Religious rituals and secular rituals: interpenetrating models of childbirth in a modern, Israeli context

Sociology of Religion, Spring, 1993 by Susan Starr Sered

Almost all anthropological writing about ritual has concerned ritual in the context of community -- ritual as social drama. Even studies of ritual in modern society have concentrated upon the role of ritual in turning disparate individuals into a community (Moore and Myerhoff, 1977). The sorts of practices that I consider in this essay to be rituals are practices that an ethnographer would probably never observe. For the most part, these practices are performed alone or with the assistance of one family member or ritual expert. In the absence of anthropological consensus about dealing with these kinds of practices, I treat them as rituals in the sense that they are symbolic actions whose results are not empirically evident to the woman performing them. I agree with historian of religion J.Z. Smith that "Ritual is, first and foremost, a mode of paying attention. It is a process for marking interest" (1987:102):

|R~itual represents the creation of a controlled environment where the variables |the accidents~ of ordinary life may be displaced precisely because they are felt to be so overwhelmingly present and powerful. Ritual relies for its power on the fact that it is concerned with quite ordinary activities placed with an extraordinary setting. (1987:109)

Both the religious and secular practices described by the women of the study can be considered rituals in Smith's sense.

Figure 1 provides a sample of religious childbirth rituals reported by the women whom I interviewed. These rituals are not required by Jewish law, although they do utilize Jewish symbols and concepts. I collected more than one hundred different religious rituals, and I suspect that further field work would have doubled or even tripled the length of the list.

Although studies similar to this one have not been carried out in other modern societies, I believe that the extent of ritual choice in Israel may be unusually large. Unlike in the United States, for example, the ethnic mixing in Israel is among people who feel themselves part of the same religious heritage. In addition, few women know which religious practices have the status of custom (optional) and which religious practices have the status of Jewish law (required). Women who selected rituals which originated in the cultural menu of a different ethnic group did not seem to feel that they were adopting foreign or heterodox rituals.

THE RITUAL MENU -- SECULAR RITUALS

The variety of secular rituals is almost as rich as the variety of religious rituals. In the following section I treat as secular rituals practices aimed at safeguarding the baby or birth, but which lack explicit Jewish content, and have not been specifically ordered by a doctor for the particular woman who carries out the practice. For the purpose of this article, secular rituals include both behaviors having conscious ritual intent and those believed by the woman to be medically proven.

The secular rituals actually reflect two rather different models: a self-help model highly developed in Lamaze-style childbirth preparation classes, and traditional secular folk wisdom concerning safe pregnancy and birth.