Rituals of Power?

Theodore Vial’s Liturgy Wars is a rich and detailed account of the struggle over the change in the baptismal rite in 19th-century Zurich. He picks the knot of this culture war, unraveling the political, theological, and ritual dimensions of the the battle between liberalizing and conserving forces.

Vial’s aims go beyond the specific struggle that is the focus of his historical study, and the book broadens out into a critique of ritual studies. He identifies two threads: The first, represented by Pierre Bourdieu and Catherine Bell among others, focuses on the bodily effects of ritual, and sees ritual as primarily an exercise of power. Bell describes not “ritual” but the “ritualization” of action, and argues that “ritualization always aligns one within a series of relationships linked to the ultimate sources of power” and “ritualization is a strategic arena for the embodiment of power relations” (quoted from Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice; Vial, 3). The alternative set of theories, developed by Dan Sperber, Humphrey and Laidlaw, Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley, seems to be opposed to the bodily emphasis of the other theorists, insisting that ritual has to be understood in cognitive and cerebral terms, not simply corporeal. Vial doesn’t think that either of the two theories are wholly right, nor are they wholly wrong, and he suggests that a healthy ritual theory must make use of “both trajectories.”

His critical observations on Bell’s work are incisive. Bell, he says, “analyzes the structure of rituals in terms of apparently fundamental binary oppositions such as in/out, up/down, and male/female.” In the Catholic mass, for instance, “inner/outer oppositions (e.g., ingesting the elements) come to dominate others (the higher/lower of kneeling; raising the host, etc.).” Ritualized action “constructs an environment that comes to be taken for granted as the way things are, and impresses the environment on the very bodies of ritualized agents” (Vial, 77-8).

At base, Vial thinks Bell’s analysis founders on a flaws understanding of human action. “There is something odd,” he notes, “about analyzing a ritual in terms of ups and downs, ins and outs, when the participants themselves think of themselves as blessing, receiving, and baptizing.” Appealing to Charles Taylor’s insight that “action and purpose [are] ontologically inseparable,” he notes that “what they think they are doing constitutes part of the act itself – their intention inheres in the act. Bell is right that strategies of ritualization separate ritual acts such as baptism from everyday acts such as rinsing a child’s hair. Yet by removing intention from her analysis of ritual action, she is unable to say why there is a difference or what force it carries” (80-82).

Perhaps those benighted scholastics, with their refined debates about the role of intention in sacramental efficacy, were better ritual theorists that we have imagined.