Ritual in Its Own Right: Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation 9780857458889

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Ritual in Its Own Right

Ritual in Its Own Right Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation

Edited by

Don Handelman and Galina Lindquist

h Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

First published in 2004 by Berghahn Books Social Analysis, Volume 48, Issue 2, Summer 2004 Paperback edition published in 2005 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2005 Berghahn Books All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A C.I.P. catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 1-84545-051-5 (pbk)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

Contents Preface

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Introduction: Why Ritual in Its Own Right? How So? Don Handelman

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Part I Theorizing Ritual: Against Representation, against Meaning Chapter 1 Ritual Dynamics and Virtual Practice: Beyond Representation and Meaning Bruce Kapferer

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Chapter 2 Otherwise Than Meaning: On the Generosity of Ritual Don Seeman

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Part II Experimenting with Ritual: Natives Here, Natives There Chapter 3 The Red and the Black: A Practical Experiment for Thinking about Ritual Michael Houseman

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Chapter 4 Partial Discontinuity: The Mark of Ritual André Iteanu

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Part III Ritual and Emergence: Historical, Phenomenal Chapter 5 Religious Weeping as Ritual in the Medieval West Piroska Nagy

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Chapter 6 Enjoying an Emerging Alternative World: Ritual in Its Own Ludic Right André Droogers

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Contents

Part IV Healing in Its Own Right: Spirit Worlds Chapter 7 Bringing the Soul Back to the Self: Soul Retrieval in Neo-shamanism Galina Lindquist

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Chapter 8 Treating the Sick with a Morality Play: The Kardecist-Spiritist Disobsession in Brazil Sidney M. Greenfield

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Part V Philosophically Speaking Chapter 9 The Tacit Logic of Ritual Embodiments: Rappaport and Polanyi between Thick and Thin Robert E. Innis

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Epilogue: Toing and Froing the Social Don Handelman

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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Preface

We have discussed ritual between us for a long time—Don often from his suspicions of the canonical understanding of ritual as representation, Galina through her studies of healing and therapeutic efficacy. Within the intellectual and ethnographic depths, so often murky with presumptions of authoritative comprehension, into which we dived in search of touchstones, made slippery by their overlong immersion in scholarship, we frequently felt that something crucial was missing from how ritual was and is formulated in scholarly discourse. Yet coming up to the surface—waves and wavelets, always in motion— we could plainly see the lack of attention given to the interior organization of ritual. No touchstones or structures, but a plenitude of dynamics. From this emerged the thought of ritual in its own right, in all its uncertainties and complexities. When Kingsley Garbett of Social Analysis suggested that we edit a volume on ritual, we recognized the opportunity to pursue these thoughts and invited colleagues to take up the challenge of ritual in its own right. Our warm thanks to the contributors, who responded with creativity, flexibility, and good humor. Though we have made no formal dedication of the volume, we do offer it back to them, as a token of our appreciation of their efforts to navigate in uncharted waters. Our thanks, no less, to Kingsley, to Marion Berghahn and Vivian Berghahn for their unstinting encouragement and support, to Shawn Kendrick, a gem of an editor with an eagle’s eye for grammar and the sensibilities of a muse, and to Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study, where, during a few days of discussion, we raised our heads from the depths and breathed. Berlin and Stockholm, September 2004

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INTRODUCTION Why Ritual in Its Own Right? How So? Don Handelman

CALVIN AND HOBBES ©1993 Watterson. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. All rights reserved.

Calvin, who introduces this collection of essays on ritual in its own right, understands ritual as well as many anthropologists. Calvin is dramatizing thematics that I am trying to avoid. Complaining about the peanut butter, spoiled because his mother did not observe the proper ritual for scooping it out, he is telling us: do the ritual correctly. It exists because it has a function—control. Perform control in your ritual, and you will have control in your life. The ritual of how to scoop out peanut butter is a representation of life. Living produces its own symbols, its own reflections, and these are the ritual, existing to Notes for this section begin on page 28.

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enact themes of living—here that of control. The ritual has meaning, otherwise why the argument between Calvin and his mother over its importance for living? For Calvin, scooping out peanut butter is akin to a Geertzian model of and model for living—you scoop peanut butter the way you live your life. One thing is certain: to understand the peanut butter ritual, one begins with life, not with a jar of peanut butter. First, though, let’s have a look at the peanut butter in the jar … Some three decades ago, Claude Lévi-Strauss called for the study of ritual “in itself and for itself … in order to determine its specific characteristics” (1981, 669). Lévi-Strauss’s concern was to distinguish ritual from myth, his overriding focus of study. He identified myth with mind and thinking, and ritual with living and the attempt to overcome any break or interruption in the continuity of lived experience, the discontinuous made continuous (674–675). Ritual, he wrote, “turns back towards reality” (680) in that “[i]t is not a direct response to the world, or even to experience of the world; it is a response to the way man thinks of the world” (681). Lévi-Strauss worried that ritual commonly is conflated with myth—in other words, that ritual too becomes a repository of beliefs and representations connected to cultural philosophies about the world. In a more Turnerian, Geertzian, or, for that matter, Leachian idiom, ritual is perceived and made into a storehouse of symbols and scripts originating in the world outside ritual, activated within ritual in prescribed ways on predicated occasions, in order to inform and to somaticize participants with appropriate meanings and feelings related directly to their cultural worlds outside ritual. In Geertz’s terms, borrowed from the philosopher, Max Black, ritual acts as a model of and model for cultural worlds, yet never ritual in itself and for itself, but always ritual as representation—the hegemonic modality for the study of rite in anthropology. A second, powerful modality, whose logic parallels the first, is ritual understood as functional of and functional for social order, a line of inquiry whose interior logic is no different from that of ritual as representation. A third modality, close to the first two in its logic, is ritual understood as yet another arena for the playing out of social, economic, and political competition and conflict. The way of thinking on ritual outlined in this introduction is not that of LéviStrauss, nor does it pursue his quest for universals, yet it originates from a not entirely dissimilar premise: if one wants to think about what ritual is in relation to itself, how it is put together and organized within itself, then first and foremost ritual should be studied in its own right and not be presumed immediately to be constituted through representations of the sociocultural surround that give it life. William of Occam’s Razor is apposite here. If one is interested in ritual as phenomenon—in itself, for itself—then be parsimonious, first exhausting what can be learned of ritual from ritual and only then turning to the connectivities between ritual and wider sociocultural orders. Attend first to what seems to exist within a particular ritual by, as Gregory Bateson (1977, 239) put it, declining to pay attention to other suppositions as to how the ritual is constituted. Nevertheless, as I indicate further on, this is not a hard and fast distinction but one predicated on degrees of momentary autonomy of ritual from social order.

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Here, the Razor carves parsimoniously in the direction opposite to that which is near-canonical in anthropology—there, ritual is a treasure house of culture and society, epiphenomenally shaped to reflect and to reflect on the latter. Though this may be so for particular rituals, it is a matter not of a priori theorizing but rather of the analysis of particular ritual forms (Gerholm 1988; Smith 1982). Put otherwise, what particular rituals are about, what they are organized to do, how they accomplish what they do, are all empirical questions whose prime locus of inquiry is initially within the rituals themselves. The Razor slices open vectors of studying ritual within itself and its doing, within its interior dynamics and practices, and not initially from within the wider sociocultural fields within which ritual is embedded. To begin the analysis of ritual as phenomenon in its own right, no assumptions need be made immediately about how sociocultural order and ritual are related, neither about the meaning of signs and symbols that appear within a ritual, nor about the functional relationships between a ritual and social order. It is the phenomenal of the ritual itself that is the problematic at issue—a question perhaps even more of the logos of the phenomenon than of the phenomenal. And, more broadly, this problematic may be phrased as that of the extent, if any, to which particular phenomena have degrees of autonomy from the worlds that create them; whether such qualities of autonomy are significant; and, if so, what such significance might be about. The sole way in which to address this problematic is to make ritual phenomena themselves the locus and focus of inquiry. None of the above claims that ritual phenomena exist independently of cultural and social orders. But the issue is how phenomena do exist as such in the social world. Phenomena are thus only if perceived to exist. Phenomena exist because they are perceived to be imbued with the real. This immediately implies that phenomena have degrees of autonomous existence—in other words, though always to varying degrees and through various qualities, they do exist in and of themselves. Nonetheless, these degrees and qualities of autonomy are profound, for they seem to relate to what may be called the interior complexity of how phenomena are organized. In turn, the interior complexities of phenomena likely are related to what persons can do within them, and how they act on persons. This discussion continues earlier arguments intended to forgo claims to the value of any universal, overarching definition or conception of ritual (Handelman 1998, n.d.a).1 No theory based on representation or functionalism can open to the tremendous diversity of phenomena that are called ‘ritual,’ and to their kinds and degrees of interior complexity. Yet my argument does not support a simple cultural relativism of ritual phenomena, aiming instead for a more comparativist perspective towards the integrity of ritual phenomena as phenomenal. Nevertheless, this orientation also shifts from a logos of the phenomenal towards one of the phenomenon. In general terms, I suggest thinking about ritual in its own right through two steps.2 The first is to separate (to an extent, arbitrarily) the phenomenon from

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its sociocultural surround, from its ‘environment,’ in order to analyze it in and of itself. This analysis is not an end in itself, but is intended to be taken heuristically as far as one can. The second step is to reinsert the ritual into its surround, with the added knowledge of what has been learned about the ritual, taken in and of itself. The first step is more phenomenological, the phenomenon existing in its own right, together with the attempt (necessarily impossible) to exhaust the significance of its forming. The second step is more hermeneutical, including meaning that extends towards the phenomenon from its surround. These steps illuminate whether—and if so, how—the ritual can be said to have its own interior integrity, and therefore whether it exists more as a representation of sociocultural order or more through its own autonomy from such order. In turn, this may clarify how the ritual as phenomenon relates to sociocultural order, without necessarily slipping into an inherently functionalist understanding.3 This perspective was put to the contributors of this volume in the following way: “We propose the following thought experiment, in order to try to learn whether ritual forms may have constituting (and self-constituting) features—structural, processual, transformational—that may inform us as to how these rituals are organized in their own right. The thought experiment asks that each of us think about a particular ritual form or forms apart from their cultural and social contexts, in order to gauge whether there are constitutive features of ritual (of its organization, its practice, its cosmo-logic) that can be identified, without comprehending these features immediately as representations of broader cultural and social orders. We call this a thought experiment because it does requires the suspension of disbelief—the anthropological disbelief that aspects of ritual may be understood with value, apart from their cultural and contextual positionings. The results of our work probably will be disparate. Yet, these results will aid in trying (once more) to evaluate whether ritual must be understood as representation, or whether (even for the sake of argument) by suppressing representation we can glean insights into the domain of ritual in its own right.” We did not insist that the contributors accept this perspective. On the contrary, we preferred to let each scholar find his or her own way in accepting, rejecting, or modifying the problematic of ritual in its own right. Phrasing the problematic as ‘ritual in its own right’ keyed the contributors into deciding whether to foreground or to background ritual in their discussions. Though this makes for a diverse set of essays, it does engage a more honest grappling with the problematic, one that we respect fully. The results are creative, eclectic, fruitful, and sophisticated, raising a range and depth of issues deserving consideration and discussion. Before going on to explore one avenue of thought regarding ritual in its own right—how ritual may be thought of as self-organizing, and so with degrees of autonomy from its sociocultural surround—I introduce briefly the contributions to this volume.

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The Studies The two essays in the opening section, “Theorizing Ritual,” incisively critique twin canons of ritual studies in anthropology—that ritual is constituted as representations of the broader order of things, and so that ritual must engage with meaning in its doing, often with its own meanings for that very order. Bruce Kapferer’s contribution shifts analytical focus from representation to process. Kapferer notes that representation is closely allied with function, and both, I add, are lacking in agency. Since ritual hardly exists apart from its practice, this lack of agency is especially ironic. Moreover, Kapferer comments that anthropological studies of ritual are largely formulated through conceptual perspectives that themselves are not grounded in the close study of ritual—precluding the possibility of learning from ritual in its own right. Through discussions of Victor Turner, perhaps the pioneer of processual analysis through ritual, and Suzanne Langer, Kapferer argues that the interior dynamics of ritual are oriented towards creating, generating, and producing effects. Some rituals gain their potency by being independent to a degree of larger realities and are therefore independent of representation. This insight leads Kapferer to conceive of ritual as a virtuality (in Gilles Deleuze’s terms), with the interior dynamics of ritual actively transforming existentialities through the potentiation of its potentialities. The very nonreferentiality of virtuality to the world outside itself enables entering into life’s vital processes within ritual, in order to adjust their relationships to the larger world. Don Seeman’s essay takes issue with the position common to Max Weber and Clifford Geertz that ritual is the response—indeed, the meaningful answer— to theodicy. As such, theodicy exhausts the significance of ritual, making its existence dependent (functionally) on infusing suffering with meaning. Ritual represents suffering in meaningful ways, thereby making it explainable, bearable, justifiable. Ritual in its own right immediately questions the taken-forgranted coupling of ritual and theodicy. Seeman argues that suffering exceeds culture, exceeds meaning. In the Weberian interpretive paradigm of verstehen, meaning is the rational response to indeterminacy and uncertainty, shaping these within parameters of the manageable—socially, personally. Theodicy thereby justifies itself through ritual, as then does culture, since ritual is formulated as the representation of culture. In terms of ritual in its own right, Seeman, marking the uselessness of suffering, rejects the Weberian paradigm of the ever-presence of meaning. The suffering of pain, he writes, invokes alterity, making space for the other denied by the self-consciousness of attributing meaning through representation. The person experiencing pain becomes an irreducible other to himself within himself, one hardly given to representation, and so impossible to ignore. In these terms, Seeman addresses changes in the emotional cosmology of R. Kalonymos Shapira in the Warsaw Ghetto of World War II. Experiencing radical, unbearable suffering, Shapira breaks with theodicy. Through this excess of pain he comes to suffer for the other, for God, thereby rescuing agency from the ruins of meaning.

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Man comforts God through ritual. Seeman draws Shapira into Emmanuel Levinas’s exegesis on the refusal of meaning embedded in the ethical turning to the other, distant indeed from the self-absorption of interpretive anthropology. Only the refusal of meaning enables man to succor God, an ethical act itself beyond meaning, fraught with the dynamics of cosmogenesis. The second section, “Experimenting with Ritual,” addresses experimentation through ritual. Since all rituals are constructed, at one time or another they were all experimental forms in human design—virtualizing, modeling, refracting, representing. Ritual in its own right encourages thinking more directly on the relationship between design and outcome. Michael Houseman (together with Carlo Severi) has developed a ‘relational’ approach to understanding ritual. The practice of ritual enacts relationships. No less, ritual reorganizes disparate elements into interdependence within the new totality of a ritual performance. Thus, ritual makes relationships. To experiment with the making of the relational, Houseman invented an initiation rite and practiced it together with students in his seminar. He was concerned to design a ritual that generates difference (in this case, gender differences grounded in new knowledge through initiation), while making these differences deeper and more concealed than they appear on the social surface, thereby ensuring their naturalization, to be taken as unalterable. Houseman understands the making and naturalizing of difference as the primary goals of initiation rites. Houseman begins with what I refer to as the first step—inventing the ritual separated from its context. The rite (The Red and the Black) did not grow from context, representing social order, but was used by Houseman to operate on social order—in fact, to recontextualize this. Houseman shows how the outcomes of the ritual honed gender differences beyond the rite itself. In effect, this was the second step—reinserting the rite into social order. Houseman demonstrates just how crucial phenomenal form and its dynamics are in embodying and shaping difference. Even with made-up, utterly meaningless ‘cultural contents’ that deliberately represented nothing, the rite itself had powerful effects. If one begins with the cultural contents of ritual, the event immediately is made to represent these contents, and the possibility of learning from ritual recedes from view. André Iteanu rejects the claims of ritual in its own right. Nonetheless, I think he identifies the premises of ritual among the Orokaiva peoples of Papua New Guinea primarily because he asks whether among them ritual exists in its own right. He finds that in the Dumontian sense, ritual is encompassed by exchange. However, Iteanu critiques Marcel Mauss and Marshall Sahlins for obviating ritual in their analyses of South Pacific social orders— they conceptualize these social orders as constituted through continuous, horizontal relationships of exchange as a Maussian “total social fact.” Iteanu argues instead that this Maussian continuousness between exchange and ritual passes through a “partial discontinuity,” one that transforms horizontal equivalency in relationships among persons into vertical relationships between

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spirits and humans. Thus, the level of spirits is enabled to transmit value to the level of humans. Yet the movement of value is efficacious only if the ritual closes with gifts from the giver of the rite to the participants. These generate ongoing exchange through time in the broader social world beyond the ritual. Iteanu brings ritual back into the debate on South Pacific exchange while qualifying its cosmic role. Through the discussion of ritual and exchange, Iteanu’s contribution raises the problematic of experimenting with ritual. But this time it is Orokaiva who are theorizing their experimentation with new ritual forms in changing social conditions, asking whether these forms are efficacious, and if not, why not. The way these Orokaiva speak of attempts at ritual design has much in common with Houseman’s discussion of the way he designed his initiation rite. The following section, “Ritual and Emergence,” relates to changing ritual, on a macroscale, through time, and on a microscale, within and through itself. The latter in particular receives no attention in anthropology and cognate disciplines. The physicist Murray Gell-Mann (in Horgan 1998) once summarized emergence as “We don’t need something else in order to get something else.” Especially on the social scale of the micro, this immediately concentrates attention on development that emerges from within and through its own interior dynamics. At issue is how ritual changes—being altered and altering itself. In the analysis of ritual as representation—symbolic of, symbolic for—self-altering does not and cannot exist. Change in ritual must be imported. Change will not come into existence through the very practice that makes it present. This position vitiates the whole idea of ritual in its own right, obviating the phenomenality of the phenomenon. Keying into historical materials through the notion of ritual in its own right, the medievalist Piroska Nagy begins to uncover and shape what she calls “intimate ritual,” ritual existing entirely within the individual, opening into inner space/time, perhaps with its own socialities (Handelman 2002). The idea of intimate ritual likely is anathema to scholars of ritual as representation, who would relegate this kind of thinking to the study of psychopathologies. The intimate ritual discussed by Nagy is the European High Middle Ages phenomenon of religious weeping. Discussions of rituals as historically grounded phenomena are commonplace today. Yet despite the diversity of explanations for the coming into being of rituals, to a high degree these explanations share the following. Historians (and anthropologists) treat pasts as cultures and social structures within which rituals take shape, their forms explained in relation to these grounds. The cultures of the past are foregrounded, their rituals backgrounded (indeed, regardless of duration [see Asad 1993] or scale [for example, Darnton 1985]). In explicating the emergence of religious weeping as intimate ritual, Nagy discusses the cosmological and historical grounds of this development. Culturally, the invisible world was more real than the visible, the latter being a pale reflection of the former. Historically, during that duration the Western church unified and grew, became institutionalized, and systematized theology. Cosmologically,

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intimate ritual was one of the possibilities of the virtual, in Kapferer’s terms. Historically and socially, intimate ritual could emerge as a form of resistance to the growing social control of the church. The intimate ritual of weeping was an individual process that was separated from social order and not socially formalized. Its efficacy of washing away sins, a divine operation on the soul, was hidden. Nagy takes pains to point out that this self-relating to the inner landscape of the human being (Gurevich 1995, 7) was not the discovery of the individual as an independent unit of social existence. Nonetheless, the emergence of this self-interiority led elsewhere. Weeping indexed God’s presence within the individual, through which the person remade herself interiorly, presenting the results to others. Communing with God, these persons circumvented church and community. Purifying the soul, Nagy argues, was a process without surcease, a profound interior transformation that continued throughout the life-course of the individual, a transformation that perhaps also overcame suffering beyond meaning, of which Seeman writes. Perhaps Nagy’s taking seriously the premise of ritual in its own right has resulted in this reconceptualization of weeping as a religious phenomenon. André Droogers documents emergence within rituals of initiation among the Wagenia peoples of the Congo. In the Wagenia instance, ritual in its own right highlights the emergence of play and the playful (Sutton-Smith 1997) as a form of alternative reality within ritual. Droogers argues that this reality begins to “lead its own life,” and that in being practiced, ritual generates its own emergent phenomena. Through ritual in its own right, its capacities to generate alterations within itself come to the fore. In the Wagenia case, the emergence of ludic behavior in the practice of rite had the effect of positive feedback, the generating of further spontaneous changes. These alterations were synergistic, of ritual evolving during its very practice (Handelman 1999). As ritual evolved through itself, both its interior organization and its relationships to its surround became more complex. To discuss this processuality, Droogers turns to theories of cognition, to connectionism, and to the simultaneities of the parallel processing of cognitive alternatives. The penultimate section, “Healing in Its Own Right,” offers two case studies of healing through contacts with other realities, other worlds. Following on Droogers’s use of theories of cognition, the contrast between these two case studies is instructive. In the first, by Galina Lindquist, active participation by the patient is essential to the dynamics of healing. In the second, by Sidney Greenfield, the dynamics of healing almost eliminate the active participation of the patient. Their materials push each scholar in radically different directions in searching for solutions to ritual in its own right. Lindquist enters the neo-shamanic theory of soul loss and soul retrieval in.order to understand its practice in treatment. Using Vyner’s terminology, Lindquist sees these treatments as “rituals of the mind” that unfold primarily within practitioners, a viewpoint that resonates to a degree with Nagy’s concept of intimate ritual, though in the latter instance the ritual was embodied almost entirely within the practitioner. Soul retrieval arises from a cosmology in which

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the self of the individual splits during severe trauma. The self—now incomplete, damaged, and lacking an integral part of itself—continues into its future, while the split-off part takes refuge elsewhere, timelessly remaining at the age at which it tore away. During the ritual of retrieval, the shaman searches for the lost part, trying to persuade it to rejoin the self of the patient. The shaman tells the patient of his journey in search of the lost part, shaping a new topology, a virtuality, for the patient to enter with newly acquired memories of her trauma and plight. Within this topology, which Lindquist refers to, referencing Csordas, as that of “imaginal performance” (again resonating to a degree with Kapferer’s use of virtuality), the patient journeys to her lost soul part to ask for forgiveness and to accept the conditions that the lost part sets for its return. The narrative, composed together by healer and patient, is crucial to contextualizing the entirety of the latter’s dis-ease and healing: without the shared interpretation of symbol and narrative, the rite of soul retrieval cannot exist. Yet it is questionable whether this is a ritual of representation in any straightforward sense. At issue is indeed the transformation of the patient through the rite in its own right. Lindquist writes that the journeys and narratives nest within one another. Especially striking to me is the way that this ritual is practiced into presence by curves—the journeys, the narratives—curving into themselves, self-closing and enclosing, organizing the temporary existence of the rite. Curvature and its relationship to self-organizing properties of ritual are discussed shortly. In contrast to Lindquist, Sidney Greenfield addresses a cosmos and healing ritual in Brazil in which the social and cognitive involvement of the patient appears minimal. The character of the Kardecist-Spiritist rite of disobsession leads Greenfield directly to issues of ritual in its own rite. In the ritual of disobsession there is an absence of articulation with any overtly shared cultural premises between healers and patients. The Kardecist cosmos is explained to the patient, albeit minimally, yet the etiology, diagnosis, and treatment are explained to her only after the work of contacting spirits and negotiating with them is done. Geenfield’s bold solution to these puzzles is to turn to the biosocial in order to hypothesize how this ritual might affect patients. In his armature are psychosocial genomics in relation to altered states of consciousness (ASC) and the Basic Rest-Activity Cycle (BRAC) of 90–120 minutes duration. The cycle contains the rhythm of dreaming, which continues no less throughout the waking hours of the individual. During the dreaming segment of this cycle, persons are more open to outside influences, to suggestion and light trance states that are used by Kardecist healing, and that, argues Greenfield, may activate bodily systems at the cellular level. Greenfield uses universal properties of human biology and physiology that he argues are embedded in the organization of Kardecist ritual in order to suggest how this rite acts on the patient. Not finding any help in interpretive paradigms of meaning, he moves outside ritual into the interior of human being in order to explain the interior of the Kardecist phenomenon. The last section of the volume invites a distinguished philosopher-semiotician, Robert Innis, to reflect on issues of ritual in its own right. Innis critiques

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the late Roy Rappaport’s major work, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, through a perspective deriving from Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowing. At issue is the crucial question of how ritual is actually assimilated and embodied in practices, of how to join the interior organization of ritual (and its shaping of meaning) to its embodiment within ritual participants—the ‘indwelling’ of ritual in Polanyi’s sense. Innis argues that ritual has the structure of a work of art, of a symbolic artifact (see also Innis 2001). We give ourselves to the organization of symbols as the focus of the felt unity of the self. Thus, existentially, we are embodied within the organization of symbols that becomes self-giving (a perspective that resonates powerfully with Galina Lindquist’s study of soul retrieval). This enables Innis to open towards the idea of socially ‘thin’ or individual ritual that is no less relevant to the cachet of ritual phenomena than the socially ‘thick’ varieties with which anthropologists usually deal. Therefore, anthropological ideas of ritual, argues Innis, should include ideas of self-meaning, of self-giving integration (remarkably paralleling Nagy’s discussion of religious weeping in this volume in relation to the presence of God within the person, and likely relating to Levinas’s ethics of alterity, examined by Seeman). In further discussing the studies in this collection, the epilogue addresses the question of just how social ritual should be in order to be thought of as ritual, then moves beyond this into issues of the phantasmagoric and the imaginary.

Towards Ritual as Self-organization It is self-evident that the phenomenal world is constituted by phenomena that are culturally perceived, if not socially constructed. It is less a truism to say that social phenomena are made to have, or to acquire, different kinds and degrees of complexity within themselves and in relation to their surrounds or environments. Emphasizing the existential ‘withinness’ of phenomena points to their irreducibility to the intentions and desires of their makers or shapers. It is essential to underscore here that though phenomena are of course breakable, they are never reducible without doing violence to their self-constitution. Fragmenting phenomena leave traces of their self-constitution, but their reduction erases even these. Social phenomena exist as phenomena, and so they exist in their own right, however fragile and transient this existence may be. Social phenomena, then, have self-integrity, with its intimations of integration. But selfintegrity, the interior capacity of phenomena to sustain themselves, varies in kind and degree. What we are calling ‘ritual,’ however loosely, is treated here as a class of phenomena whose forms, in greatly differing kind and degree, are characterized by interior complexity, self-integrity, and irreducibility to agent and environment. Thinking of ritual in this way is attempting to recover aspects of its phenomenality, yet doing so in the domain of the micro, the domain in which ritual phenomena are practiced. This is important because the ideas I am using here

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parallel to some extent macrodomain discourses—called, variously, autopoiesis, synergetics (Haken 1993; Knyazeva 2003), complexity theory (Turner 1997), self-organization, and so forth—coming from the physical and biological sciences but resonating or made to resonate, if somewhat crudely, with ‘social systems.’ The distinction here between ritual as a microdomain of organization and the macrodomains of social systems is crucial, because the claims I make for the organization of microlevel phenomena differ markedly from the requirements needed to think about macrodomain systemics.4 Perhaps the most elementary premise informing all approaches to self-organization is that this is possible only when whatever is being organized is self-referential or self-reflexive (Baecker 2001)—in other words, when whatever is organizing begins to put itself into its own organizing, so that whatever is organized until then influences whatever continues to be organized. Autopoiesis, for example (the term, coined by the biologist Humberto Maturana, literally means ‘self-making’), refers to dynamics through which “realities” come into existence “only through interactive processes determined solely by the organism’s own organization” (Hayles 1999, 138). In my terms, the phenomenon organizes (in varying degrees) the phenomenon. If autopoietic relationships become fully systemic, the system self-reproduces: “[I]t produces the components that produce it” (Bailey 1997, 86). In terms of ritual, one may argue—again, always in degrees—that a ritual produces the persons that will produce the ritual as that ritual that produces them (see Hayles 1999, 139). Thus, social autopoiesis or self-organization generates degrees of autonomy of the social phenomenon from its social surround (Mingers 2002, 294). As such, the integrity of the phenomenon—the practices that hold it together—derives in degrees from within itself and less from its social surround. In relation to social phenomena, I emphasize the subjunctive character of this condition. Nonetheless, some social phenomena, some rituals, likely approach this tightly knit condition of becoming. In this volume, perhaps the tightest fit between self-production and the transformed self is in Nagy’s conception of intimate ritual with regard to medieval religious weepers, but also in Shapira’s self-other transformations. Kapferer’s (1997) analysis of the Sinhalese Suniyama exorcism as a virtuality is an instance of a high degree of self-integrity and self-organization in ritual. Self-reference entails making distinctions (Kauffman 1987, 53), in the simplest yet crucial instance for our discussion, a distinction that the self-referential phenomenon makes between itself, in the very practice of self-referencing, and what I am calling its environment or social surround. Houseman designed his ritual, The Red and the Black, so that it had to practice making gender distinctions, while these distinctions then had to be incorporated within the ritual as it proceeded to make gender distinctions. This is in keeping with Niklas Luhmann’s (1997) argument that self-referential distinctions, such as those the phenomenon makes between itself and its social surround, are reintroduced within the phenomenon itself, as integral to its self-organizing properties (see also King and Thornhill 2003).5 Then the social phenomenon may be said to ‘look’ inward in order to ‘look’ outward, and to re-enter its surround from

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within itself. In another terminology, the social phenomenon includes the other or otherness within itself—both differentiating itself from and relating to this. Again this is a matter of degree, shifting between the possibilities of the other as representation and the other as the emerging grounds for the transformation of being within ritual. This is what enables some rituals (which I will call more complex in their organization) to act on their social surround: in the very practice of separating itself from its social surround, the ritual contains the surround, thereby acting on the surround through what is done within the ritual. This may be what enables man to feel ritual compassion for God in Seeman’s discussion of Shapira, and no less enabled Nagy’s medieval weeper to be transformed by God’s compassion. Kapferer’s conception of virtuality, for example, through the creation of cosmos from within itself, speaks directly to these issues (Kapferer 1997). I suggest, then, that within ritual forms, autopoietic qualities of self-organization and qualities of complexity go hand in hand. Perhaps the greater the degree of interior complexity within a ritual, the greater will be its tendency to self-organization. And so, the greater the tendency to self-organization, the greater the capacity of the ritual for temporary autonomy from its sociocultural surround. Then, one step further, the greater this relative autonomy, the greater the capacity of the ritual to interiorize the distinction between itself and its surround and so to act on the latter from within itself, through the dynamics of the ritual design. Of the rituals discussed in this volume, all, perhaps with the partial exception of the Orokaiva instance, are or were intended through the practice of their forms to change one or more of their participants. Topology (in a loose, nonmathematical sense) is relevant here because of its concern with form as self-connectivity (McNeil 2004). The topological movement from lesser to greater self-organization can be likened to that from a straight line to that of a curve, though in social terms it may be more advantageous to speak entirely of degrees of curvature. The less the tendency of a ritual to self-organization, the more its interior operation is akin to a straight line, a ‘line,’ moreover, that continues from and is continuous with its sociocultural surround, its existence dependent on representing the latter. Such ritual derives directly from its surround, hence its linear relationship to the latter and, too, the lesser complexity of its interior organization.6 Here map is close to, almost isomorphic with, territory. By contrast, the more the tendency of a ritual to selforganization, the more its interior organization is akin to a curve, one that arcs away from the immediate embrace of its sociocultural surround and moves towards self-enclosure and increasing self-integrity. The self-referential existence of cultural forms, their degree of self-organization and self-integrity, is intimately related to issues of recursion. Bateson gives a simple physical example of recursion: a smoke ring, a torus, turning in upon itself, giving itself a separable existence. “It is, after all,” writes Bateson (1977, 246), “made up of nothing but air marked with a little smoke. It is of the same substance with its ‘environment.’ But it has duration and location and a certain degree of separation by virtue of its own in-turned motion.” This torus is an in-curving

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form containing the beginning of elementary self-reference, the hallmark of integrity, and so of self-organization, itself existing through recursion (on the movements of the mathematical conception of torus, see McNeil 2004, 19–25). The social torus is constituted through a double movement: curving inwards, torquing outwards, through form recognizing itself within itself, and on the basis of this self-integrity moving outwards, driving into broader cosmic and social worlds.7 This double movement, inwards and outwards, is crucial to the existence of any social form containing within itself the potential for self-organization, the propensity for the forming of difference within itself and for exfoliating this, twisting it back into the broader sociocultural surround.8 The double movement—simultaneously curving towards closure and twisting towards openness—baldly describes ritual in its own right, separable yet inseparable from its surround. As separable, ritual can be examined as such. As inseparable, ritual twists back into relations with the broader worlds within which it is embedded and from which it takes form.9 Through their self-curvature, social forms, enclosing themselves within themselves as vectors of action, give themselves intentionality, organization, depth, and direction—in other words, shape.10 Recursivity in a sense gives itself a push, a “phusis” (Castoriades 1997, 331), towards completing what has been set in movement—these are the pulling qualities of propensity embedded in self-organization. No social form has the autonomous existence of absolute difference, yet without minimal self-propelling difference, no social form exists as it does, for whatever duration, under whatever conditions. This propensity to self-organization is present in the most mundane of everyday behavior and interaction. Studying face-to-face interaction, I was struck by how, whenever two or more persons began to interact, the double movement of curving towards closure and twisting towards openness came into existence, taking phenomenal shape. I coined the adage that in social interaction between two persons, one plus one never equaled two. Persons interacting were never the sum of their parts, since their interacting was mediated by the emergence of ephemeral, organizing forms whose duration was that of the interaction itself and whose emergent structures influenced the character of interaction as it emerged. Reshaping Erving Goffman’s (1961) concept, I called these transient, yet continually present, emergent forms “encounters” (Handelman 1973, 1977).11 Important again is the double movement—of an everyday encounter emerging into phenomenal form, curving towards self-closure, to some degree of self-organization, however momentary, however transient, separating itself temporarily from the social field, existing in its own right, then ending, twisting back, torquing into broader social fields, dissipating, its character influencing encounters to come. Interpersonal encounters have self-organizing propensities. In mundane life these properties are often emergent phenomena of interaction as it is occurring. Though these properties differ vastly in their degrees of complexity, they curve recursively as they emerge, shaping the ongoing interaction. Self-organizing phenomenal forms have variable capacities to generate new aspects of themselves, during their operating. Even in highly rule-governed

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contexts, social interaction contains the potential to generate creativity, which may (or may not) become part of the curve towards phenomenal self-closure.12 Social form is always in movement within itself. Luhmann (1999, 19) writes that “form is the simultaneity of sequentiality,” the compression of its dynamics. Form exists through its dynamics of self-forming and dissipation. Forming form—phenomenal form emerging through practice—does not necessitate any principled distinction between mundane living and ritual (Handelman 1979). Both domains exist through the forming through practice of temporary, interactive social units—of whatever duration, space, and significance—that rejoin the sociocultural fields from which they emerge. The signal difference between mundane encounters and ritual may be more in how they self-organize and less in any meta-definition of sameness and difference from which all else follows—a position that still dominates attempts in anthropology to define ritual. The phrasing of this introduction addresses ritual as a curving towards selfclosure and self-organization, and as whatever depth and innerness this enclosing opens. Witness the insistence of so many rituals that they go elsewhere, elsewhen, within and through themselves. The movement from the line to the curve is that of conditions of self-organization. Curving, the line becomes selfreferential, opening space, acquiring depth. In relating to itself, the curve organizes itself in terms of itself, thereby enabling its existential and phenomenal self-organization as different from whatever exists outside the curve, while including this distinction within its self-referentiality. As Bateson (1977, 242) implies, phenomenal forms “survive through time only if they are recursive. They ‘survive’—i.e., literally live upon themselves—and some survive longer than others.” In these terms, sociocultural phenomena differ in the resources they have to live on, within themselves. When self-organization becomes highly complex, a ritual has more to live on, or rather, to live through, and we may speak, rightly so, of a separate world of causation and action, one in which, perhaps, all tenses exist simultaneously within self-same space.13 These thoughts on phenomena as inwardly curving self-enclosures resonate with Deleuze’s interpretation of Leibniz’s ‘fold.’ The fold may be conceptualized as the forming of a pocket of social action, as a folding in of movements of living, articulating persons within these curving self-enclosures in certain ways, not in others. As it curves, the fold or pocket opens the depths of space/time where/when no opening had existed a moment before. The opening itself is a curving of space/time, since the movement of living is neither stopped nor blocked, but shifted into itself, enfolded, reorganized, and thereby made different, minimally, partially, utterly, from the movements of whose courses the opening is but a moment. The fold or pocket inflects and involutes (Deleuze 1993, 14–26), entailing variable and varying degrees of self-organization, the autopoietic propensity that follows from the self-closing that is the curve. Yet the pocket is partial because the fold twists back, torquing into the movements of living, refolding again in similar and dissimilar ways. The fold curves recursively because its forming is anti-Cartesian, turning over and

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upending the monothetic, and so resonating with many of the traditional and tribal rituals for which we have substantive ethnographic evidence—but no less with medieval religious weeping as intimate ritual, with neo-shamanic soul retrieval, with the experimental (The Red and the Black), with Orokaiva ritual discontinuity, and perhaps, too, with human being embracing some part of God in her compassionate embrace. This is no small matter, since numerous indigenous claims and exegeses insist that ritual does something—often transformative, temporarily, permanently—to cosmos, to participants. The doing of transformation through ritual requires curvature, the opening of space/time within which cause and effect can be joined self-referentially, such that each embeds knowledge of its relation to the other, thereby together influencing one another recursively in predictive, controlled ways. Cause and effect find one another through self-referentiality. To do controlled transformation, a ritual form must ‘know’ it is doing this, in order to recognize change as both property and product of its operation. Curvature creates the existential knowledge of what it is that is curving, as distinct from whatever realities the curve emerges from and returns into. Moreover, curvature creates the existential knowledge of how what it is that is curving is changing as it is curving, so that, for example, more interiorly complex ritual is continuously becoming other to its-self as it is practiced, since it necessarily is changing in relation to its-self. Folding, curvature, recursivity, self-referentiality, all are elemental to the idea that some forms of ritual must be separated from the sociocultural orders that create them, and thereby that these forms temporarily are made autonomous of these surrounds. This was an implicit insight of Van Gennep and Victor Turner on rites de passage as the organization of social and self-transformation. Liminality is a space/time of curvature, of renewal, rebirth, resurgence, reshaping, remaking, and so forth. But liminality also is the folding of space/time into itself, such that whatever enters, wherever, is made to relate to itself differently, coming out elsewhere, otherwise. Nonetheless, as noted, we should never forget that the relationship of lineality ~ curvature always is relative, and so that degrees of curvature, degrees of lineality, are ratios of self-knowledge and self-organization of and within ritual forms. Claims coming from anthropology often weigh in from extremes: arguing on the one hand that if ritual does something, then either this is done through representations within ritual of the broader sociocultural order, enabling ritual to reflect or radiate how values, ideals, and relationships should be shaped and resolved, symbolically, functionally; or, on the other, that ritual is organized to act directly, causally, on sociocultural order. Both positions are valid, since each is related to the kinds and degrees of self-closure of a given ritual. From this perspective, ritual becomes the self-organizing of kinds and degrees of closure and their consequences. Therefore, variation in parameters of selforganizing should be sought and explored within any given ritual. These parameters also become one guideline for a comparative study of ritual that focuses on ritual form and its doings.

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The above points to the error of thinking that a singular conceptualization or definition of ritual can encompass, let alone index, all ‘ritual’ phenomena. Though all social phenomena are interactive and so have some degree of curving self-closure, varying from the nearly flat to the near autopoietic, their variations in self-organization relate, as Bateson commented, to the degrees of self-sustainability of sociocultural forms in their surrounds. I relate these variations in self-organization to the capacity of rituals to make difference or change occur through their own operations. Put simply, the more a ritual curves into the foldedness of self-closure, the greater its self-organizing and self-sustaining capacity, and because of this, the greater its capacity to effect difference or change through its operations—thus, the more distinctive its torquing back into social order. This discussion continues the spirit of the thought experiment suggested to this volume’s contributors, of an experimental moment, one asking what, if anything, can be discovered about the operation of ritual in relation to itself, rather than worrying immediately about the truth-value of this exercise. The truth-value of this moment is never complete without the second part of the movement, ritual’s twisting back, torquing into sociocultural order. Nonetheless, scholars who insist that canons of scientific validity and its truth-claims are always at the forefront of brainstorming are unlikely to respond with any enthusiasm to this exercise. Ritual in its own right is not an end in itself but rather a perspective, a way of inquiring into ritual forms, into how rituals are put together, into whether, how, and to what degree such in-turning compositions have self-integrity. Rather than, “anything goes,” as Feyerabend (1978, 28) put it, one can say that what goes around, if it comes around, does so with difference. What comes around, then, is more toroidal than spheroidal. Beginning with ritual in its own right turns the canonical study of ritual on its head, since it obviates representation—the entire gambit of models of, models for, including the reign of the symbolic as symbolic of, and the functional as functional for—as an inherent (and oft-thought sufficient) condition for the existence of ritual phenomena (see, for example, Bloch 1992; Geertz 1980). This obviation of the necessity of representation includes the idea that ritual should be cultural self-narration (Geertz 1973) or that it must be a working out of social relations (Gluckman 1962). Instead, I am arguing that a radical way through which to learn of the relationship of ritual to social order is to examine first and foremost what, if anything, can be gleaned about a given ritual in relation to itself. The initial intention is to explain ritual more as phenomenon, as form, and less so as social order. Therefore, my premise is one of the a-representativity of ritual phenomena, a position neither pro- nor anti-representation. The degree to which the interior organization (and therefore dynamics) of particular ritual forms are dependent on their representations of sociocultural order becomes an issue for study. From the perspective of particular ritual forms, it is social order that may be perceived as radically other rather than as continuous with these rites (de Coppet 1990). Or from Kapferer’s perspective, the virtual has the potential to generate all possibilities that a ritual is capable

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of actualizing in particular conditions of practice, including its generation of the sociocultural surround.14 So, too, the way opens to considering whether a particular ritual form has self-organizing qualities. If a particular ritual form has minimal self-organizing properties, in such instances the definitiveness of the distinction between ritual and not-ritual may turn out to be irrelevant (de Coppet 1992, 2–3), or at least much less definitive, a contention borne out from within ritual by Iteanu’s contribution.

Thinking on Ritual in Its Own Right To amplify this introduction, I discuss three ethnographic instances, adding practice to my argument for the theoretical value of learning about ritual through ritual. Each instance is discussed in terms of the two dynamics raised earlier: the degree of self-closure in the rite, and its twisting back and torquing into social order. In my reading, the first instance discussed has hardly any selfclosure or tendency towards self-organization, and so has little or no twisting back; the second has self-closure coming into existence, but it is not sustainable, and one cannot quite speak of its twisting back; the third has complex curvature, the highest degree of self-closure and tendency towards self-organization, and undoubtedly twists back, powerfully torquing into social order. These two dynamics correspond to the two methodological steps outlined previously: first, separating the ethnography of the ritual from its social surround in order to discuss it in its own right, and, second, re-embedding the ritual in social order.

Minimal Self-closure: Maria Antonia Crosses the Rhine The first instance, from eighteenth-century Europe, is that of Maria Antonia, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, on her way to France to wed the Dauphin, the future king, Louis XVI. Stopping at the Rhine, she was turned from an Austrian princess into a French one. This exchange of one identity for another had been preceded by intensive pedagogy at the Austrian court: instruction to perfect her French; lessons in deportment and appearance, suitable to Versailles; changes in hairstyle; learning the latest minuets and fashionable card games; practicing the variety of bows and curtseys required by court etiquette; discussing matters of state and polity, and so on. A series of rituals had been practiced, including the French ambassador’s state entry into Vienna, Maria Antonia’s renunciation of all her hereditary rights, and her marriage by proxy to the French Dauphin (Haslip 1987, 4–8). Her exchange of identity took place in a pavilion on an uninhabited island in the Rhine. The pavilion had five rooms, two facing east (towards Austria), two facing west (towards France), and in the middle a large hall where she was to be given over to France. Prior to this, Maria Antonia shed her Austrian garments and was redressed “in the embroidered shifts and petticoats of her

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French trousseau, the silk stockings from Lyons, the diamond-buckled shoes from the court shoemaker of Versailles. Her Austrian attendants, many of whom she had known from childhood, came forward to bid her a last tearful goodbye … As formally as in a minuet, in which every gesture had been carefully rehearsed, Marie Antoinette was now handed over to her new country. Prince Starhemberg led her up to a raised dais in the central hall, in front of which was a long table representing the symbolic frontier between France and Germany. Here waiting for her were the French envoys with the official documents” (Haslip 1987, 9–10). In France, Marie Antoinette was married again, and entered into a series of rituals in which she was continually on display, in accordance with the etiquette of Versailles. Architectonically, Versailles embodied the king, and Marin (referring to Louis XIV) describes the topography as a “perfect simulacrum” of his portrait (1991, 180–181). In a sense, then, these rituals were practiced within the encompassing body of the king, the simulacrum fully continuous and perhaps isomorphic with its surround. The rituals of display were continuous with their surround. These rituals included the royal card game, the wedding banquet (held in a new theatre), and the levee—Marie Antoinette’s daily rising from bed through acts of dressing in which every piece of clothing proffered her indexed the (changing) status and prestige of the performer. The levee of the king was even more complicated in the number and variety of categories of person who had roles to play in his getting up from and going to bed. These and other royal rituals of etiquette were the stuff of court life, ongoing arenas for competition over status in which the slightest fluctuation in value was registered immediately by the participants (Elias 1983, 78–116). The interior organization of the fold in mid-Rhine leads not more deeply into itself but immediately outside, towards the courts organizing this formal exchange. There is no double movement of curving interiorly and torquing anteriorly in this rite of exchanging the archduchess for the dauphine. One act leads additively to the next, then to the next, and so on. The curvature of this pocket is nearly flat, its trajectory shallow, barely recursive, forging forward into the next ritual display, and then the one after, and the one after that. The princess is entirely a vehicle of the symbolic, exchanging one set of representations for another. The persona of an Austrian princess is exchanged for that of a French one. Despite the intricacy of protocol, the demeanor of personae, the multivocal symbolism of dress, and the political maneuvering, the ritual in mid-Rhine has no self-organizing properties. The ritual lacks complexity in relation to itself. In its entirety, this ritual (and all the others of the series, perhaps with the exception of the marriage rite) is lineally continuous with royal social order on each side of the river, and reflects this in its transfer of representations from one authority to another. The significance of this ritual is wholly in its representations, as symbolic of the social orders that gave it shape: a model of courtly form, a model for courtly form. This is clear when the rite is reinserted analytically within social order.

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The ritual in mid-Rhine was isomorphic with the organization of court life outside the rite. The ritual was another piece of the broader social matrix and was not divisible from this. The action within the ritual was entirely a manifestation of the patterning of court life. Here, ritual in its own right tells us that Maria Antonia’s change of persona did not exist in its own right. There likely was no experiencing from the world within the rite of the world without as radically different (Foucault 1993, 59)—as I would expect to be the case in rituals with more powerful properties of self-organization. In this instance, the distinction itself between ritual and not-ritual (raised by Iteanu in this volume and by de Coppet and myself elsewhere) may be irrelevant, since both domains were organized according to the same principles of formal demeanor and deference, and to the centrality of public, privileged gaze.

Curving towards Self-closure: The Dancing Regiment The second instance provides a sense of how a curvature of social autopoiesis can come into existence, since the instance—one of dance—practices curving self-closure metonymically, through its own movement. The dance is that of a regiment in eighteenth-century Geneva, observed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Members of a local regiment, on completing their exercises, ate together as companies. Most then gathered in a nearby square “and started dancing all together, officers and soldiers, around the fountain [in the square], to the basin of which the drummers, the fifers, and the torch bearers had mounted … the harmony of five or six hundred men in uniform, holding one another by the hand and forming a long ribbon which wound around, serpent-like, in cadence and without confusion, with countless turns and returns, countless sorts of figured evolutions … the sound of the drums, the glare of the torches … all of this created a very lively sensation” (Rousseau 1982, 135). It was late, the women had retired. Yet soon the windows filled with female spectators, and then women came out, the wives to their husbands, the servants with wine, the children halfclothed, running between their parents. The dance was suspended and, instead, embraces, laughs, healths, caresses—a mood of “universal gaiety”—prevailed. Rousseau’s father, trembling with feeling, embraced him, saying, “Jean-Jacques, love your country. Do you see these good Genevans? They are all friends, they are all brothers; joy and concord reign in their midst.” Rousseau commented that he himself still felt this trembling feeling, continuing, “They wanted to pick up the dance again, but it was impossible; they did not know what they were doing any more; all heads were spinning with a drunkenness sweeter than that of wine … [later] they had to part, each withdrawing peaceably with his family” (135–136). Ritual in its own right notes that in this instance the opening of space/time immediately curves, the serpentine line of dancers, officers and men together, holding hands, stepping in unison, winding round, through countless turns and returns, to the beat of drums, the puff of fifes. The ritual curves further and further into self-closure, into self-reference, organizing itself over and again

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through its practice. The more the ritual curves, the deeper its self-enfolding. The self-organization of this pocket taking shape through movement is more complex than it appears on its mobile surface. This little world exists through rhythm, and rhythm depends on tempo. Tempo organizes the dancers, enabling them to exist together through rhythm (You 1994, 362). The aesthetic recurrence of rhythmicity and its movement generate their own time/space. Effectively, the dancers and musicians momentarily existed in their own ritual reality, quite autonomous of the immediate surround. By contrast, the transfer of Maria Antonia according to protocol, from one phase to the next, is more lineally additive than transformative. However, the organizing tempo and rhythm of the regimental dance contain within their forming the propensity to fold. The curvature curves recursively through itself, forming the fold that is the curve enfolding its curvature. Space/time becomes more that of the fold, rather than a representation of the wider world. The winding shaping of this enfolding takes form in relation to the habitat of the square, the positioning of its fountain and that of the musicians.15 Without leaving the interior of this rite, we can say that the dancers, though in uniform, likely were in more of an egalitarian relationship to one another than they were in the regiment outside of the dance. The men were doing what McNeill (1995, 2) calls “muscular bonding”—“the euphoric fellow feeling that prolonged and rhythmic muscular movement arouses among nearly all participants in such exercises”—though to discuss this further requires more information than the rite in itself supplies. I underscore that in Rousseau’s description of this rite, the double movement of curving self-closure and torquing into exteriority was present to a degree. However, the dance roused unanticipated, emergent action from its social surround. The womenfolk, initially spectators, rushed from their homes to embrace their menfolk. The self-sustaining fold of the dance did not withstand the social surround torquing into the dancers: the uni-form regiment turned into a multitude of family groups, a microcosm of a family-based order, and the harmonics of the euphoric bonding of the fighting men passed into the family groups (witness also the responses of Rousseau and his father).16 Given Rousseau’s description, this is about as far as one can go in discussing the dancing of the regiment as a ritual in its own right. Here, the movement of social life suddenly (perhaps spontaneously) forms into a powerful self-enclosing curve, a fold self-organizing and augmenting the rhythm and harmonics of muscular bonding. The second step, re-embedding the ritual into the broader surround, implicates other aspects of this event, though without radically altering the rudimentary analysis I have offered of the ritual in relation to itself. In keeping with this second step, Rousseau wrote that previous to the dance the soldiers had done their exercises and then had supped together in companies. The sequencing is significant, since the dance may have been the emergent property of the men drilling and eating together. By the sixteenth century in Europe, drilling organized soldiers in systems, and the maneuver called the ‘countermarch’ by the Dutch, turned a body of men with firearms into “a unit of continuous production” (Feld 1975, 424–425), one that folded and self-organized into

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a group that fired continuously—one that, in its own way, danced continuously to the rhythm of serried ranks in movement from front to back, to the tempo of firearms discharging. The men who danced as a regiment knew the steps, the music, and how to synchronize these, but the dancing at that time and place has the sense of a spontaneous celebration and self-organization of the feelings aroused by drilling and eating together, sustainable for a time through its own propensity to fold recursively (just as drilling instilled). McNeill (1995, 8) argues that drilling together produces boundary loss in the individual and a collective feeling of oneness. Eating together undoubtedly enhances such collective feelings, harmonizing people’s interiors in concert. Sliding into dance changed the geometries, the topologies of movement of the preceding practices. The dancers joined to one another through the folding, flowing currents of rhythmic movement, synchronization, direction, entering further into the relationship between exterior and interior of individual and collectivity opened by drilling and eating together. The fragmenting of the dance by kin torqued the dancers back into the broader surround, into their families, into another topology through which the military practiced exteriority against the enemy in order to protect the interiority of family units, the core of societal reproduction.

Self-closure and Complexity: Slovene Pig-Sticking (Furez) The third instance, pig-sticking on Slovene farmsteads, demonstrates that greater curvature increases the self-organizing complexity of ritual and, furthermore, radically alters what ritual can do, in its own right. I use Robert Minnich’s rich ethnography to discuss further ritual in relation to itself and then re-embedding ritual in its sociocultural surround. The Rite of Pig-Sticking Furez is the day on the Slovene farmstead when pigs are killed and made into sausage and other pork products. The head of the household (gospodar) invites a ‘head butcher’ and others who will participate in the killing and prepare the meat. Arriving in early morning, the ‘guest’ butchers assemble around the kitchen table together with the gospodar. The head butcher takes the gospodar’s seat at the head of the table, also giving the gospodar’s wife, the gospodinja, any special instructions he may have. The mood during the small breakfast is quiet, subdued, solemn, as it is among the women in the kitchen. The head butcher says a prayer, crosses himself, and takes out his dagger-like ‘sticking knife,’ kept separate from his other blades and used only for killing pigs. The knife is thought to have its own powers and to do the killing, rather than the one who wields it (Minnich 1979, 187, 190). The head butcher takes the pig out of the sty, and the others pin it down. The women retreat into the house. Uttering, “With God’s help,” the head butcher thrusts the knife into the pig’s jugular vein, stabbing the heart. The head butcher may then etch a cross in blood below the neck (111). Until the pig is dead, there is tense silence among the butchers. Before the butchering

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begins, or before the carcass is taken into the house, it is blessed, sprinkled with holy water at the threshold of the house, or sprinkled with blessed salt by the gospodinja. The body then is convertible for human consumption (114). Usually, both skinning and butchering are done outside, and once these tasks are completed, the body parts are taken inside, where the butchers take over space, though not in the kitchen. Many of the particular cuts of meat and the cured products from the Furez are designated especially for particular meals, ritual and other, throughout the calendar year of the household. These Slovenes say: “Each limb [of the pig] has its own nameday” (107). With the body parts inside the home, the mood of the participants changes acutely, from withdrawn solemnity to sociability, joking, fun. After a jovial midday meal, the butchers make sausages: raw sausage for smoking, blood sausage, and klobasa, the meat sausage. They shape the first klobasa as a gigantic phallus, or as a double-segment circular sausage with a third segment attached and protruding through the circle, a pointed sign of sexual intercourse (117). Either a butcher brings the phallus into the kitchen or the gospodinja comes to take it. In their separate work areas, the men and women continue their ribald joking about this sausage, which remains unnamed. As night falls, with the sausage-making and cooking completed, people arrive for the Furez supper. The guests include neighbors, kin, and the wives and children of the butchers. The table is decked in white, the best service is used, and seats of honor are given to the eldest present. The gospodar returns to prominence through his speechmaking. The meal itself is huge and lengthy, with many different sausages, cuts of pork, other dishes, and wine and brandy. Afterwards, the participants dance and sing, even until dawn. The Rite in Its Own Right These are the bare bones of the event. Most evident is the event’s lineal sequencing. If we go by activity and mood, there are three segments. In the first, solemnity and religiosity prevail before and during the killing, and during the skinning and slicing up of the carcass, throughout all of which the head butcher displaces the gospodar. The second consists of bringing the body parts inside the home, with the subsequent sausage-making by the men and cooking by the women. This segment is characterized by fun, ribaldry, sexual joking, degrees of embarrassment, and greater sociability. The third is the festive meal—lengthy, convivial, replete with speeches by the reinstated gospodar and talk, stories, music, and song—embracing many guests. The segments must take place in the lineal order they do. The pig cannot be killed before the guest butchers arrive and make their preparations. The body parts must not be taken inside the house before being blessed. Joking should not occur before sausage-making begins. The festive meal cannot be held until all of the pork products are ready and additional guests arrive. Each segment corresponds to periods of the day—morning, afternoon, evening.17 Each segment has its own high point: in the first, the killing of the pig; in the second, the phalluslike klobasa made of the pig’s intestine; in the third, the high conviviality of numerous people, many from outside the farmstead, joining together. The high

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degree of curving self-closure is immediately evident. The pig returns, but different, consecrated, sexualized. The butchers return, but different, their solemnity transformed into jovial ribaldry. The women return; the home returns. The second segment is a recurving of the first, and so forth. Each recursion increases the propensity of folding the rite deeper and more fully into itself, making it more complex, more a ritual existing phenomenally in relation to itself.18 In sequence, the three segments also have a sense of climax built into their movement. A high degree of recursion enables transformation. The movement may be glossed as that of death into procreation, procreation into an extended familial order, the fruits of procreation feasting on the death that promises life for the living. The segments are not modular (as those involving Maria Antonia were, to a high degree), in that their order cannot be switched about without utterly altering the integrity of the occasion’s recursive folding. On the basis of what we know so far, there is an internal logic to the propensity of the temporal sequencing, one that appears lineal (segment moving to segment) yet is self-closing. The movement of the sequencing is a widening gyre, taking off from the death of the pig and flowing around the farmstead, momentarily changing its interior and its relationship to its exterior. The farmstead is folded into itself, but comes out somewhere else. This is evident in analyzing movement through space, especially that between the interior and exterior of the farmstead. The household invites outsiders inside. The guest butchers enter farmstead and home, eating breakfast together, the head butcher displacing the gospodar, who, as Minnich comments, becomes a guest in his own home. The border—the distinction between interior and environment, in Luhmann’s terms—between the farmstead and its exterior is stretched into the inside, into the home, especially by the head butcher, who is an analogue of the exterior plane of this border. Exterior becomes interior, a fold opening and containing this different order of things as its dynamics. Furthermore, the head butcher, the exterior made interior, moves towards the pig and its destruction. Yet on the basis of ritual in its own right, we cannot say anything directly about the pig and its possible relationship to bordering, since this information is lodged in the sociocultural surround of the ritual. Nonetheless, we can say that the killing of the pig is marked by bordering signs. With a brief invocation, the killer crosses himself, separating himself from the pig he will kill. His pig-sticking knife has killing power of its own, separating it from the killer who wields it. The skinned corpse is sprinkled with blessed salt, separating it from what it was in life, enabling it to cross the home threshold, from outside to inside. All this suggests that there is something in the pig, perhaps related to its coming death, involving its separation from human beings. Perhaps because pig and human are somehow related, even intimately? When the pig, apparently associated with outside, comes inside, it does so in pieces. An analogue of the exterior, the pig has been taken apart, and it is the interiors of this analogue—especially intestines, stomach, blood—that come inside. Inside, the interiors of the pig are used to alter mood and relationships of the interior of the home.

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The butchers coming back inside the home with the insides of the pig are not the same butchers who went outside to kill that pig. Their demeanor is different, and deep within the home they begin the intimate work of turning the pig’s interiors into sustenance. The pig’s insides, intestines and stomach, become the container, another recursive pocket within the complex fold, to be filled with the man-made mix of minced pork. Inside the home, the interior of the pig is made into the exterior of the sausage, shaped by the men into signs of sexuality and procreation, cooked by the women and later taken into the interiors of the people who will feast on it. One analogue of exteriority, the butchers, destroys and transforms another, the pig. One sign of the transformed pig, the transformed exterior (sexuality, procreation), is consumed and made interior by the participants, in the course of which they, too, are transformed. The self-organizing properties of Furez operate through this propensity of folding and enfolding the fold that continues to be folded recursively, thereby destroying exteriorities that function in the everyday. Folding within folding generates deep interiority. Thus, this ritual fold generates itself as more autonomous of the everyday, becoming in its own right a specialized context for change that will twist back, torquing into the everyday, effecting this. Inside the home, both butchers and women are preparing pork as food. This complementarity in work between ‘outside’ men and ‘inside’ women is one ground through which they relate to one another. The pig gives its interior to be made into a male sexual organ extruding from the outside male within the home of the inside female. Coming to the women, the penis is cooked, domesticated, perhaps with intimations of fertilization and procreation, perhaps with connotations of the ‘birth’ of something else, something that will be the ‘offspring’ of exterior within interior. If so, then this entire process depends upon making the domains of outside and inside, exterior and interior, bend and curve recursively into one another, segment into segment. Beginning with the coming of the guest butchers, the distinction between exterior and interior is enfolded, thereby self-enclosing the fold of the Furez. What might this birthing be? We know from the ritual that the corpse of the pig is being made into sustenance, and that during its preparation and later as food this corpse is the basis for commensality, sociality, intimacy. We know that later on the festive supper opens the farmstead even further to outsiders, expanding in duration and number. Perhaps this social expansion is the birth of something else? Everything said so far is accessible through analyzing the ritual in its own right and yet, more significantly, is integral to that ritual, in and of itself—all this without deriving the ritual form and dynamics from the broader order of things, the usual sequence of thinking in anthropological analysis. We see that this ritual has its own integrity of recursive self-organization, and, as such, this ritual form may have the propensity (indeed the interior capacity) to accomplish something that the farmstead cannot do on its own. To discuss this further, I take the second step of re-embedding the ritual within the broader order of things, as its recursion twists back, torquing into the wider society.

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The Rite Re-embedded The Slovene peasant-farmers of this region place great value on the social and economic autonomy of their farmsteads and nuclear families. Autonomy is a bastion of their identity. Farmsteads (not family lines) signify to these peasant-farmers “the continuity and stability of a local social and economic universe” (Minnich 1979, 64). The all-important standing of the gospodar is identified with a place, the farmstead, his “home ground,” and not with a family line. On the front stage (though not the backstage) of the farmstead, the gospodar appears as the sovereign of his immediate family. The relationship between gospodars is that of equals, while a gospodar entering the domain of another usually becomes ‘guest’ in relation to ‘host,’ accepting the hospitality and authority of the latter. These peasant-farmers say that Furez is a special occasion practiced annually, preferably close to but before Christmas. The Furez supper is the household’s most festive and richest annual meal. The pig is the only animal raised here for slaughter. Its killing is given the special name of pig-sticking, while the infrequent killing of other farm animals is referred to as slaughtering. The pig has an unusual status among these peasant-farmers. More than any other farm animal, the pig is involved in the daily routines of its keepers (134). Swine food commonly is prepared on the kitchen hearth, and there is some sharing of kinds of food among people and swine—cabbage and potatoes, and, in the past, millet and corn. Pigs and farm people, writes Minnich (143), are close associates. Yet unlike other farm animals, pigs are not given names, are not personalized. Moreover, pigs proffer the most prolific referents for local obscenities and sexual joking, while the most powerful rhetorical abuse refers to pigs and their inhuman qualities: “Swine lap up and wallow in their own excrement,” and “Sows devour their young” (138). On the one hand, the pig exists only to give its life, but on the other, only for the pig is an annual Furez held. As a farmstead animal, the pig has a special status—close to people, distanced from people, the nonhuman refracting the human, its death ritualized, its flayed and dismembered corpse intimating sexuality, procreation, commensality. On the human side, the autonomous gospodar abdicates front-stage authority to the head butcher, a ‘stranger’ to the ideologically independent farmstead. The gospodar thereby distances himself from the killing within his domain. In turn, the head butcher is distanced from the killing by the belief that his special dagger has the power to do the deed and kill. Nothing human, no one belonging to the farmstead, kills the pig. It is not an immaculate death, yet moving in that direction—a death with qualities of an ordeal (witness the change of mood prior to and after the killing) in which the killer takes distance and the corpse is sanctified. Yet what is being killed? And by whom? As I asked earlier, what is being birthed? On the basis of ritual in its own right, I argued that the butchers are analogues of the border between exterior and interior, the border thereby stretched into the farmstead, into the pigsty, into the pig, into the corpse, into the home, turning outside into inside, emerging through the pig’s interior as the power of sexuality and procreation, penetrating the kitchen, the women’s domain, there

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cooked into sustenance that sustains human beings and social relationships. Ritual in its own right identifies a dynamic of curving, of self-closing, forming a fold that itself is a border reorganizing itself with profound consequences for the farmstead. Yet if the butchers are the analogues of a moveable border, what is the pig, given the additional ethnography from the sociocultural surround? The moveable border that is the butchers meets the pig. Given its cultural attributes, the pig also has qualities of a living border. The pig is something like the stranger, yet positioned deep within the farmstead rather than outside it, perhaps a border between the human and the unhuman, the human and itself, an unhuman other living in close proximity to humans, the distinction between inhuman and human, between selfness and otherness within the farmstead. Yet it is a border to be effaced, if the pig is to die for humans so that they can become more fully human as social and sociable beings. As the head butcher kills the pig, one stranger destroys another, one (exterior) border destroys another (interior) one, opening the farmstead simultaneously from its outside and its inside, enabling numerous guests to move from the exterior to the deeply interior, towards the festive supper, and the pig to move towards becoming food for that repast. The cut up pieces of this interior border (the pig), made into sausage, become the sustenance for a generative, procreative sociality of labor between strange men and household women, extending later in the day to the greater collectivity of the festive supper. It is this opening of the farmstead—blossoming within the self-organizing space/time of the fold, its participants interacting through the night into the new day through joy, fun, good spirits, and fellowship—that is being birthed. Minnich (1979, 138–140) comments that the killing of the pig, of a close associate, is consecrated to a degree and has qualities of sacrifice (191), though there are difficulties in stating this baldly. Sacrifice destroys boundaries in order to create new ones, new forms. Killing the pig—destroying the implicit border, deeply interior within the farmstead, and domesticating this deep interiority that signifies otherness, the unnamed, obscenity, unbridled sexuality, and yet a kind of intimacy—is done by the head butcher, the exterior plane of that other, more explicit border separating the autonomous farmstead from social others. The exterior border destroys the interior border, changing both in the process, so that during the remainder of the fold’s time/space, neither border exists. As I commented, the butchers re-entering the home are not the same ones who went out to kill the pig. Now they are more the intimates of the home, their own sexuality and procreative drive more open, especially brought home through ribaldry; and to a degree, the women respond in kind. Butchers and women cooperate in shaping sustenance from the sacrifice. The corpse of the pig also is changed—blessed before its body parts move into the home. One border destroys the other, destroying itself in the process. Furthermore, this nullifying of borders enables whatever they excluded to flow together and to fill out into fruitful union. The gospodar—who, in his rightful standing as the head of the farmstead, would block these movements—stands down, stands aside, and is implicated neither in the killing nor in the changes

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in relationships within the household. The sustenance formed from the sacrifice has qualities of a sacrament, eaten in various forms during the festive meal by the solidary, though more amorphous, collectivity of kin, neighbors, friends. This re-embedded analysis may also illuminate why Furez should be practiced before and close to the Catholic Christmas. If the pig is a sacrifice eaten as sacrament by the autonomous farmstead, itself ‘reborn’ as a broad, solidary community without clear-cut borders and with little internal hierarchy, then in cosmic terms Furez resonates with Christmas as a preparation for the birth of the savior, whose sacrificial death is transformed into sacrament. I am not saying that Furez is an analogue of the birth and death of Christ, but I am saying that through the self-organizing closure of the Furez fold, one is made to resonate with the other. Prior to Christmas, the farmstead takes itself apart from within itself so that it is remade and delimited again, yet differently, by its exteriors turned into interiors.19 These interiors become recursive pockets in the curving fold of Furez. That is, Furez itself is a filling—and fillings within fillings—of the space/time opened through self-organization. The farmstead is filled with strangers (the butchers); the pig is filled with itself (the pork mix stuffed into its intestines); the home is filled with people (the guests); the people are filled with pork. The space/time of Furez is filled entirely with its own special mix. These fillings within fillings likely would not occur without the erasure of boundaries, enabling different substances with different values to enter one another. This also is a kind of filling of the world, a bringing of the world into fullness; perhaps echoing practices of All Hallows, All Souls, and All Saints, in the Christian universe, filling the cosmos with an entirety of its presence, awaiting the coming presence of Christ.20

Conclusion The three instances discussed here begin to show how ‘rituals,’ when treated analytically in their own right, demonstrate varying degrees of interior self-organization and complexity. Degrees of self-organization support the contention that the most complex kind of agency a ritual can have built into its design is that of making radical change through its own interior dynamics. The least complex is for a ritual to be quite continuous with the sociocultural surround, lineally reflecting and representing it in manifold ways of show and tell—telling it stories about itself, showing it to itself from various aspects, magnifying, miniaturizing, upending, celebrating, mourning, and so forth. In the latter instance, the connectivity between ritual and its surround passes through a border that hardly distinguishes, hardly differentiates, between one and the other, since the mandate of such ritual is more that of highlighting, embellishing, enhancing, and condensing than of creating difference and making change. But more complex agency depends upon greater curvature; curvature leads inevitably to selfreference and reification as a relatively autonomous phenomenon or event; and relative autonomy leads to self-organization that activates controlled causality to

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make change. In practice, the causality of curvature is circular (Haken 1993), through which distinctions such as those of ‘structure’ and ‘process’ are indivisible, through which structure as process bends through causality into itself, coming out elsewhere, differently, re-formed. Within the complexities of increasing self-organization, causality is not linear. In the instance of Maria Antonia at the Rhine, her crossing as Marie Antoinette was one of a lineally continuous series of events, each event a module, such that the addition together of the modules constituted the entire passage. One may surmise that though integral to a culture of royal display and elaboration, many of these modules could have been done away with, should geopolitical and other conditions have required it.21 The basic movement from Vienna to Versailles, from Maria Antonia to Marie Antoinette, would not have been effected, even if the status and esteem of the royal houses suffered. In the instance of the regiment, moving into dance embodied an explicit dynamic, away from the lineal into curving. The movement into dance immediately shaped some degree of more complex self-organization that sustained itself as distinct from its surround, if only for a short while. Of the three examples, Furez demonstrates that when a program for radical change is integral to ritual design, the ritual will be self-organizing to a high degree and relatively autonomous from its surround. These three instances suggest that studying ritual in its own right may be a useful strategy for thinking on ritual, one quite distinct from those usually encountered in anthropology and cognate disciplines, and in these terms opening towards a more comparative study of the phenomenality of ritual that is committed neither to the pursuit of universal definitions of ritual nor to cultural relativism.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Versions of this introduction were read to colloquia of the Department of Anthropology, University of Leuven, and the Ritual Dynamics Project of the University of Heidelberg, under the auspices there of the South Asia Institute. My thanks to the participants for their interested and constructive comments.

NOTES 1. Frits Staal (1996, 131–132) argues that ritual exists “for its own sake,” constituting “its own aim or goal.” Therefore, ritual does not have meaning within itself, for its own sake, since meaning indexes representation. Our perspectives coincide to an extent, though I reject his speaking for ‘ritual’ as a generic category, and so, too, his use of any specific ritual, in particular the Vedic agnicayana, as paradigmatic of all ritual. See Malamoud (2002, 25) on systemic aspects of the agnicayana.

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2. The phrasing “ritual in its own right” was used by de Boeck and Devisch (1994) to develop a critique of studies of divinatory ritual in Central Africa, particularly those of Victor Turner, in which the dynamics of ritual transformation are reduced, in their words, to a script or text located in social order and not in the ritual moment. 3. The overall perspective resonates to a degree with the call by Castoriades (1997, 339) to comprehend social and psychological forms and patterns from within themselves, from the perspective of their “self-constitution.” 4. By shifting from the usual discussion of levels of macro/micro-organization to domains of organization, I am assuming that the existence of microdomains, however they are organized, is not predicated on the existence of macrosystems. By beginning analysis with the microdomain of ritual, I enable the relationship between ritual and its (more macro) surround to be guided by the ways in which the ritual is organized, without assuming that this is subordinated to or directly derived from the macro. 5. The reasoning likely depends on Spencer Brown’s (1969) logical injunction that once a distinction is made, both sides of the distinction must be included in what follows. 6. Just how embedded lineality is in Western taken-for-granted perceiving and thinking is brilliantly discussed by Lee (1959). 7. On torsion, see Bunn (1981, 16–17), who argues that in torsion, or torque, as I use it, there is discontinuity rather than absolute fit in the joining of difference—here, the torquing of ritual into social order. 8. On propensity in form, see Jullien (1995, 75–89). 9. Here I sidestep my own position (which I continue to hold) that the idea of ritual is utterly otiose (see Handelman 1998, n.d.a). On the development in Western thought of the phenomenal category of ‘ritual,’ see Boudewijnse (1995) and Asad (1993). 10. On the significance of ‘depth’ for recursivity, see Rosen (2004). 11. Erving Goffman (1981, 63) wrote of his belief that “the way to study something is to start by taking a shot at treating the matter as a system in its own right … it is [this] bias which led me to try to treat face-to-face interaction as a domain in its own right … and to try to rescue the term ‘interaction’ from the place where the great social psychologists and their avowed followers seemed prepared to leave it.” 12. The position for creativity in ritual action during ritual performance is argued by Csordas (1997, 250–265). 13. Deleuze’s (1991, 58–59, 118) reading of Bergson moves in this direction. The curve may be said to create past and future simultaneously, folding them into one another, creating short cuts between them. 14. Thus, the greater the self-organizing and self-sustaining capacities of a ritual, the greater the degree of discontinuity in its torquing back into social order. However, if ritual selforganization creates itself as the replacement of social order, so that the ritual is the simulacrum of the basic premises of social order, then there is no discontinuity between the two. The outcome of the ritual returns to its surround as that surround. Here there is no longer any distinction between the ideal and the real, between map and territory. 15. Unlike the lineal movement of Maria Antonia, the trajectory of the dancers likely moved through a recursive multistability of perspective, of dancers holding onto dancers moving past dancers holding onto dancers who were moving past them. Multistability refers to a fluidity of perception, a multiplicity of perspectives, opening pathways of possibility that nonetheless keep proportional relationships and ratios, thereby exploring variations of propensity within form and sense (see Friedson 1996, 139–144; Ihde 1983). 16. Rousseau’s remembering may be called imagistic and episodic (Whitehouse 2000, 9–11, 92–93). The event likely was more a singular than a repetitive episode, though one with powerful, particularistic reverberations for the participants. 17. In the not distant past, Furez was held on three consecutive days, each day given over to one of the three segments.

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18. There is the question, beyond the scope of this work, of whether the folding of a rite deeper and deeper into itself might not generate fractal-like qualities within the phenomenon. Today, this would be my understanding of my reanalysis (Handelman 1979) of Bateson’s analysis of naven behavior among the Sepik River Iatmul—the fractal-like relationship between a single utterance that is fully naven behavior, on the one hand, and a complex performance that is fully naven behavior, on the other. Its fractal-like qualities would self-enclose the phenomenon within its own variations, expansions, contractions. 19. This part of the re-embedded analysis may be understood as a modification of Zempleni’s (1990, 208) argument that “what disintegrates the group periodically on the inside is converted in a force which delimits it continuously from the outside.” 20. Might not these ‘fillings’ be thought of, in relation to one another, as having fractallike qualities? 21. On modularity in ritual organization, see Handelman (n.d.b).

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Foucault, Michel. 1993. “Dream, Imagination and Existence.” Trans. Forrest Williams. Pp. 31–38 in Michel Foucault and Ludwig Binswanger, Dream and Existence, ed. Keith Hoeller. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press. Friedson, Steven M. 1996. Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1980. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Gerholm, Tomas. 1988. “On Ritual: A Postmodernist View.” Ethnos 53:190–203. Gluckman, Max, ed. 1962. Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1961. Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. ———. 1981. “A Reply to Denzin and Keller.” Contemporary Sociology 10:60–68. Gurevich, Aaron. 1995. The Origins of European Individualism. Oxford: Blackwell. Haken, Hermann. 1993. “Are Synergetic Systems (Including Brains) Machines?” Pp. 123–137 in The Machine as Metaphor and Tool, ed. Hermann Haken, Anders Karlqvist, and Uno Svedin. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Handelman, Don. 1973. “Gossip in Encounters: The Transmission of Information in a Bounded Social Setting.” Man (n.s.) 8:210–227. ———. 1977. Work and Play Among the Aged: Interaction, Replication and Emergence in a Jerusalem Setting. Assen: Van Gorcum. ———. 1979. “Is Naven Ludic? Paradox and the Communication of Identity.” Social Analysis 1:177–191. ———. 1998. Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. 2nd ed. New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 1999. “The Playful Seductions of Neo-Shamanic Ritual.” History of Religions 39:65–72. ———. 2002. “Postlude: The Interior Sociality of Self-transformation.” Pp. 236–253 in Self and Self-transformation in the History of Religions, ed. David Shulman and Guy Stroumsa. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. n.d.a. “Conceptual Alternatives to Ritual.” In Theorizing Ritual, ed. Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg. Leiden: Brill. (In press) ———. n.d.b. “Designs of Ritual: The City Dionysia in Fifth-Century Athens.” In Celebrations: Sanctuaries and the Vestiges of Cult Activity. Athens: Norwegian Institute at Athens. (In press) Haslip, Joan. 1987. Marie Antoinette. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Horgan, John. 1998. The End of Science. London: Abacus. Ihde, Don. 1983. Existential Technics. Albany: State University of New York Press. Innis, Robert E. 2001. “Perception, Interpretation, and the Signs of Art.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 15:20–33. Jullien, François. 1995. The Propensity of Things: Towards a History of Efficacy in China. Trans. Janet Lloyd. New York: Zone Books Kapferer, Bruce. 1997. The Feast of the Sorcerer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kauffman, Louis H. 1987. “Self-Reference and Recursive Forms.” Journal of Social and Biological Structures 10:53–72. King, Michael, and Chris Thornhill. 2003. “‘Will the Real Niklas Luhmann Stand Up, Please.’ A Reply to John Mingers.” Sociological Review 51:276–285. Knyazeva, Helena. 2003. “Self-Reflective Synergetics.” Systems Research and Behavioral Science 20:53–64. Lee, Dorothy. 1959. Freedom and Culture. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

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PART I

THEORIZING RITUAL Against Representation, against Meaning

* Chapter 1

RITUAL DYNAMICS AND VIRTUAL PRACTICE Beyond Representation and Meaning Bruce Kapferer

Ritual is one of the most used, perhaps overused, sociological categories and one of the most resistant to adequate definition. Goody (1961), as Rappaport (1999) recently notes, states that it is an analytically useless term whose definition is best avoided. Undeterred, Rappaport (1999, 24–26) then proceeds to present a formal definition that is designed to overcome some of the grounds for Goody’s assertion. He recommends a definition that distinguishes the structural form of ritual from the elements or qualities that constitute it (symbols, performative dimensions, etc.). Thus, ritual is a form sui generis that shares many of its compositional elements with other areas of human activity yet is not reducible to these elements. The overall point is similar to Handelman’s (1990) observation that ritual is a particular kind of event (of varying types) that, while

Notes for this chapter begin on page 51.

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sharing much with other kinds of human activity, is nonetheless distinguishable. Handelman remains open to the diversity of ritual forms, but Rappaport is more closed and more impelled towards a general theory of ritual. For me, the search for the definition of ritual has been a lost cause from the outset. Even though, it seems, that anthropologists can recognize a ritual when they see one, they have very diverse criteria for labeling what they see to be ritual. However, the vexing point at the center of this enduring problem for analysts of ritual (regardless of how the phenomenon may be defined) concerns the effects or potencies that ritual participants claim for its practice. Here, as to be expected, opinions are various and divided. Many of these, some of which I will refer to in the following discussion, can be categorized as representational, linguistic, and literary approaches. For example, they have stressed the potency of belief, the force of ritual naming, and the power of metaphor. Psychiatry and psychoanalysis have provided powerful tools of understanding, as has philosophy of numerous varieties, but in particular neo-Kantian and phenomenological existential perspectives. Bell’s recent surveys (1992, 1997) on approaches towards ritual blend many of these together, for this commentator, in a less than successful manner. Recently, there has been a positivist swing. Rappaport’s attempt to arrive at some kind of scientific universal understanding of religion and ritual is one example, but it is also apparent in the current appeal of psychological cognitivist approaches, and in an attraction to a kind of New Age mysticism that achieves its authority from science. Undoubtedly, all of these approaches are instructive and in varying ways useful, as I will later indicate. But what I will primarily undertake here is an approach that concentrates on ritual practice in itself and, more specifically, the formational dynamics or structuring composition of rite in which experience and meaning are constituted. I will suggest that many of the events that are studied as ritual (but by no means all) demonstrate a dynamic quality that may be highly specific to them. As such they may not be understood by a reduction to apparently similar practices that occur outside events that are categorized as ritual. The point I am making is by no means original, although I am concerned to extend into areas that perhaps have not attracted as much attention as they deserve. For this reason, I will open my discussion with a consideration of the work of Van Gennep, Hubert and Mauss, and, most of all, Victor Turner. Turner’s work brings together many of the orientations to ritual that I have mentioned, although his perspective could be classed as firmly in the literary camp. But what is particularly important in his development is both his focus on ritual events in themselves and especially his concern with the specificity of their internal process. This latter aspect of his work is especially relevant to my concern with ritual dynamics in this essay. While process and dynamics are mutually implicated, I will contend that a focus on dynamics, rather than process, moves the understanding of ritual beyond an emphasis on symbolic meaning, reflexivity, and representation. An emphasis on ritual as process is of course crucial, but the orientation to dynamics that I ultimately pursue here is directed to those aspects of ritual

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practice that may establish not only the perceptual ground for the organization of cognition but, above all, the basis for the construction of meaning and the extension towards new horizons of meaning. I focus on ritual dynamics as a structuration of perception and of cognition in which particular human potentialities both of experience and of meaningful construction may be formed. A concept that I develop is that of the virtual or virtuality, which is to be distinguished from the virtuality of cyber technology. As I will explain, the virtual of ritual is a thoroughgoing reality of its own, neither a simulacrum of realities external to ritual nor an alternative reality. It bears a connection to ordinary, lived realities, as depth to surface. I stress the virtual of rite as one in which the dynamics of cosmological, social, and personal construction—dynamics as a field of force—achieve their most intense concentration.

The Dynamics of Ritual Process Victor Turner is chiefly responsible for shifting the analytical focus on ritual from that of representation (which, in his view, stressed statics) to that of process (or dynamics). His use of Van Gennep is significant in this regard, as it was the latter who gave a non-Durkheimian legitimacy to Turner’s conceptual move. Although Van Gennep, of course, did not ignore the importance of representation, he did not write of ritual in the Durkheimian sense as a kind of “collective representation,” a symbolic formation of the social or expression of society. Rather, Van Gennep’s (1960) orientation was to conceive of rite as a conjunctive, transitive, or transitional process—a reformational or transformational organization of action facilitating change within society. Van Gennep highlighted the internal processual stages and shifts within rituals whereby distinct phases were contracted or elaborated in accordance with the problematics of the crisis or transition (e.g., birth, initiation, marriage, death) to be resolved or effected. Van Gennep had done little more than set out a schema for the understanding of ritual processes and their contribution to the reproduction of social orders and their relations. His concern with process paralleled that of Hubert and Mauss (1964) in their analysis of sacrifice, which likewise focused on the ritual process (isolating stages of separation and conjunction). Although Hubert and Mauss expanded on the Durkheimian distinct and representational symbolic categories of the sacred and the profane, they discerned a constitutive and transformational dynamic in the sacralizing/desacralizing process of rite to be compared with the importance assigned to the liminal by Van Gennep, which Turner developed.1 It is one of Turner’s major contributions to the analysis of ritual that he recognized the possibility of Van Gennep’s approach for understanding ritual as a process that could create or generate original circumstances for human psychological and social existence. For Van Gennep, ritual was demonstrated as a process in the conventional sense of a course of action or a progression of linked events. This view of ritual as process persists in much anthropological

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analysis and misses the more radical import of Turner’s direction, which went well beyond Van Gennep. Turner was directed to ritual as process in the more philosophical meaning of becoming. In this way he concentrated on the capacity of ritual to bring forth (in the ancient Greek sense of techne) and to change the very ground of being. He grasped the ritual process as not merely a machine for social reproduction or for maintaining the cosmological and cultural categories of meaning within which persons and their social relations were constituted (ritual as a mechanism for repeating the same in the sense of Eliade’s notion of “the eternal return”). Rather, Turner concentrated on the process of ritual as the generative source for the invention of new cosmological and other cultural categories within which original constructs of persons and their relations might be created. This was a radical reorientation in the anthropological analysis of ritual. Turner broke away from conventional anthropological approaches that regarded ritual both as a technology of traditional, relatively static societies, a mechanism for their reproduction, and as a means for the delusion and mystification of populations, which facilitated the legitimacy of dominant orders. Turner effectively made ritual—and especially its “betwixt and between” liminal moments, which he regarded as the potent points of transition, transformation, and creation—a basis for the development of a general cultural, social, and political theory. In his vision, this was all the more so because he understood ritual formations worldwide as embedding the grounded and fundamental ingredients of human symbolic construction and their enduring paradoxes. The critical importance of Turner’s position is that he was not concerned with developing a theory of ritual. This is obviously an impossibility at the very least because of the extraordinary diversity of the phenomenon and the fact that there is wide disagreement as to how the analytical or descriptive construct of ritual should be defined (see Asad 1993; Handelman 1990). Nonetheless, the pursuit of a theory of ritual continues with some interesting but, in the view of this anthropologist, limited and all too frequently overly ethnocentric and occasionally mystical results (e.g., Bell 1992, 1997; Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994; Rappaport 1999; E. Turner 1992; Willis 1999). The great merit of Turner’s reorientation is that he considered whatever were conceived to be ritual practices (that is, practices centered first and foremost within the physical, mental, and social beingness of human being) as themselves already including their theoretical possibility.2 This possibility was not about ritual per se but rather derived from the close analysis of ritual that led to a larger understanding of human being as a whole, that is, as a continuing and endlessly diversifying and differentiating entity in culture and in history. The powerful argument that he began was that processes observable in ritual action—especially those that are creative, generative, and innovative—are constantly repeated (regardless of whether or not they are recognized as being ritual) in the contexts of major moments of social and political change. Furthermore, they often dramatically appear at transformative moments (as Turner [1974] himself described Hidalgo’s Mexican insurrection, the European crisis of 1968, and the Vietnam protests—events that no doubt

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could include the fall of the Berlin Wall). More than simply expressive of change, they are moments of symbolic formation, perhaps switch points in Weber’s sense, which may fashion new ontological grounds and horizonal orientations. I have concentrated on Turner because his is the main route, within anthropology, for a discussion of ritual dynamics that is grounded in the phenomenon of ritual action itself. Most anthropologists have applied theoretical perspectives that have not been grounded in the observation of rites but in nonritual action. They have borrowed freely from linguistic philosophy (e.g., the application of the Austinian concept of performatives by Rappaport 1999), from drama and performance theory (e.g., Schechner 2002), from Bourdieu’s theory of practice (e.g., Bell 1992), from cybernetics and systems theory (e.g., Shore 1999), among numerous others. Such perspectives have proved insightful. However, they subordinate ritual to the logic and rationale of practices that are not necessarily those of ritual, as this may be realized in a diversity of instances. They obscure the theoretical potential that may be abstracted from ritual practice that can extend an understanding of ritual, both specifically and generally, as well as of practices that may be related to rite but which go well beyond it. Other scholars who are not committed to anthropology as a discipline yet are certainly attracted to the imagination of anthropology’s potential (which is founded in the empirical investigation of difference and the unfamiliar) have recognized, perhaps better than many anthropologists, the possibility in ritual for creating a larger understanding of the action of human beings. I mention, for example, the work of Ernst Cassirer (1955) in relation to the mythopoesis of human action which derives from an attention to rite and, in particular, the research of Susanne Langer (1942, 1953), who extends particularly the ideas of Cassirer and Whitehead. Langer (whose work was critical for Turner and other anthropological theorists of rite such as Geertz and Rappaport) concentrates on aesthetic forms in terms of their symbolic and dynamic properties. She conceives of aesthetic processes—for her, the quintessential domain of the symbolic—as demonstrating the capacity for communicating simultaneously the immediately concrete and the abstract, leading to the construction of complexity through relative economy or simplicity.3 For Langer, as with numerous others, ritual is the major crucible for the development of these potencies. It is through the dynamics of the symbolic in rite and in the aesthetic (in the unity of feeling and form) that the distinct capacities of human consciousness and mind and the potentialities of human creativity (as manifest in the arts and the sciences) are revealed (see, too, Kapferer and Hobart 2004).

Symbolic Form and Symbolic Dynamics Langer uses the term ‘dynamics,’ a concept that escapes the progressive, successional connotations of the term ‘process,’ which, while it accentuates the active, changing, and transformational character of rite, obscures the constitutive force of ritual as this is realized through the compositional forces of ritual action. The

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notion of process as used by most anthropologists also maintains a powerful representational stress that reduces the significance of the inner dynamics of rite. The term ‘process,’ as Turner particularly engages it, of course, is explicitly opposed to statics. I use the concept of dynamics to encompass both process or change and statics or stasis. As I will develop it later, ritual as a relatively unchanging form, for example, is nonetheless dynamic. That is, it constitutes a dynamic field of force having affect and effect upon those who are involved in its domain. Further, the inner dynamics of a rite—even though it may be repeated in much the same way over long periods of time—are not opposed to statics or change. As I will develop later, the dynamics of what might be conceived as a generally repeatable or unchanging form are the key to the continuing vitality of some rites—their capacity to regenerate participants and their realities, often in original ways (on a similar point, see Williams and Boyd 1993). Langer engages a Kantian notion of dynamics (which concentrates on the forces creating experience) focused on the specific forces of aesthetic or symbolic forms: music, dance, the plastic arts, language. With Kant, Langer is concerned to break out of a philosophical metaphysics that underlines her interest in dynamics, which in her usage bears close connection to notions in physics (in which dynamics and statics are not opposed). The concentration I place on dynamics (rather than process) is influenced by Langer’s direction. I (Kapferer 1983) have applied some of Langer’s ideas to the exploration of ritual dynamics in Sinhala tovil or healing rites. In this case, for example, I elaborate some of the particular temporal and spatial dynamics in performance of music and dance, their relation to the production of the trance experience, and then the movement out of trance through the intervention of the particular dynamics of comic-drama. The whole performance of Sinhala exorcism is explored as manifesting a complex interrelational dynamic of different aesthetic or symbolic processes that have perceptual and conceptual effects integral to the (re)construction of experience and the (re)formation of person and self (see Kapferer 1979). One point of such an attention to the compositional dynamics of rite is that it opened up further understanding of a diversity of symbolic processes. This is so because of the particular problematic of the rites (oriented to overcome disruptions caused by demon attack) and the demand placed upon the rites to intervene technically within the existential ground of self-formation. The rites are pragmatically oriented to develop and exploit particular symbolic formations in such a way as to shape human perception and thereby transform experience. In so doing, the ritualists have discovered dynamic potencies in their rites that may have the capacity to transform experience and possibly the situations of experience.4 The pragmatist linguistic notion of performatives is now commonly referred to in discussions of the dynamic constitutive potency of rite. But this is an extension of the spirit of the symbolic interactionist dictum made famous by W. I. Thomas that “if people define something as real then it is real in its consequences” and fundamental in most symbolic understandings of the ritual process. The perspective carried through into a discussion of ritual dynamics does not allow for the potency of ritual action independent of its constructed ideational meaningful

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scheme. Or to put the point in another way, the potency of the meaningful action of rite may be in substantial part the property of particular dynamics upon which meaningful constructs may subsequently or simultaneously build.

Beneath the Symbolic Steven Friedson (1996), in a brilliant study of music-trance-dance among the Tumbuka people of Malawi, makes this observation. He demonstrates how a specific cross-rhythmic drumming introduced at a particular moment in a healing rite creates the perceptual illusion of something materially solid entering the body and moving around inside, and then, as the drumming and healing continue, being withdrawn from the body. The force of this illusion and its process is deepened in the meanings that are built into this experiential development. It is important that the illusion—illusion as a physical materiality brought about through immediate perceptual sense experience—is independent of the meanings (the interpretations) that are placed upon it. (Friedson suggests that the basic illusory experience would be grasped by anyone made the focus of such drumming.) The perceptual experience is integral to the dynamics of the ritual event but is further elaborated through other dynamics of conceptual construction (of culturally specific interpretation). The general point should not be lost. It is that the force of much ritual may be in the dynamics of the rite qua dynamics, in the way sensory perception is dynamically organized, which then simultaneously becomes the ground and the force behind the meaningful constructions that are woven into the dynamics. Much of the dynamics of rite, and I am concentrating here on those that are internal to it, is a property of its performance structure. This relates to the particular integral dynamics of specific events within the rite (their aesthetic properties, the orientation of participants and the dynamic of their interrelation, the form and content of acts) and to the dynamics of their relation to each other. Here attention to what can be called the structuration of the unfolding performance is important. It is in the performance structuration of ritual that transformational possibilities of the dynamics of rite perceptually and cognitively can occur, an argument that Lévi-Strauss (1963) powerfully indicates in his essay “The Effectiveness of Symbols.” Csordas (1994) carries the idea much further in his phenomenological, rather than structuralist, orientation. He focuses on the dynamics of embodiment in Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) sense, whereby in the organization of the body (body hexis) in the dynamics of ritual action, perceptual and cognitive processes, transitions and transformations are produced. The dynamics of rite in the context of embodiment involve not only the playing out of structure but its creation—the point that Turner stressed in his work, thus countering a static Durkheimian representational orientation that had clogged much anthropological discussion of rite. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) adaptation of phenomenological perspectives (especially that of Merleau-Ponty) in his development of the concept of habitus in

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relation to body hexis requires some comment, especially since he has explicitly attached this practice-oriented perspective to the analysis of ritual (see also Kapferer 1997). In Bourdieu’s argument, the habitus is not a set of static or determinant oppositions, as they might be in many structuralist approaches. The dimensions of the habitus that are brought into opposition are dependent on the movement and positioning of persons through, for example, a structured space. Moreover, the meaning that may be emergent through such movement and positioning is embodied (as it is produced) through the (repeated) body movement. One of the first, and most successful, examples that Bourdieu gives of this approach is his analysis of the Kabyle house (see Bourdieu 1977). Such an orientation can be applied to the formation of a ritual space. However, I stress a ritual space as a highly active space (a shifting field of force), a habitus that, as part of its vital dynamic, is orienting and reorienting the bodies of participants, directing them into meanings that they are frequently made to produce and enjoined to bring before their conscious awareness. In Bourdieu’s terms, the dynamics of many rites might be conceived of as being simultaneously the construction and embodiment of a lived habitus. This is one way in which I explored the significance of the Sinhala Buddhist anti-sorcery ritual known as the Suniyama (Kapferer 1997). This rite takes the form of a rebirthing or regenerative sacrifice oriented in relation to a building that can be described as being designed in terms of a cosmic habitus, a “house of the ordering dynamic of existence.” This building (which the ritualists describe as a cosmic palace, Mahasammata Maligava) itself is conceived as having force. Thus, as an aesthetic form itself, it works through participant perception, drawing participants within its space, reorienting and, effectively, reontologizing, embodying within participants the Buddha doxa that the cosmic building and the development of the ritual context in which the building is set come to articulate. I stress the great ontological import of this rite. It is performed to overcome the crisis of sorcery, which is conceived as leading to ontological destruction. Sorcery in its most acute projection is seen—in the context of the Suniyama ritual—as returning its victims to a fragmented condition virtually at the dawn of creation, to a moment before the emergence of human consciousness when human beings invent, or through the imagination construct, their realities into existence (a major import of the cosmic palace and its relevant mythology; see Kapferer 1997). One aspect of the dynamics of rite that needs emphasis is the way it may organize what Rappaport (1999) refers to as the ritual gathering within its formational motion. The notion of ritual gathering embraces what is otherwise referred to as audience or spectators, but these words are far too passive. They allow for an easy equation of theatre performance with ritual performance, when there are often major distinctions. It is these differences (see below), rather than the similarities, a thrust of so much discussion concerning rite, that demand closer attention. In much ritual, the ritual gathering (that is, those not directly engaged with the production of the rite) is also participant and vital in the production of rite and its dynamics. Schieffelin’s (1976) account of giso rites among the Kaluli people of the southern highlands of New Guinea is a major

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demonstration of this fact. I (Kapferer 1984) have shown for Sinhala healing rites how performance sets up a dynamic of exclusion and inclusion for members of the ritual gathering, using them to achieve various transformations in experience and meaning for the central participants.

Ritual Dynamics and the Larger Context Much work on ritual is chiefly concerned with the relation between rite and its larger political and social context. How does ritual, and especially its internal dynamics, effect changes in its embracing context, either for the way persons are (re)oriented within it or for the way social processes within the wider context are directed? The main way in which this has been addressed is highly dependent on the particular functional integration of rites within larger cosmological, political, and social dynamics or processes within embracing totalities. That is, the rite is part of the dynamic of the whole, enabling various processes to be facilitated within it. Life crisis rites of birth, initiation, and death in such a situation are not merely representative of changes, they effect them. For example, youths are initiated into age grades, and the sociopolitical order of a society at least partly conditioned through an age-grade system is accordingly reproduced. Such rites of initiation, because of their dynamic integration within a larger process, and upon which wider processes are dependent, might be expected to have major personal and psychological constitutive force. Similarly, other kinds of rites, because of the dynamic centrality (and dependency) vested in them of encompassing cosmological, political, and socioeconomic processes, might be critical, not just for the maintenance of sociopolitical orders, but for effecting radical adjustments and transformations or disjunctive transmutations of major historical significance. Anthropological and historically based ethnographies are replete with examples. Rappaport’s (1968) discussion of the New Guinea Maring kaiko pig sacrifice is one. The kaiko, in Rappaport’s argument, is driven to be performed in circumstances of ecological overload that gathers significance in sociocultural terms. The ceremony itself operates along the lines of a cybernetic systemic feedback loop that readjusts the dynamic of the sociopolitical ecological order of the Maring as a whole, potentially setting off sociocultural and ecological processes in new directions. The kaiko intervenes through its own internal dynamic that switches and transmutes ongoing processes around it. Systems structured in relation to cosmic kingship yield great potency to the dynamics of the rites that concentrate on cosmic or divine kings. These are active in (re)forming the realities on which the potency of the king depends (see de Heusch 1981; Geertz 1973, 1980; Gluckman 1954; Heesterman 1993; Sahlins 1980; Seneviratne 1978; Valeri 1985). They are more than merely hegemonic—they are vital in the ideological support of a system of power. Rites of cosmic kingship are critical in the formation of hierarchical structures at all points in the dynamics of the reproductive change of that order (often

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extremely complex in its diversity and frequently manifesting forms of contestation and resistance). This is so from the level of the body and person, to the processes of domestic and wider kinship relations, and overall for the formation of a religio-political order. I emphasize the importance of the inner dynamics of such rites of cosmic kingship. This is demonstrated extremely well when such systems are invaded by forces whose dynamic structure and orientational cosmology are entirely distinct. Thus, the advent of Captain Cook off the Hawaiian Islands at the time of the Makahiki festival (an annual rite of social and political re-formation focused on the king) set the reproductive implications of this rite off in new directions, not merely because of the potency of hitherto external forces as such but because of the mediating potency of the rite itself. It made Cook and the material and social values associated with his presence dynamically internal to the political and social reproductive machinery that were integral to the dynamics of the major rites of Hawaiian kingship, which were condensed into the ritual formation of the Makahiki festival (see Sahlins 1980). Making meaningful the events involving Cook, in Hawaiian terms and through ritual, was a process that involved a revaluation of the conceptual categories engaged in the ongoing production of everyday life. As a consequence, the nature of everyday Hawaiian life was changed by Hawaiians themselves, even as they thought they were maintaining it. Sri Lanka at the time of the British colonial conquest, although vastly different from the Hawaiian situation, demonstrates some similarities. The invasion by the British of the medieval Sinhala capital of Kandy in 1815 resulted in the deposition and exile of the Sinhala king and the British appropriation of the annual festival of the kingship to support colonial political interests. The festival was continued with the critical difference that it celebrated the British ascendancy over the Sinhalese. Effectively, the rite was transmuted into a festival of British hegemony, a rite that simultaneously represented British sovereignty and became an agency of indirect rule through Sinhala political and social institutions (see Seneviratne 1978). Indirect rule at the time, of course, was not yet a conscious, articulated British colonial policy (Sri Lanka and Fiji were in numerous ways the sites where the policy was worked out). I suggest that, indeed, the appropriation of the Kandy festival did for a while operate as a successful “apparatus of capture” (see Deleuze and Guattari 1988). Through the artifice of this rite, whose inner dynamics condensed forces for the annual regeneration of relations and subjectivities throughout the erstwhile Sinhala realm, the British, perhaps unintentionally, were active in a revaluation of the very cosmological terms of the continued existence and repetition of the rite. Moreover, the British subjugation of a socially and politically central rite, which was integral to the social reproduction of the realities into which they had intruded, was a factor in the creation of a capitalist modernist world vital to the support of British colonial hegemony. The festival would become entirely representative of British power and later expressive of the power of Sinhala elites freed of the colonial yoke. In other words, the festival evolved into a theatre for the display of power rather than the regeneration of its circumstance. But for a

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while it did, through its inner dynamics, have force in facilitating the encysting of a new political and economic formation (see Seneviratne 1978). With social and political processes of demythologization and the gathering secularism associated with modernization and globalization, the dynamics of rite are not likely to have such ramifying effects through social and political space. The major exceptions, perhaps, are rites in those cults that closely define their own sociopolitical realities, as in the total institutional forms of certain new religious movements (e.g., some contemporary Pentecostalism, perhaps cults such as Sai Baba, or Amma in Kerala, and numerous contemporary African cults). But here I have conceived the effects of inner ritual dynamics as being dependent on what anthropologists once described as the functional integration of the symbolic practice of rite into its larger sociopolitical field. When such functional integration is broken (as in processes of demythologization), ritual is often analyzed as a site of traditionalist irrationalism, perhaps a totalizing form that in postmodernity is incongruent with contemporary realities. There are, of course, bound to be exceptions, for in modern realities ritual forms or practices are routinely (re)invented, often taking the shape of the diverse and heterogeneous realities of which they are a part. This is by no means necessarily a phenomenon of the present; descriptions of rites everywhere indicate that they are often borrowed (sometimes bought). Their very hybridity is a vital dimension of their potency. While this is recognized by students of rite, the tendency is to treat such practices—in the circumstances of contemporaneity—in rationalist terms, for example, as fetishized practice, as mystification. While hybridity, fetishism, and, indeed, mystifying propensities may be conceived as the dynamics of ritual, and often lend to an understanding of the force of rite, they are no less general categories of explanation, founded in modernist rationalism, and do not necessarily demand a close examination of the actual dynamics of rite. Moreover, such understandings continue the totalizing functionalist orientation that assumes the integration of the rite with its encompassing context, although reissued as a malintegration (the concepts of mystification and fetishism explicitly suggest this). As a result, the rite becomes a source of misconception about the nature of larger processes. Some rites may gain their force—even a continuing potency, despite changes and transformations in the cultural and sociopolitical worlds of their performance—precisely because they are, to a degree, independent of larger realities. Attention to the change of the internal content and structure of rites may occasionally be too strongly based in the assumption that it is in their change that they maintain relevance to the larger context. Undoubtedly, rites change over historical time, but such a fact may be less significant than their relatively unchanging constancy through time. Ritualists themselves frequently insist that their rites— often central or core rites such as sacrifice—are repetitions of the same originary rite. There is ideological and instrumental value in such a claim, which obscures the fact that changes have taken place. Nonetheless, there is much evidence for the broad continuity of ritual form (and content) over time and, indeed, a tension (even an ideological commitment) not only to maintain structure and content but also to force a disjunction of the rite from its embracing context.

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Anthropologists and other scholars have often defined a critical dimension of ritual performance to be its radical suspension of ordinary, everyday realities. Such a notion underpins Turner’s concept of liminality and is integral to its changing or transformational power. His analysis insists on the liminal as a leveling, a subversion and negation of quotidian lived-in structures of life. Turner’s development of this position has yielded much insight, as have discussions in which ritual and festival are seen as expressing crucial dimensions of the ludic or play (e.g., Bakhtin 1988; Handelman 1990; Huizinga 1971; Koepping 1997; V. Turner 1982). These perspectives all indicate important aspects of the internal dynamics of rite, especially its socially critical as well as creative potencies. The comedic and playful character of some rites (as the ludic outside the context of ritual) is an important feature of their capacity to break out of determining logics, to cross registers, and to generate novel meanings and understandings. But I wish to push ritual as a radical suspension of ordinary realities in a slightly different direction and to suggest that it is the very disjunction of the world of rite from its larger context that contributes to the force of much ritual dynamics. I add to this notion the nonrepresentational character of the world of rite as this is formed in its disjunctive space. I mean by this that the processes of rites are not always to be conceived of as directly reflective of outer realities, as has been the thrust of conventional symbolic analyses. This is not to say that they do not grasp or represent meanings that are integral to broad, abstract cosmological notions, which often give such ideas explicit, grounded, and experienced manifestation in the concretized pragmatics of ritual processes. Such cosmological ideas may be implicated in everyday nonritual practices, perhaps underlying a part of their tacit meaning and, at the least, being available to the construction and interpretation of ordinary and routine occurrences. They may even be metaphoric of larger processes, but this is secondary, frequently an analytic construction made by scholars who maintain themselves as being external to the phenomenon in question and committed to other rationalities. The analytical insistence sometimes holds that rite is an inversion of the real and, in extreme positions, a fetishism, a mystification. Herein is the dynamic function of rite (see, in different ways, Bloch 1986; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Staal 1989; Taussig 1987). Undoubtedly, there is merit in such assertions, but they are often formed from standpoints outside of ritual and unsympathetic to it. These views are founded, as I commented before, in an approach that assumes the functional integration of rite into its embracing polity and society. Thus, rite is either negatively or positively integrated.

Ritual Virtuality: The Dynamics of the Virtual The direction I take here is one that concentrates on ritual as a virtuality, a dynamic process in and of itself with no essential representational symbolic relation to external realities—that is, a coded symbolic formation whose interpretation or meaning is ultimately reducible to the sociopolitical and psychological world outside the ritual context. The approach to virtuality that I

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develop accentuates the internal dynamics of rite as the potency of the capacity of ritual to alter, change, or transform the existential circumstances of persons in nonritual realities. This, I suggest, demands no necessary change in the overall cosmological symbolic shape or practiced elements or events defining the rite (for example, of a particular cultural type and project) as it has been historically developed. Thus, a rite that has been fashioned in the circumstances of specific historical processes (for example, some rites of healing in Sri Lanka that were constructed after the manner of rites of ritual cleansing and regeneration of cosmic kings in ancient Sri Lanka [see Kapferer 1997]) may continue a vital changing or transformational function due to the nature of its inner dynamics. Its traditionality is already a practice of modernity: it is always already modern (see Kapferer 2002b).5 My use of the concept of virtuality draws predominantly from the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1994) but is also influenced by Langer’s notion of the virtual.6 They develop the term away from connotations of the kind that cast the virtual as somehow less than real or in one way or another a model of reality or else an ideality. These approaches cling to representational forms of argument, driving analysts to discover the meaning of ritual action either in subterranean psychologies or in outer political and social existences. The virtual is no less a reality, a fully lived existential reality, than ordinary realities of life. Yet it is substantially different. I draw attention to two aspects. First, I stress the virtuality of rite as a kind of phantasmagoric space (see Kapferer 2002a), a dynamic that allows for all kinds of potentialities of human experience to take shape and form. It is, in effect, a self-contained imaginal space—at once a construction but a construction that enables participants to break free from the constraints or determinations of everyday life and even from the determinations of the constructed ritual virtual space itself. In this sense, the virtual of ritual may be described as a determinant form that is paradoxically anti-determinant, able to realize human constructive agency. The phantasmagoric space of ritual virtuality may be conceived not only as a space whose dynamic interrupts prior determining processes but also as a space in which participants can reimagine (and redirect or reorient themselves) into the everyday circumstances of life (see, too, Williams and Boyd 1993). The virtuality of such ritual spaces and the kinds of dynamics that can be produced in them might be seen as similar to the virtualities of contemporary technologically produced cyber realities. Nonetheless, I consider ritual virtualities of the kind I have been outlining as distinct. They are not attempts to reproduce the existential processes of real realities (and, therefore, the virtually real, simulacra, or the not quite real). I reiterate the earlier point that the virtuality of ritual reality is really real, a complete and filled-out existential reality—but in its own terms. Nor can ritual virtualities be understood as alternate or parallel realities. I have stressed the nonreferentiality of ritual virtuality to external reality. This, of course, does not mean that it is independent of such reality. Ritual is a vital dimension of what I am calling the really real or, for want of a better term, actuality. But this is so in a distinct sense that relates to

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what I regard as the critical second aspect of what I take to be the character of many rites and their dynamics of virtuality. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the virtuality of which they write constitutes a descent into processes of the really real. Herein is the distinction between virtuality and reality, or actuality. Actuality is described as chaotic, and I follow their usage. The ordinary everyday realities that human beings live, construct, and pass through are continuously forming, merging, and flowing into each other. They are chaotic in the sense that they are fractal-like, always changing and shifting, immanent within and structurating, differentiating in form, crosscutting and intersecting as persons move through space and alter standpoint. The structures of life, relevant expectations, orders within which action is framed, the moods and senses of living are relatively seamlessly melding into each other, eased perhaps, and often subconsciously, by rules or mini-rites of entry and egress. This chaotic dimension (or chaosmos) of ordinary lived processes constitutes the reality of actuality. The virtual reality of ritual, in contrast, is a slowing down of the tempo of everyday life and a holding in abeyance or suspension some of the vital qualities of lived reality. This is what Deleuze and Guattari point to as the descent into reality of the virtual, as they employ the concept. I suggest that this is a critical quality of the virtuality of rite. Thus, ritual as virtual reality is thoroughly real, even part of the reality of actuality. However, through its slowing down and temporary abeyance of dimensions of ordinary flow, it is an engagement with the compositional structurating dynamics of life in the very midst of life’s processes. The virtuality of rite can be regarded as critical to what I have referred to as its techne. It is not a modeling of lived processes (as is indicated in some ritual analyses) but a method for entering within life’s vital processes and adjusting its dynamics. By entering within the particular dynamics of life by means of the virtuality of ritual, ritualists engage with positioning and structurating processes that are otherwise impossible to address in the tempo and dynamics of ordinary lived processes as these are lived at the surface. This orientation to ritual as a virtual reality (being careful to distinguish it from common understandings in contemporary cyber discourse) expands an understanding of the dynamics of many (if not all) kinds of ethnographically recorded rites. I refer, for example, to what some scholars, such as Geertz and especially Lévi-Strauss, have described as the obsession of ritualists with detail and the exactitude of their operations. These operations I take to be connected with the building—within virtual space—of the compositional formation of reality into which ritual descends. The apparent repetitive dynamic of so much ritual is a dimension of the radical slowing down in the virtuality of rite of the tempo of ordinary life, its speed, continuous shifts in standpoint, changes in perspective and structures of context—the chaos of lived existence. What is routinely described in ritual analysis as the suspension of quotidian realities is not so much suspending as it is holding at bay some of the chaotic qualities of reality, thus allowing the dynamics of reality formation to be entered within and retuned, readjusted.7

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Here it is relevant to recall some of my earlier comments concerning Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and its application to rite. Bourdieu conceives of various routine-lived spaces and practices (ritual and nonritual) as exercises of the habitus, whereby the dispositional schemes of life are reproduced, themselves becoming the creative and generating forces in the continuous, differentiating production of everyday realities. While ritual dynamics can be usefully conceived in such a way, the formation of rites as virtual realities highlights them as a means for entering directly within the habitus and adjusting its parameters. The virtual of rite is a means for engaging immediately with the very ontological ground of being. Indeed, I suggest engaging machinically within the habitus so as to reconstruct, restore, or introduce radical new elements into the dynamic structurings of its possibility. The aesthetics, repetitions, careful detailing, slowing of tempo, shifting position of participants, recontextualizations, etc., are major means for readjusting the processes within life that, among many other things, permit life as it is lived to regain its uninterrupted flow. There are numerous examples in ethnography, with initiation rites providing clear instances. Famous examples include those among Amerindians, referred to by Clastres (1989). The cisungu girl’s initiation rites among Bemba-speaking peoples of Central Africa provide a well-known illustration (see La Fontaine 1985; Richards 1956; the reanalysis by Handelman 1990; and the highly original work of Simonsen 2000). My own analysis (1997) of anti-sorcery healing rites among the Sinhalese explicitly engages the notion of ritual as virtuality in the twofold sense of an imaginal space and a technical site for entering within the dynamics of reality formation. Thus, the personal and social crisis that sorcery manifests can (within the Sinhala Buddhist context) be grasped as a moment when cosmological unities that are embedded in ongoing practice are effectively shattered, blocking and inhibiting the flow of life and its manifold projects. The dynamic of the virtual space of the Suniyama rite is one wherein cosmological unities are reinsisted as an imaginal order and the hierarchical principles—vital to the differentiating structurating flow of reality—are brought once more to fruition. Participants located in the imaginal space of the rite re-embody its processes as essential to the ongoing generation of life in all its chaotic actuality. The Sinhala Suniyama rite also is explicitly concerned with descending inside space/time dynamics, repositioning participants within such processes and bringing forth their capacity to constitute unselfconsciously dimensions of ordinary life, to move unhindered through its various orders and processes. Within the virtual space of the rite, participants engage in exercises of structuration of relations (via the dynamics of the gift) and of consciousness (via the practice and power of language—the major significance of comedic episodes in the rite [Kapferer 1997, 162–167]), regaining their composure with the flows of actuality. The ritualists who perform the Suniyama claim that it has maintained its form and content since its invention at the beginning of time and the formation of human sociopolitical orders. Of course, this is an ideological statement among much else authorizing their work. No doubt the Suniyama has changed over

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time, although there are clearly major elements within it that can be demonstrated as fairly close to what has been recorded for similar practices well into medieval times. We are all familiar with similar claims in other traditions, such as those of critical rites within Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc. The concentration that I have placed on ritual dynamics and especially on ritual as virtuality supports the contention that it is indeed the dynamics of rites (as so many ritualists claim)—rather than the fact of the empirical change of the form and content of such rites—that account for their continued force in many contemporary contexts. The features of rites that for some scholars make them inappropriate to contemporary actualities disguise the crucial potencies of their dynamics that an attention to them as virtualities highlights. The orientation that I have imparted to ritual dynamics and especially ritual as virtuality extends from other perspectives (specifically, Turner), although it does indicate some redirections. The flat, linear triadic ritual process of Van Gennep and Turner, through the conception of the virtual, as I use it, becomes a descent into the ground of reality rather than a making and a marking of a stage in a linear progression. What I am saying is already strongly implicit in Turner’s work. His initial interest in psychoanalysis (both Freud and Jung) is testimony to this, but an attention to the virtuality of rite enables the understanding of ritual to remain with its particular dynamics, to remain with the specific phenomenology of ritual practices, without assigning it to authorities who are at significant distance from those practices. In the approach to virtuality I have essayed here, there is a move away from Turner’s anti-structural orientation towards a dynamic of structuration. Although the representational, meaning-driven, symbolic perspective continues to be important, there is a shift to viewing ritual as a dynamic for the production of meaning rather than seeing it as necessarily predominantly meaningful in itself, a perspective that tends to overvalue ritual as representation and places a huge stress on processes such as reflexivity. Frits Staal (1989) has innovatively attacked the obsession with meaning in ritual analysis, but he, as with Lévi-Strauss before him, who is committed to meaning but as abstraction, misses the critical import of the dynamics, repetitions, compartmentalizations, and detailings of rite that this discussion of the virtual suggests.8 My attention to dynamics here indicates some reconsideration of various performance approaches as well, while not negating their value. Performance is a greatly overused concept. In many ways, everything can be conceived as a performance in one sense or another—even the relatively self-enclosed practice of writing and reading—which is a factor in the stress on interpretation and reflexivity (often of a highly individualistic kind) in the analysis of ritual. But the dominant notion of performance in ritual analysis is that drawn from the theatre, which I regard as being acutely problematic. Ritual is conventionally seen as similar to the drama of theatre and, indeed, sometimes as the primordial form of theatrical drama (e.g., Emigh 1996; Geertz 1972; Harrison 1997; Schechner 2002; V. Turner 1982). The observation is highly questionable, but even if it were so, an attention to ritual dynamics might reveal ritual as closer to what goes on

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behind the scenes in theatrical performance than what is overtly presented. Much ritual is directed to the foregrounding of the mechanics of construction and production, the rules and procedures for the creation and reinvention of the ongoing, shifting illusionary scenes of everyday life. Rather than engaging the theatrical metaphor of performance, an orientation based on the perspective of dynamics as presented in this essay might reconceive ritual performance as a dynamic field of force in whose virtual space human psychological, cognitive, and social realities are forged anew, so that ritual participants are both reoriented to their ordinary realities and embodied with potencies to restore or reconstruct their lived worlds. I note that the conception of ritual performance as a dynamic field is already implicit, if not thoroughly explicit, in Turner’s reorientation of the analysis of ritual in terms of his concept of process. I opened this essay with reference to the difficulty that anthropologists, at least, have in defining ritual. What I have discussed with reference to a concentration on ritual dynamics will apply in highly various ways to what may be described as ritual action. This is especially so with regard to the virtuality of rite. I consider that what I have suggested is likely to be most relevant to rituals that are directed to alter the circumstances (simultaneously social and psychological) in which the experience of participants has hitherto been constituted, that is, to rites that are not so much concerned with presenting the nature of apparent reality (varieties of public and formal ceremonial, rites of commemoration, parades, festivals) as with entering directly within the forces of their production, construction, and reinvention.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Olaf Smedal of the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, read through a draft of this essay and as usual gave me many useful suggestions.

NOTES 1. In certain aspects, Durkheim’s concept of the sacred as developed by Hubert and Mauss can be viewed as a liminal space in the sense developed by Turner. The passage through or towards the sacred in Hubert and Mauss’s analysis of sacrifice might be conceived of as effecting both a transition and a transformation. 2. Victor Turner, of course, was highly influenced by “situational and extended-case” analysis developed by Manchester anthropologists who conducted their fieldwork in central and southern Africa. The idea emerged from Max Gluckman’s initial inspiration gained from fieldwork in Zululand. Essentially, the idea was that practices themselves already contain their own theoretical understanding. A further idea was that such theoretical understanding, locked within practice, was open horizonal. That is, there were myriad different concatenations of practice that might reveal the “logics” (not the closed system

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4. 5.

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of philosophical logic, but practical logic in Bourdieu’s sense) integral within and driving the practice. Ritual, I think, for Turner was a kind of natural event, constituted as such by participants. In this sense, it was more primary than the events of Gluckman’s situation analysis that were constructed in their significance by the anthropological observer rather than by the participant. Gluckman and his colleagues in their approach to events or situations were concerned with process and dynamics. But Turner, in his consideration of ritual, expanded the idea. The influence of situational analysis as developed by Gluckman and others is clear in Turner’s early work, and it should be noted, for it extends an understanding of the intellectual milieu that drew Turner to the work of Van Gennep. Langer argues that the conditions for the formation of language are established in ritual contexts in which the symbolic is elaborated. Symbolic processes reduce complexity, and it is in this dynamic that language can emerge. The simplicity of the symbolic enables the communication of otherwise complex and irreducible experience. Williams and Boyd (1993) have extended Langer’s approach to aesthetics to an understanding of Zoroastrian ritual. Where ancient rites are seen to continue into modernity, this is often conceived as a “reinvention of tradition” (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Undoubtedly this is so and is well demonstrated in many of the festivals of contemporary Europe that have been explicitly reinvented. It is also true of many ritual reinventions in a diversity of contemporary nationalist movements. But this is not always the case, even though the personal, social, and political import of the ritual is achieved or reinvented in contemporaneity. In this sense, rites through their repetition are always being reinvented simultaneously with the attempt to make them continuous with what was practiced before. Ritual in the sense I am suggesting here is both continuous and inventive. These are not necessarily contradictions or oppositions as appears to be the implication of some invention of tradition perspectives. Langer’s usage of the concept of virtual appears to be distinct from that of Deleuze and Guattari. This is especially so because of her stress on symbolism and symbolic meaning. But as with Deleuze and Guattari, she tries to avoid metaphysics and draws explicitly from physics and, particularly, optics. The virtual, for her, is a dimension of the real, or the actual, insofar as it describes the dynamics, lines of force, etc., upon which human perceptions and meaningful constructions of reality depend. Aesthetic forms achieve their specific potency in their organization of a particular dynamic perceptual field. The main sorcery rite performed in southern Sri Lanka, the Suniyama (Kapferer 1997), is directed explicitly to repositioning the victims of sorcery within space/time. Much anxiety and suffering understood as sorcery is seen to be a direct result of the inauspicious location of victims in space/time as a consequence of the date and time of their birth. The Suniyama operates to reposition them by developing around them a new organization of space/time coordinates that frees them from previous inauspicious effects. Both Staal and Lévi-Strauss are arguing for the meaninglessness of ritual but are at considerable distance from the position I have been presenting in this essay. This is that the dynamics of rite establish the structural and experiential bases and formations for the construction of meaning. Lévi-Strauss opposes, for example, the meaningfulness of myth to the meaninglessness of rite. Myth is to music (formation, meaning) as rite is to noise (deformation, meaninglessness). Not only are myth and ritual in crucial relation (ritual might be considered as the ground of myth) but also, in the approach I present here, ritual dynamics, while not essentially meaningful, are the bases upon which meaning is built. Staal and Lévi-Strauss seem to have a meaning/nonmeaning opposition at the root of their thought, while this essay holds that ritual dynamics are integral to the emergence of meaning.

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REFERENCES Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1988. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1997. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press. Bloch, Maurice. 1986. From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassirer, Ernst. 1955 [1923–1929]. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. 3 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press. Clastres, Pierre. 1989. Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. Trans. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein. New York: Zone Books. Csordas, Thomas J. 1994. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press. de Heusch, Luc. 1981. The Drunken King, or, The Origin of the State. Trans. Roy Willis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Masumi. London: Athlone Press. ————. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson. London: Verso. Emigh, John. 1996. Masked Performance: The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre. Pittsburgh, University of Pennsylvania Press. Friedson, Steven. 1996. Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1972. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Daedalus 101, no. 1:1–37. ———. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York. Basic Books. ———. 1980. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gluckman, Max. 1954. Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Goody, Jack. 1961. “Religion and Ritual: The Definition Problem.” British Journal of Sociology 12:142–164. Handelman, Don. 1990. Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, Jane. 1997 [1913]. Ancient Art and Ritual. New York: Kessinger. Heesterman, J. C. 1993. The Broken World of Sacrifice: An Essay in Ancient Indian Ritual. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hubert, Henri, and Marcel Mauss. 1964. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions. Trans. W. D. Halls. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Huizinga, Johan. 1971 [1938]. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press. Humphrey, Caroline, and James Laidlaw. 1994. The Archetypal Actions of Ritual: A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kapferer, Bruce. 1979. “Mind, Self and Other in Demonic Illness: The Negation and Reconstruction of Self.” American Ethnologist 6:110–133. ———. 1983. A Celebration of Demons. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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———. 1984. “The Ritual Process and the Problem of Reflexivity in Sinhalese Demon Exorcisms.” Pp. 179–207 in Rite, Drama, Festival Spectacle, ed. John J. MacAloon. Philadelphia: Institute for Human Issues. ———. 1997. The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power. Chicago: Chicago University Press ———, ed. 2002a. Beyond Rationalism. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. ———. 2002b. “Sorcery, Modernity and the Constitutive Imaginary: Hybridizing Continuities.” Social Analysis 46, no. 3:103–128. Kapferer, Bruce, and Angela Hobart, eds. 2004. Aesthetics in Performance. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books (forthcoming). Koepping, Klaus-Peter. 1997. “The Ludic as Creative Disorder: Framing, De-framing and Boundary Crossing.” Pp. 1-39 in The Games of God and Man: Essays in Play and Performance, ed. K.-P. Köpping. Hamburg: Lit Verlag. La Fontaine, Jean S. 1985. Initiation. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Langer, Susan K. 1942. Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. ———. 1953. Feeling and Form. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology. London: Penguin Books. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Rappaport, Roy A. 1968. Pigs for the Ancestors. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richards, Audrey I. 1956. Cisungu: A Girl’s Initiation Ceremony among the Bemba of Northern Rhodesia. London: Faber & Faber. Sahlins, Marshall. 1980. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Schechner, Richard. 2002. Performance Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Schieffelin, Edward. 1976. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. New York: St. Martins Press. Seneviratne, H. L. 1978. Rituals of the Kandyan State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shore, Bradd. 1999. Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture and the Problem of Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simonsen, Jan Kjetil. 2000. “Webs of Life: An Ethnographic Account of Chisungu Female Initiation Rituals among Mambwe-Speaking Women in Zambia.” Ph.D. diss., University of Oslo. Staal, Frits. 1989. Rules without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras, and the Human Sciences. New York: Peter Lang. Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Turner, Edith. 1992. Experiencing Ritual: A New Interpretation of African Healing. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Valeri, Valerio. 1985. Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van Gennep, Arnold. 1960 [1909]. The Rites of Passage. Trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Cafee. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Williams, R. G., and James W. Boyd. 1993. Ritual Art and Knowledge: Aesthetic Theory and Zoroastrian Ritual. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Willis, Roy. 1999. Some Spirits Heal, Others Only Dance: A Journey into Human Selfhood in an African Village. Oxford: Berg Press.

* Chapter 2

OTHERWISE THAN MEANING On the Generosity of Ritual Don Seeman

As a hermeneutic enterprise, cultural anthropology tends to assume that ordered and coherent meaning is the primary desideratum of social life. Ritual practice plays a primarily supportive role whenever meaning has been threatened or called into question by pain or by circumstance. In this view, ritual generates meaning. Yet without denying that ritual practice can sometimes be shown to aid in the shoring up of culture’s regime, we are entitled to ask if this is all that ritual ever does. Is not theodicy, which in its broadest sense means the production of ordered meaning in response to catastrophe, only one prism through which the relationship between ritual and suffering may be viewed? References for this chapter begin on page 70.

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Treating ritual ‘in its own right’ means recognizing the traces of theodicy in our very bias for interpretation at the expense of other kinds of engagement with ritual phenomena, which might include a greater attention to lived experience, the phenomenology of suffering, and ethics. What happens when the account of suffering upon which classical ritual theory depends unravels? Emmanuel Levinas has articulated a critique of theodicy to which ritual theorists should pay attention.

Theodicy and Ritual “[T]he least one can say about suffering,” writes Levinas, “is that in its own phenomenality, intrinsically, it is useless, ‘for nothing.’” The uselessness of suffering that Levinas (1988, 157) articulates is an argument about the phenomenology of pain, especially extreme pain, which, just because it is both world and consciousness destroying (cf. Scarry 1985), must remain irreducibly present to human consciousness. “Suffering is surely a given in consciousness, a certain ‘psychological content,’ like the lived experience of colour, of sound, of contact, or like any sensation. But in this ‘content’ itself, it is in-spite-of-consciousness, unassumable” (Levinas 1988, 156). This means that pain is characterized by a paradoxically dual nature: it is both irreducibly present to the consciousness of the sufferer—transfixing attention, demanding notice—and yet implacably resistant to consciousness as such. Anthropologists who have attended to the cultural elaboration of chronic and acute pain in the lives of sufferers have only begun to chart the limits of culture’s ability to domesticate and convey this register of human experience (Good et al. 1994; Kleinman 1988). Indeed, it is the way in which suffering exceeds culture that makes the anthropology of suffering (in a discipline devoted to cultural interpretation) so problematic. The uselessness (one might also say meaninglessness) of suffering lies precisely in its tendency to exceed culture’s grasp (see Cohen 1999). The relevance of this uselessness to the study of ritual is immediate, but not necessarily apparent. It is immediate because ritual and theodicy (the attempt to make sense of suffering) have long been linked by the social sciences. Yet it is easily overlooked because these relations are by now so deeply ingrained in the local knowledge that constitutes anthropological theory as to be rendered nearly invisible to analysis. It is no accident, for example, that Clifford Geertz devotes a good part of his essay “Religion as a Cultural System” to the problem of suffering, which leads him almost immediately into a discussion of ritual practice. The “problem of suffering from a religious point of view,” asserts Geertz, is not how to end suffering but only “how to suffer,” and ritual practice is intrinsic to this dilemma. Religion as a cultural system is inevitably identified with theodicy for Geertz, since it aims to make “physical pain, personal loss … or the helpless contemplation of others’ agony something bearable, supportable—something, as we say, sufferable” (Geertz 1973, 104), and to do so through ritual. Rituals “somehow generate” a degree of correspondence between the world as lived

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and the world as imagined that is sufficient to sustain the “long lasting moods and motivations” that define religious life (112). If this model of religion can at all accommodate the occurrence of suffering that is in some sense useless, it is only when suffering is viewed as a foil to which religion allegedly responds. Geertz must certainly be aware of the extent to which he has gerrymandered religious experience and practice by defining the problem of suffering, in purely hermeneutic terms, as the drive to interpret pain or anguish in light of accepted cultural or religious values that render them more bearable. Ritual healing, religio-political activity of many kinds, and ‘good works’ in their broadest sense would all be at least partially excluded by ‘religion as a cultural system,’ since their goal is not just to make sense of suffering or to render it sufferable but to take arms against a sea of troubles. The question of ritual efficacy has been insufficiently studied in medical anthropology, but it would clearly be reductive to imply that ritual healers and those who visit them seek only meaning from this practice and not—as they often and vociferously claim—the alleviation of some real pain or sickness (Kleinman and Seeman 1998). The fact that Geertz can even imply this is due in no small measure to his reliance on Max Weber (“I believe with Max Weber,” he writes [Geertz 1973, 5] “that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun”), and so it is to Weber that we must shortly turn. Certainly, the hard distinction between ritual practice and activity devoted to pragmatic concerns (such as ending suffering) goes back to the linear progression Weber posits between elementary, “magical” forms of ritual practice, oriented to the fulfillment of pragmatic human interests (Weber 1991, 1–2), and the more inner-oriented concerns of developed “salvation religions” with which he is primarily concerned. Salvation is a central analytic rather than just a descriptive category in Weber’s The Sociology of Religion, because Weber identifies salvation with the quest for “systematic and coherent meaning” in the world and for forms of practice that promote such coherence. “To this meaning the conduct of mankind must be oriented if it is to bring salvation,” he writes, “for only in relation to this meaning does life obtain a unified and significant pattern” (Weber 1991, 59). Religious communities may witness the occasional reversion to magical concerns that are associated with saints’ cults and other pragmatically oriented attempts to commandeer blessing, but these are not strictly religious phenomena in Weber’s view, because they deal too directly with the fulfillment of quotidian human needs. Weber’s account differs in some significant ways from Geertz’s later appropriation, but both are agreed that properly religious problems are meaning-oriented, and that the problem of suffering is therefore crucial to religion’s constitution. For Geertz, as Segal (1999, 70) has perceptively argued, the problem of suffering “comes less from the failure of belief—the failure to explain, make bearable or justify experience—than from the failure of practice—the failure to prescribe behavior” or to “harmonise belief with practice.” For Weber, by contrast, “the prime threat to meaning comes not from any hiatus between belief and practice but from a failure wholly within belief: the failure to justify suffering” (ibid.).

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This is the context in which Weber most forcefully articulates his own view of ritual practice as it relates to theodicy as an intellectual problem, distinct from the practical ambitions of ritual healing or manipulation of the inhabited cosmos. “The conflict between empirical reality and this conception of the world as a meaningful totality produces the strongest tensions in man’s inner life,” he writes, “as well as in his external relationship to the world” (Weber 1991, 59). Whereas Geertz goes on to argue that ritual helps to generate meaning through embodied symbol systems, Weber treats ritual as a sign (in the distinctive Christian sense) of a believer’s inner reality. Weber’s commentators have rarely noted, for example, that the ritual virtuosity of The Sociology of Religion is exactly parallel to the capitalist virtuosity of The Protestant Ethic. Ritual activity in the Sociology and economic activity in the Ethic are each portrayed as a religiously authenticated and generative mode of practice designed to answer the problem of suffering in an apparently disordered or amoral world. And they each succeed at this task precisely because they each function as a sign of inner reality to which no other access is given. Remember that in Weber’s Ethic, Calvinist entrepreneurs maximized the production of wealth not primarily for its economic or exchange value (“thisworldly asceticism” would prevent their enjoyment of such wealth in merely hedonistic terms) but rather as a sign of divine election vouchsafed to the preordained. Similarly, the ritual virtuoso in Weber’s sociology of religion seeks confirmation of the attainment of “grace” or “salvation,” according to some particular religious (we would probably say cultural) conception: Out of the unlimited variety of subjective conditions which may be engendered by methodical [e.g., ritual] procedures of sanctification, certain of them may finally emerge as of central importance, not only because they represent psychophysical states of extraordinary quality, but also because they appear to provide a secure and continuous possession of the distinctive religious acquirement. That is the assurance of grace (certitudo salutis, perseverantia gratia). This certainly may be characterized by a more mystical or by a more actively ethical coloration … But in either case it constitutes the conscious possession of a lasting, integrated foundation for the conduct of life. (Weber 1991, 161)

“Demonstration of the certainty of grace” can take a variety of different forms, according to Weber, “depending on the concept of salvation in the particular religion” (1991, 164). It can even take the form of ethical activity, but its focus in that case remains the certification of the ethical virtuoso and not the worldly effects of ethical activity, let alone the fate of the other person towards whom ethical activity may be directed. Ritual practice is efficacious for Weber to the extent that it contributes to an ordered worldview in which the “certified” can know (and, just as importantly, show) who they really are. This is ritual as handmaiden to theodicy or “religion as theodicy” in one helpful gloss (Morris 1987, emphasis added). And this is precisely where Levinas’s phenomenology of pain opens a crucial but difficult intervention.

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Levinas never directly engaged the writings of social scientists such as Weber or Geertz, but he did critique the self-involved focus of traditional theodicy on what he dismissively labels “my own adventure in suffering” (Levinas 1988). It would be easy to mistake this for a merely ethical or hortatory pronouncement, but it is also crucial to recognize that this is a distillation of Levinas’s strong phenomenological claim about the uselessness of suffering, which resists theodicy (read ‘culture’) in precisely the same way that pain resists human consciousness, and which imposes hard limits on our ability to “make suffering sufferable” in Geertz’s terms. Although Levinas links this realization to the historical experience of the Holocaust and to “the destruction of all balance between the explicit and implicit theodicy of Western thought and the forms which suffering and its evil take in the very unfolding of this century” (1988, 161), he is also adamant that theodicy and its secular offshoots have always been problematic because of their fundamental commitment to the meaningfulness of suffering. “Suffering,” he insists, “is, in its own phenomenality, intrinsically … useless.” For all his concern with localized meaning and significance, Weber never directs his sociological Verstehen to this “useless” dimension of human experience—we might even refer to it as ‘anti-experience,’ given its irreducibility to norms of interiority, richness, and immediacy that we normally associate with experience (cf. Desjarlais 1994)—except to the extent that he believes it is susceptible of being overcome.

Otherwise Than Meaning Levinas had interlocutors other than Max Weber in mind when he attacked the regime of meaning in Western thought. He wrote most directly in resistance to his one-time teacher Martin Heidegger, who had, in Levinas’s view, privileged ontology over ethics (see Davies 1998), thereby subordinating concern for the other with concern for the self. Another way of saying this might be that Heidegger’s phenomenology privileged the anxiety that one feels over a potential loss of being above the anxiety that one feels over the potential denial of being to one’s fellows, a position that was manifest in Heidegger’s unrepentant complicity in the politics of the Third Reich (Steiner 1991). Without venturing too far into the contentious debate surrounding Heidegger, however, my argument is simply that Levinas’s essay on useless suffering works to establish an analogy between ontology (the question of being) and theodicy (the justification of being) that has implications for our study of ritual practice. If ritual is conceived as a handmaiden to theodicy, as it is in Weber and Geertz, then we are entitled to ask whether the fixation on theodicy in the social sciences has had the same masking effect as the fixation on ontology has had in the rest of Western thought. Or to put the question more succinctly, has our focus on ritual-as-theodicy (i.e., justification of culture) blinded us to aspects of ritual that are more closely associated with the upwelling of uselessness in the phenomenology of pain?

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Metaphysical and frankly theological concerns have never been far from the surface in social scientific talk about ritual. “The ultimate question of all metaphysics,” writes Weber (1991, 59), “has always been something like this: if the world as a whole and life in particular were to have a meaning, what might it be, and how would the world look in order to correspond to it?” Suffering provokes an investigation of how the world must look in order to be meaningful and a quest for the specific type of ritual virtuosity that can confirm the meaning that is inevitably discovered. One corollary of this approach is that Weber’s theodicy of certified grace tends, like his Calvinist capitalism, to justify success more than it tends to comfort failure. The perspective adopted is invariably that of the observer, and this is true of Geertz as well, to the extent that he confronts “the problem of suffering from a religious point of view,” which is only hermeneutic. Geertz’s argument is that culture justifies itself through ritual, and this leads him, like Weber, to begin his analyses of ritual from the subject position of culture and its defenders, rather than the viewpoint of those who suffer or who embody the meaninglessness of pain (cf. Das 1994). This is not, of course, a critique of the personal empathy that may or may not be exhibited by individual social scientists, but of the costs that certain modes of theorizing exact when their premises go unexamined. The essential thing for the interpreter is not that this or that individual find suffering “sufferable,” as Geertz says, but that the cultural system itself resist collapse under the weight of accumulated grief. This is one of the most crucial and largely unremarked distinctions between hermeneutic (meaning-oriented) and phenomenological (experience-oriented) approaches in anthropological research, and it bears directly on the way we should view the relationship between ritual and suffering as we proceed. To the extent that ritual is perceived through the eyes of culture, it cannot help but be seen as a machine for the generation of meaning, but this begs the question of suffering’s uselessness, which can never be domesticated in this way. The phenomenological view is incisive here, because the sheer bearableness of pain or of loss as such is never presumed: Taken as an ‘experienced’ content, the denial and refusal of meaning which is imposed as a sensible quality is the way in which the unbearable is precisely not borne by consciousness, the way this not-being-borne is, paradoxically, itself a sensation or a given. This is a quasi-contradictory structure, but a contradiction which is not formal like that of the dialectical tension between the affirmative and the negative which arises for the intellect; it is a contradiction by way of sensation: the plaintiveness of pain, hurt [mal]. (Levinas 1988, 156–157)

“There are for Levinas certain experiences,” glosses Wyschogrod (2000, 56), “that contain more than consciousness can hold at any given moment.” These include the “metaphysically rich experiences of the infinite, of transcendence,” and, we should certainly add, of pain. This recognition is of both descriptive and ethical significance for anthropology: descriptive because this is one of the reasons that culture only shapes but never determines the quality of lived

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experience; ethical because the limit of culturally imposed meaning calls attention to what is really and uniquely at stake in that which people in different social contexts undergo (Kleinman and Kleinman 1991). Levinas’s critique of Heidegger includes the charge that unbounded preoccupation with the problem of being leads to suppression of concern for the alterity of separate beings. Against Heidegger’s anxiety towards death, for example, Levinas asserts the fear of insomnia, which is an icon for unlimited self-referentiality and self-concern, for the absence of the boundaries or limits that make space for an other presence (Levinas 1985, 48). Theodicy is therefore only a particular instantiation, for Levinas, of a much larger dilemma concerning the typical preference in Western thought for the general over the particular, for existence over existents. One of the problems with theodicy is that on some level it suppresses the radical alterity of pain in a way that is analogous to the suppression of alterity in other people. The thrust of Levinas’s argument is not to affirm pain as something positive, the way certain religious traditions do, but, on the contrary, to allow the reality of pain to force analytic attention away from the general and towards the irreducible quality of the particular. This is, ironically, a task for which ethnographic research is infinitely better suited than Levinas’s own philosophical paradigm, but it requires a willingness to break with purely interpretive anthropology, which cannot help but do away too easily with the radical otherness of pain. It may appear an unnecessary burden to invoke Levinas on the uselessness of suffering when so many other important critiques of the interpretive model in anthropology have already been elaborated closer to home. Practice-oriented theorists such as Bourdieu (1977) have called social science to account for confusing the ostensible ‘rules of the game’ (i.e., culture) with the ‘game’ (i.e., social praxis) itself, and for denigrating the strategic, performative aspects of habitus. Habitus itself evokes Mauss’s (1979) early attempt to emphasize the lived and nonrepresentational aspects of bodily experience and practice that ritual activities presuppose, and Talal Asad (1993) has deployed Mauss in his own sustained critique of interpretive approaches that adopt the Reformationist bias of ritual as a “symbolic” activity that requires exegesis. Levinas would likely agree with Asad and others that anthropological analysis of ritual has tended too much towards the cognitive and logocentric range of human experience. But my invocation of Levinas in this context is meant to call attention to another feature of this problem that has not yet been sufficiently appreciated within anthropology—the important and distinctive role of alterity in defining the horizon of human experience. Wyschogrod (2000, 62) argues that part of Levinas’s overall project is to show that “there is a relation to being such that it bypasses the cognitive scheme of reducing alterity to the same through representing alterity.” I cite this bulky formulation here because “reducing alterity to the same through representing alterity” is an equally fine gloss for the work of culture described in “Religion as a Cultural System.” For Geertz, ritual helps to domesticate suffering by deploying sets of symbols that encode the context of suffering as

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“really real,” thus counteracting the explosive strangeness of suffering. And while Asad and others have critiqued the hermeneutic assumptions behind Geertz’s model—in particular, the assumption that ritual efficacy always depends upon the articulation of meaningful cognitive symbols—this critique contains pitfalls of its own. The direct appeal to an experiencing body or to the hegemony of powerful social and religious institutions is potentially just as reductive as the argument from culture, in that it too threatens to close off the experiencing self from the recognition of alterity that transcends self-reference. The experience of pain as other—irreducible and undeniable—is worth reflection, according to Levinas, because it relates by analogy to the confrontation with human others who are similarly irreducible and undeniable, and whose presence similarly constitutes a demand for response that cannot be interpreted away. In fact, this is something more than an analogy for Levinas. His phenomenological claim—which is also an ethical claim—is that my first response to the encounter with pain in another person is not grounded, as Geertz assumes, in the production of meaning, but in the “medical gesture,” which answers pain with a promise of help (Levinas 1988). The medical gesture is primordial to human experience—and Levinas here explicitly rejects the reduction of all healing to the will for power—and stands in some sense at the root of culture and language. Yet it is ‘otherwise than meaning’ in the sense that it cannot be reduced to meaningfulness or the quest for meaningfulness with which anthropology remains preoccupied. Instead, it is goal oriented, pragmatic, and possibly even “magical” in Weber’s terms, in a way that renders it effectively invisible to the paradigm of cultural interpretation. Note that for Geertz, culture and religion are essentially fungible terms that sometimes incorporate ritual as well. “The problem of suffering from a religious [but one may also read “cultural” or “ritual”] point of view,” Geertz tells us, “is not how to end suffering, but [only] how to make suffering … sufferable.” And this means that ritual and medicine are essentially opposed. To the extent that theodicy declines, so too should ritual practice decline as theodicy’s handmaiden. Yet while rejecting theodicy in an uncompromising and perhaps overblown way, Levinas nevertheless defends the honor of ritual practice in his many confessional essays, including some, like “Useless Suffering,” that cross confessional and phenomenological lines. While I have shown that Levinas’s phenomenology of suffering can be leveraged into a critique of the cultural paradigm of ritual analysis, it remains to be seen whether a view of ritual that is otherwise than meaning can be grounded in the intractable uselessness of pain.

Useless Suffering and the Disenchantment of Ritual ‘Ritual in its own right’ has been presented by the editors of this volume as an experiment in thought, and that is the spirit in which I have pursued this critique

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of meaning-oriented approaches to ritual analysis. Establishing the genealogical affinity between ritual theory and theodicy is an important first step, because it demonstrates that many of our assumptions about the meaning of ritual are, for all their performative secularism, deeply rooted in particular kinds of theological constructs. One of the reasons that Levinas’s phenomenology of pain is so congenial to this project is that Levinas also hints at a different phenomenology of ritual practice, one that is better aligned with healing and the medical than it is with theodicy. I will argue that this view is not original to Levinas, but that he was probably the first to haltingly articulate it in theoretical terms, and that his view has its roots in a different set of intellectual and religious genealogies than do those of Weber and Geertz. This is an argument that necessarily exceeds the scope of this short essay, but I hope at least to begin a conversation here by juxtaposing Levinas (and thus also Weber and Geertz) with a twentieth-century ritual virtuoso named Kalonymos Shapira, whose Holocaust writings exemplify the relationship between ritual and uselessness in an extreme social setting. Although they are not ethnographic in nature, I believe that these texts may help to point us towards features of human experience that have not yet gained the ethnographic attention they deserve. Kalonymos Shapira (1889–1943) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) were contemporaries who traveled in exceedingly different social and intellectual circles. Shapira was heir to a prominent rabbinical dynasty whose roots go back to the very beginning of the Hasidic movement in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe. He exercised authority as a teacher and communal leader throughout his adult life, and wrote extensive Hebrew-language commentaries and mystical tracts, including a volume of sermons composed each week in the Warsaw Ghetto before his deportation and murder in 1943. By contrast, Levinas derived from a decidedly nonmystical but observant Jewish family in Lithuania, the heart of Jewish rationalism. He attended university in Strasbourg, where he developed a lifelong friendship with Maurice Blanchot, and then went on to study with both Husserl and Heidegger. During World War II, he was imprisoned as a French officer, which paradoxically saved him from the fate suffered by the rest of his family, who were murdered as Jews in Lithuania. Yet despite these differences in background, training, and experience, Levinas’s and Shapira’s views of ritual resonate deeply with one another in the sense that both men sought to articulate an understanding of ritual that eschewed conventional theodicy and meaning-making. Before the war, Rabbi Shapira had been head of the largest Talmudic academy for Hasidim in Warsaw. His prewar publications focused on spiritual pedagogy, especially on the discipline and training of the emotions as precursors to ecstatic prophecy (see Seeman n.d.). Hasidism had inherited a doctrine of divine emanation from earlier schools of Jewish mysticism, but focused this teaching with unique insistence on the anthropopathic correspondence of divine and human emotion, whose linkage was an important channel for the flow of divine vitality into the created world. Emotion was viewed as an intermediate category between thought and coarse matter, and so, too, between the

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divine and human realms, and this made the ritual management and manipulation of emotional experience into a topic of central religious importance. One of the most important themes of Rabbi Shapira’s prewar writings was, therefore, his attempt to pre-empt or to reverse the “drying” and damping of emotional experience among young students that he associated with processes of secularization and modernization among Polish Jewry. He sought to “arouse and enflame” the emotional lives of students, “to allow them to experience … the sweetness of even a slight illumination of the supernal light” (Shapira 1990, 23), by which he glosses the programmatic induction of young students into Hasidic mysticism. The prophecy he sought for his students was not related to foretelling the future but to a state of anthropopathic intimacy with the divine. The prophet, as another Hasidic scholar, Abraham Joshua Heschel, explains, is a homo sympathetikos, “open to the presence and emotion of the transcendent Subject … He carries within himself the awareness of what is happening to God” (Heschel 1962, 89). This focus on emotionalism shifted radically for Rabbi Shapira with the invasion of Poland in 1939, followed by the sequestration, starvation, and eventual murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews in Warsaw. Instead of working to heighten and intensify emotional experience, he quickly found himself forced to work for the moderation of emotional extremity that could literally destroy the experiencing subject. During the first month of the German campaign in Warsaw, he lost almost his entire living family: his only son, his daughter-in-law, and his brother’s wife, who had been visiting from Palestine, were all killed in the initial German raids. Already a widower, he now lost his mother as well, reportedly (according to contemporary newspaper accounts) “of a broken heart” (Polen 1989, 11–12). Not long after this, he begins to reflect on the collapse of subjectivity under increasingly unbearable Ghetto conditions: Even now, when troubles multiply to such an extent that the beards of Jews have simply been shaved off [i.e., by edict of the authorities], leaving them unrecognizable on an external level, so too their interiority changes, leaving them unrecognizable from within. The person loses and cannot recognize himself—[Yiddish]: ehr farlert sich. He cannot feel the way he did a year ago on the Sabbath or on a weekday before the prayers, or during prayer itself. Now, he is trampled and crushed, until he cannot even feel whether he is a Jew or a human being, or whether he is an animal. He has no reality left to feel. He is lost. (Shapira 1960, 11)

Despite the traditional hopes for future redemption with which Shapira’s sermon ultimately concludes, the tone is far from Geertz’s “problem of suffering from a religious point of view,” which is simply to make suffering, “as we say, sufferable.” Described here and in essay after essay over the next two and a half years is an eruption of the literally insufferable, the failure of culture as well as of subjectivity to bear up under the onslaught of evil. This is portrayed not so much as a failure of meaning in our terms as it is a failure in the flow of divine vitality that was carried by emotional experience in the prewar writings.

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The metaphor of flow and blockage would not have to have been made explicit frequently for it to be understood by the circle of the rabbi’s immediate listeners, and a culturist account of the Ghetto sermons would no doubt seize upon this usage where it occurs to argue that the heart of the Ghetto writings is an attempt at cultural articulation or theodicy of the disaster. It would be foolish to assert that this kind of cultural articulation or theodicy plays no role at all in Rabbi Shapira’s oeuvre. But I want to call attention to a different dimension of these writings that may too easily be missed because of the challenge they implicitly pose to our habitual hermeneutics of culture and pain. In the prewar writings, divine emanation and the emotional cosmology it encoded were part of an ordered and exceedingly complicated worldview, infusing everyday life and ritual with precisely the ethos of embodied symbolism that Geertz describes so well. In that world, one could even fashion a coherent theodicy, and although Rabbi Shapira is never as forceful as some of his contemporaries in this regard, it is clear from his prewar writings that reward, punishment, and the “certification of grace” are all legitimate elements of his coherent universe. Yet the Ghetto writings are striking because of the way they call attention again and again to the bankruptcy of traditional theodicy and to the collapse of articulate meaning, which paves the way for a different kind of ritual response. An essay from 4 November 1939, early in the war, relates directly to the problem of meaninglessness occasioned by extreme social suffering and the nature of the religious response that it occasions: The word brit (covenant) is juxtaposed in the Bible both with salt (Leviticus 2:13) and with suffering (Deuteronomy 28:69) … Just as salt in proper measure preserves the meat, but in excess makes it impossible to enjoy, so suffering should come in proper measure, so that a person has the capacity to receive it. Suffering should be blended with mercy. (Shapira 1960, 10)

This metaphor of blending and mixture is compatible with Rabbi Shapira’s ritual cosmology of vital flow. In the passage cited it bears the implicit technical sense of modulating the flow of vitality from the right- and left-hand sides of the sefirotic tree, which are associated with the emotional qualities of mercy and judgment respectively. Suffering itself is here conceived as one of the many registers of vital flow, which can be blended “in proper measure” lest it overwhelm the sufferer. But Rabbi Shapira quickly goes on to describe exactly what can happen when the flow becomes a senseless flood. His homiletic context is the death of the biblical matriarch Sarah, but the subtext is clearly the death of his own mother from what appears to be an excess of suffering that goes beyond the ability of theodicy or of culture to compensate: [That is why] Moses, our faithful shepherd, juxtaposed Sarah’s death in the Torah [Genesis 23] with the binding of Isaac [her son, in Genesis 22]. It was in order to exonerate us; to show [to God!] what can happen, God forbid, when a

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person is made to suffer beyond measure. It was through excessive suffering that Sarah’s soul expired. And if this was true for Sarah, that great saint, who for all that was unable to withstand her harsh affliction, how much more will it be true for us! (Ibid.)

Suffering “beyond measure” simply devastates the subject with no hope for bearableness. Yet instead of signaling the absence of religious response as we would expect, this becomes paradoxically the ground for a different kind of relationship to agency in suffering, based not on the quest for meaning—or even the meaningfulness of ritual—but on the ethical gesture that Levinas calls “the medical”: It is also possible to suggest that Sarah herself, in taking Isaac’s binding so much to heart that her soul expired, did so for the good of Israel. In order to show God that an Israelite cannot be made to suffer beyond measure, and that even a person who remains alive after his affliction, through God’s mercy, must still lose portions of his vitality, his mind and spirit. What difference does it make to me if I suffer a full or a partial death? (Ibid.)

According to this exegesis, Sarah becomes complicit in her own death because she took the binding of Isaac “so much to heart,” when she might instead have stifled emotion for the sake of continued well-being. By allowing pain to defeat her, Sarah models a kind of agency that is not sovereign, but rather grounded in the knowledge of human fragility. Sarah embraces collapse for the sake of others and thereby defends the impossibility of bearing what cannot reasonably be borne. She does not create meaning or certify grace in any straightforward reading of this text, but signals rather the impossibility of those concepts and transcends them. What is more, it should be recognized that the writing and teaching of this sermon was itself a highly ritualized act that carried deep cosmological significance for Rabbi Shapira. Innovative study and teaching of the sacred texts in their traditional form is a ritual activity that literally draws divine vitality down from above to support the integrity and existence of the cosmos, including the community of believers. So Rabbi Shapira’s task is twofold, and I believe that this can be demonstrated again and again in his Ghetto writings. On the one hand, he perseveres heroically in the maintenance of ritual duties that sustain vital flow and the possibility of meaning. Yet the content of his teaching constitutes a denial that the insufferable can be made sufferable, and seeks to rescue agency precisely in meaning’s ruin. Sarah’s sacrifice is efficacious precisely because it draws attention to the limits of Rabbi Shapira’s own strategy of ritual maintenance, and the paradox for Rabbi Shapira is a painfully personal one. The same Yiddish newspaper that described his mother’s death “of a broken heart” relates the rabbi’s fortitude as noted by observers at the time, without, however, touching on the deep ambivalence that Rabbi Shapira’s writing signaled:

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The stricken Rebbe, however, is not broken in morale or spirit. He has remained in Warsaw, conducts tish [the ritual sharing of food] with his hasidim, learns Torah throughout the day, and is currently writing a book. The … hasidim marvel at the remarkable self-control of their Rebbe. (Polen 1989, 11–12)

Unlike his mother (whose name, not incidentally, was Sarah), Rabbi Shapira risks (but does not summarily forfeit) his life in order to continue his teaching, the ritual sharing of food, and all of the other practices that make the Hasidic zaddik into a virtual axis mundi for his followers (Green 1977). Indeed, this means that there are two ritual models that appear side by side in the wartime writings, only one of which is the traditional model of ritual efficacy that shores up the cosmos. The other is based on the model of the matriarch Sarah, whose agency on behalf of others is grounded in the impossibility of coherence or meaning in the world of the Ghetto. This is similar to what Levinas sometimes refers to as “suffering for the other.” As the genocide of Jews in Europe progressed through late 1942, so Rabbi Shapira’s essays turned increasingly towards this model, even as his own perseverance suggested a different approach. All of this requires far more elaboration than I can provide here (see Seeman n.d.), but this small sample of a rich corpus serves at least to illustrate that there is an indigenous understanding of ritual practice in which the regime of meaning is explicitly called into question by the extremity of suffering, and which reflects more or less self-consciously on the possibility of a different approach, which is ritualized yet otherwise than meaning. There is an analogy between vital flow and articulate meaning in Rabbi Shapira’s writings, which repeatedly return to themes of silence, or to the inability to experience—much less to express in articulate terms—the collapse of human meaning around him. In the shadow of that collapse, only ritual gestures—the act of sacred study rather than its content, the act of self-sacrifice rather than its potential for success, or the act of ritual observance without hope for efficacy—remain in place: “The dead flesh of a living person does not feel the scalpel.” All that we feel is a crushing sensation throughout our bones; the world is turned dark for us, neither day nor night, just disorientation and confusion, as if the whole world were pressing down upon us and crushing and compressing us, God forbid, until we burst … But we do not feel each individual affliction … (Shapira 1960, 117, emphasis in original)

Devoted proponents of cultural interpretation can certainly find material to interpret in these texts, but they will have done violence to them if they fail to note the strong motif of useless suffering transformed into a different kind of agency within ritual. The Ghetto sermons urge ritual fidelity in spite of meaninglessness, and not always as its antidote. This is the collapse not only of articulate theodicy but also of the everyday meaningfulness that normally infuses ritual practice, the sense that it contributes to an ordered and coherent life-world.

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The identity between generative meaning and ritual that we have inherited from our intellectual forebears is strong. Even those who self-consciously reject theodicy in its religious and secular forms tend to assume that the assertion of useless suffering must lead more or less quickly to the disintegration of ritual practice as well. Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s ethnography of impoverished Brazilian women, Death Without Weeping (1992, 528–530), was probably the first ethnography to invoke Levinas in this context, since she identifies his argument about useless suffering with that of liberation theology, and against the traditional religious or political justifications of poor women’s suffering. Despite her commitment to liberation theology, however, she permits herself to lament the demise of ritual practices that lend comfort to poor women’s grief, such as the celebration of church ceremonies for dead infants, which are now discouraged because they allegedly blunt the revolutionary impulse. Yet it is clear that Levinas himself had something else in mind than the replacement of the religious by the political, which this seems to entail. His comments are somewhat opaque, so that even some of his best-known commentators have been baffled by his assertion that there is ritual commitment that does not require the insertion of meaning in suffering. Edith Wyschogrod (2000, 182) has put this matter most succinctly: “What is the justification for Jewish ritual [according to Levinas] if ethical action is founded in the upsurge of the Other and if such action is the way in which Judaism appears in the world?” The same question can obviously be asked of other forms of ritual practice, but since Levinas wrote about Jewish ritual, this is the most direct form of the question that emerges. “If transcendence is experienced in the very upsurge of the one who is near,” observes Wyschograd, “ritual seems superfluous.” And then she adds a historical place marker that brings Talal Asad’s whole discussion of ritual theory in the Reformation clearly to mind: “Indeed, this is the point of view adopted by nineteenth-century liberal theologians for whom moral law alone sufficed to maintain the integrity of Jewish religiosity” (ibid., 183). No such question could have been asked of Shapira, for whom the efficacy of ritual practice required vital flow rather than articulate meaning; as a traditional mystic, Shapira affirmed the whole traditional cosmology upon which so much of Jewish ritual is based. Yet Levinas seemingly rejects this possibility as well when he declares: “At no moment does the law acquire the value of a sacrament … No intrinsic power is accorded to the ritual gesture” (Levinas 1990, 18). If neither theodicy nor cosmic vitality can be attributed to ritual practice for Levinas, Wyschograd’s question takes on an added measure of force. Yet I will argue that Levinas’s view of ritual is grounded in the same ritual cosmology as Rabbi Shapira’s, albeit shorn of its more explicit metaphysical connotations. Levinas declares himself to be above the sacramentalism of both Christian and Jewish mystical religion and denies the “intrinsic power” accorded to ritual gesture, but like Rabbi Shapira, he is profoundly indebted to the myth of zimzum or contraction upon which the cosmology of ritual vitality in Jewish mysticism is built. That is because since at least the sixteenth century, the

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heart of all mainstream Jewish mysticism has been the myth of a contraction or withdrawal that takes place within divinity to make room for creation: the divine as it were, needs to leave space for the existence of independent, created beings. This is, in fact, the whole basis of ‘drawing down vitality’ for a traditional mystic like Rabbi Shapira, who engages in acts of self-denial and obedience to the ritual law in imitation of (or in participation with) the primordial act of divine withdrawal of self and ego that precipitates creation. For Levinas, the literal implications of drawing down vitality are absent, yet withdrawal to make room for the other is taken up as the most fundamental metaphor of the ethical relation, which finds its way into both phenomenological and analytic writing. Levinas disavows the metaphysical tradition running from Parmenides to Spinoza and Hegel that always endeavors, in his words, “to suppress separation, to unite,” and which attributes all separation to “an illusion or a fault” in the absolute. He argues instead that “the same and the other [simultaneously] maintain themselves in relationship and absolve themselves from this relation, remain absolutely separated,” and that this separation is the very possibility of ethical relation. And if there was any doubt of the influence of the kabbalistic metaphor in sustaining this line of thought, he writes: “Infinity is produced by withstanding the invasion of totality, in a contraction that leaves a space for the separated being … Over and beyond the totality it inaugurates a society … [T]he idea of creation ex nihilo expresses a multiplicity not united into a totality” (Levinas 1969, 104). In his essay “‘In the Image of God,’ According to Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner,” Levinas explicitly grapples with the need to disenchant the cosmological language in which kabbalistic writing like Rabbi Shapira’s is grounded, without effacing what he calls the “inimitable resonances of this language” (Levinas 1994, 155). In the same essay, he suggests that the complicated kabbalistic cosmology through which ritual activity enervates the cosmos means that “[t]here is here an ethical significance to the religious commandments: they amount to letting those who are other than self live or, in the case of transgression, die. Does not the being of man amount to being-for the-other?” (ibid., 159). This is no indication that Levinas accepts the traditional cosmology of ritual in a literal sense, but it does constitute a clear acknowledgment that he draws upon the metaphoric resources of this cosmology in developing a view of ritual as a turning-toward-the-other that is outside the traditional self-absorption of theodicy. The fact that major interpreters of Levinas have failed to recognize this register in his writing helps to indicate the power that theodicy holds over all discussion of ritual and religion in our intellectual climate. Levinas has disenchanted Jewish themes and topoi in much the same way that Weber disenchanted Protestant ones, to make them available for an application that transcends their native contexts, and this is similar to the work that many ethnographers do in making local concepts available to a wider theoretical discourse through their writing. A thought experiment is a risky enterprise under the best of circumstances, and this is especially true when one attempts to engage two or three intellectual

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traditions that have never been brought into sustained conversation with one another in the past. My version of the ‘ritual in its own right’ question is grounded, to be sure, in a distinctive cultural genealogy and metaphysic that will seem foreign to some, but it has at least the virtue of being a different—and more self-consciously adopted—genealogy and metaphysic from the one already inscribed in ritual theory of the interpretive school. I am posing a challenge for us to engage with an aspect of ritual practice that has so far been subject only to the hermeneutic of grace’s certification, and to ask whether we can move towards a consideration of the intersubjective dimension that rises to the fore when pain is rendered useless. This is my understanding of the ‘medical gesture’ to which Levinas (1988, 158) points: It is the original opening toward what is helpful, where the primordial, irreducible, and ethical, anthropological category of the medical comes to impose itself—across the demand for analgesia, more pressing, more urgent in the groan than a demand for consolation or a postponement of death. For pure suffering, which is intrinsically meaningless and condemned to itself without exit, a beyond takes shape in the inter-human.

Ethnography has only recently begun to pay purposeful attention to the intersubjective as a realm of ethnographic investigation (Kleinman and Kleinman 1991), but whether we can fashion ethnographic tools to locate and describe gestures of transcendence in ritual will depend in part on fashioning the analytic tools necessary to describe them. In Levinas’s usage, “the medical” constitutes a realm of practice—not discourse—in which concern for the other is embodied as a fundamental refusal to be subsumed under theodicy’s self-referential rhetoric. Levinas also argues—and this is where I think we can learn the most from him—that there are moments in which ritual practice constitutes a break, a reaching for the interhuman. This is what I mean by the generosity of ritual.

REFERENCES Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, Richard A. 1999. “What Good Is the Holocaust? On Suffering and Evil.” Philosophy Today 43, no. 2:176–183. Das, Veena. 1994. “Moral Orientations to Suffering: Legitimation, Power, and Healing.” Pp. 139–167 in Health and Social Change in International Perspective, ed. Arthur Kleinman, N. Ware, and I. C. Chen. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Davies, Paul. 1998. “Sincerity and the End of Theodicy: Three Remarks on Kant and Levinas.” Research in Phenomenology 28:126–152. Desjarlais, Robert. 1994. “Struggling Along: The Possibilities for Experience among the Homeless Mentally Ill.” American Anthropologist 96, no. 4:886–901.

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Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Religion as a Cultural System.” Pp. 87–125 in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Good, Mary-Jo Delvecchio, Paul E. Brodwin, Byron J. Good, and Arthur Kleinman. 1994. Pain as Human Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Green, Arthur. 1977. “The Zaddik as Axis Mundi in Later Judaism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 45, no. 3:328–347. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. 1962. The Prophets. New York: Schoken Books. Kleinman, Arthur. 1988. The Illness Narratives. Boston: Beacon Books. Kleinman, Arthur, and Joan Kleinman. 1991. “Suffering and Its Professional Transformation: Toward an Ethnography of Interpersonal Experience.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 15, no. 3:275–301. Kleinman, Arthur, and Don Seeman. 1998. “The Politics of Moral Practice in Psychotherapy and Religious Healing.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 32, no. 2:237–250. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University. ———. 1985. Time and the Other. Trans. Richard Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. 1988. “Useless Suffering.” Trans. Richard Cohen. Pp. 156–167 in The Provocation of Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood. London: Routledge. ———. 1990. “A Religion for Adults.” Trans. Seán Hand. Pp. 11–26 in Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1994. “‘In the Image of God,’ According to Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner.” Trans. Gary D. Mole. Pp. 151–167 in Levinas, Beyond the Verse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mauss, Marcel. 1979 [1950]. “The Notion of Body Techniques.” Trans. Ben Brewster. Pp. 97–123 in Mauss, Sociology and Psychology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Morris, Brian. 1987. Anthropological Studies of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Polen, Nehemiah. 1989. Holy Fire. New Jersey: Jason Aronson Press. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Seeman, Don. n.d. “Emotion, Ritual and “Useless Suffering in the Warsaw Ghetto.” Unpublished manuscript. Segal, Robert A. 1999. “Weber and Geertz on the Meaning of Religion.” Religion 29:67–71. Shapira, Kalonymos. 1960. Esh Kodesh [Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Va’ad Hasidei Piasecno. ———. 1990. Hovat Ha-Talmidim [Hebrew]. n.p. Steiner, Paul. 1991. Martin Heidegger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weber, Max. 1991 [1922]. The Sociology of Religion. Trans. Ephraim Fischoff. Boston: Beacon Press. Wyschogrod, Edith. 2000. Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. New York: Fordham University Press.

PART II

EXPERIMENTING WITH RITUAL Natives Here, Natives There

* Chapter 3

THE RED AND THE BLACK A Practical Experiment for Thinking about Ritual Michael Houseman

In order to explore ritual action ‘in its own right’ (“in itself and for itself,” as LéviStrauss [1971, 598] advises), I have subjected students and seminar participants to a bare-bones male initiation rite of my own invention—The Red and the Black. In recounting this venture, I describe a number of recurrent features of ritual action and, specifically, of (male) initiation rites.

Introduction This experiment was designed to illustrate and further substantiate ideas developed elsewhere in connection with a particular ‘relational’ approach to the Notes for this chapter are located on page 96.

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analysis of ritual performance (Houseman 1993, 2000, 2002; Houseman and Severi 1998). According to this approach, ritual is envisaged as an enactment of relationships: those between human participants but also those embedded in a network of interpersonal ties with other, nonhuman entities, such as spirits, gods, ancestors, animals, objects, liturgical formulae. Because these relationships are acted out and not merely referred to, they are not logical or metaphorical connections between abstract terms or categories, but personal experiences sustained by intentionally and emotionally laden events. However, the relationships people act out in ritual are unusual in several respects. First, because they bring together into a single sequence of action features drawn from a wide variety of domains (subsistence, the life cycle, kinship, other ceremonial events), ritual relationships reframe these disparate elements as the interdependent components of a new experienced totality, namely, the ritual performance itself. Thus, they are not only highly evocative but exceptionally integrative as well. Second, ritual relationships typically entail what Carlo Severi and I (1998) have called “ritual condensation,” that is, the simultaneous enactment of nominally contrary modes of relationship: affirmations of identity are at the same time testimonies of difference, displays of authority are also demonstrations of subordination, the presence of persons or other beings is at once corroborated and denied, secrets are simultaneously dissimulated and revealed, and so forth. To the degree that ritual performances incorporate such singular situations, they are readily recognizable as distinct from everyday interaction: they cannot be fully accounted for in terms of ordinary intentionalities and patterns of relationship. Third, to the extent that these seemingly anomalous performances are nonetheless presumed to be meaningful (the pragmatic consequences and affective qualities of the ritual experience play an important role here), they are upheld by a degree of self-reference, a bracketing off, which confers a measure of indisputable authority upon them. They appear as necessary repetitions rather than as arbitrary inventions. Ritualization may thus be thought of as a process of recontextualization whose ‘privileged’ character (see Bell 1992) derives from the combination of these three properties: it is experientially grounded, highly integrative, and, owing to the systematic association of ordinarily antithetical modes of relationship, difficult to define in terms other than its own enactment.1 This perspective entails a number of complex issues only one of which I wish to address here, that of ritual efficacy. I understand ritual efficacy as referring to the production—subsequent to and beyond the ritual performance itself—of items of discourse and behavior that presuppose the relationships acted out in the course of the ritual’s execution. The occurrence of such items of speech and action may be taken as a measure of the participants’ commitment to the reality of the ritual relationships they enact. Ritual action, if it is efficacious, thus irreversibly affects ordinary intercourse in perceptible ways: before and after are not the same. From this point of view, ritualization is serious business, its efficacy quite different from the gratification that results from playing (or observing) a game or from observing (or participating in) a spectacle. My working

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hypothesis is that this distinctive efficacy derives, above all, neither from rite’s substantive symbolism, nor from its pragmatic consequences, nor finally from its performative qualities, but from the very enactment of the special relationships its performance implies. My intention was thus to design a ritual that consists essentially, if not solely, in a particular pattern of interaction: The Red and the Black belongs to no recognizable cultural tradition, it involves almost no explicit symbolism, its underlying ‘beliefs’ are overtly preposterous, its scenic qualities are minimal and little, if any, social function can be attributed to it. I should say at the onset that most of what I will be reporting here was not thought out in advance. The ‘design features’ (see Handelman 1998) of The Red and the Black, while drawing upon several years’ study of male initiation rites, came into being more or less full blown in a largely intuitive fashion. I was aiming at something as simple as possible and yet whose emergent, self-legitimizing properties would capture what I felt to be the essence of initiation: a discriminatory, identity-bestowing process whose ends (the initiated) are the means of its own reiteration (see Zempléni 1991). Basically, I looked to involve the participants in an undeniable, yet difficult to conceptualize interactive experience whose ostensive, arbitrary starting point (the difference between male and female) becomes, for them, an irrefutable, natural discrimination defined in terms of this experience and the conventional distinction (between the initiated and the uninitiated) it brings about (see Bourdieu 1986). Evidence for the efficacy of The Red and the Black as ritual was sought in the occurrence of subsequent behavior and speech among the participants in keeping with this paradoxical process of redefinition. While lasting commitment on the part of the participants seemed too much to expect, I was interested to see if even the slightest effect in this direction could be ascertained. For example, I was particularly on the lookout for spontaneous action and discourse implying that if women did not have access to the mysteries of The Red and the Black, this was not because they were not initiated, but because they were women. Such an allegation is true enough within the context of my contrived ritual: only the men are initiated. What I am suggesting, however, is that the efficacy of this (as any) ritual resides precisely in the fact that, as a result of its performance, assertions such as these are applied beyond the ritual frame to the world at large.

Preparation The participants are forewarned (usually a week in advance) that they will be submitted to an initiation rite. They are told that while the men will undergo the ritual, the women will participate as well; indeed, the participation of all parties, they are told, is essential for the ritual to ‘work.’ Often I mention that there may be certain students who have already participated in The Red and the Black and will thus be able to guide the newcomers through it; if such persons are not present, I say, this won’t matter because I will give instructions.2

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On the day the initiation is to take place, I hang a curtain across one of the corners of the room, close to where the most of the action will take place. I begin the class or seminar by introducing the ritual. While, at least initially, I never come out and say that I have invented The Red and the Black, my preliminary account makes this obvious. Writing “THE RED AND THE BLACK” on the white board, I explain that it is in fact an American ritual, but of Franco-Belgian origin (although no longer practiced in France or Belgium). Thus, I explain, one can come across a number of oblique references to this rite in francophone culture: Stendhal (most French students have read or heard of his novel Le rouge et le noir), Jacques Brel (a popular Belgian vocalist who sings of the red and the black), and the Société Générale (a French bank whose logo is composed of two red and black rectangles) are given as examples. This Franco-Belgian source accounts for the fact that the language used during the rite’s performance is not English but French. Thus, I conclude, once the ritual begins, only French will be spoken (of course, nothing but French is ever spoken in my classes). One of the problems posed by this experiment is that of framing: it is exceedingly difficult to bootstrap a ritual frame or context into place. The point of departure of this exercise is implicitly a play situation (let’s play at doing a ritual). However, if the participants undergo The Red and the Black with the idea that they are merely playing or pretending, the performance loses its efficacy as a ritual: no one expects it to have any real effect on ordinary life.3 So my problem is how to make The Red and the Black ‘serious’ enough. My authority as a teacher or lecturer helps, but only up to a point, as the students are party to the experimental nature of this initiative. Thus, I am caught in somewhat of a bind. If I don’t take The Red and the Black seriously, neither do the other participants. But if I do take it seriously, they don’t take me seriously, and so it becomes just another type of game. The solution I have adopted is to treat patently ludicrous propositions with obviously feigned gravity, calling into question the playful nature of the enterprise by means of a double negative. I propose a ritual experiment rather than a ritual experience. In other words, instead of simulating a true ritual performance, I pretend to simulate a false one. In doing this, my aim is to undermine the play frame from within, notably by making the rules or conventions— whose existence is supposed by any recognition of an activity as an instance of play—overtly confusing and, ideally, at once constitutive and self-contradictory. Through this type of implicit frame-challenging, I try to establish the exceptional character of what is to be undertaken, all the while keeping its exact nature unclear: one has to actually participate in The Red and the Black in order to understand what kind of activity it really is. Thus, my transparently ridiculous explanation of the ritual as being American of Franco-Belgian origin is associated, in a spurious fashion, with very real cultural references and with my own undeniable identity as an American transplanted in France, the latter being linked with my authority as teacher or lecturer. Also, the supposedly

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francophone origin of the rite allows me to introduce the flagrantly nonsensical imperative of having to speak French during its performance. To introduce all this waffle, I write “THE RED AND THE BLACK” on the whiteboard. While being overbearingly didactic, this (like the references to Stendhal, Brel, and the Société Générale) is at the same time misleading, for, as we will see, one of the secrets of the ritual plays on the approximate homonymy of the French words et (and) and est (is): by writing the rite’s name in English (justified by the fact that it is an American ritual), I establish et (and) as the default, natural interpretation of this phrase when it is spoken in French. Asking the men to leave the room, I give instructions—first to the women in the classroom and then to the men outside—on how to perform the ritual. To the women, I explain that they are to remain seated together at one end of the room. The men, whom I refer to as novices, will be brought in one by one and told to sit at a table facing the women at the other end of the room, about five to six meters away. I myself, the initiator, will sit at this same table facing the novice (with my back to the women). The women are to remain silent while the novice is brought in. However, once he is seated, they are to begin mumbling to themselves (they can say anything they like), just loud enough so that they cannot hear what I will be saying to the novice. It is important, I say, that they not hear what is being said, but it is also important that they pay close attention to the novice’s performance, as by doing so they will be lending support to the novice while he is undergoing the rite. I tell the women that at one point, the novice will cry out. When this happens, they are to stop their mumbling and either to acclaim the novice or (in certain performances) to sigh very loudly with relief. Finally, I tell them that the novice will loudly announce “Le rouge et le noir” (The red and the black) and they are to answer, equally loudly, “Oui, le rouge et le noir” (Yes, the red and the black). To the men, I explain that they will be brought in one at a time. While each is undergoing the ritual, those waiting to be called are to stay in the hallway. As the door will remain partially open, they will be able to hear what is going on; however, I tell them that they must not look, as this would detract from the ritual. Often I say that there is nothing to see anyway. Finally, I explain that they must do what I will tell them to do, or the ritual won’t ‘work’ right. In order to lay the groundwork for the participants’ commitment to the ritual realities they will enact, I provide neither the novices nor the women with a description of the initiation process in its entirety, but only with just enough information for them to properly assume their respective roles. By preventing the participants from conceptualizing the ritual in a detached fashion, I encourage them to experience it directly by having to adopt particular points of view relative to each other within the context of its performance. At the same time, my instructions aim to promote a smooth meshing of their actions such that an

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overall relational dynamic may come into being. Thus, the participants’ understanding of the ritual as a distinct totality is not provided in advance but progressively constructed by them in a personally motivated fashion; it derives from their own perceptions and behavior as dictated by their coordinate interaction. I take a longer time with the women, to whom I give more responsibility, than I do with the novices. The latter, left pretty much in the dark, are rendered clearly dependent upon what I, the initiator, will tell them to do, while the women, who are more informed about what will happen, are nevertheless obliged, as outsiders, to take their cue from the novices. This sets up an interesting tension that acts as an implicit mainspring for the ritual’s performance: on the one hand, the women may presume that the novices (who are supposed to be in on the secret) have been provided with privileged information, whereas in fact they have not; on the other hand, the novices, all the while knowing that the women are the ostensibly excluded party, cannot but be aware of the fact that they might know more than their behavior lets on. The uneasiness inherent in this situation is heightened by the fact that once the ritual begins, the women will be able to see but not hear what goes on at the table at the other end of the room, whereas the novices waiting outside will be able to hear the women’s mumbling but not see what role they play. This tension is further accentuated by the silent negotiations that invariably take place both between the waiting novices as to the order in which they are to be initiated and between the women as to whether they are following their instructions correctly. Finally, it should be noted that this tension immediately breaks down when even the slightest visual communication occurs between the women and the waiting novices (in one unhappy instance that detracted significantly from the rite’s solemnity, there was a glass door leading to the hallway with the result that some novices were able to see that the women noticed that the novices could see them). The last two times I have organized The Red and the Black, after giving instructions, I have invited the men back into the room to participate with the women in a preparatory exercise. Having everyone sit down, I ask the participants to put their hands on the table in front of them and to close their eyes, to relax and get comfortable. I do this exercise along with them. I ask them (saying that certain people might find it easier if they put their head to one side) to make a small, piteous, whining sound, just loud enough that only they themselves can hear it. After thirty seconds or so, I tell them to keep their eyes shut and their hands on the table but to lift their heads and open their mouths as wide as they can. “Wider,” I say, “Wider than that!” “Still wider!” I then ask them to keep their eyes closed and to pretend that their hands are stuck to the table and that, however hard they try, they are unable to move them. After a minute, I tell them that their hands are still stuck to the table but that they can open their eyes. A minute later, I tell them that they can move their hands. Finally, I tell them that the exercise is over.

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This preliminary exercise is useful because it sets the pattern for what in many ways is the essence of ritual experience. The participants become personally engaged in prescribed, emotionally charged, bodily actions whose exact meaning remains nonetheless unclear. The pragmatic supposition that intuitively governs ordinary interaction—that is, that outward actions express private feelings and intentions—is inverted. Within the framework of this preparatory exercise, it is the participants’ stipulated behavior that becomes the wellspring of their individual experience. The exact nature of the feelings induced by having to whine to oneself, to force one’s mouth ever open, to act as though one’s hands are stuck to the desk, and so forth, is unimportant, and remains, one may suppose, largely a function of the personality of each participant. Indeed, the exercise, by calling upon a wide range of possible emotions (self-pity, frustration, stress, relief), is designed to leave a fair amount of leeway for individual involvement so that each participant will make this collectively imposed experience his or her own (what should I be feeling? how exactly should I whine? when exactly should I shut my mouth, and so on). Interestingly enough, many participants use this exercise to try to make sense of what follows. The novices speculate along these lines while waiting in the hallway, a number of them admitting afterwards that they expected the ritual to be linked to the exercise (some participants, for example, went through the entire ritual with their hands flat on the desk in front of them). Here again, in much the same way that what is crucial is not the specific affective states the participants’ acts may give rise to but the fact that their acts are invested with personal feeling and intentionality (animosity is welcome, indifference is not), what seems to count, insofar as the participants’ commitment to the ritual is concerned, is less the precise interpretations they may make of their behavior than their presumption that this behavior is meaningful.

Performance Once the preparatory exercise is over, I invite the men and the women to take their respective places so that the ritual may begin. While people are moving to their places, I put a black box and a red box side by side on the table at the end of the room opposite to where the women are seated. The boxes are sufficiently high so that the novice, when seated at the table facing the women (the black box is on the novice’s left), cannot see what they contain. A white cloth covers the area of the desk between the chair to be occupied by the novice and the boxes, and on this cloth is a small white index card upon which I place my reading glasses. I sit on the other side of the table with my back to the women, facing the novice’s chair. When everyone is silent, I rise, turn around, and tell them that the ritual will now begin. I go to the hallway and invite the man closest to the door to come in (when an initiated man, that is, one who has already gone through The Red and the Black, is present, I instruct him to do this for me). I indicate to the

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novice that he should sit at the table on the chair facing the women, and I sit down facing him. The women begin their mumbling. Maintaining eye contact as much as possible, I welcome the novice to The Red and the Black. I inform him that I am going to ask him to place his left hand into the black box. He will feel something in the box. However, whatever it is he feels, his face must remain totally impassive. While he is doing this, I go on to say, he must read to himself what is written on the index card placed before him (in capital letters: “LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR” [the red and the black]). I take my glasses off the index card and tell him to put his left hand into the black box. “Do you feel something?” I ask. “Keep feeling around in the box. Do you feel something now?” The novice, keeping a straight face, indicates that he does (for indeed, at the bottom of the box, he feels something liquid and faintly slimy). I then tell him that before beginning the class or seminar I copiously spat into the box and that it is my spittle that he is touching. He struggles to not express disgust. While the novice takes his hand out of the box (often wiping it on the white cloth covering the table), I turn the index card over and place my reading glasses upon it again. I then tell the novice that I am going to ask him to place his right hand into the red box and that he might have to catch what it contains (as though there were something alive in the box). This may hurt him a little, I explain, but only very little (inside the red box is a small cactus plant). However, as soon as he touches what is in the box, he is to immediately cry out very loud. Finally, while he is doing this, he is to read to himself what is written on the back of the index card (it now reads: “LE ROUGE EST LE NOIR” [the red is the black]). I take my glasses off the card and tell him to put his right hand into the red box. When the novice feels the plant’s prickles (some novices grab it firmly, while others merely touch it), he cries out as though in great pain. The women acclaim him or loudly sigh in relief. Once this is over, I loudly ask the novice to proclaim the mystery of the ritual, indicating with my eyes the index card in front of him. He announces “Le rouge est le noir,” to which the women, as they have been instructed, answer “Oui, le rouge et le noir.” I then shake the novice’s hand, congratulate him on having gone through The Red and the Black and invite him to retire to the curtained-off corner of the room, telling him to face the wall and not to look out from behind the curtain. The next novice is brought in and the process begins again. When the last novice has passed through and all of the novices are behind the curtainedoff corner, I then ask them to come out and, facing the women together, to shout out once again the ritual’s ‘mystery’: “Le rouge est le noir!” The women, at my prompting, answer once again, “Oui, le rouge et le noir!” Finally, I ask everyone to shout it out together one last time: “Le rouge est/et le noir!” I indicate that the ritual is now over and that we will take a five-minute break. One of my goals in designing this ritual was to involve the participants in conventionalized behavior in which contrary attitudes and relationships become

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inextricably combined. Thus, the actions that the participants are led to undertake are conceptually uncertain; they are easily recognizable as distinct from everyday intercourse and are difficult to define in terms other than their own enactment. Drawing upon a recurrent feature of male initiation (see Cohen 1964), the women are placed in a paradoxical communicative situation: it is because they interact with the men (they are aware that the latter hear their mumbling) that they are cut off from them (their mumbling prevents them from hearing what the initiator and the novices are saying). This ambiguous position is all the more demanding in that it is the women themselves who must determine, from the changing noise level around the table, just how loud their mumbling should be. During the rite, they often glance at each other, checking as to the appropriateness of their respective noise-making (those who have participated in a previous performance tend to set the pitch). Moreover, while the women have been instructed to pay close attention to the novice’s behavior, at the same time, their having to constantly mumble becomes extremely tedious for them. Thus, their utterances are rapidly reduced to a concatenation of nonsense syllables, merging into a sort of collectively produced verbal resonance that spontaneously acquires a semimusical quality. The novices are also placed in a contradictory situation with respect to the women who are observing them. They must alternately express either significantly less or significantly more than they are actually made to feel: while having to surreptitiously suppress their disgust upon learning that they have been handling my spit in the black box, they must openly exaggerate the pain incurred by lightly touching the cactus in the red box. While incapable of disguising their anxiety regarding the trials they undergo, they must at the same time dissimulate their deception at the relatively innocuous character of these hardships. The secret revealed to the novices (the contents of the boxes) is disappointingly trivial, and this fact, as much as the nature of the boxes’ contents, is the secret to which they are bound. There is of course a still further level of secrecy that the novices must also simultaneously acknowledge to themselves and conceal from the women: contrary to what the uninitiated may think, they don’t really know what the boxes contain. About the black box, they know only what I tell them (and I lie about this: it is not spit but egg white mixed with a little water); about the red box they can only make informed guesses based on a fleeting tactile sensation (I hint that there might be something alive in the box, but this also is not entirely true). Thus, quite a number of novices, once their initiation is over, try to look inside the boxes; I, of course, do not allow this. In this way, the revelation of privileged, initiatory knowledge is at the same time an act of concealment both by the novices with respect to the women and by the initiator with respect to the novices themselves. Finally, I heighten the novices’ aroused and disoriented state by asking them to do several things at once: put their hand in the box, react in a certain forced way to what they feel, read the index card in front of them, and listen to what I am telling them, all this with the women’s ever-changing murmuring in the background. With fixed, nervous smiles or expressionless faces, they

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gaze steadily into my eyes the whole time. It is indeed essential that the novices’ ordeal, albeit of short duration, be both complex and fairly challenging: not only must the women be able to think that something nonself-evident to which they do not have access to is in fact going on, but the novices themselves must be made to feel that they have accomplished something which, while remaining partially mysterious for them as well, is unquestionably demanding and (therefore) significant. This systematic conflation of disclosure and dissimulation, one of the hallmarks of the initiation process, is also played out at yet a further level with respect to the liturgical formula from which the ritual takes its name. This additional secret, revealed to the novices when they are made to read first the front and then the back of the index card to themselves, is that “The red and the black” (Le rouge et le noir) is really, or is also, “The red is the black” (Le rouge est le noir). Unlike the enigma of the boxes’ contents, this secret is made entirely accessible to the novices. However, here again, the word play involved is distressingly inconsequential; it relates solely to the ritual and has no value whatsoever beyond. Indeed, the actual content of this secret is of much less import than the relational pattern its communication implies. Having been revealed to the novices, this secret is then communicated to the women by each novice when, at the end of his initiation, I loudly ask him, indicating the index card on the table, to declaim the central ‘mystery ‘ of the rite. However, because est and et are more or less homonymous, this revelation is at the same time the very means of this mystery’s dissimulation: while the novices openly announce “Le rouge est le noir,” the women, who, like the novices, have been misdirected before the ritual begins, cannot but understand “Le rouge et le noir.”4 The secrets revealed in the course of The Red and the Black—like most, if not all, initiatory mysteries—are calculated to be partially inaccessible and/or largely trivial and, at the same time, highly significant in terms of the interactive configurations their transmission puts into effect. The substantive contents of these secrets—what the boxes contain, the words exchanged between the initiator and novices, the various interpretations allowed by the utterance “Le rouge et/est le noir—have little importance in and of themselves.5 They constitute above all the tangible, if somewhat unintelligible, indexes for the initiatory experience and the discriminatory patterns of relationship that the participants are made to enact. In other words, these secrets do not so much contain a singular message as they give rise to a special context. Specifically, the participants find themselves caught up, simultaneously, in two very different modes of dissimulation: in the one, secrecy is openly admitted (e.g., the women are made aware of the fact that they don’t know what is in the boxes); in the other, it is surreptitiously concealed (e.g., the women remain unaware of the “et”/“est” homonymy and of the fact that the novices don’t really know what the boxes contain). As I have argued for initiation generally (Houseman 1993), it is the systemic articulation of these two contrary modes of secrecy that provides the privileged grounds for what might be called The Red and the Black’s ritual

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“work” (Houseman and Severi 1998, 254, 263): on the one hand, the designation of particular agencies (the novices, the initiator, and the uninitiated, but also, potentially, the boxes, the index card, etc.); on the other, the emergence of a specific idiom whereby the relationships between these agencies may be expressed (symbolism). The ritual condensation of avowed concealment and veiled dissimulation gives rise to a distinctive field or context of communication in which every revelation seems to generate the supposition of still further levels of secrecy and even the most trivial acts may take on new, secret yet partially indefinite meaning (cf. Barth 1975). Two points, however, are worth stressing. First, this distinctive field or context comes into being not as the result of abstract operations, but through the intentionally and emotionally laden bodily experiences afforded by the ritual action itself: the novices’ discomfort, their understated or exaggerated expressions of feeling, their ambivalent attitudes vis-à-vis the women, the latter’s frustration and forced complicity, and so forth, all play an essential role. Second, while these experiences may prove striking in themselves, they are mainly significant in that they contribute to an overall dynamic in which the different parties’ participation is mutually reinforcing. In other words, it is less the particular items of behavior that counts as it is the relational configuration of which these behaviors form a part. It is this higher order of interactive integration that allows ritual performances to absorb ‘errors’ in execution without becoming corrupted, and to accommodate considerable personal (and historical) variation. One of the most interesting aspects of this experiment, as revealed in discussion afterwards, is how the novices and the women perceive their coordinate interaction. While waiting outside in the hallway, most of the novices feel the women’s mumblings to be threatening or complaining, an impression that is accentuated when, following the absolute silence that greets the novice when he is led into the room, the women begin their noise-making as soon as he sits down.6 While some of the novices later said that they were confused as to what expression they should adopt in front of the women, many admit that while seated at the table, they are so focused on my instructions that they are largely unaware of the women’s mumbling. All are taken aback to hear the women collectively sigh or acclaim them once they cry out in pretended pain. After a further moment of tension and disorientation when the women then fall suddenly silent (this was unplanned on my part), the novice addresses the women directly, challenging them by saying out loud (as I tell them to) the rite’s central mystery, “Le rouge est le noir,” to which the women collectively answer, “Oui, le rouge et le noir.” Following this final deception vis-à-vis the women, the novice is led off to stand silently in the curtained-off corner of the room, from where he can listen to the initiation of the remaining novices. The first novices to go behind the curtain invariably set the emotional tone for those who join them later on. However, whatever the general attitude they adopt—in some performances it is impressionably solemn, in others more happy-go-lucky—most of the novices afterwards said that this

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period of collective seclusion is a relaxed and carefree one during which they often congratulate each other and welcome newcomers to the group. Significantly, almost all agreed that during this time, they felt the women’s mumbling to be caring and supportive (following one performance one novice even thanked the women for their encouragement, while several commented upon the women’s feelings of relief). Finally, when the novices triumphantly emerge from behind the curtain to face the women and declare together “Le rouge est le noir”—to which the women can only answer, “Oui, le rouge et le noir”—the novices’ anxiety regarding the women and the ritual itself has disappeared, to be replaced by an attitude of self-conscious swaggering and collective smugness (“From that moment on, I am a different person,” later observed one man). In contrast, the women, while experiencing their mumbling to be at once or (for some) alternately intimidating and encouraging, maintained that they were unaware of these changes in the novices’ attitudes towards their noisemaking. Mostly, as they later admitted, they were simply bored and, as I mentioned, spent quite a bit of time silently consulting with each other. This feeling of boredom, however, should not be confused with indifference, for it turned out to conceal something more complex, a sort of passive or purely reactive arousal, resulting, it would seem, from their paradoxical situation. Thus, one remarkable finding that emerged in discussion afterwards was that almost all of the women, in spite of being, by their own admission, extremely interested in what was happening with the boxes on the table at the other end of the room, pointedly did not try to figure out what was in them or what exactly was going on; one woman was hesitant even to look at the table, whereas most of the women later said that they paid closer attention to the novice’s eyes and face rather than to his actions.7 In other words, while watchfully orchestrating their behavior in accordance with the initiator’s and novices’ actions—starting, stopping, and modulating their mumbling at the right times, sighing (or acclaiming), and responding at the correct moments—the women carefully denied themselves the means of acquiring the knowledge that they felt they had no right to have. (This was especially true for those women participating in the ritual for the second time; their overriding concern was that they properly play their assigned role.) Interestingly enough, the one thing that the women did pay close and continued attention to was the group of newly initiated novices partially hidden behind the curtained-off corner. Novices who had gone through the initiation process were somehow easier for the women to spy upon and speculate about, as though this increasingly large, dissimulated, living mass that emerged from the initiation process— a sort of initiatory entity in its own right—was, in part, of their own making. From the women’s point of view, it is thus in close to perfect affective harmony that, at the end of rite, the men and the women face each other and shout out together, “Le rouge est/et le noir!”

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Aftermath After five minutes, during which I put the boxes and the white cloth away and place the tables and chairs back in their usual arrangement, I ask everyone to come back in and sit down. In order to initiate discussion, I ask them to write down on a piece of paper (which they will hand in to me) whether they are male or female and to indicate what they talked about and with whom during the break. This often gives very interesting results. Not only do the participants tend, at least initially, to form sexually segregated groups during the break (one woman wrote: “Now that they are initiated, they won’t speak to us”), but they often refer to themselves and to each other in terms of their ritual roles (“novices” vs. “women” or “initiated” vs. “uninitiated”). Quite a number of people, in spite of my announcing that The Red and the Black was over, wondered aloud whether the ritual wasn’t still going on. Invariably, some of the women ask the men questions (the men never ask the women anything!), such as: “What was it like?” “Did it really hurt?” “What is in the boxes?” “What did Houseman tell you?” Almost always, such questions were met with obfuscation or a refusal to answer. Typical answers included “We can’t say because we are initiated” or “I can’t tell you because you are a woman.” Let me give some examples. Several women asked one man if he felt different since being initiated and if he suffered a lot, receiving a “yes” answer to both questions. One woman asked a man whether he was really hurt, or if he cried out because he was told to. “Of course it hurt,” he replied, “if not, we wouldn’t have cried out.” “What was it?” she then asked. “It is not for women to know,” he answered. One man, upon being asked what the initiator told him to do, answered, “Place a hand in the red box first and then in the black box next,” thereby revealing nothing (although getting the order of the boxes wrong). Another, to justify his refusal, declared: “The women have it easy; we earned it. We men have paid for it.” Still another explained: “I told the women that they were unable to understand what happened because they were women.” One man reported a discussion with two women and two other men in which the latter declared: “We won’t tell the secret even if we know that everybody knows it.” One woman described the following conversation between a group of women and a group of men: “Do you feel changed?” “Yes, we know things that you will never know.” “That’s true, we are women.” Similarly, one woman, speaking of a group of women talking with an initiated man, wrote: “We didn’t ask him to describe the ritual, women not having access to this type of secret.” One woman overheard another woman asking a man what was in the boxes; to the man’s silence, she replied: “Men have their secrets, and women have theirs.” Some women complained that they should have their own initiation. There were also some really intriguing, exceptional accounts. One woman wrote: “I talked with an initiated man, asking if he was really changed. He said yes, but I didn’t believe him,” while a man wrote that while speaking in a mixed group,

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he asked that nothing of the rite be revealed, mentioning that the punishment for doing so was to get one’s hand cut off. One previously initiated man told a group of new initiates that “the ritual can be a lot harsher,” and another man told a group of women that there was a snake in the red box. Twice, following the performance, one of the men revealed that “spit” was in the box. However, in one case (in which the man preceded this declaration by saying that “supernatural things happened and that the novices were humiliated”), this caused a great outcry from the other men, who, according to their accounts, felt betrayed and told him to shut up (one of them wrote that so-andso had indeed revealed the secret, and that “in doing so he was a bad initiate and that we [the other men] are going to beat him up after class”). In the other instance, the women listened but a number of them wrote down that they didn’t believe what the man told them, or, more exactly, didn’t think that that could be the whole story (this in spite of the fact that when one of the men revealed this secret, another man participating in the discussion said that he was reassured, because he himself wondered what the box really contained). Some accounts revealed that a number of men, talking among themselves, wondered whether they had performed correctly and if they had been told the same thing; none of them, however, revealed to the others what they had been told. According to a number of accounts, some women reproached certain of the men for having given inadequate performances: they didn’t cry out loudly enough. One woman, talking to a man who mistakenly cried out while putting his hand in the black box, observed: “You are the only one who is not even capable of being initiated properly.” During one performance at which there were a great many men, only some of them were called in to be initiated. The others, having spent the whole time in the hallway, asked the initiated participants to let them in on the secret, but to no avail. Surprisingly enough, many women participated in this continued exclusion. For example, one woman asked a group of these uninitiated novices if they didn’t feel frustrated not to have been initiated, whereas one man wrote: “I’m still a novice and during the break I talked to one of the women who told me that I would never be a man. She didn’t tell me anything about the initiation. One of the initiated I talked to explained to me that they had to put their hand first in water and next into something painful.” One uninitiated novice, remarking to several women about the “sadistic tone” of the ritual because they applauded at the men’s pain, was told, “You’re never going to grow up.” Another uninitiated novice wrote: “I didn’t talk to the initiated, but listened very carefully.” Not all of the accounts handed in to me are revealing: some indicate that the participants talked to each other about something other than the ritual, while quite a few simply state “I talked with a man/woman.” However, those accounts that do report on interchanges regarding The Red and the Black are clearly oriented in the same (expected) direction. Secrets are maintained and the existence of incommunicable mysteries actively implied. Moreover, this is often done in such a way that the supposition of the initiateds’ authority and the uninitiateds' lack of understanding are upheld through the collusion of both sexes. Finally, a

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remarkable number of accounts attest to the fact that secret knowledge is to be rightfully withheld from the women simply because they are women. As I have suggested in the introduction to this essay, reactions such as these are more noteworthy than might first appear. The participants may not have a clear idea of the exact nature of the ritual or of what it ‘says’ about men and women, any more than they have of what it ‘says,’ for example, about red and black. However, precise interpretations regarding such matters, I would argue, are beside the point, optional, and largely idiosyncratic. More significant is the way in which the discriminatory relationships—acted out in the highly particular, artificially constructed context that is the ritual performance—appear to take on a life of their own. They seem to acquire the naturalized, self-evident quality that is the hallmark of everyday interaction. The ritual performance provides the participants with an exceptional experience whereby speech and behavior consonant with the relational configuration realized in the course of this performance can be more easily entertained. The participants act and speak in such a way that implies (to themselves and to others), for example, that secrecy, suffering, restraint, silence, knowledge, and manhood on the one hand and, in complementary fashion, exclusion, menace, concern, noise-making, ignorance, and womanhood on the other are not related in an external, contingent manner but in an internal, constitutive one. In this respect, the interactive logic governing the conversations during the break (as revealed in subsequent discussions) is highly significant. It is not that the women constantly pestered the newly initiated to the point that the latter were forced either to reject their advances or to concede scraps of information to them. Rather, the newly initiated paraded themselves in such a way as to invite the women’s questioning, precisely so as to be able rebuff them in this way. It is less that the women were stirred by a pressing need to know than it is that the men solicited proof of the women’s frustrated ignorance. Indeed, what for the men was an act of exclusion lying at the very heart of their distinctive status was, for a fair number of women, a tolerant complicity towards the newly initiateds’ apparent need to flout largely trivial secrets of their own. In other words, The Red and the Black seems to encourage male and female participants to define their sexual identity interdependently, that is, in relation to each other in terms of their respective ritual experiences. In this way, the participants’ actions and words beyond the ritual frame tell the tale of their commitment not to abstract ‘beliefs,’ but to the reality of the relationships they ritually enact. In terms of efficacy, I suspect that one cannot honestly expect more from any ceremonial event.8 Let me try to be as clear as possible about this. The Red and the Black, like rituals generally, does not create anything ex nihilo: unequal relations between men and women in modern Western culture are as much a premise as a result of its performance. However, what this ritual does do is lend new life to sexual discrimination by couching it in the idiom of the largely irrefutable yet difficult to define experience afforded by the ceremonial performance. Certain statements or items of behavior that, in ordinary circumstances, might appear unacceptable or

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outlandish to almost all of the participants—such as explicit claims to the effect that men are inherently superior to women—became, as a result of taking part in The Red and the Black, easier to say and do for all concerned. In some cases, these discriminatory assertions or acts were undertaken—partially, at least—in jest. The Red and the Black authorized the participants, who were for the most part anthropology students, to ‘play’ at being initiates and uninitiated (such play being, of course, informed by expectations based on prior readings of initiation rituals). However, such playfulness, which also takes place in real initiations, in no way detracts from this behavior’s very real effects: sexual antagonism, male solidarity, female self-censuring complicity, prejudiced attitudes towards persons not participating in the ritual, and so forth. In other words, discriminatory discourse and conduct favored by participating in the performance, once said and done, acquire a communicative reality in their own right, anchored in the ritual experience itself: in order to really understand how such assertions and actions are possible—well, you have to go though The Red and the Black. According to this view, then, ritual performance does rather less than more. However, as a distinctive mode of cultural transmission, what it does is immensely significant: it packages recurrent values and ideas in the form of personally invested, highly memorable, self-referential enactments.

Discussion The Red and the Black also serves a pedagogical purpose. Thus, once I have collected the participants’ papers, I initiate a general discussion of the ritual, which invariably goes off in all directions at once. I try to touch upon certain themes that open up onto more general issues regarding some of the entailments of ritual action. One striking feature, already mentioned, is the ease with which the performance is able to accommodate blunders and variations. One man, for example, cried out when putting his hand into the black box, while another, having understood me to say that he should express his feelings when touching my spit, made a great disgusted noise. A few of the men actually held on to the cactus plant in the red box such that I had to tell them several times to drop it before they let go. Quite a number of men revealed in the discussion that they did not realize that “The red is the black” was written on the back of the index card, while some of them admitted that they were so nervous, they didn’t even remember what I had said to them. And, of course, there is considerable variety in the way individual novices and women perform: some men cry out more convincingly than others; some women are more applied than others in their mumbling. There is, one must imagine, a limit as to how much deviation from the established protocol the performance can stand. However, I was surprised at just how little such disparities disrupted the ritual or diminished its apparent effectiveness. This is due, I suggest, at least in part, to the fact that ritual performances are less based on an ordered sequence of behaviors (i.e., a script) than

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oriented towards the generation of interactive patterns whose systemic qualities tend to override the individual irregularities that inevitably occur.9 Thus, for example, it is interesting to observe to what degree the novices’ and the women’s attentiveness are dependent upon one another. At one performance, the women, instead of mumbling to themselves, started speaking to each other in low voices about this, that, and whatever. The men’s concentration was immediately broken: they began looking at the women instead of looking at me, and the performance itself took on the attributes of a game or spectacle. In the same vein, discussion also reveals that successful ritual performance seems to rely less upon a convergence of the participants’ dispositions and motivations than upon the systemic coordination of their overt actions in accordance with these outward relational patterns. Not only do individual novices and women have very different feelings about what they are doing, but their interpretations of what the other group is experiencing are often widely mistaken. Thus, for example, whereas the novices felt the women to be alternately complaining, threatening, supportive, and relieved, the women were mostly puzzled and bored. This in no way detracts from the ritual’s efficacy. Considerable variability also characterizes the participants’ symbolic interpretations of the ritual. Recall that I tried to reduce the ritual’s overt symbolism to a minimum. However, for a number of participants who presume their own and others’ actions to be meaningful, certain aspects of the performance become the object of hermeneutic speculation. Death and blood are sometimes evoked in connection with black and red, respectively; one person claimed that these colors were particularly salient, culturally significant ones such that if the boxes had been blue and yellow, for example, the ritual wouldn’t have worked as well. During the break, one woman asked a novice: “What phrase did the initiator pronounce when you put your hand in the [hurtful] red box? He told you, ‘It’s the women,’ didn’t he?” Several men wondered about the structural opposition between liquid and slimy (black box) on the one hand, and dry and prickly (red box) on the other. Finally, most interesting to me, one woman, who was participating for the second time, wrote: “While I was murmuring, I noticed everything that was red or black in the room, the way Houseman was dressed but also the fact that I had a red folder and two red pens and one black pen.”10 To my mind, this last account illustrates perfectly how ritual symbolism—a wide-ranging idiom rather than a precise code—really works: not by signifying a special message, but by indexing a privileged context. The main symbolic features of The Red and the Black are simply what the participants are given to experience: the antagonistic complementarity of men and women, the association of red and black, the interdependence of concealed and avowed knowledge, the juxtaposition of silence and noise-making. What makes these features ‘symbolic’ is not the existence of particular, welldefined, hidden meanings, but the fact that they become the autoreferential vehicles for designating the system of relationships acted out in the course of the rite and the agencies that this system of relationships implies. Most of the participants, especially the novices, feel that having gone through The Red

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and the Black does make a difference, but are hard put to explain exactly what this difference is. Those aspects of the ritual that allow them to refer to it in speech and action before falling back upon the time-honored tribute to the efficacy of initiation—you have to experience it to understand—constitute the rite’s symbolism. From this point of view, the most salient symbolic feature of The Red and the Black, its most persuasive “thought trap” (Smith 1979), is undoubtedly the pattern of secrecy it begets. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the participants are reluctant to talk about such matters, and, to tell the truth, so am I. Thus, rather than baldly expose the various deceptions that the ritual entails, I do something quite different. While revealing some secrets (such as the “and”/“is” homonymy or the supposed presence of spittle in the black box), I suggest the existence of others (such as the presence of something other than spittle in the black box or the contents of the red box), and in disclosing these further secrets, I intimate the existence of still further levels of dissimulation yet to be made known (such as my instructions to the novices or what goes on behind the curtained-off corner). This process of “secretion” (Zempléni 1976) often involves simultaneously playing myself against the participants and the men against the women. For example, in the middle of a discussion on another subject entirely, having previously disclosed that, contrary to what the novices were led to believe, there was no spittle in the box, I sometimes mention that I will now reveal the “real” secret of the ritual, which only the men will be able to understand. I then show the participants a white egg for a few seconds before putting it back into my pocket. Some of the men, who have experienced the sliminess of what is in the black box, show signs of understanding (but say nothing), while the women, who have not had this experience, do not make the connection (but seem to be aware that they are missing something). By setting up several increasingly obscure layers of secrecy in this way—secrets about secrets about secrets—my goal, as it is when I provide a blatantly spurious background for The Red and the Black before the rite begins, is to introduce a measure of confusion in the minds of the participants. At the beginning of the experiment, this confusion is introduced in order to undermine the ‘play’ frame, which is in danger of taking over. However, the mystification I instigate at the end of the experiment serves another purpose entirely. Initiation rites typically entail a lengthy process whereby new initiates are progressively returned to their daily lives, with various prohibitions and prescriptive measures persisting long after the initiation itself is over. In much the same way, I at once compound and dilute the secretive aspects of The Red and the Black in order to draw out the ritual frame as much as possible. By reproducing, under the guise of learned explanation, the interactive pattern enacted in the course of the ritual’s performance, I try to extend, as gradually and as smoothly as possible, certain essential features of the ritual context into the realm of everyday interaction, thereby sustaining the rite’s efficacy as much as I can. Thus, I always keep at least one secret for myself: for example, I never tell the participants that the egg I show them is a fake one.

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(Self-)reflection In keeping with the confessional tone of the preceding section, I would like to close this account by briefly considering the ritual efficacy of this experiment for the experimenter. This is not mere self-indulgence but raises a question rarely envisaged in the study of initiation rites: What makes the ritual efficacious for the initiators? Evoking the force of ‘tradition’ seems to beg the question, and in any case hardly seems to apply in this instance. The interactive aspects of The Red and the Black may help to account for how this performance acquires singular significance for the novices and for the women, neither of whom have full access to what is going on. However, the situation is surely quite different for the initiating party who, as it were, holds all the cards. In other words, what might it be that prevents me, as the initiator, from experiencing The Red and the Black as a case of straight-out bamboozlement or intimidation, a harmless manipulation of others in the name of a worthy cause (anthropological theory)? As revealed by the way I discuss the ritual’s secrets afterwards, I am reticent to completely debunk The Red and the Black. Why should this be so? I have argued elsewhere (2002) that for the officiants, the ritual efficacy of initiation (and of ritual action generally) derives essentially not from the interactive maneuvering of human participants, such as the novices and the uninitiated women, but from the manipulation of nonpersons: objects, spells, animals, and the like. Such manipulative operations, which I called “simulations” as opposed to “dissimulations,” involving the coordination of other participants’ actions act to set up, in the minds of the officiants (and others), a circular relationship between the ritual activities they undertake and their aptitude to undertake them. These operations, I suggested, in which representation and causality are typically made to converge (cf. Boyer 1990), most often take place in preparation for or subsequent to the ritual performance itself, that is, at a further remove from the other participants’ experience of the rite. It seems to me that something very much along these lines occurs in The Red and the Black. As one student observed, the enormous importance I attribute to the “and”/“is” deception, in spite of the fact that this supposedly supreme mystery is grasped by only some of the novices (the women, of course, are in principle unaware that it even exists), is in itself worthy of note. It is perhaps no accident that my overriding concern is with what is the performance’s only explicitly liturgical feature. I confess that, somewhat perversely, the ignorance of many of the novices regarding this secret acts to justify rather than invalidate my concern, as though I have become convinced that one really has to be initiated several times in order to truly understand what the ritual is about. In much the same way, but perhaps more obviously, can be viewed the care I always take to use the same material apparatus: the same boxes, the same white cloth (which I carefully iron the night before), the same cactus plant, and so forth. When, for example, upon retiring to the bathroom to prepare the ritual,

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I see the dried traces of egg white from previous performances in the bottom of the black box, I find this strangely reassuring. I also find it fitting to be entirely dressed in red and black on the day of the performance (I am not alone in this: one woman who had already been through the ritual showed up in red and black as well). Finally, I always put on a pair of black underwear. Now, this last element is especially worthy of attention. There is no doubt that doing this tickles me because here is a still further level of secrecy that no one (save you, gentle reader) is aware of. However, what is above all worth emphasizing about these private, preparatory goings-on (especially the black underwear) is that, from the other participants’ perspective, they are totally superfluous. To the extent that The Red and the Black might be said to have any ritual efficacy whatsoever, this is surely the case regardless of the color of my underwear. I am forced to conclude that if I undertake these operations, it is because they make the ritual more efficacious for me, the initiator. Specifically, it is precisely because this preparatory behavior is so uncalled for from the other participants’ point of view—and therefore not reducible to a case of artificially induced dissimulation—that, for me, the ritual and my role in it take on added (if somewhat obscure) meaning: it is what makes me and not them the initiator. My underwear has become the tangible touchstone for my own commitment to the effect that something ‘serious’ is going on. Now, I don’t ‘believe,’ even for a second, that The Red and the Black is a real initiation rite or that I am a real ritual officiant, and yet, doing these things as I have done them before—retrospectively, it seems to me that even the first time I did them, I thought that I should have done them before (cf. Casajus 1993)—I feel more in keeping with what the ritual (not the experiment) is about. They just seem right. Better still, as past performances suggest, they seem to work. In short, I suspect that like Lévi-Strauss’s reluctant shaman (1958), by dint of organizing this damn The Red and the Black, I have been hoisted by my own petard.

A Final Note In the interests of academic closure, let me end by considering certain issues that the public, initiate-tells-all nature of the present account might itself have raised. Has everything been revealed? One of the points I have aimed to get across is just how indeterminate such a question really is. As should be clear, within the context of The Red and the Black’s performance, the existence of particular substantive secrets becomes increasingly overshadowed by the presumption of secrecy that is generated through the interactive pattern in which the participants (myself included) are involved. Indeed, to the degree that the experiment may be said to ‘work’ as an initiation rite, it entails a measure of bootstrapped circularity in which dissimulation gives rise to a specific relational form affording conditions for (further) dissimulation(s). One of my goals in conducting, discussing, and writing up this experiment has been to shed some light on the workings of what, in the end, becomes a self-organizing system.

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This system, which I take to be the essence of the initiatory process, is interactively constrained but, in representational terms, eminently open-ended: in the manner of fractal phenomena, it implies the possibility of ever further levels of meaning to be explored. In this sense, there are always additional, unarticulated secrets that may be presumed to remain, which I (or the other participants) have only to think about in order to bring into being, less as ‘things’ to be hidden or disclosed than as premises to be reiterated and put into effect. In short, while I have indeed revealed everything that comes to mind, there is, by definition, no getting to the bottom of the secrets of The Red and the Black. A second, related consideration concerns the impact that the present essay might have upon subsequent enactments. This is an empirical question that is difficult to answer in advance. On the basis of the reactions of those who have been through The Red and the Black several times, and who therefore have also participated in taking it apart afterwards, I suspect that it will have little effect: the coordinate acting out of relationships has its own systemic reasons that reason blissfully ignores. Hopefully, there will always be just enough personal involvement on the part of the participants for them to be pleasantly interested and surprised. My purpose, after all, is not to initiate people but to communicate something about initiation to them. The one person who is most likely to be affected is myself, insofar as describing The Red and the Black in such an exhaustive fashion makes me accountable in a way that sits uncomfortably with the mystifying, initiatory posture I inevitably assume when organizing this event. On the other hand, in the heat of the performance, it will be fairly easy for me to temporarily overlook the fact that I ever wrote this piece (if anyone asks, I’ll tell them that it was all true, but …). All in all, then, while it is likely that my career as an apprentice initiator is not entirely finished, perhaps the time has come for me to hand this particular exercise over to others. In any case, for a while now I have been toying with the idea of moving on to something else—sacrifice, for example.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Results of this research were presented at the Comparative Social Anthropology Working Group (EHESS, Paris) and at the “Working Papers” workshop of the African Systems of Thought research center (EPHE/CNRS, Paris). I would like to thank the participants for their helpful suggestions. I am also indebted to Marika Moisseeff, Don Handelman, Galina Lindquist, Marcio Goldman, Jayme Aranha, Jan Snoek, and an anonymous reader for comments on an earlier draft—and, most importantly, to the many co-experimenters who were willing to share their impressions with me.

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NOTES 1. For a fuller account of this approach to the interpretation of ritual, see Houseman (forthcoming). 2. I teach in the Religious Sciences section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE) in Paris, a graduate-level school, which (as with all French universities) is very cheap and fairly open to outside persons wishing to audit classes. My course has no set curriculum, the only requirement being that I not repeat myself from one year to the next. Consequently, some students attend the class for several years, such that a certain number of them have been involved in the ritual several times. I have so far organized The Red and the Black five times over the last three years. 3. This is, I suspect, a general problem, for whereas games and other explicit instances of ludic activity commonly occur within rituals without calling the latter’s seriousness into question, the status of ritual activity that proceeds from the premises of play appears to be more problematic (see Houseman 2001 for an illustration of ‘pretending to pretend’ in a ritual context; see Houseman 2003 for a discussion of the pragmatic suppositions governing play, ritual, spectacle, and ordinary interaction). 4. In order to make this dissimulated misunderstanding even more explicit, the last two times I have performed The Red and the Black, I have added the following dialogue between the novices behind the curtained-off corner and the women: Novices: “Le rouge est le noir” Women: “Oui, le rouge et le noir” Novices: “Non, le rouge est le noir” Women: “Le rouge et le noir” (interpretable by the novices as “Le rouge est le noir”) Novices: “Oui, le rouge est le noir”

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

From the novices’ point of view, this dialogue, potentially at least, makes perfect sense, whereas for the women it makes no sense at all. Centered upon the phrase “No, the red is the black,” it is built in such a way that the novices and the women are led to assume overtly each other’s roles, all the while covertly confirming (for the novices) the separation between them. One student, who had set up the camera to film the performance, later sent me the videocassette along with a set of paradoxical ‘instructions’ incorporating a still further homonymous confusion that neither I nor anyone else had thought of: “Le rouge hait le noir” (The red hates the black)! An additional source of relational condensation is provided by those men who have already participated in the ritual. I instruct them to stand behind the seated novice and to touch his shoulders as lightly as possible. This behavior is interpreted by the novices, the observing women, and the initiated men alike as being at once protective and intimidating. The women’s concentration upon the novices’ faces is particularly interesting. While the novices perceive themselves as being in plain sight of the women, several women picked up on the fact that my head and body partially block the women’s view of the novices. This suggestion relies on the general idea, put forward at the beginning of the essay, that ritual efficacy derives above all from the participants’ coordinate engagement in the relationships (with human and nonhuman entities) they enact. In this perspective, initiation, while particularly amenable to analyses in such terms, is hardly exceptional. The systemic properties of ritual performance, accentuating the participants’ attunement to the expressive rhythms and effects entailed by their coordinate actions, also accounts for certain emergent, unplanned-for features of The Red and the Black, such as the women’s suddenly falling silent after the novice cries out. The only bit of ‘symbolism’ that almost everyone spontaneously adopted, which, significantly, had nothing to do with the ritual per se, was when I once made the mistake of referring to the curtain concealing the corner (which happened to be green) as “the forest.”

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REFERENCES Barth, Frederick. 1975. Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea. Oslo: Norwegian Universities Press. Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. “Les rites comme actes d’institution.” Pp. 206–215 in Les rites de passage aujourd’hui, ed. Pierre Centlivres and Jacques Hainard. Lausanne: Editions L’Age d’Homme. Boyer, Pascal. 1990. Tradition as Truth and Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Casajus, Dominique. 1993. “Figures paradoxales dans quelques analyses de rituals.” Theme issue “Epistomologie et anthropologie: autoréférence, identité et altérité.” Les Cahiers du CREA 16:141–157. Cohen, Yehudi A. 1964. “Establishment of Identity in a Social Nexus: The Special Case of Initiation Ceremonies and Their Relation to Value and Legal Systems.” American Anthropologist 66:529–552. Handelman, Don. 1998. Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. 2nd ed. New York: Berghahn Books. Houseman, Michael. 1993. “The Interactive Basis of Ritual Effectiveness in a Male Initiation Rite.” Pp. 207–224 in Cognitive Aspects of Religious Symbolism, ed. Pascal Boyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. “La percezione sociale delle azioni rituali.” Ethnosistemi 7:67–74. ———. 2001. “Is this Play? Hazing in French Preparatory Schools.” Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology no. 37:39–47. ———. 2002. “Dissimulation and Simulation as Modes of Religious Reflexivity.” Social Anthropology 10, no. 1:77–89. ———. 2003. “Vers un modèle anthropologique de la pratique psychothérapeutique.” Thérapie Familiale 24, no. 3:289–312. ———. Forthcoming. “Relationality.” In Theorizing Rituals: Classical Topics, Theoretical Approaches, Analytical Concepts, Annotated Bibliography, ed. Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg. Leiden: Brill. Houseman, Michael, and Carlo Severi. 1998 [1994]. Naven or the Other Self: A Relational Approach to Ritual Action. Trans. Michael Fineberg. Leiden: Brill Publications. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1958. “Le sorcier et sa magie.” Pp. 183–203 in Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon. ———. 1971. L’Homme nu. Vol. 4 of Mythologiques, 4 vols. [1964–1971]. Paris: Plon. Smith, Pierre. 1979. “Aspects de l’organisation des rites.” Pp. 139–170 in La fonction symbolique: Essais d’anthropologie religieuse, ed. Michel Izard and Pierre Smith. Paris: Gallimard. Zempléni, Andras. 1976. “La chaîne du secret.” Theme issue “Du secret.” Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 14:312–324. ———. 1991. “Initiation.” Pp. 375–377 in Dictionnaire de l’ethnologie et de l’anthropologie, ed. Pierre Bonte and Michel Izard. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

* Chapter 4

PARTIAL DISCONTINUITY The Mark of Ritual André Iteanu

The issue tackled in this volume is ‘ritual in its own right.’ Its formulation is quite puzzling, as the expression ‘in its own right’ is not a social science concept but a commonsense term. I read it as an invitation to reflect on the very possibility, for anthropology, of defining notions or institutions in themselves, that is, universally, as closed-up objects. After all, is not my discipline devoted to the study of ever-present social differences, none withstanding the universal dimensions that other disciplines might or might not have evidenced? Therefore, to be faithful to this view, what an anthropologist must do to define ritual universally is to review all rituals described by the literature so as to discover Notes for this chapter begin on page 113.

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their common features.1 The variability of ritual is so great, however, that these common features end up by amounting to but a single one, that of repetition. Besides the fact that the notion of repetition as such is difficult to define (since two consecutive rituals are never quite identical), this common dimension poses a serious question. For, is not repetition more generally the implicit quality of almost all of the material that we collect? Therefore, why attribute this quality exclusively to ritual? In sum, on the broadest plane, as anthropologists, would we not simply betray our own endeavor when attempting to define institutions, such as rituals, ‘in their own right,’ if we understand this per se? Furthermore, although those who practice disciplines that do not involve lengthy fieldwork might have the impression that rituals are instinctively recognizable, anthropologists know that most of the time they are not. This is so because in many societies, and especially in Melanesia, it is never absolutely clear where a ritual starts and where it ends. For example, in Papua New Guinea, exchange is so intimately linked with ritual that it is, on the spot, impossible to distinguish them. Consequently, preparing food to be given away is certainly part of the ritual, yet it involves clearing gardens in the exact same way as is done for everyday food use. The same applies as well for establishing new villages and even new social units. All of these activities require their own rituals that also do not have clear limits. Therefore, distinguishing ritual from other activities requires an analytical approach, which I will attempt here, that takes into account a distinction: as a first approximation, in certain societies, contrary to others and to most of our analytical frameworks, ritual is not a radically exclusive category that determines a particular institution as either a ritual or not; instead, every activity is ritual to a certain extent. This specificity raises serious difficulties in defining ritual in a universal mode and is, in my view, responsible for the dilution of the notion of ritual in both Lévi-Strauss’s and Victor Turner’s theories of symbolism and in Mauss’s theory of exchange. To resolve these difficulties, in the present essay, instead of defining ritual per se, I will explore the relations of complementarity and distinction through what I call ‘partial distinction,’ which links ritual to some other form of activity at work within the same society. Using examples from the South Pacific, I argue that the relation that links ritual and exchange constitutes a crucial element in the ideology and sociology of these and other comparable societies. In my view, therefore, the societies under scrutiny force us to understand ‘ritual in its own right’ as the study of the hierarchic relations that link a number of partially distinguished activities, one of which can comparatively be called ritual. Remarkably, the relation between exchange and ritual was never clearly defined in anthropology. Although they do not problematize the question, some authors separate exchange and ritual as far apart as possible—for example, when they oppose ‘sacred rituals,’ which deal with the realm of symbols, to economic exchange, which is predicated on power—while others seem to equate them, particularly when they use the notion of ‘ritual exchange.’ In my view, this radical bipolarity is not the sign of some unacknowledged methodological

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reason, but a reaction to Marcel Mauss’s most influential view of exchange as a “total social fact”2 that explicitly reduces rituals to a simple object of exchange:3 “Further, what they exchange is not exclusively goods and wealth, real and personal property, and things of economic value. Rather, they exchange courtesies, entertainments, rituals, military assistance, women, children, dances, and feasts” (Mauss 1967, 3; emphasis added). Mauss attributes to the notion of exchange a very inclusive meaning that encompasses phenomena previously classified as religion, economy, and politics, among others. In his definition, each exchange is a total social fact connected to other comparable exchanges by the circulation of objects conveying4 a spiritual element that, following Maori language, we will here call the hau. No one can keep this spiritual element for himself or herself, as it must circulate and, at some point in time, return to where it originated. Therefore, in Mauss’s view, the hau promotes a circulation of objects that chains together a number of exchange events. Mauss’s view is doubtless illuminating; however, it also raises questions. For Mauss, since the exchange events are total social facts, what is exchanged in them, and therefore carries hau, goes much beyond material objects. According to Mauss, these include, in addition to entertainments, rituals, and feasts, “fairs in which the market is but one element and the circulation of wealth but one part of a wide and enduring contact” (Mauss 1967, 3; emphasis added). For Mauss, therefore, in the context of exchange events, any element, material and immaterial, that serves an “enduring contact”—in our terms, a relation—is an object of exchange imbued with hau. The term ‘exchange’ could then be correctly applied to all actions that activate relations and, therefore, to all rituals that deal with relations—that is, to almost all rituals altogether.5 Through his definition, Mauss thus blends most rituals, if not all, into exchange, a position that Mauss himself acknowledged by treating ritual as an object of exchange.6 What then remains is only a long chain of exchanges, along which each exchange is logically equivalent to all others, because it is linked to them by the same relation of hau. The great advantage of Mauss’s conception of exchange as a total social fact is that it frees us of distinctions—such as that between the sacred and profane, or between religion, economy, and politics—that recurrently plague anthropology. Its disadvantage is that it leaves no room for important relations like that between exchange and ritual, which nonetheless can be clearly detected in numerous societies we study. This is particularly crucial in many Melanesian societies, where exchange and ritual remain, as I shall show, clearly differentiated, in spite of the fact that exchange ceremonies, in Mauss’s sense of the term, cannot be performed outside what we normally call ritual occasions (marriage, initiation, death, peace ceremony). In Mauss’s argument, the notion of the hau is a key element of the collapse of ritual into exchange. It has been, and still is, a major question in the elucidation of the so-called “loosely structured societies.” Mauss uncovered this notion by analyzing the Maori case, in which exchange plays a prominent role. In

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the present essay, I will reconsider his analysis of the hau in light of material that I recently collected among another South Pacific society, the Orokaiva of Papua New Guinea, reputed as well for the centrality of its exchange ceremonies (see Iteanu 1983; Schwimmer 1973; Williams 1930). My aim here is to outline a midway path that seeks to restore the status of ritual while preserving the unity of the Maussian total social fact.

The Domain of the Maori Hau In “The Spirit of the Gift,” a crucial chapter of Stone Age Economics, Marshall Sahlins chides Marcel Mauss for having voluntarily elided one sentence of Tamata Ranapiri’s famous text that explains the fundamentals of the Maoris’ hau. According to Sahlins (1972, 151, note 8), while the original translation by Best reads, “I will now speak of the hau and of the ceremony of the whangai hau” (emphasis added), Mauss wrote, “Je vais vous parler du hau,” sidestepping the idea of the specific ritual that was then accomplished. Here Sahlins uses this inaccuracy as the central argument of his critique: The disputed text absolutely should be restored to its position as an explanatory gloss to the description of a sacrificial rite. Tamata Ranapiri was trying to make Best understand by this example of gift exchange—example so ordinary that anybody (or any Maori) ought to be able to grasp it immediately—why certain game birds are ceremoniously returned to the hau of the forest, to the source of their abundance. In other words, he adduced a transaction among men parallel to the ritual transaction he was about to relate, such that the former would serve as paradigm for the latter. (157–158)

Sahlins is no doubt right to criticize Mauss’s alteration of the original text.7 Attempting to restore it, he logically claims that Tamata Ranapiri invented the hau story to explain the gist of the whangai hau (ritual to the forest) to Best. Unfortunately, Sahlins’s further argumentation is fraught with a denial of ritual similar to that which he criticized in Mauss. Instead of searching for what is so special about the ‘ritual to the forest’ that needs to be explained by a “gloss,” Sahlins immediately asserts: “Tamata Ranapiri was trying to make Best understand … why certain game birds are ceremoniously returned to the hau of the forest.” Therefore, just like Mauss, he does not take the notion of ritual seriously, but reverts to exchange at once when saying that Tamata Ranapiri “adduced a transaction among men parallel to the ritual transaction” to explain why “game birds” are returned to the forest. Sahlins’s explanation in terms of exchange is, however, very doubtful, as it is hard to see why Tamata Ranapiri needed to invent such a complicated story to explain a transaction that is perfectly clear in itself. Incidentally, Sahlins quotes the text in which Tamata Ranapiri himself explains simply this very transaction to Best:

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It is the mauri [a spell located in the forest] that causes birds to be abundant in the forest, that they may be slain and taken by man. These birds are the property of, or belong to, the mauri, the tohunga [priests, adepts], and the forest: that is to say, they are an equivalent for that important item, the mauri. Hence it is said that offerings should be made to the hau of the forest. The tohunga (priests, adepts) eat the offering because the mauri is theirs: it was they who located it in the forest, who caused it to be. (Best 1909, 439; cited in Sahlins 1972, 158)

Furthermore, the transaction that the hau story describes is obviously quite different from that which takes place in the ritual. To measure this, it suffices to glance at the disparate figures (159, figs. 4.1 and 4.2) with which Sahlins represents them.8 Of course, Sahlins’s guess is that the hau story, although unclear for us, must have been quite plain to the Maori. However, in that case, since Tamata Ranapiri was one of Best’s usual and most reliable informants, he would have understood Best’s difficulty and found a more Westernized explanation. No matter how we take it, the hau metaphor cannot explain why birds are given to eat to the priest of the forest. Nor is it, as Sahlins himself rightly asserts, a general statement about exchange that is meant to be generalized indefinitely by adding up new partners, as many further interpreters seemed to have thought (see, for example, Casajus 1984 and Godelier 1996). The hau story must instead be understood as Tamata Ranapiri invented it, with only three partners. It probably says something important about the ritual to the forest and, maybe indirectly, about a certain type of ritual in general, something that neither Sahlins nor Mauss have talked about. What could it be? To understand it, one must, once again, take a close look at the informant’s statement and at the terms he uses to unfold his story: Suppose that you [A] possess a certain article, and you give that article to me [B], without price. We make no bargain over it. Now, I [B] give that article to a third person [C], who, after some time has elapsed, decides to make some return for it, and so he makes me [B] a present of some article. (Best 1909, 439; cited in Sahlins 1972, 151)

Let us, as many have before, call the three characters of the hau story A, B, and C. What immediately appears in the sequence quoted above is that Tamata Ranapiri is attempting to contrast two sorts of relations:9 that between A and B and that between B and C. The first involves a gift without “bargain over it.” For example, in the ritual to the forest, this gift is made possible by a spell, called “implanting the mauri,” that the priests of the forest (A) perform without any previous bargain, so that all other Maoris (B) can hunt birds. The relation between characters B and C of the hau story is of a different sort. One can reasonably suppose that before B gave to C, a bargain was concluded; otherwise, Tamata Ranapiri would have commented on it, as in the first relation. This hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that this transaction appears to give rise to an actual obligation to make up for the first gift with a “return.”10

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The same distinction between the two relations appears even more clearly in the new translation of the same text that Sahlins asked Biggs, a well-known Maori language specialist, to make: Now, you [A] have something valuable which you give to me [B]. We have no agreement about payment. Now, I [B] give it to someone else [C], and, a long time passes, and that man [C] thinks he has the valuable, he should give some repayment to me [B], and so he does so. Now, that valuable which was given to me [by C], that is the hau of the valuable which was given to me before [by A]. I [B] must give it to you [A]. It would not be correct for me to keep it for myself, whether it be something very good, or bad, that valuable must be given to you from me. Because that valuable is a hau of the other valuable. (152)

Here, as in the former translation, A does not have an “agreement about payment” with B, while C, on the contrary, complies to such an agreement with B when he thinks he “should give him some repayment” because he “detains” the thing the latter gave him. Although no bargain binds them, B must also give back to A, but in a different form and for different reasons. What B gives to A is a “return” and not a “payment.” Therefore, he must give A “any return” he received from C “whether it be something very good, or bad,” that is, whether this thing represents an actual “payment”11 of the first gift or not. Thus, B’s gift to A is not a “payment” but the return of the former valuable’s hau, no matter what the actual thing is worth, for otherwise supernatural sanction is incurred:12 “Were I to keep such an equivalent for myself, then some serious evil would befall me, even death” (Best 1909, 439; cited in Sahlins 1972, 151). The contrast between the two relations has an obvious further dimension. In the ritual to the forest, the birds are said to originate from the forest or to be given by some supernatural beings associated with it. The priests, who by their spell invoke the birds, are considered as intermediaries between the forest and the hunters. As such, they eat the return offering (see Best 1909, 439). Thus, an intermediary plays a crucial role in the relation between A and B, while only a straight dyadic relation links B and C. The relation between B and C is therefore characterized by directness, agreement, and exchange of equivalent value between persons, while that between A and B is distinguished by mediation, circulation of hau, and sanction of a supernatural kind. As a consequence, unlike both Mauss’s and Sahlins’s perceptions, among the Maori the hau is not to be found in every transaction. Annette Weiner perfectly described this discontinuity in the Maori exchange: “Tamata Ranapiri’s Maori text is very clear: the hau was not to be found in all gifts, only in those classified as taonga” (Weiner 1992, 49).13 Deeply preoccupied with the notion of inalienability, Weiner thought that only highly valued taonga objects carried hau. However, the Maori material itself challenges such a permanent association between a specific class of objects and the hau. For example, in the ritual to the forest that concerns us here, the hau is carried by a gift of game birds, the status of which

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does not match that of the highly valued Samoan or Maori taonga. Furthermore, in the hau story, while Tamata Ranapiri uses the term taonga to qualify all objects of exchange, he applies the term hau to these objects only when they circulate between A and B—not between B and C. Therefore, among the Maori, the hau is clearly not associated with any specific type of objects to the exclusion of all others, but is, as I have shown, exclusively and necessarily conveyed by any object that circulates in a relation of the type that links A and B. In my view, Tamata Ranapiri’s hau statement does not attempt to explain to Best, as Mauss and his later interpreters, including Sahlins, thought, the equivalence of a series of identical gifts—their transitivity, one could say—but rather a specific contrast, a ‘partial discontinuity’ between the two sorts of relations that together form the ritual to the forest, a partial discontinuity that probably seemed, even to Tamata Ranapiri, curious and difficult to explain. This partial discontinuity may be summarized as follows: while between B and C gifts are regulated by conventions in a dyadic relation, between A and B gifts are moved about by the hau, regulated by mediation, and sanctioned by supernatural power. This implies that while between B and C, the equivalence between what is given and what is paid back is crucial, between A and B the return gift is equivalent to the first gift only by virtue of the hau, no matter what it is worth. In their interpretations, Mauss and Sahlins were both blind to the partial discontinuity present in the hau story because they were committed to the equivalence of all exchanges and above all to the equality of all partners. They believed that the status of A was equal to that of B and that of C. Sahlins, at least, should have known better. In his hau story, Tamata Ranapiri addresses Best directly (“Now, you have something valuable you give to me”), thus attributing to him the place that the supernatural powers occupy in the ritual to the forest. As with Captain Cook, and many other white persons in the Pacific since then (see, for example, Iteanu and Kapon 2001), Best is apparently here equated to a “god.” Therefore, while between A and B the ritual relation is hierarchic, between B and C, the exchange relation is not.14

Partial Discontinuity and Mediation among the Orokaiva My view of the hau departs greatly from the traditional one. It emphasizes partial discontinuity between ritual and exchange, rather than transitivity among all exchanges. Of course, I would not have dared to contradict Mauss’s strongly established interpretation of the Maori text if during my last fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, a similar problem had not been at the core of what was happening in Jajau, the Orokaiva village where I had worked for the past twenty years. Interestingly for our subject, after a fifty-year experience with Christian rituals, the Orokaiva were then attempting to experiment with exchange ceremonies comparatively by confronting Christian and Orokaiva traditions. This attempt was not motivated by theoretical curiosity but by a feeling of failure. Indeed, most Orokaiva claim today that their situation has deteriorated

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under the constrictions of three converging factors: first, the traditional system is dying; second, both the Anglican and the recently established charismatic churches are at a loss because their messianic promises were never fulfilled; third, the economic development promised by the multinational logging and oil palm companies is not even expected any longer. In this context, in the village of Jajau, three ill-defined, overlapping factions, each led by a big man, whose status as such was fragile, were confronting each other on what must be done. At the larger level, their answer was unanimous: the Orokaiva world was collapsing and its social organization was in disarray because all exchange ceremonies, whether traditional or Christian, were inoperative. Consequently, each faction, around its big man, devised and organized an exchange ceremony, which was expected to be more efficient than those of the others. To conceive these new ceremonies, all three factions drew upon the same stock of knowledge—a reinvented notion of ‘true Orokaiva custom,’ a localized reading of Christianity, and a cargoistic conception of modernity—but accorded different, relative weight to the ideas that compose it. They thus came to dramatically contrasting conclusions and forms of exchange. These experiments will permit us to examine the structure of Orokaiva ritual in a schematized form. The first of these factions was led by David, previously a renowned dancer, who had now become a custom defender—according to him, the last one in Jajau. His train of thought appears clearly in the following dialog in which he scolds Justin, one of his young supporters, for participating in the New Year’s party of his rival, Norman. The latter, with whom David spent his childhood, lives at present in the capital city where he recently obtained a law degree. For Christmas, he had temporarily returned to the village in the hope of beginning a political career. David Norman has adopted White men’s path. He greeted you while walking away. Because, when you invite someone, you can’t let him go home without giving him food. Justin Then what would happen if a man invites you to a feast but gives you no pork? David Everyone will say he does not know the custom. Justin And then what would you do if, later on, this man comes to a feast that you yourself offer after building your own ritual platform? David If a man invites me to a feast and gives me some food, I would get ready to give him back a similar present. But if he invites me and gives me nothing, I am humiliated. Then, when he comes to my feast, I will tell him in public: “You invited me, but you gave me nothing. Learn now how a true man of custom treats his guests!”

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For David, food exchanges in which partners have a direct and nonhierarchic relation are the crucial moment of all exchange ceremonies. Such exchanges radically contrast Orokaiva’s attitude towards life with that of white men.15 Thus, a man who gives nothing away in exchange falls outside the custom, like Norman, whom David blames for having relinquished his own tradition. David’s severe judgment of Norman goes beyond a rival’s biased opinion, as it is based on shared knowledge of which Orokaiva language bears traces. To grasp it, it is useful to know some elementary facts concerning exchange ceremonies. Each Orokaiva ceremony begins with a number of specific gifts16 and ritual actions (pure), which differ according to the occasion (i.e., the first part of initiation is different from that of marriage, from that of funeral, and so forth), and invariably ends up with exchanges of food distributed from a raised platform (pondo). The word pondo that denotes these exchanges has, however, a twofold meaning: on the one hand, it designates each exchange ceremony as a whole, comprising its rituals (pure); on the other hand, it designates, more specifically, only the exchanges that follow these rituals (see Iteanu 1983). This polysemy shows that, contrary to what often seems important to anthropologists, the Orokaiva characterize exchange ceremonies as a whole by their most concrete and unspecific sequence, the food prestations or gifts, rather than by their specific ritual activity, which we would call symbolic. Therefore, when, as Mauss proposed, instead of ‘ritual,’ we use the expression ‘exchange ceremony’ for each whole event, we follow as well the Orokaiva usage of the term. The term pure designates the specific ritual activities that precede pondo, but as well all activities, such as gardening, working for wages, and so forth, that generate material growth. Ritual is thus not seen here as a symbolic activity. It is simply the only activity that generates growth, which is followed by food gifts. We will discuss below the meaning of this association. Like David, Orokaiva language considers that exchange, pondo, encompasses ritual, pure. Thus, when David talks of pondo, he refers at once to the whole ceremony and to its exchange sequence, without even taking into account the sort of ritual to be performed on the occasion. The encompassing position of pondo over pure is recalled once again by a most striking feature: in Orokaiva food exchange, gifts are always identical in kind and composition, independently of the ritual performed (see below; also see Barraud et al. 1994; Schwimmer 1973; Williams 1930). Pigs, taro, bananas, sugarcane, and dry coconut are systematically offered. Lately, rice, tinned meat, canned fish, and money have become acceptable gifts.17 To put it bluntly, Orokaiva exchange gifts are standardized. From pondo to pondo, they vary only in size, both in relation to the giver and to the taker. Conventionally, they also must be most exactly reciprocated (mine), either on the spot or in some future ceremony.18 Consequently, their crucial characteristic is their quantity and not that they carry hau, or anything similar to it. Unlike gifts carrying hau, Orokaiva food gifts do not tend to come back to their origin but are meant to spread away as far as possible in time and space.

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In every exchange, before he gives food, the feast-giver makes a speech in which he asserts his version (amita be) of what the ritual performed has accomplished (why a marriage is reasonable, someone’s death has been avenged, people should go into such and such crop cultivation, etc.). Thereafter, every time a receiver shares again the food he or she received, among his or her relatives and friends, he or she repeats to them what the feast-giver has said. Thus, the food presented from the platform, which is also called amita be, conveys to all successive receivers the original giver’s speech. Hence, all those who end up ingesting that food are thereafter bound by what it stood for. For example, an uncle whose niece is ill-treated by her husband will say: “I can’t complain about it, because I ate the pork that he offered for the wedding.” Food gifts thus transmit knowledge and obligations. They spread out the feast-givers’ fame and renown. They determine the extension in space of the effects of the ritual, and they trigger the receivers’ memory to prolong the ritual efficacy in time. Orokaiva pondo exchange thus determines the ritual’s impact in social space and time, but does not circulate any hau. In sum, exchange permits ritual as a whole to extend in social space and time and to build the relational fabric of society. Its prestations do not carry any hau that points to its origin, for they circulate in accordance with conventions between people who stand in a direct and nonhierarchic relation to each other. This is why, from David’s point of view, and from that of Orokaiva language, exchange is crucial and, in its general framework, encompasses ritual. It is in view of this hierarchy, that David judges his rival Norman very severely, since, according to him, the latter did not share out any food during the New Year’s exchange ceremony he organized. However, Norman has his own opinion on the matter. Here is how he describes what he did. Norman During the night, we prayed with our minister. Then we wrote our sins on small pieces of paper that we burned in the fire. We did this because we wanted to start all anew, with new behaviors, no fights, have a good life. Since we got rid of our sins, 2000 will be a good year. I built this small platform for Jesus Christ. In our Orokaiva custom, pigs are carved on the feast platform. Then they are shared among the guests. But my platform is different. It’s a platform for the Holy Spirit. On it, I cut up the word of God and shared it among my guests. Despite his local background, after spending thirty years in town, Norman only partially mastered the conduct of Orokaiva exchange ceremonies.19 He well knew that he could change the ritual—which we anthropologists call the symbolic meaning of the ceremony—according to his own views, without being in the least criticized. Although he knew he should avoid playing around with the exchange sequence, he was not cautious enough. His mistake was to believe that giving away words was equivalent to giving away food. The trap was subtle, as the problem raised was not a question of matter but a theoretical one. By

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treating a ritual element (the gospel) as an object of exchange, what Norman overlooked is the partial discontinuity between ritual and exchange. Those who reside in the village, including Justin, the young fellow who was earlier talking with David, were, on the contrary, very aware of the problem and they could even theorize about it. Justin Norman’s feast was a failure. His guests returned home starving. They accepted to burn their sins, but in the end they did not get anything to eat. Norman has been stingy, and therefore his ceremony failed. He ate his own pig alone with his family. As he announced, he gathered all seven villages and burned everyone’s sins. So that today, there is not a single sin left in our region. But I am not sure that these people won’t start immediately sinning again. Justin straight away distinguishes two moments in the ritual. In the first one, which expresses a hierarchical relation, the guests send their sins to God, while Norman, as an intermediary, gives them back holy words that carry the hau of God and of the Anglican Church. This exchange belongs entirely to ritual; therefore, the gift of holy words cannot count as a pondo. The platform that Norman built, on which religious dignitaries told the gospel, is like a church but unlike a pondo platform, on which food is stacked. Although this setup cost Norman an awful lot of food and money, Justin insists that he was stingy and that he “ate his own pig alone with his family.”20 No matter what Norman thinks, the words he gave during the ritual were carrying hau and thus were not fit for exchange. However, Justin goes much further than that. He not only affirms the partial discontinuity between the two parts of the exchange ceremonies but also talks about their relations. His point is that failing to give food in a ceremony not only contradicts a moral value but, above all, jeopardizes the efficacy of the exchange ceremony as a whole. Norman is indeed very successful when he burns everyone’s sins in the fire, as they all disappear. However, remarks Justin, since Norman gave no food away, the ritual efficacy cannot last, and all of the villagers will immediately start sinning again. To put it shortly, for Justin, exchange is indispensable to afford durability to ritual efficacy and to spread it into society. Lucien, the leader of the third faction also addresses the question of ritual efficacy but from a different angle. Thirty years ago, he was the first ordained Orokaiva Anglican priest. Now he still believes in God but, like everyone else, has become very critical of the Anglican Church. To save his faith, he has struggled for years to understand why the church rituals have so little efficacy for the Orokaiva. Lucien In our custom, we prayed to our ancestors. However, it was God himself who was fulfilling our desires on the spot, because the spirits of our ancestors were our intercessors with God.

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For example, after I die, each time my younger children will be hungry and want meat, my elder son will go hunting for them. But he will not be alone. I will be there to help him. Once in the bush, he will call me, “Lucien you are dead now, so send me a pig!” and immediately, a pig will appear. It would not wait. At once, a pig would appear … If one asks for something in his prayers, he will not get it directly. God will induce someone to give it. If, for example, I need to pay the school fees of my child, God will not give that money to me directly but suggest to someone the desire to help me. When one prays, the return comes from someone else. Our culture was alive, and then White men’s culture arrived and killed it. This is why today my prayers have no efficacy. In church, we close our eyes to see God and talk to him. But his answer takes an incredibly long time to come. However, we don’t give up and continue to pray again and again, and in the end, we are disappointed and think: “The minister lied to me, I will join another mission.” The pig hunting ritual that Lucien describes is very similar to the Maoris’ ritual to the forest. In both ceremonies, a hunter receives game from some supernatural power (God or the forest) through an intermediary (the ancestors or the priests). By using this example, Lucien therefore comments upon the ritual segment of the exchange ceremony that the two other Orokaiva leaders had so far left aside. Because for the Orokaiva, as I have shown, exchange encompasses ritual, Lucien talks of the relation between the believers and God as an exchange relation and describes prayers not as an act of faith but as objects of exchange—just as the Maori Tamata Ranapiri used the metaphor of exchange when explaining the ritual to the forest. According to Lucien’s Christianized version of Orokaiva tradition, in former times, when the Orokaiva addressed their ancestors in customary rituals, although they were unaware of it, it was God himself who met their prayers.21 The ancestors, then, acted as intermediaries, and consequently all demands were immediately fulfilled. Although there was no convention between them, God systematically sent food to believers through an intermediary or another. These prestations did not belong to the class of the standardized objects of exchange, but carried the hau. Today, however, when the Orokaiva engage in church rituals, they receive nothing in exchange. This shortcoming cannot be attributed to the Anglican Church liturgy itself, for the very same rituals are operative for whites. Therefore, why do Christian rituals remain useless for the Orokaiva? Lucien For the evangelists and the Whites at large, Christianity is their parents’ culture; for us, it is only White men’s. That is why, for as long as we Papuan will pray to God according to the ways the Whites taught us, we never meet Him. As the Orokaiva see it, the whites have their own ancestors who gave them their rituals and still operate today as intermediaries in their relation to God.

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However, when the same whites arrived among the Orokaiva, they forced them to abandon their rituals and their ancestors, to pray in church. This ended the tripartite relation between a ritual performer, God, and an intermediary,22 and the Orokaiva found themselves in a direct relation to God. Now that each believer must pray to God directly, he or she never receives what he or she asks for. In the absence of intermediaries, the Christian rituals are just as useless for the Orokaiva as the money the whites left behind without teaching them how “to grow it.” If nothing changes, Orokaiva prayers will never be answered. In Lucien’s view, although they are encompassed in the value of exchange, ritual relations are indispensable to supply the people and the society with food and meaning. The success of ritual relations, however, wholly depends on their tripartite hierarchic form. This means that each group of people must have their own intermediaries: the Orokaiva theirs, the whites others. Therefore, the notion of the intermediary is not for Lucien a purely ritual device; rather, it suggests that the society as a whole is encompassed in a larger value of exchange. Just as the Maori priests of the forest open the bird hunt for the whole Maori community, the Orokaiva ancestors allow every Orokaiva to be in relation with God.

Ritual versus Exchange: The Notion of Partial Discontinuity From David to Lucien, through Norman, we have traveled from exchange, the second and final part of Orokaiva exchange ceremonies, to ritual, their beginning. Although these three accounts lead in different directions, they are similar in that they scrutinize the position of ritual within society, particularly in relation to exchange. This voyage has brought to light a partial discontinuity between ritual and exchange similar to that found earlier in the Maori text about the hau. In both Maori and Orokaiva cases, as seen by these three men, contrary to Mauss’s and to his interpreters’ reading, exchange is not a transitive field wherein each event is equivalent to all others, involving an indefinite number of equal partners dealing with objects consistently imbued with the hau. Rather, each exchange ceremony is composed of two partially discontinuous sequences that contrast with each other. Ritual, the first of these two sequences, stages a hierarchic relation that links, through an intermediary, the receiver to some superior category, such as a class of supernatural beings,23 the affines, or the whites. This is what happens, for example, when the Maoris exchange with the forest through the intermediary of priests, or when the Orokaiva pray to God through the intermediary of ancestors. This asymmetry between partners is characterized by the fact that while the receiver is usually well identified, the pole or orientation of the relation to which the hau must return remains fuzzy. In the Maori case, the birds are said to be the property of the mauri (spell), the tohunga (priests), and the forest, and the Orokaiva say that the game is sent by God, the ancestors, or the forest. Only in the sense that they keep pointing towards a superior direction can we

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say that the objects of exchange convey the hau of their indistinct donor. This helps us understand why Tamata Ranapiri uses the word hau only when the object circulates towards the superior pole of a relation (from B to A) but neither when it goes towards the inferior pole (from A to B) nor when the relation is equal (from B to C and back). Just as the hau’s origin is not individually determined, neither is it opposable to everyone. This means that once the Orokaiva or the Maori hunter has given away game or birds to someone else, the new holder does not have to deal with the hau of the gift, which remains associated with the hierarchic relation between the original owner and receiver. If in the end the hau is not returned to where it originated, its original receiver risks a sanction of the supernatural type,24 but this does not apply to those who were subsequently given the object or part of it. All rituals are invariably followed by exchange. In exchange, the gifts are more or less standardized, in contrast to those, which are highly specific, that flow in ritual. As such, the exchange objects freely circulate—that is, with no obligation to return to their origin—to dispense the ritual meaning and efficacy and to expand the donor’s fame in social space and time. Here, donor and receiver are both clearly defined. They don’t risk a ‘mystical’ sanction, but the receiver must make an agreement with the giver to return a gift whose equivalence to the first one is primarily measured in terms of quantity.25 In the Maori case, although the hau text states clearly the distinction between ritual and exchange, it does not qualify the relation between the two. Those who have firsthand experience of that society seem to think that anthropology has largely overestimated the hau.26 This may mean that for the Maoris—as with the Orokaiva—exchange is superior to ritual. Among the Orokaiva, as I have shown, both the language and the informants propose an encompassment of ritual by exchange. Such a relation of a whole to its parts well describes the partial discontinuity that we have discerned. Ritual feeds new objects and meaning into social circulation, while exchange prolongs and expands ritual,27 constituting the continuity. Conversely, the contrast earlier developed expresses discontinuity28 that culminates in two forms of reciprocity: a quantitative equivalence between partners of equal value (for exchange), and a value difference between partners exchanging gifts that do not have to match each other quantitatively (for ritual). In my view, delayed reciprocity—which is so common in Melanesia and central in Orokaiva initiation ritual—constitutes a common form of reciprocity that is associated with ritual. Coeval with these two forms of reciprocity is a radical transformation of the objects that circulate. Partial discontinuity indeed transforms ritual objects of exchange that convey hau into standardized exchange material that subsequently freely circulates in the all-extensive exchange. Bluntly put, partial discontinuity transforms specific hau-bonded ritual objects into neutral exchange material. Everything works as if the presence of hau in objects would preclude using them in exchange;29 the objects must therefore go through

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partial discontinuity, enabling the hau they carried to return to where it originated before they can be exchanged. In my view, the transformation of ritual hau objects into exchange objects through partial discontinuity is common in the Pacific. It takes, however, varied forms. Among the Orokaiva, objects that carry hau obtained through ritual from the bush spirits must be cleansed of their hau to circulate in exchange. In other societies, such as the ‘Are’are (de Coppet 1998) or the Mono-Alu (Monnerie 1996) in the Solomon Islands, it is the contrary. Hau-less objects in the form of pearl shell money are obtained from neighboring societies,30 so they can circulate straight away in exchange without going through ritual transformation. Conversely, in the same societies, the major rituals (the chief of peace ritual in ‘Are’are and the funeral ritual in Mono-Alu) gather this money into a well-identified—though different every time—proclaimed sum. Contrary to the divisible shell money, this sum is then considered as a ritual object that can carry the hau, for a while. Unlike among the Orokaiva, in these societies, the objective is not to cleanse ritual objects of hau but rather to constitute ritual objects that can carry hau. The configuration thus unfolded may seem curious to us. I believe, however, that it helps explain a number of questions that have remained open in Melanesia and, more generally, in societies where exchange—in the sense of a total social fact—plays a crucial role. Exchange in its encompassing position could be compared to today’s global, and largely ideal, universal reference to human rights. For the Orokaiva, for example, at that level, the principle of exchange characterizes everything and everyone, present and future. Cargo cults are an application of this idea to relations with whites.31 This supremacy of exchange also manifests itself through its extension in time and space, which covers the particular way of existence of the Melanesian big man and his most universal concern—deployment of his fame and name. Ritual, on the contrary, is an encompassed value that refers to the actual exchange dealings of a partner defined as ‘us’ versus others. In this context, the other, closely associated with the intermediary, is always considered as superior in value. Ritual and its hierarchic relations thus create differentiation to determine the specific identity of the groups and persons that form the social space. However, in both the Orokaiva and the Maori view, to achieve this goal, a directly dyadic relation confronting two partners is insufficient. Just as in the Indian sacrifice analyzed by Hubert and Mauss (1968), one or more intermediaries, including a priest, are necessary to transfer the gift of the god to the sacrificer, severing the dangerous links the gift originally carried. Only then can it be given away.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Fieldwork for this essay has been funded by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. I am indebted to the participants of the “Ritual and Performance” round table organized by Bruce Kapferer and the Centro Incontri Umani in Arcegno (Switzerland) and to those of the seminar Groupe de Travail d'Anthropologie Sociale Comparative of L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris for their incisive comments. Among them, Steven Headley merits special thanks for kindly correcting my English.

NOTES 1. This of course has been done repeatedly in the history of anthropology, at least, from Van Gennep (1981) onwards. 2. For a definition of “total social fact,” see Gofman (1998, 65). 3. Mauss’s very strong statement forced those who defend distinction to radicalize symmetrically their own point of view. 4. Or “moved about by.” 5. See Michael Houseman’s chapter in this volume. 6. Mauss himself studied rituals. However, his famous works on sacrifice (1899) and prayer (1909) are prior to The Gift (1925), in which his ideas are very different. 7. At least, if Best was himself right. 8. In the following paragraphs of the article, it takes nothing less than Sahlins’s whole wit and abstraction to make these figures vaguely comparable. 9. Most commentators of the hau text (see, for example, Casajus 1984) have understood the mention of the third party to whom the gift is given as an indication that exchange is recurrent and can always extend to n plus one number of partners. I, on the contrary, take three as the minimum number of partners required to synthetically demonstrate a contrast. 10. This hypothesis seems to be contradicted by the passage of the text that says that C “decides” to make a return to B, as if C had the choice not to respect the bargain he has made. However, as we will see, this contradiction is only apparent and relative to our own language, as the term “decides” does not imply here a choice, but addresses the fact that C is not obliged to return the present to B in the same sense that B is to A, lest he even die. 11. In some societies, the notion of payment might require the presence of an increment, in others, not. 12. The obligation to give away to a third party is integral to this form of reciprocity. If B immediately gives back to A the hau of the thing he or she received from him or her, he or she would have to give back what A gave in the first place. In Melanesia, such an exchange is impossible and useless. ‘ Benefit’ from A’s prestation emerges only if B gives to C and back. This benefit appears, then, under the form of a delayed return or a credit (Iteanu 1983). 13. Incidentally, Weiner thus contradicts Mauss (1990, 10) whom she quotes just above: “[Taonga] connotes … everything that can be exchanged and used as an object for compensating others.” 14. It is not equal either. It is dyadic in the sense of nonmediated. 15. With whom the relation is always hierarchic (at least from an Orokaiva point of view).

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16. For example, in marriage, first, a number of eclectic goods are given on demand to the party of the bride’s maternal uncle, then specific shell jewels and headdresses are negotiated as part of the bride price to be given to the father. In the funeral, first, the mourners can ask for whatever they think of, then the belongings of the deceased (jewels, weapons, tools, lime pots, clothing) are given away. 17. Western food and money entered the Orokaiva system of gifts with no difficulty because, being mass produced, they never carry any local hau. 18. Therefore, after any specific ritual (death, marriage, and so forth), a number of gifts are offered ‘for the occasion,’ while many others are return gifts related to other ceremonies. 19. Or perhaps, he was forced by the circumstances (having to spend so much with his guests) and only played the fool. 20. Norman had to pay for the travel expenses of all the Christian dignitaries, some of whom came from other provinces by plane. He had to hire a car to drive them around in, rented a sound system, and fed the dignitaries for several days. Therefore, when the pondo started, he had nothing left to give away. 21. The idea is that the Orokaiva did not know it was God then; they came to understand this only after they were Christianized. 22. For Lucien, the Anglican mission was wrong from the start, as it never understood that the Orokaiva were actually praying to God, in their own way. Mistaken, they destroyed the local religious system that must now be restored. 23. What is crucial here is not the ‘sacred’ characteristic of one of the partners, but its hierarchical superiority over the other, The misleading discussion about the religious nature of ‘ritual’ is partially due to the difficulty we have in recognizing hierarchic relations (Iteanu 1990). 24. I use here the expression “of a supernatural type” because these sanctions do not necessarily have to do with supernatural beings, but with any persons or categories or beings that are accorded a superior status, in this context. 25. Among the Orokaiva this equivalence is very strict (mine), and people go a long way to find the exact species of yam that he or she received in a soup or the same brand of canned fish, to the exclusion of all other equivalent ones. 26. Personal communication by Eric Schwimmer. 27. Either through circulating the same object of exchange (Maori) or by promoting its message and fame (Orokaiva). 28. Clearly, the word discontinuity is not fully appropriate to describe this type of relation. I use it however to counterbalance the powerful notion of transitivity that Mauss established and I draw attention to this inadequacy by adding to it the word “partial.” 29. “[I]t is first and foremost a pattern of spiritual bonds between things which are to some extent parts of persons, and persons and groups that behave in some measure as if they were things.” (Mauss 1967, 11) 30. In Melanesia, pearl shell currency is almost universally obtained from a different society. Modern currency is also foreign, in the same sense. 31. In this line of thought, the classical question as to whether or not cargo cults were a response to the whites’ intrusion becomes irrelevant (for a reference work, see Kiliani 1983; for the Orokaiva, see Waiko 1973).

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REFERENCES Barraud, Cécile, Daniel de Coppet, André Iteanu, and Raymond Jamous. 1994. Relations and the Dead. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Best, Elsdon. 1909. “Maori Forest Lore.” Transactions of the New Zealand Institute 42:433–481. Casajus, Dominique. 1984. “L’énigme de la troisième personne.” Pp. 65–79 in Différences, valeurs, hiérarchie. Textes offerts à Louis Dumont, ed. Jean-Claude Galey. Paris: EHESS. Coppet, Daniel de. 1998. “Une monnaie pour une communauté mélanésienne comparée à la nôtre pour l’individu des sociétés européennes.” Pp. 159–211 in La Monnaie souveraine, ed. Michel Aglietta and André Orléan. Paris: Odile Jacob. Godelier, Maurice. 1996. L’énigme du don. Paris: Flammarion. Gofman, Alexander. 1998. “A Vague But Suggestive Concept: The ‘Total Social Fact.’” Pp. 63–71 in Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute, ed. Wendy James and N. J. Allen. New York: Berghahn Books. Hubert, Henri, and Marcel Mauss. 1968 [1899]. “Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice.” Pp. 193–352 in Marcel Mauss. Oeuvres. Vol. 1. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Iteanu, André. 1983. La ronde des échanges: De la circulation aux valeurs chez les Orokaiva. Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences. ———. 1990. “Sacred and Profane Revisited: Durkheim and Dumont Considered in the Orokaiva Context.” Ethnos 55, nos. 3–4:169–183. Iteanu, André, and Eytan Kapon. 2001. Letter to the Dead. 61 min. Paris: Felix Production. Kiliani, Mondher. 1983. Les cultes du cargo mélanésiens. Mythe et rationalité en anthropologie. Lausanne: Editions d’en bas. Mauss, Marcel. 1967 [1925]. The Gift. Trans. Ian Cunnison. New York: W.W. Norton. ———. 1990 [1925]. The Gift. Trans. W. D. Halls. New York: W.W. Norton. Monnerie, Denis. 1996. Nitu. Les vivants, les morts et le cosmos selon la société de Mono-Alu (Iles Salomon). Leyden: Research School CNWS. Sahlins, Marshall D. 1972. Stone Age Economics. London: Tavistock Publications. Schwimmer, Eric. 1973. Exchange in the Social Structure of the Orokaiva: Traditional and Emergent Ideologies in the Northern District of Papua. London: C. Hurst. Van Gennep, Arnold. 1981 [1909]. Les Rites de passage: Etude systématique des rites. Paris: Picard. Waiko, John. 1973. “European-Melanesian Contact in Melanesian Tradition and Literature.” Pp. 417–428 in Priorities in Melanesian Development, ed. Ronald J. May. Canberra: Australian National University. Weiner, Annette. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press. Williams, Francis E. 1930. Orokaiva Society. London: Oxford University Press.

PART III

RITUAL AND EMERGENCE Historical, Phenomenal

* Chapter 5

RELIGIOUS WEEPING AS RITUAL IN THE MEDIEVAL WEST Piroska Nagy

Ever since the remarks of Jules Michelet (1974, 4:167, 593) and the famous Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga (1996, chap. 1), historians have often noted the frequency and vehemence of religious weeping in medieval Christian sources. Historians and anthropologists have also addressed the development of collective weeping rituals in the Christian world (Althoff 1996, 60–79; Christian 1982, 97–114), and of ritual mourning laments that I exclude here, on which see Ernesto de Martino (1958) and Margaret Alexiou (1974). These strongly desired tears, termed the ‘gift of tears’ in the Middle Ages, were reputed to be granted by God as a sign of His presence and were seen as an efficacious means of His grace to wash away one’s sins. Most kinds of medieval weeping, however, may be deemed problematic if analyzed in terms of rituality. Medieval texts describe weeping in general and Notes for this chapter are located on page 135.

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religious weeping in particular as phenomena that resist ritualization. According to the texts, the internal feeling given by God, which is referred to as ‘compunction’—a kind of puncture of the heart that results in the efficacious religious tears, cannot be provoked, formalized, or prescribed, as it depends on God’s grace. However, the same medieval texts—spiritual treatises and hagiographic narratives—describe patterns of weeping, as well as the process that leads, with the help of God, to tears. This ambiguity of medieval sources is the problem I would like to address here; my purpose is to analyze individual religious weeping in relation to the concept of ritual. To what extent can we consider that it was, or could have been, ritualized? Can we regard this kind of weeping process as a peculiar form of ritual? Answering these questions, we can follow medieval authors, according to whom it was impossible to ritualize religious tears without losing their efficacy—their very meaning and raison d’être—a consequence of their relation to the arbitrary nature of divine grace. This was the course I followed in my volume examining the gift of tears (Nagy 2000). Alternatively, we can try to understand the efficacy of tears as a result of a new type of ritual process, one that occurs without social formalization and that I shall hereafter refer to as ‘intimate ritual.’ The elaboration of this concept makes it necessary to revisit our concept of ritual and to question its social, anthropological, and cosmological conditions of operation. This is my purpose in the present essay. In this sense, the current study can be read as a piece of experimental scholarship, approaching an old topic with new tools: I put the concept of ritual into interaction with historical data and methods. Before setting off on this path, I feel it necessary to address anthropologists as a historian and to underline how far the methodologies of our tribes differ. Unfortunately, many historians shy away from concepts and theorizing, claiming that historical truth lies in chronologically ordered details. Anthropologists, in their attempt to understand social systems, are fond of concepts, and their explanations are systemic. Despite their methodological enmity toward abstraction, historians who want to resemble other social scientists use the concept of ritual frequently. In case studies, one finds descriptions of rituals and analyses of social, political, and religious phenomena cast in terms of rituality. In most cases, however, the concept of ritual appears to be vague. Widely used by the social sciences, the term is treated as self-evident; a precise definition is, for the most part, missing. Rather than taking the word for granted, I prefer to give a working definition of it here. Ritual is frequently defined as a “behavior that is formal, stylized, repetitive, and stereotyped, performed earnestly as a social act” (Kottak 2002, 328; see also ibid., 307 and Lenkeit 2001, 221). A ritual can serve both psychological and social needs; it can be associated with supernatural beliefs and can attempt to compel supernatural forces to respond in a specific way. Some rituals—those defined by Arnold Van Gennep (1981) as ‘rites of passage’ and analyzed by Victor Turner (1991)—act in terms of a transformation of the social status and/or the inner state of their participant(s). We can add to this definition that a ritual is a composite of a behavioral pattern—a visible performance (of gestures and/or speech)—that

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has a meaning well known to all. A ritual ‘means’ (operates or refers to) an invisible process—frequently, a transformation—in a given cultural ensemble. In very structuralist terms, we can imagine this as the Saussurian description of sign: sign = signifiant/signifié ritual = performance/invisible process This definition includes rites of passage without being reduced to them. I have tried to underline the fact that in rites, something happens that has a socially recognized meaning. This return to basics in matters of ritual will be accompanied by another, more specifically medievalist return to roots. As others have already remarked (see, for example, Buc 2001, 161ff.), modern anthropology has its origins in medieval Christian theology. Nearer to our concern, the very concept of ritual efficacy stems from Christian theology and liturgy, analyzed and formed into a theory since the twelfth century on the model of sacramental efficacy, the very example of a sign that operates its meaning. As medieval theologians defined it, the sacrament “efficit quod figurat” (operates what it signifies) (Peter Lombard, Sententiae; liber IV, distinctio 22, cap. 2, 2:389; see also Dal Maso 1999; Rosier-Catach 2004). Christian culture developed a well-constructed anthropological discourse, embedded in theology. It was within the frame of theological works that medieval scholars described the constitution of the human being, his or her feelings and acts as well as their meanings. Descriptions of tears in medieval texts can be understood in relation to these theories. In discussing medieval Christian religious processes, especially the process of weeping, in anthropological terms, I will attempt to turn the complex medieval theological system concerning religious efficacy upside down—in the way that Marx attempted to correct Hegel’s philosophical system, which he considered to be resting on its head, by turning it upside down, back on its feet. By risking a sojourn in medieval anthropology, I intend only to reverse the perspective of medieval authors in order to understand their own concepts elaborated in the framework of their theology, as parts of their anthropology. For a better understanding of the relations between rituality and weeping, we have to start from a more general consideration of the latter. Weeping, mentioned quite frequently in scholarly works in the social sciences, seems to have the same fate as ritual, as far as its general understanding is concerned. As the sociologist Jack Katz has recently remarked, social sciences do not describe what crying is: “[C]ontemporary research virtually always glosses the descriptive question” and “studies of crying as a kind of social interaction are concentrated on … practical questions”(Katz 1997, chap. 4, esp. page 176). When the issue of weeping appears in these works, analysis either considers the conditions in which weeping occurs, its intensity and duration, and its gender differences, or reduces the phenomenon to its representation, without trying to produce a comprehensive understanding of crying as a distinctive form of

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socially sensitive behavior (175–178). Two reasons explain this state of affairs. The first results from the biased observations of social scientists to the phenomenon of weeping. Either they observe it as psychologists or anthropologists, or they hear or read about it in the narratives of those who lived, witnessed, or imagined it. The former leads to a phenomenological description, frequent in psychological studies, while the latter leads to the analysis of its representations and is par excellence the case with historians’ limited scope: they cannot do any fieldwork in a vanished reality.1 The second reason is the very nature of weeping as it is experienced and perceived by people of various conditions and in various times. It is widely accepted even today that crying is an “inherently mysterious” phenomenon (Katz 1997, 180). Even if people may have narratives on their crying in joyful or sad situations, crying belongs to body language, which, people feel, frequently communicates things of a depth that would be reduced and deprived of its very meaning if it were described in the analytical terms provided by language. This ‘mystery’ has been recognized by people of very different times and conditions (Barthes 1954, 157; Le Goff 1996, 875n2; Michelet 1974, 4:593). Although very attractive for poets and mystics, this is more of an obstacle to scientific explanation than an explanation in itself. However, Christian culture, when creating a charisma of tears that depends on the sole arbitrariness of God’s grace, appropriated the very mystery of the production of tears.

Weeping between Body and Soul Weeping is a process of expressing emotions that occurs between the soul (where the emotion arises, causing tears) and the body (where actual tears appear); as we have already noted, it is reputed to be difficult to control or to provoke. We can weep with rage, despair, or sudden joy, and sometimes weeping expresses emotions that we cannot even name, that are not always clearly identified, even by the person who is weeping. Regardless of cultural patterns, weeping is recognized as bringing a sensation of relief, and has been considered cathartic in different cultures (Katz 1997, chap. 4; Lutz 1999). This positive emotive state can partly explain why weeping was invested with a favorable religious meaning at the very beginning of Christianity. Christian teaching on tears—although it can be either fragmentary or continuous—describes an interior process occurring through tears. First, Jesus told his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh” (Luke 6:21), or, in another version, “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted” (Matt. 5:5). From this moment on, weeping in this worldly life became associated with the hope of salvation, and slowly attained the reputation of being salutary in itself (see 2 Cor. 7:10: “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death”). Weeping, granted by God, had the capacity of washing sins away: this was its efficacy, understood as a divine operation on the soul.

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The Church Fathers, who wrote a great deal on the benefits of weeping and elaborated on the techniques for provoking it, gave birth to a normative discourse. The first Christian texts to contain extensive teaching on tears and to take into consideration the complexity of the phenomenon of weeping were the Apophtegmata patrum or Sayings of the Desert Fathers. On the one hand, they recommended religious weeping and techniques—acts and thoughts—that could bring on weeping; but on the other hand, they also confessed that sometimes even a perfectly trained spiritual father would lack for tears without understanding why, as equally he would start to weep when he did not expect it and not be able to stop (Les Sentences des pères du désert, 2:N 592/1, 114–117 and N 592/42, 124; 4:265, 104; see also Nagy 2000, 75–94). Tears shed in prayer and in penance were recommended and prescribed to medieval monks, but an outburst of tears depended only on divine will. God could help anyone to weep: He could give tears, which washed away the sins of the soul, but who deserved tears and why, and who did not, depended on His will and grace. In Bernard of Clairvaux’s words, which apply from the age of the Church Fathers for the whole Middle Ages, “Sufficit ad meritum scire quod non sufficiant merita” (In order to be worthy of merit, it is sufficient to know that merit is not sufficient; Sermo 69 super Cantica, 6, 2:200); in other words, God’s arbitrary grace does not depend on one’s merits. This feature enhanced the idea that weeping depended on God’s will, grace, and control. It was in this light that the Fathers envisaged the mystery of tears, which proved so difficult to will—a mystery that remained unexplained for all medieval spiritual seekers. The Christian teaching according to which weeping was a convenient way to communicate sincerely one’s inner truth can be considered as a complementary aspect of weeping through God’s will. Similarly, according to the Gospels, one has to pray in secret: “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou has shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret” (Matt. 6:6), which means inside and not outdoors like hypocrites, and even without loud words, as God reads what is in the heart. Likewise, tears were reputed to be more sincere than any word because they came directly from the heart or the soul and were not manipulated by reason and will. In this view, weeping, however a bodily sign, was conceived first of all as an internal process, occurring in the heart and soul. All that tears brought about, their efficacy for washing away sins, was intimate and hidden: it did not occur in socially defined forms and did not have immediate, evident social effects. From the patristic age down to the later Middle Ages, prayer with tears, an immediate sign of inner spiritual process, was regarded as more apt to be listened to and fulfilled by God. Some authors, such as the eleventh-century monk and abbot John of Fécamp (d. 1078), were interested so much in the intimate, spiritual aspect of tears that in reading their texts, which describe what they called ‘spiritual tears,’ we cannot even be sure that they thought of weeping as a bodily process as well. Long passages in the letters of Peter Damiani (d. 1072), the famous eleventh-century monastic reformer, as in the texts of later medieval spiritual writers, describe at the same time the interior process of tears and the spiritual techniques they

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worked out in order to induce weeping (Epistola 50, 121–122). From the twelfth century onwards, a new kind of devotional literature—known especially from the sixteenth-century Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola (Christian 1982, 103– 104)—developed when the English Cistercian monk Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167) described to his sister, a recluse, the spiritual techniques through which she could recall the sufferings of Jesus Christ by remembering His last days (Vie de recluse, III, 24, 104ff.). Aelred’s technique was original because he made his female reader a participant in the biblical scene he described: she would become identified with an anonymous witness of the scene, with the sinful woman of Bethany, or with the figure of the adulteress. Involving the reader in a game of affective roles could help him or her to identify with the Christian models of weeping and could also help to bring on weeping. All of this literature, however, even when describing the tears that were obviously bodily, was concerned with the inner, psychological origin and the spiritual effects of weeping rather than its bodily manifestation. Christian efficacious weeping was, for medieval religious authors, an intimate, spiritual process. All of these teachings and experiences had the same meaning. Through them, medieval clerics explained that it was impossible to provoke and therefore to prescribe or normalize, and even less to ritualize, efficacious religious tears. This view fit well in the framework of Christian cosmology and anthropology, which refers to God as the origin and the end of the world, as well as the ultimate reality at the heart of one’s intimacy with oneself (Nagy 2002). Its modern analysts followed the interpretation of medieval discourse itself when they halted their analysis, concluding that medieval religious crying resisted all social prescription and control. Instead of questioning the rules of medieval discourse and the conditions in which it was produced, they frequently understood the descriptions of weeping in medieval texts as the genuine expression of a kind of modern self. Can we go further today?

The Weeping Process Religious weeping, as described in their texts, was understood by medieval authors as the ascension of the soul to God. This path can be regarded today as an inner transformation process and analyzed in anthropological terms, in a medieval Christian as well as in a contemporary sense. The inner transformation that occurred with crying was part of the process of religious conversion, a “turning to God” (con-versio) that one could repeat several times during his or her life: from conversion to Christian religion by baptism, through conversion from lay life to the state of religion, to conversion from secular clerical state to monastic and eremitic life, or simply by the return to God during the process of penance or of attaining a superior spiritual state. The repetitions of conversion to God, which could lead someone farther and farther on a spiritual path, required each time a purification process brought about by tears; the desire to return to God necessitated an inner, spiritual purification of sins and

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a kind of opening of the soul. Thus, the Vita Beati Romualdi (Life of Saint Romuald) of Peter Damiani, written in 1042, described the Italian monk and hermit Romuald (d. 1027) as a spiritual hero who specialized in weeping, from his conversion to the accomplishment of his spiritual path, where other mystic gifts were given to him together with the gift of tears. Spiritual mediation of tears—that is, their efficacy, which made them useful and precious—consisted of the capacity to wash away the sins of the soul. At the level of human constants, we can certainly link it to the feeling of relief that weeping can cause. Medieval descriptions of the purification process through religious weeping are more or less detailed and precise, but the stages of the process, happening according to a clear pattern, can be easily reconstructed and have been frequently analyzed by historians of theology or spirituality (Nagy 2000, 421–430). The meaning of this process in which tears play an active part was a transformation of the homo interior (the ‘inner person’), of his or her soul. From the secular, earthly state, tears converted a person to God by means of purification of the soul; all sins disappeared gradually, although during this life the purification process could never stop. One could live this process during what we can consider socialized, real rites of passage (baptism, religious conversion) or in one’s everyday life, undergoing the transformation without socialized forms. There was also a formal analogy, recognized by medieval authors themselves, between the purification by the (exterior) water of baptism and that occurring by the (interior) water of tears. Some spoke about the weeping process as ‘the baptism of tears’ or a ‘second baptism’—the interior, personal one that could perfect the social, exterior one. The process of weeping can be described as a (sign of a) continuous inner transformation, but some authors also distinguished and classified different kinds of tears. The first author who made a clear distinction of two basic kinds of tears—those of spiritual sadness and of spiritual joy—was Gregory the Great (d. 604), one of the most popular authors of the Middle Ages. He described the tears “coming from beneath,” from the regret of past sins, and those “coming from above,” from the longing for God’s realm (Dialogues, III, 34:402–403).2 In the weeping process, the first kind of tears change into the second and contribute to a feeling of relief and happiness. In the early Middle Ages, numerous texts summarized patiently the patristic opinion and reduced the theory of tears to a few sententiae like that of Gregory; high medieval authors underlined in general the continuity of the process from the first to the second stage. From the twelfth century on, however, especially in the scholastic milieu fond of classification, we find four- or five-fold distinctions of tears. Hugo of Sancto Caro, a very popular thirteenth-century Dominican biblical commentator, distinguished in his Postillae on the whole Bible, three, four, or five types of tears according to the subject he was dealing with (Opera omnia 1703, 2:103, col. 3; 3:107, col. 3; 6:16, col. 1; 166, col. 1). But let us observe the generally accepted continuity of this process. Peter Damiani (Epistola 50, 2:121–122) described clearly the change in the activities and thoughts of the person engaged on this path. It was the orientation of preoccupations and activities that changed. Earthly, horizontal concerns

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became vertical and directed towards God; exterior, secular concerns turned inward towards interiority and the holy. In this process of religious weeping, the whole human being was reshaped: a new person, a spiritual man or woman, took the place of the old, earthly one. In order to stay ‘in’ the process, which was extended to the whole life, weeping could not be stopped. The very fact of weeping on the outside testified to the transformation undergone on the inside: as in the Saussurian sign and the ritual performance, bodily weeping signified the inner process that was underway. What we observe with this example is important for our topic: the process itself was intimate, personal, and individual, but it had also an outer side, expressed in a bodily sign, the one thing contemporaries could interpret, and its conventional social meaning. We can follow the whole weeping process in detail in the treatise of John of Fécamp entitled Confessio theologica, or in his prayer on tears (Pro Gratiam lacrymarum obtinenda, 892–894; Confessio theologica, 109–182). The purifying process was started by a quest for tears: those of the prayer that God would certainly appreciate, and those of contrition, shed through regret for one’s sins. These initial tears—when one was lucky enough to be able to cry—were full of sorrow and pain brought on by the thought of those sins. Slowly, they became clearer, as the sins were washed away, and changed into tears of love and desire of God. Longing for God could be—sometimes, and only according to certain authors, such as the Cistercian William of Saint-Thierry (d. 1148)— rewarded by the feeling of God’s very presence in the soul (Exposé sur les Cantiques, 116–119; Nagy 2000, 306–307). The ‘gift of tears’ (gratia lacrymarum or donum lacrymarum) of medieval Latin texts is an ambiguous term that can designate either the whole process or only the tears of desire and the presence of God, those which bring relief and happiness. All of the stages of the process, as described above, are not always present in a narrative (e.g., hagiographic) description or in a spiritual treatise on the utility of tears, which are frequently fragmentary or allusive. However, the continuity of the spiritual process and its steps were well known in the medieval religious world. The lack of thorough descriptions or the omission of certain steps of the process means only that an author did not feel the need to describe what everyone already knew. The full description of the weeping process as it appears in some spiritual texts, such as those of Peter Damiani or John of Fécamp, which became more and more prevalent in the High Middle Ages, deserves the inquiry of historians as it indicates a new kind of attention paid to the phenomenon.

The Meaning: An Intimate Ritual When trying to understand the process in anthropological terms, we have to take note of what happened through these tears. • A spiritual process: for the authors describing it, spiritual transformation was at stake.

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• An intimate process: whether the spiritual tears were shed bodily or not was rarely of interest to medieval authors. Some of them did not even speak of bodily tears; some of them did, but without emphasizing them. These two approaches characterized a large part of the medieval period. On the contrary, spiritual tears had been corporal in late antiquity, and became that again from the thirteenth century onwards. In the Middle Ages, only a few authors paid attention to the bodily aspect of tears in the sense of providing details on the quantity of tears, their bodily effects, their perception by the one who was shedding them or by others, and so on. This third attitude mostly characterized authors of the High and late Middle Ages (from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries). • An individual process: when religious tears were described as operating in efficacious mediation, they always ‘occurred’ to a single person only. They could occur in public and could also be contagious—a weeping spiritual seeker could give the gift of tears to another—but they were not described as part of the framework of a wider social event that could be analyzed as the performance of a weeping ritual. • A process understood in analogy with the sacramental purification of baptism and of penance. Meanwhile, the descriptions follow well-defined patterns, which we can retrace from the patristic age on. The same inner elements—the acts of prayer and penance (asking God for tears to wash one’s sins, seeking God in tears, and so on), the feeling of compunction, which could include contrition or spiritual happiness while feeling God’s presence—appear in different texts of different periods, witnessing the transmission of the tradition inherited from the Church Fathers. As far as external conditions are concerned, we can affirm that there were specific moments (those of religious solitude and inner communication with God) and places (the church, a monk’s cell) appropriate for weeping, even if weeping could also take place elsewhere. Efficacious religious weeping occurred mostly when one performed well-defined religious acts: prayer, penance, and even the liturgical celebration of the Mass. There were a number of occasions during which it was proper to cry, as well as techniques that could help to bring on weeping (the thought of death for the Desert Fathers, or meditation on the suffering of Christ and the Virgin, for later Christianity). In order, however, to be able to weep—one encounters the same warning everywhere—God’s grace, the occurrence of a kind of miracle, was instrumental. Tears were essential in Christian life models; they illustrated God’s presence and efficacious operation, and they had well-defined, salutary functions. As the meaning of the process was spiritual and individual, medieval descriptions were always concerned with the exemplification, through tears, of a personal life process of a monk or a spiritual seeker. For instance, from the beginning of the Middle Ages, religious weeping during the celebration of the Mass contributed to a priest’s honor and was seen as a sign of his devotion. However, weeping during the Mass (as in prayer or during penance) never

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became compulsory or even an attitude that could be taught, imitated, or transmitted by ‘contagion’ to someone else. We do not find any social framework and formalization that would let us describe this process as a ritual. To answer the question as to what should be performed in order to achieve a certain result, we can argue that the religious efficacy of weeping lay in the act of weeping itself. The inner, spiritual transformation analyzed above, which occurred through tears, can be described as a liminal process. Therefore, in anthropological terms, medieval religious weeping can be understood as a ritual process, a kind of intimate ritual that was not socially formalized. This intimate ritual could have possible, but not necessary, social consequences, such as the growth of spiritual authority or a change of social status (e.g., in all cases of conversion). The process in itself was an internal one, limited to a specific person and not accessible to others, though the weeping itself was: it helped society to perceive the process and categorize its result—a change in the person’s spiritual status. This process seems to have functioned as an intimate ritual, through which the person remade herself or himself, presenting the result of this remaking to others. Rather than trying to define more precisely the characteristics of a new form of ritual that we would then contrast with other rituals, we have to consider this intimate ritual as the specific product of the anthropological, cosmological, and historical conditions of medieval Christian society.

Cosmological Conditions Such a description of the efficacious weeping process of internal purification and transformation leads us to revisit the concept of ritual, generally conceived as a public construction, and makes it necessary to examine the cultural conditions of the development of an intimate ritual process. • The first condition of such a cultural development lies in the phenomenology of weeping itself. As we have already noted, the inner transformation through weeping, and the relief it brings after great fear or rage when it unties an emotional knot, is a general feature of the human phenomenon of crying. Because of the inner motion it reveals, the phenomenon of weeping is perceived—today as in medieval times—primarily in terms of the individual. Weeping also highlights the particular individual who weeps as being distinguished from the others by the inner process occurring within himself or herself. • The second condition is the structure of the medieval Christian worldview itself, which defined both the vision of the person as well as that of the society and of the world. Western Christendom perceived itself as a world wherein each person, as well as the entire cosmos, existed in strict dependence on God. Transcendence was thus at the same time social and intimate, as God could look into the heart of anyone. Therefore, to have

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a social meaning and a mediating efficacy, a ritual did not need to be acted as a social gesture in itself (which would have involved other people in its dynamics, or would have depended on special conditions of time, place, or human relationship). According to the Augustinian system, the world of symbols and the invisible was considered as reality, and our world of visible things as a pale and imperfect reflection of it. In this worldview, important things happened outside everyday reality—in another world (paradise, heaven), at another time (that of the origins and of the eschatological future), and in the invisible (the obscurity of the heart). Thus, to sustain visible ritual structures, or even in their absence, intimate ritual was a possible concept. In the most important Christian social ritual, that of the Eucharist during Mass, the real ritual transformation, transubstantiation, is invisible and symbolic. • This twofold view of the world was also polarized in terms of values. Positive values—manifestations of God or belonging to Him—were attached to the forms of an ‘elsewhere,’ the beyond, of which the interiority could be easily considered as one of the avatars. Thus, interiority and its shelter, the body, have gradually become a prime space for the exploration of the divine during the later Middle Ages. • The background of such a use of interiority lies in the very structures of the medieval Western Christian vision of the human being. Christianity can be understood only in its relations to Jewish monotheism; according to standard Christian exegesis, the New Testament takes on its full meaning in relation to the Old Testament. The new relation between God and humankind established by Christianity has frequently been understood as a way of internalizing the relation to God, which in Christianity proceeds by the internal commitment of faith, while this relation is seen as collective and ritual in the Old Testament. Simplification aside, the claim is clear: instead of the ritualized social relations of a society, a whole people—the Christians—had to establish a personal, inner relation with a God who could manifest Himself in the obscurity of the heart. The very phenomenon of conversion, which was ideally a personal process and a transformation of one’s state of mind, testifies to this concept. The Church, a community of the faithful, was first of all a community of people committed to God. (As our concern is the description of the system, we will not discuss here whether, when whole peoples converted through political pressure to Christianity, anything remained in practice of this ideal process in the heads of uncultivated barbarians, who followed by obligation the conversion of their king.) Christianity required an interior personal commitment, before and after the social act of baptism, a commitment to God who scrutinizes the heart, from Whom nothing can be hidden. • The process of an inner transformation—similar to that occurring in a rite of passage, in prayer, conversion, and penance, wherein tears that wash away sins play an important role as the very means of this transformation—is carried out in order to attain a new order, ever-present on the

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horizon of the Christian worldview. Such a new order of the eschatological times was described by Jesus as the moment of the inversion of the order of the matters of this world, when he associated, in his Sermon on the Mount, mourning, tears, and suffering in this life with laughter, spiritual comfort, and beatitude in the world to come (Matt 5:5 and Luke 6:21, quoted supra, p. 122). In these passages of the Beatitudes, Jesus links tears in this life to beatitude in the world to come. Thus, conversion during this life was thought of as a means of approaching the otherworldly beatitude. We can consider the ideal of a ‘life of conversion’ of monks or hermits, or of other candidates to sanctification, as a lifelong rite of passage; this kind of life, the inner state of the self and the social conditions of life it supposed, can be understood in anthropological terms as a long sojourn in the state of liminality described by Victor Turner (1991). On the practical level of the real life of a given monk, hermit, or recluse, we can assume that each individual who adopted this kind of life process could move into and out of liminality, in relation to the stages of his or her own inner progress. • Thus, tears invested with religious efficacy, in the framework of this cosmological stance, were a manifestation of the otherworldly among us. The mysterious outburst of tears, perceived as ‘coming from the heart,’ was understood as the effect of an intimate, spiritual transformation induced by God.

Historical Conditions The cosmological assumptions of medieval Christianity were necessary but not sufficient for the development of an intimate ritual process. An inquiry into the evolution of historical conditions shows how far the development of such a seemingly uncontrollable, interior process—understood as a God-given capacity, a charisma—was linked to social and institutional conditions. A historical study of the phenomenon of religious tears demonstrates why we can argue that valorized medieval weeping was a personal, private ritual through which individuals were able to commune directly with God, while circumventing the social, the Church, and the community. The Middle Ages began with the Christianization of the Roman emperors and, subsequently, of the whole Roman Empire. From that point on, and throughout the medieval Christian world, the institution of the Church was a means of social control that encompassed secular interests. In the historical framework of Western Christendom, everyone had to be baptized in order to be considered a member of society; excommunication meant banishment from society, with more or less serious consequences from time to time and place to place. The Christian faithful, although their commitment had to be theoretically interior, were considered as such only inside the community of the Church. Inner conversion meant (and, more and more, was meant by) baptism, a formal entry into this community that was generally administered at a very early age.

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As we have seen, the ‘charisma’ of tears—their inner, mediating efficacy— had been recognized as such from the time of the Desert Fathers onwards. Observing the general shift of Christian spiritual life, we have also noted that this kind of tears appeared more frequently between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. When weeping scenes became especially frequent at the end of the Middle Ages, the very meaning of weeping, as well as its conditions, began to change. Who wept in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and why? What changed afterwards? The High Middle Ages was the period when the Western Church began to be unified: it was the time of its most important growth and of its strongest institutional claims. During a long twelfth century, in the course of the so-called Gregorian reform and its long-lasting developments (ca. 1050–1250), the Papacy tried to take control over the national churches as well as the spiritual and everyday life of the faithful. This effort was propelled by, among other things, the theoretical elaboration and systematization of the theology of sacraments in the twelfth century. Sacraments became the very means of social control, from baptism through marriage and repeatable penance to death and, beyond that, salvation. By this construction, the Church came to control the private life of its brethren, concentrating all kinds of efficacious mediation in the hands of its priests and thus reducing the place for a personal relation or communication with God. No wonder that it was at this period when all forms of efficacious interior communication with God started to be more and more highly valued. In this context, the intimate ritual of tears—a widely accepted spiritual transformation process that escaped social control—became for a while an outstanding means of grounding one’s spiritual authority, holiness, or religious respectability. Religious weeping with mediating efficacy was an authorized means of inner transformation without the intervention of clergymen. The gift of tears proved to be one of the rare, traditionally accepted ways of witnessing an inner communication with God (we saw that tears could influence Him) as well as of God’s manifestation in one’s inner self or heart. The new kind of awareness of the mediating efficacy of tears, as seen in the detailed descriptions from the eleventh century on, as well as the sociological conditions of those who ‘used’ this kind of charisma, can be characterized quite well. Various reform movements of the Church were represented by a range of figures: the monk-hermit Romuald (who led an adventurous life), his biographer Peter Damiani (engaged in religious reform), the reform abbot John of Fécamp, hermits such as Stephen of Obazine (d. 1159) in the twelfth century, members of new orders such as the Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167), and the early-thirteenth-century Beguines such as Mary of Oignies (d. 1213). All of these people were experimenting with new spiritual paths, proposed new ways of religious life, and were seeking spiritual authority, which they needed to base on their own experiences (Geréby and Nagy forthcoming). They were wandering outside the main path, which was theorized and controlled by authority; their experience was unusual and could also be judged as dangerous. As time

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passed, they belonged more and more frequently to socially weak categories: hermits, illiterate laymen, and women. This last feature can be explained by the general transformations of medieval society. From the High Middle Ages on, the institutional power of the Church was more and more sustained by the framework of literate knowledge, that is, of scholastic theology and law. Those whose social status did not grant them access to these authorized mediating means had to look elsewhere for spiritual authority. The gift of tears was the first manifestation of God in one’s soul that ‘used’ the body, which, by the incarnation of God, became a legitimized place of divine manifestations, though it also remained a place in which one could lose oneself through the inclinations of the flesh. From the thirteenth century on, a whole series of divine signs came to use the corporal being as a place of sacred ‘body art.’ From the stigmata of Francis of Assisi (1226) to the instruments of the Passion found in the heart of Clara of Montefalco (d. 1308) (Il Processo di canonizzazione di Chiara da Montefalco, 269–301), more and more spectacular signs—bodily charismas—flourished as evidence of God’s presence in the intimacy of a spiritual seeker (Vauchez 1988, 499–518). With theological discussions focused on the nature and holiness of such notable bodily signs, less attention was paid to tears and their inner transformation path (see Boureau 1995, 159–172; 1999; James of Voragine, Sermo III, 155; Marston, Quaestiones, 239–244; Vauchez 1968, 595–625). The last medieval chapter of the story of religious weeping is probably the best known. At the end of the Middle Ages, religious weeping is found frequently in the written sources and in the visual arts. Descriptions became long and developed, and collective crying scenes were well designed, especially during preaching and processions. But the meaning of the weeping process and its efficacy— the transformation process as elaborated in late antiquity by the Fathers—no longer appeared. We can consider this development a consequence of the growing suspicion at the end of the Middle Ages of individual communication with God through bodily or interior signs. Weeping as a sign of religious emotion started to lose its role of mediating between God and humans, and was integrated into formalized and ritualized processes of collective devotion. Ritualization reutilized the steps of the spiritual transformation process through weeping, but without obtaining the same result—an internal transformative efficacy. I do not think, however, that one can speak of ‘provoked’ religious weeping in any case. Perhaps techniques were used to achieve such a result, but the formalization and ritualization occurred through the integration of weeping and the techniques that helped to bring on weeping into larger, socially controlled frameworks and forms of devotion, which had their own meaning and process. In comparing late medieval ritualized tears with those analyzed above, a principal change can be observed: the late Middle Ages saw the integration of religious tears into a formalized, social process, that of a ritual in the classical sense. In one of the rare, pioneer articles dedicated to tears by an anthropologist questioning the efficacy of the Christian weeping process, William Christian (1982) describes public and collective weeping rituals in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In these,

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tears appeared among other necessary features of a collective scene, such as whippings or flagellations, and are seen by the author as “provoked weeping,” intended to obtain a specific end. He states that tears were understood as “significant visible evidence for some feelings,” could have “supernatural meaning,” and were encouraged, as was the introspection necessary to perceive them (98). Christian analyzes “weeping [as] something that people could learn how to do, in the course of exciting their emotions. People went to certain places and did certain things in order to weep. For the pain, pious tenderness or sorrow that accompanied weeping was part of an economy of sentiment that could influence God” (97–98). This author clearly describes what we can understand as the historic end of the intrinsic mediating efficacy of weeping and of the intimate ritual. Weeping became a sign of well-known emotions that were reputed to be capable of influencing God and that could be obtained by bodily and spiritual techniques, as in a magic ritual. They belonged to a whole process and could be “provoked by a religious dramaturgy in which relics, images, or people representing saints played an important part.” In the sixteenth century, Christian writes, “there was a general easiness of tears, not only in ritual settings” (100–101). Furthermore, the meaning of these tears—widespread and easily accessible to all of the devout—had changed; they no longer had the reputation of being a kind of rare charisma granted by God. They were seen as a means and a sign of devotion and nothing more, as the questions concerning them in fourteenth-century canonization processes indicate (see Il Processo di canonizzazione di Chiara, XXXV, 6; XLVIII, 7; LI, 8; Il Processo per la canonizzazione di S. Nicola da Tolentino, art. 22, 21; Nagy 2000, 407–408). *** I have analyzed here a particular form of an inner self-transformative process, which we perceive first as one that did not need to be formalized or socially ritualized in order to function. Medieval religious weeping, which served as an inner purification process and was therefore viewed as a visible, bodily sign of sanctity, seems to have worked as a ritual outside of any social control. As a means of inner transformation necessitating (and witnessing) God’s intervention in the soul, it seems to have functioned as a ritual—an intimate ritual— operating ‘in its own right.’ Such a peculiar ritual could emerge in the context of Christianity through the direct relationship between each individual and God. The force that enabled a person to form an interior intimacy with God, to open fully to God, also enabled the person to attain a greater independence of social control, which helped him or her to become more of a private person, in social terms. This ritual was therefore not merely an expression of these processes but also an active force in enabling these processes to occur. I have shown here that such a transformation process depended on the anthropological conditions (the way medieval people perceived their relation to God); on cosmological conditions (how this relation, and human society as such, was thought to be included in the whole conception of the Christian world); and, finally, on historical conditions (specific relations of institutions and persons

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that made the process possible, useful, or necessary at some time, and reduced its importance or transformed it at another). When we consider medieval cosmological order, we have to admit that the very opposition of the usual notion of ritual and the one employed in this essay has to be revised. Of course, we could decide to have nothing to do with a concept that proves to be so flexible, and to stick to medieval notions and descriptions of the inner process. But let us try to understand on what kind of presuppositions that cosmological order was built and has been employed, unquestioned until now, from this point of view. In the medieval Christian world, the genuine opposition one easily can apply between what was socially controlled and what was privately individual did not exist at all; the basic opposition was that between two worlds—the here-below and the beyond. Medieval Christianity constructed the individual—living in this world but oriented towards salvation, the beyond—with a subversive duality in his or her very heart. God, the transcendent, lived in the hearts of the faithful; in order to be an individual, the Christian faithful had to belong to God. Our modern notion of privacy and individuality, based on the possibility of belonging only to oneself and expressing this uniqueness by one’s life, would not have had meaning for medieval Christians. The very notions of modern anthropology, which concentrate on the external social description and functions of rituals, are founded on a post-romantic conception of the individual that eludes any formal social approach and, in any case, cannot be ritualized. This is the individual of the modern world. It is this view that permeates the studies of modern theologians and historians of spirituality, for whom speaking of an intimate, personal, and interior process naturally excludes any social form. An important amount of historiography has questioned the medieval (or later) ‘birth of the individual,’ opposing a ritualistic and collectivist early Middle Ages to a more individualist later Middle Ages, in which the individual—as can be perceived in different kinds of historical evidence—starts to appear from the late eleventh or early twelfth century onwards. If the question of the invention of the individual seems largely outdated today, the schemes remain and continue to surface, even in recent works. Therefore, it is important to emphasize that the strong, normative, ritualizing activity of the Church in the period of the putative birth of the individual was accompanied by the exploration and creation of socially uncontrollable ways of efficacious intimate mediation. In a significant sense, this was indeed the interiorization of intimacy, yet nonetheless not quite a turn to individualism. However, these socially uncontrolled ways occurred in a cultural context replete with social meaning and significance, and thus made sense to others. Today, a personal communication with the invisible and the intimate rituals that accompany it are often perceived as pathological: tears of compunction would easily be understood as a symptom of depressive neurosis, while intimate rituals of verification or purification might be identified, in their compulsive form, as symptoms of mental pathology (compulsive obsessional troubles). Intimate ritual is not systematically perceived as pathological nowadays, yet the suspicion is never so far away. In the Middle Ages, intimate communication

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with the supernatural was encouraged and considered as the highest possible form of communication. In sum, in the world of medieval Christianity, intimacy/interiority and ritual were not mutually exclusive; instead, both were present in the construction of self and society.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to the editors of the volume—especially to Don Handelman, muse and exegete—as well as to Damien Boquet, Judith Rasson, Barbara Rosenwein, and Dionysios Stathakopoulos for their language corrections, thoughtful remarks, and suggestions.

NOTES 1. Most historians today admit the difficulties of approaching ‘reality’ through historical evidence. The (now old) debate comes from literary criticism: see Roland Barthes (1982, 81–90), via structuralism; and for the Anglo-Saxon debate around the “linguistic turn” of an autoreferential history, see Carlo Ginzburg (2003, 13). We can distinguish two great trends among the historians who have recently tried to approach this question on a theoretical basis: firstly, those who see a gap between ‘reality’ and its ‘representations,’ such as Carlo Ginzburg (2001, esp. chap. 3, 73–88), Alain Guerreau (2001, 191–236), John W. Baldwin (1994, xxi–xxviii), Roger Chartier (1989, 1505–1520), and Paul Ricoeur (2001); secondly, others, such as Roland Barthes (1957), Michel Foucault (1966, 1969), Paul Veyne (1996, 385–429), and Jean-Claude Schmitt (1996, 267–278; 2002, 36–37), who consider that there is no distinction between representation and reality, which means that there is no sense to want to go ‘beyond’ representation to find reality. Against the relativism brought by this approach, see Ginzburg (2003, introduction). I thank especially Damien Boquet for illuminating this topic. 2. Katz, one of the rare social scientists to have developed a discourse on crying, distinguishes the same two kinds of weeping as did Gregory (“sad themes of loss or joyful themes of transcendence,” Katz, 191) and later Christian authors following him. We can seriously ask ourselves if the categories named by Gregory are witness to an anthropological pertinence that transcends ages and cultures, or if Katz is himself inside the Christian tradition that he otherwise does not quote. See Katz (1997, 175–222).

REFERENCES Primary Sources Aelred of Rievaulx. Vie de recluse. Ed. Charles Dumont (Sources Chrétiennes 76). Paris: Le Cerf, 1961. Bernard of Clairvaux. Opera. 8 vols. Ed. Jean Leclercq. Rome: Ed. Cistercienses, 1958.

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Gregory the Great. Dialogues. Vol. 2. Ed. Adalbert de Vogüé and Paul Antin (Sources Chrétiennes 260). Paris: Le Cerf, 1980. Hugo of Sancto Caro. Opera omnia. 7 vols. Venice: N. Pezzana, 1703. James of Voragine. Sermo III, De stigmatibus sancti Francisci. In Testimonia minora saeculi XIII de sancto Francisco Assisiensi collecta, ed. Leonard Lemmens. Quaracchi: Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1926. John of Fécamp. Confessio theologica. In Un Maître de la vie spirituelle du XIe siècle, Jean de Fécamp, ed. Jean-Paul Bonnes and Jean Leclercq. Paris: Vrin, 1946. ———. Pro Gratiam lacrymarum obtinenda ex peccatorum recordatione. (Published under the name of Anselm of Canterbury. Oratio XVI ad Christum) Patrologia Latina 158, 892–894. Peter Damiani. Epistola 50. Vol. 2, pp. 70–131, in Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani, ed. Kurt Reindel (Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Die Briefe der Deutschen Kaiserzeit. IV. Band). 4 vols. Munich: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1993. ———. Vita Beati Romualdi. In Fonti per la Storia d’Italia pubblicate dall’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, ed. Giovanni Tabacco. Rome: Nella Sede dell’Istituto Palazzo Borromini, 1957. Peter Lombard. Sententiae in IV libris distinctae. 3rd ed. Grottaferrata: Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1981. Il Processo di canonizzazione di Chiara da Montefalco. Ed. Ernesto Menesto (Quaderni per Centro per il Collegamento degli Studi medievali e umanistici nell’Università di Perugia, 14; Agiografia umbra, 4). Perugia: Regione dell’Umbria, 1984. Il Processo per la canonizzazione di S. Nicola da Tolentino. Ed. Nicolas Occhioni. Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1984. Roger Marston and anonymus. Quaestiones ineditae de B. Francisci stigmatibus. Ed. E. Longpré (“Fr. Rogeri Marston et Anonymi Doctoris OFM quaestiones ineditae de B. Francisci stigmatibus”). Antonianum 7 (1932): 239–244. Les Sentences des pères du désert. 4 vols. Ed. Lucien Régnault and the monks of Solesmes. Solesmes: Abbaye Saint-Pierre de Solesmes, 1970–1981. William of Saint-Thierry. Exposé sur les Cantiques. Ed. Jean-Marie Déchanet (Sources Chrétiennes 82). Paris: Le Cerf, 1962.

Secondary Literature Alexiou, Margaret. 1974. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Althoff, Gerd. 1996. “Empörung, Tränen, Zeknirschung. ‘Emotionen’ in der öffentlichen Kommunikation des Mittelalters.” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 30:60–79. Baldwin, John W. 1994. The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1954. Michelet par lui-même. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1957. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1982. “L’effet de réel.” Pp. 81–90 in Littérature et réalité, ed. Roland Barthes. Paris: Seuil. Boureau, Alain. 1995. “Miracle, volonté et imagination: la mutation scolastique (1270–1320).” Pp. 159–172 in Société des Historiens Médiévistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur Public, Miracles, merveilles et prodiges au Moyen Age. Paris: Sorbonne. ———. 1999. Théologie, science et censure au XIIIe siècle. Le cas de Jean Peckham. Paris: Belles Lettres. Buc, Philippe. 2001. The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chartier, Roger. 1989. “Le monde comme représentation.” Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 44, no. 6:1505–1520.

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Christian, William A., Jr. 1982. “Provoked Religious Weeping in Early Modern Spain.” Pp. 97–114 in Religious Organization and Religious Experience, ed. John Davis. London: Academic Press. Dal Maso, Alberto. 1999. L’efficacia dei sacramenti e la ‘performance’ rituale. Ripensare “l’ex opere operato” a partire dall’antropologia culturale. Padova: Edizioni Messaggero–Abbazia di Santa Giustina. Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les Mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1969. L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard. Geréby, György, and Piroska Nagy. Forthcoming. “Grounding Authority: The Eremitic Experience of Stephen of Obazine.” In Medieval Christianity in Practice, ed. Miri Rubin. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ginzburg, Carlo. 2001. A Distance. Neuf essais sur le point de vue en histoire. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2003. Rapports de force. Histoire, rhétorique, preuve. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, coll. Hautes Etudes. Guerreau, Alain. 2001. L’Avenir d’un passé incertain. Paris: Le Seuil. Huizinga, Johan. 1996 [1919]. The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Katz, Jack. 1997. How Emotions Work. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Kottak, Conrad Phillip. 2002. Cultural Anthropology. 9th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Le Goff, Jacques. 1996. Saint Louis. Paris: Gallimard. Lenkeit, Roberta Edwards. 2001. Introducing Cultural Anthropology. Mountain View, Calif.: McGraw-Hill. Lutz, Tom. 1999. Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears. New York and London: Norton. Martino, Ernesto de. 1958. Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico. Del lamento pagano al pianto di Maria. Torino: Einaudi Michelet, Jules. 1974. Oeuvres complètes. 14 vols. Ed. Paul Viallaneix. Paris: Seuil. Nagy, Piroska. 2000. Le Don des larmes au Moyen Age. Paris: Albin Michel. ———. 2002. “Individualité et larmes monastiques: une expérience de soi ou de Dieu?” In Das Eigene und das Ganze. Zum Individuellen im mittelalterlichen Religiosentum, ed. Gert Melville and Markus Schürer, 107–130 (Vita regularis. Ordnungen und Deutungen religiosen Lebens im Mittelalter, Bd. 16). Münster: Lit Verlag. Ricoeur, Paul. 2001. Histoire et vérité. 3rd ed. Paris: Seuil. Rosier-Catach, Irène, 2004. La parole efficace. Signe, rituel, sacré. Paris: Seuil. Schmitt, Jean-Claude. 1996. “Représentations.” Pp. 267–278 in Georges Duby, L’écriture de l’histoire, ed. Claude Duhamel-Amado and Guy Lobrichon. Bruxelles: De Boeck Université. ———. 2002. Le Corps des images. Paris: Gallimard. Turner, Victor W. 1991. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. 2nd ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Van Gennep, Arnold. 1981 [1909]. Les Rites de passage: Etude systématique des rites. Paris: Picard. Vauchez, André. 1968. “Les Stigmates de saint François et leurs détracteurs dans les derniers siècles du Moyen Age.” Mélanges d’Archéologie et d’Histoire 80:595–625. ———. 1988. La Sainteté en Occident aux dernières siècles du Moyen Age. Rome and Paris: Ecole Française de Rome. Veyne, Paul. 1996 [1978]. “Foucault révolutionne l’histoire.” Pp. 385–429 in Comment on écrit l’histoire, ed. Paul Veyne. Pbk. ed. Paris: Seuil.

* Chapter 6

ENJOYING AN EMERGING ALTERNATIVE WORLD Ritual in Its Own Ludic Right André Droogers

As a concept, the term ‘ritual’ is one whose content is disputed. This is so because it has acquired so many different connotations and uses over the years. However, if in analyzing ritual-like phenomena, one focuses on ritual as the temporary emergence and playful enactment, in its own right, of a shadow reality, the concept may stand a better chance of surviving in scholarly vocabulary. It is therefore worthwhile to consider the nature of the emergence of this ritual counterreality. I suggest that, contrary to the usual connotation of ritual as a solemn and serious occasion, the evocation of reality might bring enjoyment and fun in its creation and performance—an aspect that should receive more attention. ‘Playful’ and ‘serious’ are not necessarily opposites. Although it might be performed in a serious manner, ritual represents a playful activity, just as play is an activity that References for this chapter begin on page 153.

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is taken seriously as long as it lasts. Rituals can serve all kinds of functions, as perceived by either participants or scholars or both, but people also repeat rituals because they offer diversion and satisfaction through the playful creation of a relevant alternative reality. This other reality has its own parameters and invites cultural experiments. It opens up ample opportunities for homo ludens to show his or her ludic capacities and to play with this potential. I have elsewhere defined play as “the capacity to deal simultaneously and subjunctively with two or more ways of classifying reality” (Droogers 1996, 53). In experimenting with the idea of another emergent reality, ritual actors play seriously with variations, inversions, contradictions, double play, irony, incongruity, and counterrealities. The alternative reality is the result of people’s and generations’ playing with different ways of viewing reality. It serves as a counterpoint to the given conditions of everyday life. Once it has emerged, this reality begins to lead its own life, with its own characteristics, even though it remains subject to the agency of the actors. In generating its own emergent phenomena—through the basic and common modus that a different reality can be opened up in a ludic way—ritual establishes itself as a separate and idiosyncratic form of dynamic cultural behavior. Simultaneity is an important aspect of the ludic emergence of a ritual reality alongside normal reality. The reference in my definition of play to simultaneity is comparable to Pruyser’s “double awareness” (1976, 190) as a characteristic of the player. Lifton (1993, 4, 5) speaks of the “Protean self,” “a self of many possibilities,” as a typically human characteristic. When I use the word ‘subjunctively,’ this is a reference to the subjunctive mood indicated by Turner to “express supposition, desire, hypothesis, or possibility” (1988, 25). It is the domain of the “as if,” to be distinguished from the indicative “as is” (1988, 169). Turner referred to the human ludic capacity as a modus “to catch symbols in their movement, so to speak, and to play with their possibilities of form and meaning” (1982, 23). In this essay I will show this capacity at work in a particular ritual. In the first part of the chapter, I will illustrate this approach to ritual from my ethnography of the Wagenia (Congo), describing the initiation ritual for boys (cf. Droogers 1980). In the second part of the essay, I will show that insights from cognitive anthropology—more particularly, connectionism—are helpful in mapping the properties of a ritual, such as the Wagenia initiation, in its own ludic right. The idea of the parallel processing of schemas and repertoires lends itself especially to such a clarification. I define schemas as culturally accepted minimal scripts for and of thought, action, and emotion. I understand these schemas as together forming a repertoire. The term ‘schema’ should not be taken in too much of a static way. Although ritual, being temporary but repeatable, has the connotation of schematization and codification, a new performance is open to change and innovation. The basic connectionist suggestion is that the human mind allows for a rapid and routine comparison by the parallel—and not serial or sequential—processing of alternative schemas and the repertoires of which they are part. In the process, schemas and repertoires are changed and adapted.

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Connectionism thus shows how play works as a means of dealing simultaneously with two or more ways of classifying reality. Accordingly, the ritual shadow world can be understood as the result of the application of the human aptitude for the parallel processing of schemas and repertoires. It will be shown that the ludic in a concrete ritual such as Wagenia initiation can be understood as a specific schema repertoire that helps ritual to establish itself in its own right. The ludic repertoire can be shown to have its own parameters that guide the course of ritual performance. I will argue in addition that this parallel processing of different schemas is a source of enjoyment. In viewing ritual in this way, it becomes possible to go beyond one of the choices that serve to confuse the debate on ritual, that is, whether it is only religious or can also be secular. The other reality of ritual might mirror the supernatural reality on which religion focuses, but it might be fully secular as well. The decisive criterion is that in both religion and ritual an extra dimension is added to ordinary reality. This extra dimension can even be presented playfully as sacred-like, despite being profane, as happens in the case of the Wagenia boys’ initiation.

The Wagenia Initiation Ritual The Wagenia form a small patrilineal and patrilocal ethnic group of an estimated 7,000 people (at the time of research, from 1968 to 1971). They live in six large villages on the banks of the Congo River, next to a series of falls and rapids, in what is now a district of the city of Kisangani, the provincial capital of the Eastern Province of Congo. Traditionally, they lived by fishing in the river and the falls, but when the city was built, almost on their doorstep, and also because of population growth, men gradually sought work in the city, and a number of women started to trade in the city’s central market. Children attended secondary schools in town. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Christian missions, both Catholic and Protestant, have worked among the Wagenia. On more than one occasion, Kisangani has been the tragic scene of military revolts and rebellions that affected the civic population. All of these profound changes in Wagenia society have in some way become reflected in their initiation ritual, quite often in a playful manner. I had the opportunity to observe the Wagenia boys’ initiation ritual in 1970. Living in Kisangani since 1968 and lecturing at its university, I had been doing fieldwork among the Wagenia on the subject of religious change. In one of the villages, a mud house had been built for myself and my family. Once initiation had suddenly started, life in the villages was dominated for five months by the initiation ritual. The eldest men had been initiated at the turn of the century. The initiation in 1970, named after the president at the time, Mobutu, was the tenth since about 1888. The last ritual had been held in 1956 and had been named after the Belgian king Baudouin, who had visited Kisangani that year. Initiation names reflected significant events or circumstances at the time of the

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ritual. In the remainder of the twentieth century, two more initiation performances followed. Congo had become independent in 1960, accompanied by years of conflicts that took place also in Kisangani. Out of fear of more trouble, the men kept postponing the initiation, because once secluded in the initiation camp, boys were not allowed to leave it until the end of the initiation. Finally, in 1970, conditions were deemed sufficiently peaceful to risk the initiation. I will not repeat the analysis that I have made elsewhere of this ritual in terms of the Wagenia symbolic system and social structure (see Droogers 1980). What concerns me here is the following question: What is ludic in this ritual, and how does the ludic—both within and in reaction to a changing context— generate its own emergent ritual phenomena? In view of my definition of play (i.e., the actors’ capacity to deal simultaneously and subjunctively with two or more ways of viewing reality), it is obvious—most noticeably in the initiation camps—that the ritual established a shadow society of its own and a new way of viewing reality. For more than five months, an alternative code of behavior with its own social and symbolic grammar was introduced. People had to think in different terms. Moreover, they were challenged to be creative and innovative in their way of living this other reality. While having to follow what had been imposed as initiation custom and tradition, they at the same time had every opportunity to play their own variations on this theme. Wagenia initiation allowed people to make changes, in accordance with their changing contexts, in what seemed to be a ritual that had been transmitted from generation to generation. Thus, the novices had to go through the ritual phases of the rite de passage—familiar to anthropology since Van Gennep (1960)— of separation from the village, seclusion in an initiation camp, and reintegration into the village, with, in the Wagenia case, short intermediary stages between the first and the second phases (circumcision at the riverside) and between the second and the third phases (a nocturnal bath in the river). But every generation creates its own version, guaranteeing some form of continuity but also introducing some kind of change, usually in response to the changing times. Using the opportunities set by the ritual parameters, in a ludic alternative world of its own, people take the opportunity to mark their cultural and time-bound presence. The initiation ritual could therefore also be read as a comment on changing times. Thus, the Wagenia could be subjected subjects, passive actors, and active ‘passants’ in this rite de passage. The ludic in ritual helped people adapt to changes, such as those of the colonial and postcolonial eras, and at the same time was a guarantee of some form of continued identity, based on a supra-individual repertoire. People were thereby able to change with the times and yet remain who they were. The ritual set the rules and boundaries for their identity construction as a society (and not only as boys and men), and simultaneously left them a certain margin for free innovation. How did this work in practice? Between 29 March and 19 August 1970, in more than forty feasts held mostly on weekends, around 1,300 boys between the age of 5 and 20 were circumcised at one of the five circumcision areas on

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the riverbank, and subsequently brought to one of the fourteen initiation camps. In 1970 the majority of these camps were named after the Congolese army’s military camps. Fifty years ago, four feasts per village or group of villages were held, but when many of the Wagenia children started to go to school, more periods for circumcision were required. Those boys who did not attend school spent much more time in the camps than their colleagues who had to wait until the summer vacation in July before they could enter the camp. Some of the Protestant churches forbade their members to send their boys to initiation, but sometimes boys went on their own initiative. Once in the camp, they were not allowed to leave, not even when their parents commanded them to do so. Dancing, drumming, singing, and general rejoicing were common during the circumcision period and also, though with smaller crowds, during the vigils that usually preceded such days. The feasts were a welcome diversion in the rather dull village life. In the last days of August, when the boys left the camp and the reintegration phase began, the villages were again the scene of excitement and merrymaking.

Social Axes The shadow society was organized with reference to a few relevant and basic types of social relationships: gender, mother’s and father’s relatives, men and boys. The first two are closely related. The way in which these social axes were expressed ritually was marked by the ludic potential of having a temporary alternative reality. Attention was paid as well to the need to adapt to changing external circumstances, also through the possibilities offered by the ludic framework. In fact, these axes represent sets of schemas for thinking, acting, and experiencing social relationships that contained an inner tension. The boys’ initiation served as a crossroads where all of these axes and schemas from the social and cultural repertoire came together and were treated in a ludic manner. The builtin tension was used for ludic purposes, accentuating it but also softening it. At the same time, these schemas were adapted to the changing circumstances of the colonial and postcolonial situation. Even without modernizing influences, this ludic treatment of the social axes sometimes led to a well-humored application of these schemas, making them adaptable and malleable, even—as when making a caricature of them on circumcision days—to the point of blurring what was normally distinguished, putting the exactness of the usual classifications into question. This was a way in which the ludic contributed to the emergence of an alternative world and even to an ironical comment about this alternative reality, as when the women made jokes about the men’s initiation. Let us look more closely at each of these axes. Gender is an obvious aspect of initiation. In the initiation camp itself, an exclusive masculine society was created that contrasted with the village and emphasized gender differences, not inappropriate during a ritual that marked a boy’s transition from his dependence as a child on the women to integration into the men’s group, even though for the

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youngest this was not put into effect until much later, whereas for the oldest boys it came ex post facto. This could lead to comic situations, as when the smallest five-year-old boys were theoretically treated as men or, inversely, when the oldest boys, some of whom were already married, were no longer treated as men but as boys still to be initiated. The women were excluded from entering this male world, yet they were indispensable as an audience, sometimes literally so in that they were supposed to hear the sounds that came from the camp. A closely connected axis was that between paternal and maternal relatives. Like the women, the male maternal relatives could still be present at the first stages of the ritual, held in the village, which separated the boy from his former status. The day before he was to be circumcised, a female maternal relative shaved the boy’s hair. The women could also watch and rejoice when the boys, shortly before their circumcision, danced with their male paternal relatives on the roofs of their parents’ homes and were then carried to the circumcision ground on the shoulders of male maternal relatives. But when the men and the boys reached the riverbank, all of the women had to stay behind and could watch the circumcision only from a distance. When the newly circumcised boys were carried from the circumcision ground at the riverbank to the camp in the direct neighborhood of the village, the women were supposed to be inside their houses. Yet they often crossed this categorical boundary and peeped through cracks in the wooden windows and doors; in some cases, despite male threats that they would remain barren, the women even stayed outside to shake hands with the boys. In the seclusion period, there were several secrets that surrounded camp life. None of the women was allowed to know them, and yet they all knew them, thus blurring a male categorical distinction. If they could—indirectly and with a wink of understanding—show this, without spoiling the men’s game, they would not fail to grasp the opportunity. Several of these camp secrets were in fact rather artificial and existed only for the purpose of having a secret that excluded the women. In short, the presence of a rare event in village reality provoked a festive climate in which experimenting with the symbolic expression of gender differences and boundaries became possible. The basic schemas were available in the traditional initiation repertoire, but in this climate their minimal nature allowed for new ways of elaborating them or even deviating from them. In the course of the seclusion period, the male maternal relatives played a less important role, though they could come and visit their sisters’ sons. The paternal relatives were primarily responsible for the initiation camp of their village, just as the maternal relatives had that same role to play in their own villages. Another axis of relationships that played a role was that between the novices and the initiated men, who were ritually in charge. The boys were to become members of the men’s group but were in no man’s land—no longer a child, not yet a man. This indeterminacy, as well as the men being their connection with the world outside the camp, made the novices dependent on the men. The men brought food and took care of the boys in their confinement.

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These three axes played an important role in boys’ initiation. In the alternative minisociety that the initiation ritual created, these axes were the raw material with which the people played. Their treatment of these social relationships was marked by the transition that was at stake—that from childhood to manhood. In other Wagenia rites of passage, other transitions referred to different axes (unborn/born, bride-givers/bride-takers, living/dead, healthy/ill) that led to differences among the rituals. Yet all of the Wagenia rituals of transition shared a symbolic repertoire, even though some symbols were specific to one ritual (e.g., circumcision). Thus, in several rituals, heads were shaved, bodies were painted and adorned, people abstained from washing themselves in the river until they took their first ceremonial bath as a sign of reintegration, they had to fast, they had to stay in seclusion for some time, or they did things emphatically three times, whereas one time would have sufficed. In other words, there was a symbolic vocabulary that people could use and with which they could experiment. On the one hand, they had to employ this supra-ritual code but, on the other, could also add to and subtract from it. The ludic context led to the rise of new symbols but with a familiar message.

Comic Ritual Stages Throughout the initiation, the men were simultaneously involved in a double opposition, with the women and with the novices, who, for their part, did not remain passive. In both types of relationships, play was present, and the emerging ritual practice was marked by it. Through inversion, imitation, deviation, distortion, or exaggeration, fun was made of the other category in the relationship. The extraordinary moment of a whole group of boys going through a social transition opened up a temporary possibility for playing with old and new notions and symbols. Several examples of this can be given. Once, during a night wake that preceded the circumcision feast, women sang an improvised song alluding to the fact that the men who were to take the food for the boys to the camp ate part of it, actually one of the men’s secrets. During the circumcision feasts, there were women sporting phalluses and men who acted as transvestites, thus playing with and inverting gender roles. On several occasions, the men dancing with the boys on the roofs grotesquely mimed coition, referring to the conception of the boy and thus to his parents and to gender relations. Other dancers indicated in an exaggerated way the size of the boy, as if he were a giant. Hashish was officially prohibited by the authorities, but sometimes the men on the roofs openly and ostentatiously smoked it. All of these small pieces of ironic theater were performed to the amusement of the audience. For the initiation period, men adopted invented animal names and announced these at the top of their voice when they took the path to the camp entrance. The boys responded by imitating the sound of that animal. The alternative reality that the camp represented was thus concretized through a

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reference to the animal world as mirroring the human world. Sometimes the name was simply unpronounceable nonsense, such as Nkpenkpenikpokpo. I myself was called Pítolo (pétrole, kerosene), because the boys begged me to buy kerosene for their lamps. In the camp, the boys were submitted to trials and curses in a teasing way. As they entered the camp, some of the men conversed with the boys, wishing them well and making them repeat words that expressed well-being. But such a conversation could just as easily change suddenly into a series of curses, the fun being that the boys were repeating the words automatically, thus cursing themselves, to the general joy of all present. Or a man started to play the clown and made the boys imitate him. One young man made the boys repeat after him the words of the poem “Femme nue, femme noire,” by the Senegalese poet L. S. Senghor. This was an occasion for fun because many of the boys did not understand the words and just imitated the sounds, but also because of the erotic connotations of the poem that some understood and others did not. The men also invented nicknames for the boys. They teased them about their girlfriends. Men could utter imprecations against one boy or all of them, asking favors, such as repairing nets, to revoke the curse. Some of these imprecations were so absurd that they were clearly meant for diversion, for example, shoes that do not fit, interestingly including a modern element in a traditional practice. The cohort of men initiated in the previous initiation ritual (1956) was especially active in uttering the curses, while older men were authorized to overrule these imprecations and undo them. The novices felt free to react to these youngest men, calling them “baby initiates” or trying to pull off their loincloths. At night, the men and boys regularly engaged in communitas-like dancing that blurred the distinction between them. They danced to the accompaniment of an instrument that was supposed to imitate the sound of a parrot-like bird. The women were to think that the boys in the camp slept in the open air, although there was a hut in the U-shaped form of a bird, with breast and wings. To them, the bird whose sound they heard, and with whom the men danced and sang, was supposed to be huge. It was said to cover the boys with its wings during the night or when it rained. All of the women knew that there was a hut in the camp, but they nevertheless played along, even to the extent that when the camp hut was burned after initiation and the flames were visible over the fence of the camp, the women continued their work and acted as if they did not see the fire, simply because to them, formally speaking, there was no hut. The initiation was an opportunity for men and women to engage in erotic word games that were normally taboo. On several occasions, especially when it rained and the women were supposed to think that the boys in the camp were suffering, groups of women came to the path leading to the camp and began to dance and sing lewd songs. The men in the camp responded in a similar way. When the women’s song referred to the penis, the men shouted words that indicated the vagina. As soon as the men started to play the instrument of the big bird, the women would run away. Gender differences were accentuated and at the same time mocked.

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On other occasions, some of the men made the novices sing songs that insulted their mothers or sisters and praised male virility. Also, when boys were recovering from their circumcision, they slept on their bellies and let their penis hang through an opening in the bed in the camp hut. The men then told the women in the village that the boys had already slept with a woman in the camp. This was doubly funny because these boys were generally known to be still recovering from their painful operation. And, of course, some were far too young for sexual maturity. Sometimes the enjoyment came from the combination of traditional internal and modern external elements. When there were sufficient boys already in the camp, on the arrival of new novices, those who were already there staged a military parade that imitated what they had observed in town on colonial and national holidays. Traditionally—but what can be called traditional?—they would have appeared from behind the hut in a long line, but this had been transformed into a parade since the 1930s. Drums were made from tins, quasimilitary uniforms were put together, and lyrics were written to marching tunes. Each camp did its very best to produce a beautiful parade. Usually, the songs referred to events or persons characteristic of that camp. In the camp where I spent most of my time, the presence of a fieldworker was mentioned in one of the parade songs. (A friend of mine who visited the Wagenia villages in 2002 heard the women sing this song spontaneously when he was recognized as my friend.) The oldest boys played the role of authorities, with the camp chief being, at least in 1970, Mobutu (in 1956 it had been Baudouin, after the Belgian king) and the other boys being ministers and generals. In all of the camps, a boy played the part of the archbishop and was always prominently featured at the real parades. The smallest novice was invariably chosen for this role since, at the time, the archbishop of Kisangani was short. The ‘archbishop’ took part in the parade, making the sign of the cross and blessing those present. This absurd minibishop contributed to the general joy of the parade. In fact, the parade was a way of situating the Wagenia in an expanding world—in this case, in a new political, military, and religious system. On the day they left the camp to return to their families, the boys in the 1970 initiation staged the parade outside of the camp for the first time, thus allowing the women to see what the men and boys had been doing in their camp parade. In that way, an element was added to the traditional sequence of events, which at this stage of the ritual usually consisted only of a welcoming ceremony for the boys in which their mothers saw them again, sometimes after months of seclusion. With the intention of showing the women how much fun the parade was, from then on the gender boundary was ignored at this particular point. The night before the novices were to return to their families, they left the camp for a long-awaited first bath in the river. In the camp, they washed themselves only with lime water that painted them white, a protection against the wandering spirits of their ancestors, who were also supposed to be white. During the night of the exodus from the camps, the women had to stay inside their

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houses. They were supposed to think that the novices were chased to the river by an elephant, making a tremendous racket as it passed. The men wielded bull-roarers to accompany the passing of the animal. Sand and gravel were thrown on corrugated tin roofs of houses. The women were not the least impressed but played along. The next morning, one of the older women gave my wife an account of what had happened, imitating the elephant’s sound, amid gusts of laughter. Both the big bird and the elephant were called animals, but they were sometimes also called spirits, as if the men were enacting a religion of their own making, in which the women had to play the role of believers. Thus, they not only created a male ritual world but also arranged for a quasi-supernatural extension. In the aftermath of the initiation, after the boys had returned to the villages, several activities occurred, such as a begging tour through the villages and even the city center (where people were shocked by these boys painted black with the oiled ashes of the burnt camp hut and clothed in skirts of ripped banana leaves). At one stage, the boys sat, painted red, in front of their parents’ house, simply to show themselves to passersby. There was also one evening dance about which nobody remembered what exactly to do. As a consequence, each village interpreted that part of the ritual in its own way, reinventing it, as it were. The atmosphere was invariably that of giggling, dancing boys and men. After the initiation, the novices held wrestling matches for which they had been training in the camps. These matches were usually between villages from opposite riverbanks. This added another social axis to the motivation for play, since during these matches songs were sung that satirically insulted the other village and celebrated the glory of the wrestlers of one’s own village. The girls and women especially were active in singing these songs while dancing in the direction of the other party, but the men could also be active in mocking the other team. By now it may be clear why a frequent answer to my question of why the initiation was held was: “Because it is fun.” Of course, one of the other answers was: “To make men out of boys,” but those respondents also acknowledged the pleasure that the initiation gave. For five months, life in the villages escaped routine; the fact that there could be several years between celebrations of the ritual contributed to the general excitement. There was a festive climate and a joyful atmosphere, and a great deal of creativity was generated. Besides, there were joking relationships that expressed and softened some of the social oppositions that played a role in the ritual and were part of people’s experience: those regarding gender, the relationship between novices and the initiated, and the opposition between villages on either side of the riverbank. The creation of a male shadow society opened many opportunities for enjoyment and diversion. Let us move now from the ethnographic to the theorizing level and discuss the possibilities of viewing ritual as a ludic way of creating an alternative world in its own right, with its own mechanisms and internal drives, colored by the playfulness of the occasion.

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Ritual Play As I want to show in this essay, and as may have become clear from the preceding ethnographic sections, enjoyment through the emergence of an alternative reality is an important dimension of ritual and presents itself as a significant reason why participants like their rituals, repeat them, and perform them in a particular way. Huizinga, in his now classic book Homo ludens (1971), suggested that play creates its own order. He cited myth and ritual as areas in which the ludic is very much present and in which this order is expressed. Whether in child’s play, in that of adults, in religion, or in art, another reality is evoked. The ritual creation of another reality offers the possibility to live a different life—to engage in it, to enjoy it, and to derive sense and satisfaction from it. It is constructed as a counterworld, as a—sometimes critical, sometimes reaffirming—comment on ordinary life. The ritual reality often complements and contrasts with normal, everyday reality—as is the case with Wagenia initiation—but can also redress it after a crisis, as happens in rituals of crisis and affliction. Ritual has its own occasions. It is activated when people living a dayto-day reality pass through some crisis or transition or when they change their social positions in it, like the Wagenia boys passing into manhood. In short, these are moments in time when people become aware of that regular reality and of its shortcomings and strengths. Homo ludens then wakes up and uses his or her capacity to evoke a different reality, certainly not from scratch, and admittedly for all kinds of purposes but also—and not least—for diversion. Considering ritual in its own right draws attention to the possibility that on these occasions the practice of ritual generates or creates its own emergent phenomena, as in the Wagenia countersociety of the initiation camp and the whole sequence of events that accompanies it. The ritual actor works within a setting that facilitates but also directs his or her ritual performances. It appears that the human gift for play, in creating the possibility of an alternative reality and another way of classifying realities, both facilitates and limits the ritual actor’s behavior. Human beings everywhere use this aptitude to invoke and construct another reality, yet at the same time they reify that emerged reality, make it part of ‘tradition,’ and thus frame the imagination of future generations. The various generations of men influenced the way the Wagenia initiation was enacted and together represented and guarded an ideal form of the initiation ritual. In that sense, ritual plays a role in its own right, presupposing another reality that obliges people to work within it and within its specific characteristics. At the same time, contrary to that ordinary usage, ritual language allows for varying use and an outburst of new ideas and actions, though not everything is feasible. As is clear from the Wagenia initiation ritual, inversions, deviations, and variations are all possible, and the impression may be given that anything goes. This produces the sensation of enjoyment. Moreover, very often new elements are introduced—with a wink, as it were—such as the painful shoes as well as the military parade in the Wagenia case. So not only is there an alternative reality, but it is constructed with a certain degree of pleasure. The ritual occasion

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creates the opportunity for enjoyment. It sets the ritual grammar and obliges people to speak its language, but people do so with their own accents.

Schema Repertoires In order to get a firmer grasp on the way that the ludic nourishes ritual in its own right, I will introduce a metaphor other than that of language or grammar, namely, repertoire. In speaking of culture as a set of repertoires or even as the human capacity to use that set, the dynamics of culture as a process are made explicit. Repertoires pertain to sectors of culture, including ritual, and facilitate people’s processing and monitoring of culture. Thus, the social axes mentioned above for the Wagenia case form a distinct repertoire of schemas for social behavior as it is thought, performed, and experienced. Cultures and repertoires share at least three characteristics: they change, they may contain rather contradictory elements, and they are only partially activated. These aspects— change, contradiction, and latency—make repertoire a useful metaphor when speaking of and reflecting on current culture or, mutatis mutandis, emergent ritual. The ludic gives the ritual repertoire its idiosyncratic character, reinforcing its three characteristics due to the playfulness that these three invite and stimulate. Taken together, change, contradiction, and latency are ludic tools and opportunities. The concept of repertoire is even more effective when the notion of schema, taken from cognitive anthropology, and especially connectionism (see, for example, Strauss and Quinn 1994), is added. Schemas can be defined as culturally accepted minimal scripts (or scenarios or prototypes or models) for and of a certain thought, emotion, or act. They are representational but also serve as processors (D’Andrade 1995, 136). In other words, they are models of and models for thoughts, emotions, and actions. Strauss and Quinn (1997, 6) define schemas as “networks of strongly connected cognitive elements that represent the generic concepts stored in memory.” It is exactly this generic nature of schemas that allows for the ludic emergence of alternative realities. A schema contains a minimum number of elements, usually not more than can be remembered, that are elaborated when applied in a concrete context. Being minimal, they fit easily and efficiently into a repertoire, waiting to be activated and executed in a concrete situation. Being part of a repertoire, they do not stand alone but are mutually connected: they might be part of a hierarchical tree-like or linear causal structure, or part of a set of major and minor schemas. The Wagenia ritual performance is based on a linear schema that contains a basic number of elements in a fixed order, corresponding roughly to Van Gennep’s three phases in rites of transition. For each of these elements—separation, seclusion, reintegration—sub-schemas exist, elaborating each phase in separate ritual elements, such as (in the case of the separation phase) vigil, circumcision, or entry into the camp. And for each of these sub-schemas, there are other, more detailed sub-sub-schemas, including, for example, the correct

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method of circumcision. Schemas can be generic because they are minimal constructs that are filled in, strategically maximized, adjusted, and amended to fit the concrete situation in which they are activated and to engage the interest of the actors. No Wagenia initiation is identical to the preceding or the following one; besides, each village had its own version. But each performance is based on the accumulated knowledge as summarized in the initiation’s schema repertoire and, in a broader sense, in the repertoires for all rites of transition. Schemas, because of their minimal nature, are widely applicable. A schema is like an empty form in bureaucracy that has to be filled out for each particular case. There are schemas belonging to the macro level, for example, of Wagenia society, such as the three axes, and others that operate on the intermediary or micro levels, for example, of the villages or the families. Schemas support the system of categories that a person uses. The three characteristics of a repertoire that were discussed above, that is, change, contradiction, and latency, become visible in the practical use that people make of the schemas in that repertoire— adapting themselves, living with and using contradictions, and making strategic selections. Not all schemas are simultaneously used, and they can therefore be mutually contradictory. In using schemas, people continuously change their repertoires, for example, their ritual repertoire. Schemas differ in their durability, their flexibility, and their resistance to new influences. They can become rigid when their application is subjected to strict rules, as may happen in orthodox doctrines but also in rituals that have to be performed correctly and in minute detail. Ritual has thus gained a reputation as being characterized by formality and schematic, standardized behavior. And indeed, though ritual schemas may be subjected to conscious reflection, many are used in a routine manner, without reflection. Those schemas that have been transmitted through effective socialization will have entered routine practice and will not be easily substituted. The dramatic and bodily nature of Wagenia initiation helps the men to remember routinely the order of events from their own initiation (except in the case of that evening dance, but then, amidst much laughter, new schemas can be invented on the spot). This is also a welcome characteristic when the ritual is held after such long intervals as in the Wagenia case. According to connectionists, the tenacity of schemas is grounded in the connections in the brain between billions of neurons or processors (Strauss and Quinn 1997, 51). These neurons form networks that can become very persistent, to the point that they support routine reflexes more than reflected reactions. Socialization and learning—by initiation or otherwise—are processes that enable the formation of long-lasting connections between neurons. This reminds one of a hot issue in the debate on ritual: the question as to whether a ritual is by definition never subject to reflection or, on the contrary, needs explicit and conscious justification. Schema theory suggests that, indeed, large parts of ritual behavior can be automatic, whereas at the same time schemas can still be dealt with in a conscious manner. Another insight from connectionism, also based on ideas from cognitive studies on the working of the human brain, is that when people are faced with

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a context that demands some form of action, thought, or emotion, different parts of the repertoire of schemas may be activated simultaneously. As suggested above, simultaneity is an important characteristic of play. The human brain allows for an extremely rapid comparison of alternatives, simultaneously considering a multitude of schemas. The linearity of verbalization is therefore deceiving. Before any conclusion is formulated, a parallel consultation of archives of schemas in the repertoire is effected with the speed of light. This parallel process is much more typical of what happens in the brain than the serial procedure of verbalization (D’Andrade 1995, 139–141). People do not think in the same way as they speak or write. The verbalization of a cultural or ritual element, as when informants speak to fieldworkers, is the mere outcome of a complicated process that is much more difficult to catch but is more revealing in terms of how culture works (Bloch 1998). The view of culture as a system of customs or rules or symbols is useful as a summary, but does not reflect or determine what people actually experience (D’Andrade 1995, 149). Experience is both inductive and deductive with regard to the production and reproduction of schemas. Ritual may seem fixed, but it can generate change, either through the experience it brings as an alternative reality or as a consequence of what ritual participants have experienced in everyday reality. Nonetheless, linear, serially processed schemas do occur, and they are quickly learned and changed, as in discursive education. In comparison, parallel distributed schemas take repeated experience and much more time to be mastered, but then go to work much more efficiently and rapidly. One of the typical aspects of Wagenia initiation was that, contrary to stereotypical views on initiation, there was hardly any explicit education. Yet the dramatic events taught a great deal about the relevance of the social axes. The fact that all of the Wagenia men had undergone initiation and had experienced its dramatic, phased, and social nature contributed to the more or less correct performance, despite the long interval since the preceding occurrence. The Wagenia initiation ritual was a world of its own that conditioned the novices. The boys kept rehearsing their wrestling techniques, developing reflexes that are quicker than reflected acts. Wagenia ritual schemas appear to belong in majority to the parallel routine type but can just as well be subjected to serial reformulation. Asking why this is so would cause informants to be puzzled and showed how much routine there was in Wagenia initiation, even though raising the question stimulated informants to think of reasons. What are the implications for the ludic, especially with respect to ritual? Routine schemas serve as the basis for ritual in its own right, including the reality that is played out. Moreover, the parallel process allows for simultaneity when people are dealing with several ways of classifying reality. Whereas Wagenia village life had to continue as normally as possible, there was at the same time the reality played out in the initiation camp. Parallel processing facilitates change, which demands comparison of alternatives. It is also at the basis of irony and double talk; the wink is a metaphor for the double perspective that is proper to play, just as the other reality of ritual must be understood

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in its double perspective with normal reality. The innovation and creativity that are typical of the ludic capacity depend very much on the parallel process. As soon as people start playing with schemas, developing another reality, as happens in ritual, the aptitude for simultaneity is indispensable. Methodologically speaking, the problem is that this side of the ludic role in ritual is difficult to catch in its movement. What my Wagenia informants told me was a serial verbalization, whereas what really happened was as difficult to see as a drop of water running through the Congo River. Observing as a participant could offer compensation to a certain degree. The hidden undertow in the cultural movement also means that the contribution of the ludic to ritual itself remains largely invisible. On the other hand, ritual can exist because it is not fully manageable in the serial, discursive, inductive way. What has been suggested so far refers to the internal workings of a culture or a ritual. But ethnic boundaries have been perforated, and people, including the Wagenia, are challenged to find a place for themselves in this everexpanding world. The impact of globalization—with a continuous stream of information made available to people in cultures that, correctly or incorrectly, were formerly viewed as closed—is a constant incentive. People nowadays are incessantly challenged and obliged to adapt their schema repertoires in all sectors of life, and this challenge emerges in different ways. The Wagenia initiation contains several examples of this process of widening horizons. In the parallel consultation of potentially useful schemas, such as when the Wagenia saw fit to imitate the colonial military parade and let the smallest boy play the role of archbishop, people are juggling a rather complex set of alternatives. Some of these can be ignored and left latent, while others are prominent and inevitable, and some new elements cannot be overlooked but must be adopted. Ritual, although being in itself tenacious and inflexible, is no exception to this tendency. With these ideas in mind, one might reformulate what was said earlier and suggest that ritual represents a repertoire of schemas that is used to invoke an alternative reality, usually at times when the normal reality undergoes some crisis or transition that is not served by the usual repertoires. The occasion brings an invitation to play with schemas and thereby with reality. The minimal nature of schemas facilitates their application to concrete occasions, such as the five-month Wagenia initiation ritual, and their ludic use. Schemas and repertoires may be adapted accordingly. The ritual schemas are usually applied in a routine manner, which might give the impression that nobody is aware of the meaning of the symbols used and that they are reduced to their schematic minimal skeleton. But there may also be conscious reflection on changes in schemas and on new schemas. In both cases, the human neurological tool is used. The hidden working of the routine parallel processing of schemas gives the ludic a movement of its own that is difficult to catch but nevertheless serves as a source for emerging practices. The ritual schema repertoire carries the inner obliging qualities of the ludic in ritual and helps to understand how ritual works.

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Conclusion: A Ludic Ritual Repertoire This approach to culture and ritual, as ways of managing and monitoring schema repertoires, can easily be combined with the view of the human being as homo ludens. In simultaneously combining two or more ways of classifying reality, people play with the available repertoires and, in doing so, also change them. The minimal nature of schemas allows for their creative application. Since schemas are generic, actors are challenged to apply them in their own way. Moreover, in the case of ritual, the temporary creation and enactment of an alternative reality, and the counterpoint that is posed by it, suggest that people temporarily turn the established repertoires of normal reality upside down or inside out, or exaggerate them. These changes to normal reality give the ludic aspect of ritual its proper role. Through the substitution of the elements that compose them, schemas lend themselves to experimentation with contradictions, puns, unexpected inversions, and variations. Just as my informants normally do not think in social science terms of social order or functions or symbolic systems nor in terms of communication with the sacred borrowed from religious studies, they do not consciously stage ritual as entertainment. Some participants will not even see all of the pleasure that there is in a ritual. But others will. Emphasizing the ludic is not a way of denying the social. It is present, not only through some function or other but as the pleasure of doing something together. My exercise in reconsidering Wagenia ritual after more than thirty years has shown that ritual can be studied in its own right and is not exhaustively represented when it is reduced to societal or cultural causes or functions. The ludic side of ritual may well help to rehabilitate this contested term, because the ludic represents a way in which ritual acts in its own right.

REFERENCES Bloch, Maurice E. F. 1998. How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory and Literacy. Boulder: Westview Press. D’Andrade, Roy. 1995. The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Droogers, André. 1980. The Dangerous Journey: Symbolic Aspects of Boys’ Initiation among the Wagenia of Kisangani, Zaire. The Hague and New York: Mouton. ________. 1996. “Methodological Ludism: Beyond Religionism and Reductionism.” Pp. 44– 67 in Conflicts in Social Science, ed. Anton van Harskamp. London: Routledge. Huizinga, Johan. 1971 [1938]. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press [Original title: Homo ludens. Proeve eener bepaling van het spel-element der cultuur] Lifton, Robert Jay. 1993. The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation. New York: Basic Books. Pruyser, Paul W. 1976. A Dynamic Psychology of Religion. New York: Harper and Row. Strauss, Claudia, and Naomi Quinn. 1994. “A Cognitive/Cultural Anthropology.” Pp. 284– 300 in Assessing Cultural Anthropology, ed. Robert Borofsky. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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———. 1997. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Victor W. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. ______. 1988. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Van Gennep, Arnold. 1960 [1909]. The Rites of Passage. Trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Cafee. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

PART IV

HEALING IN ITS OWN RIGHT Spirit Worlds

* Chapter 7

BRINGING THE SOUL BACK TO THE SELF Soul Retrieval in Neo-shamanism Galina Lindquist

The idea of this volume, as I understand it, can be very simply expressed as follows: some rituals do, in fact, achieve the transformations that they purport to achieve. These transformations occur not primarily because the participants agree upon the fact that they have taken place (as is the case with Marie Antoinette, described in the introduction to this volume). Instead, these transformations are achieved by virtue of the ritual’s own intrinsic internal design. In his Models and Mirrors, Handelman (1990) terms these rituals “models,” in contrast to those that aim at re-presenting the current order of society, which he terms “mirrors.” A classic example of a ritual of the ‘model’ type is the initiation ritual, in which the social person is the object of the ritual transformation. Another general type that can be considered as paradigmatic of the model category includes rituals of healing. A ritual of healing transforms “self as a References for this chapter begin on page 172.

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bodily being” (Csordas 2002, 3; this argument is developed in detail in Csordas 1994). If this is so, rituals of healing are particularly well-suited to evaluate what can be learned of ‘ritual in its own right.’ The ritual of healing that is the focus of this chapter is called ‘soul retrieval.’ It is practiced among circles of urban spiritual seekers identified with the neoshamanism movement (see, for example, Blain 2002; Jakobsen 1999; Lindquist 1997). Though the rationale of this movement draws on practices of traditional native shamans, its expressions can best be understood as part of the New Age phenomenon, blurring the line between spirituality and psychotherapy and perceiving the quest towards the divine as indistinguishable from that of selfdevelopment. The ontology of the self as the seat and the reflection of the divine, central to New Age, is basic for understanding how soul retrieval can work to achieve its goal of healing (the self). Nonetheless, the connections between the world of the ritual and the broader social world, teased out by subsequent analysis, may be bracketed, to begin with, in this very analysis just as they are, phenomenologically, for the ritual’s participants: as Don Handelman discusses in the introduction to this volume, for transformation to work, a ritual has to create its own phenomenal universe with its own internal logic. This “logos of the phenomenon” is not necessarily that of the surrounding social world, and it does not have to be consciously perceived, mentally registered, or analytically understood by the participants to the ritual. But it should be practiced into existence, perhaps in the ‘as if’ mode, in order to create a virtuality through which (or within which) the transformations can occur. Below I shall describe the premises of this phenomenal universe and the workings of their internal design. But first, let me offer a caveat on the nature of reality invoked by this cosmos and, correspondingly, on the language I use to describe it. As with many other rituals, those staged by neo-shamans posit the existence of a reality alongside the ordinary, perhaps routinely unperceived by ordinary people in the everyday world, yet made real in and through the ritual. This ‘non-ordinary reality,’ as neo-shamans sometimes call it, is inhabited by nonhuman beings they call ‘spirits.’ Successful neo-shamanic rituals are those in which non-ordinary reality and its spirits are perceived as real by practitioners, becoming a part of their everyday world. Much of the meaningful actions, happenings, and performances in neo-shamanic rituals occur in non-ordinary reality. Placed firmly in the ritual’s internal discourse and seen by the participants’ ‘inner eye,’ this reality becomes shared through shamanic performances and, most importantly, through narratives of the journeys. In this sense, neoshamanic rituals are what Vyner (2002) calls “rituals of the mind.” The performative sequences of these rituals unfold, for the most part, only in the minds of the practitioners, translated into the transformations in their bodies and lives insofar as those minds/selves/consciousnesses are embodied and embroiled in social reality. Somatization of transformations in consciousness is integral to every ritual of healing, including therapeutic encounters in biomedicine (as research of the ‘placebo effect’ makes clear; see Moerman 2002). This has been the main premise of all anthropological analysis of healing, and

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also allowed Lévi-Strauss to parallel traditional shamanic healing and Western psychotherapy (Lévi-Strauss, 1963). But this ‘mind’ part has such a key role in neo-shamanic rituals that to understand their efficacy, the analyst must take the additional step of suspending disbelief in the participants’ narratives. The neo-shamanic universe in which healing takes place comes into being through these accounts of the universe. We must take them as descriptions of phenomenological worlds that, by being narrated, performed, and acted upon, become subjectively and socially real. In a way, soul retrieval presents a limiting case of what we can fruitfully consider as ‘ritual.’ Invariance in utterances and actions (a minimal requirement for ritual, as noted by Rappaport 1999) is here minimal and has far from central significance for what happens. The processes entailed—consisting of a series of perceptions of the ‘imaginary’ plane and of the series of narrations of these perceptions—are happening between the self and whatever is offered by the culture as a source of the generalized ‘sacred.’ In this sense, the ritual of soul retrieval is akin to what other contributors to this volume describe as “intimate ritual” (Nagy) and “thin” ritual (Innis). To analyze the logics involved, we must once again suspend disbelief or, more precisely, suspend judgment as to the verity of the constituents of this virtual reality of the phenomenal universe that is at play, intimated to an observer as it is narrated and acted out. In the case of Nagy’s religious weepers and in examples of “thin” ritual given by Innis, the verity of God is central both to the structure of the ritual and to the participants’ experience of it. In the case of neo-shamanic soul retrieval, it is the ‘shamanic journeys’ to the non-ordinary reality, souls, and soul parts that are key. Although suspending judgment can be perceived as adhering too closely to the participants’ discourse (analysis like this is always vulnerable to accusations of this sort), this step, I contend, is justified exactly because we want to analyze the emerging phenomenon as a virtual one—in its own right.

Soul and Its Loss Soul retrieval assumes that a human being has a soul, a non-ordinary essence within the ordinary body, whose wholeness determines the state of the individual’s physical and psychic health (in this sense, the soul acts on the body). The soul is the person’s center of sentience, endowing her with the capacity to perceive the world in all its fullness. Yet if an individual’s pain becomes unbearable, the soul may leave the body, causing coma and eventually bodily death. The soul continues to exist in a different dimension for a while until it ‘dissolves in the light,’ as some neo-shamans would have it. In other words, bodies cannot live without soul, and, conversely, the soul needs the body for existence in this world. In less extreme situations, only a part of the soul breaks off from the whole and leaves. When this happens, the overall sentient capacity of the person diminishes, enabling her to pass through the situation of pain without suffering its full thrust.

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The experience can be likened to anesthesia under surgery, which switches off perception centers, diminishing the body’s ability to feel the full blow of pain that, undiminished, would destroy the body’s ability to feel at all by killing the body itself. In a similar way, the soul part that has left the person lessens her capacity to perceive fully and makes her pain endurable, enabling her to survive.

Causes of Soul Loss Soul loss occurs in a situation of psychological or physical trauma, such as accidents, warfare, or surgery. Fear, anger, and the feeling of being abandoned are among the most usual causes. So, too, is a situation of long-standing compromise in which a person makes choices against her will or is forced to do something she resents. The individual survives or adapts through soul loss. It is a compromise of the self with life, an occurrence of the irony and the paradox also involved in, for example, surgery: to survive, one must let go of a part of one’s body; to live, one must begin to destroy oneself. Part of the soul leaves also when we try to be what we are not, when, in neo-shamanic thinking, we abandon our authentic selves. It leaves, neoshamans believe, when we accept social roles assigned by our seniors, parents, spouses, peers, or employers. The desire to be accepted and the fear of being left out lead us to adopt resentful patterns of behavior. A soul part may be given away voluntarily, “in a vain attempt to maintain contact with someone dear who is leaving us, departs or dies” (Horwitz 1996, 17), as when we say, “A part of me will always be with you.” Finally, part of the soul can be stolen, taken away by another through guile, if not violence. Consciously or unconsciously depriving or disempowering others, soul thieves steal to fill the gaps in their own inner essence. The perpetrators are “those whose own souls are so damaged and depleted that the only way they know to get power is by taking it from someone else” (ibid.).

Symptoms of Soul Loss The first symptom of soul loss is a felt loss of connection with one’s own surroundings, “a feeling of being empty, feeling numb, or not feeling anything at all” (Horwitz 1996, 18). Severer symptoms—neuroses, compulsive behavior, sleep disorders, and other matters for which Westerners usually turn to psychiatrists— are remedied by soul retrieval. Like other alternative healing techniques, soul retrieval is perceived as a supplement to conventional psychotherapy. Soul retrieval is not considered a method for treating physical ailments but a first step in preparing the person for such methods, making the treatment process more efficient.

The Ritual Sequence The ritual of soul retrieval is simple in form, devoid of ceremonial embellishments. It consists of a series of encounters between shaman and patient, some

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taking place one after the other, while others may have intervals of a couple of days in between. Nonetheless, the ritual sequence remains compact in time, thereby framing a single, nearly continuous interaction between shaman and patient, involving all of the patient’s mental, emotional, and sensorial capacities. The sequence begins with a conversation between patient and shaman, during which the healer tells the patient about the theory of soul loss and its supposed causes and symptoms, and the patient tells the healer why she wants to undergo the treatment, minimally including a description of her present predicament yet often referring to the most anguished moments of her life. As the process of soul retrieval gets underway, the patient is asked to lie on the floor, close her eyes, and relax, being “awake and aware in both realities,” as one practitioner used to put it. The shaman, lying next to the patient, goes into a trance to the sound of drumming and journeys into non-ordinary reality to find the patient’s lost soul part and bring it back. The imagery that the shaman experiences locates the lost soul part in a specific setting, often connected with a traumatic episode of the patient’s life. The shaman’s self acts in the nonordinary reality on a par with other figures who inhabit the scene. Though the main actors are the shaman himself and the patient’s lost soul part, other figures might also be present. The shaman’s spirit helpers are there, too, closely monitoring the procedure (healers doing soul retrieval must have considerable experience of shamanic journeys and interaction with spirits). In addition, the shaman on this journey encounters figures from the patient’s past who often have a direct connection with the trauma. The shaman might have to interact with these figures, for example, by persuading, commanding, or cajoling a soul thief to let a patient’s soul part go. The most crucial interaction, however, is that between the shaman and the soul part. While the latter might or might not communicate to the shaman the reason for its decision to leave, the shaman has to convince it that the situation has changed and that it is safe for the soul part to rejoin its soul. When the shaman has succeeded, he takes the soul part back to ordinary reality and blows it into the patient’s chest and into the top of her head. This done, the shaman tells the patient what happened on the journey. The patient relates to the narrative, confirming the details of the journey that correspond to her recollections of the circumstances of the trauma, filling in details from her past that put the shaman’s images in the context of the patient’s own experience. The following example of such an exchange is renarrated by Jonathan Horwitz in his article on soul retrieval: On my journey [to find the lost soul part] my spirits took me to a house that was burning. They took me to a room where there was a small boy, trapped by the flames. After we finally got him outside, it was clear that he wanted to show us something, and we followed him on the top of a nearby burial mound. Then my spirits told me I should take this child-soul back home [to the patient] … As I told my experiences, my friend was clearly amazed. “When I was a boy, I did not really like being in the home. I had a favorite place where I used to play, and this

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was an old burial mound from the Stone Age on my father’s land. I was always going up there. Then, when I was about six, my mother accidentally set the house on fire. I was rescued in the last minute.” (Horwitz 1996, 18)

It is clearly important for the entire interaction that the patient relates to the shaman’s narrative, picking out the details that correspond to his recollections and further weaving his own narrative based on them. The main scene of the shaman’s story, the boy caught in the flames, is confirmed by the patient, but it is given a secondary significance in the latter’s narrative. Of central importance are the child’s reluctance to be at home (indicating traumatic circumstances in childhood) and the burial site as his refuge. The detail of the shaman’s story that in itself has no meaning is made meaningful by the patient through his traumatic childhood recollections.

Case Studies The following two cases were documented in my fieldwork at a course on soul retrieval taught by Horwitz in Denmark in October 1996. The Boy in the Apple Tree. The patient has a history of alcoholism, depression, and abusive relationships. He had a disruptive childhood, which he recollects dimly, with gaps in memory. His initial interaction with the shaman is not recorded, but the shaman understands the situation to be grave, since the patient is selected as a demonstration case. After he has sat up and blown the soul into the patient’s head and heart, the shaman tells the following story. Shaman I was taken [by my spirits] to a large garden and was standing under a tall apple tree. I heard a little thin voice calling me from the big apple tree. I climbed up, and there you sat, a little five-year-old boy. For some reason, you could hardly speak—there was something wrong with your voice—but you were willing to go with me, bubbling with active exuberance. So eager were you to come down and go back home that you kicked me in the shin with quite a force—not out of vileness, but in impatience to come back home. With you was a white cat that had been sitting with you all that time. You told me that you had left home as a five-year-old—there was something that happened on your fifth birthday that caused you to leave—and you had stayed up in the apple tree ever since, only with that cat. You did not tell me what it was. Do you have any memories of this? Patient I remember the house of my childhood, in a large garden. There were many trees in the garden, also apple trees, and I used to climb up and to sit there. I remember going to the kindergarten and starting in the primary school, but just these years—around five years old—are totally blank for me, like white spots on the map.

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Shaman I got this message very strong—about a broken heart. Do you remember something about it? Patient My mother told me that I had a sweetheart in the kindergarten, and when I was five years old, she moved to another place. My mother told me I was heartbroken, but I don’t remember any of this. Another thing is that when I was a child, I was quite aggressive. I was known for destructive behavior, and children called me ‘the boxer.’ So I am not surprised that this five-yearold kicked you. When I turned nine or ten, the anger and aggression turned inwards and became self-destructive. Shaman I did not get the feeling of anger and aggression, rather of joyful, active exuberance, like one throwing a bunch of flowers into the air on a fine summer day, out of the sheer joy of life. Patient Yes, I have had this in me, too, but it came out with some people more than with others. And this white cat, I remember it very clearly. We had neighbors next door, and this cat was theirs. My parents used to be good friends with these neighbors, they were seeing each other a lot. Then something happened between them, and they stopped seeing each other. And then the cat disappeared, and I remember I missed it a lot. The shaman’s details dovetail with those of the patient. The garden, with apple trees among others, is ‘recognized’ by the patient, who accepts the shaman’s scene as a stage of further recollections and recognition. In this way, the patient enhances the ongoing intersubjective archaeology of memory that the shaman and the patient are exploring together. The ebullient behavior of the little boy is confirmed by the patient in his self-recollection as being “aggressive” and “destructive,” which is immediately redefined by the shaman as “joyful, active exuberance.” This minor reformulating alters the meaning of the patient’s past without questioning the veracity of his recollections. The white cat, central to the shaman’s story, is confirmed, though without centrality in the patient’s recollections, in turn confirming the shaman’s vision. Why the soul fled remains unnamed in the shaman’s vision and is left unconfirmed, but also uncontested, in the patient’s response. The shaman then hints at the “broken heart.” The patient confirms this, without giving centrality to the disappearance of his kindergarten sweetheart yet leaving this possibility open for himself. The overall exchange reconstitutes a scene of a traumatic childhood experience. It will become the stage on which the patient’s imagination will later do its own restoring work. The Woman with a Violent Husband. In the initial conversation, this woman (in her late thirties) has told the shaman of her abusive marriage. She had not dared leave her husband because he threatened to kidnap their son. In his journey, the

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shaman finds himself in a countryside, near a summerhouse surrounded by trees. It is late evening and dark, but one of the rooms in the house is lit. A man with black hair and black eyes is pacing there and cursing, his whole figure exuding anger and violence. A little boy is sitting on a cot, frightened and crying. Outside, the shaman sees the patient, looking about ten years younger than she is now, sitting on the roof of a country house, wearing a long grayish robe with a flowery design, her hair on her shoulders. She sits huddled up, embracing her knees, her chin resting on them and her long hair falling down. Though not crying, she is totally passive, resigned. The shaman talks to her, asking her to follow him. He assures the girl on the roof that the circumstances of the patient’s life have changed completely: the abusive marriage is ended, her life is now under control. The girl remains passive and disinterested. Only after a long conversation does she climb down reluctantly, allowing the shaman to embrace her and to bring her back. “I recognize this scene,” says the patient. “It was about ten years ago when we were at our summer place. This was one of the worst summers I can recall, and after some point my memory is blank—I just don’t have any recollections. But there was a little house surrounded by trees, my ex-husband had black hair and black eyes, and I did have a long grayish robe with a flowery design and long hair falling down my shoulders. And I used to sit like this, huddled up, hugging my knees, with my chin cupped between them. And I remember the episode that was especially painful—it was at night, it was dark, and the pain that hit me then was too strong to bear. It was surely then that she [the soul part] left me, because after this moment [after the episode she is referring to] I have had a total blackout.” Other descriptions of soul retrieval journeys could be adduced. In the stories, the details of the patients’ recollections fit together with those of the shaman’s stories, the narratives fleshing each other out. Some details of the journey follow directly from the patients’ descriptions of their predicaments. Others turn up in the shaman’s narratives, and the patient can recognize them and relate to them. These details are taken note of, redescribed by patients, and fleshed out in their own narrations discussing the shaman’s journey, thus becoming the setup of the scene of trauma as it is now recalled by them. By going back into the past and revisiting the scenes of ordeals, the patients’ memories are given a new life. In a sense, the patients are given a new past, from which their new self and a new future can be imagined. The last journey in the healing sequence is designed to enable the patient to formulate a goal, the desired end result of transformation. It is a state of wellbeing, in contrast to the painful state that had caused the soul part to leave. The patient journeys back to the time-place of trauma, and communicates with the soul part about its reasons for departure and its conditions for returning. From then on, the patient is expected to live according to the instructions given by the newly found soul part. Neo-shamans point out that if a patient fails to modify her life according to the requests of the retrieved soul part, the soul retrieval

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was in vain: should the individual continue to live ‘inauthentically,’ the soul part will leave once again.

The Performative Dimensions of Shamanic Journeys For an observer unfamiliar with neo-shamanic practice, the therapeutic effect of soul retrieval is more easily understood when journeying is viewed as an imaginal performance (cf. Csordas 1994). Shamanic journeys consist of perceiving sequences of imagery in altered states of consciousness. Working with such imagery in consciousness is basic for several types of psychotherapeutic and faith healing. Among New Age and new spirituality healing approaches, the best known of the former type are subsumed under psychosynthesis and transpersonal therapy. Of the latter variety, I draw here on religious healing among North American charismatic Catholics, studied by Csordas (1994). As Csordas notes, it is imprecise to refer to such imagery sequences as ‘mental imagery,’ since the images are presented to consciousness in proprioceptive, kinesthetic, and affective modalities not only as mental pictures but as fullfledged embodied experiences. Even though the physical body of the journeyer lies immobile on the floor, the shamanic self is in the world of the journey—in non-ordinary reality—through all of its sensual capacities. The journeying self is trained to control self-presentation in imaginal reality. This control is expected to be non-ordinary, with the shaman talking to spirits, flying, swimming, shifting shape, becoming invisible, being burned and reconstituted again. While on such journeys, the shaman also interacts with figures from ordinary reality, for example, with the patient’s lost soul, but also perhaps with a soul thief as well as other figures from the patient’s environment. These other figures might display their own agency, perhaps running counter to that of the shaman. Therefore, a shaman’s success depends upon her careful control over the presentation of the shamanic self and upon her strong and directed intentionality. The force of the shaman’s conscious intentionality is directed to this part of the patient’s self that, after leaving its host, had lost intentionality and had stayed passive. The shaman lends the lost soul part the strength to terminate the state of immobility, passivity, and weakness in which it has been immersed all these years.

Changing Memories Imagination and memory are major factors in shamanic journeys. Imagination is understood as the capacity of the self to act in the world of embodied images in consciousness (Csordas 1994, 74 ff.), closely corresponding to the shamanic notion of non-ordinary reality, that is, the scene on which the shamanic self acts. Memory is also an embodied self-process. Much like shamanic journeys, memories are often presented to consciousness as imagery

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sequences in several perceptive modalities—mainly visual, but also auditory, olfactory, proprioceptive, and affective. The process of remembering can be compared to that of a shamanic journey. The remembering self ‘visits’ the scenes of the past just as the shamanic self visits non-ordinary reality. The difference between remembering and shamanic journeys, however, is akin to the autonomy of imagination and the boundedness of memory (Csordas [1994, 156ff.] speaks about “thin autonomy of imagination” versus “thick autonomy of memory”). The difference may lie in the intentionality accorded to the remembering versus the journeying self in these two processes. Shamanic journeys unfold as dynamic interactions through which the shamanic self relates to the patient’s ontological parameters and changes them in the process. The remembering self is more like a visitor to a museum: it encounters embodied images of people and objects and delights in them or recoils from them, but does not change the exposition. When the shamanic self visits the patient’s memories, its intentionality sets in motion hitherto frozen scenes. The vector of this motion is a dynamic of successive journeys and tellings: (1) the patient’s initial narrative that sets the stage; (2) the shaman’s journey based on this narrative, putting this set stage in motion; (3) the shaman’s telling of the journey, objectifying this changed setting and offering it to the patient as a new ground for memories; (4) the patient’s journey to this changed memory setting, now assisted by shamanic intentionality, which enables the patient to change the scene of the memory further and thereby attain a new experience of the past; (5) the patient’s objectifying this experience by narrating the journey, thus getting a new memory complementing, if not replacing, the old, traumatic one. Journeys and narration are mirrors, nesting within each other at odd angles, transforming images of the past.

The New Age Self and the Neo-shamanic Soul Before discussing how the reconstitution of memories can lead to the reconstitution of self, I touch upon the self as a New Age ontology to see how it compares with the neo-shamanic soul. The New Age self is understood as a bounded entity possessed by the individual, the true core beneath the masks of social roles, the ultimate foundation for and source of the individual’s value and agency. The mature self is understood as holistic in and of itself, coterminous with a healthy individual. The self is the seat of ‘authentic’ experience, and it is harmed by ‘inauthentic’ experiences of envy, irritation, and anxiety that are triggered by discrepancies between the needs of the true self and what is expected by society, with social personae being programmed for certain relations and behaviors. This inner self is discrete and bounded, surrounded by a forbidden zone of privacy into which other selves should not encroach. This boundedness and sovereignty of the border zone, implied by the term ‘individuation,’ is considered to be a positive process and to lead to the maturation and

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fulfillment of the self. The self with broken boundaries, ‘lost in the other,’ is considered ‘fragmented’ and unhealthy. (Compare this with one of the causes of soul loss—when a soul part wants to connect to and follow a close one who has departed or left.) Furthermore, in the New Age religiosity the innermost authentic self is considered as the locus of immanence, directly connected to the divine energy: as Paul Heelas (1996) puts it, self becomes God. This New Age self may be translated easily into the concept of the soul that figures in neo-shamanic soul retrieval. The New Age self may be seen as the interplay between the core, immutable ‘I’ (the inner authentic self) and the interactional ‘Me’ (the identity of the social self) (Mead 1972). The latter is processual, formed by social relationships. To be functional, the bounded and individuated New Age self must play between the primordial and the social, the inside and the outside, always affected by the outside. In soul retrieval, a patient learns to act within the embodiment of her sentient soul, incomplete, indented, and left to survive after soul loss. This incomplete self—animating the patient at the moment she or he approaches the shaman, searching for help—corresponds to the socially constructed Me, formed by social interactions during the life path of the person from the moment of separation. It participates in journeys of the soul retrieval and, in the final journey, goes back to meet the lost soul part. The lost soul part, on the other hand, corresponds to the primordial inner self, the core immutable I. In the neo-shamanic rendering, as read from the discourse of soul retrieval, this lost soul part has kept its purity intact, uncontaminated by social masks and relationships, since it was hiding from the world in another dimension. This self-part is conceived as the I back in time, whether the shaman encounters it as an infant, a child, or a younger I. In Western cultures, specifically in New Age circles, there is a high valuation of childhood and youth. A young person is often seen as unspoiled, close to nature, more vital, more vigorous, more playful, healthier, and overall positively charged. In the New Age model, an authentic inner self is highly valued at the expense of the restricting social self. This corresponds to the valuation of soul parts, which is never explicitly stated by neo-shamans yet can be read from the conceptual structure of soul retrieval. Arguably, the lost soul part comes forth as somewhat morally superior to the sentient incomplete part. This is the authentic inner I that rebelled against pain or humiliation when the social Me resigned itself to the situation—the I that refused to be a part of the self when the Me compromised in order to survive. It is the I that remembers when the Me forgets. It is thus the bearer of one’s inner truth that one needs to access in order to know oneself. This most precious part of the self, previously muted, is now given voice, granted a place within the context of the individual’s life. By offering the ontologies of two soul parts, positioned as they are within the conceptual structure of soul retrieval, this healing technique provides the patient with a clear patterning of her dissociated self. The primordial inner self is positioned outside the embodied social self. In the process of healing, the social self reaches the primordial self, but this happens only through the

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mediation of the other, the shamanic healer. To recover one’s holism, one must go outside the boundaries of the self. The sufferer has to turn to the other for help, allowing her to enter the zone of sovereignty otherwise not to be trespassed. This turning to and opening up oneself to the other is not trivial for a Western individual—it is a price one pays for healing, a kind of selfsacrifice. Such exposure of a patient’s self to the shaman in healing can be compared with the bodily exposure of a medical patient to her physician, the voluntary surrender of privacy one otherwise observes. Neo-shamans say that to be healed, one must drop the deeply entrenched Western idea of autonomous action: to be healed, one must ‘ask for help.’ Those asked for help can include the shaman or the patient’s own spirit helpers; in any case, this request presupposes the centrifugal movement of consciousness, the directed intentionality out of the self. Any process of healing within the neo-shamanic world is thus an intersubjective process, starting with a step out of the self towards the other. This conscious movement towards the other is also the first step in the process of forgiveness.

The Restorative Force of Forgiveness Considering the importance of forgiveness in preserving the social fabric, it is given surprisingly little attention in anthropology. This is paralleled by the silence surrounding the whole concept of forgiveness in today’s Western society. Yet in Catholic (and in Russian Orthodox) theology, forgiveness is a central notion without which the relationship between human being and God would not be possible. In Catholicism, forgiveness is codified as the act of being restored to a good relationship with God, others, and self, following the period of alienation known in Christian tradition as sin. Forgiveness is the sinner’s transforming acceptance of the unconditional mercy of God, mediated by the priest through the act of absolution. In New Age spirituality, the notion of sin is abolished, as is the idea of an institution (church) and its representative (priest) mediating between self and God. The idea of authenticity, of maintaining unmediated contact with the divine when the self becomes God, replaces the Christian virtue of fortitude. Thus, the good becomes what is good for the self. The authentic self falling prey to the demands of the social Me is the state conceived as the closest correspondence to Catholic sin. In soul retrieval, this state is understood to result in soul loss, the primordial part leaving the sentient embodied soul, unable to endure an inauthentic existence. There are several steps in the process of Catholic forgiveness (McBrien 1995, 534). The first, contrition, is a heart-felt rejection of the sinful condition, a decision not to sin any more. The second is confession, when the condition of sinning is narrated by the transgressor to the priest. The preobjective, private image in consciousness becomes objectified, cultural fact; by formulating the wrong, that which is right is reconfirmed, the moral order reinstated. From having been

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hidden in the individual’s consciousness, the morally wrong is revealed publicly to the community, to the shared cultural world. By the act of absolution, the priest ritually disengages the morally flawed person from her wrongdoing, putting her once again on equal footing with the members of the moral community, thereby accepting her back into it. The essence of Catholic forgiveness, overall, is the restoration of broken bonds. Through the mediation of the priest the bond between believer and God is restored, ideally helping the sinner to restore peace of mind. The sacrament of confession may be regarded as a ritual of healing, ideally aiding the believer to achieve psychological reintegration. This intrapsychic act translates into the social, the changed individual perhaps behaving differently, taking steps towards others to restore broken bonds. In a religious community, the symbolic act of sacramental forgiveness (between human being and God) should result in practical forgiveness (between social persons), thus repairing the ruptured social fabric. Forgiveness as a means of social restoration is unrecognized since, unlike law, it is uncodified, and, unlike punishment, it cannot be enforced, depending rather on an act of good will, granted voluntarily by one individual to another. Yet the social faculty of forgiveness may be foundational for a functioning social system, acting on the interpersonal day-to-day level, doing preventive and patch-up work in microcultural links where more general cultural laws of retribution and punishment hardly reach. I suggest that the faculty of forgiveness—the choice to disregard a wrongdoing committed by a consocial—must be a universal existential capacity. This capacity is basic to the routine workings of any form of sociality, even if not theologically elaborated, and even if opposite mechanisms of upholding morality (revenge, blood feud, and so forth) are salient cultural institutions. Neo-shamanism as ideology and cultural practice has developed in the nonCatholic countries of Northern Europe and in non-Catholic circles of North America. This form of spirituality is springing up in secularized society against the backdrop of Protestantism rather than Catholicism. There is no direct counterpart in the religious life of Protestants to the theologically elaborated Catholic ritual of confession. In Protestantism, the direct contact between the individual and God is the sign of grace. Soul retrieval is an idiosyncratic formalization of the existential act of forgiveness, the restoration of broken bonds between the individual and the divine (here, in the form of the primordial self). Therefore, it is not surprising that neo-shamanic soul retrieval is practiced in Protestant countries.

Forgiveness in Soul Retrieval There are some correspondences to the Catholic sacrament of forgiveness in the ritual of soul retrieval. The conversations between shaman and patient before and after the journey for the lost soul part and the shaman’s journey itself are comparable to the stages of contrition and confession. Instead of the sinner

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speaking to the priest, the patient speaks to the shaman, formulating present predicaments and indicating painful past conditions. Instead of the priest speaking before God, the shaman supplicates before the lost soul part, for the love of the godlike primordial self, on behalf of the patient’s incomplete social Me. The shaman’s assurance to the lost soul part that the original condition of trauma has now fundamentally changed is comparable to the act of contrition, in which the sinner disengages himself from the doings he deems morally wrong. This purpose is also served by the conversation between the soul part and the sentient soul, as the latter asks the soul part why it left and what it wants so that it will never leave again. And the ritual moment of absolution parallels the culmination of soul retrieval, when the shaman sits up after her journey and gently blows the soul part into the patient’s chest and head. The poisonous emotion of the trauma is replaced by forgiveness, followed by reconciliation. The socially constructed Me is transformed by the encounter with the primordial I, which has granted its forgiveness. Previously ‘for-got’ (got out of the way of the fragmented self), the self is ‘for-given’ (given back to itself, for itself). The Me is taken back to the point of trauma, the divergence of lifelines. In the virtuality of imagination, the individual receives the opportunity to redirect her path. Instead of depleted and deserted, the self is re-empowered and given back its dignity by the presence of its vital core. Conversely, the lost part is also forgiven. There is the little boy, now bubbling with active exuberance, whose absence turned innocuous childhood mischief into violent aggressiveness; the young woman who refused to be a part of the destruction of the self; the moral judges of the self, who had sat silently and stubbornly in their refuge—all are taken back into the self. Forgiven are the incomplete selves who have retained their dignity and moral superiority, having escaped the labors, tribulations, pain, and grieving, but also the joys, fulfillments, and victories of the subsequent life of the fragmented selves. They are for-given, that is, given something that despite all of their moral superiority and intransigence they had lacked; they have been brought from the austerity of then to the generosity of now. From both parts forgetting one another, they now forgive one another, each receiving from the other its complement. All this becomes possible due to the shaman, who in soul retrieval becomes the mirror of the self. Through the shaman, the patient directs her intentionality out of the self, towards the other. Through the work of the other’s consciousness, through the shaman’s narrative, the patient discovers her lost soul part and reunites with it. William James (1985) argues that the moment of facing the divine, or of uniting with the divine, is an essence of a religious experience. In New Age spirituality, which views the divine as dwelling in the self, this moment occurs during reunification with what is seen as the primordial self. This is possible for the patient because the shaman turns to the suffering self with care and compassion, reaching out towards it with the directed force of her consciousness. It is this directed intentionality of the other to the self that reorients the self in the world, leading to its transformation. As in the case of charismatic healing described by Csordas (1994), the experience of

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the suffering self encountering the caring other becomes the experience of the self meeting with the divine.

Concluding Remarks Comparing indigenous magical practices, shamanism included, with Western psychotherapeutic practices is a commonplace of anthropological discussion. This tradition of analysis was started in a famous essay, “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” by Lévi-Strauss and has continued unabated in the discipline of psychological anthropology. Reaffirming this parallel treatment, the magical character of psychotherapy was touched upon in recent anthropological work on Western psychiatry (Luhrmann 2000): the practitioners share a secret—despite all of the scholarly energy devoted to the subject, in fact, nobody knows how psychotherapy works (see also Moerman 2002). Certainly, soul retrieval among the neo-shamans has more in common with a Western psychotherapeutic session than with a healing session of soul retrieval as practiced by a Siberian or an Amazonian shaman. The main commonality is that what is at stake is a self conceived in terms of contemporary Western culture. There is a crucial difference, however, between neo-shamanic techniques and conventional psychotherapy: the former posits another cosmology, if only in an as-if mode. In my experience (as an ‘observing practitioner’), neo-shamanic therapy fails because people tend to abandon these cosmological premises and go back to their usual ways of living. A similar technique works much better when the practitioners/ clients continue to live in the world of which this ritual is of a piece, as is the case for Catholic charismatics described by Csordas (1994). Further, in considering the terms ‘cosmology’ and ‘cosmo-logics,’ I wonder whether the idea of cosmology suits neo-shamanic practice. If this term implies a coherent, tightly put-together way of perceiving and living the world, then there is no cosmology in neo-shamanism. Indeed, to impose on neo-shamanism a consistent cosmology (or ‘theology’) would belie its very essence as a popular practice that promotes playful spirituality as well as therapeutic self-help. In the argument above, perfunctory and incomplete fragments of cosmology are, for the sake of analysis, conjectured from the instructions and narratives that constitute the technique of soul retrieval. Don Handelman prompted me to think, instead, about cosmo-logics, understood as tentative and unspoken ways to see “how everything fits together, and doesn’t—syntheses, disjunctions, contradictions that are all taken-for-granted ways in which living is practiced” (personal communication). In the practice of soul retrieval, neo-shamanic cosmo-logics are consolidated into a system whose internal design—with its narratives and journeys nesting into one another, mirroring and continuing each other— allows the patient to “rewrite her personal history” (as Carlos Castaneda, whose narratives gave birth to neo-shamanism, once put it), so as to make life in today’s urban world more manageable and bearable. To benefit from soul retrieval, patients have to accept the precepts of cosmo-logics as ontologies,

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taken-for-granted foundations of being. Nonetheless, the works of these logics are better understood in the social and historical context of the society in which the ritual is staged and of which both the shamans and the patients are part. In this regard, ritual in its own right is only the first step, as Handelman details in his introduction to this volume. The partial worlds of late modernity may deviate from the mainstream and differ from each other, as their workings carry their dwellers in vastly different directions. Yet for all of their differences, these worlds may have more solid common ground—provided by ontologies of consciousness, self, other, and the divine, constituting foundations of the Western world—than participants care to admit. Unconscious and unformulated, these ontologies die hard, surviving deep social transformations. No matter how hard practitioners may try to emulate the perceived authentic native traditions, these ontologies distinguish neo-shamanism from other ‘shamanisms’ practiced in other parts of the world. Though the idea of soul retrieval exists, for example, in Siberian shamanism (from where it was borrowed in the first place, and where it is still sometimes part of healing), its ontologies and meanings are very different from what I have described in this essay. Therefore, the logics of internal design in Siberian healing rituals will also be different, and, in spite of a perfunctory similarity of names, we shall be dealing with another ritual altogether, a different phenomenon, with a different internal logic. This difference is best understood if we analyze a ritual from the inside, on its internal conditions of existence, or, as we put it here, in its own right.

REFERENCES Blain, Jenny. 2002. Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic: Ecstasy and Neo-Shamanism in North European Paganism. London: Routledge. Csordas, Thomas. 1994. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2002. Body/Meaning/Healing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Handelman, Don. 1990. Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heelas, Paul. 1996. The New Age Movement. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Horwitz, Jonathan. 1996. “Coming Home: The Shaman’s Work with Soul-Loss.” Sacred Hoop, no. 13. Jakobsen, Merete Demant. 1999. Shamanism: Traditional and Contemporary Approaches to the Mastery of Spirits and Healing. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. James, William. 1985 (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. “The Effectiveness of Symbols.” Pp. 167–185 in Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke G. Schoepf. Vol. 1. New York: Basic Books. Lindquist, Galina. 1997. Shamanic Performances on the Urban Scene: Neo-shamanism in Contemporary Sweden. Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology, vol. 39. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.

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Luhrmann, Tanya. 2000. Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry. New York: Vintage Books. McBrien, Richard, ed. 1995. The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism. San Francisco: HarperCollins. Mead, George H. 1972 [1934]. Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Ed. Charles W. Morris. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Moerman, Daniel. 2002. Meaning, Medicine, and the ‘Placebo Effect.’ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vyner, Henry. 2002. “The Descriptive Mind Science of Tibetan Buddhist Psychology.” Anthropology of Consciousness 13, no. 2:1–25.

* Chapter 8

TREATING THE SICK WITH A MORALITY PLAY The Kardecist-Spiritist Disobsession in Brazil Sidney M. Greenfield

When a quarter of a century ago I began to study the beliefs and rituals of ‘folk’ Catholics, Kardecist-Spiritists, Umbandistas, Candombléiros, Evangelical Protestants, and other followers of what are called ‘popular’ religions in Brazil, with special interest in the interface between religious rituals and healing, among the first questions I asked were: What happened to the patients? Did they recover after the ritual treatment? If their health improved, or was perceived to improve, as the continuation of the performance of the rituals implied, how was this to be explained? Notes for this chapter begin on page 191.

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The thought that ritual is most frequently analyzed as the representation of social and cultural orders is deeply rooted in the history of anthropology. It can be found in the writings on religion by nineteenth-century evolutionists such as Tylor (1920) and Frazer (1911–1915), and was most elaborately expressed by Durkheim (1915) in his seminal study of the Australian Aborigines, for whom rites and rituals were “the rules of conduct which prescribe how a man should comport himself in the presence of sacred objects.” Durkheim’s influence on A. R. Radcliffe-Brown made this position basic to the paradigm that influenced the analysis of field data by several generations of scholars in Europe and the United States. What anthropologists often disregard is that Durkheim’s formulation of ritual was developed not from his own empirical research but from data collected by others. His analysis became part of a polemic intended to set apart what he characterized as a class of traditional societies that were in the process of being overrun and replaced by a single, modern one (Durkheim 1933, 1938, 1951). This imagery was to resonate with generations of later scholars whose field studies in small-scale societies in Africa, Oceania, and elsewhere impressed on them what the subjects of their investigations were experiencing in the wake of being colonized, missionized, invaded by traders, and imposed upon by representatives of modernity. This contributed in part to the considerable neglect of the role of religion and ritual by a half-century of scholars on the grounds that it would disappear with the inevitable onset of modernization. A second anthropological paradigm developed in the United States under the direction of Franz Boas, in which understanding modernity and its contrast with tradition was not the driving force. Melville J. Herskovits (1937, 1941; Herskovits and Herskovits 1934, 1936, 1947), following Boas, applied this framework in his examinations of African influences in the New World. Numerous anthropologists investigating religion and ritual in the American South, Latin America, and the Caribbean were to follow him (see, for example, Bourguignon 1951, 1970; Brown 1986; Courlander 1939; Goodman 1969, 1974; Henney 1974; Horowitz and Klass 1961; Hurston 1938; Landes 1947; Leacock and Leacock 1972; Lowenthal 1978; Powdermaker 1939). The populations they studied were often products of an earlier phase of the modernization process that were now parts of national societies created after the breakup of the European colonial empires rather than members of small-scale, relatively isolated groups. The research conducted by those oriented by the Boasian framework assumed that the cultures they observed and described were mixtures of those of indigenous peoples syncretized with those brought by the slaves from Africa and/or the conquerors from Europe. Each ritual tended to be analyzed in terms of its constituent elements and traced back to their hypothesized cultural-historical roots. When anthropologists moved away from this search for precontact origins, they continued to study ritual as part of a variety of religious belief systems and practices competing for the affiliation of the members who no longer were constrained by a single, official religion—that of the colonial authority of the nation to which they belonged (Greenfield 2001). In the plural world of the

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Americas, scholars trained or influenced by North American anthropology have studied ritual very much in its own terms. At another level, cultural phenomena were acknowledged to rest on the linguistic and symbolic abilities of its carriers and to continue and be traceable back over long periods of time, giving rise to the establishment of linguistics and prehistory as subdisciplines of cultural anthropology. More importantly for the purposes of this essay, cultural phenomena were never separated from the biological organisms that were their carriers. Not only was human biology the fourth subdiscipline of what has come to be know as the four-field approach, students trained in terms of it learned to think and ask questions about human biology and whether or not it had an impact on the aspects of culture being studied, or was in turn influenced by them. In the following pages, I describe and analyze two examples of ‘disobsession,’ a healing ritual from the Kardecist-Spiritist tradition. The events are presented and discussed with respect to how they might affect the biophysiology of the patients to provide them with more than symbolic assistance. In this ritual, mediums enter into trance, communicate with and/or receive spirits, and engage in dramatic exchanges while the patients, on whose behalf the treatment is performed, merely observe. Additionally, since the sufferer has only a vague knowledge of the Kardecist belief system, its premises and its cosmology, an analysis that assumes shared values, contexts, and systems of semiosis between healer and patient is not applicable. I argue that during the course of the ritual, the participants enter into a trance-like, hypnotic state in which they respond, similarly to patients treated with hypnotically facilitated psychology. While not necessarily consciously aware of it, they internalize beliefs about the powers of spirits that, as is the case with patients given hypnotherapy (Rossi 1996), may be transduced1 to turn on a variety of bodily systems, to the level of the genes. This leads to the production of proteins and enzymes that, in turn, activate the immune and other systems, thereby contributing to the patients’ cure. While from a Durkheimian perspective this might be thought of as reducing the cultural to the biological, from the Boasian view nothing is further from the truth, since a healing ritual is difficult to conceptualize independently of the biological entity being treated.

A Kardecist Disobsession It was 2:30 PM2 and a hot, humid summer afternoon in the late 1980s. The heavy iron gate on the level of the city street in an upscale neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro had just been locked while several hundred people inside were making their way up to a large building at the top of a steep hill. Within minutes they were seated on benches in a room resembling a lecture hall. At the front was a table around which eight people, dressed in white, were seated. A man standing at a microphone was offering a testimonial in which he explained how the spirits

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had helped him recover from a debilitating illness. While his story was meaningful, inspiring, even, his voice was soft and tedious and showed no change of pitch or emotion, and even appeared prayer-like. To the right of the table was an entrance to a room where eighteen to twenty individuals, also dressed in white, stood, each facing an empty chair. Off to the side was yet another, even smaller space, with several healers standing behind a curtain. In contrast with the stark whiteness of the previous rooms, this one had an altar on which were placed numerous items and brightly colored statues. The more than three hundred individuals seated quietly in the lecture hall were multiracial, of both sexes and all ages, but the majority were white females. Less than one-third were men, a still smaller percentage black. The approximately seventy-five children sat motionless, hardly uttering a sound during the lengthy session. The male at the microphone continued his testimonial for some minutes, after which a well-dressed woman replaced him, affirming, with her own tale, how the spirits had cured her. For exactly half an hour, the audience listened attentively as a succession of believers delivered soliloquies in similar soft, dry, monotonous styles about their own healings by spirits. The final speaker formally opened the session by invoking God, Christ, and the saints, asking for their help in the work to be undertaken. The spirits of the dead were entreated to cooperate. After reading several prayers, taken mostly from the Christian Gospels, the man invited Ogun and other African deities to assist in the venture. He led the audience in special songs, each intended to summon the participation of a specific African-derived supernatural. Meanwhile, the people seated around the table, who appeared to be paying no attention to what those at the microphone were saying or doing, were busily engrossed in automatic writing, as their eyes gazed off blankly in the distance. At precisely 3:00 PM, the person at the microphone stopped talking. Groups of about twenty individuals at a time were led out of the lecture hall and seated in the chairs in the smaller room, facing healers. With soft music playing in the background, others waiting gave ‘healing passes’—intended to bring energy from the other, or spirit, world—to the newcomers. By 3:30 PM, everyone was back in the lecture hall where they picked up the personal items that had been left unattended on the benches. From 3:30 to 4:00 PM, the cleansing continued as the hall, and those in it were first bathed in smoke from a censor and then covered with rose petals. Punctually at 4:00 PM, what was to be the major activity of the day began. Ushers came to selected individuals, who were conducted, one at a time, to the second large room with the curtain at the front. There each joined one of five groups of white-clad individuals who stood waiting for them. Those escorted were the patients who had registered for treatment when they first arrived at the center earlier in the day. The others who remained behind in the large hall were their parents, children, other relatives, and friends. Each newcomer tried to relate the symptoms for which relief was sought, but the healers, seemingly disinterested, quickly and quietly entered into

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trance. Almost immediately, one medium began to scream in pain and roll on the floor while a colleague bent over him as if he were performing surgery in the pelvic area. It soon became apparent that the exaggerated pantomime was of an abortion. The patient being treated was a male.

The Spiritist View of the Universe As a belief system, modern Spiritism began in Hydesville, New York, in the mid nineteenth century (Isaacs 1957; Moore 1977; Nelson 1969). Recognition of the possibility of communication with the world of the spirits of the dead spread to other parts of North America, and from there to Europe, where it eventually was codified by a French schoolteacher,3 who published the results of interviews he conducted with enlightened spirits—through mediums—under the pseudonym of Allan Kardec (Kardec 1975, 1987, n.d.). Copies of his writings were brought to Brazil in the latter part of the nineteenth century, where they became popular first with the upper classes and then, by the end of the century, among the inhabitants at large (Bastide 1978; Renshaw 1969). Kardec proposed that when God created the universe, He made two worlds, not one,4 and elaborated his vision into a compelling moral and philosophical system (Cavalcanti 1983; Greenfield 1987). Spirits are the vital element in this dual universe. Starting at the time of creation, each is assumed to have set out on an inevitable course, of which it is not necessarily conscious, the end goal of which is to attain moral perfection. To achieve this transcendental objective, spirits are incarnated in human bodies in the material world, where they are presented with challenges from which they learn the lessons needed for their moral advancement. Since they are attributed free will, a spirit may choose to benefit from, or to disregard, any lessons to which it is exposed. Spiritists define morality in Judeo-Christian terms, and although Christ is not acknowledged to be the Son of God, he is taken to be the most advanced spirit ever to have incarnated on the planet. His life is seen as the exemplar of moral perfection, and his words in the gospels, especially as interpreted by Kardec (1987), are taken as expressing all that is virtuous. At the heart of the Kardecist view of goodness in the world is charity. “Without charity,” Spiritists assert, “there is no salvation.” Spiritist beliefs have come to be referred to as the ethic of practical charity (Renshaw 1969, 74). “Spiritism without charity is inconceivable: It just is not Spiritism” (St. Clair 1971, 115). Spiritist charity took two main forms in Brazil, the giving of social assistance to the poor and healing (McGregor 1967, 93). As each spirit goes through its individual trajectory—incarnating in the material world, disincarnating and reincarnating again across the millennia, while not always consciously aware of the moral imperative to do good and avoid evil—from the decisions and choices it makes, it accumulates what is referred to as its karma: the moral balance of all of its previous experiences and choices.

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Continuing the Ritual As the medium in trance bent over his colleague in pain on the floor, a third person joined them. Fernando was a teacher and leader who circulated from group to group. When he arrived, the others deferred to his authority as he took over the direction of the ritual. First, he explained to the bewildered patient that in a previous lifetime he had been a woman who had sought help to abort a life she had conceived illicitly. The cause of the symptoms the patient was now experiencing—excruciating abdominal pains for which the doctors could find neither cause nor cure—was the spirit of the fetus who, as the result of the abortion, had been denied an opportunity to reincarnate and had chosen to devote itself to gaining revenge. Although the spirit that had prevented the incarnation by having the abortion was now in a male body, it was being made to suffer the pains of the abortion by the aggrieved spirit for what it had done in that previous lifetime. Once the patient understood this relevant biographical incident from his past, the leader explained that his treatment could begin. As the patient stood there with his eyes slightly glazed over and a perplexed look on his face, Fernando, though he was not in trance, invoked and greeted the spirit of the aborted fetus, who appeared through another member of the group. “Hello,” said Fernando, in a warm and friendly tone. “Where am I?” exclaimed an unfamiliar voice coming from this other medium, who had distanced himself physically from the rest of the group. “Why am I here? I don’t like it here. It is much too bright. What do you want with me?” “Relax, take it easy,” responded Fernando calmly. “I only wish to talk with you.” “I don’t want to talk with you,” responded the voice angrily. “I don’t like it here. I wish to leave.” Fernando persisted, calmly reassuring the spirit and continuing to ask it questions. Although the other remained reluctant, repeating its desire to depart, it soon was caught up in conversation. The answers to the questions Fernando asked, some of which he provided himself when the spirit refused to respond, resulted in a dialogue that set out in summary form the basic beliefs and premises of Brazilian Spiritism. First, the spirit was reminded of the two orders of the cosmos. Gradually, it was forced by the persuasiveness of Fernando’s reasoning to agree that the advancement and moral progress of the individual (spirit) took precedence over all other matters. It admitted that it was presently disincarnate, that is, it was in the invisible world and not in a material body. As such, it acknowledged that it should not be interacting with the incarnate, especially by inflicting pain on them. Instead of taking vengeance on someone in the material world, which according to Kardec (1987) is immoral, the spirit agreed that it should concentrate on its own development by preparing to reincarnate. The exchange between Fernando and the disincarnate being was quite heated. The latter tried to challenge and refute the assertions of faith made by his interlocutor, who would counter with a combination of eloquence and clear

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thinking. Occasionally, the protagonists’ voices were raised as if in anger, while at other times one or the other responded in a whisper. In the end, the wrongdoing spirit was won over by the uncontestable truth of Fernando’s argument. The treatment for the patient’s symptoms was the rehabilitation of a disincarnate spirit who had behaved inappropriately by seeking revenge. When finally convinced that what it was doing was morally wrong, as well as harmful to both the patient and itself, the reluctant spirit agreed to stop tormenting its nemesis, return to the spirit world, and prepare to reincarnate. The patient, dazed and confused by the events he had witnessed, was left only to anticipate that his pains would now disappear. His treatment—the rehabilitation of a spirit that had been aggrieved by the patient in a previous lifetime and had inappropriately sought revenge—was between Fernando and the spirit. The patient seemingly took no part in the ritual drama that was intended to cure him. He stood by, observing what was being done on his behalf with glazed eyes and a look of disbelief on his face, although, as we shall see later, he, too, most probably had entered an altered state of consciousness (ASC). Only after the spirit that was the cause of his suffering had agreed to stop inflicting the pain and had departed, and after the mediums had come out of trance, was he addressed directly. Fernando told him that he now would be well and instructed him to read and reflect on the writings of Allan Kardec and other Spiritist authors and to attend sessions as often as possible at a Spiritist (or Umbanda) center, where he should regularly obtain therapeutic passes.

A Variant of Disobsession Therapy The second ritual healing took place in the city of Porto Alegre, capital of Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul. More than one hundred people were waiting outside a Spiritist center at 7 AM on a cold, wet Saturday morning. Most were from the greater Porto Alegre metropolitan area, but some had traveled from as far away as Brasília, the northeast, and Amazonas, while a few had even come from neighboring Uruguay and Argentina. The patients, ranging in age from under ten to their eighties, were suffering from illnesses as varied as cancer, depression, and drug addiction. The vast majority appeared to be descendants of Europeans and to belong to the middle and lower-middle economic classes. The poor, who are mostly black, were conspicuously absent, though they are so numerous in Porto Alegre and throughout the country. Accompanied by friends and relatives, the patients had come to be treated by a group of healers known as the Casa do Jardim (Garden House). At exactly 8 AM, the doors to the building were opened, and those outside, whose number had more than doubled, were led into an auditorium at the front of which a man, in a dry, unemotional tone, recounted how the spirits had healed him. After a few minutes, Dr. José Lacerda de Azevedo, a practicing medical doctor and the leader of the Casa do Jardim, walked to the microphone

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to offer a short prayer in which he asked for the cooperation of God, Christ, and the spirits in the work that was about to be undertaken. With the efficiency and resolve that characterized the group, its members broke up into teams of four to seven persons, each going to a different smaller room. The same individuals tend to work together week after week. Everyone else waited in the assembly hall, listening to a series of believers somberly tell the story of their cure by the spirits. When their registration numbers were called, patients were escorted to the rooms to which they had been assigned. I followed Lacerda into what looked like a classroom, where he went to a table with a blackboard at the front. The six members of his team took places along the side wall. Several visitors learning the procedure sat near the leader while I was at the opposite side with my video equipment and tape recorder.5 The doctor greeted everyone individually as they entered and offered some general words of advice to the visitors before the first patient, a young woman, accompanied by her sister, entered. Both were invited to sit at the back of the room. Lacerda asked if they were Spiritists. He followed their negative reply by inquiring if they had knowledge of the writings of Allan Kardec, Chico Xavier, or other Spiritist authors popular in Brazil. The patient replied that she had heard of the authors but had not read any specific books. To this Lacerda smilingly said that perhaps she should begin to read and study. He encouraged her to present her problem to the group. After a few minutes, one of the healers, an elderly internist, politely interrupted to ask a question. The reply led to a brief exchange that culminated in the doctor saying that it appeared to him that the patient had a thyroid problem, which could easily be brought under control with conventional medicine. The type of treatment provided by this group was not needed. The woman could go to a conventional physician, if she had one, or else she could see him at his clinic. Lacerda concurred, explaining to the patient and the visitors that these sessions were devoted to assisting people with problems for which the medical establishment had no solutions. He suggested that she take his colleague’s advice, while reminding her to read some of the classic Spiritist texts and learn some basic doctrine. After politely thanking everyone, the two women left the room. The second patient was a well-dressed woman in her late thirties. She was accompanied by a distinguished-looking man wearing an expensive leather coat, who introduced himself as her husband. When they responded “no” to his routine questions about being Spiritists and familiarity with its literature, Lacerda repeated the recommendation he had made to the previous patient. The woman then launched into her story. For the past several months, Dona Anna recounted, she had been experiencing debilitating headaches and was suffering from excruciating pains in her back and legs. Although she had seen several doctors, the medications prescribed had not helped and the pain had increased. Suddenly Lacerda interrupted her—not to ask a question, but to shout the word plataforma (platform)—and began to count backwards, rather loudly,

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while waving a metal rod over his head. He brought the rod down and then up, punctuating each number. After a few counts, a dark-haired woman seated at the side of the room began to speak in a voice very different from the one she had used previously. She had gone into trance and was describing a series of events in a past life of the patient. Anna, meanwhile, was deep in conversation with another member of the healing team.

Further Explanation According to Spiritist belief, immediately after conception a reincarnating spirit attaches itself to the newly formed fetus by means of its perispirit, a semi-material, bioplasmic substance that is a permanent part of every spirit and remains its link with the material body throughout each incarnation. The chacras of the perispirit must be brought into line exactly with the plexus of the somatic body, uniting the otherwise separate domains of the universe (Greenfield 1987). Once this happens, a symbiotic relationship is established between the spirit and its material body. Each living person, according to Spiritism, is composed minimally of three distinct bodies: spiritual, perispiritual, and material. Lacerda writes of seven bodies, two of which are material and five that are spiritual (Lacerda de Azevedo 1988, 29–45). It is the last of the five spirit bodies, the astral, that is of special interest to us, since Lacerda and the Casa do Jardim healers believe it can be transported, separate from the rest of a patient’s bodies, on the platform, to the spirit world. There, Lacerda has entered into a ‘contractual agreement’ with a Dr. Lourenço, the director of the hospital Amor e Caridade (Love and Charity). This was the destination to which the patient’s astral body had been sent. It also was where the medium, now reporting an incident in the patient’s past life appearing on a large “television screen,” had gone.

The Ritual After hearing her first few words, Lacerda turned to the visitors and exclaimed: “Magia negra [Black magic].” A second medium, also at the hospital, took over and described a scene in which the spirit that now occupied the body of Anna inflicted a great injustice on a spirit that was presently incarnate as Marta, her sister-in-law. The two women have been enemies since they both joined their husband’s family. The medium reported Marta swearing that she would get revenge. Suddenly a third medium opened his eyes and in a weak, crackling voice, very different from his usual baritone, uttered: “Where am I? How did I get here?” Taking control of the situation, Lacerda turned to the voice to reassure it. “Calma [Relax],” he said. “We only wish to talk to you.”

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“I don’t want to talk to you,” replied the voice. “Let me go. I don’t want to be here. I don’t like it here! It is so bright! My eyes hurt! I want to go! Leave me alone!” Lacerda persisted: “Would you not prefer to come out of the dark and leave the grime and filth? Don’t you want to give up those ugly claws and the dirty fur?” “No,” snapped the voice, repeating that it did not want to be there nor to continue the conversation. Ignoring this, Lacerda asked further questions, gradually drawing the reluctant spirit into a dialogue. Like Fernando in the previous example, he cajoled and manipulated the spirit into acknowledging the Kardecist view of the world and its moral perspective; but there was something different. Lacerda made repeated references to low, heavy, base vibrations and to claws and fur, calling the spirit variously “a ghoul” and “a monster.”

More Explanation At one point, Lacerda called the spirit an exu. Exus are part of supernatural pantheons brought from Africa by the slaves. Originally, they were messengers to the orixás, the African deities. In Brazil, the African tradition was syncretized, first with Christianity to form Candomblé, Xangô, Batuque, etc., and then with Spiritism to become Umbanda. In the latter, the exus have become a separate category of supernaturals that incorporate in mediums. Along with pretos velhos (old former slaves), caboclos (Indians), and crianças (children), they do the charity of helping people, which Umbanda has taken from Kardecism to be its primary mission (Brown 1986; Giobellina Brumana and Martinez 1989; Greenfield and Gray 1988; Greenfield and Prust 1990; Pressel 1974). Spiritist mediums do not usually receive orixás, exus, or other Africanderived spiritual beings. They consider the religions of African provenience to be less enlightened than their own, and the African deities to be lower forms. Along the continuum that was proposed to organize the variety of popular Brazilian religions (Bastide 1978), Kardecism, or mesa branca (white table), as it is sometimes called, has been placed at the highest or most advanced end, with Candomblé, Xangô, Batuque, and the other heavily African-influenced religions at the other end as the lowest or least advanced. Umbanda is somewhere between the extremes, more progressive than religions of strict African derivation, but less so than Spiritism. Unlike most Kardecists, Lacerda and the Casa do Jardim group acknowledge African-derived spirits that they believe are able to inflict illness and injury. By ‘encompassing’ the discourse of Umbanda,6 they are able to treat the illnesses caused by these denser, less enlightened beings. Lacerda had encouraged and then arranged for several mediums in his group to join Umbanda centers where they learned to incorporate exus and other ‘low-level’ spirits. This explains why, in the session being described, a medium was able to receive the spirit that seemed to be the cause of Anna’s suffering.

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When the spirit, after being convinced of Kardecism’s basic truths, still refused to stop tormenting Anna, Lacerda authoritatively demanded that it tell him the name of its ‘boss.’ First denying that it took orders from anyone, the spirit finally acquiesced.

The Ritual, continued A fourth medium, who had been sitting quietly all this time, now burst forth in a tirade and protested being in such a brightly lit place. A repeat of the earlier performance followed, with Lacerda, using the ritualized question-and-answer format, eventually forcing the ‘boss’ to acknowledge the moral truths of Spiritism and to admit the wrong he had done. The spirit also confessed that he was not working alone, but had a gang of underlings to whom he gave orders. Some time ago the spirit that was now incarnate as Marta approached him and asked him to help her get revenge. One of his henchmen, acting on his instructions, had placed a tiny electronic device in Anna’s head that he claimed was the cause of the headaches and pains in her back and legs. The apparatus was connected to controls in his possession that only he was able to remove. “This is the black magic I mentioned,” Lacerda told the visitors. He explained that most of these low-level, malevolent spirits are organized in gangs, the leaders of which had once been incarnate in Ancient Egypt, the “home” of the black arts. Many, like the ones that appeared today, have not reincarnated since. Instead of seeking new lives that will give them the opportunity to advance morally, they hide in the lowest, darkest, densest regions of the spirit world—known as the Umbral—and sell their services to other unenlightened spirits, like the one in the body of Marta. After meekly acknowledging the error of its ways, the boss spirit agreed to remove the apparatus, go to the hospital Amor e Caridade, and seek the treatment and guidance that would enable him to reincarnate and pursue his spiritual development. Turning away from the departing spirit, Lacerda muttered, “Abrir a frequencia [Open the frequency]” and began to count backwards again, accentuating each number with a wave of the metal rod. The first medium—who had accompanied Anna to the astral plane and had been silent during the exchange with the two monster spirits—began to speak, this time in a voice different from either of those she had used before. She was joined by the only medium who had not yet spoken. They were recounting the episode— now appearing on the screen in Dr. Laurenço’s hospital—in which the spirit of Anna committed the original injustice against Marta. As it unfolded, Lacerda made explicit to the patient the offense that she had committed. He explained to the other spirit that although she had suffered an injustice, she should not have sought revenge. By means of the ritualized dialogue, he brought both spirits to concur that they each had been wrong, thus enabling him to propose that they now forget the past and devote themselves to their respective spiritual developments.

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The spirit of Marta acknowledged her treachery and apologized. She ordered the black magician to have the apparatus removed; finally, she implored the spirit of Anna to pardon her. In a scene filled with emotion, both spirits—more precisely, the mediums incorporating them—begged the other for forgiveness. A lengthy embrace and a flood of tears marked the reconciliation. As the spirits departed the mediums, Lacerda raised his metal rod once more and again counted backward. Although the treatment was complete, Anna’s astral body had not yet been brought back from the hospital in the spirit world and rejoined with her other bodies. The medium standing next to her began applying hand passes to bring energy from the spirit world to facilitate the recoupling process. He also confirmed that all of the devices had been removed. When he indicated that he was finished, Lacerda authoritatively pronounced that the patient would now be well. The incarnate Anna, meanwhile, was still engrossed in conversation with the one member of the healing team who had not gone into trance. She seemed to have been fully aware of the dramatic events played out before her, but had not reacted and appeared dissociated. It was as if she was having difficulty comprehending what she had seen and heard and relating it to herself and her suffering. My hypothesis—based on a combination of my limited training, comments on videotapes I have shown to students of hypnosis and other altered states of consciousness, and observations made by colleagues who practice hypnotherapy—is that Anna, the patient in the previous example, and many of the other patients treated at the numerous Brazilian healing rituals I have observed over a period of more than two decades (see Greenfield in press), had entered into a trance-like or hypnotic ASC. Unfortunately, there was no way to document this at the time that was not disruptive of the ritual and intrusive for the patient. Sensing her confusion, Lacerda assured Anna that she soon would have relief from the headaches and other pains. Without further explanation, he again instructed her to read the writings of Spiritist authors and to attend sessions at a Spiritist or Umbanda center on a regular basis. Finally, he informed her that she had mediumistic abilities that she should develop by taking the training that would enable her to become a part of the Spiritist enterprise of healing and other charitable works. As the patient, on the arm of her husband—who also appeared confused and bewildered by what he had observed— left the room, she expressed her deep gratitude to Dr. Lacerda and the members of the group.

Analysis and a Hypothesis for Healing and Therapy Healers and patients in the Kardecist disobsession ritual do not necessarily share a cosmology or values, contexts, and systems of semiosis. The patient may learn the specifics of the belief system’s view of the world for the first time during treatment; moreover, the instruction is directed not at the patient but at

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spirits who are not present in bodily form. The sufferer, an outsider in the ritual drama, stands by, uninvolved, and watches as others provide relevant aspects, heretofore unknown, of his or her past life experiences. Unlike those treated in most healing rituals, the patient departs the disobsession seemingly unaffected, confused, and bewildered. All of this makes it difficult to apply what have become standard forms of anthropological analysis, which focus on the symbols shared by patient and healer, to gain an understanding of this therapeutic technique. If healing is assumed to be the result of a transformation that a sick person undergoes during the course of the performance of a ritual, how do those treated in a disobsession move from a sick to a healthy state? To answer this question, I propose going beyond the symbols to look at the biophysiology of the patients. As in biomedicine, I assume that the transformation occurs in the body of the patient. I therefore argue that the symbols of the ritual trigger biophysiological processes that transform the patient internally, resulting in a cure comparable to that provided by medical treatment. To see how patients might benefit from the disobsession, I turn to some recent biomedical studies attempting to bridge the mind/body divide and conceptualize instead an interrelated system that integrates the psychological and the biological, to which I add a sociocultural dimension. Specifically, I offer a modified version of what Rossi (2002, 3) has called the hypothesis of “psychosocial genomics,” and begin with a brief discussion of trance or ASC. Trance states are a regular part of Kardecist healing and other rituals. In the disobsession, mediums enter ASC in order to travel to, communicate with, or receive spirits from the other world, so that errant disincarnate beings can be rehabilitated and dissuaded from doing harm to their victims. The dramatic performance represents a play in which the moralistic view of the world and its beliefs, and how the individual is to behave if he or she wishes to regain and retain health and advance spiritually, could not be played out without mediums going into trance. When treated, some patients are told that they, too, have the ability to enter altered states and that this obliges them, since it is often part of their own cure, to be trained as mediums, thus enabling them to participate in future ritual sessions. In Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing, Winkelman (2000, 115) reminds us: “A (near) universal of human culture is the existence of institutionalized procedures for altering consciousness.” While Winkelman and other students of healing practices in traditional societies focus on the shaman, or healer, if we were to concentrate on the patient, we might better understand the healing process.7 Inducing patients into altered states in order to heal them goes back a little over two centuries ago to the work of Franz Anton Mesmer, antedating the advent of modern psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. After being utilized by the Marquis de Puységur, Charcot, Janet, and Bernheim in Europe, there was a period of abeyance, after which research into the subject was initiated in the United States by Hull, Erickson, Hilgard, and others, and its use in therapy was reintroduced by Milton H. Erickson (Gauld 1992). Since that time,

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a large body of evidence has accumulated demonstrating the significant improvement in treatment obtained when patients are in hypnotic (altered) states (see Barber 1984, 1999; Ewin 1984; Greenfield in press; Holroyd 1992; Ley and Freeman 1984; Marmer 1959; Moore and Kaplan 1983; Rossi 1993, 2002; Ruzyla-Smith et al. 1995). While some still question whether a state such as hypnosis, and by implication all altered states, actually exists, and, if so, contend that only a small percentage of people are ‘good’ hypnotic subjects and able to respond with or without formal induction, Rossi (1993, 1996, 2002), following in the tradition of Erickson, in contrast, maintains that entering an altered state is part of the normal, everyday, biological experience of all human beings. Rossi (1996, 120) refers to this as “the wave nature of consciousness and being.” He notes that half a century ago, researchers observed that every 90 minutes or so throughout the night, sleep became a very active process for about 10 to 30 minutes, during which oxygen consumption increased and more blood flowed to the brain. Breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, and gastrointestinal movements became more variable than during wakefulness. During these periods of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, brain wave patterns, as measured by electroencephalograph (EEG), became similar to the active pattern when awake. Researchers later confirmed that the 90- to 120-minute dream rhythm apparently continues during the day. Kleitman (1963, 1969, 1982), one of the first to observe the REM activity pattern, refers to a basic rest-activity cycle (BRAC) in sleep and wakefulness. According to Rossi (1996, 124), the early therapists who used hypnosis were intuitively aware of the wave nature of human experience, but it was Milton H. Erickson who effectively applied it. Unlike his colleagues who saw patients for a 50-minute session, Erickson preferred to meet for an hour and a half or more. Rossi (ibid., 129) states: “He claimed that people in everyday life also naturally drifted between subtle but distinct mindbody states. When he worked with patients for at least an hour and a half or two, he found, they were almost certain to go through distinct changes in their consciousness and states of being.” During these lengthier sessions, for no apparent reason, the patient’s head might start to nod rhythmically, eyelids would blink slowly, and then close over faraway-looking eyes. The body might go perfectly still, with fingers, hands, arms, or legs apparently frozen in an awkward position. Sometimes there was a subtle smile on the person’s face or, more often, the features were passive and slack … On some occasions, Erickson did nothing to direct people to go into trance; it just seemed to happen, sooner or later, all by itself. (ibid.)

Erickson referred to these natural periods as common everyday trances. They are times of “openness and vulnerability to outside influences; suggestions made during this time are sometimes more easily accepted” (ibid., 130). Figure 1 illustrates Rossi’s hypothesis that “the natural unit of psychobiologically oriented psychotherapy is the utilization of one of the 90–120 minute

FIGURE 1 The Four-Stage Creative Process in Psychobiologically Oriented Psychotherapy

Notes: The lower diagram summarizes the alternating 90–120 minute ultradian rhythms of waking and sleeping for an entire day in a simplified manner. The ascending peaks of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep characteristic of nightly dreams every 90–120 minutes or so are illustrated along with the more variable ultradian rhythms of activity, adaptation, and rest in the daytime. This lower figure also illustrates how many hormonal messenger molecules of the endocrine system, such as growth hormone, the activating and stress hormone cortisol, and the sexual hormone testosterone, have typical circadian peaks at different times of the 24-hour cycle. The upper diagram outlines the basic psychobiological unit of psychotherapy as the creative utilization of one of the natural 90–120 minute ultradian rhythms of arousal and relaxation illustrated in the lower diagram. Source: Rossi (2002, 68).

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cycles of activity and rest illustrated in the lower part” (Rossi 2002, 69; see also Lloyd and Rossi 1992; Rossi 1996). This also is the time it takes for the gene expression/protein synthesis cycle to complete one ultradian cycle of healing on the level of psychosocial genomics, which, Rossi hypothesizes, is the molecular basis of mind-body healing. Based on it, Rossi affirms that “what has been traditionally called ‘therapeutic suggestion’ may be, in essence, the accessing, entrainment, and utilization of ultradian/circadian replays of mind-body communication on all levels, from the cellular-genomic to the behavioral, that are responsive to psychosocial cues” (Rossi 2002, 70; italics in the original). In The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing, Rossi (1993) had previously proposed that hypnotherapy might activate bodily systems at the cellular and even genetic levels that can contribute to the healing of a variety of illnesses traditionally categorized as physical, as well as those labeled psychosomatic. He began his argument by presenting evidence to demonstrate that the placebo still is perhaps the most successful long-term treatment modality in medicine. He contends that when an individual believes something will help her or him, that knowledge, as information, may be transduced to activate other bodily systems down to the level of the cells and genes, analogously to the way pharmaceuticals work. One of Rossi’s primary concerns is to show how hypnotherapy may contribute to healing both when complementing conventional treatments and when applied on its own. He adds: “[I]t is the patient’s own internal hypnotherapeutic work rather than the therapist’s hypnotic suggestions or programming per se that is the essence of hypnosis in problem solving and healing” (Rossi 1996, 119 italics in the original). Based on Rossi’s work, I have hypothesized (Greenfield in press) that healing may occur when information at the cultural level—held as beliefs as to what in the universe has the ability to cause and cure illness—is transduced to the psyche of an individual participating in a religious ritual. I propose that beliefs of (traditional) non-Western peoples and some religious groups regarding what has the power both to cause illness and to cure it might be considered information held at the implicit level that may be comparable to what hypnotherapists explicitly present to their (Western) patients as suggestions. When members of these religious or traditional groups enter, in controlled situations, into what Goodman (1988, 34) calls “religious trance” and continue uninterrupted in this state for at least one BRAC, they may be undergoing the same process of psychosocial genomics as hypnotized patients. In terms of Rossi’s model, they may receive beneficial healing even if nothing further happens. The analogy becomes more compelling if we hypothesize that the knowledge presented as information in a ritual, or held from previous learning in implicit memory, can move to working memory from where it is transduced to other bodily systems, whose activation contributes to the healing process. The information content of the ritual may accomplish precisely what the therapeutic suggestion does. Both of the disobsession rituals described in this chapter began with a person telling a group of potential patients in slow, monotonous tones—consistent

FIGURE 2 A Psychogenomic View of the Psychosomatic Network

Psychological Arousal Pain, Stress, Novelty, BRAC, REM Sleep, Creative Moments

❶ IEGs

❹

State Dependent Mood, Memory & Learning

Target Gene Transcription

❷

New Protein Synthesis

❸ Notes: Mindbody communication via the dynamics of psychobiological arousal that can initiate (1) immediate early gene expression (IEG) that, in turn, leads to (2) the expression of specific target genes, which (3) code for new protein synthesis that is the molecular basis of (4) state-dependent memory, learning, behavior (SDMLB) that is replayed on conscious and unconscious levels in the creation and re-creation of human experience. Source: Rossi (2002, 200).

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with some forms of hypnotic induction—how enlightened spirits, doing the charity so important to followers of Kardec, helped him recover from a condition that had diminished his ability to function or had caused considerable pain and suffering. Additional speakers followed with their own similar tales. Often, a doctor affirmed that the speaker had had an illness from which he or she was inexplicably cured following the ritual (Greenfield 1997). Each heartwarming, positive presentation, couched in terms of the Spiritist belief system, convincingly explained how disincarnate spirits cause or alleviate sickness. This credence in a universe in which the opposition between this world and the other is porous and in which beings in the other have the power to bring or cure sickness was then dramatically reinforced during the passionate exchanges between leaders and errant spirits. Though the patients appeared uninvolved and might not have been consciously aware of internalizing the beliefs expressed— and might even reject them, if asked—I suggest that as the patients entered an ASC, they absorbed, even if at a subliminal level, enough in the session, which lasted more than one BRAC, that their psyches transduced sufficient information to (1) turn on immediate-early genes that, as shown in figure 2, (2) may lead to the “expression of specific target genes, which (3) code for new protein synthesis that is the molecular basis of (4) state-dependent memory, learning, behavior (SDMLB) that is replayed on conscious and unconscious levels” (Rossi 2002, 200). Thus, when reflecting on or reacting to their experience, patients may reframe it in ways that contribute not just to their healing but also to their psychobiological well-being and growth.

NOTES 1. Transduction may be defined as the conversion or transformation of matter, energy, and information from one form to another. It is used in this essay specifically to conceptualize the possible transformation of beliefs held and expressed as symbols at the cultural level into convictions held by individuals at the psychological level, and then into the movement of neurons that turn on target and other genes to produce proteins and enzymes at the biological level. 2. I attribute the precision in the starting of each segment of the disobsession ritual to no more than the effort of the organizers to complete each session before the next program scheduled for the facilities is to go on in a Brazilian environment in which there usually is little sense of being on time. Fortuitously, this precision enabled me to realize that exactly two hours passed between the time that the ritual started and the time that the patients were treated. This is precisely the period needed for them to pass through one Ultradian basic rest-activity cycle (BRAC). The relevance of this will be discussed in the conclusions. 3. Named Léon Dénizart Hippolyte Rivail. 4. One for spirits and the material one in which we live. 5. I assume that the relatively elaborate introduction in which Dr. Lacerda participated this day was for the benefit of the visitors learning the procedures. At other times and at other centers that I visited, the patients, and those accompanying them, did not interact with the healers until they were escorted into rooms where they waited, although at all times

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they were subjected to testimonials delivered in monotone that outlined the Spiritist view of the cosmos. 6. As Hess (n.d.), applying Dumont’s (1980) framework refers to it for Kardecist intellectuals. 7. As previously noted, many of the people I have observed being treated at disobsessions and other Spiritist healing sessions appear to be in an altered state.

REFERENCES Barber, Theodore X. 1984. “Changing ‘Unchangeable’ Bodily Processes by (Hypnotic) Suggestions: A New Look at Hypnosis, Cognitions, Imagining, and the Mind-Body Problem.” Pp. 69–127 in Imagination and Healing, ed. Anees A. Sheik. Farmingdale, N.Y.: Baywood Publishing. ———. 1999. “A Comprehensive Three-Dimensional Theory of Hypnosis.” Pp. 21–48 in Clinical Hypnosis and Self-Regulation: Cognitive-Behavioral Perspectives, ed. Irving Kirsch, Antonio Capafons, Etzel Cardena-Buelna, and Salvador Amigo. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. Bastide, Roger. 1978. The African Religions of Brazil: Towards a Sociology of the Interpretation of Civilizations. Trans. Helen Sebba. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bourguignon, Erika. 1951. “Syncretism and Ambivalence in Haiti: An Ethnohistoric Study.” Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University. ———. 1970. “Ritual Dissociation and Possession Belief in Caribbean Negro Religion.” Pp. 87–101 in Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Norman E. Whitten and John F. Szwed. New York: Free Press. Brown, Diana DeGroat. 1986. Umbanda: Religion and Politics in Urban Brazil. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cavalcanti, Maria Laura. 1983. O mundo invisível. Cosmologia, sistema ritual e a noção de pessoa no espiritismo. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar. Courlander, Harold. 1939. Haiti Singing. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Dumont, Louis. 1980 [1966]. “Postface: Toward a Theory of Hierarchy.” In Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1915 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Trans. Joseph Ward Swain. New York and London: Free Press. ———. 1933 [1893]. The Division of Labor in Society. Trans. George Simpson. New York: Macmillan. ———. 1938 [1895]. The Rules of Sociological Method. Trans. Sarah A. Solovay and John H. Mueller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1951 [1897]. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press of Glencoe Ewin, Dabny M. 1984. “Hypnosis in Surgery and Anesthesia.” Pp. 210–235 in Clinical Hypnosis: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ed. William C. Wester and Alexander H. Smith. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Frazer, James G. 1911–1915. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 12 vols. 3rd ed. London: Macmillan. Gauld, Alan A. 1992. A History of Hypnotism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giobellina Brumana, Fernando, and Elda G. Martinez. 1989. Spirits from the Margin: Umbanda in São Paulo. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Goodman, Felicitas D. 1969. “Glossolalia: Speaking in Tongues in Four Cultural Settings.” Confinia Psychiatrica 12, no. 2:113–129.

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———. 1974. “Disturbances in the Apostolic Church: A Trance-Based Upheaval in Yucatan.” Pp. 227–364 in Trance, Healing, and Hallucination: Three Field Studies in Religious Experience, ed. Felicitas D. Goodman, Jeannette H. Henney, and Esther Pressel. New York: Wiley. ———. 1988. Ecstasy, Ritual and Alternate Reality: Religion in a Pluralistic World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Greenfield, Sidney M. 1987. “The Return of Dr. Fritz: Spiritist Healing and Patronage Networks in Urban, Industrial Brazil.” Social Science and Medicine 24, no. 12:1095–1108. ———. 1997. “The Patients of Dr. Fritz: Assessments of Treatment by a Brazilian Spiritist Healer.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 61, no. 847:372–383. ———. 2001. “The Pragmatics of Conversion in the Brazilian Religious Marketplace.” Pp. 490–496 in Contemporary Cultures and Societies of Latin America, ed. Dwight B. Heath. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press. ———. In press. “The Cultural Biology of Brazilian Spiritist Surgery and other Alternatives to Biomedical Healing.” International Journal of Parapsychology. Greenfield, Sidney M., and John Gray. 1988. The Return of Dr. Fritz: Healing by the Spirits in Brazil. A video documentary produced at the Educational Communications Department of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 63 min. Greenfield, Sidney M., and Russell Prust. 1990. “Popular Religion, Patronage, and Resource Distribution in Brazil: A Model of an Hypothesis for the Survival of the Economically Marginal.” Pp. 123–146 in Perspectives on the Informal Economy, ed. M. E. Smith. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America. Henney, Jeanette H. 1974. “Spirit-Possession Belief and Trance Behavior in Two Fundamentalist Groups in St. Vincent.” Pp. 1–111 in Trance, Healing, and Hallucination: Three Field Studies in Religious Experience, ed. Felicitas D. Goodman, Jeannette H. Henney, and Esther Pressel. New York: Wiley. Herskovits, Melville J. 1937. Life in a Haitian Valley. New York: Knopf. ———. 1941. The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon. Herskovits, Melville J., and Frances S. Herskovits. 1934. Rebel Destiny. New York and London: Whittlesey House. ———. 1936. Surinam Folk-lore. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1947. Trinidad Village. New York: Knopf. Hess, David. n.d. “Medical Pluralism in the Rhetoric of Encompassment: Four Religious Healing Systems in Brazil.” Unpublished manuscript. Holroyd, Jean. 1992. “Hypnosis as a Methodology in Psychological Research.” Pp. 201–226 in Contemporary Hypnosis Research, ed. Erika Fromm and Michael R. Nash. New York: Guilford Press. Horowitz, Michael M., and Morton Klass. 1961. “The Martiniquan East Indian Cult of Maldevidan.” Social and Economic Studies 10:93–100. Hurston, Zora N. 1938. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. New York: Harper and Row. Isaacs, E. 1957. “A History of American Spiritualism: The Beginnings, 1885–1855.” M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kardec, Allan. 1975 [1861]. The Mediums’ Book. Trans. Anna Blackwell. São Paulo: FEB. ———. 1987 [1864]. The Gospel According to Spiritism. Trans. J. Duncan. London: The Headquarters publishing Co Ltd. ———. n.d. [1856]. The Spirits’ Book. Trans. Anna Blackwell. São Paulo: FEB. Kleitman, Nathaniel. 1963. Sleep and Wakefulness as Alternating Phases in the Cycle of Existence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1969. “Basic Rest-Activity Cycle in Relation to Sleep and Wakefulness.” Pp. 33–38 in Sleep: Physiology and Pathology, ed. Anthony Kales. Philadelphia: Lippincott. ———. 1982. “The Basic Rest-Activity Cycle—22 Years Later.” Sleep 5:311–315.

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Lacerda de Azevedo, José. 1988. Espírito/Matéria: Novos Horizontes para a Medicina. Porto Alegre: Palliotti. Landes, Ruth. 1947. The City of Women. New York: Macmillan. Leacock, Seth, and Ruth Leacock. 1972. Spirits of the Deep: A Study of an Afro-Brazilian Cult. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Ley, Robert G., and Richard J. Freeman. 1984. “Imagery, Cerebral Laterality and the Healing Process.” Pp. 51–68 in Imagination and Healing, ed. Anees A. Sheik. Farmingdale, N.Y.: Baywood Publishing. Lloyd, David, and Ernest L. Rossi. 1992. Ultradian Rhythms in Life Processes: A Fundamental Inquiry into Chronobiology and Psychobiology. New York: Springer-Verlag. Lowenthal, Ira P. 1978. “Ritual Performance and Religious Experience: A Service for the Gods in Southern Haiti.” Journal of Anthropological Research 34, no. 3:392–414. Marmer, Milton J. 1959. Hypnosis in Anesthesiology. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas. McGregor, Pedro. 1967. Jesus of the Spirits. New York: Stein and Day. Moore, Lawrence E., and Jerold Z. Kaplan. 1983. “Hypnotically Accelerated Burn Wound Healing.” American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis 26, no. 1:16–19. Moore, R. Laurence. 1977. In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Nelson, Geoffrey K. 1969. Spiritualism and Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Powdermaker, Hortense. 1939. After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South. New York: Viking. Pressel, Esther. 1974. “Umbanda, Trance and Possession in São Paulo, Brazil.” Pp. 113–225 in Trance, Healing, and Hallucination: Three Field Studies in Religious Experience, ed. Felicitas D. Goodman, Jeannette H. Henney, and Esther Pressel. New York: Wiley. Renshaw, Park. 1969. “A Sociological Analysis of Spiritism in Brazil.” Ph.D. diss., University of Florida. Rossi, Ernest L. 1993 [1986]. The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing: New Concepts of Therapeutic Hypnosis. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton. ———. 1996. The Symptom Path to Enlightenment: The New Dynamics of Self-Organization in Hypnotherapy: An Advanced Manual for Beginners. Pacific Palisades, Calif.: Palisades Gateway Publishing. ———. 2002. The Psychobiology of Gene Expression: Neuroscience and Neurogenesis in Hypnosis and the Healing Arts. New York: W. W. Norton. Ruzyla-Smith, P., A. Barabasz, M. Barabasz, and D. Warner. 1995. “Effects of Hypnosis on the Immune Response: B-cells, T-cells, Helper and Supressor Cells.” American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis 38, no. 2:71–79. St. Clair, David. 1971. Drum and Candle. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company. Tylor, Edward B. 1970 [1871]. Religion in Primitive Culture. (First published as part of Primitive Culture.) Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith. Winkelman, Michael. 2000. Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing. Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey.

PART V

PHILOSOPHICALLY SPEAKING

* Chapter 9

THE TACIT LOGIC OF RITUAL EMBODIMENTS Rappaport and Polanyi between Thick and Thin Robert E. Innis

Roy Rappaport, in his monumental and engrossing Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999), lays an essentially Peircean or semiotic grid over the complex and historically variable phenomena of ritual in general and of religion in particular (see also Rappaport 1979). Coming to the materials from the philosophical side, without prior or contestable anthropological commitments, I find myself sympathetic to Rappaport’s concerns and admiring of his theoretical scope, empirical breadth, and existential engagement. But I am not quite satisfied in some ways either with his argument and its substantive claims or with the adequacy, focus, and implications of his conceptual framework. The philosophical References for this chapter are located on page 212.

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and semiotic core of his analysis, already adumbrated in his Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (1979), is a schematization of the levels and types of meaningfulness within which human beings construct and construe their lives in a world “devoid of intrinsic meaning but subject to physical law” (Rappaport 1999, 1). Within this stark polarity of the semiotic and the physical orders, which is actually not supported by Peirce’s metaphysical vision, Rappaport develops the relevance of the classical Peircean triad of iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity for the analysis of the practices of ritual, especially religious rituals. Ritual performances for Rappaport are semiotic frames for the production of meanings. They are intrinsically constituted as sign-complexes. Now the purpose of any sign, in the Peircean account, is to produce in the body-mind that is the interpreter an equivalent sign, which Peirce called the interpretant (which can be a feeling, an action, or a conceptual habit), and thus to bring the interpreter into the same relation to the sign’s object that the sign itself has, albeit, in the interpreter’s case, the relation is mediated by the sign-complex itself. Rituals, moreover, are to be situated within the systems of sign-complexes such as play and art, whose semiotic power and distinctive configurations—as Langer (1988) and Dissanayake (1988, 1992, 2000) have forcefully and convincingly argued—run parallel to or intersect with ritual’s own, without being identical. Rituals, in Rappaport’s view, supply or are access structures to meanings in their own way. They have their own logic and become the matrices of distinctive types of meaningful experiences exemplified paradigmatically by the bearing of religious rituals upon a realm of being marked by a pressing existential and metaphysical ultimacy, as in Tillich’s and Jaspers’s notions of ‘limit situations.’ It is Rappaport’s concept of an embodied ‘logic’ of ritual, independent of representational content, that supplies the point of entry for my engagement with the theme of ‘ritual in its own right.’ If ritual is, in itself, a distinctive ‘frame of sense,’ how are we to frame, quite generally, independent of substantive commitments, this frame? Rappaport characterizes Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity not as a theological treatise, nor as an investigation into the philosophy of religion, but as a “work in anthropology” whose “assumptions are, of course, exclusively naturalistic” (1999, 2). But while the empirical body of the book is, to be sure, anthropological, its skeletal structure, to mix metaphors, is a heady brew of semiotically oriented theological and philosophical reflections. Rappaport appropriates and applies the ‘standard vanilla version’ of the Peircean semiotic schema, which depends on differentiating the types of signs, or sign-functions, according to the ways that signs are related to their objects or make their objects known. Peirce’s by now familiar schema differentiates three fundamental and irreducible ways that the sign-object relation is constituted or ways in which a sign can do its work or function as a sign. A sign functions ‘iconically’ when it is bound to, and mediates access to, its objects by ‘resemblance’ or ‘similarity.’ The categorial ground of this type of sign, and of its meaning-making capacity, is a shared ‘quality,’ a particular ‘suchness’ or ‘affective tone’ immanent in both the sign and the object upon which it bears. A sign functions ‘indexically’ when it is bound to, and mediates access to, its objects by means of an existential bond or

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‘real connection.’ The ground of this type of sign is an extended notion of ‘contiguity’ in space or time, including the time of the stream of consciousness with its structures of retention and protention, of memory and anticipation, held in a moving present. A sign functions ‘symbolically’ when its relation to its object is defined by a convention, rule, or law. The ground here is an ‘agreement,’ whether explicit or merely followed in practice. These sign types open up, establish, preserve, and carry forward the great meaning-spaces in which we have our mental homes. They constitute the great vehicles of semiosis, the production and interpretation of signs, which are the defining features of our lives as human beings. As Rappaport rightly and provocatively puts it, “Humanity is a species that lives and can only live in terms of meanings it itself must invent. These meanings and understandings not only reflect or approximate an independently existing world but participate in its very construction” (1999, 8). Rappaport, along with at least the bulk of the anthropological tradition with which I am familiar, thinks of ritual quite generally as a distinctive structure, that is, “a more or less enduring set of relations among a number of general but variable features” (1999, 3). ‘Ritual’ denotes “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers” (24). Although such a definition could also apply to a vast array of events, from voodoo ceremonies through political rallies and jury trials to state dinners or programmed private dinner parties, Rappaport, with deep intellectual curiosity and involvement, has considerably bigger fish to fry. He wants to argue the thesis that “religion’s major conceptual and experiential constituents, the sacred, the numinous, the occult and the divine, and their integration into the Holy, are creations of ritual” (3). Rappaport goes further and calls these constituents “entailments of the form which constitutes ritual” (3). Ritual is a bipolar phenomenon: “As a form or structure it possesses certain logical properties, but its properties are not only logical. Inasmuch as performance is one of its general features, it possesses the properties of practice as well. In ritual, logic becomes enacted and embodied—is realized—in unique ways” (3). It is embodied clearly in the stream of acts and utterances, but also, Rappaport adds, in objects as well (22). I think, however, although Rappaport, strangely in light of the ‘ecological turn’ in his thought, does not make much of it, it is also embodied in places. With the aid of a rather different set of conceptual tools, whose philosophical import I have developed at length elsewhere (see especially Innis 1977, 1994, 2002), I want to comment on Rappaport’s handling of precisely this issue of an embodied logic and its philosophical grounding and validity. I leave any detailed discussion of Rappaport’s material claims for ritual for another occasion.

A Semiotic Logic of Ritual Performances The logic that Rappaport in fact is concerned with is first and foremost a semiotic logic. The central ideas are as follows. Ritual, as a matrix of meaning, generates

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and carries two streams of meanings: the self-referential and the canonical. The self-referential stream is constituted by the experiential qualities that define the existential state of being (meaning-being) of the ritual participant. The canonical stream carries the articulate formal (interpretative) frame that informs—indeed, defines—the ‘point’ of the ritual, distinguishing, say, a Quaker meeting from a Buddhist meditation session. Or, to use another distinction employed by Rappaport, the self-referential dimension encompasses the nondiscursive, affective, experiential aspect of ritual, while the canonical dimension encompasses its discursive, articulate aspect. Looked at in this way, ritual performances are communication events, with no end outside of communication itself—a Deweyan consummatory act. Such a feature arises from the “formality and non-instrumentality characteristic of ritual” (Rappaport 1999, 51). Corresponding to the two meaning streams are two types of communication, although they are not strictly correlative: auto-communication and allo-communication (51). It is most important to recognize that even solitary acts of ritual, which are legion in religion especially, are intrinsically communicative. “In fact,” Rappaport writes, “the transmitters of ritual’s message are always among their most important receivers” (51). Ritual is not just a ‘statement,’ it is also a form of auto-affection. Participating in a ritual not only sends a message to one’s co-participants that one adheres to the canonical order that is being performed by the group; it also both formulates and sends a message to oneself about what one’s correlative existential states are, or at least should be, provided one authentically tries to realize them as defined by the canon. Auto-communication refers to the eliciting of experiential events and states, while allo-communication refers to a public manifestation of adherence to universal orders (53). A key weight-bearing, and not altogether stable, hinge of Rappaport’s argument is the inversion of the normal hierarchy of meaningfulness attendant upon the choice of a particular system of signs. The inversion is as much a descriptive one as a normative one. In the Peircean schema, the ‘ascension’ of semiosis, which is logical rather than temporal, is from signs of firstness (iconic signs), through signs of secondness (indexical signs), to signs of thirdness (symbolic signs). As signs, however, in the Peircean frame, they are all instances of thirdness, since signs by definition entail, or are constituted by, mediation. While Peirce certainly thought that the vexatious rise of symbolicity, with its opening of vast fields of lying, deception, and possibilities, marked human mentation as such and that symbolic signs define the essential features of language as a selfreflexive and potentially infinite system of meaningfulness, he certainly never thought tout court that symbols or symbol systems were ‘higher’ in any absolute sense, nor indeed that they were or could be ‘lower.’ But this is what Rappaport suggests with his pivotal, fateful, and unjustified distinction between low-order, middle-order, and high-order levels of meaning, which should instead be correlated rather than ranked. Low-order meanings he calls ‘taxonomic.’ Embodied in linguistic symbol systems, these meanings ‘cut’ or ‘articulate’ the continuum of experience into classes by marking differences, that is, by articulating and expressing forms of

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definiteness or pertinence. The basis of this approach is conventionalized distinction, which makes up the discursive order. Middle-order meanings are, in Rappaport’s schema, ‘metaphorical,’ based on similarity. These types of meanings are carried by systems of iconic signs, although the various media in which they are embodied are not of the same sort. Metaphorical meanings can be rooted in multiple sensory modalities and can be embedded in linguistic, visual, auditory, gestural, and other systems. High-order meanings, for Rappaport, are wedded to the Peircean semiotic category of indexicality. They are defined by the goal of what Rappaport calls ‘unification.’ Indexical signs ‘participate’ in one way or the other in what they signify. They have a ‘real connection’ with their objects. The interpreter and user of such high-order signs is brought into an experienced real relation to their objects. This is an essentially ‘unitive’ form of meaning. The sign-user, by means of such a high-order sign, is ‘affected’ by the signified reality. Such distinctions, however, rather than being Peircean, are parasitic on Tillich’s insightful differentiation between ‘signs’ and ‘symbols’ as exemplifications of ‘mere pointing’ and of ‘constitutive participation.’ Rappaport draws a number of problematic consequences from this schematization. First, rituals are, he thinks, deeply dependent on indices (1999, 56), although they are not exclusively defined by them. Inasmuch as rituals strive for a ‘conscious effect’ on the participant, this effect, he claims, can be realized only if there is a real connection between the realities intended in (projected from) the ritual and the practitioner of the ritual. Rituals are both something we do and something that is done to us. In the loaded words of the Protestant theologian Tom Driver, rituals are “primarily instruments designed to change a situation. They are more like washing machines than books” (Driver 1998, 93). Secondly, Rappaport contends that the role of indices makes the boundary between the physical and the meaningful essentially vague. Ritual participation sets up bodily reverberations in the participants, inscribing a set of meanings into the psychophysical system of its performers. Thirdly, ritual meanings, to the degree that they are indexical, in the specific and actually non-Peircean sense Rappaport gives to this notion, are ‘ineffable.’ They are not said but ‘displayed.’ They belong, in Rappaport’s account, to the realm of showing or to the ‘presentational’ side of ritual, to follow Langer’s terminology, which Rappaport also adverts to (Rappaport 1999, 73), but whose import he does not bring into full consonance with his Peircean commitments. As Langer (1988) develops the notion, presentational forms, which ‘show’ rather than ‘say,’ are far removed from indexicality as semiotic mode. Nevertheless, Rappaport clearly sees that the deep finality of ritual is oriented towards a hierarchy of subjectivity and is governed by a logic of integration: self-integration, the pursuit of ‘wholeness as holiness’ (which leads him towards an ecological position), and integration into the realities projected by or constituted by the ritual. These realities, and their apprehension, escape, in the last analysis, the discursive dimension. When Rappaport claims that “certain meanings and effects can best, or even only, be expressed or achieved in ritual” (Rappaport 1999, 30), it is important to note

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the parallel between the expression of meanings and the achievement of effects. Fourthly, ritual participation is both an existential and a categorial ‘predication.’ Ritual participation opens participants to definitions of their states. This definition takes two forms: (a) existential and experiential achievement of a defined state of being, and (b) the actual definition of the state of being within a categorial system. “By participating in a ritual the performer reaches out of his private self, so to speak, in a public canonical order to grasp the category that he then imposes on his private processes” (106). Self-predication is an act of existential interpretation, fusing, ideally, the self-referential and the canonical into one. While the “canonical guides, limits, and, indeed, defines, the self-referential” (106), it does not constitute the total reality of the ritual’s effects. “In all rituals private psychophysical processes and public orders are at once articulated to each other and buffered against each other” (105). ‘Articulation’ and ‘buffering’ express the dialectical tension between the ‘existential’ and the ‘canonical’ dimensions of ritual and the nonreducibility of one to the other. ‘Articulation’ is both a discursive and an experiential act or process. In religious ritual, the lived senses of the Holy and their discursive formulation and development are articulated in what Rappaport calls Universal Sacred Postulates. The notion of self-articulation as self-predication allows Rappaport to advert to a central semiotic phenomenon: people are “predicated by the abstractions which they themselves realize” (1999, 149). Rappaport oscillates between the language of predication and the language of form and substance to describe this process. In ritual, he writes, we have the “substantiation of form and an informing of substance” (29). Rituals involve, on the one hand, substantiating the nonmaterial (141), that is, the system of articulate meanings constituting the canonical dimension, defined by the symbolic order, as in Halakhic observances, which “attempt to realize a divine order in mundane time” (209). On the other hand, the material is necessarily ‘formalized,’ embedded in an articulate frame as a ‘form of sense.’ By a ‘form of sense’ I mean, in the present context, first, an articulated form in which what Eugene Gendlin (1962) has called felt meaning is given, and, second, the system of categories that perform an operative hermeneutic function, that supply the content of the ritual, the interpretation of the ritual’s implied vision, and not merely the enactment of the vision. A Seder is not a High Mass. A Zen meditation session is not a Quaker meeting. A bar mitzvah is not a Christian confirmation. These essentially different activities are taxonomically, that is, canonically, different from one another. They also have different ‘feels’ or ‘affective tones.’ Rappaport’s analysis of ritual clearly oscillates between a bipolar model that distinguishes between (a) the performative (that is, experiential) and the canonical (that is, liturgical) sides of ritual, and (b) a triadic semiotic model that attempts to exploit the Peircean schema. The first distinction establishes the fact and necessity of embodiment relations. The second set of distinctions establishes not so much a hierarchy of meaningfulness as a polydimensionality of meaningfulness. But Rappaport does not really tell us how we are to think of the mechanisms of embodiment. And his foregrounding of the essentially

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semiotic dimension of ritual by means of an appropriation of Peirce needs to be corrected and enriched by other conceptual frameworks. The principal problem is twofold. First, Rappaport has not exploited the Peircean notion of the interpretant, with its differentiation by Peirce into the affective, the energetic, and the logical. Secondly, and connected with this, Rappaport has not adverted to the overarching primacy of an iconicity defined by a distinctive ‘quality,’ not indexicality, as the defining feature of the enframed existential effects of ritual. Unitive meanings cannot be irretrievably wedded to indexicality, whose defining marks include duality, resistance, sense of external effect. As I see it, the semiotic dimension in Rappaport stands in uneasy, or at least unclarified, relationship to the embodiment dimension. While it is, I think, true that the “numinous and the holy are … rooted in the organic depths of human being” (Rappaport 1999, 230), we could ask how precisely these organic depths are affected and defined by ritual’s canonical, and hence semiotic, side, which powerfully gives us “simultaneous representation of multiple significata” (256) whose import is articulated and grounded by the Universal Sacred Postulates and whose experienced simultaneity is grounded in an integration of incompatibles. I would like now to illustrate how some elements from another philosophical project, which also oscillates between embodiment and meaning, intersect with and throw light on this admittedly limited set of issues that by no means exhaust the scope of Rappaport’s analysis, but nevertheless bear upon its conceptual armature. They exemplify the complexity of any analysis of ritual that wants to be philosophically adequate to its object. More specifically, I want to show how Michael Polanyi’s development of the notion of ‘tacit knowing,’ and the correlative model of consciousness on which it is built, perspicuously foregrounds key aspects of the ‘tacit logic’ of ritual embodiment. This topic, strangely enough, is treated with great acumen in Polanyi’s 1958 masterwork, Personal Knowledge, the principal goal of which was a radical dismantling of the great myth of scientific objectivism with its own commitment to the fateful dichotomy of intrinsic meaning and physical law.

A Tacit Logic of Ritual Performances The analogy of skills that lies at the heart of Polanyi’s model is extraordinarily relevant to the analysis of ritual, initiation into which, or the learning of which, has the structure of a skill. Polanyi formulates his alternative idea of knowledge in the following manner. I regard knowing as an active comprehension of the things known, an action that requires skill. Skilful knowing and doing is performed by subordinating a set of particulars, as clues or tools, to the shaping of a skilful achievement, whether practical or theoretical. We may then be said to become ‘subsidarily aware’ of these particulars within our ‘focal awareness’ of the coherent entity that we

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achieve. Clues and tools are things used as such and not observed in themselves. They are made to function as extensions of our bodily equipment and this involves a certain change in our own being. Acts of comprehension are to this extent irreversible, and also non-critical. For we cannot possess any fixed framework within which the reshaping of our hitherto fixed framework could be critically tested. (Polanyi 1958, vii)

Rituals are comprehensive entities whose subsidiary particulars are an array of actions, utterances, objects, and places that function as vectors within the field of consciousness. The ritual is a complex concatenation of actional, linguistic, affective, and perceptual (objectual and spatial-local) wholes. The achievement of these wholes not only demands skillful knowledge but brings it into being and generates a specific type of experience, which we can fail to have. As Polanyi puts it in Personal Knowledge, “any deliberate existential use of the mind may be said to succeed or fail in achieving a desired experience” (Polanyi 1958, 201–202). The type of experience is intrinsically wedded to the subsidiary particulars that are indwelt. For as the American pragmatist John Dewey pointed out, relying on Peirce, each type of experience is marked by a distinctive qualitative feel. Each type of subsidiary, and the whole resulting from its integration, is regulated by “an underlying and pervasive quality” (Dewey 1931, 96). This underlying unity of qualitativeness “regulates pertinence or relevancy and force of every distinction and relation” (99). Running through all of the particulars, this quality “gives meaning to each and binds them together” (96). It is this quality that is first and foremost apprehended in the process of the tacit integration of a field of particulars into which we have extended ourselves. “Since tacit knowing establishes a meaningful relation between two terms, we identify it with the understanding of the comprehensive entity which these two terms jointly constitute. Thus, the proximal term represents the particulars of this entity, and we can say, accordingly, that we comprehend the entity by relying on our awareness of its particulars for attending to their joint meaning” (Polanyi 1966, 13). Or, as Polanyi puts it, “we dwell in all subsidiarily experienced things” (1969, 183). It is the joint meanings arising in ritual integrations that are at issue. Polanyi, in fact, has strikingly analyzed ritual in light of these concepts. Ritual theorists with philosophical concerns should take notice. Ritual is connected by Polanyi with a specific take on the twin notions of contemplation and participation, corresponding to the canonical and the performative roles that Rappaport delineates. Polanyi uses a version of Christianity as a paradigmatic instance of a general principle, much as Rappaport scoured the vast anthropological data field for his instances. “The universe of every great articulate system is constructed by elaborating and transmuting one particular aspect of anterior experience: the Christian faith elaborates and renders effective the supernatural aspect of anterior experience in terms of its own internal experience” (Polanyi 1958, 283). Without entering into a discussion of what Polanyi means by “supernatural,” I note that this internal experience consists in the

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evocation and imposition (self-predication) of a set of correct modes of feeling that are enjoyed for their own sake, as an inherent quality of experience, with “no ulterior intention or ulterior meaning” (197). The purpose of ritual, in the Polanyian position, is to provide a field of actions, gestures, words, images, or places that elicit these modes of feeling. But this field is itself purposely generated and formalized by a passionate quest to break out of the normal conceptual framework within which we interpret and experience the world. Indeed, the religious ritual displays a permanent tension between dwelling in and breaking out, which also grounds the sense of the numinous. Polanyi remarks that “a valid articulate framework may be a theory, or a mathematical discovery, or a symphony. Whichever it is, it will be used by dwelling in it, and this indwelling can be consciously experienced” (1958, 195). Ritual has indeed a deep affinity with the performance of a symphony. When we observe or manipulate experience, however, “we are guided by experience and pass through experience without experiencing it in itself” (197). The conceptual framework in such cases functions as a screen between us and the experienced realities projected by it. The performative contemplation “dissolves the screen, stops our movement through experience and pours us straight into experience; we cease to handle things and become immersed in them … As we lose ourselves in contemplation, we take on an impersonal life in the objects of our contemplation” (197). Polanyi continues, in a vein close to Rappaport and to Gadamer’s analysis of art: Correspondingly, the impersonality of intense contemplation consists in a complete participation of the person in that which he contemplates and not in his complete detachment from it, as would be the case in an ideally objective observation. Since the impersonality of contemplation is a self-abandonment, it can be described either as egocentric or as selfless, depending on whether one refers to the contemplator’s visionary act or to the submergence of his person. (197)

It is egocentric in that the visionary act is an experienced state of being that is communicated to and made known to the participant. It is selfless in that the ritual contemplator submits him- or herself to, or lets him- or herself be informed by, transpersonal orders of symbolic meaning. Religious ritual clearly involves at least the attempt to “break through the screen of objectivity and draw upon our preconceptual capacities of contemplative vision” (Polanyi 1958, 199). By “preconceptual capacities,” Polanyi is drawing attention here to a nonanalytical orientation towards the world as a whole, or at least towards a segment of it, as a numinous phenomenon. In the case of Christian ritual, with which he was most concerned, Polanyi notes: “[T]he whole framework of intelligent understanding, by which he [the worshipper] normally appraises his impressions, sinks into abeyance and uncovers a world experienced uncomprehendingly as a divine miracle” (197). For Polanyi, then, ritual, worship, and contemplation are isomorphic and, in the case of Christianity and other monotheistic traditions, are deeply informed for him by the via

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negativa. We are invited “through a succession of ‘detachments,’ to seek in absolute ignorance union with Him who is beyond all being and knowledge. We see things then not focally, but as part of a cosmos, features of God” (198). The search for an experienced unity is connected with a ‘mystical view,’ which transforms our customary modes of vision. The meaning arrived at is a kind of physiognomic or physiognostic meaning, a meaning that is immanent in the form and, at the same time, a transcendent focus that is not able to be attained conceptually. Polanyi makes a crucial distinction in his theory of knowledge that is very helpful in determining just what kinds of meanings make up the ritual frame, and that intersects directly with Rappaport’s dichotomy of the performative and the canonical. Polanyi writes that “anything that functions effectively within an accredited context has meaning in that context and … any such context will itself be appreciated as meaningful” (1958, 58). He continues: We may describe the kind of meaning which a context possesses in itself as existential, to distinguish it especially from denotative or, more generally, representative meaning. In this sense pure mathematics has an existential meaning, while a mathematical theory in physics has a denotative meaning. The meaning of music is mainly existential, that of a portrait more or less representative, and so on. All kinds of order, whether contrived or natural, have existential meaning; but contrived order usually also conveys a message. (58)

Looked at this way, ritual and contemplation are suspended between these two poles of meaning. But it is clear that existential meaning, as Polanyi uses the term, is connected with the high-order meanings of ritual participation foregrounded by Rappaport. In terms of our analysis, we may say that the primary purpose of the ritual is to generate in the participant primarily perceptual and affective wholes by eliciting the integration of sets of subsidiarily attended from words, gestures, actions, images, and spaces or places into a focus that is the existential meaning of the religious experience. The religious experience, as the construction of an experienced whole, is configured as an existential meaning, embodied in an ordered frame. Ritual, or the total objective context of religious action or perception, can then be evaluated either from the point of view of its effectiveness or from the point of view of what terminal feelings or affects or patterns of sensibility are to be produced. Polanyi illustrates the types of terminal feelings in his interpretation of Christianity as follows. (Other articulate systems, of course, will have different terminal feelings.) Christianity, he remarks, is characterized by a mounting tension along with the “hope of a merciful visitation from above,” indeed, of a gift of grace (1958, 198), of an experienced ‘gratuity.’ Consequently, “the ritual of worship is expressly designed to induce and sustain this state of anguish, surrender and hope” (198). Christianity is for Polanyi a “heuristic vision which is accepted for the sake of its unresolvable tension … The indwelling of the Christian worshipper is therefore a continued attempt at breaking out, at casting off

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the condition of man, even while humbly acknowledging its inescapability” (198). This indwelling involves a technique that supplies a demand to evoke appropriate affective states. The affectivity and sensibility that constitute the mode of response are generated by an articulate framework—that of ritual. The ritual functions as a subsidiary: its focal unity—the set of immanently experienced affective responses and transformed perceptual and imaginal physiognomies—must be generated by tacit acts of integration, by performances that cross a logical gap separating the field of subsidiaries from their organizing and binding context. It is in this deepest sense, rather different from that indicated by Rappaport, that ritual is performance. It is a performance of self-meaning. But, how do we know that our ritual performance is correct and has generated the proper existential states? To what extent can we determine that we are actually having veridical experiences, as in the experience of conversion, transformation, and identification induced by ritual participation? Polanyi makes in this context a fruitful distinction between verification and validation. The acceptance of different kinds of articulate systems as mental dwelling places is arrived at by a process of gradual appreciation, and all these acceptances depend to some extent on the content of relevant experiences; but the bearing of natural science on facts of experience is much more specific than that of mathematics, religion or the various arts. It is justifiable, therefore, to speak of the verification of science by experience in a sense which would not apply to other articulate systems. The process by which other systems than science are tested and finally accepted may be called, by contrast, validation. Our personal participation is in general greater in a validation than in a verification. The emotional coefficient of assertion is intensified as we pass from the sciences to the neighboring domains of thought. But both verification and validation are everywhere an acknowledgement of a commitment: they claim the presence of something real and external to the speaker. As distinct from both of these, subjective experiences can only be said to be authentic, and authenticity does not involve a commitment in the sense in which both verification and validation do. (1958, 202)

Rituals clearly, in this view, are tested by processes of validation, by a heightening of the “emotional coefficient” of assertion. Nevertheless, relying on a theory and relying on a ritual have the same logical structure. Both involve a process of interiorizing. “To rely on a theory for understanding nature is to interiorize it. For we are attending from the theory to the things seen in its light, and are aware of the theory, while using it, in terms of the spectacle that it serves to explain” (Polanyi 1966, 17). The interiorization of a ritual, like the assimilation and practice of the processes of science, is a process of tacit groping, albeit existential groping. Can we, however, specify in more detail the nature of the ritual participant’s integration of subsidiaries? Polanyi proposes a crucial distinction between two types of tacit integrations and consequently between two different forms of meaning-making, which he calls indication and symbolization.

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The paradigm case of an indication is the integration of a phonic image to its meaning or sense, or the use of a word to denote something in the world. The phonic image is a functional clue or vector, but it has no intrinsic interest in itself. Although it has what Don Ihde has called an ‘echo effect’ or what Dewey, extending Peirce, describes as a distinctive ‘qualitative feel,’ it is still marked by an essential transparency, a purely functional relation to what it means. Any probe, pointer, or script is related to its ‘focus’ in this manner. Polanyi holds that “[i]n cases of indication, the subsidiaries are functionally of no intrinsic interest” (Polanyi and Prosch 1975, 70). Such an integration of subsidiaries into a focus is called by Polanyi self-centered because the subsidiaries are “made from the self as a center (which includes all the subsidiary clues in which we dwell) to the object of our focal attention” (71). It is clear that ‘indication,’ as understood by Polanyi, is quite different from the way Rappaport approaches the notion. But, in ‘symbolization,’ as Polanyi uses the concept, “the subsidiary clues do not function … merely as indicators pointing our way to something else. In this second kind of meaning it is the subsidiary clues that are of intrinsic interest to us, and they enter into meaning in such a way that we are carried away by these meanings” (1975, 71). What are these subsidiaries and what is their importance in the analysis of the tacit logic of our embodied apprehension of the ritual as a symbolic complex, in Polanyi’s sense? The symbol, as an object of our focal awareness, is not merely established by an integration of subsidiary clues directed from the self to the focal object; it is also established by surrendering the diffuse memories and experiences of the self into this object, thus giving them a visible embodiment. This visible embodiment serves as a focal point for the integration of these diffuse aspects of the self into a felt unity, a tacit grasp of ourselves as a whole person in spite of the manifold incompatibles existing in our lives as lived. Instead of being a self-centered integration, a symbol becomes rather a self-giving one, an integration in which not only the symbol becomes integrated but the self also becomes integrated as it is carried away by the symbol—or given to it. (74–75)

This is what happens in ritual embodiment. A ritual, looked at as an embodiment of meaning, has the same structure as a work of art, that is, as a ‘symbolic artifact.’ It consists of a frame and a content that mutually define one another. The frame and the discursive content, following Polanyi’s analysis, embody each other, rather than merely bearing on the other or externally pointing to the other. What Polanyi says about poems, paintings, sculptures, and plays applies also to ritual: they are “so many closed packages of clues, portable and lasting” (87). We give ourselves to them because in the deepest existential sense we find ourselves embodied in them. Rappaport makes much of the metaphorical dimension of ritual, although he inaccurately places it as a middle-order meaning. It is, rather, primary and constitutive. But, once again, what Polanyi says about the metaphorical structure of the artistic image can be transposed into the ritual key. The essential point is the irreducibility of metaphor and its heuristic power. Polanyi writes: “When

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a symbol embodying a significant matter has a significance of its own and this is akin to the matter that it embodies, the result is a metaphor” (Polanyi and Prosch 1975, 40). This is in fact a reformulation, in Polanyian terms, of both Peirce’s affirmation of the iconic foundation of metaphor and Langer’s notion of a presentational symbol that is rooted in the pregnancy of a form. Polanyi’s use of “akin” is a recognition of our grasp of (and our being grasped by) an ‘affinity’ between the symbolic form and its content. This affinity is more felt or lived through than thought. But it is, as Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) have clearly and persistently shown, deeply embedded in body-based image-schemata, which are subsidiaries that we attend from both in terms of our own felt sense of bodily movement and feeling tones and also in terms of their semiotic embodiment in the ritual. Symbolic image and metaphor are correlated with one another for Polanyi. They both involve processes of ‘figuration.’ Note how Polanyi applies his cognitional schema to this correlation: “As in the symbol, so in the metaphor: the subsidiary clues—consisting of all those inchoate experiences in our lives that are related to the two parts of a metaphor—are integrated into the meaning of a tenor and vehicle as they are related to each other in a focal object (a metaphor). The result is that a metaphor, like a symbol, carries us away, embodies us in itself, and moves us deeply as we surrender ourselves to it” (Polanyi and Prosch 1975, 78–79). It is in this process of being moved deeply by felt symbolic affinities that I think we find the roots of the sense of the numinous and of the possibility of an interconnected whole that grounds Rappaport’s ecological notion of the Holy. For Polanyi, a ritual, like a work of art, produces, in multiple sensory modalities, “a powerful and moving image, embodying our own diffuse experiences, thus giving us an object in which to see them as integrated” (Polanyi and Prosch 1975, 79). But ritual images gesture towards a ‘transnatural’ fact that constitutes the symbolic order in the widest sense of that term. The ritual brings us into focus through this embodiment process. Without the ritual frame and our embodiment in it, our lives would be formless, “submerged in a hundred cross-currents.” The arts are described by Polanyi in language that would certainly fit ritual. Just like the arts, rituals are “imaginative representations, hewn into artificial patterns; and these patterns, when jointly integrated with an important content, produce a meaning of distinctive quality” (1975, 101). This joint integration is, indeed, an integration of incompatibles on the literal level, but its fittingness, or aptness, is validated by the ritual participant who is simultaneously perceiver and performer. Do we not have here the specification of the epistemological background conditions of the inextricable fusion of ritual meaning with its frame? But strangely enough, this is not a fusion unique to ritual. It is a kind of general semiotic condition that marks all meaningful intercourse with the world that is itself always marked by a distinctive qualitative feel. This is one of the major insights of the whole pragmatist tradition, especially developed by Peirce and Dewey. Rituals, like works of art, are not just instruments for clarifying our life, in a conceptual sense, by imposing a set of canonical meanings on it; rather, they move us, as art does, “through influencing the lived quality of our very existence” (109). One learns to be so by being

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in a ritual. The point of the rite, what it exemplifies, in Nelson Goodman’s sense, must be not only intellectually acknowledged but also experientially validated— that is, ‘known’ in both ways. Unlike music, however, which we can meaningfully experience without ‘knowing the score,’ every ritual performance, as Israel Scheffler puts it, “functions as a demonstration, or teaching act, a purpose of which is to educate the community in the rite’s rationale” (Scheffler 1997, 160). This education, to speak Jamesian language, does not just give us ‘knowledge about,’ but ‘knowledge by’ acquaintance, participatory knowledge that fuses our consciousness, in all its dimensions (somatic-motoric, perceptual, imaginative, conceptual, aesthetic), with the exemplified and expressed properties of the rite. The rite, in fact, refers up to a vast sea of affects or affective tones that are exemplified (symbolized, Polanyi would say) in it. As Scheffler, following Goodman, uses the term, “expression is not a matter of what the symbol denotes or characterizes, but of what denotes or characterizes it” (Scheffler 1997, 140). Exemplification is therefore of forms of consciousness that are embodied in the ritual frame. We read ourselves into and out of the frame, just as we read the world through and by means of the frame. But this ‘reading’ is both a conceptual and an experiential process. The ritual ‘articulates’ or ‘selects from’ the dense set of possible experiential states and conceptual unities that make up for us ‘the world.’ We have to rely skillfully on the symbol to identify ourselves, for we are in it as much as it is in us. What Goodman says, writing in Languages of Art about the art symbol, can apply also to the ritual symbol in the broadest sense of that term, that is, any symbolic form or artifact ritually appropriated: “What we read from and learn through a symbol varies with what we bring to it. Not only do we discover the world through our symbols but we understand and reappraise our symbols progressively in the light of growing experience” (Goodman 1976, 260). What is crucial is the semiotic density of the ritualistic matrix, its richness, its semantic or symbolic plenitude, its ability to shape and sustain forms of attending. This is also why there is a deep affinity between ritual, and ritualinduced modes of attending, and art in all of its forms. A deep and disturbing remark of Schleiermacher points in this direction. “Religion and art,” he writes, “stand beside each other like two friendly souls whose inner relationship, if they suspect it, is still unknown to them” (cited in Deutsch 1996, 89).

Between Thick and Thin Ritual We can, then, see the bearing of the preceding conceptual schemata on the following examples, which would perhaps not otherwise easily come to mind as paradigmatic rituals. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his essay “Self-Reliance”: “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us always sit” (Emerson 1992, 145). What does one do in this ‘sitting’? One prays. And what is prayer in this Emersonian perception? “Prayer is

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the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view” (147). The silent church, an objective symbolic artifact, looked at in this way is the physical and imaginative frame of the inner scene of ritual. I see no reason to exclude such an Emersonian preference, executed in the affectively charged and contemplative imagination, from authentic religious ritual. Certainly, Emerson’s commitment to a specific set of Ultimate Sacred Postulates, upon which he meditates while sitting and which he is trying to inscribe into his life, validates it. This sitting is a performance, an existential achievement. Moreover, the poet Philip Larkin, decidedly no Emersonian transcendentalist but rather a pious agnostic, clearly practices what Emerson prefers, within, to be sure, a quite different set of Ultimate Sacred Postulates. His religiously unsettling poem, “Church Going,” begins in a startling way: “Once I am sure there’s nothing going on/I step inside, letting the door thud shut.” But what then? What happens? “It pleases me to stand in silence here.” Something is made present here. Larkin is made present to himself—sees himself made present—in the deepest existential sense. The empty church becomes for Larkin a focusing lens, a polydimensional Polanyian symbol for the clarification and raising of his sense of existing in a complex, historically laden, meaning field. “A serious house on serious earth it is,/In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,/Are recognized, and robed as destinies.” Churchgoing, when nothing is going on, is clearly a ritual (indeed, a compulsion) for Larkin, as sitting was for Emerson and, indeed, for many others in very different traditions. It, too, is a kind of contemplative and hermeneutical practice in which we situate ourselves over against, and access, the worlds projected in Ultimate Sacred Postulates embodied in the objective forms of the ‘churches.’ It establishes and sustains a relationship, a mode of attending. It is an instance of self-giving. More generally, attention, as Simone Weil pointed out, roots out evil, understood as indifference to truth or intrinsic meaning or as the subjecting of all meaning and value to the demands of an autonomous ego. “Every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves” (Weil 1951, 66). The object of such an attending, to the degree that it is grasped as ‘true,’ becomes the “image of something precious” (73). Every fragment of truth becomes “a pure image of the unique, eternal and living Truth” (73), for Weil the Ultimate Sacred Postulate. Indeed, even “every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament” (73). These movements to what, from the anthropological point of view, would be considered ‘thin’ or individual rituals do not, I think, make superfluous the ‘thick’ social and formalized rituals, publicly performed, that are Rappaport’s and the anthropological tradition’s main concern, but they certainly do not make them, at least in their traditional religious forms, indispensable. In fact, they exemplify the same embodied logic as the hermeneutically and existentially thick rituals that Polanyi’s notions of symbolization and embodiment allow us to access. It is this logic that defines ritual in its own right. The socially ‘thinner’ forms of ritual, strangely enough, leave us no place to hide and demand from us a profound personal commitment. Any configuration

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of actions, words, objects, or places can become an instrument for enabling, conditioning, and eliciting performances of self-meaning, of self-giving integrations. Their semiotic density and formal structure derive from any configuration’s iconic power to mirror and project in rich imaginative structures our deepest human concerns, its indexical power to affect us in our existential depth, and its symbolic power to locate and define us within a universal and ultimate conceptual system. In this way, informed by the analytical lenses of Rappaport and Polanyi, we can see the scope, truth, and general pertinence of Iris Murdoch’s contention that ritual is “an outer framework which both occasions and identifies an inner event” (Murdoch 1970, 16).

REFERENCES Deutsch, Eliot. 1996. Essays on the Nature of Art. Albany: SUNY Press. Dewey, John. 1931. “Qualitative Thought.” Pp. 93–116 in Dewey, Philosophy and Civilization. New York: Minton, Balch & Company. Dissanayake, Ellen. 1988. Homo Aestheticus. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ———. 1992. What Is Art For? Seattle: University of Washington Press. ———. 2000. Art and Intimacy. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Driver, Tom F. 1998. Liberating Rites. Boulder: Westview Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1992. The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Brooks Atkinson. New York: The Modern Library. Gendlin, Eugene. 1962. Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning. New York: Free Press. Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of Art. Indianapolis: Hackett. Innis, Robert E. 1977. “Art, Symbol, Consciousness.” International Philosophical Quarterly 13, no. 1:81–98. ———. 1994. Consciousness and the Play of Signs. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2002. Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense. University Park: Penn State University Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books. Langer, Susanne K. 1988. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Abr. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Murdoch, Iris. 1970. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge. Polanyi, Michael. 1958. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. London: Routledge. ———. 1966. The Tacit Dimension. New York: Doubleday. ———. 1969. Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi. Ed. Marjorie Grene. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Polanyi, Michael, and Harry Prosch. 1975. Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rappaport, Roy A. 1979. Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. ———. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheffler, Israel. 1997. Symbolic Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weil, Simone. 1951. Waiting on God. London: Routledge.

EPILOGUE Toing and Froing the Social Don Handelman

Understandably, one would think, the social is the heartland of ritual studies. What is ritual, if not the Durkheimian effervescence of the social? Still, a number of the essays in this volume move towards the borders of the social. Perhaps this has occurred because the contributors were asked to think of ritual in its own right, thereby freeing them from the so deeply embedded anthropological stricture that ritual is social because it must be attached to, relate to, or service some group. Ritual is created by groups and expressive of groups, otherwise it is insignificant. This complicity of ritual and groupness implicitly demands that rite have meaning or function for the social, the raison d’être of ritual’s existence. Thus, the structures, dynamics, and processes of ritual are immediately oriented to the social. Rarely considered is that taking this tack eliminates other possibilities in which thinking on ritual ignores the borders of the social. Nonetheless, if ritual is (though I am less than certain of this) the great generating ground of the human phantasmagoric, as I think Bruce Kapferer argues, then insisting that this ground must be utterly social denies (again) the essential phenomenality of ritual phenomena. I argued in the introduction that the constitution of phenomenon qua phenomenon should have a central place in ritual studies. Protecting the phenomenality of ritual insists, as I tried to show, that it should be possible to avoid committing the analysis of a particular ritual to meaning/function even before one grasps just what its shape implies. But this requires that we begin analysis with the phenomenality of the phenomenon itself, and not with its surround. If form is to exist in and of itself, to whatever degree, minimally, maximally, with whatever qualities, it must have integrity—completeness or wholeness, as its Latin root intimates. The degrees and qualities of completeness of the ritual phenomenon constitute its phenomenality, giving to it textures and rhythms of phenomenal reality. The emphasis I put on the form and forming of phenomenality is an attempt to avoid prejudging what any given ritual is about (if it is about anything that may be specified) but also to refrain deliberately from defining the term ‘ritual,’ since monothetic definition insists on exact distinctions of the either/or variety. Notes for this section are located on page 221.

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Speaking of degrees of self-closure and integrity is a way of trying to avoid the overreification of ritual phenomena while insisting on their phenomenality. Now, it is easy for me to write of degrees and qualities of curvature as indices of the complexity of self-organization that a given ritual develops or evolves, while claiming that complexity effects what participants are able to do through that ritual form, and, too, what ritual form is able to do through its own dynamics—yet so what? In terms of their possible application, these ideas are vague, loose, seemingly bearing little relevance to the practice of ritual. Nonetheless, these ideas are terms of reference, a way of thinking that is distinct from those usually used to conceptualize and think about ritual. Whether this way of thinking makes any difference to the study of ritual is not for me to say. However, this perspective does tell anthropologists and others that unless they put aside the conventional toolkits of the ritual trade, they will continue to reproduce rituals as qualities of the known, and these may well be very distant from the possibilities generated by conceptualizing ritual as the creative grounds of the phantasmagoric. The creative grounds of the phantasmagoric open to the imaginal, to the imaginaries through which worlds are made, but no less to how worlds are changed, together with the living. In this collection, ritual as virtuality, creating worlds through its own interior dynamics (Bruce Kapferer); suffering that is greater than meaning, enfolding God, the source of meaning (Don Seeman); shutting out the social and the intimate, infoliating, turning to God (Piroska Nagy); Robert Innis’s discussion of Michael Polanyi’s work of art and intimate, thin ritual; Michael Houseman’s creation of ritual, intended to enfold the social within itself, thereby effecting perception of the social through rite; finding and reconciling with the lost soul part, existing in a timeless cosmic fold (Galina Lindquist); Orokaiva thinking about what sort of ritual will work to engage people feelingly with Christianity (André Iteanu); the multiple invisible presences of the Kardecist cosmos (Sidney Greenfield); the playful opening of previously nonexistent folds of virtual space within ritual (André Droogers)—before all else, these are acts of imagining integrity through the social into its own beyonds, where, when, human completing and completeness are formed and destroyed. These acts of imagining open the social to the creation of formations that enfold and infoliate the social in myriad ways, remaking, limiting, generating it through itself. These sorts of imaginings in relation to the social have clustered primarily in and around what we call ‘ritual.’ Ritual becomes the imagining of the social, but through ritual, not through the social. Regardless of the aspects of ritual that the contributors address, they all relate to these through a ritual imaginary—the capacities of rite to imagine otherness, other-where, otherwhen, through its own self-organizing media and their originary grounds. Ritual self-forming and self-organizing of rite are done always through a ritual imaginary. Ritual in its own right recognizes that the comprehensiveness and usage of the imaginary vary with the integrity of self-organization that particular rites enable and accomplish. Simplistically (but recognizing this), the greater this integrity, the greater the autopoietic autonomy of the rite from its

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social surround. It is these self-organizing qualities of phenomena that give them relative freedom towards the social. In turn, these qualities enable studies of ritual in its own right to border the social.

How Social Must Ritual Be? A number of the contributions question, as I put this, how social a ritual must be in order to be ritual. Given that the grounds for a particular ritual will be social in some way, must its form be directly accountable to the social? To argue that a given ritual form need not be accountable directly to the social makes contingent upon ritual practice whether this phenomenon will have meaning and function. Meaning/function, then, is not a given that follows directly from the fact that the ritual is practiced. Questioning whether particular ritual forms must be social in their phenomenality pushes the discussion of ritual beyond the usually acceptable. In Piroska Nagy’s discussion of medieval weeping, ritual is intimate, concealed within the person, hidden from the social surround. Understood within its historical environment, this was not a solipsistic rite, simply between the person and herself. Instead, she opened within herself to the possibilities of cosmos, to God’s penetration that reorganized her from within herself. The person embodied her ritual, taking it within her wherever she went, her body becoming the interface between ritual and social surround. More generally, in Spencer Brown’s terms, these persons took both sides of the distinction between self and the social into themselves, making the social subordinate to the self, thereby opening the way to personal mysticism. For some three centuries, these persons limited the presence of the social within their intimate ritual or, perhaps more accurately, shut in the social within themselves. For people around her, the ritual dynamics within such a person were no less mysterious than are those of many other initiation rites—witness the plays on ritual knowledge between males and females in Droogers’s account of Wagenia initiation and how Houseman makes initiate knowledge, surrounded by secrecy within secrecy, a cornerstone of deliberately creating a rite of initiation. Nagy rightly writes of weeping as a lifelong intimate ritual of initiation into the mysteries of salvation of the soul. Her think-piece is a provocative challenge to the insistence of canonical anthropology that ritual be grounded in shared meaning, more of which will be discussed further on. Looking even at a reproduction of a late medieval composition, The Weeping Madonna, by the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Dirk Bouts, one is struck by the quiet composure of the weeper, her face exposed beneath her cowl, gaze averted, eyes reddened, two tears peeping from one eye, four others tracking her cheeks. Despite the interpretive comments by art historians, we do not know the interior dynamics of this madonna—we guess, at the meaning of the tears, at their function, as if meaning/function is crucial to understanding why she is weeping silently. Yet the social ‘why’ of weeping is hardly the issue here.

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The tears that leak from her interior are but the fluid transparencies of the feeling that fills her, utterly hidden within. Her weeping, in Levinas’s terms, as discussed by Seeman, refuses meaning, indeed refuses its consolation. Her weeping is beyond meaning, beyond function, the weeping that thereby opens to possibility, to the creative grounds of ritual, to ritual generating cosmos, here perhaps one of resurrection and salvation. Then, too, her weeping is the ground of meaning, the ground of function, a matrix of possibility from which meaning/function will take shape, but hardly reducible to this. Her creative vortex of feeling may be contained, yet never domesticated.1 Feelings, anguish amongst them, transforming being from within, open to a virtuality of possibility, as I think Kapferer argues, though which forms will emerge from potentiality arise from social and historical conditions, as he maintains. Nonetheless, whatever goes on through the interiority of these feelings never departs from, never loses, its openings to virtuality and its potentiations. This is an apposite comment for thinking on playfulness and play, as Droogers’s contribution shows—the creating of space/time folds opening within themselves into unknowns (see Lindquist and Handelman 2001), rather than the domestication and closure of play through insisting that what play does, first and foremost, is to provide metacommentaries (meaningful, functional) on the social. The actualities of any given ritual coexist with their virtual potentialities. It is not that the forming of form that is ritual-as-it-is-practiced enters into a domain of virtual possibility whenever ritual creation or creative acts within ritual occur, or when, for example, interior feeling is beyond meaning/function. Rather, the ritual and its virtualities are contemporaneous. Deleuze (Deleuze and Parnet 2002, 150–151) puts it this way: “The actual and the virtual coexist, and enter into a tight circuit which we are continually retracing from one to the other … the two [become] indistinguishable.” The relationship between the forming of ritual form and the emergence of possibility from within virtuality becomes autopoietic. This is the relationship between the emergence of play within Wagenia initiation and the ongoing rituals. This, too, is how the shaman searches for the lost soul part, and how the latter comes into existence through neo-shamanic soul retrieval. This argument parallels Deleuze’s commentaries on Henri Bergson’s theory of time. Deleuze (1991, 59) writes: “The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass … Not only does the past coexist with the present that has been, but, as it preserves itself in itself (while the present passes), it is the whole, integral past; it is all our past [and, I add, its matrixial, combinatorial potentialities of possibility], which coexists with each present” (emphasis in the original). One can then argue, for example, that a given ritual is not out-of-time but utterly full of time, burstingwith-time, with all of the possibilities (of becoming, being, existing) that time potentially enables, and therefore bursting no less with creative potential. This, one can say, is very much a matter of the ontologies of rite, into which Lindquist begins to tap in her contribution.

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Continuing these thoughts would return us to issues of recursivity and to questions of self-organization, to whether this grasp of ritual is related to the degrees of complexity in its self-organization. Nevertheless, this kind of argument should also alter, for example, understanding of ritual liminality, as this was developed by Victor Turner—liminality less as ritual out-of-time, entering into dimensions from which time is absent or held constant, but rather liminality as ritual bursting-with-time, bursting with all of the potentialities of the forming of form. Ritual phenomena are indeed venues of creativity, as Victor Turner argued on and off, but this is less because of their liminality, as he understood this, and more because liminality is in the tightest of circuits with the virtual, so that the actual is perhaps most opened to possibility. To some extent, the issue of creativity and creation through ritual phenomena is akin to the problem of how difference and change emerge, as social phenomena organize autopoietically (Hayles 1999, 223; Mihata 1997, 33). Ritual in traditional social orders likely is a most prominent venue of phenomena privileged with cultural creation through the potentiation of the possible. In this sense, much traditional ritual is a vortex of the virtual, in the way Kapferer uses the virtual—a vortex through which cosmii are made, but no less explored in their making.2 Yet traditional rituals as venues of creativity have hardly been explored as such, nor will they be so long as there persist the obsessions with Durkheimian functionalism, with Geertzian stories that people tell themselves about themselves, with the Gluckmanian conception of ritual as social relations (Gluckman 1962), and with ritual reduced to arenas of politics and power (Bell 1992). All of these perspectives ironically deny the virtual capacities of ritual, closing the phenomenality of rite to the creative potentialities of the imaginary, of possibility. The neo-shamanic ritual of soul retrieval refracts that of medieval weeping. The soul retrieval patient must discover within himself the distinction between his self-known yet unreflective self and its split-off traumatized part, a distinction between self and self. Once this distinction is made and experienced, the difference generated by this rupture may be healed. But the struggle is primarily interior, between part-self and part-self in order to recover the whole self. The journey to healing is necessarily through the social, through shaman, through narrative, but its goal is to make the healed patient autonomous of the social in his own right. The split-off part often tears away because it has been traumatized by the social. The byproducts of the social, the sources of anguish, are concealed within the individual. The retrieval of the soul is a kind of exorcism, one which banishes these byproducts from the interior of the individual, enabling self to rejoin self and reacquire integrity. The soul retrieval narratives are not Geertzian stories of cultural reproduction, looking into mirrors, however concave, convex, telling ourselves who we are. These stories are more journeys of inner exploration, ever-shifting, everchanging, intended for and created together with individual patients who must learn to travel virtually to themselves within themselves through this neoshamanic cosmos. The narratives are undertakings of cultural creation within

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ritual, in a sense, custom-designed for each patient. Whereas the medieval weeper opened herself to God, perhaps to the known infinity of cosmos that contained her, the postmodern neo-shamanic patient opens himself to himself, to the known yet unknown within. Both the intimate ritual of medieval weeping and that of postmodern soul retrieval are concerned to create deeply interior recursivities of considerable complexity within the person, while limiting the influences of the social surround. The recursivities contained wholly within the individual are at their densest in persons who are modern individuals in the fullest sense, who understand themselves as autonomous beings in and of themselves, and who, as Robert Innis discusses, thereby contain ritual within themselves as the intimacy of selfgiving integrity, indeed, intimacy. Ralph Waldo Emerson carries ritual prayer within him; Philip Larkin prefers silent solitude within an empty church. Unlike the medieval weepers, whose interior personhood opened to and was engaged by God, these modern individuals find themselves, their self-integrities, through themselves. In their own ways, Nagy, Lindquist, and Innis (as well as others here) implicitly take issue with the pervasive tendency in anthropology to define ritual primarily in invariant, canonical, structural terms (most recently by the late Roy Rappaport [1999, 24–58]) and to call this ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ ritual (see the critiques by Handelman 1998, n.d.). Don Seeman writes of a creative ritual response that re-forms worlds during catastrophe, the response of the bereft consoling the maker of worlds, the creator, on his world gone bad, on his inability to protect his people. Again originating deep within the person, the response was still in the making, yet to surface within social practice, when the ritualist’s life was cut short. R. Kalonymos’s ritual gesture is other than meaning, writes Seeman, following Levinas’s refusal of meaning. Meaning, as Filip de Boeck and Rene Devisch (1994) accurately comment, is more in keeping with social engineering, with the notion that the world can be fixed, remade, made right. To refuse meaning, then, is often to accept reality rather than ideology—the reality, not the theology, of God the omnipotent, no less in helpless anguish than those whose lives are being murdered, God discovering his own frailty in the face of emergent processes he himself did not imagine. Of course, to refuse meaning may also be the response that rejects God the world-maker—either he cannot exist, for otherwise how could he accept the cruelty of his world, or he is indifferent, a callous creator, not deserving of his people. R. Kalonymos makes his choice, one of com-passion for his worldmaker who made him. Beyond meaning is anguish, filling being with feeling that is uncontainable just as it is inconsolable. Seeman’s understanding of Levinas, in relation to Kalonymos’s ritual response, is that of human being holding God (the alter of alters) in his arms, consoling him over the free will with which he has endowed human beings. As existence collapses, hastening entropy, what is the creator to do?3 The ritual response opens into possibility, into space/time that had not existed a moment before, creatively reshaping, remaking worlds, never done once and for all, rejecting the canonic, but closer to

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Kapferer’s position (and that of de Boeck and Devisch) of rite as world-making. Once world is created, can creation ever cease? Even in the monothetic monotheism of Judaism, this possibility of ongoing creation exists. Seeman’s essay challenges the Durkheimian ideal that ritual necessarily serves social order in the image, or, for that matter, the gestalt, of the latter. Once ritual comes into existence, it generates its own emergent dynamics. Kalonymos takes God’s perspective, or, more accurately, takes his feeling towards his beloved cosmos, his cherished people—hence the depth of God’s anguish, of Kalonymos’s compassion, even as he is destroyed. Kalonymos will die with God’s name on his lips, his death, though unwilled, thereby an act of self-sacrifice, of the generosity of feeling beyond meaning, indeed, of fellow feeling, offered freely precisely because it is other than meaning, full of what I can only call self-alterity, the self recognizing its alterity to itself (Wall 1999, 1), and so incorporating the distinction between self and other, thereby opening to otherness, one of the powerful potentialities of ritual.4 Suffering is beyond meaning precisely because it refuses the self-satisfaction of the hermeneutic response. When suffering is integral to the autopoietic qualities of ritual, it may well lead elsewhere—less in search of meaning, more in search of possibilities of world-making. (Can we read Nagy and Lindquist in this way?) Nagy, Lindquist, and Seeman all evoke the deep intimacy enabled by ritual modalities, between the selves of ritualists, themselves as alter, and the interiors of cosmos and its other beings. Intimacy intimates connectivity through innerness, a connectivity that itself may be feeling first and foremost. Connections through cosmic interiors of all sorts will be strongly recursive. What we call feelings seem inevitably to be recursive, which may explain to some extent how feelings are so powerful in thrusts towards self-organization. In a highly autopoietic ritual world, innerness dominates. Other contributors—Kapferer, Iteanu, Droogers, Houseman—shift us strongly towards ritual and the social, nonetheless critiquing the meaning/function paradigm of representation. Here I give particular attention to Houseman’s essay. Michael Houseman shows through his experiment that ritual makes the culture of social relationships. He has designed a ritual technology for the creation of difference and is telling us that if we insert into this design whatever distinction we desire between categories of persons, this will be turned into difference in the social relationships of persons from these categories. Moreover, these persons will carry this difference into the social surround, beyond the ritual event. As he writes elsewhere (Houseman 2002, 86), a “circular relationship” is established “between the actions the initiators [and the initiated] undertake and their ability to undertake them.” In autopoietic terms, “the components of the system, through their operations, further produce the components which constitute the system” (Kay 2001, 466). Houseman builds the distinction of gender into his ritual design and (resonating with Spencer Brown) takes both sides of this distinction into the design. Though this may seem self-evident, the incorporation of both sides of the gender distinction is precisely what enables this design to generate social differences

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between the genders. That both sides of the distinction are within the ritual makes this more autopoietic, enabling the ritual to turn the categorical distinction between genders into social difference in relatedness. In baring his ritual design, Houseman is telling us that ritual in its own right represents nothing beyond itself, and that this absence of meaning does not detract in the least from enabling the ritual to turn categorical distinction into social difference. In its own right, his ritual makes or modifies culture.5 Intriguingly, the autopoietic dynamics that Houseman arbitrarily activates pull him, their creator, into their recursion, making him more of a subjected participant, caught, if not by the seat of his pants, then close by. The kind of self-organization that Houseman puts into movement also selfproduces indeterminacy (Luhmann 1997, 363)—as the creator is drawn further into the emerging determinism of his own creation, observer becoming subject, the conditions of the ritual’s future become more opaque, more uncertain. Following on Houseman (and, to a degree, Lindquist, as well as the Orokaiva discourses with ritual discussed by Iteanu), Sidney Greenfield raises the issue of how ritual works when the participants do not share common understandings of culture, and when those who are being healed have at best only a sketchy sense of and limited feel for the cosmological premises that inform the existence of the ritual. How is it that healing proceeds? On what grounds? This issue simply is unapproachable through a culturological attitude that puts shared meaning at the forefront of comprehending ritual, though my guess is that a lot of ritual practice has not been well studied because of this approach. Greenfield chooses to enter the physiology of the nervous system in seeking an explanation for Kardecist healing in Brazil. This avenue of thinking is increasingly gaining in popularity, especially since biology (and theoretical physics) is so prominent in providing for our cosmologies. I foundered on this problem forty years ago (Handelman 1967a), and the halting explanation I offered then (Handelman 1967b) really limped, to say the least. At issue for me was a Native American shaman who had changed his healing so that its form, technics, and thematics were utterly foreign to everyone I knew or heard of whom he had treated. Nonetheless, patients of great social and cultural diversity continued to come for treatment, and his reputation only gained in stature. One could not really speak of cultural meaning or of social function. He was a recluse, issues of power were irrelevant, and he resisted representation when anthropologists and others thrust this upon him (Handelman 1993). In anthropological terms, my perception today is as opaque as it was then. In terms of this collection, I can say that he represented nothing—nothing, that is, other than the actualization of possibility, of an emerging strand of the phantasmagoric, perhaps a tight circuit between actuality and virtuality. Ritual in its own right plainly says to take the phenomenality of ritual seriously if you are interested in the phenomenon of ritual. Then study ritual through ritual, and see where this leads, whether these directions are worthwhile. Surprisingly (?), no existing avenues are shut by this approach—though they become more contingent and, thus, more open. And, after all, Calvin, the ritual expert, can always retort: “If you can’t control your peanut butter, you can’t expect to control your life.”

Epilogue: Toing and Froing the Social

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NOTES 1. This point is alluded to, but beautifully, in Edward Schieffelin’s (1976) discussions of the ritual arousal of anguish and its control, but not its assuagement, among a New Guinea people. 2. Here I emphasize traditional ritual as a venue of creativity, since I do not think that rituals associated with modern state orders have much of this capacity. See Handelman 2004. 3. Especially if evil is understood to come into existence as an emergent, and therefore indeterminate, process. Levinas (1990, 63) himself believed in “the essential possibility of elemental Evil” (emphasis in original), in the absence of alterity. 4. The pure gift comes into existence perhaps only when its giving is beyond meaning and therefore beyond reciprocity, which depends on meaning. Beyond meaning, this is also beyond the Derridean deconstruction of the gift (Derrida 1992). 5. Houseman’s approach reminds me of Tom McFeat’s (1974) creation of culture in experimental small groups. McFeat understood culture to come into existence when information-transmission in small groups began to create n+1 generations, in other words, when the next generation (in practice, the next person to join the group) took on the distinctions, differences, and values of the small group, thereby continuing these (even as they changed) through time. One can easily imagine Houseman turning his ritual design into one that deliberately creates multiple generations of initiates.

REFERENCES Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. de Boeck, Filip, and Rene Devisch. 1994. “Ndembu, Luunda and Yaka Divination Compared: From Representation and Social Engineering to Embodiment and Worldmaking.” Journal of Religion in Africa 23, no. 2:98–133. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Bergsonism. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2002. Dialogues II. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Given Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gluckman, Max. 1962. “Les rites de passage.” Pp. 1–52 in Essays on the Ritual of Social Relations, ed. Max Gluckman. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Handelman, Don. 1967a. “The Development of a Washo Shaman.” Ethnology 6:444–464. ———. 1967b. “Transcultural Shamanic Healing: A Washo Example.” Ethnos 32:149–166. ———. 1993. “The Absence of Others, the Presence of Texts.” Pp. 133–152 in Creativity/ Anthropology, ed. Smadar Lavie, Kirin Narayan, and Renato Rosaldo. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1998. Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. 2nd ed. New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2004. Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Events. Oxford: Berg Publishers. ———. n.d. “Conceptual Alternatives to Ritual.” In Theorizing Ritual, ed. Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg. Leiden: Brill. (In press) Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Houseman, Michael. 2002. “Dissimulation and Simulation as Forms of Religious Reflexivity,’ Social Anthropology 10:77–89. Kay, Robert. 2001. “Are Organizations Autopoietic? A Call for a New Debate.” Systems Research and Behavioral Science 18:461–477.

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Levinas, Emmanuel. 1990. “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” Critical Inquiry 17:63–71. Lindquist, Galina, and Don Handelman, eds. 2001. “Playful Power and Ludic Spaces: Studies in Games of Life.” Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology no. 37. Luhmann, Niklas. 1997. “The Control of Intransparency.” Systems Research and Behavioral Science 14:359–371. McFeat, Tom. 1974. Small-Group Cultures. New York: Pergamon. Mihata, Kevin. 1997. “The Persistence of ‘Emergence.’” Pp. 30–38 in Chaos, Complexity, and Sociology: Myths, Models, and Theories, ed. Raymond A. Eve, Sara Horsfall, and Mary E. Lee. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rappaport, Roy A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schieffelin, Edward. 1976. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Wall, Thomas Carl. 1999. Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben. Albany: SUNY Press.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

André Droogers is Professor of Cultural Anthropology, especially Anthropology of Religion and Symbolic Anthropology, at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. He has done fieldwork in Congo and Brazil, and also held academic positions in both countries. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, and is the coeditor of a number of volumes. His research interests include syncretism, desecularization, Pentecostalism, and play. His most recent book, coedited with Sidney M. Greenfield, is Reinventing Religions: Syncretism and Transformation in Africa and the Americas (2001). Sidney M. Greenfield is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has conducted ethnographic research in the West Indies, New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Brazil, and ethnohistorical and historical research in Portugal and the Atlantic Islands on problems ranging from family and kinship to Spiritist surgery and healing to the participation of Evangelical Protestants in politics in Brazil. Author and/or editor of seven books, producer, director, and author of five video documentaries, he has published some 120 articles and reviews in books and professional journals. Among his more recent works are Cirurgias do Além: Pesquisas Antropológicas Sobre Curas Espirituais (1999); Argeu: A Construção de um Santo Popular (2003 [2000], co-author, Antonio Mourão Cavalcante); Reinventing Religions: Syncretism in Africa and the Americas (2001, co-editor, André Droogers; and Spirits, Medicine, and Charity: A Brazilian Woman's Cure for Cancer (1995) a video documentary. Don Handelman is Sarah Allen Shaine Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He has been a fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, Collegium Budapest, the Institute for Advanced Studies at The Hebrew University, and the Olof Palme Visiting Professor of the Swedish Social Science Research Council. He is the author of Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events (1998) and Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Events (2004), and the co-author, with David Shulman, of God Inside Out: Siva’s Game of Dice (1997) and Siva in the Forest of Pines: An Essay on Sorcery and Self-Knowledge (2004).

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Michael Houseman is Director of Studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Religious Studies Section in Paris, France, and Head of the Systems of African Thought Research Center (EPHE/CNRS). He has published extensively on kinship and on ritual, including (with C. Severi) Naven or the Other Self: A Relational Approach to Ritual Action (1998). He has done fieldwork in Cameroon, West Africa, and more recently among Maroon populations in French Guyana. He is particularly interested in the emergent effects of interaction and is currently working on the participatory entailments of ritual, play, spectacle, and bureaucracy, and on the computer-assisted analysis of large-scale marriage networks. Robert E. Innis is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is the author of many works, both systematic and historical, dealing with the intersections between philosophy, semiotics, and the human sciences, including Karl Bühler: Semiotic Foundations of Language Theory (1981), Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology (1985), Consciousness and the Play of Signs (1994), and Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense (2002). He was also twice Fulbright Professor at the University of Copenhagen and Humboldt Fellow at the University of Cologne. He is currently preparing a book, Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind, to be published by Indiana University Press. André Iteanu is Directeur de recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He has led for several years the research center ERASME of the CNRS and the Ecole des Hautes Etude en Sciences Sociales. He has recently finished a documentary film, Letter to the Dead (Felix Production, 2002), and published “Hommes et femmes dans le temps” in Sexe relatif ou sexe absolu (2001). Bruce Kapferer, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, has held major teaching and research posts in Australia, England, Scandinavia, Holland, and the United States. He currently heads a research group at the University of Bergen (funded by the Norwegian Research Council) that is examining contemporary state and extra-state processes. He has published books and articles on the basis of his ethnographic field research in Zambia, Sri Lanka, and Australia. At present, he is engaged in a comparative study of modern state systems and their histories of transformation. Galina Lindquist is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Stockholm. She studied neo-shamanism in Scandinavia, and healing, magic, and folk religiosity in urban Russia. Her interests lie in the intersection between the anthropology of religion and medical anthropology, as well as in the studies of ritual and play. Her work includes Shamanic Performances on the Urban Scene: Neo-Shamanism in Contemporary Sweden (1997) and Conjuring Hope: Healing and Magic in Contemporary Russia (Berghahn Books, forthcoming). Her present field is in Tuva, Southern Siberia.

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Piroska Nagy is Assistant Professor in Medieval History at the University of Rouen in France. A former fellow of Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Studies, she has also taught at Central European University, Budapest. Her field of specialization is intellectual and religious historical anthropology of the medieval West. She has published a book on the gift of tears in the Middle Ages, Le don des larmes au Moyen Age Ve–XIIIe siècles (2000), and is the author of numerous articles on the emotions in the Middle Ages and on East-Central European ecclesiastical history. Don Seeman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University. He previously taught in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and holds his Ph.D. in social and medical anthropology from Harvard. His ethnography Tainted Hearts, on religious transformation and experience among Ethiopian immigrants to Israel, is forthcoming. Other recent publications include “Ritual Practice and Its Discontents” in A Companion to Psychological Anthropology (2004), and an article on the relationship between emotion and ritual practice in Jewish mystical thought for AJS Review. He is currently conducting research on the phenomenology of religious violence in Israel.

Index absolution, 168–170. See also contrition; forgiveness; soul retrieval Aelred of Rievaulx, 124, 131. See also intimate ritual aesthetic, 20, 39–42, 52, 210 agency, 5, 27, 44, 47, 66–67, 139, 165–166 allo-communication, 200. See also autocommunication altered state of consciousness (ASC), 9, 180, 185–186, 191. See also disobsession; healing; Kardecist alterity, 5, 10, 55, 61–62, 219, 221n3. See also self self-alterity, 219 alternative world, 138, 141–142, 147 Augustinian system, 129. See also cosmology; intimate ritual auto-communication, 200. See also allocommunication autopoiesis, 11, 19 autopoietic, 11–12, 14, 16, 214, 216, 219– 220. See also complexity; curve; fold; recursion; self-organization; virtuality baptism, 124–125, 127, 129–131. See also intimate ritual basic rest-activity cycle (BRAC), 9, 187, 189–190, 191n2. See also psychosocial genomics Bateson, Gregory, 2, 12, 14, 16, 30. See also complexity; curve; social torus Bernard of Clairvaux, 123. See also intimate ritual Best, Elsdon, 101–104, 113n7. See also Maori; Sahlins; Tamata Ranapiri big man (Papua New Guinea), 105, 112. See also exchange; Orokaiva Blain, Jenny, 158 Bloch, Maurice E. F., 16, 46, 151 Boas, Franz, 175 Bourdieu, Pierre, 39, 41–42, 49, 52, 61, 77. See also habitus Bouts, Dirk, 215. See also intimate ritual

Brazil, 9, 174, 178, 180–181, 183, 220. See also Kardecist; Spiritism Cassirer, Ernst, 39. See also Langer charisma, 119, 122, 130–131, 133. See also intimate ritual charismatic churches, 105. See also Orokaiva charity, 178, 182–183, 191. See also cosmology; Kardecist Christian, 27, 58, 68, 98, 104–105, 109–110, 114nn20–21, 119, 121–124, 127–135, 140, 168, 177, 202, 204–206 Church Fathers, 123, 127. See also intimate ritual cisungu (Bemba), 49. See also rituals of initiation communitas, 138. See also rituals of initiation; Turner complexity, 3, 10–13, 18, 21, 27, 39, 52n3, 123, 203, 214, 217–218. See also Bateson; curve; fold; Luhman; McNeil; recursion concealment, 83, 85. See also relational approach; ritual condensation confession, 168–169. See also absolution; contrition; soul loss; soul retrieval Congo, 8, 138–141, 152. See also Droogers; Wagenia connectionism, 8, 138–140, 149–150. See also schema contemplation, 56, 204–206, 211. See also Polanyi contrition, 126–127, 168–170. See also absolution; confession; forgiveness; soul loss; soul retrieval cosmology, 5, 8, 44, 65, 68–69, 124, 171, 176, 185 cosmological, 7, 37–38, 43–44, 46–47, 49, 66, 69, 120, 128, 130, 133–134, 171, 220 Csordas, Thomas, 9, 29n12, 41, 158, 165–166, 170–171. See also imaginal performance

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Index

culture, 3, 5, 28, 38, 55–56, 59–62, 64–65, 78, 89, 109, 121–122, 149, 151–153, 159, 171, 176, 186, 219–220, 221n5 curve, 12–15, 20, 24, 29n13 curvature, 9, 12, 15, 17–21, 27–28, 214 curving, 9, 13–16, 18–20, 23, 26–28. See also complexity; fold; recursion d’Andrade, Roy, 149, 151 de Boeck, Filip, 29n2, 218–219. See also ritual in its own right deception, 83, 85, 93, 200. See also experiment; ritual efficacy de Coppet, Daniel, 16–17, 19, 112 Deleuze, Gilles, 5, 14, 29, 44, 47–48, 52nn5–6, 216. See also fold; virtual; virtuality Desert Fathers, 123, 127, 131. See also intimate ritual Devisch, Rene, 29n2, 218–219. See also ritual in its own right Dewey, John, 204, 208–209. See also Peirce disobsession, 9, 174, 176, 180, 185–186, 189, 191n2. See also Brazil; Kardecist; Spiritism diversion, 139, 142, 145, 147–148 Driver, Tom, 201 Droogers, André, 8, 138–142, 144, 146, 148, 150, 152, 154, 214–216, 219, 223 Durkheim, Emile, 51n1, 175 Durkheimian, 37, 41, 176, 213, 217, 219. See also representation dynamics, 3, 5–8, 11–12, 14, 16–17, 23–24, 27–28, 29n2, 35–37, 39–53, 129, 149, 190, 213–215, 219–220 efficacy, 8, 57, 62, 67–68, 75–78, 89, 91–94, 96n8, 107–109, 111, 119–123, 125, 128–133, 159 embodiment, 10, 41–42, 167, 197, 202–203, 208–209, 211 emergence, 7–8, 13, 42, 52n8, 85, 138–139, 142, 148–149, 216 emergent, 8, 13, 20, 42, 77, 96n9, 139, 141, 148–149, 218–219, 221n3 emergent processes, 218 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 197, 210–211, 218 emotion, 63–64, 66, 122, 132, 138–139, 149, 151, 170, 177, 185 enjoyment, 58, 138, 140, 146–149 Erickson, Milton, 186–187 ethics, 10, 56, 59. See also Heidegger; Levinas

227

evil, 59, 64, 103, 178, 211, 221n3. See also Weil exchange, 6–7, 17–18, 58, 98–112, 114n27, 161, 163, 179, 181, 184. See also reciprocity exchange and ritual, 6–7, 99–100, 104, 108, 110–111 exorcism, 11, 40, 217 experience, 2, 36–37, 40–41, 43, 47, 51, 52n3, 55–57, 59, 61–64, 67, 76–79, 81, 84, 89–93, 104, 111, 131, 147, 151, 159–161, 163, 166, 170–171, 187, 190–191, 200, 204–207, 210 experiment, 4, 6, 16, 55, 62, 69, 75, 78, 85, 92–94, 104, 144, 219. See also Houseman; rites of initiation; ritual in its own right thought experiment, 4, 16, 55, 62, 69. See also ritual in its own right feeling, 19–21, 39, 81–82, 85–86, 104, 120, 125–127, 160, 163, 198, 205, 209, 216, 218–219 felt meaning, 202 fetishism, 45–46 fold, 14, 18, 20–21, 23–24, 26–27, 214. See also complexity; curve; Deleuze; self-organization forgiveness, 9, 157, 168–170, 185. See also absolution; confession; contrition; soul retrieval form of sense, 202 fractal-like, 30n18, 48 framing, 75, 78, 161 France, 17–18, 78. See also Houseman Friedson, Steven, 29n15, 41. See also multistability of perspectives; trance function, 1, 5, 24, 46–47, 58, 77, 81, 133, 153, 191, 198, 202, 204, 208, 213, 215– 216, 219–220. See also representation Furez (Slovenia), 21–22, 24–25, 27–28, 29n17. See also Minnich game, 18, 61, 76, 78, 91, 101, 103, 109–111, 124, 143. See also ludic; play; rituals of initiation; Wagenia Geertz, Clifford, 2, 5, 16, 39, 43, 48, 50, 55–65. See also representation gender, 6, 11, 121, 142–147, 219 gift, 49, 98, 101–104, 108, 111–112, 113nn17–18, 119–120, 125–127, 131–132, 148, 206, 221n4. See also Mauss; Orokaiva; reciprocity

228

Index

gift of tears, 119–120, 125–127, 131–132. See also baptism; intimate ritual; self globalization, 45, 152 Gluckman, Max, 16, 43, 51–52n2, 217. See also function; representation; Turner Goffman, Erving, 13, 29n11 Goodman, Nelson, 175, 189, 210. See also symbol Greenfield, Sidney, M., 8–9, 174–176, 178, 180, 182–187, 189, 191–192, 194, 214, 220, 223 Gregory the Great, 125. See also intimate ritual Guattari, Felix, 44, 47–48, 52n6. See also Deleuze; virtual; virtuality habitus, 41–42, 49, 61. See also Bourdieu Handelman, Don, 1–4, 6–8, 10, 12–14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28–30, 32, 35–36, 38, 46, 49, 77, 95, 135, 157–158, 171– 172, 213–214, 216, 218, 220–221, 223 Hasidim, 63, 67. See also Levinas; Shapira hau (Maori), 98, 100–104, 106–112, 113n9, 113n12, 114n17. See also Best; gift; Mauss; partial discontinuity; reciprocity; Sahlins; Tamata Ranapiri healing, 8–9, 40–41, 43, 47, 49, 57–58, 62– 63, 157–160, 164–165, 167–172, 174, 176–178, 180, 182, 185–186, 189, 191, 192n7, 217, 220 Heelas, Paul, 167. See also New Age Heidegger, Martin, 59, 61, 63. See also alterity; ethics; Levinas; phenomenology Herskovits, Melville, 175 high-order meanings, 201, 206. See also indexicality; low-order meanings; middle-order meanings; Peirce; Rappaport Holocaust, 59, 63. See also Shapira homo interior, 125. See also intimate ritual; transformation homo ludens, 139, 148, 153. See also game; Huizinga; play; Wagenia homo sympathetikos, 64. See also Shapira Horwitz, Jonathan, 160–162. See also neoshamanism; soul loss; soul retrieval Houseman, Michael, 6–7, 11, 75–76, 78, 80, 82, 84–88, 90–92, 94, 96, 113n5, 214– 215, 219–220, 221n5, 224. See also experiment; relational approach; Severi Hubert, Henri, 36–37, 51n1, 112. See also Mauss; Sahlins Hugo of Sancto Caro, 125. See also intimate ritual

Huizinga, Johan, 46, 119, 148. See also homo ludens; play iconicity, 197–198, 203. See also indexicality; Peirce; Rappaport; semiotic; symbolicity imaginal performance, 9, 157, 165. See also Csordas imagination, 39, 42, 148, 163, 165–166, 170, 211. See also Csordas indexicality, 197–198, 201, 203. See also iconicity; Peirce; Rappaport; semiotic; symbolicity individual ritual, 10 indwelling of ritual, 10. See also Polanyi Innis, Robert, 9–10, 159, 197–200, 202, 204, 206, 208, 210, 212, 214, 218, 224 intentionality, 13, 81, 165–166, 168, 170 interpretant, 198, 203. See also Peirce; semiotic intimacy, 24, 26, 64, 124, 132–135, 218–219 intimate ritual, 7–8, 11, 15, 119–120, 126, 128–131, 133–134, 159, 214–215, 218. See also emotion; homo interior; suffering; transformation; ritual in its own right Iteanu, André, 6–7, 17, 19, 98, 100–102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112–114, 214, 219–220, 224. See also partial discontinuity Jakobsen, Merete, 158 James of Voragine, 132 James, William, 170. See also New Age Jesus, 107, 122, 124, 130 John of Fécamp, 123. See also intimate ritual Kaiko (Maring), 43 Kapferer, Bruce, 5, 8–9, 11–12, 16, 35–36, 38–40, 42–44, 46–50, 52, 54, 113, 213–214, 216–217, 219, 224 Kardec, Allan, 178–181, 191. See also disobsession; Spiritism Kardecist, 9, 174, 176, 178, 183, 185–186, 192n6, 214, 220. See also altered states of consciousness; charity; disobsession; healing Katz, Jack, 121–122, 135n2. See also emotion Kisangani (Congo), 140–141, 146 Kleitman, Nathaniel, 187. See also basic rest-activity cycle klobasa (Slovenia), 22. See also Furez

Index

Langer, Susanne, 5, 39–40, 47, 52n6, 198, 201, 209. See also Cassirer; presentational symbol Larkin, Philip, 197, 211, 218. See also thin rituals Levinas, Emmanuel, 6, 10, 55–56, 58–63, 66–70, 216, 218, 221n3. See also Heidegger; Langer; refusal of meaning; suffering Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 2, 41, 48, 50, 52n8, 75, 94, 99, 159, 171. See also ritual in its own right Lifton, Robert J., 139 liminality, 15, 46, 130, 217 liminal, 37–38, 46, 51n1, 128. See also rites of initiation; transformation; Turner Lindquist, Galina, 8–10, 95, 157–158, 160, 162, 164, 166, 168, 170, 172, 214, 216, 218–220, 224 low-order meanings, 200. See also highorder meanings; indexicality; middleorder meanings; Peirce; Rappaport ludic, 8, 46, 96, 138–145, 147–149, 151–153. See also homo ludens; Huizinga; play Luhmann, Niklas, 11, 14, 23, 220. See also autopoiesis; complexity; recursion Luhrmann, Tanya, 171 Makahiki festival (Hawaii), 44. See also Sahlins male solidarity, 90 Maria Antonia (Marie Antoinette), 17, 18– 20, 23, 28–29, 157. See also complexity; fold; recursion Maturana, Humberto, 11. See also autopoiesis Mauss, Marcel, 6, 36–37, 51n1, 61, 98–104, 106, 110, 112, 113n2, 113n6, 113n13, 114nn28–29. See also Durkheim; exchange; gift; hau; Hubert; reciprocity; total social fact McNeil, Donald H. 12–13. See also topology McNeill, William H., 20–21 Mead, George Herbert, 167. See also New Age self; self; other meaning, 2–6, 8–10, 28, 35–38, 42–43, 46–47, 50, 52n8, 55, 57–68, 81, 85, 94–95, 100, 106–107, 110–111, 120– 122, 124–127, 129, 131–134, 139, 152, 162–163, 197–206, 208–209, 211, 213–216, 218–220, 221n4. See also Geertz; Levinas; otherwise than meaning; pain; Rappaport; refusal of meaning; semiosis; Shapira; suffering; tacit knowing; theodicy; Turner

229

medical gesture, 62, 70. See also Levinas; pain; suffering memory, 107, 149, 162–166, 189–191, 199 mental imagery, 165 middle-order meanings, 201. See also highorder meanings; indexicality; loworder meanings; Peirce; Rappaport Minnich, Robert, 21, 23, 25–26. See also Furez Moerman, Daniel, 158, 171 morality, 169, 174–175, 177–179, 181, 183, 185, 187, 189, 191, 193 multistability of perspectives, 29n15. See also Friedson Nagy, Piroska, 7–8, 10–12, 119–120, 122–126, 128, 130–134, 136, 159, 214–215, 218–219, 225. See also intimate ritual narrative, 9, 126, 161–162, 166, 170, 217 naven (Iatmul), 30n18. See also Bateson; fractal-like neo-shamanism, 157–158, 169, 171–172. See also cosmology; Horwitz; shamanism; soul loss New Age, 36, 157–158, 165–168, 170. See also neo-shamanism New Age self, 157, 166–167. See also soul non-ordinary reality, 158–159, 161, 165–166. See also altered states of consciousness; imagination; memory novices, 79–88, 90–93, 96n4, 96nn6–7, 141, 143–147, 151 numinous, 199, 203, 205, 209. See also Rappaport ontologies, 157, 167, 171–172, 216. See also New Age; self; soul Orokaiva (Papua New Guinea), 6–7, 12, 15, 98, 101, 104–113, 114n17, 114nn21–22, 114n25, 114n31, 214, 220. See also exchange; hau; Mauss; partial discontinuity; pondo; pure; reciprocity other, the, 5–6, 12, 15, 59, 67, 69–70, 112, 114n23, 167–168, 170. See also alterity; self otherwise than meaning, 55, 59, 62, 67. See also Levinas; pain; Shapira; suffering; uselessness of suffering pain, 5, 55–63, 65–66, 70, 82–83, 85, 88, 126, 133, 159–160, 164, 167, 170, 178– 181, 190–191. See also disobsession; rites of initiation; Kardecist; suffering Papua New Guinea, 6, 98–99, 101, 104

230

Index

paradoxical communicative situation, 83 partial discontinuity, 6, 98–99, 101, 103–105, 107–113, 115. See also exchange; hau; Mauss; Orokaiva; pondo; pure; reciprocity Peirce, Charles Sanders, 197–198, 200, 203–204, 208–209. See also Dewey; Heidegger; Rappaport; semiotics; sign Peircean, 197–198, 200–203. See also iconicity; indexicality; interpretant; symbolicity perispirit, 182. See also Kardecist; Spiritism Peter Damiani, 123, 125–126, 131. See also intimate ritual phantasmagoric, 10, 47, 213–214, 220. See also virtual; virtuality phenomenality, 7, 10, 28, 56, 59, 213–215, 217, 220. See also phenomenology; ritual in its own right phenomenology, 50, 56, 58–59, 62–63, 128 phenomenological, 4, 36, 41, 55, 59–60, 62, 69, 122, 159 phenomenology of pain, 56, 58–59, 63 phusis, 13. See also recursivity physiognostic meaning, 206. See also Polanyi play, 8, 18, 46, 76, 78, 80, 84–86, 90, 92, 96n3, 125, 129, 138–141, 143–145, 147–148, 151–153, 159, 161, 167, 174–175, 177, 179, 181, 183, 185– 187, 189, 198, 216. See also Droogers; homo ludens; Houseman; Huizinga; ludic; rites of initiation; Wagenia playful, 8, 46, 78, 138–140, 167, 171, 214 Polanyi, Michael, 10, 197, 203–212, 214. See also indwelling of ritual; thin ritual; tacit knowing; work of art pondo (Orokaiva), 106–108, 114n20. See also exchange; hau; Orokaiva; partial discontinuity; pure; reciprocity postcolonial, 141–142 presentational forms, 201. See also Langer presentational symbol, 209. See also Langer Pruyser, Paul W., 139 psychosocial genomics, 9, 174, 186, 189. See also altered states of consciousness; basic rest-activity cycle; Rossi; ultradian cycle pure (Orokaiva), 70, 106, 206, 221. See also exchange; hau; partial discontinuity; pondo; reciprocity purification, 119, 124–125, 127–128, 133–134

Quinn, Naomi, 149–150. See connectionism; repertoire; schema Rappaport, Roy, 10, 35–36, 38–39, 42–43, 159, 197–209, 211–212, 218 reciprocity, 98, 111, 113n12, 221n4. See also Best; exchange; hau; Mauss; Orokaiva; pondo; pure; Sahlins; Tamata Ranapiri delayed reciprocity, 111 recursion, 12–13, 23–24, 220. See also autopoiesis; complexity; curve; fold; self-organization recursivity, 13, 15, 29n15, 217 refusal of meaning, 6, 60, 218. See also Levinas; representation; Shapira; suffering relational approach (to ritual), 6, 75. See also Houseman; ritual condensation repetition, 44, 52n5, 99 representation, 1–5, 7, 9, 12, 16, 20, 28, 35–37, 50, 93, 121, 135n1, 175, 203, 219–220. See also Durkheimian; function; Geertz; Turner ritual as a virtuality, 5, 35, 46. See also Kapferer ritual as process, 36–38, 128 ritual condensation, 75–76, 85. See also Houseman; relational approach ritual efficacy, 57, 62, 67–68, 75–76, 78, 91, 93–94, 96n8, 107–108, 111, 121, 129 ritual healing, 9, 57–58, 157–158, 169, 176, 180. See also Horwitz; Kardecist; neo-shamanism ritual in its own right, 1–9, 11, 13, 15–17, 19–21, 23–28, 29n2, 31, 55–56, 62, 70, 75, 98–99, 133, 138–141, 143, 145, 147–149, 151, 153, 157–158, 172, 198, 211, 213–215, 220. See also complexity; experiment; fold; selforganization; William of Occam ritual performance, 6, 29, 41–42, 46, 50–51, 75–76, 78, 80, 89–93, 96n9, 126, 140, 149, 186, 199, 207, 210 ritual practice, 6, 36, 39, 55–59, 61–63, 67–68, 70, 144, 148, 214–215, 220 ritualization, 76, 120, 132 rituals of initiation, 8, 90. See also disclosure; dissimulation; play; secrecy; transformation; Turner; Van Gennep; Wagenia initiation rite(s), 6–7, 75, 77, 94, 215. See also transformation rituals of the mind, 8, 158. See also Vyner

Index

Rossi, Ernest L., 176, 186–191. See also basic rest-activity cycle; psychosocial genomics; ultradian cycle Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 19–20, 29n16 sacrifice, 26–27, 37, 42–43, 45, 51n1, 66, 95, 112, 113n6 Sahlins, Marshall, 6, 43–44, 98, 101–104, 113n8. See also Best; exchange; hau; Mauss; partial discontinuity; reciprocity; total social fact salvation, 57–58, 122, 131, 134, 178, 215–216 schema, 37, 138–140, 149–150, 152–153, 198, 200–202, 209. See also connectionism; Quinn; Strauss schema repertoire, 139–144, 149–153 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 68. See also Levinas; suffering seclusion, 86, 141, 143–144, 146, 149. See also rites of initiation; Wagenia secrecy, 75, 83–85, 89, 92, 94, 215. See also concealment; dissimulation; relational approach; rites of initiation Seeman, Don, 5–6, 8, 10, 12, 55–58, 60, 62– 64, 66–68, 70, 214, 216, 218–219, 225 Segal, Robert A., 57 self, the, 9–10, 59, 130, 158–160, 165–168, 170–171, 208, 215, 219. See also alterity; other self-closure, 13–17, 19–21, 23, 214 self-curvature, 13 self-giving, 10, 208, 211–212, 218 self-organization, 10–17, 19–21, 24, 27–28, 29n14, 214, 217, 219–220. See also autopoiesis; complexity; Luhmann; recursion; social torus self-organizing properties, 9, 11, 17–18, 24 self-predication, 202, 205. See also Rappaport self-reference, 11, 13, 19, 27, 62, 76 semiosis, 174, 176, 185, 199–200. See also meaning; Peirce; Peircean; Rappaport; sign semiotic, 197–199, 201–203, 209–210, 212. See also meaning; Peirce; Peircean; sign semiotic density, 210, 212 Severi, Carlo, 6, 76, 85. See also Houseman; relational approach sexual antagonism, 90 sexual identity, 89

231

shaman, 9, 94, 160–171, 186, 216–217, 220. See also neo-shamanism; soul loss; soul retrieval; transformation shamanic journey, 157, 166 shamanism, 171–172, 186 Shapira, Kalonymos, 5–6, 11–12, 55, 63–69. See also Levinas; otherwise than meaning; uselessness of suffering sign, 22, 24, 58, 99, 119, 121, 123, 125–127, 132–133, 144, 146, 169, 197–199, 201. See also Peirce; Rappaport; semiotic, semiosis signs of firstness (iconic signs), 200 signs of secondness (indexical signs), 200 signs of thirdness (symbolic signs), 200 simulation, 75, 93. See also relational approach; rituals of initiation dissimulation, 84–85, 92, 94. See also deception; relational approach social axes, 142, 149, 151. See also Wagenia social torus, 13. See also Bateson; recursion; recursivity soul, 8–10, 15, 66, 119, 122–126, 132–133, 157–173, 214–218. See also intimate ritual; neo-shamanism soul loss, 8, 159–161, 167–168 soul retrieval, 8–10, 15, 157–162, 164–165, 167–172, 216–218 Spiritism, 178–179, 182–184. See also Brazil; Kardec; Kardecist spirits, 7, 9, 26, 76, 108, 112, 146–147, 158, 161–162, 165, 174, 176–178, 180– 181, 183–186, 191n4 spirit world, 177, 180, 182, 184–185 Sri Lanka, 44, 47, 52n7 Staal, Frits, 28n1, 46, 50, 52n8. See also meaning Strauss, Claudia, 149–150. See also connectionism; schema suffering, 5, 8, 52n7, 55–62, 64–68, 70, 75, 89, 127, 130, 145, 159, 170–171, 180– 181, 183, 185, 214, 219. See also absolution; contrition; Levinas; pain; soul retrieval; theodicy; uselessness of suffering suffering for the other, 67 Suniyama (Sri Lanka), 11, 42, 49, 52n7 suspension of disbelief, 4 symbol, 9, 58, 200, 208–211 symbolicity, 197–198, 200. See also iconicity; indexicality; Peirce; Rappaport; semiosis; semiotic; sign syncretized, 175, 183

232

Index

tacit knowing, 10, 203–204. See also Polanyi Tamata Ranapiri, 101–104, 109, 111. See also Best; exchange; hau; Mauss; Sahlins; total social fact techne, 38, 48. See also Turner; virtuality theodicy, 5, 55–56, 58–63, 65, 67–70. See also Geertz; Levinas; meaning; Shapira; suffering; uselessness of suffering; Weber thick rituals, 197, 210, 211 thin rituals, 10, 159, 197, 210, 211, 214. See also Polanyi topology, 9, 12, 21. See also McNeil total social fact, 6, 98, 100–101, 112, 113n1. See also exchange; Mauss; partial discontinuity; Sahlins trance, 9, 40, 161, 174, 176, 178–180, 182, 185–187, 189. See also Friedson; Kardecist; ritual healing; ritual performance; rituals of initiation; soul retrieval; Suniyama; Wagenia transduction, 191n1 transformation, 8–9, 12, 15, 23, 29n2, 38, 51n1, 111–112, 119–121, 124–126, 128–133, 157–158, 164, 170, 186, 191n1, 207. See also complexity; intimate ritual; neo-shamanism; ritual healing; ritual in its own right; soul retrieval trauma, 9, 157, 160–161, 164, 170. See also ritual healing; soul; soul loss; soul retrieval Turner, Victor, 5, 11, 15, 29n2, 35–41, 46, 50–51, 51–52n1, 99, 120, 130, 139, 217. See also Durkheimian; Gluckman; Langer; liminality; play; representation; ritual as process; rituals of initiation; ritual performance; techne; Van Gennep ultradian cycle, 189, 191n2. See also basic rest-activity cycle; disobsession; psychosocial genomics; Rossi ultradian rhythms, 188

Umbanda (Brazil), 180, 183, 185 Universal Sacred Postulates, 202–203. See also Rappaport urban shamanism, 158, 171. See also neoshamanism; New Age uselessness of suffering, 5, 56, 59–62. See also Levinas Van Gennep, Arnold, 15, 36–38, 50, 52n2, 113n1, 120, 141, 149. See also liminality; rituals of initiation; Turner verstehen, 5, 59. See also Weber virtual, 8, 16, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45–53, 67, 159, 214, 216–217 virtuality, 5, 9, 11–12, 35, 37, 46–51, 158, 170, 214, 216, 220. See also autopoiesis; Deleuze; Guattari; imagination; Langer; phantasmagoric; ritual as a virtuality Vyner, Henry, 8, 158. See also rituals of the mind Wagenia (Congo), 8, 138–142, 144, 146, 148–153, 215–216 Warsaw Ghetto, 5, 55, 63. See also Shapira Weber, Max, 5, 39, 55, 57–60, 62–63, 69. See also Geertz; meaning; suffering; theodicy; verstehen Weil, Simone, 197, 211. See also evil Weiner, Annette, 103, 113n13. See also hau William of Occam, 2 Winkelman, Michael, 186. See also altered states of consciousness work of art, 10, 208–209, 214. See also Polanyi Wyschogrod, Edith, 60–61, 68. See also Levinas zaddik (Judaism), 67. See also Shapira Zempleni, Andras, 30n19 zimzum (Judaism), 68. See also Levinas; Shapira