Ritual Theory Summary

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This book review is going to be looking the work of Catherine Bell in her book ‘Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice’. In this book, Bell looks at people’s curiosity with rituals and the pre-existing notions of rituals. Bell hashes out the argument on connections that make a discourse on ritual to compel cultural activity studies. Bell acknowledges that there hasn’t really been any analysis of the term ritual that has presented forward one definitive definition, that shows its role in the way people think around religion and culture. Bell across her book argues her thesis that ritual doesn’t control individuals or societies with no consensus.
In the first section ‘The Practice of Ritual Theory’, Bell explores the definition of ritual and how diverse
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Bell lists off ‘types’ of rituals like, “ritual studies and liturgics, religious ritual and secular ritual, ritual and ceremonial, secular ritual and secular ceremony”, and of these examples she stamps in the idea of a lack of universal definition of ritual. Bell attempts to overcome this problem using the term practice. Bell uses the notion of practice to explore and explain ritual. It is hard to distinguish how an “activity, in the very act, differentiates itself from other activities.” Bell uses practice to grasp onto this idea to try and gain a perspective on how to distinguish between the two. Bell defines practice as a “term that is designed to represent the synthetic unity of consciousness and social being within human activity” and explains that to refer to the term practice, practice needs to be taken as a complicated term for human activity. By using the term ‘practice’, Bell identifies four features of human activity which acts as a basis to describe ritual activity. Practice is “(1) situational; (2) strategic; (3) embedded in a misrecognition of what it is in fact doing; and (4) able to reproduce or reconfigure a vision of the order of power in the world.” By building on these features Bell is able to …show more content…
When talking about ritual control Bell looks back at Durkheim’s work looking at the ‘four influential theses concerning ritual in terms of social control. The four theses were “the social solidarity thesis, the channelling of conflict thesis, the repression thesis, and the definition of reality thesis.” Bell looks at the first thesis where Durkheim suggest that “ritual exercises control through its promotion of consensus”, the idea of why rituals seem like the appropriate or common activity to do. Bell however using theorist’s opinions, explains the occurrence of social control in two separate lights. The first one being that people are behaviourally conditioned to act in a certain way through ways like repetition, the action being drill into the person’s behaviour and the second explanation is emphasising cognitive influences of modelled relations by which rituals deemed to be the correct way and what is the right action. Bell concludes this section by going against what others have said about ritual being a controlling aspect of social life and instead brings up her thesis that rituals “does not, in any useful understanding of the words, ‘control’ individuals or society. She explains that although ritual is heavily related with power it doesn’t directly control people or cultures, and instead people willingly perform

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