Music & Peacebuilding
Music & Peacebuilding
The Embodied Poetry of Ritual and Symbol in Transformative Space
This final episode of season 1 explores ritual, symbol, and peace building with Dr. Lisa Shirch. Dr. Shirch is senior research fellow for the Toda Peace Institute, Senior Fellow with the Alliance for Peacebuilding, and Visiting Scholar at George Mason University’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. We explore the “rationality” of ritual, the power of symbol and transformative space, and the dark side of ritual when it is used for xenophobia and hate.
The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.
There there's always one identity or more that we share. So it's a matter of creating a ritual space where people can find those other identities. And I think the ritual lubricates, or it makes it easier for someone to shift the identity that they are speaking from so that people start talking to each other as two mothers, rather than Muslim Christian, Muslim, Jewish, whatever
Speaker 2:You were listening to the music and peacebuilding podcast, a professional development network at music, peace, building.com, exploring intersections of peacebuilding sacredness, community creativity and imagination through research and story. Dr. Lisa shirk is senior research fellow for the tota peace Institute where she directs the Institute, social media technology, and peace building program to study the impact of social media on conflict dynamics and to encourage civil society movements, to use peace building skills, to address disinformation hate speech and digital harassment. Shirk is also a senior fellow with the Alliance for peace-building and visiting scholar at George Mason university's school for conflict analysis and resolution. She taught in the graduate conflict transformation program at Eastern Mennonite university for 23 years. Dr. Shirck has authored over 40 articles and numerous books and book chapters. Her books include the little book of strategic peace building, conflict assessment and peace building planning and the ecology of violent extremism in this final podcast of season one, we explore one of sharks earlier books titled ritual and symbol, and peacebuilding. So you have a long history of writing and the thinking and the peace building field. Uh, and I'm interested about how you decided to move into thinking about ritual.
Speaker 1:Yes. Great question. So when I was in graduate school, um, I had just finished a two year term of voluntary service with Mennonite central committee, which is a relief and development organization in Canada, working with indigenous groups on land rights and in indigenous human rights. And so I went into the graduate program coming from a culture, working with people who have a lot of ritual and a lot of a symbol in the way they do their work, um, and their community life. And so what I, what really struck me in graduate school that so much of the field of conflict resolution and peace building was so, um, front frontal cortex oriented, sort of this, um, rational, you know, verbal communication techniques, which I think are really important. I, I don't undervalue that part, but I felt like all the books I was reading really were ignoring all of the symbolic and ritual aspects of peacebuilding that I had just lived through for two years of living and working with first nations, indigenous people in Canada. So then about two years into my graduate degree, I, I did this summer, um, internship, you could say with the Institute for multi-track diplomacy, which they were doing a peace building work between Greek and Turkish. Cypriots on the islands of Cyprus and the leader, the facilitator of that work, uh, Louise diamond incorporated a lot of ritual into her peace building work. So she was a Jewish peace builder. And even though nobody in Cyprus is really Jewish, they're from different cultural backgrounds. She wanted to share her culture by inviting the Greeks and Turkish Cypriots to a Seder, a Passover dinner, um, that the Seders service has a lot of symbol and ritual. Um, and so I just really observed that Louise diamond had this way of both teaching the negotiation skills that are more of the Harvard model of, of win-win negotiating, you know, communication based interest based community, uh, negotiation, but then like weaving through these moments where people were dancing together, singing together, telling stories together, sharing about their families and eating together. And it was these, these moments that were really the most transformative for the group. And so I sort of felt like there was this sort of missing dimension that the field of peacebuilding that would examine ritual and symbol and you know, how emotions are really critical part of how people think. Um, and so if we're, if we're trying to remove emotions or manage them in a, an a sort of Western conflict resolution technique where, you know, uh, we, we kind of think of emotions as useless or something to be managed rather than a source of change for people
Speaker 2:Dr. Shirck speaks about the Eurocentric bias to believe that ritual is less rational and therefore less important than rational thought. She writes ritual actions are not to be dichotomized with thought. Ritual is simply a different form of thought of communication using the example of her education and first nations, smudging ceremonies, shirk speaks of how communities move intentions deeper in areas of kindness through ritual. Can you talk about maybe our bias toward, or maybe our bias against thinking of ritual as a rational way of being
Speaker 1:The Western mind? Western philosophers have, um, overemphasized, the frontal cortex and rationality in the way we think people change their minds or what guides people's behavior. And so there is a presumption that people think their way through problems and then choose to act in a certain way. And I think the reality that is now being realized through neuroscience is that people actually act their way into being that it is the emotional brainstem core that really controls more of our behavior. And if we can create new neural pathways, which, you know, sort of actually entering the change process of behavioral change through the way we act, we can eventually change the way we think, but like, it, it, we don't actually usually change our mind before we change our behavior. It's usually a behavioral change that happens first. And so this idea of ritual as we act our way into being, you know, from the first nations communities that I was working with, I tell a story in my book about the smudging ceremony, where before every community meeting there was this ritual and most of the time the elders would lead it without explaining what it meant. So part of my dissertation research was interviewing them to understand what this ritual meant, but the idea was that they would light this, uh, put on fire this bowl of herbs with Cedar, Sage, other herbs, and it would start to smoke and people would take that smoke in their hands and they would pull it over their eyes to see only good intentions and what people were doing and saying at the meeting. And they would pull the smoke to their ears, like to wash their years out so that they would hear only good intentions of what other people were saying. And then they would pull the smoke from the bowl to their mouth so that they would speak clearly and in a way that exhibited care towards others and they would pull it over their head and to their hearts so that their intentions of their mind and their heart would also be pure. And so this ritual would begin every meeting. And I think the Western mind thinks, well, well, why couldn't you just write down those rules and pass them out? Or why wouldn't, why do they need to be re why does the ritual need to be done in front of every meeting? You know, like if it's just a rational thought that we should be kind to each other, then, you know, we would think our way into being kind to each other, but the ritual minds, it is the opposite that we must do. The actions must, our physical bodies have to breathe in that smoke. And we have to go through the actions of washing out our mouth and our ears and our eyes, because from that action, that symbolic actions, then we actually have a better chance of behaving in the meeting the way we really want to behave.
Speaker 3:So in your book, just so we define it for our audience about what ritual actually is. You define ritual as a unique social space embodied being, and then a process of either reinforcement, formation or transformation. Can you talk a little bit about like what makes ritual ritual?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so there's what we call spatial markers in a ritual. So in the smudging ceremony that I just described the smoke and the burning herbs creates a visual and a smell. So you see the smoke and you smell the smoke. And so it creates a space that is set apart from the rest of life when there is no smoke. So there's this idea that you're using the senses of sight, smell, taste, sound, et cetera. So, um, you know, in Buddhist meditation, there's the ringing of the bell that creates the space of now, this is a meditation ritual. There's sort of, um, you know, in the, in the Jewish Seder that I was discussing earlier, the idea of, um, you know, drinking the wine at certain parts of the ceremony. And it's that taste that is setting the space apart, or it's the prayer that is repeated, that is setting the space apart. So that there's all these sort of symbolic sensual ways that ritual space is different from regular life. And so this is a different use of ritual than the word habit like. So a habit is not the kind of ritual I'm talking about. The kind of ritual I'm talking about is something that the second part of the definition it's either forming or transforming our worldview. So it's influencing the way we think either by trying to remind us of core values and ethics of what it means to be a human being or by changing the way we believe so that we act differently. You know, and I think the ritual of smudging and bringing the smoke to our eyes and our ears is a, is a forming and a transforming it's. It's T it's teaching kids about this intentional way of life, where we see good intentions and other people. Um, but it's also like transforming us every day as we go through the day and maybe we're unkind or we're angry, or we're not thinking nice thoughts about people. It transforms us to a place where we can live out those ethics. And we can remind ourselves that we want to behave in a different way.
Speaker 3:Lisa shirk writes symbols, condense information about the world into a single unified form. The American flag is a symbol to people around the world for the government and goals of the United States. Yet the symbol can be interpreted in different ways as a symbol of either freedom or tyranny, depending upon the worldview of the observer. Symbols are ambiguous precisely because they allow for multiple interpretations. If we move to talking about symbols and why symbols matter. So this is where we start connecting with Susan longer. And her idea of maybe symbols as a way of knowing, can we talk about how symbols seemed to condense information and that they also seem to have power because they're ambiguous?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think even speaking more widely, you know, most people can think of a rainbow butterfly as a fairly simplistic symbol of hope or beauty, but these are really deep cultural symbols of, of transformation as well. When the rainbow comes out, it's a transition between the sunlight and the rain. And the butterfly is a, is an example of a Ridge of a symbol that is about transformation because this, this creature that's now with wings used to be a cat or pillar. Um, and I think that those are very simplistic symbols it's that people can recognize that are used in them popular culture, but it's, it's almost easier to talk about symbols like that are so rich that you don't even actually recognize how and these things, they communicate in the world of communication studies and the stuff metaphors and the way people frame. Yeah. Ideas. So, you know, in the spring, when it's time to do our taxes, well, what are taxes assemble of to us? And, um, and how, how has the communication that we use to communicate about our taxes? You know, how does that shape our behavior and our politics? We've got beliefs. And so there've been studies about this sort of thinking of taxes as a burden that need to be relief relieved. So we talk about tax relief and that's a whole symbol symbolic frame that makes taxes seem like a plague, something that that needs to be gotten rid of or reduced. Whereas the more democratic and action say more European way of thinking of taxes as a public investment, as something we do with joy, because we want to live in a system.[inaudible] where we have, I have good roads, we have good education. I have great health care. It's the same really positive view of taxes as something we do, because we want to live in a beautiful community where everybody has enough and where things are taken care of in the public sphere. These are two symbolic frames on the same word or the same idea. I think it just shows you actually how powerful symbols are and how loaded with multiple meanings are and how important it is for us to unpack our assumptions of symbolic connotations, different people. And again, if we want to try transform the way people think and act, we have to be thinking in the field of peacebuilding about this symbolic level, right. Of meaning. And it's under, yeah, it's, it's the unstated assumptions and connotations that people associate with controversy, political issues like immigration. So is immigration about people bringing diseases and illegal acts and, um, crime and death, um, or is immigration about human rights and, um, fleeing from terror and poverty or bringing new skills and a new workforce and more diversity to our society, which improves us and helps us all grow. I mean, there's symbolic frames of immigration and taxes are just two examples of just how symbol like framing is so important to how people think and act.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think one of my favorite things to do with students when I'm first introducing them to the field of semiotics is to start off by showing them political advertisements because political advertisements have a minute and a half to two minutes to get their message across. And they've figured out that you can say sometimes a whole lot more assembles than you can with words. And I love to take students back to Ronald Reagan's advertisement of it's morning in America again, and, you know, to see the symbolism of the sunrise and the person getting married and the person raising a flag, and you can layer so much meaning in those spaces.
Speaker 1:Right? And, and this is again where I come back to the neuroscience because our brains are really highly developed in terms of understanding symbols and coding things with image and smell and sound. So there's a lot more going on in our brains than just the words that we say, or, you know, just sort of the simplistic, superficial, rational part. I think of what we think is going on. And so, you know, in watching a movie, you can train yourself to start hearing the musical tones that are changing and how that music makes you feel different or how the shades of the lighting in the movie is signaling something to your brain that your brain picks up on way before you've actually realized, Oh, I think there's something scary coming up. Or, Oh, this is going to be a beautiful scene because the sun is coming up and the music's relaxing, or, you know, there's sort of, um, I think most artists filmmakers, they, they understand that these sensual and symbolic ways of communicating are really very powerful
Speaker 2:Music, education philosopher, June Boyce Tillman has written about the power of a liminal space as a space of dreaming and imagining where realities can be reformed through artistic processes. Using the example of the liminal space of the wood in Shakespeare's Midsummer night's dream, she writes in the wood, the humans lose their power to a band of fairies. And so their responsibility is temporarily removed and they are in the power of something beyond the patriarchy of the prevailing culture. They enter the realm of their own vulnerability and they enter it together, magical thinking answers, a deep human need. It is a way of making sense of things that would otherwise seem painfully arbitrary. Things like love and beauty artists understand the power of the arts has liminal space, where we lose ourselves in the granddaughter of the moment moments where melodic dissent might become grief, an interval, a triumph or harmonic resolution has profound moments of B. So let's transition to liminal spaces. You cite Victor Turner's work. And I love, I love his work on community service and these ideas of liminal spaces. And, and you talk about how liminal spaces create a feeling of equality. They can invert hierarchy, they can frame intentional relationship. Uh, they can open channels for feedback and they can shape new actions. So talk about this place in limbo and like, why are liminal spaces important?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think, um, I think particularly for conflict. So if I'm thinking about designing a peace building process for a group, a country, even you, you want to introduce these, I decide this kind of a liminal space because people are usually frozen, I think in conflict, our ability to think creatively and to dream and imagine something different than what we are currently in becomes very limited. And it's interesting right now with climate change, uh, I see people struggling to create a liminal space where we can imagine surviving on the planets and the liminal space is, um, happening. I think on the edges as cities decide that they want to do something different than the nation that they are living in. So they are, um, they're just opening up a much broader array of creative solutions and having brainstorming sessions and turning things upside down, which is what the liminal space does when, when you reject all the frozen assumptions of how the world should act and what it should be like, and you almost start from scratch or you turn it upside down and you reverse things. And, um, you know, the, the communities that are inviting the corporations to come and be the audience, listening to the indigenous leaders and the community leaders talk about what they want for the future of their, of their community. You know, sort of just flipping upside down, who has the power, who has the ability to shape the future? I would say in Afghanistan, when I was working on the peace process, everything is so gendered and so divided by male spaces and female spaces. And occasionally there would be this opportunity for men and women to sit together and dream about what Afghanistan looks like in 20 years, that felt like a liminal space where it was a room, maybe in a hotel conference room. It wasn't a beautiful ritual space, but it was so different from the outside world that the rules of what was okay to say and what was okay to do, we're different there. And so anytime you can create a space outside of a frozen, stuck conflict and rewrite the rules, that's going to be helpful to finding creative solutions to
Speaker 2:Shirk spoke of the power of liminal space in lubricating, our identities, finding common identities and spaces where we can reimagine ourselves, our relationships and our context differently, you know, the way
Speaker 1:Tend to become very fixated in who we are depending on the conflict. So I spent, uh, four months in Israel, Palestine a couple of years ago where obviously the Jewish Palestinian identities are very, very strong, but, you know, I went to an environmental conference where Palestinian Israeli, Jordanian environmentalists were meeting together about a shared problem, which was pollution in the, in the rivers and the water in the air. And yeah, their identity was really shifted in that conference space where they were, they were scientists, they were environmental activists. They were community workers concerned about a different problem other than being Jewish or Palestinian or Israeli Palestinian, the liminal space. So the ritual space of something set apart can make it easier to see other identities that we each hold because each one of us belongs to many different groups from our education level, our profession, our language, our region, our gender. Um, and so we can really always find something in common with another person, even though there may be a huge political conflict between my people and your people. There there's always one identity or more that we share. So it's a matter of creating a ritual space where people can find those other identities. And yeah, I think the ritual lubricates or makes it easier for someone to shift the identity that they are speaking from so that people start talking to each other as two mothers, rather than Muslim Christian, Muslim Jewish.
Speaker 3:And in your book, the only example that we haven't talked about yet is when you talk about women's groups and creating patriarchy free zones and the use of like a candle to create sacred space for women that feels empowering and freeing at the same time, could you speak to what that example does for identity in a different way?
Speaker 1:So the example that I wrote about in my book was actually the one that moves me the most is how women's groups across the world are creating new rituals. Um, and so most rituals that we think of are traditional or passed on or transformed space, but this is a very, um, it's, it's a very sacred or religious ritual that these women's groups were creating for victims of sexual abuse. And, and the one that struck me so much was, yes, you, you light a candle to help set the space apart, but there was a woman who wanted to bury a childhood dress for, for the girl that she had been, who had been sexually abused to kind of help her transition from victim to survivor that, um, this girl had lost her childhood. She had lost so much. And in her place, this woman who was now a survivor was living and strong and looking to the future and wanted to put to rest this young girl who had been so wounded. So the ritual act of having a burial for address and address was representative. It was a symbol of the abuse childhood. It was a religious ceremony, but it was improvised. It was created by these women's groups. And I interviewed dozens of women across North America who are part of women's groups that have created rituals to help women Mark different transitions in their lives to feel more empowered, to sort of bring into being the person they wanted to be.
Speaker 3:And if we talk about worldviews, because they're really important, part of your book is this idea that ritual can encourage adverse adversaries to see themselves in others, through other lenses. And so we're able take off our lens and maybe even using your example earlier about being able to think of each other as mother, rather than thinking of each other as different from a religious context, how our worldviews shifted in your experience through ritual.
Speaker 1:So, you know, there's actually different parts of the brain that have different ways of processing information and the neuroscientists that I quote in my book or that I cite. Um, and this is really old neuroscience. The field of neuroscience has evolved a lot thinking about this, but, you know, it's it's as if each part of our brain has a different window on reality and has the ability to create, create new ideas and, and new ways of thinking about things. But we have to enable that to happen. And I think ritual and symbol connects parts of our brain in a way that transforms our worldview. So allows us to see a problem or a conflict or a situation in a new way. And so for that woman who buries her childhood dress in a, in a funeral, she is actively changing her world view. She is acting her way into being, she wants to change, and she wants to act it out as if it's it's the behavior, it's the motion, it's the symbology of it that will lead her to feeling like a survivor so that she can be at the funeral. She can cry and access the emotional part of her brain that experienced abuse. And she can grieve the loss of that child and go through that emotional space and then sort of, um, allow herself to move on after the burial, as a new person who is a survivor.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think your reference of neuroscience is so good because in the time, since you've written the book, I feel like neuroscience has only strengthened its idea that emotions are the central part of how we form some of these worldviews and that in many ways we need to deescalate our, our sympathetic nervous system and our, our, our fight and flight response, our centers of fear. And that once as we do that work, that's what allows us to lubricate ourselves into new worldviews. Exactly. So I don't want to end this conversation without maybe talking about the dark side of ritual, because I think that it's important to hold that that ritual is not just a universal. Good. And you talk about this in your book that rituals can be used to harden identities and worldviews, and they can be used as a tool for oppression. Can you talk about instances where you've seen rituals used for harm rather than for good?
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Yeah. So ritual is a powerful tool that can be used for good or bad. Um, and I think an example is this morning in Washington, DC, there's the national prayer breakfast, which is supposed to be a religious liminal space where policy makers, political leaders from the democratic and Republican sides come together. They pray, they talk about ethics and values. I don't think it was that this morning. Um, so in reading about what happened and, you know, it's, it becomes hijacked to say, you know, Jesus is on our side and we pray because God wants the Republican party to win the election and the Democrats are evil and bad, you know, so I think many times religion and gen general religious spaces are used to justify political opinions and beliefs that often are not freeing, um, and maybe harmful or dangerous. So, um, and certainly, you know, in Charlottesville, Virginia with, uh, the March in 2017, the white nationalists, the white supremacist groups, they had torches, they had, you know, fire that is so traditional for so many rituals and they had chants and they had loud music. They definitely created a ritual space in which to share their hate and, um, you know, threatened people. And, uh, they were definitely upset at the symbols of the statues, the monuments, um, that were important to them and their identity. So it's a definitely an example of the flip side of, uh, how ritual can be used, um, for harm. And I think, um, Hitler in Nazi, Germany had so many symbols, so many songs and marches and so much liminal space that transformed the nation into killers, into a nation that could commit a Holocaust. And I think that's the most compelling reason why peacebuilders should think about the power of ritual because ISIS and every violent extremist, um, terror group uses ritual to transform its numbers, to enable them to do harm. And so ritual and symbol are incredibly powerful. And if we are in the peacebuilding field only trying to change behavior and attitudes with rational words, we're missing, we're missing a huge part of what it means to be
Speaker 2:While ritual can have dark sides. Shirk speaks of ritual as silent poetry, as she describes the Egyptian Israeli peace process under president Jimmy Carter, understanding the momentous nature of that peace process. Prime minister Baygon had asked president Carter to sign photos of Carter, Sadat and himself for each of his eight grandchildren. Carter secretary obtain the names of each of Bagans grandchildren, so that Carter could write a personal note to each quote when Carter handed Bagan the photographs, pagans, eyes, water, the photographs had triggered thoughts of his grandchildren and their future in a war torn region. A few minutes later, Bagan announced that he wanted to keep working on the peace process as photograph centered thoughts about the future of his grandchildren and opened a door to his identity, not solely as a world leader, but in identity as one with deep love for his grandchildren. So how has your thinking changed in the time since you wrote the book?
Speaker 1:I wouldn't say it has changed a lot. Um, I would say my field has come along with me. So, um, you know, I was, uh, kind of ridiculed by my professors for, um, having a dissertation on this topic in the 1990s when nobody else was studying it. And, uh, it just kind of went nowhere for, for me. I mean, I, um, I abandoned it in search of other topics where there may be more interest, but I have continued writing it about it more in the last five years. So I have three or four chapters that have come out in books in the last four to five years, um, that are focused on ritual. Um, so I wrote one actually it's not out yet called, uh, rituals in an age of terror from Trump to the Taliban that looks at extremist groups and the rituals that they use and how people who are trying to work for peace or are using ritual in an age of terror and, and white nationalism. So yeah, I keep writing about it. I don't think my thinking about it has changed that much. I'm just relieved that more people in the field are talking about neuroscience and understand symbolic framing and end the power of ritual. And that includes you in this, in this interview. So I'm grateful that you're interested in this, that you're exploring it. And I look forward to hearing more of your podcast to learn what you're doing
Speaker 2:Special, thanks to dr. Lisa shirt for her time. And scholarship links to her publications and website can be found on our podcast website at music, peace, building.com. If you are as fascinated as I am by symbol and ritual, I highly recommend her text on ritual and symbol in peacebuilding as well as other music, education peacebuilding and anthropology techs that will be listed on our website. As we close this first season of our podcast, I close with the blessing taken from the thoughts of dr. Lisa Sheree. May you enter a rainbow and hold the blessing of symbol transforming sun soaked water droplets into beginnings and thresholds transforming smoke into reminders to seek best intentions. May you dance to music? Transforming metered time into rituals of shared being may we honor joy, happiness, pain, and grief, bearing violence and fear and giving birth to love may we signify the dance of our time together, Listeners. It has been a joy and a pleasure to spend time in this first season, examining and centering the voices of this podcast. I am eternally grateful for all the ways in which I have grown, learned and changed through all the hours that I've spent on this podcast. And most importantly, I am grateful for you. I am grateful for the time you took to listen for the many people who have written feedback and for all of those who have engaged in our podcast. Thank you. This is the music and peacebuilding podcast hosted by Kevin Schoener Johnson. At Elizabeth town college. We host a master of music education with an emphasis in peace building thinking deeply. We reclaimed space for connection and care. Join us at music, peace, building.com.