Rituals and Experience

“Rituals thrive in the world of lived experience; they germinate in the loams of human foibles and a desire for survival and transcendence; they grow conjuncturally out of the cultural and political meditations that shape the countours of groups and institutions serving as agencies of socialization.” (38)

Peter McLaren has sought to define the most prominent point in which power structures, culture, and education merge as “ritual”. In his first chapter of the book he seeks to lie out the purpose of his study into ritual behavior in schools, while defining the parameters for his research within a uniquely interdisciplinary field of study. I am glad to have read this article, because I have been searching for a good site of interjection into power structures, culture, and education as McLaren has attempted to find. I found my answer last week when I reflected on the primacy of experience within education and culture as sites of power reproduction and shifting symbolic meanings. Because “experience” in cultural studies and critical pedagogy is going to be the foundation of my capstone, I was making connections during my readings between “experience” and “ritual” within the classroom and within other cultural sites. McLaren himself recognizes that rituals are embedded in shared experiences and the production of meaning and that we must also examines these experiences based on rituals in order to eventually “pattern and repattern cultural symbols and thus mollify some of the negative symptoms of modern technocracy” (7). One of the last of his motivating question even explicitly references experience when he says, “How do these same rituals influence or impact upon the intentionality and lived experience of students?” (6)

In thinking about experience, I feel like rituals are just one of the many ways that experiences create specific cultural meanings for reproducing systems of power and reinforcing symbolic codes, but I do not feel like it is the only way. In other words, a ritual is one kind of experience, but not the only kind that creates meaning for the lives of students. There are a few ways in which rituals can be defined more specifically from experience and I think that this difference allows flexibility if I am going to make experience the larger framework for my studies. Much of his definitions of rituals are what I would see as a cultural studies definition of “culture” and “experience” (pages 2-5), but he later delineates a greater difference between “experience” and “ritual”. One of these characteristics is that ritual has a mystificatory power, or it makes social life something that is “normal” or “natural” when it is actually still be socially constructed to perpetuate the status quo (27) Also that it has an embodied “rhythm” (31) in a “motional world”. The meanings created through rituals can sometimes be more explicit, but its reliance on symbols is a lot more overt than naming it simply as an experience. However, at this point my definitions of experience and rituals are still underdeveloped, and I do not have the nuances yet to clearly articulate how I believe ritual is just one smaller part of the variety of important experience that students learn from inside and outside the classroom.