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Ritual is a highly fraught topic in anthropology and has such an extensive literature that some authors, in despair at ever making sense of the category, have even advocated abandoning the term altogether (e.g., Staal 1990; see also Bloch 1992; Goody 1961). In spite of this, the word will not go away in common usage—nor do I think it could in academia—and so the effort to come up with a theoretical approach should continue. As mentioned in Chapter 2, I am arguing that ritual should be seen as a type of human special event (a metagenre) and therefore not something that links us to the animal kingdom (as play does) but rather as something that separates us from it. This is a heterodox view in much of the current theoretical writing but one that I think is justified in the interests of conceptual clarity.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137342386_3

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