Agency, Identity, and the Emergence of Ritual Experience

Abstract

We draw from psychological research on meaningful activity to identify the conditions that promote ritual experience among individuals. Specifically, we ask whether feelings of agency and expressions of identity inform the extent to which individuals experience routinized parts of their lives as meaningful rituals. Interviews and a random factorial survey of U.S. citizens demonstrate that the three most significant factors productive of ritualized experience for our sample were a sense of purposiveness, the experience of autonomy, and identity enactment. Our findings resonate with the psychological literature on meaningful activities and suggest a new appreciation for the role of agency and identity in generating meaningful ritual experience for individuals.