We, the Meaning-Makers

Narrative Arc

From the individual to the collective

The previous modules in this series focused largely on individual meaning — Viktor Frankl's will to meaning, the role of practice and mastery, and the way personal narrative shapes a coherent self. This module makes a turn. It asks: what happens to meaning when we stop looking at the individual and look at the group?

This is not a minor shift. For most of human history, and for most cultures today, meaning is not primarily a private achievement. It is something enacted together — through ceremony, through shared witnessing, through the synchronized practice of ritual. Before there were museums or gallery walls or bestseller lists, there was the fire circle, the communal feast, the all-night ceremony.

The module has two movements. The first explores ritual as technology — the mechanisms through which collective practice generates meaning that individuals alone cannot produce. The second explores the audience side of meaning — what happens in the mind and body of a person receiving art, and how that reception is itself an active, generative process, not passive consumption.

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Part I: Ritual as meaning-making technology

The oldest evidence

The structure at Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Anatolia, built between 9,600 and 8,200 BCE, predates agriculture. Hunter-gatherers with no permanent settlement constructed at least twenty monumental semi-subterranean buildings with T-shaped limestone pillars up to five and a half meters tall. Whatever else it was, it was a place where people gathered to do something together. Archaeologists now interpret such early Neolithic sites not as isolated architectural anomalies but as nodes in regional networks of shared symbolic practice — communal representations that enabled increasingly complex social organization.

The insight from this archaeology is straightforward but important: ritual performance and shared symbolic systems were integral mechanisms for organizing complex communities from the very beginning.

What ritual does: the mechanics

Ritual art generates meaning primarily through collective participation and shared symbolic engagement, not through individual authorial expression. Three interlocking mechanisms are at work.

First, emotional alignment. The synchronized elements of ritual — music, movement, visual symbols, coordinated action — align individual emotional states with collective values and cosmologies. This process is not metaphorical. Researchers describe communitas — a spontaneous feeling of connectedness produced through communal participation — as a binding mechanism that operates below the level of propositional belief.

Second, symbolic encoding. Following Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner's tradition of interpretive anthropology, rituals can be read as culturally produced symbolic texts. They encode how a community understands reality, identity, value, and spiritual truth — not as a book encodes information, but as embodied action produces shared understanding in the doing.

Third, social cohesion and transmission. Ritual participation creates bonds that strengthen belonging and shared identity. Across African initiation ceremonies, rituals function as a matrix promoting communication, fraternity, and integration while transmitting knowledge, cultural values, and community identity across generations.

Ritual does not communicate meaning the way a book communicates information. It produces meaning in the participants through the act of doing it together.

The integration of making and meaning

Many traditions do not separate art from life, or making from spiritual practice. Indigenous art ontologies treat artistic creation as inseparable from daily life, spirituality, and intergenerational transmission of knowledge. In many Indigenous languages, there is no distinct word for "art" because the category itself does not exist as a domain separate from life and spiritual practice.

This has practical consequences. The meaning and spiritual significance of Indigenous artworks are fundamentally dependent on their ceremonial and social contexts. When such objects are removed from ceremonial use and displayed in museums, they become partially or entirely disconnected from the knowledge systems that generate their meanings. The object remains; the meaning migrates.

The creation process itself is ritualized. Among the Iroquois, a False Face mask must be carved from the trunk of a living tree, with the tree ritually addressed before carving begins. Prescribed ritual acts are understood as equally or more important than technical skill; if ceremonial protocols are omitted, the artwork loses its spiritual efficacy. The artwork's power depends on proper enactment during its making, not merely on its formal properties.

Cosmological knowledge is encoded in the work itself. Navajo weavings embody the concept of Hozh'ó (harmony) through four-fold symmetry; the cross represents Spider Woman and her teachings; lightning patterns represent storm forces essential for fertility. Weaving's central role in Navajo cosmology is inseparable from the practice of transmission itself. Pueblo pottery employs standardized geometric symbols — fine lines for rain, spirals for spiritual journey, the kiva step for terraced rain clouds — encoding understanding of water, seasons, and interconnectedness. Kente cloth among Akan peoples encodes specific philosophical concepts and moral values. None of these meanings are intrinsic to the geometric forms themselves: pattern meanings are culturally constructed and conventionally agreed upon, requiring transmission within a community to remain legible.

Knowledge is transmitted through oral traditions, direct apprenticeship under elders, and ritual participation. Elders recognized as knowledge-keepers transmit understanding of symbolism, creation rituals, and spiritual principles through storytelling, demonstrations, and guided practice. This is not inefficiency or the absence of writing. It is a deliberate system that keeps meaning living and adaptive rather than fixed in a form that can be separated from practice.

Collective devotion in Sufi practice

In Sufi artistic practice, the primary meaning of art-making is devotional participation in collective remembrance (dhikr) of the divine, not individual self-expression. Each Sufi order maintains specific liturgical forms combining recitation, singing, music, dance, costumes, incense, meditation, and trance. Both silent and vocal dhikr create conditions for deeper connection with the divine. The practitioner's individual consciousness is oriented toward participation in a transcendent reality; individual expression is secondary to communal spiritual function.

Ritual feasting among the Ainu

Among the Ainu people of Hokkaido, the integration of ritual and meaning-making extends to subsistence itself. Daily activities — hunting, fishing, gathering — were thoroughly ritualized and governed by spiritual protocols. Before food procurement, hunters and fishers performed kamuynomi (prayers to kamuy, divine beings) to request consent and support. These prayers transformed food acquisition from mere subsistence into an act of spiritual engagement with the divine world.

Ritual feasts at ceremonies like iyomante represent acts of spiritual communion where the community shares in the material gifts provided by kamuy. Collective consumption distributes the kamuy's blessing throughout the human community; the feast completes a reciprocal exchange. Ceremonial objects — including home-brewed tonoto (millet wine), dumplings, and dried salmon offered to kamuy — are not incidental to food consumption but central to the spiritual meaning of meals.

Ainu shamans in Sakhalin held primary ritual leadership roles, conducting all-night ceremonies involving community participation, dancing, and chanting to achieve altered states of consciousness. There was no formal priesthood. Ritual function was distributed across village chiefs, shamans, and the whole community as participants.

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Part II: The audience as meaning-maker

The shift from collective to hermeneutic

The first part of this module was about collective meaning generated through participation in shared practice. The second part shifts the frame: what happens in the individual encounter with a finished work? What does it mean to receive art — to read a novel, attend a concert, stand in front of a painting — as a meaning-making act?

This is not a retreat to the individual. Reception theory and hermeneutics show that even individual aesthetic encounters are structured by collective frameworks — cultural horizons, shared expectations, community-formed taste — that the individual can only partially see.

Gadamer: understanding as event

For Hans-Georg Gadamer, the central figure in philosophical hermeneutics, art discloses meaning through interpretation, and this disclosure is not mere phenomenological appearance but actual understanding. His claim is sharp: "the experience of art is an experience of meaning." And: "art is not separated from truth and knowledge."

This challenges two common assumptions. The first is that meaning is stored in the artwork, waiting to be retrieved by attentive viewers. The second is that aesthetic experience is purely subjective — a feeling with no epistemic content. Gadamer dissolves both. For him, artworks have an "excess of meaning" that unfolds through interpretation; no single encounter exhausts a work's meaning. And aesthetic understanding depends on Bildung — formation, cultivation of judgment and taste — not mere feeling.

More strikingly, Gadamer describes aesthetic encounter as fundamentally disruptive. When a work addresses us, its impact is "centrifugal" — it upsets and transforms what we customarily recognize. He distinguishes between Erlebnis (subjective emotional response) and Erfahrung (transformative truth-encounter). Aesthetic experience functions hermeneutically by exposing the hidden assumptions and frameworks through which we habitually perceive, enabling reorientation rather than mere opinion change.

Jauss's reception theory, built on Gadamer's foundations, extends this: a literary or artistic work is not an object with fixed intrinsic meaning but an event in the ongoing history of reception. Its meaning is constituted through the encounter between the work and historically variable reader horizons. Readers are not passive recipients but active participants in meaning-making.

Fig 1

Art functions collectively too: the concert and the ceremony

Individual reception and collective experience are not opposites. Contemporary research shows that communal aesthetic experiences — synchronized movement, shared emotional expression, collective witnessing — foster solidarity, transmit cultural values, and create social cohesion. The meaning generated in a concert hall, a cinema, a theatre, or a festival is not simply the sum of individual interpretations. What becomes sacred in a community is defined through shared engagement; synchronization reduces barriers to cooperation and reinforces trust. Arts function as foundational mechanisms for creating and maintaining social identity.

Catharsis: three competing accounts

The oldest Western theory of how audiences are transformed by art is Aristotle's concept of catharsis, and its meaning has been disputed ever since he wrote it. Three distinct interpretive frameworks have emerged:

Fig 2

These are not merely academic distinctions. They generate fundamentally different accounts of why you feel different after a great tragedy. Was your nervous system purged? Were your emotional responses calibrated toward virtue? Did you come to understand something about pity and fear that you didn't know before? The question matters because your answer shapes how you seek out, use, and value difficult art.

Contemporary research supports neither a purely somatic nor purely cognitive account. Emotional complexity — the layering of multiple, sometimes contradictory emotional states — emerges as a core component of transformative aesthetic experience, distinct from simple cathartic release. Transformative encounters are structured around three components: cognitive discrepancy (the work disrupts your existing expectations), epiphany (a moment of new understanding emerges), and lasting aftereffects (the shift persists beyond the encounter). This is not catharsis as somatic release. It is something more like reorganization.

Rasa: the Indian alternative

Classical Indian aesthetics offers an entirely different framework. Rasa theory, documented in the Nātyasāstra (c. 200 BC–200 AD) and developed most fully by Abhinavagupta, defines the aesthetic emotion evoked in audiences through performance arts as "universal bliss of the Self or Atman colored by the emotional tone of a drama." The primary goal of rasa-based performance is to transport audiences toward "the expression of ultimate reality and transcendent values" — to create experiences of spiritual and moral significance.

Where Western catharsis debates focus on what happens to specific emotions (pity, fear), rasa theory grounds aesthetic transcendence in explicit metaphysical premises about consciousness and ultimate reality. The audience does not simply have their emotions managed or clarified; they undergo transcendental experience.

Neuroaesthetics: what happens in the brain

Neuroaesthetics provides a third perspective — not philosophical but empirical. Aesthetic experiences emerge from interactions among three large-scale neural systems: sensory-motor, emotion-valuation, and semantic-knowledge networks. The semantic-knowledge system — incorporating personal history, education, cultural background, and contextual information — is crucial for meaning detection during aesthetic encounters. This explains why meaning in art is not simply in the work: it requires a prepared receiver.

The medial orbitofrontal cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex are consistently activated across both visual and musical aesthetic appreciation, suggesting a domain-general neural mechanism for aesthetic meaning-making. The same brain architecture that evaluates importance and personal relevance is involved when you find a painting profound or a piece of music devastating.

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Part III: Music, grief, and identity renegotiation

When meaning-making becomes urgent

Grief is the condition where meaning-making is most obviously not optional. When someone significant dies, the entire framework through which a person understood their life — their roles, their daily practices, their sense of who they are — is disrupted. Contemporary bereavement research characterizes grieving as "a process of reconstructing a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss."

Art and music play a specific, documented role in this reconstruction.

Continuing bonds through music

The older model of grief — stage-based, oriented toward "closure" and detachment from the deceased — has been replaced in contemporary research by a continuing bonds model. This model holds that sensory and quasi-sensory experiences of the deceased, including auditory perceptions and hearing their voice through recordings or associated music, are normative, adaptive, and central to continuing bonds work. They occur in 42–82% of bereaved individuals across cultures. They are not signs of pathology or "unresolved grief." They are how people maintain and rework connection.

Music is a primary medium for this. Bereaved individuals report five primary gratifications from intentional music use: creating connections with the deceased, facilitating a sense of co-presence, positive mood management, negative mood management (emotional confrontation and expression), and projection (using music to explore or reflect on their emotional landscape or identity). 94% of bereaved participants in one study intentionally used music during their grief journey.

Why music in particular? Auditory memory activates embodied, affective states with greater intensity than visual or linguistic memory alone. Hearing a song associated with the deceased activates associative memory and somatic resonance — the body recalls. Auditory memory also fades faster than visual memory, which paradoxically heightens the emotional weight of preserved recordings and shared music, making them precious vehicles for maintaining sensory bonds.

Identity renegotiation

Grief is not only about the deceased. It is also about who the bereaved person is now — the loss of a relational role (partner, parent, child, friend) and the reconstruction of a self that contains both the loss and the ongoing inner relationship.

Music reception enables identity renegotiation in bereavement by providing a sensory-affective space where the bereaved person can simultaneously mourn the loss of a relational role while integrating the deceased into a transformed but ongoing identity. When a bereaved listener engages with music associated with the deceased — or discovers new music that resonates with their changed self — they are performing identity work: confirming who they were with that person and reconstructing who they are without them, while maintaining an inner relationship.

Repeated, intentional engagement with music over time — returning to the same songs, albums, or works across months and years — enables progressive reworking of the meaning of the deceased's presence. Each return is not regression but renegotiation. The act of curation — selecting what to listen to, in what sequence, at what moments in the grief journey — is itself a form of meaning-making practice.

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Annotated Case Study

Ainu kamuynomi — when every meal is a ritual

The Ainu case is worth examining in depth because it makes visible something that other examples leave implicit: the complete integration of meaning-making practice into everyday life.

For the Ainu of Hokkaido, the world is populated by kamuy — divine beings who take the form of animals, plants, fire, water, and natural phenomena. Every interaction with the material world is simultaneously an interaction with the divine. This is not a metaphor; it is an ontological claim about the nature of things.

Before the hunt. A hunter does not simply go fishing. Before engaging in food procurement, he purifies himself and performs kamuynomi — prayers requesting the kamuy's consent and support. The fish or deer is not an object to be taken but a kamuy choosing to offer its body. The ritual negotiates the terms of a relationship.

The offering. Tonoto (millet wine), dumplings, and dried salmon are prepared and presented as gifts to kamuy. These are not incidental to the meal; they are the spiritual meaning of the meal made material. The home-brewed alcoholic beverage is not food; it is a tangible expression of respect and gratitude that transforms the act of eating into participation in a reciprocal exchange.

The feast. At ceremonies like iyomante (the bear ceremony), ritual feasts transform individual consumption into communal spiritual participation. The community shares in the kamuy's blessing by consuming together. Collective consumption integrates the kamuy's substance into the community's bodies, perpetuating the sacred relationship.

The shaman. Shamans conducted all-night ceremonies involving community participation, dancing, and chanting to achieve altered states of consciousness. There was no formal priesthood. Ritual function was distributed: village chiefs, shamans, and community members all had roles. The ceremony was not a performance for an audience; it was a participation by everyone present.

What the case shows. The Ainu example illustrates several principles that apply across collective meaning-making contexts:

1. Context-dependency: The meaning is inseparable from the practice. A tonoto offering in a museum display case is no longer a tonoto offering; it is an artifact of one.
2. Relational ontology: Meaning is not located in objects or in individuals but between humans, non-humans, and the sacred — in the ongoing maintenance of relationships.
3. Transmission through participation: Knowledge is transmitted not by writing it down but by doing it with people who know how to do it. This is not a limitation; it is the mechanism by which meaning stays living.
4. The sacred and profane are not separated: Every meal is potentially sacred; every hunt is potentially a ceremony. The question is not "is this art?" but "is this being done well, in right relationship?"

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Compare & Contrast

Collective ritual meaning vs. individual hermeneutic meaning

These two modes of meaning-making are not opposites, but they operate differently and are often confused.

Dimension	Collective ritual	Individual hermeneutic encounter
Primary mechanism	Synchronized participation, co-presence, embodied action	Interpretive encounter between work and reader/viewer
Location of meaning	In the shared practice itself; the community in action	In the "fusion of horizons" between work and receiver
Role of the individual	Participant in a larger structure; individual intention is secondary	Active co-constructor of meaning; interpretation is unavoidable
Transmission	Embodied, oral, apprenticeship; meaning is bound to context	Can be carried through objects separated from original context
What disruption does	Breaks the ritual; meaning fails	Potentially transforms the receiver (Gadamer's Erfahrung)
Examples	Ainu kamuynomi, Sufi dhikr, Göbekli Tepe ceremonies, Navajo weaving	Reading a novel, attending a concert, encountering a painting

The key insight: Neither is "more real." Collective ritual produces meanings that cannot be generated individually; hermeneutic reception produces meanings that collective participation does not necessarily provide (individual transformation, identity renegotiation). Most powerful meaning-making contexts — a concert that becomes communal, a grief ceremony that opens into personal insight — involve both at once.

Catharsis vs. rasa

	Catharsis (Aristotle)	Rasa (Abhinavagupta)
Tradition	Ancient Greek, Western	Classical Indian
Core mechanism	Purging, refining, or clarifying specific emotions	Dissolving individual emotional particularity into universal aesthetic consciousness
Metaphysical premise	Minimal; psychological and ethical	Explicit; grounded in understanding of consciousness and ultimate reality
What the audience undergoes	Emotional management	Transcendental experience
Emotional specificity	Pity and fear (tragedy-specific)	8 or 9 rasas (multiple basic aesthetic emotions)
Goal	Proper emotional calibration	Access to transcendent dimension of experience

Both agree that aesthetic experience can produce genuine transformation. They disagree about the mechanism and the destination.