The historico-philosophical basis of the social ontology of the ritual

The aim of this article is to analyse three philosophical traditions - structuralism, post-structuralism, and ordinary language philosophy, which make an important contribution to the creation of a renewed concept ''ritual'' in the aspect of social ontology. In this aspect the ritual is treated as a text or communication. From the point of view of structuralism representatives, the ritual is a structure, in which some code is enciphered. As a result, the main principle structuralism sees the ritual is the search for an analogous structure in all rituals. There is no diachronic analysis, only the synchronic one, studying the ritual without its historical context. Post-structuralism is the transformation of structuralism. As a result, understanding the ritual as a system with a structure makes relates structuralism and post-structuralism. But post-structuralism refuses from the absolutisation of the structural analysis as a method of cultural text interpretation. Post-structuralism, unlike structuralism, emphasises the non-rational and non-structural component of a cultural object. At last, post-structuralism refused from the idea of the search for a single core of a system. Its representatives concentrated on messages and ciphers, which are understood intuitively. From the point of view of post-structuralism representatives, the repeatability of the ritual ceased to be its main feature, and the synchronic analysis of various ritual actions was not the primary method for comprehension of the sense of ritual practice. Also, we can say about the impossibility to create a common classification for all rituals, because for post-structuralism the non-rational and marginal component became principal, but not the structural and rational component. From the point of view of ordinary language philosophy representatives, the ritual was studied as a multilevel text, which contains at least three levels - deep symbolical, social symbolical and expressive. This multilevel character allows to say that part of the information in the ritual is understood by intuition for the majority of people, and the other part of the information in the ritual serves as self-determination for ritual participants. As a result, the macro-textual space of the ritual is composed of the micro-textual levels. According to the results of the research, the author concluded that the hermeneutic problem is basic in the social ontology of the ritual. She also represented the hermeneutic concepts of the ritual by structuralism, post-structuralism, and ordinary language philosophy.

Keywords

Authors

References