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Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity
This pioneering, interdisciplinary work shows how rituals allow us to live in a perennially imperfect world. Drawing on a variety of cultural settings, the authors utilize psychoanalytic and anthropological perspectives to describe how ritual--like play--creates "as if" worlds, rooted in the imaginative capacity of the human mind to create a subjunctive universe. The ability to cross between imagined worlds is central to the human capacity for empathy. Ritual, they claim, defines the boundaries of these imagined worlds, including those of empathy and other realms of human creativity, such as music, architecture and literature.
The authors juxtapose this ritual orientation to a "sincere" search for unity and wholeness. The sincere world sees fragmentation and incoherence as signs of inauthenticity that must be overcome. Our modern world has accepted the sincere viewpoint at the expense of ritual, dismissing ritual as mere convention. In response, the authors show how the conventions of ritual allow us to live together in a broken world. Ritual is work, endless work. But it is among the most important things that we humans do.
The authors juxtapose this ritual orientation to a "sincere" search for unity and wholeness. The sincere world sees fragmentation and incoherence as signs of inauthenticity that must be overcome. Our modern world has accepted the sincere viewpoint at the expense of ritual, dismissing ritual as mere convention. In response, the authors show how the conventions of ritual allow us to live together in a broken world. Ritual is work, endless work. But it is among the most important things that we humans do.
248 pages, Paperback
First published February 27, 2008
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436 people want to read
About the author
Adam B. Seligman
19 books5 followersAdam B. Seligman is Professor of Religion at Boston University and Research Associate at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs there. He has lived and taught at universities in the United States, in Israel and in Hungary where he was Fulbright Fellow. He lived close to twenty years in Israel where he was a member of Kibbutz Kerem Shalom in the early 1970’s. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages. He is director of CEDAR – Communities Engaging with Difference and Religion (www.CEDARnetwork.org) which leads seminars every year on contested aspects of religion and the public square in different parts of the world. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 29, 2021
Unequal Fictions
I like academic social science, especially when it confirms my prejudices. But even my prejudices are unsatisfied by erudition which takes itself far too seriously to be taken seriously by anyone else. Ritual and Its Consequences , for example, plays right into my intellectual hobbyhorse: that the Christian concept of faith (or as the book euphemistically prefers: ‘sincerity’) is a spiritual and social virus which should be recognised for what it is. But I don’t buy it.
I am constitutionally sympathetic to the authors’ claim that ritual, that is, collective symbolic action, has been hijacked by religious fundamentalists thereby distorting the important role of ritual in public life. Their conclusion is that we need to rescue ritual from its religious connotations and that: “Only through a reengagement with ritual as a constitutive aspect of the human project will it be possible to negotiate the emergent realities of our present century.”
The book distinguishes two types of ritual (actually it defines ‘ritual’ in opposition to ‘sincerity,’ a confusing distinction which I will simplify to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ritual). Good ritual is that which ‘frames’ (a verb which I take to mean ‘culturally defines’) group action as a sort of collective aspiration. That is, good ritual implies action ‘as if’ something were true about the world. So, for example, periodic voting in a democracy is an important ritual of solidarity even though one’s individual vote is of insignificance to the progress of democracy. We vote ‘as if’ it matters not because it does.
Bad ritual, on the other hand, is undertaken not ‘as if’ the world were a certain way but ‘as is’, that is to say the world as it really exists according to the participants in it. This, the authors claim, is ritual in “the mode of sincerity,” by which they mean the participants believe that something other than what they are doing together is being demonstrated, created or affirmed. The classic example of this is the Augustinian conception of the Christian Eucharist in which the collective actions of a priest and his congregation are the visible symbol of an ontological transformation of themselves and bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
In short, good ritual is that which enhances communal commitment and solidarity toward an ideal. Bad ritual is that which relies upon and presumes firm belief in the existence of some reality beyond what can be seen. In other words, bad ritual involves faith while good ritual implies a sort of benign or good-willed cynicism:
This is a preposterous thesis. Firstly because any given ritual contains both true believers and those who are just along for the ride. There are indeed fanatic democrats who take it as a quasi-religious duty to vote and consider those who don’t as political heretics. And there are Christians, including Catholics, who have little faith (or knowledge) in dogmatic concerns yet show up at Mass or other services as a matter of tribal feeling.
The central problem with the distinction between good and bad ritual however is the idea that motives for participants are relevant at all. According to the authors’ logic the ceremonial of the Roman circus, including its ritual slaughter, is of a superior sort to that of an infant’s baptism, the former involving no sincerity at all, and the latter demanding a modicum of sincerity by the officiant, parents, god parents and other witnesses. Rather than refuting each of the detailed propositions presented in the book, I think it more efficient to refer to a piece of superior fiction written a quarter century before their work: Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods.
In Small Gods , the Great God Om finds himself in an unbearable position - that of an upended tortoise - a direct consequence of a paucity of faithful followers. While the country of Omnia is nominally devoted to him, he has only one sincere believer, a desert monk who rights the god from his inverted and humiliating position and feeds him lettuce. Meanwhile, the Omnian leaders cynically use religious ritual to maintain national unity during their invasion of neighbouring countries. As the Romans knew well, a little ritual slaughter is always good for morale. The Great God Om goes about using his single acolyte to recover the hearts and minds of the population who have been mislead by politicians and clergy.
I doubt that the four academics who co-authored Ritual and Its Consequences read Pratchett’s book. If they had they might not have published. Pratchett embarrasses them in absentia , as it were, by demonstrating the silliness of their thesis: that ritual engaged in as a matter of faith is particularly dangerous and inferior to ritual engaged in as ‘framing for action’. Pratchett even describes a neighbouring country to Omnia full of similar intellectuals who make a living from saying similarly dumb things.
Not all fictions are equal. In general I find literary ones superior to those of the social sciences.
I like academic social science, especially when it confirms my prejudices. But even my prejudices are unsatisfied by erudition which takes itself far too seriously to be taken seriously by anyone else. Ritual and Its Consequences , for example, plays right into my intellectual hobbyhorse: that the Christian concept of faith (or as the book euphemistically prefers: ‘sincerity’) is a spiritual and social virus which should be recognised for what it is. But I don’t buy it.
I am constitutionally sympathetic to the authors’ claim that ritual, that is, collective symbolic action, has been hijacked by religious fundamentalists thereby distorting the important role of ritual in public life. Their conclusion is that we need to rescue ritual from its religious connotations and that: “Only through a reengagement with ritual as a constitutive aspect of the human project will it be possible to negotiate the emergent realities of our present century.”
The book distinguishes two types of ritual (actually it defines ‘ritual’ in opposition to ‘sincerity,’ a confusing distinction which I will simplify to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ritual). Good ritual is that which ‘frames’ (a verb which I take to mean ‘culturally defines’) group action as a sort of collective aspiration. That is, good ritual implies action ‘as if’ something were true about the world. So, for example, periodic voting in a democracy is an important ritual of solidarity even though one’s individual vote is of insignificance to the progress of democracy. We vote ‘as if’ it matters not because it does.
Bad ritual, on the other hand, is undertaken not ‘as if’ the world were a certain way but ‘as is’, that is to say the world as it really exists according to the participants in it. This, the authors claim, is ritual in “the mode of sincerity,” by which they mean the participants believe that something other than what they are doing together is being demonstrated, created or affirmed. The classic example of this is the Augustinian conception of the Christian Eucharist in which the collective actions of a priest and his congregation are the visible symbol of an ontological transformation of themselves and bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
In short, good ritual is that which enhances communal commitment and solidarity toward an ideal. Bad ritual is that which relies upon and presumes firm belief in the existence of some reality beyond what can be seen. In other words, bad ritual involves faith while good ritual implies a sort of benign or good-willed cynicism:
“Sincere views are focused not on the creation of an ‘‘as if’’ or a shared subjunctive universe of human being in the world. Instead, they project an ‘‘as is’’ vision of what often becomes a totalistic, unambiguous vision of reality ‘‘as it really is.’.. They appear in the arrogance of what are termed fundamentalist religious beliefs.”
This is a preposterous thesis. Firstly because any given ritual contains both true believers and those who are just along for the ride. There are indeed fanatic democrats who take it as a quasi-religious duty to vote and consider those who don’t as political heretics. And there are Christians, including Catholics, who have little faith (or knowledge) in dogmatic concerns yet show up at Mass or other services as a matter of tribal feeling.
The central problem with the distinction between good and bad ritual however is the idea that motives for participants are relevant at all. According to the authors’ logic the ceremonial of the Roman circus, including its ritual slaughter, is of a superior sort to that of an infant’s baptism, the former involving no sincerity at all, and the latter demanding a modicum of sincerity by the officiant, parents, god parents and other witnesses. Rather than refuting each of the detailed propositions presented in the book, I think it more efficient to refer to a piece of superior fiction written a quarter century before their work: Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods.
In Small Gods , the Great God Om finds himself in an unbearable position - that of an upended tortoise - a direct consequence of a paucity of faithful followers. While the country of Omnia is nominally devoted to him, he has only one sincere believer, a desert monk who rights the god from his inverted and humiliating position and feeds him lettuce. Meanwhile, the Omnian leaders cynically use religious ritual to maintain national unity during their invasion of neighbouring countries. As the Romans knew well, a little ritual slaughter is always good for morale. The Great God Om goes about using his single acolyte to recover the hearts and minds of the population who have been mislead by politicians and clergy.
I doubt that the four academics who co-authored Ritual and Its Consequences read Pratchett’s book. If they had they might not have published. Pratchett embarrasses them in absentia , as it were, by demonstrating the silliness of their thesis: that ritual engaged in as a matter of faith is particularly dangerous and inferior to ritual engaged in as ‘framing for action’. Pratchett even describes a neighbouring country to Omnia full of similar intellectuals who make a living from saying similarly dumb things.
Not all fictions are equal. In general I find literary ones superior to those of the social sciences.
January 30, 2017
Great book. Super helpful analysis on what our culture is missing by denigrating the role of ritual in our lives and communities. Sincerity's logical end, in the absence of ritual, is the total autonomy of the individual to the exclusion of the community. We need shared social space and our culture's prioritization of individual expressions of sincerity preempts our ability to connect across differences. This also affects our art, architecture, and music. Sincerity and individual expression are important, but they cannot be all-important. Ritual helps to connect us to the past as well as to our present community and permits us to connect with future generations as well.
Well worth the time.
Well worth the time.
March 30, 2019
Ritual as a subjunctive, creating a world of as if ... thought-provoking ...
Read
August 2, 2015This is probably the most exciting academic study I've read in a long time. The thesis is basically that the modern world has abandoned ritual for "sincerity"--the quest for our true and pure essence and intentions. These scholars find something valuable in ritual, that is too often dismissed as "empty." Such traditions hold the world in place, so to speak, as we constantly re-create it through rituals that gesture towards the eternal. Or something like that. I want to recommend this to non-academics, but I'm not sure if it is for absolutely everybody. . . but if it sounds interesting, you should give it a whirl.
May 12, 2014
this thing doesn't *really* hold together given that the four authors write about their four wildly divergent respective fields from chapter to chapter, and when we were using this in a religion dept. methods-type class i had just read half of jbutts' excitable speech and was a mess and just wanted to keep shouting about j.l. austin without really pausing to check whether i was right that Everything Is Basically Performatives. all that said, game changer for me, will probably reread.
June 10, 2012
Thought provoking to say the least. The book contrasts the use of ritual vs "sincerity" in terms of dealing the imperfection of living in this world; with ritual offering the best of hope of living with the reality of life in view of what it might be: what is in light of "as if." Not an easy read but well worth the effort.
June 19, 2017
Such an insightful book about the need for both ritual and sincerity in viewing our life and our societies. The authors argue that we have overemphasized, in religion and in basically all domains of our life, the importance of sincerity forgetting how utterly pervasive (and useful) ritual is. Definitely and eye-opener!
December 7, 2017
Misunderstands Geertz completely, but a good frame for thinking about religious vs. areligious thought.
Want to read
August 13, 2020Nonfiction. Recommendation by David and joXn.
March 30, 2024
Seligman has a really specific understanding of ritual (as institutionalized practice) and sincerity (which is not part of ritual) that were unexpected.
November 12, 2014
Witty, playful, and insightful! "Ritual" is more about framing than about a set of behaviors. It is about a world of imagination that can be enacted again and again. We tend to say imagination is unlimited. Surely it is. Yet the authors are saying we may be able to distinguish idiosyncratic things just happen in my mind and truly imaginative work by looking at whether the imaginative work can be shared. So it is not just about imagination per se; it is about the generation and condition of common imaginations. So ritual helps us to pin the various possibilities of the imaginative work of sociality on an invisible and blanket board and turns it into a cognitive map. Think about the tiny ritual like "please and thank you!" in our everyday life. This trivial convention can be ignored or violated; and yet, their existence reminds us of the elastic margins in our everyday life where "we" have already been possible. Very stimulating thoughts! I need to re-read it as my background knowledge prepares me better to absorb these ideas!
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews