Ritual (n.) is a group neurosis, but one that groups cannot do without. We could cure a group of its ritualizing merely by demythologizing its conviction that rituals stand for anything other than the projected group will.
Ritual (n.) is a means by which we express our social dependence. What is important in ritual is our common participation and emotional involvement, not the specific rationalizations by which we account for the rite.
Ritual (n.) is a sort of magical glue or lubricant contrast this with marx, for whom it can either bind people together or blind them to their own best interest.
Ritual (n.) is associated with the characteristics of a society dominated by mechanical solidarity.
Ritual (n.) is not necessarily religious or related to the worship of a God, rather it is the symbolic means by which people worship their own society.
Ritual (n.) is predominately functionalist in its social function, (whereas for victor turner its social function is essentially interactionalist).
Ritual (n.) is the mystical elation in which men acquire shared concepts and shared obligations.
Ritual (n.) is the category of religious behavior that delineates and demarcates sacred time, space, and feelings from non-sacred, that is, profane.
Ritual (n.) bonds the individual to society... at the same time, rituals serve to reinforce core social values, through the division or the world into the two basic categories of sacred and profane.
Ritual (n.) is the origin of man's capacity for thought and for man's sense of obligation, these dual capacities form together in the crucible of shared mystical experience induced by collective ritual.
Ritual (n.) is the original ground of violence that is subsequently encoded as 'sacrificial'.
Ritual (n.) is the switchpoint between external moral restrictions (and the groups of the social order) and the internal feelings of imaginative conceptions of the individual.
Ritual (n.) is virtually absent in modern societies tied together by organic solidarity.