ABSTRACT
Serious Fun Camps for seriously ill children may have long-term beneficial effects on children with life threatening illnesses. Serious Fun experiences can be a life enhancing ritual process for healthy social transformations in chronic severe childhood illnesses. Victor Turner’s break with functionalism came with his move to a processual approach for social drama, but it took him some time to recognise liminality within ritual experiences as the creative milieu of the social world. Pathological ritual behaviour is a feature of obsessive-compulsive disorders in which stereotypical practices such as hand washing become repetitive, useless and destructive to sociability. Ritual is a cultural system of standardised behaviours that manipulate human emotion towards a purpose. The separation from the real world into a liminal space is repeatedly interrupted by medical necessities. Ritual communicates both self-referential and canonical information. Self-referential information is what the campers have achieved.
