ritual
the power of rituals
Sarah Drinkwater and
ritual
In France, food norms are powerful and cohesive forces, while in the US food is simply a whirlwind of chaos.
Jasmine Bina • A Time to Build Tight Brands in the Chaos of Loose Cultures
Ritual is essential because it is truly the pattern that connects. It provides communication at all levels – communication among all the systems within the individual human organism; between people within groups; between one group and another in a city and throughout all these levels between the human and the non-human in the natural environment.
Dolores LaChapelle • Ritual is Essential
The largest companies today are obsessed with generating content in a completely de-ritualized context. But content always exists in tension with form. Ritual is the form we have abandoned in our relentless quest for content.
Ted Gioia • 13 Observations on Ritual
addictive scrolling and swiping can never achieve the sense of closure and boundedness we all crave.
In an overly digitized world, people embrace with intensity the few remaining ritualistic activities available to them. Halloween gets turned into something extravagant—not just for children anymore, but adults too. The same is true of Valentine’s Day or Mardi Gras and other ritualized occasions. They are pushed to extremes because people have so... See more
Ted Gioia • 13 Observations on Ritual
Ritualization is a potent stabilizing agent, a simple salve for a stressful time if only we are mindful of how we use its powers.
The Hidden Powers of Everyday Ritual
Patterns of Transformation: Designing Sex, Death, and Survival in the 21st Century
patternsoftransformation.com
The magic circle, a term I have borrowed directly from game studies, is the invisible perimeter between everyday life and an experience where different rules of engagement are at play. (Anthropologists call it the “ritual frame” and contemporary mystical practices call it the “container”.) The magic circle describes the limits of both the formal rules of an experience, and the informal norms that an experience allows for. It can literally feel like magic to be inside one thanks to the seemingly inexplicable shift in logic for how things happen and what is meaningful.