For the most part, ritual has been consistently described alongside the concept of identity. In several critical readings on ritual, it is often portrayed or centered around a group of people's sense of self. For Renato Rosaldo in his piece Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage, he discusses what ritual is and how he thinks its restricting definition should change. Sara Shneiderman is more recently interested in associating ritual with broader terms such as ethnicity in Reframing Ethnicity: Academic Tropes, Recognition beyond Politics, and Ritualized Action between Nepal and India.
Much like some approaches to ethnography, the ways in which rituals are analyzed have been criticized largely for being too limiting. Rosaldo critiques and targets how ritual