The Ritual Roots of Society and Culture 43
Prayer.) How selfless this unisonance feels! If we are aware that others are singing
these songs precisely when and as we are, we have no idea who they may be, or even
where, out of earshot, they are singing. Nothing connects us all but imagined sound.
(1991: 145)
I would like to point out how, through the prevalence of television, rituals today
can be shared by millions within and even beyond the nation state. I think of two
instances: One where ritual worked effectively and one where it collapsed. I am old
enough to remember well the November afternoon in 1963 when John F. Kennedy
was shot in Dallas, Texas. For the following three days, millions were glued to their
television screens as a ritual drama of great complexity unfolded. The rituals were both
national and religious. They involved the casket lying in state in the Rotunda of the
United States Capitol, and then being taken by procession to the railway station, from
which it was transported by train to Boston for a Catholic funeral mass presided over
by the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston. The sudden loss of a head of state is apt to be
traumatic in any society. The three days of ritual following Kennedy’s death did seem
to help make it possible to return to some kind of normal life after such a catastrophe.
In democratic societies, elections are ritual events, even if minimally religious ones.
The very fact that millions of people go to the polls on one day and that there is great
national attention to the outcome guarantees a high order of emotional intensity to
such an event. Since television, elections have gathered very large audiences to await
the outcome and the ritual concession and acceptance speeches that follow. But in
the United States federal election of 2000, nothing seemed to go right. The television
media made two wrong calls as to who won the election and then had to admit that
the election in Florida, on which the electoral college vote hung, was too close to call.
What followed was anything but effective ritual. Almost every key actor in the events
after the election failed to follow the appropriate ritual script – indeed things reached
the point where it wasn’t clear what the script was. The resolution of the election by a
partisan vote of the Supreme Court of the United States, which has no role to play in
elections according to the American Constitution, was the final failure of ritual closure.
A failed electoral ritual produced a winner with severely damaged legitimacy.^9
In a society in which more and more human interactions are mediated by the mar-
ket, and orientation to the market competes with traditional religion and nationalism
for the loyalty of many citizens, one may wonder what form the ritual expression of
solidarity will take, or whether it can really be diminished or eliminated, leaving theo-
rists of ritual to wonder if their basic assumptions will be disconfirmed. At the moment,
it seems far too early to draw so drastic a conclusion.
CONCLUSION
Finally, I would like to turn to some methodological issues which I have avoided so far
in this chapter. Catherine Bell, in two very useful books,Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice
(1992) andRitual: Perspectives and Dimensions(1997), has summarized the present state
of ritual studies and some of the difficulties and ambiguities which have arisen within
the field. She intelligently reviews the history of theorizing about ritual in the social sci-
ences and religious studies and points to the wide variety of views, but also to the lack of
(^9) Clifford Geertz (1973: 142–69) brilliantly describes a failed ritual of much more modest scale.