ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that in ritual studies one has to differentiate between staged or ritualized emotions and emotions that are triggered or caused by rituals. It summarizes the author's understanding of rituals in general and aims to exemplify his argument by referring to ritual weeping, with a special reference to Nepalese mourning and marriage rituals. The chapter proposes that rituals must be distinguished from everyday acts by five criteria that make for a grammar of ritual: causal change; formal decision; formal criteria of acts: formalism, publicity, irrevocability, “liminality”; modal criteria of acts: subjective effects, public nature, transcendence; and change of identity, role, status, authority. For Whitehouse, the scripted or staged tears would be doctrinal and real or spontaneous tears, imaginistic. But rituals do not always make these differences for it is sometimes difficult to separate the formal from the informal, the prescribed action from the normatively expected action.
