Quotes from Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity

By Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, Michael Puett, & Bennett Simon (2008)

• Fundamentalist movements—with their totalizing claims of authentic belief—should be understood as prototypical sincerity movements, not as a return to some kind of “traditional” ritual order.#
  ReligionSociology
• What we usually call the “modern” period, therefore, should instead be understood in part as a period in which sincerity claims have been given a rare institutional and cultural emphasis… Even revolts against this so-called modern era are done in the name of finding ever-more-authentic forms of sincerity.#
  Sociology
• The very necessities of social life restrain the extremes of sincerity, while the very facts of historical/temporal change limit any attempt to organize life solely according to ritual.#
• The promotion of modern “secularism” has in fact always occurred in conjunction with the growth of “religion” as a category, because these are the two remnants from the splitting apart of worlds where religion and daily life were intertwined.#
  ReligionSociology
• The Christian is, phenomenologically speaking, doing something very different from her Jewish and Muslim counterparts. She is engaging in a voluntary, discursive, indicative, and very private act. She is sincere. The Jew and Muslim instead undertake a performative, repetitive, subjunctive, sometimes antidiscursive, and social (even when done alone) act. They are doing ritual. To conflate all these acts as “prayer” misses the point of the different actions and denudes them of their significance to the people involved.#
  ReligionSociology
• A new rule or law clarifies old ambiguities but always opens up new ambiguities at its edges.#
  Law
• Practitioners of sincerity must contend with a degree of internal hypocrisy as part and parcel of their existence, because the desired wholeness of such sincerity is, in the final analysis, impossible.#
• Sincerity, carried to its extreme, is the very search for wholeness, for the overcoming of boundaries and the positing of a unitary, undifferentiated, uncorrupted reality. It is the utopian impulse itself.#
• On the most fundamental level, the ordering of social life requires us to make distinctions, to posit differentiations, and, in the most elemental way, to separate out the different units of our social world. Social order, as all order, rests on distinctions and on separation. Logically, the separation of different units requires the positing and maintenance of boundaries between them. It is not mere coincidence that the creation myths of different peoples typically begin with a process of differentiation, whether in the book of Genesis or Hesiod’s Theogony or the Akkadian Enuma Elish. They also go on to show how a concomitant process of dedifferentiation threatens the newly divided world, as with Chronos swallowing his children or the stories of the Flood, both Babylonian and biblical. Differentiation and hence order are won only at great cost and sacrifice and maintained with great effort and wisdom.#
  Sociology
• A measure of hypocrisy complements any notion of a true self because we can never fully express an inner being and because any social interaction is mediated by language and other conventions.#
• Civilizations or movements with a diminished concern for ritual have an overwhelming concern with sincerity, which we can see in forms as widely varied as those Puritan sermons and the Buddhist concern with uncovering the Buddha nature hidden within each of us. In some sense, then, sincerity works as the social equivalent of the subjunctive, which we discussed earlier. If there is no ritual, there is no shared convention that indexes a possible shared world. Instead, social relationships have to rely on a never-ending production of new signs of sincerity (though of course there can be ritualized forms of the search for sincerity).#
  Sociology
• Rituals occur in a kind of pure subjunctive, and it is hard to imagine them at all without boundaries that can be crossed. And indeed they disappear in moments of utopianism, when all boundaries seem to dissolve. What use are food taboos if we live in a world that is not inherently polluting, if it is not broken but complete? What is the need for sacrifice as a way of communicating with the divine if the divine already exists within us? Buddhism thus removed the Hindu sacrifices because the Buddha-nature is inherent in every individual, just as Protestants moved away from Catholic sacrifice because each follower needed to take God directly into her own heart without intermediation. This is why utopian movements so often also tend to be antinomian, denouncing all conventional rules.#
  ReligionSociology
• We share empathy (what the classical sociological literature calls trust) only when we share the potential space of the subjunctive.#
• Ritual and play share some strongly salient features that set them both apart from the world of work, of instrumental calculation and other modes of integrating self and world.#
  Sociology
• Impurity is always with us, if only because our categories can never in themselves fully encompass the world. #
  Philosophy
• There is no foundation, there are no overarching sets of guidelines, laws, or principles. There are only actions, and it is up to humans to ritualize some of those actions and thereby set up an ordered world.#
  Philosophy
• Since the practice of ritual creates its own illusory world, ritual must be understood as inherently nondiscursive—semantic content is far secondary to subjunctive creation… it is nondiscursive in the sense that it cannot be analyzed as a coherent system of beliefs. The meaning of ritual is the meaning produced through the ritual action itself. That is one reason that so many rituals include nondiscursive media like music or masks, and even language may be used in ways that defy discursive interpretation.#
  SociologyReligion
• Getting [ritual action] right is not a matter of making outer acts conform to inner beliefs. Getting it right is doing it again and again and again—it is an act of world construction. This suggests the counterintuitive insight that in this world of ritual acts the self is left more “room to wander” (perhaps also to wonder) than in one where the self has to be firmly identified with its role—where the matrix of social order is in sincerity (for which there is never enough evidence, cannot be, anywhere, at any time).#
  SociologyReligion
• When we say of a culture that its members share a symbol system, or a set of values, or a common idea of the sacred, we are in essence asserting that they share the potential space of a shared “could be.”#
  Sociology
• What constitutes society—what makes the social a sui generis entity, irreducible to any other—is precisely a shared “could be,” a mutual illusion of the sort that all rituals create. To a great extent, this is what symbols do more than anything else: they represent a “could be.”#
  Sociology
• Rituals such as saying “please” and “thank you” create an illusion, but with no attempt to deceive. This is a crucial difference from a lie, which is an illusion with a clear attempt to deceive the other. In this ritual is much more like play, which is the joint entrance into an illusionary world.#
  Sociology
• Sincerity imagines a world “as is” instead of ritual’s multiple worlds of “as if.” It looks to discursive meanings and unique selves instead of repeated acts and fragmented realities. One crucial implication of the turn toward sincerity over the last few centuries has been a general dissolution of social boundaries in principle, even as people constantly reassert them in fact.#
  Sociology
• Sincerity often appears as a reaction against the perceived hypocrisy of the ritually created subjunctive. Yet those reactions in turn tend to ritualize over time.#
  SociologyReligion
• Such traditions [as Judaism and Confucianism] understand the world as fundamentally fractured and discontinuous, with ritual allowing us to live in it by creating temporary order through the construction of a performative, subjunctive world.#
  Religion
• All too often the modern world has absolutized boundaries. This occurs, on the one hand, through the construction of unassailable identities (such as racial, ethnic, or what are termed “religious” identities, or even the idea of citizenship in the nation-state), and, on the other, through the destruction of all particularism and denial of all constitutive difference between peoples and communities.#
  SociologyPolitics
• There is a very strong ‘‘sincere’’ component to contemporary manifestations of religious radicalism—be they Christian, Islamic, Hindu, or Jewish. To no small extent, this sincerity occurs in the romantic expressivism of these movements… This view understands the religious act—and, all too often, the religious act as politics— as the vehicle for self-expression and self-fulfillment. It is less God’s work that is being realized in the world than one’s own projection of selfhood. Too often this is the unfortunate result of a privileging of authenticity and choice as touchstones of religious action in today’s world.#
  ReligionPoliticsSociology
• The importance of sincerity within Protestantism is in many ways a commonplace… It is, to be sure, not unique to Protestantism. It can be found to be equally salient among Hasidic Jews, Zen Buddhists, or Chinese Mohists of two millennia ago. Henri Peyre has traced its role from the Renaissance through twentieth-century French literature. But it is in and through its Protestant articulation that it has had such a pervasive and formative role in contemporary culture.#
  ChristianityReligionSociology
• Sincere views are focused not on the creation of an “as if” or a shared subjunctive universe of human being in the world. Instead, they project an ‘‘as is’’ vision of what often becomes a totalistic, unambiguous vision of reality “as it really is.”#
  ReligionSociology
• Ritual can be, of course, an orientation to the sacred, but it is not the only possible such orientation—sincerity is another, of equal importance, and of vastly different import.#
  SociologyReligion
• It is the framing of the actions, not the actions themselves, that makes them rituals. Thus both partaking of the Eucharist and shaking hands can be understood as actions that are framed ritualistically. They can also be understood nonritualistically, at least on their margins.#
  Sociology
• Ritual can also take place with no concern for meaning (at least in its standard discursive sense), and in many cases informants refuse to spin out meanings, but simply say that they perform rituals in certain ways because that is the tradition. Most of the meanings we can read into ritual, after all, come into play outside the frame of the ritual itself. Ritual… is about doing more than about saying something.#
  ReligionSociology
• The famous Augustinian understanding of the Eucharist as the “visible sign of an invisible grace,” although it long predates the Reformation, has become the mode through which much of ritual has been understood. In such a view, the “thing itself” always resides beyond the ritual, and the ritual act is only its instrument. To be sure, this understanding has led to important exegesis of ritual’s symbolism, but it also led to an emphasis on inner states like sincerity or belief that may not always be relevant to the social and cognitive contexts of ritual action. Among other preconceptions, this orientation suffers from an overly subjectivist and individualist emphasis on meaning and interaction. Such a view sees the “essential” or constitutive arena of action (often read as intention) as something within the social actor or actors, with the external, formal ritual seen as but the marker of these internal processes.#
  ReligionSociology

Caroline Humphrey & James Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual (1994)

• Ritualization, by presenting action to experience as already-constituted and hence apprehensible elements, allows a wide variety of actual conduct to be counted unambiguously as successful performance, and this is independent of the attribution of particular propositional meanings to the acts.#
  Sociology