Meaning and Embodiment in Ritual Practice

The article explores the interaction of verbal and nonverbal semantic levels in the performance of Christian ritual. The article maps the distinction between theoretical and performative knowledge onto Barnard and Teasdale's Interacting Cognitive Systems model to give a (partial) account of how...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Wiseman, Harris (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Open Library of Humanities$s2024- 2022
In: Zygon
Year: 2022, Volume: 57, Issue: 3, Pages: 772-796
Further subjects:B 4E
B interacting cognitive subsystems (ICS)
B embodied spirituality
B Attention
B Ritual
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Summary:The article explores the interaction of verbal and nonverbal semantic levels in the performance of Christian ritual. The article maps the distinction between theoretical and performative knowledge onto Barnard and Teasdale's Interacting Cognitive Systems model to give a (partial) account of how meaning emerges in ritual participation. With Christian ritual, both know-how and know-that are needed. Above all, it is their interaction that generate the richness of meaning in ritual performance. Three core claims are made. First, many contemporary concepts of ritual have at least one flaw in that they do not grasp the relationality between verbal and nonverbal, wherein both dimensions have a semantic integrity of their own. Second, there is an ideological valuation of the semantic levels. The experiential level is not only meaningful in its own right, but the fundamental ground of spiritual knowing. Third, combining learning styles and kinds of attention can be valuable for eliciting the full semantic richness of ritual participation.
ISSN:1467-9744
Contains:Enthalten in: Zygon
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1111/zygo.12805