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not the definitive Ncwala—if such a thing could be said to exist at all, since each and every Ncwala actually reflects a very distinct political agenda rooted in the historical events unfolding among the Swazi at the time. When Kuper returned to observe the Ncwala in 1966 on the eve of Swaziland’s national independence, Lincoln notes, she found that it reflected a very different political ethos. Lincoln contrasts the Ncwala’s symbolic construction of the political power of the king in three different periods: prior to colonialism, during colonial rule, which included the performances of the 1930s; and on the eve of independence. He argues that Gluckman’s analysis of it as a ritual of rebellion was true for the precolonial period, but under colonialism the Ncwala also became a ritual of resistance to British domination. Hence, he concludes, Gluckman’s emphasis on social unity in the Durkheimian tradition obscures the more complex power dynamics of domination and subordination between the British and the Swazi as well as the articulation of loyal and disloyal factions within the Swazi nation itself.114

As we saw with the Mukanda ritual and the Akitu festival, the various ways of interpreting royal ceremonies such as the Swazi Ncwala or the British coronation yield a plethora of interesting connections and nonexclusive insights. The most successful analyses appear to be those that can appreciate a multiplicity of purposes, strategies, and performances; that is, they may recognize structural components that are rooted both culturally (e.g., the queen’s annointment by the archbishop indicates subordination to God) and more generally (the stages of separation, liminality, and reincorporation in the Swazi king’s Ncwala), but the ritual is not reduced to some timeless repetition of enduring structures. Its historical context is vital and central.

These interpretations share some recognition of the role of complex systems and how they mediate all action, reflection, and interpretation. These mediating systems are, in effect, what we mean by culture. For the most part, proponents of “cultural analysis” have found ritual an effective focus for tracking and formulating the dynamics that comprise culture—even if, as for the more practice-oriented approaches, the cultural exists nowhere else except in how it is constituted in action.

Conclusion

The three preceding chapters on theories of ritual cannot be read as a simple evolutionary sequence in which the earlier theories are deemed primitive and out of date, while the later ones are current and superior. In fact, the actual historical sequence is much more complicated than the abridged outline of this section can adequately portray. The sequence of major categories—that is, phenomenology, functionalism, structuralism, and so on—implies succession, when, in fact, all three approaches can still be found in studies of ritual today. Moreover, since these categories are not exclusive, many theorists can be legitimately placed in different ones at different points in their careers. In the end, few approaches are really autonomous. They appropriate insights from other methods but give them a new rationale; they layer older assumptions with new concerns; and they quietly synthesize opposing positions within more complex and dynamic models. Yet in the process of generation and selfpresentation, each composite theory inevitably contrasts itself with all other theories.

Despite the importance of historical and ethnographic data, theories are always reacting, or often overreacting, to other theories.

There are a number of other schools of thought concerned with analyzing ritual, particularly in relation to explicit political or confessional issues, that do not fit neatly into the history of major theoretical positions outlined in this section. One could argue that these schools, at least to date, have been more influenced by these major positions than they have exerted influence of their own on the direction of this history of theory. Nonetheless, several examples of feminist analysis of ritual theory have justly attracted serious attention, notably Nancy Jay’s study of the way in which gender issues are involved in the institutions of ritual sacrifice.115 Her work reminds us that ritual practices and traditions have been critical to the establishment and naturalization of cultural hierarchies based on age and gender. Liturgical studies conducted from within religious traditions is another very vital area of reflection and scholarship—in part because it is one of the few areas studying ritual in highly literate and heavily documented groups and societies, although theological issues readily shape much of this study. Many religious traditions developed various types of experts in the practice of ritual and sometimes in the formal study of its history. For Christians and Jews in particular, study of their liturgical histories has been closely connected with movements for reform—either in terms of modernization or in a return to purer traditional models. Some of these dynamics within ritual communities are addressed in the final section of this book. It is not common, however, for feminist or liturgical studies to concern themselves with the idea of ritual in general. For the most part, the perspective afforded by the general category of ritual has provided them with more or less interesting and relevant views of their own specific traditions of liturgical practices. Few have yet to suggest how their tradition’s history and practices might, in turn, inform this general category. The most suggestive exceptions to this tendency so far, however, are undoubtedly the work of feminist scholars: by virtue of their critical exploration of traditional gender roles, they stand somewhat outside their religious tradition’s ritual history and the history of formal scholarship on ritual in general. It is a perspective that can yield useful insights into the way in which our “science of ritual” remains historically and socially akin to the practice of particular liturgical traditions.

The lack of any definitive winner in the history of theory does not mean that scholarship on ritual has not forged useful tools for analysis and reflection. Ritual as the expression of paradigmatic values of death and rebirth; ritual as a mechanism for bringing the individual into the community and establishing a social entity; or ritual as a process for social transformation, for catharsis, for embodying symbolic values, for defining the nature of the real, or for struggling over control of the sign—these formulations are all tools that help us to analyze what may be going on in any particular set of activities. They are also vivid reflections of the questions that concern us and indicate, therefore, something of the way in which we who are asking the questions tend to construe the world, human behavior, meaning, and the tasks of explanation.

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PART II

RITES

The Spectrum of Ritual Activities

At one time or another, almost every human activity has been done ritually or made part of a ritual. In practice, however, neither ritualists nor scholars of ritual are ever tempted to consider everything to be ritual. The idea that some acts are intrinsi-

cally different from others appears to be basic to how people think of ritual, and the last section presented a number of attempts to provide a substantive definition of ritual that highlights this sort of intrinsic difference. Certainly the most obvious rituals are those activities that form part of a tradition or canon of rites, be it religious or secular. Yet other evidence suggests that ritual activities are also as situational as they are substantive, to use Jonathan Z. Smith’s terms, a matter of what is selected to be done and how it is done in particular situations rather than fixed activities or even intrinsic principles that govern ritual everywhere. For example, we commonly describe many activities—from war games to cocktail parties—as “ritual-like” by virtue of specific features about the way they are done. Hence, in addition to designated ritual repetoires codified by tradition, often preserved in textual sources, and presided over by trained experts, there are multiple activities that people can ritualize to various degrees.

Since the earliest studies of ritual, scholars have imposed some order on this situation by setting up categories with which to distinguish among dissimilar types of ritual activities. While these taxonomies emerged from each theorist’s particular perspective, resulting in a great deal of variety, it is not hard to find a fair amount of consensus on basic categories. Chapter 4 in this section explores six fairly standard ritual genres by presenting representative examples of each in some detail. The next chapter, however, explores activities that are harder to categorize, namely, those that can be ritual-like but are not quite ritual by cultural definition. The stylized behaviors demanded by conventions of social etiquette, sports, or political spectacles, to name just a few, are testimony

92 Rites: The Spectrum of Ritual Activities

to how a culture’s notion of ritual is dependent upon a loose but total system of ways of acting. The degree of ritualization that one invokes and the degree to which one does so by appealing to tradition or formality, among other features, reveal some of the strategies by which such actions work in their world. By exploring the most generally accepted examples of ritual first and then turning to those activities that are often deemed rituallike, we should be able to uncover some of the qualities that our culture associates with ritual and some of the strategies underlying how we ritualize.