Rites

Rites are defined by function and the function is connection across distance, both spatial and temporal. Two mechanisms are named. As a capacitor a rite stores an excess of anima to be drawn on later, and as a repeater it brings forward a cluster of interactions from another spacetime, so a rite can either hold something or reach something. The power of rites, anima banks and euphoric objects to act as capacitors and link a vastly extended self through many spacetimes is what Marsh calls the true nature of culture, which makes rites the mechanism culture runs on rather than one of its contents. Her historical account follows. Culture was attached to heredity, and heirlooms and inherited property exist because of the anima considered to exist within them, so filial inheritance has no basis unless people are treated as extensions of the lives and selves of their ancestors. Refusal is visible in the same terms. Generations that will not maintain the family objects or continue the family business or name are refusing to extend the self, which is a structural description of something usually read as indifference. Her observation about religion is worth keeping, since she quotes the view that the quarrels and divisions about religion were unknown to the heathen because their religion consisted in rites and ceremonies rather than in constant belief, which fits her account exactly, as a practice that connects produces no doctrine to fight over.

Ritual studies is a substantial field, with Durkheim treating ritual as the generator of social solidarity, Turner analysing liminality and communitas and Rappaport arguing that ritual establishes convention and sanctity. Catherine Bell shifted the focus to ritualization as a strategic practice. Roy Rappaport and others treat the making present of a distant past as central rather than incidental, which is close to Marsh's repeater. Her contribution is the two-mechanism split, since separating storage from connection distinguishes rites that accumulate something from rites that reach for something, a distinction ritual theory generally leaves implicit.