Ritual Risk and Emergent Efficacy: Ethnographic Studies in Christian Ritual

Abstract

Ritual is a domain of analysis shared across Christian confessions and continents. Yet in anthropological work on Christianity, studies of ritual have thus far remained piecemeal and disjointed, unwittingly perpetuating distinctions between north and south, ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ publics, Pentecostals and ‘the rest’. This introductory essay charts the analytic potential of developing a robust cross-cultural analysis of ritual from the perspective of anthropologists of Christianity. We employ ritual risk and efficacy to expand the ongoing study of the practice of Christian sociality, which we explore through three themes. Firstly, this collection is united by a shared interest in ritual inefficacy—the ‘infelicitous’ moments when ritual go awry—and the societal and metaphysical risks that may result. Secondly, the collection examines the social ‘work’ of ritual in defining and authorizing particular forms of Christianity. Finally, the essays explore the ways Christian futures are imagined and created through ritual.

Keywords:

• Christianity
• ritual
• risk

Notes

1. For example, Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, and Victor Turner all built the field around studies of ritual.

2. Notable exceptions include the work of Thomas Csordas and Simon Coleman (as well as James Bielo and Miranda Klaver, both cited here). In part, this lacuna is the result of the way the field initially coalesced around Protestantism which anthropologists did not initially associate with ritual. At the same time, Christian case studies have been lacking or been absent in the growing literature on ritual efficacy produced by scholars in ritual studies (e.g. Hüsken; McClymond). Work in anthropology of Christianity has paid attention to materiality (Meyer and Houtmann), if not ritual per se, drawing on approaches to semiotics that view symbols as objectified (e.g. Keane).

3. Among anthropologists, there are some signs of a resurgence in interest. There are recent volumes on religious ritual (Hicks) and the 2015 Meeting of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion included ritual in its biennial theme. In 2012, Cultural Anthropology produced an online collection on the topic at http://www.culanth.org/curated_collections/4-ritual, access date: 2 July 2016.

4. We have consciously sought to bring together ethnographers who draw on anthropology (Hillary Kaell, Marc Loustau, and Ronald Grimes are in religious studies departments) and anthropologists (Casey Golomski, Eric Hoenes, and Jessica Hardin).

5. Hoenes and Loustau both refer to ‘ritualization’. While this concept is defined in a number of ways in ritual studies, for Hoenes, it refers primarily to “the differentiation and privileging of particular activities” (Bell 204). Loustau’s use of the term emphasizes how ritual is embedded in everyday life, recalling scholars such as Coleman and Csordas.

6. Clearly, we do not take a Durkheimian approach that views ritual as necessarily reflecting and re-inscribing a societal ideal. Nor do we attempt to distinguish between ritual and spectacle.

7. Moore and Myerhoff associated the ‘doctrinal’ with Malinowski’s Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays and the operational with Lévi-Strauss’s “L’efficacité symbolique”.

8. In Orthodoxy, humans are made in the image of God, just as the transcendent God was made incarnate in a human body. As a result, there is a fundamental affinity between God and humanity expressed through anthropomorphic forms (e.g. icons). The liturgy is a dialogical encounter between God and humanity that reaches its highest form in the orality of chant, song, and prayer.

9. For this reason, some studies of Christianity eschew the term ‘ritual’ in favor of ‘ritualization’ (Coleman, “Moving”). We use the term ‘ritual’ because the essays in this collection center on particular ritual events understood by their participants as distinct moments or actions. See, however, note 5 for exceptions.