Harvey Whitehouse on Rituals

One of the most salient aspects of what generally makes a ritual a ritual is that the action itself is divorced from real life or its real life roots – and that fascinates anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse. By his own admission, what intrigues the statutory chair in social anthropology and professorial fellow of Magdalen College, University of Oxford is that ritual is “behavior that is ‘causally opaque’ – by which I mean it has no transparent rational causal structure.

“[Rituals] are that way,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Space podcast, “simply because by cultural convention and general stipulation that is the done and proper way to carry out the behavior, and not for any other reason.” This is not to say rituals don’t have a purpose – and that purpose, whether explicit or implicit, is really the focus of Whitehouse’s scholarship – but that the actions themselves are, essentially, ‘just so.’ Despite that distance between the pragmatic and the enigmatic, Whitehouse finds ritual is important in understanding both conflict and cohesion.

Rituals can range from collective and official things like funerals, initiations, political installations and liturgical events to personal and somewhat spontaneous things like shaking hands. One thing that unites all of these is that they are copied by others, especially initiates, even when the original purpose for the ritual has fallen away. Or as in one research project Whitehouse describes, there was never any “end goal” in the first place.

(And as he makes clear, religion and ritual are not synonymous, and shouldn’t be “muddled together.”)

While this lacuna of the ritual impulse is inherently interesting, where Whitehouse’s work has taken him is the effect of ritual, and how rites can serve different masters depending on the size of the population participating.

Rituals done in small groups tend to produce a greater amount of “social glue,” often due a shared intense bonding experience that “fuses” individuals into a larger whole. This insight, partially derived from a visit to Libya in 2011 to study the groups trying to depose Moammar Ghadafi, has implications, for example, in addressing extremism.

By contrast, rituals performed among larger populations – which often see “high frequency but relatively dull and boring rituals in order to establish a set of identity markers that can be maintained without radical mutation” – often focus more on ensuring conformity.

Whitehouse’s own journey into studying religiosity (“I’m not religious myself but deeply fascinated by what makes people religious”) and ritual also are covered in the podcast. As a young academic, Whitehouse started by doing fieldwork in Papua New Guinea focused on economic anthropology. “The people I ended up living with for two years, deep in the rain forest, were very interested in telling me about their religious ideas and ritual practices. They were the ones who got me into the topic.”

It was less, he added, that they wanted to proselytize and more that “they got bored with my questions about production and consumption and exchange and all these boring economic things. I think people were starting to want to avoid me when they saw me coming with my notebooks.”

Whitehouse has created a number of academic centers that focus on the nexus of ritual and wicked problems. For example, he co-founded the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflicts at Harris Manchester College in 2014 and is the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion established last year.