"For Appadurai, what is crucial to appreciate is that is if rituals meaningfully enable volatility to be negotiated 'live' in rituals, there must be a staging of genuine uncertainty about who we really are, both individually and collectively. That is, if rituals are merely a repetition or 'ratification' of the social roles and behaviors and patterns of life already lived outside the ritual space, the rituals are pointless. In order for them to have meaning as enabling and sustaining a 'co-staging of uncertainty and certainty', then for ritual purposes we must be treated
as dividuals*, potencies for asscoiation and reassociation in relation to changing needs and circumstances (both natural and cultural).
* this term is used in contrast to the way it is meant by Deleuze (as a slicing and dicing of individuals). Here it references 'entities whose affordances and responsibilities dynamically shift in relation to other human, nonhuman, animal, technical, machinic, elemental and ecological presences.'
Joshua Ramey Politics of Divination (2016) p.141
