It’s easy to think of ritual as inherited from the past. Weddings, funerals, spiritual and religious practices, graduations and anniversaries seem designed to connect us to tradition and memory.

But rituals can also face the other way. Ritual can be understood not merely as remembrance but as preparation. Rituals allow people to practise identities, relationships and responsibilities before they are fully realised.

A graduation ceremony does not simply recognise years of study and a qualification. It marks someone ending one phase of life and stepping into another. An induction does more than acknowledge someone as new to a role. It helps someone become part of an organisation. A public oath asks people to commit to different behaviour after the words have been spoken.

The future can be practised before it arrives

Ritual often draws on familiar symbols, stories and actions, orienting people toward what comes next rather than what has gone before.

This dynamic is particularly evident in rites of passage. Anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner showed how many rituals involve movement through a threshold: separation from a previous identity, a period of transition, and emergence into a new social role. Turner described this liminal state as being “betwixt and between” – a condition in which a person is no longer what they were but has not yet become what they will be.

From a futures perspective, liminality is fascinating because it creates a structured space for becoming. It gives people somewhere to practise a future version of themselves.

Ritual as rehearsal, enactment and prefiguration

Thinking about ritual as rehearsal is useful but only tells part of the story, as not all rituals function in exactly the same way.

Some are best understood as rehearsals. They allow participants to practise identities, commitments or forms of relationship that may become important later. Through repetition, people begin to learn what a future arrangement feels like.

Others function as enactments. They bring a new reality into existence in the moment they occur. That graduation ceremony does not simply prepare someone to become a graduate; it officially confers that status.

A third possibility is prefiguration. The term is often used by social movements to describe efforts to live according to desired future values in the present. Rather than waiting for a different society to arrive, people begin embodying aspects of it now.

Many rituals do all three at once. A public commitment to environmental stewardship might rehearse future responsibilities, enact a present obligation, and prefigure a different relationship with the natural world.

Beyond imagining futures

Much futures thinking focuses on imagination and possibility. Futuring itself might be considered ritualistic but that’s a conversation for another day.

We create scenarios, forecasts and visions. We ask what might happen. These approaches are valuable, even if they remain largely cognitive exercises.

Rituals pose a different question:

What would people need to practise now in order to imagine and become capable of living in a different future?

This shifts futures work from imagination toward participation.

Kirsten Moegerlein suggests that ritual may be “a potential leverage point for change” (Moegerlein 2015). Rituals do not simply express culture or values. They can reveal and mobilise capacities such as trust, memory, care, responsibility and belonging that may already exist within communities.

Conceiving rituals for different futures

While a scenario depicts a possible future, a ritual allows people to practise and participate in one. People can temporarily inhabit a future and discover what behaviours, relationships and obligations it requires. 

Designing future rituals in the present could help us reconsider how we live now as ecological crises demand we create new relationships, obligations and responsibilities. 

In 2017 the Whanganui River was recognised in law through the Te Awa Tupua settlement as a legal person and an indivisible living whole (Te Awa Tupua Act 2017). The legislation reflects the understanding of Whanganui iwi that the river is not merely a resource but an ancestor. But a change in legal status does not in itself teach people how to live within that relationship. Laws can establish a framework, whereas communities learn how to inhabit it through repeated social practices. This is where ritual becomes critical. 

What might help communities learn to relate to a river as a living entity rather than as property or infrastructure?. 

Which futures are we already rehearsing?

Rituals can function as rehearsals for new ways of relating to the living world, even if they are not inherently progressive.

As ritual scholar Catherine Bell (1992) argued, ritual practices are deeply connected to questions of power. They can reinforce existing social arrangements just as effectively as they can support change. A ritual can rehearse hierarchy as easily as equality. It can preserve a worldview as effectively as it challenges one.

So which futures are our rituals shaping? Which futures do they propagate?

The repeated practices of institutions, communities and organisations often contain assumptions about the future long before those assumptions appear in policy documents or strategic plans.

What people repeatedly perform together teaches them how the world is expected to work. Perhaps that is why ritual deserves more attention in conversations about ‘the future’.

Futures will be shaped by technologies, infrastructures and political decisions. And by the repeated actions through which people learn who they are, what they value and how they belong.

Sometimes rituals preserve the past. Sometimes they enact the present. And sometimes they allow us to rehearse a future that is only just emerging.

References

Austin, J.L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bell, C. (1992) Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press.

Maeckelbergh, M. (2011) ‘Doing is believing: prefiguration as strategic practice in the alterglobalization movement’, Social Movement Studies, 10(1), pp. 1–20.

Moegerlein, K. (2015) ‘Co-designing rituals for transitional times’, PhD Consortium paper, Nordes 2015: Design Ecologies, Stockholm. Available at: https://archive.nordes.org/index.php/n13/article/download/444/416

Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 (NZ).

Turner, V. (1967) ‘Betwixt and between: the liminal period in rites de passage’, in The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 93–111.
Van Gennep, A. (1909) Les rites de passage. Paris: Nourry. English translation (1960) The Rites of Passage, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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