Public Ritual

The contractual nature of public ritual in Western culture is critical to interpreting the symbolism of political rights within modern communities of world culture. For example, the gesture of gift-exchange is one measure of how rituals revitalize society by shared gestures of affection and devotion. A second example, the ritual invocation of violence touches directly on the history of power. Feud and vengeance, combined with factional struggles in cities, territorial, and modern-nation states in Renaissance Italy, has supported the belief shared by scholars that the importance of ritual in political systems is its ability to foster the resolution of conflict. For the history of the Protestant Reformation, communities in the monarchies of northern Europe engaged in destructive elements of ritual and violence in order to discredit the authority of ordained rule predicated in the history of Catholic liturgy. The horrors of the Wars of Religion offer full testimony of the brutality inflicted throughout communities based on legitimate and historical practices that supported royal authority. Yet, the crisis of representation posed by a divided polity of Protestant and Catholic adherents ultimately produced rituals of reconciliation. In France, communities petitioned the queen regent of France, Catherine de Médicis (1519–1589), to uphold the sacred basis of royal authority. The shared language of devotion between the widowed queen and her subjects suggests that the sustained perception of transcendental experience ultimately supported the promulgation of the first modern notions of toleration. The subsequent promotion of Henri IV's authority as king in the late sixteenth century was achieved in two stages. First, the award of amnesty and gifts to the king's political rivals that took place in a ceremonial seating that captured the essence of the symbolism of the Last Supper; second, his conversion to Catholicism and the celebration of a royal rite of coronation enacted the drama of mystical revival of the royal body and the body politic. In Switzerland and Imperial German cities, the violence of the Reformation was addressed through the ritual of stallung (peace-bidding), which dramatized the connotations of the performance of Penance with the symbolism of the Last Judgment. Finally, in England, ritual use of royal healing, combined with elaborate pageantry and ceremonial associations between king, queen, and nobility, the ruler and the ruled, remained a potent force in royal courts of Sweden, Poland, and Russia in premodern Europe. The adaptation of rites of advent was a potent source of political renovation for Western Europe during the twentieth century. The confluence of ritual, pomp, and power as an ideology is also evident in the articulation of the doctrine of "manifest destiny" that has guided the diplomatic relations of both the United States and Britain.

Study of ritual also offers broader cultural implications throughout world communities. By the seventeenth century, ceremony was adapted by Spanish, English, and French inhabitants of colonial North America to legitimize claim to new lands and political power over native inhabitants. The ceremonial history of African and Caribbean communities, for example in Dahomey and Jamaica, reveals how political elites either created or usurped power over local communities and resources. The myths and symbols of ritual based on precepts of theology were also part of the politico-religious culture of the Incan rulers in pre-modern communities, Islamic communities in world culture, and the history of imperial authority in Japan and China into the twentieth-and twenty-first centuries. The modern use of ritual extends to the political drama of the Russian Revolution, the rise of ideologies of fascism, nazism, and communism. Rituals and the public display of symbols of authority in modern China underscores how fully aspects of political power based on representation of human and divine decree have been adapted by communities to invent national and world mythologies of divine providence associated with the social construction of twentieth-and twenty-first century visions of hegemony. Of particular interest is the adaptation of ritual, foremost parades, to include the construction of national identity in Singapore, throughout communities in North America, as well as Sino-Soviet regimes of the late twentieth century. The general significance of parades as models of ritual and cultural anthropology has recently included study of both minority and gay and lesbian culture in world communities.

If the cumulative effect of this cycle of ritual performance was to promote a gradual secularization of society predicated on modern notions of state and conscience, one question remains open for the study of ritual within the political discourse of human rights: to what extent has the modern study of medieval ritual promoted a rebirth of violence associated with the rise of the modern state and the legal construct of racial slavery? Both events are predicated on the dichotomy of embodied rights and powers. Both systems of government have been historically grounded in royal legal fictions based on Christological notions of ordained authority. If, as scholars assert, the life of ritual and religion shifts continually between the two phases of maintaining and regenerating world systems of belief based on sacrifice, the model of cultural anthropology may need to question belief that the dynamic of ceremonial performance can be codified into a search for a universal system of just law necessary for the promulgation of human rights based on a model of theological ethics.