5.4 RITUAL AS A TOOL OF CULTURAL
TRANSMISSIONPeople participating in rituals are not just bonding. A great part of religious
traditions is passed on within and across generations in the framework of
rituals. Theories of how ritual holds society together appeal to a variety of
mechanisms that promote solidarity and cooperation, but they are not par-
ticularly interested in what and how gets transmitted from one participant to
the other. Another perspective on rituals regards them as venues of cultural
transmission.
In ritual studies, questions of cultural continuity have been addressed in the
framework of discussions about“calendric rituals,”“maintenance rituals,”“trad-
itionalism,”or“confirmatory rituals”(e.g., Zuesse, 2005, pp. 7841–5). As Catherine
Bell noted,“[m]ost rituals appeal to tradition or custom in some way, and
many are concerned to repeat historical precedents very closely”(Bell, 2009,
p. 145). It has been taken for granted somehow that rituals preserve traditions;
however, how they achieve that has remained an understudied problem.
Scholars asked how rituals represent or influence the social or cosmic order
(e.g., Bell, 2009, pp. 156–9; Stephenson, 2015, pp. 38–69) but they seldom
explicitly addressed the practical details of such assumed processes. In fact,
it seems that the study of cultural transmission in rituals (in the direct
sense of understanding how bits of culture are transmitted in them) has
been a marginal interest. This is perhaps explained by the interest in“implicit
messages”that scholars meant to uncover by deciphering the language of
ritual words and actions, considering such deciphered messages as the actual
content of transmission. Taking our discussion of cultural transmission in
Chapters 2 and 4 as a starting point, we can presume that culture is transmit-
ted in the form of artifacts, imitated behaviors, and learned ideas, where behaviors
and ideas are recorded as memories. Although scholarly opinions on such details
could be perhaps pieced together from traditional ritual theories, we will turn our
attention directly to one of the foundational cognitive theories of religion.
Based on his fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, anthropologist Harvey
Whitehouse articulated the“theory of the divergent modes of religiosity”or
simply the Modes Theory in a series of publications (Whitehouse, 1995, 2000,
2004). As Whitehouse (1995, pp. 203–21) acknowledged, his theory owes
partly to former theories in the sociology of religion, such as Max Weber’s
model of the routinization of charisma. However, Whitehouse’s theory
connects sociological and psychological variables in a novel way. In his
fascinating ethnography, Whitehouse (1995) documented the rise and fall of
a reform-movement within a syncretistic religion in Papua New Guinea.
The Pomio Kivung movement was acargo cultthat expected the return
of the deceased ancestors in the shape of white-skinned Europeans at
the end of times, bringing European material welfare and technological
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