Non-religious Contexts Research Articles

Ritual Elements in Community

The Oxford English Dictionary says that a rite is ‘a formal procedure or act in a religious or other solemn observance’. The word comes into English through the French rite from the Latin ritus. Its original meaning escapes etymologists; and this is a mixed blessing, for we neither can nor must attempt a retrieval of its hidden roots. We are told by respectable etymologists (if such there be) that the word is associated from earliest times with Latin religious usage, but that even in the early Latin it was already extended to ‘custom, usage, manner or way’ of a non-religious sort. [Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary.] So, too, in modern languages the terms ‘rite’ and ‘ritual’ have specifically religious meaning, but they are also used in social and cultural settings that we would not call religious. What first strikes us about the terms ’ and ‘ritual’ is an emphasis upon a certain formality, upon a regular and stable way in which an action or set of actions is to be performed. A ritual is more than a formalism, however, since there are formalisms that are not rites, such as the logical rules for making a valid argument. Moreover, the term is frequently associated with the terms ‘myth’, ‘symbol’ and ‘faith’. These, too, are primarily religious, but are also extended to non-religious contexts. Indeed, there seems to be a network of such terms whose usage touches upon some extraordinary quality in things. Like them, the term ‘ritual’ shares both a wide variety of meanings and a certain hint of impropriety. The variety of ritual forms is notorious, ranging from the most sacred religious liturgies to the absurdities of a fraternity initiation; and the impropriety of the term breaks out whenever we brand a certain action ‘ritualistic’, just as we sometimes refer slightingly to an assertion, saying it is ‘mythical’, ‘merely symbolic’ or ‘credulous’.

The Way Forward in the Religious Study of African Primal Religions1

This article is written from a methodological viewpoint that must first be outlined. This begins with the assertion that the nature of the field of study must provide the major control over the methods employed. Religion is a human activity and experience that is liable to be interwoven with all aspects of human life, and its study therefore requires, sooner or later, all the human sciences. The study of religion is polymethodical: we can even speak of the physiology of religion when examining the interactions of the human body, various drugs and religious experience. More obvious methods, however, are those employed in the social sciences and in psychology. To these we should add the geographical study of religion which I would widen to include all interactions with the physical environment, under the term ecology of religion. Historical study is another inescapable discipline, to which must be added, although for rather different purposes, the philosophy of religion and the theology of religion. These methods mostly derive from the non-religious context and conditioning to which all religions are subject. Insofar, however, as the religious is a dimension or sphere of human life sui generis other methods are necessary, or at least other orientations and concerns, for the systematic study of the distinctive and peculiar features of religion. We have to study not only religion in its total milieu and that milieu itself, but also what it is that is interwoven with all the other dimensions of existence. To fail to take seriously either the religious itself, or the milieu itself, is to fall into a reductionism in one direction or the other and so into an unscientific distortion of the data. The study of religion therefore certainly needs the distinctively religious disciplines of the phenomenology and history of religions. By the phenomenology of religion I refer to the systematic