Paper short abstract:

Is there a sacred ritual space in premodern Finnish healing practices for skin burns? The paper discusses rituals via the competence theory of rituals by T. E. Lawson and R. McCauley. The aim is to conceptualize the factors that make human cognition categorize a specific situation as a ritual.

Paper long abstract:

The paper presents a cognitive viewpoint to the concept of ritual space. What happens in the mind and cognition when people perform a ritual? Why do people experience a space of ritual as sacred even if the ritual is not performed in materially limited spaces of rituals and religions? This paper takes the viewpoint of competence theory of rituals (Lawson & McCauley 1990) while considering what happens in a human mind in a ritualistic event or situation. The theory presents ritual actions the way the human cognition discriminates them from other behavior, such as routines.

As an ethnographic example I use premodern Finnish healing practices for skin burns. In premodern time the vernacular view for the causes of wounds and burns were often seen as something that the origin has transmitted from itself to a human. This something could be conceptualized as an anomalous state, a disease, and it was called 'vihat' ('anger' in plural). The healing practice often headed to erase 'vihat' from the patient. The concept of wounding and healing was tightly linked to the spiritualistic world and worldview, for example by concluding different kinds of interactions (e.g. incantations) between the origin of the wound, the patient, and the healer.

The ethnographic example of this paper stands for healing rituals that are presented in everyday life and outside of material sacred places. Therefore the example is very suitable for presenting, how the ritual space is experienced in mind and which cognitive factors affect to that experience.