kelley wrote:
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> ritual is bound up with language and is
There you go again. My point is that ritual _preceded_ language, probably by several hundred thousand years. It's that "bound up with language" that I balk at. It may be, but it need not be. Infants "interact socially" long before they achieve any language. And as adults we constantly find ourselves in the midst of actions/social relations _prior_ to their having any symbolic/conscious place in our thought.
I should add three other books to my quotation by citation.
Antonio Damasio, _Descartes Error_ Antonio Damasio, _The Feeling of What Happens_ Israel Rosenfield, _The Invention of Memory_
> integral to communicative interaction.
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> sociological definition of ritual, that is.
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> ritual, in sociology, is referred to as symbolic interaction.
Then sociologists skip a whole day of creation, as it were. Ritual and we precede (in principle and chronologically) symbol and I, in human and pre-human history and in the present.
Both in individual life and in the life of the species the hypothetical first thought has to be preceded by motion, by action, by social being.
Carrol
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> kelley