chapter three → ritual firewalls
Ritual is best understood as an embodied interface for collective world-building. Everything we do can be (and quite possibly has been) performed in a ritualistic manner — yet, of course, not everything we do is a ritual. The distinction lies not in the action itself, but in the frame through which it is enacted and perceived. Most available research approaches this frame from a functional standpoint, focusing primarily on the roles rituals are supposed to serve — social, personal, or cultural.
The space of ritual tends to emerge when attention is heightened, repetition is charged with intention, and trivial actions acquire more weight than their immediate function suggests. What we call ritual, then, is less a fixed category and more a mode of being together — one often misunderstood or diluted by the symbolic systems used to study it. This chapter argues that much of ritual theory has failed to grasp this fluid, embodied dimension — and that, in our current landscape of digital exhaustion and communal fragmentation, ritual can (and should) be viewed as a counter-practice to capitalist alienation, not an exotic relic of the past.
Rituals On Demand
Rituals are trending — both in the art world and in pop culture. Take Marina Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic, for instance — ahead of its premiere in October 2025, she describes it as the most ambitious work of her career; a realization of a long-standing dream of going back to her cultural roots. The work is a reenactment of ancient Slavic fertility rites, a return to pre-Christian, pre-capitalist modalities of collective expression. She is not alone: from curated exhibitions centered on Islamic rituals to participatory installations like Lee Mingwei’s Rituals of Care, major institutions are embracing ritual as a frame for experience.
This trend is nothing new, of course — ritual has been central to many 20th-century avant-garde practices, from Dada and Fluxus to early feminist performance art, which took inspiration from ritual forms to resist rationalist, capitalist logics. Yet the surge of interest in the past 5–10 years feels different: it is more explicit, globalized, and thematically central than before. The ritual turn has very quickly reached the mainstream, but does not seem to be leaving the underground anytime soon — one of the rare cases of universal resonance across cultural strata.
So what exactly has changed in recent years? Obviously, quite a lot; but I would argue that there is a direct, traceable causation between the dynamics outlined in the previous chapters — the Western crisis of meaning and the parasitic haustorium of the modern internet — and this ritual resurgence. This crisis, and the post-pandemic digital fatigue that escalated it, have made not just artists but also audiences seek collective, embodied experiences as a natural response to existential dread, anxiety and grief. The increased commodification of cultural production makes us long for something shared, physical, and untouchable by platform logic.
Paradoxically, it is this very longing for meaning and connection that drove rituals’ viral ascend on platforms — from TikTok “cleansing” trends and full moon manifestations to the explosive popularity of astrology apps, breathwork influencers, and trauma-informed retreats, ritual is bleeding back into the mainstream under a thousand guises. These acts may seem minor or aestheticized, but beneath the wellness branding lies something deeper: a persistent desire for shared symbolic experience — something Western culture still craves far more than it supplies.
Survivorship Bias
Modern ritual comeback begs several questions — first of all, how much do we think we know about rituals, and how much of it is true? Through which frameworks have rituals been studied, and at what cost? Much of what we call “ritual theory” emerges not from the cultures being observed, but from the ones that documented them. The canon — Durkheim, van Gennep, Turner, Douglas, Smith — reflects a distinctly Eurocentric and functionalist worldview, shaped by the political conditions of its time: imperialism, Christian moral order and Enlightenment rationalism.
This matters because the very societies whose culture formed the basis of anthropological understanding of ritual were simultaneously being displaced, assimilated, or exterminated by the same forces funding and legitimizing that research. Anthropology often claimed to “preserve” indigenous knowledge, but preservation was never its primary concern. The researchers behind early ritual theory were more invested in systematizing what they encountered, focusing not on accuracy (or even less so, deep understanding), but on legibility and status within European intellectual frameworks. Even when their methods passed the ethical standards of the time (which they did not in many cases), they would be considered exploitative or extractive today.
While it may be reductive to dismiss all those early works as ill-intended and malicious, it is equally naïve to treat them as neutral or universally valid. It is important to recognize this epistemic paradox: the reason we continue to rely on these texts is not because they are inherently authoritative, but because the societies being studied were dismantled by the same colonial systems that produced the studies. There is no living counterpoint to compare the findings against; and the findings are considered canonical precisely because the cultures can no longer speak for themselves. This phenomenon might be described as epistemicide — a term coined by sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos to describe the killing of knowledge systems through colonial domination. When a culture is destroyed, its epistemology dies with it, leaving a ruin that is interpreted through foreign eyes and institutionalized as "truth". In this context, ritual theory becomes less a study of human universals, and more a study of how Western thought extracted symbolic capital from the collapse of other worlds.
Capitalism Arrives
If we were to rethink ritual theory, a good place to start would be its deeply ingrained functionalism. Most classic accounts treat ritual as a mechanism — a tool for achieving social cohesion, marking transitions, or reinforcing power structures. These accounts weren’t entirely inaccurate, but they treated ritual as a means to an end, flattening it into a utility that fits within capitalist and rationalist worldviews. The collectively embodied dimension of ritual is seen as an incidental side feature, not as part of its essence. This flattening of ritual into function mirrors capitalism’s general logic: valuing processes only by their outputs, and experience only by its utility.
This framing makes sense if we look before ritual theory was even conceived — at the dawn of the first Industrial Revolution (and with it, the modern capitalism), rituals increasingly came to be associated with the “dark ages”. They were framed as redundant artefacts of a superstitious past, and gradually displaced by individualist selfcare and entertainment practices. This shift, rooted in Enlightenment rationalism and industrial efficiency, has largely prevailed throughout modernity, and reached its peak during the early anthropological era.
Researchers of that time, such as Edward B. Tylor — whose Primitive Culture (1871) is still considered seminal to the discipline — interpreted myth and ritual as irrational attempts to explain or influence natural phenomena. His framework conformed to the dominant logic of the time: one that viewed history as linear, progress as Western, and anything outside industrial rationality as a primitive and obsolete stage of development. In his view, people of so-called “primitive cultures” used ritual and myth to make sense of the world — for no other reasons than the absence of scientific reasoning. Rituals, therefore, were not valued on their own terms, but seen merely as precursors to empirical science — symbolic means to achieve pragmatic outcomes like health, fertility, or rainfall. Tylor’s concept of “animism”, which he defined as the belief in spiritual beings, was framed as the earliest evolutionary stage of religion, placing non-Western cosmologies at the base of a unilinear ladder toward monotheism, science, and secularism.
This framing aligned perfectly with the logic of capitalist modernity. Capitalism, in its industrial phase, promoted a worldview in which value is measured exclusively by productivity, efficiency, and market worth. Within such a paradigm, rituals appear inefficient, irrational, and quite simply redundant — that is, unless they are reframed to serve market-friendly functions like wellness, identity formation, or brand loyalty. As Enlightenment ideals merged with capitalist modes of production, ritual was stripped of its ontological meaning and reimagined either as spectacle or therapeutic technique. Ironically, the current resurgence of rituals doesn’t appear to be driven by functionality — after all, there are more efficient and scientifically validated ways to achieve the outcomes that rituals symbolically aim for. What people seem to be seeking is not function, but meaning.
Beyond Function
To move beyond functionalist framings of ritual, what needs to be reframed is not only what rituals do, but also how exactly they construct meaning — i.e. not through outcomes, but through the specific forms they take. Rituals are not just social technologies — they are cosmological interfaces. In other words, asking “what function does this ritual serve?” presumes that rituals exist to solve something, which already limits the scope of their potential. Instead, a more generative question might be: “what mode of existence does this ritual bring into being?”
A relevant concept to revisit here would be Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics: he argues that every culture produces its own cosmology-technology relation — a unique synthesis of metaphysical assumptions and technical practices. Cosmotechnics, in this sense, refers to the ways in which a society's tools, gestures, and rituals are grounded in its specific cosmological worldview. The claim to universality of the “global tech”, largely adopted by Western societies, creates an illusion of neutrality and effectively masks other ways of world-making and organizing relationality. Hui calls out this false universality and describes a future reoriented through plural, culturally specific techno-cosmologies — each with their own tools, canons and vocabularies. Under this lens, rituals are not merely tools for regulating the social, but ontogenetic procedures: they sustain and instantiate worlds.
This ontogenetic view resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of structuralism and their emphasis on becoming. Rituals, in this sense, are not symbolic stand-ins for something else, but real-time zones of intensification — territorializations of affect and rhythm that cut across human and non-human forces. The “ritual” here is not a fixed choreography, but an emergent assemblage it actualizes: bodies, rhythms, sounds, smells, beliefs, memories. Rather than representing a stable cultural meaning, it produces temporary configurations of this meaning through collective embodied participation. It creates a field in which experience is not interpreted but generated, enabling participants to inhabit altered relations to time, space, and each other.
The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) picked up on a similar thread through a darker lens: reading rituals not as stabilizers of tradition but as sites of hyperstition: self-fulfilling mythotechnical entities that summon futures into being. For them, ritual is a machine for time travel, for hacking linearity. In the bleak reality of capitalist realism (a concept closely tied to CCRU’s orbit), this reactivation of ritual serves as a techne of time, not merely of meaning. It points to alternative trajectories of world-building — ones not determined by function or profit, but instead by mythic recursion and feedback loops.
Reclaiming ritual today needs to come not from a place of nostalgia but that of invention: it is less about a return to one’s “roots” and more about cultivation of new relational ecologies. In this context, ritual shifts from being a discipline to be studied into being a whole medium — a powerful vehicle for collective sense-making. Improvisational, highly context-dependent, open to mutation, uncannily familiar yet completely novel — and all of this has implications not only for how we study rituals, but for how we create them, particularly in contemporary cultural practices like festivals, street protests, flashmobs, and club events.
Emergent (Para)rituals
Not all rituals announce themselves as such. In many club cultures today — especially those shaped by postcolonial or diasporic experience — a new form of ritualistic action is emerging. It comes to be not through tradition, but through form, assembled into what we might call pararituals: collective practices that generate altered states, regulate emotion, and restore communal bonds, without relying on formalized structure or sacred doctrine. These are not institutional rituals, but embodied routines of survival, resilience, and joy. Often rooted in rhythm and dance music, these practices do not aim to function or symbolize, but rather to invoke and transform.
Pararituals differ fundamentally from traditional rituals by their emergent, context-driven nature. Traditional rituals rely heavily on established doctrines and formalised roles, whereas pararituals spontaneously arise from collective participation, often in response to conditions of marginalisation or restriction. Rather than marking stable transitions or reaffirming social order, they temporarily dissolve hierarchies and foster conditions of collective immediacy.
The prefix “para-" (from "beside" or "alongside" in Greek) signals both proximity and deviation — just as parasites exist beside their hosts, pararituals exist beside traditional rituals, drawing from their formal structures while remaining fundamentally separate. They occupy a liminal space between the sacred and the secular, between tradition and innovation. Where traditional rituals often serve to reinforce existing social structures, pararituals emerge precisely where those structures have failed or been forcibly dismantled. They arise in contexts of displacement, whether geographic, cultural, or economic — in diaspora communities, in spaces of marginalisation, in the aftermath of trauma.
This emergence is not accidental but adaptive. In situations where conventional forms of community-building have been disrupted — by colonisation, migration, urbanisation, or economic precarity — pararituals provide alternative mechanisms for collective meaning-making. They require no priesthood, no sacred texts, no institutional backing. Instead, they rely on what might be called "embodied knowledge" — ways of being together that are transmitted through participation rather than instruction.
The temporary nature of pararituals is crucial to their function. Unlike traditional rituals that often aim for timeless repetition of ancient forms, pararituals are deliberately ephemeral. They create intense moments of collective experience that dissolve back into everyday life, leaving participants transformed but not bound. This temporality allows them to respond quickly to changing conditions, to adapt to new contexts of oppression or possibility. They can emerge overnight in response to crisis, or evolve gradually as communities develop new needs and capacities.
Pararitual Geographies
What defines a pararitual is not its origin but its effect: the way it reshapes attention, time, and relation through repetition, intensity, and embodied participation. This becomes especially vivid in contexts where traditional ritual forms have been displaced or suppressed — where the club becomes not just a site of leisure, but a platform for reinvention. In much of the Global South, the pararitual emerges as a response to historical trauma, spatial segregation, and ongoing struggles for visibility and agency.
In Durban, the heavy, looping percussion of gqom transforms township events into charged zones of embodied trance. One could argue that the genre’s minimalism and tension mirror the pressures of daily life under economic precarity and spatial apartheid — a parallel not uncommon in dance music, be it techno echoing Detroit's post-industrial alienationor Chicago house channeling the liberatory desires of Black queer communities in the face of systemic marginalization. But as gqom is a newer occurrence, it has not yet been fully commodified — though the struggle is unfolding in real time, as global pop appropriations by artists like Beyoncé, will.i.am, and even Disney’s Lion King remake gesture toward its aesthetic while often stripping it of context. This tension — between grassroots sonic urgency and global market capture — reflects the broader dynamics pararituals face when they cross into platform economies. So far, the community has won — the rhythmic nature of gqom seems to have precisely the form that the industry struggles to commodify: one that relies on intuition, collective entrainment, and asymmetry.
In Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, baile funk takes on another form: an assertion of presence under criminalisation. The sound systems are mobile, the parties often unsanctioned, and the rhythms distinctively syncopated. The world knows baile funk as a distinct music genre, but in Brazil, the term refers not to the music itself but to the event — the baile — a street party deeply embedded in the social fabric of the favela. It is the spatial and social context in which the music unfolds: a collective gathering that reclaims public space through sound. The baile becomes a pararitual of defiance — it is not so much about myth or transcendence as it is about holding space, creating visibility, and asserting autonomy in a landscape that routinely denies all three. This kind of ritual emerges not from tradition, but from the need to be heard — loudly and urgently.
In these cases, the club event becomes a pararitual infrastructure: not a return to old forms, but the invention of new ones that carry out similar functions — regulating emotion, expressing identity, and reclaiming space. These practices are affectively charged, but not religious; they require not belief, but participation. And unlike functionalist interpretations of ritual, their power lies not in what they symbolise, but in what they enable: the regulation of emotion, the negotiation of collective identity, and the reoccupation of space under restrictive conditions. The club setting makes this possible through specific structural features — repetition, loudness, duration, anonymity — which lower social inhibition and allow for new forms of interaction. But as club culture appears to be in decline across many Western contexts — facing rising costs, gentrification, legal crackdowns, and shifting attention economies — it begs the question: is the club merely a site of entertainment or convenience, or does it hold a deeper, culturally specific function as a uniquely modern site of pararitual experience?
Chapter Conclusion
The contemporary resurgence of ritual practices represents an emergent cultural immune response to haustorial capture. Just as biological systems develop defences against parasitic extraction, human communities are unconsciously assembling practices that restore agency through embodied, collective experience. The concept of pararituals reveals how cultures adapt to digital extraction by creating new forms of meaning-making that cannot be easily commodified or captured by algorithmic systems.
While pararituals can temporarily restore agency and create spaces of collective meaning-making, they remain vulnerable to appropriation and commodification. An effective resistance requires not just cultural adaptation but structural intervention — the development of technological systems that operate according to different principles than extraction and accumulation. The question then becomes: how might we design digital and physical architectures that enhance rather than diminish cognitive sovereignty?
Understanding rituals as adaptive immune responses against cognitive extraction sets the stage for exploring precisely how such adaptations survive digital capitalism’s compulsion toward legibility and optimisation. The following chapter investigates the paradox of resistance through intentional opacity — exploring why the strongest forms of resilience lie in practices that defy full articulation.