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Ritual and Symbolic Behavior
1880 Ritual and Symbolic Behavior See also: Civil Wars; Class Conflict in Capitalist Society; Cold War; Colonialism and Imperialism; Law and Violence; Peace and Democracy; Social Control and Violence
Further Reading Foran, J. (ed.) (1997). Theorizing revolutions. London: Routledge. Foran, J. (2005). Taking power: On the origins of Third World revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldstone, J. A. (1991). Revolution and rebellion in the early modern world. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Goodwin, J. (2000). No other way out: States and revolutionary movements, 1945–1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1962). The age of revolution, 1789–1848. New York: Mentor. Mann, M. (1993). The sources of social power: The rise of classes and nation-states, 1760–1914, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McDaniel, T. (1991). Autocracy, modernization, and revolution in Russia and Iran. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moore, B., Jr. (1966). Social origins of dictatorship and democracy: Lord and peasant in the making of the modern world. Boston: Beacon Press. Paige, J. M. (1975). Agrarian revolution: Social movements and export agriculture in the underdeveloped world. New York: Free Press. Parsa, M. (2000). States, ideologies, and social revolutions: A comparative analysis of Iran, Nicaragua, and the Philippines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Selbin, E. (1993). Modern Latin American revolutions. Boulder, CO: Westview. Sewell, W. H., Jr. (1985). Ideologies and social revolutions: Reflections on the French case. Journal of Modern History 57, 57–85.
Skocpol, T. (1979). States and social revolutions: A comparative analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skocpol, T. (1994). Social revolutions in the modern world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sohrabi, N. (1995). Historicizing revolutions: Constitutional revolutions in the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and Russia, 1905–1908. American Journal of Sociology 100, 1383–1447. Tilly, C. (1978). From mobilization to revolution. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley. Tilly, C. (1993). European revolutions, 1492–1992. Oxford: Blackwell. Walt, S. M. (1996). Revolution and war. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wickham-Crowley, T. P. (1992). Guerrillas and revolution in Latin America: A comparative study of insurgents and regimes since 1956. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zunes, S. (1994). Unarmed insurrections against authoritarian governments in the Third World: A new kind of revolution. Third World Quarterly 15, 403–426.
Relevant Websites Encyclopedia of Marxism:http://www.marxists.org/glossary/ index.htm Internet Modern History Sourcebook: Scientific, Political and Industrial Revolution:http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ mod/modsbook2.html The Russian Revolution:http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/ russ/rusrev.html
Ritual and Symbolic Behavior Philip Smith, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Brad West, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia ª 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Concepts of Ritual and Symbolic Behavior Ritual and Symbolic Behavior among Animals Ritual and Symbolic Behavior among People
Glossary Ritual Forms of associative human activity organized around symbolic sets denoting the sacred and profane. Can also be used to denote repetitive, conventionalized forms of human activity and/or forms of human action which lack an obvious practical utility.
Ritual and Conflict Ritual, Symbolic Action, and Building Peace Further Reading
Symbolic Behavior Activities organized around a process of communication, usually involving the transmission and reception of information. Can also be used to describe deeds that have a normative or cultural component which is expressed in the action itself. The concept of symbolic behavior is often contrasted with ideas of purely rational or utilitarian action.
Ritual and Symbolic Behavior
Studies of ritual and symbolic behavior look at the signifying practices and expressive actions that underpin both peace and violence. An emphasis is therefore placed on symbols and communication practices and the contexts within which they operate. Two broad theoretical traditions can be identified, one rooted in evolutionary biology and the other in cultural theory. In this article, greater attention is given to elucidating this cultural strand, with biological understandings used as a counterpoint.
Concepts of Ritual and Symbolic Behavior It has long been noted that many violent behaviors of both humans and animals cannot be accommodated within commonsense understandings of ‘real’ violence and ‘rational’ action. Observers have pointed to play, pretense, and mock violence and to elaborate preparations and displays that appear to have no obvious utility for the conduct of battle or to social norms which replace bloody combat with elaborate but harmless games. These sorts of disparate phenomena tend to be accounted for in terms of ideas of symbolic and ritual behavior, which to some extent operate as catchall residual categories for explaining the apparently inexplicable. In the biological sciences, understandings of symbolic behaviors are framed within the discourse of evolutionary biology and, in particular, game theory. This gives rise to a mechanistic and strategic model of action, with animals seen as engaging in expressive actions in order to obtain an evolutionary advantage. In the social sciences, a greater emphasis is placed on culture and the imaginative faculties of the human species. Here the preferred vocabulary is one of symbolic action rather than behavior. There is usually a greater emphasis placed on voluntarism and reflexivity, seeing symbolic systems as a resource with which humans construct meaningful worlds. Notwithstanding these divergent roots, both traditions give a central place to processes of communication and to describing the roles which participants take up.
Ritual and Symbolic Behavior among Animals The seminal text in the study of ritualistic violence in animal populations is Konrad Lorenz’s work in 1966 On Aggression. In this work Lorenz pointed to the tendency of many animal species to engage in ritualized, nonlethal displays of aggression, especially in the context of mate selection. There may also be ceremonial displays of dominance and deference which animals conduct through the careful production and reading of the signs that are exchanged. Among African wild dogs, for example, a defeated combatant will signal when it is bested by posturing in submission and will usually be
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allowed to escape unharmed. Lorenz argued that such activities carried evolutionary advantages. They provided a harmless outlet for violent instincts, allowed superior specimens to locate mating partners (thus improving the gene pool), and provided a means of strengthening group bonds in social animals such as geese and rats. More recent work argues that Lorenz wrongly specifies the level at which natural selection works. Instead of looking for benefits at the level of the species or even the individual, we should see natural selection operating at the level of the gene. Consequently, ritualized combat behaviors should be seen as a manifestation of ruthless, genetically programed competition between gene-carrying organisms of the same species rather than as a more or less cooperative adaptation that allows a species to compete with other species. A fundamental problem for this sort of tooth-and-claw view of the animal world has been to explain why animals do not kill their opponents once they have defeated them in a ritual encounter. The current orthodoxy is to suggest that escalated fighting carries a risk of serious injury even for a dominant animal. Natural selection will favor genes that prevent animals from engaging in this activity too frequently. Accompanying the shift to the gene level of analysis has been the rise of game theory as a means of explaining animal behavior. Using mathematical models it is possible to interpret and numerically represent displays of ritualistic behavior as a form of competition in which players (genes carried in organisms) engage in competition with other players. Strategies (escalation, bluff, submission, flight, etc.) are determined by the costs (e.g., time, energy), benefits (e.g., potential access to mates, food), and risks (e.g., danger of injury) of particular lines of action. It is generally argued that ritualized displays of aggression are common in the animal world because they provide players with a low-cost, low-risk means of attaining benefits. Dominant animals can assert their power, and weaker animals can challenge, without either risking fatal injury. And both can obtain objective information about their position in the pecking order and their odds of future success. Because such a system will eventually work to the benefit of participants, ensuring the survival of their genes, evolutionary process will work to effect a gradual improvement in the transfer efficiency of signals between actors and reactors, leading to sophisticated mechanisms for signaling ‘intentions’ and future lines of action. With communication replacing (or at least augmenting) real force, possibilities arise for organisms to obtain an evolutionary advantage over other members of their species through specializing in or manipulating ritualized communication systems. It has been suggested this might account for hypertrophied display organs, such as the peacock’s tail, which are, in other respects, possibly cumbersome and dysfunctional for survival. Such an analysis can also help interpret bluffing behaviors. For example, a
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bird might signal to its flock the arrival of a predator in order to have exclusive access to a food resource. In the case of ritual aggression, a skilled mimic could sound or look like a bigger animal or could fake the ‘intention’ of being willing to fight to the death. To sum up, current research on ritualized aggression and symbolic behaviors in animal populations is driven by evolutionary biology and game theory. Emphasis is given to the selective advantage that accrues to genes from participation in this kind of encounter rather than in escalated fighting. While the language of game theory speaks of the ‘strategies’ and ‘ploys’ that might be involved in a symbolic conflict, it is important to remember that these are linguistic conventions that assist in the application of a rationalistic game theory to a behaviorist context. Most biologists see animal behavior as a blind product of genetic programing. By contrast, social scientific understandings of ritualistic aggression in humans tend to point toward the culturally meaningful nature of such forms of conflict. The broad consensus is to see them as products of broader social values and specific human choices rather than as the expression of a utilitarian survival function. Despite these divergent paradigms there are some important areas of overlap. Sociobiologists such as Edward O Wilson, Lionel Tiger, and Konrad Lorenz have suggested that the resources of biology might be of use in explaining ritualized violence in areas such as human territoriality, male bonding, and group cohesion. Other scholars exploring more microlevel issues of body language, emotions, and facial expressions have also tried to draw analogies from animal behavior to human experience. Symbolic interactionists have also, albeit rarely, looked to animal studies in developing a broader understanding of routinized and ritualistic aspects of face-to-face human interactions. For example, although he was attentive to the creative, meaning-making qualities of human actors, Erving Goffman’s work in areas such as frame analysis and interaction ritual evinced an awareness of ethology. This is reflected in some of his terminology (e.g., deference and demeanor, grooming talk) and in the influence upon him of Gregory Bateson’s work on the metacontexts that frame the interpretation of behavior among animals. Despite these linkages, the dominant stream in cultural anthropology has been profoundly antithetical to biological understandings of ritualized encounters and violence, seeing them as deterministic and insufficiently attuned to the complexities of human symbolic systems. This article now turns to this more cultural tradition.
Ritual and Symbolic Behavior among People One of the most significant findings across the anthropological and sociological record has been the centrality of symbolic and ritual behavior to forms of violence.
In traditional societies war is often regarded as a ritual activity as much as a utilitarian activity for gaining political or economic power, with violence strongly linked to the attainment of manhood. Indeed one commentator sees it as ‘‘a rough male sport for underemployed hunters, with the kinds of damage-limiting rules that all competitive sports have.’’ Conflicts are often on a small scale with tribes agreeing to limit the force that is used. In parts of Highland New Guinea, for example, wars are called off when someone is wounded and warriors use inaccurate arrows without feather flights. Among the Native Americans of the Great Plains, the highest honor came from ‘counting coup’, not killing. This involved approaching an enemy without carrying weapons and touching him. Comparative studies of war and violence across civilizations, like that of Quincy Wright, suggest that the shift to more utilitarian, rationalized, and unrestrained forms of violence organized around conquest and domination emerged with agriculture and large-scale civilizations. In hunting-and-gathering societies there was no fixed wealth worth taking and people could easily run away. With the shift to agriculture, people had to stand and fight if they wished to eat. Along with agriculture there also came larger population densities and complex hierarchies, the emergence of military specialists, and full-scale wars associated with imperial expansion. These trends reached their logical conclusion in the militaristic empires of antiquity (Egypt, Rome, etc.), with their planned, ‘pragmatic’ approach to violence. This saw mass killing replace the ritualized killing of small-scale societies, with defeated populations often put to the sword. The shift toward more ‘rational’ and secular but also larger-scale forms of violence has continued up to the present day. Indeed, the rise of industrial capitalism and modernity in the West has seen the process accelerate thanks to a growing reliance on advanced technology and systems of coordination and control that operate at a distance from the points of battle. This move from symbolic and ritual violence toward norms advocating a rational and utilitarian organization of combat is in degree rather than in kind. Throughout history we can identify ritualistic elements in fighting styles and ethics. Noted examples include the combat codes of European knights and Japanese samurai, and the individualistic flair demonstrated by Cossacks and cavaliers. While contemporary combat styles have been rationalized by technowar, many scholars argue that conflict and violence is still underpinned by nonrational factors at levels from those of everyday life to full-scale war. Moreover, normative constraints often play a role in limiting the intensity of violence. To a certain extent, then, contemporary violence can be still considered a form of symbolic action, even if its ritualistic qualities
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are sometimes latent rather than manifest. Consider the following examples from everyday life:
Ritual and Conflict
research shows that casual bar-room • Anthropological brawls tend to follow a ritualistic sequence of threats
So far this article has discussed the symbolic and ritualistic dimensions of violence in animals and humans. These have been described as the ways in which conflict is patterned, generated, or limited by meanings embodied in codes, signs, and symbols. This last section looks at theories of ritual itself and the ways in which theories of ritual have been used to explain peace, war, and violence. The contemporary study of ritual in the social sciences has its foundational moment in Emile Durkheim’s masterwork The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Here Durkheim drew upon Australian aboriginal ethnography to argue that societies must periodically come together to renew their bonds. He claimed they achieved this through rituals characterized by physical proximity and the manipulation of the symbols of the sacred and the profane. In his understanding, these rituals worked to generate social stability and harmony. The broad thrust of Durkheim’s work, then, is to suggest that ritual activity is important for allowing peaceful coexistence within groups. Despite his data being drawn from a small-scale society, Durkheim claimed that his theory had a more general applicability. He argued, for instance, that the flags of modern nations were analogous to aboriginal totems. Important arguments to this effect have come from scholars like Lloyd Warner and Edward Shils. Drawing upon ethnographic data from a small Massachusetts town, Warner suggested that Memorial Day ceremonies dedicated to fallen soldiers constituted a kind of cult of the dead that united citizens. Shils made a similar point about the 1952 coronation of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, arguing that it enabled the nation to come together. These kinds of claims are now generally perceived to be simplistic. In a seminal article, Steven Lukes suggested that we need to explore the relationship between rituals and social conflict. Pointing to sectarian Orange Day parades in Northern Ireland, Lukes maintained that rituals are often used to divide as well as to unite communities. He also argued for ideas of agency and strategic action to be included in thinking about rituals as a replacement for the vague and systemic causal attributions of the Durkheimian functionalists. Over the past 30 years the kind of agenda instantiated by Lukes has come to predominate in ritual studies. Functionalist models that locate ritual causality in ‘social needs’ for harmony have been replaced by studies attentive to power, inequality, and interests. Here an emphasis is placed on the ways that rituals and ritual exchanges legitimize and reproduce structures of power and inequality. Important contributions within this critical tradition have come from scholars like Marc Auge and Pierre Bourdieu. Another significant feature of contemporary research has been inputs from structuralist and poststructuralist theories. These have enabled ideas of discourse, narrative, and semiotics to be
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and blows, with informal rules preventing fighters from using weapons like knives. Anthropologists and sociologists studying sport have pointed to the symbolic and ritualistic qualities of violence in sports such as boxing, wrestling, cockfighting, and bullfighting. Crimes against women such as domestic violence and rape are often interpreted as expressive acts which dramatize male power and resentment and which are often underpinned by an irrational culture of machismo. Studies of urban gangs have pointed to the value system that leads young men to risk their lives and kill to protect their territory and gang colors.
In addition, the following are examples from war: racist, and/or nationalist beliefs have played a • Ethnic, role in every war since the French Revolution. Today
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ethnonationalist beliefs remain important in arenas such as Iraq, Aceh, and Chechnya. Many states voluntarily subscribe to the Geneva Convention, a document that provides minimum rights for those involved in war. This might be seen as an endorsement of the idea that war should be limited and constrained by human values. Religious beliefs and motivations remain important factors behind war (e.g., in the Middle East). It could also be argued that apparently secular beliefs in democracy, reason, and equality that underpin some pro-war rhetoric amount to a civil religion. Extreme atrocities, such as genocide or acts of terrorism, are difficult to interpret as rational or instrumental actions that contribute much to winning a war. They can be better understood as dramatizations of power and hatred. The legitimization for going to war is often supported by quasimythological themes. In the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and Western allies these included the demonization of Saddam Hussein and apocalyptic narratives concerning his intention to employ weapons of mass destruction against his enemies.
Few commentators would claim that contemporary war is directly analogous to its more ritualistic counterparts. Similar to other major social processes it has been bureaucratized and its conduct is usually rational and strategic – in intention, if not in enactment. However, it is important to realize that ritualistic and symbolic beliefs provide for its legitimacy in wider society and offer an important source of motivation for participants.
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incorporated into an understanding of ritual dynamics, providing for a more sophisticated understanding of the ways culture works. Early contributions from Mary Douglas on purity and pollution and Victor Turner’s processualist analyses of liminality remain important sources of inspiration. Also significant are borrowings from Le´viStrauss on cultural codes and Bakhtin on the carnivalesque. While also vital to critical understandings of ritual, this line of cultural elaboration has provided the basis for a recent revival in neo-Durkheimian scholarship. This research seeks to hold on to what is best in Durkheim’s Elementary Forms (such as ideas about the autonomy of culture, solidarity, and emotion) while jettisoning what no longer seems viable (the assumption of social consensus, functionalism). This emerging research tradition also draws upon the critical theories discussed earlier so as to be able to put forward a more hard-headed and empirically grounded understanding of ritual dynamics. At present, links between ritual studies and peace studies remain underdeveloped. Scholars in the ritual studies area often use phenomena like nationalist and military parades as sources of data, but do not have issues of peace and violence at the center of their research agenda. They are often more interested in theoretical issues concerning the structure and process of rituals themselves. To be sure, ideas about domination, conflict, and exclusion can be found, but rarely are these translated into a central preoccupation with issues of physical violence or peaceful coexistence. On the other hand, scholars in the peace studies area often refer to the ritualistic qualities of violence (e.g., when discussing the kinds of themes listed in the section entitled ‘Ritual and symbolic behavior among people’), but do so in passing and without reference to core theory in the ritual studies area. The result has been two literatures that have passed each other like ships in the night. This is unfortunate as the core issues of ritual theory, such as the dynamics of solidarity and exclusion, the importance of sacrifice, and the roles of quasireligious symbolic codes and the collective memory in the legitimation of the social order, are obviously of very direct relevance to understanding peace and conflict. Nevertheless, in recent years a number of studies have become influential in thinking through these latent and potential connections. Important characteristics of the literature include an interdisciplinary theoretical input centering on the textuality of social life, the idea of ritual as an arena of struggle and violence as well as consensus, a concern with the autonomy of culture as a ‘variable’ that makes possible violent and nonviolent outcomes, and, finally, a concern with the need for historically and culturally specific, process-driven explanation. Perhaps the best way to get a feel for this expanding, interdisciplinary literature is to briefly review some representative examples.
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Bruce Lincoln’s explorations of ritual and violence are rooted in critical theory. Lincoln makes use of Roland Barthes and Maurice Bloch in developing a model of social life that sees symbolic and ritual activity as closely associated with the reproduction of, and challenges to, structures of power. In Lincoln’s view, social integration through ritual always benefits some groups more than others. This is evinced in his discussion of the Swazi Ncwala, an annual ritual ostensibly celebrating harvest, death and rebirth, and kingship. Lincoln shows how a covert subtext of the ritual was a sustained, but coded, critique of colonial domination. This affirmation of a universal Swazi identity worked, however, to reinforce the power of the Swazi king over his subjects by symbolically trumping internal conflicts between factions within the Swazi nation. So a ritual constructing solidarity in the face of one form of domination ended up reproducing another. The work of Randall Collins shares with Lincoln an interest in the relationship between ritual and power. Collins, however, believes that acting together is more important than a shared symbolic code in building solidarity. Central to his argument is the concept of ‘emotional energy’. For Collins, it is in situations of high emotional energy that symbols endure by being inculcated in people’s minds, carried through time by ‘ritual chains’. High and low emotional energy emerges from the relative intensity of situational characteristics such as communicative gestures, emotional rhythms, flows, and mutual focus. These, in turn, produce motivating forces in which individuals will instrumentally seek out interaction rituals that contain maximum emotional energy, whether they are positive emotions such as altruism and love or negative emotions such as anger and fear. For this reason individuals and groups can often find a kind of desire for conflict and crisis, such as in individual acts of violence or the undertaking of military action. The ability of ritual to bridge social divides in plural Western societies is explored in an alternative dramaturgical way by Jeffrey Alexander. Alexander argues that a more nuanced understanding of ritual in contemporary society can be achieved through conceiving of cultural traumas and periods of crisis in performative terms involving actors, audiences, props, scripts, and plots. In a study of the terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers, Alexander argues that Al Qaeda not only wished to inflict death and destruction but also create political and social instability in the United States through an act in which American culture would be seen as weak and morally corrupt. While the performance was initially successful in threatening to disrupt social order, the terrorists failed in their aims as a counter-performance was constructed in the United States’ public sphere that reinterpreted the event and resulted in a new social solidarity. From this perspective we can understand how the attacks eventually produced exactly the opposite effect and meaning than Al Qaeda had in mind.
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In his book Why War Philip Smith compares different nations’ narrative constructions of crisis leading up to the Iraq war, the Gulf war, and the Suez conflict. Contrary to the dominant academic theories of warfare that privilege economic and material interests, Smith argues that narrative understanding itself can be the reason that warfare is chosen by the state over alternatives such as diplomacy. Drawing upon the work of narrative theorists such as Northrop Frye, Smith decodes the national discourses of the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Spain for his case studies. He concludes that genre interpretations align with war in ways that are regular and predictable. For example, in the Suez crisis the narrative employed in the American public sphere could be classified as ‘‘low mimetic,’’ with an ‘everyday’ and bureaucratic nature. The result was opposition to military intervention against Colonel Nasser’s regime. By contrast, prior to the Gulf war and Iraq war, a ‘‘high mimetic’’ apocalyptic genre developed in the United States that portrayed Saddam Hussein as an evil, Hitler-like figure, and allowed for the justification of human sacrifice. Smith’s narrative classification model helps us develop a cultural interpretation of war where discourse and narrative are not merely used as tools for legitimation by powerful elites but which also directly influence the decision to go to war. In a sense, all wars are symbolic actions as they are launched from platforms of meaning-making activity. In Theorising the Standoff, Robin Wagner-Pacifici explores similar kinds of narrative themes of crisis but relates them to symbolic action at the level of the individual as well as the group. She analyzes various standoff cases in the United States such as Wounded Knee, Waco, and Ruby Ridge, to understand moments of social contingency. In such threshold episodes in which violence is imminent, the normal guiding principles of action become unstable and ambiguous. A siege mentality occurs on both sides where new interpretive and symbolic frameworks apply. Seemingly banal actions and objects, such as the sirens of fire engines, can result in situations of danger and confrontation. Wagner-Pacifici’s analysis informs us that while such potential violent episodes are created by structural forces such as religious, ideological, and political clashes, it is often situational behaviors by individuals in particular cultural environments that ultimately determine peaceful conclusion of the standoff.
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Ritual, Symbolic Action, and Building Peace Ethological studies belong to an intellectual field which borders on the morally dubious territories of Social Darwinism and eugenics. In the wrong hands, such as those of Adolf Hitler, such theories can be used to question the belief that peace is either possible or good. On the
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contrary, they can be taken to lead to the conclusion that conflict is not only inevitable, but also an ennobling duty. Through military triumph over the weak and through programs of ‘ethnic cleansing’, the strong can claim their birthright and purify and refine their bloodstock thus fulfilling some kind of ‘racial destiny’. Fortunately, it is possible to derive a more constructive lesson from the ethological literature once it is realized that there is no inevitable connection between scientific knowledge derived from observations of animal behavior and a pseudo-Darwinistic moral philosophy. Humans are different from animals, and one of the most important differences is their ability to construct moral codes and institutional arrangements which modify or transcend the effects of nature. An important argument along these lines is William James’ essay on ‘The moral equivalent of war’. James recognizes the existence of martial traits in modern people that have arisen as a result of thousands of years of war but suggests that these can be channeled into nonviolent avenues such as public service. In this way, he argues, society could retain the constructive ‘‘character building’’ qualities of military service but avoid bloodshed. In a similar vein, the biologist Richard Dawkins has denied that his analysis of the ‘‘selfish gene’’ is a justification for selfish, free-market individualism as some of his critics have suggested. Rather, he contends, scientific knowledge allows us to be aware of the operation of genetic conditioning and, consequently, to be able to sit down and discuss rational strategies for thwarting genes and nurturing genuine altruism. In this way, we can ‘‘rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.’’ Knowledge about ethology allows for reflexivity and an awareness of the negative traits of our species – the instinctual and selfish behaviors which are to be avoided. We can also look to the ethological corpus for more positive suggestions for constructing peace. Two potential themes stand out. The first of these is that the literature can be used as a resource for strategy analysts who are attracted to rational choice and game theory. It might be possible to locate in the animal kingdom and the adaptive behaviors of its members exemplars for constructing distributions of resources, threats, and balances of power that encourage ritualistic rather than escalated fighting. The attraction (and also weakness) of these kinds of solutions is that they do not require changing people’s minds. Rather they permit peaceful coexistence to be built into situations where human competition remains every bit as fierce as it is between genomes. An example of such a situation was the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, which underpinned the nuclear deterrence strategies of the United States and the Soviet Union in the post-World War II period. The idea here was that the costs of full-scale nuclear war, such as global destruction and nuclear winter, would be too high for either side. Consequently, expressions of their mutual hostility were
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limited to regional wars (e.g., Nicaragua, Vietnam) and symbolic and diplomatic skirmishing. This is perhaps analogous to the de-escalated violence we find in animal combats, where threat of death or serious injury prevents even dominant contestants from using full force. A second possibility afforded by animal studies is that they can be creatively misread to serve as a kind of moral exemplar. While animal behaviors might be selfish from the perspective of science, they can often appear to be altruistic or moral to common sense. The shift toward postmodernity is seeing nature resacralized in contemporary popular culture as a zone of purity and symbiosis. This provides a fertile setting for distributing positive imagery that sees ritualistic, restrained violence in animals as a role model for morally aware human action. We can already see signs of this kind of discourse emerging in popular advocacy for animals like dolphins, whales, and gorillas. Such animals are often attributed an almost spiritual ability to live in peace and harmony with their environment and each other. The diversity of human cultures equally provides a rich resource with which to think creatively about building a peace culture. The literature on small-scale societies can be studied for ideas about how to replace a culture that valorizes escalated violence with one that recognizes the superiority of low-harm alternatives. An enhanced understanding of the ritual and symbolic foundations of contemporary violence can lead to greater reflexivity about existing practices and promote the search for nonviolent alternatives. By the same token, we can look in a pragmatic way for forms of symbolic action that seem to offer more positive alternatives. In the case of ritual, for example, the weight of academic research suggests that militaristic parades do little to build peace and understanding. Alternative commemorative forms, however, can play an important role in breaking down barriers and building pacifist solidarity. In their book Dark Tourism John Lennon and Malcolm Foley show how sites of death, disaster, and atrocities have increasingly become sites of modern pilgrimage. From fieldwork at places such as the Auschwitz death camps and tours of World War II battlefields, they argue that tourism at these sites promote doubt about the project of modernity and the questioning of the infallibility of science and technology. In a more detailed ethnographic study on tourism at the World War I Gallipoli battlefields in
Turkey, Brad West similarly demonstrates how international tourism can foster sentiments of tolerance and peace. From interviews with young Australian budget travelers, he argues that a new national collective memory of the campaign has developed in which former foes Turkey and Australia/New Zealand have been reimagined as friends that share common historical event of sacrifice. By looking at these kinds of success stories, and through analyzing their symbolic and ritual foundations for generalizable principles, peace activists can start to construct lines of action that might make a difference.
See also: Aggression and Altruism; Clan and Tribal Conflict; Cultural Studies, Overview; Decision Theory and Game Theory; Ethnicity and Identity Politics; Folklore; Gender Studies; Warriors, Anthropology of
Further Reading Alexander, J. (2004). From the depths of despair: Performance, counterperformance, and ‘September 11’. Sociological Theory 22(1): 88–105. Alexander, A. and Smith, P. (eds.) (2005). The Cambridge companion to Durkheim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnard, C. J. (1983). Animal behaviour. London: Croom Helm. Collins, R. (2004). Interaction ritual chains. Princeton: University of Princeton Press. Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durkheim, E. (1915). The elementary forms of religious life. London: Allen and Unwin. Dyer, G. (1985). War. New York: Crown. James, W. (1942). The moral equivalent of war. In Essays on faith and morals, pp 311–328. New York: Meridian. Lennon, J. and Foley, M. (2000). Dark tourism. London: Continuum. Lincoln, B. (1987). Ritual, rebellion, resistance. Man 22, 132–156. Lorenz, K. (1966). On aggression. London: Methuen. Lukes, S. (1975). Political ritual and social integration. Sociology 9(2): 289–308. Smith, P. (2005). Why war? The cultural logic of Iraq, the Gulf War and Suez. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sperber, D. (1975). Rethinking symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wagner-Pacifici, R. (2000). Theorizing the standoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. West, B. (2005). Independent travel and civil religious pilgrimage. In Down the road, pp 9–32. Perth: API Press. Wright, Q. (1965). A study of war. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Further Reading Foran, J. (ed.) (1997). Theorizing revolutions. London: Routledge. Foran, J. (2005). Taking power: On the origins of Third World revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldstone, J. A. (1991). Revolution and rebellion in the early modern world. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Goodwin, J. (2000). No other way out: States and revolutionary movements, 1945–1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1962). The age of revolution, 1789–1848. New York: Mentor. Mann, M. (1993). The sources of social power: The rise of classes and nation-states, 1760–1914, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McDaniel, T. (1991). Autocracy, modernization, and revolution in Russia and Iran. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moore, B., Jr. (1966). Social origins of dictatorship and democracy: Lord and peasant in the making of the modern world. Boston: Beacon Press. Paige, J. M. (1975). Agrarian revolution: Social movements and export agriculture in the underdeveloped world. New York: Free Press. Parsa, M. (2000). States, ideologies, and social revolutions: A comparative analysis of Iran, Nicaragua, and the Philippines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Selbin, E. (1993). Modern Latin American revolutions. Boulder, CO: Westview. Sewell, W. H., Jr. (1985). Ideologies and social revolutions: Reflections on the French case. Journal of Modern History 57, 57–85.
Skocpol, T. (1979). States and social revolutions: A comparative analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skocpol, T. (1994). Social revolutions in the modern world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sohrabi, N. (1995). Historicizing revolutions: Constitutional revolutions in the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and Russia, 1905–1908. American Journal of Sociology 100, 1383–1447. Tilly, C. (1978). From mobilization to revolution. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley. Tilly, C. (1993). European revolutions, 1492–1992. Oxford: Blackwell. Walt, S. M. (1996). Revolution and war. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wickham-Crowley, T. P. (1992). Guerrillas and revolution in Latin America: A comparative study of insurgents and regimes since 1956. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zunes, S. (1994). Unarmed insurrections against authoritarian governments in the Third World: A new kind of revolution. Third World Quarterly 15, 403–426.
Relevant Websites Encyclopedia of Marxism:http://www.marxists.org/glossary/ index.htm Internet Modern History Sourcebook: Scientific, Political and Industrial Revolution:http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ mod/modsbook2.html The Russian Revolution:http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/ russ/rusrev.html
Ritual and Symbolic Behavior Philip Smith, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Brad West, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia ª 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Concepts of Ritual and Symbolic Behavior Ritual and Symbolic Behavior among Animals Ritual and Symbolic Behavior among People
Glossary Ritual Forms of associative human activity organized around symbolic sets denoting the sacred and profane. Can also be used to denote repetitive, conventionalized forms of human activity and/or forms of human action which lack an obvious practical utility.
Ritual and Conflict Ritual, Symbolic Action, and Building Peace Further Reading
Symbolic Behavior Activities organized around a process of communication, usually involving the transmission and reception of information. Can also be used to describe deeds that have a normative or cultural component which is expressed in the action itself. The concept of symbolic behavior is often contrasted with ideas of purely rational or utilitarian action.
Ritual and Symbolic Behavior
Studies of ritual and symbolic behavior look at the signifying practices and expressive actions that underpin both peace and violence. An emphasis is therefore placed on symbols and communication practices and the contexts within which they operate. Two broad theoretical traditions can be identified, one rooted in evolutionary biology and the other in cultural theory. In this article, greater attention is given to elucidating this cultural strand, with biological understandings used as a counterpoint.
Concepts of Ritual and Symbolic Behavior It has long been noted that many violent behaviors of both humans and animals cannot be accommodated within commonsense understandings of ‘real’ violence and ‘rational’ action. Observers have pointed to play, pretense, and mock violence and to elaborate preparations and displays that appear to have no obvious utility for the conduct of battle or to social norms which replace bloody combat with elaborate but harmless games. These sorts of disparate phenomena tend to be accounted for in terms of ideas of symbolic and ritual behavior, which to some extent operate as catchall residual categories for explaining the apparently inexplicable. In the biological sciences, understandings of symbolic behaviors are framed within the discourse of evolutionary biology and, in particular, game theory. This gives rise to a mechanistic and strategic model of action, with animals seen as engaging in expressive actions in order to obtain an evolutionary advantage. In the social sciences, a greater emphasis is placed on culture and the imaginative faculties of the human species. Here the preferred vocabulary is one of symbolic action rather than behavior. There is usually a greater emphasis placed on voluntarism and reflexivity, seeing symbolic systems as a resource with which humans construct meaningful worlds. Notwithstanding these divergent roots, both traditions give a central place to processes of communication and to describing the roles which participants take up.
Ritual and Symbolic Behavior among Animals The seminal text in the study of ritualistic violence in animal populations is Konrad Lorenz’s work in 1966 On Aggression. In this work Lorenz pointed to the tendency of many animal species to engage in ritualized, nonlethal displays of aggression, especially in the context of mate selection. There may also be ceremonial displays of dominance and deference which animals conduct through the careful production and reading of the signs that are exchanged. Among African wild dogs, for example, a defeated combatant will signal when it is bested by posturing in submission and will usually be
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allowed to escape unharmed. Lorenz argued that such activities carried evolutionary advantages. They provided a harmless outlet for violent instincts, allowed superior specimens to locate mating partners (thus improving the gene pool), and provided a means of strengthening group bonds in social animals such as geese and rats. More recent work argues that Lorenz wrongly specifies the level at which natural selection works. Instead of looking for benefits at the level of the species or even the individual, we should see natural selection operating at the level of the gene. Consequently, ritualized combat behaviors should be seen as a manifestation of ruthless, genetically programed competition between gene-carrying organisms of the same species rather than as a more or less cooperative adaptation that allows a species to compete with other species. A fundamental problem for this sort of tooth-and-claw view of the animal world has been to explain why animals do not kill their opponents once they have defeated them in a ritual encounter. The current orthodoxy is to suggest that escalated fighting carries a risk of serious injury even for a dominant animal. Natural selection will favor genes that prevent animals from engaging in this activity too frequently. Accompanying the shift to the gene level of analysis has been the rise of game theory as a means of explaining animal behavior. Using mathematical models it is possible to interpret and numerically represent displays of ritualistic behavior as a form of competition in which players (genes carried in organisms) engage in competition with other players. Strategies (escalation, bluff, submission, flight, etc.) are determined by the costs (e.g., time, energy), benefits (e.g., potential access to mates, food), and risks (e.g., danger of injury) of particular lines of action. It is generally argued that ritualized displays of aggression are common in the animal world because they provide players with a low-cost, low-risk means of attaining benefits. Dominant animals can assert their power, and weaker animals can challenge, without either risking fatal injury. And both can obtain objective information about their position in the pecking order and their odds of future success. Because such a system will eventually work to the benefit of participants, ensuring the survival of their genes, evolutionary process will work to effect a gradual improvement in the transfer efficiency of signals between actors and reactors, leading to sophisticated mechanisms for signaling ‘intentions’ and future lines of action. With communication replacing (or at least augmenting) real force, possibilities arise for organisms to obtain an evolutionary advantage over other members of their species through specializing in or manipulating ritualized communication systems. It has been suggested this might account for hypertrophied display organs, such as the peacock’s tail, which are, in other respects, possibly cumbersome and dysfunctional for survival. Such an analysis can also help interpret bluffing behaviors. For example, a
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bird might signal to its flock the arrival of a predator in order to have exclusive access to a food resource. In the case of ritual aggression, a skilled mimic could sound or look like a bigger animal or could fake the ‘intention’ of being willing to fight to the death. To sum up, current research on ritualized aggression and symbolic behaviors in animal populations is driven by evolutionary biology and game theory. Emphasis is given to the selective advantage that accrues to genes from participation in this kind of encounter rather than in escalated fighting. While the language of game theory speaks of the ‘strategies’ and ‘ploys’ that might be involved in a symbolic conflict, it is important to remember that these are linguistic conventions that assist in the application of a rationalistic game theory to a behaviorist context. Most biologists see animal behavior as a blind product of genetic programing. By contrast, social scientific understandings of ritualistic aggression in humans tend to point toward the culturally meaningful nature of such forms of conflict. The broad consensus is to see them as products of broader social values and specific human choices rather than as the expression of a utilitarian survival function. Despite these divergent paradigms there are some important areas of overlap. Sociobiologists such as Edward O Wilson, Lionel Tiger, and Konrad Lorenz have suggested that the resources of biology might be of use in explaining ritualized violence in areas such as human territoriality, male bonding, and group cohesion. Other scholars exploring more microlevel issues of body language, emotions, and facial expressions have also tried to draw analogies from animal behavior to human experience. Symbolic interactionists have also, albeit rarely, looked to animal studies in developing a broader understanding of routinized and ritualistic aspects of face-to-face human interactions. For example, although he was attentive to the creative, meaning-making qualities of human actors, Erving Goffman’s work in areas such as frame analysis and interaction ritual evinced an awareness of ethology. This is reflected in some of his terminology (e.g., deference and demeanor, grooming talk) and in the influence upon him of Gregory Bateson’s work on the metacontexts that frame the interpretation of behavior among animals. Despite these linkages, the dominant stream in cultural anthropology has been profoundly antithetical to biological understandings of ritualized encounters and violence, seeing them as deterministic and insufficiently attuned to the complexities of human symbolic systems. This article now turns to this more cultural tradition.
Ritual and Symbolic Behavior among People One of the most significant findings across the anthropological and sociological record has been the centrality of symbolic and ritual behavior to forms of violence.
In traditional societies war is often regarded as a ritual activity as much as a utilitarian activity for gaining political or economic power, with violence strongly linked to the attainment of manhood. Indeed one commentator sees it as ‘‘a rough male sport for underemployed hunters, with the kinds of damage-limiting rules that all competitive sports have.’’ Conflicts are often on a small scale with tribes agreeing to limit the force that is used. In parts of Highland New Guinea, for example, wars are called off when someone is wounded and warriors use inaccurate arrows without feather flights. Among the Native Americans of the Great Plains, the highest honor came from ‘counting coup’, not killing. This involved approaching an enemy without carrying weapons and touching him. Comparative studies of war and violence across civilizations, like that of Quincy Wright, suggest that the shift to more utilitarian, rationalized, and unrestrained forms of violence organized around conquest and domination emerged with agriculture and large-scale civilizations. In hunting-and-gathering societies there was no fixed wealth worth taking and people could easily run away. With the shift to agriculture, people had to stand and fight if they wished to eat. Along with agriculture there also came larger population densities and complex hierarchies, the emergence of military specialists, and full-scale wars associated with imperial expansion. These trends reached their logical conclusion in the militaristic empires of antiquity (Egypt, Rome, etc.), with their planned, ‘pragmatic’ approach to violence. This saw mass killing replace the ritualized killing of small-scale societies, with defeated populations often put to the sword. The shift toward more ‘rational’ and secular but also larger-scale forms of violence has continued up to the present day. Indeed, the rise of industrial capitalism and modernity in the West has seen the process accelerate thanks to a growing reliance on advanced technology and systems of coordination and control that operate at a distance from the points of battle. This move from symbolic and ritual violence toward norms advocating a rational and utilitarian organization of combat is in degree rather than in kind. Throughout history we can identify ritualistic elements in fighting styles and ethics. Noted examples include the combat codes of European knights and Japanese samurai, and the individualistic flair demonstrated by Cossacks and cavaliers. While contemporary combat styles have been rationalized by technowar, many scholars argue that conflict and violence is still underpinned by nonrational factors at levels from those of everyday life to full-scale war. Moreover, normative constraints often play a role in limiting the intensity of violence. To a certain extent, then, contemporary violence can be still considered a form of symbolic action, even if its ritualistic qualities
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are sometimes latent rather than manifest. Consider the following examples from everyday life:
Ritual and Conflict
research shows that casual bar-room • Anthropological brawls tend to follow a ritualistic sequence of threats
So far this article has discussed the symbolic and ritualistic dimensions of violence in animals and humans. These have been described as the ways in which conflict is patterned, generated, or limited by meanings embodied in codes, signs, and symbols. This last section looks at theories of ritual itself and the ways in which theories of ritual have been used to explain peace, war, and violence. The contemporary study of ritual in the social sciences has its foundational moment in Emile Durkheim’s masterwork The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Here Durkheim drew upon Australian aboriginal ethnography to argue that societies must periodically come together to renew their bonds. He claimed they achieved this through rituals characterized by physical proximity and the manipulation of the symbols of the sacred and the profane. In his understanding, these rituals worked to generate social stability and harmony. The broad thrust of Durkheim’s work, then, is to suggest that ritual activity is important for allowing peaceful coexistence within groups. Despite his data being drawn from a small-scale society, Durkheim claimed that his theory had a more general applicability. He argued, for instance, that the flags of modern nations were analogous to aboriginal totems. Important arguments to this effect have come from scholars like Lloyd Warner and Edward Shils. Drawing upon ethnographic data from a small Massachusetts town, Warner suggested that Memorial Day ceremonies dedicated to fallen soldiers constituted a kind of cult of the dead that united citizens. Shils made a similar point about the 1952 coronation of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, arguing that it enabled the nation to come together. These kinds of claims are now generally perceived to be simplistic. In a seminal article, Steven Lukes suggested that we need to explore the relationship between rituals and social conflict. Pointing to sectarian Orange Day parades in Northern Ireland, Lukes maintained that rituals are often used to divide as well as to unite communities. He also argued for ideas of agency and strategic action to be included in thinking about rituals as a replacement for the vague and systemic causal attributions of the Durkheimian functionalists. Over the past 30 years the kind of agenda instantiated by Lukes has come to predominate in ritual studies. Functionalist models that locate ritual causality in ‘social needs’ for harmony have been replaced by studies attentive to power, inequality, and interests. Here an emphasis is placed on the ways that rituals and ritual exchanges legitimize and reproduce structures of power and inequality. Important contributions within this critical tradition have come from scholars like Marc Auge and Pierre Bourdieu. Another significant feature of contemporary research has been inputs from structuralist and poststructuralist theories. These have enabled ideas of discourse, narrative, and semiotics to be
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and blows, with informal rules preventing fighters from using weapons like knives. Anthropologists and sociologists studying sport have pointed to the symbolic and ritualistic qualities of violence in sports such as boxing, wrestling, cockfighting, and bullfighting. Crimes against women such as domestic violence and rape are often interpreted as expressive acts which dramatize male power and resentment and which are often underpinned by an irrational culture of machismo. Studies of urban gangs have pointed to the value system that leads young men to risk their lives and kill to protect their territory and gang colors.
In addition, the following are examples from war: racist, and/or nationalist beliefs have played a • Ethnic, role in every war since the French Revolution. Today
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ethnonationalist beliefs remain important in arenas such as Iraq, Aceh, and Chechnya. Many states voluntarily subscribe to the Geneva Convention, a document that provides minimum rights for those involved in war. This might be seen as an endorsement of the idea that war should be limited and constrained by human values. Religious beliefs and motivations remain important factors behind war (e.g., in the Middle East). It could also be argued that apparently secular beliefs in democracy, reason, and equality that underpin some pro-war rhetoric amount to a civil religion. Extreme atrocities, such as genocide or acts of terrorism, are difficult to interpret as rational or instrumental actions that contribute much to winning a war. They can be better understood as dramatizations of power and hatred. The legitimization for going to war is often supported by quasimythological themes. In the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and Western allies these included the demonization of Saddam Hussein and apocalyptic narratives concerning his intention to employ weapons of mass destruction against his enemies.
Few commentators would claim that contemporary war is directly analogous to its more ritualistic counterparts. Similar to other major social processes it has been bureaucratized and its conduct is usually rational and strategic – in intention, if not in enactment. However, it is important to realize that ritualistic and symbolic beliefs provide for its legitimacy in wider society and offer an important source of motivation for participants.
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incorporated into an understanding of ritual dynamics, providing for a more sophisticated understanding of the ways culture works. Early contributions from Mary Douglas on purity and pollution and Victor Turner’s processualist analyses of liminality remain important sources of inspiration. Also significant are borrowings from Le´viStrauss on cultural codes and Bakhtin on the carnivalesque. While also vital to critical understandings of ritual, this line of cultural elaboration has provided the basis for a recent revival in neo-Durkheimian scholarship. This research seeks to hold on to what is best in Durkheim’s Elementary Forms (such as ideas about the autonomy of culture, solidarity, and emotion) while jettisoning what no longer seems viable (the assumption of social consensus, functionalism). This emerging research tradition also draws upon the critical theories discussed earlier so as to be able to put forward a more hard-headed and empirically grounded understanding of ritual dynamics. At present, links between ritual studies and peace studies remain underdeveloped. Scholars in the ritual studies area often use phenomena like nationalist and military parades as sources of data, but do not have issues of peace and violence at the center of their research agenda. They are often more interested in theoretical issues concerning the structure and process of rituals themselves. To be sure, ideas about domination, conflict, and exclusion can be found, but rarely are these translated into a central preoccupation with issues of physical violence or peaceful coexistence. On the other hand, scholars in the peace studies area often refer to the ritualistic qualities of violence (e.g., when discussing the kinds of themes listed in the section entitled ‘Ritual and symbolic behavior among people’), but do so in passing and without reference to core theory in the ritual studies area. The result has been two literatures that have passed each other like ships in the night. This is unfortunate as the core issues of ritual theory, such as the dynamics of solidarity and exclusion, the importance of sacrifice, and the roles of quasireligious symbolic codes and the collective memory in the legitimation of the social order, are obviously of very direct relevance to understanding peace and conflict. Nevertheless, in recent years a number of studies have become influential in thinking through these latent and potential connections. Important characteristics of the literature include an interdisciplinary theoretical input centering on the textuality of social life, the idea of ritual as an arena of struggle and violence as well as consensus, a concern with the autonomy of culture as a ‘variable’ that makes possible violent and nonviolent outcomes, and, finally, a concern with the need for historically and culturally specific, process-driven explanation. Perhaps the best way to get a feel for this expanding, interdisciplinary literature is to briefly review some representative examples.
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Bruce Lincoln’s explorations of ritual and violence are rooted in critical theory. Lincoln makes use of Roland Barthes and Maurice Bloch in developing a model of social life that sees symbolic and ritual activity as closely associated with the reproduction of, and challenges to, structures of power. In Lincoln’s view, social integration through ritual always benefits some groups more than others. This is evinced in his discussion of the Swazi Ncwala, an annual ritual ostensibly celebrating harvest, death and rebirth, and kingship. Lincoln shows how a covert subtext of the ritual was a sustained, but coded, critique of colonial domination. This affirmation of a universal Swazi identity worked, however, to reinforce the power of the Swazi king over his subjects by symbolically trumping internal conflicts between factions within the Swazi nation. So a ritual constructing solidarity in the face of one form of domination ended up reproducing another. The work of Randall Collins shares with Lincoln an interest in the relationship between ritual and power. Collins, however, believes that acting together is more important than a shared symbolic code in building solidarity. Central to his argument is the concept of ‘emotional energy’. For Collins, it is in situations of high emotional energy that symbols endure by being inculcated in people’s minds, carried through time by ‘ritual chains’. High and low emotional energy emerges from the relative intensity of situational characteristics such as communicative gestures, emotional rhythms, flows, and mutual focus. These, in turn, produce motivating forces in which individuals will instrumentally seek out interaction rituals that contain maximum emotional energy, whether they are positive emotions such as altruism and love or negative emotions such as anger and fear. For this reason individuals and groups can often find a kind of desire for conflict and crisis, such as in individual acts of violence or the undertaking of military action. The ability of ritual to bridge social divides in plural Western societies is explored in an alternative dramaturgical way by Jeffrey Alexander. Alexander argues that a more nuanced understanding of ritual in contemporary society can be achieved through conceiving of cultural traumas and periods of crisis in performative terms involving actors, audiences, props, scripts, and plots. In a study of the terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers, Alexander argues that Al Qaeda not only wished to inflict death and destruction but also create political and social instability in the United States through an act in which American culture would be seen as weak and morally corrupt. While the performance was initially successful in threatening to disrupt social order, the terrorists failed in their aims as a counter-performance was constructed in the United States’ public sphere that reinterpreted the event and resulted in a new social solidarity. From this perspective we can understand how the attacks eventually produced exactly the opposite effect and meaning than Al Qaeda had in mind.
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In his book Why War Philip Smith compares different nations’ narrative constructions of crisis leading up to the Iraq war, the Gulf war, and the Suez conflict. Contrary to the dominant academic theories of warfare that privilege economic and material interests, Smith argues that narrative understanding itself can be the reason that warfare is chosen by the state over alternatives such as diplomacy. Drawing upon the work of narrative theorists such as Northrop Frye, Smith decodes the national discourses of the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Spain for his case studies. He concludes that genre interpretations align with war in ways that are regular and predictable. For example, in the Suez crisis the narrative employed in the American public sphere could be classified as ‘‘low mimetic,’’ with an ‘everyday’ and bureaucratic nature. The result was opposition to military intervention against Colonel Nasser’s regime. By contrast, prior to the Gulf war and Iraq war, a ‘‘high mimetic’’ apocalyptic genre developed in the United States that portrayed Saddam Hussein as an evil, Hitler-like figure, and allowed for the justification of human sacrifice. Smith’s narrative classification model helps us develop a cultural interpretation of war where discourse and narrative are not merely used as tools for legitimation by powerful elites but which also directly influence the decision to go to war. In a sense, all wars are symbolic actions as they are launched from platforms of meaning-making activity. In Theorising the Standoff, Robin Wagner-Pacifici explores similar kinds of narrative themes of crisis but relates them to symbolic action at the level of the individual as well as the group. She analyzes various standoff cases in the United States such as Wounded Knee, Waco, and Ruby Ridge, to understand moments of social contingency. In such threshold episodes in which violence is imminent, the normal guiding principles of action become unstable and ambiguous. A siege mentality occurs on both sides where new interpretive and symbolic frameworks apply. Seemingly banal actions and objects, such as the sirens of fire engines, can result in situations of danger and confrontation. Wagner-Pacifici’s analysis informs us that while such potential violent episodes are created by structural forces such as religious, ideological, and political clashes, it is often situational behaviors by individuals in particular cultural environments that ultimately determine peaceful conclusion of the standoff.
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Ritual, Symbolic Action, and Building Peace Ethological studies belong to an intellectual field which borders on the morally dubious territories of Social Darwinism and eugenics. In the wrong hands, such as those of Adolf Hitler, such theories can be used to question the belief that peace is either possible or good. On the
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contrary, they can be taken to lead to the conclusion that conflict is not only inevitable, but also an ennobling duty. Through military triumph over the weak and through programs of ‘ethnic cleansing’, the strong can claim their birthright and purify and refine their bloodstock thus fulfilling some kind of ‘racial destiny’. Fortunately, it is possible to derive a more constructive lesson from the ethological literature once it is realized that there is no inevitable connection between scientific knowledge derived from observations of animal behavior and a pseudo-Darwinistic moral philosophy. Humans are different from animals, and one of the most important differences is their ability to construct moral codes and institutional arrangements which modify or transcend the effects of nature. An important argument along these lines is William James’ essay on ‘The moral equivalent of war’. James recognizes the existence of martial traits in modern people that have arisen as a result of thousands of years of war but suggests that these can be channeled into nonviolent avenues such as public service. In this way, he argues, society could retain the constructive ‘‘character building’’ qualities of military service but avoid bloodshed. In a similar vein, the biologist Richard Dawkins has denied that his analysis of the ‘‘selfish gene’’ is a justification for selfish, free-market individualism as some of his critics have suggested. Rather, he contends, scientific knowledge allows us to be aware of the operation of genetic conditioning and, consequently, to be able to sit down and discuss rational strategies for thwarting genes and nurturing genuine altruism. In this way, we can ‘‘rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.’’ Knowledge about ethology allows for reflexivity and an awareness of the negative traits of our species – the instinctual and selfish behaviors which are to be avoided. We can also look to the ethological corpus for more positive suggestions for constructing peace. Two potential themes stand out. The first of these is that the literature can be used as a resource for strategy analysts who are attracted to rational choice and game theory. It might be possible to locate in the animal kingdom and the adaptive behaviors of its members exemplars for constructing distributions of resources, threats, and balances of power that encourage ritualistic rather than escalated fighting. The attraction (and also weakness) of these kinds of solutions is that they do not require changing people’s minds. Rather they permit peaceful coexistence to be built into situations where human competition remains every bit as fierce as it is between genomes. An example of such a situation was the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, which underpinned the nuclear deterrence strategies of the United States and the Soviet Union in the post-World War II period. The idea here was that the costs of full-scale nuclear war, such as global destruction and nuclear winter, would be too high for either side. Consequently, expressions of their mutual hostility were
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limited to regional wars (e.g., Nicaragua, Vietnam) and symbolic and diplomatic skirmishing. This is perhaps analogous to the de-escalated violence we find in animal combats, where threat of death or serious injury prevents even dominant contestants from using full force. A second possibility afforded by animal studies is that they can be creatively misread to serve as a kind of moral exemplar. While animal behaviors might be selfish from the perspective of science, they can often appear to be altruistic or moral to common sense. The shift toward postmodernity is seeing nature resacralized in contemporary popular culture as a zone of purity and symbiosis. This provides a fertile setting for distributing positive imagery that sees ritualistic, restrained violence in animals as a role model for morally aware human action. We can already see signs of this kind of discourse emerging in popular advocacy for animals like dolphins, whales, and gorillas. Such animals are often attributed an almost spiritual ability to live in peace and harmony with their environment and each other. The diversity of human cultures equally provides a rich resource with which to think creatively about building a peace culture. The literature on small-scale societies can be studied for ideas about how to replace a culture that valorizes escalated violence with one that recognizes the superiority of low-harm alternatives. An enhanced understanding of the ritual and symbolic foundations of contemporary violence can lead to greater reflexivity about existing practices and promote the search for nonviolent alternatives. By the same token, we can look in a pragmatic way for forms of symbolic action that seem to offer more positive alternatives. In the case of ritual, for example, the weight of academic research suggests that militaristic parades do little to build peace and understanding. Alternative commemorative forms, however, can play an important role in breaking down barriers and building pacifist solidarity. In their book Dark Tourism John Lennon and Malcolm Foley show how sites of death, disaster, and atrocities have increasingly become sites of modern pilgrimage. From fieldwork at places such as the Auschwitz death camps and tours of World War II battlefields, they argue that tourism at these sites promote doubt about the project of modernity and the questioning of the infallibility of science and technology. In a more detailed ethnographic study on tourism at the World War I Gallipoli battlefields in
Turkey, Brad West similarly demonstrates how international tourism can foster sentiments of tolerance and peace. From interviews with young Australian budget travelers, he argues that a new national collective memory of the campaign has developed in which former foes Turkey and Australia/New Zealand have been reimagined as friends that share common historical event of sacrifice. By looking at these kinds of success stories, and through analyzing their symbolic and ritual foundations for generalizable principles, peace activists can start to construct lines of action that might make a difference.
See also: Aggression and Altruism; Clan and Tribal Conflict; Cultural Studies, Overview; Decision Theory and Game Theory; Ethnicity and Identity Politics; Folklore; Gender Studies; Warriors, Anthropology of
Further Reading Alexander, J. (2004). From the depths of despair: Performance, counterperformance, and ‘September 11’. Sociological Theory 22(1): 88–105. Alexander, A. and Smith, P. (eds.) (2005). The Cambridge companion to Durkheim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnard, C. J. (1983). Animal behaviour. London: Croom Helm. Collins, R. (2004). Interaction ritual chains. Princeton: University of Princeton Press. Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durkheim, E. (1915). The elementary forms of religious life. London: Allen and Unwin. Dyer, G. (1985). War. New York: Crown. James, W. (1942). The moral equivalent of war. In Essays on faith and morals, pp 311–328. New York: Meridian. Lennon, J. and Foley, M. (2000). Dark tourism. London: Continuum. Lincoln, B. (1987). Ritual, rebellion, resistance. Man 22, 132–156. Lorenz, K. (1966). On aggression. London: Methuen. Lukes, S. (1975). Political ritual and social integration. Sociology 9(2): 289–308. Smith, P. (2005). Why war? The cultural logic of Iraq, the Gulf War and Suez. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sperber, D. (1975). Rethinking symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wagner-Pacifici, R. (2000). Theorizing the standoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. West, B. (2005). Independent travel and civil religious pilgrimage. In Down the road, pp 9–32. Perth: API Press. Wright, Q. (1965). A study of war. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.