is ritual universal?
last updated: 21.x.2004
page status: update work in progress
based on a bbc radio four summary supplemented by various additional research
?Ritual? BBCR4, 1100, Tues 6 August 2002
link: But now on BBC Radio 4 we discover that while some kind of ritual behaviour is found in every human society on earth, it?s also found throughout the natural world. Dr Gillian Rice takes a deeper look at the ubiquitous nature of ritual, to find out why it is so ingrained in all living things.
FX drums, chanting
FX plainchant underlying intro, vox (CS)
Left right track split, left track overlaid twice.
Get up at five forty, then we proceed into the church where we have the first prayer of the day, which is called matins consisting principally of psalms, with a couple of readings and prayers at the end.
Then it?s followed by forty minutes of private meditation and silence. Then there?s work?
?then the second?
?of silence?
?consisting of psalms?
?ung, again mainly psalms, with a hymn and some prayers at the end.
?and the fact of having to go into church at these fixed periods of the day adds a certain rhythm to it and gives a certain direction, which wouldn?t otherwise be there.
FX Bircalls, underlying
Male voice
If you arrive at a Fijian village, there is a whole series of ritual observances that have to be gone through before you can even open your mouth.
FX ?macaw?
You?re taken into a house, you?re taken through a particular door, you?re given a place on the mat where you have to sit and then the other people within the village will come and they?ll sit around the house in a very specific order of ranking, and then they will bring to you a coconut shell which you have to drink in one draught and fling it away from you.
So there?s this very specific and quite lengthy ritual that has to be gone through before you can even start talking to them.
FX, bird calls, underlying
female voice
I didn?t realise first of all, or certainly not appreciate, how much this ritualistic behaviour was affecting my life.
It instigated itself initially by my wanting to check doors were locked. I would go back repeatedly and check up to a number of four or five times sometimes, to the point where after a few months I was missing transport. Busses, trains, taxis, everything you can think of; everything was primarily worked around the ritualistic behaviour.
FX, Tibetan chanting and cymbals
GR Now there?s a cacophony of sounds for you. The links between them may not be obvious at first, but each demonstrates an aspect of ritual behaviour. And ritual in all its forms, personal, social and pathological, is what this programme is about
Researching the subject has led me along a remarkable trail of discovery, and I hope to share with you some of that fascinating journey.
This programme will be trying to understand why ritual is so common throughout the human and animal world, and I?ll also be exploring the intriguing idea that there?s a biological reason why ritual is such a fundamental part of normal behaviour.
But before we race ahead, lets think about what we mean when we use the term ritual.
Ron Grimes: (RG)
It?s important I think to distinguish between ritualising, which is rather informal and low level, happens in everyday life, and a rite, which is like high liturgical rites.
GR Ron Grimes is professor of religion and culture at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, and has made the study of ritual his life?s work.
If we start with the rites, the big ceremonies that we?re all familiar with, marriage, funerals, church services for example, why does he think that on these occasions that we choose to express our feelings through ritual.
RG I think we mark major moments of passage, well my brother put it to m this way one day ? he said ?Is what you?re trying to say that rituals are ways of putting an exclamation point on an event?? and I thought ?well said? - he should write the books on ritual, not me. Rites are ways of making moments memorable, of driving them deeply into the bone, into the psyche, where they are, if you want replayable, and they?re ways of creating a time and space for us to pause to sort of soak in the moment, and to say ?well these are the things that count, these are our values, we want to set them up front and give them explicit attention.
GR At the other end of the spectrum, the daily ritualising as he puts it, is less obviously ritual activity. But Ron Grimes very firmly places the minutiae of day-to-day life within his definition.
RG Virtually everything in the world can be ritualised, I mean there is nothing that cannot and probably has not been ritualised, so I think we have to be careful that we don?t think of ritual as just the kind of thing that marks the big events, it also marks the very small events, like leaving to walk out the door, going to work, putting my son or daughter to bed at night when they were children. We kiss, shake hands, we say goodbye, we hug, so we have little tiny - I would call them acts of ritualisation - that mark everyday life.
GR Why do you think that those little acts, why are they so important to us?
RG Well, they create a sense of regularity, a sense of familiarity, a way of making contact. They?re also shorthand, I think, they?re shorthand ways of condensing what could become a very long speech at the front door.
GR So ritual is fundamental to our lives, it has a practical use on a day-to-day basis, and we imbue acts of ritual with great meaning in our social and religious ceremonies. It seems to be almost a natural part of the human condition. I asked Ron Grimes if it really is universal.
RG If you define it broadly enough then you can say well sure, ritualising activity is universal, there?s not a culture in which you don?t find it.
GR Ritual then is found throughout human society. But what about the animal world, is it just as much a part of animal behaviour as it is ours?
Tim Birkhead: TB
TB I think ritualised behaviour is incredibly widespread, I mean this is the basis for a lot of communication, a lot of aggressive behaviour and courtship behaviour, which is almost ubiquitous across the animal kingdom. I don?t know how far down the scale of things you want to go but I mean certainly it?s very common in insects for example and probably common in organisms that are simpler than insects as well.
GR Tim Birkhead is professor of animal behaviour at the University of Sheffield. I asked him how he defines ritual behaviour in animals.
TB A ritualised behaviour is any highly stereotyped, repetitive kind of action, that an animal does, and an animal behaviourist would usually associate that with some kind of display, so most sexual or aggressive displays are associated with ritualisation to a lesser or greater extent.
So ritual behaviour is as useful to animals as it is to us. It has many functions that help animals organise their society, and communicate with each other.
FX, seagulls
The long call, the typical call that gulls make that you think of when you?re by the seaside, the male swings its head down below its breast and throws its head back with its beak wide open and gives that typical seagull call, now that?s a highly ritualised display and that particular display is a territorial display, it says ?I own this spot? or ?I own this territory?, depending on where the gull is. But there are lots of other kinds of ritualised displays. One of the ones that I like best of all is the one performed by Australian magpies, and this is a singing display and its actually, the song is actually used very frequently on the soundtrack of things like Neighbours. What happens is, these birds are group-living, group-territorial, and they roost together in some trees and at dawn, they fly down from their roosting trees, and usually stand around a fence-post or a bush and it looks really weird, and then they all start that wonderful warbling, and this might be four or five of them, doing a group chorus, highly ritualised, highly stereotyped, and after about ten minutes they all fly off, and go about their everyday business. And I suspect that that?s something to do with bonding.
FX, birdcalls (presumably Australian magpies)
GR It seems ritual is everywhere in the natural and human worlds. It?s therefore tempting to ask if there?s something inherent in both animals and humans, that drives us to perform rituals. Some psychiatrists now believe that certain kinds of ritual behaviour, such as planning, repeating and checking, have been programmed into the brain over the course of evolution. Circuits linking the frontal lobes ? immediately behind the forehead ? and the basal ganglia, deep within the brain, appear to be responsible for controlling these types of behaviour. Neuro-transmitters, or chemical messengers in the brain are also involved, including serotonin and dopamine, which is closely related to adrenaline.
Recent animal experiments seem to support the idea that activity of dopamine in the brain influences ritualised behaviour. Henry Scheckman, professor of psychiatry and behavioural neuro-sciences at McMaster Univerity in Ontario, injects a rat with a drug called Quinperol, which stimulates the dopamine system, and then places the rat onto what he calls an ?open field?, a table-top with various objects on it.
HS
We inject the animal with the drug twice a week, and each time we inject the animal with the drug, we put him into the open field. From all the places in the open field, the animal chooses one or two, or actually he visits very often one or two places, So he keeps returning to one or two places . He keeps returning to those places exceedingly fast, much faster than to any other place. When he returns to this place, he also has a model ritual that he performs, a particular set of acts that he has developed, that he shows when he returns to that place. You know he touches it, he turns to the right, he turns to the left and then he does maybe something else and then he goes away. And then he comes back again.
GR So chemicals and circuitry in the brain are implicated in the control of both human and animal ritual behaviour. But human ritual is often connected to spirituality. So could this mean that our desire to worship a deity is due to a kind of biological hard-wiring. Does it bother theologians that humans perform rituals because our brain chemistry tells us to? Ron Grimes again.
RG I think there?s a definite biological basis to every human activity. There is, so I don?t see that we escape our biology, and spirituality is not about escaping biology. So even if there is a biological impulse to ritualise, we don?t ever have that biological impulse in its sort of pure, naked biological form. By the time any human being can see it, by the time it?s externalised, it?s already inculutrated.
GR So you?re saying it?s not occurring in a cultural vacuum.
RG That?s right, so there is no pure biological gesture. Just the way I sit, just the way I breathe, is inculturated. The fact that I breathe is biological but the fact that I breathe from high in my chest probably says, you know, I?m, I grew up in a certain culture. The fact that I?ve been told to hold my belly in, pull my stomach in and not let it hang out. The fact that I breathe at the rhythm that I do is partly dictated by biology but it?s also partly dictated by the fact that I?m a male, that I grew up in a particular culture in a particular era. So even if we aspire to ritualise in ways that are utterly natural, and we say ?this is a natural way of behaving?, we nevertheless have learned that from our elders, from our siblings, so the way we do it is inevitably inculturated.
GR Biology may drive us to perform certain kinds of ritual, but cultural influences have shaped the way we use them. So let?s leave the biology behind, and take a deeper look at the variety of ways in which society harnesses ritual.
FX Bells
Many human rituals are associated with celebration, used to intensify the uplifting emotion of particular events.
FX various music ? ?Oh When The Saints? ? football crowd chanting
We also use ritual on a personal level, to help us relax, pray or meditate. I often recommend repetitive relaxation techniques, yoga or meditation, to help patients deal with anxiety and stress. In some instances, social rituals can have similar effects. Ron Grimes again.
RG Ritual can certainly be calming, if the ritual is designed to do that, if it?s a meditative rite, for example, that may be one of its aims or one of its after-effects. But rituals can also hype people up; they can stir up enormous energy and aggression, so rituals work on both ends of the energy scale, at the low end and at the top end. We can?t just make assumptions that rituals necessarily create a particular kind of energy constellation or a particular type of mood. Ritual is a device. It?s not necessarily even a moral device; I mean it?s amoral; you can push it in either direction. And you can use it to calm or to send people to war.
GR In mediaeval times, ritual had an even greater power. Caroline Musig is a senior lecturer in theology at the University of Bristol, and has studied mediaeval Christian rituals. During that period, when religion was such a fundamental part of everyday life, ritual was considered to be a very potent force.
FX chant
CM Ritual was real, as opposed to symbolic. Ritual actually would change a person, could change a society. It was palpable, was tactile, it was not symbolic, it was something they felt, they could actually see almost. Very often they had visions, related to the fact that after a ritual has been carried out, somebody then knows that their loved one has now gone to heaven, and so there?s proof that ritual works, so it?s not a symbol, it?s a reality.
GR In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, some people took ritual to extremes. One of the popular forms of religious ritual was fasting.
CM There were examples in the middle ages of people who fasted to the degree of starving themselves to death. So it went beyond the mere notion of fasting for, say, expiation of sin, or for coming together as a Christian community remembering Christ in the desert. People began to fast to such extremes that they were dying, and perhaps one of the most riveting cases is Catherine of Sienna, the fourteenth century holy woman, who started out fasting in the normal sense where all Christians would fast together as a community at particular times of the year, or before the reception of the Eucharist. But Catharine not only stopped eating meat and stopped drinking wine, she stopped eating almost everything, and if she did swallow something, she would make herself vomit it up, because she felt that she should not be eating, in order to purify herself.
GR Catherine of Sienna starved herself to death at the age of 34. But she didn?t do this just for herself. She believed her drastic action was helping others too.
CM What Catherine thought she was doing was expiating not only her own sin, but the sins of all other Christians. It was a time when purgatory became a very popular idea in the middle ages, and so Catherine believed her through extreme fasting that not only was she purifying her own sins, the sins of her contemporaries, but also those people who had died and were in purgatory and suffering. She thought through her own suffering she could cleanse them more quickly and they could go to heaven.
FX plainchant
But this was not considered normal. There were people who were very very worried about what was going on. We see correspondence with someone like Catherine, people begging her to eat. And there are others who said that fasting should not be to this extreme.
FX plainchant
GR Catherine of Sienna represented one end of what seems to be a sliding scale between normal and excessive adherence to ritual. There is a point when ritualised behaviour becomes pathological. Carrying out rituals can then take over a person?s life, through no choice of their own.
Vox (F) It instituted itself initially by my wanting to check doors were locked. I would go back repeatedly and check, up to a number of four or five times sometimes. It was very soon after the checking of door locks that this contamination fear suddenly struck home with me. I was having to scrub my hands, initially up to the elbows and then I couldn?t get away with that, I had to sort of stick my whole self into a bath or shower.
Everything was primarily worked around the ritualistic behaviour and it really, in the space of about six months, was engulfing my whole life.
GR This lady suffered from a distressing psychiatric illness, called obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD. Repeated checking of light switches or door locks, obsession with symmetry and fear of contamination are classic OCD symptoms. Judith Rappepore a child psychiatrist from the national institute of mental health in Maryland, USA, is a specialist in OCD.
JR OCD is a case where a need to repeat meaningless ideas or meaningless behaviours take over and significantly interfere with your life. So that for example it?s not unusual to have somebody who might like to walk in a certain way, or my father never mailed a letter in his life without checking three or four times to see whether or not the letter actually had gone down into the mailbox, but this in no way interfered with his life, it was just a minor idiosyncrasy. People with OCD waste hours of their day. It?s an embarrassment, it isolates them from other people and often in severe cases they can lose their job and alienate people close to them.
GR I asked Judith Rapperpore how early in life OCD starts to show itself.
JR Almost half of people with OCD have symptoms that start before age fifteen and it?s not that unusual to see some children with symptoms before age ten.
GR So what rituals do these young people show.
JR Rather similar ones, and what?s quite fascinating is talking to these children who?ve never heard of the disorder and certainly don?t know each other and seeing the same kind of things manifested. And I?ve seen several young boys who seemingly out of the blue start to wash their hands excessively, and at the end of washing their hands often for ? oh a half hour or and hour ? feel they have to turn off the tap with their elbows, or else they would get their hands dirty and have to start all over again.
GR But childhood rituals are very common. I bet lots of us can remember taking care not to step on cracks in the pavement, or feeling compelled to do things a set number of times. That?s just a normal part of human development. But is there a relationship between normal childhood rituals and the appearance of OCD later on?
JR We did a study actually, to say whether, did our children with OCD actually have more of these childhood rituals, and it was quite consistent, the answer was no to that, on the other hand what we did see was that some children who developed OCD quite seriously at say about age ten, that they have had episodes of their true OCD as small children.
GR Studies suggest that OCD affects up to three percent of the population, which is as common as diabetes in the UK. That means in my practice of 9,000 patients, I would expect 200 of them to have OCD, but actually I?m aware of less than twenty. Many OCD sufferers are so embarrassed by their condition that they try to keep it hidden, not only from family and friends, but also from their doctor. Which is sad, because the disorder can be treated. Behaviour therapy, which repeatedly exposes the person to whatever triggers off their ritualistic acts, can be extremely helpful. And remember the neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin, that I mentioned earlier. Certain anti-depressant drugs, which affect their activity in the brain, have proved very effective for some OCD patients, providing more indirect evidence that ritual behaviour is controlled by specific parts of the brain. It?s possible that Henry Scheckman?s animal work may eventually give us a better understanding of OCD in humans.
HS I hope it will be helpful; it certainly points to the idea, which hasn?t been around that much, that the dopamine system may be involved in OCD. It?s an idea that psychiatrists are starting to consider, but they really haven?t considered it that much. And that would certainly be a good animal model for the kind of OCD where the dopamine system may be hyperactive. There are probably different types of OCD and we may be tapping into one kind.
GR So the system controlling ritual behaviour can go disastrously wrong, but under normal circumstances ritual can be useful and life-enhancing for individuals and society. But in our rational, technological scientific western world, we don?t seem to have much use for it. I asked Ron Grimes if this poses problems.
RG The relative lack of ritual does seem to me to present a problem ? we are lacking in symbolic vocabulary so when there was a great crisis, when September the Eleventh occurs, the repertoire that we can go to that will unite a nation or unite a group of nations is very small. You say ?well what are the symbols we can mobilise? and you make a list, well, candle, flag. This list is fairly short. So it?s not that we don?t have any but our facility with symbolic language and symbolic action is inhibited. I think we?re ritually inept if you want it bluntly.
FX soundtrack of plane hitting WTC (vox, ?holy shit? ?oh my god, oh my god?, commentator ?another plane just flew in? vox ?oh my god, the explosion is incredible? sirens.)
GR September the eleventh, a time not just of crisis in the USA, but an event that sent shockwaves around the world.
RG Most of what I witnessed on television - and like everyone else I was watching it ? often seemed un-nuanced and over-simplified. But ritualised it was. It was one of the most ritualised events on the planet. The day of mourning that was celebrated in may countries ? I?m just picking two or three examples - but for example both the American one and the British one sang very martial hymns. That wasn?t done in Canada. What was interesting in the Canadian one was how much silence there was, how few flags there were. So to compare the ritual responses to those events, I thought was very revealing. Ritually it seemed to me that both the American one and the British one were already marshalling the troops.
FX vox (US accent) ??let us also pray for divine wisdom, as our leaders consider the necessary actions for national security. Wisdom of the Grace of God that as we act, we not become the evil that we deplore?? drums, bugles, into organ and choir ?Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory??
GR The memorial services after September the Eleventh were a rare example of the power of ritual being used in the western world. On a national scale since then, and in our everyday existence, we seldom acknowledge the emotional force of ritual, and how it could enrich our lives. Ron Grime believes that ritual can engage our bodies, not just our minds, and that?s vital if we?re to be fully functional human beings.
RG I got interested in looking at body-involving traditions. It just seemed to me that if something was meaningful, it wasn?t just meaningful in my heart, or in my head, but it was also meaningful in my body. I?m one of those kinds of people that I don?t know what I think until I go take a walk, so there is a kind of knowledge of the body if you will.
GR Father Ciprine Smith, a Benedictine monk, also believes an effective spiritual life is only possible if physical ritual is at its core.
CS We can?t relate to God unless we do physical things with Him; words, gestures, movements, speech singing, all of these things. Because we are physical beings we?ve got to express ourselves in physical ways, and it?s hard for me to imagine how one could have an effective religious life which didn?t have this very concrete human activity as the basis of it.
GR Perhaps our disregard of ritual here in the west means we?re missing out on a way to enhance celebration, cope with tragedy and live more fully. Surely ritual isn?t just for Christmas, it?s for life.
RG Part of the problem is that we try to constrain our rites into small time periods. We seldom ritualise you know through the night, across a two or three day period, but ritually rich cultures do that, and I think meaning then is driven very deeply into the psyche, into the brain, into the bone. But you have to be willing to invest the time and energy to do that.
GR And if we don?t you think we lose, exactly what?
RG I think if we don?t, meaning floats at a very superficial level for us. It?s not in the skin and the bones. And I think for meaning to have power, to have effect, to have consequence, for ethical values to have effect, they have to be deeply rooted in the human body.
Link ?Ritual? was presented by Dr Gillian Rice and produced in Bristol by Mary Colwell.
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