68 Theories: The History of Interpretation

Likewise, the system of offerings communicates messages about the relative status of the invisible recipient, effectively distinguishing among groups of spirits that have different relationships with the living. Within this ritualized semantic system of money offerings, alterations in what is offered to any particular type of spirit can affect that spirit’s place in the hierarchy of gods, ancestors, and ghosts. An ancestor offered only copper cash is likely to become as problematic as any ghost, while a demonic spirit to whom gold “god” money is sacrificed is likely to grow in stature and power until he or she can confer godlike blessings on those who make the offerings.23

Linguistics

For Turner, Leach, and Geertz, ritual is a suggestive language for communicating statements about structural relationships, but each theorist developed this idea in a distinctive way. Turner and Geertz focused more on the interaction of social experience and cultural symbols, while Leach emphasized more purely linguistic features in an attempt to formulate the rules that govern the orchestration of a ritual sequence in the same way that rules of grammar govern a verbal sequence. The Turner-Geertz style of anthropological interpretation has been labeled “symbolic,” “semantic,” or “semiotic” because it is concerned with interpreting the meaning of statements, activities, and events. Geertz himself wrote that “the concept of culture I espouse . . . is essentially a semiotic one. Believing with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be, therefore, not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”24 In contrast, Leach’s direct appeal to the field of linguistics as a model, a direction developed more fully by others, has been labeled “syntactical” since its concerns are analogous to a focus on the pattern or structure of word order in a sentence. This type of linguistic approach has aimed at a more scientific and less “interpretive” methodology. That is, it has tended to eschew interpretation for explanation, meaning for efficacy, semantics and semiology for syntax. Such theorists do not ask what ritual expresses or means; instead, they ask what the grammatical rules are that generate and structure ritual as a form of communication.

Most of these syntactical theories of ritual reflect the influence of the idea of

“performative utterances” developed by the analytical philosopher J. L. Austin (1911– 1960).25 Austin attempted to analyze the instrumentality of language, that is, how, in the case of some statements, to say something is to do something. For example, the

“I do” voiced by the man and woman at the proper moment in a wedding ceremony, as well as the officiant’s proclamation, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” actually render the two people married. These words do not describe the deed; they are the deed. Similarly, the meaning of the statements such as “I christen this ship the Queen Elizabeth” or “I declare this court adjourned” must take into account the deeds that these statements actually accomplish, not just the references for each individual word.

Austin’s theory of performative utterances generated a larger analysis of “speech acts,” which suggests that all acts of speaking have some performative dimension.

Austin theorized that the ability to generate effective speech acts is based on one’s knowledge of rules that are really “conventions” to which one’s speech must conform. John R. Searle (b. 1932) developed Austin’s ideas into a more comprehensive analysis of the rules that govern effective speech acts. Most significantly, while Austin distinguished among the rules for speaking, the performative act of speaking, and the actual content of what is said, Searle demonstrated that these three dimensions are all inseparably constituted in the very act itself. The basic irreducible unit of linguistic communication, for Searle, is not the symbol, word, or sentence, but the illocutionary act of producing them.26 Analysis of the rule-governed nature of this illocutionary act held out great potential for analogous treatment of the ritual act.

Although discussion of these theories could be quite complex, the simple insight that some words do things had a profound effect on studies of ritual. As a result, ritual as a symbolic language was said to communicate not by describing, expressing, or conveying ideas, as semantic theorists like Geertz had avowed. Rather, the symbolic language of ritual actually does something, although exactly what ritual speech acts do has been explained in different ways. The syntactical approach that was ushered in by those who read Austin and Searle even led some theorists to argue that semantic interpretations are insufficient since the most essential feature of ritual language is that they are acts that do things, not mere bearers of information. Frits Staal, for example, has argued that as “pure” performance, rituals do not have any meaning.27

The earliest uses of Austin’s and Searle’s work, however, still held on to something of a semantic concern with meaning as well as certain elements of the functionalist agenda. Ruth Finnegan’s early application of the idea of performative utterances to both day-to-day and more formal ritual speech patterns of the Limba of Sierra Leone demonstrated how these verbal acts perform important social transactions involving personal and social commitments.28 In a later and much more functional study, Benjamin Ray applied Austin’s notion of performative utterances to the ritual speeches of the Dinka and Dogon tribes of eastern Africa. He ignored the symbolic meaning of these speeches, that is, what they expressed in values and attitudes, in favor of demonstrating their instrumentality or what the words accomplish, namely, the creation of certain social states.29 However, both Finnegan and Ray only dealt with ritual speech. Other uses of the linguistic approach, building on the idea that ritual activity (including ritual speech) is a language or at least analogous to a language, attempted to treat ritual activities themselves on the model of performative speech acts. Tambiah, in particular, made an explicit appeal to extend Austin’s ideas beyond just ritual speech to ritual action. This perspective enabled him to analyze the structure and performative efficacy of all magical-ritual activity, as he called it, as the key to its meaning and purpose.

Theorists like Turner or Geertz developed the semantic or semiotic side of the language analogy to stress what ritual communicates, that is, the ideas, values, and attitudes it expresses and transmits. Others, however, such as Leach and Tambiah, developed the syntactical side, stressing that ritual does not communicate concepts, it produces signs in structured patterns that trigger experiences that reproduce concepts in the minds of the participants. This last formulation, specifically developed by Valerio Valeri, suggests that ritual communicates only by producing model expe-

70 Theories: The History of Interpretation

riences that provide an implicit understanding of the cultural system. The communicative process is, in effect, subordinate to an experiential process distinctive to ritual.30

In his application of linguistic theory to ritual language, Maurice Bloch argued that semantics cannot be distinguished from syntax, that meaning is transmitted by the way in which lexical or symbolic units are grammatically combined.31 What is distinctive about ritual, he suggested, are the particular constraints it places on syntax, which make the language of speech and song very stylized and formalized. Bloch demonstrated the “poverty” of expression in ritual, how what can be said is greatly restricted by the way it must be said in order to be recognized as authoritative and legitimate ritual. The formalization of speech in ritual is produced by restricting the syntactical structures that can be chosen for use, which leads to an archaic style of speech; form becomes more important than content, while content becomes very predicable and redundant. Bloch used Austin and Searle’s terminology to describe how the minimal propositional force (content) and maximum performative force

(form) of these restricted speech codes influenced people not by transmitting information but by catching them up in a situation of standardized statements and responses. “You cannot argue with a song,” he points out.32 Ultimately, for Bloch, the formalized language distinctive of ritual creates and maintains a type of religious and sociopolitical authority known as “traditional authority.” In traditional authority, the power of an individual or an office is understood to come from sources beyond the control of the community, as the power of a king who rules by “divine right” differs from the power of an elected public official.33 In contrast to the structuralism of LéviStrauss and the semantic symbolists, Bloch echoed a syntactical concern with what ritual does, not what it says. There is, he argued, no hidden code to crack. The obvious codes of formalized and restricted speech used in ritual are the very means by which it does what it does—namely, exercise considerable social control by creating situations that compel acceptance of traditional forms of authority.

Two major theoretical studies have followed up Leach’s call for work on the grammatical rules that generate ritual language, the first by Frits Staal, noted earlier, and the second by E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley.34 Both projects rely heavily on the linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory “generative grammar.” Critical of the possibility of uncovering the structure of a language directly from the empirical data of human usage, Chomsky argued for a different method, a focus on the linguistic competence of an “ideal speaker-listener . . . in a completely homogeneous speech community,” not the linguistic performance of the actually spoken language. Therefore, instead of analyzing behavior and its products, Chomsky attempted to analyze the system of tacit knowledge that goes into behavior, a shift, as Lawson and McCauley describe it, from the cultural dimension of language use to the cognitive dimension of linguistic ability.35 In a second basic argument, Chomsky also suggested that all grammatical expressions have both a surface structure and a deep structure. Linguistic expressions are generated from the deep structure by applying rules, such as rules of transformation and recursivity. Like Lévi-Strauss, Chomsky’s notion of deep structure suggests the existence of a universal grammar that constrains all particular natural languages; and his work on generative grammar has attempted to construct the syntax underlying all natural languages in terms of an abstract formal system.36

Chomsky’s methods and model are implicit in Staal’s theory of ritual, despite the fact that Staal’s conclusions reflect different concerns. Staal first argues strongly for the inadequacy of semantic (meaning) interpretations of ritual. For example, he contrasts two types of activity: ordinary everyday acts and ritual acts. In ordinary activity, the results are what count, and, for that reason, ordinary activity is very open to spontaneous improvisation. In ritual, however, it is the rules that count: “What is essential in the ceremony is the precise and faultless execution, in accordance with rules, of numerous rites and recitations.”37 Staal also demonstrates that what makes an ordinary action into a ritual action is not primarily a change in its meaning but a rule-governed change in its form. Hence, he concludes, an ordinary action is turned into ritual action by being subjected to formal rules of transformation. For example, verses from the Indian Vedas are transformed into ritualized mantras by virtue of the application of rules that govern their meter and pronunciation. As a mantra, the verse is taken out of its textual context and turned into a series of highly stylized sounds, the meaning of which is of no consequence. Indeed, many Brahman ritual experts are quite ignorant of what the sounds actually mean, but they are highly skilled in rendering them precisely according to the rules.38 Hence, for Staal, ritual is rulegoverned activity that can be understood only as such. Its meaning, he continues, would be nothing more than the various rationales that may have accrued to it over time and as such of no use in analyzing ritual as ritual: “Like rocks or trees, ritual acts and sounds may be provided with meaning, but they do not require meanings and do not exist for meaning’s sake.”39

Staal argues that analysis of the syntactical rules of ritual holds out the promise of a real science of ritual in contrast to the descriptive hermeneutics generated by semantic approaches concerned with meaning. In other words, syntactical rules can explain ritual, not just posit another subjective interpretation. Staal does not actually deny a semantic dimension to language; he simply denies that ritual is a language. As a rule-governed activity, ritual is like a language but is not actually a language, and for this reason, and unlike other linguistic approaches, he goes on to analyze ritual activity, not with methods specific to linguistics, but with the mathematical and logical methods that, he argues, originally gave rise to linguistics in the first place.40 Staal concludes, in effect, that ritual predates language, as animal ritualization predates human language, and linguistic syntax itself is derived from ritual syntax. He appeals to ethological evidence to uncover the origins of ritual activity but more immediately looks to prelinguistical principles, which are somewhat comparable to those used in Chomsky’s generative grammar, to recover the rules that govern and comprise ritual activity. In keeping with the idea that ritual syntax was the root of linguistic syntax, Staal credits ancient Indian ritualists and grammarians with the first science of ritual and the first linguistic theory. Based on analysis of both performed rituals and the knowledge of ritual known to Vedic experts, he identifies several major syntactical rules that constitute the grammatical structure or patterned sequence of ritual activity: recursivity, embedding, and transformation.41

E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley take a different tack by stressing the inherent complementarity of interpretation and explanation, culture and cognition, or semantics and syntax as the first of two “crucial metaphysical theses.”42 They go on to formulate an analysis of religious ritual that intends to appreciate how syn-