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The Rituals of Humanity and the Rhythms of Reality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Roland A. Delattre
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Extract

Rhythm—the measured flow of motion—is an essential formative aspect of reality and of our experience, and ritual is among the principal cultural resources by which we grasp and participate in those rhythms and gain some purchase upon them and the energies they embody.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 5 , October 1980 , pp. 35 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

NOTES

1. Gibson, James J., The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).Google Scholar

2. Berger, Peter L., The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), p. 62.Google Scholar

3. van Gennep, Arnold, The Rites of Passage, trans. Vizedom, Monika B. and Caffee, Gabrielle L., intro. Kimball, Solon T. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 194.Google Scholar

4. Robert Kelly is quoted without citation in McDermott, John J., The Culture of Experience: Philosophical Essays in the American Grain (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1976), p. 192.Google Scholar

5. See esp. “Walking,” in Thoreau, Henry David, Walden and Other Writings, ed. Atkinson, Brooks (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 597–632.Google Scholar

6. Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958)Google Scholar, to be discussed later in this essay.

7. Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 17.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., pp. 112–13.

9. Hofstadter, Albert, Truth in Art (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965), p. 85.Google Scholar

10. Turner, Victor, “Ritual as Communication and Potency: An Ndembu Case Study,” in Hill, Carol E., ed., Symbols and Society (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1975), p. 59.Google Scholar

11. Bernstein, Basil, Class, Codes and Control: Theoretical Studies Towards a Sociology of Language (New York: Schocken, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger (Baltimore: Penguin, 1970)Google Scholar, Natural Symbols (New York: Vintage, 1973)Google Scholar, and Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).Google Scholar

12. Michelson, Peter, “Where Did Neighborhoods Go?” The New Republic, October 7, 1972, p. 25.Google Scholar

13. Geertz, Clifford, Islam Observed (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968)Google Scholar. The phrase I quote is the title of Chap. 4.

14. Arendt, , The Human Condition, p. 146.Google Scholar

15. Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New Edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), p. 138.Google Scholar

16. Arendt, , The Human Condition, p. 133.Google Scholar

17. See esp. Turner, Victor, “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology,” Rice University Studies, 60, No. 3 (1974), 53–92.Google Scholar

18. Turner, Victor, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974), p. 55.Google Scholar

19. See, for example, Illich, Ivan, “Schooling: The Ritual of Progress,” The New York Review of Books, 15, No. 10 (12 3, 1970), 20–26.Google Scholar

20. Williams, Raymond, Drama in a Dramatised Society (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), p. 5Google Scholar. The quotation in the next sentence is also from page 5. See also Williams, Raymond, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken, 1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. See Douglas, , Purity and Danger.Google Scholar

22. Cuddihy, John Murray, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (New York: Basic, 1974).Google Scholar

23. For an analysis of the ritual dimensions of this process at a critical stage, see Bercovitch, Sacvan, “How the Puritans Won the American Revolution,” The Massachusetts Review, 17 (Winter 1976), 597–630Google Scholar. The perspective developed in that essay is extended in Bercovitch, 's The American Jeremiad (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978).Google Scholar

24. Grimes, Ronald L., Symbol and Conquest: Public Ritual and Drama in Santa Fe, New Mexico (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), p. 76.Google Scholar

25. Ibid., p. 77.

26. Ibid.