43 RITUAL

Anja Dreschke

The relationship between reenactment and ritual is often associated with the restagings and reappropriations of narratives from a mythological past and is common in many religious ceremonies.

For example, the Eucharist, celebrated as part of the Christian liturgy, is generally thought of as a symbolic reenactment of the Last Supper (practices of reenactment). In the past, rituals were often defined as stereotyped, formalized, repetitive actions that served the primary purpose of communicating with spiritual or otherworldly entities. This limited perspective was called into question in the late 19th century, when new disciplines like anthropology, sociology, and psychology broadened the meaning of the concept of ritual from the sphere of religion to symbolic actions in general. The new approach defined rituals by their function, whether it be to establish social solidarity, to cope with individual or collective crises, to bring success on the hunt, or to structure the life cycle or the seasonal cycle. Rituals were seen as marking temporal breaks between interlinked actions, synchronizing the achievements of a community, and reinforcing beliefs in magical powers. Today, the field of ritual studies also includes approaches from media and communication studies, performance studies, and theater, literary, and art theory. It deals with a broad variety of different performances, ranging from everyday action (Goffman, 1959), play (Bateson, 1972), and theater (Schechner, 1985) to social drama (Turner, 1982) and possession rites (Kramer, 1987). The term ritual thus continues to defy a single definition. Instead, the field of ritual studies focuses on investigations of specific ritual practices in their local contexts and rites in different areas of social life (e.g., Geertz, 1973; Tambiah 1979; Douglas, 1966). Most scholars now treat rituals as highly creative and productive social interactions that reinforce the significance of meaning-laden objects and practices within specific social, political, and religious contexts.

The field of ritual studies distinguishes between reenactment as an analytical concept or scholarly method, and historical reenactment as a social phenomenon. The latter has become a popular leisure activity around the globe and takes a range of different forms and sometimes involves transnational social networks. Many hobbyists who reenact past events show a particular interest in the religious life of those whose lives they imitate, most readily observable among so-called Indian hobbyists, who emulate the historical cultures of Native Americans (Kalshoven, 2012; Penny, 2014). This appropriation of the spiritual practices of spatially, temporally, or culturally remote groups raises fundamental questions about how, if at all, the boundaries between reenactment and ritual can be drawn, and about how conflicting claims concerning legitimacy, authenticity, and the production of meaning ought to be addressed.

Promising approaches to these issues have been developed by theater scholar Richard Schechner and by anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner (1982) organized so-called “playshops,” in which students explored the use of reenactment as a method to better understand the ethnographic literature on rituals. Schechner drew on his work as a director of experimental theater in order to stress the common features of ritual, play, theater, and everyday actions. His concept of “restored behavior” addresses the ways in which collective and individual memory and identity are constituted through repetitive actions (Schechner, 1985). Though Schechner does not use the term reenactment, his concept of restored behavior suggests that performances are always based on the (re)enactment of what he calls coded actions. He states that the process of rearranging, recontextualizing, and reassembling restored behavior underlies all forms of performance that include staging, scripts, improvisation, rehearsals, and training. Schechner’s notion of performance as a continuum, with theater at one extreme, and everyday action at the other, was inspired by Turner’s concept of “social drama.”

For his concept, Turner drew on the tripartite structure that Arnold van Gennep (1909) identified in certain rites of passage.

Such initiation rituals frame the transition of an individual from one social status to another, and can be divided into a phase of separation from a social role or order, a liminal (Latin limen, English threshold) phase of disorientation and uncertainty, and a phase of reintegration into an established order. Turner was particularly interested in the liminal phase, which he describes as a state of in-betweenness, during which social structures and differences dissolve, leading to the experience of communitas as a condition of indeterminacy and potentiality (Turner, 1969). A prime example of such liminal states are carnival festivals, where everyday conventions, behavioral patterns, and social hierarchies are temporarily inverted or thrown out. A parallel can be found in historical reenactments, in which practitioners seek to experience a social world different from their everyday reality, dressing up in costume to take on the role of a historical character. For Turner, this exceptional state constitutes an anti-structure that functions as an antidote to the existing social order, which in turn helps to reaffirm the established structure of a society. At the same time, it has the potential to spark individual and collective transformation. In other words, rituals can engender social or political changes that lead to the creation of new customs or institutions. This dialectic of structure and anti-structure corresponds to the dual nature of reenactment, which is characterized by both renewal and an affirmation of what already is.

Turner distinguishes between the liminal, which designates ritualistic practices that are obligatory for all members in small-scale societies, and the “liminoid,” which applies to the “leisure genres of art, sport, pastimes, games, etc. [...] practiced by and for particular groups, categories, segments, and sectors” (Turner, 1982, p. 86) in complex societies. The main difference is that liminoid phenomena are not obligatory but a matter of choice, a criterion that also holds true for participation in historical reenactments.

Yet the fact that these activities are voluntary does not mean that they are arbitrary forms of amusement, as some critics assume. Like other liminoid phenomena, historical reenactments are embedded in the social life of the participants and can be studied—like rituals—as practices of community building that help produce collective identity and meaning. The type of meaning varies from case to case: historical meaning is produced when a battle is reenacted in a living history museum, while spiritual meaning can be produced through religious reenactments like the Eucharist. Nevertheless, it may not always be possible to subsume a performance under a single heading. Depending on how it is framed (Goffman, 1974), one and the same performance can be interpreted as historical reenactment or

Anja Dreschke

as religious ritual. For example, among the Cologne Tribes, who reenact the historic life worlds of Huns and Mongolians, it is common to celebrate wedding ceremonies or other life cycle rituals that have both a collective and an individual significance: on a collective level, they aim to accurately represent the historical Hunnic or Mongolian culture for a wider public, while on an individual level, they serve as effective marriage rituals for the bride and groom and other members of the group (Dreschke, 2016). The line between historical reenactment and religious ceremony becomes even more blurred in the appropriation of trance or possession rituals. Such rituals can be considered reenactments in the sense that they are mainly based on mimicking otherworldly beings (Taussig, 1993), a relationship that can fruitfully be investigated by comparing practices of embodiment and practices of imagination (Kramer, 2005) in (possession) rituals and in historical reenactment (Dreschke, forthcoming).

Particularly complicated is the question of how to treat the adaptation of indigenous ritual practices by non-indigenous people in historical reenactments. The rise of esoteric religious movements like (neo)shamanism (Lindquist, 1997), (neo)paganism, or Wicca (Luhrmann, 1989; Greenwood, 2000) in the second half of the 20th century is indicative of the increased popularity of alternative spirituality.

At the same time, major religions seem to have lost some of their impact, at least in the West (Hanegraf, 2013). One explanation for this trend may be feelings of alienation from established forms of religious practice that are perceived as ossified versions of formerly vivid or “real” rituals, thus motivating people to seek out new expressions of individual or collective spirituality (Caduff and Pfaff-Czarnecka, 1999). The members of the Cologne Tribes, for instance, emphasize that they experience the spiritual practices they adapt in their reenactments as more authentic and meaningful than the Catholic rituals they were socialized into, while for most outsiders, their performances appear to be a random amalgamation of elements from different cultural and religious traditions, namely Siberian and Mongolian shamanism. These contradictory positions are mirrored in current debates about cultural heritage rights: non-native practitioners who adapt indigenous religious beliefs are accused by both political activists and academics of inauthentically or illegitimately appropriating the rituals and thus of harboring neo-colonial attitudes (Welch, 2007). To counteract such criticism, “plastic shamans,” as their detractors call them, employ different strategies to legitimize their reenactments. The Cologne Tribes claim that shamanism should be viewed as a universal primary religion that underlies all other religious beliefs (for a comprehensive discussion on the construction of shamanism in the Western imagination, see Znamenski, 2007). In doing so, they seek to justify and make plausible their reenactments. From the point of view of the practitioners, the adaptation of what appears to be foreign to outsiders is conceptualized as a revitalization of the beliefs of one's own alleged ancestors (on similar strategies oflegitimization, see Laack, 2011). From the perspective of contemporary ritual studies, the adaptation of ritual practices from a foreign culture or another period of time is conceived as a ritual transfer that can be mediated through oral tradition, texts, sound recordings, or (moving) images.Various aspects of such transfers can be studied, including their geography/space, ecological environment, culture, religion, politics, economy, or society (Langer and Snoek, 2013).

Assuming that in a globalized world, rituals are not just tied to local traditions but migrate through transcultural and transnational networks, ritual practices are embedded in complex processes of revitalization, reframing, and reinterpretation, thus serving as an almost inexhaustible reservoir for inventing new “traditions” (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). Historical reenactments thus might be considered as ritualistic practices of a (rather) new global trend. They can be interpreted as practices that contribute to the production of historical meaning. They take the form of religious rituals, tourist spectacles, displays of nationalism,

politicized reanimations of folklore, artful instances of choreography, and bodily techniques of trance and possession. Viewing reenactments as rituals opens space for better understanding the politics of inventing traditions and folklore, of making practices authentic, of their commodification, and of the globalization of ritualistic practices and their medialization.

43 RITUAL

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