ritualtheir actions meaning. Ritual also helps to relate the sacred narrative. In
sharp contrast to Eliade, Jonathan Z. Smith, another historian, emphasizes
the importance of context, which often assumes a dramatization about how
life should ideally be and not what it is in fact. By periodically reaffirming
the existing cosmic and social order, ritual keeps chaos from overwhelming
the cosmos by creating wide patterns of order and meaning.
The anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–1983) breaks new theoretical
ground with a theory of ritual by viewing it as a social process with a
dramatic structure. Turner seeks to stress the dynamic aspect of ritual by
focusing on its process. Ritual represents five aspects of a dramatic per-
formance: playing of roles, use of a rhetorical style of speech, an audi-
ence, knowledge and acceptance of a single set of rules, and a climax.
Rituals are also social dramas of either harmonic or disharmonic process.
These dramas arise in conflict situations, and they adhere to a pattern of
conflict: breach, crisis, redressive action, and reintegration. During the
conflict, social contradictions are masked from view. The ritual drama
provides a symbolic unification which temporarily bridges factionalism
and schismatic rifts in a society. Ritual is thus a symbolic layer on real
social processes. Turner also identifies a fourfold structure of ritual: sym-
bolic, value, telic (purpose), and role. The symbolic structure of ritual
means that it is an aggregation of symbols. Value stands for information
expressed in actions and gestures that are regarded as authoritative, valid,
and axiomatic. The telic structure underlies the observable structure, with
each phase containing an explicitly stated aim, such as getting rid of evil
or to benefit the people with abundant crops or health. The role structure
refers to the interaction between human actors.
In a provocative essay, the Indologist Frits Staal claims, after investi-
gating an ancient Hindu sacrifice, that rituals are meaningless. Devoid of
any aim, function, or goal, rituals are pure activity and orthopraxis. He
phylogenetically asserts that human rituals are often modeled on ritual-
ized animal behavior. Ritual, a pure activity for Staal, constitutes its own
aim, and thus its essence is meaninglessness.
Instead of a lack of meaning, the anthropologist Roy Rappaport stresses
the non-instrumental aspect of ritual, which suggests that it operates to
regulate the relationship between people and their natural resources,
resulting in the maintenance of an environmental balance. Although ritual
is a social process, it also represents a connection to a cultural ecosystem
and a formality discovered in all human behavior. By means of its formal
features, ritual can communicate its meaning instead of relying on its
symbolic or expressive aspects. Rappaport calls attention to five features
of ritual: (1) encoding by others than performers, which means that
performers do not determine all acts and utterances because they have