FadeTheButcher
07-03-2004, 12:17 AM
This is an excerpt from something I happen to be reading. Tell me what you think.
"A second example of a speech-based place would be ritual. Or, to state it more correctly, certain types of rituals are examples of proper places of faithfulness. In oral cultures, certain types of rituals are examples of proper places of faithfulness. In oral cultures, every aspect of life is ritualized. By contrast, in our hypervisual culture, which has so thoroughly lost touch with the places inherent in speech, ritual appears to have no purpose; indeed, to refer to something as a "ritual" is often to disparage it as meaningless. But humans have a very deep-seated need for ritual. All human societies and institutions have a variety of rituals, and individual humans who have rituals, and individuals who have no rituals invent them. This is because ritual is an essential place; it allows individuals to orient themselves in the world. Rituals do this by representing very general human experiences in a highly particular manner, usually by representing very general human experiences that are very spread out in time and space in a manner that is much more localised.
An excellent example of a ritual that does this is the act of voting in a democratic political system. People in present-day democracies are taught that they vote to choose their leaders, but this is actually a poor explanation of what voting accomplishes. In any system of representative democracy, the process of choosing leaders takes place largely within organisations, such as political parties, which narrow the possible candidates for public office down to a small number, often only two, from which the voters much choose. Furthermore, as political scientists have pointed out, if voting is primarily an attempt to determine who one's leaders should be, then there really is no point in voting, since even in a local election -- much less a national election, where millions of votes are cast -- the probability that one's vote will actually make a difference is practically zero. Very few elections, even at the local level, are decided by one vote or even one hundred votes. In fact, for political scientists, one of the great mysteries of modern democracies is why anybody does bother to vote. A much better understanding of voting is that it is a ritual of democratic citizenship.
When one votes, one is taking part in a ritual that helps one to understand that one belongs to a community in which individuals are regarded as equal, and in which the people who govern are accountable to the people they govern, and cannot rule arbitrarily. Voting takes the experience of democratic citizenship -- of, for example, not having to bow low to certain privileged individuals, or of not living in terror of the secret police -- and represents it in the more compact procedure of voting, where each individual has one vote to choose the society's leaders." (Jardine, pp.247-48)
"A second example of a speech-based place would be ritual. Or, to state it more correctly, certain types of rituals are examples of proper places of faithfulness. In oral cultures, certain types of rituals are examples of proper places of faithfulness. In oral cultures, every aspect of life is ritualized. By contrast, in our hypervisual culture, which has so thoroughly lost touch with the places inherent in speech, ritual appears to have no purpose; indeed, to refer to something as a "ritual" is often to disparage it as meaningless. But humans have a very deep-seated need for ritual. All human societies and institutions have a variety of rituals, and individual humans who have rituals, and individuals who have no rituals invent them. This is because ritual is an essential place; it allows individuals to orient themselves in the world. Rituals do this by representing very general human experiences in a highly particular manner, usually by representing very general human experiences that are very spread out in time and space in a manner that is much more localised.
An excellent example of a ritual that does this is the act of voting in a democratic political system. People in present-day democracies are taught that they vote to choose their leaders, but this is actually a poor explanation of what voting accomplishes. In any system of representative democracy, the process of choosing leaders takes place largely within organisations, such as political parties, which narrow the possible candidates for public office down to a small number, often only two, from which the voters much choose. Furthermore, as political scientists have pointed out, if voting is primarily an attempt to determine who one's leaders should be, then there really is no point in voting, since even in a local election -- much less a national election, where millions of votes are cast -- the probability that one's vote will actually make a difference is practically zero. Very few elections, even at the local level, are decided by one vote or even one hundred votes. In fact, for political scientists, one of the great mysteries of modern democracies is why anybody does bother to vote. A much better understanding of voting is that it is a ritual of democratic citizenship.
When one votes, one is taking part in a ritual that helps one to understand that one belongs to a community in which individuals are regarded as equal, and in which the people who govern are accountable to the people they govern, and cannot rule arbitrarily. Voting takes the experience of democratic citizenship -- of, for example, not having to bow low to certain privileged individuals, or of not living in terror of the secret police -- and represents it in the more compact procedure of voting, where each individual has one vote to choose the society's leaders." (Jardine, pp.247-48)