Science provides a fairly successful way of “listening” to ecosystems. After all, most creatures in the diminishing wilderness, just like a sad pet or an abused child, don’t really know that something is not right — they just grow up accepting it as normal. They can’t, or they won’t dare,Continue Reading
Ritual allows us to express subjunctive, would-be, could-be states of mind. Through ritualing we make the unknown known. In today’s world, this is often the realm of the scientist, or the artist, although the virtual universe is filled with true, lifestyle-changing individuals. (And there are charlatans, too, but they areContinue Reading
Science — more properly, scientific method — is a ritual; just like magic and religion, its “central aim,” as Susanne K. Langer writes, “is to symbolize a Presence, to aid in the formulation of a religious universe.” It is, simply and fundamentally, an attempt to express the unknown. The ability of scienceContinue Reading
If a ritual helps to solve a problem — if it is good — it gets repeated and another seemingly irrational tradition is born. But is a ritual merely an attempt to control some crisis? Or, rather, is it an expression of something much more meaningful? When asked by theContinue Reading
Victor Turner, a seminal theorist on the nature of ritual, described what he called the liminality of the performance. During the liminality of the performance, participants in a ritual are momentarily freed from the bonds of their socially constructed world. Liminality dissolves the cognitive structures determined by the traditions of theContinue Reading