Rituals in Religion

In France during the 1960s, anthropological concerns with symbolism, spearheaded by Claude Lévi-Strauss, were far more centrally concerned with myth than with ritual.

Bourdieu.

Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972), a critique of French structuralist but also British functionalist approaches, proposed an alternative approach that devoted considerable attention to the analysis of ritual. As the title of the book suggests, Bourdieu stressed the importance of the domain of practical activity, understood in terms of "habitus," taken-for-granted predispositions that were neither consistently verbalized nor unconscious in any deep sense. Such predispositions included, for example, bodily gestures, modes of interpersonal interaction, and the organization of space and time. "Rites, more than any other type of practice, serve to underline the mistake of enclosing in concept a logic made to dispense with concepts; of treating movements of the body and practical manipulations as purely logical operations; of speaking of analogies and homologies … when all that is involved is the practical transference of incorporated, quasi-postural schemes" (p. 116).

Ritual in historical time.

In recent years, anthropologists have grown increasingly self-conscious about the historical contexts in which they conduct their research and correspondingly wary of abstracting cultures from particular places and times with specific antecedents. For example, Maurice Bloch's analysis of circumcision ritual among the Merina of Madagascar paid particular attention to historical accounts to demonstrate how a family ritual was transformed into an expression of the central power of the state in the late eighteenth century and back again, in the twentieth century, into a family performance with increasingly anti-Christian and antielite overtones. While elements of the symbolism may have been invariant and placed constraints on the uses to which the ritual might be put, it was equally clear that the meanings of specific performances were highly subject to the agency of particular actors. Jean Comaroff's account of ritual in Zionist churches among the Tshidi of South Africa explicitly integrated a focus on practice with attention to historical context, arguing that the sometimes disjunctive synthesis of precolonial Tswana and of Protestant Christian imagery is a form of resistance to the social and cultural hegemonies that marginalize adherents.

Talal Asad has gone so far as to historicize the very concept of "ritual," pointing out that in eighteenth and nineteenth century editions of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica the term specifically referred to instructions for performing the divine service. It was precisely early anthropologists such as Tylor, Frazer, and Robertson Smith who introduced the concept of ritual as symbolic behavior, in other words as a form of practice that called for decoding, for interpretation, especially by an outsider. Using the Rule of St. Benedict as a paradigm, Asad advocated a return to the earlier meaning of ritual as a prescription for action: "Ritual is therefore directed at the apt performance of what is prescribed, something that depends on intellectual and practical disciplines but does not itself require decoding" (p. 62). While many anthropologists balk at so far-reaching a critique, contemporary accounts of ritual demonstrate a heightened sensitivity to issues of agency, gender, power, and the capacities of ritual performers to understand and interpret their own actions in modern contexts.