Symbolic gestures in extraordinary everyday life: on ritual grief

Abstract

Ritual manifestations are configured as age-old devices of memory, as they concentrate narratives and modes of transmission that sustain both the act and the effect of ritualization since their ancestral origins. This text proposes a reflection on the relevance and urgency of instituting symbolic gesturalities when significant losses and grief occur. Recognizing the multidimensionality of rites and giving visibility to their functions, compositions, symbolisms, dimensions, and perspectives was the path chosen to pursue this aim. Ritual experiences are configured as eminently heterogeneous human activities. On the one hand, they appear in their general configuration, as constituents of everyday life and as expressions of meaningful human doing. On the other hand, they acquire a singular dimension when they are associated with the complexity of human grief in its various forms, resulting from ruptures already under way or imminent, in which ritualization assumes specific characteristics and developments. Given the plurality of human experiences that require gestures with symbolizing value, it becomes necessary to make explicit the concepts that support this reflection, constructed considering piacular rites, funeral rituals, and liminal rites. From this perspective, the notion of poiesis stands out as an intervention support, since it makes it possible to understand the creation and production of rituality as inventive gestures. From this perspective, occupational therapy is invited to reflect on ways to institute ritual poiesis as a constitutive dimension of its intervention process.