Thank you very much for this kind introduction. I want to start first with an expression of my gratitude for the stay here.

I'm very happy to be here to do my research in this very inspiring and international atmosphere.

Despite of my English, I would like to apologize for my English. It is not as good as I would like it have to be. But I will do my best.

I want to start with an art piece, a short introduction just for tuning in. Because this is the first lecture of this year. I think it's a good sign for a new year.

It was a kind of starting point for modern sculpture. It is more than 100 years old and it is called The Sleeping Views, La Muse d'Ormée, ou La Tichelafene Muse.

I love it very much. It is so calm, so peaceful and so full of ideas and inspirations. That's the reason I love it. Just take a look and read this quote from the artist.

I think it's a very good starting point for our topic of the day.

Here you can see my outline for today. My main topic for this lecture is the relevance of rituals and the relevance of aesthetics, both for social order and for identity.

In the first section I want to go on ritual theory and of course especially rituals of predictions.

I would like to start with everyday life rituals, with interaction rituals. Because I think it is crucial to understand this ritual in everyday life before we go beyond everyday life.

My second point will be the role of aesthetics. In the last part I will go to a field study I have made in the last weeks in Berlin according to this topic in the consortium here.

Okay, let us start. Now comes my theoretical starting point. The philosophical anthropology with Helmut Plassner of one of the main authors is for me a very good starting point.

Because this approach understands the human existence as determined in a double way, but still with space for free will and creativity. That's an important point.

Double determined means by culture and by nature. Humans are biological beings like other creatures and they are shaped crucially by culture and society too.

It means that the nature of human beings is to have culture, because human beings are not sufficiently adapted to natural surroundings.

Helmut Plassner founded the concept of eccentric positionality. That's not easy to translate in German.

Extantic positionality of humans. This concept means that human beings are part of nature through their body and at the same time they are outside of nature through their cognitive abilities.

On the one hand we are beings like other beings with a sense of nature, mostly aware of our body and his needs and feelings and his ties to other creatures, plants and nature itself.

On the other hand we have an open intentionality, surplus energy which can be shaped by cultural forms. Therefore we have a great range of different cultures.

A famous sentence from Helmut Plassner is in the German discourse of course, I translated, we are our body and we have our body at the same time.

We do not only live but we have to lead our life. In the human existence there is always a fascinating tension and sometimes even a thrilling contradiction between two poles, the natural and the cultural dimension of existence.

And especially in modern societies these two aspects have fallen apart and disintegrated.

My starting hypothesis is that rituals are a classical social pattern which integrates the bodily existence and the sensual perception into culture and into natural environment.

Rituals are a way to stabilize the extantrical intention for human way of life and to connect with the community and with the natural surroundings.

Rituals are fundamental for social order, for stability and for change of a community and of a society.

I would like to distinguish some different types of rituals, they are overlapping of course.

First we have everyday life rituals, mostly called interaction rituals. The second types are the kind of rituals which are religious or spiritual or rich de passage, changing rituals, changing biography or changing societies.

And the third kind is prediction rituals of course because it is a topic of the consortium.

First I want to stress everyday life rituals.

I think that it is important if we want to investigate the borders between everyday life and other modes of perception, we first should have an intensive look on the structure of perception in everyday life and interaction rituals in everyday life.

The author who investigated interaction rituals in a classical way, Erwin Goffman, he examined rituals of kindness and politeness, a kind of secular rituals, but there is the question if there is a rest of something sacred in this everyday life rituals.

A contemporary sociologist working on interaction rituals too, interaction rituals and emotional energy, that is Renner Collins and I admire his work very much.

Everyday life rituals regulate social interactions, like a script or a kind of grammar with a system of rules used in a tested way, hidden way, but mostly right without explicitly applying the underlying rules like a grammar.

When we say hello or goodbye, when we are opening or closing a conversation, when we surrender speech, when we are polite to each other, when we knock on a door or when we are delicate and tactful, then we are using interaction rituals, this system of rules.

We don't want the other person or we ourselves losing face, therefore we avoid to come too close to other persons, knocking on doors for example or keeping a specific spatial distance in interaction.

We avoid to hurt his or her boundaries in order of the personal rights of every person in social context. We avoid to miss a social role or a social mask for ourselves and for other persons.

Interaction rituals include ceremonial acts and rules of acting, rules of speech, rules of distances in various situations, rules of body containment and rules of body language, like pulling the head or shaking hands, face expressions and so on.

We have a cultural shaped system of rules and at the core of the system, and this is a very interesting point, is the idea of honoring the other, worshipping the concept of personality, which means to accept another standpoint in the world.

That's a fundamental philosophical problem in a phenomenological view and now I will stress some complex thoughts of famous feminologists like Maurice Maloponti, Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas.

In everyday life, not in science, but in everyday life, our perception is centered in the center of our body, perceiving and experiencing everything from a centered perspective.

Not in science, here we have a concept of perception which is abstract, not founded on a specific point in space or time, not located in specific surroundings, but put in an abstract system of space and time, independent from a concrete actor or observer.

But in everyday life, our perception is centered to our own body, to the living, actively perceiving body.

In German language, we have two words for the body, Körper and Leib. In English there are no expressions which are fitting for this difference.

The term Leib means the body from an inner perspective, including feelings, spontaneous impulses, vitality or even pain. It means the living body and its experiences, impulses and motions.

The term Körper means the social formed body, body as an instrument for specific social formed and trained actions, for high developed actions like sports or dancing or handicrafts or surgery.

Our body as a system which can be repaired. That is an underlying assumption in modern medicine. You could say in ancient medicine mostly the life was treated. In modern medicine mostly the Körper is repaired with medicine or surgery.

Let us now go back to the fundamental phenomenological problem of social interaction as described by Sartre and Levinas.

Every interaction contains a basic problem of understanding the other. Between ego and alter is a border, a gap.

They are both socially shaped with great parts of common knowledge and common parts of identity, but there is always a gap too.

We may be very familiar and close to a person sharing many experiences and many zones of tacit knowledge, but in every interaction even in very familiar relationships there is a moment of alienation too.