Ritual and Grief

Rick Muller sent me this piece, as I said. It's interesting that consumerism and grief are intertwined here: well it is Harvard Business School! But it's an interesting, speculative conjunction. The idea is that rituals enhance consumption and help to process grief: they do something a little bit contrary then (one is enhancing, the other palliative). And grief as we know is the inability to "swallow" something.

Rituals are an aesthetic attunement to a thing. As such they fall into the closure/death part of my OOO theory of causality. Grief and eating are two moments in a continuous process. Rituals open me up to eating and help to close me down to grief. Rituals ease my sincerity in that they lubricate my interaction with another entity.