Ritual and Personal Transitions

- blurred boundaries between ritual and theatre
- rituals as transformations from within a group

A definition of ritual
"a performance, planned or improvised, that effects a transition from everyday to an alternative context within which the everyday is transformed" - Alexander 1997: 139, in Bowie p.140

Ritual as a dominant/defining feature of religion?

Ritual of theatre? efficacy vs entertainment
- see Schechner 1994: 120 and Bowie p.146
- Kacek (monkey) dance of Bali originally part of religious ritual that induces trance/exorcism, reworked in the 1920s around the myth of Ramayana, and in 1970s categories of sacred ritual or performance influenced what could officially be shown to tourists and what should be saved  (Picard 1990)

Van Gennep
- it should be said that when a person moves from one space to another, the transition transforms their usualy patterns - of movement and understanding
- like stepping into a movie theater and allowing yourself to believe in the world the story is set

Turner on the installation of King Kanongesha
- he undertook rituals to remind him that the people wanted him to be king (he was chosen to take up the position) and to ensure that he would empathise with them: preparing him for the obligations of the role
- sexlessness and anonymity
- servile posture
- ordeals and humiliations

Imbalu - male circumcision initiation ritual practised by the Bagisu in Uganda
- tradition carried on because of belief that uncircumcised men will be the cause of the demise of the people
- during the initiation, men must not show that they are in pain (in full view of the public, which includes friends and family giving encouragement) otherwise they shall dishonour themselves and the family

Liminality and Communitas
- film The Terminal, based on the story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri who lived in Charles de Gaulle Airport because he was not allowed to enter France proper and could not leave to go elsewhere
- liminality - autonomy, anti-structure, creative; likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisiblity, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness (Turner 1991: 95)
- communitas - 'emerges where structure is not'; egalitarian bonds, unstructured, celebrates human relatedness

Female initiation
- degrees of coercion and control exercised upon the initiates is great
- single/individual initiation rather than in groups means experience is not shared and sense of communitas is then absent; isolated
- dressing and decoration, rather than stripping
- attitude/emphasis to acitivities rather than context
- political implications: who initiates the women?
- health factors differ between male and female circumcisions
- less need in practice to humble the ritual or to make the females civilised (part of the society, as boys are regarded as proper men with rights after they undergo initiation)
- Ellen Grunbaum points out that protests from the West of foreign practices results in backlash because the context is not properly understood by those not immersed in the societal values, but there is some change amongst the society's attitudes parallel to changes in economy and politics

Romanticising initiation
- ayahuasca vine has hallucinogenic properties, and to the Santa Daime following the preparation of this (drug) is itself a ritual
- when documenting, the focus is on the pain and physical transformation, rather than indigenous psychology and looking for the reason they undergo such pain
- is there a need for initiation rituals in the West where personal development is separated from responsibility and commitment?