Rituals

For this week’s readings, it’s been interesting to see how far some people will go in order to secure a “good day” or a “winning game”. The idea that people will go so far as to do the same thing at every game, makes you think that they live in a constant “Groundhog’s Day” where everything is the same and if there’s one slip up than the whole day will go down the drain. I know I’ve been faulted into doing the same thing because our culture works well with comfortable and will do anything the same again in order to reach that peak of ‘comfortableness’ if you will. As one article described, when people see how some of their reactions create a good outcome, they will continue to do that action until the outcome doesn’t turn out the way they wanted. I know as a performer, I have some rituals that I do in order to make me feel comfortable before I go out in front of an audience. I make sure not to wash my hands too close to performance time just because I feel like it washes off something that could help my performance. It sounds a little crazy now that I’m writing it out, but to me, it helps me get in the mind set of knowing that I have a performance to do and I need to do it well. From looking at things this week, I’ve realized that there are tons of rituals that go on everyday and most of them aren’t even accounted for. Sure Baseball is a great example of an American televised sport that has rituals left and right, but there are many other examples where rituals are used. This is where the idea of the rabbit’s foot and in the general, ‘lucky charm’ come into effect.

As Bradd Shore wrote in his article, “Rituals, on the other hand, bring the shared framework of forms and rules forward into consciousness… Often, however, a ritual is assumed to be more important than everyday behavior”, and that is definitely so. Rituals are more for the individual than they are for a group of people. Rituals are different for each person and everyone does theirs differently than everyone else. We now even have products called “Everyday Rituals” by Aveda that assure great hair every time you use them. Our culture is obsessed with rituals and the end products that result when they go well. The one thing I thought was funny though when reading about how baseball players will change their rituals when the last one doesn’t go so well was the fact that if one their ritual doesn’t work one time they will find a new one all of a sudden. In our culture, if things don’t go our way, we first blame something else for our misfortune and then after everything else has been crossed out, we blame ourselves. Rituals are a way of putting off the process of blaming ourselves in the end. Sure they may help us win a game, or perform well, but in the end we have to see that we must work hard at our paths in order to make the destination a little more worthwhile.