The response of primal people to their environment is largely ritualistic.. .an idealization of the relationship of human beings to their surroundings. Modern people, however, often try to neutralize (rather than to ritualize) their experience of nature. Ritual tends to deal with ambiguity on the level of ambiguity — in the way that art deals with reality. On the other hand, the "civilized" viewpoint is inclined to turn ambiguity into certitude and orthodoxy. The central method for this transposition from a world of essences to a world of objects, as philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer have indicated, is through the use of words as the definitive framework of realism. "Words are certainly our most important instruments of expression," Langer informs us in Philosophy in a New Key, "our most characteristic, universal and enviable tools in the conduct of life. Speech is the mark of humanity. It is the normal terminus of thought. We are apt to be so impressed with its symbolistic mission that we regard it as the only important expressive act, and assume that all other activity must be practical in an animalian way, or else irrational — playful, or atavistic (residual) past recognition. But in fact, speech is the natural outcome of only one kind of symbolic process. There are transformations of experience in the human mind that have quite different overt endings. They end in acts that are neither practical nor communicative, though they may be both effective and communal; I mean the actions we call ritual."
Ritual is a symbolic transformation of experiences which no other medium of expression can adequately contain. Because it springs from a primary human need, it is a spontaneous activity that arises without self-consciousness, without adaptation to either a pragmatic or conscious purpose. Its growth is undesigned in the sense that primal architecture is "undesigned." Its patterns, for all their intricacy, merely express the social process of a unique people who are largely unconscious of the social structure in which they live. Ritual is never successfully imposed on a people. When such missionary efforts are made, the imposed ideology is thoroughly assimilated into preexisting ritual forms.
The province of ritual, like dance, has been continually assaulted as mindless and compulsive because it does not sustain the certitude and orthodoxy of the language-bound mentality of civilized people. Freud saw rites as acts which must be performed out of sheer inward need. It is now apparent that ritual acts are often the spontaneous transformation of external as well as internal experience. A good example of ritual as a form of social accommodation is visible in the Booger Dance of the Big Cove band of the Eastern Cherokees. In this ritual, which is not quite the same as any other Cherokee ceremony, we discover a dramatic record of the anxiety of the tribe, a strong reaction against the symbol of the white invaders, and an expression of fear in dealing with the white world that surrounds the Big Cove settlement. The Booger Dance fuses the invasion of the white man to the spiritual forces of nature with which the Cherokee had learned to cope, therefore making the existence of whites somehow less alien and threatening. The Cherokee believe that they cannot politically deal with the white invaders.