“Can There Be a Form between a Game and a Story?”
With movies and books, the viewer and/or reader experiences the story, moves along with it, and sympathizes with the characters. The viewer becomes almost like a third person character, seeing everything that is happening, but never becoming a part of it. Video-games rely on the player becoming the character in order to play. To make a cross between the two different ways to take in a story, the person would have to interact with the movie, and still be a third person character. This seems almost impossible to me. You would have to combined an interactive narrative with a linear narrative. The closest thing to that I can think of is Interactive Fiction, or IF.
“The Obvious Aspects of Ritual”
So, this article was not so ‘obvious’ to me as I thought it would be. ‘Liturgy’ is a number of things. It can mean a form of public worship, a particular arrangement of services, or a type of Eucharistic services, something done in Eastern Churches. So, ‘Liturgy thoerists’ try to find the meaning behind such rituals and services, and explain it. Rappaport has a problem with this, as he believes that by defining ritual, you are desecrating the very sacrity of the ritual itself. He believes that liturgy is a very specific idea, and that the sacred is a byproduct of ritual. Of course, I have a few problem with that as I believe that the sacred is part of ritual, and not necessarily a byproduct. By saying that, he is suggesting that ritual is not sacred within itself, but the liminality to it makes it sacred over time. For me, in order to make a ritual meaningful to people, it needs to be the sacred as well as limited. Even now I am upsetting Rappaport, as he believes that rituals cannot be questioned, and that is one of the facets that add to its sacred byproduct.
“The Meaninglessness of Ritual”
So, now ritual is meaningless. Staal suggests that ritual are done no longer for meaning, but just simply ‘because’. The study of rituals has become a joke, as the meaning of rituals has been lost. Ritual theorists ignore the most basic rules to ritual, due to human evolution, rituals have become obsolete. I have to disagree. Sure, rituals allow for community building and moral boosting, but they still have a place in society. We may not need to do a ritual to ensure a good harvest, due to the advances of technology, but we still need to go through the ritualistic ways of marriage. We loose some rituals over time, but others become more entangled within our popular society, and cannot be removed as easily as Saal suggests. I do agree however, that ritual is the basis for religion. I believe I had written something like that in a past blog, but it makes perfect sense. Without any community builders or sense of control over chaos, religion would be nothing more than a some ideas and philosophies. Overall, I’m torn over Saal. He has some good ideas, but a lot of conflicting ideas with other theorists.
“A Performative Approach to Ritual”
This just seemed to be the bridge between all things. It seemed like he never said anything of value. “The distinction between religion and non-religion and ritual and non-ritual is not absolute”. Yeah, I believe everyone knows that. If you could define it clearly that easily, there woudln’t be debates about religion and what it means. Ritual is community, and activities done by the community. End of story.
“Territorial Passage and the Classification of Rites”
This article was really interesting, and it would’ve been nice to been able to read the book. So, rites of passages are only parts of rituals, and are rather phases instead of a repeated event or activity. Everyday people goes through different phases, or different rites of passage, and we must fulfill a rite of passage in order to pass on to the next “room”, or rather, the next stage of life. This seemed like a great idea, but not fully realized. I can only assume that the book covered it more deeply, because this left me wanting to read more.
