is usually treated as something other societies have and modern institutions have .
An organisation that holds a weekly meeting in which nothing is decided is performing a ritual.
Calling it a waste of time assumes the purpose was to decide something, which it may not have been.
The meeting may exist to make visible who belongs, who speaks first and what may be said aloud.
Those are not trivial functions and no performs them.
distinguish the stated purpose of a practice from what it achieves.
The distinction is not a claim that participants are , which is the usual misreading.
People generally know what a ceremony is for and would find the question odd rather than difficult.
Reformers who such practices on grounds of efficiency frequently find something worse takes their place.
A weekly meeting that established who was in the group is replaced by a set of private conversations that establish the same thing less openly.
The function did not disappear; the did, and with it the possibility of observing it.
ceremonies work in the same way and are similarly dismissed.
A ceremony marking the point at which somebody becomes a member tells everyone else that they have.
Where no such point is marked, the transition happens anyway and nobody can say when.
New arrivals then spend months uncertain whether they have arrived, which organisations record as a morale problem.
None of this argues that every existing practice should be preserved.
It argues that a practice should be understood before it is removed, which is a low bar rarely cleared.
The question to ask is not what the meeting decides but what would happen in the month after it stopped.