REINVENTING RITUAL

Author(s): Ronald L. Grimes

Source: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal , Spring 1992, Vol. 75, No. 1 (Spring
1992), pp. 21-41
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41178560

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REINVENTING RITUAL

Ronald L. Grimes

ЭДоктн America is rife at present with invented rites, some of

which one might want to regard as good examples of ritual
creativity and some of which one might want to castigate as evi-
dence of widespread cultural neurosis. There is a growing
popular literature on these rites, and, implicitly, it calls into
question some key scholarly assumptions about ritual. Virginia
Hine refers to the phenomenon as "self-generated" ritual and
"self-created" ceremony.1 I refer to it as "ritualizing"2 or, oc-
casionally, "emerging ritual."3 Whatever one calls it, there are
many manifestations of it. For example, feminist accounts of
self-consciously constructed ritual are multiplying rapidly.4
Though much feminist ritual draws on traditional resources,
much of it is the result of spontaneous improvisation and imag-
inative effort. There is a smaller but growing body of psycho-
logical literature on the development of ritual for purposes of
family therapy and intergenerational transition-making.5 Pro-
ponents work with families to construct rites that reveal, diag-
nose, or heal dysfunctional aspects of a family system. Another
body of literature is ethnographic, and it includes numerous
works that depict ritual in the context of colonialism and other
culture-contact situations.6 This kind of ritual arises as critical
and creative response to radically altered social configurations.
Ritual emerging under the pressures of intercultural conflict is
necessarily self-conscious, because ritual construction often oc-
curs within a few years, in a single lifetime rather than across
generations or aeons. The ethnographic literature on ritual

Ronald L. Grimes is Professor of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier Uni-

versity in Waterloo, Ontario. He has served as General Editor of the Journal
of Ritual Studies since 1986. His publications include Ritual Criticism (1990),
Beginnings in Ritual Studies (1982), and Symbol and Conquest: Public Ritual and
Drama in Santa Fe, New Mexico (1976, to be reissued in 1992).

Soundings 75.1 (Spring 1992). ISSN 0038-1861.

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22 SOUNDINGS Ronald L Grimes

creativity also includes works b

who imaginatively reconstruct
studied in the field.7
With almost no exceptions, schol
take into account this emergent
like to think of our theories and definitions as reflections of
popular culture. And if we are convinced of the efficacy of
ideas, we may even want to believe that our definitions and the-
ories transcend all forms of culture, popular as well as elite.
Theories are not supposed to reflect culture, rather they are
supposed to account for it, or lay the grounds for its evaluating.
But theories and definitions change, usually in patterns con-
sonant with changed cultural practices. One particularly strik-
ing contemporary example is the theory and definition of
ritual. Since the mid-1960s the understanding of ritual (which
includes not only its definition and theory but also its image
and sense) has been undergoing a dramatic shift. One way to
account for the shift is to treat it as a consequence of Victor
Turner's theories, particularly his widely known and appropri-
ated notions: liminality, communi tas, ritual process, and social
drama. Before Turner, ritual was static, structural, conserva-
tive. After Turner, it is imagined as flowing, processual, sub-
versive. In effect he reinvented ritual.
There is considerable truth in this account, which attributes
changed sensibility to changed theory, but the account is half-
truth. The other half of the truth is that Turner's theorizing
was itself goaded by much that we associate with the popular
culture of the late 1960s: experimental theatre, popular psy-
chology, feminism, hippies, festivals, travel, pilgrimages, en-
tertainment, counterculture politics. The reinvention of ritual
was already taking place in the culture and era in which Turner
wrote.

Whether shifts in theory lead or follow cultural changes

chicken-egg problem I have no desire to solve, but I do thi
important to examine conceptions of ritual that have n
caught up with the popular phenomena they should acc
for. Even Victor Turner's formal definition of ritual lagge
hind his sense and theory of it.8 If he had adhered to his o
definition, he would have never noticed most of what he ar
was distinctive about ritual.

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 Reinventing Ritual 23

Despite Turner's effect on the North American sense of rit-

ual, it is still rather typical of scholarly theories and definitions
to maintain that ritual is collective rather than individual and
traditional rather than invented. This view is held not just as
true but as true by definition: an action will not be recognized
as ritualistic unless it meets these two criteria, collectivity and
traditionality. There are two corollaries. One is that ritual con-
sciousness is pre-critical. A second is that ritual is meaningful
and that meaning consists of the words or ideas to which ritual
acts refer.

The view of ritual as traditional (rather than invented), col-

lective (rather than individual), pre-critical (rather than self-
conscious and reflective), and meaningful (i.e., referential), is
so widespread and unquestioned as to make it virtually sacro-
sanct, hence the necessity of critique. No single theorist es-
pouses all these criteria in a definition of ritual, but its several
features are widely stated or implied.

Is Ritual Necessarily Traditional?

The rhetoric of ritualists (people who engage in ritual

tices) has several strategies for denying the inventability
ual. One, for example, is to claim, "It has always bee
this way" or "Our grandparents did it this way" or simpl
traditional." In effect this kind of statement is used to deflect
explanation of ritual. It is a quasi-explanation that makes ritual
a kind of, or consequence of, tradition.
Another strategy, which raises the ante considerably, is to
claim for a rite the status of a sacrament instituted by some
divine figure, often in the beginning or in the time before this
time. This is the more radical form of denying the inventability
of ritual. Both strategies put ritual considerably beyond the
range of mere human creativity and thus beyond the reach of
criticism.

The rhetoric of ritologists (people who study ritual) has par-

allels to that of the practitioners. For some, ritual and tradition
are virtual synonyms, or if not that, then partners for life: ritual
is the enactment of tradition, or, put more synchronically, the
enactment of convention or custom. For instance, Stanley
Tambiah defines ritual as

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24 SOUNDINGS Ronald L Grimes

a culturally constructed system of

constituted of patterned and ord
acts, often expressed in multiple m
rangement are characterized in var
ventionality), stereotypy (rigidity
redundancy (repetition).9
Although Tambiah does not use
plies it in several terms: "cultura
"conventionality," and perhaps
plicit in the assumption that ritu
conventional is the denial that it
romantic a notion, then, "invent
I do not want to argue that ritu
that it is also invented and that i
may not seem that we who are n
ritual, any more than it seems tha
It seems that we merely inherit a
It may even seem this way to sha
seeming givenness is an illusion.
a clock's hands do not move, this
a view of the process. A longer
beneath an apparently timeless, m
Just as language is always bein
using it, so ritual is always in t
ritualists enact it. The history of
reveals it as changing, and these
ent with others, which suggests
fully cultural process. As soon as
historical and cultural, the door
constructed and on occasion, cons
that we have very few long-rang
which gives the illusion of stasis
However much one might be ju
the self-generated rites reported
ethnographic literature are aut
there is less room for debate abo
must be wary of allowing descr
normatively. To say that an inve
thing; to say that it is not ritual
In most cultures ritualizing is so
in the margins, on the thresholds

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 Reinventing Ritual 25

cal classicists and eulogized by ritual romantics. In either case

it makes havoc of theories and definitions of ritual if we have
built into them the notions of tradition, repetition, and collec-
tive participation.
If we admit the possibility that ritual can be invented, then
ritualizing requires a revised understanding of tradition if we
are to retain it as a feature of ritual. Tradition must be under-
stood not merely as cultural inertia but also as a mode of active
construction. The work that has most thoroughly examined
the relation between tradition and ritual invention is the collec-
tion of essays, The Invention of Tradition}1 In it Eric Hobsbawm
says, "Inventing traditions ... is essentially a process of formal-
ization and ritualization characterized by reference to the past,
if only by imposing repetition."12 For Hobsbawm, invented
tradition is any set of practices governed overtly or covertly by
a set of rules and worked out symbolically or ritually in order to
inculcate values and behavior by establishing continuity with
the past.13
Hobsbawm's understanding of both ritual and tradition is
conditioned by the kinds of ritual he and his associates choose
as examples. All the instances are of civil or royal ceremony.
Hobsbawm and company study the invention of Bastille Day in
1880, ceremonies of the Daughters of the American Revolu-
tion, May Day, the Olympic Games, royal weddings,14 and
other devices of decadent colonialism and emergent
nationalism.

Hobsbawm distinguishes tradition from custom. Custom is

loosely held and comparatively flexible.15 Tradition, on the
other hand, is rule-bound; it has the aura of invariance; it
boasts "the sanction of perpetuity".16 Custom is, for example,
what British judges do. What judges do is not invariant (a soci-
ety is lucky if it is even consistent). However, says Hobsbawm,
what judges wear (wigs and robes) is invariant; this is tradition.
In Hobsbawm's model ritual serves tradition rather than
custom.

There are two problems with Hobsbawm's view of trad

One is that he denies its flexible, adaptive aspects. The o
that he regards the invention of tradition only as a sym
as an ideology-perpetuating tool of political establishme
revolutions.17 There is little doubt that the mass-pr

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26 SOUNDINGS Ronald L Grimes

state-sponsored traditions that he

of their own inventedness, but th
the only form that the invention
more, Hobsbawm seems to imply
tive only if ritualists are self-d
known to have been invented are not effective. "Where the old
ways are alive," he says, "traditions need to be neither revived
nor invented."18 In his view invented tradition is not so much
creative as manipulative. Or if it is creative, it is so within very
narrow limits. Traditions, like tastes and fashions, he suggests,
can only be created after they have been discovered in popular
culture. Unfortunately, Hobsbawm and associates say little
about either the limits or dynamics of ritual creativity. If they
were to do so, they would, I presume, have to deal with ritual
"custom"; it is the stuff that is flexible and therefore alive.

Is Ritual Necessarily Collective?

Much contemporary ritualizing is focused on the body

articulated using the rhetoric of the self. This focus and
ric give emergent ritual a distinctively individualistic etho
sets it in opposition to the standard scholarly view of ritu
group-oriented phenomenon that is essentially collecti
necessarily social.
Often ritualizing individuals claim to tap the depths
unconscious, and then they pit the results against the br
of conventional social wisdom as represented in collective
One tactic of ritualized individualism is to mythologi
practices in Jungian, Eliadean, or, more recently, Tur
terms. Accordingly, the zones of ritual creativity are
"the collective unconscious," "the mythic center," or "lim
ity." Deep, centered, or liminal ritualizing functions as
ternative to both the merely conventional and the tradit
and it allows individuals outside the confines of institutions or
sometimes even groups to engage in ritual practice. Scholar-
ship itself is appropriated and used mythically against scholars
who would use it critically against emergent ritual.
There is a sizeable literature on individualism and self-
culture, the most penetrating example of which is Habits of the
Heart by Robert Bellah and his associates.19 Paul Vitz, who re-
gards this phenomenon as "selfism" or "the cult of self-

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 Reinventing Ritual 27

worship,"20 castigates it as both bad science and bad faith.

Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism21 is the best seller
that popularized the now widespread view of North Americans
as narcissists. Virtually all of this literature is prescriptive and
critical, and virtually none of it considers the ritual manifesta-
tions of individualism. Consequently, many students of ritual
overlook or reject ritualizing on definitional grounds ("It is not
really ritual") or moral and psychological grounds ("It is neu-
rotic and narcissistic").
Theologically or anthropologically trained critics worry
about the ethical and psychological liabilities of ritualizing,
which they assume is narcissistic because it is said to serve that
mythical entity, the self. But the self itself is a cultural con-
struction, so one could just as easily argue that self-generated
rites are a form of social expression. There is no such thing as
an unsocialized individual, therefore no such thing as an asocial
rite.

A major problem for theorists of ritual is how to conceive the

relation between self and society. Too often individual and
group are construed as mere static opposites when in reality
they are dialectical pairs that presuppose and require one an-
other. Theorists of ritual too often set ritual on the collective
side of an individual/collective split, but we should reject the
dualism this action presupposes, because taking seriously
either term in the self/society pair always leads to the other
term: bodies are enculturated and cultures are embodied. For
this reason it is necessary to reject much that is assumed about
ritual and the individual, for example, that private ritual is in-
herently neurotic or that all ritual is by definition collective. It
is necessarily collective only in the sense that anything human is:
nothing escapes socialization. Societies have their most persis-
tent root in the human body itself, and the body is always - no
matter how closeted or private - socially inscribed.
Theories that deny the possibility of individual ritual are too
undialectical in their conception of the relation between self
and society. Even Roy Wagner, who has most adequately theo-
rized the inven tability of cultural forms, flounders on this
score. He describes the self/society dynamic as cyclical - one
would assume, dialectical.22 However, he characterizes the
cycle as moving sequentially from everyday consciousness to

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28 SOUNDINGS Ronald L Grimes

ritual consciousness, a movement

ating to collectivizing. For Wagn
tic, while ritual is collectivistic.
still unable to embrace the possib
In contemporary North American
site of the movement he describe
makers of new rites is an express
the everyday is an expression o
deciding whether ritual is the to
vidualizing is not a matter of the
of observation of actual behavio
ritual ought to preclude the poss
izing, since we know that huntin
times emphasized ritual individua
I am not offering an apologeti
criticizing theories that make r
group behavior. I am the first to
"self culture" is dangerous. The
intercultural imperialism, and
cially if a self introjects the notio
Certainly, both the notion and t
considerable refinement, or ritua
sis, but this danger does not obv
ritual.

Are Ritualists Necessarily Pre-critical?

Assuming that ritualists - at least when they are engage

the act of performing rites - exist in an unself-conscious,
critical state of mind is widespread. Jack Goody, for inst
defines ritual as "a category of standardized behavior (cus
in which the relationship between the means and the end
intrinsic."24 Defining ritual as outside of means/end logic
plies that it is irrational and therefore incapable of groun
critique. For romantics this absence of means/end reas
would be a virtue, but for Goody and others it is not. In s
views rituals are assumed to be in the body and therefore n
the mind. The new ritualizers as well as the old theorists of
ritual sometimes lapse into this assumption that ritual is a way
of embodiment, therefore a way of "getting out of the head."
This way of speaking about the effect of ritual is probably

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 Reinventing Ritual 29

popularized version of the practice in Gestalt therapy that

chides patients for speaking merely from their heads.
The implication that ritual is a pre-critical activity takes many
forms. For instance, Hobsbawm's argument that ritual func-
tions like ideology in its tranquilizing of criticism implies this
attitude. Roy Wagner and Paul Connerton hold a similar view.
Wagner believes self-consciousness about the invention of cul-
ture has a shattering effect. He says,
Of course, a realization of this fact by the symbolizer would be
deadly to his [or her] intention: to see the whole field at once, in
all its implications, is to suffer a "relativization" of intention, to
become aware of how gratuitous a part it plays in the activation
of symbols. Thus the most compelling necessity of action under
these circumstances is a restriction of vision . . . ,25

Applied to ritual, this view would suggest that recognition of

the inventedness of ritual is too critical an activity for ritualists
to engage in. Self-consciousness would amount to a kind of
unmasking that undermines motivation.26 Wagner implies that
it is possible for him, the scholar, to see ritual's inventedness,
but not for the dancers themselves to see it. When ritual is
relativized by being conceptualized as invention rather than
convention, says Wagner, the result appears " 'forced,' 'com
mercialized,' 'too serious,' or 'sacrilegious.' "27
Wagner suggests that taking oneself too seriously as an in
ventor of culture28 produces not invented but counterfeit cul-
ture, with guilt as the primary motivation to action.29 Self
invention - though perhaps a necessity in some cultural con
texts - is a flirtation with neurosis, and, he says, those who as
pire to professional ritual creativity can be virtually assured of
neurosis. So, although Wagner does not say that ritualists can-
not be self-conscious and critical, he clearly implies that th
consequences of doing so would be destructive to ritual.
The belief that ritual is a pre-critical activity is often linked t
the fact that ritual is embodied and to a view of the human
body as a non-cognitive entity. The most astute theorist of the
relations between memory, embodiment, and ritual is Paul
Connerton. In How Societies Remember*0 he tries to formulate a
theory of memory that utilizes Hobsbawm's view of tradition-
inventing and takes seriously both ritual and the body. At first,
Connerton seems more promising than Hobsbawm. Part of his

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30 SOUNDINGS Ronald L Grimes

strategy is to distinguish "incor

scribing practices."31 Incorpora
tive - smiling and hand-shaki
practices are textual, for instan
print, computers, tapes, files,
traps.32 For Connerton general
rum and habit and specific comm
example, are instances of incorp
societies to remember.

Connerton attacks the cognitive imperialism of linguistic

models when used on bodily practices.33 And in applying per-
formance theory to ceremonies, he explicitly rejects symbolic
or semantic interpretations of ritual.34 In his view commemo-
rative ceremonies are "acts of transfer"35 that depend on
"habit-memory," as distinct from personal and cognitive mem-
ory.36 Embodied memories are those that enable performers
to reproduce a certain kind of performance. Like typing or rid-
ing a bicycle, performing rites depends on embodied knowl-
edge, which is tacit and does not depend for its effectiveness on
ritualists' ability to do an exegesis of it .
Although I accept Connerton's central claim that ritual em-
bodiment is a primary means through which societies remem-
ber and thus create tradition, I reject his understanding of the
body and of ritual. Rites do not "transfer" either memories or
knowledge. Neither knowledge nor memory is a quantity de-
posited somewhere, for example, in texts or computers. The
container/contained metaphor37 is contrary to his own theory
of incorporating practices. The theory requires a performative
model in which rites improvise and thus reinvent. Unfortu-
nately, Connerton lapses back into inscription language, the
very model he criticizes. In his epistemology the body is a
"sedimentation" of the past, and memory is the "transmission"
of the past. For him performance is the way such transmission
occurs. Unfortunately, he ignores the transformative activities
of both body and memory.
The view of ritual that emerges from Connerton is much like
Hobsbawm's, if not actually borrowed from Hobsbawm. Con-
nerton says,
Newly invented rites spring up and are instantly formalized ....
That is why invented rites, involving sets of recorded rules and

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 Reinventing Ritual 31

procedures, as in modern coronation rites, are marked out by

their inflexibility. By virtue of their procedural inflexibility they
are held to represent, as nowhere else, the idea of the unchang-
ing for a society of institutionalized innovation. Their intention
is reassurance and their mood is nostalgic.38
The kinds of invented rites Connerton studies- coronations,
for example - determine his conclusions. I would have no
problem with his argument if he recognized that his is a view
appropriate only to certain kinds of invented rites, in certain
kinds of societies, during certain historical periods. But he
ignores processes of tacit ritual revision and adaptation that
mark some traditional societies, as well as the ad hoc (rather
than rule-bound) ritual inventiveness in self-conscious subcul-
tures in our own society. The problem his view presents for
theorizing about ritual is that it assumes invented rites are nec-
essarily specious. Unlike Connerton I do not know of any
ttwinvented traditions.

Connerton says,
Both commemorative ceremonies and bodily practices contain a
measure of insurance against the process of cumulative ques-
tioning entailed in all discursive practices. This is the source of
their importance and persistence as mnemonic systems. Every
group, then, will entrust to bodily automatisms the values and
categories which they are most anxious to conserve. They will
know how well the past can be kept in mind by a habitual mem-
ory sedimented in the body.39

This is an interesting idea - that groups hide important

memories from the great searchlight of critical consciousness
by stashing memories in the body. But it is one Connerton as-
sumes, not one he demonstrates. For him the body is a kind of
repository - a bank or library - that works on the basis of "au-
tomatisms" (a bank with an automated teller, one supposes).
Connerton does not look for evidence that the ritualizing body
can be either cognitive or critical; he simply assumes cultures
use bodies to house a collection of treasures, thus protecting
them from being raided by critical questions. He might, for
instance, have considered Hopi women, who have a fall cere-
mony in which they mock the sacred winter ceremonies con-
trolled by Hopi men. He might have considered Pueblo
clowns, who regularly perform their critiques in the midst of
the most solemnly sacral rites.

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32 SOUNDINGS Ronald L Gúmes

One place to look for evidence

rites with some measure of critic
with self-deception, is in the rite
what people say about those rit
rightly recognizes the bodily fou
view of the body is that it is a h
implies that it is essentially passi
prehend the creative, cognitive, c
izing body.40 The human body is
It has its own way of questioning,
its own form of wisdom. The bod
conversely, the mind is embodied
In my view ritualizing is not inc
nor is a sense of mystery incom
vided self-critical actions are embedded in rites themselves,
and provided the timing of criticism is carefully chosen. Criti-
cism itself can take the form of an action, a gesture. It need not
take the form of an intellectual operation separate from ritual
performance, an operation that forces it to stand apart as liter-
ary criticism sometimes does from literature or as religious crit-
icism (i.e., theology) sometimes does from liturgy. We are
used to thinking of ritual and criticism, if not as opposites, then
as an unhappily married pair. We worry that criticism may de-
stroy mystery, or mystery befog criticism. But it is quite possi-
ble to develop forms of critique that do not depend on the
ideology of objectivism with its penchant for distancing, or on
dividing up social roles into critics on the one hand, and ritual-
ists on the other.

In the Ritual Studies Lab which I direct, where we experi-

ment with ritual in a highly self-conscious environment, two
sorts of criticism transpire: acted out critique and verbal, ex-
pository critique. Whatever we enact seriously we later invert
and thus criticize. Whatever is revelatory is later fictive, and
vice-versa. The effect is much like that of Hopi Kachina initia-
tion: enchantment is held in constructive tension with dis-
enchantment - an important skill in a society highly susceptible
to romantic mystification, on the one hand, and cynical dis
enchantment, on the other. Much depends on the timing o
criticism. If we separate the formal critique and analysis of an
event from the experience of it by an hour or week, most par

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 Reinventing Ritual 33

ticipants eventually learn to hold two attitudes simultaneously:

reverence and iconoclasm.

Cultural processes, including ritual, are human construc-

tions, and awareness of this fact does not automatically imply
the death of them. Religious studies and anthropology have
tended to identify as religious those elements of culture that its
participants are least able to criticize. To some practitioners, as
well as to some scholars, religious culture (ritual, for example)
is a given - its sources out of reach and its authority beyond
question. However, improvisation and revision are essential
parts of many, if not most, ritual traditions, not just the ritual
experiments and ad hoc rites I have mentioned. An adequate
theory of ritual should take into account the revision, improvi-
sation, and invention of cultural forms. All such processes im-
ply that ritualists are not uncritical of what they perform.
Although we may think that self-consciousness in ritual per-
formance and construction is something new, arriving in North
America in the 1970s, reflexivity is not new nor confined to this
continent. Reflexivity is to a culture what self-consciousness is
to an individual. When a society enacts itself in ritual, it is able
to see itself mirrored. Far from tranquilizing critique or immo-
bilizing performance, such reflexivity, especially heightened in
festive and initiatory rites, can serve as a strong motive for criti-
cism and as a stimulus for enhanced performance.
Counterculture ritualizing, for instance, that of feminists, is
sometimes torn between a sense of the importance of ritual and
a self-consciousness about the contrivance of enactment. But it
is not necessarily the case that either self-awareness or conscious-
ness of invention means the death of ritual, any more than
breaking symbols or demythologizing myths prevents their
reappropriation in an attitude of second naivete. Sam Gill has
illustrated how ritual disenchantment can, in fact, enhance rit-
ual performance and tradition.43
Roy Wagner distinguishes between cultural change that only
amounts to an alteration of imagery and change that alters the
line between the given (what Wagner refers to as "innate") and
the invented.44 The latter is a fundamental shift of sensibility.
At present we are, I believe, in the midst of such a fundamental
change in our attitude toward ritual. Gestures once regarded
as innate and scenarios once treated as sacrosanct are now un-

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34 SOUNDINGS Ronald L Grimes

derstood as cultural constructions.45 But I do not believe that

the death of supposedly primordial actions or revealed rites
spells the death of ritual practice any more than doubt neces-
sarily destroys faith. Reflexivity, the awareness of performance
by one who is performing, does not have to precipitate the de-
mise of ritual; it can become part of the work of ritual. It may
even be that ritual is a primary cultural means whereby partici-
pants learn to comprehend and criticize the constructedness of
what are taken to be cultural facts.

The claim that people cannot live with ritual criticism or with
the knowledge that rites are invented is exaggerated and not
based on much field observation. Clerics, shamans, and schol-
ars disenchant ritual all the time. Calling attention to the sym-
bolic nature of the realities negotiated by ritual is one of the
primary functions of ritual leaders. People's capacity to incor-
porate critical self-consciousness depends mostly on their hav-
ing experienced rites that weave criticism, self-parody, and
humor into the fabric of the ritual system itself.
One of the most powerful presentations of critical, self-con-
scious, but nevertheless effective, ritualizing is by Barbara
Myerhoff in her ethnographic classic Number Our Days.46 Re-
garding a made-up rite for senior citizens, the Graduation-
Siyum, she writes,
All rituals are paradoxical and dangerous enterprises, the tradi-
tional and improvised, the sacred and secular. Paradoxical be-
cause rituals are conspicuously artificial and theatrical, yet
designed to suggest the inevitability and absolute truth of their
messages. Dangerous because, when we are not convinced by a
ritual we may become aware of ourselves as having made them
up, thence on to the paralyzing realization that we have made up
all our truths; [that] our ceremonies, our most precious concep-
tions and convictions - all are mere invention, not inevitable un-
derstandings about the world at all but the results of mortals'
imaginings.47

Like Wagner, Myerhoff seems to imply that an awareness of

invention and a recognition of the role of imagination is devas-
tating for ritualists, yet she documents ritual activities that illus-
trate the contrary. She herself participates in made-up rites,
aware of their constructedness and taking them seriously at the
same time.48 The assumption by scholars that second nativeté
is possible for themselves but not for ritualists is astonishingly

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 Reinventing Ritual 35

ethnocentric. Second naivete is as possible in performing ritual

as it is in appropriating ancient myth, and it is as possible
among ordinary participants as among scholarly participant-
observers.

Is Ritual Necessarily Meaningful?

The phenomenon of ritualizing not only implies revisions

our understanding of tradition, collectivity, and critical
consciousness but also of meaning. Conceptions of mean
are closely linked to symbol theory. Three widespread assu
tions about ritual are (1) that its building blocks are sym
(2) that symbols are the carriers of meaning, (3) that the m
ing of a symbol is that to which it refers, and (4) that ritua
"believe in" these meanings.
If one asks ritualists what their rites and symbols mean,
quickly finds that there is little connection between how m
people can articulate about a symbol's referents and
meaningful it is to them. The usual social-scientific way of
dling this conceptual dilemma is to resort to function. Thu
ritual becomes meaningful by virtue of what it does soc
not just by virtue of what it refers to. Turner, for exam
makes "operational" (i.e., functional) a category of mea
alongside "exegetical" (or referential) meaning.49
I do not deny that ritual symbols either refer or do, but
problem with both semantic and functional theories is
either they set us looking outside of ritual for the meanin
ritual or they lead us to believe that meaning is a kind of re
entiality.50 One of the most insightful theorists for helping
ticulate questions about conventional theories of ri
meaning is Dan Sperber. In Rethinking Symbolism he sugge
that the search for symbolic meanings in ritual is fundamen
wrongheaded, because it makes us think ritual is a set of c
messages.51 But inevitably when we decode them, they
banal - counterfeit inventions, to use Wagner's term. Th
pectation that rites have meaning in a semiotic, or referen
sense is an expectation of our culture, says Sperber.52 Thus
may be ethnocentric to try applying it elsewhere.
He argues that what ritualists offer as interpretations of
bols are usually as opaque as the symbols themselves, and
they are not really interpretations at all but further acts of

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36 SOUNDINGS Ronald L Grimes

bolizing. Interpreting, or doing

amounts to the reinvention or recreation of them in another
form;53 it is not an explanation of their meaning. In short,
meaning does not consist of "indigenous exegesis" (Turner's
term) or what members of multinational Western religious tra-
ditions like to call "theology." It is not a matter of explicating
referents.

Sperber makes a provocative claim: that smells are symbols

par excellence.54 Symbols work like smells, he suggests. They
evoke rather than refer. Olfaction is our least rationalized
sense; its way of meaning is tied more immediately to primary
bodily responses than those rooted in other senses. The smells
of freshly baked bread or of burning flesh reach the guts (i.e.,
the cerebral cortex) directly; they evoke, in the one case hun-
ger, in the other revulsion.
Sperber claims that, "when Westerners speak in a vague way
of meaning, they are really talking about evocation."55 Smells,
he argues, are difficult to recall (we usually resort to visual sym-
bols instead), but they are extraordinarily powerful in the area
of recognition and evocation.56 We can recognize a smell aris-
ing from an old drawer even though we cannot recall where we
originally encountered such a smell. Then, as if by magic, here
comes a whole set of memories from the distant past; we did
not know we had them. Ritual symbols, understood according
to this Sperberian, olfactory logic, focalize attention and evoke
memory; they do not leave us with religious ideas or political
statements that constitute their meaning.
In Sperber's view evocation is the re-collecting of some ini-
tially unfulfilled condition, in other words, a defect, a break.
Sperber thinks the defect is conceptual. And here I begin my
departure from him. I think this is only one among several pos-
sibilities. His understanding is more exclusively cognitive than
mine.

In any case, symbols in this view are part of a system of im-

plicit knowledge,57 and ritual is an improvisation, reconstruc-
tion, or anticipation based on that knowledge.58 It is not
merely a repetition of it. Sperber says,
The cyclical movement of cultural symbolism might seem absurd
if it were not precisely for the constructive character of remem-
bering. Indeed, it is not a question here of the endless quest for

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 Reinventing Ritual 37

an impossible solution, but rather of a repeated work of re-or-

ganization of the encyclopedic memory. Each new evocation
brings about a different reconstruction of old representations,
weaves new links among them, integrates into the field of sym-
bolism new information brought to it by daily life: the same ritu-
als are enacted, but with new actors; the same myths are told, but
in a changing universe, and to individuals whose social position,
whose relationships with others, and whose experience have
changed.59

Sperber' s argument implies that ritual, by virtue of its olfac-

tory-like symbolization, is not just occasionally creative, as in
the case of experimental ritual, but regularly so. Ritualists do
not merely discover the meaning of symbols but, by improvis-
ing with them ritually, invent "a relevance and a place in mem-
ory for them despite the failure in this respect of the conceptual
categories of meaning.60
Like Sperber I believe that the most interesting cultural
knowledge is tacit, which is to say, preconscious, implicit, and
embodied. When knowledge becomes explicit, he says,61 it can
be learned by rote, but when it is tacit, it cannot; it must be
reconstructed, improvised, or reinvented in each new
enactment.

At first it may sound as if Sperber, like Wagner, Hob

and Connerton, is suggesting that ritual consciousne
critical because it is embodied and that the body is n
tive. But he is not. Tacit knowledge is still knowled
knowledge in a surgeon's or artist's hands is no less kno
because it is embodied, and it is no less critical because
cism takes the form of action rather than verbal articulation.
If ritual meaning is anything like what I have implied by ap-
propriating some of Sperber' s views of symbols, then belief is
not quite the right word for what one does as a ritualist. Would
we want to speak about believing a smell, as we might speak of
believing a statement? Does the surgeon "believe in" her
hands, or the artist, his? I think not. We must give up the lin-
guistic analogies that have formed the basis for much theo-
rizing about ritual. But then what? If ritual is not message or
communication, we will have to become more articulate about
it as play, performance, and practice. But that is another essay.
To conclude, I have argued that contemporary invented rites
are precipitating a corresponding conceptual reinvention of rit-

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38 SOUNDINGS Ronald L Grimes

ual. Whereas previously we may h

essarily traditional, collective, pre
now have to say, " 'Taint necess
tained ritualizing and revised theor
likely to be the bleeding of genr
lines that separate ritual from art
apy - but this bleeding of bounda
represent instead ritual's reconn
sources and tributaries.

NOTES

1. Virginia Hine, "Self-Generated Ritual: Trend or Fad?" Worsh

55.1(1981):404-419. See also her "Self-Created Ceremonies of Pas-
sage," in Betwixt £sf Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation, ed.
Louise Cams Mahdi and others (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987) 304-26.
2. To avoid endless terminological wrangling I have previously taken the
tack of using the term "ritualizing" (Beginnings in Ritual Studies [Washing-
ton, DC: University Press of America, 1982] 53 if.) to denote emergent
or newly constructed ritual. Ritualizing is the activity of incubating ritual;
it is the act of constructing ritual either self-consciously and deliberately
or incrementally and editorially, as it were. The gerund form ("ritual-
izing") is a reminder that I am highlighting the processual phase in the
life history of a rite.
3. Ronald L. Gnmes, Emerging Ritual, Proceedings of the North American
Academy of Liturgy. Plenary session lecture. St. Louis, MO. (January 2-5,
1990) 15-31.
4. See, for example, Barbara G. Walker, Women's Rituals: A Sourcebook (San
Francisco: Harper 8c Row, 1990); Renee Beck and Sydney Barbara Me-
trick, The Art of Ritual: A Guide to Creating and Performing Your Own Rituals
for Growth and Change (Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 1990); Zsuzanna Bu-
dapest, The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries (Berkeley, CA: Wingbow,
1989); Rosemary Radford Ruether, Women-Church: Theology and Practice
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985); Marjorie Procter-Smith, In Her
Own Rite: Constructing Feminist Liturgical Tradition (Nashville: Abingdon,
1990); and Hallie Iglehart, Womanspirit: A Guide to Women's Wisdom (San
Francisco: Harper 8c Row, 1983).
5. See Evan Imber-Black and others, Rituals in Families and Family Therapy
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1988) and Steven Foster and Meredith Little,
"The Vision Quest: Passing from Childhood to Adulthood," in Betwixt &
Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation , edited by Louise
Cams Mahdi and others (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987) 79-110.
6. See, for instance, James Fernandez, Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious
Imagination in Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982); Robert Farris
Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy
(NY: Vintage, 1983); and Ellen Badone, The Appointed Hour: Death,
Worldview and Social Change in Brittany (Berkeley, CA: California UP,
1989).

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 Reinventing Ritual 39

7. See, for example, Victor W. Turner, "Dramatic Ritual/Ritual Drama:

Performative and Reflexive Anthropology," The Kenyon Review, new se-
ries, 1.3 (1979):80-93.
8. Ritual, he says, is "prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given
over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in mystical be-
ings or powers" (The Forest of Symbols: Aspects ofNdembu Ritual [Ithaca, NY:
Cornell UP, 1967] 19). For a critique of this definition see Ronald
Grimes, "Victor Turner's Definition, Theory, and Sense of Ritual," in
Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism: Between Literature and
Anthropology, ed. Kathleen M. Ashley (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990)
141-46.
9. Stanley Tambiah, "A Performative Approach to Ritual," Proceedings of the
British Academy 65:119.
10. Exemplary historical accounts of rites include Mark C. Carnes, Secret Rit-
ual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989) and
James Watson, "The Structure of Chinese Funerary Rites: Elementary
Forms, Ritual Sequence, and the Primacy of Performance," in Death Rit-
ual in Late Imperial and Modern China (Berkeley: U California P, 1988) 3-
19.
11. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983).
12. Hobsbawm 4.
13. Hobsbawm 1.
14. David Cannadine, one of the authors in The Invention of Tradition, calls
these weddings "essays in television ritual" ("The British Monarchy, с
1820-1977," in Hobsbawm 159).
15. See also Terranee Ranger, "The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Af-
rica," in Hobsbawm 247.
16. Hobsbawm 2.
17. Hobsbawm 12.
18. Hobsbawm 8.
19. Robert Bellah and others, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment
in American Life (Berkeley, CA: U California P, 1985).
20. Paul C. Vitz, Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1977).
21. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Di-
minishing Expectations (New York: Warner, 1979).
22. Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture, revised and expanded edition (Chi-
cago: U Chicago P, 1981) 122.
23. See, e.g., Ake Hultkrantz, Native Religions of North America. (San Francisco:
Harper 8c Row, 1987) 14, and Guy H. Cooper, "Individualism and Inte-
gration in Navajo Religion," in Religion in Native North America, ed. Chris-
topher Vecsey (Moscow, ID: U Idaho P, 1990) 67-78.
24. Jack Goody, "Religion and Ritual: The Definitional Problem," British
Journal of Sociology 12.2 (1961):142-64.
25. Wagner 44.
26. Wagner 55.
27. Wagner 56-57. I have no doubt that this is sometimes - perhaps,
often - the case. The first few years of the life of the Ritual Studies Lab,
about which I have written elsewhere (Ritual Criticism, chapter 5), were
plagued by the problem of self-consciousness and a persistent sense of
the artificiality of trying to learn and teach skills essential to the construc-
tion of rites.

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 40 SOUNDINGS Ronald L Grimes

28. Wagner (2) wryly defines an anthr

word "culture" with hope, or even wit
standing, he says, is "the metaphorizat
thropology, he muses, is a Western "cul
(31). The mysterious, magical, invisible
culture only becomes visible when ther
that, subjected to experiences beyond o
tence, anthropologists objectify the di
ture (9). Culture is invented as a constru
difference. This construct accounts both for "their" otherness and "our"
self-consciousness. Our self-consciousness leads to cultural relativism
(3), the view that our values, rites, and symbols are not given but
invented.
29. Wagner 82.
30. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1989).
31. Connerton 72-73.
32. Connerton (4) bemoans the fact that this type of memory has been given
preferential treatment for two millennia of hermeneutic inquiry, hence
texts rather than the human body remain the determinative example in
many views of social memory.
33. Connerton 94, 96, 100. Connerton seems unwittingly to compromise his
critique of linguistic imperialism when he asks what it is that is
remembered in commemorative ceremonies, and answers, "... A com-
munity is reminded of its identity as represented by and told in a master
narrative" (70). In effect, this statement implies that a ritual performance
is dependent on a primary narrative, a linguistic text, specifically a "col-
lective autobiography" This termi.
34. Connerton 70. However, he appropriates the definition of ritual used by
Lukes: Ritual is "rule-governed activity of a symbolic character which
draws the attention of its participants to objects of thought and feeling
which they hold to be of special significance" (44).
35. Connerton 40.
36. See Connerton 22, 35.
37. For more on the container/contained metaphor see George Lakoff and
Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1980) 29 ff.
38. Connerton 64.
39. Connerton 102.
40. On the cognitive dimensions ot ritual see Theodore W. Jennings, Jr.,
"On Ritual Knowledge ," Journal of Religion 62.2 (1982):1 11-27.
4 1 . Connerton s view of memory parallels his view of the body. Memory for
him is like a funnel or filter. The filter metaphor is useful; it reminds us
of memory's selectivity. But like all metaphors it obscures other impor-
tant truths. Memory is also like a muscle: it grows stronger as exercised;
it moves the body into action; it is a source of action, not merely the
recipient of it.
42. See my Ritmi Criticism (Columbia, SC: U South Carolina P, 1990).
43. Sam Gill, Native American Religious Action: A Performance Approach to Religion
(Columbia, SC: U South Carolina P, 1987) 58 ff. See also Sam Gill,
"Hopi Kachina Cult Initiation: The Shocking Beginning to the Hopi's
Religious Life, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Supplement, 45.2
(1977): 447-64.
44. Wagner 105.

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 Reinventing Ritual 41

45. Americans, Wagner suggests (57), conventionally treat the "innate" as

made up, but they also complain about the contrived and made up quali-
ties of things. Thus, one might suppose, they search more intensely for
what is natural or "deep." Knowledge that rites are invented rather than
given or innate does not necessarily make people more willing to em-
brace ritual change.
46. Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1978).
47. Myerhott 86.
48. See the films, "Number Our Days" and "In Her Own Time."
49. Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell UP, 1967) 51.
50. A similar cntique is developed by Frits Staal, л he Meaninglessness ot
Ritual," Numen 33.1(1979):33-64, 185-224. For a critique of Staal and
further reflection of Sperber's thesis see Hans H. Penner, "Language,
Ritual and Meaning," Numen 32.1 (1985):1-16.
51. Dan Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism, trans. Alice L. Morton (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1975).
52. Sperger 83.
53. Sperber 50.
54. Sperber 118.
55. Sperber 148.
56. Sperber 117.
57. Sperber x.
58. Sperber xi.
59. Sperber 145.
60. Sperber 113.
61. Sperber x.

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