Ritual

Andrew Strathern, Pamela J. Stewart, Pamela J. Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351903011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume consists of a number of carefully-selected readings that represent a wide range of discussions and theorizing about ritual. The selection encompasses definitional questions, issues of interpretation, meaning, and function, and a roster of ethnographic and analytical topics, covering classic themes such as ancestor worship and sacrifice, initiation, gender, healing, social change, and shamanic practices, as well as recent critical and reconstructive theorizing on embodiment, performance, and performativity. In their Introduction to the volume, the Editors provide an overall survey and critical consideration of topics, incorporating insights from their own long-term field research and reflections on the readings included. The Introduction and readings together provide a unique research tool for those interested in pursuing the study of ritual processes in depth, with the benefit of both historical and contemporary approaches.

Part I

Definitions and Fundamentals

[1]

Variation and indexicality in the Maring ritual cycle

Roy A. Rappaport

There are possibilities for variation in both the contents of ritual and in their time and place of occurrence. All of these possibilities are nicely illustrated by certain rituals performed by the Maring, a group of slash-and-burn horticulturalists living in the Simbai and Jimi Valleys of New Guinea’s Central Highlands (Rappaport 1968).

The Maring had little contact with Europeans before I first sojourned among them in 1962 and 1963. There were at that time about 7,000 Maring speakers organized into twenty or more autonomous local groups or populations ranging in size from 100 to 900 members, each composed of one or more putatively patrilineal clans, and each occupying a territory of several square miles, in most instances running from river bottom to ridge top on one side or the other of either the Jimi or Simbai valleys. Political relations are such that each local group has a Maring enemy across at least one of its borders on the same valley wall, and intermittent warfare characterized relations between such enemies until the mid 1950s. The rituals of interest here are among the many that together comprise an elaborate and protracted liturgical order, cyclical in form, taking a dozen or more years to complete. This ritual cycle and the individual rituals of which it is made have been described in detail elsewhere (see Rappaport 1984); we can therefore confine our discussion here to certain of its features. Ritual cycles are conducted separately by each local population. In fact, that they join in conducting a ritual cycle is what defines aggregates of clans occupying contiguous territories as local populations (see chapter 8). The ritual cycle can be said to start during the course of warfare. If it becomes clear that hostilities – always engaging adjacent groups – are not going to be swiftly composed, the antagonists hang certain ritual objects called mbamp ku (fighting stones) from the center poles of their ringi yin (ringi houses). These small round structures are associated with the spirits of men killed in warfare (rawa mugi red spirits). When the fighting stones are hung, a charcoal, called ringi, laden with occult virtue, is prepared inside the ringi houses. The rituals occurring at this time are elaborate and costly. Both red spirits and other ancestors are invoked, and pigs sacrificed to them. They are also momentous. Hanging the fighting stones transforms opponents into formal enemies (cenang yu “ax men”: those to whom one relates through the sharp edge of an ax). Rigid and enduring taboos separate cenang yu in peacetime as well as during war, and it takes four generations to remove all impediments to social relations between groups who have declared each other to be such. With the hanging of the fighting stones combat is escalated from ngui mbamp (brother fight) or ura awere (nothing fight), in which only bows and arrows are used, to a much more lethal form, in which spears and axes also figure. Moreover, a great many taboos – most noticeably on all sexual relations and on a great many foodstuffs – come into effect with the hanging of the stones. All of them last for the duration of the warfare, but some for many years longer. Some, indeed, are permanent for those subject to them.

While local populations are presumably or ideally composed of groups of agnatically related men and their in-married wives, a substantial portion of the male population of any local population is, in fact, made up of non-agnates living uxorilocally, sororilocally or matrilocally.¹ When the local population among whom such a man lives hangs its fighting stones he may choose to fight at the side of his hosts not as a mere ally but as one of them. The choice may be almost academic because, if he is a long-term resident, he would probably be ashamed to do other than to declare himself not to be one with his hosts, and might not be allowed to remain in residence if in fact he did. Be this as it may, if he does choose to be numbered among those with whom he lives, he joins them in having ringi applied to his face and his body.²

Allies do not have ringi applied to them. By wearing it a man therefore signifies that he comes to battle not as an ally, but as a principal antagonist. The role of a principal antagonist may well be more dangerous than that of an ally because enemies are more motivated to kill principal antagonists than they are their antagonists’ allies. Indeed, they even may attempt to avoid killing or injuring their antagonists’ allies.³

Should a local population remain in possession of its territory at the conclusion of a round of warfare (in most cases neither side is dislodged) it conducts further rituals that, among other things, provide its erstwhile resident aliens with further opportunities to identify with it. First, if such a man is in possession of any mature or even adolescent pigs he will join the other locals in sacrificing them to various categories of spirits, and in presenting the bulk of the pork to men from elsewhere who have fought as allies. That is, he acts towards others as do the men among whom he has been living and at whose sides he has fought. The role he takes in these rituals – sacrificer of pigs and donor of pork – cannot help but indicate that he shares with his erstwhile hosts the burden of debts to allies and spirits that warfare entails for the principals.

The final and most important act in the rituals terminating hostilities is the planting of small trees or shrubs called yu min rumbim (yu [men]; min [“soul,” life principle, shadow]; rumbim [Cordyline fruticosa, pidgin English: tanket]) by each of a local population’s sub-territorial groups (usually patricians or clusters of them). All men participate in this ritual by grasping the rumbim as earth is tamped around its base. Some informants say that they are actually injecting their min into the plants. Be this as it may, they are signifying their connection to the land in which it is planted and to each other. The former alien, having defended the land upon which he lives in the same fashion as its native sons and having sacrificed his pigs as have they, joins them in clasping the rumbim, possibly mingling his min with theirs, but at any rate joining them and, in effect, rooting himself in the land.

We note, then, three ritual contexts associated with warfare in which, as Leach would have it, the individual expresses his “status as a social person in the structural system in which he finds himself for the time being.” Participation in them by native sons, although important, is hardly noteworthy, for it doesn’t indicate anything not already established and well-known. Much more noteworthy would be their failure to participate. On the other hand, the participation of resident aliens, anomalous figures whose positions are ambiguous, is much more noteworthy, for it indicates clearly what has not previously been entirely clear: the groups with which they align themselves.

Their participation indicates membership. It does not simply symbolize it, despite the fact that the association of ringi, presentations of pigs and the planting of rumbim seem to be, or in fact are, only conventionally related to membership. To apply ringi to oneself before going into battle is not merely to report or assert that one will accept the dangers of group membership, or to symbolize one’s acceptance of those perils. It is in itself to accept them. There is no possibility for dissembling. Similarly, when one who was previously a resident alien joins native sons in sacrificing pigs and presenting pork to allies he is not symbolizing his willingness to discharge the responsibilities of membership in the local group. He is discharging them. His actions indicate his position because: (1) they are highly visible; they constitute a display and (2) they are intrinsic to, an aspect of, that which they signify. To attach oneself to a territory by planting a tree into which one has poured one’s life principle, and to join a group by mingling one’s life principle with those of others surely has an iconic aspect, for the acts bear formal resemblance to that which is being signified. Yet planting the rumbim is also an index of membership because the planting brings the membership into being if it did not previously exist.

This account may suggest, among other things, that the information transmitted in ritual may be highly redundant. Three successive rituals speak of membership. Leach (1966) and others (Bloch 1973) have stressed the ways in which ritual reiterates messages. It should be noted, however, that for the erstwhile alien these three rituals are not entirely redundant. In the first he accepts the dangers of membership, in the second its economic and ritual responsibilities. It is only later that he participates in the ritual which gives him rights of membership.

We note finally that what is being indicated, the membership of a previous alien, is on the face of it simple – a man is either a member or an alien. This clear and simple indication, however, emerges out of a rather complex process. Not only is the willingness of the former alien to accept duties and responsibilities prerequisite to his membership, so is his acceptance by the body of members. That his act of clasping the rumbim is, so to speak, a summary of complex private and public decisionmaking processes is a matter to which we shall return.

3. Index, icon, and number in the Maring ritual cycle

The planting of the yu min rumbim terminates hostilities and a truce ensues. Some years later – it may be more than a decade – when the group has what it considers to be sufficient pigs to discharge to ancestors and allies the debts incurred in the last round of warfare, the rumbim is uprooted and a year-long festival, or kaiko, is staged. During the kaiko debts to allies and ancestors are repaid in pork, and when it is finished the group may again initiate warfare.⁴

A local population entertains members of other friendly local groups from time to time during its kaiko, and it is useful to examine these festivals in some detail, for they are full of self-referential messages of great significance to the participants. They commence with the arrival, generally late in the afternoon, of the visitors. The most prominent feature of such occasions is the dancing of the local and visiting men to the accompaniment of their own drumming and singing. Dancing continues from the time the visitors arrive until early next morning, interrupted only at dusk for a formal presentation of food by the hosts to their guests. At dawn the dance ground becomes a trading ground; people from as much as a day’s walk away, most of whom are members of neither the host nor visiting groups, convene to exchange, traditionally, bird plumes, shell ornaments, axes, native salt, and baby pigs.

We may recall that by dancing at the kaiko of another group a man signifies that he will come to his hosts’ aid in future rounds of warfare. Given the structure of Maring society, ritual provides an especially effective medium for the transmission of this information.

The Maring are highly egalitarian. There are no political authorities capable of commanding men into the wars of others. Whether or not to assist another group in warfare is a decision resting with each individual male, and is made on the basis of his own considerations. Allies cannot, therefore, be recruited by appealing to other local groups as such. Rather, each member of the groups primarily engaged in hostilities appeals to affines, cognates and sometimes trading partners in other groups for help. These men, in turn, urge their co-residents and even kinsmen from yet other local populations to “help them fight.”

The channels through which invitations to dance at a kaiko are extended are precisely those through which appeals for military aid are issued. Invitations to dance are not extended from one group to another but from individual men to kinsmen and trading partners, and these men, in turn, ask their co-residents and, possibly, kinsmen from elsewhere to “help them dance.” The equivalence of dancing and fighting is, perhaps, further signified by the similarity of the pre-dance rituals performed by contingents of visitors to pre-fight rituals. A certain clay (gir) is ritually applied to the ankles and feet to strengthen them for both fighting and dancing, and certain pouches called mbamp yuk (fighting packages) in which are secreted occultly powerful materials including the exuviae of enemies, are applied to weapons, drums, shoulders, heads and feather headdresses to make them sharp, strong, ardent, and, in the case of the plumes, vibrant, fascinating, and attractive. The martial character of the dancing is also reflected in the stylized way in which visiting contingents enter onto the dance grounds of their hosts. They charge over the fence, voicing the long, low Maring war cry, led by a small vanguard of men brandishing axes or mbamp yuk, running back and forth in the peculiar stylized fighting prance of the Maring and other Papua New Guinea Highlanders. Their women come in quietly behind them, to be greeted by local women on the edges of the dance ground.

At first the visitors alone occupy the dance ground, but when they finish singing their entrance song the formation of local men joins them. The two groups dance separately for a while but gradually they merge and dance together until dusk when speeches are made by hosts, and food is given the visitors. The food consists, for the most part, of cooked vegetables – with taro being especially important – but also includes quantities of sugar cane for quenching thirst. It is presented to those visitors specifically invited to the kaiko by the men who invited them. The recipients immediately and publicly redistribute the food to those who have come to “help them dance.” The hosts have displayed to them, in the course of this distribution, the number of followers each of those whom they have invited has been able to mobilize. In like manner, the food distribution provides some grounds for the visitors to assess the local status of the men inviting them. Donors assemble the foods to be presented to visitors by calling upon the men helping them to bring forth their contributions. How many men have assisted each donor, as well as the gross amount of food each donor has been able to assemble, is a matter for all to see. In sum, both hosts and guests are provided information concerning the social status of the men who connect them.

With darkness, dancing begins again and continues around low fires until dawn; women are the most numerous and significant spectators. The dancing is tacitly competitive. Men boast of dancing and singing without respite through the night, although most of them do take frequent breaks, and, by dawn, when trading replaces dancing on the t’p kaiko, (dance ground), only a few die-hard young men, weary, footsore, and hoarse, are still at it.

That the networks through which dancers are assembled and fed are icons of those through which military assistance is mobilized seems apparent, for the two are formally similar. But the term “icon” hardly does justice to their relationship. The dancing network is not simply “like” the mobilization network. The men invited to dance are men who are likely to be importuned for help in wartime, and those who “help them dance” are likely to be among those who help them fight. Given the near identity of dancing and alliance networks, and given the understanding that to dance entails a pledge to fight, the mobilization of visiting dancing contingents for kaiko has indexical as well as iconic value. Such events, in which alliance networks a...