Ritual, Media, and Conflict

Rituals can provoke, initiate, or escalate conflict. In Iraq suicide attacks, beheadings, and “surgical” bombings were both ritualized and mediatized as strategies for legitimizing violence. Smuggled video images of Saddam Hussein’s execution during the Muslim religious festival i?d al-fitòr, which marks the end of Ramadan, were experienced as a provocation. Simultaneously, ritually repetitive and symbolically saturated media presentations were construing the former ruler as a martyr.

Rituals can also mediate or resolve conflict. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995 – 2004) and Northern Ireland’s Healing through Remembering Consultation (2001 – present) employed ritual as a means for coping with the aftermath of violent conflict by attempting to foster reconciliation. To Reflect and Trust, a ritualized form of storytelling initiated by Don Baron in 1992 brought together children of Holocaust survivors with children of Holocaust perpetrators. Processes based on the Arab-Islamic practices of sulh (settlement) and musalaha (reconciliation) are emerging as well.

But anecdotal examples are insufficient. There is a pressing need for theories and methods capable of disclosing ritual’s ambiguous role in public life. Even though ritualization marks the human life cycle and suffuses religious practice, existing research pays scant attention to ritual’s capacity for mediating or provoking conflict. Although conflict is a normal—not necessarily pathological—aspect of human life, mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict, as well as shaping the ways groups use ritual in situations of conflict. Media representations have long been instrumental in establishing, maintaining, and challenging political and economic power, as well as in determining the nature of religious practice. More recently, online religion, accompanied by online interreligious conflict, has become a reality, so even practitioners of traditional rituals must now come to terms with the media-conditioned sensibilities of participants conscripted into the so-called war of images or converted to ritualized game-playing.

Ritual, Media, and Conflict is a project funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and the German Research Foundation. Grants from the two organizations facilitated two years of collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. The project is coordinated by Ronald L. Grimes (Canada, the Netherlands, U.S.A.); Ute Hüsken (Germany, Norway); Udo Simon (Germany); and Eric Venbrux (the Netherlands).

The project is now becoming a book written collectively for Oxford University Press  by twenty-four authors from several countries. The full list of authors is as follows:

Anna-Karina Hermkens
Barry Stephenson
Catrien Notermans
Eric Venbrux
Erik de Maaker
Fletcher Dubois
Gerard Wiegers
Ignace de Haes
Jan Snoek
Karen Polit
Kerstin Radde
Marga Altena
Marianne Riphagen
Nadja Miczek
Paul van der Velde
Robert Langer
Ronald L. Grimes
Simone Heidbrink
Tom Driver
Thomas Quartier
Thomas Widlok
Udo Simon
Ute Huesken
Werner Binder

We came together less on the basis of our knowledge of either media or conflict than on the basis of our interest in ritual. Although our fields and specializations vary, all of us study ritual of various types with multiple methods in geographically disparate places.

Each chapter, built on examples of ritualized, media-driven conflict around the globe, is multi-authored. Growing out of international and inter-university cooperation, this volume is not, we hope, a loose collection of conference papers. Rather, it is authored by teams that met face-to-face as well as online. Balancing specific cases with general comparative, methodological, theoretical, and practical concerns, the authors not only explore specific examples but craft approaches for studying them. We explore the dynamics of instigating, disseminating, and escalating conflicts by means of media-driven rituals and ritually driven media.

Most authors writing in this volume feel at home in their case studies, the thicket of on-the-ground historical or ethnographic details to which our research is tethered. The struggle was to discover or invent the connective tissue, the golden thread with which to stitch the patches into a quilt. We brainstormed questions worth entertaining and teased out theses worth arguing. What claims might we make? For instance, we could state what seems to be the obvious: Media document ritual. However, anyone who has ever pointed a camera at a ritual knows that cameras can also disrupt and, in the end, transform a ritual. Quickly, the simple claim becomes complex. Similarly, we might have argued, “Ritual resolves conflict,” but doing so instantly provokes the counterargument, “Ritual disguises conflict, thereby amplifying it.”

The task of formulating a clear question or substantive claim became even more daunting when all three concepts were mobilized simultaneously. Which of these claims, for instance, is cogent: “Because media thrive on conflict, they are undermined by ritual,” or “Ritual itself is a multimedium subject to all the manipulations and conflicts that characterize contemporary digital mass media.”

Ritual, of course, is not a thing. Since rituals are events rather than objects, we felt we gained precision by transposing nouns into verb-like constructions: “Ritualizing media dulls the critical acumen of viewers,” or alternatively, “Mediatizing ritual transforms it into a commodity, and commoditization inevitably generates conflict.” There are, of course, a myriad of other possibilities, including, “Mediatizing conflict spreads it,” and “Ritualizing conflict makes it intractable.”

All these examples are bald and unqualified, but we are not arguing their truth, only illustrating the range of claims that one might have advanced in handling such a complex topic. When scholars actually develop arguments, we typically introduce historical and geographical qualifiers: “Interpreted in accordance with so-and-so’s theory, the ritualizing of conflict A, in place B, at time C, rendered that conflict intractable.” Now, our bald questions have morphed into hyperqualified ones. In this form the question is no longer universal nor is it stated in the eternal now of the ethnographic present. Instead, it is restricted to a historical period and a geographically locatable place. At either extreme, we risk saying nothing, or at least nothing convincing or relevant. At the unqualified, universalistic end of the spectrum, we claim more than we can possibly demonstrate. At hyperqualified end, we risk merely stating the obvious.

After long discussions of our cases, the authors agreed that all chapters should wrestle at least one common question. At first, we formulated it this way: What is it about ritual that, when it is mediatized, makes it especially generative of conflict? Such a question would focus our inquiry squarely on ritual. But then, after noting that a perfectly plausible reply could be that there is nothing special about ritual, we edited it to read: Is there something about ritual that, when it is mediatized, is especially conducive of conflict? However, this version only required a yes or response, not an argument line. So we considered other iterations: When ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or by the ritualizing of media) how do the patterns of conflict change? Since we allowed authors to work with variants of the question, and even to take issue with its presuppositions, it became obvious that the question was more of a touchstone than a hypothesis, which is to say, our connection to the question is ritualistic rather than strictly logical. Authors were required to make a pilgrimage to it and to return; that is all. But upon returning, would the story be worth telling? That remains to be seen.