Monday Apr 22, 8 – 9:30 PM BJT

Venue: AB 1079

Speaker: Peter van der Veer

Director Emeritus, Max Planck Society

Professor Emeritus, Utrecht University

Abstract

The Buddha rejected sacrifice, the core ritual of the Brahmanism of his time. Luther rejected the foundational rituals of Catholicism. These are only two of the most important examples of how rituals have been rejected and redefined with great social-historical consequences. Weber’s arguments concerning the rationalization of religion, and the replacement of magical actions by moral values, similarly sought to show that the rejection and redefinition of religious ritual are embedded in disagreements about their efficaciousness. At the same time, Max Weber highlighted how such transformations in ritual in turn influenced economic logics (Wirtschaftsethik), as well as expanded the spaces in which we should seek to find ritual practice at play. Under his influence, and taking a broad comparative perspective, Karl Jaspers developed the world-historical concept of ‘Axial Age Breakthroughs’ (1949). Such breakthroughs are manifested in the concomitant phenomena of renunciation, salvation, and especially the existence of a transcendental moral order—phenomena that have been re-examined in Charles Taylor’s theory of secularization (2007). 

This paper focuses on debates regarding ritual, and disciplines of the self, and the moral, political and economic criteria through which their value and efficacy is negotiated and contested. Such debates are often characterized by the rejection of some kinds of ritual as useless and based on false consciousness, as well as by the foregrounding of other work and social activity as morally superior. Religious rituals inevitably offer up a space for debate and critique regarding efficacy and propriety, not only internally among practitioners, but also between different traditions. 

The paper seeks to account for the tensions of change in ritual, grounded in anti-ritualism, rejection and reform, and cultivation of self. In exploring the expansion and contraction of ritual spaces and by analysing the changing and contested moral orders and regimes of values inherent in these transitions, this paper seeks to elicit the tensions of change in ritual, anti-ritual, and in the efficacy of reform.

Bio

From 2009 until 2021, Dr. Peter van der Veer was the Director of the Department for the Study of Religious Diversity at Max Planck Institute. Dr. Van der Veer works on religion and nationalism in Asia and Europe.