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shape of a light switch in a dark room and expecting that a press of the switch will result in the illumination of the room by a light fixture somewhere. It is by virtue of convention and habit, not technical knowledge, that we take the pressing of a switch to signal the appearance of light. Leach makes clear that the logical fallacies by which the sorcerer could threaten his victim are commonplace in our various forms of cultural communication; there is nothing uniquely magical or ritualistic about these fallacies. “I am not suggesting,” Leach writes, “that we should treat light switching as an act of magic, but only that, if Sir James Frazer had been consistent, he should have done so! The action is technical in intention and may be technical in its consequences, but the actual form of the action is expressive.”123

The prominence of magic in early theories of ritual and religion has now given way to approaches to ritual that usually do not make these distinctions. Indeed, many of the scholars described in this chapter would now see the term as a hindrance to objective analysis and as closely tied to historical biases, such as Protestant-Catholic and modern-primitive prejudices. The recent tendency has been to see differences in forms of ritual activity as rooted first in different social structures, as when small local communities struggling to maintain their identities are compared to large, inclusive congregations attempting to create allegiances over and above local groups.

A secondary recent tendency, rooted in linguistic analysis, also distinguishes forms of symbolic, expressive, or performative modes of communication. Nonetheless, witchcraft and sorcery are now nearly technical terms for describing specific forms of religious activity associated with particular social and doctrinal features.124 In the end, they have all been subsumed as examples of ritual behavior, which now includes high mass in a Greek Orthodox church, the swearing in of the president, school graduation ceremonies, and the special talismanic actions taken by a pitcher as he gets ready to throw a baseball. This is not to say that scholars do not see any differences among these rites but simply that what they share has become of greater theoretical interest than what seems to distinguish them—at least for the time being.

Profile: Interpreting the Mukanda Initiation

Just the Babylonian Akitu festival attracted certain theories of ritual and became a much reworked example among those concerned with the origin or essence of ritual, the Ndembu Mukanda initiation for young boys is a good representative of the type of ritual that social functionalists and structuralists turn to interpret. Turner provided a very detailed description of the Mukanda as he observed it among the Ndembu in

1953, while also using other ethnographic accounts for comparison and amplification. His description makes explicit use of the theoretical views of other interpreters, notably van Gennep and Gluckman. After a very brief general sketch of the Mukanda itself, this section presents each level of Turner’s analysis in artificially separate stages in order to demonstrate how each of these major theoreticians contributed to interpretation of this ritual. Van Gennep, Gluckman, and Turner are representative of the most influential approaches to ritual discussed in the foregoing section, even though they do not exhaust all the ways in which ritual has been defined and studied as a “social fact.” Indeed, several theorists have addressed other initiations and de-

veloped rather contradictory interpretations. For example, Vincent Crapanzano explicitly challenges the notion of initiation ritual as a passage and, less directly, as a healthy medium for the definition of social identity and community.125 Other challenges to a processual understanding of initiation—and to any theory of ritual that looks at only part of the evidence—also come from those working more closely with materials on women’s experience, as in Bruce Lincoln’s study of female initiation rites and Caroline Bynum’s analysis of the dominant symbols in women’s portrayal of the initiatory experience of conversion.126

The Mukanda initiation rite of the Ndembu of northwestern Zambia represents one version of the general pattern of male circumcision ceremonies found in the Bantu culture area.127 It is also, as far as any particular ritual can be, a fairly representative example of a male initiation ceremony and typical of the many similar examples that have inspired and continue to support the theory of rites of passage. In the various myths explaining its origin, most relate how a boy was accidentally circumcised while playing among sharp grasses and the practice was thereafter adopted by all the males of the tribe. The word “Mukanda” means “to heal and make strong,” and this emphasis in the ritual circumcision is borne out by the rite’s symbols of purification, healing, and empowerment.

Like all male initiation ceremonies, the main purpose of the Mukanda rite is to turn boys into men. The critical mechanisms of this transformation are the removal of the boys from the care of their mothers, their circumcision by tribal elders who act as ritual experts, a period of healing and instruction in which the boys assume new duties and social identities that reinforce their relationships to their fathers, and finally a communal celebration that acknowledges the changed status of the young men as they return to places in the larger society. The full sequence of ritual activities has occasionally lasted for more than two months and involved a cluster of interdependent villages.128 The themes stressed in the symbolism of these activities indicates that the uncircumcised boy is considered unclean, effeminate in his dependence on women, and outside the formal male governing structure of the tribe. The extended circumcision rites, therefore, act to purify him, break his connection to the world of women, and induct him into the male hierarchical power system.

The Ndembu appear to identify three main sequences within the overall Mukanda ritual, which neatly correspond to the tripartite structure van Gennep identified for rites of passage in general.129 What van Gennep called the separation stage is known as kwing’ija (“causing to enter”) and is marked by preliminary rites such as sanctifying certain spaces, ritual washing, and the removal of the boys from their ordinary routines into the bush, where activities culminate in the circumcision. The transitional or liminal state, identified as kung’ula (“at the circumcision lodge”), includes a variety of activities associated with the boys’ seclusion in a specially constructed building that is off-limits to all but certain ritual officiants and male kin. There the boys are tended by their fathers and brothers as they recover from the circumcision. They receive instruction in esoteric Ndembu customs and undergo various trials and tests. The final ritual stage of incorporation, known to the Ndembu as kwidisha (“to take outside”), is a set of rites that return the young men to new positions within the community, including simulated intercourse to signify virility, burning the initiation lodge, dances, and a series of entries into the village. For van Gennep,

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the three-stage pattern reinforces the clarity or rigidity of the traditional Ndembu categories of boy and man, male and female, and circumcised and uncircumcised, while simultaneously moving people from one category to another. Hence, the ritual depicts the structure of the community as it reformulates who is who in the community; both processes are means for maintaining and enhancing the sense of community. The Mukanda also makes frequent use of the type of symbolic passage that van Gennep described so accurately, such as passing through gateways and crossing the boundaries of communal or sacral spaces, symbols of ritual killing and rebirth, secrecy and hiding, and changes in clothing and the revelation of new identities.

Max Gluckman’s work on ritual pointed to the ways in which rites depict and resolve fundamental social tensions, and Turner presented ample data for applying Gluckman’s theory to several levels of conflict and resolution in the Mukanda. On a structural level, Ndembu society is built upon the positive tension between two forms of organization: first, a matrilineal principle of descent that establishs one’s primary identity in terms of the maternal lineage; and, second, a patrilocal principle of habitation and government according to which lineages and networks of men determine village residence and the political structure of interconnected villages. The Mukanda vividly demonstrates the conflicts that result from this dual mode of organization since the rite is orchestrated to weaken the first form of social bond, the mother-son relationship, in order to strengthen the second, the father-son relationship that is critical to the organizational harmony of clusters of villages.130 On a symbolic level, Gluckman and Turner also find the tensions between these two forms of organization expressed in the rite. For example, the Ndembu compare a boy’s uncircumcised penis to female genitals, which are considered wet and polluted. The act of circumcision is thought to correct this—it “makes manhood visible.”131 During the ritual, there is an analogous display of hostility between the mothers of the boys and the men who are ritually involved in breaking the dependence of the boys on their mothers. In keeping with this and the conflict of loyalties that needs to be resolved, a boy who cries out in pain for his mother will be deemed a coward, but no such judgment is made if he cries out for his father. On yet another more overtly political level of conflict, the Mukanda ritual is also a trial of strength for rival local leaders. Turner describes the complex and lengthy preliminary negotiations by which they compete and contend for the prestige of sponsoring it or performing important roles in the ceremonies.132 While many of the specific activities involved in the Mukanda reflect complex power wrangling among the leaders, Turner argues that the ritual itself provisionally resolves these conflicts as people eventually play the parts they could secure for themselves and the ceremony unfolds as a living model of cooperation, tradition—and the reigning prestige order.

Besides incorporating the theories of van Gennep and Gluckman, Turner also developed specific interpretive themes of his own. In particular, he stressed how the liminal period of the initiation represents an inversion of the usual order of society. The equality of the boys is stressed when they are housed together in the bush, while other Ndembu conventions are consistently violated by means of obscene gestures, homosexuality, and taboos against touching the ground.133 Turner saw this as a breakdown of the “natural” social hierarchy in order to facilitate an experience of communitas. It was in this vein that he also interpreted the appearance of the ances-

tors as masked dancers called makishi, whose presence collapsed distinctions between the living and the dead, the ancestral past and the present time—an interpretation that very much echoes aspects of the phenomenological theory of Eliade.134 At critical moments in the course of the Mukanda, Turner argued, unrestrained festivities effectively asserted undifferentiated community in the face of the contending systems of structure, the matrilineal and the patrilocal. Hence, he concluded that the

Mukanda is a ritual assertion of “the unity, exclusiveness, and constancy” of corporate groups and classes. In transforming “unclean” children into purified members of the male political community, the Mukanda “strengthens the wider and reduces the narrower loyalties.”135 When ritually portrayed in the Mukanda, even the motherson and father-son relationships become symbols of more embracing and complex social relationships.

Turner echoed Gluckman when he concluded that the Mukanda is a “mechanism” for restoring a state of dynamic equilibrium among the component relationships of Ndembu society. In order to do this, the ritual mechanism must draw on time-honored practices of tradition as well as the current state of power relationships among members of the community. The goals of such a ritual are both to maintain traditional Ndembu society and to allow individuals to press for their own private interests. But Turner’s analysis of the Mukanda also contrasts with how Gluckman would interpret it: the ritual does not really resolve social conflicts and result in social equilibrium; instead, the ritual dramatizes the tensions in a context in which the simultaneous expression of overarching social bonds and symbols of unity facilitates the ongoing dynamics that make up the processes of real social life.136

The Mukanda initiation of the Ndembu lends itself, of course, to the particular theoretical issues that concerned van Gennep, Gluckman, and Turner, and it is important that the last two developed and refined their theories among the Ndembu and peoples rather similar to them. In particular, their functional-structural theories appear particularly appropriate to groups whose social, economic and political organizations are sufficiently limited geographically that one can attempt to plot most of it and, in doing so, try to see the connections between symbolic actions and social life. Neither Gluckman nor Turner would have thought to analyze French or British ritual life with the same thoroughness, though they both regularly drew provocative comparisons. Likewise, they would not have jumped to analyze the historical records on the Babylonian Akitu festival, for which fieldwork was impossible and the information they would consider necessary to have was impossible to secure from limited records. In later works, Turner did address rituals that ranged beyond the grasp of the usual forms of fieldwork. In applying his theories of ritual to the practices of the followers of the 13th-century Francis of Assisi, medieval pilgrimage, and modern theater productions, Turner revealed an affinity with the myth-and-ritualists and the phenomenologists, namely, the concern to identify universal principles of ritual action.137 The universality that Turner pursued was carefully couched in terms of science, that is, as a matter of regularities from which certain natural or social laws might be deduced, in contrast to the quest for a single original event, primordial pattern, or underlying essence. Nonetheless, these different orientations share the sense that ritual, if it is to be explained at all, must be interpreted in large part by reference to nonsituational principles.

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In an analysis of women’s initiation rituals, Bruce Lincoln suggests that van

Gennep’s spatial model for ritualized social passage does not work very well. There seems to be a different set of symbols used in women’s initiations since the young girl is hardly ever really separated from village and family. She may be isolated but usually well within the orbit of her family. Instead of a symbolic logic of separation-liminality- reincorporation, Lincoln suggests that the symbols of enclosure-metamorphosis- emergence are more appropriate. He also finds that many women’s initiations appear to rely on a logic of molding in order to transform an immature girl into culturally defined image of womanhood. While the symbolic activities used in this transformative process are varied, they tend to be more evocative of the cocoon metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly than of a boy passing through dangerous and purifying ordeals to return as a warrior.138

Using very different materials, the medieval historian Caroline Bynum finds a similar disjunction between the van Gennep–Turner theory of initiatory passage and women’s experience. The experience of transition, liminality, and inversion so basic to Turner’s model of initiation—and initiatory narratives—appears to fit accounts of male religious experience, such as the story of St. Francis, but not women’s understandings of what they are experiencing. Male adoption of female dress or selfreferences at critical (liminal) turning points in their spiritual life clearly signifies loss of self and birth of a new self, but female recourse to male dress or symbols, if it happens at all, appears to be a pragmatic social decision while the woman’s self-image remains stoutly female. Bynum could also find no structure of separation, transitional breach, and reincorporation or dramatic turning points and reversals. In the case of the 15th-century English mystic Margery Kempe, she “achieves spiritual growth not by reversing what she is but by being more fully herself.” This may not be surprising since women in these centuries could hardly, like Francis, “take off all their clothes and walk away from their fathers or husbands.”139 Bynum suggests that while Turner accurately notes how liminal women are to men, thereby making female imagery a natural source of reference for dramatic changes in male status, the opposite was not true. Medieval women, at least, did not tend to see themselves as liminal or as liminal in relation to men. She concludes that Turner’s theory may be truer for those who occupy a certain place in the structure, namely, elites, those who in effect are the structure. As such, van Gennep’s and Turner’s notions of a process of social transition marked by liminality may not be as universal as they supposed.140

Vincent Crapanzano also launched a frontal assault on van Gennep’s theory of rites of passage and, by implication, those theories so indebted to van Gennep, such as Gluckman’s and Turner’s. On the basis of studies of Moroccan rites of circumcision, Crapanzano specifically argues that the alleged three-stage structure of rites of passage “may reflect less the reality of the ritual than the culture of the anthropologist.”141 Unlike most functionalists, who look to the structure of the rite to see how it works to reinforce the structural order of society, Crapanzano notes the perspectives of the individuals involved. These individual perspectives are not the same, of course, and any general theory of what ritual does would have to deal with this variety. However, to demonstrate the problems with van Gennep’s reigning paradigm, Crapanzano focuses on the perspective of the young boy undergoing the ritual circumcision. This

focus is sufficient, argues Crapanzano, to expose the “ritual illusion” to which scholars have succumbed, namely, the assumption that ritual actually does what it says it does. For example, if the ritual declares that the boy is now being made a man, scholars have believed that to be the case. Crapanzano suggests that what ritual is doing is much more complicated, and theories that emphasize ritual as a functional mechanism for legitimate passage and successful incorporation into social groups are misleading.

Based on his observations in Arab villages in Morocco, Crapanzano provides a rather different interpretation of circumcision as part of male initiation. The ritual, he argued, creates a fundamental disjunction, not passage:

[The ritual] declares passage where there is in both ritual and everyday life no passage whatsoever—only the mark of passage, the mutilation that is itself an absence, a negation. . . . It is a precocious rite. The boy is declared a man before he is (emically as well as etically) physically a man—or is treated as a man. . . . [It is] a series of contradictory messages that remain unresolved, at least in the ritual immediate.”142

In a Moroccan village, a boy is circumcised as soon as he is old enough to “remember” the event, usually between three and six years old, although economic factors and the presence of siblings can affect the timing. In contrast to the Ndembu

Mukanda, the Moroccan ritual is a necessary prerequisite for both spiritual and sexual manhood; it does not confer manhood. The ritual involves only a temporary separation from the world of women, a brief and ambiguous excursion into manhood, after which the boy is returned to his mother. There is a public procession in which the father takes the boy, mounted on a horse or mule, to the central male domain, the local mosque, but while they say a few prayers, the father must carry his son to keep him from touching the ground. Prior to this procession, however, the womenfolk paint the boy’s hands and feet with henna in the manner of a bride, and his head may be shaved. On returning from the mosque, the father disappears. The surgery is done by a male barber with other men to hold the boy still, but it is his mother who carries him into the room, stands by the door during the operation, and receives him in her arms, swaddled like an infant, when it is over. Then she dances for a short while with her bleeding son pressed against her bare back before taking him away to be tended by women until he is well again. Clearly, this is not a linear progression from boyhood to manhood. For Crapanzano, it is more of a circular return.143

With an ethnographically sophisticated reading of the psychosocial ramifications of Oedipal desires, Crapanzano implies that Moroccan circumcision is experienced by the boy as a sobering culmination of those taboo desires. It is, therefore, an event that thrusts a child out of the illusions of childhood into the cold, anxious world of reality. The child has no choice but to submit to the ritual, and it is the submission in pain and fear that he forever remembers. For Crapanzano, the rite is orchestrated to crystallize a particularly total and dramatic submission to the demands of civilization and the group; the repression of the individual’s childish desires is made all the more complete by vivid and painful memories of the roles played in the ritual by his father, mother, and larger community. The ritual is meant to instill anxiety, not re-

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solve identity, since the boy “in his ‘manhood’ is deprived of his manhood.” For

Crapanzano, the rite is meant to induce “profound feelings of inadequacy, inferiority and worthlessness that demand constant compensation.” The ritual takes the great timeless Oedipal anxiety of separation from the mother and fear of the father and inscribes them into a single event that “grounds the individual in civilization and history.”144

Crapanzano briefly reviews the history of explanations of ritual circumcision, noting the attempt to find rational and universal explanations. Some, for example, have explained circumcision rites as an attempt to imitate female defloration, to differentiate male and female more fully, as necessary to sexual virility and procreation, as a substitute for human sacrifice, as a mark of group membership, or as a practical solution to a host of medical problems. Psychoanalytic explanations usually explain circumcision in terms of envy of female fertility, the attempt to destroy a lingering femininity associated with the womb and dependence on the mother, or as a mock castration. Crapanzano’s Freudian functionalism attempts to be more ethnographically grounded than these, and he is most convincing when he points to the importance of analyzing a ritual in terms of its own particular cultural setting. Ritual circumcision may not mean the same thing everywhere. Theorists who presuppose general patterns of ritual activity, such as van Gennep’s three-stage process of initiatory passage, can fail to see the complexities of specific rituals—as well as their deeprooted ambiguities. Ritual, Crapanzano suggests, is a cultural creation and, as such, involves all the neuroses that make us humans.145 It is not some sort of pure technology that smoothly and neatly works to socialize human beings according to general laws. This tension between interpretations that appeal, explicitly or implicitly, to universalities and those that stress the highly particular and immediate situation is central to many current debates on ritual and is addressed further in the next section on questions of meaning.

Crapanzano’s interpretation of a male initiation ritual, and its qualifications of a universal ritual process, has an echo in an independent analysis of Hopi initiation by Sam Gill, who addresses the part of the nine-day process in which the children are whipped rather harshly.146 Hopis understand the whipping as connected to the great secrets that will be revealed to the initiates, either as payment for the new knowledge or as a warning never to divulge what they have learned. However, first-person accounts of the initiatory experience make it quite clear that the whipping is minor in comparison to the pain the children feel on learning the great secret—that the kachina dancers are not the gods come down to the village as the children have been taught, they are just men of the tribe dressed up and masked. One old man remembered his feelings on the last day of the ritual festival when the truth was made known to him:

When the Katcinas entered the kiva without masks, I had a great surprise. They were not spirits, but human beings. I recognized nearly every one of them and felt very unhappy, because I had been told all my life that the Katcinas were gods. I was especially shocked and angry when I saw all my uncles, fathers and clan brothers dancing as Katcinas. I felt even worse when I saw my own father—and whenever he glanced at me I turned my face away.147