Yes, rituals are all around us, and we engage in them daily. From moment to moment, even.

There may have been a little ritual you performed while preparing to read this. Maybe you made your lunch, or a coffee. Or found your favourite place to sit. Maybe it meant escaping the office fluorescence for a preferred chair in a warm spot with plenty of light.

Perhaps you checked your phone for notifications. Nothing urgent. So you switched modes, settled down and opened this newsletter.

Finally, you are ready and available to the ideas in this little article — before doing whatever you need to do to get back into that other headspace again.

Ritual can act as a gateway social script, marking our transition from one place, state or space to another. We use rituals to get into the zone, and out of it. They also appear at the beginnings and endings of relationships, both transactional and emotional.

And, as with so many cultural concepts we encounter in everyday life, there are layers just beneath the visible behaviour that are structural and largely invisible. Context sits in our peripheral vision and is often simply taken for granted.

One of those less obvious but substantial parts of ritual is the identity we give to the things involved in it. Those things can be, well, almost anything. But within a ritual they become something because we do something quite particular: we give them meaning. We attribute purpose, identity, action or value to them.

That is how an ordinary object can become symbolic, significant — even iconic.

If you are familiar with semiotics, you’ll recognise the relationship between the signifier — the thing we see, hear or encounter — and the signified, the idea or meaning it comes to represent.

Colour is an easy example. When you see the colour red, what does it mean? Stop. Emergency. Danger. Heat. Anger. Threat.

But on Valentine’s Day it is also the colour of love: deep and passionate. To be fair, love and imminent threat can occasionally be the same thing, but I digress.

The point is that red is never merely red once it enters a cultural system. Its meaning depends on context. Put a red object into a ritual and it may bring all of those associations along with it.

The same thing happens with a brand logo, religious icon or other familiar symbol. The object becomes a bearer of meaning, and that meaning can have enormous power when activated in the right context.

Movies are famous for protagonists scrambling for two random sticks and holding them together to approximate a Christian cross. The construction can be crude, but the moment the symbol is recognised — bam! — the vampire is gone.

Apple has also reportedly been very particular about how its products appear on screen, illustrating how brand meaning can be reinforced through the characters and contexts with which it is associated.

On a more everyday level, it might be the pen you used to sign an important contract, or the heirloom cookware used to prepare a family recipe for a significant occasion. We see it in decorative ornaments too, and in where and when they are placed during seasonal holidays.

In some instances, the things we use can even begin to feel human-like.

The routines of ritual, the artefacts involved and the meanings reinforced through repetition have surprisingly porous boundaries. Affection, memory and even visceral responses to touch can develop into something resembling a relationship.

And so, pretty quickly, the ritual of coaxing your 40-year-old manual car to start on a cold Thursday morning in July elicits the cry: “Come on, Bessie. You can do it.”

Or perhaps more familiar is the antagonism shown by the photocopier, despite your having followed every instruction in the correct order and asked it nicely. At that point, we have given the inanimate an identity, or at least a personality.

We have anthropomorphised it.

That’s one for the Scrabble players. Use it at a party.

Okay, so we might not personify many of the things involved in our daily rituals. But at some level, everything acquires meaning. It has to.

Otherwise the ritual begins to lose its effect. The login fails. The team bond dissolves. The system breaks down. The meaning vanishes.

We are very good at measuring the elements of behaviour that are real, tangible and observable. But we also need to remain curious about the silent partners in our actions — the objects, symbols and artefacts around us — and what they come to mean in the doing.

When we build a culture, a pattern of behaviour or even a system of operations, we are also engaged in the creation of rituals: patterns of action animated by things carrying embedded meanings.

Those objects might begin life in the name of efficiency or function. But through repetition, context and experience, they can become something else entirely.

They can carry belonging. Ambition. Memory. Authority. Value.

Square Holes is a cultural insight studio.

We design mixed method explorations of people and culture beyond the category,  uncovering the patterns, tensions and shifts shaping behaviour to inform strategy, inspire innovation and enable confident decisions. Our studio model brings together the right mix of thinkers, researchers and specialists for each exploration. If you’re navigating change, entering a new market, or seeking deeper understanding of people and culture, let’s start a conversation >