into a synchronized harmony that allows an energizing renewal of his body, the community, and the universe.76 By the same logic, the creation of a miniature garden is a ritual-like action that uses a vast system of correspondences to establish a bounded space that invokes the interrelationship of the microcosm and the macrocosm, enabling one either to ponder their intrinsic identity or to attempt to affect the balance of one by manipulating the balance of the other.

Such gardens make particularly clear the totalizing potential of powerful symbols, that is, the way they contain worlds of associations within a condensed image, in regard to which people can act out their sense of personal and corporate involvement. In Ortner’s rubric, however, some symbols summarize or condense a wealth of human experiences, while other symbols elaborate these associations by helping to sort out experience, locate it in cultural categories, and enable people to understand “how it all hangs together.” Summarizing symbols may discourage thought in favor of emotional reactions, but elaborating symbols seem to provide vehicles for thinking, imaging, and communicating.77 If the American flag, or most any other national flag, is a good example of a summarizing symbol, the miniature garden is a good example of an elaborating symbol; it suggests how this mode of “totalization” provides a type of analysis of the cosmic order and enables people to participate in the creation and sustenance of that order. In contrast to national flags, the miniature garden does not have a pronounced communal dimension, even though it is a common public sight. It is not there to rally any group ethos. It is simply a highly aesthetic expression of the way in which the intimate and personal are linked to the cosmic and impersonal.

In all of the foregoing examples, ritual-like action is activity that gives form to the specialness of a site, distinguishing it from other places in a way that evokes highly symbolic meanings. Such activities differentiate a sacred world—however minute or magnificent—in the midst of a profane one, thus affording experiences of this sacrality that transcend the profane reality of day-to-day life. Where the flag is raised, the nation lives. It asserts a certain identity, history, and value system. But it does not do so because a piece of colored cloth is strung up a pole. The symbolness of the flag lies in the multiple activities that differentiate this cloth, handle it in special ways, and respond to it with particular emotions. In the same way, it was not the vast torrents of water that made Niagara the natural embodiment of America; it was the pilgrims, tourists, poets, and honeymooners who came to experience there a complex set of connections that linked American identity to this great work of God. Hence, what makes activities around certain symbols seem ritual-like is really twofold: the way they differentiate some places from others by means of distinctive acts and responses and the way they evoke experiences of a greater, higher, or more universalized reality— the group, the nation, humankind, the power of God, or the balance of the cosmos.78

Performance

In recent years, much attention has focused on what ritual has in common with theatrical performances, dramatic spectacles, and public events. Most of these comparisons rest on a recognition that the performative dimension per se—that is, the delib-

160 Rites: The Spectrum of Ritual Activities

erate, self-conscious “doing” of highly symbolic actions in public—is key to what makes ritual, theater, and spectacle what they are. While a performative dimension often coexists with other characteristics of ritual-like behavior, especially in rulegoverned sports contests or responses to sacral symbols, in many instances performance is clearly the more dominant or essential element. For example, a number of studies address the ritual-like aspects of clowns and clowning. They point out how clowns follow certain rules, usually rules of inversion, by which they upset and mock the status quo. By extension, clowns themselves function as powerful symbols of cultural inversion, ludic freedom, and social innocence. However, what is most essential to what clowning is all about is the elaborately dramatic “acting out” that it involves.79

The qualities of performance can be analyzed in terms of several overlapping features. First of all, performances communicate on multiple sensory levels, usually involving highly visual imagery, dramatic sounds, and sometimes even tactile, olfactory, and gustatory stimulation. By marching with a crowd, crying over a tragic drama, or applauding an unconvincing politician, even the less enthusiastic participants of the audience are cognitively and emotionally pulled into a complex sensory experience that can also communicate a variety of messages. Hence, the power of performance lies in great part in the effect of the heightened multisensory experience it affords: one is not being told or shown something so much as one is led to experience something. And according to the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, in rituallike behavior “not only is seeing believing, doing is believing.”80

Another feature of performance lies in the dynamics of framing. As noted with regard to sacral symbols, distinctions between sacred and profane, the special and the routine, transcendent ideals and concrete realities can all be evoked by how some activities, places, or people are set off from others. Intrinsic to performance is the communication of a type of frame that says, “This is different, deliberate, and sig- nificant—pay attention!” By virtue of this framing, performance is understood to be something other than routine reality; it is a specific type of demonstration.81 It can also confer on the performance the ability to signify or denote larger truths under the guise of make-believe situations. Hence, since the person talking is framed by all the conventions of a theater production—stage, curtains, tickets, audience, familiar script—we know that he is not really Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Although his overt identity is make-believe, by virtue of the way in which the theatrical framework sets his words and deeds off from day-to-day reality, the performance is credited with the ability to convey universal truths by means of an experience not readily accessible elsewhere.

Such frames not only distinguish performance as such, they also create a complete and condensed, if somewhat artificial world—like sacral symbols, a type of microcosmic portrayal of the macrocosm. Since the real world is rarely experienced as a coherently ordered totality, the microcosm constructed on stage purports to provide the experience of a mock-totality, an interpretive appropriation of some greater if elusive totality. For the sociologist Don Handelman, “all public events, in their creation of limited social worlds, are exercises in holism.”82 By virtue of this condensing or totalizing feature, Hamlet is generally understood to speak to the human condition itself, a set of issues much larger than the story of a Danish prince or

even the real-life stories of the actors and members of the audience. As a threedimensional representation of reality, public performances can provide powerful experiences of the coherence of cultural categories and attitudes—or their incoherence, as modern theater has demonstrated. Even when performances express complex ideas, tragic ambiguity, or competing demands of conscience, as in Shakespeare’s story of Hamlet, Handelman argues, “Establishing visible external forms, [they] bring out of all the possible might-have-beens a firm social reality.”83

Hence, the ritual-like nature of performative activities appears to lie in the multifaceted sensory experience, in the framing that creates a sense of condensed totality, and in the ability to shape people’s experience and cognitive ordering of the world.

In brief, performances seem ritual-like because they explicitly model the world.84 They do not attempt to reflect the real world accurately but to reduce and simplify it so as to create more or less coherent systems of categories that can then be projected onto the full spectrum of human experience. When successfully projected over the chaos of human experience, these categories can render that experience coherently meaningful and are themselves validated in that process. Anthropologists who have explored a wide variety of cultural performances, from Balinese cockfighting to Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, look to how people use these events to formulate for themselves what their culture and their community mean. While such modeling events may invoke conflicting or incoherent categories, the processual structure as they unfold in time may still achieve a rough resolution of such conflicts. In this way, many public events claim an implicit power to transform: when experienced and embodied in these orchestrated events, the categories or attitudes that appear to be in conflict can be resolved and synthesized.

Some of these features of ritual-like performance are visible in the historical pageants that were particularly popular community events in the towns and cities of America from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th. Indeed, there appears to have been a veritable explosion of commemorative pageants in which people used costumes and elaborate scenery to dramatize historical events associated with their community. The Morgantown municipal centennial celebration of

1885 had the usual historical oration, a display of historical relics, and the dedication of an imposing monument, but the centerpiece was a procession in which local citizens dressed up in historical costumes and rode old wagons and farm vehicles. By the turn of the century, such processions had given way to fully developed historical pageants depicting the adventures of the early Puritans or more local events. These pageants were the medium through which these communities created images of the past that gave form to a particular sense of history and tradition. They were highly public images—the results of an intense degree of community negotiation and heated disputes over interpretation and significance. They located a community in historical time and in the social fabric of the larger world, articulating the difference between timeless values and more contingent ones. For this reason, such events were a process that could both generate and integrate differences, with the final performance depicting a synthetic consensus in very visible and memorable images of the hard-won communal cooperation. Indeed, historical pageants were “rituals of social transformation” and the instruments for the very creation and dissemination of civic traditions.85

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The more recent quincentennial commemorations of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World were comparable to these turn-of-the-century historical pageants, complete with exact replicas of his ships reenacting the crossing of the Atlantic, as well as ceremonies in Mexico City in honor of the Indians killed by the

Europeans and their diseases. Even though the quincentennial was full of interpretive controversy, its various public celebrations and demonstrations were relatively good “mirrors” of who Americans are and how they see themselves. If the performances involved were simply a matter of entertainment, on the one hand, or political ideology, on the other, the significance of Columbus’s “discovery” versus his “conquest and annihilation” of the New World would be trivial. But most participants in these events instinctively felt that the manner in which Columbus’s adventures are represented today, some five hundred years after his landing in the Americas, will shape how this country defines itself in the future.

Scholars have studied many examples of ritual-like public events to explore the power of performance to shape values and perceptions. Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, painstakingly orchestrated to express power, adulation, German mythic motifs, and forceful symbols of national unity and purpose have been repeatedly analyzed as a particularly graphic example of the use of ritual-like politics. The sheer size of these spectacles, with hundreds of thousands marching, singing, and waving flags, guaranteed that the event overwhelmed and swept along the majority of those in attendance. Particular care was taken to choreograph an awesome spectacle that impressed people with the disciplined precision and near-spiritual unity of the marchers. It appears that Hitler was well aware of the effects of these rallies since he wrote that “the man who comes to such a meeting doubting and hesitating, leaves it confirmed in his mind: he has become a member of a community.” Elsewhere he notes, “I personally could feel and understand how easily a man of the people succumbs to the suggestive charm of such a grand and impressive spectacle.”86

In the case of Mohandas Gandhi, another master of political orchestration, different values but the same features of ritual-like performance animated his public spectacles of social protest. In his 1930 campaign against the salt tax, which was part of a larger effort to win India’s independence from Great Britain, Gandhi and some of his followers, called satyagrahis (those who seize the truth), undertook a march to the sea coast some 240 miles away in order to collect their own salt and thereby challenge the British monopoly.87 Thousands joined them along the way and when they came to the sea, they all deliberately broke the law by gathering up salt. As everyone expected, Gandhi and many others were arrested and brought to trial, where they could further voice their views on the injustice of the tax.

Another Gandhian salt campaign, led by followers while Gandhi himself was still in jail, created an even more powerful spectacle. About 2,500 satyagrahis planned to enter a salt factory to confiscate salt, and they notified the government of their plans in time for police and barbed wire to be set up to keep the protesters out. When the satyagrahis arrived, they waded through muddy ditches surrounding the factory and marched right up to the police patroling the barbed wire. As they approached, the police beat them on their heads with iron-tipped clubs, but not one of the protesters raised an arm to defend himself. A journalist described the scene as follows:

They went down like ten-pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whack of the clubs on unprotected skulls. The waiting crowd of marchers groaned and sucked in their breath in sympathetic pain at every blow. Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. . . . The survivors, without breaking ranks, silently and doggedly marched on until struck down. Although everyone knew that within a few minutes he would be beaten down, perhaps killed, I could detect no signs of wavering or fear. They marched silently, with heads up, without the encouragement of music or cheering or any possibility that they might escape serious injury or death. The police rushed out and methodically and mechanically beat down the second column. There was no fight, no struggle; the marchers simply walked forward until struck down.88

This was political theater of a deadly earnest kind, a ritualized confrontation between two value systems in which one side deliberately and vividly demonstrated to everyone the moral superiority and, hence, the justice of its cause.

For Albert Bergesen, the periodic “witch-hunts” that have coursed through American national life from 17th century Salem to the “red scare” led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s are also examples of sociopolitical spectacles that have functioned as “national rituals” and “ritual mechanisms” for the periodic renewal of communal values.89 For some sociologists, such campaigns are comparable to the political means by which dictators or ruling elites attempt to rid themselves of real or imagined opposition—as with Stalin in the U.S.S.R., Mao Tse-tung in China, or

Pol Pot in Cambodia. Such purges may also divert attention from failed policies, focus discontent on convenient scapegoats, or streamline and reinvigorate the vast bureaucracies upon which totalitarian regimes often depend. Yet there is also evidence that the hysteria, accusations, and public confessions of large-scale witch-hunts are more complex, indirect, symbolic, and ritual-like than these pragmatic explanations appreciate. For instance, the historical record suggests that dramatic purges occur in inverse ratio to the presence of real enemies or policy failures. When analyzed more symbolically, these political performances appear to divide up the world into two absolute camps, the good and innocent on the one hand and the deviant and reprehensible on the other. With these performances, the community itself simultaneously identifies images of political deviance and images of collective tradition and proper feelings. Evil is seen as infiltrating the good community from the outside in order to contaminate and undermine it: Bergeson argues that “just as purity requires dirt for its very existence, so do political ideas of national interest require those that would undermine them to periodically dramatize their very meaning.”90 Hence, the witch-hunt’s orchestration of public accusations, trials, confessions, and punishments can be a powerful means for reaffirming the status quo of the larger group and forestalling the emergence of threatening attitudes or ideas.

What is particularly ritual-like about witch-hunts is the performative features by which an elaborate cast of people publicly dramatize a contest of values, compelling observers to align themselves with the larger community or risk identification as the enemy. The performative event helps to shape social attitudes by giving dramatic form to polarized positions; people must choose, and in doing so they are drawn into