The Place of Ritual in Our Time

This essay represents my contribution to a collection of essays I have edited entitled Religion and Cultural Studies. The contributors range from scholars in the fields of English, History, History of Religion, and Anthropology, to scholars such as Jack Miles and Karen McCarthy Brown, whose books, God: A Biography (1995) and Mama Lola: A Voodoo Priestess in Brooklyn (1991), have also attracted nonacademic audiences. The collection attempts to convey the centrality of religion in our current cultural scene and also to build on what is in my view one of the best prospects of cultural studies as a field of inquiry: the recovery of interdisciplinary concepts, both in our own time and in previous ones.

My essay will be a plea for recognition of the continuum between intellectual work and ordinary life, for the continuity between esoteric and common practices. The tie between cultural studies and religion, in my view, is inevitable; cultural studies has already begun, and will continue, to "get" religion. Prominent analysts of religion and culture have helped to articulate the prospects of this engagement. Cornel West defines the centrality and variety of American religious life: all the "religious sects and groups and cults and denominations . . . through which folk come together" in this country (695). David Hollinger discovers a new Sombartian imperative in the air. (In place of "Why is there no socialism in the United States?" we have "Why is there so much Christianity in the United States?" [21].) It may be that for our time religion will be the grand "multicultural" scene, the great "pluralist" case.

This is a large claim. And let me begin accordingly with a broad postulate: ritual acts express an unbridgeable gap--a chasm--between what is sought or aspired to and the historical present. Ritual actors are always at a loss in relation to some prior moment of greater spiritual promise and communal coherence. In this sense, sacrifice is the quintessential ritual form, and its mark or signature is its articulation of nostalgia. I mean nostalgia in its most literal sense: nostos ("return to home") algia ("pain" or "sickness"--a longing to the point of sickness for return, for home). The idea of return is implicit in sacrifice, in its attempt to restore a lost relationship between humans and gods or to atone for some spiritual offense. Also integral to sacrifice is a certain wistfulness about the legitimacy of its appeal. Sacrifice has long been viewed as a precarious enterprise, its ritual identity deriving in part from the fact that it appears out of place, outmoded, a historical antique or remnant that is fast disappearing. Thus many of the sacrificial actors or witnesses I will discuss worry about the authenticity of the ritual procedure, its infiltration by elements that are not supposed to be there. But the act itself of sacrifice, whether actual or alleged, becomes a token of authentic belief: where there is sacrifice, there isfaith.

And where there is faith, there is interdisciplinary study. For religion is one of the points in our different disciplinary discussions of culture where overlap is inevitable and most productive. Because religion involves, by definition, the transcendence and reconstitution of boundary, it occupies borders between the imagined and real, the historical and universal, the known and unknown. Religion's own "borderline" position calls for an academic response that is necessarily interdisciplinary and richly aware of the productivity and authenticity of the "illusory" in culture.

To "place" ritual in our time will require some leaps and bounds. So I will be ranging, from an American breakfast table, to a suburban backyard in the 1990s, to Kiev, Russia, in the early decades of this century. All of these scenes will project us further back to an ancient era when sacrifice was a predominant social institution. This is because sacrifice, ritual, is an act of commemoration. It is a reminder of previous intensified events, of their ongoing vitality, and also of their anomalous character. However...