ABSTRACT
For anthropologists ritual has long been a key to meaning and value in unfamiliar societies. Social historians have increasingly become interested in the phenomenon of ritual for its own sake, or to decode distinctive cultural patterns in societies where it is especially salient, or to shed light on past political and social relationships. Ritual is widely understood to be formalized, repetitive, stylized, and symbolic behavior. Though specifically demarcated by place, time, and dress as well as in verbal and symbolic content, ritual events act persuasively upon everyday life through the expressive and symbolic use of the body, often through the multisensory experience of performance. This article uses ritual in this restricted sense, but one could note a number of fine historical explanations of quasi-ritualistic behavior such as the role of play in culture (Johan Huizinga 1950), the rise of table manners in Europe (Elias 1982), and the cult of cleanliness in Dutch culture (Schama 1981).
