Understanding Rituals: A Critique of Representationalism

Abstract

The explanations of ritual practices observed in archaeological contexts often proceed on the representationalist basis that the human mind contains the social constituted ideas or representations that underpin the practice of rituals. Such a view remains widespread and, despite the often proclaimed rejection in contemporary theory of the Cartesian mind-body and other dualisms, it perpetuates the Enlightenment representationalist heritage according to which mental contents represent social reality and, as such, drive ritual practices and human action more generally. This article illustrates the meaning and value of rejecting such a representationalist view of human (ritual) action in favour of what we call an institutional view. In such a view, a ritual can be conceived as a form of recurring activity involving temporally and geographically dispersed actors active in differing roles and hence also with differing interests and levels of knowledge of the ritual and the associated belief system.

Keywords:

• Ritual
• religion
• institutions
• beliefs
• mental representations

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Johannes Müller and Martin Furholt at the Graduate School ‘Human Development in Landscapes’, University of Kiel, Germany, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments on this paper.

Notes

¹ A terminological note. While a philosopher might routinely use the term ‘cognitivism’ (but also ‘representationalism’, ‘mentalism’, ‘psychologism’) to denote the wider Cartesian epistemic orientation, in the archaeological context ‘cognitivism’ suggests an exclusive reference to the work of archaeological cognitivists such as Malafouris and Renfrew (2010). As this article is at pains to show, in our view the phenomenon of representationalism is essentially more widespread than Renfrew et al.’s cognitivism. Hence, we have opted for the label ‘representationalism’.