ABSTRACT
Every ethnographer will probably recognize a ritual when he or she sees one, because ritual is symbolic activity as opposed to the instrumental behavior of everyday life. A crucial part of every religion, ritual is regarded as a type of routine behavior that symbolizes or expresses something and, as such, relates differentially to individual consciousness and social organization. That is to say, it is no longer a script for regulating practice but a type of practice that is interpretable as standing for some further verbally definable, but tacit, event. The shift in the usage of “ritual” from what is literally a script to behavior, which is itself likened to a text, is connected with other historical changes. Among these is the nineteenth-century view that ritual is more primitive than myth—a view that neatly historicizes and secularizes the Reformation doctrine that correct belief must be more highly valued than correct practice.
