Systems

174 Contexts: The Fabric of Ritual Life

newborn but also turn up in rites to mark the transition to adulthood, the passage from the world of the living to the world of the dead, and even in the ancestral ceremonies that link the dead to the fertility of successive generations. In this case, the content or structure of the rites themselves create links that group them into a coherent set. While most of the rites presented in chapter 4 were removed from their actual context in a larger organzation of ritual practices, they were grouped in terms of identifiable classes of rites (such as rites of passage, calendrical rites, political rites).

So Chinese birth rites were given as an example of the class of life crisis rites that also includes initiations, marriages, and death rites. For the most part, the classes identified in chapter 4 are analytical ones invented by scholars; in some cases, however, they also correspond to distinctions and connections among rites that are made by the ritual performers themselves by virtue of replicated symbols, gestures, and terminology.

Such systematic linkages can be terribly important for understanding the significance of a single ritual act. The Chinese “full month ritual” that ends the confinement of mother and newborn is echoed in the traditional capping ceremony to mark transition into adulthood and in the preparation of the corpse for burial. Likewise, the birth practices associated with the god Taishen and the restless soul of the newborn are echoed in the rites to settle the soul of the deceased in the extended sequence of funeral ceremonies. If the theme of rebirth is also replicated in the marriage ceremony, then marriage becomes a part of this extended sequence of interconnected rites, implying the intrinsic importance of a spouse to one’s basic identity. In many cultures, however, marriage ceremonies are not symbolically linked to a birth-initiation-death ritual sequence. Instead, a rather different set of symbols links marriage to the rituals attending trade negotiations or the determination of the winner and the loser in contests of strength. The religious and cultural significance of marriage and marriage rituals could easily be misunderstood if the larger ritual context, created by symbolic echoes and duplications, is ignored.1

Generally, a society has more than just one ritual system; usually, multiple systems overlap, sometimes in tension with each other, sometimes in complementary harmony. At times, the Christians of China and Africa have felt caught between two ritual systems deemed incompatible—traditional rites to the ancestors on the one hand, and Christian rites that explicitly forbid the “idolatry” of worshiping other gods, on the other hand. Some groups, like the Chinese peasants who joined the 19thcentury Christianized Great Peace (Taiping) Rebellion, burned their ancestral tablets so as to comply with the demands of the Christian system. Other groups tried to work out a compromise, frequently arguing that ancestral practices are not rituals of worship addressed to gods but simply customs signaling great respect. Most often, people tried to participate in both ritual systems without worrying too much about how they fit together.

Some cultures, such as traditional Hawaiian society, appear to have had a relatively neat ritual system that explicitly integrated, however loosely, multiple and sometimes competing subsystems by means of a loose hierarchization that simultaneously differentiated and integrated the pantheon, priestly specialists, sacred places and objects, ceremonial occasions, and even clientele.2 The system behind the Mukanda initiation ritual of the Ndembu, described in Chapter 2, involved a temporal system

of calendrical rites focusing on the village community that was complemented by a geographic system of regionally-defined rites, performed in response to particular events, which drew several villages together and underscored their mutual interdependence. The Mukanda, as a non-calendrical rite, was organized whenever enough boys came of age in the larger regional network. Some ritual systems have such complex histories and dynamics that any general principles of organization remain elusive or very provisional. Chinese religion, for example, has long demonstrated a complex interaction among any number of levels of ritual life, including the local level of village religion, which embraces but goes beyond domestic and lineage practices, the imperial government level of Confucian (or Communist) orthodoxy and bureaucratic control, and various regional levels defined by the practices of any number of Taoist, Buddhist, sectarian or lineage associations.3

The anthropologist Pierre Smith has tried to characterize the organization of rites in terms of a few structuralist principles. Periodic rites, such as those for life crises and calendrical holidays, are balanced by occasional rites that respond to specific situations, such as rites of affliction or political enthronements. In addition, rites organized around the individual are balanced by those organized around the collective. Periodic rites form a system “along an axis of the syntagmatic type; each rite in the series will necessarily be preceded and followed by another in a clearly determined order which will be repeated with each recurrence of the cycle.” For Smith, therefore, any one ritual within a periodic system is incomplete and meaningless by itself; its significance depends upon its place in the complete sequence. The sequence of life crisis rites usually forms a periodic system for the individual, while a sequence of annual rites closely tied to the seasons forms a periodic system for the collective. Indeed, Smith suggests that all periodic systems attach themselves to the natural order, either the astronomical order of the seasons or the biological order of the human life span. As a result, an irreversible passage of time is experienced “as an ordered series of eternal re-beginnings and repetitions.”4 The close identification of the life of the collective with the eternal regeneration of the seasons can give rise to powerful symbols of the naturalness or rightness of the collective, even evoking a type of immortality accessible through identification with the continuity of this unending cycle.

Such symbols are particularly prominent in nationalistic rites that emphasize the people’s connection to the land or that attempt to inspire the “ultimate sacrifice” of laying down one’s life for the sake of one’s country.

In contrast to periodic rites, Smith sees occasional rites as primarily a reactive response to some form of disorder. They organize themselves into a loose system by virtue of a paradigmatic logic in which a basic ritual structure is replicated in a variety of quite independent situations. While most societies have some form of periodic and occasional ritual system, a society may emphasize one more than the other, possibly even differing as to which system is associated with the individual and the collective. Among the Bedik of Senegal, for example, Smith found that the collective rites are organized with seasonal periodicity but also closely integrated with a set of periodic life crisis rites. This organization suggests that the Bedik view of the relationship between nature and society differs significantly from the view Smith finds among the Rwandans. The Rwandans appear to have very little ritual recognition of the collective as an entity in need of periodic reaffirmation. In their view, society is

176 Contexts: The Fabric of Ritual Life

an extension of nature and does not need any such effort. The bulk of their ritual focuses instead on occasional rites that intervene to correct a dangerous situation in the natural-political order, usually by repressing deviations that range from physical abnormalities to political uprisings. In contrast, the Bedik see their society as a cultural construction that needs to be regularly affirmed and legitimated, primarily by

“naturalizing” it—that is, by working to make it correspond to the natural cycle of the seasons and to replicate the equally naturally cycle of biological life.5

There are other ways to perceive and analyze the organization of rites. One method that regularly turns up in discussions of ritual density concerns the historical development of a corpus of rituals guarded and maintained by a class of priests.

In this case, an elite ritual system gradually grows quite distinct and removed from the more flexible ritual customs of the rest of the community; the latter may also develop their own ritual specialists, usually less formal, who offer their clientele ritual services not provided by the more elite priesthood. This is a simplistic description of the development of “high” and “low” ritual systems. The anthropologist Roy Rappaport has analyzed some properties of these types of systems by contrasting “rituals” and “liturgical orders.” As such, rituals involve the performance of set sequences of formal physical and spoken acts not created by the performers themselves; they are primarily “self-referential,” what Rappaport calls “indexical.” That is, they express the current situation of the actors, pointing to immediate meanings and purposes. By contrast, liturgical orders, which also involve predetermined sequences of actions and speech, are best seen as predominantly “canonical”; that is, the messages encoded in them are invariant and impersonal, concerned with the universal and the eternal, and thereby invested with elaborate propriety. While liturgical orders may give some room to self-referential performances that communicate something immediate and individual about the activities or actors, they are, at best, minimally self-referential, and their authority, dignity and comprehensiveness rest on this canonicity.6

For Rappaport, individual “rites” are always part of a larger “liturgical order” that encodes a basic worldview that is simultaneously cosmic, cultural, physical, and biological. The more fully people are pressed to participate in a well-established liturgical order, the more they are being pressed to conform to the basic worldview encoded in the liturgical canon. The authority of this liturgical order is a result of the invariance of the canonical, non-self-referential encoding, and it gives rise to a particular notion of the sacred as that “quality of unquestionableness imputed . . . to postulates [that are] absolutely unfalsifiable and objectively unverifiable.” In other words, the more participants in a ritual conform to the canonical structure of the liturgical order by minimizing any self-referentiality, the more authority is located within the liturgy itself. As a consequence, Rappaport concludes, in this type of system the “less than punctilious performance of a ritual” or any form of liturgical experimentation can undermine the authority of the liturgy and all that rests on it.7

The Christian sacramental system and the Indian Vedic ritual system have probably received the most attention by scholars interested in analyzing the overall logic, connecting symbols, and replicated structures of large ritual systems.8 Smaller systems have also been studied, such as Chinese Taoist rites, the ritual life of the Sherpas of Nepal, and, as we will see, the modern system of Soviet rites established in the