76 Theories: The History of Interpretation

As with most other theoretical approaches, the shortcomings of performance theory are probably the flip side of its strengths and insights. The comparison of ritual to all sorts of dramatic spectacles or structured improvisation effectively demonstrates shared features and similar processes. At the same time, such comparisons often result in simply describing one unknown in terms of another, and fail to account for the way in which most cultures see important distinctions between ritual and other types of activities. Yet performance theory has proven useful in its stress on the dramatic process, the significance of the physical and bodily expressiveness found in ritual, and its evocative attention to secular and new forms of ritual or ritual-like activity. Such research has made very clear, for example, that ritual is not simply a matter of the more formal and elaborate ceremonies familiar in the major religions. The use of the term “ritualization” by performance theorists, probably borrowed from ethological studies, undoubtedly helped to formulate a way of looking at ritual activity as activity that is picked up in recent theories of human activity as praxis.

Practice

In addition to performance theory, the 1970s also saw the emergence of several formulations of human action as praxis, or “practice,” a term that has been heralded as a key idea in the last decade of anthropological theory, usurping, some have said, the place of “structure” as the dominant image for cultural analysis.72 The term derives from Karl Marx’s usage, which emphasized the inherent productive and political dimensions of human activity. Yet few of these theories can really be called Marxist, and most represent a highly synthetic convergence of several lines of thought. Indeed, practice theories share a number of concerns with performance theory, particularly the latter’s critique of the inability of purely structural and semiotic approaches to account for historical change, action as action, and acting individuals as bodies and not just minds. In contrast to the static view of structuralism, which tends to see human activity as a matter of enacting cultural rules, practice theory claims to take seriously the ways in which human activities, as formal as a religious ritual or as casual as a midday stroll, are creative strategies by which human beings continually reproduce and reshape their social and cultural environments.

Practice theory also addresses several issues that differentiate it from performance theory. For example, it is less interested in specific types of acts, such as ritual or dance, and more interested in how cultural activity in general works. Yet some practice theoreticians do address ritual as such and cast it as “paradigmatic” activity, that is, as activity that particularly showcases cultural patterns. Many practice theorists are concerned with analyzing large processes of historical and cultural change, often developing more nuanced versions of Geertz’s model of the interaction of human action, needs, and experiences, on the one hand, with traditional cultural structures, organizational patterns, and symbolic systems, on the other.73 In addition, practice theorists are particularly attentive to the political dimensions of social relationships, especially with regard to how positions of domination and subordination are variously constituted, manipulated, or resisted. Not surprisingly, practice theory has emerged in conjunction with greater attention to the lingering effects of colonial-

ism, the political ramifications of routine cross-cultural encounters, and the various social effects of economic and cultural domination.

In a number of highly theoretical ethnographic studies, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (b. 1930) developed a provocative model of the cultural practices involved in ritual activity.74 Most simply, he argued that practice brings together structure and history, system and event, continuity and change. In other words, ritual enables enduring patterns of social organization and cultural symbolic systems to be brought to bear on real events; in the course of this process, real situations are assessed and negotiated in ways that can transform these traditional patterns or structures in turn. For Sahlins, human action is critical to the shaping of culture and history, and he has sought the theoretical tools that can display this. One of his most compelling ethnographic examples is a complex analysis of the death of the explorer

Captain James Cook in 1778 at the hand of Hawaiians who, he suggests, mistook

Cook for one of their more important gods. Cook’s death has been the subject of a vigorous and ongoing interpretive effort by historians and anthropologists, in which most of the explanations proffered have been closely linked to the particular religious or methodological orientation of the interpreter.75 Sahlins argues that Cook’s death stemmed from the explorer’s transgressions of the ritual status the Hawaiians had accorded him. Killing him was an active response to a cosmological crisis and not the mere reproduction of prescriptive rules or structures. As such it was an act of performative tradition, or practice, and thus the very creation of history.

For Sahlins, as for Turner and Geertz, the traditional formality and self-conscious- ness of ritual make it a type of human practice in which basic cultural processes are particularly accessible to observation and analysis. Moreover, in some societies, particularly those dominated by traditional forms of kingship, ritual activities appear central to cultural life in general. Hence, ritual can serve as a convenient example of the forces shaping all forms of social action. In his account of Cook and elsewhere,

Sahlins tries to demonstrate how ritual creates a meaningful event out of a new and potentially incomprehensible situation, namely, by bringing traditional structures to bear on it. If done effectively, the ritual action enables those structures to embrace and subdue the new situation, rendering the situation meaningful and enabling the structures themselves to continue to thrive as legitimate, appropriate, and relatively unaltered. Should a situation resist the ritual formulas that are brought to interpret it—if someone is hailed as a king but does not act as one—then those structures must be reinterpreted and perhaps altered. For Sahlins, the application of cultural structures to new situations, most readily observed in ritual action, is the very process of history itself. With this view, he rejects those notions of history that see it as a descriptive account or consciousness of events unfolding throughout a neutral duration of time. Instead, he argues that history is the way in which a cultural traditions appropriate new situations. Like other practice theorists, he sees people as making their own history in their own cultural fashion and ritual as a frequently central instance of this activity.

A rather different tack has been taken by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who has proposed a formal “theory of practice.”76 While Sahlins looks to history to provide the dynamic missing in more static structural analyses and ends up redefining history in terms of anthropologically appreciable activities, Bourdieu attempts to

78 Theories: The History of Interpretation

go further by redefining both history and structure in terms of the dynamics of cultural action. In other words, ritual does not actually bring history and structure together since neither exists except insofar as they are embodied and reproduced in human activity as cultural values. For Bourdieu, these values are embodied and reproduced by means of strategies of human practice that are rarely conscious or explicit. Therefore, the theorist must focus on the acts themselves, not on abstractions like “structure” or “historical process.” Bourdieu uses the term, “habitus,” borrowed from Marcel Mauss and Max Weber among others, to designate human activity in its real and immediate context, that is, as the set of dispositions by which people give shape to social traditions or, in another formulation, as the structured and determined attitudes that produce structuring and determining practices.77 In a key passage on myth, for example, Bourdieu argues that one should not approach a myth as some object complete in itself and lying open to analysis or as some sort of mythopoeic form of subjectivity. To “confront the act itself,” in this case the act of mythmaking, one must address the principle underlying all practices, which is “the socially informed body.”78

Although Bourdieu offers only brief analyses of specific ritual practices, he argues that ritual in general is not a matter of following rules, even in predominantly oral societies. In general, he characterizes rituals as strategic practices for transgressing and reshuffling cultural categories in order to meet the needs of real situations. The rites of plowing or marriage among the Kabyle of Algeria, he writes, “have the function of disguising and thereby sanctioning the inevitable collision of two contrary principles that the peasant brings about in forcing nature.”79 When that which nature has divided or united, according to the culture’s taxonomy of categories of the natural, must be changed or reversed, it is ritual that can neutralize the dangers associated with such sacrilege. By means of its collective, public, and carefully delegated forms of authority, as well as its complex and “judiciously euphemized” symbolism, ritual can sanction—or even deny—the sacrilege in the very act of committing it.80 Among the Kabyle, deflowering a bride, plowing the first furrow, cutting the last thread in weaving, or harvesting the last sheaf all presuppose an ordered set of cultural categories that both should not be violated and yet must be violated. Echoing Van Gennep, Bourdieu finds that ritual licenses these violations even as it reinforces the underlying sense of order that the violation transgresses. It affirms the differences and boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the divine and the human; but it is in ritual that these differences and boundaries are allowed, for a few careful minutes, to break down.

In another example, Bourdieu explores the rituals of gift giving in order to challenge explicitly structuralist models of ritual that have depicted gift exchange as an ordered system in which reciprocity establishes relatively egalitarian relationships and facilitates certain communicative functions. He demonstrates that the actual giving and receiving of gifts involve complex strategies of challenge, domination, and honor: “To reduce to the function of communication . . . phenomena such as the dialectic of challenge and riposte and, more generally, the exchange of gifts, words, or women, is to ignore the structural ambivalence which predisposes them to fulfill a political function of domination in and through performance of the communication function.”81 In other words, the ritual exchange of gifts or insults or women in

marriage is not primarily the communication of messages about the social order. In actual practice, such ritualized exchanges are ways of establishing political dominance by means of what appear to be overtly fair exchange. Ritual is a tool for social and cultural jockeying; it is a performative medium for the negotiation of power in relationships.

Maurice Bloch has used both Marxist and Durkheimian ideas to explore how ritual goes about actually constructing authority, ideology, and power. As noted earlier, he has analyzed the restricted linguistic codes that are used in ritual to generate hierarchical structures of authority that appear to be sanctified by tradition. He emphasizes the contrast between ritual and other activities by arguing that ritual produces distinctly ideological forms of knowledge that are in tension with the more purely cognitive forms rooted in day-to-day behavior. Rather uniquely, Bloch concludes that ritual is not a necessary dimension of social life, as so many others have held; as a type of ideological mystification, it is “the exercise of a particular form of power,” a form that makes “a power situation appear a fact in the nature of the world.”82

Two other influential analyses of ritual as practice have also developed the connection between ritual practices and power, namely, Sherry B. Ortner’s studies of

Sherpa culture in Nepal, which address the rites of daily life as well as the political activities involved in the founding of Buddhist temples, and Jean Comaroff’s study of changes and political tensions in the postcolonial ritual life of the Tshidi of South Africa.83 In general, both studies understand ritual to be the means for mediating enduring cultural structures and the current situation. It is through ritual practice that culture molds consciousness in terms of underlying structures and patterns, while current realities simultaneously instigate transformations of those very structures and patterns as well. The ritual life of a people is the sphere where such accommodations take place. Beyond this basic similarity, both studies contribute fresh nuances to an understanding of ritual practices in a historical context. Ortner attempts to describe a dynamic cultural process by which human activities reproduce cultural structures in strategically reshaped ways. While her study of Sherpa Buddhist templebuilding examines activities outside most formal definitions of ritual, it vividly illustrates the way in which human practices produce and negotiate relationships of power, providing a perspective quite useful for the analysis of discrete ritual activities.84 Comaroff’s study of precolonial and postcolonial rituals among the Zionist churches of the Tshidi of South Africa also attempts to uncover some of the complex negotiations of power involved in ritual activity. She argues that the Zionist synthesis of Tshidi tradition and Christian rites of healing is not a passive accommodation of colonialism but a set of highly coded efforts to control key symbols and defy the hegemonic order of colonialism. Ritual, she suggests, is “a struggle for the possession of the sign.”85

The anthropologist Talal Asad, developing aspects of the work of Bourdieu and the historian Michel Foucault (1926–84), explicitly addresses the need to move from “reading symbols” to “analyzing practices.” The former suggests that culture exists as some separate dimension, while the latter recognizes the fact that cultural values and meanings exist only insofar as they are embodied in what people do. Yet Asad distinguishes his approach from the preceding practice theories by virtue of a comprehensive perspective that addresses two fresh themes: the historicity of the concept

80 Theories: The History of Interpretation

of ritual and the involvement of this concept in practices that structure very wideranging power relationships. So, for example, he contrasts the medieval Christian concept of rites for developing virtue (an understanding of ritual in terms of discipline and morality) with the modern concept of rites as symbolic action (in societies where formal manners, not discipline, are deemed necessary to social morality). In a series of historical and ethnographic studies, Asad finds different “technologies of power” behind culturally distinctive constructions of the self, society, and the cosmos. Indeed, he argues that the whole modern perspective on “ritual” as symbolic activity is itself another historically shaped organization of power, one that is intimately linked to very modern Western assumptions about the self and the state. The “fundamental disparities” among various historical forms of so-called ritual activity lead Asad to conclude that the inadequacies of a single category like “ritual” to describe them all is further evidence of the politically and culturally hegemonic functions of the term. Hence, he warns against the normative application of concepts that are the historical products of a Christian history and Christian organizations of power.86

In an earlier work, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (1992), I also presented a critique of theoretical discourse on ritual and proposed a more systematic treatment of ritual as a form of cultural practice. The critique addressed two problems: the overdetermined circularity of theoretical discourse on ritual and the problems that attend the definition of ritual as either a distinct and autonomous set of activities or an aspect of all activity. With regard to first, the logic underlying most theoretical discussions of ritual depends on a dichotomization of thought and action. While this dichotomization facilitates a focus on action per se and on ritual as a type of action, it unwittingly structures the whole discussion of ritual around a series of oppositions, including an opposition between the theorist and the ritual actors. Ritual comes to be understood as that which mediates or integrates all these oppositions, as the sociocultural mechanism by which cultural ideas (thought) and social dispositions

(action) are integrated on the one hand, and as the phenomenon that affords theorists (thought) special access to the dynamics of culture (action) on the other.87 A clear example, although by no means the only one, is found in Geertz’s analysis of ritual, which culminates in the statement that ritual performances are “not only the point at which the dispositional and conceptual aspects of religious life converge for the believer, but also the point at which the interaction between them can be most readily examined by the detached observer.”88 Ultimately, it is the theorist-observer’s grasp of how ritual action synthesizes the conceptual and the behavioral that generates the theoretical meaning of the rite and, for Geertz, establishes a distinctly cultural level of analysis. While discourse on ritual need not be as closed and overdetermined as Geertz’s argument suggests it is, the appeal of the category of ritual undoubtedly resides in part in how it appears to evoke and resolve, with great naturalness, some of the most subtle but compelling structures of modern thought, notably the dichotomy between thought and action. Using an argument that I will extend in part III of this book, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice also suggested that this overstructured discourse on ritual have been vital to defining key aspects of the whole theoretical enterprise itself. A series of examples points to the way in which various conclusions about the nature of ritual and sociocultural life functioned to legitimate

and even mandate the ethnographic and theoretical activities of scholars: “the theoretical construction of ritual becomes a reflection of the theorist’s method and the motor of a discourse in which the concerns of the theorist take center stage.”89

The second part of the critique addressed the dilemmas that attend two major ways of defining ritual, either as a distinctive and essentially different set of paradigmatic activities or as a set of qualities found to some degree in all activity. Both approaches can get bogged down in elaborate taxonomies and problematic distinctions between utilitarian and nonutilitarian action that end up with ritual action as expressive, noninstrumental, or irrational. These features are likely to have little to do with the categories relevant to ritual actors, and tend to invoke, moreover, methods of analysis that analyze action as the execution of a conceptual program. The very nature of activity and practice is lost.90

Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice proposed a more systematic framework for analyzing ritual as practice. First of all, human practice in general has some common features, namely, it is situational, strategic, apt to misrecognize the relationship between its ends and its means in ways that promote its efficacy, and it is motivated by what can be called “redemptive hegemony,” a construal of reality as ordered in such a way as to allow the actor some advantageous ways of acting. Given these features, what sort of practice is ritual? Clearly, ritual is not the same thing everywhere; it can vary in every feature. As practice, the most we can say is that it is involves ritualization, that is, a way of acting that distinguishes itself from other ways of acting in the very way it does what it does; moreover, it makes this distinction for specific purposes. A practice approach to ritual will first address how a particular community or culture ritualizes (what characteristics of acting make strategic distinctions between these acts and others) and then address when and why ritualization is deemed to be the effective thing to do. Exploring some limited generalizations about how people ritualize, I focused on the series of oppositional schemes that are mobilized as the body moves through space and time; these schemes are generated by the gestures and sounds of the body and act to qualitatively structure the physical environment. In this process, some schemes come to dominate others in a seemingly natural chain of association. The structured environment provides those in it with an experience of the objective reality of the schemes. The agents of ritualization do not see how they project this schematically qualified environment or how they reembody those same schemes through the physical experience of moving about within its spatial and temporal dimensions. The goal of ritualization as such is completely circular: the creation of a ritualized agent, an actor with a form of ritual mastery, who embodies flexible sets of cultural schemes and can deploy them effectively in multiple situations so as to restructure those situations in practical ways. Among the most important strategies of ritualization is the inherent flexibility of the degree of ritualization invoked.

In this practice approach to ritual, therefore, the following points are most central.91 First, ritual should be analyzed and understood in its real context, which is the full spectrum of ways of acting within any given culture, not as some a priori category of action totally independent of other forms of action. Only in this context can the theorist-observer attempt to understand how and why people choose to differentiate some activities from others. From this perspective, the focus is less a matter of clear and autonomous rites than the methods, traditions and strategies of “ritualiza-

82 Theories: The History of Interpretation

tion.” Second, the most subtle and central quality of those actions we tend to call ritual is the primacy of the body moving about within a specially constructed space, simultaneously defining (imposing) and experiencing (receiving) the values ordering the environment. For example, the body movements of ritually knowledgeable agents actually define the special qualities of the environment, yet the agents understand themselves as reacting or responding to this environment. They do not see how they have created the environment that is impressing itself on them but assume, simply in how things are done, that forces from beyond the immediate situation are shaping the environment and its activities in fundamental ways.92 For this reason, and as a third feature, ritualization is a way of acting that tends to promote the authority of forces deemed to derive from beyond the immediate situation. For example, participants may embody and deploy various schemes for molding an environment, and experiences within it, according to values that differentiate the sacred as autonomous and eternal and transcendent. The result is a ritualized agent who has acquired an instinctive knowledge of schemes that can be used to order his or her experience so as to render it more or less coherent with these ritual values concerning the sacred. In effect, the real principles of ritual practice are nothing other than the flexible sets of schemes and strategies acquired and deployed by an agent who has embodied them.

This type of analysis of ritual practice affords the opportunity of analyzing more and less effective rituals, the various degrees of ritualization that are invoked, and the great diversity of cultural schemes and styles of ritualization. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice closed with an analysis of how this approach to ritualization is less concerned with the issues of social control that most other theories of ritual address, and more concerned with mapping the orchestration of complex relationships of power— especially how the power at stake is deemed to be of nonhuman or nonimmediate (god, tradition, virtue, and so on) and is made amenable to some degree of individual and communal appropriation.

Practice theory makes it possible to focus more directly on what people do and how they do it; it involves less preliminary commitment to some overarching notion of ritual in general. It assumes that what is meant by ritual may not be a way of acting that is the same for all times and places. Ritual, or ritualization, may be best defined in culturally specific ways since cultures, and even subcultures, differentiate among their actions in distinctive ways. Hence, a universal definition of ritual can obscure how and why people produce ritualized actions; it certainly obscures one of the most decisive aspects of ritual as a strategic way of acting, the sheer degree of ritualization that is invoked. For these reasons, practice theory today seems to offer greater opportunity to formulate the more subtle ways in which power is recognized and diffused, interpretations are negotiated, and people struggle to make more embracing meanings personally effective.

In sum, the study of ritual as practice has meant a basic shift from looking at activity as the expression of cultural patterns to looking at it as that which makes and harbors such patterns. In this view, ritual is more complex than the mere communication of meanings and values; it is a set of activities that construct particular types of meanings and values in specific ways. Hence, rather than ritual as the vehicle for the expression of authority, practice theorists tend to explore how ritual is a vehicle for the construction of relationships of authority and submission. Most practice theories

also share a number of assumptions that follow from this basic orientation. First, they attempt to see ritual as part of a historical process in which past patterns are reproduced but also reinterpreted or transformed.93 In this sense, ritual is frequently depicted as a central arena for cultural mediation, the means by which various combinations of structure and history, past and present, meanings and needs, are brought together in terms of each other. As Comaroff notes, “ritual provides an appropriate medium through which the values and structures of a contradictory world may be addressed and manipulated.”94 The ability to address and manipulate them is the power to define what is real and to shape how people behave. In a second shared assumption that follows from the first, practice theories are explicitly concerned with what rituals do, not just what they mean, particularly the way they construct and inscribe power relationships.95 A third assumption addresses the issue of individual agency, how persons “in their everyday production of goods and meanings, acquiesce yet protest, reproduce yet seek to transform their predicament.”96 Basic to this concern is a focus on the physical mind-body holism as the primary medium for the deployment and embodiment of everyday schemes of physical action and cultural values—as in the arrangement of a home or the orchestration of a game—that are the means by which culture is reproduced and individual categories of experience are forged. Finally, implicit or explicitly, many practice theories suggest the value of jettisoning the category of ritual as a necessary first step in opening up the particular logic and strategy of cultural practices.

Profile: Interpreting British

and Swazi Enthronement Rites

The complex and effective relationship between ritual and political power has probably been obvious to many since the first headdress was donned or crude scepter raised.

Many of the earliest formal studies of ritual in general focused on kingship, and the issue of the divine king became central to the myth and ritual school. Social functionalists also analyzed a variety of political institutions, including kingship, in an attempt to explain how ritual maintains kingly authority and social order. From a different perspective, symbolic-culturalists have addressed political kingship in terms of how the symbolic action of ritual actually constructs royal power and authority. This section will trace two types of political rituals, the coronation of the queen of

England and the Swazi Ncwala ritual, as they have been analyzed in a succession of functionalist followed by culturalist interpretations of the sort laid out in this chapter.

In a classic monograph, “The Meaning of the Coronation,” Edward Shils and

Michael Young set out to explain the intense emotional involvement of British citizens in the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on June 2, 1952.97 They concluded that the coronation was a “national communion,” a ceremonial reaffirmation of the moral values that undergird the community. Durkheim had written that “there can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and its personality.”98 In this spirit, Shils and Young analyzed the coronation in terms of the

84 Theories: The History of Interpretation

ideals and sentiments that it seemed to depict. On one level, the queen herself acted out some basic values: by taking the oath, receiving the Bible, and being anointed by the archbishop, she demonstrated her human subservience to the laws of God and the moral standards of the society, even as she was given the right to rule that society in the eyes of God. On another level, by virtue of the presence of the people in the abbey as well as the power of the media, the coronation was a collective experience in which idealized social bonds were reaffirmed. Families celebrated together, congenial crowds assembled spontaneously, undisturbed by pickpockets who had taken the day off, and even feuding factions in one large housing complex settled their dispute and came together over a cup of tea to watch the event on television. For the authors, the monarch and her royal family were idealized models of the social relations that constitute the community; when acted out so explicitly in the coronation ceremonies, the values that underlie these relations are reexperienced and reaffirmed by the whole society.

The analysis by Shils and Young has been critiqued as an oversimplistic application of Durkheimian theory. In appealing to a more complex form of functionalism, the sociologist Steven Lukes challenged the basic assumption that values hold a society together and that a consensus on values must exist in any society.99 What holds societies together, he suggested, is not consensus but compliance: people agree to go along with a particular way of seeing things. What ritual actually does is help

“to define as authoritative certain ways of seeing society: it serves to specify what in society is of special significance, it draws people’s attention to certain forms of relationships and activity—and at the same time, therefore, it deflects their attention from other forms, since every way of seeing it is also a way of not seeing.” He saw this as a

“cognitive dimension” of ritual, involved in “mobilizing bias” instead of consensus and encouraging the “internalization of particular political paradigms.” In this way, ritual exercises a real form of social control; it “draws people’s attention, and invokes their loyalties, towards a certain powerfully-evoked representation of the social and political order.”100

Lukes’s interpretation of the Shils and Young account modifies it in two ways: first, it recognizes multiple value systems within a society, not a single latent system; second, it attempts to demonstrate how ritual promotes one value system at the expense of another rather than forging any fresh experience of true consensus. If Lukes analyzed Queen Elizabeth’s coronation itself, he would focus on situations in which symbols vied with each other until one effectively, if temporarily, came to dominate. Instead of seeing the main images of the coronation as invoking the ideals and latent values that hold society together, he would interpret how the orchestrated images of the queen and royal family silenced diverse opinions about government and England’s postwar role under a deluge of symbols sure to invoke nationalist loyalties. For Lukes, the elaborately staged coronation was a political act that mobilized loyalty to some symbols at the cost of others. Insofar as it generated a dramatic experience of communitas, it successfully marginalized any and all who had less enthusiasm for the proceedings. In many ways, Lukes’s appreciation of the role of ritual in addressing social conflict builds on Gluckman’s analysis of ritual as a means for social integration but not necessarily value consensus.

The royal Ncwala ritual of the Swazi people of Swaziland in southeastern

Africa is prodigiously complex; the best ethnographic description is a dense twentynine pages long, and any one summary appears to emphasize different aspects from other summaries.101 Yet a brief outline of the ritual events is sufficient for our purposes. As a whole, the ritual is a firstfruits harvest type, composed of two structurally similar parts, the two-day “little” Ncwala, which begins on the new moon just prior to the December solstice, when the old year ends and the new one starts. It is followed by the four to six day “big” Ncwala, which starts a fortnight later on the full moon. The timing of the ritual is quite important, requiring the king to retire from the community when the moon is on the wane and “race the sun” to begin the ceremony before the solstice.102 In the little Ncwala, priestly representatives of the king travel to the frontiers of Swazi-controlled lands in order to collect river water and seawater in special calabashes that will be used to invigorate the king. A black ox is also slain to secure medicines for the king. When all these things are assembled, the king enters a sacred enclosure and is “doctored” with these substances, eventually spitting through openings in the east and west, which is understood as consecrating or “stabbing” the new year. He enters the enclosure for treatment and spitting twice; the first time, the people sing the Simemo, a song that expresses hatred for the king, but the second time they sing praises. In the big Ncwala, the king again acquires special supernatural powers by being treated with waters and vegetation secured from all over the realm and with parts of an ox that has been driven wild and then killed.

Again he spits to the east and west and this time bites into fruits from the first harvest

(until the king eats of the harvest, it is taboo for anyone else to do so). Later, various groups in strict hierarchical order also bite into the crops. Warriors then enjoin a mock dance-battle against the king. At the height of these activities, the king appears in the guise of a legendary demonic spirit, dancing wildly, to signify the powers he has acquired. Through a series of activities, however, these powers are gradually controlled and sorted in ways that subordinate the powerful king to the well-being of social group. Punctuated by specific warrior dances, songs of praise, and a final feast, the king lights a purifying fire to burn the things of the old year and entreat rain. He then bathes, is treated with medicines, and finally takes the throne.

Gluckman’s analysis of the annual Swazi Ncwala rite drew attention to how ritual actually displays “the powerful tensions which make up national life.”103 He argued that the Ncwala is “not a simple mass assertion of unity, but a stressing of conflict”— king against the people, people against the state, king and people against rival princes, queen and queen mother against the king, and so on. According to Gluckman, the

Swazi believe that this symbolic acting out of conflicted and ambivalent social relations can bring about a cathartic unity and prosperity.104 The prescribed behavior of the ceremony makes clear that even those caught up in these tense relationships with the king still supported his kingship. A concomitant message is also made clear: that the kingship is sacred, not the king himself. This idea underscores the virtue that is incumbent upon the ruler lest his behavior justify the eruption of a rebellion in order to protect the office from abuse. Despite the differences between the social, economic, and political circumstances of the Swazi and the British, and the stylistic differences in the way they ritually affirm their institution of kingship, Gluckman’s

86 Theories: The History of Interpretation

conclusions still echo those Shils and Young: the ritual functioned to strengthen and unite the nation by displaying the values and dramatizing the ideal relationships that animate their social system.

Several theorists have challenged Gluckman’s analysis of the Ncwala, notably

T. O. Beidelman. Beidelman’s more cultural approach led him to focus on the cosmological symbols and processes of the rite in terms of what they seemed to mean to the Swazi. He dismissed Gluckman’s analysis of the rite’s supposed sociopolitical dimensions as based on a flawed functionalism, an approach he saw as attempting to uncover “the latent functions and results” of a ritual without giving any consideration to its “culturally manifest purpose.” Beidelman concluded that the Ncwala was not concerned with the expression of rebellious conflict or resentment, but rather with the systematic separation of the king from various groups within the Swazi nation in order to facilitate his unique and supernatural empowerment as “king-priest” of the whole nation.105

As these comparisons imply, political rituals have been a major focus for cultural as well as functional approaches. Geertz, for example, has echoed Gluckman’s point that ritual puts social forces on display. Yet it does so, he argues, not to afford a cathartic experience of social solidarity, but to define what is cognitively real. In a study of the political world of premodern Bali, which he characterized as a “theatre state,” Geertz attempted to demonstrate that royal rituals are neither simple displays of power nor displays that disguise real power.106 Instead, these vast ceremonial displays of kingly ritual themselves constitute kingly power, just as performative utterances do things, not simply communicate things. He presents the traditional Balinese court as a microcosm of the supernatural order, the image of the universe, and the embodiment of the whole political order. In this political theater, state-sponsored rituals “were not the means to political ends; they were the ends themselves, they were what the state was for. Power served pomp, not pomp power.”107 From Geertz’s perspective, Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and the Swazi king’s tasting of the firstfruits are “arguments made over and over again in the insistent vocabulary of ritual” that status in the human world is an approximate but legitimate reflection of the inherent hierarchical order of the cosmos itself. Such ritual arguments, communicated in the symbolic action of elaborate ceremony, he avowed, were the very workings of power in the Balinese state. Although the sociopolitical situations of England and

Swaziland differ significantly from that of 19th-century Bali and each other, in each case, Geertz suggests, ritual creates the authority of the monarch, it does not simply display it. To think otherwise would be to radically misunderstand the nature of symbolic action.108

Maurice Bloch criticized Gluckman’s interpretation of the Ncwala as reductionistic since it reduced a vast and complex ceremonial to just one social function, that of maintaining the social and political entity.109 But Bloch also argued that Geertz’s analysis of the ritual workings of power in Balinese kingly ritual is incomplete since it never explains how the symbolic construction of power is made persuasive or relevant to the people. Bloch himself argues for a dual understanding of royal rituals. First, such rituals use a variety of methods familiar to the people to construct a level of symbolic authority as the opposite of the contingent here and now. In this way, the ritual legitimates royal authority by showing how it is “an essential aspect of a

cosmic social and emotional order.”110 Second, on another level, these rites create very specific cultural meanings by the way in which they adopt symbolic forms rooted in the culture’s everyday life in order to make connections between the royal ceremony and the more humble ceremonies of daily life. It is this second dimension, he argues, that explains the emotional and ideological power the royal ritual has over its participants. For example, in terms of Bloch’s first level, a series of symbolic actions link the coronation of the queen to the authority of God, his bishop, and the will of the people. On a second level, other symbolic activities link the young woman’s accession to the throne to the succession of generations and the life of families, thereby associating the rather distant events in the abbey with symbols of great personal impact. Not only the divinely recognized mother of her people, Elizabeth II is also the daughter of the nation and the bride of the political power structure. While she is symbolically raised above all others, she is simultaneously made symbolically evocative of the emotional aspects of the daily life of all British families.

Despite their own sense of disagreement over differing methodological orientations, Bloch’s dual analysis roughly coincides with two dimensions that Tambiah identifies in political ritual, namely, a symbolic dimension in which the structures of human authority are laid out as iconic with the nature of the cosmos, and an indexical dimension in which key features of the ritual relate to and legitimate the current social hierarchy.111 In terms of the British coronation, Bloch and Tambiah might both point to the symbols that define the queen’s human authority as subordinate to, but derivative of, the divine authority of God represented by the archbishop, the Bible, and the oath to uphold and abide by the laws of the land and of God. Moreover, these rites of submission to God’s ultimate authority are followed by another sequence in which the “frail creature,” divested of her regalia, is systematically transformed into a queen. First, she is anointed with consecrated oil in the same way that “Solomon was anointed king by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet”; then, she is presented with the sword of power and the orb of moral responsibility. The authority over others extended to the queen by God and the simultaneous demand for complete obedience to God replicate the hierarchical nature of God’s divine presence and the condition of all humans subject to his ultimate authority. The structure of her authority defined by the ritual conforms, therefore, to a timeless picture of the order of the human and divine cosmos. However, all the ritual sequences that relate the queen to the human community also imply and validate a hierarchy, from the important eyewitness guests in the abbey itself to the most distant families gathered around a television set. The current social order, as well as the cosmic order, is defined from the highest to the lowest and all the tiers of social position in between. The effect of these iconic and indexical dimensions in the ritual is a series of emotive and political connections to a transcendent order, as well as a dynamic mechanism by which the universal and the particular each legitimate the other.112

In another reexamination of the Ncwala ritual, Bruce Lincoln undermines many previous interpretations, all of which relied heavily on the ethnographic description provided by Hilda Kuper, who observed performances in 1934, 1935, and 1936.113 In keeping with the practice orientation of historical anthropologists like Sahlins, Comaroff, and Ortner, Lincoln points to the significance of the colonial context in which the recorded rite was performed, arguing that the observed performances were