The ritual as the way of the conveyance of the value-sense world of social memory

The paper deals with the importance of the ritual in the conveyance of the value-sense world of social memory. The ritual is one offirst forms representing the content of value- sense world of social memory. J. Assmann studied ancient cultures of Israel and Egypt. Heconsidered the importance of a ritual and its role in the concept and rendering of value-meaning world of social memory. Cultural memorywas the only way to preserve the group identity, as the absence of a widespread written language did not contribute to the preservation ofknowledge and understanding of the past. Therefore, social groups could neither save nor convey any information about them to futuregenerations if there had not been written description of everyday life situations. The advantage of J. Assmann concept of the ritual is that it isa careful, well-proved classification of the ritual (both in the form and content) as a way to preserve cultural memory of preliterate periods. J.Assman identifies tow main "foreseen, noticeable" functions, reflecting peculiarity of the ritual, it legal and formal ones. Br. Malinowski is,to some extent, of the same opinion, when studying ancient cultures. But his conclusions have been proved by other grounds. Principles ofthe B. Malinowski theory are based on: 1) a detailed empirical study of a small community made by one ethnographer 2) a constant anddirect contact with the members of this community 3) consistent implementation of the thesis that all phenomena of this culture areconsidered to be direct basic human needs. Thus, the results of the field research prove that the tradition which could teach only to act inaccordance with "analogy" and pattern can be placed in the foreground, as if tradition is a "horizontal" layer implementation of continuity,reflected in the memory. The ritual, using mach deeper memory layers, was an action activity which could be understood only in the contextof the preceding events. Therefore, the ritual could absorb a "vertical" layer of society memory. A scientific position, which considers theritual as a sophisticated form of a symbolic action having its own semantics, which can detect the content of what is happening and conveyits sense to next generation, is represented in Y. Lotman works. He analyzed the ritual as a special form of memory that stores informationabout the procedure, rather than the extraordinary events. Existence sense has its equivalents in the ritual. It is the ritual content, having realexistence sense that can be introduced into hypothetical modality of social memory. Theoretical approaches analysis of the ritual as the wayto preserve and pass on social memory has allowed us to conclude 1) that the ritual being fixed in social memory is in its content entity event2) as an active action, the ritual is carried into a hypothetical modality, thus gaining the sublimated identification.

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