ritualalready been established; (2) formality, which suggests adherence to form
in the sense of punctilious and repetitive behavior within a specific con-
text; (3) invariance means that there is no ritual without some variation
and choice about participation; (4) performance; and (5) formality versus
physical efficacy. The formal element refers to ritual decorousness, punc-
tiliousness, conformity, repetitiveness, regularity, and stylization.
Ritual includes a wide variety of physical actions, styles, and cognitive
sensibilities for more recent scholars. The ritual specialist Ronald Grimes
catalogs many ritual components that includes action (e.g. movement,
dance, performance, mime, music, rhythm, gesture, and play), time
(e.g. season, holiday, or repetition), objects (e.g. masks, customs, icons,
and art), symbol and metaphor, divine beings (e.g. gods, goddesses,
demons, and ancestors), and language (e.g. sound, song, poetry, story,
and myth). Types of ritual can be classified into the following: rites of
passage; festivals; pilgrimage; purification; exchange; sacrifice; wor-
ship; magic; healing; interaction rites; meditation rites; rites of inver-
sion; and ritual drama. Catherine Bell offers a pragmatic approach to
categories of ritual with her six open-ended types: calendrical rites; rites
of passage; rites of exchange and communion; rites of affliction; fasting,
feasting, and festivals; and political rites. Rites of affliction seek to miti-
gate, for instance, spirits believed to be harming humans by healing,
exorcizing, protecting, or purifying people to alleviate their suffering.
Bell calls attention to linguistic performance, which focuses on the
action of the body. If all action is strategic and situational, ritual action
construes its situation in terms of overt submission to the authority of
transcendent modes of power and the humans accepted as spokespersons
for such power. Strategy is associated with deft bodily moments, marking
off space and time, and acts of kneeling or procession. It is the human
body that initially defines ritual space and time, and thereafter dramati-
cally reacts to it. Hence ritual does not control a person, but it rather
constitutes a specific dynamic of social empowerment.
Somewhat akin to Bell, Stanley Tambiah, an anthropologist, takes a
performative approach to ritual by arguing that rituals accomplish or per-
form something. As a symbol of communication, ritual causes a transfor-
mation of its participants. Ritual is a culturally constructed system,
according to Tambiah, that represents a symbolic communication, which
consists of a patterned and ordered sequence of words and activity whose
context and arrangements are characterized by formality, rigidity, fusion,
and repetition. Rituals are performances in three fundamental senses: (1)
saying something is doing something; (2) a staged performance that uses
multiple media; and (3) indexical values being attached to and inferred
by actors during the performances.