44 Robert N. Bellah
progress toward reaching anything like a consensus. Reflecting the somewhat skeptical
mood that is not uncommon in religious studies today, she raises the question as to
whether the widespread belief that ritual is universally benign is an improvement over
an older notion of ritual as regressive habit, suggesting instead that ritual, like all human
action, is involved in contexts of power and subject to many forms of manipulation. She
cites Vincent Crapanzano’s (1981) study of Moroccan male initiation rites, which “cru-
elly traumatize a child in ways that benefit the conservatism of the social group,” as a
rare example of an anthropological study that shows ritual to be other than uniformly
benign. She also suggests that ritual is very much in the eye of the beholder, each the-
orist finding what he or she is looking for. Bell stops short of complete nominalism
and in fact develops several useful typologies for thinking about aspects of ritual, but
in the welter of competing theories she is tempted, like many scholars today, to opt
for a healthy skepticism. Yet also, like many contemporary critics, her work is subject
to the same critique she makes of others. Starting as she does from a view that human
action is fundamentally strategic (1992: 81), it is not surprising that the manipulative
element, which is always present in ritual to be sure, will receive heightened attention.
As any reader of this chapter will know, I believe that we cannot do without general
terms in the social sciences, even though many such terms are of recent and Western
origin. Healthy skepticism about them is always in order, but that does not mean that
they cannot refer to real features of the real world. I have argued that ritual is not
only real, but, in agreement with Rappaport, that it is “humanity’s basic social act,” a
position that, though contestable, has a great deal of evidence in its favor.