Why is ritual important to gluckman

Concentrating on the Big Incwala, it is possible to differentiate two parts of it. The first half consists of preparational ceremonies in particular collecting waters and plants from different parts of the Swazi kingdom. In the afternoon of this day, the princes — the kings administrators and rivals at the same time — drive him into the cattle hut with wild songs of hostility. Forcing the strangers, aliens and rivals — including the princes — to leave, a green gourd is destroyed as an emblem of the past year.

The following day is a day of prohibition gradually dispersing the ambiguous magic preparing the celebration of the last day. Altogether, her account is very limited in its interpretative quality, however. Rather than rebelling against the institutional structure as such — the divine kingship — the Swazi are believed to metaphorically battle against the person of the king in his individuality. Constrained by belief and custom the repetitive ritual is seen to defend the kingship against the king ibid.

Making the case for an historical argument, Gluckman tries to prove the strength of his analysis ibid. This claim seems somehow counter-intuitive: does the external threat not automatically unite a society, without necessarily involving an internal ritual conflict? Furthermore, how does society accomplish change if conflict is always ritualised — how are kings overthrown? Not only that he concentrates his energy on searching for the function, what if he got his interpretation of the chants wrong — what if the chants do not express a deep hostility?

Rather than approaching a sociological and psychological analysis as Gluckman, Beidelman starts with the symbolic vocabulary, the cosmology, in more general. Transferring this thesis, Beidelman ibid. Medicines sea water, organs from an ox, plants such as the gourd are strengthening the king through their relationship with the supernatural.

How would you analyze the Swazi Ncwala? Essay, 7 Pages, Grade: J L Johannes Lenhard Author. The community will continue to exist after the stage of incorporation and social solidarity will be greatly strengthened Turner In the social relations approach, we also want to know if there is a one-to-one correspondence.

Can we say that every ritual that changes people's social relations is a rite of passage? Conversely, are the rituals that do not change social relations not rites of passage? This also departs from the confusion in Les rites de passage.

Van Gennep simply describes the rite of passage but does not define its boundaries. In the beginning discussion of Les rites de passage , the rite of passage is not included in the sixteen categories van Gennep The rite of passage is thus meant to be a ritual structure. Such a statement cannot be made without doubt.

If the rite of passage is a ritual structure, how can it be discussed as a childhood, engagement, or wedding rite? We should forgive van Gennep since at the beginning of anthropology this type of defect was almost unavoidable. However, the question remains: what is the relationship between ritual, rite of passage, and social relations? Gluckman distinguishes four kinds of ritual—magic action, religious action, substantive or constitutive ritual, and factitive ritual—clearly point out that rite of passage is a typical constitutive ritual.

It is a pity that the standard of division is not the change in social relations because we cannot judge the precise positions of the rite of passage and the social relation.

Turner conducts a deep study of rituals that have the structure of rites of passage, and is unable to answer the question. Should we use ideas like those of Leach, and see ritual as a communication level that all behaviors have Leach ? This actually removes the boundary between behavior, ritual, and rite of passage. Why most rather than all of them? What is the remaining part of the ritual?

Footnote 1 Leach does not provide an answer. The analysis of the rite of passage in different ethnic groups reminds us of another fact: although the process structure of different ethnic groups is the same, the specific behaviors are very different. After van Gennep the ethnography continues to enrich this ritual diversity—one side of human cultural diversity. In the case of initiation, a Nuer boy in East Africa has to cut six long marks on his forehead with a sharp knife Evans-Pritchard In Yunnan, China, a New Year ritual for children over the age of thirteen is to change their clothes; the boy wears trousers and the girl wears a skirt Cai ,.

There is no specific age requirement for children to sleep apart from their parents. Each family determines the time according to their own economic and construction conditions, but usually when the child is between the ages of eight and thirteen years. Girls in Yiche begin to wear the hairstyle and the hat of a young girl. In addition, there is no observed initiation in Yiche.

In today's Han village traditional initiation is almost dead. Differences in initiation in ethnic groups is a common topic in anthropology. The few examples cited above emphasize that although initiation is usually regarded as a typical example of rite of passage, its complexity, duration, and even whether it exists or not show differences according to ethnic group.

There is a spectrum of initiation ranging from none to complex. The cause of the spectrum is complex and opaque Winzeler This means that we do not know what initiation is.

Why do some people need a physical change to mark adulthood such as circumcision, which will bring children great physical pain especially in societies in which anesthesia technology has not been developed, while other people do not even need to change the type of clothes?

Ritual changes in different times. People will create rituals, but also eliminate rituals. What triggers these changes?

Van Gennep tried to classify rites and repeatedly stressed that initiation should not be considered as only a rite of passage. Can rite of passage be treated as a ritual type? If so, what other types of rituals are there? Or can we only use rite of passage as an analytical tool? Is there another ritual process pattern? Finally, as van Gennep knows, the identifiable degree of the three stages of the rite of passage differs in various ethnic groups regarding the same kind of ritual, or different rituals in one ethnic group van Gennep What is the cause of these differences?

Gluckman , Gluckman hopes to answer the generating question through the degree of differentiation in social roles. According to this hypothesis, it is easy to arrange the Nuer, Na, Yiche, and Han into a sequence of degree of social differentiation degree from low to high.

This order also represents their degree of social development and rationalization. Unfortunately the degree of social role differentiation is not accurate enough to make an evaluation of the whole society. Even if we can say the Nuer is in a lower degree of social differentiation, it is hard to prove that Na, Yiche, and Han villagers have obvious differences in degree. When we focus on a particular ethnic group such as the Yiche, it is easy to find their social life filled with ritual activities.

The Yiche not only have a large number of religious ritual experts, but ordinary people also bear the task of some certain rituals such as sacrificial rituals within the family house. So can we include the Yiche in a highly ritualized society? Why is it difficult to observe the existence of adult rituals in a society with highly complex funeral rituals?

Religion and ritual have not been ended due to the secular Stark and Bainbridge To this day it is highly ritualized that English people still talk about the weather Fox Gluckman's theory inherits the genetic defect of functionalism theory: it cannot provide an effective explanation for the diversity and ritual changes in various ethnic groups.

Noting the limitation of functionalism, Turner returns to the psychological way that Gluckman criticized, risking excessive interpretation and extensive use of psychoanalysis, and finally made a hodgepodge of functionalism, psychology, and structuralism Turner We have analyzed many difficulties in the concept of rite of passage.

Gluckman believed that the change in social relations brought by ritual is the core of the rite of passage, but he did not realize that these changes originate in the identity change of members of society, which is clearly pointed out by van Gennep.

Below I continue to explore the causes of identity change by using belief theory. When people hold a ritual they always have an aim, some existence that is targeted at the ritual. We call the ultimate target existence the ritual object for convenience.

Before and after the rite of passage the social identity of the ritual object changes, which is the most general purpose of the rite of passage. The social relationship between the self and others is determined by the social identity of the self and the other. Once the social identity changes, the social relationships of the self and other members of the community naturally shift.

Further, social identity is a kind of social classification of individuals. The category of ritual objects can be changed by rites of passage.

Humans are social animals that have to rely on classification to understand the world. We try to put everything in the world into a certain category Durkheim and Mauss The human classification system satisfies the formal logic in most cases, and the classification itself implies the jump and fracture when we engage in classification activities. The position of the classification of existence can give us a sense of security. An unclear classification position means social relations can be uncertain, and people's behavior can appear chaotic because of the lack of reliability.

In many cases the existence that has not been clearly classified can be considered unclean and dangerous Douglas Rituals help to restore purity. Rites of passage are rituals that change the classification of things Bourdieu Classification is a judging process. Once we make a judgment, it guides our way. Specific to the classification process, the way we treat an object depends on which category we believe it belongs to, not what it actually belongs to. When we believe that the fungus we harvest is nontoxic, we eat it.

When we reexamine the rites of passage, we find that what happens before and after the ritual is nothing but our belief. The rite of passage changes our belief about the ritual object and the way we judge the ritual object.

The Samo in Burkina Faso, who have an asymmetrical bilateral kinship system, have a wide range of social consanguinity that is banned from marrying Cai Some couples have unfortunately discovered that they are in this prohibition range after their marriage.

We see that before the ritual the Samo believe that the two people are socially consanguineous and their marriage will do harm to the society.

Upon the completion of the ritual people no longer believe that the two people are connected by a culturally sanguine relationship and the marriage becomes harmless.

The society holds that this change of belief requires a ritual. On the other hand, they believe that the change of a certain property of existence does not require a ritual and no such ritual will be observed.

The presence or absence of a rite of passage and its degree of complexity is decided by beliefs on whether it is necessary or possible to change it through a ritual, and the difficulty of the degree of the change. For example, current Han villagers believe that the transition from child to adult is a biological process and no ritual is required. If there is no such ritual, the transition will not occur. For example, in Han society there is no ritual to remove social consanguinity; the only solution for such a marriage is divorce.

Before we act we make a judgment on the possible effects of this action, and begin to act only when we believe that the action will reach a certain valuable aim. We must act because we believe in the judgment that we have already made, and believe that our actions can change the state of the object of the action.

All actions are intended to make some kind of change. Specific to ritual, we believe that the classification of ritual objects before and after our actions will change. People take a particular action because they believe in the function of the action. When people do not think the action will play a proper role they have three options: abolishing the action, changing the action, or introducing new actions.

It can be seen that action must be intended to change our belief regarding the object of our actions. Of course, on occasion the action object will change their own beliefs about themselves because of the actions.

The rite of passage belongs to ritual, and the ritual belongs to action. The proposition for general action is also true for ritual. Like rites of passage, rituals are meant to change beliefs.

Is there a difference between the rite of passage and the ritual? Grimes aims to distinguish different types of changes. These rites move but do not transform. By contrast, when effective rites of passage are enacted, they carry us from here to there in such a way that we are unable to return to square one. A change that never comes back cannot be defined as a transformation—a marriage can end in divorce, and death can be followed by reincarnation.

We now see that the rite of passage is a ritual to change belief. Action and ritual must be carried out to enact change in beliefs, so the rite of passage, ritual, and action are equal. However, this conclusion seems absurd. Let us look at two famous anthropological definitions of ritual.

Both of these cannot be used as a definition of ritual; they note the surface phenomena that apply to certain rituals without pointing out the entity of ritual. To make matters worse, they also use wrong and misleading words. Is it a highly formalized activity that we go to work every day at the same time? Here are three examples. The first case is the ordinary flight process from not long ago. When we want to travel by air, we must first buy plane tickets at the booking point, by telephone, or on the Internet.

After that, we have to arrive at the airport at least half an hour before departure in order to obtain boarding passes, check luggage, and board the plane through security. When the plane arrives at its destination we get off the plane and leave the airport with our luggage. Anyone who has experienced air travel is familiar with this, and no one would ever view it as a ritual. However, with a simple analysis, we find that this process is in line with a rite of passage. The process of buying our ticket is similar to getting engaged, it is a separation ritual, and we begin building a relationship with the airline.

With the boarding pass we enter a liminal phase. At this point we have constructed a social relationship with the airline. If we are late for boarding the airport will use a radio reminder to urge us to hurry or the plane may be delayed. However, the airport will not remind the passenger with a ticket but no boarding pass. After boarding all passengers in the same cabin form an anonymous passenger community until the flight is over.

After we leave the plane we regroup into the social fabric. This process is clearly a prescribed, highly formalized behavior with no use of technology application or even faith in mystical power. A card with some printed symbols creates the relationship between the airline and airport. The second case focuses on the headhunters of the Ilongot in the Philippines.

The male looters at the headhunting wait for the best time to hit their victim, cut off his head, catch it before it falls on the ground, and then run away quickly. For boys without a successful headhunt this is unquestionably a rite of passage; but for someone who is already a veteran hunter it is more a matter of filling their constant need.

Obviously, since no one is waiting for you to hunt his head, the headhunting process is highly technical and flexible. There are no formal regulations or formal behavior associated with it.

The third case is ancestor worship. In my survey each family of Yiche needed to enact ancestor worship activities at various festivals. In most families these ancestral activities are performed independently by the hostess.

Yiche is patrilineal and patrilocal. Ancestor worship activities are highly formalized, and are closely related to the mystical spirits of ancestors. The manner of ancestor worship is inherited only along the patrilineal line; there is no common standard for the entire ethnic group. The same phenomenon has also been observed in other areas. In the same or similar ethnic groups, the same ritual with the same name has a different pattern of behavior Rappaport, , Through the analysis above, we see that some daily routines that are usually not considered rituals are in many ways consistent with the core characteristics of the ritual.

Yiche ancestor worship is obviously a ritual, but there are differences between any two patrilineages and is thus more like a daily activity.

Both theoretical analysis and case study have shown how difficult it is to draw a line between rite of passage, ritual, and everyday behavior. In his paper Jack Goody attempted to define ritual by means of the relationship between means and end. In , Goody proposed the radical view that, given the inability to separate rituals from common practice, the use of rituals should be abandoned as an analytical concept. This work elicited little academic reaction, and other researchers continued to use ritual as an analysis object.

The paper does not appear in this book and is never mentioned. This seems to suggest that Goody may have given up the route he took in , and returned to his definition. In the s Bell questioned treating ritual as an entity She later emphasizes that there are cultural differences on whether a set of behaviors belongs to ritual.

Bell suggests using a behavior spectrum ranging from rite behavior to class rituallike , replacing the definition of ritual Humphrey and Laidlaw argue that ritualization was the real core of the theory of ritual After examining numerous definitions of ritual between and , Platvoet concludes that ceremony has a broad range. Snoek gives a very broad definition of ritual from the perspective of behavior. In their recent book Stewart and Strathern agree with Bell completely. According to epistemology, it is equivalent to enlarge the extension of concept and to cancel it.

According to Bell, the range from ritual to daily behavior is a behavior, so we can say some everyday behavior is rituallike behavior. We can also say that some ritual is a kind of daily behavior; there is no difference to cancel ritual.

Belief theory can reveal more clearly and concisely the significant difficulties hidden behind the existing ritual concepts and move our analysis a step forward. When Leach asserts that most rituals are rites of passage he does not tell us the other types of rituals, but he must be aware that the rite of passage model can explain most ritual.

If we combine ritual, rite of passage, and action, it is natural to say that all of these actions are rites of passage, and that they can be naturally analyzed in three steps. When we generalize the transition ritual pattern to the analysis of all behaviors, we announce the end of ritual analysis.

Thus if we cannot find revolutionary explanations, rituals and rites of passage must be abandoned. We have already concluded that all actions, including rituals, are intended to change. If ritual exists, it is then natural to conclude that the changes being sought by the ritual are different from those of the nonritual. In other words, if we succeed in finding a certain type of purpose, ritual with and non-ritual without, we can continue to use ritual in analysis.

If we fail, we must abandon the usage of ritual. In traditional use, rituals are usually associated with the supernatural and mysterious. One of the reasons why previous efforts failed is that these words cannot be used as concepts. In addition, one cause of confusion is that we do not know exactly what kind of entities have changed and what kind of relationship has changed. Ritual is based on belief.

We also often use rituals as common practices in religion, so if religion can be separated from nonreligious areas there is a hope for the definition of ritual. Defining religious ritual will be the first step to defining ritual. Fortunately attempts to define religion have recently evolved. In his study, Cai divides mental existence into two types: mental existence without material support ME1 and with physical support ME2.

There are two kinds of ME1, spirit and demon. There are two kinds of ME2, human and medium. After distinguishing between these forms of mental existence, Cai defines religion as an association between two types of mental existence In my view, a change in relationship is very important, but what ritual intends to change is not social relations between people but the ME1 and ME2.

I define ritual in religion as follows:. Rituals are acts aiming to change the relationship between the ME1 and ME2. In this definition I put the subjective judgment of the actor but not the ritual object in the first place, the actor including demander who wants to do the ritual, and performer who does the ritual.

As long as there is an action in order to change the relationship between ME1 and ME2, the action is ritual. There is thus individual ritual, which is only acknowledged by the actor himself but not by other social members. As in the prior analysis of change in social relations, the change in relationship occurs because one end of the relation changes, or both ends change: ME1 changes, ME2 changes, or ME1 and ME2 both change.

In real society, people change ME1 for the purpose of changing ME2. There is no pure sword action only aiming at ME1, so the ritual also has two categories:. Ritual 2 R2 : the actor intends to only change ME2, but it will change the relationship between the two MEs. It is an R1 when the actor consciously induces a change in ME1, including pleasing, soothing, intimidating, or overcoming.

If the behavior is only considered to change the ME2, and has nothing to do with ME1, then it is not an R2. The actor does not consider ME1 at the beginning of the act, which was not a ritual. Rituals must be religious actions, but the reverse is not true. At least two types are not included. The first type only changes ME2 but does not think that it will affect the ME1, such as a religious believer trying to improve the level of their religious knowledge by studying religious classics but as long as the believer thinks that the study process will affect ME1, the study process becomes ritual.

In the second type the actors do not believe that there is ME1 when they act, but other members of society believe that this behavior causes a change in ME1. With so much effort, we are fortunate to continue to use ritual as an analytical tool. If this definition succeeds, it will greatly simplify our research work, and will also clearly define the objectives for our ritual study. First, my definition is given for ritual in religion.

In my opinion, there is no secular ritual so the definition applies to all rituals. In the future, if we can find some actions wanting to change a certain category of existence different from general behavior, it will not be too late to enlarge the limitations of ritual. If the actor thinks that his action will influence ME1, the action is a ritual.

One ritual will become a common behavior when the actor does not believe it has the effect on ME1. In many societies, one of the most common phenomena is that although people no longer believe in some sort of ritual that can change ME1, they also act according to the process of the ritual behavior for some reason. What people are then doing is no longer a ritual, just a set of behaviors that has the same process as the ritual.

Sometimes people use certain characteristics of traditional rituals to create new behaviors. These behaviors are ubiquitous in nonreligious life, such as secular weddings, graduation ceremonies, or inaugurations. Because of these seemingly ritual processes, we have an unclear understanding of rituals; we may call them ceremonies instead.

Third, the concept of the rite of passage will be abandoned. People believe that a behavior process is needed to change the ritual object, which does not necessarily have a particular structure. Fourth, the key to ritual is that people believe that certain behaviors can affect the ME1, so it does not matter whether such behaviors are performed according to fixed procedures.

Just like the ancestor worship of Yiche, there are differences between the patrilineages. Finally, we leave the generating questions of ritual to cognitive psychology and other disciplines. Perhaps they can solve these puzzles in the future Boyer ; Stausberg Bell, Catherine. Ritual theory, ritual practice. With a foreword by D. New York: Oxford University Press.