Introductory note on play and ritual: Rhythm, pulsation, and fractal dynamics

Although we intuitively ‘know’ that play and ritual sometimes constitute one another—and that the boundary between them is so thin that at times it simply evaporates—we, nonetheless, continue to attribute the kinds of transformations that rituals enable mainly to the domain of the sacred and the kinds of transformations enacted through play to the mundane (to paraphrase Durkheim’s now obsolete term ‘profane’). In that sense, we artificially distinguish between social triviality and phenomenality as two predetermined modes of action and perception. The fact is, however, that our research interlocutors, the subjects of our ethnographic analyses, often do not distinguish at all between play and ritual. This is especially prominent in events that seem to blend elements of both these cultural scenarios in a single frame of reference. How should we approach analytically the double-bind inherent in this form of social practice, which can be described, somewhat mischievously, as both ‘ritualized play’ and a ‘playful ritual’?