What Makes Ritual Different?

Note: This was the original post written on 2/16.

Driver:
"Ritual's Two Siblings"
"Order"
"Community"

As Driver’s arguments for the importance of ritual and ritual change become clearer to me, I wonder more and more about the need for his arguments and the truth in his separation of ritual from all other human action. In the last few readings, Driver speaks of ritual as it relates to the confessional and ethical modes of performance, order, and community. Confessional performance, he writes, occurs when a person both develops and demonstrates his or her beliefs. Ethical performance occurs when a person uses their beliefs towards the greater good, inherently confessing at the same time. But how do we distinguish ethical and confessional performance from every day life? When I get dressed in the morning, I am confessing to the world what I think is appropriate to wear. Every conversation that I have during the day both demonstrates my beliefs and contributes to others’, ultimately affecting the greater good. Driver also mentions the order and community so important to ritual. When I sit down to eat around three meals a day every day, I know that millions of people share the same structural regimen as I do, and thus, does this make my meals rituals? Driver describes liminality, the absence of normal social structure, as a defining aspect of ritual, but everything that I do during the day is a little different than what someone else would consider a social norm. Even if we refuse to consider brushing and flossing every day a ritual, we could consider attending a specific class twice a week as ritual, speaking about subjects that the majority of society would consider quite bizarre. Hence, while I believe that Driver writes a wealth of interesting material about society in general, I want to know more about what he considers ritual as compared to any other frequent human practice.