The typical traditional ritual is not opt-in. It is coercive and compulsory within a context, with strong penalties for opting out. This is a key feature, possibly *the* key feature, that modern ritual-and-ceremony fetishists miss, in bith analysis and design.
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Ritual and ceremony are primarily about power reassuring itself of its own continued potency through the regular extraction of coerced arbitrary performances out of subjects.
It is only secondarily about pleasure or anything positive for those who have to endure it.
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Opt-in ritual and ceremony without coercion are about power larps.
We should probably use a different word for personal soft rituals like morning pour-over coffee.
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Traditional ritual and ceremony look very similar to functional behavioral protocols that accomplish useful things but in many ways they are anti-protocols, designed to *stop* useful and functional behaviors. One of my favorite papers gets at this jstor.org/stable/2778293
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Often though, ritual-and-ceremony theaters emerge from once-useful protocols after they’ve a) outlived their utility for most b) been captured by a powerful few c) deliberately perpetuated/grown through force for the few instead of allowed to shrink to asymptotic value level
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In opt-in modern pseudo-rituals, perhaps. In trad ones, maybe a core 20% are enjoying the collective ritual trance. 80% are in varying degrees of misery depending on coercion levels.
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Replying to @vgr
There is something very powerful about synchronized group behavior like this. For the participant, there's some potent magic in it. Group hypnosis or something.
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Unless you can demonstrate that control/relevance are equally distributed, this is actually a definition of power. And I suspect it can’t be equal because that would require actually creating meaning and stability, not just a “sense” (aka illusion) of it that’s stronger for some.
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Replying to @vgr
This is…a subset of rituals, but by no means all of them. Many are about control, yes, but more in terms of asserting human control and relevance in an uncertain universe and creating a sense of meaning and stability.
Like funerals. Or (non-coercive) prayer.
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Replying to
this is a very early-1980s postmodern definition of ritual, when the idea that everything is social control was at its peak
that view of is flawed precisely because it deprives participants of agency
there is far more to ritual than power, otherwise people would not buy into it
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Replying to
Nope. It’s my lived experience of actually growing up in strongly ritual culture and observing others like it.
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Fair. I’m not here to negate your lived experience. It does differ from others’ experience, though — which matters when we’re talking about concepts like ritual across the total human population.
But maybe I’m anthropologizing a lay conversation.
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I’m familiar with the pomo ideas too… I just think think they’re empirically valid in this case for the vast majority of rituals. I just find it disingenuous when people who like the minority non-power rituals act like the power ones don’t exist or define them out of scope.
Replying to
This frustration, I get. Pouring yourself a coffee is not the same thing as mandatory self-flagellation or spirit possession ceremonies. Like at all.
Originally “rite” was supposed to mean the mandated social activity, and “ritual” is the repeatable act itself. But they blurred.
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