Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice [Paperback]

As seems to be generally agreed, Bell's writing style is more than a little dense, and while she in some sense introduces ritual theory, she really assumes you already know a great deal about it. Consequently, the book is simply not approachable unless you have already read most of the works to which she refers. If you've been assigned this for an undergrad class, or a beginning grad class, you have been cheated. Professors, please, don't assign this until people have already read Smith, Levi-Strauss, Durkheim, Frazer, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, Geertz, Ortner, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Turner, Grimes, and probably Derrida for good measure. This is a wonderful book if you know all that stuff; it's truly painful if you don't.

I first read this when I started grad school, and I hated it. Couldn't see the point, frankly. Bell's criticisms of various theories seemed worthwhile, but as she doesn't really propose a new method in the end, what's the point? So I dropped it happily for a long time.

Then I came back to it, almost ten years later, because I found myself delving very deeply into ritual theory, its history, and its future. Suddenly I saw what Bell is up to, and realized that this thing stands as one of the single most important contributions to the field.

Now how can both be true? Well, here's the short, grossly-simplified version.

First, Bell argues that pretty much all current ritual theory tends to cleave along a fault-line: thought/action is the usual form. That is, people DO ritual, and THINK something else. She then turns to a deconstructive approach, and demonstrates that this is logically nonfunctional. She's right, by the way. Whatever you think of the rest of the book, this argument (about the first quarter of the book) leaves smoking rubble where the vast majority of ritual theory used to be.

Next, she picks up the notion of "practice," as formulated by Sherry Ortner, Michel de Certeau, and Pierre Bourdieu, and argues that ritual is a mode of practice, and thus continuous with other modes of behavior within everyday life.

BUT, you see, one of the oddities of ritual is precisely that it usually is understood by the people doing it as NOT continuous. This, she argues, is one of the defining factors of ritual as a specific mode of practice: the practice of "ritualization" largely depends on the construction of a division between ritual and other behaviors, within the culture in question.

Armed with that as a structure, she goes and proposes a new way of looking at ritualization, rather than ritual; that is, she wants to look at the way people ritualize rather than the product of their constructive process.

Personally, I suspect that this shift to ritualization drags us right back into action rather than thought, precisely the thing she wanted to get out of, but the way she does this is very, very slick.

Now here's the $64,000 question. Did you understand, or care about, almost any of what I just wrote? If yes to both, you're going to love this book (or hate it, but enjoy the process). If no to either or both, don't read this.

Once again, would people stop assigning this book to those not prepared to address it intelligently? It's simply not fair, and you should be using the time on something more useful and approachable.

What I love most about Bell's book is its explicit critique of the Gramscian Marxist concept of ideology's relationship to power. Bell offers the rather straight-forward argument, "if your juridical or military apparatus is powerful enough to coerce a subjected group without fear of subversion or recourse, what need have you to whitewash your hegemony with ideology?" Bell makes the Foucaldian argument that ideological discourse does not disguise what needs no disguise, but rather what does; we encounter ideological interaction not when one group's domination of another is impregnable, but rather in cases where neither group can clearly dominate the other without considerable cost or risk, giving way to negotiation and compromise between competing free agents. Ideological discourse shows up in such scenarios because it is through the manipulation of symbols that compromises are rendered tolerable by lending them an aura of cosmic rightness, thereby redeeming the participants' negotiated lots in life and society.

Bell's argument flies in the face of traditional structural-functionalism, which reads the individual and individual agency out of the sociological equation. For structural-functionalists, ideologies act upon individuals by instilling in them a homogeneous set of values and motivations; individuals are passive and plastic while ideology is active and firm. Bell's reckoning reverses this picture: individuals manipulate ideology in the discursive process, acting on behalf of their own self-interests; ideology becomes the effect of human activity rather than its cause (Umberto Eco and Marvin Harris have made similar arguments in their own works). Thus, social cohesion is achieved not because humans are fundamentally social creatures (as the social-functionalists contend), but either because one group coerces another by virtue of force, or else because approximately equally matched individuals realize that there is more to gain from cooperation (with minimal loss through compromise) than from resistant hostility (with excessive loss through costly open-ended conflict).

If I have any major criticism of Bell's book, it is this: she presents ritualization as an intuitive, instinctive enterprise, undertaken only in those scenarios when it is the strategically most effective option (in other words, when competing agents are too equally matched to effectively dominate one another). Yet, human decision-making is regularly inhibited by poor or incomplete information, the neurological limits of information-processing, hastiness, and faulty or dogmatic opportunity-cost associations. (Neoclassical economic thought has suffered similar criticisms over the past few decades.) So Bell's contention contra Geertz that there is no such thing as a failed ritual seems ill-conceived. On the contrary, an inequitably well-endowed agent may submit to compromise because he or she fails to appreciate the possibility of a one-sided dominion, while another may overestimate his or her means and thus attempt to engage in coercive hostilities to ill effect. Throughout her book, Bell frequently uses the term "strategy" to characterize ritualization, yet she neglects the long, unfortunate history of failed military and economic strategies (cf. Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly" and "The Guns of August" on the history of failed military strategy). Why, then, should the political strategy which Bell has labeled "ritualization" be immune from similar catastrophe? While I do not agree with Ronald Grimes at every point, I think he is more on the mark than is Bell for conceeding the possibility of "ritual infelicity."