ABSTRACT
The term “ritual” is used in everyday speech as well as in scholarly and scientific circles to refer to functionally opaque conventions. Efforts to define ritual have often focused on more or less per ipheral or variable aspects, such as symbolic affordances (Leach 1954), deference (Bloch 2004), or compulsion (Boyer and Liénard 2006). It is indeed the case that ritual actions can trigger exegesis, legitimate domination, or resemble the symptoms of OCD patients, but these are somewhat dispensable aspects of the phenomenon in question. By contrast, functional opacity is a common denominator of all actions that are typically labelled “rituals.” By calling something a ritual, we assume that the rationale for adhering to the prescribed procedural sequence would not be of a physical-causal kind.
