Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society [1 ed.] 9780801491511

Citation preview

Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors Symbolic Action

in

Human

Society

Victor Turner

m

Series Editor:

VICTOR TURNER

J/UqeASA^/tLfServv JtubUy

DRAMAS, FIELDS, AND METAPHORS Symbolic Action

in

Human

Society

SYMBOL, MYTH, AND RITUAL SERIES General

Raymond

Firth, Symbols: Public

Turner

Editor: Victor

and Private*

Eva Hunt, The Transformation of the Hummingbird: Cultural Roots of a Zinacantecan Mythical

Poem

Bennetta Jules-Rosette, African John Maranke Sally Falk

Apostles: Ritual

Moore and Barbara

Communal

Ideology: Cases

and Conversion

G. Myerhoff, and Questions*

in the

eds., Symbol

and

Church of

Politics in

Barbara G. Myerhoff, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians* Victor Turner, Dramas,

Fields,

and Metaphors: Symbolic Action

Society*

Victor Turner, Revelation and Divination in

Ndembu

Ritual*

Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure*

Roy Wagner, Available

Lethal Speech: Daribi

in a Cornell

Myth

Paperbacks edition.

as Symbolic Obviation

in

Human

DRAMAS, FIELDS,

AND METAPHORS Symbolic Action in

Human

Society

VICTOR TURNER

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright

©

1974 uv Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof,

must not be reproduced

in

any form without permission

in

writing from the publisher. For information address Cornell University Press,

124 Roberts Place, Ithaca,

New York

14850.

First published 1974 D > Cornell University Press. First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1975.

Fifth printing 1987.

International Standard

Book Number 0-8014-91

Library of Congress Catalog Card

Number

51 -7

73-16968

Printed in the United States of America

The paper

in this

book

is

acid-free

and meets the guidelines

and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines of the Council on Library Resources.

for

for

permanence

Book Longevity

TO ALEX AND RORY

Foreword

Recently both the research and theoretical concerns of

many

anthropologists have once again been directed toward the role

of symbols

nomic

—

political,

and even eco-

and cultural processes. Whether

this revival is a

religious,

—

in social

mythic, esthetic,

belated response to developments in other disciplines (psychology,

ethology, philosophy, linguistics, to it

reflects a return to a central

is

difficult to say. In

name only

a few), or

whether

concern after a period of neglect,

recent field studies, anthropologists have been

myths and rituals in the context of social action, and improvements in anthropological field technique have produced data that are richer and more refined than heretofore; these new data have probably challenged theoreticians to provide more adequate explanatory frames. Whatever may have been the causes, there is no denying a renewed curiosity about the nature of the connections between culture, cognition, and perception, as these collecting

connections are revealed in symbolic forms.

Although excellent individual monographs and bolic anthropology or comparative

peared, a

common

not only

by

is

symbology have recently apby a

intended to

books has not been

fill

monographs and

field

sym-

focus or forum that can be provided

topically organized series of

present series

articles in

this lacuna. It

theoretical

is

available.

The

designed to include

and comparative studies

work by scholars in other disciplines, and humanistic. The appearance of studies in such

anthropologists, but also

both

scientific

forum encourages emulation, and emulation can produce fruitful new theories. It is therefore our hope that the series will serve

a

as a

house of

titioners of

many

any

mansions, providing hospitality for the prac-

discipline that has a serious

and creative concern

8

Foreword

with comparative symbology. off, in sterile

Too

Nevertheless, our primary aim

works on

often, disciplines are sealed

pedantry, from significant intellectual influences.

ritual

is

to bring to public attention

and myth written by anthropologists, and our

readers will find a variety of strictly anthropological approaches

ranging from formal analyses of systems of symbols to empathetic accounts of divinatory and initiatory

rituals.

Victor Turner University of Chicago

Contents

Preface

1

Dramas and Ritual Metaphors

1.

Social

2.

Religious Paradigms and Political Action:

Becket

at the

4.

The Word

5.

Pilgrimages as Social Processes

6.

Passages, Margins,

of the

60

Drama

Hidalgo: History as Social

98

Dogon

156 166

and Poverty: Religious Symbols of

Communitas Metaphors of Anti-structure Index

Thomas

Council of Northampton

3.

7.

23

*

in Religious Culture

231

272 301

Illustrations

CHARTS 2.

Chronology of Becket's martyrdom Genealogy of Henry II of England

3.

The

i.

Independencia:

Some key

dates

73

74 103

MAPS church, and pilgrimage centers

1.

Mexico:

2.

Pilgrimage to Pandharpur

3.

Chalma:

4.

Pilgrimage to Ocotlan

State,

An Otomi

Indian pilgrimage route

192

194 199 213

Preface

"Dramas," "passages," "action," "processes"

words

in the titles of the essays in this book.

such terms in fact to

as

"metaphors" and "paradigms."

—these are the key Alongside them are

The book

attempts

probe and describe the ways in which social actions of

form through the metaphors and paradigms

various kinds acquire

in their actors' heads (put there

generalization

from

by

explicit teaching

and implicit

social experience), and, in certain intensive

circumstances, generate unprecedented forms that bequeath his-

tory

new metaphors and

social

dynamics

gram,"

paradigms. In other words,

as a set of

as certain

of

my colleagues,

notably the

New

believe to be the case. Living action, for the

gists,

I

do not

see

"performances" produced by a "pro-

Anthropolo-

human

species,

can never be the logical consequence of any grand design. This

is

not because of the inveterate tendency of man's "free will" to resist

manifest good and manifest reasonableness, as Dostoevsky,

Berdyaev, Shestov, and other "alienated" Russians would have

but because of the processual structure of social action

itself.

it,

Van

Gennep made a striking discovery when he demonstrated, in his comparative work on rites of passage, that human culture had become cognizant of a tripartite movement in space-time. His focus was restricted to ritual processes.

was

at least a

He

ritual,

but

moment when

paradigm covers many extra-

his

insisted that in

all

movement there moved in accordance

ritualized

those being

with a cultural script were liberated from normative demands,

when they were, ments

in jural

indeed, betwixt and between successive lodg-

political

worlds almost anything

systems. In this gap between ordered

may

happen.

In this interim of "liminality," the possibility exists of standing '3

Preface

14

aside not only

positions

from

one's

own

That

ternative social arrangements.

tolerably orderly societies

is

made

danger

this

evident

by

taboos that hedge in and constrain those on structure loses

its

is

all

series

social

of

al-

recognized in

all

the proliferation of

whom

the normative

grip during such potent transitions as extended

initiation rites in "tribal" societies

who

but from

social position

and of formulating a potentially unlimited

and by

legislation against those

in industrial societies utilize such "liminoid" genres as litera-

ture, the film,

and the higher journalism to subvert the axioms and

standards of the ancien regime

—both in general and

in particular

cases.

Without

program might indeed determine perforprograms can be undermined and multiple alternative programs may be generated. The liminality,

mance. But, given

liminality, prestigious

result of confrontations

"field" in

between monolithic, power-supported

many subversive alternatives is a sociocultural which many options are provided, not only between

programs and

their

programmatic gestalten but programs. As

my

between the parts of

also

colleague Harold Rosenberg, the art

often argued, the culture of any society at any

different critic,

moment

is

has

more

like the debris, or "fall-out," of past ideological systems, than is itself

Coherent wholes

a system, a coherent whole.

may

it

exist

(but these tend to be lodged in individual heads, sometimes in those of obsessionals or paranoiacs), but

human

social

groups tend

to find their openness to the future in the variety of their meta-

phors for what

may

be the good

paradigms. If there

is

transiently bayonets

may

achieved

—the

telligences,

When

order,

it

life

is

and

in the contest of their

seldom preordained (though

underpin some

result of conflicting or

political

schema);

it is

concurring wills and in-

each relying on some convincing paradigm.

one surveys large spans of

social

processes, one sees

an almost endless variety of limited and provisional outcomes.

Some seem

to

fall

on the programmatic

eschew precise structural of

human

articulation.

society, seen processually,

is

side of the scale, others

But the besetting quality the capacity of individuals

Preface to stand at times aside

from the models,

for behavior and thinking,

which

patterns,

as children

There

about these capacities

if

we

is

and paradigms

they are conditioned

into accepting, and, in rare cases, to innovate selves or to assent to innovation.

15

new

patterns them-

nothing mysterious

are to accept the testimony of evo-

lutionary biology. Evolving species are adaptive and labile; they

escape the constraints of that form of genetic programming which

dooms

under conditions of radical environ-

a species to extinction

mental change. In the evolution of man's symbolic "cultural" action,

we must

seek those processes

endedness in biological evolution. those

liminal,

or "liminoid"

I

which correspond to openwe have found them in

think

(postindustrial-revolution),

forms

of symbolic action, those genres of free-time activity, in which all

previous standards and models are subjected to criticism, and

fresh

new ways

of describing and interpreting sociocultural ex-

perience are formulated.

The

first

of these forms are expressed in

philosophy and science, the second in art and religion.

This book

is

concerned both with the strength* and

certain "root paradig ms^" such as the acceptance of

— in the somewhat contrasting —and with the dramas where

for the sake of an altruistic cause cases of

Becket and Hidalgo

vitality of

martyrdom

as

social

conflicting groups and personages attempt to assert their

and deplete their opponents' paradigms

between Henry former friends,

II

who

—

as in the

own

confrontations

and Becket and between Hidalgo and

his

for various reasons supported Spanish hege-

mony

over Mexico.

which

religious paradigms are continually reinvested with vitality,

such

as pilgrimages,

I

have also considered the processes through

which commit

individuals unreservedly to

the values of a particular faith in order to able but

make not merely accept-

glowing the hardships and unforeseen

disasters of

long

journeys across several national frontiers. Religious paradigms are also maintained

by

the periodic emergence of counterpara-

digms which under certain conditions become reabsorbed initial

in the

and central paradigm. The essay "Metaphors of Anti-

structure in Religious Culture"

exemplifies this process in the

1

Preface

6

context of Indian culture.

I

believe that

has a

it

still

wider appli-

cation and has something to say about developmental cycles in Eu-

ropean and Chinese

becomes today's becomes tomorrow's centered. I am

religion. Yesterday's liminal

stabilized, today's peripheral

not here advocating a cyclical repetitive view of the human torical process.

tive

view

Rather

is itself

At

alternatives.

I

am

only one among a number of possible processual

the other extreme

as a succession of unique,

movement

his-

suggesting that the cyclical repeti-

we may

find history regarded

unrepeated phases in which

all

forward

owing nothing to the past. Between these poles many degrees of mutual accommodation are possible. I would suggest that what have been regarded as the the result of inspirations

is

"serious" genres of symbolic action

comedy

(at their "birth")

—

myth, tragedy, and

ritual,

—are deeply implicated

in the cyclical

which have flourished since the Industrial Revolution (the modern arts and sciences), though less serious in the eyes of the commonality (pure

repetitive views of social process, while those genres

research, entertainment, interests of the elite), have had greater potential for changing the

ways men

relate to

one another and the

content of their relationships. Their influence has been more insidious.

Because they are outside the arenas of direct industrial

production, because they constitute the "liminoid" analogues of liminal processes cieties, their

tional action

To be

and phenomena

in tribal

and early agrarian so-

very outsiderhood disengages them from direct func-

on the minds and behavior of

either their agents or their audience

is

a society's

members.

an optional activity

from external norms imparts to them a pleasurable quality which enables them all the more readily to be absorbed by individual consciousnesses. Pleasure thus becomes a serious matter in the context of innovative change. In this book I have not taken up this point, but my conthe absence of obligation or constraint

cern with complex societies in change (twelfth-century England, nineteenth-century Mexico, medieval India, medieval and modern

Europe and Asia as settings for pilgrimage processes) points ward this formulation.

to-

Preface

17

culmraj^mams where paradigms are formulated, establ ished^ and co me into conjjicj;. Such paradigms consist of sets of "rules" from which many kinds of sequences of social action may be generated but which In the present context, "fields" are the abstract

what sequences must be excluded. Paradigm con-

further specify flict arises

in

over exclusion

rules.

"Arenas" are the concrete settings

which paradigms become transformed into metaphors and political power is mobilized and

symbols with reference to which in

which there

a trial of strength

is

between

paradigm-

influential

dramas" represent the phased process of their

bearers. "Social

These abstract formulations underlie the essays that make up the book. I have ranged widely through geography and history, over India, Africa, Europe, China, and Meso-America,

contestation.

from ancient society through the medieval period revolutionary times.

I

know

that

I

have trespassed

modern beyond the to

My

limits of

my

excuse

that jj;figarjjnankinH as o ne in essence though manifold

is

in expression^ creative ness.

competence on several occasions.

disciplinary

Any serious

and not merely adaptive

study of

man must

*in

hi s

manifo ld-

follow him wherever he goes

and take into serious account what Florian Znaniecki called the "humanistic coefficient," whereby sociocultural systems depend

not only for their meaning but also for their existence upon the participation of conscious

with one another.

lead anthropologists into tures

where the most

human

upon men's relations which should extended study of complex literate cul-

It is this

agents and

factor of "consciousness"

articulate conscious voices of values are the

"liminoid" poets, philosophers, dramatists, novelists, painters, and the like.

This book

programmatic perforce because

beyond disciplinary frontiers. Its main imperfections derive from such incursive nomadism. But I would plead with my colleagues to acquire the humanistic skills that would enable them to live more comfortably in those territories where the masters of human thought and

is

art

it

strays

have long been dwelling. This must be done if a man, an authentic anthropology, is ever to be-

unified science of

y«>

1

Preface

8

come

possible.

I

am

an advocate not of abandoning the methods

of behavioral science but of applying them to the behavior of an innovative, liminal creature, to a species

whose

Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, Newton, and Einstein.

bers have included Galileo,

individual

mem-

as well as

A cknoivledgments Four of thor

is

au-

John Wiley & Son ("Metaphors of Anti-

structure in Religious Culture"), ed.,

The

these essays have been published previously.

grateful to

Changing Perspectives

first

written for Allan Eister,

Study of Religion,

in the Scientific

Worship 46

(August-September 1972): 390-412; 46 1974; to (October 1972) 1482-494 ("Passages, Margins, and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas"); to History of Religio?is 12, no.

(1973): 191-230 ("The Study of Pilgrimages as Social Pro-

3

by permission of the University of Chicago Press, Copy1973 by the University of Chicago; and to Social Science Information 7, no. 6 (1968)155-61 ("The Word of the Dogon"). The opportunity to write "The Study of Pilgrimages as Social Processes" was afforded me by the Lichstern Fund of the Department of Anthropology and by a grant from the Division of the cesses")

right

©

Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.

I

am most

grateful

to both these sources of assistance.

My

thanks are due to Father Jorge Serrano-Moreno,

patiently acted as

my

S.J.,

who

research assistant in the collection of Mexi-

can data. His research was financed by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, to

we I

whose generous support

are both indebted.

am

particularly thankful to have had the constant advice

stimulus of cial

my

colleagues and students of the

Thought and of

gave

me much

Committee on So-

the Department of Anthropology of the

University of Chicago.

who, when he was

and

I

would

also like to

thank Jerald Brown,

a graduate student at Cornell University,

valuable information about the then incipient

Preface

counterculture.

The

of Cornell University Press have con-

staff

tributed their skills to the

My

making of

this

whole

like

once more to acknowledge

series.

this

book, and, indeed, of

thanks are due to them. Finally,

incomparable help with

19

this

I

would

my debt to my wife, Edie, for her as with all my other publi-

book

cations.

V.T.

DRAMAS, FIELDS, AND METAPHORS Symbolic Action

in

Human

Society

CHAPTER

-4

Social

Dramas and

Ritual

Metaphors

In this chapter

I

some of the influences

shall trace

the formulation of concepts

anthropological field

1

that led to

developed in the course of

I

work and

to consider

how

they

my

may be

used in the analysis of ritual symbols. In moving from experience of social

life

to conceptualization

and

intellectual history, I fol-

low the path of anthropologists almost everywhere. Although we take theories into the field with us, these become relevant only if and when they illuminate find very frequently that

social reality.

it is

not a

we

Moreover,

theorist's

tend to

whole system which

so illuminates, but his scattered ideas, his flashes of insight taken

out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. Such ideas

have a virtue of their own and may generate new hypotheses. They even show how scattered facts may be systematically connected! Randomly distributed through some monstrous logical system, they resemble nourishing raisins in a cellular mass of inedible dough.

The

intuitions,

not the

them, are what tend to survive in the later to locate the sources of

make

sense of

The

my own

concepts

I

some

tissue of logic

connecting try

field experience. I will

insights that helped

me

to

field data.

would

like to

mention

are:

"social drama,"

"the processual view of society," "social anti-structure," "multivocality,"

and "polarization of

ritual

symbols."

I

the order of their formulation. All are pervaded

human 1

social life

is

mention these

by

the producer and product of time,

which be-

Department of Anthropology, University of October 1971.

First presented at the

fornia at San Diego, in

in

the idea that

23

Cali-

Dramas,

24

comes

its

Fields,

measure

and Metaphors

—an ancient idea that has had resonances

in the

very different work of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Henri Bergson. Following Znaniecki, the renowned Polish sociologist,

had already come, before doing

work, to

field

insist

I

on the

dynamic quality of social relations and to regard Comte's distinction between "social statics" and "social dynamics" later to be

—

elaborated essentially

—

by A. R. Rad cliffe-Br own and other positivists as misleading. The social world is a world in becoming,

not a world in being (except insofar as "being" of the this

static,

atemporal models

men have

is

a description

in their heads),

and for

reason studies of social structure as such are irrelevant.

are erroneous in basic premise because there

That

"static action."

is

why I am

a little

is

They

no such thing

as

chary of the terms "com-

do use them, for they are often thought of as static concepts. Such a view violates the actual flux and changefulness of the human social scene. Here I would look, for example, to Bergson rather than, say, to Des-

munity" or "society,"

too,

though

I

cartes, for philosophical guidance.

However,

I

am

alive to the virtues of

Robert A. Nisbet's warn-

ing in Social Change and History (1969:3-4) about the use of

"becoming" and

similar notions,

such

as

"growth" and "develop-

ment," which rest fundamentally on organic metaphors. Nisbet has

drawn our

logical

whole metaphorical family of socio-

attention to a

and sociophilosophical terms such

as "genesis,"

"growth,"

"unfolding," "development," on the one hand, and "death," "deca-

dence," "degeneration," "pathology," "sickness," and so on, which

Greek idea of "physis" This term means "growth," from

STATE OF TLAXCALA

L

f

12

v

°

/

y

V>

2A I

6 also in oc\ 25 \ 50 54 TIaxcala 13 26. 3 6 56 9 1 91

^

"^

STATE OF 48

PUEBLA 10

%

5^-Puebia 37

3

£»

34 55

49

39

6

32 41

47

51

11

S~^

/

3

57 5

vX

/

«

2

Tehuacano 9 58 19

15

10

Map

4.

Pilgrimages to Ocotlan: Serial order of annual parish visitations

20miles

Dramas,

214

miles

Fields,

and Metaphors

from Ocotlan, the northernmost

is

about 80 miles, the most

easterly nearly 75, while the westernmost, Huejotzingo,

is

only

from the shrine. This proximity is due to the orographic that the mighty volcanoes Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl

16 miles fact

coming from the any case seem to fall more

present formidable eastern barriers to pilgrims states of

Mexico and Morelos

—who

naturally, in terms of ecology

in

and cultural

tradition, within the

catchment areas of the great pilgrimages centered upon Our Lady of Guadalupe and Chalma. Historically, too, the pilgrims from

come mostly from within

the inner circle seem to

the limits of

the pre-Columbian Tlaxcalan "republic/' once allied with Cortes against the Aztecs.

Here

perhaps an instance of what was

is

when

formerly mystical nationalism, state.

Tlaxcala was an independent

Pilgrims go almost pointedly to the ancient heartland near

the city of Tlaxcala, although the major episcopal and hence church-structural center still

a Spanish

now Puebla,

is

and Creole

city. It

according to a Hispanic city plan.

was

essentially

built after the

Conquest

One might

almost regard the

Tlaxcalan answer to the Virgin of

Virgin of Ocotlan

as the

Guadalupe. Both, in

fact, are said to

origins, for the

and

historically

have had similar miraculous

Virgin of Ocotlan appeared to a Tlaxcalan peasant

named Juan Diego, about

ten years after the Virgin of Guadalupe

revealed herself to the Aztec Juan Diego, at Tepeyac. Shortly after the vision the Virgin's

image was discovered by Francis-

can missionaries, embedded in the trunk of a huge ocote pitch pine tree (whence Ocotlan), and Tlaxcalans believe that statue of ocote

in

the

wood which

is

it is

today placed above the high

this

altar

But whereas the Guadalupan devotion was

basilica.

by the secular clergy, according to Robert Ricard, author of The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico (1966:190), the Tlaxcalan devotion was encouraged from the beginning by the fostered

—which, indeed, has promoted the

Franciscan order

first

growth

of other important regional devotions, such as the cults of

Our

Lady of Zapopan at Guadalajara, Our Lady of Izamal in Yucatan, and of Our Lord of the Sacromonte at Amecameca. Much has yet

Pilgrimages as Social Processes to be written in terms of cultural interrelations

215

dynamics about the complex

between the secular church, the various missionary

orders, each with

its

own

subculture and style of organization,

and the different indigenous Mexican peoples. The

political an-

thropology of these relations also remains to be written.

To

return

to

map

the

numbers according to

allocated

catchment

of the inner

parishes sending pilgrim groups to

area:

the

Ocotlan were mapped and

their order of departure for the

shrine in the annual pilgrimage roster.

There was a marked

tendency to alternate near and far parishes, and those coming

from south, north, and

east.

cessive pilgrimage journeys,

For example,

if

one considers suc-

one finds that in forty-three cases

out of sixty-four these came alternately from the cardinal points

and from the central area immediately around Ocotlan. example, one considers the

first fifteen

If,

for

journeys in the calendar

year in terms of near and far parishes, the sequence runs: near, far, far, near, far, near, far, far, near, far, far, far, near, far, far, far.

The

last

two sequences of

three "far" parishes represent swings

Even when pilgrim groups come from the inner circle of parishes round Ocotlan, they come alternately from different compass directions. These data show how there is an attempt here, probably, conscious and from

east to south to north.

successively

deliberate

— —to avoid the creation of solidary blocs of pilgrimage

groups coming from the same subregion in successive waves.

same tendency

may

The

be observed in the rotation of market days in

intervillage systems in

Mexico today.

A

homogenizing and mixing

process goes on, even at this level of the conscious ordering of pilgrim groups, in contrast to the segmentary barrio organization

within villages and municipios.

On

a

grander scale the same

is

true of the

grimage system's organization. Here the major are dioceses,

though parishes from

all

Mexico

Guadalupe

pil-

ecclesiastical units

also send

groups

was lucky enough to purchase, in Mexico Qty, runs of three magazines specializing in Guadalupan affairs for periods of approximately fifteen years, though with some

throughout the year.

I

Dramas,

216

serious lacunae.

Fields,

and Metaphors

These

are:

La Voz Guadalupana,

closest to the

clergy; Tepeyac, the one with most quantitative information;

and the popular devotional magazine Juan Diego, firmly and patriotically dedicated to the cause of the

Aztec commoner whose

cloak became the canvas for the miraculous painting. These various sources yielded

much

pilgrimage groups that pay

information about the kinds of

official visits to

partial processing of the data, the

—taken from 31, 195

1, is

Tepeyac

—

characteristic.

can and Atlacomulco

following

the basilica.

From

a

of pilgrim groups

list

from January 13 to the parishes of Teoloyu-

visiting the basilica

On January

13,

in the state of

Mexico; on the 14th, the

personnel of the Ejidal Bank, the personnel of a drugstore, the

Union of Fishermen, and the personnel of group of neighbors from

a hotel;

on the

16th, a

on the Mexico State; on the 23rd, the alumni of an engineering school; on the 25th, the parishioners of Tultepec, Mexico State; on the 26th, the guild (corporation) of the "Children of America"; on the 27th, the Congress of Catholic Schools, hopefully edified on this occasion by a sermon from the archbishop of Mexico; on the 28th, coachline workers, personnel of the Bank of Mexico, parishioners of Tultitlan, Mexico State, personnel of a printing and paper company, and of a candy and chocolate factory; finally, on the 31st, pilgrim students back from the 1950 Holy Year observances at Rome, Peralvillo in the Federal District;

19th, the parishioners of Calitlahuaca,

under the leadership of the Society of

The

Jesus.

lists

include

professional groups, such as architects, doctors, pharmacists, en-

schoolteachers,

gineers,

and lawyers,

bankers, journalists, and writers. In

grimages by

Diocesan

"Spanish bullfighters"

parties, led

by

their

own

as

May and

well

as

195

there

1,

businessmen,

were

pil-

"nutrition

students"!

bishops, usually

go on the

same date each year: thus, the diocese of Zacatecas reaches the shrine at Tepeyac every September 10, that of Leon on October 15,

of Aguascalientes on October 29, of

and so

Saltillo

and San Luis

November 7, the Archdiocese of Oaxaca on May 12, on. The magazine La Voz Guadalupana also mentions

Potosi on

Pilgrimages as Social Processes that

many

217

family pilgrimages take place annually. These inven-

groups are supplemented by information about individual

tories of

Sometimes

pilgrims.

their

"El Pito" went to thank her

won, with her slain bull!

An

Virgin of

motives for visiting the

Guadalupe are given: for example,

in

by

aid, in the arena,

November

1952 the matador

offering her the prize he had

probably the ears or

air hostess attributed to a

tail

of the

by Our Lady the passengers and crew

miracle

foiling of a "scandalous attempt'' to rob the

(thus jeopardizing their lives) of a Mexican Airlines plane on

way from Mexico

City to Oaxaca.

It is

its

clear that mass media of

communication and modern means of transportation have been absorbed into the pilgrimage system here as elsewhere, for example, at Lourdes and

Lourdes, 1971:38,

Mecca (see Rev. J. A. Shields, Guide to and Malcolm X, 1966:321). Indeed, the

fn. 2,

communitas character of pilgrimages and

their capacity to

evoke

the loyalty of the most diverse types and groups of people to

common

aims

—

in contrast to

many

are probably well adapted to the

sectarian religious activities

communications media of mass

culture and large-scale societies, industrial perhaps even feudal.

more than

For example, during the eighteen days of the great

of the Three Kings at Tizimin in Yucatan from

January

17, trains of

December

fiesta 3

1

to

twenty-four cars each leave Merida Central

Railroad station at short intervals every day, bearing their bulging loads of pilgrims, while from as far

away

as

Mexico City

motorists drive their automobiles to be blessed at the shrine! For the Three

Kings were themselves great travelers

opinion and well

knew

in

Mexican

the hazards of the public highways! Per-

haps one of the most bizarre and at the same time heroic involve-

ments with modern transportation

is

rather cryptically related in

the August 12, 1947, issue of the popular newspaper Excelsior, cited in the

Tepeyac:

widow Encarnacion

a pilgrimage to

de Guerra of Copan, Honduras, is beginning Guadalupe on foot. ... It is a penance precisely be-

cause she had lost a leg in a car accident [the paper rather characteristically

does not mention whether she had an

artificial

limb!]. In

Dramas,

218

January of

Fields,

and Metaphors

made

year the Guerra family

this

a pilgrimage to the

Sanctuary of the Cristo of Esquipulas in Guatemala, and the car in

which they were traveling crashed into a deep ravine. The result of was the death of six of the seven passengers. After a long stay in a North American hospital, the lady, now a widow, recovered. For her deliverance from death, and as a result of a previous promise, she committed herself again to the mercy of the Guadalupana [the Dark Virgin]. Given the difficulties of a journey under these conditions, it is easy to imagine that the penitent has not designated a fixed date for her arrival at the end of the route. But her travels have already begun. The distance from Copan to Mexico City is more than 1500 kilometers. this catastrophe

It is

not recorded whether the

made

gallant, one-legged,

and undeniably

Mexico City, but it is certainly proverbial in Mexico that once one starts on a pilgrimage one should never turn back. For example, a major folk belief about the Chalma pilgrimage which, on foot, is quite an arduous undertaking is that if one complains about the journey and starts to tragic lady ever

to

it

—

—

return home, one will be turned into a stone. will befall couples

who commit

pilgrims say that

if

road

all

littering the

they will

finally

women. And

The same

fate

adultery on the way. But pious

one kicks such transformed humans lavishly the

way

to the shrine of

Our Lord

of Chalma

be forgiven and changed back into

men and

so every pilgrim kicks a few stones toward the

According to Ruben Reina (1966:176)

shrine as he goes along.

the pilgrims traveling to Esquipulas in Guatemala have the same belief in punitive petrification.

lady was traveling

have their

John Hobgood there

is

when

perils for

And

it

was

to this shrine that the

she had her accident. Pilgrimages even

Americans,

for, as

one pilgrim remarked to

on the road from Ocuilan to Chalma: "You know,

even a stone they

American who laughed

at

call

El Gringo de Chalma.

He was

an

our customs and was changed into

a

stone" (1970b: 99).

A

final

systems

is

example of synchronic arrangement provided by the annual

fiesta, just

in

pilgrimage

mentioned, of the

Pilgrimages as Social Processes

Three Kings grimage

in eastern

Yucatan. Here the major unit of

not the brotherhood or sodality (hermandad)

is

219 pil-

but

,

the religious guild (gremio). Robert Redfield has discussed the in The Folk Culture of Yucatan (1941:71, 161, but has not commented on certain of its features that once 299), more manifest what I have called the communitas bias of pilgrim-

gremio briefly

ages.

The gremio

Yucatan than

in

or guild, which in

is

more

elaborately developed

the rest of Mexico, seems to have been

introduced by the Spanish as a direct copy of the European medieval guild. Otto von Simson writes of the European guild

was "an intimate interconnection between

that there

and economic elements in the corporate merchants.

It

was usual for medieval guilds to place themselves

under the protection of a patron

saint

and to join

in the regular

observation of certain devotional practices" (1962: 167). assured

not

by

know

religious

of artisans and

life

several citizens of

precisely

We were

Tizimin that "originally" (they did

when), the gremio

in

Tizimin was a "corpora-

tion" of workers in a particular trade or craft (oficio), and that it

was obligatory to

religious in function

great their

fiesta.

join

it.

Today

the gremios are exclusively

and organize the religious aspect of the gremios

Affiliation to

members come from

is

voluntary, and

outside Tizimin

—

many

of

in contrast to the

hermandades or "brotherhoods" of central Mexico which draw

membership from the local people only. The governing the gremio is made up of a president, a secretary, and treasurer, and a variable number of committee members (vocales), any of whom can be strangers to the parish. One elected official

their

body of

is

known

as the anfitrion

derived from the

or "host," a curious term, for

Amphitryon of

classical

legend

who was

it

is

cuck-

by Zeus. He has to be a permanent resident of Tizimin. In some gremios the "host" voluntarily takes on his role, to fulfill olded

a promise

duty

is

(promesa) made to the three Holy Kings. His main

to give a banquet

members of his feasters amount

on the day of the

fiesta, in

greviio traditionally take part to as

many

as six to eight

which the

—sometimes

hundred people

the at a

Dramas,

220

time. This

and Metaphors

Fields,

means

from the time of

that

must acquire and fatten up the banquet.

Two

his

pigs, turkeys,

appointment, the host

and other delicacies for

or three days before the gre?nio's great day,

female members or wives of members

The

come

to help with the

members in cash, make the banquet possible. According to Redfield (1941:299) members are both men and women, and a term of membership consists of three years; some gremios are divided into sections, and it is possible that some of these have become independent gremios since Redfield's time, thus accountpreparation of the meal.

kind, and services

all

contributions of the

help to

ing for the increase in numbers of gremios, from nine to twelve.

Redfield further suggests that

came from

times

the same

capital city of Yucatan.

all

the

town or

members of a section somefrom Merida, the

village or

This arrangement

recalls the corporate

organization at Ocotlan and Merida and indicates the centralizing

function of Tizimin for Yucatan

—and

Campeche, Quintana Roo, and even Honduras,

in fact for the old

The gremio

may

of Guatemala and

Maya oikoumene.

be held more than once

—again

in

con-

with other systems of religious government, for example, of

trast

the

offices

indeed far beyond, for

parts

mayordomia type

—

at the local level.

they remain under the control of

Sometimes, however,

a single family.

Variation also characterizes the names of the gremios. There are several criteria of nomenclature. Sometimes sex and civic status

is

determinative of the

title,

as in the

and the Gremio de Senoritas, though

sometimes

it is

Gremio de Senoras

men may belong

to these;

occupation, as in the Gremio de Agricultores (the

It

named after religious perGremio of Leo XIII, and the was hard for us to discover in a

how many

guilds there were. Redfield had

farmers' guild); other gremios are

sonages or figures, such as the

Gremio of two-day

the

visit

Holy Kings. just

mentioned nine, but several of our informants, declared there

were twelve. They were only able to give us six names though the five just mentioned plus the traders' guild (Gremio de Vendedores).

Pilgrimages as Social Processes All agreed, however, that each guild

of the days of the

fiesta,

and that

this

2 2

was responsible for one

was always on the same

members could make preparations

date every year, so that the

well in advance.

As

well as being open, varied, and flexible, the guild system

of Tizimin betrays in the

liminal

its

degree to which

it

is

and communitas character or

church. Structurally, the parish priest has guilds. Certainly, he has

no

rule,

but simply because,

as

is

one

priest,

but highly

do with the

Father "Panchito" Puc,

intelligent, told us, if

tantamount to belonging to none. In

The

to

not due to any ecclesiastical

longed to one he would have to belong to

tary to theirs.

little

jurisdiction over their affairs, for he

belongs to none of them. This

a volatile, elfin figure,

all,

and

fact, his role

is

mass for them, thus providing their religious raison

solemn and

sacred legitimation. Despite priest

is

its

festive,

significance,

as locality, has a

life,

this

however, interaction

restricted; the priest's role

other aspects of Mexican religious

d'etre. In a

devoWe from

rather than pastoral, structural rather than intimate.

and

he be-

would be complemen-

this

guild has to assist him, for he says their special

sense, its other functions,

between guild and

style

independent of the institutionalized

is

sacerdotal

As

in

many

the pueblo, both as people

high degree of autonomy from the secular

clergy. This seems indeed to be especially the case in the pil-

grimage domain. Traditional pilgrimages continue to operate with the help of modern technology

—

as

though the pilgrims had

never heard of ecclesiastical modernization or renewal.

The

of the Three Kings

fiesta

ceptualized as first

novena

two

stresses the religious, the

festive aspects of the total situation,

celebrations

lasts

for eighteen days con-

successive novenas of nine days apiece.

The

second the commercial and

which

contains, as pilgrimage

do the world over, three major foci in space/time.

These are solemnity,

festivity,

and trade,

all

three representing

from day-to-day participation in structural role playing and status incumbency, and three types of voluntaristic activity. In Tizimin, it would seem that the

different types of liminal disengagement

Dramas,

222

guilds are

most prominent during the

minates on January is itself

and Metaphors

Fields,

how

an interesting example of

popularly controlled

novena which cul-

first

the principal day of the

8,

feast, in a

fiesta.

This date

the numerical logic of the

thoroughly Mayan fashion, has

taken precedence over the church's liturgical calendar, where, of course, January

6,

Epiphany,

properly speaking, the Feast

is,

of the Three Kings or Magi. It

is,

to

my

mind, plausible that originally there were nine but that their number has been in-

guilds, as Redfield wrote,

creased to twelve subsequently as the in popularity fair.

This

is

fiesta

particularly true of the second novena, for

time that the local government maximizes

running of the

how

has continued to

grow

and to acquire something of the character of a trade

fiesta.

at this

participation in the

Redfield (pp. 298-299) has vividly described

the officers of the Tizimfn

commission from

its

it is

town government appoint

political favorites to hire musicians to

a

play at

the jaranas, the national folk dances of Yucatan, and at the

rodeos and bullfights.

To

obtain funds for these activities, the

commission holds an auction

at

Christmas and disposes of the vari-

ous concessions involved in the

fiesta:

"the corridas (bullfights),

the vaquerias (including the jarana, or national dance of Yucatan), the merry-go-round, the 'wheel of fortune'

(the ferris-

wheel), and forty or fifty 'locations' (puestos) in the market place at

which the buyers

are entitled to

sell

food or drink or

operate gambling tables." Redfield reports that although the net profits accruing to the

commission are supposed to be handed

over to the municipal treasury to pay for public improvements (in accordance,

one might think, with the communitas

the whole occasion),

it is

pockets of the commission."

And

this

may

from the truth. According to our informants, January fiesta, is

spirit

of

widely held that a part "remains in the

8

not be too wildly far

is

and attendance begins to decline after

the high spot of the this

midpoint, which

the culmination of the fiesta sagrada, the religious novena.

Matters were perhaps different in Red field's time

—

in the 1920's

Pilgrimages as Social Processes

and

1930*5,

during and just after the antireligious regimen of

President Plutarco Calles .

.

.

223

—when

the "fiesta of Tizimin

a business enterprise so arranged as to

make

it

[was]

possible for

the genuinely pious also to take part" (1941:299-300).

Today,

as

in other pilgrimage centers, there appears to have taken place at

—perhaps be-

Tizimin a resurgence of the religious component

cause pilgrimage represents a final defense for folk Catholicism the

against

iconoclastic

tion

now

and rationalizing modernization

going on in the structured church. Perhaps

represents a reac-

it

and an alternative to the depersonalizing and anomic tenden-

modern

cies in

industrial

and bureaucratic organization and

may

not be unconnected with the "retribalization" processes described

by Abner Cohen (1969) and S. N. graphs. The Maya, at any rate, seem today of being Maya. to

Maya

eralizations first

Maya

includes being pilgrims

father and as a

on the evidence before me to maka a few gen-

about the symbolism of Mexican pilgrimage centers. place, the greatest shrines, as

barrio santos y

garded

being

to be

Christian shrines.

It is possible

In the

And

monomore than ever proud

Eisenstadt in several

opposed to

village or

seem to be devoted to universalized and supernatural

mother "Father

figures, for Christ

God"

is

rather than as

almost everywhere re-

"God

the Son," for ex-

ample, at Chalma and Sacromonte. Second, they are frequently

connected with natural features, such wells,

and springs. Third,

in

as hills,

mountains, caves,

Mexico, several of the most important

Christian centers of pilgrimage are located at or near the major

pre-Columbian pagan centers of pilgrimage. Fourth, and tension of this tendency to superimpose later tures,

many

an ex-

earlier struc-

centers are composite in character, containing not one

shrine, chapel, or other edifice,

different

upon

as

but several, each constructed

period in the pilgrimage's history.

centers, too, the

approach to

a

major shrine

is

at a

Usually, at such

demarcated by a

sequence of minor shrines; often these take the form of the fourteen Stations of the Cross or the fifteen Mysteries of the

Holy Rosary. Frequently, but not

always, these structured ap-

Dramas,

224

Fields,

proaches are up a

and Metaphors to represent the soul's ascent through

hill,

penance and patience. Fifth, Guadalupe has a in the

there

system shared neither

is

by no

are

shrines,

its

shrine

complex

nor indirect reference to any other

direct

Mexican pilgrimage devotion, whereas there

unique place

special,

other center; in

at

every

other

center

or statues devoted to the

paintings,

Dark

Virgin, indicating her position as the dominant symbol of Mexi-

can mystical nationalism,

and beyond

this,

I

suggest,

of

a

Catholic communitas extending beyond the boundaries of the present and past Mexican political systems. In some towns, for example, Culiacan in Sinaloa state, there

is

as,

an exact facsimile

of the spatial structure of the Mexico City devotion, dedicated to

Our Lady

of Guadalupe, with a basilica located on a

the town, and a pilgrim's way, flanked the mysteries of the rosary, leading to

by it,

hill

outside

shrines representing

just as there

is

in the

national capital. This recalls the pre-Columbian practice of build-

ing

cities

many

on

a

cosmological plan, recently demonstrated for

by Paul Wheatley (1971);

ancient civilizations

the layout

of buildings and quarters on the ground replicates the major

modes of cosmological a spatial

and in

classification, translating a cognitive into

arrangement of parts

Maya

—

as

calendrical cycles (see

Ancient Mexico," 197

1

)

do the

divisions of the

Aztec

John Ingham, "Time and Space

Provincial towns, again, in their lay-

out tend to replicate the master plan of the

capital.

This would

be another example at a different cultural level of the conservation of the past in the present, with

Guadalupe

as the spiritual

At this changed post-Columbian come to symbolize the widest, most

capital of the pilgrimage system. level,

though, the system has

— the Earth shrines of the —rather than to represent the segmental oppositions and

generic bond between Mexicans Tallensi

like

power cleavages of a sociopolitical structure. The pilgrimage system is at once an instrument and an expression of normative communitas. Sixth, for those

many pilgrims who travel on foot and donkeyway of going to a major pilgrimage center is

back, the traditional

Pilgrimages as Social Processes

very important in

itself.

One

gains

225

more merit or grace by ignor-

More important

ing modern means of transportation.

than

this, as

John Hobgood has written with reference to the Zapotec Indians of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the great Cristo of

visit

sidered

essential

Chalma, and

if it

to

who

Chalma near Mexico

City, "it

make

has been important to

is

to

con-

on the way to

sacred way-stations

visit

month

travel for over a

the pilgrimage

by

following exactly the same route every year, since before the time of the Spanish conquest, then additional information

on how both

it

may be

ideas

possible to gain

and trade goods moved

back and forth throughout Mesoamerica" (19703:2). Hobgood

Otomi Indians from the town of Huizquilucan, near the shrine of Our Lady of the Remedies, just west of Mexico City, all the way to Chalma on foot and confirmed that there were indeed sacred way stations which appeared

himself traveled with a party of

to be connected with pre-Columbian archeological sites (see 4).

Map

But here, once more, there has probably been convergence

with the European pilgrimage pattern, for there grew up established routes to the great

European shrines

through a number of sacred hostelries, hospitals,

routes stimulated

way

—and these

stations.

As

also passed

in Mexico, too,

and markets grew and flourished beside these

by

The Road an excellent map

the flow of pilgrims. In his book,

to Santiago (1965:6-7),

Walter Starkie provides

of the network of routes leading to Compostella in northwestern

Spain where the important pilgrimage shrine of

St.

James the

Apostle was located. These routes, which brought pilgrims from

Germany, England, and the Low Countries, as well as from Spain and France, were each punctuated with lesser pilgrimage centers and with abbeys, churches, and hospitals to cater for the spiritual and material needs of pilgrims. Yet here, too, as always in considering pilgrimages,

Indian

we must beware

and Muslim pilgrimages

exhibit the

same picture of

a great shrine, each lined is

as

for

of too narrow a view.

which

I

a multiplicity of routes

with sacred

though such shrines exerted

a

way

have

The

evidence

converging on

stations (see

Map

2). It

magnetic effect on a whole

Dramas,

226

and Metaphors

Fields,

communications system, charging up with sacredness many of

its

geographical features and attributes and fostering the construction of sacred and secular edifices to service the needs of the

human stream

passing along

in fact, generate a "field."

they have played

am tempted

I

at least as

to speculate

whether

important a role in the growth of

markets, and roads as economic and political factors. Cer-

cities,

tainly,

was

routes. Pilgrimage centers,

its arterial

Otto von Simson has argued that the "religious impulse

so all-pervading an element of medieval life that even the

entire

economic structure depended upon

wise,

the

economy

from

received

periences the impulse

it

Cathedral, 1962:170).

He

Almost

it.

static other-

customs and ex-

religious

its growth" (The Gothic growth of Chartres, Canter-

needed for cites the

bury, Toledo, and Compostella,

all

major pilgrimage centers

in

the period of Gothic architecture, in support of this view. If the

was

Protestant ethic

a precondition

of capitalism, perhaps the

pilgrimage ethic helped to create the communications net that

made

later

capitalism a viable national and international system.

shown how

Recently, Ralph della Cava (1970) has

hamlet of Joaseiro in

Brazil's

the backland

impoverished northeast has

in-

creased in population from 2,500 to about 80,000 between 1889

and the present day. This sensational demographic growth has been almost entirely due to the development of the town

as a

pilgrimage center, as the result of an alleged miracle whose authenticity

was sternly denied by the

the Catholic church, both in Brazil and it is

likely that several important

they were S.

Itza,

writes of several important

(1967:133).

"To

which formed "the

In ancient Mexico,

developed because

For example,

Maya

cities,

J. Flric

such

as

first

focal point of pilgrimages"

these places," he writes,

courses of pilgrims,

The

cities

representatives of

Cozumel, and Izamal, that they possessed sacred

wells or cenotes

135).

Rome.

Maya

pre-Christian pilgrimage centers.

Thompson

Chichen

official

many

of

them from

"came immense con-

quite distant parts" (p.

bishop of Yucatan, the Franciscan, Landa, com-

pares the pilgrimages to Chichen Itza and

Cozumel with the

Pilgrimages as Social Processes

pilgrimages

Christian

Izamal, as the

Rome

to

and Jerusalem. "Furthermore,

home of Kinichkakmo,

most important shrine"

say about Izamal elsewhere;

We

135).

(p. it

sun

a manifestation of the

Maya

god, and of Itzamna, one of the greatest of also a

2:7

gods, was

have more to

shall

was for centuries the most im-

portant Christian pilgrimage center in Yucatan, dedicated not to

gods but to the Christian Mother of God. that pilgrimages sometimes generate cities

we need

take this view

and consolidate regions,

communitas

petrifies into

be regenerated

may

former sociopolitical systems. There

by which, under

well be a process going on here

may

we

not abandon the view that they are sometimes also the

ritualized vestiges of

tions,

If

as a

certain condi-

politico-economic structure but

communitas center when

a

new

alterna-

tive politico-economic center develops or forcibly replaces the old.

The new

secular structure enters into a

complementary

re-

which then becomes sacralized communitas. Former centrality has be-

lationship with the old structure,

and infused with liminal

come settle

new

and

masses. a

may

peripherality

centrality, as

coming and

saints

into existence as

their

then

become

the

waves of pilgrims invade, and many

new

near the peripheral shrines. But

are constantly ers

but

peripherality,

setting for

pilgrimage shrines

rumors of miracle work-

therapeutic deeds spread

These shrines may be situated

in

new

among

locations. It remains

problem for intensive investigation to study the conditions

under which such folk devotions survive until they become tablished pilgrimages legitimated

gious system in is

the

where such

whose

field

as survival.

I

is

am

the authorities of the reli-

of beliefs they have sprung up. This

historical studies as

able. Failure to survive

problem

by

just as

Ralph

della Cava's are so valu-

important an anthropological

at present inclined to favor the

that a pilgrimage's best chance of survival religious

orthodoxy

a

es-

renewed

is

vitality, rather

view

when it imparts to when it asserts

than

against an established system a set of heterodox opinions

and

unprecedented styles of religious and symbolic action. In

this

latter situation

one

finds sects, heresies,

and millenarian move-

Dramas,

228

Fields,

and Metaphors

ments, but not pilgrimage centers.

be

alive if pilgrimages are to

still

of producing miracles; but

even

tional,

if

it

The

old has to be

develop and to be

shown

still

to

capable

must patently remain the

tradi-

the pilgrimage devotion renovates certain areas of

tradition that have lapsed into latency or near oblivion for de-

cades or even centuries. Religions persist as cultural systems partly because popular interest and energy are not equally distributed at

all

times over

all

their levels

and

epoch get focused on one or a few. The

sectors,

rest are

but

at

each

not abandoned

low pulse, until quickened again by popular devotions which are only

or obliterated but remain unmanifest, or at a

—

they are

seeming novelties or challenges to the

total system,

long run show themselves to be among nisms. It

may

be the

also

case, as

we

its

but in the

maintenance mecha-

have seen, that those

pil-

grimage centers which survive and thrive have been grafted onto even older centers,

like scions

on mentors. This would be true

for Guadalupe, Chalma, Izamal, and Ocotlan, at

least, in

Mexico.

Such a superimposition may involve a conscious rejection at the same time as an unconscious acceptance of the old religion.

What what

is is

here rejected

the former structure, declared anathema;

is

tacitly accepted

is

the perennial communitas,

no longer

normative (for the norms are consciously rejected) but seen

as

promising renewed true fellowship.

References Aguilar, Carlos

M.

1966.

Nuestra Senora de Ocotlan, Tlaxcala. Tlax-

cala.

Burton, Sir Richard.

1964.

Al-Madinah and Meccah.

Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to 2

vols.

New

York: Dover. First pub-

lished 1893.

Cava, Ralph della. 1970. Miracle at Joaseiro. University Press.

Cohen, Abner. 1969. Custom and Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Politics in

New

York: Columbia

Urban

Africa. London:

Pilgrimages as Social Processes

Deleury, G. A. i960.

Dowse,

Ivor.

1963.

The Cult of The Pilgri??i

Vithoba. Poona:

Sangam

229

Press.

Shrines of England. London: Faith

Press.

1964. The Pilgrim Shrines of Scotland. London: Faith Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1948. The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .

August 12, 1947. Mexico City (Daily newspaper.) Meyer. 1945. The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi. London: Oxford University Press. Garbett, G. Kingsley. 1963. "Religious Aspects of Political Succession among the Valley Korekore." In The History of the Central African Peoples eds. E. Stokes and R. Brown. Lusaka: Government

Excelsior. Fortes,

,

Press.

Gennep, Arnold van.

& Kegan

i960.

The

Rites of Passage.

London: Routledge

Paul. First published 1008.

Gluckman, Max.

1965. Politics,

Law and

Ritual in Tribal Society.

Oxford: Blackwell. Hansa, Bhagwan Shri. 1934. The Holy Mountain. London: Faber and Faber.

Hobgood, John.

A

1970a.

Working Papers No.

Pilgrimage to Chalma. Huixqu\lucan Project,

Madison: University of Wisconsin. Study in Directed Cultural Change. Huixquilucan Project, Working Papers No. 14. Madison: University of Wis.

1970b.

Chalma:

12.

A

consin.

Ingham, John.

(December) Jarett,

Dom

1971. :

"Time and Space

Bede. 191

ed. Charles

in

Ancient Mexico,"

Man

6

61 5-629. 1.

"Pilgrimage." In

G. Herbermann.

New York:

The

Catholic Encyclopedia,

Appleton.

De Porfirio Diaz a Zapata: Memoria Nahuatl de Milpa Alta. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autonoma Mexi-

Jimenez, Luz. 1968.

cana, Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas. Juan Diego. Published monthly in Mexico City. Karve, Irawati. 1962. "On the Road: A Maharashtrian Pilgrimage," Asian Studies (November): 13-29.

n

Lewis, B. 1966. "Hadjdj." In

The Encyclopedia

of Islam. Leiden:

Brill.

Maine, Henry. 1861. Ancient Law. London: Murray. Malcolm X. 1966. Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove. Milburn, R. L. P. 1963. Foreword to The Pilgrim Shrines of England,

by I. Dowse. London: Faith Press. Newert, M. Margaret. 1907. Canon Pietro Casola's Pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Manchester: University Press.

230

Dramas,

Nutini,

Hugo G.

and Metaphors

Fields,

1968.

Saw Bernardino Contla. Pittsburgh: University

of Pittsburgh Press.

Raymond. 1963. Les Pelerins du Moyen Age. Paris: Fayard. Peacock, James L., and A. Thomas Kirsch. 1970. The Human Direction. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Redfield, Robert. 1941. The Folk Culture of Yucatan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reina, Ruben. 1966. The Law of the Saints. Indianapolis and New Oursel,

York: Bobbs-Merrill.

The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press. Romano, V., O. I. 1965. "Charismatic Medicine, Folk-Healing, and Folk-Sainthood," American Anthropologist 67 (October): 1 151-1 173. Shields, Rev. J. A. 1971. Guide to Lourdes. Dublin: Gill. Simson, Otto von. 1962. The Gothic Cathedral. New York: Harper Torchbooks. First published 1956. Singer, Isadore, ed. 1964. Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Ktav. Starkie, Walter. 1965. The Road to Santiago. Berkeley: University of Ricard, Robert. 1966.

California Press.

Tepeyac. Published monthly in Mexico City.

Thompson, J. Eric S. 1967. The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Fro cess: Structure and Anti-structure.

Chicago: Aldine.

Voz Guadalupana,

La. Published monthly in Mexico City. Watts, Francis. 19 17. Canterbury Pilgrims and Their Ways. London:

Methuen. Wensinck, A. Leiden:

J.

1966.

"Hadjdj." In

The Encyclopedia

of Islam.

Brill.

Wheatley, Paul. 1971. Pivot of the Four Quarters. Chicago: Aldine. Yang, C. K. 1961. Religion in Chinese Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER r*

Passages, Margins,

and Poverty: Religious

Symbols

This chapter

is

The

I

it

a

1

modality of social

my

have called "communitas" in

which

Ritual Process, and

Communitas

social structure.

yet

concerned with the study of

which

interrelatedness

Communitas

of

is

I

book

oppose to the concept of

a fact of everyone's experience,

has almost never been regarded as a reputable or coherent

by

object of study

social scientists. It

drama, and

ligion, literature,

art,

and

is,

however, central to

its

traces

may

deeply engraven in law, ethics, kinship, and even economics.

becomes

occasions. In this chapter I

It

of passage, in millenarian movements,

visible in tribal rites

in monasteries, in the counterculture,

what

re-

be found

I

shall try

and on countless informal to define

mean by "communitas" and by

more

"structure."

explicitly

Something

should be said about the kind of cultural phenomena that started

me on to me

this

quest for communitas. Three aspects of culture seemed

to be exceptionally well

endowed with

ritual

symbols and

These may be described, outsiderhood, and structural inferiority.

beliefs of non-social-structural type.

respectively, as liminality,

Liminality

a

is

formulation of

term borrowed from Arnold van Gennep's

rites

de passage, "transition

pany every change of age.

state

rites"

—which accom-

or social position, or certain points in

These are marked by three phases: separation, margin (or

conference at Dartmouth College on Myth and Ritual, published in a revised form in Worship 46 (Aug.Sept. 1972): 390-41 2; (Oct): 43 2-494. 1

First read at a

August

1967,

and

first

231

Dramas,

232

limen

—the

Fields,

and Metaphors

Latin for threshold, signifying the great importance

of real or symbolic thresholds at

though cunicular, "being quality of this phase in

middle period of the

this

would

in a tunnel,"

many

cases, its

rites,

better describe the

hidden nature,

its

sometimes

mysterious darkness), and reaggregation.

The

phase, separation, comprises symbolic behavior sig-

first

nifying the detachment of the individual or the group from either an earlier fixed point in the social structure or

established set of cultural conditions

(a

"state").

from an During the

intervening liminal period, the state of the ritual subject (the "passenger," or "liminar,") becomes ambiguous, neither here nor there, betwixt

and between

passes through a symbolic

fixed points of classification; he

all

domain

that has

few or none of

the

coming state. In the third phase the pasconsummated and the ritual subject, the neophyte or ini-

attributes of his past or

sage

is

tiand reenters the social structure, often, but not always at a

higher status level. Ritual degradation occurs

as

well as elevation.

Courts martial and excommunication ceremonies create and represent descents, not elevations.

formed

in the narthex or

Excommunication

porch of

rituals

were per-

a church, not in the

nave or

main body, from which the excommunicated was being expelled symbolically. But in liminality, the symbolism almost everywhere indicates that the initiand (initiare, "to begin"), novice (novus,

"new," "fresh"), or neophyte structurally

if

(veos-^vrov,

standard definitions and classifications.

outward

an equality with I

emerges,

He

his

from the main

lodge or camp, and reduced to

fellow initdands regardless of their preritual

would argue if

is

has been divested of the

attributes of structural position, set aside

arenas of social life in a seclusion

status.

"newly grown")

not physically invisible in terms of his culture's

that

it

is

in liminality that

communitas

not as a spontaneous expression of sociability, at least

in a cultural

and normative form

—stressing equality and comrade-

norms rather than generating spontaneous and existential communitas, though of course spontaneous communitas may and does arise in most cases of protracted initiation ritual. ship as

As well

as the

betwixt-and-between

state of liminality there

is

and Poverty

Passages, Margins,

233

the state of outsiderhood, referring to the condition of being

permanently and by ascription

either

set outside the structural

arrangements of a given social system, or being situationally or temporarily set apart, or voluntarily setting oneself apart from the behavior of status-occupying, role-playing

would

system. Such outsiders

mans, diviners, mediums, pies,

priests, those in

hoboes, and gypsies.

who

members of

that

include, in various cultures, sha-

They

monastic seclusion, hip-

should be distinguished from

members (by ascription, optation, self-definition, or achievement) of two or more groups whose social definitions and cultural norms are distinct from, and often even opposed to, one another (see Stonequist, Thomas, and Znaniecki). These would include migrant foreigners, second"marginals,"

are simultaneously

generation Americans, persons of mixed ethnic origin, parvenus

(upwardly mobile marginals), the declasses (downwardly mobile marginals), migrants

from country

changed, nontraditional marginals

is

in

What

is

that they often look to their

called inferior group, for

group

role.

to city,

and

women

interesting, about

group of

in

a

such

origin, the so-

communitas, and to the more prestigious

which they mainly

live

and in which they aspire to

higher status as their structural reference group. Sometimes they

become

radical critics of structure

from the perspective of comwarmer and

munitas, sometimes they tend to deny the aff ectually

more

egalitarian

bond of communitas. Usually they

conscious and self-conscious people and

ranks a disproportionately high

may produce from

number of

their

and David Riesman's concept of "secret" marginality

philosophers.

where there

are highly

are people

who

subjectively

fail

writers, artists,

to feel the identities

expected of them seems to overinflate the concept (1954:154). Marginals like liminars are also betwixt and between, but unlike ritual liminars

they have no cultural assurance of a

final stable

resolution of their ambiguity. Ritual liminars are often

moving

symbolically to a higher status, and their being stripped of status

temporarily dictated

The

by

is

a "ritual," an "as-if," or "make-believe" stripping

cultural requirements.

third

major aspect of culture that

is

of concern to the

Dramas,

234

Fields,

and Metaphors

student of religion and symbolism again

may

be an absolute or a

is

"structural inferiority.

relative, a

,,

This

permanent or a transient

matter. Especially in caste or class systems of social stratification

we

have the problem of the lowest

skilled

status,

worker, the harijan, and the poor.

grown around

of the outcast, the un-

A

mythology has

rich

the poor, as also has the "pastoral" genre of litera-

ture (according to

W.

Empson); and

in religion

and

the

art,

peasant, the beggar, the harijan, Gandhi's "children of

God,"

the despised and rejected in general, have often been assigned the symbolic function of representing humanity, without status qualifications or characteristics.

Here the lowest represents the

human total, the extreme case most fittingly In many tribal or preliterate societies, with stratification

along class

as a value-bearer

portrays the whole. little

lines, structural inferiority

whenever

structural strength

way

in the

of

often emerges

dichotomously

is

opposed to structural weakness. For example, many African societies

have been formed by militarily more powerful incomers

conquering the indigenous people. political office,

such

headmanships.

On

The

invaders control high

as the kingship, provincial governorships,

the other hand, the indigenous people, through

their leaders, frequently are held to have a mystical

the fertility of the earth and of

all

upon

it.

power over

These autochthonous

people have religious power, the "power of the weak" the jural-political

vided land

and

power of

itself as against

as against

the strong, and represent the undi-

the political system with

internal

its

segmentation and hierarchies of authority. Here the model of

an undifferentiated whole whose units are is

total

posited against that of a differentiated system,

status

and

roles,

and where the

positions in a structure.

One

social persona

is

is

human

whose

beings

units are

segmentalized into

oddly reminded of those Gnostic

notions of an extraterrestrial "fall" in which an originally undivided

"Human Form

Divine" became divided into conflicting

functions, each incompletely

human and dominated by

a single

propensity, "intellect," "desire," "craftsmanship," and so on, no

longer in orderly harmonious balance with the others.

and Poverty

Passages, Margins,

A similar contrast may

between the "hard"

kinship,

and the

pass,

in societies

based primarly on

legal line of descent, patrilineal or

through which authority, property, and

matrilineal,

ment

be found,

social place-

"soft," "affectional" side of the family

the parent of so-called

235

"complementary

through

mother's side in

filiation,"

This

patrilineal systems, father's side in matrilineal systems.

side,

as distinct from the legal line, is often attributed with mystical power over a person's total welfare. Thus in many patrilineal

mother's brother has powers of cursing or blessing

societies, the

but no legal power. In others, the mother's kin

his sister's child,

may

act as a sanctuary against paternal harshness.

case,

more

plementary

merged

whom

is

between

in

is,

any

com-

Fortes calls the "sub-

he

is

to his lineal kin, for

importantly a bundle of jural rights and obligations.

In this chapter

show

Meyer

or of what

filiation,

side of descent" (1949:32) than

he

A man

clearly an individual in relation to his kin of

I

examine several aspects of the relationship

will

and structural

liminality, outsiderhood,

in the course of

something of the

it

inferiority,

and

dialectical relationship

over time between communitas and structure. But

if

we

are to say

that a process such as ritualization tends to occur frequently in

the interstices or clear about

what

term "structure" lytical sciences,

or descriptive.

on the edges of something, we have that something

of course,

is,

and even It

is.

What

is

commonly employed

in geology,

which

is

inhabitants, or bridges

The

with

struts

in all ana-

mainly taxonomic

and

piles;

or

it

may

invoke the

—each hole being

and some being more important than others. social

sciences,

like

partly descriptive; the result

meaning of structure gists.

The

evokes architectural images, of houses awaiting

bureaucratic image of desks with pigeon holes a status,

to be fairly

social structure?

Some regard

in the

biology, are partly analytical and is

that there

work

is

wide variation

in the

of anthropologists and sociolo-

structure as primarily a description of re-

peated patterns of action, that

is,

of an observable uniformity of

action or operation, of something "out there," capable of being

empirically observed and, hopefully, measured. This viewpoint,

Dramas,

236

and Metaphors

Fields,

represented most prominently in anthropology

Radcliffe-Brown and

by

criticized "entities

British

his

who

Levi-Strauss,

by

the

work

of

has been severely

followers,

holds that social structures are

independent of men's consciousness of them (although

they in fact govern men's existence)" (1963:121). All that can be directly observed in societies, he says, is "a series of expressions, each partial and incomplete, of the same underlying structure,

which they reproduce

in several copies without ever completely

exhausting

Levi-Strauss asserts that

if

its realities."

the structure can be seen

it

will not be at the

.

.

.

empirical level,

but at a deeper one, previously neglected; that of those unconscious

we may hope

categories that

which,

hand, the social system as

manner

by bringing together domains

it

actually works,

and on the other, the

in which, through their myths, their rituals

representations, their society

He

to reach,

appear disconnected to the observer; on the one

at first sight,

men

and their

religious

try to hide or to justify the discrepancies between

and the

ideal

image of

it

which they harbor [1960:53].

taxes Radcliffe-Brown for his "ignorance of hidden realities"

and for believing that structure servation

But

when in

it is

fact

it is

of the order of empirical obit.

not with Levi-Strauss's concept of "social" structure,

really cognitive structure, that shall I

is

beyond

wish to begin

I

invoke here the concept of structure

gories," or regard "structural" as

this analysis.

Nor

as "statistical cate-

what Edmund Leach has

called

"the statistical outcome" of multiple individual choices. Sartre's view of structure as "a complex dialectic of freedom and inertia," where "the formation and maintenance of each group is contingent on the free engagement of each individual in its joint activities" (L. Rosen on Sartre in "Language, History, and the

Logic of Inquiry in Levi-Strauss and Sartre," 1971:281) to

my own

though

theoretical position,

structure in this argument. structure here

—and what

social order in

most

is

What

I

it is

not what

intend to convey

I

is

closer

mean by by social

implicitly regarded as the frame of

societies

—

is

not a system of unconscious

Passages, Margins,

categories, but quite simply, in

arrangements

patterned

of

and Poverty

237

Robert Mertonian terms, "the and

status-sets,

role-sets,

status-

sequences" consciously recognized and regularly operative in a given society. These are closely bound up with legal and political

norms and

sanctions.

By

Robert Merton designates

"role-sets"

"the actions and relationships that flow from a social status";

congruence of various po-

"status-sets" refers to the probable sitions

occupied by an individual; and "status-sequences" means

the probable succession of positions occupied

by an

individual

through time. Thus, for me, liminality represents the midpoint of transition in a status-sequence

hood a

refers to actions

between two

and relationships which do not flow from

recognized social status but originate outside

status refers to the lowest in

which unequal rewards

tiated positions.

positions, outsider-

rung

in a

it,

while lowermost

system of social

stratification

are accorded to functionally differen-

A "class system,"

would be

a

system

concept of "unconscious

social

for example,

of this type.

%

Nevertheless,

Levi-Strauss's

structure" as a structure of relationships between the elements of

myth and

rituals

liminal ritual

more

the

must enter into our reckoning when

phenomena. Here

difference

I

tiated,

may

is

segmented system of structural positions (which

neous, undifferentiated whole. the preliminary picture

I

The

first

The

individual

the unit

is

is

as a

may

or

homoge-

model approximates

to

have presented of "social structure."

the units are statuses and roles, not concrete

viduals.

Here

of complexity, a

posited between the notion of society as a differen-

not be arranged in a hierarchy), and society

Here

consider

between structure and communitas. Im-

plicitly or explicitly, in societies at all levels

contrast

we

must pause to consider once

human

indi-

segmentalized into roles which he plays.

what Radcliffe-Brown has

role-mask, not the unique individual.

called the persona, the

The second model, com-

munitas, often appears culturally in the guise of an Edenic, paradisiacal, Utopian,

which

or millennial state of

affairs, to

the attainment of

religious or political action, personal or collective, should

Dramas,

238

be directed. Society

comrades

—of

experience

and Metaphors

Fields,

pictured as a communitas of free and equal

is

total persons.

it, is

"Societas," or "society," as

a process involving

both

social structure

we

all

and com-

munitas, separately and united in varying proportions.

Even where

there

of such a state of

no mythical or pseudohistorical account rituals may be performed in which

and cooperative behavior

egalitarian

which

is

affairs,

is

characteristic,

and in

secular distinctions of rank, office, and status are tem-

On

porarily in abeyance or regarded as irrelevant. occasions, anthropologists

who

these ritual

have previously, from repeated

observations of behavior and interviews with informants in non-

up

model of the socioeconomic structure cannot fail to note how persons deeply divided from one another in the secular or nonreligious world nevertheless in certain ritual situations cooperate closely to ensure what is believed to be the maintenance of a cosmic order which transcends the contradicritual situations, built

tions

we

and

a

conflicts inherent in the

mundane

social system.

Here

have an unstated model of communitas, an operational model.

Practically

all rituals

of any length and complexity represent a

passage from one position, constellation, or domain of structure to another. In this regard they

may

structure" and to be dominated

by

be said to possess "temporal

the notion of time.

from structure to structure many rituals pass through communitas. Communitas is almost always thought of or portrayed by actors as a timeless condition, an eternal now, as "a moment in and out of time," or as a state to which the structural view of time is not applicable. Such is frequently the character But

in passing

of at least parts of the seclusion periods found in initiation rites.

Such

is

the character, too,

grimage journeys in several

and

many

pil-

waken and

many

weeks.

The

novices

rest at fixed hours, often at sunrise

sunset, as in the monastic life in Christianity

They

protracted

have found, of

religions. In ritual seclusion, for ex-

ample, one day replicates another for in tribal initiations

I

and Buddhism.

receive instruction in tribal lore, or in singing and dancing

from the same

elders or adepts at the

same time. At other

set

Passages, Margins, and Poverty

times they

may hunt

the elders.

Every day

Then

repeated.

239

or perform routine tasks under the eyes of is,

in a sense, the

again, seclusion

same day, writ large or

and liminality

Masked

Eliade calls "a time of marvels."

gods, ancestors, or chthonic powers

may

may

contain what

figures, representing

appear to the novices

or neophytes in grotesque, monstrous, or beautiful forms. Often,

but not always, myths are recited explaining the origin, attributes,

and behavior of these strange and sacred habitants of Again, sacred objects

may

liminality.

be shown to the novices. These

be quite simple in form like the bone, top,

ball,

may

tambourine, apples,

mirror, fan, and woolly fleece displayed in the lesser Eleusinian

mysteries of Athens. Such sacra, individually or in various

may

binations, tations,

com-

be the foci of hermeneutics or religious interpre-

sometimes in the form of myths, sometimes of gnomic

utterances hardly less enigmatic than the visible symbols they

purport to explain. These symbols, visual and auditory, operate culturally as mnemonics, or as communications engineers would no doubt have it, as "storage bins" of information, not about pragmatic techniques, but about cosmologies, values, and cultural

axioms,

whereby

a society's

deep knowledge

is

transmitted from

one generation to another. Such a device, in the setting of "a place that

Welsh

me

is

not a place, and a time that

folklorist

and sociologist

is

not a time" (as the

Alwyn Rees once

the context of Celtic bardic utterance),

is all

described for

the

more neces-

sary in cultures without writing, where the whole cultural deposit has to be transmitted either through speech or

by repeated

vation of standardized behavioral patterns and artifacts.

am

beginning to wonder whether

functionless elements in

myth and

it

is

ritual patterns

Roo

during the

described

War

Maya

I

which preserves a

which they may become functional again

replicated pre-Columbian

And

not the structuring of

such elements through centuries until they find milieu in

obser-

socioeconomic

—

as the

social organization in

Cruzob

Quintana

of the Castas in nineteenth-century Yucatan,

by Nelson Reed

in his exciting

book The Caste War of

Yucatan. Major liminal situations are occasions on which a society

Dramas,

240

takes cognizance of their

and Metaphors

Fields,

itself,

incumbency of

society

may

or rather where, in an interval between

members of

specific fixed positions,

that

obtain an approximation, however limited, to

a

global view of man's place in the cosmos and his relations with

other classes of visible and invisible in

myth and

ritual

total pattern it

changes.

entities.

Also, importantly,

an individual undergoing passage

may

learn the

of social relations involved in his transition and

He

may, therefore, learn about

social structure in

how com-

munitas. This view need not depend heavily on explicit teaching,

on verbal

many

explanations. In

that neophytes learn to

societies

become aware of

seems to be enough

it

the multiple relationships

between the sacra and other aspects of their culture, or from the positioning of sacred symbols in a structure of relationships which are above, which are below; which are on the left, which are on the right; which are inside, which are outside, or from their prominent attributes, such as sex, color, texture, existing

learn

—

density, temperature

—how

critical aspects

of cosmos and society

modes of interlinkage. what Levi-Strauss calls the "sensory codes" underlying the details of myth and ritual and the homoare interrelated and the hierarchy of such

The neophytes may

learn

logues between events and objects described in different codes visual, auditory,

the It

medium

is

and

tactile.

I

not

is

is

the message, and

all this

that there

is

a certain

inadequacy in

have just made between the concepts "structure"

and "communitas." For clearly the munitas

here

nonverbal, though often meticulously structured.

can be seen from

the contrast

The medium

lirninal

situation

of com-

heavily invested with a structure of a kind. But this

a social structure in the

symbols and

ideas,

is

Radcliffe-Brownian sense but one of

an instructional structure.

to detect here a Levi-Straussian structure, a

It is

way

not too

difficult

of inscribing in

the mentalities of neophytes generative rules, codes, and media

whereby they can manipulate the symbols of speech and culture to confer some degree of intelligibility on an experience that perpetually outstrips the possibilities of linguistic (and other cultural)

expression.

would

call

Within

this,

one can find what Levi-Strauss

"a concrete logic," and behind

this,

again, a funda-

and Poverty

Passages, Margins,

241

mental structure of human mentality or even of the human brain In order to implant this instructional structure firmly in the

itself.

minds of neophytes

it

seems necessary that they should be stripped

of structural attributes in the social,

or political sense

legalistic,

of the term. Simpler societies seem to feel that only a person

temporarily without

status,

property, rank, or office

ceive the tribal gnosis or occult

wisdom which

edge of what the tribespeople regard culture and indeed of the universe.

edge,

is,

as

The

is

is

fit

in effect

to re-

knowl-

the deep structure of

content of such knowl-

of course, dependent on the degree of scientific and tech-

nological development, but, so Levi-Strauss argues, the "savage"

mental structure which can be disengaged from the palpable

integument of what often seem to us bizarre modes of symbolic representation

is

with our

identical

own

mental structure.

We

share with primitive men, he holds, the same mental habits of

thinking in terms of binary discriminations or oppositions; like

them, too,

we

have

rules,

including deep structural rules, govern-

ing the combination, segregation, mediation, and transformation

of ideas and relations.

Now men who are heavily involved in

jural-political, overt,

and

conscious structure are not free to meditate and speculate on the

combinations and oppositions of thought; they are themselves too crucially involved in the combinations

and

political structure

and

and oppositions of

stratification.

They

social

are in the heat of

the battle, in the "arena," competing for office, participating in feuds,

factions,

and

coalitions.

This involvement

affects as anxiety, aggression, envy, fear, exultation,

entails

such

an emotional

flooding which does not encourage either rational or wise reflection.

But

in ritual liminality

side the total

men

apart

system and

— and

be translated

it is

its

social structure,

conflicts; transiently,

surprising

as "set apart"

If getting a living

they are placed, so to speak, out-

how

they become

often the term "sacred"

may

or "on one side" in various societies.

and struggling to get

be called "bread" then

it,

in

man

and despite of

a

does not live "by

bread alone." Life as a series and structure of status incumbencies inhibits the

Dramas,

242

full utilization

Fields,

of

human

said, in a singularly

within man."

I

and Metaphors capacities, or as

Karl

Marx would have

Augustinian fashion, "the powers that slumber

am

thinking of Augustine's rationes seminalesy

"seminal reasons," implanted in the created universe at the be-

ginning and

left to

work

themselves out over historical time. Both

Augustine and Marx favored organic metaphors for social movement, seen in terms of development and growth. Thus, for Marx, a

new

"grows"

social order

livered"

by

in the

Preliterate societies, out of the little

"womb"

of the old and

is

"de-

the "midwife", force.

scope for

leisure.

Thus

it is

need for mere

only by

survival, provide

ritual fiat, acting

the legitimate authority vested in those

who

through

operate the ritual

men and women

cycle, that opportunities can be created to put

outside their everyday structural positions in family, lineage, clan,

and chieftainship. In such

major

rites

de passage the "passengers" and "crew" are

ritual exigency, to

confront

periods of

situations as the liminal

all

free,

under

contemplate for a while the mysteries that

men, the

difficulties that peculiarly beset their

society, their personal problems,

and the ways

in

which

their

own own

wisest predecessors have sought to order, explain, explain away,

mask ("cloak" and "mask" are different: "cloak" is to "conceal," "mask" is to impose the "features" of a standardized

cloak, or

interpretation) these mysteries and difficulties. In liminality resides

the

germ not only of

religious askesis, discipline,

and mysticism,

but also of philosophy and pure science. Indeed, such Greek philosophers as Plato and Pythagoras are

with the mystery I

would

like to

known

to have had links

cults.

make

it

clear at this point that

I

am

here re-

ferring not to such spontaneous behavioral expressions of

munitas

as the

kind of good fellowship one finds in

marginal and transitional social situations, such pub, a "good" party as distinct from a

train, a

group of

more

seriously,

passengers at play on an ocean voyage, or, to speak

some

secular

an English

"stiff" party, the "eight-

seventeen a.m. club" on a suburban commuters'

at

many

as

com-

religious meetings, a "sit-in," "love-in," "be-in," or

more

Passages, Margins,

dramatically, the

focus here

Woodstock or

rather on cultural

is

expressions of communitas,

Wight

of

Isle

—and

and Poverty

hence

communitas

243

"nations."

My

institutionalized

as seen

spective of structure, or as incorporated into

it

from the peras a potentially

dangerous but nevertheless vitalizing moment, domain, or enclave.

Communitas

is,

existentially speaking

spontaneous and self-generating. 2 munitas "bloweth where structure, as antimatter

even sions

in its origins, purely

of existential com-

opposed to

listeth." It is essentially

hypothetically opposed to matter. Thus,

is

when communitas becomes normative its religious expresbecome closely hedged about by rules and interdictions

which tope.

it

and

The "wind"

act like the lead container of a dangerous radioactive iso-

Yet exposure to or immersion

in

communitas seems

indispensable

human

social requirement.

and "need"

not for

me

is

freely.

here

from time

to time even

if

only to

masks of liminal masquerade. But they do

liberating

And

to be an

a real need,

"a dirty word," to doff the masks, cloaks,

apparel, and insignia of status

don the

People have

t

I

would

between communitas,

like to point

liminality,

out the bond that

and lowermost

status. It

is

this

exists

often

believed that the lowest castes and classes in stratified societies

immediacy and involuntariness of behavior.

exhibit the greatest

This

may

or

may

not be empirically true, but

persistent belief held perhaps

it is

at

any

rate a

most firmly by the occupants of

positions in the middle rungs of structure

pressures to conformity are greatest, and

whom

structural

secretly

envy even

on

who

while they openly reprobate the behavior of those groups and classes less

normatively inhibited, whether highest or lowest on the

Those who would maximize communitas often begin by minimizing or even eliminating the outward marks of rank as, for example, Tolstoy and Gandhi tried to do in their own persons.

status ladder.

In other words, they approximate in dress and behavior the condition of the poor.

These

signs of indigence include the

wearing

of plain or cheap apparel or the assumption of the peasant's smock or worker's overalls. 2

Here

I

Some would go even

would contrast

"existential"

further and try to ex-

with "normative" communitas.

Dramas,

244

Fields,

and Metaphors

opposed to "cultural" character of com-

press the "natural" as

munitas, even though "natural" nition,

by allowing

remain unwashed,

is

and

their hair

as in the case

here, of course, a cultural definails to

grow and

their skin to

of certain Christian saints and

Hindu and Muslim holy men. But since man is inveterately a cultural animal, nature here itself becomes a cultural symbol for what is essentially a human social need the need to be fully together with one's fellows and not segregated from them in struc-

—

tural cells. in

some

cally or

A "natural"

or "simple"

cases, signalizes that

merely human,

of status or

mode

of dress, or even undress

one wishes to approximate the

as against the structurally specific

basi-

by way

class.

A

random assortment of such aspirants to pure communitas would include: the mendicant friars of the Middle Ages, especially those of the Franciscan and Carmelite orders, for example, whose members by their constitutions were forbidden to possess propperty, not merely personally, but even in

common

so they had to

by begging and were hardly better clothed than beggars; some modern Catholic saints, like St. Benedict Labre, the palmer (d. 1783), who was reputed to be always covered with vermin as subsist

he traveled ceaselessly and silently around the pilgrimage shrines of Europe; similar qualities of poverty and mendicancy are sought

by Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh holy men of India and the Middle some of whom even dispense with clothing altogether; in America today we have the counterculture people, who like holy men of the East wear long hair and beards and dress in a variety of ways ranging from the clothes of the urban poor to the attire East,

of underprivileged rural and ethnic groups, such as Amerindians

and Mexicans. So

critical

were some hippie men, not long ago,

of the principles underlying the structure out of which they had

opted that they even rejected in their dress the dominant American

stress

on

virility

business milieu

and successful aggressiveness

by wearing

in a competitive

beads, bangles, and earrings, just as

"flower power," in the late

was opposed

to

military

strength and business aggressiveness. In this they share

common

1960's,

and Poverty

Passages, Margins,

ground with the Virasaiva

saints of

245

My

medieval south India.

colleague A. K. Ramanujan has recently translated from the Kannada language some poems known as vaccinas which in their protest

against

Hinduism

reject the

superficial.

One

There

dichotomies in

structural

traditional

woman

between man and

differences

of these bhakti poems

is

orthodox as

quoted below, page 286.

no doubt that from the perspective of incumbents in positions of command or maintenance in structure, communitas even

is

when

it

becomes normative

indeed, that for

spend

much

—represents

those, including even political leaders,

all

of their lives in structural role playing

sents a temptation.

danger and,

a real

Who

it

who

also repre-

does not really want to shuck off that

old armor plating? This situation was dramatically exemplified in the early history of the Franciscan order. So St. Francis'

off sharply,

and the

Italian bishops

when a

dioceses

their

modify

property. In this

its

rule with regard to the

way

a

were

mendicant rabble. In the

quarter of the thirteenth century Pope Nicholas

that the order

fell

complained that they could

overrun by what they considered to be

all

rushed to join

following that recruitment to the secular clergy

not maintain ecclesiastical discipline

last

many

III

decreed

abandonment of

communitarian threat to the

jural

was turned to her advantage, for the doctrine of poverty has left a permanent impress on Catholicism acting as a constant check on the growth of Roman legalism, with

structure of the church

its

heavy involvement

in political

and economic structures.

Liminality, then, often draws on poverty for

symbols, particularly for larly, as

we

its

symbols of

have seen, the voluntary outsiders of our

own

society,

draw upon symbolic vocabulary of poverty and indigence. Both the

particularly today's voluntary rural

the

repertoire of

its

social relationship. Simi-

communards,

also

mendicant orders and today's counterculture have

affinities

with

another social phenomenon which has recently aroused great interest

among

anthropologists and historians.

I

refer to that range

of religious movements, scattered throughout history and of wide

geographical provenience, which have variously been described as

Dramas,

246

and Metaphors

Fields,

"enthusiastic," "heretical," "millenarian," "revitalistic," tic,"

"messianic," and "separatist"

by which they have been

—to

called

by

cite

"nativis-

but a few of the terms

theologians, historians, and

not enter into the problem of providing

social scientists. I shall

an adequate taxonomy of such movements, but will content

my-

with mentioning a few of their recurrent attributes which

self

seem closely cieties,

In the

similar to those of (1) ritual liminality in tribal so-

religious

(2)

first place, it is

mendicancy, and (3) the counterculture.

common

for

members of

up what property they have or

either to give

these

movements

to hold

all

their

property in common. Instances have been recorded of the destruction of at the

property by the members of religious movements

command

believe,

to

all

that in

is

of their prophetic leaders.

most

societies differences in

major differences of

relate to the

may

rationale here,

it

I

property correspond

status or else in simpler stateless societies

segmentation of corporate groups.

property, or "pool"

and

The

To

"liquidate"

(the fluid metaphors are perhaps significant

sometimes be concretely expressed in water symbolism,

such as baptism, perhaps an instance of Levi-Strauss's "concrete logic"), life

is

to erase the lines of structural cleavage that in ordinary

prevent

men from

entering into communitas.

Similarly, the institution of marriage, source of the family, a

basic cell of social structure in

attack in

many

religious

many

by

comes under

movements. Some seek to replace

what Lewis Morgan would have or

cultures, also

various forms of "group marriage." Sometimes this

to demonstrate the

it

by

called "primitive promiscuity" is

held

triumph of love over jealousy. In other move-

ments, on the contrary, celibacy becomes the rule and the relationship

between the sexes becomes a massive extension of the Thus some religious movements are similar to reli-

sibling bond.

gious orders in abstaining from sexual activity, while others re-

semble some groups of hippies in breaking ness.

Both

the group ties,

attitudes

by

"liquidating"

too, there

is

down

toward sexuality are aimed its

sexual exclusiveat

homogenizing

structural divisions. In tribal socie-

abundant ethnographic evidence to

testify that

1

Passages, Margins,

an interdiction

major

in

rites

may

cense

is

laid

on sexual

and Poverty

247

relations during the liminal period

de passage. Sometimes, too, episodes of sexual

li-

follow periods of sexual abstinence in such ceremonies,

words, both antithetical modes of representing the de-

in other

monogamous marriage are utilized. 3 To digress briefly, it seems to make more sense of

struction of

if

we

regard sexuality not so

and

sociality

much

sociality as neutralized libido

various modalities,

either

Sexuality, as a biological

drive,

in

its

bolically manipulated to express

dimensions of sociality.

much

quite as

Whereas

as the

as

It

as the expression,

or structure.

culturally and hence

sym-

one or the other of these major

thus becomes a means to social ends,

an end to which social means are contrived.

structure emphasizes, and even exaggerates, the bio-

logical differences

between the

sexes, in matters of dress, decora-

and behavior, communitas tends to diminish these differences.

tion,

Thus

in

phytes,

many tribal initiations where both sexes appear as men and women, boys and girls, are often dressed

and behave similarly segregates

them and

in the liminal situation.

critical rites

a

alike

they are restored

at some of the by immersion, male catechumens may wear the same type of

movements,

of incorporaton, such as baptism

and female neophytes or

—

neo-

Afterward, custom

stresses sexual differences as

to the structural order. In religious

robe

but

of communitas is

the facts

primordial source of

robe which often deliberately conceals sexual differences,

among one of the offshoots from the Bwiti cult of Gabon as described by James Fernandez. It is still today a commonplace of conversation in situations dominated by structural (or middleas

class) values to tell

whether

it's

hear such a

boy or

comments on a girl

—they

hippies

all

as,

"How

can one

have long hair and dress

alike?''

Nevertheless, similarity in appearance between males and fe-

males does not necessarily 3

mean

the disappearance of sexual at-

Clearly the organizational outcomes of celibacy versus orgy must be as must the attitude of the guardians of orthodox structure to movements of these rival types.

very different

Dramas,

248

traction

Fields,

and Metaphors

between them. There

no evidence to suggest

is

that

mem-

bers of the alternate culture are less sexually active than their

But

"straight" fellows.

sexuality,

sometimes perhaps in the "poly-

morphously perverse" forms recommended by Norman Brown and extolled by Allen Ginsberg, seems to be here regarded by

them rather

way

as a

comwide-range mutual understanding. Such

of enhancing the inclusiveness of

munitas, as a means to a

means

positively opposed to asserting the exclusive character

is

of certain structural bonds, such as marriage or unilineality.

The many

such "enthusiastic" and

traits that

chiliastic religious

movements share with the liminal situation in systems suggest that these movements too have But

their liminality

should

it

is

be viewed

as

spontaneously generated in a situation of

what Parsons, following Weber,

when seemingly fundamental

the "prophetic break,"

former

efficacy,

axioms for social behavior, and emerge, at

first

Religion and

a liminal quality.

not institutionalized and preordained. Rather

radical structural change,

ciples lose their

traditional ritual

their capacity to

new modes

calls

social prin-

operate as

of social organization

to transect and, later, to replace traditional ones.

ritual, it is

well known, often sustain the legitimacy

of social and political systems or provide the symbols on which that legitimacy

macy

is

most

vitally expressed, so that

of cardinal social relations

is

when

impugned, the

ritual

the legiti-

symbolic

system too which has come to reinforce such relations ceases to convince. led

by

It is in this

limbo of structure that religious movements,

charismatic prophets, powerfully reassert the values of

communitas, often in extreme and antinomian forms. This primal impetus, however, soon its

impetus; as

Weber

says,

u

attains its

apogee and

loses

charisma becomes routinized," and

the spontaneous forms of communitas are converted into institutionalized structure, or

become

routinized, often as ritual.

What

the prophet and his followers actually did becomes a behavioral

model

to be represented in stereotyped and selected liturgical

form. This ritual structure has two important aspects: on the one hand, the historical deeds of the prophet and his closest com-

and Poverty

Passages, Margins,

249

panions become a sacred history, impregnated with the mythical

elements so typical of liminality, that becomes increasingly re-

and revision and consolidates into a structure

sistant to criticism

in the Levi-Straussian sense as binary oppositions are set

up and

between crucial events,

individuals, groups, types of con-

duct, periods of time, and so on;

on the other hand, both the deeds

stressed

of the founder and his visions and messages achieve crystallization in the

symbolic objects and

rituals.

Indeed,

there

is

may

it

no written

activities

of cyclical and repetitive

well be that even in tribal religions, where

religious history, the cyclical rites that

seem so

closely in their stability and repetitiveness to resemble natural phe-

nomena, such animals,

may

as the seasonal

round and the

life

cycles of birds and

well have originated in times of social

man-made or due

crisis,

whether

to natural catastrophes, in the novel and idio-

syncratic visions and deeds of inspired shamans or prophets.

Freud's notion of "repetition compulsion," whatever its

causes, fairly well describes the process

tional

whereby

may

be

the inspira-

forms generated in some experiences of communitas get

become the routinized forms of The outcomes of "vision" become the models or pat-

repeated in symbolic mimesis and structure.

The word

terns of repetitive social behavior.

to heal or intrinsic

amend power

or act that appeared

personal or social disorder comes to be accorded in

isolation

from

its

original

context and

formally repeated in ritual and incantatory utterance.

deed becomes an ethical or

Let

me

Among

ritual

Ndembu

of Zambia,

I

from

my own

field

experience.

have been able to allocate ap-

proximate dates to the introduction of certain

rites to

and curative cult systems which, although they of the properties of the more traditional their origins in

is

creative

paradigm.

give a simple illustration

the

A

some disturbed phase of

rites,

now

the hunting share

many

nevertheless betray

Ndembu

history.

external threat seemed to intensify the sentiment of

Here

Ndembu

For example, the Wuyang's gun hunters' cult and the Chihamba curative cult, in their prayers and symbolism, refer unity.

unmistakably to the traumatic impact of the nineteenth-century

Dramas,

250

Fields,

and Metaphors

on the harassed and

slave trade

introduced

Tukuka

concept of possession by in

marked contrast

many

of

Ndembu;

fleeing

marked by

cult,

alien,

the quite recently

notably European

to the almost Apollonian dignity

however, despite their differences, present the

It is

and

not only among the

a

stands

spirits,

restraint

of the traditional ritual performances. These

communitas of interdependent

and

hysterical trembling

rituals,

Ndembu

as

a

sufferers.

Ndembu

but also in the history of

most of the great religions that we see crisis disclosing communitas and the manifest form of such communitas subsequently reinforcing an old structure or replacing

it

by

a

new

one. Various

reform movements within the Catholic church, the Protestant Reformation

and

itself,

attest to

this.

not to mention the innumerable evangelical

movements within

revivalistic

the

whole Christian world,

In Islam, Sufism and Sanusi reform

movements

among the Bedouin and Berbers exemplify but two among many. The many attempts in Indian Hinduism to liquidate the caste structure,

from Buddhism, through Jainism and Lingayatism and Gandhism not to mention such syncretic

— —are further examples.

the Virasaiva saints to

Hindu-Islamic religions I

mention

this correlation

between

sociologists identical

communitas, and the

crisis,

of religions mainly because

genesis

it

is

and anthropologists that "the

too often held

social"

with the "social-structural," that man

and consequently

structural animal

the breakdown of angst,

Sikhism

as

a

homo

is

is

by

at all times

nothing but a

hierarchicus.

Thus

a social system can only result in anomie,

and the fragmentation of society into a mass of anxious

and disoriented individuals, prone,

as

Durkheim would have said, For if such a society is

to pathologically high rates of suicide.

unstructured

it is

nothing.

of structural relationships

It is less

may

often seen that the dissolution

sometimes give communitas a posi-

tive opportunity.

One kirk,"

recent historical example of this

when from

is

the "miracle of

Dun-

the destruction of the formal organization of

the Allied armies in 1940 an informal organization arose, deriving

Passages, Margins,

from the

liberated spirit of communitas.

and Poverty

The

rescue of small

groups of soldiers by the crews of small boats gave of resistance generally

known

as

251

rise to a spirit

"the spirit of Dunkirk."

The

general careers of guerrilla bands as against formally regulated

and hierarchical armies Cuba, and Vietnam that there

is

in the recent history of China, Bolivia,

may

am

not suggesting

alienation (to

mention three

be further examples.

no anomie, no

no

angst,

I

currently popular "A"s) in such situations of drastic structural

change

—one

social field

must not be surprised or indignant that

contrary social processes

may

in

any

be simultaneously at

—

work but I am suggesting that there are socially positive forces at work here too. Structure's breakdown may be communitas* gain.

Durkheim, whose work has been so and France,

is

both in England

term "society" to represent, on the

different times, he uses the

one hand, a

influential

often difficult to understand precisely because, at

set of jural

and religious maxims and norms, coercing

and constraining the individual and, on the other, "an actual ing and animating force" closely approximate to

"communitas." Yet

calling

for

it

Durkheim conceives of

what we

are here

not a complete approximation,

is

this force as

"anonymous and im-

personal" and as passing through the generations, whereas

communitas rather

immediacy and spontaneity.

we

see

between persons, an I-Thou

as a relationship

relationship in Buber's terms or a is its

liv-

We,

It is

the very essence of

structure that

is

which

transmitted,

by rote and repetition; though under favorable circumstances some structural form, generated long ago from a moment of communitas, may be almost miraculously liquified into a living form of communitas again. This is what revitalistic or revivalistic religious

movements,

—to

do

as against radical

restore the social

bond of

pristine vigor of that religion in

ecstasy.

For example,

as

its

or transformist ones, aim to their

Ramanujan

writes,

crisis

and

"Like European

what they felt was the of the ancient traditions no different from

Protestants, the Virasaivas returned to original inspiration

communicants to the

days of generative

Dramas,

252

Fields,

and Metaphors

true and present experience" (1973:33). Perhaps lies

the notion of

in the

permanent revolution.

£venements de Mai-Juin 1968

It

was

in Paris

certainly present

when

adopted symbols of unity and communitas from revolutions. Just as during the Paris

munards

identified themselves

Commune

under-

this, too,

the students

French

earlier

of 1871, the com-

with the revolutionaries of 1789,

even to the point of adopting the revolutionary calendar for the

commune's magazines,

so the 1968 events identified themselves as

Commune. Even

a kind of re-enactment of the Paris

erected there had

little

the barricades

instrumental value, but were a symbol of

continuity with the grandeur of the 1871 uprising.

When

a social

system acquires

a certain stability as in

by

the societies until recently studied

anthropologists, there tends

to develop in the temporal relationship

communitas lectical."

a process to

The

life

which

it is

between structure and

hard to deny the epithet "dia-

cycles of individuals and groups exhibit

ternating exposure to these major Individuals proceed

from lower

modes of human

is

though they

may

al-

intercourse.

to higher statuses through in-

terim periods of liminality, where they are stripped of status,

most of

possess a religious status.

the antithesis of status in the structural domain.

But

all

secular

this status

Here the high

are obliged to accept the stigmata of the lowly and even to en-

who will become their inferiors, many African chiefs and headmen.

dure patiently the taunts of those as in the installation rites

of

Since liminality represents what Erving "a leveling and

stripping"

of structural

GofTman would status,

call

an important

component of the liminal situation is, as we saw earlier, an enhanced stress on nature at the expense of culture. Not only does it represent a situation of instruction

—with

a

degree of objectivity

hardly found in structural situations where status differences have to be explained

away

or, rather,

merely accepted

—but

it is

also

replete with symbols quite explicitly relating to biological processes,

order.

human and nonhuman, and to other aspects of the natural In a sense, when man ceases to be the master and becomes

the equal or fellow of man, he also ceases to be the master and

Passages, Margins,

and Poverty

becomes the equal or fellow of nonhuman beings. that fabricates structural distinctions;

253

culture

It is

culture too that eradi-

it is

cates these distinctions in liminality, but in so doing culture

forced to use the idiom of nature, to replace

—even

by

fictions

its

is

na-

what reality they have in a framework of cultural concepts. Thus it is in liminality and also in those phases of ritual that abut on liminality

tural facts

if

these facts themselves only possess

that one finds profuse symbolic reference to beasts, birds,

Animal masks, bird plumage, grass

vegetation.

leaves swathe

fibers,

and

garments of

and enshroud the human neophytes and

priests.

by aniby these verysame forces. One dies into nature to be reborn from it. Structural custom, once broken, reveals two human traits. One is liberated intellect, whose liminal product is myth and proto-

Thus, symbolically, their structural mality and nature, even as

it is

philosophical speculation; the other

by animal

disguises

life

is

snuffed out

being regenerated

is

bodily energy, represented

The two may

and gestures.

then be recom-

bined in various ways.

One

classical

prototype of

cavern

even

—epitomizing

stallion,

outsiderhood

who would

later

occupy leading

and

who

in his

liminality

mountain

—instructed,

of Achaean kings and princes,

initiated, the adolescent sons

litical

centaur

this revealed duality is the

Cheiron, half wise old man, half

positions in the social

and po-

Human wisdom and animal force meet who is both horse and man. As is well

structure of Hellas.

in this liminal figure,

known, theranthropic acteristics abound in

figures

combining animal with human char-

liminal situations; similarly,

human

beings

Even

angels

imitate the behavior of different species of animals. in the Iranian, Judaeo-Christian,

haps be regarded in this

way

—

and Islamic traditions as

may

per-

ornithanthropic figures, bird-

humans, messengers betwixt and between absolute and

relative

reality.

would be unwise, and in fact incorrect, to segregate structure too radically from communitas. I stress this most vigorously for both modes are human. For each level and domain Yet

it

Dramas,

254

Fields,

of structure there tural

is

and Metaphors

a

links established

mode

of communitas, and there are cul-

between them

most

in

ongoing,

stable,

sociocultural systems. Usually, in the seclusion or liminal phases

of

de passage,

rites

at least

some of the symbols, even of the

sacra

displayed, have reference to principles of social structure.

among

example,

the

Nyakyusa of Tanzania, who

an important symbolic medicine in

all rites

For

are patrilineal,

de passage

is

a reddish

which represents the principle of patrilineal descent. And, as Terence Turner of Chicago showed in his paper on the Kayapo Indians of Brazil, sacred

fluid, rather

endearingly called

myths, which,

if

ikipiki,

not always actually told in the secrecy or

se-

clusion of liminal situations, often refer to crucial points of pas-

sage or transition in the lives of individuals or groups.

myths often

are regarded globally, these situation to

analogy

which they

rather

than

refer

of

they

which] or

contrast

is

one of

opposition"

Here Terence Turner is reof Levi-Strauss. Turner distinguishes be-

(T. Turner, 1967: Abstract, ferring to the dialectics

[in a relation

dialectical

When

"relate to the social

p. 2).

tween two aspects of the structure of the myth: "the

internal

structure of logical relations of opposition and mediation between

the discrete symbolic elements of the ture

upon which Levi-Strauss

relation

which

between the myth

it

myth

(the aspect of struc-

prefers to concentrate), and the

as a

whole and the

social situation to

refers" (T. Turner, 1967; Abstract, p. 2). This continu-

ous thread of structure through ritualized communitas in liminality

and

is,

to

my

mind, highly characteristic of long-established

stable cultural systems, in

which,

as it

were, communitas has

been thoroughly domesticated, even corralled Elks and Kiwanis in the United States.

Raw

—

as

among

the

or wild communitas

phenomenon of major social change, or, it may be, sometimes, a mode of reaction against too rigid a structuring of human life in status and role-playing activities as some

is,

more

typically, a

— —against

of the counterculture people claim their revolt to be

what they

call

"American middle-class

values,"

or against the

"organization men," or against the tacit regimentation imposed on

and Poverty

Passages, Margins,

many

levels

255

and domains of society by the dominance of a

complex with

tary-industrial

its

mili-

complicated repertoire of covert

social controls.

To my mind

it is

the analysis of culture into factors and their

any and every possible pattern, however

free recombination in

weird, that

most characteristic of

is

liminality, rather than the

establishment of implicit syntax-like rules or the development of

an internal structure of logical relations of opposition and mediation.

The

limitation of possible combinations of factors

vention would indicate to

me

the

by con-

growing intrusion of structure

into this potentially free and experimental region of culture.

Here, a remark of Sartre

dominate individuals, but

which has no

I

who work

to the agents

own

its

results as

which

tween "activity which has no structure

men

worked matter

Structures are created by activity

structure, but suffers

produces in

"I

structure and laws that

see in this the reply of it.

liminality as a phase in social life in

sults"

seems apposite:

(1969:57-59)

[agree] that social facts have their

,,

this

and

structure"

I

see

confrontation beits

"structured re-

their highest pitch of self-consciousness.

Syntax and logic are problematic and not axiomatic features of liminality.

We

have to see

if

they are there

—empirically. And

if

them we have to consider well their relation to activities no structure, no logic, only potentialities for them. In long-established cultural systems I would expect to find the growth of a symbolic and iconographic syntax and logic; in changing or newly established systems I would expect to find in

we

find

that have as yet

liminal situations daring

relating symbolic

ments to be

and innovation both in the modes of

and mythic elements and

related.

There might

also

in the choice of ele-

be the introduction of

new

elements and their various combination with old ones, as in religious syncretisms.

The same liminality as

formulation would apply to such other expressions of

Western

literature

and

art.

Sometimes

art expresses

or replicates institutionalized structure to legitimate or criticize;

but often

it

combines the factors of culture

—

as in

cubism and

Dramas,

256

abstract art

—

and Metaphors

Fields,

in novel

and unprecedented ways. The unusual, the

paradoxical, the illogical, even the perverse, stimulate thought and

pose problems, "cleanse the Doors of Perception," as Blake put it.

This

is

Thus

when

especially likely to be the case

preliterate societies in

art

presented in

like

initiation.

the portrayal of monsters and of unnatural situations in

terms of cultural definitions, like the incestuous the gods in the

myths of some

function in forcing those

who

what they have For each society

connecting

a pedagogical

have taken their culture for granted

hitherto taken to be

"givens."

requires of

its

only adherence to rules and patterns, but skepticism and initiative. Initiation as to

ties

may have

religions,

to rethink

much

is

an instructional situation

is

its

axioms and

mature members not of

at least a certain level

to rouse initiative at least as

produce conformity to custom. Accepted schemata

and paradigms must be broken novelty and danger.

They

if

to

are

initiates

have to learn

how

cope with

to generate viable

schemata under environmental challenge. Something similar

may

be found in European literature, for example, in the writings of Rabelais and Genet. Such mastery over

granted by the uninstructed

hanced power during the

may

later

phenomena taken

for

well be thought to give en-

incumbency of

a

new and

higher

status.

But the frequency with which such unnatural cultural or anti-structural

—events

—or rather

as incest, cannibalism,

close kin, mating with animals are portrayed in

myth and

ritual surely has more than a pedagogical function.

anti-

murder of

It is

liminal

more too

than a mere cognitive means of coding relationships between ritual elements, of assigning to

them

ing transformations as Levi-Strauss

we must return

pluses or minuses or indicat-

would

assert.

Here,

I

think,

to our earlier point about certain aspects of nature

asserting themselves in liminal situations.

well as culture has

its

For human nature

as

unconscious regularities, though these regu-

larities

may

human

beings are to go about their business of getting a living

be precisely such

and maintaining

as

have to be denied expression

social control as

they do

so.

Much

if

that the

Passages, Margins, and Poverty

depth psychologists

insist

257

has been repressed into the unconscious

tends to appear, either in veiled form, or, sometimes, perfectly explicitly, in liminal ritual

and

unman

mythologies, the gods slay or

mother and and birds

sisters,

its

their fathers,

rites that act these out, their

sentatives or imitators imitate, in symbol,

immortal amoralities. In

real

their

and secret

—

repre-

or sometimes even

rituals, especially in

societies, there

or symbolic cannibalism

human

the

manhood, womanhood, or into

seclusion rites of initiations into tribal associations

mate with

copulate with mortals in the form of animals

—while in

literally, these

many

connected myths. In

in

which men

may

be episodes of

eat the flesh of the

recent dead or of captives, or else eat the symbolic flesh of deities

spoken of

as their "fathers," "brothers," or

are regularities

"mothers." Here there

and repetitions indeed, yet they are not those of

law and custom but of unconscious cravings which stand opposed

—

norms on which social bonding secularly depends to the of exogamy and the prohibition of incest, to*those enjoining

to the rules

respect for the bodily person of others, to veneration of elders, class men differently from animals. Here would revert to my characterization in several articles of key symbols and central symbolic actions as "semantically

and to definitions that again

I

certain

bipolar," as "culturally intended" to arouse a gross quantity of

—even

affect

of

illicit

affect divested of

to licit

affect

—only

moral quality, in a

to attach this later

quantum of

phase of a great

ritual,

and legitimate goals and values, with consequent restora-

tion of moral quality, but this time positive instead of negative.

Perhaps Freud and Jung, in their different ways, have

much

to

contribute to the understanding of these nonlogical, nonrational

(but not irrational) aspects of liminal situations.

What

seems to emerge from

this brief

glance at some of the

and myths is that phenomena exhibit great depth these and complexity. They emphatically do not lend themselves to being reduced to the cultural apparatus of liminal rituals, symbols,

all

terms of practitioners of a single discipline or subdiscipline, such as the various

and opposed schools of psychology, emotionalist

Dramas,

258

and

and Metaphors

Fields,

intellectualist,

various schools of sociologist^ reduc-

the

tionism from the followers of Radcliffe-Brown to those of Levi-

and theologians

Strauss, or philosophers

the contextual involvement of these

who may

tend to neglect

phenomena with

the social

economy, and ecology of the specific groups in which they occur. What we do not want is a Manichean separation of what is purely intellectual or spiritual in such structure, history,

phenomena from what

pivotal religious

Nor

we

should

separate

—

itself to

actually does experience

it.

—

experience from someone

Here

I

would say

who

if

the cultural

—can

correspond

that

found in liminality

as

symbol

in considering the liminal

something which offers

form of communitas

material and specific.

is

with an actual experience of communitas, the symbols there presented

may

be experienced more deeply than in any other con-

text, if the ritual subject has

what theologians would

"proper dispositions." Here what Matthias Vereno

4

call

the

has called

"the essentially relational or predicative esse" of the symbol

most

fully exemplified

Men "know"

less

or

—

a relation

more

relationship with other

which he

calls a

is

"gnostic" one.

function of the quality of their

as a

men. Gnosis, "deep knowledge,"

characteristic of liminality, certainly in

is

highly

many parts of Africa, as the Dogon and Audrey

Germaine Dieterlen has shown for Richards for the Bemba, where it is believed that the esoteric knowledge communicated in symbols in the girls' puberty rites changes the inmost being of the neophytes.

new knowledge

is

imparted, but

It is

new power

is

not merely that absorbed,

power

obtained through the weakness of liminality which will become active in postliminal life

been redefined

woman

the neophytes' social status has

in the aggregation rites.

Among

grown from a girl through communitas of women.

recapitulate the

argument so

far:

Bemba

the

a

the importation of

has been

gnosis in a

To

when

in a situation

which

is

temporally liminal and spatially marginal the neophytes or "pas4

Matthias Vereno of the University of Salzburg

the Conference at

Dartmouth College (August

made

1967)

this

comment

on Myth and

at

Ritual.

Passages, Margins, and Poverty

sengers" in a protracted authority is

—

in other

rite

de passage are stripped of status and

words removed from

ultimately maintained and sanctioned

and further leveled to cipline

a

259

homogeneous

a social structure

which

by power and force social state

through

dis-

and ordeal. Their secular powerlessness may, however, be

compensated by

a sacred

power, the power of the weak derived

on the one hand from resurgent nature and on the other from the reception of sacred knowledge. social structure

is

Much

of

what has been bound by

liberated, notably the sense of

comradeship and

communion, in brief, of communitas; on the other hand, much of what has been dispersed over many domains of culture and social structure is now bound or cathected in the complex semantic systems of pivotal, multivocal symbols and myths which achieve great conjunctive power and possess what Erik Erikson, follow-

would

ing Rudolf Otto, tions have

which

call

"numinosity."

been emptied of their

character,

It is as if social rela-

legal-political structural character,

though not, of course,

specific structure, has

its

been imparted to the relations between symbols,

and values

ideas,

rather than between social personae and statuses. In this no-place

and no-time that

resists classification,

categories of the culture

symbol, and

the major classifications and

emerge within the integuments of myth,

ritual.

In everyday

life

people in tribal societies have

little

time to de-

vote to protophilosophical or theological speculation. But in pro-

which everyone must pass, they become a privileged class, largely supported by the labor of others though often exposed by way of compensation to an-

tracted liminal periods, through

—

nealing hardships ulate about

we

—with abundant opportunity to learn and spec-

what the

tribe considers

have a fruitful alienation of the

partial

its

"ultimate things."

total

individual

persona which must result in the development at

principle or potentiality

if

life

immersion

— very

in

the

depths of liminalitv

bolized in ritual and

myth

least in

not always in practice of a

rather than a partial perspective on the

as a

grave that

is

Here

from the total

of society. After

his

frequently sym-

also a

womb— after

Dramas,

i6o this

who

and Metaphors

Fields,

profound experience of humiliation and humility, a man at the

end of the

political status or ticularistic

becomes the incumbent of

ritual

a senior

even merely of a higher position in some par-

segment of the

be quite so parochial, so particularistic, in

many

can surely never again

social structure

his social loyalties.

This

which practice protracted circumcision rites: the initiands are drawn from diverse tribal segments; when the rites are completed they form an association with mutual rights and obligations which may last until death and which cuts across cleavages on the basis of ascribed and can be seen in

tribal societies

achieved status. It

would seem

where there

that

is little

or no structural pro-

from or abandonment of structural commitments seeks cultural expression in ways that are not explicitly religious, though they may become heavily ritualized. Quite often this retreat from social structure may appear to take an individualistic form as in the case of many postRenaissance artists, writers, and philosophers. But if one looks closely at their productions, one often sees in them at least a plea vision for liminality, the social need for escape

—

for communitas. paint, or

The

artist is

compose for

not really alone, nor does he write,

posterity, but for living

communitas.

Of

course, like the initiand in tribal society, the novelistic hero has to be reinducted into the structural domain, but for the "twice-

born" (or converted) the sting of that domain envies,

and power struggles

gaard's "knight of faith"

and quantitative crowd antithesis to synthesis

its

—has been removed. He

who

is

ambitions,

moves from

and though remaining outwardly this its

Kierke-

like

having confronted the structured

as "the qualitative individual"

from others in forth inwardly free from

guishable

—

order of social structure

despotic authority,

is

indistinis

hence-

an autonomous

source of creative behavior. This acceptance or forgiveness, to use William Blake's term, of structure in a

movement

of return

from a liminal situation is a process that recurs again and again in Western literature, and, indeed, in the actual lives of many writers, artists, and political folk heroes from Dante and Lenin to

Passages, Margins, and Poverty

Nehru and

the African political exiles

represents a secularization of

who became

what seems

261

leaders.

It

to have been originally

a religious process.

Recently there was a tendency among

many

people, especially

those under thirty, to try to create a communitas and a style of that

life

permanently contained within

is

was Timothy Leary's "Tune the liminal being a passage,

it

in,

liminality.

turn on, and drop out." Instead of

seemed to be coming to be regarded

communes as initiathan permanent homes. Of course, this con-

although some seemed to think of

as a state,

tion lodges rather

version of liminality, in modified form, into a also

Their motto

way

of

been true of the monastic and mendicant orders

life,

in,

has

for ex-

ample, Christianity and Buddhism, but the religious state has been there clearly defined as an exceptional condition reserved for those

who

where

aspire after perfection, except, of course, in Thailand

young men spend

all

a year as

monks. The religious

for everyone, but only for those "elected

have seen

how

held to be

by

by

grace."

life is

Even

the structured church.

sects

a

desire

to

generalize

and outsider condition. One of

liminal

we

dangerous primitive Franciscan communitas was

But the Western urbanized hippies shared with many enthusiastic

so

not

seminar at Cornell gave

my

historical

and perpetuate

their

graduate students in a

me some Haight-Ashbury 5

literature,

produced during the brief heydey of the "Hashbury" culture, and I

would

quote some passages from a journal called the

like to

Oracle which used to be published "approximately bi-monthly"

San Francisco, where

in

journal."

I

was described as the hippies' "house quote from Volume I, number, 6 which appeared in it

February 1967, and has subsequently been spoken of as "a vintage number." Most of the features which we have ascribed to the liminal phases of rites de passage

ligous 5

movements reappear

This

district in

1966 and 1967. love."

Its

and to the early stages of

in this literature

with startling

re-

clarity.

San Francisco was the main center of "hippiedom" rise to such posters and grafitti as: "Haight

name gave

in is

Dramas,

262

We

Fields,

and Metaphors

have seen that in liminality social structure disappears or

is

simplified and generalized while the cultural apparatus often be-

comes structurally complex. Well, printed page of this

first

copy of

about "rock" (described the end of the baroque").

as

"the

Rock

then,

we

find

on the very

the Oracle a series of statements

first

'head'

music we've had since

clearly a cultural expression and

is

instrumentality of that style of communitas which has arisen as the antithesis of the "square," "organization

man" type of bureau-

cratic social structure of mid-twentieth-century America.

I

now

seems

quote freely (but exactly) from

that the

term "rock

sometimes the

New

"some

v

a modality- of

That rock total

affection)

on which

—the study of rock!)

is

principles are not limited to music, and that its

enunciating

[note: the emphasis

on

much

of the

aspirations today (these being

freedom, total experience,

partial perspectives

it

form of music and

These include:

shape of the future can be seen in

namely

a

communitas. The author of "Notes for

Geologv" (geology

principles."

this page,

sometimes represents

will

total love,

peace and mutual

totality or "totalism" rather than

and on the "prophetic" character of

this liminal

manifestation]

That rock

is

a

way

of

life,

international and verging in this decade

down, muted, modiby typeheads, whose arguments don't apply and whose machinations don't mesh because they can't perceive (dig) what rock really is and does [note: the stress on the pan-human yet immediate quality of this "new" social relationship and its cultural on

universal;

and

can't be stopped, retarded, put

fied or successfully controlled

product

— both

That rock

is

called "rock"]; a tribal

phenomenon

[sic.],

immune

to definition and

other typographical operations, and constitutes what might be called a

— against acid heads —but of course truly "tribal" phenomena

Twentieth Century magic [note: "typeheads"

—"define" and

"stereoO'P^"

as

are really highly involved with classifications as Levi-Strauss

and the

"thought structuralists" have shown]

That rock

is

a vital

agent in breaking

distinctions [note: the expression of

structural divisions]

down

absolute and arbitrary

communitas' power of dissolving

Passages, Margins, and Poverty

263

That group participation, total experience and complete involvement are rock's minimal desiderata and those as well of a world that has too many people [note: the stress on the need for face-to-face relationships in which communities best flourishes] That rock is creating the social rituals of the future [note: the stress on the creative role of certain social situations in which new

—

definitions

and models for behavior are constructed];

That rock presents an quality of liminality

That rock

is

is

aesthetic of discovery [note: the experimental

here recognized];

evolving Sturgeonesque

So much for the

social

homo

gestalt configurations.

of this "rock

characteristics

com-

munitas." "Typographic" for this author designates that kind of analytical thinking that presupposes a corpse, as against "vital agencies" of discovery; "typeheads" are sterile

belers";

to an

American author of science

popular some years ago people

man

who

constituted a

evolution"

as the crucial as

and authoritarian

and "Sturgeonesque" refers not to the Russian

— when

human

among human

unit.

together.

who wrote

"la-

but

a novel,

the hippies, about a group of gestalt

the individual

is

— "the

next stage in hu-

replaced

by

the cluster

These people "bleshed" together,

Robert Heinlein's cult group

"grocked"

fiction

fish,

in

Incidentally,

Stranger in a Strange students

of

just

Land

symbolism and

myth should take note of science fiction, for this genre provides many examples of just such a juggling of the factors of culture in new and often bizarre combinations and settings as was postulated earlier as a feature of liminality in initiations

and mystery

Here we are dealing with "an esthetic of discovery," a mythology of the future, an "omega" mythology, as appropriate for a society undergoing rapid and unceasing change as a mythology of the past, or an "alpha" mythology, is appropriate for a religions.

stable

The

and relatively repetitive and cyclical

social order.

structure-dissolving quality of liminality

for "rock

.

.

.

breaks

down

is

clearly present,

absolute and arbitrary distinctions."

have written elsewhere (1969) that communitas is, in principle, universal and boundless, as against structure which is specific and

I

Dramas,

264

Fields,

and Metaphors

we find rock described as "international and But now let us look at what the Oracle's "geologist" rock as a cultural manifestation rather than a mode of

bounded. Here universal."

says about

.

.

.

social relationship:

Rock

a legitimate

is

avant-garde art form with deep roots in the music

of the past (especially the baroque and before), great vitality and vast potential for

growth and development, adaptation, experiment,

etc.;

Rock

shares most of

music

.

.

.

and

it

its

formal/structural principles with baroque

and baroque can be judged by the same broad

standards (the governing principles being those of mosaic structure

of tonal and textural contrast:

Here again we

tactility, collage).

see the contrast

between the unstructured com-

munitas (or in the words of the author, "the groups themselves far

more intimately

interrelated

and integrated than any com-

parable ensemble in the past") and

product and medium, which,

highly elaborate cultural

its

myths analyzed by Leviframework of "formal/structural

like the

Strauss and Leach, has a logical principles."

The

pedigree of "rock" communitas

is,

of course,

much

than our author supposed. There was no doubt a "rock"!

And

longer

paleolithic

anthropologists the world over have participated

in tribal "scenes"

not dissimilar to the rock "scene"

—

in the se-

clusion lodges of initiation or in the rhythmical dances, with

improvised singing societies.

—of many

Our author

kinds of ritual in

many

kinds of

speaks, too, of "synaesthesia," the union of

visual, auditory, tactile, spatial, visceral,

and other modes of per-

ception under the influence of various stimuli such as music, dancing, and drugs. This "involvement of the whole sensorium" in tribal ritual and in the services of many modern removements. Arthur Rimbaud, one of the folk heroes of the u counterculture, would have approved of this as un dereglement

is

found

ligious

ordonne de tons senses." Just as

les

sens" "a systematic derangement of

Rimbaud wrote about

the

all

the

vowel sounds having

distinctive colors, so our author talks about "sensory counter-

and Poverty

Passages, Margins,

point

— the senses

registering contradictory stimuli and the brain

having fun trying to integrate them .

.

.

.

.

.

imagine tasting G-minor

the incredible synaesthesiae!"

One could

point out the detailed resemblances between liminal

phenomena of

But

kinds.

all

way

attention to the

I

will

conclude the chapter by calling

that certain cultural attributes of ascribed

inferior status acquire a

communitas significance

liminal situations or liminal personae. This stress

of weakness and poverty

Here, of course,

I

am

is

havior

may be

as

as attributes

not confined to the counterculture.

much

or as

little

class,

or rank. Such be-

dependent upon social-struc-

tural considerations as the behavior of their status superiors.

have in mind

is

of

on the symbolism

not talking about the actual social behavior

of persons of structurally inferior caste,

I

265

the symbolic value of the poor

man

What

or harijan

of religion, literature, and political philosophy. In religion, the

holy

man who makes

himself to

all

appearances poorer than the

meanest beggar may, and in fact often does, come from a wealthy or aristocratic, or at least highly educated stratum of the social structure. St. Francis, for example,

chant;

Gautama was

was the son of

a prince. In literature,

we

a rich

mer-

find the values of

communitas represented by such types as Tolstoy's peasants and by such characters as Dostoevsky's prostitute Sonia, Chekhov's poor Jewish fiddler Rothschild (the irony of that name!), Mark Twain's Negro slave Jim and youthful vagrant Huckleberry Finn of

whom

Lionel Trilling has said that they form "a primitive

community of pride between

and the Fool

we have tariat,

saints

.

.

.

because they do not have an ounce of

them" (The Liberal Imagination, 1953: 11 off.), King Lear. In political philosophy

in Shakespeare's

the images of Rousseau's

and Gandhi's Untouchables,

Noble Savage,

whom

Alarx's prole-

he called harijans or

"the children of God." Each of these thinkers, however, had different structural recipes

communitas with

real

and different formulae for relating

to structure. Liminal poverty

must not be confused

poverty, although the liminally

actually poor. But liminal poverty,

whether

may become

poor it

is

a

process or a

Dramas,

z66

and Metaphors

both an expression and instrumentality of communitas.

state, is

Communitas

And

Fields,

is

what people

because communitas

human

interlinkage,

nor sanctions,

as it

God. The you "are" in who "are," then you

honesty-

of being, people

another.

The

world

that

is

in order to exist materially at

principle

by

is

simple: cease

relate

to

"dig"

or

its

one

these Edenic prescriptions

to organize structurally

and the more complex the tech-

nology of living becomes, the more finely cut and finely

meshed does

com-

love one another. In the

men have

all,

of

—both the

the relationship of

"naturally"

difficulty experienced

in a post-Edenic

mode

does neither on conventions

are; if

munitas to others

poverty.

such a basic, even primordial

depending

the love of

you

to have and

by voluntary

often religiously equated with love

it is

man and

love of

is

really seek

social division of labor

inter-

become, and the more

time-consuming and absorbing become society's occupational and organizational statuses and roles. milieu

is

to subordinate

One

communitas

great temptation in this

totally to structure so that the

The opposite temptaThe basic and perennial

principle of order will never be subverted. tion

to opt out of structure altogether.

is

human

social

problem

is

between these modalities

to discover at a specific

what

men; but

to

since structure

is

the right relation

time and place. Since com-

munitas has a strong affectual component,

material interests,

is

it

appeals

more

communitas perhaps even more importantly than

sex tends to get repressed into the unconscious, there to either a source of individual pathological

released

in

directly

the arena in which they pursue their

violent

cultural

symptoms

forms in periods of

6

become

or to be

social

crisis.

People can go crazy because of communitas-repression; sometimes people

become

obsessively structural as a defense

mechanism

against their urgent need of communitas.

The major

religions have

always taken account of

this

bi-

polarity and have tried to maintain these social dimensions in

balanced relationship. But the countless sects and schismatic move-

ments 6

in the history of religions

"The need

to relate" to others.

have almost always asserted the

Passages, Margins,

values of

that

from which they have seceded have become

empty forms.

structured and secularized, mere

totally

267

communitas against those of structure and claimed

the major religions

ficantly,

and Poverty

Signi-

such separatist movements have almost invariably adopted

a cultural style

dominated by the cultural idiom of indigence. In

their first impetus,

such movements often strip their members of

show

of wealth or status, adopt a simple form of

the outward

speech, and to a considerable extent strip their religious practices

of ritualism and visual symbolism. Organizationally, they often

them

abolish priestly hierarchies and substitute for

either pro-

phetic charismatic leadership or democratic methods of represen-

such movements attract great numbers and persist for

tation. If

many

years, they often find

necessary to compromise with

it

structure once again, both in their relations with the wider society and in their

own

internal concerns

both

liturgical

and or-

ganizational.

The

how

great historical religions have, in the course df time, learned

to incorporate enclaves of

passage

communitas within

their institu-

their — —and to oxygenate, so to speak, the "mystical body"

tionalized structures

just as tribal religions

making provision for those ardent communitas and poverty

all

souls

do with

who

de

rites

wish to

by

live

their lives. Just as in a ritual of

in

any

complexity there are phases of separation from and reaggregation to the tain

domain of

many

social structure

— phases which themselves conwhich

structural features, including symbols

express structural principles

—and

interim of communitas with

its

a liminal phase representing

own

rich and elaborate

bolism, so does a great religion or church contain tional

and

liturgical sectors

many

organiza-

but maintain in

a central position

sanctuary of unqualified communitas, of that poverty which

said to

Angelus

an

sym-

which overlap with and interpene-

trate the secular social structure a

reflect or

be "the poetry of religion" and of which Silesius, the Sufist poets,

Rumi and

St.

is

Francis,

Al-Ghazali, and the

Virasaiva poet Basavanna were melodious troubadours and jongleurs.

Dramas,

268

The

between

link

be found in

also

tural complexity.

and

full circle

he

who

by

his

order.

in

is

and Metaphors

Fields,

Now I

state that

communitas

very existence,

That

is

and communitas can

inferior structural status

tribal societies; it

not merely a mark of struc-

is

would like to bring my argument round from the standpoint of structural man, is

an exile or a stranger, someone who,

calls into

question the whole normative

why when we consider cultural

to look in the interstices, niches, intervals,

institutions

we

have

and on the peripheries

of the social structure to find even a grudging cultural recognition

of

this

primordial

human modality

of relationship.

On

hand, in times of drastic and sustained social change,

the other

com-

it is

munitas which often appears to be central and structure which

may

constitutes the "square" or "straight" periphery. If one

to venture a personal evaluation of such matters, one that

much

dare

might say

of the misery of the world has been due to the prin-

cipled activities of fanatics of both persuasions.

one finds

a structural

who would

On

the one hand,

and ultimately bureaucratic ubermensch

like to array the

whole world of

lesser

men

in terms

"New Order," and on the who would abolish all idiosyncratic between man and man (even necessary organizational

of hierarchy and regimentation in a

other the puritanical levelers differences

differences for the sake of the food quest), and set

up an

ethical

tyranny that would allow scant scope for compassion and forgiveness. said Blake

"One Law

for the Lion and the

Ox

is

Oppression,"

with reference to such ethical tyranny. Yet since both

social modalities are indispensable for

human

social continuity,

neither can exist for long without the other. Indeed, is

maximized to

full rigidity, it invites

it

tarianism, all

becomes

in a short while

from the need

its

to suppress

structure

the nemesis of either violent

revolution or uncreative apathy, while

mized,

if

if

own

communitas

is

maxi-

dark shadow,

totali-

and repress

in its

members

tendencies to develop structural independences and interdepen-

dences.

Moreover, communitas, which universal, has

been

is

in principle boundless

and

in historical practice limited to particular geo-

Passages, Margins, and Poverty

graphical regions and specific aspects of social varied expressions of socialist

communitas such

semireligious communities and

bastions,

communes

nudist colonies,

tion camps, have often

with

real as well as

large-scale

in the

found

it

modern

call

Thus

the

convents,

brotherhoods,

countercultures, initia-

necessary to surround themselves

symbolic walls

would

sociologists

When

life.

as monasteries,

269

—

a species of

what

structural

"boundary maintaining mechanisms."

communites

are involved, these tend to take the

form of military and police organizations, open and

secret.

Thus

to keep out structure, structure has to be constantly maintained

When

and reinforced.

the great principles regard one another as

"becomes what

antagonists, each

is

and thus "redeem the contraries," that right relationship

What

beholds."

it

needed, to quote William Blake again,

seems to be

to "destroy the negation" to discover

is,

what

between structure and communitas

at a

time and place in history and geography, to give to each

To sum

the

is

given

its

due.

up, a major stumbling block in the development of

sociological and anthropological theory has been the almost total identification of the social

with the

formal relations are considered structural. course, but not

all;

these include the

possible to distinguish the

enormous

created

Even inMany of them are, of

social structural.

most relevant ones, and

it is

deep from the shallow here. This has

difficulties

many

with regard to

problems,

such as social change, the sociology of religion, and role theory, to

name but

a few. It has also led to the

social structural

is

"psychological"

view that

—whatever

has also led to the positing of a false

is

that the social has a free or

all

that

may

What

unbound

as

seems to be the

confront one another not as role players but as "human

Once

this has

who

phenomena

men

totals,"

recognizantly share the same humanity.

been recognized,

sciences to examine

It

in-

well as a bonded

or bound dimension, the dimension of communitas in which

integral beings

not

is

mean.

dichotomy between the

dividual as subject, and society as object. case

this

more

it

will be possible for the social

fruitfully than hitherto such cultural

as art, religion, literature,

philosophy, and even

many

Dramas,

270

Fields,

and Metaphors

of law, politics, and economic behavior which

aspects

hitherto eluded the structuralist conceptual net.

rich with reference to communitas. find out in

what

precise

way

The

have

Such domains are

vain task of trying to

found

certain symbols

in the ritual,

poetry, or iconography of a given society "reflect" or "express" its

can then be abandoned. Symbols

social or political structure

may

well reflect not structure, but anti-structure, and not only

reflect

it

but contribute to creating

same phenomena

it.

Instead,

in terms of the relationship

and communitas to be found

can regard the

between structure

such relational situations

in

sages

between structural

tions,

and in the powers of the weak.

states,

we

as pas-

the interstices of structural rela-

References

Durkheim, Emile. Tr.

J. S.

Fortes,

1961.

The Elementary Forms

of the Religious Life.

New York: Collier. First published 191 2. 1949. The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi.

Swain.

Meyer.

Lon-

don: Oxford University Press.

Gennep, Arnold van.

& Kegan

i960.

The

Rites of Passage. London: Routledge

Paul. First published 1908.

Levi-Strauss, Claude,

i960.

"On Manipulated

Bijdragen tot de Taal, Land en Volkenkunde .

1963. Structural

Sociological Models,"

n6( 0:45-54.

Anthropology. Tr. Claire Jacobson.

New

York:

Basic Books. First published 1958.

The Oracle (San

Francisco). 1967. Vol.

Ramanujan, A. K.

1973.

1,

no. 6 (February).

Speaking of Siva. Baltimore: Penguin Books.

Reed, Nelson. 1964. The Caste War in Yucatan. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Riesman, David. 1954. Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press. Rosen, Lawrence. 1971. "Language, History, and the Logic of Inquiry in Levi-Strauss and Sartre," History and Theory 10(3): 260-294. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1963. Search for a Method. New York: Knopf. 1969. "Itinerary of a Thought," New Left Review 58:57-59. Stonequist, E. V. 1937. The Marginal Man. New York: Scribner. Trilling, Lionel. 1953. The Liberal Imagination. New York: Anchor Books. .

Passages, Margins,

and Poverty

271

Turner, Terence. 1967. "The Fire of the Jaguar: Myth and Social Organization among the Northern Kayapo of Central Brazil." Paper given at the Conference on Myth and Ritual at Dartmouth College,

August 1967 (including Abstract). Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process. Chicago: Aldine. Znaniecki, F., and W. I. Thomas. 191 8. The Polish Peasant and America. Boston: Badger.

in

Europe

CHAPTER -7

Metaphors

of

Anti-structure

in 1

Religious Culture

In

my

book The Ritual

Process,

I

posited a difference between

society as "structure" and society as "anti-structure." Perhaps

I

was wrong, as some reviewers have suggested, to make the overworked term "structure" work again like a good and patient cart-horse in yet another capacity, but tional connotations

By

structure

make

it

I

consider that

its

tradi-

an effective operator in the argument.

meant, roughly, social structure as most British

I

and many American anthropologists and sociologists have defined the term, that

more or

as a

is,

less

distinctive

arrangement of

mutually dependent institutions and the institutional organization of social positions and/or actors which they imply. Class structures are only one species of structures so defined, and a measure

of alienation adheres to insofar as

all,

including so-called tribal structures,

tend to produce distance and inequality, often lead-

all

ing to exploitation between old and young.

Even

man and man, man and woman, and

the egalitarian reciprocities involved in

exchanges of consumer goods such

as

uncooked food

assert

some

degree of distance, as against sharing the same meal, the anthropologists'

"commensality"

paradigmatic I

medium of ritual becomes "communion."

have used the term "anti-structure," but

clear that the "anti" 1

—which, caught into the exemplary and

First published in

ligion, ed.

Allan

272

W.

is

I

would

like to

make

here only used strategically and does not

Changing Perspectives in the Scientific Study of Re(New York: John Wiley, 1974).

Eister

Metaphors of Anti-structure

imply

radical

a

it

has been the theoretical

negativity. Structure

point of departure for so

many

social anthropological studies that

has acquired a positive connotation

—even

though

as

Blake might have

said,

generative center.

form in

as

some of

I

my

really

I

When

mean something

as

men

I

speak

positive, a

do not seek the eradication of matter by French-inspired colleagues have tried to do

recent years, but suppose a matter from which forms

"unpacked,"

cir-

than as the center or

substance of a system of social relations or ideas. of anti-structure, therefore,

would

I

bound or

prefer to regard structure rather as the "outward

cumference,"

273

may be

know and communicate.

seek to

Roughly, the concepts of liminality and communitas define

what

I

mean by

anti-structure.

Liminality

—a

term borrowed

from van Gennep's formulation of the processual structure of ritual in

Les Rites de passage

—occurs

in the

middle phase of the

of passage which mark changes in an individual's or a

rites

group's social status and/or cultural or psychological state in

many

societies past

and present. Such

rites characteristically

be-

gin with ritual metaphors of killing or death marking the separation of the subject

from ordinary

secular relationships (in

status-role behavior tends to prevail

which

even in informal situations)

and conclude with a symbolic rebirth or reincorporation into society as shaped

by

the law and moral code.

order of birth and death

one dies to "become a is

is

little

The

biological

reversed in rites of passage

child."

The

—there

intervening liminal phase

thus betwixt and between the categories of ordinary social

Symbols and metaphors found

in

abundance

life.

in liminality repre-

sent various dangerous ambiguities of this ritual stage, since the classifications

tion

on which order normally depends are annulled or

—other

symbols designate temporary antinomic liberafrom behavioral norms and cognitive rules. This aspect of

obscured

danger requiring control

is

reflected

in

the

paradox that in

liminality extreme authority of elders over juniors often coexists

with scenes and episodes indicative of the utmost behavioral

freedom and speculative

license.

Liminality

is

usually a sacred

Dramas,

274

Fields,

and Metaphors

by taboos and

condition protected against secularity

turn

in

prevented by them from disrupting secular order, since liminality

movement between

a

is

fixed points

and

essentially

is

ambiguous,

and unsettling.

unsettled,

In liminality, communitas tends to characterize relationships

between those jointly undergoing

ritual

The bonds

transition.

of communitas are anti-structural in the sense that they are undifferentiated, equalitarian, direct, extant, nonrational, existen-

I-Thou Communitas

tial,

by norms, differs

(in is

it is

Feuerbach's and Buber's sense)

relationships.

—

not shaped

spontaneous, immediate, concrete

not institutionalized,

it is

not abstract. Communitas

from the camaraderie found often

though informal and

domain of

structure,

munitas, to

borrow

egalitarian,

still

in

everyday

which may include interaction

a phrase of

Durkheim's,

published 19 12), part of the "serious

life,

which,

within the general

falls

is

"de

(Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious first

it is

life." It

Com-

rituals.

serieuse"

la vie

Life,

i

961 1427;

tends to ignore,

reverse, cut across, or occur outside of structural relationships.

human

In

history,

and communitas, or

all

that

between structure

see a continuous tension

I

at all levels of scale

which holds people

and complexity. Structure,

apart,

defines their differences,

and constrains their actions,

is

field,

for

which the opposite pole

communitas, or anti-structure,

the

egalitarian

is

one pole in a charged

"sentiment for humanity"

of which

David

Hume

speaks, representing the desire for a total, unmediated relationship

between person and person,

a relationship

which nevertheless does

not submerge one in the other but safeguards their uniqueness

in

the very act of realizing their

commonness. Communitas does not

merge

them from conformity

identities;

norms, though is

liberates

it

this

is

necessarily a transient condition

to general if

society

to continue to operate in an orderly fashion. I

have discussed elsewhere

how, among

(1969:90-106)

Ndembu

people of Zambia, in the liminal phase of their

passage,

communitas

actually engendered

is

by

both

metaphorically

ritual

leveling and

rites

represented

humiliation.

the

of

and

Other

Metaphors of Anti-structure

275

features. In more pronouncedly what Benjamin Nelson (1971:19),

exhibit similar

societies

archical societies with

hierinter-

Weber, might call "sacro-magical structures of concommunitas is frequently affirmed by periodic rituals in which the lowly and the mighty reverse social roles. In such societies, too, and here I have drawn examples from European preting

sciousness"

and Indian history, the religious ideology of the structurally powerful tends to idealize humility, orders of religious undertake ascetic

low

those of

lives,

specialists

on the contrary, cult groups among play with symbols of power. These

while,

status ritually

contrary processes go on in the same religious

field,

modifying,

opposing, and being transformed into one another as time goes on.

I

w ould T

like

here to give some examples of

how

processes operate in the religious field of India, drawing

work of two Indian colleagues and The first example is taken from

my

Delhi University, formerly

Manchester.

such

on the

friends. a

paper

by

Singh Uberoi, of

J.

colleague at the 'University of

"Sikhism and Indian Society" (1967).

It is entitled

Uberoi opens with the proposition that the Hindu system of

term "caste" to include both varna, the

caste relations (using the all-India classification,

tion)

is,

and

jati,

in fact, only half of

the localized subcaste classifica-

Hinduism. Here, of course, he parts

company with Max Weber, who regarded the position of Brahmins)

as

caste (and particularly

"the fundamental institution of

Hinduism." The whole Hindu dharma,

literally

"law," "justice,"

sometimes "religion," which might perhaps be paraphrased in this

context as "religio-moral

field,"

is

term varnashramdharma. Thus, there

often described

are,

in addition

by to

the

caste

(varna), the institution of the four stages or statuses (ashramas), student,

householder, forest dweller, and homeless

through which

high-caste

Hindus were

pass. If social anthropologists

traditionally supposed to

tended to focus on the institution

of caste to the exclusion of the ashram system,

cause they preferred to social relations

mendicant

work with

it is

probably be-

stable, localized

and positions bound up

in easily isolable

systems of

customary

Dramas,

276

Fields,

and Metaphors

regularities rather than

with processual models. But,

Uberoi

as

points out, the social system of caste seems always to have been

surrounded by a "penumbral region" of noncaste, or even

where there throve the renunciatory

caste,

religious orders

on

principles repudiated the ascribed statuses resting

And, indeed, the fourth ashram or

birth.

sannyas, the state of being a holy

man

stage, that

caste

and

known

who

or ascetic,

anti-

whose as

has dedi-

cated himself completely to the quest for moksha or "salvation," was always a metaphorical door through which the individual was recommended by sages and teachers to pass from the world of caste to that of its negation from structure to anti-structure,

—

one might say, for there himself of

from

his

all

is

a

structural ties

memory

moment when and

is

kinship connections.

all

the sannyasi divests

even recommended to erase

As Uberoi

mutual relation of the two worlds, caste and

argues, "the

anti-caste,

seems

to be of the greatest significance to a broad understanding of either."

For there

system. Sannyas

may

is

is

a social

and corporate aspect of the ashrama

not only a stage in an individual

represent a religious order of renunciation.

life

cycle but

Uberoi con-

siders that the total structure of medieval India could

into three

main segments, even

if this

exercise in gross oversimplification.

be

split

involves for historians an

There was

a

division be-

tween (1) the rulers (the world of rajya), (2) the caste system (varna, with an emphasis here also on the ashram of the householder, grihasta), and (3) the orders of renunciation (sannyas). The interrelations of these features would seem to define a sociocultural field in the medieval period, each part of which achieves its

full significance

only in terms of

its

relationship to

all

the

others.

In this

field,

Uberoi continues, there were many orders which

rejected caste initially or broke pollution rules, regarding nothing as

common

or unclean

In the course of time,

—he instances the Sanyogis of the Punjab.

many

of these came back from mendicancy

to householding again. Uberoi suggests that this apparent contradiction may be resolved by regarding both these conditions as

Metaphors of Anti-structure

forming the different stages or phases of cycle.

From

this standpoint,

once renounced caste with

any

all its

277

developmental

a single

specific order or suborder that social rights

and duties and

its

notions of sacred space and time, and "walked out through the

open front door of sannyas into the

ascetic wilderness, could

become disheartened or lose the point of its protest, and even end by seeking to re-enter the house of caste by the backdoor." In so doing, it would reverse the individual's institutionalized life path from householder to world-renouncer, but, then, groups do not move irreversibly deathward as individuals do. They tend to find that after a few generations they still confront later

the same old problems under approximately the same old conditions,

and that what seemed a grand climactic gesture of world-

renunciation was, in fact, no climax at

medieval India was that so to speak,

from the

nonprocreative, its

What

not a solution.

certainly

all,

possibly an evasion, and

seems to have

happened

in

as a particular order or section fell back,

frontier of asceticism,

propertyless,

and 'abandoned

occupationless,

liminal

its

existence,

function within the total field of varnashrandharma would be

fulfilled

by some other order or

section.

venture to say, "protestant," impulse feature. If

of a

new

The

itself

we may

a constant

we were making an extended-case study of the genesis we might say that the sannyas principle was a

order

perduring "latent-field-characteristic" of that

field

harma. Parallels with the modern American and alternative or counterculture

here, but

ascetic,

remained

it

may

of varnashrand-

West European

be inaccurate and superficial

does appear as though the frontier of protest against

"straight" or establishment

Western culture has been occupied by two or three years or so. For

different types of groups every

example,

some

specific

groups

have

transformed

themselves

from ghetto family to city commune to manufactory or farm

commune

in a

way

that suggests broad parallels with the return

from sannyas to grihasta. Western askesis (though this may have Near Eastern roots) parallels sannyas here and the other major

—

counterstructural modality, sexual community, had an affinity

Dramas,

278

and Metaphors

Fields,

with certain Tantric notions

—often

the Eastern and

Western

notions converge in syncretic metaphors. Paperbacks and travel

many Western

have brought Eastern religion into the

West

tempo

the

much more

is

But

in

rapid under conditions of

and urbanism and multiple communica-

large-scale industrialism tions media,

milieus.

and the tempos of change

in East

and West might

be compared with the differential effects of sun and incubator.

But the processual form speedier and

more

is

similar,

though the transformations are

blurred.

Reverting to medieval India, Uberoi suggests that "during an order's ascetic period positions, or pass

may occupy one

it

or the other of

through both successively. ...

may

It

two

either

adopt a theory and practice completely opposed to that of caste

and be for that reason regarded

as

heterodox and esoteric; or

might remain within the fold and link

itself

through the normal sectarian

of caste people."

affiliations

be said that a heterodox or antinomian sect caste as

its

living

is

Uberoi was interested

its

It

could

one opposed to

shadow, while an orthodox sect

tary to the caste system, being

it

to the caste system

is

complemen-

other half within Hinduism.

in the special position of the Sikhs, being

one himself and having problems about

it.

In his view, the Sikhs

barred the door to asceticism, but did not return to the orthodox citadel

of caste.

What

they tried to do, he thought, was to

"annihilate the categorical partitions, intellectual and social, of

the Indian medieval world," to liquidate

might

say.

the states of

its

formal structure, one

Sikhism rejected the orthodox opposition between

common

citizen or householder

and renouncer, and

of the ruler vis-a-vis both of these, refusing to acknowledge

them in a

as separate

and

developmental cycle.

or qualities

modes of

distinct

inhering in

existence, let alone stages

The

Sikhs did acknowledge the powers

the

domains of rajya, sannyas, and

grihasta,

but sought to invest their virtues conjointly in a single

body of

faith

and conduct,

European Reformation, the

world,

as

Weber

like

who has

some Protestant

sects

during the

took the virtues of monasticism into

shown

so

cogently.

Nevertheless,

Metaphors of Anti-structure

279

Sikhism did not make for the internalization of conscience individual; corporate

were highly

values

The Sikhs, in on to show how

point of militancy.

fact,

and Uberoi goes

this

tion

stressed

in the

even to the

renounced renunciation, renunciation of renuncia-

expressed in detail in the cultural symbolism of the five

is

"K's," the kes ("long hair," or acceptance of "nature"), kangha

("comb," to control the "natural" to control the

hair), kara ("steel

arm band,"

sword arm), kripan ("sword," directed aggression),

and katsh ("short drawers that end above the knee," to control the genitalia).

I

will not

that he argues that

all

go

into his analysis here except to say

these symbols

imply both

a recognition of

natural processes and forces and simultaneously their religiocultural control, a nice synthesis of asceticism

and acceptance of

became in time counter-structure, as the gurus succeeded one another from Nanak (1469- 15 39) to Govind Singh (1675-1708), but remained outside Hindu natural urges. Sikh anti-structure

structure (MacaulifTe, 1909).

My

second case to

»

illustrate

how

processes of structure, anti-

and restructuring can coexist and

structure, counter-structure,

modify one another continuously over time in the same ritual field, and how field properties influence the metaphors in which religious experiences within

able paper

by

my

it

are expressed,

is

taken from a valu-

colleague at the University of Chicago, A. K.

Ramanujan ("Structure and Anti-Structure: the Virasaiva Example,"

1

97

1,

later published in his translation of

poems, Speaking

of Siva, 1973), on the religious literature of Virasaiva saints of the

tenth to twelfth centuries in South India.

The

Virasaivas,

though

ascetics, followed a different path to moksha, or salvation, from that taken by orthodox Hindus. They stressed devotion, love, and faith rather than the scrupulous performance of caste

not

duties and rituals.

Yet

their

"way"

has

become one of

the three

recognized ways of attaining salvation in Hinduism, alongside (1)

complex and exacting performance of

ritual,

and (2) knowl-

edge through meditation or Yoga. Nevertheless the Virasaiva

movement was,

in its inception in the

Kannada-speaking regions,

Dramas,

280

and Metaphors

Fields,

"a social upheaval

by and

for the poor, the lowcaste and the

outcaste against the rich and the privileged;

was

it

a rising of

the unlettered against the literate pundit, flesh and blood against

stone" (Ramanujan, 1973:21).

bhakti religions, Virasaivism Protestant movements.

have in

common such

The

Ramanujan suggests is

that, like other

an Indian analogue to European

Indian and European movements

characteristics as:

protest against mediators like priest, ritual, temples social hierarchy,

name of direct, individual, original experience; a movement of and for the underdog, including saints of in the

and trades

(like

pressions

and

first

translations of inaccessible

translations of the Bible in

hierarchy-by-birth with

Sanskritic texts

work

as

and evangelism, a

(like

the

replacing a social

elect,

hierarchy-by-experience;

mystical

a

dia-

authentic regional ex-

Europe); a religion of arbitrary grace,

with a doctrine of the mystically chosen trines of

castes

Bunyan, the tinker) speaking the sub-standard

of the region, producing often the

lect

religious all

doc-

ethic; monotheism mixture of intolerance and humanism harsh and

worship leading to a puritan

tender [pp. 53-54].

Dr. Ramanujan had written his paper for a seminar on Aspects of Religion in South Asia at the School of Oriental and African

Languages, University of London, March 30-April

he read ture.

my

book The

He was

so

much

opposition indicated in

2,

197

1,

before

Ritual Fro cess: Structure and Anti-Struc-

struck its

in the Indian data that he

by

subtitle

made

it

the resemblance between the

and that which he had noticed

the

title

of his paper, "Structure

and Anti-structure: The VIrasaiva Example." This was because the strategic thrust of his paper centered on an attempt "to un-

pack the meaning of i.

it

e.

Sthdvara

[stasis]

a single 'binary opposition* in Virasaivism,

and Jangama [dynamis]

.

.

.

and show

how

organizes attitudes towards religion, society, language, metrical

form, imagery,

...

etc.

as seen in the

vac anas [the body of

religious lyric poetry

produced by the early

ment)"

am

(p.

1

).

Since

I

saints

of the move-

dealing with metaphors of anti-structure,

Metaphors of Anti-structure I

281

can hardly do better than present in some detail Ramanujan's

poem

exegesis of a

written

by Basavanna,

the Vlrasaiva leader,

which exemplifies the opposition sthavara and tion which, stripped of cultural

much

its

Indian integument,

jarigama, an opposiI

hold to be cross-

and universal. The metaphorical opposition, too, draws

of

from

significance,

its

its

function within the South

Indian religiomoral field of varnashramdharma.

Here

is

Basa-

vanna's poem:

The will

rich

make temples

What a

shall

for Siva.

I,

poor man,

do?

My the

legs are pillars,

body

the shrine,

the head a cupola

»

of gold.

O

Listen,

lord of the meeting rivers,

things standing shall

but the moving ever

fall,

shall stay.

According to Ramanujan

[Ramanujan, 1973:19]

poem

this

"dramatizes several of the

themes and oppositions characteristic of Vlrasaiva protest" (p. 19). u Thus, Indian temples are built traditionally in the image of the

human body" many cases the ing head

The

European Gothic cathedrals represent

crucified Christ, even to the extent that the hang-

altar at the east

ritual for building a

and planting after

the basta.

like a

body

The

end).

temple begins with digging in the earth

pot of seed.

a

implanted seed,

named

in

symbolized by a slight curvature of the building

is

beyond the

(just as

parts.

The temple

human. The

The two

top of the temple

is

said to

sides are called the is

rise

from the

different parts of a temple are

hands or wings,

the head, the sikhara.

The

shrine,

Dramas,

282

Fields,

and Metaphors

the innermost and the darkest sanctum of the temple the womb-house.

The temple

primordial blueprint of the

has forgotten

moving

its

fades.

The temple becomes

submerged.

is

return to the original of

a garbhagrha,

human body.

But in history the human metaphor ing,

is

thus carries out in brick and stone the

originals.

The

model, the mean-

a static standing thing that

Basavanna's

poem

calls

body

temples, preferring the

all

for a to

the

embodiment.

The poems body

.

.

.

suggest a cycle of transformation

into temple, or a circle of identities

—a

temple

—temple

is

a

body

into is

a

temple [pp. 19-20].

I

am tempted

here to see this also as a metaphor for the process

whereby communitas becomes

structure and then communitas

again and for the ultimate identification of both modalities as

human

sociality.

Ramanujan points out tween making and being.

that the

poem draws

a distinction be-

rich can only make temples. They may not be or become temby what they do. Further what is made is a mortal artifact, but what one is is immortal things standing shall fall, but the moving

The ples

—

ever shall stay.

This opposition, the standing is

at the heart of VIrasaivism.

The

with the Indo-European words stature, static, status, stay,

vs.

and

the moving, sthavara vs. jangama, Sanskrit

work

sthavara

is

cognate

in English like stand, state (estate),

carries connotations of these related

words. Jangama contains a cognate of English go. Sthavara

is

that

of property, a thing inanimate. Jangama

is

moving, moveable, anything given to going and coming. Especially

in

which

stands, a piece

Virasaiva religion a Jangama is a religious man who has renounced world and home, moving from village to village, representing god to the devoted, a god incarnate. Sthavara could mean any static

symbol or

worshipped

idol of god, a temple, or a linga

in a temple.

two words carry a constrast between two opposed conprefers the original to god of worship. Basavanna the symbol, the body that remembers to the temple that forgets, the

Thus

the

ceptions of

.

.

.

Metaphors of Anti-structure poor, though living,

moving jangama

283

to the rich petrified temple,

the sthavara, standing out there [pp. 20-21].

As Ramanujan

indicates, "the polarities are lined

the rich

:

the poor

temple

:

body

make

:

be

the standing (sthavara)

:

the

There

is

up and judged:

moving (jangama)"

an evaluation asymmetry here: jangama

sthavara. Here, too, evangelism begins. ligious cultures

make

is

Metaphors

similar oppositions, but

[p. 22]

better than

in other re-

do not take

sides.

For example, the Analects of Confucius distinguish between the concepts li and jen but regard them both as necessary to a virtusocial life. According to D. Howard Smith (Chinese from 1000 b.c. to the Present Day, 1971:40), the character li originally was closely associated with the sacrificial cult by which the manes of the ancestors and the gods and spirits were worshiped and honored. In Confucius' day it had come to represent the "unwritten customary usages which regulated all

ous

human

Religions

the various relationships of society and family." It has been vari-

ously translated as "propriety,

rites,

ceremonies,

ritual. "

The

character jen has been variously translated as "love, goodness,

benevolence, humaneness, man-to-man-ness" (p. 42). tations

from the Analects

will indicate

Fan Ch'ih asked the meaning of

jen.

few quo-

operational meaning.

its

The

A

master

said,

"love

men"

[12:21].

There may be a

A

a noble

mean man who

man who

man who

failed in jen, but never

was there

possessed jen [14:7].

possesses jen will not seek to preserve his life at the

expense of jen. There are those

who through

death bring their jen

to perfection [15:8].

Jen ]en

is

is

reconciled with

self denial

and

denial and return to

li

in the following: li (propriety, ritual). For by selfwhole world would return to jen [11:1.

a return to li

the

Quoted from Smith, 1971:42-43].

Dramas,

284

Fields,

Here Confucius would be possible

and Metaphors

sees the extremes as touching.

kindness or for humanity," and munitas, while

think that

I

it

humanexpression as com-

to translate jen as "the sentiment of

li is

its

social

not so far from what

Confucius seems to be saying that

if

men

I

have called structure.

operated within and ac-

cording to the norms of the structure without seeking to subvert those

norms

to their

own

self-interest or factional goals,

the result in terms of peaceful, similar to those

This

is

produced by spontaneous,

the position

which

coexistence

just, social

his critics

existential

down

then

would be

communitas.

the ages have called

"conservative." This position implies, on the one hand, a bonding

by

of individuals

ritual or propriety, and,

on the

other, a safe-

guarding of each individual's independence within the general interdependence. Here distancing

is

guarding of each person's dignity.

saw

Vlrasaivas, too, sometimes

ultimately one.

The

Ramanujan

not constraint, but the safe-

To

be perfectly

writes:

Virasaiva trinity consists of guru, linga, and jangama

ual teacher, the symbolic stone signs of the cult,

its

They

representative.

the

fair,

and jangama were

that sthavara

emblem

incipient sthavara,

of Siva,

and

i.e.,

—the

spirit-

the structural

wandering mendicant

his

are three yet one. Basavanna insists, in another

poem, "sthavara and jangama are one" to the truly worshipful spirit. Yet if a devotee prefer external worship of the stone linga (sthavara) to serving a human jangama, he would be worthy of scorn [p. 22].

This identification of the moving and the standing, the speaking

and the spoken, man-to-man-ness and

ritual,

together with the

process of their mutual recognition, forms a metaphorical triple classification

found not infrequently

cial correlates

structure,

and

of these

may

in religious culture.

be termed, in

societas, the process

my

whereby

The

so-

view, anti-structure,

anti-structure

is

peri-

odically transformed into structure and structure into anti-structure. I

have here not stressed opposition between communitas and

structure, but

between anti-structure or astructure and

structure.

Metaphors of Anti-structure

This

because the VIrasaivas have elected to stress liminality,

is

and the Confucians communitas, ture.

For while

is

li

as the essential

marked

contrary to struc-

affinity to sthavara,

both being

jangama, "the mov-

as "structure,"

closer to liminality, and jen, "humaneness," to communitas,

than either

is

One archmetaphor

to the other.

outside structure, is

has a

without forcing

translatable

ing,"

285

between

me

in

my

is

structures, a dissolvent of structures,

"movement," "nomadism," "transience"

concerns

which

for that

—

it is

this aspect that

current research on comparative pilgrimage

processes past and present. Jangama, "anything given to going

and coming,"

seem to be

fits

well with this notion. In passing,

in a period of history

when jangama

considerable place in public attention

we would

values

—exemplified,

despite their manipulation for box-office purposes,

occupy

a

for instance,

by such

films

Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider, and other "road" movies and

as

moving people who, unable to belong to any institutionalized group, any sthavara status, must travel from place to place, bed to bed, class to class, but may never stay anywhere

literature of

long:

in

Process,

brief, I

the

suggested that history

able liminal periods,

tween

"hang-loose ethic" people. In

which share

itself

seems to have

The its

Ritual

discern-

certain distinctive features, be-

relatively stablized configurations of social relations

cultural values.

and

Ours may well be one of them. One difference

between East and West here, though,

may

lie

in the sadness of

Stoicism of the Western wanderers and the gladness and faith of the Eastern.

The former

tively positive. to begin to

are positively negative, the latter nega-

Thereby hangs a

tale

it

would take volumes even

tell.

Liminality often provides favorable conditions for communitas,

but

it

may

against his

all,

or her

have the reverse

effect, either a

Hobbesian war of

all

or an existentialist anarchy of individuals, each "doing

own

thing." This

is

clearly not

what Confucius had in Love of one's fellows

mind when he dichotomized li and jen. could go very well, he thought, with propriety, or the maintenance of those structures which depend upon the proper fulfill-

Dramas,

286

Fields,

and Metaphors

ment of customary

obligations

(//).

essential opposition

between

and

li

Thus

for

jen —jen

him there was no was IPs inner dy-

namic.

Yet traces of communitas adhere to jangama

in

VIrasaiva

thought. In his protest against traditional structural dichotomies, the poet Dasimayya, translated jects the differences

by Ramanujan,

between man and woman

for example, re-

as superficial, stress-

ing their fundamental unity, thereby anticipating certain modern

Western trends by nine centuries If

they see

breasts

they if

(p. 26):

and long hair coming

call it

woman,

beard and whiskers

they

call it

man:

but, look, the self that hovers in is

between

nor

O

man woman

neither

Ramanatha. [Ramanujan, 1973:27]

Note here

the jangama metaphors, "coming,"

"hovers," "in

between," "neither-nor," coupled with the communitas metaphor, the single "self" underlying cultural differences.

In connection with the earlier Sikh illustration,

mentioned

I

the sequence, stxucture/anti-structure/counter-structure/restructuring, as characterizing in India the fate of protest

movements.

Ramanujan gives further illustration of this. For him, the division made by Redfield between "great" and "little" traditions in Indian civilization, or

between such

folk/classical, folk/elite, aristocratic, lay/hieratic,

protest religious traditions

similar antitheses as popular/learned,

low/high, parochial/universal, peasant/ is

of

little

movements such

were rejected

importance to the founders of as VIrasaiva.

Great and

Little

alike as the "establishment," as structure,

and what was stressed was religious experience, krpa or "grace."

The

religious

poems

distinguish

anubhava, "The Experience."

between anubhava, "experience," and

The

latter

is

a search for the

unmediated

Metaphors of Anti-structure unconditioned

vision, the

history, time

and

cliche,

through the received Experience labels.

.

.

.

(sruti)

A

It as it

One

lives in a

world of the pre-established,

and the remembered

when it comes, comes like a storm The grace of the Lord is nothing

or wheedle by prayer, rule, ing.

unpredictable experience. Living in

act, the

one

287

ritual,

to

such husks and

can invoke

a devotee

mystical word, or

mystical opportunist can only wait for

It,

But the

{snirti).

all

sacrificial offer-

be prepared to catch

passes [pp. 31-32]. irresistibly

is

He who

reminded here of William Blake's

binds to himself a joy

Does the winged But he

who

life

destroy

kisses the

joy

as it flies

["Eternity," Everyman's edition]

Lives in eternity's sunrise.

For Ramanujan, "structure" includes cognitive, ideological, as well as

linguistic,

physical and social structures

—

it

and

is,

in

which confers order and regularity on phenomena or among phenomena. It does so even as it breaks the continuity of the world into "sign" and "signified," "code" and "codified," in order to make

brief, that

assumes that these will be found in the relations

that external reality intelligible it.

and communicate knowledge of

Here we have the perennial problem of resolving the contrabetween distinction, or discontinuity (briefly, structure),

diction

and connection, or continuity; of experiencing unity while knowing

it

by means of

Hinduism

subject and object nitive or

contrasts.

is

lost

sented in

One

which

all

—what

is

often in

distinction

between

—appears to obliterate

communicational. In

tween subject and object either as

The Experience

called samadhi, a state in

it,

not only

felt to

be

lost,

but

Self or as formless void. This

Hindu mythology and

ritual

structure, cog-

all

the distinction be-

is

is

all

is

experienced

sometimes repre-

metaphor by the ap-

parently amoral, capricious, yet creative acts of the major deities,

who

transcend the laws and limitations of men. In annbhava, the

VIrasaiva

devotee

"needs

nothing,

he

is

Nothing,"

Ramanujan, "for to be someone, or something,

is

writes

to be differ-

Dramas,

288

and Metaphors

Fields,

from God. When he is one with Him, Nothing without names" (pp. 32-33). Structure depends upon binary oppositions in the last analysis or so some of our French colleagues would have it. But anti-

entiated and separate

he

—

is

the

structure serial,

abolishes

divisiveness,

all

or graduated. This creative

tures, social, philosophical,

all

moment

of rejection of struc-

and theological, what Ramanujan

"this fierce rebellion against petrification" (p. 33), in the

the

binary,

discriminations,

"moving" of "grace" tended, however,

calls

name of

in practice

and

in

Indian social history to be merely a rebellion against what Hindus

were currently doing.

It

of interior experience

was not only an

against

assertion of the value

outward forms

—

course to what were

no

different

felt to

it

was simul-

by having

taneously an attempt to legitimate such experience

re-

be pure ancient traditions that were

from true and present experience. The

originally

enunciated Truth, the "deposit of faith," was just such as the

devotee had personally experienced. Since these traditions had

become

part of structure, the structure of both Great and Little

traditions, the

gitimated

paradox existed that rejection of structure was

by recourse

to structure, as in

Europe

le-

the Protestants

appealed to the simple, communitarian church of the founding fathers as their

paradigm for rejection of the Catholic

formalism intervening between the pristine states

pharisaicai

and contemporary

of Christianity. But once this has been done

we

cannot

speak any more of "anti" structure, but only of "counter" structure.

Ancient Hindu scriptures were cited by the Virasaivas to

support a return to immediate experience. "Alienation from the

immediate environment can mean continuity with an older Protest can take place in the very ideals" (p. 33).

The danger

in

doing

thereby already puts one's foot on the escalator. Liminality

fold has begun. linguistics

is

this

is,

first

of course, that one

rung of the structural

terminating; the return to the structural

Ramanujan, since he

and a literary

name

ideal.

of one's opponents'

critic,

is

at

once

a professor of

saw the Virasaiva return

to struc-

ture via counter-structure in terms of the rhetorical structure of

Metaphors of Anti-structure their literary output.

I

will not enter

its

technical dimension here,

except to echo his conclusion that "spontaneity has rhetorical structure;

no

free verse

289

its

own

truly free," and that "with-

is

out a repertoire of structures to rely on, there can be no spontaneity" (p. 38).

The common Hindu

stock of similes, analogies,

drawn upon in the VIrasaiva poetry although used in new and startling ways while the apparently inspirational poems can be shown to have a consistent metrical structure, characterized by what Roman Jakobson has called "grammatical

and metaphors

is

—

parallelism," as well as other

the

American

major symmetries and patterns. In

tradition the poetry of

Walt Whitman might pro-

vide an apt analogy.

To

summarize

collapses

drastically: VIrasaiva protest

and rejects both

and

traditions

social bondedness. In its

becomes counterstructural

it

initially

and regional structures and source of

stresses mystical experience as the basic

human meaning and expression

all-India

mysticism

developing group

socially

and culturally

and ransacks past traditions to validate immediate experience.

For analyzing the next stage Redfield's and

Little traditions

how

for example,

becomes

distinction

useful again.

between Great

Ramanujan

has shown,

in the course of time the VIrasaiva heretics are

canonized; temples are erected to them, Sanskrit hagiographies are

composed about them. Not only

local legend

and

ritual,

but

an elaborate theology assimilating various Great tradition ele-

ments

may grow around new

founders of a

—

movements by the first all

caste,

them.

They become,

and are defied

as the Jains, originally a

in turn

Hindu

retrospect,

in

by new

heresy,

egalitarian

were defied from

VTrasaivas. Anthropologists should take note

this that a scientific

study of any component of Indian re-

from jati-system

to Jain ideology, at a given point in his-

ligion,

tory, should really take into account and represent

by appro-

priate constructs the total field of Indian religion as context. It is

phor

now

time to look more closely at the structure of meta-

in these religious contexts.

body"

is

We

have already seen

stated as being in relation to

how

what VIrasaiva poets

"the call

Dramas,

290

Fields,

and Metaphors

jangama, "the moving," and "the temple" to sthavara "the standing."

Although each of these terms

vocal symbol, there

is

is

what

the ensemble of referents.

would

call a

multi-

and analogy between

sufficient similarity

the various referents of each symbol for

I

it

to represent fairly well

One approach

to the study of meta-

phor, which draws somewhat on Levi-Strauss, Jakobson, and

Noam Chomsky,

is

Elli

Kongas Maranda's

discussion in her recent

"The Logic of Riddles" (1971: 193-194). She relates metaphors to the concepts "analogy" and "metonymy," accepting

article

Aristotle's definition of the

first:

"There

is

an analogy whenever

there are four terms such that the relation between the second

and the

between the fourth and the third," Analogy is a "technique of reasoning, resting on two kinds of connectives between phenomena: similarity and contiguity, in other words metaphor and metonymy. In the analogy formula [therefore] two members in the same structural position (A and C) constitute a sign, a metaphor in which one of them (A) is the signans, or the 'signifier,' and the other (C) is the signatum, or the 'signified.' The members on one side of the equation mark are in a metonymic relation to each other (A and B)." Thus, in the analogy, she arranges metaphor and first is

for example,

similar to that

A/B

= C/D.

.

metonymy

as in the

.

.

following diagram:

ANALOGY METAPHOR

tA/ "Metonymy equation of

is

two

SIGNANS

=

C SIGNATUM /

thus the relation of

two

terms; metaphor, the

terms." In the Virasaiva

Ramanujan an analogy

is

temple/ sthavara (standing)

poem

translated

by

constructed in the following terms:

= body /jangama

(moving).

The

re-

between sthavara to temple is similar to that between jangama and body. This analogy is then subjected to evaluation. In the abstract it may be true that the relation between stasis and

lation

temple

is

similar to the relation

between dynamis and body, but

Metaphors of Anti-structure the context of the

standing shall

fall

poem

introduces the paradox that "things

but the moving

While the temple begins

shall

ever stay"

(my

italics).

metaphor of the body, the poem

as a

suggests that in reality, even in eternity, there

body

291

no temple, only

is

(shades of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the

body), but that the body has in

it

the holiness

metaphorically ascribed to the temple: "the

Basavanna puts

it.

I

would

-f-

::

is

only

the shrine," as

structure: anti-structure

liminality). Sthdvara

communitas. For sthdvara,

which

posit another metaphorical relation-

ship here: sthdvara: jangama

communitas

body

as

is

to

jangama

Ramanujan

(that

as structure

is

is,

to

writes, has such social

structural connotations as "status, estate, a piece of property."

And

jangama,

like the transitional

period in

rites

of passage repre-

sents

"moving, anything given to going and coming." The jan-

gama

in VTrasaiva religion represents a

a "religious

from

man who

permanently liminal man,

moving Even those who did not wander themselves bound by the strict rules of

has renounced world and home,

village to village" (p. 21).

physically did not feel caste or kinship.

"VIrasaiva

Ramanujan,

movement was

in his exposition, stresses that the

a social

upheaval

by and

for the poor,

the lowcaste and the outcaste against the rich and the privileged" (p. 21), a

communitas based on the

favor of immediate experience the meeting rivers" their

dissolution of caste ties in

—for the Vlrasaivas, "the Lord of

which regularly appears

as

the refrain of

poems, does not exactly refer to the personal Siva of the

Hindu pantheon, but rather to the experience of samddhi in which such distinctions as I-Thou, God-human, subject-object, become unimportant and all seems to be one or nothing, in the sense that language has nothing positive to say about such an

experience. This position,

mysticism,

is

common

of Zen religion D. T. Suzuki

when he

to both Eastern and

(On

Indian

Mahay ana Buddhism),

writes:

Our language

is

the product of a world of

numbers and individuals of is most usefully applicable Indian Mahay ana). But our experi-

todays and yesterdays and tomorrows, and to this

Western

perhaps most clearly formulated by the great scholar

world (known

as loka in

Dramas,

292

ences have

it

and Metaphors

Fields,

that our

world extends beyond that

loka, that there

is

another called by Buddhists loka-uttara, a "transcendental world", and that

when

language

is

forced to be used for things of this world,

comes warped and assumes

oxymora

kinds of crookedness:

all

it

be-

["fig-

ures of speech with pointed conjunction of seeming contradictories, 'faith unfaithful

e.g.,

kept him falsely true/ " Oxford English Dic-

tionary], paradoxes, contradictions, contortions, absurdities, oddities,

ambiguities, and irrationalities. it.

we

It is

apply

to that

it

my

Language itself is not to be blamed for who, ignorant of its proper functions, try to for which it was never intended [1968:243].

ourselves

no accident that this jangama or mystical rhetoric, charged with oxymora and metaphors, is very often characteristic of movements of egalitarian, popular protest during liminal periods of history when social, economic, and intellectual structures showing great stability and consistency over long periods of time begin to show signs of breaking up and become objects of questioning both in structural and anti-structural terms. We have been accustomed to thinking of mystical utterance as In

view

it

is

characterizing solitary individuals meditating or contemplating in

mountain, desert, or monastic

cell,

and to see

in

it

almost any-

thing but a social fact. But the continuous operational conjunction of such language with

the Friends of leads

me

uttered

God

refers

when is

it

is,

common

withdrawal has

with the Rhineland mystics, for example,

metaphorically

"Withdrawal" there this

communitas type,

a

think that at least something of what

to

mention terms but

movements of

is

to

extant

is

"detachment," "disinterest," there to the mystical lexicon of

being

relationships.

social

many

is,

to

cultures,

not from humanity, but from structure

become too long

petrified in a specific shape.

Here

it

not merely a question of one component of the social structure,

a class or caste or ethnic group, seeking to better

within a total structural system, nor to

make

its

a

circumstances

new

structural

system free from the exploitative tendencies inherent in the structure of

its

men from

predecessor. all

What

is

being sought

structural limitations, to

make

is

emancipation of

a mystical desert out-

Metaphors of Anti-structure side structure itself in

pure nothingness,"

though

this

293

which all can be one, ein bloss niht, "a Western mystic Eckhart once wrote

as the

"nothingness" has to be seen as standing in meta-

phorical opposition to the "somethingness" of a historically derived structure.

It

has as yet content but no manifest structure,

only explosively stated anti-structure. History will of course un-

pack

its

latent structure, especially as experience encounters tradi-

tional structures of culture

the Experience

now

and thought. Those

who

have had

have to confront the establishments both

of Great and Little traditions as they try to realize their vision

Now

in social relational terms.

becomes

vision

sect,

then church,

then in some cases dominant political system or a prop for one

communitas resurges once more against

until

spaces and instants every structure

provide

—since

between

its

is

it

from the

by

forced

its

liminai

nature to

on distance and discontinuity and these interstitial spaces provide homes for

structure depends

units,

anti-structural visions, thoughts,

and ultimately behaviors. Com-

plex societies, too, provide a multiplicity of structural subsystems,

manifest or latent, forming a field propitious for the growth of counterstructures, as individuals pass between subsystems. ciety

is

a process

which embraces the

words and work, of

religious

and isolated prophets,

as

much

and

visions

and

political

reflections, the

mendicants,

exiles,

of crowds and

as the activities

masses, the ceremonies of the

forum and marketplace, and

deeds of legislators, judges, and

priests. If

such seemingly solitary or withdrawn zeros as well as pluses, in as well as structure,

on

these fields,

we

and

see

it as

the

having

and minuses and

central developments, anti-structure

and that there

various levels

then

its

we can

purifiers,

So-

in

is

a constant interplay

between

various sectors of sociocultural

will begin to avoid

some of the

difficulties

in-

herent in systems of thought which recognize only structurally positive values, rules,

and components; and these are only positive

because they are the rules recognized as legitimate

and least

intellectual elites at a given time.

one half of human

by

the political

Such systems throw out

sociality, the creative

at

(and also destruc-

Dramas,

294

Fields,

and Metaphors

which insists on active, extant, vital unity, and upon novelty and extemporization in styles of human interrelations. But it should also be observed that fanaticism and intolerance tend to characterize movements that stress communitas as the tive) half

counterstructural negation of structure. Iconoclasts, evangelists,

Roundheads,

well as mystics, poets, and

as

their ranks.

The

Virasaivas

the

the

khanda, two

Sikhs,

were

saints,

abound

fierce evangelists; the

in

symbol of

curved swords, a double-edged

dagger, and a discus, symbolizes martial virtue as well as spiritual

power. "Liberty, fraternity and equality" were shouts that drove Bonaparte on to seize an imperial crown. Societies

which

stress

structure

—and

establish

mystiques of

hierarchy and status, setting unalterable divisions and distances

between categories and groups of human beings fanatical in the eradication of

tion of groups

—become equally

communitas values and the

liquida-

which outstandingly exemplify them. Often we

find communitarians unforgivingly arrayed against structuralists,

and vice

versa.

The

historical expression.

preach love

as a

basic cleavage in social

Those

major

man

religions or humanistic systems

ethical principle

—and

all

versal" religions profess this value as central

what

is

"man-to-man-ness,"

meant by

love.

The

li

this reconciliation

which

so-called "uni-

—beam

version of the Confucian reconciliation between

mony" and

finds frequent

and

out some jen, "cere-

being broadly

great religious systems harmonize

rather than oppose structure and communitas and call the resul-

"body" of the

tant total field the

faithful, the

vmrna ("comity")

of Islam, or some similar term which reconciles love with law,

communitas with

structure. In fact, neither

law nor love can be

when they are implacably opposed; both more so, when masked as moral excellence.

such the

Both structure and anti-structure

are then hate;

all

are represented in the con-

crete imageries and acts of the ritual process in tribal and peasant societies.

Such

societies are

nonverbal symbols

no

may even

less

Man

than

we

are,

and

afford swifter access to the

their

human

matter than sophistries and apologetics. There structure and anti-

Metaphors of Anti-structure have

structure

not become as yet generalized

295

opposed

into

ideological positions, well adapted to political manipulation, but

the metaphors of iconoclasm exist within the texture of cere-

monies heavily endowed with icons. The construction and de-

moments of a single they have been made by

struction of images are descriptions, since

to describe adequately the

ritual,

but

this will

alien observers, fail

communitas aspect of

metaphorical actions and their

anti-structural

symbolic components

be increasingly remedied

of these cultures describe what

it

has

Most

ritual process.

in

tribal

members

as literate

meant to them to

partici-

pate collectively in ritual of an anti-structural tenor.

Here

novels,

and poetry currently being published

new

nations

plays,

in the

—

form an important body of data personal documents that give us what Znaniecki calls the "humanistic coefficient" of a social analysis.

An

analogous instance

may

my

be helpful here. In

cur-

rent study of pilgrimage processes in historical religions such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism,

Hinduism, and Buddhism,

I

am

be-

ginning to accumulate evidence from pilgrims' narratives that experiences of a communitas type are often the subjective correlates of constellations of

symbols and metaphors objectively

indicative of anti-structure. Nevertheless, despite this grave la-

cuna about the presence of communitas give one example out of tribal ritual

many

in tribal limina,

may be

that

from

cited

of the deliberate effacement or destruction of

plex structures of symbols, each of

which

is

a

I

will

studies of

com-

semantic system

of great complexity.

These instances of orthodox and permitted iconoclasm always take place in the liminal or marginal phase of major rites of passage, in the portion of institutionalized time assigned to the

portrayal of anti-structure. Sometimes they are associated with

an act of act

sacrifice,

but often they occur independently of such an

though they have

a sacrificial character.

One

of the best ex-

amples of the metaphorical destruction of structure that

Audrey Richards' account of the Bemba ceremony at puberty, Chisungu (1956). Among

given in

I

know

is

girl's initiation

the

Bemba of

Dramas,

296

Fields,

and Metaphors

northeastern Zambia the chiswigii acts

ritual

—which

a

and

is

[is]

which descent man, and in which

17).

ate

is

reckoned through the

a

man comes

woman

modeling of figurines

which

(p.

the elabor-

is

—Richards counted forty-two —over several days of the protracted

in clay

in

lasted twenty-three days

been longer, with

and not

with her husband's"

of the distinctive features of this ceremony

one performance she studied ritual,

by which

to live with his wife's rela-

woman

marriage rather than a

One

marriage of a young

united to the family group of his bride, in a

tribe in

the

— preceding the

dancing, and the

an "integral part of the series of ceremonies

bridegroom

tives at

sequence of

a long, elaborate

include miming, singing,

handling of sacred objects girl,

is

many symbolic

and

in the past

may

have

actions taking place each day.

Further pottery figurines or "emblems," made in a hut are

known

as

mbusa; the mistress of ceremonies

is

(all

known

as

nachimbusa, or "mother" of the emblems) are suddenly pulled to pieces

two hours

The emblems

after the ensemble of

is

completed.

and typical cultural settings of her coming structural

values,

position as wife and mother.

Each has

cryptic song attached to

and

her social benefit senior

emblems

are used to teach the girl-novice the duties, norms,

by

it,

is

a specific ritual

the senior ladies present, especially

"mother of the emblems."

name,

Dr.

and

Richards

by

the

Fr.

E.

Labreque, of the Missionary White Fathers, have collected material

on these didactic

add up to

mature woman's structural that of the

tensions

a

fairly

full

is

particularly

account of

fate in a matrilineal society,

Bemba, with many of

also

much

exegeses. Richards' appendix to Chi-

sungu, giving informants' interpretations of mbusa, valuable. In brief, they

a

interpreted to the girl for

represented —

as

I

its

have

structural

indicated

such

a as

problems and in

chapter

4,

my

book The Forest of Symbols (1967:193-194). Richards shows how the emblems refer, inter

"Betwixt and Between," of

alia,

to

domestic duties, agricultural duties, the obligations of

husband and wife, obligations to other

relatives, the duties

and

circumstances of legitimate motherhood, the authority of chiefs,

Metaphors of Anti-structure

297

and to the general ethics incumbent upon mature Bemba. In Richards' words: In terms of time spent, the ritual handling

the

The

rite.

and presentation of the

more hours than any other

sacred emblems probably occupied

part of

handling, preparation and presentation of the pottery

emblems and the

collection of the

woodland and domestic mbusa

cost

work on

The much time and energy. emblems in the [novice's] hut has been described and it will be remembered that this long day's work was destroyed at the end of the very same day. Apart from the making and finding of mbusa, their presentation by the different women in order of rank seemed, to me at least, the most interminable part of the chisungu rite the organizers

.

.

long day's

.

the pottery

.

.

since

the

.

involved the singing of every doggerel

it

rhyme

(interpreting

meaning of each mbusa) some twenty times or more [1956:

The

swift destruction of images and

structed

emblems laboriously con-

not precisely comparable to the demolition of religious

is

statues, paintings,

Banaras,

138].

Henry

and icons by Byzantine iconoclasts, Moguls

in

VIII's commissioners, Cromwell's Roundheads, or

Scottish Covenanters. But behind

perhaps the same

it lies

human

impulse to assert the contrary value to structure that distances

and distinguishes man from man and man from absolute

reality,

The important

describing the continuous in discontinuous terms.

who use metaphorical means is to build up as they may a structure of ideas, embodied in sym-

thing for those elaborately as bols,

and

which

a structure of social positions,

will

keep chaos

at

bay and create

a

symbolically expressed,

mapped

area of security.

Elaboration may, as in Chinese cosmological schemes, obsessional in character.

of what

lies at

Then

a

metaphorical statement

become is made

once between the categories of structure ("inner

space") and outside the total system ("outer space"). Here words

prove

useless, exegesis fails,

and there

to express a positive experience

by

is

nothing

a negative

left to

do but

metaphorical act

— to destroy the elaborate structure one has made and admit transcendence, that

is,

over

all

that one's culture has been able to say

about the experience of those

who

bear or have borne

it

to

its

Dramas,

298

Fields,

and Metaphors

present point in time. Actually, what

may

dent

Only

who know how

those

Mere

has been built.

conceptually transcen-

literal

a nonverbal

social reality

way

—communitas

know how

to build

destruction

destruction illustrated in ritual. is

is

well be experimentally immanent

is

itself.

to collapse

what

not the metaphorical

Here the metaphor of destruction

of expressing a positive, continuous aspect of

which tends

to escape the discontinuous character

of most codes of communication, including linguistic codes. Per-

haps ture

this is is

because

man may

still

be an evolving species;

his fu-

in his present, but as yet unarticulated, for articulation

is

Western thinkers share with and both of us reveal the dilemma in our non-

the presence of the past. This state the aborigines,

verbal symbols, in our metaphors. Chisungu,

we might

say in

conclusion, presents ritual and antiritual, in a relation of comple-

mentarity rather than contradiction. Structure and anti-structure are not Cain and Abel, to use a

metaphor familiar to ourselves;

they are rather Blake's Contraries that must be "redeemed by destroying the Negation." Otherwise

we must

all

perish, for be-

hind specific historical and cultural developments, East versus

West, hierarchical versus

communism,

egalitarian systems, individualism versus

the simple fact that

lies

an anti-structural entity,

who grows

man

is

both

a structural

and

through anti-structure and

conserves through structure.

References

Durkheim, Emile. Tr.

Swain.

J. S.

1961.

Gennep, Arnold van.

& Kegan Macauliffe,

The Elementary Forms

New York: i960.

of Religious Life.

Collier. First published 191

The

2.

Rites of Passage. London: Routledge

Paul.

M.

J.

1909.

The Sikh

Religion. Oxford:

The Clarendon

Press.

Maranda,

Elli

Kongas. 1971. "The Logic of Riddles." In Structural

Analysis of Oral Tradition } eds. P. and E. K. Maranda. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Nelson, Benjamin. 1971. "Civilizational Complexes and Interciviliza-

Metaphors of Anti-structure tional Encounters."

ciation Conference,

Paper read August 30.

at the

299

American Sociological Asso-

Ramanujan, A. K. 1971. "Structure and Anti-structure: The VIrasaiva Example." Paper given at the Seminar on Aspects of Religion in South Asia at the School of Oriental and African Languages, University of London. 1973. Speaking of Siva. Baltimore: Penguin Books. .

Richards, Audrey. 1956. Chisungu. London: Faber and Faber. Smith, Howard D. 1971. Chinese Religions from 1000 b.c. to the

Present Day. Suzuki, D. T.

New York: 1968.

On

Holt Paperbacks. Indian

First published 1968.

Mahay ana Buddhism.

New

York:

Harper Torchbooks. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure. Chicago: Aldine. 1970. The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell Paperbacks. First .

published 1967. Uberoi, J. Singh. 1967. "Sikhism and Indian Society," Transactions of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study , vol. 4. Simla.

Index

Action, symbolic and

ritual,

$$,

$6

Actors in political field, 127 African cultures, and symbol systems,

163-164

Agnes,

St.,

martyr, 86

Aldama, Juan, 102, 107, 112 Alexander III, pope, 61, 73, 88,

102, 112; as

of,

102,

in

Hidalgo, 119,

109,

symbol, 112

disagreement

no,

III,

with

11 2-1 13,

121

Anamnesis, 208 Anouilh, Jean, 86 Anthropologists' handling of history, Anti-structure, 45, 46, 50, 202, 272298 passim; see also Structure and anti-structure, pairs of opposed terms Archetype, conceptual, 26-27, 28 Arena, 98, 102, 103, 129, 135-136;

definitions in

discussed,

17,

Hidalgo Insurrection,

132-135; 102,

128,

139-140

Ashram, system of 2

martyr, 72, 74, 85-86, 89; chronology, 73; refuses to sign Constitutions of Clarendon, 77; as

(stages in life),

75-277

Atemporal structure, 35-37 Augustine, St., 151, 161, 242 Azcarate, Juan Francisco de,

and bishops, 80-

92-94; forced to pay fines and debts, 81-83; h"s t° point, 84; says St. Stephen's Mass, 84-87; and barons, 84, 94-95; appeals to pope, 93; refuses sentence

83,

88,

90,

w

125; battle

Allende, Ignacio, 102, 103, 107, 113, 115, 117-118, 124-125; leader of criollos,

y

82;

origins, 77, 86, 95;

77-78,

93

Alhondiga granary,

about, 62-63; his pride and humility, 66 88-89; as chancellor, 70,

and leaves council, 95 Berington, Joseph, 62 Bernstein, Basil, 156 Betrayal, a myth of culture, 122-124 Bierstedt, Robert, 32 Black, Max, 25, 27-28, 20-30

Blake, William, 50, 68, 114, 151, 159, 256, 260, 268, 269, 287, 298 Body symbols: among the Dogon, 161-162; in India, 281-282

Boehme, Jakob, 159 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 103, 137, 142 Breach, in social drama, 38

Brown, Jerald, 18 Brown, Paul Alonzo,

Brown Virgin

63

Guadalupe, Virgin of Guadalupe of

see

Buber, Martin, 47, 251, 274 Bunge, Mario, 51-52 Burton, Sir Richard, 167

143,

144 Bailey, Frederick, 38, 129, 140 Barbarossa, see Frederick I

Barth, Frederick, 129, 140 Becket, St. Thomas, 23-58 passim; sources, 61-63, 69; controversy

Cabildos, "43.

municipal

local

councils,

"45

Caesaropapalism, 77, 151 Calame-Griaule, Madame

G.,

156-

164 Calleja,

Canon Casola,

General

Felix, 116,

law, 75, 76-77, 94

Canon

Pietro,

167

301

118,

120

302

Index

Cava, Ralph

della, 209,

Changes in political Chicago seminar, 54 ChisungUy 298

girls*

Christianity, ity,

226

field,

Council of Northampton,

42

initiation,

296-297,

and liberty and equal-

151

Church and

state,

71, 73, 79-

95

150; conflicts be-

tween, 60-61

Counterculture, 246, 254-255 Criollos, American-born persons of Spanish descent, 101, 115, 136-138; likened to earth beings, 10 1; in ferment in Latin America, 102; fail to support Hidalgo, 116, 118, 120, 137-138; in creative liminal position, 1 1 8- 1 19; European versus

Churchill, Winston, 63 Class structure of Mexico, 136-139

American

Cluniac reform, 61, 73, 77

cal

Cohen, Abner, 223 Commensality, 204, 272 Communitas, 45, 49, 201-202, 231;

cabildos,

defined, 274; as anti-structure, 4647; as prajna, intuition, 46-47; and structure, 46, 49, 54-55, 119, 178, 206, 208, 266-268, 294; in liminal-

and ritual, 56, 238; Hidalgo, symbol of, 100; pent up, as cause of primary process, in, 146; at Mecca, 168-169; ity, 47, 53, 201, 202, 232;

types of, 169; normative, 169, 212, 224, 232; existential, 169, 243;

and

party

criollos, 136-137; politi-

142;

and municipal

143-145;

revolutionary, of Guada-

of,

146-148; and lupe, 152

Our Lady

Crisis, in social

drama, 38-39, 103

Cyclical processes, 16

Debris theory of culture, 14 Deleury, G. A., 1 70-1 71, 194, 206-207 Descartes, Rene, 25 Deshen, Shlomo, 210-211 Diego, Juan, 105, 152 Dieterlen, Germaine, 156, 162, 165, 258

gemeinschaft

(community),

201;

Dogon, 156-165

universalistic,

202-205,

264;

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 54, 265 Douglas, Mary, 160

262,

regeneration of, 227-228; the undifferentiated whole, 237; aspirants 244-245; routinized, 248-249; disclosed by crisis, generating re-

to,

250-251; at Dunkirk, 250rock music, 262-263; timeless, 274, 285; as jen (humankindness), 284-285; as jangama (the moving), 286; see also Pilgrimage Comparative symbology, 7-8 Comte, Auguste, 24, 57 Conflict, 35; in medieval England, 60-61; between cross and sword, 91; between supporters of different Virgins, 117; of mestizos and ligions,

251; in

Indians against Spaniards, 127 Confucius, 283-284 Conscious agents, 17, 32 Consciousness and community, 45 Constitutions of Clarendon, 73, 75-

79 Contla, San Bernardino, 190-191 Cos, Dr., 150, 151

Dowse, Drama,

Ivor, 179 see Social

drama

Dunkirk, 250-251

Durkheim, Emile,

24,

$6^

57,

183-

184, 200, 202, 251,

274 Dynamics, social, 24 Earth: heroes' origin in, 10 1; shrines in Africa, 184-185, 197; indigenous people's power over, 234

reform; Cluniac, 61, Mexico, 150-15

Ecclesiastical 77; in

Eisenstadt, S. N., 223 Eliade, Mircea, 189, 239 Eliot, T. S., 62, 66 Empson, W., 234 Enthusiastic movements,

246, 248

Erikson, Erik, 259 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 184

Evenements, Paris 1968, no, 252 Exclusivity and inclusivity, 186 Extended-case history, 43

.

Index Fanon, Franz, 126 Fate, 67, 69 Ferdinand, Crown Prince, see Ferdinand VII Ferdinand VII, king of Spain, 103, 104,

Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe de Bajan Guanajuato, battle of, 112 Gulliver, Philip, 34

Had], see Pilgrimage and Mecca

142-143

126,

3°3

Fernandez, James, 247

Hamill, Hugh, 98, 102, 104-105,

Field, 17; social, 27; political, 42, 38;

124-125, 136-137, 138, 139 Hansa, Bhagwan Shri, 194-195

of Hidalgo Insurrection, 102, 126, 129-131, Firth,

136,

139; latent,

Raymond,

135,

277

33-34

Fitzstephen, William, 69-70, 80, 91 Foliot, Gilbert, bishop of London, 82-83, 90, 93 Fortes, Meyer, 184, 77,

Franciscans,

Frederick

I,

Germany,

185, 235

214,

245 Barbarossa, emperor of 105,

107,

120,

Hard

line of descent,

and soft

side,

235 Harris, Marvin, 36

Heidegger, Martin, 54 Heinlein, Robert, 263 Henry II, king of England, 69-70; struggle with Becket, 72-94; genealogy, 74; retreats before Becket, 91-92

73, 74, 78

French Revolution, 102, 151, 153 Freud, Sigmund, 27, 249, 257

Henry IV, emperor

Functionalism,

Henry, bishop of Winchester, 81, 83 Hidalgo Insurrection, 98-154 passim; chronology, sources, 100, 102;

31,

32

Gachupines, Spaniards, 136-138 Games theory,

107, 112, 118,

103;

140- 141

Gandhi, Mahatma,

243, 265

Garbett, Kingsley,

184-185

Gemeinschaft, community, 201 Gennep, Arnold van, 87, 195-196, 273; and tripartite movement in rites of passage, 13; and liminality, 47. 231

Genotypical and phenotypical goals, 67 Gilbert of London, see Foliot, Gilbert

Gluckman, M.

G., 176 Gnostics, 159, 161, 163, 234, 258 GofTman, Erving, 200

Goodman,

Paul, 201

Grace, 287 Great Tradition and Little Tradition, 188, 286, 289, 293

Greek tragedy,

67 Griaule, Marcel, 156-157 Grito (Cry) of Dolores, 99, 100- 101, 103,

107,

35,

"Growth" metaphors,

intended

24, 30-31

Guadalupe, see Virgin of Guadalupe, Pilgrimage, Symbol, and

as

protection

kingdom of Ferdinand VII,

of 104,

capture of Dolores, 108; 108; reaches Celaya, 109; primary process in, no; sack of Guanajuato, 112; taking of Valladolid, 115; failure of Criollo support, 116, 118; aims for Mexico City, 116117; battle of Monte de las Cruces, 116; defeat at Bridge of Calderon, 120

Hidalgo, Miguel, 98-154 passim; as father of his country, 99; as Captain General of America, 100, 109; at Literary and Social Club of Queretaro, 102-103; pulls his boots on, 107; makes Grito of Dolores, 108; takes up Guadalupe banner, 108, 152; as leader of Indians, no, 112;

excommunicated,

criollo,

115;

a

orders slaughter of 118, 148; stripped of 121, 122; betrayed and

117;

Spaniards,

command, captured

108, 143

of Germany,

73» 74

at

Nuestra

Guadalupe de Bajan,

Senora

de

122, 124-125;

executed, 125; develops cash crops

and industries among Indians,

130;

Index

304

Hidalgo, Miguel (cont.) activity

in

different

political fields,

1

social

and

30-1 31

Karve, Irawati, 205 Kern, Fritz, 61 Kierkegaard, Soren, 260

Hinduism, 275-278

Kirsch, A.

Hippies, 244, 246, 247, 261-265 Historians' aims, 1 31-132 Hobgood, John, 218, 225

Knowles,

Kuhn, Thomas,

tion

Indian miners of Guanajuato, heroes,

persuaded to turn against

followers of 116; Hidalgo, 126; cultural autonomy of 150; see also Indios Indigenism, 145-148 Indios, indigenous Americans, 10 1, insurrection,

societies,

14;

and liminal and liminoid processes, 16 Industrial revolution, 15, 16 Inferiority, structural, see

most

Lower-

status

Informants, and translation, 157-158 Ingham, John, 224 Initiation:

87;

the

into status of martyr, 72, Hidalgo Insurrection as,

101

Innovation, 15, 16, 18 Insurgentes, insurgents, 10 Interaction of two thoughts in metaphor, 29-30 Islam, 168-169, i73- J 74^ 177" 1 ? 8 * l 95 Iturbide, Agustin de, 99, 122, 125

Dom Bede, 170, 175 Jimenez, Luz, 203-204 Jouvenal, Bertrand de, 109

Jarett,

civil

Leach,

29, 31

and canon, 75

Edmund,

236

Leslie, Charles, 57

Levi-Strauss, Claude,

140,

236,

237,

B.,

174-175, 177-178, 198

Limina of history, 28; and the Mexican Revolution of Independence,

Mexican revolution Hidalgo Insurrec-

tribal

Law,

Lewis,

of, 98; see also

138-139, 152 Industrial and

76, 77, 80,

240-241, 246, 249, 254, 256, 262 Lewin, Kurt, 27, 33, 49, 128, 158

Icelandic saga, 40, 66-67, 68-69 Iconoclasm, 295-298 Images, in Mexico, 189 Imagination, creative, 51-52

112 Indians:

David, 63,

81, 89-90, 91, 92, 93

Humanistic coefficient, 17, 32-33 Humanization of non-human universe (Dogon), 160 Hume, David, 274 Hunt, Robert, 127

Independence,

Thomas, 200

Dom

98-99

Liminal place, 87 Liminal thinkers,

18, 28 Liminality, 231-270 passim; defined, 237; and taboos, 13-14; and communitas, 47; distinguished from

communitas, 52; of criollo middle position, 118; in Ndembu circumcision, 200-201; and invisibility, 232; and timelessness, 238-239; and masks, myths, and sacra, 239-240; and leveling and stripping, 241, 252, 259; as origin of philosophy and science, 242; and sexuality, 246-248; nature stressed over culture in, 253; an experimental region, 255, 263; and monsters, 256; ambiguity in, 274; see also Pilgrimages

Liminoid genres, 14, 15, 16, 17 Literary and Social Club of Queretaro,

102

Louis VII, king of France, 74, 78 Lowermost status, or structural inferiority,

231,

234,

237,

243-244,

265, 268

McHenry,

J.

Patrick,

112

Maine, Henry, 175-176 Maitland, Frederic William, 63 Malcolm X, 168-169, 195, 204 Maranda, Elli Kongas, 290 Marginals, 233

Index Marx, Karl, 24, 28, 242 Marxist analysis, 141 Masks, 239 Maximilian, emperor of Mexico, 123

Mendicancy, religious, 246 Merton, Robert, 201, 237 Mestizos, persons of mixed Spanish and Indian descent, born in the

New

World,

114

Metaphor, 24-32; defined, 25; using "growth" words, 24, 241; transformative, 25; using "machine" words, 25, 28; in Freud, 27-28; interaction view of, 29-30, 51; for natural or cultural, 32; fluid, 246; in Indian poetry, 280-283; for liminality, movement, 285; structure of, 290-

of

processes

society,

NjdTs Saga, 40 Northampton,

305

see

Council

of

de

Guadalupe

de

Northampton Nuestra

Senora

Bajan,

122

Hugo,

Nutini,

100

Nyakyusa, 254 Objectivity, 183-184 Oracle (journal), 262-264

Orectic pole of meaning, S5

Orozco, Jose,

Our Lady

09,

113

of Guadalupe, see Virgin

of Guadalupe of the Remedies, Virgin of the Remedies Oursel, Raymond, 1 80-1 81

Our Lady

see

Outsiderhood, 231, 233, 237

2 9*

Mexico, 96-154 pass'mi; political development of, 142-144; pilgrimages in, 186-187, 180-193, 203-204, 208-228; state, church, and pil-

grimage centers, 192 City, under threat from Hi-

Mexico

dalgo,

116-118

150,

179-180 Milman, Henry Hart, 62 Morelos, Jose Maria, 113, 115, 121,

150,

Mukanza

P.,

119,

154

village,

257 mystic,

106,

153,

211,

224

Ndembu,

15,

68;

also

Root paradigm

Parsons, Talcott, 248 Paz, Octavio,

113

25, 200 Peninsulars (Spaniards), see Gacbupines People, government by the, 142-143,

Pepper, Stephen C, 26 Pilgrimage: and communitas, 166-172, 182-183, 203-208, 211;

53,

164,

108,

240-250

Nelson, Benjamin, 275 Nicholas, Ralph, 129 Nisbet, Robert A., 24-25, 27-28

200,

6s

,

and

liminality, 6$, 166, 195-197; volun6$, 170-171, 175-176, 108-

taristic,

200;

and

obligatoriness,

65,

174-

of passage, 65, 195organization, 211-223; 198; 170, increase of numbers, 171-172; and social structure, 171, 106; catch177;

as

ment

areas, 178-179; and literature, sacralization of route, 182-

182;

49-50,

religious,

147 Pepita, 107

49

Municipal councils, see Cabildos Mysticism, 287, 291 Myth, 239; of Mexican revolutionary leaders, 122-124; of 113, mestizo culture, 114; of resurrection, 122; of via crucis, 123-124; of twin supernaturals among Dogon, 162-163; of unnatural acts, 256-

Nationalism,

81;

Peacock, James,

151

Milburn, R. L.

67,

defined, 17; scientific, 29; and fate, 67; of martyrdom, 74, 87, 92; see

Pascal. Blaise, 48

Mier, Fray Servando Teresa de, 106, 148,

Pallium, 86

Paradigm,

rite

183, 197-198, 210; neglect by social science and theology, 187-188; and the Protestant ethic, 188; brotherhoods, 100-191, 212; peripherality of shrines, 192-196, 227; routes.

Index

306

Pilgrimage (cont.) 194,

study

synchronic

224-226;

199,

promise,

the

208-223;

of,

212-215; parish visitations, 212; guilds, 219-221; solemnity, festivity,

and

trade, 221-223;

composite

centers, 223; stimulus to economy, 226-227; superimposition of

Processual units, 43 Prophetic break, 248 Protestants, 250, 277, 288 Puc, Father Panchito, 221

Queretaro conspiracy, 102-103, IQ6 Quest, in literature, 182 Quetzalcoatl, 152

shrines, 226-228

Pilgrimage centers: Acambaro, 186; Amecameca (Sacromonte), 193, 214, 223; Bar Yohai, 211; Buddhist, 167, 182; Campeche, 209; Canterbury, 66\ Chalma, 186, 191, 193, 199,

203-204,

Chichen 180-181,

218;

Itza,

225,

Chartres,

Compostella,

226; 226;

226;

Cozumel, 226;

Czenstochowa,

45; Elijah's cave, 211; English, 179; Esquipulas, 218;

Guadalupe, 209,

226-227; Joaseiro,

105,

45,

215-218,

187,

Jerusalem, 226;

189,

Izamal,

224;

Kailas

167,

193,

214, 173;

and Manas,

194; Knock, 45; Lourdes, 217; Ma Yuan, 168; Mecca, 167, 168-169, 175, 177-178, 195, 198, 204; Mexi-

223-225; Ocotlan, 189, 193, 211-215; Pandharpur, 170-171, 193104, 108, 205, 206-207; Paricutin,

can,

(Texas), 211; Remeof the, 186, 193; San Juan de los Lagos, 103-104; Tizimin, 211, 217, 219-223; Toledo, 209; Pedrito

dies,

226; 193,

Our Lady

Walsingham,

179;

Zapopan,

214

205; to Mecca, 168-169, Pandharpur, 170- 171, 198; to Compostella, 180- 181; in Mex-

Pilgrims,

204; to

ico, 186-187

Polanyi, M., 25 Poles of meaning, SSS^ 89, 257 Pollock, Frederick, 63

Poverty, 234, 243-245, 265-267 Power of the weak, 152, 234, 270 Prajna, intuition, 47-49, 52 Pre-Cortesian epoch, 148-150 Primary process, 110-112, 122-123 Principio, principle of government, also "the beginning," 144, 149 Processual analysis, 44-45

Race, differential support of Hidalgo by,

1

1

5-1 16

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R.,

24, 57,

140,

152, 236, 237

Ramanujan, A. K.,

245, 251-252, 279-

291

Reconquest of Mexico, 113, 149 Redfield, Robert, 188, 219, 220, 222, 286, 289 Redressive action, 30-41 Reed, Nelson, 239 Rees, Alwyn, 239 Reina, Ruben, 218 Reintegration phase of social drama,

4 f'4 2 Religion: 1

1

5-1 16,

politicized

150-15

genesis of, 250;

1 ;

by Spaniards, historical,

186;

movements of pro-

test and renewal, 278-293 Replication in history: reactivation of Shona mediums during rebellion, 184-185; communitas regenerated at the Izamal shrine after the conquest, 226-228; of myth and

ritual

in

Cruzob movement,

239;

Virasaivas' return to inspiration of traditions, 251; of

French Revolu-

tion, 252

Restricted code, 158 "Resurrection" of executed revolutionaries, 122

Reversal: of roles, 53; of history, 149 Revolutionary process, 102 Revolution, as primary process, rioiii

Revolution of Independence, Mexican, see Hidalgo Insurrection Riario, Juan Antonio, 107, 112, 130 Ricard, Robert, 105, 214 Richards, Audrey, Richards, I. A., 29

36, 258,

295-298

Index

307

Riesman, David, 233 Rimbaud, Arthur, 264

Spanish colonial system, 98

Rite of passage, 13, 196-197, 231-232, 240, 273; pilgrimage as, 65, 182; into nationhood, for Mexico, 99; tribal, 258-260; see also Liminality

Spiro, Melford, 134 Starkie, Walter, 190, 225 State and church in Middle Ages, 61

Speech (Dogon), 161-163

Ritual, 56, 238, 239, 249

Rivera, Diego, 99, 1 13 Robertson, James C, 62, 69, 70, 78, 81, 85, 89 Rock music, 262-265

Romano, V., 2 1 Root metaphor, 29, 48 Root paradigm, 15, 67-68,

75,

241, 269-270; social, defined, 201, 236-237, 272; Levi-Straussian, 236,

98;

96,

general properties of, 64; and communitas, 68; distinguished from quotidian model for behavior, 68; the Christian, 68, 69; of martyr-

dom,

Stephen, St., 73, 85-87, 92 Structuralism and processualism, 45; in Africa, 164 Structure, 288; social, in, 235-236,

240-241 Structure and anti-structure, pairs of opposed terms: ancestral shrines:

earth shrines,

184-185

anu(experience) anubhava bhava (The Experience), 286:

288

87-88, 92

bound:

Rosen, L., 236 Rosenberg, Harold, 14

caste:

free, 269

sannyas

(state of

being a

holy man), 276 centrality of state capitals:

Sacra, 239, 240 Sacromonte, see Pilgrimage centers:

Amecameca Samadhi,

the

experience,

religious

287, 291

Sandombu, 40-50

Rev.

107

finesse,

"hard"

A., 217 Sierra, Justo, 09-100, 102, 114

Shields,

J.

Social drama, 32, 33-45, 78-79,

ampton,

134;

Mexico,

99,

compared with revo-

lutionary process, 102 Social enterprises, 34, 35 Sovereignty, 103, 106, 142, 145 So:,

word

(a

Dogon

concept), 156-

"soft"

(Buber's): I-Thou, 47, 251 (customary usages regulating Chinese society): jen (human-

kindness), 283-285 and sacramental system, fixity: pilgrimage, travel, 167168, 171, 186, 207-208 military invaders: autochthonous people, 234 orthodox Hinduism: Virasaiva

movement, 279-280 phenotypical interests (in man): genotypical goals, 67

reform

(in

Mexico)

:

revolution,

"3 secondary process: primary pro-

165

Spaniards in Mexico, see

descent:

local

67;

71; a series in

114, 116, 126;

of

I-it It

of NjdVs Saga, 40; of Sandombu, 49-50; of Becket, 69; of Council of North17,

48

line

side of family, 235

Signatura Rerum, 159, 163 Sikhism, 278-279 Simson, Otto von, 188, 219, 226 Siquieros, David, 99 Smith, D. Howard, 283

and paradigms,

ters, 197

conservation: growth, 298 culture: nature, 252-253 differentiated system: undifferentiated whole, 234, 237 Vesprit de geovietrie: Vesprit de

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 236, 255

"Screw the Spaniards,"

pe-

of pilgrimage cen-

ripherality

Gachupmes

cess,

1

10-1

1

Index

308

Structure and anti-structure (cont.) exclusivity:

social

inclusivity,

1 86 sthavara (the standing; temple) jangama (the moving; body), 280-291 structure: communitas, 167, 171,

2 37 temporality:

238-

timelessness,

2 39

typeheads: rock ("a vital agent of discovery"), 262-264 vijnana,

reason:

prajna,

intui-

tion, 47-50

white (race): black, 168-169

worked

work

matter:

who

agents

255 Structure-anti-stxucture-counterstructure-restructuring, 275-294 Structure, temporal and atemporal, it,

Tallensi, 184-185 Temporal structure, 35-37, 43, 238

Tennyson, Alfred, 85 Theranthropic figures, 253 Thomas, St., see Becket, St. Thomas

Thompson,

J.

Eric

226

S.,

Time and social life, 23-24 Time of marvels, 239 Tolstoy, Leo, 243, 265 Turner, Edith, 1 80-181

Turner, Terence, 254 Turner, Victor: The

Drwns The

of AfForest of Symbols, 31, 296; Introduction to Forms of Symbolic Action, 55; "Mukanda: the Politics of a Nonfliction,

39,

^6\

44,

political Ritual," 44; Political

The

thropology, 42;

cess, 46-47, 48-49, 53, 6$,

272,

285;

An-

Ritual Pro169, 212,

Schism and Continuity,

35,44

3pi

Symbolic Action

in

BOOV

phors

Humar

VICTOR TURNER "One

of the

v

most imaginative commentati

contribution

in brilliant

colors.

He has

is field

here adds another

ny sources, including

dr,

both Richards and Levi-Strauss, but his a, s highly individual, developing even further his own special vocauuiary for key themes, and put forward with an air of strong personal conviction which gives the analysis great force. The seven essays include material from [Turner's] recent studies in Mexico and Europe, as well as from psychological, poetic, and religious literature, and from history. ... [It is a] rich, thoughtful, and theoretically stimulating book." —Times Literary Supplement .

.

.

ISBN 0-8014-9151-7

THE SERIES SYMBOL, MYTH, AND RITUAL General Editor:

VICTOR TURNER

This series provides a forum for current research on myth, ritual, and symbolism in anthropology and other related fields. The primary purpose is to introduce broadly comparative and theoretically significant anthropological studies on the role of symbols. Also included, however, are works in other scientific or humanistic disciplines that are seriously and creatively concerned with comparative symbology. The series maintains a balance between descriptive and analytic studies; the authors are both younger scholars and established figures of international reputation.

Cover photographs: Mexican image

Ndembu

Cornell Paperbacks

ikishi

of Christ's

masker

in

Scourging

at the Pillar.

circumcision

ritual.

Cornell University Press

ISBN D-flOm-TlSl-7