Do rituals have a place in modern life? Are they ultimately pointless, or rather essential for social life? Can rituals themselves become specific places where meaning and belonging can emerge? Might they offer social skills to “make-oneself-at-home” (Bergmann) in a world of homelessness and displacement?

Exploring questions like these demands an open and comprehensive mind-set. Rituals are sociocultural mediums that invoke the ordered relationships between human beings and non-immediate sources of power, authority and value. According to Bell, they enable people to embody assumptions about their place in a larger order of things. Ritualizations are those actions that transform a practice into a ritual.

The older assumption that religion and ritual would decline with the process of modernisation has, as we know from many studies, not come true. Instead one can follow and analyse processes of ritualization in different social spheres. One can even wonder if the skill to ritualise represents an essential human skill.

Here I will trace the significance of ritualization in two spheres: environmentalism and urban space. In both one can see how rituals contribute to the fabrication of meaning alongside the rational and scientific approach to understanding reality.

According to Rappaport, we must differentiate between a scientific and a religious mode of approaching reality, but also argue for a synthesis of them both. An fundamental tension in human life is found between the fabrication of meaning in terms of our environment and what he calls “the epistemologies of discovery” that aim to explain the laws of this environment. Can both scientific explanation and ritualised fabrication of meaning enter into a fruitful synthesis?