INTRODUCTORY UNIT - RITUALS, CULTURE AND US

8. THE PRICE OF MODERNITY - THE LOSS OF RITUAL

One of the major casualties that the modern western world has inflicted on the traditional cultures and, arguably, on the lives of many human beings in western societies is a steady undermining of belief in the importance of ritual. We live in a world which is skeptical towards the idea of ritual acts, we see much ritual as superstition, we speak of values as important, but have tended to distance ourselves from the value of the ritual acts which once acted as a framework for those values. Let us now think for a moment about the role of ritual in human life and suggest some of the things that have been lost or abandoned in the move away from ritual.

We all perform ritual acts on a regular basis. Rituals refer to those acts, which we invest with some symbolic meaning, over and above the concrete nature of the act itself. Here, however, we are referring to those ritual acts that are dictated by the demands of a person's own culture, and specifically those previously mentioned clusters of symbolic acts that become enshrined in ceremonies involving the individual at crucial turning points in his or her own life. Let us examine the significance of such ceremonies from two vantage-points, both the cultural group and that of the participating individual.