How do we see rituals in our life ? Some of us think that rituals assist in keeping tradition and status quo in place. Here we move beyond the religious or cultic meaning of rituals. Some anthropologists think that they have less to do with continuity than with resistance. Rituals provide occasions for people for catharsis. Several anthropologists have taken the ritual of carnival to understand how it becomes a moment to go against the reining order of a society. The question is: Are we to see a resistant elements in all rituals or are we to view them only in rituals like carnival that are openly resistant to the reigning order of things? Are we to only to see contestatory side of rituals or see them as also as supporting authority and power? While the anthropologists have focussed their studies on the contestatory side of the ritual of carnival, they seem to be blind about the place of women in the same.
This has shifted ritual studies from symbolic analysis to ritual practice theory or studies. These studies have brought our attention to the everyday and the non-ritual. Every day is seen from the sense of repressed and oppressed tensions characteristic of the hustle and bustle of modern market driven life. While the awareness of oppression runs deep, the ritual opens a space and time where people can express their resistance and seek catharsis and solace. Ritual, therefore, becomes a counter-hegemony space for the ordinary people. Ritual opens a multivalent or polysemy where each individual can come in public with the joys, sorrows and burdens of life. Anthropologists do not see resistance as simply counterpart to power . It is viewed as resistance to the order that is forced by power.
Within rituals, therefore, there are seeds of contestation of power and the societal order it imposes on people. Ritual instead of being a moment of sanctification of order becomes a moment of silent interrogation of the order at play in a society. Although, ritual is temporally short, it has role in letting the social conceptualization of society of each individual to seek realization. Ritual is an important site of resistance besides it being site of community constitution. Rituals have a way of keeping contradictory worlds together. This means rituals are not merely spaces and times of identity representation and assertions. They are moments that provides space for transitory defiance of the reigning order. Rituals that at face value appear to align with reigning order and power have profound emancipative and therapeutic power. There are multiple foci and forms of disorder embedded in the ritual. They are sites of containment of chaos and regeneration of new life.
Ritual have tremendous power. It may display social alignment at the face level , they also have undercurrents that make them sites of resistance at the individual as well as collective level. May be within the domain of this anthropology of ritual, we have to view the rituals of exposition of St. Francis Xavier. Every ten years it does open a site of resistance, and therapy for people of all walks of life . People from all over the globe come to break away from the everyday order of their life and seek catharsis and healing . I try to move away from Luis Dumont’s (Homo Hierarchus) position that seems to see rituals are occasion of marking purity from impurity/ pollution which to me as well as other scholars have casteist overtones or linings, and hence here I have embraced Nicolas Dirks position that sees rituals are intense moments and spaces of resistance. Those that follow purity/ pollution binary diatribe seem to see in the Saint only a pollution of their narrowly constructed nationalism as we can clearly see in the discourse of Subash Velinkar in recent days. Hence instead of viewing the event and the ritual with the casteist purity /pollution principle, we have the challenge to see the ritual of exposition of St. Francis Xavier as an emancipative event. Like all ritual have subversive sides, the ritual of exposition St. Francis Xavier is multivalent and is marked by polysemy. Hence, all people can draw meaning, catharsis, healing and prophetic dissent from it.
