Essay 1 & 2 Ritual Bricolage, Failed Ritual

Essay 1 & 2
Name
Institutional Affiliation
Course Title
Instructor
Date
2. Defining Rituals
Introduction
While it is the general human knowledge that rituals have been in existence since the early days, there is still no consensus on exactly what constitutes a ritual and hence very few comprehensive definitions of the term. This essay draws on three different articles from different cultures to develop a comprehensive definition of the term ritual. The definition presented in this paper is that a ritual is a practice in a particular culture consisting of a set of activities with a symbolic meaning within the culture, whose performance, including the performer, is normally prescribed by the religion or traditions of the community in question.
In another article, “Queer Pilgrimage: The San Francisco Homeland and Identity Tourism,” Howe (2001) examines how the city of San Francisco has been fashioned as a “queer homeland” using a kind of pilgrimage that strengthens participants’ sense of identity. According to Howe, the collection of identifications developed within and among places of ritual does not lead to a totalizing or the singular notion of “queerness.” Howe (2001) rather regards the process of pilgrimage as a mediation between the self, the other and a certain place. From the article, there is a new perspective on how ritual activities establish and reproduce models of identity and offer places of appreciation while remaining elastic and open to various interpretations and types of bias.
In the article “The Maoist Shaman and the Madman: Ritual Bricolage, Failed Ritual, and Failed Ritual Theory,” Chao (1999) depicts a Naxi shaman trying to cure a madman, he combines prayers to the gods with political mottos of the Mao-era in a ritual that seriously confuses his audience. Chao uses this representation not only to study the doubts in the identification of the Naxis of western China after the Mao era but also to open the scrutiny of ritual to the often-ignored likelihoods of eventuality and in some cases failure. Chao’s analysis changes the discussion away from the existing state of affairs of established ritual institutions to highlight the first moment of creation and reception and specifically its uncertainty while also locating the moment within a larger social context.
In his article, “Discipline and the Arts of Domination: Rituals of Respect in Chimborazo, Ecuador,” Lyon (2005) examines corrective rituals in Ecuadorian haciendas. Lyons traces the origins of whipping rituals as forms of punishment in both religious and labor circles (Lyon, 2005). He argues that the practice of whipping across these social contexts was entangled with cultural and specifically symbolic meaning to produce a “respect complex” which influenced not only people’s bodies through pain but also their minds. Additionally, Lyon also hints at probable links between symbols across ritual practices, a promising research area for future Ritual Studies.
Conclusion
Combining the ideas of these three scholars on what perfectly constitutes a ritual, we can come up with a new definition for the term. All three scholars do agree that ritu...