A Hopi woman recounted a similar reaction: “I cried and cried into my sheepskin that night, feeling I had been made a fool of. How could I ever watch the Kachinas dance again? I hated my parents and thought I would never believe the old folks again.148

The rite ends “on this note of discord.” In analyzing this ritual of “disenchantment,” Gill suggests an attempt to shock Hopi children out of a naive realism and force them to “search out a new basis for perceiving a meaningful reality.” The males are then brought into the kachina cult itself, and as dancers who don masks to impersonate the gods they now must work out a theology of divine presence in a world that has been experienced as painfully disjoined.149

Is the Ndembu Mukanda—as van Gennep, Turner, and Gluckman would argue—a smooth passage into a secure sense of Ndembu manhood and an orchestrated experience of liminal communitas that works to diffuse tensions between the matrilineal and patrilocal systems and renew the underlying sociocultural order of Ndembu society? Or—as Crapanzano and Gill suggest—is it a familyand societyinduced trauma in which childhood desires and naiveté are cruelly exposed, socializing the child into adult roles by instilling anxiety, repression, and submission? While many aspects of these interpretations are not mutually exclusive, by themselves they generate very different models for the function of ritual. The examples of a rather different symbolic logic and imagery for women’s initiation rites—specifically, metamorphosis rather than territorial passage—is an important clue that theories about universal ritual structures might fail to see important aspects of ritual action.

Conclusion

Questions about how ritual functions within society gave rise to useful and influential formulations of the social dimensions of ritual activity. Functionalists and early structuralists insisted on the practicality of ritual action—how it facilitates social life— in contrast to the theorists discussed in part I, who tended to emphasize its mysticism or emotionalism and how it facilitated individual psychic identity and coherence. The functional-structuralists explored what appeared to be the “social” work of ritual activities: the formation and maintenance of the social bonds that establish human community, the socialization of the individual through an unconscious appropriation of common values and common categories of knowledge and experience, the channeling and resolution of social conflict, and the periodic renewal or transformation of the social and conceptual structures underlying community life. These analyses, however, gradually began to raise questions that reached beyond concerns with ritual’s social function.

New questions addressed two major issues. The first concerned history and raised questions about how ritual and social structures changed over time or under duress. Those asking these questions rejected the “ahistoricism” of the functionalists, who had been concerned in their turn, of course, to discard the antiquated evolutionism of the myth and ritualists. The second set of questions arose around the issue of communication and the emergence of interest in how symbolic and linguistic systems work. Religious symbols and the symbolic activity of ritual appeared too complex to

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be mere reflections of the social order; they were clearly embedded in elaborate systems that appeared to have their own logic, and the relationship of this logic to social organization was obviously not simple and direct. Scholars began to explore the communicative nature and linguistic logic of ritual activities. Instead of how ritual functions, therefore, they began to ask what ritual means.

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The emergence of a perspective more concerned with questions of meaning than with questions of function, with so-called cultural phenomena than with so-called social phenomena, was not a sudden one. Moreover, the difference in viewpoint is not simply a historical progression from one theory to another, since a British emphasis on social issues coexists with an American emphasis on cultural issues.2 Nor can a clear line be drawn between functional-structuralists on the one hand and sym- bolic-culturalists on the other. Many theories incorporate aspects of both perspectives, and a number of theorists have emphasized one or the other at different stages of their careers. Some even attempt to synthesize the two perspectives within a single mode of analysis. Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and Edmund Leach, for example, can be fitted into both groups. Therefore, the classifications of theories presented in this chapter simply reflect a rather provisional scholarly consensus as to the dominant emphasis of any theory or scholarly corpus.

Analogies with language had turned up in earlier theories of ritual, notably those of Radcliffe-Brown and Eliade. Both men noted the structural similarities between ritual and language when approached in terms of morphology, the study of form and structure. They suggested that linguistic morphemes, the smallest meaningful word units, were analogous to the smallest meaningful structural units of ritual, which they envisioned as either set routines of action (e.g., purification acts or offerings) or set units of symbolism (e.g., sun-fire-light symbols or water-birth-life symbols). Others scholars compared rites to texts, arguing that both needed to be “decoded” in order to determine their real meaning, which was a meaning other than the conscious intentions and interpretations given to those activities by the actors themselves. While some of this terminology evoked psychoanalytic notions of decoding an unconscious subtext, it also resonated with the emergence of a science of linguistics that focused on the unconscious processes and patterns underlying the spoken statement.

Symbolic Systems and Symbolic Action

The analytical power of the cultural approach derived from its distinction between

(1) a cultural level frequently equated with the conscious and unconscious ideals and values of a group and (2) a social level frequently equated with the empirical realities of lived existence. This two-tiered model made it possible to analyze culture as a semiautonomous system, even though it provoked pressing questions concerning how such an autonomous cultural system related to the actual social conditions of a community.3 When Lévi-Strauss introduced a particularly powerful method for analyzing cultural systems of symbols, many were simultaneously receptive to it and wary of the problems it raised.

Lévi-Strauss’s method of structural anthropology used a linguistic model to explain cultural phenomena other than language. Language, he wrote, is “the cultural phenomenon par excellence . . . the most perfect of all those cultural manifestations which, in one respect or another, constitute systems, and if we want to understand art, religion or law, and perhaps even cooking or the rules of politeness, we must imagine them as being codes formed by articulated signs, following the pattern of linguistic communication.”4 His method drew on developments in structural linguis-

tics pioneered by Roman Jakobson and Ferdinand de Saussure that revolutionized linguistics in several ways. Their work effectively shifted linguistics from study of conscious spoken speech to study of the unconscious infrastructure governing the production of speech. In addition, they focused attention on the relationships among terms and how terms formed a linguistic system, as opposed to an earlier focus on how each linguistic term, as an independent entity, related to some real object in the world. From this perspective, de Saussure and Jakobson were able to formulate what they saw as general and universal laws of language.5 Lévi-Strauss did not consider language to be the origin of culture, nor did he regard cultural systems such as art or ritual to be anything more than “akin” to language. Yet he echoed a conviction held by many linguists when he suggested that the grammarlike rules that govern the production of cultural systems like art or myth or ritual exist neither in culture nor in social organization but in the biological organization of the human brain.

Lévi-Strauss attempted to uncover this underlying grammar by decoding two main types of cultural phenomena: kinship systems and myth systems. In both cases, his structural method attempted to go beyond the obvious meaning of kinship rules or mythic story plots to get at the unconscious grammar that regulates the structure of these kinship relations and story plots. In other words, he suggested that below the level of the manifest content of kinship patterns and myths, there is another level of meaning and message residing in the grammatical form or coded structure of the system. Human beings impose a meaningful pattern on raw experience, he argued, by classifying things in ways that are not so much logical as analogical, that is, based on common similarities and opposing differences. The resulting system of classes and binary oppositions acts as a framework with which to interpret and order what would otherwise be the chaotic randomness of human experience. For Lévi-Strauss, these underlying oppositions, the most basic of which is the opposition of nature and culture, are the fundamental grammar of symbols and symbolic action; they are the rules that enable such images and activities to effectively communicate and order experience.

Although the groundwork for this critical shift in the interpretive stance of the social sciences had also been laid by many nonlinguists, including the philosopher Ernst Cassirer and the anthropologists Lévy-Bruhl and Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss’s model was an important turning point.6 Prior to him, an anthropologist like Radcliffe-

Brown approached a ritual by attempting to see how its religious ideas reflected a distinct form of social organization. It was expected, for example, that societies that ritually venerated a high god would have concomitant patterns of social organization and behavior. The interpretation of high-god rituals meant, therefore, demonstrating their rootedness in a particular form of social structure and their role in maintaining that structure. After Lévi-Strauss, however, religious ideas and symbols

(high gods, ancestors, food offerings, etc.) were regarded as systems in themselves; the meaning of any one symbol depended on the logic of its relationships to other symbols. The theorist decoded these relationships to uncover the invisible and unconscious structures that determined the manifest interrelationships of symbols

(father gods and son gods, types of food offerings, etc.). The real meaning of the system was thought to lie in the message communicated by the invisible structural patterns. Thus, the term “structure” in the “French structuralism” represented by Lévi-

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Strauss does not refer to a functional isomorphism between the structure of ideas and the structure of human social relationships. For these new structural anthropologists, social organization does not determine ideas, nor does the symbolic system lay down rules for social organization. Rather, an underlying structuring process, located in the human brain, is thought to determine both the cultural and social dimensions of a society by providing the logical models with which to order experience and resolve intellectual and social problems.

Many anthropologists were not completely convinced that biology was the real explanation of the logic of symbolic systems. Some, like Edmund Leach, were fairly committed to some form of the Durkheimian emphasis on the effects of social organization on conceptual systems, and so they modified French structuralism to suit their purposes. Leach’s 1976 study, Culture and Communication, mentioned earlier, was subtitled “An Introduction to the Use of Structuralist Analysis in Social Anthropology” to indicate his appropriation of Lévi-Strauss’s work. While accepting the linguistic framework, Leach went on to use different assumptions and tools for decoding the messages transmitted by symbolic activities like ritual. He rejected the idea of universal mental functions, arguing that when the structuralist method was applied to the myths or rituals of a particular society, it did not arrive at universal structures, simply the cultural ideals of that particular society. Just as theorists generate abstract models of cultural ideals in order to impose order on the vagaries of social behavior, so each social group generates its own abstract models or cultural ideals; these are often expressed quite clearly in ritual, but may be seldom realized in actual practice. “We engage in rituals in order to transmit collective messages to ourselves,” and these messages, Leach asserted, are always about the social order.7 Although LéviStrauss argued for a single source for both cultural and social dimensions, Leach continued to maintain a clear distinction between them and, in a functionalist way, saw the social dimension as the source of a symbolic system that could nevertheless be analyzed independently of it.8

Leach used several linguistic terms to depict the possible relationships among symbols within a cultural system. The terms “metaphor” and “metonymy” were derived from Jakobson, while the analogous terms “paradigmatic” and “syntagmatic” were derived from de Saussure and Lévi-Strauss. He compared these sets of contrasting terms to other sets like harmony and melody or symbol and sign. Other scholars have added analogous pairs: synchronic and diachronic, signals and indices, and the set of relationships implied in the terms “sign,” “symbol,” “index,” “signal,” and

“icon.” As noted earlier, a metaphorical relationship is one of asserted similarity or resemblance between two things that are arbitrarily connected and otherwise quite unrelated. For example, a serpent is a symbol for evil in the book of Genesis, although the relationship between serpents and evil is metaphorical—that is, conventionally asserted but essentially arbitrary. In a metonymical relationship part of something is taken to stand for the whole of it, as a crown, which is a part of royal garb, is used to stand for sovereignty. Paradigmatic associations are based on a type of structural resemblance that can be transposed to different situations. For example, the relationship of a feudal lord to his vassal is paradigmatically replicated in the medieval notion of the relationship of God to the believer or a father to his son in the context of a family. Syntagmatic associations are chainlike relationships among elements in

a type of series, such as the relationship among letters that make up a word, the musical notes that make up a melody, or the words that make up a poem. Leach compared both syntagmatic and metonymical relationships to a melody, understood as the sequence of musical tones; then he compared paradigmatic or metaphorical relationships to harmony, understood as the simultaneous replication of the same pattern of sounds by different instruments. The opposition between diachrony and synchrony, patterns of change in contrast to the unchanging structure of relationships, also roughly fits this comparison of melody (a matter of change) to harmony (a matter of simultaneity). Leach argued that all these terms help describe the difference between symbols and signs and thereby illuminate various forms of communication. A symbol evokes a metaphorical, paradigmatic, or synchronic relationship between itself and what it refers to. A sign, on the other hand, involves a metonymical, syntagmatic, or diachronic relationship between itself and its referent. Signs, as opposed to symbols, do not occur in isolation; they are always contiguous with other signs that together form part of a set; it is only as part of a set that a sign can communicate information. For example, a green light means “go” only as part of the set of juxtaposed colored lights, red, yellow, and green.9

Since mixtures of metaphor and metonymy characterize all human communication, Leach suggested that it should be possible to determine what mixture characterizes the distinctive communication style of ritual. For example, he pointed out that the significance of the veiled bride in white is dependent upon a metaphorical relationship with the veiled widow in black, even though the relationship is not consciously perceived. He also demonstrated the more complex metaphorical and metonymical associations underlying the sacrifice of an ox, which is replaced by a cucumber, in ritual offerings to the gods among the Nuer. While Lévi-Strauss pointed to how myth can transform one set of relationships into another, Leach suggested that ritual is primarily based on a logic by which metonymical relations are transformed into metaphorical ones. For example, in the sorcery example noted earlier, the metonymical relationship between a few strands of hair and the person is transformed into a metaphorical association between the sorcerer’s action on the hair and action on the body of the person.10

For Leach, ritual is a medium for the expression of cultural ideals and models that, in turn, serves to orient, though not prescribe, other forms of social behavior.

As a medium for cultural messages, ritual enables people to modify their social order at the same time that it reinforces basic categories of it. At times, Leach described ritual as a dimension present to some degree in all activity; at other times, he implied that ritual is a fairly distinctive medium, a language geared for intellectual operations of a particularly abstract and metaphysical kind.11 Most specifically, he pioneered the idea of ritual as an intellectual operation in which the categories affirmed as the cultural order can be transgressed. Ritual can turn a young boy or girl into a recognized adult, a piece of stolen hair into the means to make someone ill, or bread and wine into the sacralizing presence of a transcendent god. In doing these things, ritual posits bounded categories—child/adult, action here/effect there, human/divine—and then formally transgresses them. The messages that are communicated by ritual use such systems of bounded and transcended categories to promote the continuity and the flexibility of the social order. In other words, for Leach,

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ritual keeps a system of cultural categories responsive to human needs; ritual keeps culture meaningful.

Clifford Geertz (b. 1926) made many of these ideas more explicit and concrete in his extensive treatment of ritual. He described religion as a cultural system, that is, a system of symbols that influences people’s feelings and motivations by formulating coherent conceptions of the general order of existence.12 The symbols of religious beliefs and the symbolic activities of religious ritual constitute a system of values that acts as both “a model of” the way things actually are and “a model for” how they should be. With this famous formulation, Geertz attempted to describe how the symbols and activities of ritual can project idealized images that reflect the actual social situation, on the one hand, yet also acts as a template for reshaping or redirecting the social situation on the other. Hence, for Geertz, the symbolic system that constitutes culture is neither a mere reflection of the social structure nor totally independent of it. It always exists in response to the problems of meaning that arise in real human experiences, such as the problems of evil and suffering. When lived out in ritual, such a symbolic system provides an embracing worldview (a coherent framework of general ideas) and induces an ethos (a set of moods and motivations).

It is in ritual, he suggests, that images and attitudes about the nature of existence are fused with one’s actual experiences of the realities of existence: “in a ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world.”13

A similar formulation of the workings of ritual as a symbolic system is offered by the anthropologist Nancy Munn, who describes ritual as “a symbolic intercom between the level of cultural thought and complex cultural meanings, on the one hand, and that of social action and the immediate event, on the other.”14 How does such an intercom work? Munn contends that ritual symbolism and activities draw upon a cultural code or lexicon of categories that refer to various set areas of experience in a particular society, such as categories for types of persons, deities, and bodily experiences. As part of the cultural code, these categories are organized according to patterns of opposition (e.g., human versus divine, male versus female, hot versus cold, etc.) and associative clusters (e.g., water, fertility, female, nourishment in one cluster). Ritual manipulates parts of this cultural code, recombining categories and clusters in various ways in order to communicate convincing interpretations of real life situations (e.g., death as a passage, god as dangerous, or women as weak). In this way, ritual models connections of interrelated ideas that express values basic to social life but does so by objectifying those values in symbols that are emotionally experienced by participants in the ritual.

Culturalists not only broke with functionalists by analyzing culture as a relatively independent and languagelike system of symbols, they also attempted to talk about social and cultural change. Functionalists had treated the social system as more or less static in order to try to grasp its structural patterns of organization. They were only secondarily concerned with how those structural patterns changed over time. Yet the idea that ritual mediates the interaction of two levels, cultural ideas and social experience, gave theorists a means of depicting change as a constant process. Turner had been very concerned to explain how ritual facilitates both the continuity and the redressive transformation of social structures. Geertz gave ritual a similarly

important place as a mechanism of sociocultural change, but a somewhat different description of how it works. In Geertz’s description, ritual enables a group’s ethos and worldview—that is, their attitudes and their general concepts of world order (their experiences and their ideals)—to temper and nuance each other.15 It is a mechanism for the ongoing processes of adaptation and renewal that constitute communities, and plays a crucial role in the way in which the sociocultural holism of a living community works. Geertz implicitly contrasted his approach with functionalist analyses when he argued that religion is sociologically interesting not because it describes the social order but because it shapes it.16 He demonstrates this point is a description of the Balinese rite of combat between the witch Rangda, who is the embodiment of fear and horror, and the foolish but lovable monster Barong, who expresses narcissistic playfulness. Geertz points out that these two characters are not representations but powerful presences that draw the crowd into dramatic experiences of participation in the struggle. In other words, Rangda and Barong do not simply reflect the audience’s experiences of life, they effectively help fashion them.17

In another ethnographic example, Geertz described the ritual intricacies and significance of cockfighting in Bali, where, despite its illegality, it is as central to Balinese culture as baseball is to American culture. While cockfighting evokes concerns with status, money, virility, and pride, these rituals do not functionally affect anyone’s actual social status or significantly redistribute income. What the emotionladen contest does is “render ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible” by depicting it in terms of activities for which the practical consequences have been removed or minimized to matters of appearances. When represented in the ritual of cockfighting, the meaning of everyday experience is “more powerfully articulated and more exactly perceived.”18 It is, Geertz concludes, a Balinese interpretation of Balinese social experience, “a story they tell themselves about themselves.”19 Cockfights provide people with the imagery and cultural codes with which to conceptualize, order, and reinterpret their own experiences. With this approach, Geertz effectively argues not just for the importance of ritual to what cultural life is all about but also for the importance of a focus on ritual when interpreting culture. He concluded his analysis of the cockfight with two observations that went beyond his earlier formulations and suggested new directions in analyzing ritual. First, he observed that anthropological analysis parallels the interpretation of a text: “The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts” that the anthropologist is trying to read over their shoulders.20 Second, he argued that the function, so to speak, of the rite is not to heighten or resolve social passions, as Gluckman or Turner might have avowed, but simply to “display” them.21 These two images, that of textual analysis and that of display, have been developed further by other ritual theorists.

The idea of a languagelike system of symbols fueled various other forms of symbolic analysis. Studies of the “language” of the food offerings made to south Indian gods or the “message” of the spirit money offerings made to Chinese deities, ancestors, and ghosts are two examples.22 In the latter case, Chinese gods are offered gold spirit money, of which there are various kinds that correspond to the three main classes of the celestial bureaucracy according to Chinese folk religion. The ancestors are offered silver money, and ghosts are given copper cash. The value of the offerings to any one group is a function of that group’s place in the whole system of offerings.