Engaging with Ritual Angela M. La Porte, Ph.D. University of Arkansas Camilla McComb, Ph.D. Eastern Michigan University Peg Speirs, Ph.D. Kutztown University Ritual has long been an integral part of artistic practice and can be seen throughout the world as a reflection of meaningful human cultural experience. Traces of ritual behaviors from our human ancestors still exist in the form of rock art from Northwestern and Central Australia (Michaelsen, Ebersole, Smith, & Biro, 2000; Ross & Davidson, 2006) to 17,000-yearold sites in South Africa (Thackeray, 2005). Although much of the rock art depicted rituals related to hunting, healing, and other unidentifiable practices, the imagery and content varied across cultures, places, and time periods. Early scholarly studies of ritual focused on practices then seen as exotic, performed by people described as primitive in isolated places of the world (Brown, 1980; Durkheim, 1912), and often included various art forms as essential parts of ceremonial practices (Dissanayake, 1988). Ritual representations in art have become mystical and religious or secular images and/or acts, changing with culture over time and reflecting aspects of cultures from which they emerge (Brown, 1980, Dissanayake, 1988; Durkheim, 1912). Whitaker (1980) asserts that ritual “must be symbolic, repetitive, stereotypical, and a complexly patterned event” (p. 316) while Brown (2005) suggests that it becomes “segments of our patterns of behavior which we have inherited and practice and pass on to our descendants” (Brown, 2005, p. 127). As scholars attempt to define ritual, there is no universal understanding. Some non-Western languages lack a comparable term (Bell, 1997). The evolving characteristics of a ritual are perhaps best reflected in Grimes’ (1990) comparison to family characteristics where no two family members are identical, but they may share certain resemblances. This is
reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s (1953) definition of a game, and the understanding of art through the open concept theory (Weitz, 1956). The latter theory categorizes something as art if there is at least one characteristic of the form/object that resembles what has been historically identified as art. In neither instance is there a single characteristic that is shared by all games or art, but there is at least one recognizable similarity to prior manifestations of them. Relative to Grimes (1990) and others, a tangible definition for ritual and its relationship to art is a religious or secular act, performed repeatedly or reactivated by a person or group that involves the body and/or the senses, sound, language, a level of meaning, and often an artifact from material culture. Over the past 50 years, ritual has become a prominent crosscultural theme among artists, often rooted in ceremonies and traditions as many religious rituals decline or emerge anew (Bastien & Bromley, 1980) [see “Reinventing Ritual: Contemporary Art and Design for Jewish Life (2009)]. Today, many rituals are evolving into more secular expressions (Brown, 1980) and reflect the inventions and objects of the time, place, and culture [see “Art in Odd Places 2011: Ritual” (2011), and “Off-Spring: New Generations” (2014)]. According to Bastien and Bromley (1980), “Ritual and ceremony are integral to human societies. They provide human groups with means of creating a sense of continuity or transition, solidarity and communality, and mystery and majesty” (p. 58). The current interest in ritual seems to be a postmodern deconstruction of these ideas and a reassembly or reapplication in new contexts.