An Introduction to Ritual Studies: My Future Work with FOCUS

Hello readers,

Today's entry is going to be less of a prescription to a problem, and more of a methodological piece of some continuing work that I plan to do which may appear on this blog (or as published writing later in life.) In order to understand this work, a description of ritual studies and a beginning (non-scholarly) plain sense treatise on what I am doing is necessary.

Ritual studies is a science which looks at ritual and its effect on community simply put. This can be done in many ways, usually it is a science which requires observation of a particular event, ritual, etc. and then tries to obtain some sort of knowledge about the effect it has on the people who participate in the ritual. Ritual studies can be done on all sorts of events, rituals, people. My particular focus in ritual studies is going to be to examine the FOCUS conference and look at its effect not only on the mentality which the conference wants to derive to its participants, but also what effect this has on Catholic identity. (simply put who's in and who's out in the minds of the speakers at the FOCUS conference.) Also examining is this effect truly consistent with what is Catholic based on what is handed down via the tradition.

In order to do this ritual study, I will need to take note of the order which events happen, and the particular things which stand out while doing the ritual. (examples of this include the style of Mass that occurs at the conference, priests vestments at Mass) but also at the event (meaning the conference itself) which includes the attitudes of the speakers, the topics chosen by the speakers at the conference, etc. These two things together build attitudes about many different topics including ecclesiology (the study of the Church, and what it means to be a Church), ethics (interesting in what ethics the speakers speak about as well), and the human person (is the human person essentially good or bad based on what the speakers talk about mostly, though the ritual norms can teach about anthropology (the study of the human person) as well.)

It is important to note the presuppositions which occur through the speakers at the conference and any common themes they have in their speeches (even if they are on unrelated topics.) For example, if a speaker tells you to be afraid of the world in talking about relativism (the moral theory that morals are subjective to each person, namely there is no objective truth), then later another speaker tells you to be afraid of the world while talking about relationships, this is a common theme which tells the interpreter something about how the leaders of the conference want to influence the attendees.

On the summary, this is the basics of what my work in this area will be. The idea of ritual itself makes this work more complicated because ritual itself is inherently polyvalent and the symbols have their deepest meaning only when one is a part of the community. My own presuppositions complicate this work as well because I'm not simply writing whatever I do as a favorable treatise on FOCUS, rather my own presuppositions want to critique what happens at this conference. This in turn, will affect how I interpret the data, there is no avoiding this, but I will provide copious notes and copies of programs to show from where my tendencies to see certain parallels come. (The postmodern problem discusses this at great length, which I will avoid for sake of space, though this problem will come up in future writings, as this is a presupposition of my thinking.)

Again, anything substantive on this topic which I write is a long ways away but I do want to show people where my mind is coming from as I write or talk about this specific topic. I understand methodology can be a bit boring, (I also have struggles in reading methodology pieces) but it's important in this case to know the method both for people who personally interact with me on this topic and for those who may be interested in reading the ritual studies work which comes forth later.

I welcome comments and questions for ideas which can be explored in ritual studies. Thank you all for your time.

Aristocrates