Ritual Techniques in Affliction Rites | Belcher 22 Ritual Techniques in Affiction Rites and the Lutheran-Catholic Ecumenical Liturgy of Lund, 2016 Kimberly Hope Belcher Abstract Protest and reconciliation rituals play a contested but important role in social change. This essay analyzes how rituals of reconciliation efectively negotiate between competing factions and norms by using ritual techniques as embodied symbols. Against the horizon of theory from Victor and Edith Turner and Cas Wepener, participant observation of the Lutheran and Catholic Joint Commemoration of the Reformation “Common Prayer” in Lund, Sweden on October 31, 2016 reveals fve stages: crisis/diagnosis, redress, forgiveness and acceptance, binding, and reparative mission. Each is marked by its own characteristic techniques, whereas some symbolic elements manifest the diferent stages throughout the liturgy. This liturgy demonstrates how one liturgy can speak to various factions and stages in the process of accommodating a new norm (Christian unity) within a contested set of identities (“Lutheran” and “Catholic”). It is in the stages of forgiveness and binding that the relationship between the ritual-symbolic realm and the real work of social reconciliation is most directly visualized. Keywords Reconciliation, ritual, Lutheran, Catholic, Lund 2016 1 Techniques, effcacy, and affiction rites Ritual techniques are the embodied physical actions that address social and spiritual realities, chal- lenging Western assumptions of the dichotomy between the material world and the spiritual, symbol- ic, or social world. 1 Ritual (symbolic, patterned, socially signifcant human behavior) both presupposes 1) Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” Economy and Society 2, no. 1 (1973): 70-88, https://doi. org/10.1080/03085147300000003; Michel Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude,” “The Battle for Chastity,” “Technologies of the Self,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. P. Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 175-84, 185-98, 223-52. I gratefully acknowledge helpful feedback from many: several classes of University of Notre Dame undergraduates in my “Holy Communion and Christian Disunity” course, my Fall 2020 “Ritual for Crisis and Healing” seminar participants, attendees of the 2021 Societas Liturgica Congress (virtual), the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript, Nathan P. Chase, and Mark Yearbook for Ritual and Liturgical Studies Vol. 38 (2022) 22–41 • https://doi.org/10.21827/YRLS.38.22-41 © 2022 Kimberly Hope Belcher (CC–BY) IRiLiS / CRH