Turunen: Rituals Have a Job to Do

A demanding project is finished, yet its ending barely registers. Ari Turunen raises this disappointment at the close of Signs of Good and Evil: the work was done, but it was never properly marked. Nearby comes the christening of a ship with a bottle of champagne. Why add another action to an event if the vessel is already ready to launch?

The most useful answer here is not about hidden forces. Finishing work and making its completion a shared occasion are not quite the same thing. A ritual can perform the second task without controlling the first.

Symbolic Does Not Mean Unreal

In the final chapter on calming rituals, Turunen recounts Arnold van Gennep’s account of transitions between statuses, groups, times and places. Birth, naming, marriage and burial appear not only as biological or practical facts: a community has to name the change and recognise someone’s new position.

Turunen puts it briefly: “We symbolically express beginnings and endings.” Express is the useful word, rather than a promise that a symbol will put everything right. A bottle is not a test of a vessel’s readiness. The ceremony can instead publicly mark the start of another stage.

The same distinction helps with the less solemn project example. Imagine a closing meeting that names the completed work and thanks particular contributors. This is a hypothetical illustration, not a success story added to the book. The meeting does not finish outstanding tasks, but it gives participants an occasion to announce together that a stage is over. The symbolic action has an intelligible audience and purpose, without guaranteeing good luck in the next project.

A Threshold Is Something to Cross

The account of van Gennep adds an intermediate, liminal state. Turunen explains it through the image of a threshold: someone is no longer entirely in the previous position but has not yet entered the next. His examples include a child who has not been named and a dead person not yet buried.

The scheme makes a rite a sequence, not merely an attractive gesture. It opens a transition, carries people through it and is supposed to end. Waiting indefinitely for a ceremonial full stop is not much of a full stop.

Applied to shared work, this yields a modest question: what exactly is being closed, and by what criterion? If the result has not been accepted, a celebration cannot replace acceptance. If the work is accepted but its contributors remain unnamed, marking it can serve a separate purpose. One action need not impersonate the other.

How Far the Defence Goes

Turunen opens his author’s foreword with a sweeping rejection of our rationality, pointing to feelings and imagination. In the introduction, by contrast, he calls humans rational beings before returning to a catalogue of superstitious habits. These formulations convey the energy of his polemic better than they define a precise test of rational decision-making. Having feelings does not, by itself, demonstrate an error in a particular argument.

We need not accept that entire framework to distinguish social recognition from a promise of magical influence. Equally, defending ceremony does not justify every demand made in the name of tradition. An understandable function does not remove the question of what a rite requires from its participants.

For a celebration of shared work, the distinction is concrete: are we checking the result, recognising contributions or trying to secure future luck? These are different tasks. The first two can name an object and a purpose; solemnity alone cannot establish the third.

The Reading Decision

Book and author: Signs of Good and Evil: A History of Superstitious Customs — Ari Turunen. The title is an English rendering for this article, not identification of an English edition.

Edition: the Ukrainian edition jointly published by Nika-Centre and Anetta Antonenko Publishers, 2020, translated from Finnish by Iryna Malevych. The publisher’s catalogue confirms the year; a bibliographic credit on its site confirms the translator.[1][4]

Main idea: a ceremony can recognise the completion of work without replacing the result or insuring the future.

Relevance: a way to examine a ritual’s purpose, not a demonstrated psychological treatment.

Read / pass: read the broader cultural collection if the customs themselves are what you want. For the question of marking an ending without believing in magical causation, the whole book is not essential.

Verdict: a summary is enough—for this narrow question. The useful distinction is already conveyed here; it does not require reading every account of a superstition’s origins.

Source and Scope

The author’s foreword, introduction and final chapter on calming rituals were read in full in the Ukrainian edition. Anthropological explanations are considered as Turunen presents them, not as independent verification of every historical etymology, theory of the mind or therapeutic effect. No such effect is promised here. The workplace illustration is hypothetical, not an invented experience of the blogger. The short English quotation is translated here from Ukrainian.

Sources

[1] https://anetta-publishers.com/books/118 — Turunen — Ukrainian publisher edition record [4] https://anetta-publishers.com/presses/1544 — Publisher-hosted bibliographic credit: Iryna Malevych