Ritual and Its Consequences: an Essay on the Limits of Sincerity by Adam Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon

I bought this scholarly book on ritual theory because of Michael Puett and Robert Weller, both of whom I'd read and enjoyed engaging with.

These scholars attempt to re-think rituals in anthropology away from its post-Protestant influences. The dominant approach to understanding rituals have been to see it as an external and formal referent for something within the social actors who participate: this "attitude toward self and world" is what they call "sincerity." The scholars also want to move ritual away from the domain of the religious. Ritual for them is "an orientation to action" that need not be confined to religious spaces. Ritual and sincerity are "two 'ideal typical' forms of framing experience, action, and understanding that exist in all society, in tension with one another" and the essay attempts to flesh out and theorize these differences.

Ritual is fundamentally a subjunctive; it is "the creation of an order as if it were truly the case." Puett's work comes to the fore here; in his view of early Confucian writings, Heaven and Earth are fundamentally chaotic and pattern-less, and it is human beings that create pattern and order through rituals. Ritual need not be limited to highly formalized and religious rites. Even the act of saying "please" and "thank you" and other such social niceties creates an "as if" world in which participants interact with one another as if the other is an autonomous individual with the power to decline. Note that this contrary to the mode of sincerity. One does not need to be "sincerely" thankful to engage in this ritual action and to recognize the other participant in this way. For these scholars, society is almost ritual writ large--it "is precisely a shared 'could be,' a mutual illusion of the sort that all rituals create."  Rituals always operates in the tragic dimension, as the as if world created by ritual is ultimately overcome by the broken world of experience. Ritual requires endless work to renew pockets of order.

Ritual and sincerity are often described as dichotomous concepts: as if (subjunctive) vs. as is (indicative), form vs. content, bound by history and tradition vs. a break from the past, and non-discursive vs. discursive, to mention a few key terms. Ritual allows mediation of boundaries while a paradigm of sincerity denies the existence of boundaries altogether. The power of ritual to mediate between boundaries makes it an important alternative to the boundary-less utopic imaginings of the contemporary world and the hardened boundaries by liberal forms of governance.

These scholars re-evaluate fundamentalist movements using this new paradigm. While it is commonly thought fundamentalist movements are reactions to the atomized modern subject and a return to pre-modern religious traditions, these movements are actually religious movements of sincerity, which make claims of authentic belief.

One additional note: I found these scholars' mode of collaboration to be interesting. Each scholar wrote and edited each others work until it became a collective whole; they did not just contribute one chapter each.

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