Although Bell is a fantastic writer, that does not mean that her book is easy to use. This maladroitness is the result of Bell’s insistence that she is not offering a new theory about ritual. Rather, Bell makes use of theory in order to criticize how others have theorized about ritual. However, the book is not an entirely negative enterprise. She also uses theory in order to forge a new framework for looking at the activities that we are used to conceptualizing as ritual.
Such a goal for a book might appear rather silly. Nonetheless, Bell has good reasons for framing her work in such a way. For example, one of the reasons that she does not want to offer a new theory of ritual is that she wishes to avoid the extensive, and in her mind unproductive, taxonomy that even the task of defining ritual involves. For in defining ritual, one has to demark how it is different from ceremony, liturgy, rite and a host of other activities. Bell does not want to go down that path because she spends a good deal of part one of her book demonstrating that while scholars can use such demarcations in order to make balanced structure, such structures rarely have much congruence with the world outside that piece of scholarship.
The other reason that Bell avoids pinning down ritual through a precise definition is that she is encouraging us to note and embrace the flexibility of ritual. For example, she notes that there are two strategies that ritual participants use to indicate that this ritual stands in contrast to rest of daily life, formalization and periodization. We can see such formalization and periodization in the Catholic Mass, which requires specific participants, specific instruments and a specific time. However, Bell is also quite aware that if we make formalization and periodization requirements of all things ritual, we miss the opportunity to define as ritual those actions that participants set up as deliberately informal and un-periodized. That is, if we would miss as ritual the masses that Christians conduct in their homes, possibly in protest to the over-formalization of mass.
Such concerns may appear to have nothing to do with ancient manumission. I think that they do. We have specific examples of Greek and Roman manumission because this practice was formalized. So for example, a number of Greeks wrote inscriptions asserting that that a slave had been manumitted on a particular day by a particular priest at a particular temple. However, the Greek and Roman comedians never present manumission in this way. Instead, in comedies manumission is simply a speech-act: once the slave-owner declares that the slave is free, the slave is free. As a contemporary readers, we could read these depictions in comedy as simplifications that do not have a direct relationship with how the Greeks and Romans practiced manumission. Or are the comedies evidence that the Greeks and Romans were manumitting their slaves in this way and that we simply do not have any records of it because such an informal method would not leave behind any record?
Such a goal for a book might appear rather silly. Nonetheless, Bell has good reasons for framing her work in such a way. For example, one of the reasons that she does not want to offer a new theory of ritual is that she wishes to avoid the extensive, and in her mind unproductive, taxonomy that even the task of defining ritual involves. For in defining ritual, one has to demark how it is different from ceremony, liturgy, rite and a host of other activities. Bell does not want to go down that path because she spends a good deal of part one of her book demonstrating that while scholars can use such demarcations in order to make balanced structure, such structures rarely have much congruence with the world outside that piece of scholarship.
The other reason that Bell avoids pinning down ritual through a precise definition is that she is encouraging us to note and embrace the flexibility of ritual. For example, she notes that there are two strategies that ritual participants use to indicate that this ritual stands in contrast to rest of daily life, formalization and periodization. We can see such formalization and periodization in the Catholic Mass, which requires specific participants, specific instruments and a specific time. However, Bell is also quite aware that if we make formalization and periodization requirements of all things ritual, we miss the opportunity to define as ritual those actions that participants set up as deliberately informal and un-periodized. That is, if we would miss as ritual the masses that Christians conduct in their homes, possibly in protest to the over-formalization of mass.
Such concerns may appear to have nothing to do with ancient manumission. I think that they do. We have specific examples of Greek and Roman manumission because this practice was formalized. So for example, a number of Greeks wrote inscriptions asserting that that a slave had been manumitted on a particular day by a particular priest at a particular temple. However, the Greek and Roman comedians never present manumission in this way. Instead, in comedies manumission is simply a speech-act: once the slave-owner declares that the slave is free, the slave is free. As a contemporary readers, we could read these depictions in comedy as simplifications that do not have a direct relationship with how the Greeks and Romans practiced manumission. Or are the comedies evidence that the Greeks and Romans were manumitting their slaves in this way and that we simply do not have any records of it because such an informal method would not leave behind any record?