The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities.
This is why anthropologists often have such trouble defining what a ‘ritual’ even is. If you start from the solemn ones, ritual is a matter of etiquette, propriety: High Church ritual, for example, is really just a very elaborate version of table manners. Some have gone so far as to argue that what we call ‘social structure’ only really exists during rituals: think here of families that only exist as a physical group during marriages and funerals, during which times questions of rank and priority have to be worked out by who sits at which table, who speaks first, who gets the topmost cut of the hump of a sacrificed water buffalo, or the first slice of wedding cake. But sometimes festivals are moments where entirely different social structures take over, such as the ‘youth abbeys’ that seem to have existed across medieval Europe, with their Boy Bishops, May Queens, Lords of Misrule, Abbots of Unreason and Princes of Sots, who during the Christmas, Mayday or carnival season temporarily took over many of the functions of government and enacted a bawdy parody of government’s everyday forms. So there’s another school of thought which says that rituals are really exactly the opposite. The really powerful ritual moments are those of collective chaos, effervescence, liminality or creative play, out of which new social forms can come into the world.54
