating, washing, kneeling).

The authors’ purpose is to isolate the specific features that distinguish ritualized action from everyday actions. They argue that the difference lies in the relation of the intention of the agent and the identity of the action. In everyday life, the intention of the agent determines the identity of his action; citing Charles Taylor, they suggest that everyday actions are “inhabited” by their intentions so that the two are ontologically inseparable. The intention to point out Jesus to the soldiers in Gethsemane identified Judas’s kiss as “betrayal” rather than “greeting” or “demonstration of love.” This “intention in action” is the “intentional meaning” of an action, and it gives identity to everyday actions.

In ritual, Humphrey and Laidlaw argue, this link is broken. This is not to say that ritualized action is wholly non-intentional. As the authors summarize the situation, the agent in ritual both is and is not the author of his actions. The ritual actor is author of his act in a somewhat indirect sense: Insofar as he chooses to take a particular stance, insofar as he adopts a certain attitude toward the action (what they call the “ritual commitment”), the action is intentional. The content of that commitment, however, is precisely the admission that one’s acts are not of one’s own authorship; adopting the ritual stance means that you “make it the case that you are no longer, for a while, author of your acts.” Thus, insofar as the identity of the action is concerned, however, the agent’s intentions are not determinative.

What then does identify an act as a ritualized act? How does this gap between intention and identity of action open up? The actor’s intentions are disconnected from the identity of the act because ritualized acts in liturgical traditions are “socially prescribed and present themselves to the individual actors as ‘given’ and external to themselves” (p. 5). This stipulation of ritualized actions in advance is of an “ontological” order: the social stipulations determine not only what an agent may or may not do but also what the actions are. The agent in ritual thus treats his ritual action as an object. Because it is external to himself, he can apprehend it and assign it particular meanings, and the meanings that agents attach to a particular ritual act may be extremely various. It is this opening of a gap between the agent’s intention and the identity of his action that defines and constitutes ritual and gives ritual its peculiar multifarious significance.

This distinction of ritualized action from everyday action is captured by the term “archetypal,” a notion the auhors introduce by way of a discussion of the cognition of acts. Cognition can be examined through lists of “necessary and sufficient conditions” or through comparison of a particular act with mental “prototypes.” Neither of these approaches offer a satisfactory account of the cognition of ritualized acts. Instead, they are “archetypal” (not, the authors insist, in a Jungian sense). This implies two things about ritualized actions: 1) they are “not the act which it mimics” (ritualized sowing of seeds is not sowing of seeds), and 2) they are treated as “a token of its stipulated type” (p. 150).

Several problems arise from this analysis. First, their distinction between purpose and intention is inadequately worked out. Taylor, whom the author’s cite favorably, speaks of actions inhabited by and inseparable from purposes; but the authors immediately move into using the term “intentions” (pp. 4-5) and “intentional meaning,” suggesting an identity of purpose and intention. The meaning of “intentional action” is illustrated by reference to Austin’s distinction of locutionary and illocutionary force, the former describing the semantic content of an utterance, the latter describing the “point” of an utterance, what it intends to do. The “intentional meaning” of an action is what the action intends to do; it is to non-linguistic actions what illocutionary force is to speech acts. Only much later is a distinction explicitly introduced between intentional meaning and purposes (p. 167). The authors cite as an example a policeman who tells a skater that there is thin ice: his intentional meaning is to issue a warning but his purpose may be to prevent an accident or to do his duty. 

This distinction, introduced so late in the analysis and with little explanation, underlies the entire account of ritual. The importance of this distinction becomes clear from an examination of how their argument for their distinctive formulation of “ritualized action” draws on the responses given to their questions to Jains performing the puja ritual. In everyday life, while intentions may not be explicit or always conscious, there is always the possibility of expressing an intention. But the authors were struck by the fact that the participants in the rite would answer questions of “What are you doing?” by saying, “I’m doing the puja”; the authors add that this answer will be the same “whatever you happen to be thinking, because for one and the same ritual act . . . the actor’s intentions can be very various indeed” (p. 95). They illustrate by referring to a portion of the Jain puja in which the actor lifts an oil lamp toward the statue of the god: 

“What are her intentions as she does this? Is she shedding light on the idol? Is she offering the lamp to the idol? Is she shedding the light on herself? Is she representing the ‘light’ of doctrine by the light of the lamp? And of these might be the case. We have met people who say they think of this action in each of these ways. In addition, it is quite possible to perform the act correctly without having any such intention, and we have met with others who say no more than that they are doing puja with a lamp. Yet in each case they would all agree that they are performing the same act. Unlike in the case of the newspaper deliver or the arm-raising experiment, their various thoughts about what they are doing, their various intentions in acting this way, make no different to the correct description of what they do, the kind of action they may be said to have performed” (p. 95).

This contrasts with everyday life where “to identify someone’s action one must have a correc

t understanding of their intention in acting. In everyday life, if you see two people doing the same thing, but with different intentions in action (say, ‘driving a car’ and ‘stealing a car’), you will count these as different actions” (p. 95).

It seems as if the authors are demanding a different level of explanation from the participants in the Jain ritual than from people engaged in “everyday” activities. What is wrong with the answer “I am performing the puja?” in answer to the question, “what are you doing?” This is an inadequate answer only if one sees no point in doing this particular action. Are the authors already assuming the stance that rituals like the puja are pointless, and therefore pressing the participants for a “deeper” answer? 

At a particular level, the actions of “driving” and “stealing” a car might be construed as the same; even if we include the intentions of the actors, there is a sense in which both are intending to drive a car. And if we asked what each is doing, that is the answer we might receive. Only if we pressed for a more detailed intention would we receive distinct answers.

Are “intentions” the same as “thoughts which occur at the time of performance of an action” or even “thoughts about the action”? The authors at times identify “intentions” with “what you are thinking of at the moment” (e.g., p. 5: identity of ritualized act is distinct from “intentions and thoughts of the actor” and thus “You have still done it, whatever you were dreaming of” ). This is confirmed by their comparison of the action of a tourist who inadvertently performed part of the puja and a woman performing the lamp puja:

“To an observer [the tourist] appears to have performed pushpa puja, but he has not. Why not? The obvious answer might seem to be that he did not have that particular intention. But let us think again about the lady who was performing lamp puja. She counts has having performed that act, even if she did not, as she lifted the lamp, have that intention. She might not know that ‘dip puja’ is what it is called, she might mistaken think of its as part of the same act as incense puja, she might perform it with some different, perhaps more elaborate intention, such as ‘getting rid of my sins.’ The overarching ‘intention’ she does have, and what distinguishes her from the tourist, is the ritual commitment. Her particular intentions no longer fix the act she is performing, as do the tourist’s, and this is because she has already made an ‘intentional’ decision” (p. 99).

Ritualization thus depends on a prior intentional decision; once that decision is made, however, the actions that are performed as ritualized actions take their identity from prior stipulations rather than from the intentions of the actor.

This seems fair enough, but is it adequate to distinguish ritualized action from other sorts of actions? Is this different from everyday life? The authors cite as an example of an everyday action the paper boy’s delivery of a newspaper at your door. His action is an act of “delivery.” What makes it so? The authors claim that it is his intention (to “deliver”) that distinguishes this action from other possible explanations (such as, he “lost” the paper). 

But the identity of the action is certainly not dependent on the thoughts he has at the moment of delivery, for his thoughts are likely to be of football and girls. If we asked him, he would be able to answer, “I am delivering the paper,” and the implicit intention-in-action would be expressed verbally. Might he how, hoever, say something different? Might he now say, “I’m making money” or “I’m working”? Are actions in everyday life singular? Are intentions singular? So also, the woman performing the lamp puja might be thinking of anything while she performs it; but when asked, she would identify the action as — what? If she said, performing the puja, is this a different kind of answer from the paperboy’s? If she said, I’m getting rid of my sins, is this a different kind of answer from the paperboy’s “I’m working”?

The authors thus fall into the same kind of dualism of thought and action, rationality/ irrationality that they seem to want to escape. They certainly explicitly distinguish functional and ritual action. But of course functionality depends on one’s view of things. If one really believes the Jain doctrines of karma, the soul, etc, then performance of the rites is functional. The authors tend to avoid pejorative language, but concede in the end that ritual is pointless action, and raise the question of why people the world over engage in such activity. But it seems that this conclusion is just a reiteration of a starting point – a very Western, modern starting point – the assumption that ritual is meaningless action.