Critics suggest that the ritual of the healing process has a strong placebo effect.
In fact, most of the exercises rely not on the final product you create but on the therapeutic, meditative ritual of the creative process.
And then, there's the most famous cannabis-loaded religion of all, Rastafarianism, where cannabis smoke is the primary ritual in the process of "healing the nations".
While the ritual of each process is great, the outcome will be no different than waiting on another year if there is no behavior change.
In this complex landscape, even mortuary rituals became part of the process by which elite families could jockey for position.
It is clear that Van Gennep was talking about a mixture of ritual structure and ritual purposes, and the "process pattern" in his text is not just a kind of abstract structure which we call today.
Human beings have developed all manner of rituals to ease the process of parting, from simple handshakes to elaborate funeral liturgies.
Through co-encounters within matrixial (Ettinger, 2005) and real religious/political borderspaces via art and ritual, the process of decolonizing the Divine (Fernandes, 2003) for each woman, and the group as a whole, proved possible when supported by a compassionate community.
When I floated this topic on the Consumed Facebook page and my Web site, Murketing, my correspondents reminisced about the cassette version of making and sharing as a "ritual"; the process "involved a level of engagement for both the maker and recipient" that can't be matched by more convenient computer-enabled methods.
And this is the state of America's racial awareness in the 21st century, as manifested in our quadrennial ritual of power transfer, the process that's supposed to make us the world's greatest democracy.
