Debate about whether or not artifacts are for ritual purposes always reminds me of a wonderful book by David Macaulay called "Motel of the Mysteries." [1] The publisher's description gives a good sense of it:
"It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization."
As kids growing up in a village, my friends and I played with button whirligigs and we made them out of broken pieces of clay pots discarded by our parents: Take a piece, rub its boundary on a hard irregular surface until it is smooth and discoid, make a hole in the center (take care not to break the object), pass a thread through this hole and keep the thing at the midpoint of the thread. Hold the two ends of the thread with your hands, spin it for a while and stop, and then immediately start whirling the thing by alternately pulling and releasing the tension on the thread.
That brought me down some interesting Wikipedia journey, this former farm machine repairman built a whole collection of Whirligigs for two decades after he retired:
He was hard-worker his whole and he couldn't sit around all day, so he spent 6-days a week (except Sundays) building some really creative "kinetic art" from old machine parts.
The town of Wilson, NC has turned it into a park after he died:
Just wanted to point out that it's great seeing the "Citations" and "Further Reading" links to the actual studies at the bottom and within the article. If only more of those 'science' news sites did the same...
> “Hey, what’s this?” asks the first guy. “I dunno, probably a toy … or a religious object,” says the second.
> Archaeologists have long tended to choose the second option
One of the many reasons archaeology frustrates me. If you can't figure out why somebody built something in the past, its always for ritual reasons, rather than more mundane reasons.
For example, I went to Chichen-Itza last week. If something happened, and all the street vendors' stalls were abandoned, it's almost certain that archaeologists of a thousands years in the future would conclude that it was a major religious pilgrimage site, of a culture obsessed with miniature pyramids, obsidian miniatures, marble chess sets, and brightly glazed ceramic skulls. What they would make of the multitude of ceramic phallic hash pipes, I'm not sure I want to speculate about...
In your example, the activities are not religious.
However, to me, the tiny pyramids and other trinkets are a kind of modern day ritual - if something that has no clear explanation or practical purpose can be called a ritual.
Let's take a moment and think: why do we carry those items home after journeys? I've observed most of the time we toss them in a drawer and smile aftre discovering them 5 years later. We place them on the shelves. Do we use them to signal social status? Not really, they can usually be readily bought locally. When we gift them, do we expect the other person to remember what they meant 2 years later?
Or do we do it because "this is what people do"?
Of course, maybe there is a different answer, but to me, it looks like we produce these things to fulfill some irrational, ritualistic? need. If we do that now so often, then people in the past most likely did that too.
The problem is not the label "ritual", it's the way the word shuts down all further discussion.
Why? "Ritual." Done.
But that doesn't actually answer "why" it just gives it another word.
Another example in the same light: "How was the world created?" "God" vs "How was the world created?" "Big Bang".
In both cases you have answered nothing. You just used another word. "How was God created?" "Don't know", "How was the Big Bang created?" "Don't know".
Using a scientific sounding word does not actually answer the question, anymore than using the word "ritual" answers the question.
Instead the lack of knowledge should be made explicit, and not hidden behind a "comfort" word. (I.e. a word used to make you feel better about not knowing.)
Irrational is not the way I'd frame rituals. There is always a reason for theSe things and the reason can be explained, which does not lie in the object of the ritual itself but the purpose. We give gifts from our travels because it tells our loved ones we were thinking about them even while we were so far away from them. It retrospectively bridges a time-space gap. We bring these objects home for ourselves for various reasons but one might be that the object somehow represents the place we were, maybe it has the look of the place, maybe it literally just acts as a physical reminder, or maybe we have a collection of those things already-- and a collection being an explorative fixation on the multitude ways that a particular type of object can express itself.
”They include not only the worship rites and sacraments of organized religions and cults, but also rites of passage, atonement and purification rites, oaths of allegiance, dedication ceremonies, coronations and presidential inaugurations, marriages and funerals, school "rush" traditions and graduations, club meetings, sporting events, Halloween parties, veterans parades, Christmas shopping and more. Many activities that are ostensibly performed for concrete purposes, such as jury trials, execution of criminals, and scientific symposia, are loaded with purely symbolic actions prescribed by regulations or tradition, and thus partly ritualistic in nature. Even common actions like hand-shaking and saying hello may be termed rituals.”
With such a definition, it isn’t much of a stretch to call about anything that isn’t clearly a tool ritualistic in origin.
I think that the point is that using current methods, future laymen will look at the work of future archeologists and through a misunderstanding of their terminology will think that there was a cult that worshiped snowmen.
One example I heard was that, in 1000 years, people may discover strange yellow arches and assume that they had religious significance. But what kind of significance _does_ McDonalds have in today’s society? Is going to the pub followed by burger and chips an important ritual followed by many in modern society?
Many of the things we do in modern society are ritualistic, if we want it or not. For example, the energy and money we spent in watching superhero movies and buying related literature and promotional products can clearly be described as ritualistic. Superheroes are true gods of our generation, even if we don't pray to them.
Exactly. They are representative of what we think of ourselves as human, what we could be, what is possible, and what should be. They are just as important as any deity of old. We take cues from our idols, we listen to them and often do what they do or say. We put ourselves in the world of our idols all the time.
I think we lose the significance of ritual when we try to be "rational". For me, ritual is entirely rational. Without it we'd almost be stuck in a stagnant loop, trying to rationalize all of our behaviors without actually making any definitive action because we know at the brain-level it's "just" neurons firing, it's just "feelings". Ritual is an immersion in creative processes, providing not only stability but possibility.
It seems natural for any worldview examining another to see as ritualized emotional cultivation the actions and objects that to the older were part of the daily acknowledgement of reality.
For sure there are great difficulties in understanding what has passed when primary sources är long gone and we only have silent artefacts. But don't you think the remains of today, compared to the now considered ancient, due to todays obsession with and more long lasting documentation?
> due to todays obsession with and more long lasting documentation?
I'm not sure it's longer-lasting. I've got VHS and audio tapes I don't have the equipment to play. I've got two voice recorders - each one requiring proprietary software to extract the audio from. The last time I checked, a few years ago, the software was no longer maintained, and may not run on modern Windows machines.
If I put in the effort, I could probably figure out how the files are stored, and how to decode them, but it's not exactly a casual task.
"It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization."
[1] Some images here: https://wearethemutants.com/2017/12/06/david-macauleys-motel...