exchanging verbal abuse and indignities in verses strictly governed by classical canons of meter and rhyme. Many ancient Arabic poets specialized in this art of cursing enemies, a poetic genre known as hija’, or execration poetry. With the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, there was a rather extraordinary revival of execration poetry in television broadcasts sent back and forth among Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq. Using medieval Arabic, the literal meaning of which is barely understood by most Arabs, one Saudi poet sang out a variety of racist insults at Saddam Hussein:

Saddam, O Saddam,

Of our flesh not are you.

Claim not to be a Muslim,

For you are truly a Jew.

Your deeds have proved ugly,

Your face is darkest black.

And we will yet set fire

To your bottom and your back.65

The demand for such entertaining propaganda had both the Saudi and Iraqi governments holding contests with monetary rewards for the composers of particularly dazzling or damning verses. As propaganda goes, such medieval poetry would seem to be a bit esoteric, but the adherence to classical models seems to have evoked an effective framework of heroic imagery from the past with which to interpret the complexities of inter-Arab hostilities in the present.

Less aesthetically pleasing, perhaps, but often no less orchestrated and venomous, are the complex negotiations that attend formal bargaining between company management and labor unions.66 Likewise, presidential debates, congressional hearings, debating societies, and even routine legal proceedings in which defense and prosecution contend in a court of law all follow an enormous number of prescribed rules that regulate and thereby facilitate conflicted forms of interaction. There is a general tendency toward ethological or functional explanations that see this kind of ritual and ritual-like practice as channeling aggression in order to create a fair and measured environment in which explosive differences can be safely aired. This suggests that ritualization by means of rule-governance can be deployed not only to control the engagement of powerful social forces, but also to create the impression that such powers exist. Rule-governance, as either a feature of many diverse activities or a strategy of ritualization itself, also suggests that we tend to think of ritual in terms of formulated norms imposed on the chaos of human action and interaction. These normative rules may define the outer limits of what is acceptable, or they may orchestrate every step. In either case, they hold individuals to communally approved patterns of behavior, they testify to the legitimacy and power of that form of communal authority, and perhaps they also encourage human interactions by constraining the possible outcomes.

Sacral Symbolism

Activities that explicitly appeal to supernatural beings are readily considered to be examples of ritual, even if the appeal is a bit indirect, as when the president of the

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United States takes the oath of office by placing his left hand on the Bible and swearing to uphold the duties and responsibilities of the presidency. Although it is not part of the institutional life of a specific religious group, the oath of office clearly derives from Christian ritual and represents the Christian values in American civic religion.67 Many other activities are not so overt in their appeal to a supernatural reality. More subtly, they simply assume and variously express a fundamental difference between sacred things on the one hand and profane things on the other. In doing so, these activities express generalized belief in the existence of a type of sacrality that demands a special human response. Aside from religious examples, such as the symbols of the

Christian cross and the star of David, there are secular examples as well. National flags and monuments are routinely regarded as more than mere signs representing a country or an idea; they are symbols that embody values, feelings, and histories of national ideals and loyalty.68 In the many public arguments over how the flag of the United States should be treated, no one argues that the flag itself is holy. Yet, many people seem to feel that this piece of cloth, when deliberately crafted as a flag, should be handled in very specific and respectful ways. It is thought to stand for something as large and diffuse as “the American way” and as specific as ideas about freedom, democracy, free enterprise, hard work, and national superiority. According to the anthropologist Sherry Ortner, the flag “does not encourage reflection on the logical relations among these ideas, nor on the logical consequences of them as they are played out in social actuality, over time and history. On the contrary, the flag encourages a sort of all-or-nothing allegiance to the whole package, best summed . . .

[by] ‘Our flag, love it or leave.’”69 Symbols like the flag, which Ortner calls “summarizing” symbols, effectively merge many ideas and emotions under one image. This type of totalization generates a loose but encompassing set of ideas and emotions that readily evoke a collective sense of “we”—as in “our” flag.70

The complicated nature of such symbols becomes apparent when people attempt to define what it is that makes a piece of cloth into the flag as a sacral symbol: is it the specific red-white-and-blue arrangement of stars and stripes, the cloth itself, or would a paper flag merit as much respect? If so, what about a flag drawn in crayon on a white linen sheet? In other words, when is a flag “the” flag? In religious traditions, such questions have been answered through rituals of consecration: the Hindu statue of the god Siva is just a bit of clay until it is consecrated; then it must be treated with the respect one would have for the deity himself. The same is true in the Roman

Catholic and Greek Orthodox traditions, where the ritual of consecration is thought to transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ himself. Such forms of consecration are not explicitly invoked in the secular or civic arena, although people tend to carry the concept over in various ways. Associations like the Boy Scouts and the armed forces teach “official” techniques for how to fold the flag, salute it, raise it each morning on a flagpole, and bring it down each evening. These rulegoverned procedures underscore the ethos that a flag should never be treated as just another piece of colored cloth. Yet Supreme Court decisions that burning the flag is a protected form of First Amendment free speech are widely interpreted as retreating from the religious language of a sacred flag and all the legal complexities that would develop on how to define it.

Activities that generate and express the sacral significance of key symbols like the flag are often considered to be ritual-like. While ritual-like action is thought to

be that type of action that best responds to the sacred nature of things, in actuality, ritual-like action effectively creates the sacred by explicitly differentiating such a realm from a profane one. If we were to try to pin down the exact nature of the sacrality evoked in such symbols, however, we would find a type of circularity by which sacredness, when not explicitly a religious claim to divinity, is a quality of specialness, not the same as other things, standing for something important and possessing an extra meaningfulness and the ability to evoke emotion-filled images and experiences.

In other words, with regard to objects as sacred symbols, their sacrality is the way in which the object is more than the mere sum of its parts and points to something beyond itself, thereby evoking and expressing values and attitudes associated with larger, more abstract, and relatively transcendent ideas.71 This quality of sacrality is attributed not only to objects, of course, but also to places, buildings, and even people.

As symbols, geographic places are thought to be more than mere arbitrary sites where something important happens or happened in the past. Somehow the distinctive landscape, interiors, or the events that transpired there serve to imbue the site with a significance that can evoke emotional associations for those who visit there.

For example, one of the great symbols of America has traditionally been that unparalleled natural landmark, Niagara Falls. From the early nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, Niagara Falls was the primary objective of American travel.

In his study of Niagara, John Sears argues that it was the place where ideas about God’s power, nature’s beauty, and America’s destiny came together in experiences and attitudes that helped to define what it meant to be an American both corporately and individually. Many travel books from this period repeatedly use the analogy of pilgrimage to describe a visit to Niagara, no matter whether the visitors were among the swelling tide of tourists, honeymooners, or artists seeking an experience of transcendence. In an account entitled “My Visit to Niagara,” Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804– 64) evoked a “pilgrim’s progress” by describing his gradual convergence on the sacred site and his culminating experience of a fundamentally moral lesson.72 Even the heavy accretions of tourism and gross consumerism that quickly packaged the experience of the Falls could not diminish its symbolic significance. Indeed, the evocative power of Niagara actually endowed the extravagant commercialism with significance, providing a type of moral justification for tourism. It linked transcendental images of America with the robust energy of unbridled consumerism, mass society, and democratic kitsch; it even represented the convergence of aesthetics and religion with the sciences of geology and hydraulic engineering. For Sears, Niagara embodied “the values and the contradictions of the society for which it served as the principal shrine.”73 Clearly, ritual-like visits to Niagara Falls, like the ritual-like ways of treating the flag, point to the intrinsic circularity of rites and symbols, namely, how such activities create the powerful communal symbols that effectively induce and justify such ritual-like responses.

In a somewhat more remote example, the activities of the astronauts who first landed on the moon were distinctly ritual-like. Neil Armstrong’s formal pronouncement, “One small step for [a] man, one great step for mankind,” as well as the formal erection of the American flag in a manner so reminiscent of earlier rites of colonization, evoked a complex chain of symbolic associations with the moon. While some people declared that the mysterious moon of lovers and star gazers would never be the same, others voiced another set of symbolic associations: the moon as a dis-

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tant point to conquer, a symbol of the triumph of American over Soviet science, and the manifest destiny of America to reach out into space. Very similar nationalist and universal associations also attended the “conquering” of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norkay in 1953.

Historical sites can act as powerful symbols not simply because important events took place there but also because they embody contradictory and contested interpretations of those events. For example, American battlesites like the Little Big Horn,

Gettysburg, and Pearl Harbor have long been considered a type of sacred ground because of the drama of their events as well as the sheer loss of life. Yet they are also the sites of a constant and concomitant struggle to define exactly what is most important about the place and what should be the proper response. Similarly complex sites, evoking both ritual-like acts of pilgrimage and contested interpretations, would include Lenin’s tomb or the memorial museums at Auschwitz and Hiroshima. As with Niagara Falls, visits to these places readily take on the style of religious pilgrimages, even though these sites distinguish sacred and profane in very secular and historical terms. Their conjunctions of hope and horror, good and evil, chaos and order, heroism and despair evoke images and emotions so unlike those of daily life as to endow these places with a tangible spirituality. At the same time, it is possible that visitors seek some resolution of all these contradictions, some experience of holism that can pull together the fragmentation of personal and national life and grant a sense of the overall goodness or stability of the whole. Even if no resolution can be clearly formulated, sufficient demarcation of the acts of visiting, confronting, and feeling—via the use of boundaries, staged progression, and accompanying narrative—can often supply an overarching framework within which contradictory emotions and meanings can be embraced.

Symbolism can evoke ritual-like activities on a much smaller scale as well. A curious example is the highly formal miniature gardens traditionally cultivated in Vietnam, China, and Japan.74 Called “miniature mountain” (nui non bô) in Vietnamese, “landscape in a container” (penzai) in Chinese, and “stones in a container” (bonsai) in Japanese, these gardens are usually constructed in a small basin of water, often filled with goldfish, in the middle of which rises a small mountain of rocks, dwarf trees, and sometimes diminutive pagodas and figures. It is a miniature universe, a microcosm that not only depicts the larger macrocosm but also evokes the forces and principles that animate it—the primary elements of earth, stone and water. Cultivation of the garden is a matter of tending the balance and harmony of these elements. The historian Rolf Stein describes this type of miniature garden as a ritually delimited work, a sacred place, and analogous to a holy city, temple, or magic circle.75 In the Chinese tradition in particular, the gardens evoke both religious and artistic associations. Trees and rocks represent health and longevity, water is a mirror for reflection and the discernment of nondualistic reality, fish denote good luck and well-being, mountains reach to heaven while enclosing womblike caves for regeneration and transformation, and the diminutive distinctness of the closed garden evokes the spirituality of the hermit who has left the social world to return to the natural one. A well-known Daoist religious ceremony unfolds around an altar that recreates the four cardinal directions, the center, the heavens above, and the hells below; the Daoist master travels through this universe as he paces around the altar bringing the various levels of the cosmos