[As a brief preface, though this has almost nothing to do with what I'm about to write, I spent a good chunk of time yesterday afternoon trying to remember the name of the anthropologist that wrote about situational selection during British colonial rule in Rhodesia/Zululand. I still can't come up with it, and that drives me bananas. As I was telling my stupid/awesome favro yesterday, it's completely unacceptable to me that my degree cost about $120,000 and I can't even remember a name from a basic 200 level course IN MY MAJOR. I know my brain will eventually shit out the answer, but it's very frustrating to realize how quickly these things slip away, not to mention that I've thrown away all my course packets from college anthro courses, because, why would I ever need them?!]

I attended a wedding in my old superhero stomping grounds on Saturday. There’s nothing so much as a wedding that turns me introspective, which is very telling of my a) gender and b) proclivity to criticize others. This time, in addition to taking mental notes of what I would have at my own wedding (amazing dress and hair, many attractive guests, hummus at the reception) and what I would eschew (the color of the bridesmaids’ dresses, all the cheezy lite FM love songs, the bride crying at her own wedding), I thought a lot about the ritual involved in the wedding ceremony and how arbitrary and weird it is. This wedding was particularly steeped in tradition as the bride was Eastern Orthodox and the groom standard Midwestern Catholic. There were two priests present, and they performed elements from both religious traditions. In Romanian Orthodox, this includes an elaborate chant accompanying a “crossing” of the bride and groom with the wedding rings as well as a crowning ceremony where crowns are placed on the heads of the newlyweds and more chanting binds them together once more.

I started to think about ritual and what it comprises. There is an element of repetition, both in the short and long terms. In this crowning and crossing ceremony, both the rings and crowns were touched to the bride and groom three times, and then the two circled the altar three times. In the Catholic religious tradition, sinners are told to say prayers of repentance multiple times (e.g. “Do ten Hail Maries”) in order to obtain forgiveness/absolution of sin. In a long term sense, of course, these rituals maintain their staying power from being repeated over generations until their origins are shrouded in myth and doctrine. What is the point of these scales of repetition? There are, of course, ties to other traditional elements (e.g. the number 3 figures prominently in Western religion, signifying the elements of the Holy Trinity), but it seems to me it also provides a sense of comfort. If a ritual is performed more than once, it becomes “official,” or there is a greater sense of permanency, just as the more stitches you use to fasten a button to a shirt, the more tightly it will stay attached.

This reminds me of nothing so much as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, where the sufferer must perform specific actions in a specific order multiple times, in order to ease the anxiety caused by one [irrational] fear or another. Is all ritual–religious, social, political, or otherwise–brought about by some form of anxiety, or is organized ritual a fundamentally different entity than, say, tapping a glass on your teeth three times every time you take a drink of water, or washing your hands 22 times in half an hour? There’s certainly a lot of anxiety involved in religion, so I’ll use a different example: saying “God Bless You” when you sneeze. [N.B. I know that this phrase clearly has its roots in religion, but for social purposes it's crossed over into the secular realm; the phrase "Gesundheit" merely means "Good health."] People who have no particular religious affinities say “God Bless You” when someone sneezes, and in fact, for most people the phrase is essentially a reflex (like sneezing itself). I’ve heard of people actually getting angry when others don’t “bless them” after they sneeze; in other words, not to do so represents a violation of a ritualistic code. In the same way, compulsive handwashing, or foot-tapping, or any other such behavior, is performed instinctively and to omit such behavior causes an uncomfortable hiccup–or at least a very noticeable departure from the norm–in the course of a social/obsessive event.

And let me tell you, once you start viewing a wedding as nothing more than a series of obsessive-compulsive reactions… it’s a lot more fun.

Part two will be about performative speech acts… but that’s for another post.

-S.K.