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indirect projections of this social organization. However, this direct or indirection connection between social organization and cultural ideas became hard to demonstrate in a convincing fashion. Structuralism emerged as the attempt to pursue what increasingly appeared to be the autonomous order of cultural values, symbols, beliefs, and practices. No longer did theorists assume that a symbol was a projection of some social relationship. Rather, a symbol was seen to have no fixed meaning in itself or in relation to a fixed social reality; its meaning depended on how it was grouped with other symbols. The syntactical grouping of symbols in structured relationships, interconnecting systems, and elaborate classificatory taxonomies made it clear that this realm of symbols had a much more complicated relationship with social organization and action than functionalism had surmised. While Turner and Douglas began to expound more structural understandings of functionalism, Leach’s work was particularly instrumental in demonstrating structuralism’s potential for analyzing ritual. His contributions, as well as developments in the work of Turner and Douglas, are an important part of the next chapter. These new forms of structural analysis were also indebted to another contribution by social functionalists, namely, their repeated scrutiny of the categories of magic and religion. Indeed, speculations about magic rooted in the nineteenth century were a popular way of thinking about religious activities, especially those of other peoples.

Magic, Religion, and Science

Underlying the history of scholarly analysis of ritual just outlined is an important current of thinking about magic and magic’s relation to religion and science that has been critical to shaping successive understandings of ritual. Traditionally, ritual has been distinguished from other modes of action by virtue of its supposed nonutilitarian and nonrational qualities. Due to this distinction, shaking hands is a ritual, but planting potatoes for food is not. Like nonutilitarian, nonrational denotes the lack of any practical relationship between the means one chooses to achieve certain ends. Hence, there is no intrinsic causal relationship between shaking hands and forming a nonthreatening acquaintance with someone; the handshake is an arbitrary cultural convention and could, in another culture, just as easily signify quite different intentions.

Likewise, washing one’s hands to clean them is not a ritual, since there is a necessary connection between the means and the end but the repeated hand washing irrespective of cleanliness that is seen in compulsive behavior is apt to be considered ritualistic, as Freud noted.99 In brief, these distinctions have meant that if a cultural action serves no practical purpose, then it is ritual.

Just as this understanding of the nonrational and nonutilitarian has been a major criterion of what constitutes ritual and distinguishes it from ordinary, logical, or scientific modes of acting, it has also been invoked to express an underlying difference between modern and primitive societies, as well as between profane and sacred ways of looking at the world. A number of theorists have used these distinctions in even subtler extensions, such as distinguishing religious rituals from magical rituals. Rites deemed to be truly nonutilitarian, a matter of “pure worship” so to speak, were categorized as religious, while those nonrational acts that appeared to seek a very

practical result, such as healing or rainfall, were deemed to be magic. Some theorists explicitly contrasted both religious and magical practices to science, defined as rational action in pusuit of a practical result. In this way the simple opposition of utilitarian and nonutilitarian action generated the popular triad of magic, religion, and science.100

Tylor and other early theorists were very concerned to distinguish clearly between the “higher” mode of religiosity seen in Christianity and the “lower” mode seen in “primitive” religions. They saw the first as characterized by revelation, monotheism, morality, and intercessionary worship; the second was characterized as amoral, polytheistic, and concerned only with the pursuit of personal advantage through magical practices. From this perspective, Tylor considered magic totally distinct from religion. Indeed, he saw it as more akin to science than religion, a pseudoscience, to be precise, in the sense of an inherently faulty attempt to fathom the cause-and- effect relationships in nature. In Tylor’s evolutionary view, magic as such would eventually be replaced by both real religion and real science.101

Frazer followed Tylor in seeing magic as quite distinct from real religion, but “never a science” and more a “bastard art” that does not worship and supplicate but rather contrives to make things happen. He also linked magic, religion, and science in an explicit evolutionary sequence. Yet, despite the relegation of magic to the more primitive end of human experience, Frazer attempted to analyze the type of logical reasoning used in magic as he understood it. He identified two principles of nonscientific logic: first, “homeopathy,” the law of similarity, or the principle that “like produces like” (pouring water encourages rain); and “contagion,” the law of contact, or the principle that “things which have once been in contact continue ever afterwards to act on each other” (harm caused a piece of hair will be felt by the person who owns the hair).102 With these principles, Frazer attempted to make some sense of the many odd rituals reported in ethnographic accounts. Of course, he was not alone in trying to understand the so-called primitive mind. The very influential work of

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (1910), also attempted to unravel the irrational and mystical logic, or mentalité, behind the magical practices and worldviews of native peoples.103

Durkheim took a more sociological approach to the question of magic, distinguishing magic and religion primarily on the basis of the social relationships involved in each. His extended analysis developed the insight of Robertson Smith, who suggested that magic is opposed to religion as the individual is opposed to the social group.104 Religion differs from magic, for Smith and Durkheim, precisely because it is not “an arbitrary relation of the individual man to a supernatural power” but the relation of “all the members of a community to a power that has the good of the community at heart.”105 Although beliefs and rites are found in both magic and religion, continued Durkheim, in religion they are shared by a defined group, and it is the profession of them that unites the group into a single moral community or church. Magical beliefs and rites, however, do not unite people no matter how popular they may be, since such practices always involve individuals: “the magician has a clientel and not a Church.”106 As an individual and not a communal practice, magic falls outside the group dynamics that Durkheim believed gave rise to religion as a social institution. In a basic way, therefore, he does not fully account for it.107

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Malinowski explicitly rejected the evolutionary aspects of the theories of Frazer,

Lévy-Bruhl, and Durkheim as typical of armchair anthropologists.108 He knew from his firsthand fieldwork among the Trobriand Islanders, for example, that they were as rational as anybody and that magic, religion, and a body of scientific knowledge can simultaneously exist side-by-side: “There are no peoples however primitive without religion and magic. Nor are there, it must be added at once, any savage races lacking either in scientific attitude or in science.”109 Yet each type of reasoning is used for different purposes and in different contexts. Religious rituals, for example, are concerned with common traditions of communion with spirits, ancestors, or gods and tend to address emotional or psychological needs. By contrast, magic, for Malinowski, is essentially manipulative and thus contrasts with religion, which aspires to a more authentic relationship with divine beings. In his view, magic commands, while religion seeks. In magic, techniques are a means to an end; in religion, worship is an end in itself. Hence, while he saw both magic and religion as nonrational and the very opposite of scientific, technical, or causal activity, Malinowski also maintained the distinction drawn by Tylor and Frazer that magic is essentially manipulative—precisely because it is not a pseudoscience. It is a natural emotional reaction to situations in which technical knowledge or skills are unable to guarantee success. “Magic flourishes wherever man cannot control hazard by means of science. It flourishes in hunting and fishing, in times of war and in seasons of love, in the control of wind, rain and sun, in regulating all dangerous enterprises, above all, in disease and in the shadow of death.”110 He demonstrated, for example, that magical rituals were not used to sail canoes, at which the Trobrianders were very skilled, or to fish in shallow lagoons. However, magical rites were often used when fishing on the open sea, which could be both dangerous and unsuccessful. Malinowski gave a functionalist explanation by noting that in this type of context such rites made people adventurous and optimistic, enhancing the self-confidence that is necessary for effective cooperation. The logic of magical rituals lay in how they were used— primarily to alleviate anxiety. The function of magic, therefore, was “to ritualize man’s optimism, and to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear.”111

Evans-Pritchard’s 1937 study of witchcraft among the Azande of the Sudan also stressed the intellectual rationality of their so-called magical beliefs: “Is Zande thought so different from ours that we can only describe their speech and actions without comprehending them, or is it essentially like our own though expressed in an idiom to which we are unaccustomed?” he asked.112 Analyzing the categories of Zande thought, he found that magic and witchcraft are a coherent but flexible set of ideas.

While so fully embedded in action that they are hard to formulate in the abstract, these practices explain what cannot be explained in other ways. Magic also proved to be part and parcel of Zande religious beliefs, not something separate either theoretically or practically. Yet the Azande distinguish clearly between witchcraft, sorcery, and good magic or bad magic. The fact that neighboring tribes like the Dinka and the Shilluk had few magical beliefs, while the Azande were completely preoccupied with them, suggested special aspects to Zande social life and worldview that Evans-Pritchard pursued.

Evans-Pritchard’s most famous example is the Zande interpretation of the granary that collapsed, killing two people who happened to be sitting under it. The

Azande were perfectly well aware of the fact that termites had damaged the granary supports, leaving the edifice likely to fall over at any moment. Yet such “scientific” reasoning did not explain what was for them the most important and obvious question: why did the granary happen to fall just when it did, killing those particular people? To answer this question, the Azande turned to explanations of witchcraft.113

Evans-Pritchard traced Zande witchcraft accusations and the use of magical medicines to their roles in social relationships and communal tensions. Ultimately, he argued, the purpose of magical beliefs and practices is not the Malinowskian notion of enhancing optimism and self-confidence but an attempt, simultaneously much more social and intellectual, both to relate unusual events to their systems of belief in larger forces and to seek to affect such events through these same forces. Hence,

Zande witchcraft and magic form a comprehensive system of interpretations and ritual activities sufficiently flexible to deal with a wide variety of events and not be readily disproven by experience. Moreover, Evans-Pritchard made clear, magical rites may be performed in conjunction with technical or utilitarian actions, not in place of them. Without abandoning a distinction between empirical and ritual activities, he argued that each has to be understood in its own terms: rituals are not concerned with empirical ends, yet they are perfectly rational when understood in reference to the traditional beliefs about gods that accompany them.114

In an early study, Douglas raised two equally important questions concerning magic: why do some societies place more emphasis on witchcraft beliefs than others, and why have European scholars defined magic the way they have? After reviewing theories of magic from Tylor to Robertson Smith, Douglas wryly noted a curious parallelism, particularly clear in the work of Robertson Smith: namely, treatment of the “ethical” religion of the ancient Hebrews in contrast to the “magical” religion of their tribal neighbors paralleled Protestant views of the contrast between the ethical focus of the Reformed churches and the magical style of Catholicism so given to

“mumbo jumbo” and “meaningless ritual.” Douglas concluded that the study of comparative religion had unwittingly “inherited an ancient sectarian quarrel about the value of formal ritual” and that it was this sectarian quarrel that led scholars to define “magic” as a matter of primitive, manipulative rituals that expect to be automatically effective in contrast to the high ethical content and disinterested pure worship of “religion.”115 For Douglas, the solution was to treat both religion and magic as forms of symbolic action reflective of particular forms of social organization.

In a later discussion of the Bog Irish of London, Douglas contrasted these very traditional Catholics and their adherence to Friday abstinence from meat with Protestant religiosity, which has promoted the importance of good works and intentionality over such ritual practices that smack of totemic taboo. She argued that both types of religious ethos and their corresponding forms of ritual behavior, the magi- cal-sacramental on the one hand and the ethical-commemorative on the other, are determined by social organization. It is certainly not the case that one involves magic, while the other involves real religion. Both forms of ritual and religiosity must be analyzed in terms of the expressive function of ritual and the different social values and structures that are being expressed in each case.116 In this argument, Douglas dispensed with any intrinsic distinction between utilitarian and nonutilitarian forms of ritual behavior; both types of communities use ritual, but the styles of ritual differ

50 Theories: The History of Interpretation

in accordance with the different social organization and values of these communities. The Friday abstinence rituals of the Bog Irish are similar to the refusal to eat pork in traditional Jewish communities, and both practices can be explained in terms of social factors. For example, both communities are relatively closed groups intent upon maintaining their minority identity in the face of a powerful majority that has open rather than closed forms of organization and espouses universal values rather than particular customs. The so-called magical forms of symbolic action are simply the type of ritual practice found in such local and closed communities, while so-called religious forms of symbolic action are those types that derive from other social structures, particularly accompanying the emergence of translocal groupings. For Douglas, the basic principle of ritual action is the same in both cases: ritual is always a matter of symbolic actions that express sociological truths in cosmological terms.117

The nineteenthand twentieth-century debate over magic, religion, and science has successively defined ritual activity as nonrational, then as rational given its premises, and finally as a fundamentally symbolic form of communication, which means that it is irrational with respect to science but rational in terms of its internal coherence and purpose!118 This last definition subsumes magical ritual and religious ritual, treating both in terms of the symbolic, expressive, and even linguistic nature of human activity. With this perspective, therefore, the distinction between magic and religion collapses and was soon retired; as a result a focus on “ritual” in general emerged more clearly. Nonetheless, lingering concerns and distinctions mean that ritual activity is still apt to be contrasted with utilitarian, technical, or scientific behavior. Stanley J. Tambiah (b. 1929) has straddled these transitions, on the one hand invoking Frazer and Malinowski’s problematic formulations of magic and religion, while on the other hand beginning to apply a linguistic perspective on symbolic action that changes the nature of the original distinctions completely. In contrast, the work of Edmund Leach takes little cognizance of any significant differences among socalled magical rites and expressive political or technological actions—all are analyzed in terms of the logic of linguistics.

In an article entitled “The Magical Power of Words,” Tambiah challenged a particular notion of magic rooted in the theories of Frazer and Malinowski, namely, that “primitive” peoples believe that words can accomplish things because of a mistaken belief in the intrinsic identity of the word and the thing. For example, the ritual casting of spells to exorcise demons, dispel pestilence, and so on has been considered magical because scholars presumed that the practitioners of such arts expected the power of the words themselves to accomplish the deeds. Tambiah attacked this scholarly presumption in several ways. First, he noted that despite a Frazerian contrast between spells and prayers, both can be readily found within a single ritual, and he used Sri Lankan rituals as examples. Second, he attempted to “explode the classical theory” by showing that so-called magic is not based on a belief in the “real identity between word and thing” but is based instead on an “ingenious” use of “the expressive and metaphorical properties of language.”119

Tambiah used two terms from the linguistic studies of Roman Jacobson, whose influence was being widely felt in structural studies like those of Lévi-Strauss.120 “Metaphor” and “metonymy” denote uses of language that are considered central to its expressive properties. A metaphoric relationship meant that A is treated as if it

were B (a game of chess is compared to the game of life; pouring water is an analogy for rain), while a metonymic relationship treated A as if it were a part of B (a crown indicates royalty or the queen herself; the cross stands for Christ, and if it is a bit of the true cross, then it may be deemed to possess some degree of his holiness due to physical contact). These two principles echo Frazer’s two laws of magic: he saw the law of similarity in the way that linguists see metaphorical relations, while the law of physical contact functions as a metonymical connection. In exploring how the metaphors and metonymies of ritual language actually work, Tambiah found only a heightened form of what constitutes ordinary language, not anything qualitatively different. Ritual language is not mumbo jumbo, he concluded; it is intelligible, rational, and logical in the way it exploits the properties of language in general. Ritual language works, he argued, by addressing participants, not gods, “using a technique which attempts to restructure and integrate the minds and emotions of the actors.”121 For example, from Malinowski’s descriptions of Trobriand Island garden magic, a fertil- ity-enhancing spell recited before turning the soil uses a formulaic invocation of metaphors to analogize planting and harvesting with larger concepts governing pregnancy, canoeing, and other realms organized by Trobriand cultural categories. For Tambiah, such formulas integrate the technical, aesthetic, and evaluative dimensions of human behavior.

In later studies, Tambiah continued to discuss “magical acts,” by which he meant ritual modes of thought and action in contrast to scientific modes. While arguing that both science and ritual are based on analogical thought, he held that they differ in their objectives and criteria for validity. Ultimately, however, he also pointed to the notion of performance to explain how they differed: ritual acts are “performative” in nature and can be evaluated and understood only in terms of performative linguistic categories.122 By “performative,” Tambiah meant the particular way in which symbolic forms of expressions simultaneously make assumptions about the way things really are, create the sense of reality, and act upon the real world as it is culturally experienced. The performative dimension of ritual action has become a central idea in most current theories of ritual.

Leach also proposed a reinterpretation of magic in terms of its use of language. He took the example of a sorcerer who secures a piece of hair from the head of his intended victim; accompanied by spells and rites, the sorcerer destroys the hair and predicts that the victim will soon sustain injury. What is the logic underlying this activity, Leach asked. In answer, he argued that the so-called magical nature of the act is rooted in a logical fallacy, but it is a type of fallacy that we routinely use in our language due to the powerful symbolic effect that it can have. The sorcerer deliberately mistakes the relationship that obtains between a person and a piece of his or her hair: what is a disconnected and former piece of the person (a metonymical relation) is taken to be an analogous replica or stand-in (metaphorical relation) for the person. The actual relationship that results when a piece of hair is in the hands of the sorcerer is mistakenly understood as the same as having the head of the victim in the sorcerer’s hands. For Leach, the logic of what has been traditionally dubbed magic is simply the juxtaposition of one set of relations for another. In terms of linguistic theory, a metonymical relation is taken to be metaphorical relation. The same type of operations also take place, he reasons, in the simple act of feeling for the familiar