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tax (form) shapes semantics (meaning), on the one hand, while semantics (meaning) constrains ritual syntax (form), on the other. Like other linguistic theoreticians, they regard ritual as analogous to language in that both ritual and language are traditional cultural systems bound by rules. They also adopt aspects of Chomsky’s linguistic competence model in order to analyze the rules by which people generate ritual action, not specific rituals. Stressing what they call a “cognitive” approach (in contrast to the intellectualist, symbolist, and structural approaches), they regard ritual as a formal system and attempt to deduce the small set of universal “grammatical” rules that govern the generation of all forms of ritual action and expression. Ritual participants, they suggest, would know these rules in the same implicit way that English speakers know that the sentence “Curious green ideas sleep furiously” is ill conceived but syntactically correct.43 Their second crucial metaphysical thesis is that this “competence approach” to analyzing sociocultural systems integrates the individual and the cultural (the external inherited symbolic system) by focusing on the cognitive representations that constitute an idealized participant’s implicit knowledge of the cultural system.44

Unlike almost every other contemporary treatment of ritual, Lawson and McCauley limit their analysis to specifically religious ritual, defined as rites influenced by a belief in supernatural agents. This is due in part to the fact that they see religious ritual as the paradigmatic focus of semantic approaches concerned to interpret meaning since these events “diverge less from their idealized cognitive representations than is the case with linguistic pehonomena” and thus appear to be particularly amenable to this form of analysis. In the end, they elicit two “universal principles” that govern their purely formal and abstract model of religious ritual systems. The first, the principle of superhuman agency, states that the most central rites are those in which the god is the main agent in contrast to those rites in which the god is passive. The second, the principle of superhuman immediacy, which can override that of agency, states that the fewer the number of “enabling actions” and superhuman agents involved in the rite, the more central the rite is. The most central rituals are presupposed in other rites, while disruptions or changes in the central rites will have more serious consequences for the rest of the ritual system. They conclude that the richness and complexity of a ritual system is directly proportional to the commitments to the existence and number of superhuman agents.45

Despite their concern to integrate semantic interpretation and syntactic explanation, Lawson and McCauley are committed to an approach that valorizes truly

“scientific” analyses of religious phenomena in contrast to what they see as the overly descriptive and often undisciplined subjectivity of other approaches. Their cognitive method, they say, can formulate theories that are systematic and amenable to empirical testing and refinement.46

Performance

If concerns with syntax dominate linguistic and cognitive theories, concerns with both semantics and syntax are prominent in theories of ritual performance that began to gain currency in the 1970s. For a semantic theorist like Milton Singer, “cultural

performances” such as rituals, festivals, and theater are expressions of the more abstract and hidden structures of the comprehensive cultural system.47 Others have tended to see such activities less as expressions of an existing system and more as the very form in which culture as a system actually exists and is reproduced. Some syntactically inclined theorists, particularly those building on Austin’s model of performative utterances rather than Chomsky’s model of linguistic competence, have used theories of performance to try to surmount the tendency to treat action like a text to be decoded. Performance metaphors and analogies allow them to focus, they say, on what ritual actually does, rather than on what it is supposed to mean.48 While performance theory can appear to be a welter of confusing emphases and agendas, it does represent an important consensus on many aspects of ritual action.

Historically speaking, a number of ideas came together in the mid-1970s to yield a “performance approach” to the study of ritual: Kenneth Burke’s discussions of dramatism, Victor Turner’s descriptions of ritual as “social drama,” Austin’s theory of performative utterances, Erving Goffman’s work on the ritual units that structure the performances of social interaction, and even Bloch’s analysis of the effects of formulaic speech and song.49 Although myth and ritual theorists have long argued that theater emerged from ritual, performance theorists tend to see more of a twoway street.50 And although the aesthetic connections among ritual, drama, music, folklore, and dance had been studied, culturalists could see provocative suggestions in the metaphors of drama and performance as to how the realm of cultural ideals actually comes to be embodied in social attitudes and personal experiences.51 In this way, the old Durkheimian description of how ritual orchestrates experiences of collective enthusiasm so as to mold people’s social identities continues to be recast in less functionalist terms—by asking how symbolic activities like ritual enable people to appropriate, modify, or reshape cultural values and ideals.

In particular, performance models suggest active rather than passive roles for ritual participants who reinterpret value-laden symbols as they communicate them. Cultural life has come to be seen as this dynamic generation and modification of symbolic systems, as something constantly being created by the community. From this perspective, change becomes a dynamic process integral to how people live and reproduce culture, not something that happens to a passive and static social entity.

The active imagery of performance has also brought the possibility of a fuller analytical vocabulary with which to talk about the nonintellectual dimensions of what ritual does, that is, the emotive, physical, and even sensual aspects of ritual participation. Hence, ritual as a performative medium for social change emphasizes human creativity and physicality: ritual does not mold people; people fashion rituals that mold their world.

While some performance theorists ally their work with ethology, most others invoke semantic and syntactic understandings of meaning. James W. Fernandez, for example, has used linguistic theories to generate a model of the “performative metaphors” that organize ritual action in contrast to the “persuasive metaphors” of nonritual or rhetorical usage. He defines ritual as a strategy for applying metaphors to people’s sense of their situation in such a way as to move them emotionally and therein provoke religious experiences of empowerment, energy, and euphoria.52 For those more semantically inclined, performance theory is a way to critique the syn-

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tactical structuralism of Lévi-Strauss and his disciples, which tends to focus on the myths, rituals, and kinship systems of tribal nonliterate peoples and gives little attention to literate cultures, particularly the voices of poets, dramatists, novelists, and other artists concerned with feeling, imagery, and expression. Ronald Grimes, for example, in studies of contemporary American ritual, argues that ritual performances do not involve systems of opposing symbols. Rather, ritual performances appropriate symbols in so many different ways that, if they were all set out as a neat system, the result would be full of contradictions; performance allows such contradictions to be avoided.53 Hence, performance theorists have tended to depict culture not as a fully articulated formal system or a set of symbolic codes, but as a changing, processual, dramatic, and indeterminate entity.

Several basic concepts are central to most performance approaches. First, ritual is an event, a set of activities that does not simply express cultural values or enact symbolic scripts but actually effects changes in people’s perceptions and interpretations. Closely involved with this perspective on ritual events is an appreciation of the physical and sensual aspects of ritual activity. Some theorists appeal to kinesthesia, the sensations experienced by the body in movement, while others appeal to synesthesia, the evocation of a total, unified, and overwhelming sensory experience.54

Grimes draws attention to these dimensions by cataloging some of the physical movements and sensibilities invoked in ritual activities.55 Such theories attempt to grasp more of the distinctive physical reality of ritual so easily overlooked by more intellectual approaches.

Another important concept in performance theory is “framing.” As first used by Gregory Bateson (1904–80), the term indicates the way in which some activities or messages set up an interpretive framework within which to understand other subsequent or simultaneous acts or messages. Frames, for Bateson, are a form of “metacommunication.” For example, framing enables one monkey to hit another and have it understood as an invitation to play, not fight. In a similar example drawn from

Radcliffe-Brown’s study of the Andaman Islanders, Bateson points out that it is the frame placed on a ceremonial blow that makes it clear whether one is initiating war or making peace.56 Many studies have explored the types of frames that ritual performances invoke and how they do so. There is some consensus that ritual performances are signaled, at least in part, by a way of speaking that contrasts everyday talk with more ceremonial styles of speech. This ceremonial style is “keyed,” to use Goffman’s word, by various means of metacommunication, such as the use of special codes of archaic speech, explicit statements announcing the beginning and end of the action, distinctive uses of metaphor and metonymy, stylized rhythms or distinctive vowel harmonies, and tempo or stress patterns.57

In addition to the principles of ritual as event and ritual framing, performance theorists are concerned with the peculiar efficacy of ritual activities, which distinguishes them from literal communication, on the one hand, or pure entertainment, on the other. Although there is not much agreement in this area, most performance theorists imply that an effective or successful ritual performance is one in which a type of transformation is achieved. Some have described it as a transformation of being and consciousness achieved through an intensity of “flow” or “concentration.”58

Others have debated whether the efficacy of ritual performance resides in the trans-

formation of the meanings of symbols or in the nondiscursive, dramaturgical, and rhetorical levels of performance.59 This issue is linked to the concern of performance theorists with what some have called the emergent quality of ritual, defined as a function of its performative dimensions, which refers to what ritual is uniquely able to create, effect, or bring about.60 From this perspective, what emerges from ritual is, in one sense, the event of the performance itself. When analyzed further, this event is seen to have brought about certain shifts and changes, constructing a new situation and a new reality: a boy is now recognized as a man, prestige has accrued to some but not others, certain social relationships or alliances have been strengthened and others undermined. This emphasis on the efficacy of performance attempts to illustrate a major goal of performance theory, to show that ritual does what it does by virtue of its dynamic, diachronic, and physical characteristics, in contrast to those interpretations that cast ritual performances as the secondary realization or acting out of synchronic structures, tradition, or cognitive maps.61

In describing the construction of new cultural images, dispositions, and situations, performance theory has also focused creative attention on the importance of concomitant processes of self-reflection and interpretation termed “reflexivity.” Many have seen the dramatic or performative dimension of social action as affording a public reflexivity or mirroring that enables the community to stand back and reflect upon their actions and identity.62 As a distinctive quality of performance, one in which people can become an audience to themselves, reflexivity has invited further speculation in turn on the role of the theorist observing and studying ritual. It has been suggested that the study of ritual parallels the epistemological concerns of those who perform ritual, giving so-called theorists and so-called performers much to share.63 Late in his career, Turner suggested that the ethnographic study of ritual should be supplemented with performances of it, by the theorists themselves, in order for them to grasp its meanings. His suggestions were picked up by others who have interwoven the study and the practice of ritual in various ways.64 In a related development of these issues, Grimes has opened up the issue of ritual criticism, or “ritology,” where the theorist helps ritual performers to reflect on the efficacy of their own ritual activities.65

Performance theory is apt to see a wide variety of activities—theater, sports, play, public spectacles—as similarly structured around cross-cultural qualities of performance, and performance approaches to the study of ritual have often drawn heavily from studies of these other genres.66 Many have hailed these approaches for overcoming the misleading boundaries too often drawn between rituals, festivals, healings, dance, music, drama, and so on.67 Indeed, the processes of creative socialization seen in cultural patterns of play may be particularly relevant to understanding ritual. Some analysts of the metacommunication patterns in play and ritual have stressed the similarity of “make believe” and “let us believe.”68 Rock concerts and football games have also been treated as cultural performances that can shed light on how ritual validates cultural values that cannot be proven real and correct in any other way.69 John J. MacAloon’s study of the Olympic games analyzes both the rituals that accompany the contests and the historical evolution of other genres of performance within this preeminent public spectacle of the twentieth century.70 Similarly, theater and drama have been studied as forms of ritual in which performances serve as an effective medium for the reinterpretation of traditional images and concepts.71