Paper short abstract:

The notions of reflexivity and ritualisation provide the resources to construct a post-theoretical perspective that rejects the reifications intrinsic to scientism and grounds the study of human beings not in social, cultural or biological determinants, but in the faculty of reflexivity itself.

Paper long abstract:

This paper argues that the notion of reflexivity provides the resources to construct a post-theoretical perspective that rejects the reifications intrinsic to scientism and grounds the study of human beings not in social, cultural or biological determinants, but in the faculty of reflexivity itself. Specifically, in regard to the study of ritual, I will show how such an auto-critical perspective overcomes scientism (the ideological imposition of natural-scientific modes of knowledge and practice on all scholarly fields) because ritualization and scientific research differ not in kind but in degree, for both deploy the reflexive weaving of received behavior with innovation in recursive processes both to produce desired outcomes (felicitous ritual performances, successful experiments) and reproduce roles for ritual or scientific agents. The objectivity championed by scientism gives way to involvement, for instead of encoding ritual phenomena into a non-ritual metalanguage, there is the charged interface between different ritual systems and conflicting ritual expectations. This view of ritualization as a mode of reflexive practice thus breaks with scientism and all other ideologies that depend upon singular epistemological breaks to separate a given field or discourse from its religious, ritual, or ideological antecedents.

As a constituent aspect of the human species, reflexivity can not at all serve as the distinguishing feature of a discipline. What distinguishes reflexivity in the social sciences is the degree to which reflexivity moves from tacit to explicit knowledge, and the facility of this process depends greatly on scholarly acculturation. It is only by simultaneously employing scholarly, semiotic technologies and underscoring their limits that scholars will begin to account for the objectively determined social structures at the very heart of subjectivity, thereby making the social sciences truly critical, and not merely the losing competitors of the natural sciences.