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With recent major publications like cognitive anthropologist Dmitri Xygalatas’ Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living (2022) and now, Harvard Business School professor and behavioral scientist Michael Norton’s The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions (2024), ritual is a topic of increasing scholarly attention as of late. In The Ritual Effect, Norton explores the particularities of what makes a ritual a ritual, as opposed to a habit or a compulsion, in pursuit of his primary focus: the effect of ritual itself. This is done in part through certain anecdotes, to help distinguish between Norton’s family’s gathering for Christmas, for instance, and his family gathering for Christmas with Johnny Mathis’ Merry Christmas playing, annually, on his father’s record player. The distinction is important here, as the difference between a habit, the “what”, and a ritual, the “how,” in its particular and ordered behaviors. A needle is deftly threaded through the observed behavioral twists and turns, consistently showing the human universality of the unique “how” of each ritual’s resulting effect.
Norton stresses that behaviors which have historically laid claim to the word “ritual,” like that of religious ceremony, are only one way in which ritualistic behavior can occur. Grocery shopping can be a habit in its obligatory routine, or it can be a coordinated, intentional behavior that constitutes a ritual with the unique way in which you order the occurrence. But grocery shopping, you might say, is not a behavior typically associated with the word “ritual.” Here another important distinction is made, between what Norton coins as “legacy rituals” vs. do-it-yourself or “DIY rituals.” Legacy rituals are the more well-known behaviors associated with established forces in culture over long periods of time, like Catholic mass or fasting during Ramadan, whereas DIY rituals are behaviors like what Norton describes organical