The approach that Durkheim and Mauss took in looking at ritual can be called “functionalist,” because it looked at ritual as serving a social function and serving to maintain society and to control society.
Some decades later, however, another approach became popular in structuralism, as advocated by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.
In this approach, ritual was to be interpreted as an outgrowth of our cognitive structure, like all of society.