Why Ritual Matters— A Theoretical Analysis
Or, Why Ritual is More than a Morning Routine
“Expression is not the same things as communication. You can express your feelings to a stone, yet it is unmoved”.
— Gilbert Lewis, 1980
Introduction
Wrapped in a muffle of native Korean accent, my name was softly but distinctively spoken from the front podium of The Great Hall. I was sitting off to the right — legs folded, back straight, eleven years of age — and barked a guttural shout of acknowledgment to Master Lee’s summons. Springing to my feet in attention, I bowed, and was invited to approach the podium. Climbing the stairs, my legs still pained from the evening’s tests of rigour; the sweat yet to dry. I had seen Master Lee three times per year since I was six years of age, but never had I been so close to him. Bowing again, Master Lee motioned a subtle nod in return; a nod that housed the respect I had built for him over many years. With aged and experienced hands, he reached for my sweat-stained and thread-torn red belt, untying the weary knot I had adjusted and readjusted countless times throughout the evening's battles. Beltless, I stood there, facing focused stares from fellow students and the witnessing community of spectators. Their silence was deafening. My traditional Tae Kwon Do gi hung loose and misshapen, an honest representation of the level of exhaustion I was feeling in making it to this point. What happened next — in a moment I can’t quite put my finger on — changed everything.
But it also changed nothing.
In the martial arts, belts are symbols of specific experience and knowledge. On this night I stood there with my new belt gently wrapped around my torso. My name stitched in golden tradition, softly hanging to the left. “Wow, I am a black belt now?” I asked myself. But meanwhile, bewilderment lingered. I hadn’t changed at all. I was the exact same person with the exact same knowledge. Both my knowledge and ability no different to when I was wearing red. I was simply on the other side of a series of events I had prepared for and performed countless times prior. What made this occasion so different? In the moment, I felt no transformation. Within myself nothing had changed, but to those around me, everything was different. With this belt, and within the bounds of this community, my name had changed, even talking with me required a respectful bow. The belt legitimized me as a source of knowledge. The owner of physical skills and philosophies of respect and self-control.
The ordeal I went through on this night carried me outside my everyday reality and into one that is ideologically performative. Rich in symbols and ritualised behaviour, the setting served to alter the meaning of otherwise everyday actions into ones which are transformative. But in what manner was this transformative, particularly if I — the actor — felt no immediate transformation? What did the actions of this night communicate, to who did they communicate and how did they lead to such profound changes in my relations with those around me?
In light of such questions, this article sets out to detail an anthropological discussion of the communicative aspects of ritual and symbolism, and how this fits within systems of ritual and symbolism more broadly.
While it is a profane example, a reflection on this personal anecdote brings together the anthropological elements of communication in ritual and symbolism that will be explored by this article. It calls upon the role played by the witnessing community, and the different levels of actors within it. The manner in which each of these actors — including myself — interprets the ritual action and its ‘embedded code’ not only highlights aspects of communication but also the multiple voices it consists of. Furthermore, this scene offers an aspect of transformation, a moment of confusion and liminality which features a state of naked ‘statusless’ limbo (Turner, 1966). Exploring these concepts of ritual and symbolism through an anthropological and ethnographic lens will shed light not only on the role of ritual communication but also on its complexities within various forms of ritual action.
Ritual is a complex social medium. In this article I take a stand for the importance of communication in ritual and symbolism, all the while discussing its multilayered and multidimensional ambiguities that make the topic one of ongoing complexity within anthropology. The problems of translation and interpretation are critical themes which will feature throughout this article. They are the invisible forces that exist in between the actions or objects of ritual and symbolism and the information they communicate. Proceeding in this manner calls up a discussion of what ritual is (Tylor, Durkheim, Rappaport); the realms of human experience within which it exists; how meaning is encoded into ritual (Douglas, Turner, Leach); the multi-layered interpretive ambiguities of this meaning; and the structures or transformations they support. An ethnographic analysis of ritual life in Aboriginal Australia (Dussart 2000) contextualises its communicative aspects in a manner that moves between the overlapping worlds of tradition and modernity. How ritual has evolved in the event of colonialism is a strong example of the way ritual extends into and communicates within a subordinated cross-cultural environment, particularly regarding the internal transformations of gender dichotomies, power and kinship, as well as how ritual moves beyond the ceremonial domain in both geospecific and temporal terms concerning pre and post-contact society.
Ritual and the Human Experience
What is ritual? What are symbols? While the term ‘ritual’ brings to mind scenes of ‘primitive’ cultures performing seemingly cryptic activities, rituals form an integral part of all societies and are found in both the realms of the sacred and the profane. The distinction between these two realms — as offered by Durkheim — confines religion to the sacred, a realm which pertains to the ‘transcendental’ and ‘extraordinary’ activities that occur outside of other everyday acts (Durkheim 1912). Considering the extent to which the literature discusses ritual in relation to religion it is useful to attempt a working definition.
Such a definition for religion can be gauged from likes of Tylor, Durkheim and Geertz. Putting an immoveable finger on this definition is something that anthropologists have struggled with since beginning to study the topic in traditional societies, a large part of this struggle concerning problems of translation and conceptualisation (Eriksen 2001: 220–1). Tylor, with one of the earliest anthropological definitions of religion, simply describes it as “the belief in supernatural beings” (Tylor 1871). This definition accompanied his development of animism, which pertains to the belief in all parts of nature having a soul. Durkheim’s split between the sacred and the profane is accompanied by the argument that ritual is society worshipping itself, that the deities worshipped by religion are projections of the power of society. Both of these views have their issues in terms of interpretation, an aspect which extends right through into ritual communication itself. What is supernatural to me might not be supernatural to you. Eriksen highlights the example of Trobriand garden magic which is just as important to them as manure is to the modern farmer, however, this ‘supernatural belief’ is not necessarily part of their religion (2001: 221). For the purposes of this article, Geertz offers a functional definition of religion:
“(1) a system of symbols (2) which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men (3) by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (Geertz 1993: 90).
This definition is useful in the discussion of ritual communication as it shifts the focus from a system of animism and reasons as to why things exist in the world (Tylor), and from a focus on the social functions of religion (Durkheim), to one which centers on religion itself and how it provides meaning and drive to human existence. This shift from function, structure and integration to one of meaning, symbols and processes also exists in the earlier work of Evans-Pritchard in the translation of emic beliefs of Nuer religion into concepts that are comparable to mainstream European religions (Eriksen 2001: 222; Evans-Pritchard 1956). Placing the spotlight over meaning and its interpretation serves well in the discussion of ritual.
How then is ritual situated within religion? Ritual gives concrete expression to religious notions. It distinguishes between expressions of superstition and those which fall within religion. Superstitious beliefs which are given public expression are legitimised within emic religious beliefs. Rappaport offers a definition that ritual “is the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not encoded by the performers” (Rappaport 1979: 175). This definition is quite useful in the discussion of communication as it highlights fundamental aspects; i.e. a combination (sequence) of formal acts (physical or linguistic) which are formally pre-determined (coded) by someone other than the actor. Turner also discusses this ‘prescribed formal behaviour’ in relation to the role symbols play in ritual describing it as “the smallest unit of ritual which still retains the specific properties of ritual behaviour” (Turner 1967: 19). The human experience is flooded by symbols, and as per Geertz’ analysis, rituals are comprised of a structured system of many symbols. Offering an effectively simplistic analogy, Leach adopts the example of the English alphabet, detailing the process by which we make letters convey information:
“…we first select twenty-six marks from an infinity of possible marks and declare that these twenty-six marks constitute a set. Then we make an inventory of the sounds of our spoken language, cutting up the intonation continuum in a distinctly arbitrary way. We then allocate the arbitrarily distinguished sounds to the arbitrarily distinguished letter marks, and tidying things up by improvising a number of special combinations for sounds which will not fit. Then finally, by stringing letters together in sequences, we produce a kind of model of natural speech”(Leach 1976: 95).
With this, there is an intellectual condition in the recognition of a symbol and what it communicates. Lewis stresses that it ‘involves awareness’. With symbolism involving the notion of one thing representing something else, there must be a recognition of the distinctions between two concepts for one to be used as a symbol for the other. If ‘x’ is symbolised by ‘y’, one must acquire the knowledge that ‘x’ and ‘y’ are not the same (Lewis 1980: 112). As presented by Leach, this idea of ritual behaviour — and all behaviours, for that matter — being ‘encoded’ by a system of symbols is a vital aspect to understand the information that is being conveyed. An aspect of this definition which is pertinent to communication is the term ‘encoded’, and that ritual acts are not encoded by the performers. Douglas cites Bernstein, distinguishing between two different types of codes; elaborated and restricted. Elaborated code allows an individual actor to draw from a wide range of syntactic alternatives that are freely and flexibly arranged, enabling individual intentions to be made explicit; a sense of agency, if you will. On the other hand, restricted code draws from a predetermined and rigidly organised range of syntactic alternatives (Douglas 1970: 23).
Furthermore, and considering the social aspects of ritual giving public life to religious knowledge, restricted code is said to be deeply enmeshed into the immediate social structure in a manner that has a double purpose. Douglas admits that the ritual does convey information but it also — in the same time and space — expresses, embellishes and reinforces the social structure, this latter aspect being the dominant feature considering the pre-determined and restricted nature of the action or utterance performed (1970: 23). Turner supports this notion of ritual being the key to understanding human society in his citation of Wilson (1954); “…rituals reveal values at their deepest level … men express in ritual what moves them most, and since the form of expression is conventionalised and obligatory, it is the values of the group that are revealed” (Turner 1969: 6). The argument for ‘reinforcement’ of social structure is contrasted with the argument for transformation which warrants further discussion in a later part of this article.
It has already been established that ritual and symbolism exists outside of the sacred realm and occur throughout all aspects of the human experience. Hidden within the seemingly common everyday actions of how we go about our life are rituals that shape our belief and communicate information to our immediate community. Such profane rituals are so fundamental and often habitual that it is sometimes hard to identify them as ritual. Differing such habitual behaviour from an animalistic, nonsymbolic ‘stimulus-response’ behaviour is that human actors are self-conscious, enabling symbolic interaction (Callero 1991: 46–47; Bell 1997). In this sense, ritual is self-conscious, however symbolic interaction does not always require this self-conscious cognition. Consider making a toast at a birthday party or shaking somebodies hand. Such ‘everyday rituals’ — or as Callero puts it, noncognitive symbolic interactions — can be distinguished from simple actions of habit by the way in which symbolic meaning is communicated to the community. Like habit, these rituals free the actor of complex cognitive engagement by adopting a predetermined, culturally accepted set of actions, yet such rituals differentiate from habit with their distinct sociological dimension (1991: 47).
Let me take the example of shaking the hand of an acquaintance. Such an act is so commonplace in modern society that it's ritual aspects pass by unnoticed. The coming together, joining and shaking of hands serves no functional purpose in the physical realm. However, the action serves in a meta-physical performative manner which communicates a message of greeting, acceptance or agreement between each actor, from which further interaction can occur. Of course, as previously stressed by Lewis, this case assumes and reinforces the requirement that both actors have the cultural exposure and intellectual awareness of the symbolic link between the act and its interpretation.
To this point, I have been able to establish some of the complex ways in which ritual and symbolism exist on various levels of the human experience, both to the individual and to social reality more broadly. Eriksen gives reason to the importance of ritual studies within anthropology for “it can be seen as a synthesis of several important levels of social reality” (2001: 227). These different levels — the symbolic and the social, the individual and the collective — are the realms between which ritual communicates. The multiple layers of ritual communication are betwixt between a system of encoded symbols and the disparity between intentionality and interpretation.
The Multiple Layers of Ritual
Communication of ritual occurs on a number of different planes, each of which has their own individual interpretive capacity for different meanings. A term for this, as provided by Turner, is ‘multivocality’ (Turner 1967: 50). While he makes this reference for a single symbol’s ability to stand for many different things, it is also true for ritual as a whole. Eriksen provides us with the example of the wafer consumed during communion in the religious Christian ritual. The wafer simultaneously acts as an everyday wafer and also as a part of Christ’s body (Eriksen 2001: 231). This multilayered quality of the wafer places it in a state which Turner has called ‘liminal’; it forms a bridge between the earthly and spiritual worlds (Turner 1969). A phase existing between two different distinctive states. Turner's study on aspects of Ndembu ritual highlights the key elements of multivocality when it comes to understanding communication in ritual, particularly regarding dominant symbols.
Rituals are said to all be focused on dominant symbols that exhibit a number of key characteristics upon which ritual communicates. Turner uses an ethnographic example of the milk tree as a dominant symbol in Ndembu initiation rituals. Named for its secretion of a thick milky substance, the milk tree symbolises both the breast and breast milk concerning female puberty rituals. Additionally, the tree also symbolises dependence between mother and child (Turner 1967: 22). Furthermore, the tree symbolises a dichotomy of contradiction and fission, the contradictory elements existing in the manner in which ritual involves the tree mobilizing women against men, highlighting levels of female exclusiveness. With this manner of multivocality, the tree can be said to have two primary meanings: biological and social (Eriksen 2001: 231). According to Turner, the milk tree is a dominant symbol due to the fact that it is sufficiently conceptually condensed in a manner which enables different phenomena to have a common expression. The milk tree is a “fusion of divergent meanings”, a characteristic enabling different people to interpret and express a form of solidarity through the same symbol. The third aspect of dominant ritual symbols is a polarisation of meaning between the ideological and the sensory. With these characteristics, Turner argues not only that ritual symbols are multivocal, but that they must be of such ambiguity if they are going to create a sense of solidarity within a community of individual actors, each of whom has their own interpretive capabilities. The symbol must be capable of meaning different things to different people (Eriksen 2001: 232).
With this understanding of the multivocality of symbols, we must now turn to the multilayered question of who is interpreting the information communicated by a symbol. As already discussed, the social reinforcement aspects of ritual see the surrounding community to be one layer of interpretation. The other obvious layer is the individual actor themselves. Methods of understanding the information communicated by ritual in both of these cases are complex and vary greatly. However, and considering the discipline, we must consider the interpretation of a ritual by that of an ‘outsider’; namely, the anthropologist. For in capturing their fieldwork data, the anthropologist is attempting to disregard the coded filters of their own culture and understand an encoded ritual which is foreign and often conceptually bewildering. In this sense, the anthropological account of ritual is always symbolic: it must be conveyed through our own symbols (Wagner 1984: 144). Even this article in itself is a kind of symbolic interpretation on a set of symbolic interpretations of other anthropological and ethnographic literature.
Lewis takes this multilayered interpretive issue further in his study of penis-bleeding rituals within the Gnau community of the West Sepik province in Papua New Guinea. Previously, Margaret Mead had equated this ritual with female menstruation, however, upon asking the Gnau directly, they explicitly answer that “no, it is not like menstruation” (Lewis 1980: 2). With this, Lewis deals with the anthropological approaches to the interpretation of ritual and symbolism. Also drawing upon the deciphering of a code within ritual and symbolism, Lewis likens the anthropological interpretation dilemma to knowing a piece of music: the more precisely you know what possibilities there are in making the music, as well as knowing the limits of the system, the more accurately you can understand the particular ritual performance (Lewis 1980: 4).
The Ambiguous In-Between
A discussion of the concept of liminality goes hand in hand with the transformative elements of ritual. Writing in particular about rites of passage, Turner cites Van Gennep in showing that all rites of passage consist of three phases: separation, margin and aggregation (Turner 1969: 94; Van Gennep 1909). These three phases consist of two ‘states’, each different from the other, and one liminal phase existing in between. The first phase of separation is made up of the symbolic actions which communicate the detachment of the ritual subject from their initial state. Margin, also known as the liminal period, features intentionally ambiguous characteristics as the subject is transformed from one state to another. The final aggregation phase sees the ritual subject reconstituted as an individual entity once more, albeit in a state different to that they began in (Turner 1969: 94; Eriksen 2001: 146). A focus on the second phase of liminality serves this discussion on ritual communication.
Also referred to as ‘threshold people’, Turner states the importance of ambiguity for individuals in this state; “liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned by law, custom, convention and ceremony” (Turner 1969: 95). Likened to death or re-birth, this phase is the key to communicating the transformation of an individual through ritual. The liminal phase is dangerous as the subject within it exists outside of society and runs the risk of not being reintegrated if the newly applied role, power hierarchies or values are rejected. During this in-between state, the individual is structurally and possibly even physically invisible to his typical cultural reference point. Providing an example, Eriksen cites Beidelman (1971) and details the Kaguru people of central Tanzania. During the customary rite of passage of male circumcision, if the boy immediately dies after the procedure is completed, he is unable to be buried in the traditional manner as he does not comprise of an accepted state. He is neither a boy nor a man (Eriksen 2001).
Liminality is a concrete state of communication. While the personal state of the individual is ambiguous, it is clearly and publicly communicated to the rest of society that they are in a moment of ritual transformation. Considering the multiple layers of communication I have discussed previously, I would like to raise the question of an inherent communication within the individual subject and whether the change of state is internally communicated upon execution of the aggregation phase. With the broader social elements associated with a change of state — say, from boy to man — an internal communication that started with the separation phase may not be communicated to the individual until a later stage when the actor is subjected to the emic functions that culturally come to be associated with manhood.
A study of these internal and external aspects of ritual is found in Humphrey and Laidlaw’s study of the Jainist puja ritual. Explicitly defined by the practitioners as an ‘empty ritual’, the authors agree and proceed to say that other anthropologists have been mistaken in thinking that the communication of meaning defines ritual (Humphrey & Laidlaw 1994: 2). With a focus on intentionality, it is stated that Jainist ritual “severs the everyday link between the intentional meaning of the agent and the identity of the act they perform” (1994: 2). With this empty ritual, the external action does not constitute the ritual, but rather the internal intentionality performed by the actor, the goal being to achieve a transformation of the soul. In this sense, the external action is not performative by way of the ritual, but the internal aspects supply meaning and ritual performativity. In terms of communication, there is difficulty in knowing what is happening internally for the individual.
With their focus on these empty actions of puja ritual, Humphrey and Laidlaw offer a theory of ritual being an account of the transformation of action by ritualization (1994: 3). Furthermore, this discussion of action continues in a qualitative manner saying that actions and their purposes are ontologically inseparable. They argue that ritual action is “still directed, but the relation between intention and action is subtly transformed” (1994: 5). In this way, the action is the same as the everyday action, but the intention is different, thus severing the everyday link. Similar to the ‘restricted codes’ previously discussed, ritual acts in puja practice are often prescribed and passed down through generations. The act is already structured, “almost like an object” (1994: 5). Despite the explicitness of this ‘empty ritual’, the authors raise concerns with the enigma of why puja practitioners continue to practice ritual in this manner when ritualization only serves to make the actions pointless (1994: 260). Such pointlessness is only relevant in the sense of the everyday mode of the action and seeing as though the internal application of ritualization severs this everyday link, the action itself still serves in a meta-physical performative manner. Such is this internal confinement of the performative aspect of the puja ritual that it makes communication and accurate interpretation of the ritual almost impossible. While set and setting may be able to indicate a shift from everyday action to ritual action, the internal ritual information remains confined.
Particularly when compared with ritual such as the rites of passage discussed above, the puja ritual highlights the stark disparities between various forms of religious acts, and subsequently the manner in which the communication of information is affected. Moreover, it highlights the multilayered aspects of communication, as although precise information is not conveyed to witnesses, the ritual actor is immediately aware of a transformation between the realm of the profane to the sacred on a personal meta-physical level.
Communication Between Cultural Spheres
The myriad of multilayered and ambiguous notions associated with ritual and its communication is brought to the fore when ritual is implicated in a cross-cultural context. The interpretive complexities of meaning and intention become exemplified when they occur with a cultural juxtaposition between an indigenous population and the world of modernity that has come to dominate it. Such is the case for The Warlpiri of the Central Australian Desert. This ethnographic example is of a culture defined by ritual performances and offers material that illustrates the transformation of ritual itself in response to colonial adversity.
Dussart’s ethnography not only offers an account of ritual life in an Aboriginal settlement, but she situates it temporally in a manner which illustrates both the communication and transformation of ritual within an indigenous community at points prior to, during and post-contact with the colonial West. Specifically, Dussart shows the transformative elements of how female ritual leaders are able to transcend rigid gender divisions that divide them from the male-led community, and how the colonial event came to influence such a transformation in ritual. Drawing upon Durkheim’s split between the sacred and profane, Dussart asserts that “Warlpiri life is ritual” in the sense that the expression of a spiritual connection to the ancestors penetrates life beyond the formal ceremonial sphere; during hunting expeditions, for example (Dussart 2000: 5). This observation raises the question of the level secularism in Warlpiri society. Is there a profane realm, or just different ‘levels’ of the sacred?
Understanding these levels of separation in the temporal contexts of pre and post-contact society is useful in highlighting how the communication of ritual has transformed the Warlpiri community, particularly in terms of political power. For the Warlpiri, kinship, gender and persona are at the core of defining a social identity, and this social identity is sustained both in the performance of formal ritual and in the profane realm (Dussart 2000: 3). Furthermore, these fundamental building blocks of social identity flow throw society with the production of ceremonial and metaceremonial knowledge. This source of ritual material is referred to as ‘secret knowledge’, or The Dreaming, and is the determining factor in how ritual is reproduced in the formal ceremonial setting (2000: 13). Citing Tonkinson (1988), Dussart is able to establish that pre-contact Warlpiri society stressed egalitarian tendencies and provided a series of checks and balances when it came to the individual accumulation of political authority. The nomadic nature of their traditional culture also played a significant role in discouraging nonegalitarian patterns of social and ritual engagement (2000: 36). While pre-contact society placed an emphasis on the patrilineal descent of ritual identity, and thus the ownership of ‘secret knowledge’, it was not restricted to the male gender and in no way weakened the female role in terms of ritual inheritance (2000: 28).
This pre-contact society was significantly impacted by suppressive settler policies in the early twentieth century. A dramatic change ensued which impacted the entire Warlpiri social structure. The Aboriginal communities of the central desert were classified as ‘wards of the state’ and had their entire life controlled by the new government. Ritual life was subsequently suppressed due to colonial policies, a key one involving the Aboriginal community being put to work, thus rendering them unable to visit sacred sites. Communities were forced to become sedentary and relocate to camps which they shared with neighbouring communities. This, as well as other policies such as those leading to the stolen generation, resulted in kinship ties being severed and the bonds so vital to the reproduction and inheritance of ritual knowledge disappearing (2000: 37). The extent of the impact of the colonial encounter is exhaustive and it continued to supress Aboriginal life until 1976 when The Aboriginal Land Rights Act was passed enabling the Warlpiri to begin attempts to regain control over their ancestral lands (2000: 39). Obtaining this control required proof of genealogical descent to traditional lands. The only means available to the Warlpiri to communicate such genealogical proof was through the expression of site-specific secret knowledge passed down between generations. Recognised as legitimate by the state, the production and enactment of ceremonial performance thus became a powerful act which translated into a legally binding tool. Song, dance, body and voice literally served as property deeds in the process of regaining traditional lands.
With this cross-cultural communication of ritual information, the Warlpiri community and their practice of ritual continued to shift in the environment of the camp, particularly regarding newly evolved ritual activities which had developed along with forced settlement. On a macro level, these camps were differentiated on a basis of gender and marital relations; yupukarra for married people, jilimi for unmarried women and jankayi for unmarried men (Musharbash 2008; 32). The spatial dynamics between these camps both reflected and influenced social norms and customs. Traditionally, yupukarra is at the centre, with jilimi to the west and jankayi directly to the east. A resulting impact of sedentarisation has manifested particularly in the way in which the Warlpiri people of Yuendumu have engaged in the jilimi (single female) camp. This camp has become highly gendered and serves a single-purpose due to strict marital practices. From a young age, girls would grow up in their parent’s yupukarra until the age of eight or nine when they would move to the yupukarra with their first and much older husband. When widowed, they spend a significant time in jilimi mourning until they remarry and move back to yupukarra (Musharbash 2008; 48). This process continued and saw jilimi function primarily as a camp of mourning for widowed women transitioning between marriages. As detailed in her ethnography, Musharbash states that not only did jilimi increase in numbers and size, but they transformed from places of temporary residence for women to “centres of sociality” (2008; 46). Complimenting this, Dussart observes that the creation and new function of the jilimi opened up avenues of ritual autonomy for women, enabling them to emerge as autonomous, independent ritual actors who actively participate in the creation, transmission and maintenance of the values of their society (Dussart 2000: 8).
The communication of ritual in the cross-cultural and temporal moments of the Warlpiri community moves in both directions. While on the one hand it has co-opted Western sensibilities in its ability to convey genealogical information for the regaining of land rights, it also exhibits the fundamental link between ritual life and the structure of society. For in this case where a distinction between the realms of the sacred and the profane becomes blurred, ritual life adapts in a manner that not only continues the production and succession of cultural knowledge but also resurrects elements of social engagement and cultural identity.
Conclusion
An understanding of ritual and its constituting symbolism creates an awareness of the wide-ranging types of ritual that exist within both the profane and the sacred realms. In this sense, the importance of communication can be underscored due to the various performative aspects ritual has, whether they are transformative, socially reinforcing or something more ambiguous which pertains specifically to an actor’s own internal intentionality. I began this article with an anecdote on the martial arts and it seems logical, in light of the literature and ethnography presented, to conclude with answers to the presented questions in the same manner.
The multiple layers of communication that exist during the grading ceremony are now quite obvious. This social setting — including Master Lee, the senior instructors, junior students and other spectators — legitimised the event in a transformative manner. Receiving the belt via the post would not achieve this same transformation. Being summoned to the front podium and stripped of my belt placed me in a liminal moment out of time where I was statusless between positions. To those witnesses, the next moment in which the new belt was tied to me I was aggregated back into the community with a new status, however, I still felt lost. To me, who intrinsically felt identical — same skill, same knowledge — this process of aggregation occurred over the proceeding months where the ‘cultural’ functions of my new position were presented upon me in my everyday reality. This multiplicity of communication conveyed meaning on several different levels, resulting in numerous interpretations. The ritual action of this night is a true example of the diverging, ambiguous and multilayered aspects of ritual and symbolic interpretation.
Ritual communication is multi-faceted; a process of symbolic expression that requires an intimate and exact knowledge of the performer's intentionality if one hopes to acquire a communication of precise intended meaning. However, while we could get lost in issues of restricted code and multiplicity, it is possible to be clear on the communicative capabilities of ritual and its vast symbolic systems. Ritual communicates intentionality; information which is received via a filter of the observers own interpretation. Despite this interpretive dilemma, the communication of ritual serves both in transformative and socially reinforcing categories. The importance of communication in ritual is one which will both remain as a performative pursuit for ritual actors and one of analytical investigation in the field of anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork.
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