Home > Death and the King's Horseman Summary & Study Guide > Essays and Criticism > Ritual and the political unconscious: the case of Death and the King’s Horseman

Death and the King's Horseman | Ritual and the political unconscious: the case of Death and the King’s Horseman

In the following essay, the author uses the concept of the political unconscious in its examination of the political function of rituals.

In feudal societies, ritual was part of the cultural dominant. In other words, ritual was part of a complex and insidious apparatus of cultural and political reproduction employed by the dominant groups. It is to be expected, given the superannuation of the feudal mode of production in Western societies, that the phenomenon of ritual itself would have lost much of its power and social efficacy. There is a sense in which this development cannot be divorced from the gains of the Enlightenment and the triumph of rationality. From the eighteenth century, scientific reasoning seemed to have...

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