Understanding Rituals

Daniel de Coppet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134926626
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Understanding Rituals explores how ritual can be understood within the framework of contemporary social anthropology, and shows that ritual is now one of the most fertile fields of anthropological research. The contributors demonstrate how rituals create and maintain - or transform - a society's cultural identity and social relations. By examining specific rituals from various theoretical viewpoints, they reveal the ultimate and contradictory values to which each society as a whole is attached.

Chapter 1
Ritual as spatial direction and bodily division

David Parkin

Lévi-Strauss may be credited with having privileged words, in the form of myth, over ritual, regarded as ‘mere’ action. One might be forgiven for imagining that he even despised ritual action as being empty of words and that, for him, only myth could give rise to the logocentric reasoning that has allegedly characterized Western forms of rationality. For example, he is charged with regarding ritual as ‘the bastardisation of thought’ (Crick 1982:300, citing de Heusch 1980), with thought itself being most imaginatively expressed in myth. It is not unreasonable to infer that, for Lévi-Strauss, action without words, including for example exchanges of goods and services and those entailed in marriage, is the most elementary form of communication and, despite the use elsewhere of the action-based metaphor bricolage to characterize mythological thought, myth is the highest (Lévi-Strauss 1966:16–33). In his own words,

The value of the ritual as meaning seems to reside in instruments and gestures: it is a paralanguage. The myth, on the other hand, manifests itself as a metalanguage; it makes full use of discourses, but does so by situating its own significant oppositions at a higher level of complexity than that required by language operating for profane ends.

(Lévi-Strauss 1977 [1973]: 66)

I wish to suggest that the manner in which many anthropologists, including Lévi-Strauss, have understood ritual entitles us to reverse this privileging and to argue that it is precisely because ritual is fundamentally made up of physical action, with words often only optional or arbitrarily replaceable, that it can be regarded as having a distinctive potential for performative imagination that is not reducible to verbal assertions.

Since Lévi-Strauss’s early major impact there has developed a now widespread anthropological view that words and actions are inseparably inscribed in each other: ‘language penetrates the social’ (Ardener 1982:12). However, to go back to the unstudied counter-implications of Tambiah’s (1968) pioneering analysis of the magical power of words, the claim that speech can stand alone in certain situations as autonomously efficacious and as having illocutionary effect (and so constituting action) obliges us also to consider the alternative possibility of a world of non-words or, at least, of actions which achieve their legitimacy through performance including speech only secondarily, if at all.

I would certainly agree that the linguistic is inseparably part of the social and that speech is itself a form of social action—a view developed long ago through the work on propositions of Austin (1962), Searle (1969), and others, as well as, from a somewhat different perspective, the later Wittgenstein. I imagine also that few would dissent from the claim that this inseparability of word and deed characterizes a prevalent and sometimes reflexive anthropological view of social process. But I would suggest that anthropological ideas of ritual contrasted with myth constantly threaten to reverse this premise: it is often part of the alleged special character of ritual that it does presuppose an action or series of actions which does not need speech. Thus, while myth is rendered as privileging words, ritual is held to privilege physical action; but it is an action that can only be understood as bodily movement towards or positioning with respect to other bodily movements and positions. If such movements are a principal feature of ritual, then it must be through them rather than through verbal assertions that people make their main statements.

An implication of this view is that all rituals are in some way rites of passage: in other words, that they presuppose phasal movement, directionality, and positioning. Since it is through such movements and positions that participants make statements both about the world and about the ritual itself, a further implication is that there may often arise a quality which keeps the ritual going and which I will call ‘agency by default’: that is to say, it is less that persons opt to set up and maintain these rituals than that, in criticizing others’ competence in bodily movement and direction, they may be left with the task of organizing the ritual. This agency by default is the underside of the now familiar claim, advanced earlier by Leach (1954), Southall (1954), and Middleton (1960), that rivals compete to control the conduct of rituals in order to legitimate leadership roles.

But what is here meant by a ritual, or by ritual in general? It would be tedious to go through yet again the lists of criteria by which they have been laboriously defined. There have been valiant attempts, although it is amazing how nominalist they can be, with the most satisfactory understandings of purported ritual being drawn not from definitional criteria but from extended case studies. There is, however, an approach which hovers over the assumption that rituals are always in some way regarded as rites of passage and that they survive through agency by default. It is an approach which sits uneasily with those other approaches which have been variously dubbed functionalist, intellectualist, symbolist, and Marxist. Rather than give it a name, let me outline its overlapping features:

We can take as encompassing a time-span during which this approach has emerged two little-known articles: one by Jack Goody (1977) and the other by Thomas Gerholm (1988). Goody’s ‘Against “Ritual”’ is a witty deconstruction of the concept, insisting that it can never satisfactorily be defined. It concludes with a somewhat whimsical appeal to see ritual within ‘a hierarchy of organised skills and processes’ which include formal, repetitive behaviour, Goffmanesque small encounters, and largescale ceremonies. Gerholm’s paper also deconstructs current assumptions of ritual, but, whereas Goody’s dismantles in order to rebuild a broader sociological edifice of interaction, it suggests that ritual is anything but an edifice and that it is an arena of contradictory and contestable perspectives—participants having their own reasons, viewpoints, and motives and in fact is made up as it goes along. Not surprisingly, Gerholm calls this a post-modernist view, but he is certainly not wedded to this label.

His example is the description by V.S.Naipaul in The Enigma of Arrival (1987) of his sister’s funeral in Trinidad, where people of Indian Hindu extraction constitute a large minority (40 per cent) coexisting with others of European, African, and Chinese descent and with adherents of other religions, including Christianity. On hearing of his sister’s death, Naipaul does not immediately depart for Trinidad but mourns privately in Britain where he lives. When he does arrive at his family home in Trinidad, he is amazed by what he sees. There is an insistence that the woman be given a ‘proper’ Hindu funerary ritual, for which the dead girl’s brother summons a Hindu ‘priest’ who, throughout the ceremony, is questioned by the brother as to the meaning of actions in the ritual. We are given the impression that the priest himself interprets his scriptures very liberally and hesitantly. Naipaul asks whether anything quite like this ritual has occurred before.

Gerholm’s purpose in providing this outline is to suggest that such jumbled-up ritual is a common feature of the modern world, in which, like Naipaul, we can be in London one day, sorrowfully meditating on a sister’s death, and next day have flown the many thousands of miles to attend the funeral, slipping almost unnoticed into the melée. He also argues that, while this may for us as anthropologists be an extreme case of fragmented ritual, that of Victor Turner’s superinformant, Muchona, with his description of ritual as made up of artful internal logic and consistency, may well be an equally extreme case of coherence (Turner 1959). I suspect that fragmentation of meaning is always produced but is dispersed in different ways: in so-called isolated and homogeneous cultures, its dispersal may take the form of spatially as well as temporally opposed whole rituals (e.g., funerals in one area or era may invert the forms of funerals but resemble those of, say, weddings in another area or time), while in so-called exposed, heterogeneous cultures, the dispersal or fragmentation may occur within the ritual.

Gerholm does not wish, however, to remain with the idea of ritual as only dispersing meaning. He argues in favour of an intellectualist rather than symbolist perspective: that rituals, however they are defined, are not just expressive of abstract ideas but do things, have effects on the world, and are work that is carried out—that they are indeed performances. This expressively instrumental view of ritual is certainly that which has gained currency over the last decade, as is evident, say, from Gilbert Lewis’s study of the Gnau of New Guinea in 1980 to Bloch’s 1986 analysis of Merina circumcision ritual and others since.

A key notion in this development is what Lewis calls the ‘ruling’ (1980:11). Participants in a ritual may well contest the proper conduct of the ceremony or may acknowledge their ignorance and ask others what to do or what some action or object means. But that the ritual is a ritual and is supposed to follow some time-hallowed precedent in order to be effective or simply to be a proper performance is not in question. An implication of Lewis’s study is that Western-trained anthropologists will probably agree as to what a ritual is when they actually see one at work (1980:8, 14), sharing a sense of special occasion that may partly mirror their common epistemology but that is also largely shared by the ritual’s participants themselves, who heed the ‘ruling’.

We can see this as more than just custom, for the sense of occasion that makes up ritual calls for ‘public attention’ (Lewis 1980:7, 20–21) in a way that custom, if carried out ‘correctly’, does not. Lewis tends to regard ritual and custom as drawing on similar attributes (1980:11–13), but let me here make a distinction between them that is consistent with his emphasis on the ‘alerting’ quality of ritual. Custom is silent and, if properly carried out, unnoticed: it is only when the customary greeting is impaired or the man orders his drink in an odd way that the custom is noticed in its breach. As the obverse, ritual is culturally loud and vibrant even when acoustically mute and tranquil: the sacrifice, initiation, or May Day parade is already a publicly marked event, even when carried out behind closed doors or secretly; whether or not it is deemed to have gone wrong is part of the putative public gaze which constitutes it. Excluded from this definition then, are personal rituals which may anticipate the myth-dreams of collective cults but which, as private secrets, do not yet evoke public judgement.

The emphasis on ‘ruling’, then, is an invitation to us as outside observers not to record or decipher precisely sequenced rules but rather to acknowledge that people expect there to be rules as a condition of public ritual. In other words, even when neither observers nor participants can agree on, understand, or even perceive ritual regulations, they are united by a sense of the occasion as being in some way rule-governed and as necessarily so in order to be complete, efficacious, and proper.

So-called structuralist approaches to ritual have, of course, stressed precisely the logic of this rule-governed behaviour and have in fact sought the regularities that transcend the individual consciousness of participants. Recent work by de Heusch (1985) on sacrifice, by Tcherkezoff (1983) on Nyamwezi dualism, and by Werbner (1989) on his own and others’ ethnography are examples. Such scholars see themselves as tackling the challenge thrown to structuralism to account for history and agency in the decoding of cultural logicīs). Applause for their ingenuity is, however, tempered by reservations about the temptation in structuralism to enter into infinite regress in the discovery, or creation, of new structures. For my purposes, however, I do not wish to set up structuralist against such other approaches as intellectualism and symbolism. Rather, what interests me is the use made, in such studies, of directionality—of axes, cardinal points, concentric zones, and other expressions of spatial orientation and movement. Werbner’s most recent study is in fact entitled Ritual Passage, Sacred Journey and includes essays which justify the title.

My own division would be between two approaches: (1) that which tends to treat ritual as a process of such internal conceptual significance, if not consistency, that we are given only a limited idea of that ritual’s movement through social space and (2) that which, instead, emphasizes the ritual as clearly concerned with directionality and as making up a journey or passage undertaken and/or marked by participants standing in spatial relationships to each other. (Perhaps these are emphases rather than approaches, for they are often found within the same analysis.)

The approach to ritual as always concerned with movement, directionality, and spatial orientation is, I think, distinctive. It takes up a hint from V.Turner (1982:24) that all rituals are, in a way, rites of passage, including both those that celebrate birth, initiation, marriage, death, and seasonal changes and those he calls rites of affliction. We can extend the list to include the many liturgical rituals occurring in the annual calendars of so-called world religions. They all, following Turner following Van Gennep, involve a liminal phase, a betwixt-and-between element, and so presuppose an initial phase of separation and one of reaggregation. Can we think of any ritual which does not have such phases, however much they may be redefined (see T.Turner 1977)? The more specific use of metaphors of passage and journeying is also, of course, found in many descriptions of, say, Amazonian shamanism (Descola 1992, Overing 1990), African divination (Parkin 1979; 1991), marriage ceremonies premised on ideas of capture, elopement, and reciprocal visiting, funerary rituals involving the carrying, burial, and sometimes reburial of corpses (Bloch 1971; Feeley-Harnik 1991), special processions, and pilgrimages (Sallnow 1987).

I want to go farther than this and suggest that it is precisely the infinite combinatorial possibilities for directional change and spatial orientation that almost merge ritual with art and yet also, in conjunction with its purposive nature, make it not just performative but performative-for-some-goal and for-someone. If I may be allowed to impose a Western-derived distinction, art tends towards a performative en-soi, culminating ultimately in the magical and aesthetic power of directionally oriented and shaped objects (socalled fetishes), while ritual tends towards a performative pour-soi, conscious, through its participants, of its power to make or break life depending on the directions and, literally, the steps it takes and so entrusted with that good faith, yet forever experimenting with these spatial forms. Changes in the steps, dances, movements, gestures, spaces, axes, and directions of ritual can never be neutral if noticed, for they deviate from a pre-existing form remembered or constructed by at least some participants and/or onlookers. And while public deviation in ritual threatens the ritual and is, indeed, its inner contradiction, it is also that which sustains it, for disagreements over ritual procedure hold public attention. Much the same may be said about claims to the sanctity of any words used in the ritual. Words may be important elements of ritual performance, sometimes critically so. But while words may stand alone in myth unaccompanied by gesture, they are dependent on the directional movements that make up ritual. It is in this sense that ritual, full of spatial movement and gestural performance, could make the evolutionary transition to drama and theatre, based at first primarily on mime rather than on dialogue.

With such steps and movements, rather than the words, as the main points of articulation in ritual, it is not surprising that it is these directional and spatial qualities which are commonly referred to as the basis of the ‘proper’, ‘hallowed’, and ‘effective’ ritual. I have never come across a ritual in which the spatial movements and orientation counted for nothing and the words were all-important. By contrast, I have never met a ritual in which the words, though sometimes claimed to be essential for proper performance, were not inscribed in spatially arranged phases and sequences: it is less that their utterance heralded a new phase than that certain points and places in the ritual process were chosen as appropriate niches for verbal expression. It might be argued that certain kinds of silent prayer are exceptions to this generalization, but, even so, they commonly assume bodily and directional postures, such as facing an altar or Mecca, such that even the silent prayers permitted to individuals absent from a mosque or church may be regarded as a temporary and spatially expedient variant of the more desirable public and collective ritual act carried out in a house of worship.

At this point let me offer a minimal definition of ritual: Ritual is formulaic spatiality carried out by groups of people who are conscious of its imperative or compulsory nature and who may or may not further inform this spatiality with spoken words.

Definitions are risky adventures, and this attempt seeks both to summarize my argument so far and to avoid the teleological pitfall of claiming that repetitive, formalized activities without words are ritual while words without action are myth. I draw on an unorthodox view of ‘proposition’ as sometimes communicated through silent, physical movement and not through words (Parkin 1980:48) and so agree with Lewis (1980), Tambiah (1968), Rappaport (1979), and especially Bloch (1986:195) that ritual is neither fully a statement nor fully an action—for it is indeed the case that a ritual need not fulfill a stated aim in order to continue and be believed in. But what I do regard as fundamental to this ambiguity and tension between a ritual’s performance and assertion is its formulaic spatiality, namely, the capacity to create and act through idioms of passage, movement, including exchange, journey, axis, concentricism, and up-and-down directions.

Just as the language of anthropological theory is based on metaphors of spatial direction, progress, and conquest (Salmond 1982), so rituals can only be described, by either observers or participants, as movements between points and places and as positionings. But this formulaic spatiality is not uncontested. Indeed, I would argue that f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• European association of social anthropologists
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Ritual as spatial direction and bodily division
• Chapter 2: From one rite to another: the memory in ritual and the ethnologist’s recollection
• Chapetr 3: Brothers and sisters in Brahmanic India
• Chapter 4: The brother—married-sister relationship and marriage ceremonies as sacrificial rites: a case study from northern India
• Chapter 5: Transforming Tobelo ritual
• Chapter 6: Ritual implicates ‘Others’: rereading Durkheim in a plural society