Ontogeny of Ritualization in Man

In this zoological setting, I may consider it a sign of hospitality that the ontogeny of ritualization in man is to be discussed before that in animals. This permits me to give full consideration to man’s complexity, and to dispense with the attempt to derive the human kind of ritualization from what has come to be called ritualization in animals. Rather, I will try to show what in human life may be the equivalent of the ethologist’s ritualization, and to present a developmental schedule for its ontogeny.* To do so, I must first set aside a number of now dominant connotations of the term. The oldest of these is the anthropological one which ties it to rites and rituals conducted by communities of adults (and sometimes witnessed by children or participated in by youths) for the purpose of marking such recurring events as the phases of the year or the stages of life. I will attempt to trace some of the ontogenetic roots of all ritual-making but I will not deal explicitly with ritual as such. A more recent connotation of 9ritualization’ is the clinical one . Here the term 9private ritual’ is used to conceptualize obsessional behaviour consisting of repetitive solitary acts with highly idiosyncratic meanings. Such behaviour is vaguely analogous to the aimless behaviour of caged animals, and thus seems to provide a 9natural’ link with a possible phylogenetic origin of ritualization in its more stereotyped and driven forms. But it seems important to set aside this clinical connotation in order to take account of newer insights both in ethology and in psychoanalysis. There is now a trend in the ethological literature (recently summarized in Konrad Lorenz’s Das Sogenannte Boese (Lorenz 1964)) which follows the original suggestion of Sir Julian Huxley to use the word ritualization (and this explicitly without quotation marks) for certain phylogenetically preformed ceremonial acts in the so-called social animals. The study of these acts clearly points away from pathology, in that it reveals the bond created by a reciprocal message of supreme adaptive importance. We should, therefore, begin by postulating that behaviour to be called ritualization in man must consist of an agreed-upon interplay between at least two persons who repeat it at meaningful intervals and in recurring contexts; and that this interplay should have adaptive value for both participants. And, I would submit, these conditions are already fully met by the way in which a human mother and her baby greet each other in the morning. Beginnings, however, are apt to be both dim in contour and lasting in consequences. Ritualization in man seems to be grounded in the pre-verbal experience of infants while reaching its full elaboration in grand public ceremonies. No one field could encompass such a range of phenomena with solid observation. Rather, the theme of ritualization (as I have found in preparing this paper) can help us to see new connexions between seemingly distant phenomena, such as human infancy and man’s institutions, individual adaptation and the function of ritual. Here, I will not be able to avoid extensive speculation. * For a conception of the human life cycle underlying this attempt, see E. H. Erikson (1950, 1964).