Rare, intense ritual produces vivid personal memory and tightly bonded small groups; frequent, routine ritual produces standardised doctrine and large anonymous communities.
Whitehouse's theory ties ritual frequency to memory type and thence to social scale. High-arousal, infrequent rites are remembered episodically and bind those who went through them together; low-arousal, frequent rites build semantic memory, permit orthodoxy and scale to strangers. The prediction is that a tradition cannot have both at once in the same place.
In practice
- An organisation with an annual ordeal of an offsite has intense cohorts and no shared doctrine.
- A company with a weekly all-hands has a common vocabulary and no particular loyalty between colleagues.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation ties ritual frequency to memory: rare and intense rites are remembered episodically and bind those who went through them, while frequent routine rites produce semantic memory, standardised doctrine and larger anonymous communities.
- In its favour
- The theory makes explicit predictions, which is unusual in the anthropology of religion, and several of them have been tested with historical and experimental data.
- Against it
- The two-mode structure has been criticised as too clean for the ethnographic record, many traditions mix both, and the causal direction between ritual form and social scale is hard to establish.
- Standing
- A theory with explicit predictions and mixed empirical support; the two-mode structure has been criticised as too clean for the ethnographic record.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change