The Craft of Ritual Studies (Oxford Ritual Studies) [1 ed.] 9780195301427, 9780195301434, 0195301420

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The Craft of Ritual Studies

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The Craft of Ritual Studies RONALD L. GRIMES

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grimes, Ronald L., 1943– The craft of ritual studies / Ronald L. Grimes. pages cm ISBN 978-0-19-530142-7 (hardback)–ISBN 978-0-19-530143-4 (paperback) 1. Ritual. I. Title. BL600.R743 2013 203’.8-dc23 2013015628

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Dedicated to Karen McCarthy Brown in honor of her many crossings and in memory of Roy Rappaport (1926–1997), Catherine Bell (1953–2008), and Frits Staal (1930–2012), debating partners become ancestors

Craft: • an art, trade, or occupation requiring special skill, especially manual skill • to make or manufacture with skill and careful attention to detail • skill or ability used for bad purposes; cunning; deceit; guile —Dictionary.com It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it. —Jacob Bronowski • The list is the mark of a highly advanced, cultivated society because a list allows us to question the essential definitions. The essential definition is primitive compared with the list. • We like lists because we don’t want to die. —Umberto Eco

CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables xi List of Lists xiii List of Videos and Appendixes Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction

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PART I

METHOD

1 Performing Research and Teaching JOHN BOURKE AS A STUDENT OF RITUAL

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FROM SYMBOL AND CONQUEST TO THE CRAFT OF RITUAL STUDIES

2 Fieldworking Ritual PREPARING THE FIELD

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37 40

NEGOTIATING

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PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION INTERVIEWING

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3 Reading, Writing, and Mediatizing Ritual WRITING

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Description 62 Narration and Dialogue Argumentation 67

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Contents

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Explanation and Interpretation Ritual Criticism 71 PUBLISHING AND PRESENTING

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THE MEDIA OF STUDYING RITUAL

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PART II

4 Filming Fiesta

CA SE

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SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE SANTA FE FIESTA

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THE SANTA FE FIESTA, 2007 101

The Spring Events 105 Fiesta Begins 108 Fiesta Proclamations 109 The Entrada 110 Parades and the Queen’s Audience 114 The Fiesta Melodrama 114 The Pontifical Mass and the Mass of Thanksgiving Candlelight Procession 115

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AARON’S ZOZOBRA 116 BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE SANTA FE FIESTA

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RITUAL CRITICISM AND THE SANTA FE FIESTA

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FIELD AND HOME IN RITUAL STUDIES

5 Framing Fiesta

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THE SPANISH RECONQUEST, 711–1492 CEREMONIES OF POSSESSION

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THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO, 1519–1521 134 THE CONQUEST OF NEW MEXICO, 1598 THE PUEBLO REVOLT OF 1680

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THE RITUAL RECONQUEST OF SANTA FE, 1692

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THE MILITARY RECONQUESTS OF SANTA FE, 1693 AND 1696 THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES

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FESTIVITY, AMERICAN PAGEANTRY, AND THE MYTH OF SANTA FE: THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES 149 CONTOURS OF FIESTA HISTORY

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Contents

PART III

6 Theorizing Ritual

THEORY

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THE MEANING OF “THEORY” WORKING WITH THEORIES

Testing Theories 173 Constructing Theories

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7 Defining and Classifying Ritual USING THE TERM “RITUAL”

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EXAMPLES OF SCHOLARLY DEFINITIONS CLASSIFYING RITUALS RITUAL MODES

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8 Mapping Ritual

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RITUAL AND SPORT

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RITUAL AND MUSIC

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RITUAL AND THEATER RITUAL AS A DOMAIN

9 Elements of Ritual RITUAL ACTIONS RITUAL ACTORS

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242 248

RITUAL PLACES

256 262

RITUAL OBJECTS

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RITUAL LANGUAGES RITUAL GROUPS

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COMPARING RITUALS

RITUAL TIMES

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RITUAL STRUCTURES AND PROCESSES ELEMENTS AND DOMAINS

10 Dynamics of Ritual WHAT RITUALS DO

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RITUALS EMPOWER AND DISEMPOWER GROUPS RITUALS ATTUNE AND DISATTUNE BODIES

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Contents

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RITUALS REINFORCE THE STATUS QUO AND ENACT TRANSFORMATION RITUALS MAKE AND UNMAKE MEANING MODELING RITUAL

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REIMAGINING THEORY AND METHOD

Glossary 339 Sources Cited Notes 363 Index 393

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F I G U R E S A N D TA B L E S

Figure 8.1. Figure 9.1. Table 5.1. Table 7.1. Table 7.2. Table 8.1. Table 8.2. Table 9.1. Table 9.2.

Nested Genres of the Olympic Performance System 216 Elements of Ritual, Simplified 235 A Comparison of De Vargas’s Journals with the 2007 Entrada 144 Modes of Ritual 204 The Santa Fe Fiesta Contrasted with Wittenberg’s Lutherfest 209 A ritual is not . . . 211 A ritual is like . . . 212 Elements of Ritual, Expanded 237 The Elements in Four Domains 286

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LISTS

List 1. List 2. List 3. List 4. List 5. List 6. List 7. List 8. List 9. List 10. List 11. List 12. List 13. List 14. List 15. List 16. List 17.

Kinds of Interview Questions 48 Kinds of Research Questions 51 Kinds of Academic Writing 59 Family Characteristics of Ritual 194 Structures and Processes of Religion 197 Rites of Passage Theory 202 Ritual Moods 205 Ritual Actions 206 Similarities of the Santa Fe Fiesta and the Wittenberg Lutherfest 207 An Artist’s Notes for a Cover Design 231 Action Words 246 Ritual Roles 251 Kinds of Ritual Time 262 Kinds of Ritual Language 276 Collective Considerations in the Study of Ritual 280 Ritual Dynamics 295 A Theory of Ritual Symbols 320

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VIDEOS AND APPENDIXES

The Santa Fe Fiesta, a video album online at https://vimeo.com/album/1557600, is integral to chapter 4. Illustrative and supplementary videos are contained in two additional online albums: Ritual Creativity, Improvisation and the Arts, https://vimeo.com/album/ 1524902; Highgate, https://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/albums. References to specific sections of a video are coded by title or number, then minute and second separated by a colon. For example, 1:30–3:20 refers to a video beginning at one minute and thirty seconds and continuing through three minutes and twenty seconds. Appendixes for this book are online at oxrit.twohornedbull.ca/volumes/craft-ofritual-studies/ and on the author’s site at http://ronaldlgrimes.twohornedbull.ca/ craft.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to students who, through many years of research and teaching, consulted, supported, and contended with me. Some I engaged face-to-face, while others I tracked down and read. Some I taught; some taught me. In a few cases—especially rare, therefore especially treasured—we taught each other. I was greatly edified by working with several undergraduate, doctoral, and postdoctoral students at Radboud University Nijmegen, including Marga Altena, Sophie Bolt, Kim de Wildt, Meike Heessels, Damiaan Messing, Janneke Peelen, and Joanna Wojtkowiak, along with Olga Věra Cieslarová and Martin Pehal of Charles University, Prague. Whether just down the road or across an ocean, several collaborating colleagues helped enormously: Tom Driver, Barry Stephenson, Ute Hüsken, and Janet Walton. Also important were conversations with Radek Chlup, Phyllis Granoff, Bert Groen, Troy Messenger, Helen Phelan, Joe Roach, Koichi Shinohara, and Casey Sokol. I also thank Thomas Quartier for encouraging me to write the book and Eric Venbrux for including me in the Refiguring Death Rites project. Family members contributed to video projects that support this book. Susan Scott was my ever watchful, always astute editorial consultant. Bryn ScottGrimes, my fast-learning field research assistant, sometimes ran a second camera and made several videos. Cailleah Scott-Grimes contributed an evocative video. I am grateful to the many staff at Oxford University Press whose craft is everywhere evident in this book: Cynthia Read, Charlotte Steinhardt, Sasha Grossman, and Gwen Colvin. My appreciation goes to several universities for inviting me to present parts of this book in lectures, panels, and workshops: Charles University Prague, Denison University, Dortmund University, Emory University, Hamilton College, Radboud University Nijmegen, Union Theological Seminary, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Bern, the University of Colorado, the University of Exeter, the

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Acknowledg ments

University of Heidelberg, the University of Limerick, the University of Lund, the University of Oslo, and Yale University. Work on this publication was also financially supported by the Scientific Development Program of Charles University in Prague (PRVOUK) No. 13, Rationality in Human Sciences subprogram, Cultures as World Metaphors. I am especially grateful to Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music, which provided me with a fellowship without which I would not have had the time, space, and financial support to complete the video project, Ritual Creativity, Improvisation, and the Arts, and to finish this book.

The Craft of Ritual Studies

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Introduction

However the brain works, mine depends heavily on eye-hand coordination. “The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.”1 I enjoy making things with my hands and giving them away. Persistently reflexive, I also take delight in thinking about making. I collect found objects with which to make things. To keep up with the accumulative mess, I make lists. To get oriented I tell stories. I slide readily from things manual and visual to things verbal and conceptual. I reason from particular to general, narrate from present to past, and doggedly cycle between the down-and-dirty details of ethnographic research and the abstractions of philosophical reflection. This combination has led inexorably to conducting field research with a camera in my hands and to a book designed accordingly: first a method, then a case, and finally a theory. Part I provides methodological orientation for studying ritual by laying out the basics of participant observation, interviewing, and videography. Part II, an online case study of the Santa Fe Fiesta coupled with analysis of the videos that constitute the case, is followed by a history of the fiesta’s predecessors. Part III theorizes ritual by considering its definitions, cultural locations, elements, and dynamics. The three parts—method, case, and theory—play off each other. Their relationship is circular and interactive rather than linear or hierarchical. I imagine this volume as a book for the hand even though it is not a step-by-step, how-to book. Whether it is actually a handbook, imagining how the finished product would fit into the palm sometimes kept me writing. The result is a written volume accompanied by online videos, a hybrid without a proper—or at least a nice— name. In New Mexico such creatures, even when they are humans, are dubbed “coyotes.” In English royal history such offspring, especially if they aspired to high office, were given less kind names. Even though my intention is to orient readers, the initial effect of these reflexive ruminations on the study of ritual may be disorientation. Aimed at enhancing the dexterity of ritual studies researchers, the book may nevertheless induce disorientation, awkwardness, and self-consciousness, but students of ritual shouldn’t worry too much about these feelings, since they usually evaporate quickly. Although the book and its accompanying online videos are designed with classrooms in mind, their argument resembles an extended position paper more 3

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the craft of ritual studies

than an introductory textbook. Whereas textbooks provide balanced surveys of a field, summarizing key ideas and introducing major thinkers, I am articulating a position by connecting the dots of my own research on ritual. To make the through-line of the argument more visible, thus more vulnerable, colleagues appear mainly in endnotes. Like the little girl instructed to be sure of her meaning before she spoke, I approached the writing task asking, “How can I know what I think till I see what I say?”2 My research on ritual began with fieldwork in 1973 on the Santa Fe Fiesta and ended in 2012 as it began, with the Santa Fe Fiesta. I almost called this Endings in Ritual Studies. The title would have seemed to complete Beginnings in Ritual Studies, bringing to a conclusion what that book initiated. But in the final analysis, there is no final analysis. I found that I could not write something that I or anyone else would take as “the last word.” So The Craft of Ritual Studies is an ending only in the sense that it is the most complete statement of what I have to say about the study of ritual. If for others it is a fruitful beginning, I will rest content. Some who study ritual consider their labor a science; others regard it as an art. However, I’ve come to consider ritual studies a craft. Craft is art’s practical-minded, hands-on, manual-laborer cousin. When I was a high school student, a teacher rebuked me for taking woodworking and typing, both courses then labeled “manual arts.” I was puzzled at being instructed that such subjects were mere crafts, neither true arts nor very academic and thus not for students like me. Only girls took typing, and only dunderheads took shop or auto mechanics. What kind of student was I? The sort, my teacher retorted, who should take Latin (forget Spanish), because I was going on to university. Obediently, I took that dead language, but defiantly, I also took shop and typing, which have served me more faithfully than Latin. The supposedly higher “language arts” would have served me more effectively if I had chosen to learn Spanish. Latin might have served me well if I had eventually studied medieval European liturgies instead of contemporary rituals. As a manual art, or craft, ritual studies may lack the clout of science, the venerability of Latin, and the elevation of fine art, but it should not lack utility. If you can’t put your hand to this book and use it, something has gone awry. Unlike art, which, they say, cannot be taught because it is the issue of genius rather than the outcome of manuals, the craft of ritual studies should be as utilitarian and easy on the environment as a good Dutch bike. Ritual studies should be as beautifully proportioned as an Arts and Crafts–style Morris chair and as tasty as artisanal bread or your local craft beer. If you think of the study of ritual as a science, you will aspire to be systematic and search for rules, if not laws. If you think of ritual studies research as an art, you will think of systems as prisons; you will suppose that there are few, if any, laws; and you will consider rules as social conventions, there for you break or transcend. If you are really, really smart, you will suspect that it’s all too easy—and likely damaging—to overdraw the differences between science and art. So I take a middle path.

Introduc tion

5

To treat ritual studies as a manual art, an activity of the hands, arises from a conviction that theorizing, like ritualizing, is inescapably embodied. The trouble is that we human beings are not necessarily articulate about that which we embody. Ask someone walking in a procession or exiting the throes of trance, “Why ritual?” and your question will barely elicit a glancing shrug, “Why not?” Persist questioning and you may hear, “Because we always have done so” or “Because our ancestors did so” or “Because doing so is a good thing.” Such answers are about as satisfying to a student of ritual as the answers that great dancers or star athletes give immediately after stellar performances. The relevance of ritual is far from evident to students. Even though an academic ethos is supposed to be more reflective than a ritualistic one, a professor asking a room full of students, “Why study ritual (or anything else for that matter)?” often hears responses that are not all that different from those tendered by ritualists, ballerinas, and hockey players: “Because it’s what you do in university” or “Because my parents want me to.” In both academic and ceremonial circumstances, such replies have something vaguely honest but strangely comical about them. Students nearing the end of a course on ritual sometimes turn the tables, asking me the question I asked them at the beginning of the course: “So, Dr. Grimes, why do you study ritual?” The question is genuine, because by now they have figured out that I don’t study it because I was cradled in it or am enamored with it. I chant them a bit of Latin: “Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto.” Terence, a Roman comedy writer and the son of a slave mother, offered this wry retort to a difficult question: “I am a human being, so nothing human is foreign to me.” To avoid presumption I edit Terence as I appropriate him. I change “is” to “ought to be.” I study ritual because nothing human ought to be foreign to me. Some human activities, ritual among them, seem persistently odd. I believe we should study most intensely those things that seem most foreign to our own experience. The more “other” something human feels, the less human we become if we do not query it. So my somewhat longer, non-Latinate answer to the probing student question is something like: “I study ritual because I don’t quite get it, but apparently some other people do. For that reason, studying ritual forces me to pose a double-edged question: How come they get it and I don’t?” How is it that ritual, which can appear so natural in some settings, seems so contrived in others? How can it seem so utterly essential even to people who don’t get it? One can study ritual either because it makes so much obvious sense or because it makes no sense whatever. Either motive will do. If something seems not only foreign, but alternately weak and powerful, as is the case with ritual, this combination should alert us that studying diligently is imperative. In a technocratic world, ritual can seem disabled, a mere dependent variable, and yet ritual also is said to marshal enormous power. It keeps Toyota factories running. It enabled Christendom to rule much of the world. It empowered the terrorists who took down the Towers. We hear that it keeps the Dalai Lama from being consumed with rage at China. We are told

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that it transformed young Germans into Nazi soldiers. So we had better study ritual; our humanity depends on it. Ritual studies encompasses ritual in all its forms—religious and nonreligious, collective and individual, transformative and confirmative, textually prescribed and improvised, traditional and invented, long-lived and short-lived, emerging and declining, change-inducing and change-resisting. Interdisciplinary in approach and cross-cultural in scope, ritual studies is carried out in the field as well as in libraries; it is ethnographic as well as textual. Because ritual studies emerged under the colonial tutelage of anthropology, many of us who study ritual assume that the paradigm for research consists of outsiders who arrive from elsewhere poised to study other people’s rituals. Robertson Smith is said to have given modern anthropology its first comprehensive theory of ritual. If you underline “modern,” “anthropology,” “comprehensive,” and “theory,” perhaps this myth of the origins of ritual theory has some truth to it. But Smith was hardly the first to think critically and comprehensively about ritual. Ritual is studied by people within their own cultures as well as across cultures. Practitioners, not just scholarly outsiders, have long theorized about ritual. You can find ritual theory in sacred texts such as India’s Satapatha Brahmana or in religious treatises such as Kukai’s treatments of Japanese Shingon Buddhist ritual. So we should not ignore two facts: Practitioners sometimes theorize, and theorists sometimes practice. People cross and recross the sacred but imaginary line that separates ritual practitioners (whom I also call ritualists and ritual actors) from ritual studies scholars (whom I also call students of ritual). As useful as the insider/ outsider distinction can be, when the labels are reified and then stacked into a hierarchical arrangement (theorists above practitioners, for example), each tempted to write the other off, we lapse into stereotyping. In these circumstances each becomes polemical and indignant toward the other. From the inside, the dogma is that outsiders can’t possibly understand. From the outside, the prejudice is that insiders don’t really understand what they are doing. Each is half a truth. Each posture, that of insider and that of outsider, has its virtues and vices, and neither has a monopoly on the truth. Ritual studies as an interdisciplinary academic enterprise is in its adolescence, having begun flying under this particular label in 1970s, but the study of ritual is older than ritual studies. As I imagine it—for that is all we can do—the origins of the study of ritual are ancient and multiple. Perhaps studying ritual arose when a rite went astray: What just happened? Why didn’t that work? Or when one devoted ritualist encountered another ritualist equally devoted to another ritual tradition: Why are you doing that? How did you do that? How does that work? Where can I get one of those? People, I suppose, began to theorize about ritual when it went wrong or when practitioners found themselves in situations evoking comparison, competition, or judgment. My guess is that doing preceded theorizing about doing, but who knows? Neither I nor anyone else. Whatever the case, ritual studies scholars did not invent

Introduc tion

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ritual, the study of ritual, or ritual theory, even if they invented current concepts of ritual and knit together the interdisciplinary academic field of ritual studies. Ritual studies scholars are latecomers upon the ritual scene. For years I have wrestled with simple-sounding but difficult questions: What is ritual? What do rituals do? How do ordinary practitioners cultivate, enact, and assess ceremonies? Ever since I began working on ritual, both the idea and the thing itself have been troubling. More recently, it was disconcerting to stumble over yet another set of questions with a familiar but different ring: What is theory? What do theories do? How do ordinary scholars create and assess theories? I had assumed I knew what theories were, but, like most things put under microscopes, they ramify, becoming ever more complex. This is a book, then, written out of the repeated rediscovery that both ritual and theory are thorny as concepts and daunting as practices. Most academics who study ritual are not ritual studies scholars. They are historians of religion, anthropologists of religion, area specialists, theologians, sociologists, psychologists, literary critics, performance studies scholars, or others whose expertise is elsewhere. So there is a broad and a narrow use of the term “ritual studies.” On the one hand, it means simply “the study of ritual” regardless of discipline and regardless of the status, professional or amateur, of those who carry it out. On the other hand, it refers to the study of ritual by scholars who devote most of their research time and energy to doing it. In the former sense many engage in it; it the latter, few. Most of us who study ritual also teach about it. In a recurring fantasy, one uncomfortably close to reality, I am in a small, overheated, oxygen-deprived classroom late in the evening. I am trying to keep a seminar on ritual theory awake, but the students, their caffeine now running thin in their veins, are tempted to snooze. They are eager to escape the interminable abstractions for a beer or some other bodily reprieve. I must not only keep them awake but also imbue them with theoretical sophistication and methodological finesse, for in the spring, when the snow thaws, they risk being eaten alive in the field, surrounded by ritualizing bodies who will circumambulate their socks off or drive them with dancing into the hardwood floor, where the spirits will have a feast day on their untutored souls. Taking desperate measures, I jump up on the desk, book in hand, and begin to stomp out a rhythm. The connection between theorizing and dancing having escaped them, the students yawn, jolting me back to reality. The obvious cure—any good prof will tell you—is to get the students to do the work. Stop lecturing at them; this is a seminar, so let them talk, do the work, play the stuff out. Whatever else it is, research is a problem not only of the brain and the academy but also of pedagogy and writing, so both activities will be close at hand as we ruminate on theory and method in the study of ritual. Students, especially graduate students, must display theory and method or be found wanting. Bereft of theory and method, they risk shriveling into mere undergraduates. So in the upper

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crust of student culture, the ever-competitive quest is on for current theory and useful methods. When, by dint of passage, graduate students have been transformed into professors and writers, they sometimes disremember the albatross of theories and methods and begin heavy-handedly imposing these burdens on underlings. Having been put to sleep by dealing in definitions and waxing on about theorizing, newborn professors do likewise to their students. Sleep, of course, is not bad, but sleeping in class is. It’s fine for theory to daunt, but it ought not to bore. But how are we to make theory and method not only practical but also engaging? That is the teacherly question. It is also the writerly question. One answer to it is “Get real.” As teachers of ritual studies, we keep ourselves and our students awake by connecting theories to theorists and to their actual circumstances. We induce wakefulness by refusing to disembed theories and methods from lived lives. The other answer is “Get imaginative; be playful.” By admitting that there is a certain foolishness or playfulness, a kind of musicality or poetry, to theorizing, we are not defiling these fine and high arts, only admitting that theorizing too is an imaginative practice.

PA RT I

METHOD

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1

Performing Research and Teaching

Method, case, and theory are parts of a dynamic whole. Interacting, they constitute research. When we examine a case with an eye to the practices that produced it, we have begun to extract its method. When we employ a method, a theory is implied. When we put a theory to work on a case, a method is required. A method determines how rituals are or ought to be studied. Whereas a case tracks a specific ritual as practiced, a theory speaks of ritual in general—its forms, elements, and dynamics. Employing a method, like marshaling a theory, is neither hard science nor fine art. It is a craft. How, when, and in what proportions you invoke the guidance of theory, marshal the directives of method, or resort to storytelling are infinitely variable. How woodenly or musically you play these scholarly instruments is partly a matter of personal style and partly a matter of professional expectation and convention. How much homage you pay to previous theorists and the literature, as well as how aggressively you take them to task, varies widely. Even if your theories, methods, and data are rigorously scientific, their deployment is craftlike. Methodology (“talk about method”) takes at least two rhetorical forms. Methodological advice assumes an imperative mode, while methodological narrative happens in declarative mode. In the first, an experienced researcher advises an inexperienced one, “Check your batteries periodically throughout the course of an interview.” The senior researcher, basing counsel on experience, makes suggestions or lays down a rule. In the second, the elder tells stories: “Once, when I was interviewing a most articulate participant, I became so fascinated that I forgot to check the batteries. When I returned home, I realized I didn’t have the interview, only my memory of it. And, wouldn’t you know it, a week later, the participant was dead.” The distinction between prescribing and narrating is less clean that it might appear. Storytelling can readily be heard as covert advice: “I made a mess, so don’t you do it this way.” Like dictionary definitions that start out as descriptions of usage, fieldwork narratives can, over time, become prescriptions. “How I conducted fieldwork” stories can be delivered or heard as cautionary tales implying, “This is how you should behave in the field.” Whereas methodological narrative is often in the 11

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method

service of how not to do things, methodological prescription is largely about how to do things. In any case, the goal of methodological reflection, of whatever ilk, is orientation in the field. Whereas theory is about gaining perspective, and cases are about grounding, method is about becoming oriented. Without the orienting activity of method, data swamp us and theories abstract us. Methodology is the meta-activity of reflecting on methods. Methodology is what we are doing in this paragraph. Method is the “how” of research, the bedrock of practical knowledge that enables us to do things well in the field. How-to knowledge is not only necessary out there, where things can get confusing or even dangerous, but is also essential here at home. It includes the full range of activities that researchers carry out: applying for grants, clearing ethics review boards, operating recording devices, conducting interviews, reading texts, analyzing data, writing books, editing video, and making multimedia presentations. Method includes not only the set of procedures operationalized in the field but also those for preparing to enter it and for presenting research after leaving it. Methodology encompasses at least two distinct but related kinds of knowledge. The first is practical, on-the-ground know-how: how to gain access to a ritual, interview a participant, or take field notes. The second is so-called higher-order knowledge: thinking critically, comparing rituals across cultures, or interpreting postures and gestures. This second kind of methodological knowledge shades off into theoretical knowledge. The method I advocate here argues for the value and necessity of carrying out ethnographic, historical, literary, and videographic tasks when studying live ritual events in the field.3 The method focuses on contemporary events and those who participate in them, and it assumes going afar into a field, if not geographically, then culturally. Even if I am only going a few blocks across town, I imagine arriving as a stranger or outsider. The usual way of describing fieldwork is to say that it consists of participant observation and interview. To these I add audiovisual documentation; it is no longer an expensive option but rather an affordable necessity. The audiovisual aim that I’m trying to foster is not only note-taking and data gathering with a camera but using recorded material for analysis and crafting presentations for audiences. The preponderance of scholarly writing about ritual is based on ancient and historical texts. The rituals to which they refer are inaccessible to field researchers carrying cameras. The method I advance here fits this kind of data only indirectly or imaginatively. Those wanting to study historical, virtual, or fictive rituals will have to make modifications to the method; so will those wanting to study their own rituals as insiders. I am not suggesting that the proposed method is the best or only way to do research on ritual. I do, however, believe that this way provides the fullest possibility for critical access to ritual data. One can learn more about a ritual by being there than by reading about it, and one can more completely document a rite with a

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camera than without one. Whether one actually learns more depends on the abilities of the researcher and the circumstances of the research. Research on ritual and teaching about it embed scholars in a complex process of social interactions that unfolds across time and usually in multiple places. We can imagine it as a trajectory, narrative, performance, or even as a ritualized process. This trajectory, which traces the path that connects a researcher with both a researched community and a scholarly community, aims at various targets: securing a grant, offering a course, or publishing a book. Research is a process for challenging common sense and conventional wisdom, thereby expanding the boundaries of knowledge, but such expansion also encounters resistance. Like an arrow released from a bow, research projects encounter drag. Even though we might wish the path from beginning to end were a straight line, it necessarily traces a curve. To compensate for gravity and inertia, we aim higher than the target. Our proposals promise unique and valuable results. Compared with others, our proposals and manuscripts are most worthy of funding or publishing. Like blurbs on the backs of books, proposals advertise. Since research formalities not only facilitate but also inhibit innovative impulses, they constitute traditions every bit as much as ritual systems do. Research bureaucracies not only facilitate, they also obstruct the expansion of knowledge. Like every cultural subsystem, academic researching, teaching, and writing enshrine guarded conventions and house vested interests. So the research process not only challenges assumptions, it also suppresses and distorts knowledge. Research is reported not only in publications and formal reports but also in tales from the field told to students or colleagues. If you describe a research interaction by schematizing it into a beginning, middle, and end, it is a narrative. If you present it before an audience, it becomes a performance, and an evaluation of it, a performance review. Application forms often prescribe the shape of expected narratives. Check boxes, tables, timelines, and budgets may not look like stories, which more typically take the form of sentences and paragraphs, but usually there is an implicit narrative and sometimes, a required performance. If you do not honor the conventions, you will not get the grant or be published. A research project, no less than a play, follows an arc: You are educated about ritual by reading accounts and theories. These may or may not echo anything you have actually experienced in a ritual tradition from your own domestic, civil, or religious formation.4 If you are exceptionally lucky, you are taught methods and get to practice using them before you are launched into the field, where you will confront a ritual. You conceptualize the project, especially ritual’s role in it. Since you have not actually done the research yet, you are both remembering and imagining. Remembering what you have read from other scholars who

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have studied ritual, you both defend and advertise what you hope to do in the future. Cautiously, you imagine (without calling it imaginative) what you propose, knowing that evaluators will be looking over your shoulder. Using forms and instructions administered bureaucratically, and adhering to canons of length, style, and timing, you apply for a research grant. The application is vetted, peer-reviewed, ranked, and then selected or rejected for funding. Assuming you get a grant to do fieldwork, you negotiate your way into the field, using methods to gather data to which you will apply a theory learned from teachers and books. The theory and method are supposed to determine the kinds of data you collect and the questions you ask of them. You observe, participate, interact, and interview, transposing each kind of activity into data encoded in multiple media such as notes, tapes, videos, photos, material objects, memories. Perhaps you share some of these with the people whose rituals you study. Maybe they give you feedback. Maybe you even collaborate with them. You return home and in your study or library begin the work of writing. The first thing you do is translate multimedia data into the genres valued in your academic discipline. For instance, you write descriptions of ritual events, and you write up conversations that you have been taught to call interviews. Then, you apply a theory to data. If that theory is scientific, you are obliged to test it by identifying variables, quantifying covariances, tendering explanations, and making predictions. If the theory is not scientific, you nevertheless must somehow generalize or compare, mobilizing scholarly concepts to frame your dialogue with the data. Since you are not free merely to report, you stretch the purview of your descriptions and dialogues by writing interpretations, lacing your writing with quotations from reputable scholars. You aim to make a contribution to knowledge by obtaining new data, proposing a new interpretation of existing data, or, if you are a senior scholar, by making theoretical advances. These question, critique, or refine someone else’s theory. Major advances, you have heard, arise from proposing a new theory. Having analyzed your data, you craft articles, perhaps a book. Drafts of publications are vetted by confidential, anonymous peer review, and then revised before being made public. Maybe you send a draft to the people among whom you worked in the field. Drawing on your research, you make verbal and multimedia presentations at conferences. You invite responses, both positive and negative, to these presentations. You teach courses, lecturing on the subject matter.

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Your publications and presentations are read, reviewed, and critiqued. In some cases you respond to these reviews, taking their implications into account in future research projects. Outside the academy you are construed as an expert, so perhaps you grant media interviews. Then the cycle starts over again. Typically, you go elsewhere because the academic market requires something new of you. But since you are cultivating expertise, you are torn. Perhaps you will return to the same place, producing a follow-up or longitudinal study. If we connect its beginning and ending, this process becomes a cyclical narrative. It begins, ends, and then starts over again. When it starts over, we scholars claim to be building on our previous research records. Grant proposal forms frequently ask assessors about track records, assuming that, having run the race once, applicants are more likely to complete subsequent rounds. Great plays can be generated out of stock plots, so it is no insult to notice the stock, narrative, or performative qualities of research and teaching trajectories. You smile, maybe even laugh, at such a tale. It doesn’t fit everyone, perhaps no one. The process is not uniform—it has cultural, regional, and historical variations. Not only does this little tale labor the obvious; it also pokes a bit of fun and skirts thorny questions: Are these chronologically ordered stages, or simultaneously present layers? What constitutes valid critique? To what extent should writing about ritual take into account the research and teaching cycle in which it is embedded? Even if you don’t wish to call this set of formalized expectations a narrative or performance, there is little question that most scholars mount repetitive, seasonal, highly stylized performances in which the academic community exercises its collective wisdom through forms designed to instill its virtues and to deter what it deems intellectual vices. The process requires that one’s own little (autobiographical) story be submerged into or shaped to fit the big (mythic) academic story. One’s pay and promotions, which is to say, much of what scholars treat as sacred, depend on these evaluations. Maybe you don’t want to call this process a ritual, but it is stylized, formalized, and prescribed. The reason for hinting that research might be ritualized is not to demean it. Rather, it is to say that the usual ways of discussing theory and method are too idealized and too narrow. We need a broader, more inclusive sense of both, since theories and methods include not only arguments, definitions, and demonstrations but also storytelling and performing. The notion of a research narrative or performance complicates our understanding of theory and method. Now we must ask: Method for doing what task? At which point along the research-and-teaching trajectory? If we take seriously the idea that research, like ritual, requires performance, we will attend to the bodies, voices, and roles that shape interactions with people whom we study. We will learn to examine the scripts and conventional genres that underwrite

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our thinking. We will study the social theatrics and politics that swirl around research activities. We will document the sensory, material culture that concretizes and fetishizes research. And we will attend to the conceptual and spatial frames that set off research as special. In short, we will treat ritual processes and research processes as relatives, not as opposites.

John Bourke as a Student of Ritual Perhaps a sample research narrative can make the point more convincingly than a generic scenario. For scholars like me whose subjects are contemporary, it can sometimes be enlightening to take a historical excursion. Doing so can contribute considerable perspective on current theoretical and methodological issues. Also, students of ritual are often overwhelmed not only by the complexity of rituals and the complications of field research but also the oughts of method, so it can be enlightening to know how fraught with dead ends and missteps actual field research is. John Bourke’s compulsive journal-keeping and candid accounts allow readers to peer into his methods and theories for studying ritual.5 His journey to the Hopi Snake Dance in the nineteenth century passes through Santa Fe, New Mexico, the scene of our case study, and then culminates two hundred miles west of the city. Because his writing is so transparent, one can see what the study of ritual looked like during the so-called Second Conquest, the one carried out by descendants of English rather than Spanish invader-explorers. The year is 1881. The modern Santa Fe Fiesta will emerge in less than a decade. Lt. John Gregory Bourke, United States Cavalry officer and military ethnologist, is riding west from Santa Fe. Accompanied by others, he is wheeling along in a horsedrawn field ambulance. They are traveling toward the Hopi mesas of northeastern Arizona. Bourke has been given a year’s leave to conduct an ethnographic scouting mission on the rituals of several tribes. Besides being a soldier, he is an anthropologist who is about to witness the Snake Dance and write the first and most widely read account of it. Bourke, a graduate of West Point Military Academy, is only thirty-five years old. Even so, he is already a seasoned soldier, having fought in and survived the Civil War at age sixteen, then weathered two of the fiercest Indian wars, those with the Apaches and the Lakotas. Bourke is regarded by Indians and soldiers alike as dogged, courageous, fair, and literary-minded. Bourke’s Apache friends call him “Captain Cactus” or “Paper Medicine Man.” When Apaches want favors, Bourke, ever the scholar, trades favors for religious knowledge. He writes, “I did not care much what topic he [an Apache] selected; it might be myths, clan laws, war customs, medicine—anything he pleased, but it had to be something, and it had to be accurate.”6 No site in North America has been continuously inhabited for a longer time than the three high desert mesas inhabited by the Hopis. They are sustained by a ritual

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tradition that is one of the most enduring in the Americas. Compared with many other First Nations rituals, which were either obliterated or subsumed into Christianity, those of the Hopi were, comparatively speaking, intact. Then, as now, the Snake Dance is partly sequestered in underground ceremonial chambers called kivas. However, Hopis say they sing and dance not for themselves alone but also for the planet. Despite this planetary aim, ritual knowledge is not public. Even many Hopis do not have access to all of it. To give away kiva and Snake Clan secrets would be to court disaster, even death. Then, as now, Hopis say their lives depend on the performance of the Snake Dance. Without rain, which their deadly ancestors, the serpents, bring, the Hopis would die. They dance in order to be Hopi, in order to be human. Another ethnographer, Frank Cushing, of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, has urged the Hopis to admit John Bourke to the Snake Dance, which occurs every second year in late August.7 Bourke’s visit has no official government status, and the kivas are not open to most Hopis, much less to American soldiers. Because Bourke anticipates resistance, he and his men stage an improvised ceremonial entry, the tawdry Anglo equivalent of Hispanic rites of reduction. The gringos ritualize in order to gain access to ritual. Bourke’s men pay him exaggerated homage as if he were a revered personage on a mission of great consequence. Consequently, when Bourke arrives at Walpi on First Mesa, the Hopis respond with a ceremonial display of courtesy. Bourke is pushy. When the Hopis protest his intrusion into the kivas, he feigns ignorance, pretending not to understand. Hoping to distract them, he aggressively shakes their hands, pump-handling them like a whistle-stop politician. He pushes past those who would obstruct him, climbs down the ladder, and enters the underground ritual chamber. Inside the kiva now, Bourke himself tells his adventure-hungry readers what he encounters: The stench had now become positively loathsome; the pungent effluvia emanating from the reptiles, and now probably more completely diffused throughout the Estufa [kiva] by handling and carrying them about, were added to somewhat by the rotten smell of the paint, compounded, as we remember, of fermented corn in the milk, mixed with saliva! I felt sick to death, and great drops of perspiration were rolling down forehead and cheeks, but I had come to stay, and was resolved that nothing should drive me away.8 These words come from a man who sweated only half as much in the face of Geronimo and his greatly feared Apache warriors. Bourke’s description is not only a confession of fear but a report on a ritually induced awakening of his senses. This olfactory awakening jolts him momentarily out of his visualist bias. The underground portion of the ritual, executed in close, dark quarters, requires the handling and herding of

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rattlesnakes with eagle feathers. The sheer tactile and olfactory power of the scene terrifies Bourke. But, with military discipline, the lieutenant does not abandon his post, although, according to his story, his compatriots evacuate theirs.9 Later, above ground, Bourke describes another scene, which, again, we will see through his eyes: Fill every nook and cranny of this mass of buildings with a congregation of Moqui [Hopi] women, maids and matrons, dressed in their graceful garb of dark-blue cloth with lemon stitching; tie up the young girls’ hair in big Chinese puffs at the sides; throw in a liberal allowance of children, naked and half-naked; give colour and tone by using blankets of scarlet and blue and black, girdles of red and green, and necklaces of silver and coral, abalone, and chalchihuitl [turquoise]. For variety’s sake add a half-dozen tall, lithe, square-shouldered Navajos, and as many keen, dyspeptic-looking Americans, one of these a lady; localise the scene by the introduction of ladders, earthenware chimneys, piles of cedar-fuel and sheep manure, scores of mangy pups, and other scores of old squaws carrying on their backs little babies or great ollas [clay pots] of water, and with a hazy atmosphere and a partially-clouded sky as accessories, you have a faithful picture of the square in the Pueblo of Hualpi, Arizona, as it appeared on this eventful 12th day of August 1881.10 Although Bourke’s narrative is poly-sensuous, his visualist preferences dominate; the description is a picture postcard. Constituting only a brief portion of the book, his description of the ritual is propped up by two bookends. At the front is a travel narrative; at the back is a theory. Snake-Dance of the Moquis is a classic of early American ethnography, a rare work of observation, even though John Bourke and Peter Moran, whose job it is to sketch the rituals, cannot keep up with the pace of the ritual actions. The Snake Dance liturgy, he says, lasts for sixteen days, not for an hour or two on Sunday morning, so by the end the scholars are exhausted. Bourke has no idea what the costumes, objects, and spaces mean, nor does he know what will happen next. Bourke is keenly aware that the complexity of the event far exceeds his ability to observe and document; it also exceeds his linguistic abilities. Consequently, his arrogance in breaching the secrecy of the kiva is softened by humility regarding his ethnographic account of the ritual. Bourke carries away what tourists and photographers such as Edward Curtis will soon be carrying away: pictures. Whereas his pictures are mainly verbal, those of tourists will be primarily visual and photographic. Bourke also carries away tactile and olfactory memories. In the end, he will publish the visual materials rendered as verbal data, but the tactile and olfactory memories, I believe, covertly determine the tenor of the theory, eventually undermining it.

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Bourke is unable to make friends with the Hopis in the way he had with Lakotas and Apaches, even though he had fought against the Lakotas and Apaches and had only observed and intruded upon the Hopis. To his credit, he records a discussion with Nanahe, an exceptionally frank Hopi who tells him the truth to his face:11 I saw you in the Estufa [kiva] at the dance; you had no business there; when you first came down we wished to put you out. No other man, American or Mexican, has ever seen that dance, as you have. We saw you writing down everything as you sat in the Estufa [kiva], and we knew that you had all that man could learn from his eyes. We did not like to have you down there . . . , but we knew that you had come there under orders . . . , so we concluded to let you stay. . . . One of our strictest rules is never to shake hands with a stranger while this business is going on, but you shook hands with nearly all of us, and you shook them very hard. . . . You being a foreigner, and ignorant of our language, can do us no harm. . . . A secret order is for the benefit of the whole world, that it may call the whole world its children, and that the whole world may call it father, and not for the exclusive benefit of the few men who belong to it. . . . If they [the secrets] became known to the whole world, they would cease to be secrets, and the order would be destroyed, and its benefit to the world would pass away.12 In this stinging critique of Burke’s visualist ethnocentrism, Nanahe both compliments and criticizes him in a succinct sentence: “We knew that you had all that man could learn from his eyes.” Bourke’s intrusiveness challenged and his capacity to understand the Hopi Snake Dance confounded, he leaves the Hopi mesas, going to visit nearby Mormons, who have been busy trying to convert Hopis into Christians. Although he turns something of an ethnographic gaze upon the Mormons, he is so relieved at being away from the kivas and rattlesnakes that he does not follow through. Although a little strange, the Mormons are insufficiently other to hold his attention for long. After leaving Walpi, Burke does lots of reading, on the basis of which he compares what he has witnessed there with what he can learn from books about rituals in Greece, Guinea, Scandinavia, and Polynesia. His conclusions are partly determined by Hopi data and partly by reading comparatively. His comparisons are not always even-handed. Some of them are driven by the desire to show how the American way is superior to the Hopi way. Occasionally he inverts the hierarchy, suggesting the superiority of Hopi ways. Out of the comparison, he constructs a theoretical category, “ophiolatry.” The Snake Dance is classified as the idolatrous worship of serpents. This classificatory act is his most fundamental theoretical move. By 1891, only seven years after the publication of Snake-Dance, Burke’s theory of Hopi ophiolatry crashes under the critique of Jesse Fewkes, another ethnographer, who conducts a more prolonged study examining variants of the Snake Dance at

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three other Hopi villages. Armed more by data and details than drama and literary flourishes, Fewkes concludes that the ceremonies are not about idolizing snakes but about ancestor veneration and rain-making.13 Fewkes’s view continues more or less intact today. Even though Bourke’s theory is displaced by Fewkes’s, Bourke’s book nets considerable cultural and academic capital. Eventually, he is elected president of the American Folklore Association. For Bourke, who dared to step down into a snakefilled kiva, this stepping back to write, lecture, and theorize was also a stepping up. His ethnographic foray and publication presage a tourist flood. A few years after the publication of Snake-Dance, other anthropologists arrive at the mesas. In the wake of scientific and popular publications by these social scientists, a sea of gawking tourists swamps the Hopis. The Santa Fe Railroad issues a tourist’s guide for the Snake Dance and begins using Snake Dance images on posters to attract ticket-buying tourists. The Hopi Snake Dance becomes one of the most photographed, painted, and writtenabout indigenous rituals in the Americas.14 Consequently, as late as 1984, Emory Sekaquaptewa, a Hopi and an anthropologist, has to complain about white people who simulate Hopi performances and who believe that non-native people have a right to Hopi rituals as if they were in the public domain.15 In 1895, the year before his death, Bourke is patronized by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Along with defeated Indians, some of whom Bourke had fought and written about, he and other aging soldiers are put on display. Only in his late forties, he is already being cast in the role of an old war horse. Ironically, when he dies at forty-nine, this lifelong student of indigenous ritual is buried without ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery.16 Bourke’s scientific method is suffused with personal style. Like Frank Cushing, an ethnographer working among the nearby Zunis, Bourke observes rituals firsthand, but, unlike Cushing, Bourke does not participate in Hopi rituals or live among the people. Like Cushing, he is intrusive, but unlike Cushing, Bourke stays only for a short time, does not learn the language, and does not dress up like a Hopi. Both men took copious notes and both sketched or brought sketch artists. Although both were courageous and showed more respect for native people than many of their compatriots, both theatricalized dishonestly and invaded sacred precincts without proper invitation.17 By today’s standards, their fieldwork ethics were imperialistic and disrespectful. Writing strategies are a key feature of methods developed in the humanities and social sciences. In observing and writing, Bourke mobilizes his reader’s senses with metaphor. Watching Peter Moran, his sketch artist, Bourke writes, “As long as he [Moran] could manage to endure the noisome hole, his pencil flew over the paper, obtaining material which will one day be serviceable in placing upon canvas the scenes of this wonderful drama.”18 Quite deliberately, Bourke wraps the ritual in dramatistic and artistic metaphors. He sees the Snake Dance as if it were drama and art. Insofar as he is able to capture

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ritual’s sensuousness, he is a better writer than many scholars who write about ritual today. We would do well to imitate the sensuality of his writing but probably not its sensorium organization,19 because it renders multisensory activity into monosensory, visualist scenes warped by his revulsion at the overwhelming tactile and olfactory dimensions of the Hopi ritual. Bourke’s book on the ritual was preliminary, the outcome of a scouting mission. He does not claim otherwise. The document is neither a fully developed ethnography nor a full-blown theory. His book is a mixed-genre patchwork rather than a systematically applied theory governed by a scientific method. Bourke’s conclusions were determined less by his theory than by his worldview—the taken-for-granted values and the sensory prejudices of Victorian America. A scholar’s implied theory may differ radically from his or her declared theory. A summary of the dramatic arc of Bourke’s research narrative runs something like this: Our protagonist hears a story about strange ritual behavior and goes to investigate it. In the process, he triumphs over adversity and returns to publish and theorize. He brings home the boon of knowledge, which artists, politicians, and educators can put to culture-enhancing use. Building upon an ever-widening comparative perspective, he theorizes and storytells his encounter with the Hopi Snake Dance. On the basis of both the story and theory, others arrive at the scene. Soon it is media-constructed, photographed by Edward Curtis and hundreds of other camera-carriers.20 As a result, today the Snake Dance ritual is completely sequestered. No longer available as an object of study, it is instead the object of fantasy-driven art and speculation-driven scholarship. The arc exceeds Bourke’s own lifespan, and it has consequences that do not match his intentions. Students of ritual in our time as well as Bourke’s continually traverse the distance from circumference to center and back. So the researcher’s stance is dynamic, not static, and often it moves across the circle of ritual performance; observation becomes participation. Kinesthetically conceived, ritual is the act of stepping in to be, whereas theory is the act of stepping back to know. Fieldwork typically requires both gestures but only the second attitude. This shuttling in and back is both bodily and conceptual, generating perspective by the constant shifting of angles of observation and vectors of participation. Method is how one negotiates the distance between center and periphery. Method requires bodily, therefore sensory, action. Since Bourke stepped down and into Hopi liturgy in order to know, rather than to be, from a Hopi point of view, he did not “get it.” His and others’ “not getting it” eventually motivated Hopis to resequester the ritual, but not getting it was also the irritant that drove Bourke to theorize about the ritual. From a Hopi perspective, the Snake Dance was, and is, a sacred rite, a liturgy. From Burke’s viewpoint, it was a visual-verbal illustration of a theoretical category, ophiolatry. From the point of view of the tourists who soon followed, it was a spectacle. From my point of view, Burke’s account of his encounter with the Hopi Snake

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Dance is an illustration of a research narrative, a dynamic loop that knots together a religious ritual with the sensory data of field research, the methods of ethnography, and the tenets of a budding theory. It would be unfair to stress Bourke’s theoretical conclusions, since he, like his anthropologist colleagues, Jesse Fewkes and Frank Cushing, was known more for his descriptions and hands-on methods than for his theories. In late nineteenthcentury American anthropology, reputations were made mainly on the basis of ethnographic descriptions embedded in journey narratives. Even though Bourke was obliged by scholarly convention to push his data in the direction of theory, theorizing was not what built nineteenth-century academic reputations. It is easy to debunk John Bourke’s theory of religion. Because he was an American soldier who lived in the colonial nineteenth century, we nonsoldiering academics cannot help noticing how culture-bound he was. When, for example, he confesses his antipathy toward snakes, referring to them as “mankind’s first enemy,” rather than as promising but dangerous relatives, we can feel him shiver.21 We shiver at his shiver, because casting snakes as enemies rather than as ancestors twists his theorizing into a Christian judgment on serpents. Whereas Bourke’s seeing the rituals as drama and as art may be constructive despite its playing out a visualist bias, his olfactory response to snakes, because it eventuates in their becoming symbols of evil, reads like obstructive theorizing. Today, journeys and narratives about these journeys continue to shape ethnographic research on ritual. But the tendency in twenty-first-century scholarship is to shrink, omit, or publish separately autobiographical travel narratives, leaving ritual descriptions to serve as grist in the mill of theory. Whereas nineteenth-century descriptions of rituals were largely narrative-driven, twenty-first-century ones are expected to be more theory-driven. The intention in making such a shift is to render research publicly accountable and scientifically respectable, but the effect is also to disembody research, severing it not only from the researcher but also from the research narrative (which one typically hears over a beer) and the research performance (which one hears on ceremonially framed academic occasions). The outcome of much current theorizing about both religion and ritual is often to desensualize and hypervisualize them. As Nanahe observed, we have learned what can be learned using only our eyes, but our feet, noses, and tongues are probably as ignorant as they were in Burke’s day. Because our theories and methods require of us performances that are inept if not imperial, because our theories and methods do not require of us kinesthetic, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory attentiveness, we have much information about, but little sense for, the Snake Dance and other such rituals. By comparing and contrasting Hopi ritual practices and early American ethnographic practices, my intention is not to set up a binary opposition. On the contrary, it is to distinguish and relate researching and ritualizing by examining the arc that leads from the former to the latter. So let me say it plainly: Academic research is not only analytical, it is also narrative and performative. By transposing ritual into data,

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scholars exercise ceremonial power by stepping back, then up into positions of academic authority. The rituals of researching, teaching, and publishing constitute the academic ceremony that goes on after the indigenous liturgy ends. Who knows?—maybe research is as essential to First World academic life as the Snake Dance is to Third World Hopi life. With the Snake Dance, Hopis make it rain. With our theory-and-method dances we scholars makes things generalizable, maybe predictable, and, on rare occasion, even profitable. Hopis paint their faces, while academics put on dark robes and funny hats. Hopis enter kivas. The educated elite enter ceremonial chambers for dissertation defenses and graduations. Each group dances its own kind of dance. Each way of masking exercises its own kind of authority. But make no mistake about it, research, however public and scientific its mask, is incubated underground, where smelly things writhe in the dark. Research does not happen only in the light of day in public spaces. We students of ritual, like snake-handling Hopis, engage in a dangerously elevated activity, so it is only proper that we who write about ritual receive instruction (and maybe a few whiplashes) from practitioners. We should learn not only about the Hopi but, insofar as we can, from the Hopi. What Hopis do with their own worst fears and greatest hopes is to sequester or mask them, rendering them sacred. They set loose ritual clowns, who both police and mock liturgical activity. Then, they unmask. The play of power is eventually downplayed. The Koyemsi, or mudhead clowns, are sometimes depicted as dolls riding Palölökong, the feathered water serpent who slithers up out of a jar, becoming erect in the process. He rises up precipitously toward the sky.22 Such serpent-ancestors are as essential as rain, but they are also as dangerous as the devil. The Hopi scenario requires that sacred clowns, like scholars, ride high. However, it also requires that they be thrown off into the dirt. So be assured: Like others who aspire to think theoretically and write methodologically, our landing spot is predetermined. Hopis, I imagine, would consider the act of studying ritual to be like trying to contain rattlesnakes. By whisking them ever so lightly with eagle feathers, Hopis herd the snakes, capturing them temporarily in clay pots. Later, dancers release the snakes in kivas and on the plaza. Finally, they recapture the snakes and, having blessed them with cornmeal, let them go. In two years, the whole process starts over again. I am guessing Hopis would tolerate our researching indigenous people’s rituals if, in the end, we promise to break our theory pots and let the data go so they will be plentiful when the whole round starts over again. Since I am playing out the notion that ritualizing is the act of stepping in to be, whereas researching is the act of stepping back to know, the two activities are different but dialectically related. Pushed, the one kinesthetic activity can pass over into the other. Ritualizing can pass over into research, and research into ritualizing. The researcher’s reflex of stepping back from kivas and sanctuaries is a kinesthetic response to dissonance and disorientation. Methods are tools of intervention aimed not only at ensuring objectivity and fairness but also insulating researchers from

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danger and disorientation. However much research is governed by data gathered into notes, it is also driven by a desire to escape alive and tell the story, erect a theory, or otherwise generate academic capital. Management-by-method is an attempt to control an object of perception experienced as unmanageable by stepping back and then taking up a tool that renders the ritually dangerous event into a visual or verbal scene more predictable and less threatening. The labor of research, like that of ritual-making, arises from and generates its own conceptual space.23 Method-operationalized theory is an act performed, transpiring in a setting or on a set. However much the magic of words makes it appear that theories dwell either nowhere or everywhere, they, in fact, arise and decline somewhere. Staged, theorizing is place-specific. We are used to locating rituals in space but not theories.24 It may be true that theorizing enables perspective, but the theorizing eye is not really panoptic; it is neither universal nor divine. As Apaches say, “Wisdom sits in places.”25 In other words, it would be wise to follow methods and formulate theories as if the place where we do so matters.26 Like ritualizing, thinking theoretically and acting methodically are bodily acts. Although performing them requires stepping back or returning home, these places are nevertheless places; they are not everywhere or nowhere. However godlike this disappearing act may appear from the perspective of local people in the fields where we study, we who come and go to do research are merely human. They know that, but we sometimes forget. The best way to humanize research is to contextualize it. In this respect a theory is no different from a ritual. Theories and methods, like rituals, should be understood in their several contexts: social, historical, cultural, or ecological. Because scholars are embedded in landscapes, eras, and communities, we better understand methods and theories when we comprehend their relation to the lives and times of those who create and consume them. When we do so, theories and methods no longer seem superior to rituals; the two are just different kinds of enactment.27

From Symbol and Conquest to The Craft of Ritual Studies Having laid out a generic research scenario followed by that of a nineteenth-century fieldworking scholar-soldier, I feel obliged to reflect critically on my own research and teaching performances. Its narrative arc begins in the classroom, leads to the field, eventuates in writing, loops into filmmaking, and culminates in this book with its accompanying videos. Unlike Bourke, I repeatedly returned to one ritual scene across a forty-year period. Like Bourke, I stumbled into things, having as much trouble at the end as I did at the beginning. Like Bourke’s story, mine is not a model for anything, although I can imagine its being used as a cautionary tale in the classroom. Having tried to teach a course on myth and ritual in which the ritual section floundered, I realized that neither my religious formation nor my degrees had

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prepared me to understand ritual. So I began reading. Read and reread, written works, like rituals, can shape us. Victor Turner is widely known for masterful ethnographic writing and for making major contributions to ritual theory.28 Reading his works in 1972 initiated for me a shift away from philosophy of religion toward the anthropology of ritual. Because of my formation as a student of sacred Christian texts and big Western ideas, it was revolutionary to discover that one could make a profession of traveling, talking with practitioners, writing narratives or descriptions, and reflecting on the process. Shortly after inviting me to the University of Chicago as a Fellow of the Faculty, Turner suggested that I would never understand ritual by auditing his courses or reading in the library. Even though I was already a young faculty member with a PhD, he insisted that I should engage in field research rather than sit in his seminars. When I asked how I might learn to do such a thing, he quoted my mother without knowing it: “By doing it. You learn to do by doing.” He added, “That’s how I learned.” So, thirty years old, three years out of graduate school, and barely at the beginning of an academic career, I moved to Santa Fe not knowing exactly what I would study there.29 Quizzed in formal circumstances, I would explain, “I’m going to do participant observation and conduct interviews.” However much I was rehearsing newly learned lines, that sentence was tasty as it rolled off the tip of the tongue. Asked twice, I would occasionally quip, “I don’t really know what I am doing, but I hope to find out.” Asked again, I might edge up on a long story by replying, “I’m returning home—but the home I never knew I had. I grew up in New Mexico but not in Santa Fe. I discovered Santa Fe in much the same way as Europeans ‘discovered’ the Americas. The fact that the place felt like a discovery said more about me than it did about the place.” The academic year 1973–1974 was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The proposal said nothing about Santa Fe, not because I lied but because the course of my research changed drastically a few weeks after receiving this grant for a postdoctoral year. In the proposal I had said I wanted to write an introduction to ritual. I framed the problem as a writerly issue, not as a problem of either theory or field research methodology. Quickly, I discovered that I could not write the book. I was not ready. Turner had pointed out the obvious: I had never done fieldwork. Since he was so obviously right, I swerved dangerously on the career expressway, writing the NEH to inform them of the desired lanechange. Graciously, they granted me permission to change focus. I doubt that either the NEH or any other large granting agency would be so accommodating these days. In any case, I have been trying to write that introduction to ritual ever since I failed to do so in 1973. This book is in some peculiar way the grandchild of that never-written book. Driven, then authorized, to make the change, I moved to Santa Fe to learn how to do field research. For better and worse, the field was not only the place but also the teacher. My intention was not to write, but that view changed. What was the

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point of interviewing, observing, and recording, if I did not also keep a fieldwork journal? So for several months I practiced what would in a decade or so be called “writing culture.”30 James Clifford and George Marcus’s book Writing Culture, published in 1986, would be at the forefront of what came to be called “the literary turn” in anthropology.31 By questioning the desirability of supposedly scientific objectivity and recognizing the literary basis of anthropology, that volume precipitated a seismic shift in the field. By calling attention to narratives and tropes in ethnographic writing, it put the act of writing alongside travelling and dwelling as foundations of cultural anthropology. Even before I knew what culture was, I was in a crude way “writing culture” in the place where Writing Culture would be incubated, at the School of Advanced Research. After I returned to Chicago, Turner convinced me that what I had in my hands was an incipient book, Symbol and Conquest: Public Ritual and Drama in Santa Fe, New Mexico. After some very dogged editing by a press editor, Turner published the book in 1976 in his Symbol, Myth, and Ritual Series.32 Although the book is more or less ethnographic, I didn’t think of it as ethnography, and have I never called myself an anthropologist. Doing so would have seemed pretentious, since I had no training in the field. Vic was a real anthropologist; I was not. When I moved to Santa Fe, I barely knew the city existed even though I had grown up in New Mexico.33 I knew that it was the capital of my home state and that it had a lengthy religious history. A bit of reading quickly convinced me that it was a thicket of ritual symbols and that contentious ethnic issues were being negotiated there. Although I was short on knowledge, in retrospect it seems I was high on instinct. The decision was fortuitous, and for forty years the fiesta and I have carried on a commuting, love-hate relationship. It is the public event to which I return. The fiesta both inspires and irritates me to grapple with the big theoretical and methodological issues of studying ritual. At the same time, attending the fiesta always provokes me to ask myself where home is. Moving a research agenda forward requires periodic assessment of what one has done: How can I write The Craft of Ritual Studies if I do not understand the strengths and weaknesses of the earlier book, which this one in some sense concludes? The question I ask myself about Symbol and Conquest is not so much what I might have done differently—I did what I could, as best I could, given my religious and academic formation. So the question has to be: How do I now read what I wrote then? First the positives: Symbol and Conquest is the first field-research-based study of ritual written by a religious studies scholar, unless there is a sleeper volume I don’t know about. So escaping the ivory tower, although I loved it, feels like an achievement. I will probably never overcome the feeling that academic scouting, fieldwork, is a virtue even though I know it is also prickly with vices. The book struck a balance between meaning-oriented, performance-oriented, and power-oriented approaches. Academic discourse about power mushroomed in the decades after 1973, and questions about whether rituals mean anything at all also

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intensified in the same decades. Even so, I still consider it right-headed to balance these perspectives and to resist attempts at dissolving the one in favor of the other. I considered Symbol and Conquest’s formulation of Santa Fe’s symbol system an achievement (see Appendix 12: Major Symbols of the Santa Fe Fiesta). Although I would now revise it, it still seems to me that the effort to formulate a ritual’s core symbol system is a worthwhile pursuit. Whether I “discovered” or “invented” that system is debatable, but I am happy with the result, whatever one calls it. I argued that there are three dominant symbols in the fiesta: that of Don Diego de Vargas, that of the Fiesta Queen, and that of the Marian statue La Conquistadora. The three constitute the core of a ritual-and-performance system that divides up the symbolic labor and links religious, political, and civic meanings into a dynamic but traditional process that positions Hispanic Catholic religion and culture at the center of a conflictual zone spoken of by local people as “tricultural.” Since the symbols are predominantly Hispanic Catholic, they do not map equitably onto Santa Fe’s triculture. By overrepresenting the one, they underrepresent the others. Besides, there aren’t only three cultures. One often hears about Indian, Hispanic, and Anglo cultures as if there were only three ethnic groups in Santa Fe, and as if each were unified. They, of course, are not. Even if one narrows “Indian” down to “Pueblo,” the category is itself a Spanish-language label for people who lived in towns, as distinct from those Indians who were nomadic. The Pueblos speak several distinct languages. Some Hispanics speak Spanish; others do not. Some think of themselves as Spanish Americans; others, as Mexican Americans or as Latinos. In Santa Fe some Anglos are from English-speaking countries, but others are from Poland or Greece or Ireland or even Nigeria. So the notion of a Santa Fe “triculture” is as fictive as the claim that it is harmonious. As for the limitations of Symbol and Conquest, there are several. One is that the symbol system needs revision. Both the Burning of Zozobra and the performance of the fiesta melodrama are missing from my earlier account of dominant symbols. Since I now believe they are core performances, this omission is a weakness in the theorizing. Another problem is the absence of named voices—living, breathing bodies. Quoted interviewees are few and far between. Although I interviewed many people, for fear of disrupting conversations, I recorded few of them and cited even fewer. This weakness is both writerly and methodological. As an editor, I now point out such absences in other people’s manuscripts. Another flaw: The book does a mediocre job of evoking the sensory qualities of key events and quotidian life in Santa Fe. There is little thick description and no sustained audiovisual presentation to make up for the absence. Even chapter 4, which is about the Entrada, it is not really a description of the 1973 pageant but a piecing together of its script with bits of remembered observation. Such a description would not pass muster in the fieldwork courses I now teach. And neither would the audiovisual work. I snapped still photos as a quick way of taking notes. Since

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tourists were taking pictures, a camera helped me blend into the crowd. Even though I “took notes” with a camera, potentially constituting an object of study, I failed to follow through. My fiesta slides soon gathered dust, only a few of them making their way into Symbol and Conquest. The function of the photos was mainly to testify that I had been there, taken it down, and completed the anthropological rite of passage called fieldwork. The photos, ensconced in a proper book, were sucked into the service of what was then considered real, that is, published textual, scholarship. The pictures, never really valued in themselves, were put to work procuring tenure. They earned their keep, I suppose, but they also left me dissatisfied for decades. A final problem is the shallow time depth. My approach to the fiesta was synchronic. It lacks the diachronic perspective provided recently by the only other book-length study of the fiesta, Sarah Horton’s The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented.34 Even though I had access to two large archives, I discovered very little good historical data that would cast light on the fiesta. However, that absence may have been because I was not very interested in fiesta history. Now, it seems to me more important to integrate historical and ethnographic research. I tell the story about reading Turner and writing Symbol and Conquest partly to illustrate the crucial point that reading and writing are of central methodological importance. They are not mere distractions or the donkey work of hacks. They are skills with direct bearing on the field study of ritual. Even if one advocates audiovisual field research, as I do, reading and writing remain fundamental to the task. The same is true of teaching. I was catapulted into field research by a pedagogical problem. When I entered the field, students accompanied me. When I returned to teaching, my field research was funneled into the classroom. Since my path loops through university classrooms, my own trajectory implies a teaching-and-research narrative. I don’t do “pure” research. In fact, I’m not sure I know what it is. For me, field research is by its very nature “impure.” I taught courses not only on ritual and the arts in the American Southwest, but also on theory and method. The results of teaching theory and method courses have not always been encouraging. Across forty years of teaching, I have participated in repeated curriculum reforms, many of them driven by a theory-and-method agenda.35 When I began teaching early in the 1970s, we assumed that everyone would “just get it,” in the same way one is said to “just get” sexual knowledge. After all, I was told by a colleague, theoretical and methodological concerns arise naturally in every course. Of course, they do not. Regardless of the frequency with which students were citing theorists, we faculty noticed that students were not naturally siphoning off the appropriate skills and perspectives from our courses. So a tiny band of colleagues decided to construct courses that would inculcate theories and model methods. But who would teach them? Any of us, all of us, we assumed. But that assumption too was wrong. Most professors quickly declined in order to “let” others do the work. A few of us volunteered; others were drafted. In either case, we faculty weren’t about

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to admit that we knew little more than our students about methods and theories. Most of us had not been taught such things any more than we had been taught fieldwork. My department’s first graduate theory and method courses were constructed without the benefit (or curse) of a textbook, because none was available. We compiled huge anthologies, or “course packs”—rightly named, because students needed pack horses to carry home those first two or three theory-and-method volumes that we produced in the 1980s. They were full of what were then the obvious names: Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Mircea Eliade. The list was long and rambling, and, tellingly, it included very few religious studies writers. Our classics were imported goods. The list of authors included few women, although that soon began to change. Appearances of scholars from religious backgrounds other than Christian or places other than Europe and North America were rare. This mix, or lack of it, is also changing. One pedagogical aim was to eliminate those nasty surprises that occur in fourthyear courses, or even at the end of MA thesis defenses, when students go blank at the mention of Émile Durkheim, Clifford Geertz, and Harvey Whitehouse or find they are unable to mobilize a single theory or recite a single definition of either “ritual” or “religion.” But we did not achieve our aim. Even after taking our demanding theoryand-method courses, students still stared blankly. The problem, we discovered, was not so much lack of exposure or poor memory as it was lack of motivation. Across two decades, as we continued teaching theory-and-method courses, students became increasingly resistant and faculty noticeably bored. Eventually, we dropped the requirement altogether. Then, offered as options, such courses came and went, changing shape to fit the research interests of each newly rotated-in faculty member who taught them. Our collective strategy fizzled; it became fragmented and laissez-faire. My own picking and choosing resulted in a pronounced turn toward method. Unwilling to give up on methodological and theoretical issues, I decided to experiment by inverting their order—first method, then theory, beginning at the bottom rather than the top of the intellectual pyramid. If theory is at the top, at the bottom are method courses and below those, writing courses, assumed to be remedial gigs for first-year undergraduates. I taught both. Why was writing at the bottom and method in the middle, below theory? Because, like liturgics and pastoral care in theology schools, they were applied rather theoretical, the equivalent of shop or typing.36 In the method course, theory was introduced, but late and lightly. Instead, I kicked students outdoors and into the field, stationing them in the midst of the blooming buzzing confusion (as William James once called it) of nonacademic life. The plan was to proceed inductively rather than deductively by having students encounter religion and ritual on the ground, in the community where they were attending university.

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In such circumstances, hunger for theory would, I hoped, arise. As students gained field research experience, they would begin to look for ways to understand and organize it. Instead of hearing lectures on the tenets of the myth-and-ritual school or the implications of cognitive theory for the study of ritual, we fondled video cameras, experimented with interview techniques, tried out styles of notetaking, and braved the inquisitions of ethics review boards. Each class opened with “tales from the field.” Some were tales of woe, as batteries failed and interviews were lost. Others were stories of testy, dying, or impaired interviewees. These tales from the field kept students awake. They were fascinated, overwhelmed, or puzzled, but they were not bored. There was a whole off-campus world, which, of course, they knew already, but now it was a valid object of study, and that “object,” as it turned out, was a subject, capable of talking back, taking issue, or serving tea. So we solved the “how to stay awake” problem. We also largely solved the “how to” problem. Students did, in fact, learn the necessary basic skills, and often they left with a keen sense of how demanding field research is and how much more there was to learn. Such attitudes satisfied some of my own criteria for what education is all about. Although students experienced both the one-term and one-year field research courses as too short, they were no longer terrified of “the field,” and they became, if not adept at field research, at least articulate about why they would never attempt it again. No one ever boasted that it was easy. The time demands and multitasking requirements were so daunting that students became skeptical of faculty who treated field research as a pedagogical bow with which to decorate their courses. A remarkable feature of academic life is hearing colleagues who, in their own arena, are judicious and measured act foolhardy in someone else’s arena. Numerous times I have heard, or overheard, faculty declare that they were thinking of “just teaching” fieldwork in the summer. Never having taken a course in it, published on the basis of it, or conducted it, they were “just” going to teach students how to do it. On two such occasions, I responded ironically by saying that I thought I would teach Greek or Sanskrit the next year. When these would-be fieldwork instructors glared back, I pointed out that doing so would be about as silly as teaching fieldwork methods without adequate preparation and training. Don’t get me wrong. Since you learn methods much as you learn a language, it follows that there is more than one way to do it. One way is by immersion, the way I did it at Turner’s behest. Several generations of anthropologists learned participant observation (before the term existed) this way. Another, more recent way is by book, course, or lab. But any of these ways is hard work. Neither just happens. Faculty, like students, can learn to do field research without taking a course in it, but there is a learning curve. It is steep, and it takes time. Probably the best way to learn field methods is to combine book-learning with apprenticeship in the field. The pressures of being in the field can be a marvelous teacher provided you have books and mentors to fall back on, and “fall back” is the right metaphor.

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Do students in fieldwork methods courses become more interested in and competent with theory? Yes and no. They become more interested; that much is evident. They understand the need for theory better at the end than at the beginning of the course. Most recognize that, if they want to enter into conversation with other scholars, they must learn to “speak theory” as surely as they should learn to “speak indigenous.” Just as their interviewees’ community has its own discourse that the investigating student is obliged to learn, so the academic community has its. The metaphor of “bilingualism” or even “trilingualism” was repeatedly proposed by students as they learned to distinguish their own everyday speech from that of interviewees and from that of academics. However, left to their own devices, some graduate students still chose to write atheoretically despite the course penalties for doing so. They presented interviewees’ narratives or their own descriptions, claiming that they spoke for themselves. Motivated by humility, resistant to abstractions, or disturbed by the complexities of fieldwork, student researchers sometimes objected, who are we to interpret someone’s religious life or a group’s sacredly guarded rituals? These students left the fieldwork course interpretation-shy rather than theory-hungry. The majority, however, found the stimulation and complication of rituals studied in the field enormously attractive regardless of how disorienting it was initially. In 1988–1989 I spent another year in Santa Fe, this time, writing not directly on the fiesta but on ritual criticism, interpreting rituals with an eye to implicating their practice.37 I had become interested in understanding how rituals, including the fiesta, are evaluated. Although critique is sometimes sequestered or even suppressed, it goes on most of the time. And although scholars sometimes talk as if ritual occasions always demand that people be well behaved and orderly, this is a front-of-house view. During festivals, officials say nice things about their city and each other, but festivals and rituals are also times of jockeying, chaos, and acting out. People leave events saying what they liked and did not, comparing this year’s fiesta to last year’s. Organizers too discuss what went well and did not. On such occasions people not only enjoy themselves, they also argue, fight, and compete. Conflict at the edges of festivals and rituals is as normal as fun at the center. Santa Fe seemed an apt place in which to step back, writing about criticism and conflict in ritual circumstances. In addition to meeting regularly with other fellows, mostly anthropologists, at the School of Advanced Research,38 I attended the 1988 fiesta, gathering materials and keeping an eye and ear open for changes and controversies. Near the end of my stay, a young filmmaker, Jenny De Bouzek, knocked on my door. Not yet finished with her degree from New York University, she had heard about the fiesta, read Symbol and Conquest, and wanted to make a film on the basis of it. Would I be willing to consult with her? Yes, of course. The collaboration could be an opportunity to learn more about documentary film. Joined by Diane Reyna, a Pueblo woman working at a local television station and the College of Santa Fe, the three of us began discussing possible ways of

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making the film that eventually became Gathering Up Again: Fiesta in Santa Fe. They were the filmmakers; I was the scholarly adviser. Because time soon ran out and I had to return to Canada before shooting began, the project became theirs. I was marginal to it, since I was not in Santa Fe for the storyboarding, interviewing, shooting, or editing. It also became clear that Symbol and Conquest, although maybe an adequate starting point for thinking about the fiesta, was not really a good basis for a film. Since the religious elements that suffused Symbol and Conquest were too complex for a short film, the filmmakers did not pursue them. Also, the book was not a narrative, and it did not contain characters with whom viewers might identify. The filmmakers needed a human interest angle and decided to find and follow three main characters from the “three cultures” so dominant in fiesta ideology. They decided not to superimpose a voice of authority on the film, letting local people speak for themselves. I encouraged them not to focus only on front-stage events but also to document backstage preparation and aftermath. Because of some backstage footage, their film eventually created a serious public controversy. In 2007 I returned, yet again, to Santa Fe. At first, I felt I had already said what I have to say about the fiesta. I had declared to friends, “You can’t go home again” (even though Santa Fe was never my home for more than a year at a time). Besides, Pedro (Pete) Ribera-Ortega, my primary consultant in 1973–1974, was now dead.39 Reflecting on the shortcomings of Symbol and Conquest, however, changed my mind. I wanted to remedy its lack of historical perspective on interreligious cooperation and interethnic conflict. I wanted to continue working on ritual creativity, criticism, and conflict in a place where these processes were writ large. I had also become increasingly interested in the role that media, particularly video and photography, play in the study of ritual.40 Having arrived early and waiting for the fiesta to begin, I began digging into the New Mexico State Archives, wondering what treasures they held on the history of the fiesta, a topic I had barely touched previously. When I discovered several boxes of Fiesta Council minutes in the Angelico Chavez Library, the appeal of a longitudinal study began to take shape. How candid were the minutes? Did they record only decisions, or did they include discussions and debates? How did the Fiesta Council respond to Archbishop Sanchez’s adding the name “Our Lady of Peace” to “Our Lady of the Conquest”? How had the Fiesta Council taken account of Gathering up Again? How had the Entrada script changed across forty years? Would there be drafts of it in the archives, or were the Caballeros territorial about them? Were the two Pueblo “ghosts from the past” still in the script? Pedro Ribera-Ortega and I had spent long hours discussing those two characters. Are there still only three cultures in Santa Fe myth? Is de Vargas still taking off his armor, and are the Indians still surrendering the city? And Old Man Gloom: Are his moaning, groaning, and death cries still terrifying to children? And how do people view his burning now, as secular partying? As pagan worship? As a gringo pastime?

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When I stopped by the Santa Fe Fiesta Council booth erected near the plaza, I saw only one familiar face. I identified myself and asked if it would be possible to have front- and backstage access to the events. Were there any barriers I should know about or people I should notify? Quickly, I discovered that Zozobra was now officially “Will Shuster’s Zozobra” and that this image of Old Man Gloom was now under copyright protection. I would need to apply to the Kiwanis Club for a press pass to gain upfront access. The lady in charge of the Council’s booth suggested that I call the Fiesta Council president so he would know what I was doing. On the phone the next morning, he declared that I could not interview a single person, attend a single event, or take a single picture without his permission. And his permission, he insisted stridently, would only be given if warranted by a vote of the entire Fiesta Council of 165 members, and that is very unlikely since everyone is busy. It’s fiesta time, you know. You should have applied last winter or spring. Applied? I was stunned. The fiesta was, and is, a public event, and I had been tracking it off and on for decades. Permission had never been required. Regardless, I offered to drive over some peace offerings: a professional résumé, the proposal for this book, an ethics clearance, a set of interview questions. No, that was not necessary. Besides, he was busy. What if I sent them by e-mail? Okay, fine, I could do that and he would get back to me . . . if he had time. Of course, he didn’t. A few days later, despite efforts on my behalf by a few Fiesta Council members and a Lensic Theater staff member, my collaborator and I were turned away from a mariachi concert. When I asked whether all scholars, filmmakers, and journalists were being turned away, the answer was “No, sorry, you are being turned away.” No reason was given. When I asked the supervisor whether, in fact, a meeting of the full council had approved this decision, he smiled sympathetically and politely excused himself. Later, when I asked a Fiesta Council member what was going on, she too smiled knowingly and simply said, “Fiesta Council presidents have a lot of power . . . but,” she counseled with a wink, “only for a very short time.” Where was all this defensiveness coming from? I could only guess that the Fiesta Council, as well as the Caballeros de Vargas, offended by Gathering up Again, had tried to set in place procedures to control media depictions of the fiesta. When I inquired, some Fiesta Council members remembered the film and controversy; others, especially younger ones, said they did not. The Fiesta Council president’s prohibition left me disoriented, so I spent the time photographing barriers—gates, fences, locked doors—while a colleague and I pondered: Is this an ethical issue? Should I call the chair of my university’s research ethics review board?

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Eventually, I decided the issue was legal rather than ethical and that the proper place for a confrontation, if it came to that, was a courtroom. The fiesta is a public event, with reporters everywhere asking questions and every third person carrying a camera. So I began shooting and interviewing, while simultaneously trying to consult with and further inform the Fiesta Council president without directly asking for his permission, since I rejected the premise that having his permission was legally necessary. Near the end of the fiesta, I approached him, suggesting that both “his” fiesta and my research project would fare better if we cooperated. In what seemed a surprisingly gracious gesture, he agreed. He seemed to be carrying no malice, and, without my asking, he assured me that I would have the permission of the Fiesta Council before he left office in a few weeks. I never heard from him again. Despite the multiple barriers, other doors opened. Caballeros facilitated connections. Council members talked freely. Mothers asked me to videotape their performing sons. Gatekeepers offered backstage access. Kids stuck their faces in front of my camera. Clergy, including the archbishop, smiled and granted access. Why? Who knows? Maybe they didn’t know about the controversy; maybe they didn’t care. Maybe festivity breeds cordiality. Back home, I began editing footage. Then, the next summer I flew to Santa Fe to meet the new Fiesta Council president. After a cordial, hour-long discussion, he said he would present my project in August to the Fiesta Council and get back to me. He never did. So, as authors sometimes say about biographies of unwilling subjects, this case study is an “unauthorized” conclusion to my decades-long research on the Santa Fe Fiesta. Both barriers—the one around the fiesta generally and the other around Zozobra specifically—concerned images and media. The obstructions illustrate how ethical, legal, and economic concerns converge. The image of Zozobra had been pirated and used to sell T-shirts, diverting the proceeds from Kiwanis’s projects for children. The problem with getting access to the Burning of Zozobra was resolved quickly by signing agreements with the Kiwanis: If I am blown up by fireworks or burned to death in flames, I hereby relinquish all my rights forever and ever, amen. The document was positively liturgical, much of it in oversized, ALL CAPS type. Inside-thefence access to the Burning of Zozobra was highly controlled. There was no such thing as a scholar’s pass, but with a videographer’s pass, we were free to roam during rehearsals as long as doing so was not obstructive or intrusive. During the actual event videographers were assigned to small, quite specific spaces and instructed to stay in them. Some did; some did not. The press pass was a mixed blessing, however, because I was expected to trade copyright ownership for this pass. The Kiwanis proffered a written agreement, which, if signed, granted the organization copyright over and ownership of the footage I would shoot. To sign the agreement was to “work for hire.” Having given up copyright, a videographer would then have to ask for a license to use his or her own footage. However little I liked doing so, I jumped through the hoops, just as I would

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have jumped through those of the Fiesta Council if the president had facilitated my doing so. Then there was the issue of permission to document masses in churches and processions on streets. Are these public events? If not, who gives permission? And what are the expectations of decorum? When the cameras come out, you know something special is transpiring. When the cameras are prohibited, you know something even more special is about to happen.41 Photography is often prohibited, restricted, or assigned a fee in New Mexico’s pueblos. In churches it is sometimes restricted, especially during worship; however, fiesta time is something of an exception. Many cameras are running. I repeatedly asked permission from whoever seemed to be in charge at the cathedral or at Rosario Chapel. The most common response to such an inquiry was to usher us farther forward. Once, we were cautioned not to be intrusive. But what about the faces of people praying, singing, or yawning? Are we intruding by training cameras on them? How close is too close? Is public prayer private? When is private prayer public? If the occasion is public and cameras are everywhere, is it unethical to videotape and later display religious activities? There are good arguments on both sides of these methodological-ethical questions. Because fieldwork situations morph and attitudes change, one’s questions never quite become routine, so 2007 seemed as much a beginning as 1973. Turning in 1973 from philosophical and theological texts to ritual performances had been a seismic shift. The other shift with serious epistemological consequences was toward audiovisual research in the few years leading up to 2007. Almost from the beginning of my teaching career, I had used films as pedagogical devices, as illustrations of ideas. Later, when I began teaching courses on religion and visual culture, I showed and analyzed photographs, paintings, and films less as illustrations of ideas than as forms with their own religious and ritualistic dynamics, but I was not creating such works. In 2007, I began to do so. On the cusp of retirement, I returned yet again to Santa Fe, this time with a camera in hand. Although this book was in the back of my mind, at the front of it was video-making. My motivation was to net the avalanche of data that festivals dump on scholars who study them. It would take me several years to grasp how profoundly a camera-in-hand method would affect what goes on in the brain. Even after retirement I returned again in 2012 to document changes in the fiesta pageant. Anyway, why tell such stories? Since they are not prescriptive models to be imitated, some would say they are better traded over coffee or beer. Are tales from the field proper stuff for hatching theories, concocting methods, and crafting cases? Some scholars avoid reflexivity in research because doing so puts the focus too squarely on themselves. I espouse it because theories of ritual and methods for studying it are profoundly conditioned by the narratives and performances in which they are embedded. Whatever should happen in the sciences, in the arts and humanities theories and methods shorn of their framing research narratives always strike me as half-truths. Case studies in ritual are incomplete unless we pursue two kinds

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of questions simultaneously: not only “What does this ritual mean or do?” but also “What is this research for?” Not only “What motivates them to ritualize as they do?” but also “What drives us to study their rituals?” A case study designed to precipitate theoretical and methodological reflection must necessarily step back from its object of study to inquire into the research and teaching scenarios that structure the process. Ritual studies research is not only descriptive and analytical but also personal. It is not only theoretical; it is also political. It is not only about principles, rules, and guidelines but also about encounters, stories, improvisations, and performances.

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Fieldworking Ritual

Even though there are many theory books in both performance studies and religious studies, there are few, if any, method books in either field. As far as I know, there is no book on how to study ritual, even though much anthropological field research had its origins in the study of ritual, and a fair amount of performance studies research treats ritual as a type of performance. Most books on ritual, whether popular or scholarly, do not contain index entries, much less chapters, on method. When sections on method do appear, they are typically brief narratives, less on “how to do it” than “how I did it.” Students of ritual asking how to study ritual are left to infer the answers. Since I have already told two “how this scholar did it” stories, readers may worry that I too will leave key questions about method unanswered. In one respect, I will. Since there are good anthropological works about doing fieldwork, there is no reason to repeat what they do well. So my aim in this chapter is mainly to reflect on methodological issues pertinent to the audiovisual study of ritual in the field. I consider it more crucial to foster an attitude than to lay out a step-by-step protocol.42 One reason writers avoid how-to approaches to the study of ritual is that prescriptive advice written in books is necessarily generic, whereas conducting fieldwork is radically particular. As a result of this disjuncture, method-talk can easily generate false expectations. Popular music manuals assure us that we can learn to sing if we just buy the book in our hands and follow its ten easy steps. If only it were that easy. Research generated out of a handbook can easily produce the wooden results comedians attribute to sex manuals. In contrast to mechanistic, one-twothree methods are the no-step mystical approaches whereby fieldwork becomes an art that one just somehow learns. Unteachable, artistic fieldwork is the outcome of genius or inspiration. I try to avoid both the mechanical and the mystical.

Preparing We are prepared long before we begin preparing. Before a student of ritual ever asks an adviser how to prepare for entering the field, formation has happened, and 37

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education is only part of formation. However temporary the sojourn you are about to make, and whatever the places and relationships you will leave behind at home, it is a person, not merely a student or researcher, who enters the field. Our selves, not merely our roles, will arrive there, and likely these selves will be changed, even if we are deeply resistant to being changed. Library work can change lives, but fieldwork almost always changes lives. “Go to the field prepared” is good advice but also cheap, because it is not at all obvious how we should prepare. With prior knowledge we tend to prejudge, and prejudging is sometimes little more than prejudice. Consequently, some advisers, sounding like a certain breed of theater director, advise unpreparing. To unprepare is to cultivate radical openness, a way of unknowing. There is something to be said for going into the field studiedly and calculatedly unprepared. There are merits to playing the ignorant Johnny-come-lately. A posture of receptivity, a cultivated readiness to be taught, is a virtue. Anyone who visits a ritual for the first time is—or at least ought to be—a student of ritual, someone who has arrived on the scene in order to learn, therefore displaying an attitude of receptive inquiry. However, this kind of unknowing is as difficult to achieve as prepared preknowing. Both are hard work, and unknowing is not the same as either forgetting or just plain ignorance. Unknowing is a practice, an accompaniment for, rather than an alternative to, knowledge-gathering as way of preparing to enter the field. The usual way of preparing to enter the field is to read accounts about, or by, the people you are studying. Among most scholars, whether to read is less the question than when to read. You can do fieldwork either way: Read everything you can get your hands on before you arrive, or studiously avoid reading until you have finished field research. Each way has advantages and disadvantages. If you arrive unread, the locals may think you are nonchalant and not to be taken seriously. If you arrive overread, the locals may either deride your bookishness or defer to your expertise. Either way, you win some, you lose some. Either way, you still have to do both: Prepare and unprepare. If you don’t prepare by buying batteries and practicing with recording equipment before you arrive, you may miss the first act while playing catchup (see Appendix 6: Common Errors in Using Fieldwork Equipment). If you don’t unprepare by detaching yourself from what you already know, you may seem like a know-it-all or an unteachable intruder. Preparatory reading should include general methodological works. Although there are none that focus on ritual, it is worth identifying a small collection of books that have proven useful for field research. Among the most comprehensive and intelligible is H. Russell Bernard’s large volume, Research Methods in Anthropology.43 Jean Schensul and Margaret LeCompte’s boxed, seven-volume set, Ethnographer’s Toolkit, is a less technical alternative.44 Two specialized, systematic books by James Spradley, The Ethnographic Interview and Participant Observation, are extraordinarily valuable.45 A wonderfully on-the-ground book is Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes.46 Crucial for assessing ethnographic accounts is Reading Ethnographic Research: A

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Critical Guide.47 Because those who study ritual increasingly find photography and video essential rather than ancillary research tools, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor’s Cross-Cultural Filmmaking is a must.48 Also helpful are John Collier Jr. and Malcolm Collier’s Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method.49 The classic in visual anthropology is Karl Heider’s Ethnographic Film.50 But you need more than general ethnographic orientation. You also need rudimentary information about the situation—first, your own. How long will you be there? If you can only be there for a weekend, week, or month, then you have little choice but to focus very tightly or be content with a reconnaissance mission. If you have a year or two, you can produce an account of more breadth or depth. How fluent are you in the language and the culture? How long will it take you to comprehend what sophisticated interviewees are saying? How long will it take before you stop committing unwitting social blunders? Forget the ritual, you first have to eat, sleep, and live. How will you do that? Are you up to the avalanche of tasks? Many of the preparatory tasks are those you would carry out for any protracted visit or temporary move. Even if you don’t or can’t read about the ritual and its people, you can still imagine and infer: What exactly will you face in the field? A village? A city? A country? A multinational process? And what kinds of rituals are you stepping into? What is their frequency and accessibility? Are the rituals repetitive, in which case you can return to capture what you missed first time around? Or are they once-in-ageneration events? In this case you must grab them now or forever lose them as the focus of your research. What is their scale? Are the rituals performed by thousands scattered across a city and the surrounding countryside with several events happening simultaneously, or are they concentrated on a village green with only half a dozen actors? The first requires a team or magic carpet. The latter can be studied by a single researcher carrying a video camera. Access, like scale and frequency, is a major question needing to be answered early, even prior, to arriving. Is the situation public? If not, who gets in? Are entry requirements gender-specific? Class-specific? Who gets invited? What does it take to get in, and how long might it take you to qualify for entry? If you are not qualified, whom do you consult about getting training or making an exception? And what is the expected decorum? Even though goals, like situations, change, be explicit about your aims. It is worth articulating them to yourself as well as those who might fund or have to live with the consequences of your research. Ritual studies research is determined as much by what you intend to produce as it is by either your education or a theory. Are you writing a book? Delivering a lecture? Producing an article? All of the above? Must you defend them? Sell them? And whom do you most wish to please? Who is your primary audience—your supervisor? Your colleagues? Your interviewees? Your mother or father? You can laugh, but sometimes this is the most truthful answer. If you anticipate multiple audiences, which has priority? Do you want first to satisfy the friends you make in the field, then the academic critics, or the other way around?

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Who cares about your research? And why do you care that they care? Most of us do not know the answers to all these questions at the outset, but it is better to answer them tentatively, knowing that the answers will change, than to defer answering them until you are certain—a state you may never achieve anyway.

The Field Although students regularly ask what is involved in fieldwork, not one has ever asked me what is meant by “the field.” They assume they know. At least they know what it is not. The field is not the library or a classroom, a fact both exhilarating and threatening. In the fieldwork courses I teach students are required to go somewhere else in the city; they cannot go home or stay in their dorm rooms. They must cross at least one major boundary, typically a religious or ethnic one, but sometimes a geographical, class, gender, or economic one. Without prompting, students regard leaving home or campus for the field as a kind of initiation, because “the field” represents the real world for which a costly university education is supposed to prepare them. For entry into the field they desperately want methods. Whereas theory too often eludes their grasp or seems uselessly high-flown, methods promise to be useful, and equipment, they often assume, is the symbol of this coveted utility regardless of whether they know how to use the stuff. Often, at the beginning of a fieldwork course, there is a rush to buy an audio recorder, since video cameras seem expensive or intrusive. Equipped with a pocket recorder, students of ritual begin to feel and act like a fieldworkers, and “fieldwork” sounds a lot like “adventure.” In 1973, when word got out that I was going to Santa Fe to do fieldwork, a small flock of students began knocking on my door begging, literally, to go. When we arrived and they asked what to take notes on, I jested with more truth than I knew, “Anything and everything that moves.” Stumbling unprepared into a set of overlapping, highly charged fields, they were rapidly disoriented, in fact, in culture shock because I had no idea how to do fieldwork, much less supervise it. Don’t do as I once did. In field research on ritual, boundary debates are inevitable, because rituals inhabit physical and social environments that can be bewildering in their complexity. When a scholar enters such an environment for the purpose of study, it is a field in both senses of the term: a place out there (as in “going far afield”) and an arena of charged interactions (as in “entering a magnetic field”). Studying-by-going-elsewhere is a valuable but troubled method partly because of its long association with religious missionizing and cultural imperialism, but even in times supposedly postcolonial and postmissionary, trouble continues to arise because the studied and those who study them interact like magnets. They tend to constellate their respective worlds into orbits arranged around themselves. Depending on their orientation, they attract or repel.

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A fundamental premise of ritual studies is that a ritual is embedded. In math, embedding is the mapping of one set into another set. In grammar, embedding is the insertion of a smaller unit into a larger one, for instance, a phrase into a clause or sentence. A ritual thrives in a social and geographical locus like a plant thrives in its native soil. Perhaps this ritual was long ago imported, perhaps it will again be exported, and perhaps it can even survive permanently on the move. But moving rituals, like transplanting trees, is not simple; it often fails because of ritual’s tendency to take root. The methodological consequence of this premise is that we understand a ritual more fully by studying it in its setting. Scholars enter the field not for adventure (although adventures sometimes happen), and not only to experience a ritual close-up but also to experience rituals in their environments. An irony of ritual studies is that a ritual makes sense only in context, but rituals themselves work partly by decontextualizing the very actions they feature. Miss either point and you misunderstand ritual. In courses on the study of ritual a fundamental methodological directive is: If you go into the field to study ritual, study ritual. The directive sounds silly, but I find myself repeating it, because even seasoned scholars tend to study rituals by writing about something else, most characteristically the society and culture in which that ritual is embedded. Instead of writing on a ritual, they write around it. Young students of ritual often imitate this habit of older students. The directive (when studying ritual, study ritual) and the premise (rituals inhabit environments) should be kept in balance. Study the ritual; also study what surrounds it. The only way to keep such advice from becoming contradictory is by treating the fieldwork situation as a gestalt, a figure-ground formation. Put in cinematic terms, the figure, ritual, is your focal point; the ground is the fuzzy surround that frames the focal point; the ground is the culture. Since fields can go on endlessly, it is necessary to determine your intended depth of field. As the photographic term suggests, a shallow depth of field would put everything beyond the ritual out of focus, whereas a long depth of field would take in everything between it and the horizon.

Negotiating Fieldwork is not a freewheeling enterprise. Field research is fraught with powerwielding, power-yielding, and power-sharing. If you work for a university or hold membership in a professional association, you will probably be required to vet your research proposal, coming face to face with an academic community’s decorum, definitions, values, and expectations. Typically, you will be required to make several applications, any one of which can require as many hours of labor as writing a scholarly article for publication. Among the gateway documents are dissertation or book proposals, sabbatical proposals, funding applications, and requests for ethics review. Each document is both an advertisement and an act of negotiation.

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However much ritual itself may be a way of maintaining power balances or creating power imbalances, so is the study of ritual. Fieldworkers are facilitated and judged by colleagues both there and here. When you stroll around in the field, you are always tripping over someone else’s rules of decorum, misconstruing the tacit understandings of your new colleagues, misunderstanding their values, and failing their expectations. So you negotiate and question.51 Who are “those” people in the field? Informants? Experts? Ritual leaders? Natives? Participants? I usually say “ritualists,” “participants,” or “consultants” because “informants” sounds too much like “spies.” Sometimes information is, in fact, tendered secretly, and something like spying occasionally happens, but if something else, namely, collaboration, does not happen most of the time, field research fails. Reciprocity takes many forms, and there is no point in trying to enumerate or describe them, but some form of give-and-take, trade-and-barter, usually happens; otherwise resentment is the outcome. Ethics review is increasingly required as an initial foray into the complex negotiation processes that spring up everywhere in the path from here to there and back again. Reviews are for a worthy cause, protecting the people you study from harm, but reviews are also exercises in rhetoric. As in writing a dissertation proposal, you have to sound authoritative even though you know little about the topic. Colleagues, commissioned to make judgments about the likelihood of your adhering to the required ethical principles, sometimes overstep their bounds by levying methodological, theoretical, and political judgments as well. Like all professional codes, those that govern research on human beings are fallible and only as humane as the people charged with enforcement and the people mobilizing these codes in the field. In the field, explaining what you are doing is the usual preface to question-asking and release-signing. The basic principles encoded in such forms are easy enough to state. The people (“human subjects”) whom you study must consent, and that consent must be informed, voluntary, and confidential. For it to be informed participants must understand the potential risks and benefits of what you want to do. For it to be voluntary, there cannot be coercion, direct or indirect. For it to be confidential, anonymity must be offered, and steps must be taken to keep data secure. For my 2007 round of fiesta research, I proposed to interview anyone who might attend the Santa Fe Fiesta. Since children attend, my institution’s ethics review board required a script. I complained but complied and was then surprised and happy with the result. Having to explain your research to an imagined kid is both more fun and more challenging than having to explain it to your colleagues. Part of the script for children (with ethical principles in bold) reads:52 Informed consent: I want to make a book and video about the Santa Fe Fiesta that students, maybe from all over the world, can read and watch. To do that, I need your help. Would you be willing, with your [parent’s, etc.]

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permission, to let me interview you about [name of a fiesta event], also to follow you for a while with a video camera? You know what an interview is, right?53 Do you have a video camera? [If the answer is yes, I offer to let the youngster see mine.] Potential benefits: You may be able to help me a lot. Sometimes kids see more than adults do. From down there, you see things we don’t with our eyes this high off the ground. [You hope the kid laughs.] You know what I mean? You can help me understand [festivals, parades, etc.], and maybe even help people create better ones. You can help me write a better book, because you see and know things I don’t. Plus, it can be fun to see you and your family on video. [I usually give video selections as gifts to the family.] Possible risks: There could be minor difficulties, so you should know what they are. For instance, since you will be a lot older when the book comes out, you might look back and think what you said now is stupid. My son and daughter sometimes look back at old videos of themselves and laugh. But you can you handle that, right? What if you say things that your [mom, dad, etc.] will object to? This is your interview and you get to say exactly what you think. But you know how parents are; they sometimes have pretty strong ideas about what their kids should or should not say. I do; I am a dad. So, if we get ourselves into a bind, we’ll sit down with your [parents, etc.] and figure out what to do. Are you okay with this? Voluntary consent: Here’s how it works. I ask the questions, and you get to give the answers. If there are questions you don’t want to answer, you don’t have to. You can say, “I don’t want to answer that.” I’m easy if you say that, because you are the interviewee. In fact, you can even say, “I quit” or “That’s enough” if you want to. If you quit, I erase the tape, we shake hands, and off you go to enjoy the fiesta. Oh, and if you get bored, we’ll take a break or wrap things up. Okay? We can also switch roles. You can ask me questions too. You can even interview or videotape me if you would like to. You’re in charge. In fact, you can tell me to turn off the recorder or ask me not to show something you might say. If you say, “This is off the record” (you know, confidential), that’s up to you. I’ll cut out all that stuff before anyone else can see these tapes. Confidentiality: If you or your [parent, etc.] want to, we can leave out your name, you know, we can say, [hamming it up] “As one of our interviewees, a child, said . . . blah, blah, blah . . .” But that only hides you if you appear in a book. On a video or DVD, well, it doesn’t make any sense, does it? They’d see you and know who you are anyway. We could use a fake name in a book, although sometimes people figure out who you really are,

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so that’s not always a smart move if you really don’t want people to know who you are. In the field I never read this script to a child. I did, however, improvise on the basis of it, so writing it was a worthwhile exercise. The script addresses not only a potential child interviewee, but also a guardian or parent who is likely sitting there. It also addresses, implicitly, members of the ethics committee who approved the script. However easy it is to state the ethical principles of conducting research among people, and however firmly one believes that people should be treated respectfully and fairly, things rapidly get complicated in the field. What if a parent “helps” by suggesting answers to questions? What if your interviewee wishes to be known rather than cloaked in a pseudonym, and you work for one of those institutions that overrides the wishes of interviewees by insisting on anonymity? In public situations who grants consent—everyone? Only those whom you interview or video record? Only leaders? If you buy an interviewee lunch, is that coercion? Is offering a hundred-dollar bill? And what if participants wish to express consent in ways other than signing forms that read like legal documents?

Participant Observation Participant observation is the keystone of ethnographic research. Once, the practice distinguished cultural anthropology from other disciplines, but other disciplines began borrowing this method of going elsewhere—ironically, at about the same time anthropologists began declaring that it was no longer necessary to go anywhere else, that one could just as usefully view one’s home place as if from afar. The most direct way of studying a ritual is by attending it, opening up the possibility that all your senses will take in the event. However, observing is often implicitly construed on a visual model: You go to see a ritual enacted. Upon arrival, without being too caught up in the goings-on, you observe, which means mainly seeing but also listening. If the ritual is especially compelling, you may notice olfactory, gustatory, and tactile data too. If you are not very reflective, you may participate by way of these senses without recognizing your participation. In any case, you arrive as a peculiar kind of audience member, because the ritual you are observing is to your untutored eyes and ears, mostly a performance even though for participants it may be something else. Your entrance fee is the cost and trouble of getting here. They have admitted you, albeit hesitantly. So you watch, knowing that you are being watched. You are observing them, but they are observing you too. Soon, however, you are not only watching and listening but also taking notes or punching buttons on a video camera. Such actions make the situation a little like school. You hope that slavishly copying things down declares to the participants: What you are doing is important, worthy of attention. You realize that other

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messages are also possible: I am spying. I am stealing. I am invading. I am standoffish. But you carry on, because, like cooking or carving the turkey at Thanksgiving, note-taking and recording gives you something to do so you don’t have to suffer the awkwardness or repetitiveness of talking with the relatives for the whole time. Besides, a camera and notebook are also badges declaring: What I am doing is important too. Being an observing stranger from elsewhere, although anomalous and annoying in many cultures, is neither a virtue, nor a vice, merely a practice, a method. Observing well is difficult. Not everyone does it equally well. Well done, it requires a fisheye, one that sees not merely straight ahead but circularly, all around, peripherally. The ethnographer’s eye resembles the eye of your first-grade teacher: She has eyes in the back of her head. Even the ordinary gets extraordinary attention. Observing-as-watching is sometimes too simply conceptualized as an outsider standing on the perimeter of an arena and watching actions from a distance. One can also watch from the middle of things, and observation can be coupled with other kinds of participation. One watches while talking or eating, dancing or singing, so it is best not to polarize the differences between participation and observation. Observation is more than watching. It’s not merely your eyes and ears that are open but also your fingers and feet and brain. You taste, touch, smell, and move regardless of whether your methods require multisensory attentiveness. Since sounds permeate ears, smells noses, and food the belly, auditory and olfactory observations more drastically implicate observers than mere watching does. But, so far, there is no medium for communicating a smell, taste, or touch to an audience in the way one conveys a sight in video or a sound in audio. The only option is to describe, interview, photograph, or video, in effect rendering olfactory, gustatory, and tactile data as audiovisual data. Since good field observation is multisensory, “attending” more accurately describes the task than “observing.” To attend to is to assume the role of a servant. Attending requires full presence, which does not come naturally; it must be practiced. It is almost impossible to observe without participating, especially if you observe for long or repeatedly. Researching, you are at first an outsider, but researching attentively bends the body forward. Even if you cannot fully participate because the ritual itself or your own moral commitments preclude it, you become something of a participant by listening empathetically, even if you intend later to think critically. The so-called insider/outsider debate hinges on a spatial metaphor.54 Participating insiders are imagined to inhabit some kind of circle; leaders, the inner circle. Outsiders are strangers construed as arriving from elsewhere to lurk about the circumference of the action. The distinction is not as clean-cut as it seems, since observers can participate and participants, observe. If we scholars watch or listen attentively, then we are already participating, even if we are standing outside the circle. Scholarly observers can participate, sometimes even centrally, and ritual

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actors sometimes observe quite critically. While dancing or singing, they notice who else is singing or dancing and who is not. It is almost impossible not to observe while participating. Participants rarely participate in everything; they participate selectively. The same is true of observers; they don’t always observe. So the only two possibilities are selective participant-observation and selective observerparticipation. On the premise that objectivity would be lost by participation, particularly in ritualistic or religious events, some researchers keep their distance or at least do not display the fact that they actually crossed the sacred line by participating in a rite.55 Even so, other fieldworkers participate in the cultures they study. Whether the shift from “classical” distancing to “postmodern” collaborating is actual or rhetorical is difficult to determine. Sometimes early researchers were formally initiated but played down or omitted this fact in their writings. In some circles it now seems both dated and patriarchal to play standoffish outsider-observer. In some quarters ethnographic writing now deviates significantly from distanced objectivism. Reflexivity, being aware of and articulating one’s own position, is now a significant current in ethnographic writing. With the rise of feminist theories and methods that emphasize collaboration with the people one studies, describing interactions between oneself and others became legitimate in scholarly writing. Asked by students, “Should I or shouldn’t I participate,” I usually say, “Yes, if it’s appropriate.” But the “if ” is a big one. What if doing so violates your conscience? What if doing so violates their decorum? In all such quandaries, the real answers are negotiated in actual situations. Can you learn something from participation that cannot be learned otherwise? Yes, no doubt about it. But do you also risk losing something? Again, yes. There are real gains and losses from every fieldwork choice, particularly the choice to participate or not. By participating, we risk being changed,56 and radical change may amount to conversion, a down-to-the-root transformation. Conversion is probably never complete, which is why new converts are typically so zealous; their zeal masks the partiality of their transformation. Whether we should risk conversion by participating in other people’s rituals, we do, in fact, risk it, especially if the fieldwork is protracted. The choice is really whether to minimize, moderate, or maximize your chances of being changed. If you are converted, the resulting research and writing become what religious studies scholars like to call “theology,” that is, insider, or participant, reflection on the practices of your own community. Transformed by participation, you may still be critical, but the chances are that you will also be read as an apologist.57 The ultimate conversion is not that of changing beliefs and ideas but of taking up residence and thus not returning home, the symbolic place of reflection upon journeys elsewhere. Short of the radical choices of converting or going native, there are many other options, not only coparticipation in rituals but also collaborative writing and filming. Like team-teaching, coauthoring is not half the work but double the work.

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Interviewing Understanding depends on the wiles of empathy, the doggedness of human curiosity, and the incisiveness of our queries. Questions are the motors that propel the vehicles of research.58 Where do questions come from? For most people, the obvious answers seem to be: the mind, the brain, or social interaction. A few, more attentive to the point of issue than the point of origin, might reply, the tongue, or the mouth, or even the hands or eyes. We don’t usually think of questions as residing in hands, although a phrase like “the question at hand” should make the notion seem less oxymoronic. In any case, if you study ritual with a camera in your hands, the idea of querying actions with your eyes and hands makes sense. So let’s say that questions arise from lots of places: our body-minds, the environment, society. To query ritual is to assume the posture of a student—and students are not the only students. Any question-driven inquirer, even one with several degrees, is a student. In the middle of someone else’s ritual, all of us, even professors, are learners. The most effective teachers are those who have not forgotten how to be students. As the French essayist Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) put it, “To teach is to learn twice.”59 Fieldworkers not only attend, observe, participate, and document but also interview, arriving and leaving laden with questions. Since interviewers cannot query ritual, at least not directly or literally, they necessarily ask questions about ritual rather than to it. Addressed with questions, rituals are stubbornly mute, so fieldworkers have to engage the people who create, enact, or supervise them. An interview is a conversation in which one of the parties, the interviewer, makes space for the other by attentive, empathetic listening and dogged, persistent querying. Good interviewers are exceptionally quiet and uncommonly nosy. If you are interviewing on camera, you sometimes have to work at keeping your mouth shut. If you don’t, you will later have serious audio editing problems, but there are other, better reasons. Your silence is the canvas on which the other paints. Silences, however, can be awkward or ambiguous, so the question-stream is essential to maintaining an animated interview. So your metaquestion to your interviewing self must be something like: How can I effectively play out my questions? What kind of a dance does this question elicit? Interviewing is neither mere chat, which is so superficially light-handed that interviewees begin looking for better ways to spend their time, nor is it interrogation, which is so heavy-handed that an interviewee wants to flee or comply, proffering merely what interrogators want to hear. Neither chat nor interrogation, an interview is also not mechanical. If an interview resembles a fill-in-the-blank quiz, the resulting research will be shallow and the writing perfunctory, so interviews often become two-way conversations. Interviewing leads to conversations in which speakers take turns performing. First you talk and I listen. Then I talk and you listen. Suddenly, seized by the moment,

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we both talk at once, each overtop the other. Maybe we argue or even yell. First you are an actor telling me what you imagine I want to hear, and I am your one-person audience displaying infinite interest. Then I am the actor and you—now joined by friends and family—are an audience backed up by a peanut gallery of critics. Fieldwork interviewing is coperformance. I pose what I take to be a well-thoughtout, even heartfelt question, and my testy, playful interviewee counters: Why do you want to know? What do you mean? What business is it of yours? What kind of question is that? Winks aside, you know these questions are real, and you cannot dodge them. “What kind of question is that?” is actually a good metaquestion. A fieldworker needs to know what kinds of questions are possible. It is not enough to have a bunch of questions or only one kind of question. Since you need to come at your topic from different angles, you need different kinds of interview questions.60 List 1. Kinds of Interview Questions

• Grand tour question: Would you tell me about the place of ritual in your life? Can you walk me through your wedding, step by step? • Typifying question: What is a typical Sabbath like (for you, for your family, for an Orthodox Jew)? • Classification/category question: What are the kinds of ceremonies? What kinds are enacted here? What types of objects can appear on the altar? Does dancing count as a religious experience? • Function questions: What are these books used for? What are the uses for that table? • Attribute questions: What are the qualities of an elder? What are the characteristics of a longhouse? • How-to question: Can you teach me how a Muslim should pray? Can you help me learn to chant? • Sequence questions: What are the steps to ordination? What are the phases of a pig sacrifice? • Experiential question: Will you tell me about your experience at sesshin (a Zen retreat)? Talk about how you felt during the funeral. • Indigenous-language question: What terms do you use to refer to your holy book (e.g., the Koran, the Gita, the Bible)? What does it mean when someone says . . .? • Mistake question: What things do outsiders usually do wrong when they attend puja? What would constitute improper behavior with the Torah scroll? • Hypothetical questions: What would happen if your Buddhist son were to marry a Hindu woman? If someone refused to make an offering, what might happen? • Example question: What’s an example of “having faith”? What’s an example of “being slain in the spirit”? • Identity question: Who has the power to make changes in worship services? Who washes the dead? Who sweeps the aisles?

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• Object question: When you hold this wampum belt in your hand, how do you feel? What do you recall? • Narrative question: Tell me the story of your grandmother’s arrival in this country. How did this sacred object arrive here—what’s its “biography”? • Causal question: What would have to happen before a woman could be included in a minyan? What caused the denominational schism? • Spatial question: What places in this building are most sacred? Least sacred? What things happen here? What things would be least likely to happen here? • Rationale question: For what reasons would an applicant for membership be rejected? Why must one be married to be considered fully human? • Exclusion question: Who cannot commune? What are “unclean” foods? • Devil’s-advocate question: You said you had a vision. How do you know you weren’t hallucinating? • Imaginative/analogical/projective question: What is meditation like? What color is it? How does it taste? • Performance question: Would you draw a picture of the most important moment in the rite? Here’s a camera; would you use it to photograph the places you think most important to people who live here? • Value question: What’s more important to you—family life or work? Who has the greater authority, rabbis or rebbes? • Comparative question: How would you compare this year’s New Year celebration with last year’s? How does that village’s ceremonial fare compare with that of your village? • Metaquestion: What questions would you like me to ask you? What questions should not be asked of an elder? Differing kinds of questions imply differing tones, ranging from supportive (how are you feeling today?) to pushy (who gave you the right to do that?), from informational (how many candles are there?) to speculative (what structural changes would occur if your leader were to die)? Technically worded research questions, the kinds that appear in grant proposals, must be translated into a set of smaller, less technical interview questions couched in ordinary language. Whereas you address research questions to data and theory questions to theorists, you address interview questions to interviewees, who are often not scholars. Research questions can be laced with key theoretical and technical terms; interview questions cannot. However much students of ritual may enjoy taunting each other by asking what ritual is, most people don’t carry formal definitions in their heads. Participants can rarely tell you what ritual is. Maybe they don’t even use the word, so interviewers often have to infer definitions and meanings by observing interviewees’ practices. Writing question-sets is crucial to good interviewing even if the questions are later revised or even trashed. They need tempering and sharpening before being

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toted into the field. Nothing clarifies your intentions quite as much as having to ask yourself what, exactly, you want to ask others. Having drafted your questions, invite colleagues to paraphrase them, or, more daunting, pose them to yourself and try to answer them. You may discover that some of them are unintelligible. Better to find out at home than in the field. Write them out. Revise them religiously. Pose them doggedly. Practice them until they sound like you, until they no longer sound like you are reading from a book. When applying for grants or petitioning ethics review boards, you are often asked by gatekeepers to provide question-sets: What questions will you be asking interviewees? Since you may articulate them without knowing much about the situation you will face, questions for grant committees and review boards amount to improvisations or rehearsals. Such questions may or may not actually be used in the field. They may be used selectively or as the basis for semi-improvised questions. Without a doubt, they will be revised for multiple audiences: assessors, interviewees, colleagues, friends and family, readers whose attention you hope to hold. Field questions are the ones you actually ask, as distinct from your interview questions, the ones you wrote out beforehand. In field circumstances, the questions you actually pose are rarely identical with those in your prepared set. The two sets can diverge dramatically. Field questions, captured by a recorder, can be embarrassingly inarticulate. If you write them up for publication, you will probably want to edit them. Some may be planned, but many will be improvised, responses to the flow of discussion. Actual questions include not only those that show up on tape recorders and in transcripts; they also include those asked informally or off the record. It is important to keep a record of these, since they are the surest evidence that your interviewees are teaching you something. If you retain chronologically ordered sets of field questions, you will see that they continually change from proposal through fieldwork to publication. How they develop is important data, maybe even an interesting story. To inquire is to display empathy; however, it is also to poke and prod, thereby exercising a privilege. If you don’t probe, you will skim the surface. And if you probe, counterquestions may come back at you. An interviewee questions you: What do you mean? Why would you assume that? Is knowing that really important or necessary? Why do you want to know that? Such retorts can be as revealing as any answer. To tolerate, even celebrate, the incisive counterquestion posed by an interviewee is a mark of a good researcher and a clue that actual dialogue is occurring. Since you are being allowed to question, allow yourself to be called into question. Even though you arrive as an interviewer, let yourself be interviewed. You may learn something. Being in the field where you may be counterinterviewed often raises personal questions: Why do I care about this topic or these people? What is the effect on my family of being here? What is the effect on these people? Such questions often sit behind research questions. Sometimes personal questions motivate research; sometimes they distort it. Whether or not they are explicitly written about in publications,

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they should be known to the researcher and recorded in journals. Sometimes ritual participants will tolerate questioning only if researchers are willing to reveal the personal questions that lie behind their academic questions. Metaquestions typically arise after interviews or projects when it is possible to step out of the loop of interchanges and ask questions about the questions: How did that interview go? Was it the right time to pose that question? Why was this question revealing and that one not? Do the questions that I am posing to interviewees actually help me answer my research questions? If not, which set needs modifying? Questioning one’s questions is important, because self-awareness is essential to effective field research. Question-asking doesn’t stop after fieldwork is over. The most indispensable tool of field research is not electronic but interrogatory. No curiosity, no research. Querying, the engine of learning, requires linking a set of interview questions addressed to ritual participants with a research question addressed to data, thus making a recursive move toward the theory that engendered the questions. Research questions tether the unruly beast of research. Whereas interviewees answers interview questions, it is the job of ritual studies scholars to answer research questions, thereby enabling them to pose theory questions to other scholars. Not just any question will do for research. A central methodological task is discovering or formulating a research question. If you are not in hot pursuit of this question and its answer, you are a mariner without a compass. Sometimes you know the question before entering the field; sometimes, during; sometimes, even after. Answers are necessary, but they are only as good as the questions to which they are responses. The array of possibilities has to be sifted until you can shape one capable of generating a convincingly argued thesis. There may be more than one research question, but it is a worthwhile exercise to try reducing the many to one, the big question, to which all others are tributaries. But what kind of research question will you pose? There are as many kinds of research questions as there are kinds of interview questions. Below are some examples of research questions for studying religion and ritual. Although some of them are too large or broad to produce good articles or papers, they illustrate the kinds of research questions that students might pose. List 2. Kinds of Research Questions

• “Should” questions: Should the study of religion be taught in Arizona public schools? Should Catholics abort when it is certain that a baby will be born with serious mental defects? Should the state of Israel be controlled only by Jews? • “How” questions: How do Ojibways use ritual when hunting? How does so-called Voodoo death work?61 • “Which” questions: Which approach to the teaching of world religions is best, thematic or historical? Which religions are truly “world” religions? Which tradition best understands nature—Wicca or Pueblo religion?

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• “Where” questions: Where is the real source of Zen Buddhism—in meditation or in the sutras? Where did the Aryans come from? (This is a good question only if there are alternative accounts and you argue their pros and cons.) Where is sacrality located in contemporary Dutch culture? (This one is dangerously large.) • “When” questions: When are adolescents most in need of initiation rites? (This one needs narrowing: Adolescents in which culture and era? Male adolescents or female or both?) When did Enlightenment ideas about authority displace Christian ideas? (The question, of course, assumes that they did. So there is a prior question: did Enlightenment ideas, in fact, replace . . . ?) • “Who” questions: Who wrote the Gospel of Mark? Alternatively, does the source called Q really lie behind the Gospel of Mark? Who should decide who gets a donor organ? (This question combines a “who” and “should” question.) Was Jesus really the son of God? • “Why” questions (A “why” question can be about either causes and intentions, on the one hand, or consequences and effects, on the other, so be clear about which kind of “why” question you are asking.) Why do members of cults sometimes commit suicide? (Needs further specification: Which cults?) Why did Buddha sit under the Bo tree? (For this kind of question you will have to ask subquestions: Why do the sutras say he sat there? Why do I think he sat there? What social factors may have led to his choice? And so on.) • “What” questions: Is Arnold van Gennep correct in claiming that rites of passage have three phases? (Implicitly, the question asks, “What are the phases of a rite of passage?” or, more radically, “Do rites of passage really transpire in phases”?) What are the “parts” or “structures” of a religion? (A good question only if you consider alternative answers to it.) What are the causes of a cargo cult? (You’ll probably want to focus the question on a specific cult.) • “Yes/no” questions: Does Victor Turner’s theory of social drama work when applied to women’s initiation rites? Is C. G. Jung’s Answer to Job a story or an argument? (Could be reframed as a “which” question: Which genre most accurately labels Answer to Job—story or argument?) Has the secularization hypothesis been definitively disproved? Having formulated a research question, try it out on others (see Appendixes 7 and 8 on troubleshooting research questions and theses). Is your question clear? Rhetorical or real? Answerable? By what means? Can you responsibly answer the question in the time and space available? Are there at least two possible answers? Do you plan to make a choice, arguing on behalf of one of the alternatives? If so, what are the counterarguments? And how do you respond to those arguments against your argument? Will the answer to your research question elicit something other than a mere description, report, or narrative that assumes the form: “There is this, then that, then that” or “The author says this, then this, then that”?

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Just as actually posed field questions may deviate considerably from planned interview questions, so stated research questions may not be the same as implied research questions. In 2007 I reframed my research question several times. The version I carried to the Santa Fe Fiesta was: How has the fiesta changed since 1973? After only a few days, I began to edit the question because I realized that my behavior—on the streets with a camera—implied a different kind of question. The date made my original research question sound historical, but the data I was gathering were audiovisual. I realized I would be unable to do enough archival research to track detailed changes from 1973 to 2007. So for a while I thought the implied question might be something like: How do the fiestas of 1973 and 2007 compare? I began charting the comparison. Later, after I had done more historical research and began to sift data, edit footage and write, I realized that I could best answer a twofold question: (1) what does an audiovisual portrait of the fiesta reveal about the fiesta’s subtexts? and (2) how does framing that portrait historically change the picture? These are the two research questions that part I, the case study, actually tries to answer. Your research question, although it is supposed to be an anchor, often changes and sometimes even drifts. It is entirely possible to arrive back home and, on reviewing your data, discover that you cannot answer your original research question. So you either return to the field or, more likely, ask yourself, what question can these data actually answer? This question then becomes your thesis question. Thesis questions drive argumentative, or scholarly, writing.62 A thesis question is as necessary for this kind of writing as a research question is for research, and since the rhetoric of writing differs from the rhetoric of research, the thesis question may be framed differently from the research question even though the two are related (see Appendix 7: Research Questions and Theses and Appendix 8: Troubleshooting Theses). You not only argue a thesis about a topic, you also write for an audience. So a thesis question is necessarily coupled to a reception question: As author, whom do you imagine as your readers? The way most readers have access to most rituals is by way of books. If scholarly writers do not address readers’ actual interests, the reading act goes awry, and our books swiftly find their way to garage sales. Audience (or reader) questions are those that readers or viewers actually bring to publications and presentations. At least implicitly, they ask themselves: What do I want to know from this book or presentation? Rarely do audience questions take the form: What happened? And then? And then? Unless, of course, they are reading a mystery novel. Most readers are not asking for tedious recitations of one event followed by another. More probably they pick up a book or watch a film about ritual asking: Why does this event matter to those people? Why should I care about their rituals? Like researchers anticipating interviewees’ counterquestions, writers must imagine readers’ questions. Editors are stand-ins for would-be readers. Good editors help authors accurately anticipate what questions readers carry to the reading. Among your readers are other scholars, some of whom perhaps wrote theories that you carried into the field. As a result, a research project not only poses a research

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question about a ritual and a reception question about readerships but also theory questions: Dear Theory, do you work? Do you do what you claim you do? What are you good at? Not so good at? A conscientious scholar tests a theory’s central claims and taken-for-granted axioms. Insofar as a theory is a hypothesis, it should be interrogated vigorously. Questioning one’s theory is as essential as questioning one’s informants and questioning a ritual.

3

Reading, Writing, and Mediatizing Ritual

For students of ritual, the first object of inquiry is likely not a ritual but a piece of writing about one. Consequently, reading and writing are foundational methodological skills. Because most of the rituals that most of us study are embedded in documents, the primary method, even for fieldworkers, is not running a recorder but reading books and articles. However, since reading and writing are considered elementary skills, they are usually treated as remedial issues rather than as activities worthy of methodological reflection. The act of reading a scholarly book about ritual is like unpacking a set of Chinese boxes. Consider this scenario: Ritualists nested in multiple environments participate in enactments constructed from elements in those environments.63 Asked by observers to account for these performances, participants reconstruct the ritual from memories of multiple enactments of it, thereby embedding a ritual in the ritual. Scholars, using the tools of their trade and anticipating general readers as well as the critiques of other scholars, write books and articles describing and interpreting what they observe and hear, often mixing descriptions of a ritual with descriptions of the ritual. Actual readers, not always identical with anticipated readers, read or misread, depending on who they are and what their reading environments are like. Readers of scholarly books try to comprehend the ritually focused, verbally described worlds authors create. However, readers, like ritual actors and scholarly writers, are also immersed in their own cultural environments and ritualization processes that supply the constraining assumptions, conventions, and genres that frame their perceptions and interpretations. In sum, a ritual is contained by a cosmos and located in one or more geography and ambient ecology. Usually it is entrenched in a ritual tradition or system surrounded by and suffused with its ambient societies and constituent cultures. As presented by a scholar in a book, lecture, or film, that ritual becomes even more deeply embedded in (and thus constrained by) the media, concepts, theories, definitions, and typologies deployed to present it to readers. These readers, swimming in the sea of their own worlds, read, see, and hear this described and theorized ritual in terms 55

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of those worlds.64 Comprehending the complexity of this embedding and translating process should make one pause in the face of a basic methodological question: When studying ritual, what is it that one actually studies? The answer is often a book, but a book is deeply embedded. But suppose we try to stop worrying for a moment about the theories or media that might frame an account. Suppose we try to cut below or behind the book to get at the ritual, the real thing. What is it we study? What’s our focus? There are several possibilities: one performance of one ritual; the ritual (an abstraction based on multiple performances); a ritual system (understood synchronically); a ritual tradition (understood diachronically); a ritual element (an object, an action, a phase, a place, etc.); a ritual in its interactions with its environment. It is unlikely that a researcher can assume all these perspectives in a single project. Research requires focus, but focus does not have to be on a thing; it can be on a relationship or interaction. There is no best or correct kind of focus, since the choice depends on your aims and resources. You don’t necessarily have to know your focus before you enter the field, but if you don’t eventually discover or create it, your research is in trouble. Assuming that you choose to read first and then do fieldwork, the most effective kind of preparation is critical, rather than merely informational, reading. Reading critically means reading a work with an eye and ear to its theory and method as well as its construction and development. Theoretical and methodological reading is difficult, like watching a movie in order to infer how it was made rather than being caught up in the characters or plot. This kind of reading takes practice, and our questions are little shovels, necessary because theory and method are often buried like ore. We moviegoers easily lapse into entertainment mode, allowing a film to do what it was designed to do, engulf us in its reality. Scholarly articles and books may be less entrancing than movies, but being carried along is still a temptation to which active theoretical and methodological querying is an antidote. Students usually write papers on the basis of reading or skimming other people’s works. If the students are especially conscientious, they read books and scholarly articles, not merely webpages. If they persist in locating and reading scholarly sources, the next trick is that of learning to think while reading rather than after reading. A good way to start is to write questions in margins. Marginalia can transform reading from mere consumption into dialogue and debate. As a reader, ask the writer whose handiwork you hold before you: What kinds of research did you have to do in order to write this piece—conduct experiments, be a participant, observe, interview, read other books, consult, discuss, debate? Inquire into the obvious. When reading a scholarly account of a ritual, can you locate the ritual descriptions? It is surprising how frequently ritual descriptions are thin or even absent from books about ritual. Sometimes there is little that breathes of life. What does the author enable you to see? Hear? Smell? Touch? What is the balance of concreteness and abstractness in the article or book? How much of the description is concrete (rooted in a specific time and place) and how much is generic (generalized across multiple

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instances)? Descriptions often serve as examples in support of arguments. Which claims are illustrated with examples? Which claims are not? In addition to depictions and evocations tethered to specific events, authors usually offer reflections and generalizations. What does the author say about this ritual in particular? About ritual in general? Which general statements are the most theoretically central? Which ones are peripheral? Does the author identify special cases or exceptions that do not fit his or her generalizations? Don’t be afraid to ask the simple, hard questions. What does the author say explicitly about his or her theory and method? Having located the overt passages, can you discern implicit intentions? If so, how do they differ from the explicit ones? Playing explicit claims off implicit ones is crucial to critical reading. Notice how often theories, methods, definitions, and orientation statements are introduced early in a book or article only to slip away, no longer operative in later portions. Sometimes an author offers both a theory and a method, sometimes only one of these. But even if both are presented, is the one more developed than the other? And what about the range of data? On what specific rites or genres of ritual is the theorizing based? Do the core generalizations apply only to one ritual system, culture, or situation? To several? To all? Does the author distinguish the culturespecific statements from the more generally applicable ones? Notice how often there is slippage between the two. And what is the scope of applicability? In what respects can the theory or method be made the basis of other research projects— your own, for example? Students are taught to highlight formal definitions, and authors are now asked to provide key terms to facilitate electronic searching. Accordingly, what are the work’s key terms, both technical and ordinary, and what are their definitions, explicit and implied? What typologies, classifications, categories, and subcategories does the author use or assume? Which technical terms are essential? Which are obfuscating jargon? What ordinary words seem to have special meanings? Most theories and some methods depend on figures of speech. What metaphors, analogies, or images permeate the theoretical discourse? Is their role central or peripheral? Foundational metaphors are not always easy to locate (did you read “foundational” as metaphoric?), but they are always present and often determinative. Having searched a work for such figures of speech, some of which are strong enough to become figures of thought, a reader can begin to recognize the extent to which the treatment of a topic is literary or artistic. To what extent is it also prescriptive? Comparative? Interpretive? Explanatory? In books on ritual, narration and argumentation are sometimes skillfully woven, sometimes hopelessly entangled or woodenly boxed in. In classes I sometimes ask students to experiment with transposing a scholarly work into a narrative, to formulate its implied story. If you wanted to make this article you are studying into a play, what would be the arc of action, the sequence of dramatic acts? Then I run the question in the other direction. I say that scholars who go elsewhere to study rites

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often tell stories about getting there, participating, and returning. Then I ask, what argument lines do these narratives imply or underwrite? Since books and articles unfold (the pages are numbered, and authors usually assume you read them in order, even though you probably don’t), it is always worth asking about steps and stages. How is the article or book organized? How does the organization contribute to, or detract from, the argument? What are the steps in the argument of the book? The argument line (like the plot line of a movie) may or may be laid out in a beginning-to-end sequence. Just as nothing prevents a screenwriter from putting the end at the beginning, so a scholar can open with a conclusion. If so, is it a demonstrated conclusion or a taken-for-granted premise? Locating an argument line leads naturally to asking, what are this work’s question and thesis? State it as briefly as possible, preferably in a single, if complex, sentence. By what steps or procedures does the author develop this thesis? How is the thesis related to the theory and method? Because a scholarly writer cannot test everything, every piece of argumentative writing makes assumptions that are untested if not untestable, so it helps to identify what a writer takes for granted. What does this author value? Avoid? Criticize? What is sacred (least questionable) or taboo (most avoided) in this work? In what places, or in what respects, is the piece written so as to preclude disagreement, for instance, by assuming that certain claims are obvious or revealed or proven? Are these so all-encompassing that they make the central argument in principle unfalsifiable? How would you as a reader know if its central claims were erroneous? Is there a privileged voice or point of view, for instance, that of the author or that of an interviewee? What reifications are granted authority? The Literature? Religion? Science? If you can locate the work’s method, what is its range? For whom would it work? Only the author? Could the method be yours as well? Is it idiosyncratic, reflecting only what this author thinks or does, or does it prescribe what we are all supposed to do when studying ritual in the field? What are the stages of this method? Must they be performed in chronological order? If you perform them in some other order, what might happen? Once you are able to locate or formulate the theory and method, you are in a position to ask how they relate to other theories and methods. What is their position in “the literature”? From whom is the author borrowing? Is the author adapting and modifying the literature? Criticizing it and proposing an alternative? If this work on ritual were all you had ever read about the topic, what distortions would result? In what ways is the depiction partial, idiosyncratic, or tendentious? Ordinarily readers can only answer such questions if they have read more than the single book or article in their hands. Although it may seem strange or unnecessary to raise questions about readership in trying to understand a book’s theoretical and methodological framing of its presentation of ritual, a critical reader asks, who is the implied readership? Writers, like speakers, put things differently to different audiences, so imaginative

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audience-shifting is a way to gain critical perspective. Imagine that your author has to explain his or her argument to a child or an elderly parent: What would it sound like? What would be missing? What would be added? Audience and tone are related. You speak in a different tone to your dog than to your child. (Or maybe you don’t. If not, what does that tell you?) Describe the work’s style and tone of voice (defensive, authoritative, imaginative, playful, tendentious, enthusiastic . . .). What can you infer about the author’s background (religion, training, age, gender, class, field, tradition, politics, region)? What inferences can you make concerning the effect of these factors on the thesis, theory, and method? Some theories are engineered to explain. They lay out causes, covariants, or effects, as a way of accounting for them. Explanations, although they may be complex, tend to simplify. Other theories are designed to facilitate interpretation. Interpretations, although they may be simple, tend to complicate. Ask of a book on ritual: Is anything reduced to, or explained by, anything else (for example, religion by economics or psychology by social structure)? Is the aim to interpret? Explain? Propagate? Defend? Attack? Construct? As readers, we inevitably read for our own interests and purposes, so question yourself too: What good, or use, is this book to me? If I were to apply this theory, method, or perspective to a topic of interest to me, what questions would it lead me to ask? By applying the theory and method to data not considered by the author, one is beginning the work of testing it. Which features of the theory or method work with my data? Which ones apply only if they are reformulated? Which ones do not apply at all? Finally, you are in the position to pose the big evaluative questions: What is your overall assessment of this author’s treatment of ritual? Of this work’s theory and method? If major portions of it are inapplicable, what is your conclusion? Do you recommend abandoning, expanding, or refining the theory?

Writing Having read, students of ritual write. We often speak of scholarly writing as a genre, but like most genres, it is really a set of genres or subgenres, some public, some private, some preliminary, some final. Here are some of the kinds of writing that academics produce, facilitate, or evaluate. List 3. Kinds of Academic Writing

• • • •

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

scholarly articles popular articles single-authored books edited volumes chapters introductions book reviews abstracts manuscript evaluations conference papers conference responses discussions workshops fieldwork journals interviews transcriptions logs slide shows video audio websites DVDs scripts grant proposals sabbatical proposals yearly reports

The list is shocking less because of its length than because of how few items are deliberately taught to students. Professors who lecture without being taught to lecture are on par with fieldworkers who are not taught to do fieldwork. So we learn by imitation; we learn to do by doing. The trouble is, some people don’t learn. Take grant proposals. If they aren’t convincing without being overblown, apologetic, or vague, you don’t get your sabbatical or your research funding. Or recommendations. If they aren’t articulate and detailed, your students don’t get jobs. For many years I assumed every faculty member wrote good recommendations, but several years of serving on assessment committees convinced me otherwise. I had a similar revelation about scholarly articles when I became a journal editor. Sure, you can learn to write an abstract in an hour if someone teaches you or you do a bit of research, but many don’t. After I finished a PhD, I assumed I knew how to write until my first book manuscript met the hand of a serious editor. Notes, both the fieldwork kind and the kind students take in lectures, may seem like a boring, unimportant topic, but they matter. Writing about ritual may culminate

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in books, but it begins with notes and other means of data-making. Data are sometimes “gathered,” but most data are made. Researchers seldom bring home the data in the ways husbands were once said to bring home the bacon, because we cannot bring home anything truly raw: rituals, people, or places. Everything portable enough to bring home is already half cooked. Raw data, if there is such a thing, are parboiled by selective attention, note-taking, and recording methods. Fully cooked entrees—books, articles, and videos—are what the reading public sees, but they depend on partly cooked, half-baked notes in journals, sketches, descriptions, questions, glossaries, timelines, lists, maps, transcriptions, charts, diagrams, recordings, photos, personal ruminations, and the least substantial, most important data of all, memories of experiences in the field. Since these are the data actually studied by a researcher who returns home and sits in front of a computer screen, it is worth reading a good treatment of field-note writing.65 Given that notes may seem minor and everyone supposedly knows how to write them, it would be easy to skip them. To discourage students from doing so, I sometimes require collective note-taking in classes. One student per class plays scribe, freeing up the others to listen and interact. If you are a professor, it’s nice to see student faces; you can tell whether you’re getting through or not. At the next session these notes are reviewed and corrected. The process shows how dramatically notetaking styles differ and how little people know about writing up notes efficiently and accurately. Another exercise with a similar outcome is that of asking students to describe the same scene in a campus coffee shop and then compare their accounts. Even if you don’t theorize the process, the comparisons awaken would-be students of ritual to the peculiarities of their own angles of vision and the consequences of those angles on writing. Note-taking matters. Researchers in the field typically begin their research by studying ritual performances rather than, say, ritual elements or systems, because an event is a unit you can observe, take notes on, photograph, record, and perhaps participate in. Because ritual events happen in specific places and unfold through time, it is commonplace to take notes on them chronologically. However, the efficiency of notes as triggers of memory declines with every passing hour, so unless they are quickly transcribed and fully expanded, their value declines, since human memory tends to condense and highlight. As a scholar writes a book about a ritual, it is based distantly on those actual ritual events, but proximally it is rooted in these notes that are your data and the memories they encode or evoke. As a result, field research resembles historical research more than one might imagine. The major difference is that a fieldworker witnesses an event, while a historian does not. After the fact, however, notes are just another form of textual data, and who is to say that you are any more reliable than, say, Marlow, the unreliable narrator in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness? You still have to take account of your own interestedness, your own position, just as you would that of Marlow. Fieldwork, like textual work, still requires critical

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assessments of written or recorded sources, including those lovingly handmade by you. Audio and video recorders help ensure accuracy, so I advocate their use, but they have limitations too. Suppose I tote home footage of a ritual. It, not the ritual itself, constitutes my data.66 I don’t actually have a ritual in hand. I have a series of fastmoving, but in themselves utterly still, frames. Played back fast enough, they create the cinematic illusion that action is transpiring before my very eyes. But, of course, I haven’t really captured all the action. Watching my videos of the 2007 Burning of Zozobra or the 2012 Entrada, I don’t have the feel of the hot New Mexico sun or the smell the pressing crowd. I have the Fiesta Children’s Parade only from my point of view. My audiovisual notes on it, like my written ones, are not from a knee-high kid’s point of view or from the point of view of a crippled vet in a wheelchair or from the angle of the archbishop noticing my camera pointed at him. What I have as data are highly selective and reworked long before I begin editing. A few colleagues and students say they mistrust media; they prefer handwritten notes (as if notes were not media). For sure, recording instruments can intimidate or distract, but how fast can the hand move? When your eyes are following your scribbling hand, what expressions do those eyes miss on an interviewee’s face? What tone of an interviewee’s voice escapes notice? Paper-mediated interviews are conditioned not only by the speed of handwriting, but also by the duration of your attention span, the width of your peripheral vision, and the response of an interviewee to the fact that your face is turned toward a notepad rather than toward him or her. Noticing this cascade of consequences, most field researchers supplement notepads with electronic recording devices, but even these are run by hand, guaranteeing that the final product will be handcrafted even though it may be digital.

Description A multitude of genres are built on the foundation of handwritten notes, computerized transcripts, and electronic recordings. Among students of ritual, one of the most basic writing genres is description. Scholarly writers need descriptions to provide the bedrock for their interpretations, and readers, having witnessed only a few rituals, need descriptions to prompt their imaginations. Descriptions can be generic or concrete. Generic ones are often flagged by rhetorical cues: the persistent use of present tense, subjunctives such as “would,” adverbs such as “typically,” and references to “the” such-and-such ritual.67 Among Catholics “the” Mass is a typification built up by remembered, repeated, or imagined instances sometimes coupled with texts such as The Roman Missal. Thinking in terms of “the” ritual can arise among participants when there is a name for the event or when memories and texts congeal into an ideal or typical ritual. Idealized notions also arise among scholars for the same reasons, but also because they want to generalize or expand the scope of their conclusions beyond a single performance of one rite.

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Fledgling attempts at describing a ritual are often generic, resembling a still life or portrait. Portraiture, whether in oil or words, freezes its subject at a particular moment, capturing some part which is allowed to stand for the whole. Portraiture, although it can be revealing, creates a distortion when the depicted subject is an event unfolding through time. Since the apparent repetitiveness of some rituals can make them seem static, portraiture is tempting. However, to disrupt the boredom created by the illusion of sameness, some writers resort to “moving” strategies such as narrative. Ritual narratives can take several forms. One is, “First this happens, then that happens, and finally something else happens.” Another is, “I traveled to a faraway place where I witnessed this amazing event, and now I have returned to tell you about it.” Describing a Wiccan rite, Nikki Bado-Fralick writes, “The ceremony of cakes and wine is a time of relaxation and sharing between all who are present within the Circle. The priestess blesses the cakes and wine by invoking the blessings of the God and Goddess into them. This is done in full view of the Dedicant, who watches but does not participate.”68 This description is generic, even though Coming to the Edge of the Circle is largely autobiographical and includes nongeneric descriptions of specific ritual events such as Brian’s initiation. Bado-Fralick focuses on a set of rituals, some of which she describes concretely and some generically. In contrast, Charlotte Frisbie, writing about a Navaho girl’s puberty ceremony, says, “After the film crew departed, the remainder of the cake was divided, and with much joviality all the women and some of the singers, including Frank, Jimmy, John Smiley, and Wilson, sat by the pit and ate. The author slept for four hours. During this interval, the cake was covered with a canvas anchored by tools to protect it from the blowing sand.”69 Frisbie’s description is concrete rather than typified or idealized. The event is in the past, the actors are named, and extraritualistic activities, such as the author’s nap and the blowing sand, give the description an aura of specificity and tangibility. Although these features do not ensure the truth of the account, they do enhance its sensuality. Despite the contrast between the two passages, it is Frisbie, not Bado-Fralick, who is attempting to create a model. She is not content to write autobiographically about her own ritual experiences among Navahos. She wants to generalize. Consequently, her book is subtitled “a study of the [my emphasis] Navaho girl’s puberty ceremony.” After studying four specific ceremonies, she marshals them into columns to display their similarities and differences.70 The categories of comparison are based on the chronological phases of the ritual, and they, in effect, constitute the abstract structure, or model, of “the” Navaho girls’ puberty rite. If Frisbie can build a model of “the” Navaho rite, then it becomes possible to set it alongside the rites of other people, theoretically generating a model of puberty rites. She does not, however, take this last step. The staple of ritual studies should be descriptions of single ritual performances by named actors in actual places at specific times. This kind of account ensures the

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necessary level of detail for historical and comparative research. Most published ritual accounts are not full enough to ensure that a scholar other than the person who observed and wrote about the ritual could analyze it. A historian in the remote future would be frustrated by the sketchy remains. Furthermore, descendants of the ritual’s participants would be unable to reconstruct and reenact the rituals of their ancestors on the basis of such writings. Either way of trying to use the account would fail. Treating a ritual as an abstracted whole often displaces detailed descriptions of actual ritual performances because the details of a ritual can seem infinite, and accounts of them, boring or bewildering. But this is an inadequate reason for circumventing the hard work of providing detailed, engaging descriptions. Recommending full descriptions may sounds like belaboring the obvious, but many books about ritual never describe one; the fully described ritual is an anomaly. Full descriptions and beginning-to-end audiovisual documentation of entire ritual performances are rarely published. Regardless of the persuasiveness of Clifford Geertz’s call for thick ethnographic description, neither he nor others have produced many thickly described or thickly presented rituals.71 Even if the analogy of thickness is more about depth than length, the number of thickly described rituals remains remarkably small.72 In their place authors offer mixed genres—not only narration and description but also reflection and theory. Authors outline, chart, skim off high points, flag dominant symbols, summarize participants’ aims, discuss books or authors, and speculate about a ritual’s functions. Compared with long descriptions, this interplay among subgenres of writing passes muster for publication. Faced with entangled performances in the field and word-counting editors or easily bored audiences, scholars sometimes shrink the focus of their research, analyzing one or two elements considered dominant or revealing. An evocatively described, illustrated part coupled with the summarized whole enables writers to move quickly to a ritual’s meanings and functions, where most of the interpretive energy is spent. This genre-shifting is not necessarily a failure, especially if it results in more engrossing writing, but the trade-off does create a chasm between the research task and the writing task. Whereas a researcher’s goal is to create full and accurate data, a writer’s aim is to create a richly human, nonfictional account by mobilizing the full range of genres, not only description but also dialogue and even character or plot development. Although I am recommending that the described single ritual performance should be a staple for research, it will never take center stage for publication. Consequently, I am not suggesting that it should be the only unit of analysis. Not every piece of writing needs to focus on either a ritual performance or the ritual. A scholar can widen the scope of description to include an entire ritual tradition or decrease it to focus on a single ritual element. We need macro-level analyses of whole ritual systems and micro-level studies of actions, phases, objects, and spaces. In addition, we need to study what is “around” or “below” a ritual, namely, its

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infrastructure, the biological, psychological, and social processes that make all human activity possible.

Narration and Dialogue Ritualists tell stories, and so do scholars who study rituals. I have told stories about John Bourke’s research and about mine. Storytelling may not be a method essential to every way of studying ritual, but it is endemic to most ethnographic approaches and necessary to the one I am espousing here. During the first half hour of field research classes, I invite students to share “tales from the field.” They relish these stories, unabashedly recounting how they spilled tea on an interviewee’s new carpet or blithely tripped over a skeleton in a family closet. Later they learn about the historical connections between travelers’ tales and ethnographic research. The point of “tales” is not entertainment but practice in the skills of storytelling: selection, condensation, word choice, animation, and dramatization. At least three narrative forms are commonly employed in the study of ritual. One is narrative description, a recounting of the way a ritual unfolded from beginning to end. Another is indigenous exegesis: interpreting a ritual by telling about a participant’s experiences with it. A third is the scholarly account, which, when it becomes reflexive, tells about a researcher’s encounter with a ritual. Writers combine— sometimes skillfully, sometimes woodenly—all three, along with non-narrative forms. The most frequent partner to these forms of narration is dialogue. Although dialogue is more a staple for life history than ritual studies writing, its power is evident in works such as Conversations with Ogotemmêli because it allows readers to comprehend how deeply embedded in ritual Ogotemmêli’s religious ideas are.73 Whereas narration’s most basic form is “I came, I saw, I failed to conquer,” dialogue’s is “She said, he said, she said.” This pairing of narration and dialogue is the basis for much ordinary conversation and the bread and butter of novels.74 Together, they show up whenever two people talk about almost anything, including ritual, so knowing how to perform, as well as analyze, dialogue is a mainstay of ritual studies. Students of ritual need to be able not only to analyze these processes but also to carry on conversations, listen to stories, and tell stories. They also need to understand the differences between the oral, written, and videographic forms of each. Although I am advocating narrative and dialogue as tools for a ritual studies method, two caveats are necessary. The first is that a ritual is not a narrative; neither is it a dialogue or drama.75 Some scholars have treated ritual as drama or as narrative and then forgotten the metaphor. In “Narratives: The Guilty Secret of Ethnographic FilmMaking,” Paul Henley tries to explain why rituals are a staple of ethnographic film: Another, and perhaps more obvious, reason why ritual events should be such a recurrent topic of ethnographic film-making is that they generally

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have an intrinsic narrative structure which can easily be recycled and used as the basis for the narrative structure of a film. For, as anthropologists have been very much aware since the work of van Gennep in the earliest days of the discipline, ritual events tend to be of a processual nature, with a self-evident beginning, an equally evident conclusion and a clear progression from one to the other. . . . Therefore, in making a film about a ritual event, an ethnographic film-maker need do no more than take these intrinsic narrative structures and . . . use them to construct the narrative structure of his or her film. In fact, I would hazard the guess that if one were to take all the ethnographic films that had ever been made, one would discover that a large proportion were about ritual events and that the vast majority of these had narrative structures of precisely this kind. . . . In order to ascribe meaning to the events they portray and, in so doing, engage an audience, all ethnographic films, in common with documentary films generally, require some sort of narrative structure that the audience can identify early on in the screening and then follow through to the end of the film. If a film does not have a narrative structure, or if this is very difficult to construe, then there is the risk that the film will come across as merely a sequence of incomprehensible vignettes and the audience will soon get disenchanted. Before this happens, there is considerable evidence to suggest that audiences will attempt to construct a narrative, even if the film-maker has failed to provide one.76 Henley is right, scholars and filmmakers who avoid structuring their accounts as narratives take a risk with audiences, but I am more inclined to speak of “narrativizing” (an activity performed unwittingly by audiences and deliberately by filmmakers) than to believe that narrative is an inherent quality of ritual. Henley himself alludes to an alternative view, namely, that audiences expect or want narratives and, when they do not get them, they tend to construct them. Rituals may include narratives, and people may tell stories about rituals, but neither activity makes a ritual a narrative. A marked beginning and ending with lots of stuff in the middle does not make a story. One way to test the view that rituals are either narrative (Paul Henley’s view) or dramatic (Victor Turner’s) is to try writing a full description or making a film of a ritual. The outcome is not a play or story but an assemblage or bricolage. You can make a story of it, but it isn’t a story. If the ritual you wish to present is not only repetitious but also sedentary or monochromatic, bereft of local color, it would be daunting to produce an account that is anything but deadly boring to cinematically conditioned audiences. Even in the case of a ritual that is mobile, spectacular, and colorful—as the Santa Fe Fiesta is—accounts of it can easily lack the drama necessary to keep a reader reading. A description entrances Westernized readers only if it has a plotlike dynamic that carries them forward and is animated by characters whose responses readers care about or identify with.

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One kind of narrative that ritual studies scholars utilize is historical. The problem with ethnographically inspired “go and study” scenarios is the short time frame. Unless you live in the middle of what you study, you go for a year maybe. If you’re determined and skilled with grant applications, perhaps you return for another. But the ritual you’re studying may have been there for quite a while before you arrived, maybe eons. A big ritual event can be overwhelming. As a result, all your attention is on it for the hours or days it lasts. How it came about and how it has been shaped by the history of the place where it occurs can easily escape your attention, hence the necessity for historical research. As with ethnographic research, if it is to serve ritual studies it must be critical, drawing heavily on primary sources and examining their points of view and vested interests, and it must be contextual, examining not only what a ritual is or does but how it has interacted with its environment through time (see Appendix 20: Analyzing a Historical Document). So, as students of ritual, we have a twofold obligation: to write well and to tell the truth. However much we may doubt the possibility of disinterested truth, we have an obligation to write accurately and fairly, weighing sources while ferreting out intentions and exploring influences, causes, and consequences. Personal narrative is yet another variant. The standard advice for writing academic papers is “Avoid referring to yourself explicitly (‘in this paper I will examine’).”77 Instead of helping students find the delicate balance whereby an author is narratively present in her or his own account without occluding the research subject, mentors tend to shut down the first-person singular altogether. Although this advice still represents the norm for academic writing, an undercurrent constantly bubbles up through it. That current is fed by feminist and ethnographic writers who, instead of treating the self as an intrusion, treat it as necessary for revealing the interactions that helped produce the final scholarly product.

Argumentation Scholarly writing has at least two distinguishing qualities. It is informed by research, and it is argumentative. “Argumentative” does not mean “contentious,” only that the aim is to convince readers by developing a thesis, offering reasons for holding it, and considering counterarguments. This is not the place for a protracted discussion of scholarly writing, since there are excellent books on the topic. Among the best is Rolf Norgaard’s Ideas in Action: A Guide to Critical Thinking and Writing.78 Not merely a style guide, the book is rich with examples of scholarly writing; it is itself an argument for argumentative writing. The requirement that scholarly writing be argumentative does not preclude other kinds of writing—description, dialogue, and narration, for example—only that these other genres should serve the development of an argument. However much popular audiences may prefer narrative-driven writing, scholarly audiences expect argument-driven writing. In writing for generally educated, nonspecialist audiences,

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both are necessary—arguments for checking the excesses of stories, and stories for enlivening theories. Good scholarly writing (like “good” anything) is rare. Mediocre writing is too often the rule rather than the exception for several reasons: the decline of grammar teaching in public schools; the outsourcing of editing by academic presses; fads in scholarly writing; and the multiplicity of genres. For these and other reasons, writing skills, along with other research methods, should be explicitly taught, practiced, and evaluated at both undergraduate and graduate levels.79 Even academics complain about “academic” writing. Among press editors, one code word for bad academic prose is “dissertationese,” which flags of a thicket of problems: extraordinary sentence length, impenetrable jargon, excessive quotation, compulsive citation, defensiveness, abstracted or labored prose, distanced or disembodied attitudes, and failure to cultivate one’s own voice. Some scholars never find mature writing voices. Dissertation writing may enhance research skills, but it too rarely improves writing skills. Dissertation writing can ingrain poor habits that require decades to change. Some characteristics of dissertationese are more understandable than others. Defensiveness, for instance, is understandable in a situation where one has to anticipate formally defending a dissertation. Literature reviews along with theory-andmethod chapters have a function in degree programs, but for book publication such chapters often must be integrated, shortened, or eliminated. For too long the standard North American practice has been writing dissertations and then revising them into books. In a few institutions dissertations are now being written as books, a welcome change provided that scholarly writing is actually taught by skilled scholarly writers rather than presumed as a skill students and professors already have. Students of ritual are responsible for engaging in several communities of discourse: that of the community they study, that of the scholarly community, and increasingly that of educated nonspecialist readers. But which should determine the tenor of writing? Which community’s definitions and labels will you use—those of participants or those of colleagues? And what about your own voice, tone, and point of view? Answering such questions is fundamental to the craft of writing about other people’s rituals. The answers, many would say, depend on context. When addressing the scholarly community, speak scholarese, and when talking with participants, use localese. Easy enough when talking person to person, but when publishing, audiences may be broadly mixed, and we writers have to imagine rather than face our audiences. Then what? Do you compromise by mixing and matching, or do you make a difficult choice in favor of one audience? Communities have their treasured terms. Hoping for consensus or debate, scholarly communities define and defend them, but setting these words loose in the field is rarely wise. Saying in Santa Fe that I had come to study rituals or examine symbols was often met with quizzical retorts: Do you mean masses? Native American ceremonials? And people sometimes responded to my questions with their own: La Conquistadora is only a symbol? I used buzzwords, many of which I had to surrender.

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Participants too had a dense cluster of their own buzzwords: not only fiesta (festival) and other Spanish terms such as entrada (formal entrance), pregón (proclamation), desfile (parade), and grand baile (grand ball), but also English words like celebration, mass, novena, ceremony, performance, concert, show, prayer, thanksgiving, procession, extravaganza, entertainment, meeting, play, song, music, opera, drama, and melodrama.80 Students of ritual who aspire to be good scholarly writers have to learn to dance gingerly in the thicket of participant and scholar terminology and, even more demanding, find their own voices while doing so. Mentors should enable young scholarly writers to cultivate their own styles. The writing voice of a scholar should be as distinctive as that of a novelist or poet. Writers, dancers, and painters are not the only ones who have styles; so do bricklayers, models, and scholars. Whereas methods are public and teachable, style is not. It can be fostered but probably not taught, at least not directly. If method is the “how” of theory, style is the “how” of method. A scholar’s style is how he or she embodies and performs a method both in the field and in the various media of scholarly and public communication.

Explanation and Interpretation Since I construe the notion of method broadly, it includes the full range of skills that scholars learn in order to conduct research on ritual. A more conventional view would limit method to ways of gathering and interpreting data. Whichever view one holds, scholars are not reporters; they must interact with their data. At a bare minimum, a student of ritual has to say something about a ritual that participants themselves do not say. However much contemporary Western scholars in the field listen empathetically to ritualists in their homes and sanctuaries, scholars in academic settings are expected to go beyond quoting or paraphrasing indigenous accounts. In academic parlance, explanation is the “harder” approach allied with the physical sciences, while interpretation (sometimes also called criticism) is the “softer” approach associated with the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences.81 In North America, the term “science” is often restricted to research that is quantitative and validated by prediction-making or repeatable, experimental testing. In Europe the term is broader, applying to any discipline that is systematic and public rather than confessional and religious.82 The problem with dividing up the academic world between hard and soft approaches is that too much falls between the cracks. Much scholarly writing is interpretive in some ways, explanatory in others. By proposing to pursue ritual studies as a craft, I dance over and on both sides of the abyss. As with chair-making or bread-baking, so with ritual studies: There is a physics and chemistry—a science—to it, and there is also an art to it. I can make chairs or loaves by following plans and recipes or by imitation and intuition. It doesn’t matter how an artisan gets the job done; the proof is in the sitting or the eating.

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Explanation proffers scientific accounts of the infrastructure of ritual action. How do physical and social bodies work? How do rituals appropriate, modify, or build on these workings?83 What are the physics of ritual postures and gestures? What are the chemistry and biogenetics of ritually formed bodies? Explanations tend to focus on causes and effects or covariances. The religious sometimes say their rituals cause or influence divine action. In the face of these assertions, scientists from Western or Westernized academies substitute other causes and influences or go mum. Explaining signals that you are trying to be scientific, whereas going silent means you are either timid or, god forbid, religious. Due to the nature of academic research scenarios, there is seldom a sustained public conversation between scientists who explain rituals and practitioners who enact those rituals, although such conversations sometimes happen in the field. After the fieldwork experience concludes, the paths diverge. Their interpretations are for them; our explanations are for us. We don’t even agree to disagree but rather pass like ships in the night, avoiding a collision course. Contemporary scholars are not inclined to accept at face value ritualists’ own explanations for doing what they do, so even scholarly interpreters, like scholarly explainers, have to do more than repeat what they’ve heard. There has to be a difference between what a ritualist says and what a ritual studies scholar says. A difference in perspective often underlies interpretive conflicts. On the one hand, ritualists tend to articulate intentions, aims, ideals, and goals. Participants say that rituals purify and empower participants, serve the spirits, bless the world, and influence desirable things to happen. On the other hand, scholars tend to focus on functions and consequences, assuming that rituals conserve traditions, consolidate identity and groups, and disempower others outside the ritually constituted community. Scholarly interpreters, talking as if the unintended consequences of ritual constitute its real function, tend to focus on inferred, observed, or theoryderived functions and consequences.84 In most cases the differences are ontological, differences of worldview. Ritualists say, “We dance to make it rain.” Scholars say, “They perform to create group solidarity.” Such “translations” are not really translations or even explanations but two different ontologies or statements of faith. So a caution is in order: Explanatory moves may be essential to scientific academic life, but they can also lead to intellectual condescension, implying, “We really know; you really don’t.” Students of ritual who expect to be heard in the field have to practice humility, not pronouncing that we alone know what rituals really do.85 We don’t have to believe every word ritualists utter or uncritically assume their perspectives, but we should question ourselves as radically and persistently as we question others. As a result of differing worldviews and differing perspectives, dissonance between the two kinds of discourse is predictable. When ritualists say they dance to make it rain and researchers in the field report, “They believe that their dancing makes it rain,” this is, perhaps, fair enough, since the worldviews of the two groups

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may diverge significantly. However, if students of ritual go further, declaring that dancing cannot lead to raining but only to, say, collective effervescence, this claim amounts to a tenet of faith. Thinkers and writers may believe their own axioms, but they can no more demonstrate the truth of them than dancers can theirs. The godterms of academe are psychological, biological, cultural, or social factors.86 From such perspectives, rituals have consequences by means of public dramatization rather than divine intervention. Rituals work in the same way that other cultural activities do. Ritual efficacy, then, amounts to inscribing images and meanings in bodies and minds, harnessing the collective energies of groups, and enacting them so as to maintain, or occasionally disrupt, hierarchies and distributions of power. This kind of explanation is essentially humanistic and, some would say, reductionistic, insofar as it reduces ritual efficacy to nonsupernatural causes and effects. Interpretations, insofar as they resemble dialogue or conversation, are most adept at working close to the ground on the minute particulars of a ritual. Explanations, insofar as they aspire to articulate publicly verifiable patterns, tend to be universalistic. Interpretations derive their power to convince from their capacity to present specific ritual performances or ritual traditions, whereas explanations gain theirs by their ability to account for ritual in general. Whereas interpretations are largely about the details of rites themselves, scientific explanations are mainly about the infrastructure of ritual.

Ritual Criticism Those who would explain ritual sometimes consider those who would interpret it as soft, or uncritical, but this caricature overlooks the persistent connection between interpretation and criticism. Journalistic film interpreters (often called film critics) broker transactions between movie production and movie consumption. Whereas film critics openly assist consumers in making informed viewing choices, scholarly critics assist students in interpreting, and even this sort of assistance sometimes indirectly influences consumption. In both kinds of film criticism, interpreter-critics think of themselves as fair, holding objects of interpretation at arm’s length in order to judge them fairly and comparatively. It is common to distinguish interpretation from criticism, treating the former as neutral and the latter as judgmental, but this distinction is too neat. The choice is rarely whether to interpret or critique but whether to make explicit the critiques embedded in interpretations. In one situation you may choose to play down your judgment while in another you play it up. There is no simple way to separate interpreting and evaluating, because interpreters are always positioned and interests, always vested. The only choices are whether, when, and how to reveal your positions and investments. For this reason I treat criticism as a variant of interpretation. Ritual criticism is the documentation and analysis of negative and positive evaluative claims about a

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ritual. Ritual criticism is the act of interpreting a ritual with a view to implicating its practice.87 Speaking about interpretation this way sounds vaguely dangerous, but I do so deliberately as a reminder to myself and others that interpretations do have consequences for practice even if they are not made overt. Tendering interpretations is not only about finding or formulating meanings; it is also about identifying or taking positions regarding practices. Sometimes those positions are ethical, sometimes political, sometimes aesthetic. By implying that interpretations are critical and therefore in some sense practical, I do not mean that scholars should play either the role of experts pronouncing judgments on ritual behavior or of servants catering to the whims of practitioners. I mean, rather, that interpretation is always implicitly, if not explicitly, evaluative, so there is always both a connection and a tension between engaging in ritual and interpreting it. Ritual criticism is a concept based on a repeatedly observed empirical reality: People make judgments about rituals, both their own and those of others. No matter how sacrosanct a religious rite, religious leaders assess it, and so do participants. Although leaders may wish ordinary folks would submit quietly and uncomplainingly to religious authority, people grumble about their leaders’ ineptitude, and they praise the grace and color of ceremonies they admire. Likewise, leaders talk shop, trading ideas about what works and doesn’t.88 Criticism is always positioned; its interests, always vested. The possible positions are not only those of insider and outsider, but those of various kinds of insider: leaders and followers, children and adults, men and women. Critiques express not only judgments based on explicit criteria but also the vested interests of those who make them. Criticism, no matter how crass or refined, cautious or blatant, always leads back to the parties offering it, so studying rituals requires questions that might resemble those of an investigative reporter: Who are these ritualists? What do they stand to gain? What are they risking? The act of evaluating a ritual, no matter who does it, usually implies degrees— not merely polar opposites, “good” and “bad,” but also “good in this way, not so good in that way”; not just “felicitous” and “failed” but also “successful in this respect, failed in that respect.” Seldom does a rite fail in every respect. It would be as difficult to make a rite falter in every respect as it would to construct or perform one that succeeds in every way. Consequently, it is worth identifying the kinds of ritual mistakes that are possible (see Appendix 4: Types of Ritual Infelicity).89 Like other kinds of judgment-making, ritual criticism is inherently comparative: Today’s service was better than last week’s; your sister’s wedding was less meaningful than your brother’s. Comparative judgments can be made in multiple ways. One can compare a particular enactment with a remembered instance: today’s inauguration with last year’s. One can also compare a ritual with an idealization (“the perfect wedding,” “how funerals should be done”) or abstract model (Arnold van Gennep’s threefold model of passage).

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Ritual criticism runs in two directions; it can be either positive or negative. “Positive criticism” may sound oxymoronic to the public ear, but to scholars of literature and the arts criticism can be positive, negative, or both. Criticism is not only about the worst examples but also about the best, so it exposes not only ritual glitches and failures but also ritual aspirations and ideals. Negative criticisms of all sorts, not just of a ritual, tend to be sequestered. If critique does not happen behind closed doors, it happens in select company by segregating audiences. You say what you really think, but only in front of those you trust. Negative criticism can even be “hidden in plain sight” by damning with faint praise or shrouding a critique in skilled, ironic, excessive praise. Ritual criticism as either a theoretical construct or a methodological practice is not above criticism, but there are better and worse ways to disprove, demonstrate, or extend the notion. One way is locate circumstances where it cannot happen because of, say, an emotional groundswell in a ritual or the marshalling of defensive authority around a ritual. Researchers, then, have to search out the dark corners. Is critique happening in some other place? At another time? By people of one caste but not another? Just because an informant declares that no one would dare question such-and-such a ritual does not mean that no one does. Ritual criticism is not about experts arriving from elsewhere to say bad things about other people’s rituals.90 In rare instances, when scholarly observers are asked to assess rituals, refusing may seem disingenuous. Invited, respectful critique is not likely to incur the resentment that would meet uninvited broadsides from on high. Ritual criticism is like any other form of evaluation: Much depends on the tenor and timing of delivery as well as on the mix of positive and negative comments. An important part of ritual criticism is locating and understanding positive judgments about rituals: What evidence do participants offer for judgments that the Santa Fe Fiesta is “wonderful” or “uplifting,” that fiestas “build community”? Although there are similarities between ritual criticism and critiques in the arts, there are also differences.91 My approach to interpretive criticism draws on but is not identical with literary and film criticism. A ritual is not a movie, and a religious system operates differently from an entertainment market, so ritual criticism, especially in religious settings, necessarily differs from film criticism. Unlike theater criticism, ritual criticism is not usually published in newspapers, and ritual critics are not typically paid professionals. But rituals and films have in common at least two features; they are performative, and people evaluate performances. Film criticism is published in newspapers for the public, whereas liturgical criticism is typically sequestered or shrouded, but the circumspection does not alter the basic fact that both participants and observers evaluate rituals, thus implicating their practice. In my view, interpretative labor is most productive when it circles a ritual, approaching it from multiple vectors. Labeling them is difficult because the terms are so fraught, but below is a proposal for naming the vectors of ritual interpretation.

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Each includes a brief allusion suggesting how one might apply each kind of criticism to the Santa Fe Fiesta. Representation criticism examines the way a ritual is represented: What is the medium of representation (a verbal account, an article, a book, a film, a photo)? What is the genre (scholarly, popular, documentary, feature)? What is selected for representation? Not selected? Whose representation is this? What are the vested interests of the speaker, author, film maker, or presenter? Santa Fe: A critic would examine the construction of the Santa Fe videos attached to this book, exposing their biases and vested interests. Formal criticism studies the internal forms and flows—the elements and phases—of a rite either as performed on an actual occasion or as it is typically enacted. How is the rite orchestrated, or choreographed? What are its explicit and implicit aesthetic canons? What is the internal “logic” (the “plot,” the “trajectory”) of the rite? Of what elements is it constructed? How do these elements interact? How do the phases build on each other? Detract from each other? Are they harmonious? Dissonant? Santa Fe: A critic could examine the form and flow of the events that compose the fiesta, asking, for example, why first things are first and last things last. Production criticism tracks the way a ritual performance or ritual system is created and sustained. Who does what? How? What is the division of labor? Who has authority? Who doesn’t? How is authority garnered or transmitted? What is hidden backstage? Exposed front-stage? What happens after the performance? Who cleans up? Santa Fe: An interpreter might, for example, sit in on planning and evaluation meetings hoping to answer some of these questions. If the research were based on reports instead, preliminary representation criticism would have to take place first. Exegetical criticism elicits and analyzes participants’ verbalizations about the ritual: What interpretations do ritual participants themselves offer? What stories do they tell? What kinds of reflection are encouraged? Discouraged? What worldviews are expressed in the ritual? What beliefs or doctrines does the ritual presuppose? What values are espoused, enhanced, or sustained by the rite? To what extent are they collective? Individualistic or personal? Santa Fe: An interpreter might conduct interviews supplemented perhaps by a critical study of the interviews included in the videos. A critical interpretive edge could be developed by interviewing people, or categories of people, absent or minimally represented in my videos. Reception criticism examines the “consumption” of a rite by its “audiences,” that is, the social uses to which the rite is put. Who is the ritual for? What are the effects of the ritual on its participants? On the ambient society? What does the ritual put into force? Inhibit or prevent? What social forces does it underwrite? Which groups are empowered or disempowered by it? Santa Fe: A researcher might focus on, say, tourists rather than primary ritual actors like the de Vargas figure or Fiesta Queen. Tradition criticism tracks the course of the ritual’s historical development. From what kinds of sources (texts, objects, archaeological remains, oral accounts) is the

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history constructed? Where did the ritual come from geographically? Nationally? Ethnically? Religiously? What sources or influences are embedded in the ritual? How has the ritual changed, or remained the same, across time? Santa Fe: A researcher might study archival documents, contemporary news accounts, and local exegesis, assembling them into a developmental sequence, the basis of a history or story about the fiesta’s changes through time. Although I have used a version of this approach to interpret the wedding scene from Fiddler on the Roof, interpreters rarely circumambulate rites a sufficient number of times to answer all these kinds of questions.92 I am not suggesting that interpreters should deploy all these approaches at the same time, only that it is worthwhile to “triangulate” a ritual by crosscutting it in several ways to develop a critical interpretive edge.

Publishing and Presenting We can study rituals with a variety of motivations: to enact them, to revise them, even to subvert them. Like lumberjacks contemplating trees while imagining them as finely built cabinets, students of ritual cast their gaze on rituals, construing them as potential articles, books, or presentations. Most of us study rituals in order to document them, and we document them not merely to understand them but also to present them. The “in order to” is determinative; the imagined end determines the means. The “fieldwork for the sake of publication” impulse means we have mixed motives. Like most research, ours is not “pure” but product-oriented. However process-oriented our intentions, Product (with a capital P) still looms. We participate and observe in order to document, in order to write a book, in order to convince deans and impress colleagues, in order to enhance our self-esteem as researchers, writers, and teachers. As surely as auto workers or grape pickers, this stack of motives means that we are building artifacts for pay even if we are also serving grander purposes. I don’t mean that research is only self-interested. It can produce gifts as well as books for sale. Offering copies of a book, video, or other scholarly products as gifts to a studied community can be a wonderful practice, but it does not obviate the larger, framing economics of the transactions we call research and publication. A token carried or sent back as a gift to one’s “informants” is not only a gift, but also a bid for recognition or affection. Although, in the throes of participation, you may momentarily forget your original production motives, they return, and even if they do not, people being studied notice the difference between participation to be and participation to produce. The intent to publish transforms the adventure of going into the field into an enterprise.93 A scholar in the field has to anticipate multiple audiences: press editors, peers who review manuscripts, and readers both in the field and at home. Editors, representing presses and journals, stand in the way, at once facilitating and obstructing

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passage. Such people, both actual and imagined, peer over your shoulder. Their interest, or lack of it, shapes the way students of ritual think, feel, and gather information. Each group exercises judgments about form and content, writing and argument. When manuscripts are sent out for review, they are usually accompanied by a form asking questions, thus implying a set of criteria. Just as we cannot observe a ritual outside its cultural matrix, so we do not publish in a social vacuum. Academic and publishing subcultures shape research and teaching, so the more a would-be scholar-writer knows about them, the more likely attempts to publish will succeed.94 The Life Passages Series, which Robbie Davis-Floyd and I edited for the University of California Press, was successful as far as it went. The initial idea was to produce a series of books on major rites of passage: birth, coming of age, marriage, and death. Then, if these books took off, we would branch out to other, less obvious passages: healing, divorce, retirement, and so on. We facilitated fine marriage and death volumes.95 Many teacher-scholars told us that they would use a coming-of-age volume in class. However, when asked to write such a book, they replied that their own research trajectories were not organized “that way,” which is to say, broadly and comparatively. Many offered to write volumes on coming of age in a single culture or religious tradition, but we could convince no one to write a broader thematic volume. After several years of being unable to commission a volume on coming of age and initiation, we terminated the series. The methodological point is that students of ritual have to study not only rituals but also the professional expectations of academic guilds and the publication cultures of various presses. The University of California Press’s Religion on the Ground Series, for which I was series editor, failed in a more ignominious way. There is not a single volume in the series. Even though it was approved by the press and existed as an empty placeholder for several years, it failed for two reasons. One is that it was too far ahead of the technology curve. It was defined as a book-plus-DVD series. Everyone— scholars, students, the press—loved the idea. Yes, of course, they said, students of religion should be able to hear the sounds and see the sights of religion, not merely read about it. However, rare was the scholar who, loving the idea, would take the time and spend the money to gain the training and equipment for producing DVDs. Consequently, the series was merely a flag of hope flapping in the breeze for several years while a few of us tried to stoke the fires of multimedia scholarly production. Then, having midwifed a model volume ready for assessment, editing, and production, the press declared itself not interested in the topic of the book even though it had known the topic for a few years, and even though the press editor admitted that the manuscript and DVD were excellent. Positive reviews and recommendations notwithstanding, the editorial board said the book would not sell enough copies. Although the press was a university press, it was under increasing pressure to consider not only quality but also sales. Lesson learned: Authors who do not understand how the publishing industry works risk having their field research stranded.

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The Oxford Ritual Studies Series, which contains this book, is alive and well partly because the press has a global reach and ample resources. Following the advice of the press editor for the series, the international group of series editors decided to give priority to single-authored monographs and to minimize edited essay collections. If you don’t know that the Oxford Ritual Studies Series tries to avoid essay collections, you can waste enormous amounts of time and energy. There is more to a publisher’s culture than economics. Even though Oxford University Press is British, the series is published out of the New York office, so for many purposes the series is American. What this means for European authors (so far the series has no Asian or African authors) is that they must come to terms with American publishing conventions. Many European writings about ritual are published in edited collections subsidized by granting agencies rather than book sales. Editors of European books often approach presses with money in hand and without the necessity for either peer review or a demonstrated market. As one European author wryly put it, “I could care less whether only two people will read my book.” Although the English in volumes written by multilingual European authors is usually readable, sometimes having been vetted by “English checkers,” the writing sometimes does not pass muster with Oxford or other North American university presses. So the editing process becomes more costly and time-consuming. To my mind, the time and money are well worth the effort, but European authors complain about the necessity to popularize when writing for North American presses. There are endless debates about whether the demand in North America is really for clarity and intelligibility or merely popularity. European writers for American publications have to worry about communication values and attention spans in a way they do not when publishing with European presses. So my advice to consider publication cultures as part of your method works is most effective if it happens at the beginning rather than the end of field research, and if you consider specific presses, specific publication climates, and even specific editors. Research on ritual is not only published in print or posted online but also presented orally at conferences and in classes. Presenting a ritual sounds easy enough. You go someplace else and gather data. You return home to process it. Then, at a venue you show your “findings.” Having done fieldwork, you would like to demonstrate your hard work. Presenting a trophy or souvenir is mandatory; otherwise, no one will believe you have been there, done that. Most of your audience will not have been where you have been or witnessed what you have witnessed. They may care little for the particulars of “your” ritual or its setting. Instead, they await, sometimes impatiently, the conclusions, exportable generalizations, or points where your research converges with theirs. Presentations, like publications, are best when tailored to specific situations, but often you cannot know those situations ahead of time: Who will attend? With what questions on their mind? With how much time on their hands?

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Presentations at scholarly conferences tend to be word-bound. The twentyminute read conference paper is the reigning genre, but the value that might be added by live performance is often minimized by presentations delivered faceparallel-to-paper. Few of these papers are crafted for oral performance. Rather, they are drafts of articles or chapters. As a result, they are usually too dense, better read than heard. They are too long, with presenters announcing that they are skipping pages. Occasionally, words are supplemented by powerless PowerPoint images or, worse, words laid densely onto screens (see Appendix 19: PowerPoint Presentations). A multimedia presentation on ritual requires the audiovisual equivalent of a description. But if you present at a conference, you may have only twenty minutes; in your own classroom, perhaps you can take thirty or forty. Since you are an academic, you believe that only an hour or two will really do justice to the complexities of the ritual you so painstakingly studied, but would your colleagues and students remain attentive for that entire time even if you could have a bigger time slot? Not likely. Even when the added value could be immense because the scholarship is brilliant and the delivery impeccable, scholars often find the conference-presentation scene frustrating, because words, except in the hands of remarkable writers, are rarely up to the task of evoking the sensory richness of ritual. Even the sparest of rituals floods the senses, but the scholarly conference ethos favors desensualization and abstraction. Multimedia presentations may counter both, but they also double or triple the demands on both presenters and audience. A presenter must become not only a writer and speaker but also a videographer, video editor, photographer, photo editor, and sound technician. An audience member must become a viewerlistener. The viewing-listening audience has to see, hear, and interpret the interactions among at least four media: written word, spoken word, moving or still image, and recorded sound. In addition, an audience interested in interpreting, not merely witnessing, your mediatized ritual has to interpret each of these tracks as an implicit commentary on the others. Sometimes these multitracks are redundant, saying almost the same thing, but sometimes they say different things in dissonant or even contradictory ways. So if we are to communicate what we have learned in the field, we must pay as much attention to presenting as we do to data gathering or interpretation.

The Media of Studying Ritual Ritual studies is rooted in the senses. For both good and ill, it tends to start with the visible and audible appearance of bodies in motion enacting meanings in social contexts. The discipline of ritual studies is enhanced by field methods because a ritual can be more fully understood by asking participants questions, listening to their responses, participating alongside them, observing their interactions, audiovisually documenting their rituals, and receiving what they offer as gifts or critique.

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Fieldwork is greatly enhanced by video. It captures details we don’t see or can’t remember, and it engages the senses of both producers and viewers in a way that writing alone usually does not. An audiovisual recording can track exterior bodiliness in spatial and auditory context. On the premise that a person’s interiority is never completely interior, some would even claim that an astute film can even reveal human interiority. In any case, the study of ritual is not primarily about ideas in people’s heads or feelings in their hearts but about display, hence the necessity for using video and audio recordings. For studying contemporary rituals they are methodological necessities, not options, and they have analytical, not merely expressive or pedagogical, value. Although the philological, historical, and literary-critical study of ritual texts has a venerable history, these methods have some rather cramping limits. Historians usually cannot observe their subjects, and archaeologists do not typically have the opportunity to interview theirs. Lacking living persons and performances, these scholars are forced to combine inference with imagination to reconstruct the rituals implied by manuscript fragments and foundation remains. Historians and archaeologists would likely jump at the chance to time-travel and film the rites and sites into which they pour their energy. Multimedia publication is no longer prohibitively expensive, and publication is no longer restricted to print. As long as the means of publication were expensive and difficult to access, you had to make a choice: Either publish in expensive formats available only to a few specialists or write what the educated nonspecialist reader would read. But the Internet presents other possibilities. You can put a terse, engaging account in a book and couple it with videos and full transcripts of interviews online. You can link technical books with accessible online films or even two versions of a film.96 You can even post unedited footage of a ritual, affording scholars the opportunity to edit their own versions or levy critiques of your editing practices.97 Even though querying is an interrogatory activity for which the basic model is face-to-face interpersonal talk, querying is increasingly mediated. Querying ritual still happens in verbal media, but it can also happen in other or multiple media, so students of ritual need to reflect methodologically about the process. “Mediatizing” is a clumsy neologism referring to the transposing of knowledge into various means of communication—popular and elite, written and electronic, virtual and tangible.98 “Mediating” is more euphonic but also more ambiguous, since it connotes peacemaking, and mediatizing can create trouble as surely as it can enhance peace. Media are means of discovery as well as communication. We don’t merely learn and then transmit what we have learned through media. Rather, learning itself happens by means of media, rendering research methods media-dependent. Even the most widely used methods—participation, observation, and interview—vary, depending on the media employed. Everyone knows the presence of a camera or recorder changes interview dynamics, but so does the presence of a pencil or

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notebook. Now interviews are sometimes conducted over the phone, by e-mail, or in other virtual settings since our interviewees, like us, are increasingly on the go. Even supposedly raw data are mediated and manufactured coming and going. Before we arrive on an ethnographic scene, we already know “through a glass darkly” what’s going on. Maybe we have read e-books about the rituals we propose to study. Even without books physical and virtual, a screen of prejudgments stands between us and them.99 Then, when we arrive in the field, there is more mediation. Between us and ritual participants is a recording device, a notebook, a question-set. And after we leave, between us and them is an ocean or a cultural divide or a language barrier. Between us and our colleagues is a knowledge gap. Any way you consider it, there is always some mediating idea, intention, person, or device.100 Even what we know experientially through our senses is mediated through nerve endings, spines, and brains. All data, even sense data, are mediated through representations. So “the” media are just other panes of glass that require two-sided scrubbing lest the opacity compromise the clarity of our vision. In studying ritual, media are multiple—one set for research and another for communicating the results of that research: not only a pen and pad or microphone for audio but also a camera for video; not only software for writing but software for audio and visual editing, as well as for showing stills and movies. The outcome of these interactive pairs is that rituals, as studied by us and presented to others, are multiply mediated. In one sense, things have been this way for a long time. Scholars have long analyzed ancient ritual texts as stand-ins for actual rituals, even though they know there is rarely a strict correspondence between a ritual text and its performance. Prescriptive texts are not mirrors of what people actually did. Even knowing this, indigenous groups in the process of reviving no-longer-in-use rituals sometimes consult ethnographic accounts of those rituals, transforming descriptive texts into prescriptive ones. A book is a medium toward which many of us assumed a polemical posture in the 1970s, when ritual studies began. We resisted the tyranny of the book. Textualism and classicism were a set of values that inspired scholars to act as if everything worthy of study was contained in an ancient text. All that was needed to make sense of religion was to understand the sacred books of the world’s so-called major religions. Such understanding was available by exegesis, careful, word-by-word reading, and rereading. If a reader wanted to set things in a larger context, that task could be achieved by looking at other books. Texts were contextualized by reference to other texts; primary sources were framed by secondary sources. Primary-source texts were the real thing; secondary sources were not really sources at all but parasites thriving on primary-source texts. Ritual was studied by reading primary-source ritual texts in order to write secondary texts called publications. Textualism and classicism may still dominate but no longer exclusively. It is now permissible to study popular culture, items of material culture, and ritual on the Internet. Anything and everything is a legitimate object of study, and everything,

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even ancient sacred texts, should be studied in historical and social, not just textual, context. “Texts in contexts” is the current incantation. So we should not overdraw the differences between textualists and fieldworkers. When fieldworkers enter the field, they do so to produce texts, so there should be no fundamental antagonism between the two groups; they need each other’s expertise. Textual research and field research are not opposites, much less enemies. Since texts often lie behind performances, thorough fieldwork on ritual usually includes archival or textual work. Most of us who were educated textually and then turned to field research never really gave up on written texts and never completely ignored contexts. “The field,” after all, is a context. Those who head for that peculiar place continue writing articles and books. Even though we study living, breathing human beings there, we return home, where we transpose persons and events into simulacra—notes, data, documents, recordings, photos, and publications. The rituals we study became pages of words, screens of images, or speakers full of sounds. Besides producing written interpretations, contemporary ritual studies scholars now create audiovisual documents. Like written-up rituals, videoed rituals are not rituals. A video of a ritual is a text, albeit not a printed one. However much rituals on film appear to be living, they are no more alive than rituals in old books. A scholar studying a contemporary film of a contemporary ritual without access to its participants is in almost the same position as a historian forced to rely on inference and imagination. Ethnographic accounts of rituals come about by acts of writing. However scientific, our accounts are also literary and therefore as governed by the conventions and canons of writing genres (journalistic, scientific, fictional) as they are by facts. A major point of the Writing Culture revolution was that culture is not only “out there” in the field; it is also a written representation “here” at home.101 Representations sometimes become substitutes for the real thing, because they themselves have their own kind of reality. We scholars are in the business of creating virtual ritual. Our accounts are, if not avatars, at least stand-ins. However vividly participants in our accounts sing and dance, we are still the string-pulling puppeteers. Actors appear in our accounts only insofar as we let them. Actions appear, but only if we re-create them. Places appear but only if we reconstruct them, and we reconstruct them largely in words, sounds, and images. Most of us scholars, most of the time, analyze not rituals but renditions of rituals, substitutes that we sometimes lapse into treating as if they were the real thing. It seems to be a rule not only of ritual life but of life in general that the semblance of a thing, although it is not the thing itself, may nevertheless be treated as if it were the thing. Although an icon is a painting, it is not a mere painting. An icon is the embodiment of that to which it points, so it does more than point; it participates in that to which it points. A virtual ritual is not a ritual, but it is not not a ritual either. One has to say both: It is, and it is not. It’s a delicate dance. A description of a rite is not a rite; the recipe is not the cake; the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. It is crucial

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not to lose track of this all-important “not.” It reminds us of difference. However, in some circumstances, the recipe is all one has to guide the baking. The finger is the only way a merely human half-blind eye spots the magnificent moon. So we must also remember that although the recipe is not the cake, it is the way to the cake. Early in the emergence of ritual studies, many of us insisted that ritual is necessarily embodied, so we wanted to study it live, on the ground. Living bodies are still an anchor point, because rituals cannot be studied if they are not physicalized. Consequently, religious traditions in which the aim is to internalize ritual actions present a methodological problem. In these traditions participants practice introjecting ritual actions into their hearts and spirits. If we are to study such internal ritualization, there are few options other than tracking brain activity, but reading a chart is not all that different from reading a transcript of an interview or watching a film. Although impossible to access directly, internalized ritualization is embodied, and so is sitting at a computer. Virtual rituals are comparatively, not absolutely, disembodied. People sitting at their desks, hand upon mouse, eyes glued to avatars, are embodied, even though in a sedentary, somewhat cyborgian way. Their movements may be minimal, but their brain activity is not. Ritual studies scholars are, therefore, now in the business of studying virtual rituals carried out in sedentary positions focused on fictive stand-ins engaging in embarrassingly awkward ways of relating. Ritual studies scholarship will, I believe, always need to refer to the gross-motormovement versions of rituals while also studying internalized, filmed, and online versions. The fuller-bodied versions have much to teach us about the thinner versions, which are parasitic on the thicker ones. If you don’t think so, watch some Second Life rites of passage. They are easily available on YouTube. Peruse some weddings, funerals, births, and initiations, and you will discover how firmly they are lashed to their fleshly, on-the-ground counterparts. The root of ritual studies is the actually (not virtually) enacted, socially and physically embodied event. Cut this cord and you have communications studies, maybe, but not ritual studies. Virtual ritual depends on flesh-and-blood ritual in the way fiction depends on life. Fiction may become so important that someone says, “No fiction, no life,” but that person is probably a fiction writer. “Virtual” is the adjectival derivative of “virtue,” a word with an intriguing etymological history.102 The term has not always been gender-neutral, nor has it always denoted moral excellence. Vir is Latin for “man” or “manliness,” and virtus originally meant “efficacy” or “potency.” In a curious turn, “virtue” became in the Middle Ages almost synonymous with a woman’s chastity. Then in the seventeenth century, the term acquired the connotation that made it possible to speak about virtual reality: “virtual” came to mean “in effect,” or “as good as.” The 2006 Unabridged Random House Dictionary now offers this definition: “being such in power, force, or effect, though not actually or expressly such.” Today, the word points to things not physically present but made by computers, film, or other means to appear as if they are. Today, when we hear references to things virtual, we tend think almost exclusively

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of computer-mediated realities, to which we are increasingly willing to grant ontological status, thus the phrase “virtual reality.” Virtual realities may not have the same ontological status as “really real,” or “first-world,” realities, but they nevertheless have effect; they are consequential. Since some now openly claim that their Second Lives are more real than their First Lives, we must exercise caution in speaking too casually of Second Life and similar modes of experience, because couples really, which is to say, legally, get married on Second Life.103 Although critics may discount virtual experience, they may feel differently if their partners were to confess to having had Second Life sex. The issue isn’t only moral, it’s methodological. If your Second Life avatar commits acts sexual, ritualistic, or economic, has your First Life self, committed those acts? Jesus is said to have said that if you have done something in your heart, you have done it, period. The question one might wish to ask the bodily-deceased-butvirtually-alive Jesus is whether the difference, minuscule as it may seem, makes a difference. Everyone knows there is an important difference between murder on the street and murder on stage, so why should in-the-imagination or onscreen sex be equated, without remainder, with in-the-body sex? Such are the questions that befuddle researchers working with online and cinematic ritual. Three doctoral researchers working on Internet ritual at the University of Heidelberg helped me enter Second Life, create an avatar, and tour some of the online ritual sites they were studying.104 One site was a memorial erected after the shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007. Later, I was queried by a Globe and Mail news reporter wanting to know what I thought about online memorials, roadside shrines, and made-up funerals. In preparing to answer her, I reentered Second Life to check some of the memorials there. A ritual studies student teleported down beside me. After we walked around a bit, he asked me how I felt about the shrine. After some hesitation I replied, “Detached and curious.” I asked how he felt, and he replied, “Sad.” His response left me wondering: Were his sadness and my flat affect comments about our two different personalities, the site design, or the sheer fact of the memorial’s being onscreen? And is sadness expressed by an avatar a real emotion or a subjunctive emotion? And what is the proper mood for conducting Internet research on virtual memorializing? In this instance, my mood was determinative of how long I chose to dwell in front of a picture of a dead student, whether I read inscriptions, and whether I was content to walk slowly rather than fly around quickly, surveying the turf. One of the Virginia Tech memorial sites, like some other religious sites in Second Life, would not let avatars fly over the site because doing so was deemed irreverent. Seldom does anyone talk about the impact of mood on method or method on mood.105 Methods are supposed to curb moods or at least prevent them from distorting our view. Moods come and go. Because there isn’t much we can do about waves of emotion, we tend ignore them theoretically and methodologically. But we do so at our peril. When moods endure, they become attitudes, permanent tilts, or

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characteristic cants, with which we greet the worlds we study. Attitudes are the ground we walk on, so they are among the bedrocks of method. Robert Duvall’s film The Apostle contains two revealing behind-the-scenes outtakes.106 In both, we see the normally inviolable insider/outsider, actor/nonactor boundary being breached. Not only do real preachers and a real congregation act in the film, but an actor and a technician, both members of the crew, are seized by the spirit during the making of the film. Duvall not only has to direct and act the part of Sonny, who is leaving his fictive congregation; he also has to negotiate with actual church members to keep the real congregation from dividing over the issue of being shot by “Hollywood.” They worry that Hollywood will reduce them to caricatures. In The Apostle real pastors must not only preach and court the spirit but also must perform their preaching and spirit-courting for the cameras. So everyone, it seems, is crossing and recrossing the seam between virtuality and reality, fictionality and ultimacy. Whereas Duvall the director-actor has to perform toward believing, the evangelists believe toward performing. The difference makes less difference than certain theories of ritual—those that inscribe belief into their definitions—would lead us to believe. For eons we human animals have toyed with enactments that are almost-butnot-quite rituals, and since virtual events can now occupy as many of our waking hours as physically embodied activities do, understanding the attraction is urgent even though virtuality is not new. We are not the first to have multiplied and mixed media in the service of virtual ritual. In The Golden Ass Lucius Apuleius (Algeria, 123–180 ce) undergoes a transformation from an ass to a human. When he begs the goddess Ceres to change him back into his normal human state, she replies by instructing him to participate in a ritual: Follow thou my procession amongst the people, and when thou commest to the Priest make as though thou wouldest kisse his hand, but snatch at the Roses, whereby I will put away the skin and shape of an Asse, which kind of beast I have long time abhorred and despised. . . . Moreover, thinke not that amongst so faire and joyfull Ceremonies, and in so good a company that any person shall abhorre thy ill-favoured and deformed figure, or that any man shall be so hardy, as to blame and reprove thy suddaine restoration to humane shape, wherby they should gather or conceive any sinister opinion: and know thou this of certaine, that the residue of thy life untill the houre of death shall be bound and subject to me. . . . If I perceive that thou art obedient to my commandement, addict to my religion, and merite my divine grace, know thou, that I will prolong thy dales above the time that the fates have appointed.107 This interchange is part of what is probably a fictive ritual.108 It is doubtful that Apuleius’s account is of a physically enacted ritual. Does Lucius Apuleius literally

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walk in a procession as a literal ass who becomes a human at the end of it? We are reading about something other than a ritual performance. Apuleius’s text seems to be a ritual fantasy mixed with a vision account and—since Apuleius was a priest as well as an initiate into several cults—perhaps bits of ritual memory. Such a mix might seem utterly outside our experience and worldview if it were not for similar scenes in Second Life, an online world in which contemporaries, sitting in front of computer screens at home, undergo ritualized transformations to and from animals. Since a ritual in a book is no less a creature of imagination and no less the captive of a medium than is ritualizing in Second Life, we should be willing to consider The Golden Ass, The Book of Common Prayer, and the Confucian Book of Rites alongside Second Life ritualizing and ethnographic films of rituals without insulting anyone by seeming flippant. Ritual accounts, ritual presentations, ritual texts, and ritual documents are parasitic on physically embodied rituals, and they have one thing in common: Insofar as they represent and depend on ritual, they are all virtual. When we view or read them, it is “as if ” we were encountering an actual ritual. Between the disembodied subjunctive and the embodied actual there is a wide range of possibilities. At the fantasy end of the spectrum, an artist or visionary tries to go beyond the constraints of the ordinary, making unexpected, creative turns in representing a ritual. At the ethnographic end, a scholar tries to present a ritual accurately and in context. If, in the case of fantasy, one must be faithful to one’s imagination, in the case of ethnography, one must be accountable to the originating communities and receiving audiences. Either way, the outcome is virtual, rendering the study of ritual inescapably media-driven.109 Now that video cameras are embedded in cell phones, mediatization and virtualization have crept into every corner, so there is a rising tide of resistance.110 When people ask what I’m doing in the field, I usually say I am “videoing” because “filming” sounds pretentious. More casually, I say I am “shooting” because “videoing” sounds too exclusively visual. When I say “shooting,” people usually ignore the metaphor, but occasionally they don’t. I have been instructed that film editors no longer cut and splice film and that I would raise fewer hackles by using less aggressive terms. I have been admonished that the metaphor is violent, too reminiscent of hunting. Besides, in many languages “shooting” is not a common metaphor for “taking photographs” or “making videos.” One can think of the photographic or videographic act in other ways, for example, as “receiving” an impression or “capturing” a scene. “Capturing” is another dangerous metaphor. It is not nice to make captives. Captured bodies don’t have the same looks on their faces as home-bodies do. A ritual captured is a specimen, a butterfly pinned to a board. Capturing is as troublesome as shooting, so I persist in saying “shooting” as a reminder not to overlook the possibilities of violation inherent in audiovisual documentation. For me “shooting” declares, “The thing is loaded; handle with care.”

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Late nineteenth-century photographic projects such as that of Edward R. Curtis not only rendered Indians iconic but also functioned as a form of trophy-taking, the white man’s peculiar form of headhunting.111 Shooting pictures was a means of packaging the booty of conquest so it could be traded back east. Whereas the Spanish used plays, the English used cameras. In the American Southwest photography functioned like a rite of reduction, an enactment formally imposing a subordinate status on conquered. Feminist scholars have launched scathing critiques of “the gaze,” with its voyeuristic, objectivizing, violating possibilities.112 Women, like indigenous people, have become wary of the camera, since it has served too often as an instrument of sexist and racist domination. As a consequence of photographic and cinematic intrusion, many Native groups now consider picture taking an intercultural rip-off, so they forbid it during their ceremonies, or else they make camera-toting white folks pay dearly for the privilege. Tourist photos seem innocent enough until you are pulled up short, instructed by indignant locals that not all rites are fair game. Shooting a rite can disrupt it, or, if sustained, even destroy it. The act of shooting renders the one who wields the machine godlike, a manufacturer of eternity. Shooting mystifies. A videographer looks through a viewfinder, screen, or lens and, by doing so, focuses on some things while cutting others out. The right and ability to define which things are out of bounds and which things are central wields an enormous, mystifying power. Rites, like photos, may enable participants to contemplate what is really real, to encounter mystery, but they also mystify. Rites, like photos and film, can cloud the sources of authority, shielding them from criticism. Those with ritual and photographic know-how have more authority; those lacking such knowledge have less. So you can understand the consternation of the locals. If your grandmother’s funeral were disrupted by a bunch of Handycamcarrying strangers, the expanding and contracting phallic lenses of their electronic gadgets trained upon your grieving uncle, profanation would seem to be the only possible outcome. Even scholars, dedicated to analysis, would protest the photographic rape of a memorial service. But make no mistake about it, women and Indians also carry cameras; they can and do shoot back, so unless we relish the prospect of a photographic war, we scholars, especially if we are white guys, need to pause, listen, and watch, asking how to make our image-taking machines behave respectfully and serve just causes. Shooting can not only violate and mystify; it can also validate, declaring, “This event is really important.” Think about weddings. Video documentation and portrait shooting can intrude, but they also announce that the documented event is worthy of remembering (even if photos can also induce a peculiar kind of amnesia). Norma Joseph, a colleague at Concordia University, once described a scene from a Jewish wedding that she attended in Detroit. The videographer was shooting the photographer who was shooting the wedding party, all of whom were carrying throwaway cameras distributed so everyone could help capture the

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fleeting “precious moments.” The reflexivity, Norma observed, was at least three layers deep. So along with the vice of videographic overkill, there is also the virtue of witnessing. Many rites of passage require witnesses. In some circumstances a fleshy, merely human pair of eyes is too fallible, but when amplified through a lens and dramatically followed up by a distinctive click or telling whir, the eye creates evidence; it makes memories. In these situations documenting a ritual performance is no longer the violation of a rite by an outsider but part of the ceremony itself. A Ghanaian graduate student conducting field research on funeral rites in Toronto discovered that they were being regularly documented and that the videos were being shipped back to Ghana.113 Why? Because tradition requires inheritors to participate in funerals, and video participation is one way of discharging that duty across an ocean. There’s more to the audiovisual documentation process than shooting. Having shot, one cuts and pastes. “Cutting” like “shooting” is a warning label. Across the last two decades some of my most profound learning experiences have come from editing video and audio. Since I ran a television camera when I was a high school student, learning to use a video camera, regardless of its challenges, presented few surprises. I grew up with cameras but not video-editing suites. Even though at age seventeen I had a part-time position as a television camera “man,” I had not imagined what is possible when you can cut and paste digitally, manipulating not only single frames (there are thirty per second) but even pixels, tiny dots per square inch. Video editing is an exciting but scary business, like being able to modify genes. However much the public venerates actors, particularly those we regard as film stars, the Hollywood convention is to bill directors as a film’s primary maker. If I had my way, I would use the editor’s name. I expected video editing to be difficult, but I did not expect it to be either revealing or creative. Experienced writers and writing instructors like to say, “All writing is rewriting.” A good writer knows how utterly essential it is to edit and be edited. Editors make things flow; editors make things precise. In working with video, it is likewise necessary to winnow the folders full of clips and energize the flow. Editing, you can’t quite create ex nihilo, but you can make things grow, flow, and disappear. You can make people skinnier or fatter, lighter or darker. You can eliminate them altogether. Because this whole behind-the-scenes show is so dramatically godlike, it borders on the diabolical. The anthropologist Victor Turner taught my generation of scholars that ritual is nothing if not dramatic. He made the claim as matter of definition and theory. Although many scholars continue to echo his assumption, I no longer share it. Although ritual and drama may be first cousins, and rites can be photogenic to the point of being dramatic, we are not well served by the theory that rites are necessarily dramatic. Many rituals, even of the festive sort, are sedentary, repetitive, tedious or boring—marked by a rhythm quite unlike the climactic actions that the Euroamerican West expects of drama. Try to make a film of a ritual, and you may discover how undramatic ritual can be.

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Nevertheless, you can edit a static or boring subject so as to make it lively. Although a rite is not a drama, you can dramatize it editorially. If the drama is not there in the actions of participants committing acts liturgical and celebrative, you can, if you are adept at video editing, put some drama into the mix, the way Ken Burns infuses editorial drama into the Civil War, baseball, jazz, and New York City. His cameras constantly pan across or zoom into manuscripts and relics. Never mind that the historical actors are dead or that the objects were never living, the camera operator, editor, and narrator are alive. By their shooting and zooming and panning and storytelling, they can dramatize the inert into the lively and engaging. There is a risk, however. Editorial selectivity and focus engage viewers while blinding them. Editing hides countervailing activities and disguises blemishes. With digital editing, we can now disguise and manipulate right down to the pixel level. Consequently, most of us are unable to tell which things were really there and which things were edited in or out. When the cost of film and equipment was high, every shot had to count, but now that the process is digitalized, each shot no longer costs. Most scenes end their days as clips resting in unused folders, the new “cutting room floor.” In the digital age, videographic creativity is as much about editing as shooting. After a shoot, you pick through the midden of your footage and assemble the good bits. Of course, when you videoed the ritual, you were already doing another kind of editing by selecting centers of interest, determining positions and angles, and composing shots. Even so, much of what you recorded you now discard as junk. In the end, you don’t use it because it is not relevant or it is badly shot. The sound is faint; there is a glare; the images blur and fragment. What you edit out is much greater than what you edit in. Most fieldworkers studying ritual do not think of themselves as videographers. They are anthropologists or Asianists or religious studies scholars or folklorists who happen to carry cameras. They are even less likely to think of themselves as “audiographers,” even though scholars without big budgets necessarily become their own sound technicians. The fact that there are only circumlocutions (“sound person”) signals a problem. Another signal is that, even though video cameras have both a lens and microphone, we rhetorically reduce the camera’s sensory capabilities by referring to the output as “video.” To make matters worse, microphones built into video cameras are usually second-rate. Even if built-in mikes were of high quality, most consumer-users would persist in thinking of their cameras as machines for recording visual images. Audio tends to be an afterthought, and this auditory inattention in the field leads to serious problems later while sitting at an editing suite. It takes a long time to retrain the body so it is not so obviously tipped exclusively toward the moving, visually arresting scene and to learn that audio cannot be “shot.” Videoing a festival, you can be trapped into locations quite removed from the center of action. With a zoom lens you can more or less compensate for the visual distance, but even with a supercardiod, or shotgun, microphone you cannot

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compensate as effectively for the auditory distance. Despite the long, front-focused reach of such a mike, the sound becomes removed and chaotic. Good sound requires a microphone close to a mouth or other sound source. Besides this distance problem, there is a continuity problem. North American viewing culture allows, in fact demands, quick visual cutting, but its auditory culture expects continuity. Since amateurs in the field usually underestimate the importance of audio to a film, they do not systemically collect long strips of audio. And because auditory continuity is impossible using the synchronous sound that accompanies rapidly shifting video cuts, videomakers editorially bridge with music. Whether you think of a musical overlay as an editorial workaround or as a cheat, being trapped into using it should provoke you into paying more attention to audio in the field. Like audio, still photos tend to play a secondary role except for scholarly book production purposes, in which case the black-and-white photo continues to dominate. If I present a black-and-white photo in class, students complain in the same tone they use when objecting to excerpts from radio shows. They prefer something colored and movielike. Students, like colleagues at conferences, can be taught to appreciate audio and still photos, but they do, in fact, have to be taught.114 The few who are eager to study black-and-white photos or listen to sound recordings are considered artsy or quaint by their peers. Since cell phones now have the ability to record video, photos can seem old hat. Who wants a still of a fast-moving ritual? Photos, after all, represent only thin slices of an event. Why bother with a piece when you can have the whole cake? When I first carried a video camera to the field, I felt exactly this way. Later, I changed my mind as I began to notice my own breathless greed: Chase the action; get it all. Some days I was seeing little and hearing even less. I work more often with artists than with advertisers or scientists, and most of the photographers of my acquaintance regard their instruments as aids for contemplation. When they walk the streets shooting sewer covers and bricks or prowl the woods for bugs and birds, they slow down, attending to the textures, colors, and contours of things. When they edit, they contemplate details that most of us hurry past. Whereas the video camera seduces me into frenetically tracking what my eye considers “the action,” audio recorders, still cameras, and video-editing programs slow me down. My photographer friends attend to the world differently than I do habitually.115 By attending to less, they see more. So now I experiment, switching among videography, photography, and audio recording. An obvious division of labor is to shoot action with video, use stills for places and objects, and deploy audio for conversations or music. Even though places and things act on people, they don’t move, so a moving picture can be a distraction. Just as doing more still photography on a ritual can slow you down, so devoting more attention to audio can bring you in close. Mediatizing a ritual doesn’t necessarily disengage you. The consciousness of a photographer can be profoundly suspended and deeply engaged at the same time.

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Several years ago I was using a still camera to document the Toronto Towneley cycle of mystery plays. It was raining, and most of the audience, not up to the ordeal of redemptive suffering, had gone home for supper. A bedraggled, university-age Jesus was lugging a cross down the via crucis, which is to say, across the quadrangle of Victoria College. A few persistent photojournalists were still weathering the scene, their cameras trained on the savior. A photographer in a yellow poncho boldly approached the dripping Jesus on his way toward Golgotha, which is to say, toward Bloor Street. The photographer drew surprisingly close to Jesus’s face. A few bystanders gasped. The shooter snapped a shot. Then, suddenly, he fell to one knee and began to weep as he clapped his hand over his mouth. At that moment I, having stepped back rather than in, shot him shooting “Jesus.” What are we to conclude from the photojournalist’s actions? Certainly not that picture taking obviates respect or distracts attention. And certainly not that being deeply moved requires one to believe. Just as Huichol shamans can swallow hundreds of peyote buttons and still organize pilgrimages and know where baskets and bows should be placed, so you can simultaneously shoot and feel. Just as Hopi children learn to hold simultaneously the knowledge that kachinas are spirits and also their relatives dressed up in masks and costumes, so you can ritualize in a fictive, or even ironic, mode. It is possible, simultaneously, to shoot and to revere, to embrace fictionality and to have faith. The only caveat is that you have to practice. Talking this way can start to sound too “spiritual” and disembodied, so let’s turn to the sheer weight and volume of stuff: bags, laptops, cameras, microphones, tripods. It is crucial to have the right equipment and know how to use it. What is the right equipment? Whatever most nearly matches the situation, your goals, and your field research style.116 “Equipment” includes everything from local currency and appropriate clothes to electronics. Show up in a bush hat looking like Indiana Jones or burden yourself with a truckload of expensive video equipment, and you will become an object of derision or envy. You will waste time and lose face defending your investments. However, arrive without a video camera and you may never capture that unanticipated funeral in sufficient detail to produce a vibrant description of it. Carrying a load of stuff can be daunting, and handling tools is not everyone’s forte. Sure, relationships with people matter more than relations to things, so if it comes down to a choice between your interviewee and your camera, yes, of course, put the thing down and go with the person. Usually, however, you are not faced with an either/or decision, and if you believe the tools matter to the trade, then your relationship to those tools matters. A recording device can be a way of listening to a person more intently, a way of tuning in to a person’s tone of voice. If you insist on being alienated from machines and you avoid learning to use them well, they will inhibit rather than enhance your work. So fieldworkers need to ask: What tools do I really need? How much do I really know about my tools? Can I find the buttons in the dark? Does my recorder connect me to others or intrude upon my relationships?

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Is my camera an albatross, or an extension of my brain? When something goes wrong (and it always does), am I the sort who stomps in consternation or figures out what went wrong? Interviews can be rich with verbal and gestural nuance, and rituals dense or protracted. Since note-taking is not up to the task, I video, grabbing details that I can later study, transcribe, or describe. The advantage of audiovisual recording is that it captures more data, more accurately than handwritten note-taking. Some consider pen and paper more authentic, but these tools also draw your face down into the page. Pen and paper do not allow you to make notes while walking or driving. If I carry a single piece of equipment, it is a video camera. Since things jam and batteries die, I also carry the archaic tools, pencil and paper. Usually, I also carry a still camera and an audio recorder. At home is a computer set up for audiovisual editing. So studying ritual audiovisually can imply a lot of freight. To enhance legibility and take advantage of searching and indexing functions, most notes handwritten in the field are later input as journal entries on computers.117 Likewise, recorded interviews are typically transcribed into computers to facilitate coding or careful study of an interviewee’s words.118 My own practice is to use a video camera not only for note-taking but also for documentation that will be edited for public presentation. If one presses a video camera’s index button with each new scene or session, it is easy to find and log videos with notes. Even if your aim is to present a ritual in writing rather than as a “film,” you can more fully describe a ritual performance on the basis of a video than either notes or audio alone. In addition, using a video camera reduces the number of tools to manage, thereby increasing your familiarity and efficiency with that tool. Moving images do not replace words. Even if one carries an electronic recording device, there is still a need for words on a screen or page. Transcribing interviews from digital to written format remains a primary method for studying oral data, but there is no reason why readers should not hear the voices of interviewees. Good video editing software allows one quickly to export an audio track to a WAV or MP3 file, which can then be posted to a website or transcribed in the same way one transcribes an audio recording. Participants and fieldworkers alike sometimes wince at the thought of machines. Some find the video recorder intimidating. In my experience such situations are rare, and sometimes offering to cap the lens solves the problem. Lens capped, a small video camera is no more intimidating than an audio recorder. But if participants resist or shut down, feeling that a camera is foreign to the spirit of the ritual or conversation, field researchers sometimes have no choice except to participate and observe empty-handed, documenting the event later. In some circumstances electricity is unavailable or batteries are impossible to get, but in most situations fieldworkers are allowed to carry recording devices. In a few cases we have to forgo documentation altogether, but most of students of ritual cannot afford to do so for long.

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Everything, whether you take it or leave it, costs. It costs to buy, to maintain, to store, to carry. It costs to carry stuff, and it costs to leave stuff at home. Size matters, but bigger is not necessarily better. You can now make decent videos and photos with a camera that fits in a shirt pocket. Larger cameras weigh more and call more attention to themselves, but they are steadier and often produce higher-quality video and audio. Smaller ones produce wiggly pictures but call less attention to themselves. The same is true of tripods. Without them, the viewer’s world will veer off course, shake, and bounce. Wiggly pictures may be okay for notes but not for public showing or publication. As they grow in size, tripods intrude and, worse, immobilize you, making it harder to be responsive to the flow of action. In the best possible world, you know ahead of time which situation demands stability and which one mobility. If we book- and computer-literates can now encounter rituals by way of media and, in turn, produce ritual-filled media for student and colleague consumption, reception criticism has to be a central methodological concern. For whom do we write or record? Who is the audience? Why do we care that reader-viewer-listeners attend to our descriptions, analyses, and theories? Scholars all, we want to impart knowledge. But why? To what end? Know in order to . . . what? Predict? Dance? Converse? For me, it is neither to predict nor dance, although both are worthy activities. The aim of writing, shooting, or presenting ritual is dialogical. It is to converse with the people I study, the students I teach, and the broader audience who wants to talk about ritual. I edit videos and write books about ritual not to impose scientific order on the universe or to convert all animals, human and otherwise, to some particular dance. Dancing and predicting can be wonderfully engaging human activities, but, as I practice ritual studies, conversation is what it is for. And what is the talking for? The talking, I would say if pressed, is to enhance life on the planet. In my book, the ultimate answer to the “why do research on ritual” question is “planetary survival,” but no one has to buy into my answer in order to do fieldwork.

PA RT I I

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4

Filming Fiesta

Rituals were a staple of the earliest films of “other” cultures by “Western” filmmakers. Although the films were as troublesome as the terms, the practice of shooting rites continues unabated. Documentarians raid rituals for television.119 Visual anthropologists record rituals, hoping to engage their colleagues and students. Tourists remain as eager as ever for displays of local color that they can carry home. Despite worries over cultural imperialism and the invasion of privacy, studying rituals audiovisually is of growing importance for multiple reasons. A major reason is methodological. Unlike objects, events happen then evaporate, so scholars need a way to capture, slow down, and replay them. Another reason is theoretical: Since rituals are imagined as “windows on culture” or wells tapping into deep currents and countercurrents swirling beneath societies, they can be revealing condensations of symbols and values. Videos allow us to peek through the window or access the tap. There is the added value that rituals, unlike beliefs and ideas, are not only recordable; they also engage the senses of both researchers and those considering their work. I don’t want to exaggerate. Although a picture may be worth a thousand words, not all pictures are. It is just as likely that a few well-chosen words are worth a thousand hackneyed pictures. So what I aspire to is, of course, the right pictures coupled with the right words. Tagging along with this parade of virtues is a brood of vices. Cameras grab actions efficiently, but they can also encumber users and inhibit those at whom they are pointed. It is a struggle to remain an attentive interviewer while monitoring sound levels, and it is hard not to be self-conscious while being asked questions on camera. To make matters worse, the magic of film can work against the scholarly enterprise by switching off our brains. We are conditioned by entertainment films to relish the experience of being carried along without the necessity for critical reflection. The sensory overload provided by a well-wrought film can lure us into emoting without thinking. There is another difficulty too: Readers like their books, and viewers like their films. Most of us are not adept at tacking back and forth between online videos and words on a printed page, which is exactly what I’m about to ask you to do. Only with considerable effort can audiovisual recordings be harnessed to serve the goal of theoretical and methodological reflection on ritual. 95

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A ritual is an event. Since an event is not a stone or a building, it persists for a moment, and then disappears. Since the 2007 Santa Fe Fiesta died in the doing, I can only represent it, not present it. The classical way of representing a ritual is with a written description, perhaps supplemented with a few photos, but I am espousing another way, one that leads with video and follows with writing. This case study, then, consists of two written chapters coupled with an album of seven online videos: 1. “Sights and Sounds of the Santa Fe Fiesta,” 5 min. http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/sf-fiesta-sights-sounds 2. “The Santa Fe Fiesta, 2007,” 74 min. http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/sf-fiesta-2007 3. “Aaron’s Zozobra,” 11 min. http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/aarons-zozobra 4. “Behind the Scenes of the Santa Fe Fiesta,” 55 min. http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/sf-fiesta-behind-scenes 5. “Ritual Criticism and Conflict in the Santa Fe Fiesta,” 53 min. http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/sf-fiesta-ritcrit 6. “Field and Home in Ritual Studies,” 28 min. http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/field-home-ritual-studies 7. “The Entrada of the 2012 Santa Fe Fiesta,” 22 min. http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/2012-sf-fiesta-entrada The videos are the leading edge of the case; the chapters are its trailing edge. The videos mostly show, and the chapters mostly tell. The first video is a five-minute introductory montage. The second is an hour-plus, chronologically organized documentary presentation of the fiesta without voice-over or commentary. The third video contains interviews with participants, along with scenes of the construction, rehearsal, and aftermath of the fiesta. The fourth piece cuts away from public venues to show a domestic fiesta celebration. The fifth video, a scholarly argument overlaid with fiesta footage, addresses two audiences, other scholars and fiesta organizers. The sixth piece is a half-hour interview with me conducted by a colleague. The seventh is an update of the fiesta pageant of 2012. These videos are not quite documentaries, much less movies, although they share features of both. Like documentaries they sometimes seem instructional. Like data, they sometimes appear raw. Like home movies, their production is less than perfect.120 And like movies, they sometimes entertain. The sequence of videos roughly mimics fieldwork: First you naively enter an unfamiliar place to hear and watch a strange event. Next you interview. Then you reflect and analyze. Finally, you read and critique. The later videos question and reveal more than earlier ones. Following the sequence is like peeling an onion layer after layer.

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The disappearing act that is so definitive of performance creates anxiety (although the returning act so typical of ritual may alleviate some of it). Couple this anxiety over disappearance with the brief shelf life of books and a field researcher-writer is tempted to present the Santa Fe Fiesta instead of the 2007 fiesta. Eternalized as the fiesta, the book and videos might seem worth the price of admission. Dignified by the perpetual now of the so-called ethnographic present, such a treatment could, for the wishful thinker, launch the fiesta into digital and typographic eternity, but the fiesta is an abstraction. And neither an abstract fiesta nor a dead one is very enticing. Short of attending next year’s fiesta—and that will be different from this year’s version—readers only have access to a stand-in. The entire process, from ritual event to your engagement with an account of a ritual, is not only mediated (by me, your authorial middleman) but also mediatized (by use of audiovisual and written media). Taking account of mediators and interlocutors is the first step in achieving a critical understanding of ritual. Middlemen and their magical media have vested interests, and revealing those interests is one of the major tasks of scholarship. Consequently, this chapter tries to demystify the very videos that may, in fact, mystify the fiesta. Everybody knows a video of something is not that something. First there was a fiesta, but now there are only videos, audio recordings, and written accounts of it. Compared with an actual fiesta, even a high-definition digital representation is a parasitic commoditization. Although this book and its videos will garner little cash, reputations and other forms of cultural capital ride on it. To make matters worse, only a fragment of the possible images that could have been derived from the fiesta are bundled together in this package. Besides having no direct access to the fiesta, your indirect access is partial and packaged—some would say, fetishized. And to think, you paid good money for this! I have been talking as if the fiesta were real and the videos are not, but another view is possible. The videos have their own kind of reality. Already they have outlasted the 2007 fiesta. Probably they will outlast me, maybe even you. If longevity counts, the videos live on. Unlike the fiesta, that evanescent event in the past, the videos are tangible and salable. Moreover, when did knowing that representations are not the things they represent ever stop people from treating them as real? Responding to representations as if they embody the things they represent is one of the surest signs of ritualization. The picture of a saint is not that saint, yet people kiss the representation. The flag is not the country, yet Americans will attack you if you desecrate theirs. So both things are true: Representations are not what they represent, and people, even those in the know, sometimes treat representations as if they, in fact, embody what they represent. Santa Feans not only get happy during fiesta; they also get heated about misrepresentations of their fiesta. Knowing about representation, you will want to ask some tough questions: Since representation is necessarily partial, what should the student of ritual select for presentation? What they themselves find attractive? Those things they surmise

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reader-viewers will enjoy? Scenes that Santa Feans would approve? And how much is enough? Or too much? A video of the whole fiesta would last as long as the fiesta itself, and who would watch such a thing? And what is “the whole thing”? Fiesta proper transpires across an autumn weekend, but there are prefiesta events immediately before it, as well as preparatory activities in the spring and summer. Does a video-maker include or exclude those? What about the private parties and gatherings that occur during fiesta time? And what about preparation and clean-up? How much does it matter that the whole fiesta does not appear on video? After all, no one experiences the whole fiesta. Even the president of the Santa Fe Fiesta Council cannot attend everything, if not for lack of energy, then for lack of ability to be in more than one place at a time. Festivals thrive on simultaneity and surfeit. The council plans the entire fiesta, but not one of its members ever experiences the entire event. Planning requires delegation of authority, and supervision requires distribution of labor. Consequently, among Fiesta Council members each person’s knowledge and experience is partial. So the whole fiesta, like the fiesta, is nothing that any person, insider or outsider, ever experiences. There are as many fiesta experiences as there are people. Because some events are simultaneous, only a crew or team could cover them all. Any single team member would have to experience some of the events secondhand by way of another team member’s account or audiovisual documentation. As a result, a documentation team could represent the whole, but no member of it could actually experience the whole. My colleague, Barry Stephenson, and I tried to cover the entire 2007 fiesta. We missed only a couple of scheduled events, but we missed many private ones, and we were sometimes too tired to listen well or observe carefully; we were there but not fully present. For a couple of missed events I traded footage with another videographer. Even if one could see and hear and smell it all, probably no one would. Trying to consume the whole fiesta would amount to multisensory gorging and result in sensory overload. Even fiesta-goers excuse themselves: “I don’t need to go. If you’ve heard one mariachi concert, you’ve heard ’em all,” which of course isn’t true. This is just what people say when they are tired. Part of fiesta is getting tired, if not sick, of the whole thing. With good reason the Fiesta Council does not meet for the first few months after each fiesta concludes; the members are burned out. Maybe you’re growing tired of prefatory observations and have already cut to the chase by putting on the videos, but you want to know what it is you’re watching. Required to name a genre, I suppose I would call these “teaching videos.” I could make them sound more important by calling them “ethnographic films,” but I’m not an ethnographer any more than I am a filmmaker. I’m student and teacher of ritual studies with a camera. Addressed to a general, university-educated audience, the videos are designed to facilitate analysis, provoke questions, and stir up debate among those who analyze festivals and rituals. If my aim had been to produce a television documentary, producers would have insisted on having a single forty-minute

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film. But I am a scholar and this is a book, so I do not have to yield completely to the entertainment imperative or to entice sponsors. My aim is to educate students of ritual, inviting reflection on the relations between the book and videos, among the several videos, and between the whole package and the Santa Fe Fiesta. Viewing conventions come into play as you watch and listen. Makers of videos do not get to determine viewing contexts or viewers’ habits. Contexts (for instance, living rooms, libraries, cinemas, museums, and classrooms) and habits (for example, preferring fast-paced Hollywood-style continuity editing to slower European-style cuts) are more determinative of a video’s meaning and impact than the maker’s intentions are.121 I wish it were otherwise, but it is not. Just as team-teaching doubles rather than halves your labor, so multimedia authorship compounds the required time investment. I supposed making a video would take as much time as writing a book, but never mind, I was prepared. I would lay out double the usual labor. However, “the” video became “videos.” The audiovisual materials were gas-guzzlers, taking twice the energy of the book. Because this was my first time handcrafting a book-with-videos, and because I had no research grant with which to buy labor, I had to teach myself many of the technical skills. So do the math. If you suspect that I’m exaggerating, try it yourself. The game I am about to play here is “show and tell all.” Of course, I won’t, because I can’t. Still, I will try. My writing plan is not only to contextualize the videos but also to expose some of their difficulties and problems. This case study, then, will not be a model for imitation but fodder for discussion. In the field, I both took notes and video-recorded. At home I shuttled from the computer on which I write to the computer on which I edit video. The resulting set is a braid with every strand wrapped around every other strand. Because of the looping, the choice is yours at every paragraph break: Do you continue reading, or do you listen and view? If you haven’t already done so, I recommend that you now step into the fiesta by watching and listening to the first video, then step back into reading the section that follows. Repeat the view-then-read sequence to the end of the chapter.

Sights and Sounds of the Santa Fe Fiesta Designed to whet your appetite, the first video resembles a movie trailer. Like most movie trailers, this video was made late in the construction process, but it is designed to be viewed ahead of the main attraction. Like an appetizer, “Sights and Sounds” should make you hungry for the meal. If instead it becomes a substitute for the meal, making you think you’ve now seen it all, it has not done its work well.122 A provocative exercise would be to watch this five-minute video both before and after the other videos. Viewed after, it should precipitate questions: Is this an adequate or fair summary? What distortions are introduced by compressing the seventy-four videominutes of video 2 into video 1?

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With minor exceptions the first two videos follow the chronology of the fiesta itself. The Santa Fe Fiesta, like every performed event, had its own forward momentum, and the (or “my” if you prefer) prime directive for fieldwork is to follow this trajectory. The festival leads; you follow. Even though rituals are not narratives, rituals unfold chronologically, so typically you shoot or take notes on them from beginning through middle to end. You can, of course, edit video nonlinearly, but to do so, you have to overcome the order of a video’s time code, which clicks relentlessly forward. The first video is more sound-driven than “The Santa Fe Fiesta, 2007,” the longer second video. In “Sights and Sounds” the music tracks were laid down first. Only in a few places does a listener-viewer hear synchronous sounds that naturally accompany the scenes. On some occasions, especially when you see people talking but can’t hear their words, you probably become all too aware that musical sounds are displacing vocal sounds. The result, I hope, is what playwright Bertolt Brecht called a Verfremdungseffekt: in English, “alienation effect.” Audiences are jolted out of what we might call “audience trance” into awareness that the performance is being constructed by a filmmaker (too exalted a label for a scholar with a camera). Video 1 is a summary, and summarizing rituals is not something that only scholars do. Some local kid explains to another who has just moved to town, “Well, to begin with, there is this giant puppet that gets burned, and then there’s a play about the conquistadors taking Santa Fe back from the Indians. . . . Oh, and there’s lots of parades and processions and masses and things to buy or eat.” Voilà: In a couple of sentences the new kid on the block is oriented by an “old” kid. Video 1 does, more or less, what the older kid does (“Well, there’s this giant puppet. . . ”) or what the fiesta program does (“6:00 a.m., Rosario Chapel, Mass, parking free”). Another way, a more adult way, of getting a quick summary is to find a copy of the program published as a supplement to the New Mexican, the local newspaper (see Appendix 9: Santa Fe Fiesta Schedule, 2007). The program lays out dates and times in chronological order and provides a map so wise parents know where to park. In good adult fashion, parents can pick and choose what seems worthwhile in view of their busy schedules. Besides verbalized local summaries, another way to get oriented is local ritual criticism, overheard in exchanges such as this: “Did you see the look on the face of the Secretary of the State of New Mexico during the official proclamation of fiesta when the helicopters flew over, not once but twice, at the wrong time? I don’t blame her for hiding behind her script, her eyes peeking over the top of the page.” “And that priest, did you hear him refer to reconciliation between Indians and Native Americans, as if they were two different groups? He probably meant ‘Indians and Spanish Americans’ or something like that, don’t you think?” Participants themselves crunch down rituals in a variety of ways—summarizing high points in a sentence or two, laying out a timetable, proffering evaluative tidbits—for many of the same reasons they report on movies and evaluate concerts

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over a drink after the show. Summaries, narratives, descriptions, and conversations about performances, including rituals and festivals, are common human behavior. All are socially necessary, maybe even inevitable.

The Santa Fe Fiesta, 2007 “The Santa Fe Fiesta, 2007,” which shows more than it tells, is a frontal view of that year’s fiesta, depicting what a persistent tourist, novice fieldworker, or interested resident might have seen by attending most of the events, viewing them from central positions, searching out highlights, and hunting for either typical or epitomizing scenes. The video follows the fiesta fairly closely as it unfolds chronologically from beginning to end.123 The video’s sections largely follow the divisions of the fiesta program. Whereas “Sights,” like a movie trailer, is of a length and depth that might appeal to kids or tourists in a hurry, “Fiesta 2007” is more like an educational film aimed at students of ritual rather than television viewers, although its pacing resembles that of a made-for-television documentary designed to fit a time slot and grab viewers with its pacing, color, and sound. “Fiesta 2007” would not likely be shown on television because it has no voice of authority to orient the audience.124 Viewer disorientation and questioning are inevitable while watching this video, because there are few onscreen notes and no voice of authority to explain or narrate; there is only my invisible hand controlling the shooting and editing. The fact that my hand is not really invisible—you can see the camera wobbling—sets some viewers to constructing their own metanarratives: And now Grimes, the filmmaker, is jostling for elbow room; here he is overlooking the most interesting interaction; see how he gravitates to details and forgets to provide orienting shots. The video would not pass muster on television for another reason: It lacks a story. There are no central characters to identify with, and the plot is minimal, merely the beginning, middle, and end of one year’s fiesta. “Fiesta 2007” is not an ethnographic film, although it shows signs of wishing it were. An ethnographic film, publicly regarded as a genre similar to the made-for-TV documentary, does not follow documentary TV canons. An ethnographic film can proceed at a slower pace and is less constrained by the duration of a television viewing slot. Ethnographic films often address scholars, especially anthropologists. If they track characters at all, they are usually unfamiliar, so we need the ethnographer’s assistance. An ethnographic film has fewer obligations to entertain than a TV documentary, but it has more obligations to contextualize and to bridge the distance between “them” and “us.” Students to whom I have shown the second video often confess to stopping it to Google for more information: Why are they burning that creature? How big is Santa Fe? What is the history of the event and the place? “Fiesta 2007” does little overt questioning. It is as straightforward a visual and auditory narrative as I could construct. However, it is more scholarly than the first

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video. It lets events go on longer, and at crucial points it includes verbal articulations of some of the fiesta’s meanings. The “2007” in the title reminds viewers that the event is time-bound, urging them not to make premature leaps to “the” fiesta. Although video 2, like video 1, is an audiovisual summary of the actual fiesta, its length more readily serves as a counterpart to a written description, the classical way of conveying ethnographic data. I could have described the event in prose, but a prose account would provide readers with a sense of the fiesta more slowly and less graphically. How many pages would it take to describe what you see and hear in “The Santa Fe Fiesta, 2007”? And how many pages of this description would you read? Ethnographers, historians of religion, and ritual studies students talk as if “thick descriptions”125 are a staple, but many authors avoid writing full descriptions of ritual enactments, because they know that wading through them is a chore for readers, and for that reason they are often edited down or out for publication. Even so, students in my fieldwork and ritual courses are required to describe events in words because the discipline of writing and the kind of attentiveness it cultivates are so important.126 They quickly learn that five minutes of observed interaction or video easily produces ten to twenty pages of prose. A fruitful exercise is to have students of ritual shoot a video of a brief event or interaction, write a description of what they saw and heard without watching the video, then watch and edit the video. The strengths and weaknesses of each medium quickly become evident. Because of the limitations of both written descriptions and audiovisual representations of ritual, we should use them to supplement each other. Video excels at showing; writing, at telling. In “Fiesta 2007” some of the onscreen actions are implicitly commented on by being juxtaposed with other images. For example, as the priest prays during the fiesta proclamation on the plaza, the video cuts away to images of Spanish Catholic piety found in shops around the plaza. It does so mainly to contextualize the prayer but also to cover up the visual mess created by trying to get my tripod to behave. Even though I intend to produce an even-handed audiovisual narrative of the fiesta, someone with knowledge of the fiesta or a vested interest in it could take issue with the selections and juxtapositions. A pious Santa Fe viewer might object: Grimes, who grew up Protestant, is just bored with the prayer, so he tries to jazz it up with pictures. Someone else, also guessing, could reply: No, actually, he’s being modest, trying not to intrude on something as sacred as a prayer. Some questions worth asking about the second video are: If the video is, or is not, narratively compelling, is that because of the nature of festivals and rituals, the conditioning of viewers by Hollywood movie conventions, or the videographer’s limitations? If your attention rises or falls, where and why? If judgments about the event seem to be expressed, do they appear to arise naturally from the fiesta, or do they seem manipulatively engineered by the video? I experimented with ways of presenting the fiesta other than chronologically arranged visual and auditory sequences. One version followed my earlier book on

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the fiesta, Symbol and Conquest, by breaking up the fiesta into civil, religious, and ethnic activities, but that conceptual framework not only destroyed the chronology of the fiesta; it would have disoriented viewers. Another version used a map, laying out what happens in the central plaza and then contrasting it with what happens in peripheral spaces, but that approach implied a space-centered theory—not the kind I intend to propose. A third version would have explored how today’s fiesta became what it is. I dropped this method both because I lacked the right kind of research and because it would have required an on-camera narrator coupled with lots of Ken Burns–style zooming or panning across documents.127 The discarded experiment that came the nearest to completion, because it connected most directly with the theory I will eventually propose, would have organized the film around elements of the fiesta: ritual objects, ritual actions, ritual spaces, and so on. The scheme was useful in generating an initial shooting list, but rigorously following it would have diverted attention from the chronological unfolding of the fiesta’s core actions. Partly because of its frontal perspective and chronological presentation, “Fiesta 2007” lacks not only a compelling story but also an explicit scholarly argument. Lacking a story would condemn it for television, and lacking an argument would condemn it as scholarship. Looking over my shoulder, Susan, my wife and editorial consultant, referred to “Fiesta 2007” as the “AARP version.” At first, I thought she said “art” and was vaguely flattered. Later, when she repeated the phrase, I realized that she was invoking the group known as the American Association of Retired Persons, so we had a long discussion. She got herself off the hook by explaining that she just meant that it was a nonoffensive, quickly grasped presentation of the fiesta. It is true that the perspective of video 2 is largely polite and front stage. Most of what you see is what fiesta producers would like you to see. The film is not quite laudatory, something a tourism board would produce, but it is polite rather than doggedly interrogative.128 About the only question it implies is the newcomer’s question, what’s going on here? There is a disconcerting parallelism between tourism, colonial exploration, missionary work, and ethnography. We go elsewhere, usually uninvited, and stay for a while to see what others are willing to show. Then, having pleased the locals by spending money, displaying goodwill, and spreading various gospels about our fine and noble ways, we return home, displaying stuff : souvenirs, photos, wonder stories, videos, and accounts in books. It was a life-transforming ordeal and a good time was had by all. Many of the locals, however, now own cameras, and some of them are shooting back, documenting us documenting them. The scene is changing. Everyone carries a camera, shoots the festivity, and posts to YouTube or Facebook. If you don’t like my video, you can usually find an alternative, remix mine, or make your own. In any case, however much the second video is a grand tour, following the fiesta from beginning through middle to end, it does the basic work of orienting viewers. The other value is that the treatment resembles what most students of ritual try to

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produce the first time they document a rite: something that looks like an unbiased picture. Viewing it, then reflecting on its production, makes the virtues and vices of such approaches palpable, thus debatable. Having reviewed the video many times now, I would do things differently next time by giving it a more distinctive, less generic point of view. I would follow a family during fiesta. The advantage would be its embodying the fiesta in the experience of people other than the filmmaker and providing characters with whom an audience might identify. If you watch carefully, some scenes may give you pause, making you reflect on the ethics of field research. Eight minutes and twenty-two seconds into “Fiesta 2007,” we notice a woman singing along with a mariachi vocalist. Who is this singeralong? An aunt? A mom? A grandma? Just someone who knows the song? Does she mind that we watch her watching and singing along? Are we (you the viewer looking through my camera) intruding on her? What about the scolding at minute 9? Or the mom at ten minutes, fifty-seven seconds? She is dancing with someone I assume is her son. They know I’m videoing but tune out the fact that the camera is watching. Is this an intimate scene? Should we be watching it? Is every interaction in a public event public? Are there private interactions in public events? Lots of faces, hands, feet, and hats are singled out. Do we scholars have a right to capture and display them? Do you have a right to watch them? At Fort Marcy Park, during the dance at Zozobra’s feet, high school girls dressed in black writhe in a serpentine manner down the steps (video 2, 12:30). My camera has a powerful zoom, so you can see white skin through black leotards—probably not how adolescent girls wish to be seen. But is my job to present others as they wish to be seen? If you watch carefully, you can also see the lead dancer counting out loud to keep everyone on cue. Even though located center front stage, the counting is not supposed to be visible. None of this kind of exposure of “backstage” elements (even though they are literally front stage) is visible to the throngs in attendance. The camera reveals the dancers in the same way a high-definition camera shooting stage actors can make their gestures seem overdone or expose makeup-covered facial flaws. For big crowds an actor has to project, but too much stage-type projecting in a movie makes competent actors look silly. So even this “AARP” presentation sometimes reveals backstage behavior. Front stage and backstage are not so much designations of places as they are labels for kinds of relationships between viewers and the viewed. Any audiovisual documentation of a ritual performance is a summary. There is no other possibility, even if the video were as long as the ritual itself. Documentary and ethnographic filming are necessarily selective. Although surround sound is now possible, surround vision is not. Even if the camera were to run the full length of a ritual and every angle were wide, it is impossible visually to record everything in a 360-degree circle. Selectivity begins before the camera is turned on, as soon as you choose a place to stand. When selectivity begins, so does creativity, but so do unwitting editing, self-censorship, intercultural blindness, and gendering. Pan and zoom

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as you will, you can’t shoot from everywhere. Arm yourself with a shotgun microphone and you may overhear secrets, but you will also miss what is said beside or behind you. Plug in your omnidirectional PZM microphone, plopping that square piece of metal down on a table, and you will scoop up so much verbiage that you can’t distinguish one voice from another. So even a simple video tour of a ritual, bereft of authoritative voice-overs and laid-in text, is an interpretive work. It does not merely contain commentary. It is commentary. Even with its explicit part-markers, video 2 is somewhat disorienting. It is not quite what a tourist would want. When touring, we expect clear guideposts because we’re disoriented, and info bites because our time is limited. If your eye and ear are more ethnographic than touristic, you will begin to wonder who’s who. You will want to know why people do what they do. Keen viewers, busy assembling bits of knowledge as “Fiesta 2007” plays forward, can, by the end, probably answer some of the basic questions: What’s that person’s role? What event leads to what other event? But other questions—about names and motives, for example—will persist into the viewing of the second and third videos. An important question that should be addressed to every presentation of a ritual is “What has been left out, and why?” Three events are missing from “Fiesta 2007”: the Mariachi Extravaganza, La Merienda de la Fiesta (the fashion show), and the Historical Fiesta Lecture. My camera was not allowed into the extravaganza because, we were told, this is Santa Fe Opera policy. The omission was not a serious loss, since mariachi music was regularly played on the plaza. I missed the fashion show because it conflicted with a domestic fiesta celebration. This omission is a bit of a loss, since the fashions tend to be historical and ethnic, and documenting such a display would have helped understand how these two notions play out in Santa Fe.129 The historical lecture is missing because the camera was confined to the balcony, where the sound was poor. The topic, “Women on the Camino Real,” could have been very important to public understanding of the fiesta if the lecturer had made the connection, but she did not.130 The de Vargas figure, queen, cuadrilla, and court were required to attend the history lecture. The fiesta lectures were initiated, in part, to educate them, along with the public, about the commemoration in which they were participating. Having such an event and requiring fiesta royalty to attend, in effect, declares that the Fiesta Council considers education, particularly historical education, important to the fiesta. The historical lecture is also the only fiesta forum in which scholarly perspectives can be brought to bear on the celebration.

The Spring Events “Fiesta 2007” opens with footage from the spring, when the de Vargas figure and Fiesta Queen, having already been chosen, are ceremonially installed.131 Afterward, the video circumambulates or crosscuts the plaza several times. Although fiesta

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events are scattered throughout the city, the plaza is central, not only geographically but ritually, ecclesiastically, and civilly. During fiesta, elevated performance stages are erected, and the plaza is replete with tents and booths for selling food, arts, and crafts. Strolling the plaza, dressing up and dressing down, gawking and showing off, buying, drinking and gorging, being entertained and socializing are staples—activities that most of the people do most of the time. Ordinances for the Laying out of New Towns, a section of The Laws of the Indies, codified in 1573, makes centralized plazas a key feature of Spanish city planning. They served the ritual purposes of military display, civil administration, and religious centralization.132 In the Americas, certain features of Aztec urban planning, such as the plaza, merged easily with Spanish layout practices and then spread throughout Mexico and the Southwest. Except for a few minor accommodations dictated mainly by its isolation and poverty, Santa Fe was originally laid out in accord with the Ordinances.133 Today, despite urban sprawl, the development of strip malls along the major highway leading south to Albuquerque, and the traffic congestion around the Santa Fe Plaza, the plaza remains socially and ceremonially active.134 The state capital, city hall, and cathedral are all nearby. Organizers who want their events noticed must take account of the plaza’s drawing power. Native people have privileged access to the portico of the Palace of the Governors, which faces the plaza, for selling crafts. In the spring, months before fiesta begins, a competition occurs, resulting in the selection of a local Hispanic Catholic man to play the role of the Spanish conquistador, General Don Diego de Vargas. Candidates compete to play de Vargas and to be La Reina de la Fiesta de Santa Fe (Queen of the Santa Fe Fiesta). His role first appeared in 1883; hers, in 1927. His role refers to events in 1692, but her role enshrines no such historical reference. The Fiesta Queen, although duly honored and elaborately decorated, does not embody some other prestigious figure. Whereas he is playing de Vargas, she is the Fiesta Queen and his consort. Both characters are present throughout the fiesta, but he plays the lead role in a pageant that articulates the fiesta’s founding ideology. Likewise, the men in de Vargas’s cuadrilla bear the names of historical characters. The queen’s court consists of Spanish princesas and Indian princesses, even though Pueblos had no princesses. Whereas the queen competes and is elected, Indian princesses are appointed. Two reasons are given for appointing rather than electing. One is that there are so few candidates, and the other is that some Native people object to competition as a way of achieving status. Many of the eligibility requirements are almost the same for both the de Vargas figure and the queen. They must be free of criminal record, must have been born in New Mexico, and must have resided in Santa Fe County for at least five years, although in the twenty-first century the nativity requirement has been relaxed for de Vargas. No longer required, it is recommended.135 Contestants must be of Spanish descent and produce a history of their Spanish surnames as well as a copy of their baptismal records.136 They must demonstrate that they can communicate effectively in both

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Spanish and English and know something about the history of fiesta. Judged on appearance, poise, personality, and sincerity, candidates sign formal contracts obliging them to abide by the Fiesta Council guidelines.137 To compete for the role of either Fiesta Queen or de Vargas, contestants must successfully deliver a three-minute speech in Spanish. For some doing so is easy; for others the performance is a struggle. There are differential requirements as well as common ones. The most notable difference is that females, who must be between eighteen and twenty-four, cannot have been married or have children. A Fiesta Queen can neither marry nor become pregnant during her reign. There is no requirement that she be a virgin, only that she appear to be one. Queens and the public have sometimes interpreted queenship as symbolic of the Virgin Mary, although this interpretation is officially discouraged. Apparently, the de Vargas figure, who must be at least twenty-one, can either marry or impregnate without risk of losing his office. It is worth noting that the historical de Vargas, legally married back in Spain, had a mistress and children in the New World; however, no one cites, or would cite, this historical fact as an example to be emulated by his young, contemporary male stand-ins. Occasionally, controversy breaks out around the competitions. Because someone wins, others lose, even though losers may be offered lesser positions. The most common complaint read in newspapers and heard in street conversations is nepotism. Candidates have, or are said to have, relatives or friends who voted for them without declaring a conflict of interest. Sometimes more serious charges are levied. For instance, it became controversial that the 1990 Fiesta Queen was not a Catholic. In 1999 a woman of both Hispanic and Pueblo heritage argued that she had been disqualified from competition because of her mixed heritage. Charging the Fiesta Council with racism, she withdrew from the competition for queen.138 The archbishop knights the de Vargas figure and crowns the queen in the Santa Fe Cathedral (video 2, 1:41). Afterward, a statue called La Conquistadora (Our Lady of the Conquest) is carried from the Santa Fe Cathedral to Rosario Chapel, where de Vargas is thought to have camped as he engineered the so-called “bloodless” reconquest of 1692. In 1680 Pueblo warriors had joined forces, a rare occurrence, to revolt against the Spanish dominating Santa Fe and the surrounding Kingdom of New Mexico. Some of the colonizers who had escaped death saved the statue of La Conquistadora, carrying her back to what is now El Paso, Texas. Twelve years later General Diego de Vargas led the first wave of the reconquest. Assisted by a few soldiers and Indian allies, the conquistador ceremonially reclaimed the area for the Roman Catholic Church and Spanish Crown. By choosing to reenact the events of 1692, the city in effect ritualizes a previous ritual. The pageant does not mention the violent re-reconquest of 1693. This larger, second wave was military rather than liturgical. It included settlers, some of whom died from the winter, and resulted in the execution and enslavement of Native people. Not long after the competition, an entourage (cuadrilla), each member representing a historical colonist, is appointed to accompany the de Vargas figure. A

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court, consisting of Native princesses and Hispanic princesas, is appointed to accompany the queen. During the summer, newly elected fiesta royalty visit New Mexico parishes, schools, and other fiestas.

Fiesta Begins Prefiesta events such as the Night-Light Parade, arts and crafts shows, the Historical Lecture, and mariachi music precede fiesta proper, which has multiple beginnings. Religiously, fiesta starts with a 6 a.m. mass at Rosario Chapel (video 2, 18:36). Civically, the fiesta starts with a reading from the Fiesta Proclamation of 1712 in a ceremony on the Santa Fe Plaza. Popularly, fiesta starts with the Burning of Zozobra. Zozobra is not a traditional Hispanic or Native icon but an Anglo artist’s invention. In 1924 Will Shuster (1893–1969), an enterprising Santa Fe artist, burned an unnamed effigy in his yard for fiesta guests. Presumably inspired by Holy Week celebrations among the Yaqui, who were using fireworks to explode a donkey-mounted effigy named Judas, Shuster publicly introduced Zozobra, or Old Man Gloom, to the rest of Santa Fe Fiesta 1926. This action, originally referred to as a “burning at the stake,” was staged as an execution preceded by a death sentence and accompanied by revolver shots fired into the effigy’s body. During the burning, Kiwanis, dressed in black, peeled off their robes to expose their festive costumes.139 In today’s burning there are no black robes, revolvers, or execution rhetoric. For the next forty years or so Shuster, his friends, and associates rebuilt and incinerated the creature. In 1964, Shuster assigned legal rights to the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe, which now the uses the ceremonial burning as its major fund-raiser for college scholarships, local youth projects, and camp fees for physically challenged children. The Kiwanis hold copyright on both the phrase “Will Shuster’s Zozobra” and images of the effigy. The rest of the fiesta is in the public domain. A. W. Denninger, long involved with the production, describes the creature with wry wit: Zozobra is a hideous but harmless fifty-foot bogeyman marionette. He is a toothless, empty-headed facade. He has no guts and doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. He never wins. He moans and groans, rolls his eyes and twists his head. His mouth gapes and chomps. His arms flail about in frustration. Every year we do him in. We string him up and burn him down in a blaze of fireworks. At last, he is gone, taking with him all our troubles for another whole year. Santa Fe celebrates another victory.140 Despite his signifying nothing, Zozobra, the city’s scapegoat and repository of negativity, is stuffed with shredded paper and notes naming troubles from which

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participants hope to be liberated. The burning, which is the fiesta’s most popular event, is said to lighten the hearts of residents so they can celebrate fully. In 2000 the Library of Congress chose Zozobra to represent New Mexico in the American Folklife Center’s “Local Legacies: Celebrating Community Roots,” even though some Santa Feans felt that La Conquistadora should have held this place of honor.141 The Burning of Zozobra has gradually developed something like a plot with characters. Old Man Gloom is inert until darkness arrives, at which time a herald announces the impending event. With the arrival of the Queen of Gloom, dressed in white, Zozo, as he is sometimes called, becomes animate. Soon she is joined by Gloomies—children, also dressed in white—and by Gloom Princesses, dressed in black. They seem to be exiting, like rats abandoning a sinking ship. Then the Fire Dancers arrive, swirling fire around their heads and torsos. They tease and annoy Old Man Gloom. By now, the amplified music and drumming are thundering. Zozo’s arms begin to wave. He opens and closes his mouth so the pained screaming and moaning can escape. A single adult Fire Dancer, dressed in red, performs a solo that concludes by torching the hem of Zozobra’s skirt. The flames crawl quickly up his body, setting off the firecrackers inside him, while a blaze of multicolored fireworks erupts overhead. The burn, watched in awe by thousands, lasts for several minutes, until Old Man Gloom is completely destroyed except for the chicken wire that gave him shape and the pole from which he was suspended. The crowd, screaming the last of its cheers, makes its way to the Santa Fe Plaza, where, for the rest of the evening, bars and restaurants overflow with the performed happiness of celebrants. Popularly regarded, the Burning of Zozobra is the beginning of fiesta. It is the biggest event. For some it is the fiesta. Others who describe their motivations as traditionally religious stigmatize Zozobra as “not traditional,” “not religious,” or “mere fun.” For these participants the real fiesta begins with the early morning Mass in Rosario Chapel, not with the evening burn in Fort Marcy Park. Religious and ethnic rivalry is sometimes embedded in such preferences. Historically, Rosario is where General de Vargas, the Spanish conqueror, is said to have camped, whereas Fort Marcy is where General Kearny, the American conqueror, is said to have camped. Officially, the Kiwanis themselves do not espouse a religious or ethnic understanding of the event. Those most closely associated with Zozobra are, you might say, committed practitioners but not “true believers.” Their attitudes, although serious, are also iconoclastic and playful. However, some of the Fire Dancers hold eclectic neopagan views of the event.142 For them, the burning is spiritual or ritualistic, not merely cultural.143

Fiesta Proclamations During fiesta, parts of the 1712 proclamation are read, once early in the morning at Rosario Chapel, then later in the day at the Santa Fe Plaza (see Appendix 10: The Santa Fe Fiesta Proclamation). In 2007 the mayor of the city, president of the Fiesta

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Council, clergy, court, and cuadrilla participated in both events. In accord with the original proclamation, the city demonstrates its symbolic assumption of financial responsibility by passing a small bag of coins from the mayor to the archbishop. The Rosario reading is embedded in a Catholic mass, whereas the plaza reading is a braid of civil ceremony, religious ritual, military display, and ethnic celebration. Because the blend appears so seamless, a foreign visitor might not guess that this event takes place in a country based on the legal separation of church and state. In addition to a ceremonial reading of the old document, the 2007 plaza proclamation included singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a sign-language version of the Lord’s Prayer, and recognition of the war dead. The 2007 ceremony became a tangle of ritual glitches as the reading of the proclamation was twice interrupted by a badly timed flyover of military helicopters (video 2, 34:11).

The Entrada The fiesta is like a set of Russian matryoshka dolls. The largest is a festival. Inside it are nested liturgies, civic ceremonies, entertainment, and performances. One of these performances, the Entrada, is a pageant which tells a story that contains a reenacted liturgy. Like a Möbius strip, the story turns as it twists, invoking “history,” a container that contains even the fiesta. Fiesta ritual and fiesta narrative don’t merely sit alongside each other. Since they are intertwined rather than parallel, the phrase “fiesta narrative” can refer to the temporal arc of a single year’s fiesta, stories told during and about fiesta, or the historical sweep that culminates in the fiesta. When telling the story of one year’s fiesta, Santa Feans typically refer to the larger mythichistorical narrative. The ideological core of the fiesta is performed in the Entrada, an equestrian triumphal entry culminating in a pageant in which de Vargas, inspired by La Conquistadora, ceremonially reclaims the city from the Indians who began occupying it when the Spanish fled. Chief Domingo, cast to represent all Pueblo people, cooperates with General de Vargas by ceremonially resubmitting to the Spanish Crown and the Roman Catholic Church. In civilly, militarily, and religiously framed proclamations, city and church leaders declare that, as a consequence of 1692 and its renewal in this annual celebration, Santa Fe now proudly celebrates multicultural harmony and, by implication, interreligious peace. The Caballeros de Vargas supervise and direct the Entrada. The city council, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Fiesta Council use the pageant to explain why there is a fiesta at all. Despite the claims of harmony, the Entrada has for many years been a source of controversy. Although a Native American man occasionally plays the role of Chief Domingo, and a few Native women typically hold positions as fiesta royalty, the pageant continues to be the object of periodic indigenous criticism. The fiesta in general and the Entrada in particular have been boycotted by Pueblos. Even so, a few Pueblos, drawn in by ties of friendship or loyalty to the church, participate.

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In response to criticism, the Caballeros de Vargas have periodically revised the Entrada. Over the past forty years, they have reduced its length and decreased its dramatic elaboration. At one time the Caballeros decided to stage Chief Domingo as if he were almost de Vargas’s equal. In 1973, when I first began studying the fiesta, the play featured not only a heroic de Vargas but also angry, resisting Pueblos, labeled “ghosts from the past.” De Vargas was made dramatically present; they were not. The hinge of the play was de Vargas’s brave removal of his armor and his unarmed entry into a city occupied by resisting Natives. In 2007, the conflict that once propelled the drama forward was almost completely elided. In the 2007 there are no groups of angry Indians, and Cacique Domingo has a single line of resistance: “We wish you had never come back” (video 2, 43:50). The hinge of the 2007 pageant is a set of baptisms. When Domingo hands over his children to a Franciscan priest for baptism, the action signals his people’s return to the Roman Catholic Church as well as their submission to the Spanish Crown. According to official fiesta ideology and local church theology, this baptismal moment is not an act of submission but the beginning of peace and reconciliation. The baptism is not mere historical representation, much less an act of interreligious domination. Rather, audiences are instructed, it is a renewal of interethnic harmony among Natives, Hispanics, and Anglos. So the fiesta’s ritual strategy for dealing with interethnic and interreligious conflict is to perform a single incident selected from the long and complex history of Spanish-Pueblo interactions. This moment, 1692, may have been one of the least violent in that history, but it was also the one that established Hispanic Catholic hegemony by deploying various media to further its dominance. While the Caballeros de Vargas perform the historic moment of Hispanic interethnic and interreligious ascendency, the Roman Catholic Church collaborates but also reinterprets these performances. One of its strategies is to minimize the history of conflict. Homiletically, clergy speak of violence as a relic of the past and rhetorically cast La Conquistadora as “Our Lady of Peace.” A few members of the Fiesta Council have tried to dampen conflict by consulting with Native people alienated from the fiesta, but the rhetorical moves, script changes, ritual revisions, and occasional consultations have been only partly successful. The video titled “The Entrada of the 2012 Santa Fe Fiesta” is an addendum to the 2007 set to assist in tracking changes in the most controversial part of the Santa Fe Fiesta.144 This addition has the added pedagogical usefulness of presenting a fairly long strip of fiesta footage with unedited audio. Since nothing has been excised or shortened on the audio track, listeners have the entire Entrada script. The video track is interrupted only by cutaway shots of spectators, sometimes to cover camera jostling. The equestrian phase of the 2012 Entrada takes about seven minutes and is witnessed by spectators lining Lincoln Avenue, which leads to the plaza. Most spectators crowd onto West Palace Avenue around the raised stage erected on the plaza’s

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northwest corner. To make way for the police and cuadrilla, crowd controllers repeatedly have to push spectators back to the north side of Palace Avenue. The entire performance from the time de Vargas’s cuadrilla arrives at the plaza is just over twenty minutes long. The introduction, read from a script, takes almost five minutes, a quarter of the total performance time. The crowd is told that it is participating in the “historic reenactment of the resettlement” of Santa Fe and that 2012 is the 320th anniversary of this event. After a brief account of the “great Indian uprising of 1680” against Spanish “overlords,” de Vargas is described as “peacefully” resettling New Mexico. The phrase “peaceful reconquest” is not used. The Spanish are described as returning humbly, no longer considering themselves conquerors but partners. The Indians are described as welcoming rather than resisting the Spanish. According to the narrative, the Pueblos too have changed their minds, realizing the benefits of being exposed to “the larger world” represented by the Spanish presence in New Mexico. Then the narrator declares, “God saw that it was good and blessed it.” By appropriating this line from the Genesis creation account, the Entrada in effect treats the events of 1692 as a new creation, following upon the twelve years of “desolation” between 1680 and 1692. The narrator claims that neither the Spanish nor the Pueblos conquered the other, so New Mexicans are now the “children” of “that historic reconciliation,” which, he instructs his audience, is marked by similarities in food, architecture, and religious belief. Then there is an apology of sorts (video 7, 2:46). The narrator tells us that the Entrada, a “simple play,” carries with it a request for forgiveness for oppression and that the play is testimony to the existence of “an unbreakable bond” with each other, the land, and God. A request for forgiveness is nowhere heard in the play itself. The wording is peculiar, since “we” (Caballeros? Hispanics? Santa Feans?) don’t directly ask “them” (all who have been “offended by oppression”) for forgiveness. And they (Native people) do not formally accept that apology. Rather, according to the narrator, the play itself is a way of asking for forgiveness and of declaring ties that bind. But if one examines the words and actions of the play itself, no one asks for forgiveness. The Spanish do not ask for it. Indeed, they offer pardon to the Indians as if they are the ones in need of forgiveness. The narrator’s message contradicts the message embedded in the ceremony of submission. So the dissonance continues. When de Vargas dismounts to greet Governor Domingo, the actors standing on Palace Avenue mime while the narrator supplies their words and describes the scene. Entering the villa is conveyed by having the actors leave the street and mount the stage, where, despite the prefatory apology and the declaration of interethnic partnership, the ritual of possession-taking occurs. The crowd of witnesses is now addressed as if it were composed of citizens of “this ancient villa.” De Vargas, who takes considerable dramatic time reading the legal documents, restores the city to the Spanish, not to a combined Spanish-Indian partnership. The result of the ceremony is unmistakable: De Vargas declares overtly that he has taken possession not

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only of Santa Fe but of all the pueblos. Even though in the narrator’s introduction it was declared that no one conquers anyone else, the series of vivas make it obvious who triumphs: the Spanish Crown and the Roman Catholic Church. Occupants of the city, Spanish and Indian alike, are by this ceremony of possession made “loyal subjects.” Only after the city is restored to Spanish civil and religious authorities are the Indians, represented only by Domingo, addressed. Instead of being asked for pardon, the Indians are offered pardon, on the condition that they submit religiously. Domingo still has his one line of resistance, “We hoped you would never come back,” suggesting that the intervening years were hardly a time of desolation. Even so, Domingo agrees to try to live in peace, and, agreeing to return to the church, he offers his sons for baptism. The padre, asked to “intone the traditional hymn of thanksgiving,” sings “Holy God We Praise Thy Name.” In neither Latin nor Spanish, this was originally an Austrian hymn translated into English. The concluding prayer to La Conquistadora is offered in Spanish, after which de Vargas and his cuadrilla, joined by the queen and her court, remain onstage for pictures. Historical critiques notwithstanding, the 2012 play continues to depict de Vargas as removing his armor, helmet, and sword, and it continues to treat La Conquistadora as the spiritual guide of the event; she remains queen and protector. Curiously, the play now deploys two images of Our Lady, one a tiny doll raised and twirled on a stick, the other carried on a palanquin. There is still the major historical and dramatic problem that spectators do not actually see a group of resisting, angry Indians. They see instead Domingo, a single Native man, encountering a large group of Spaniards. Since first witnessing an Entrada in 1973 I have refrained from making public judgments about the play’s dramatic quality. My critiques have been historical and ethical. Since the actors are not professional actors, talking like a drama critic seemed out of place. There is another reason as well: The play, although not a liturgy in form, is liturgical in function. From some points of view, criticism of a priest’s performance of the Mass would be beside the point, the point being to praise God rather than put on a good show. People sometimes deflect criticisms of a liturgical enactment by pointing either to the importance of the event being commemorated or to the sincerity of the performers (even though teachers of liturgics or drama might consider both of these merely excuses). I question neither of the importance of the event nor the actors’ sincerity, but I do wonder why the narrator has such a struggle with his script, why de Vargas has such a hard time remembering his lines, and why the padre cannot carry a tune. I am assuming these men were chosen for qualities other than their performance abilities, but did they practice enough? Did anyone work with them in a sustained way? How much does audience believability matter? Between 1973 and 2012 the performance quality of the Entrada seems to have declined. Fewer lines are now memorized, remembered, and delivered well. Regardless of what one thinks of the Entrada, audience embarrassment can only make its message more questionable.

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Parades and the Queen’s Audience The queen’s audience is an occasion for the queen and her court to see, be seen, and be photographed. They, along with de Vargas and his cuadrilla, watch and cheer the Children’s Parade. Just as the Entrada is his event, the audencia is hers. Whereas in the Entrada he “acts,” in the Audiencia she “is” or “is seen.” Put another way, his job is to determine the shape and outcome of intercultural and interreligious conflict. Her job is to remain pure, which is to say, outside the fray, just as La Conquistadora’s place is above it. There are three parades: the Night-Light Parade (rained out in 2007), the Children’s Parade (Desfile de los Ninõs), and the Historical-Hysterical Parade (Desfile de la Gente). Some participants refer to the Children’s Parade as the Pet Parade. Turnouts for the last two are large. Children appear in both, although the former is restricted to costumed children, their pets, and only a few parents and organizers. A few Catholic participants link pet-bearing children to St. Francis’s legendary association with animals; most do not. Prizes are awarded, pictures of selected pets and owners are published, and recently children have begun participating as judges and parade marshals. The Historical-Hysterical Parade is neither very historical nor hysterical. At other points in its history, it has taken up one or both agendas, that of illustrating Santa Fe history or mocking Santa Fe society. Now it is a fairly conventional American parade, including anything and everything: former fiesta royalty, local bands, anti-abortion groups, religious groups, the fire department, the sheriff ’s posses, and politicians handing out candy and flyers.

The Fiesta Melodrama Whereas the Entrada, masses, and proclamations enact what is sacred about fiesta, the annual melodrama stands these sacralized elements on their head. Performed at the Santa Fe Playhouse in 2007,145 “A Foul Flimflam Filches Fiestas . . .” features a villain who, in plotting to take over Santa Fe, tries to shut down its fiesta and legislate against the use of hot chili. A bearded Anglo playing the resuscitated de Vargas not only spoofs the Spanish; he also mocks the English by declaring, “Next time, it’s Whitey who’s goin’ down.” The melodrama wraps critique in a blanket of humor, teasing out conflicts by embodying them in local stereotypes and playing them off one another. The fiesta melodrama performs an important possibility, that of connecting iconophilia with iconoclasm, but it is only partly effective because people pick and choose. Some go to mass and watch the Entrada, whereas others attend the Burning of Zozobra or the melodrama. Pious iconophiles and irreverent iconoclasts can segregate themselves, going to events that suit their tastes and avoiding those that don’t. A few attend both kinds of events, but doing so is not typical. In the 1970s

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Hispanic Catholics played the iconophilic roles and Anglo non-Catholics played the iconoclastic roles. There are now some exceptions to what looked like a rule then. Hispanics are now on the board of the Santa Fe Playhouse and are active in the Burning of Zozobra. Anglos are active in the Fiesta Council and Catholic Church. So now it would be inaccurate to assign simple ethnic agendas to these organizations.

The Pontifical Mass and the Mass of Thanksgiving The masses are of a piece, more or less standard Roman Catholic liturgies adapted to local circumstances, for example, by the use of mariachi music or the inclusion of dances by Native children. The masses play a dual role. On the one hand, they are gatherings of the faithful and fully open only to the baptized. On the other hand, they are public events open to all. Fiesta homilies vary but typically refer to the role of the church in settling New Mexico, to the deaths of “the martyrs” (clergy killed during the 1680 Rebellion), and to La Conquistadora, crediting her with peace among the various peoples of Santa Fe. She does not usually venture outdoors during the festivities, so she is less visible during fiesta than during the spring novena. If a representation of the Virgin is needed, as it is in the Entrada, a copy is used to protect the original from breakage or theft.

Candlelight Procession Fiesta concludes with an evening mass and candlelight procession up a hill to the Cross of the Martyrs. Above the city, a brief homily supported by bell-ringing and devotional music recollects the deaths of Franciscan martyrs in the 1680 revolt. The Candlelight Procession is as fully ecclesiastical as any other procession that begins at the cathedral, but one sometimes hears it referred to as an ecumenical or interfaith rite, because it includes United Methodist handbell ringers at the Cross of the Martyrs, where the procession and the fiesta itself conclude. The procession is one of the most visibly emotional moments of fiesta. Like the Burning of Zozobra, it is held at night and marked by fire, but the procession is more often described as “beautiful” rather than “spectacular.” Its sounds and words are meditative as the cuadrilla and court prepare to dissolve and disperse after months of intense bonding. In 2007 the speaker reminded the crowd that others too had died—not only the clergy referred to as “the martyrs” but also Catholic laypeople and Native people. He did not point out, however, that the Cross of the Martyrs does not commemorate their deaths, so the homily did not entirely overcome the message of the place and monument. Fiesta concludes formally with thanksgiving for Santa Fe’s Hispanic Catholic–mediated peace, and informally with much hugging and weeping. Like most festivals, the Santa Fe Fiesta transports but does not transform most participants.146 Although the ending is emotional, the festival does not end with a

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resolution of conflict. From the fiesta’s beginning to its end, there is much activity and lots of interaction but little plot or character development. When fiesta ends, it leaves the city and its citizens pretty much where they began. Religious and ethnic conflicts are alluded to, and some participants say they feel renewed, but the long-standing tensions are not ultimately resolved. After all, a resolution would obviate the need to have the fiesta again next year. Filmed, the fiesta elicits ambivalent responses. Audiences, I find, are initially riveted to the screen by the sound, movement, and color of “Fiesta 2007,” but they have many questions, most of them critical of the Entrada even if they know nothing of its history. One showing of a draft of “The Santa Fe Fiesta, 2007” was met with a fair bit of yawning. An ethnographic filmmaker in the audience tried to comfort me by saying that people also yawned while watching footage of a ritual that he documented. Perhaps the attention drift was due not only to the lateness of the hour or the length of the video but also to the nature of ritual itself. Audiences are embedded in a viewing culture conditioned by feature films and television documentaries. Our eyes and ears are disattuned to ritual rhythms, especially repeated or extended ones. This ethnographic filmmaker remarked, “By the way, you should know that ethnographers have little interest in reading, or viewing, other people’s visual ethnographies.” Even though he was probably hyperbolizing, it is true that even academics who study ritual can have surprisingly short attention spans. We too are part of a culture addicted to drama, drive, engaging characters, and “invisible” cuts that reassure us with their conventionalized continuity-making.

Aaron’s Zozobra Not all fiesta events are civic and public; some are domestic. These private events are sequestered behind walls and gates. They happen in people’s yards and in restaurants or parks. Invited by a gracious parent, I documented an instance of domestic ritualizing, a backyard celebration with a Zozobra-burning at its center. “Aaron’s Zozobra” follows Aaron Newsom-Pino, a teenager whose younger brother, accompanied by his mom, participated in the big, official burning, where I met them.147 Aaron, however, stayed home, preferring to build and burn his own effigy. Neither tourist nor mere spectator, Aaron was, for an evening, a ritual-maker. Even though he hardly spoke a word, he was a ritual leader. To help him mount this act of ritual creativity, relatives and friends of the family gathered to eat, drink, socialize, and video. Against the background of a colorful view of the Ortiz Mountains at sunset, they witnessed and validated his burning. In the video, family and guests encourage Aaron, who awaits his moment. He is nervous and impatient. Seeing that my camera is increasing his self-consciousness, I hand it to him, so a bit of the preburn footage is actually his. I ask him how he would like me to shoot his burning. As darkness creeps in and the moment arrives,

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Aaron begins to set off fireworks in escalating stages. When he finally torches Zozobra, one of the men supplies the creature’s moans and groans as the flames engulf the effigy. The mom gets out her camera to capture the moment for the family video archive. People watch the glowing embers for quite some time. Then the wind suddenly arises, blowing sparks in every direction. Some fly into the eyes of Aaron’s dad. He is in pain and a little worried but tries to save the occasion by brushing it off. A male friend teases him; his wife looks worried. As friends prepare to depart, they ritually recover their equanimity by shouting, “Viva la fiesta!” In strict legal terms, Aaron’s backyard burn might have violated the Kiwanis Club’s copyright of “Will Shuster’s Zozobra.” However, this is Aaron’s, not Will’s, Zozobra. Burning in one’s own yard is in keeping with Shuster’s fiesta spirit, so no one frets, since the Kiwanis copyright is mainly about the prevention of profiteering with the image of Zozobra. Aaron’s burning gives us a glimpse of an adolescent’s experience of fiesta, but, like most research on rituals and festivals, mine shortchanges both the young and the elderly. If I return to study the Santa Fe Fiesta yet again, I will track families rather than individuals, studying their interactions during fiesta.

Behind the Scenes of the Santa Fe Fiesta In “Behind the Scenes” we hear people talking about what they have just done or are about to do. We see Old Man Gloom, still in pieces, not yet assembled for his glorious burn. We watch the melodrama’s villain, shirtless and strutting as he puts on makeup before going on stage. We meet children waxing articulate about Old Man Gloom and security officers worrying about fire, alcohol, and weapons. With this video we begin learning names and associating them with faces and roles. We catch David Trujillo, breathless, just as he comes offstage from playing the role of Don Diego de Vargas in the Entrada pageant. We listen to Ray Valdez, director of Will Shuster’s Zozobra, wishing for more historical accuracy in the Entrada, and we hear Hugo Martinez-Serros taking issue with local views of conquest and chafing at the way the fiesta performs and underwrites ethnic and nationalistic distinctions. Even though this third video is rawer than the first two, students of ritual find it more provocative. Backstage is more telling than front stage. Backstage, people tell stories about ritual experiences, and these, more than the rituals themselves, are capable of revealing social conflicts or articulating trenchant critiques. “Behind the Scenes” documents activities and interchanges on the periphery, allowing viewers to glimpse the work required to construct, maintain, and evaluate the fiesta. As with every social activity, rituals are preceded by preparation and followed by aftermath. People put up signs, build puppets, assemble costumes, put on festive garb, paint their bodies, and cook food. They also disassemble booths, take down tents, and

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clean up messes. Much of this work is invisible. Although essential as infrastructure, these activities are unseen and often unremarked. Workers, custodians, and cooks often expressed surprise at being asked if I could document their work. Repeatedly they replied, “Sure, but no one ever does that.” Some asked, “Why are you videoing us?” My usual reply was that rituals take a lot of work and that students of ritual need to understand it. However invisible preparation and clean up may be to participants, it should not be invisible to people who study ritual. Whereas feature films typically segregate the film itself from the backstage extras, documentaries typically integrate the two. Documentary filmmakers move in and out of places, crossing repeatedly from front- to backstage. Videos 2 and 3 segregate front and back in order to mime the shift that students of ritual make as they move from being untutored observers to being experienced, questioning fieldworkers. In the beginning fieldworkers see much and comprehend little, and for quite some time they do not have access to sequestered zones, but eventually, in the fourth video, some of these zones are opened up. Backstage is always relative, and it is not always a place. Go to any hidden or cordoned-off area and turn on a camera, and it becomes onstage if not front stage. If the first video risks becoming a tourist brochure, a behind-the-scenes video risks becoming a National Inquirer report: Did he really say that? Did she really do that? What is the truth about their relationship? Who has power over whom? What, they really believe such things? How did I miss that? How typical is that person’s view? Although I wince at the comparison, both paparazzi and field researchers care about what goes on behind closed doors, in places where deals are struck and telltale signs are swept under frayed rugs. A key difference is the code of ethics that binds academic field researchers. Another difference is the scholar’s willingness to foster debate. A third is the scholarly obligation to provide evidence. So even though we poke our noses in places where some wish we wouldn’t, we try to do so with respect and integrity. Ultimately the point of backstage inquiries is not voyeuristic but analytical and practical: How does all this work? What might make it work more effectively? What inhibits it from functioning fully? The longest set of clips in “Behind the Scenes” is about the Burning of Zozobra. Since this event is dangerous, is the largest in scale, and involves the greatest number of people, it requires more set-up and rehearsal time than most other fiesta events. With the proper credentials and a press pass, the rehearsal is publicly accessible, whereas the Entrada rehearsals are not. The Burning of Zozobra is a spectacle. People expect everything and nothing from it. People know the effigy is an invention of Will Shuster, an artist who was bored with the usual fiesta routine. Not only is Zozobra invented; he is also recent, dating only to 1920s. If you ask Santa Feans whether the burning is either religious or ritualistic, the reply is usually no. David Trujillo says he doesn’t believe in Zozobra; the burning is “just fun,” the “greatest fireworks display in the Southwest” (video 4, 17:08). However, some of the fire dancers have another view. They refer to the burning as “spiritual,” “ritualistic,” and

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“religious” (video 4, 4:05). Interviews with these dancers illustrate how easily a single rite, or even a single ritual element, can carry a load of multiple, divergent interpretations. Interviews with the children playing Gloomies illustrate how unwise it is to talk only with adult ritual leaders. Younger children may have to participate ritually in the arms of adults, but as they mature, they have their own experiences and begin to speak their own minds by appropriating and transforming words and phrases obviously learned from adults. “Behind the Scenes” presents excerpts from interviews. Like every other public festival, the Santa Fe Fiesta is mounted by people with differing opinions about how things should be done and with conflicting views of what these activities mean. Some of the interviewees merely narrate or dramatize events, making them more comprehensible to viewers than they are on the first or second video. Other interviewees are evaluative, their voices dissenting from officially espoused viewpoints. By agreeing to let their opinions be recorded and shown, they not only help students think about ritual but also invite neighbors to debate the issues. These interviews are illustrative rather than representative. Much more interviewing would be required to present a gender or ethnic balance or even to represent the full range of attitudes toward fiesta. Securing a representative sample would require a team of interviewers and a detailed questionnaire, along with long-term ethnographic research. Among the interesting but unanswered questions precipitated by these few interviews are: How do women experience the Entrada? Does it matter whether people “believe in” Zozobra or “believe in” Catholicism? On what occasions do people debate the fiesta? Is the event really as important as participants claim? How would anyone know if the fiesta were not important? The interview with David Trujillo was facilitated by two people. When a Caballero de Vargas learned what I was doing, he graciously offered to help by introducing me to his daughter, a former Fiesta Queen. As we were talking, the mom of the cuadrilla’s drummer asked for a copy of my video so she could watch her son. I agreed. In exchange, she volunteered to facilitate an interview with Trujillo when he finished performing. The Entrada ended, and suddenly, he and I, both breathless, were face to face. Like Trujillo, Ray Valdez, director of the Zozobra-burning, was perpetually busy during fiesta, but one afternoon, a day or so after the burning, he seemed to have a spare moment and, to my surprise, began to interview me: “How does this year’s fiesta compare with the one you saw in 1973?” After I told him a bit of what I remembered, he launched into a critique of the Entrada. Hugo Martinez-Serros, a retired university professor of Spanish, is an old friend, and I stay with him when I am in Santa Fe. Each evening he would prepare supper as we looked over our fiesta footage using his television as a monitor. Night after night he was uncharacteristically silent, so one morning after the fiesta had concluded, I asked him what he thought, and, in no uncertain terms, he told me.

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Ritual Criticism and the Santa Fe Fiesta Whereas the first three videos are largely narrative, “Ritual Criticism and the Santa Fe Fiesta” is argumentative and probably the most controversial. I don’t expect everyone to like it, because it is a lecture, arguing a set of theses and raising critical questions about the fiesta. By probing participants and their festivities, I try to engage them in the way I do scholars who theorize about ritual. The video asks whether the Santa Fe Fiesta is really a performance of peace, as fiesta officials claim. I argue that the answer is both yes and no. What is said publicly is that the fiesta enacts, or reenacts, tricultural harmony, but I try to show that fiesta performances also encode conflict while simultaneously masking it. Masking conflict is not the same as living in peace. Even though the fifth video draws on the entire fiesta as context, it focuses on the one issue, peace and conflict. Most rituals are so multifaceted that one issue, even when it is well understood, seldom exhausts their meanings and functions. Festivals, notorious for having a protean nature capable of endless extensions and add-ons, are even less susceptible to one-dimension or one-issue interpretations. The movement from the first four videos to the fifth is from showing to telling to argumentation. In this video suggestive images are made to serve argumentative words. Expository video, which emphasizes telling, is out of favor among film aficionados and ethnographic filmmakers. Some regard it as an artifact of colonialism, a product of disembodied white males, displaying condescending, godlike attitudes and sporting omniscient commentaries.148 Despite these criticisms, made-fortelevision documentaries often wrap expository voices of authority around excerpts from interviews and snippets of action, thus instructing viewers how to interpret what they are seeing. I don’t do that, but I do take a position. The aim, however, is not for anyone, either in the scholarly community or the community that is Santa Fe, merely to accept what I say on the basis of my supposed authority. Rather, I am taking a position, hoping to instigate discussion and debate. Driven by a talking head, the “Ritual Criticism” video is not very filmic. One viewer complained that, because I am in a living room (actually, my study), she expected storytelling, since that’s what would be happening if a talking head appeared on television in such a setting. She was right to complain. I delivered variations of this lecture several times, sometimes live, sometimes on video, sometimes with a mixture of live lecture and film clips. The technical difficulties of turning taped versions of those lectures into a video were too great, so what you see here is a simulated lecture. I am reading the script from a computer monitor while the camera peeks just over its top. There was no live audience, and you can sense that. Whenever I have shown drafts of this video, I too have taken issue with the Grimes there on the screen; he makes me edgy. The lecture is not the last word on anything. I have been tempted several times to omit or redo it but decided it more honestly represents the fieldworking and video-making process left as it is.

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Looking through a video camera’s viewfinder, you do not see everything you shoot. Only when you slow things down on an editing screen can you begin seeing all that your camera actually recorded. Video 5 began to emerge while I was editing the scene that I came to call “The Glance” (video 5, 41:07). I began to wonder whether it contained a moment of covert resistance to the dominant ideology of the fiesta, so I began to search my fiesta footage for other such moments and to reflect on the camera as an analytical and critical tool. I did not go to Santa Fe only to observe what was going on but also to continue tracking the dynamics of peace and conflict,149 asking questions concerning ritual gestures and postures: How do actions accrue, or carry, meaning? Can ritual actions lie? How does one recognize either a true or false gesture? What if words and actions in a ritual are inconsistent or contradictory? These are simultaneously ethical and dramatistic questions. In 1973 I witnessed a heated verbal conflict between a group of Native baseball players and some Hispanic performers rehearsing the Entrada. Only a flight prevented a fight. In the 1970s Native resistance was overt. Things have changed since then, but the tensions are not gone. Between then and now the Caballeros de Vargas and Fiesta Council have tried to ease tensions by revising scripts, changing costumes, shortening the Entrada’s plot, and recasting some of the characters. For instance, in the spirit of performing a more equitable peace, Chief Domingo was moved from the middle of the cuadrilla to be closer to the front, nearer de Vargas. On parade floats the Indian princesses were moved up to the same level as the Spanish princesses. Even so, in 2007 some princesses walked in front, while others walked behind. Does the order encode a hierarchy that remains despite the explicit ceremonial changes? In the “Ritual Criticism” video we are not only behind the scenes but also below the radar, asking whether gestures and postures send messages different from those articulated in public rhetoric. We watch people yawning at Mass. Are they bored, or were they up partying last night? When such actions occur during fiesta, does that make them part of fiesta ritual? Can this fiesta, or any ritual for that matter, ever mean something other than what participants say it means? Do groups ever transmit unwitting messages, and if so, how can scholars know whether they understand those messages correctly? On what grounds might an observer propose a different, or even dissenting, interpretation of a rite? A major issue is whether, in interpreting a ritual, scholars can go beyond merely repeating or summarizing what informants tell them. Can they venture into ritual criticism? Participants critique rituals, but can scholars do so as well? My answer is yes, but doing so is always risky. In my view the risk is worth taking if ethical issues are at stake. “Ritual Criticism and the Santa Fe Fiesta” juxtaposes priestly messages about peace with tacit messages encoded in the postures and gestures of fiesta royalty. If the first and second videos risk enchantment by flamenco and mariachi rhythms, this one tips in the opposite direction, toward disenchantment. In most situations the best medium for analysis (as distinct from presentation) is probably the written

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word because of its facility in handling argument, but video can be quite adept at capturing ritual dissonance. Consider the scene in which the archbishop knights the de Vargas figure and crowns the queen in the Santa Fe Cathedral (video 5, 1:41). Archbishop Michael J. Sheehan holds a cross rather than a sword for knighting David Trujillo to play de Vargas. He is instructed to embrace all those who make Santa Fe home and told to serve as a “bridge” among people of every “language, culture, and creed.” Then, having been knighted, de Vargas dons his sword. Why is the sword there at all? Probably because ritual-makers consider the sword necessary for historical reasons. Even so, why is it ceremonially necessary to don the sword at the front of the church? And why immediately after being knighted? The sword may be historically evocative, because de Vargas did, in fact, back up his “invitation” to the Pueblos with a threat. But the message “De Vargas and the Santa Fe Fiesta are about peace” is ceremonially compromised by the weapon. The two-phase gesture—knighted with a cross, then invested with a sword—says gesturally something like, “Peace, or else.” Santa Fe clergy repeatedly speak of the events of 1692 as a moment of reconciliation, as if it and its offspring, today’s fiesta, were full of generous gestures of interfaith dialogue. The historical de Vargas’s own descriptions are less guarded. He greets Pueblos kindly “with warm words and chocolate,” on the one hand, but demands submission, on the other.150 He offers to treat them kindly like a father but also threatens them. If they do not obey and comply, he will “destroy them once and for all.”151 He points cannons at them and cuts off the water to the city. Contemporary clerical interpretations are at best articulations of a pious aspiration and at worst less than accurate. Today’s rhetoric would have it that La Conquistadora was given her title because she conquered Indian hearts. Conquering hearts seems to be acceptable, whereas conquering bodies is not. John Kessell, a historian and judicious translator of de Vargas’s works, paints a different picture, one in which de Vargas is following the example of Cortés, who, after his conquest of the Aztecs, began referring to an image of Our Lady of Remedies as La Conquistadora.152 In other words, this title is, in fact, connected with military conquest. But even if you allow the softer, more recent interpretation, making her name a function of religious rather than military conquest, you cannot ignore the obvious fact that the ceremonies of reduction were coerced, backed up by military threat. De Vargas is clear: If Indians do not become Christians, he does not want their friendship and will resort to war.153 Since the video ends with recommendations, some may wish it stopped sooner. Who am I to make recommendations either to ritual studies scholars or to the city of Santa Fe? Shouldn’t a scholar just present the facts? Do researchers have a right to intervene in the rituals they study? For me, taking a position is a way of doing what scholars ought to do: think critically and enter into public discussion. Recommendations, after all, are not laws but rather propositions for debate, and debating is one way of exercising citizenship in a democracy.

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Field and Home in Ritual Studies You don’t want to be accused of “armchair anthropology,” the label pinned on scholars who, instead of going out in the field to talk with others, sit at home writing about them. Getting out of the chair is the first step toward being initiated into the Anthropology Tribe.154 Even so, those who go out usually return, sitting in armchairs to write their accounts. Field and home, however distant, are also connected. So in the final video I step back from Santa Fe across an international border. “Field and Home in Ritual Studies” was created after showing the second video a few times and being urged by viewers to come out from behind the camera. Most of this one was shot at home, not in the field, so it is also a different kind of behind-the-scenes piece, one that is reflexive rather than investigative. I invite viewers into my home so they can situate me. Inquisitive readers know presentations are always from a perspective. So scholars have an obligation to locate themselves, to inform readers and viewers about the person writing this book and making these videos. What are his vested interests? What is his background? Why does he care? What questions, biases, and commitments does the scholar carry into this research and writing? What are some of the determinative attitudes that lie behind the book and videos?155 Since my own method requires reflexivity and positioning, I had always intended to provide both. If nothing else, a reflexive video discloses some of the less-thangodlike features of yours truly—godlikeness being a distortion unwittingly created by the other videos. Although the sixth video may set me up for ad hominem arguments, it also provides potential grounds for taking issue with what I have written and shown. Like the behind-the-scenes video, “Field and Home” resembles the extras on commercial DVDs. Implicitly, this video takes issue with ethnographic films that show fieldworkers in the homes of others but not in their own homes. I invite viewers into my home for tea not because they care about me but because I want to set the two locations (field and home, the United States and Canada) in implicit dialogue, dramatizing the fact that research and writing constitute a cycle. Even if a “here’s my dining room” video isn’t terribly revealing, it at least reminds you that visual accounts of rituals are as much home movies as they are ethnographic films. If this were not a theory-and-method book, I might not have made such a video, but since it is, it seems fitting for students of ritual to notice how a home visit can make field research seem less exotic, more ordinary.

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The first video is designed to lure you in with its color, sound, and energy. The second, requiring a longer time commitment, is designed to orient, allowing you to feel that you are beginning to get what’s going on. The third, by inviting you into an intimate family setting, trips up our usual tendency to focus on adults when studying ritual. The remaining videos would provoke you to question, defamiliarizing the very event with which I have tried to make you familiar. Maybe my plan worked, maybe not, but if it did, I now have a problem. The fiesta, particularly the Entrada, may seem strange. If you are not Hispanic and not from Santa Fe, I imagine your asking, “Why do they continue putting on that play?” I have interviewed many devotees between 1973 and 2012, and they have repeatedly pointed me to their history when I asked this question. Films may be good at helping us understand the sensory qualities of ritual, but, by seeming so present, they can obscure a ritual’s past. Anyone who sees a movie based on a novel knows how much is left out. Films may be more vivid and feel more emotionally real, but writing more effectively supports reflection on complex situations. Feature filmmakers shoot and edit following a set of conventions designed to make shooting and editing invisible. Ideally, viewers should feel that they are in the middle of the action and that they understand things they could not without the film. Walking out of the dark cinematic cave, moviegoers should feel as if they have been somewhere different and that they have seen and heard everything essential about the events and characters in that different place. Even if a few names are missing, a few minor subplots are left dangling, and some of the motivations remain opaque, viewers should feel that there is not much left to show or see. But my aims are scholarly rather than cinematic. I want you to question, but also to do it in ways that don’t merely repeat the old prejudices that Hispanics and Anglos have had about each other. For that reason I will set the fiesta against a historical background. Background matters. All along the Rockies, houses sell for more when they can advertise a view of the mountains, preferably visible in the background through a wide picture window. Unlike geographical background, however, historical background is not immediately visible. Someone has to make it so. The historical past must be repeatedly reinvented by telling a story about the 124

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ancestors, putting on a period costume, displaying an old object, or reading an archaic document. The brain is hardwired to contextualize; it makes sense of things by networking them.156 Consequently, the Santa Fe Fiesta, like anything else, makes the most sense when it is connected to a context. Ripped out of social, historical, and ecological context, most things become incomprehensible. Context provides perspective. From too close or too far away things are unintelligible. People on earth photographed from a space station are not recognizable as people; they are mere dots. Dots viewed from the right distance constitute letters on a newspaper page. In studying ritual, several kinds of context are possible: social, geographical, and historical. If one chooses history, however, a big question remains: Which history? Whose history? Several histories could be treated as tributaries to the Santa Fe Fiesta: histories of the American Southwest, of New Mexico, and of Santa Fe; the comparative history of religions in the Americas; and the history of American pageantry and festivity. In print, there are many histories of the West; a few histories of the Southwest, New Mexico, and Santa Fe;157 almost no histories of religion in the Southwest or of the study of ritual; and only one or two brief histories of the Santa Fe Fiesta. There are a few good histories of American pageantry. In short, there are multiple kinds of history from which to choose, each adding its own light and casting its own shadow. If you were to opt for geographical rather than historical framing, you would begin to orient yourself. Assuming you carry a map in the car, you know that Santa Fe, located almost in the middle of the state, is the capital of New Mexico and that New Mexico is located in the southwestern United States. In the heart of the photogenic American Southwest and perched at an altitude of seven thousand feet, Santa Fe is the nation’s highest capital. To the south is desert. To the north are mountains and skiing. To the west are the Jemez Mountains, and to the east, the Sangre de Cristos, both offsprings of the Rocky Mountains, which head north, eventually crossing the border into Canada. The Rio Grande River cuts its way south until it crosses into Mexico, emptying into the Gulf. Alongside this thin band of precious, contested water runs El Camino Real, the Royal Road, the primary north–south artery connecting Santa Fe with Mexico City; it runs 1,456 miles. Down this road the colonists fled, and up this road General Diego de Vargas led those bent on recolonizing New Mexico. Some aspects of orientation are less about maps than about imagery. Santa Fe is in “the Southwest.” If you’ve seen old movies, you know “Southwest” also equals cowboys and Indians. Santa Fe residents, particularly during fiesta and Christmas, refer to the place they inhabit as “dramatic.” William Chauncy Langdon, one of the early promoters of American historical pageantry, remarked, “The pageant is a drama in which the place is the hero and the development of the community is the plot.”158 From Langdon’s perspective, the hero of the fiesta would not be a conquistador but the city of Santa Fe itself. In this view the city would not be a mere setting but an actor, maybe even the star.159

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Santa Fe, the name ceremonially conferred upon the capital of New Mexico, means “Holy Faith.” Even if you want to, in this place you cannot escape the history of religions. Translated into English, the city’s full, official title, La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís, means “The Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi.” This and hundreds of other place-names evoke the Spanish Counterreformation Catholicism that took root in the region.160 For anyone familiar with the history of the city’s name, it also evokes conquest and interreligious conflict. In Santa Fe, Spain, Columbus was granted the right to begin his exploratory voyage of 1492, the year Jews were forcibly expelled from that country. Santa Fe, New Mexico, is heir to this religious complexity, as well as interethnic comingling and conflict. So-called crypto-Jews (Conversos) and forcibly converted Muslims (Moriscos) were among the Spanish who in 1598 began colonizing the Kingdom of New Mexico, located on New Spain’s far northern frontier. The Spanish Inquisition, initiated in 1626, was created to ensure that New Christians, as they were called, did not revert to their old ways. New Christians imagined they would find more religious freedom in the New World. They assumed they would be farther from the Inquisition, but the Inquisition itself was exported to Mexico, then to New Mexico. If you’ve done a little homework, you know that the Spanish arrived here before the English and that by the time the English arrived, they were already Americans, no longer English. The order of arrival matters. The Pueblos were around Santa Fe first. Then came the Navahos. Then the Spanish, then the English-and-Irish-andGermans-and-Jews-become-Americans, who in Santa Fe are referred to as “Anglos.” Since our geographical mapping has now looped back into historical narration, it is evident that frames, or contexts, are partly given, partly made. If you drive into Santa Fe a few days before fiesta, you not only enter a context; you also carry one with you. In addition, you create a new one. Are you staying at Motel 6 or the Inn at Loretto? Such choices begin to construct your fiesta experience as that of a low-income person or that of a rich person. And will you get your dose of mariachi music on the streets or at the Santa Fe Opera? And your ticket to the Fiesta Melodrama: Will it be on “pay as you can” day? These decisions not only take place in a historical and geographical context but also create the context in which you will experience fiesta. The cultural context is not only constructed by visitors or scholars; it is also a given in the sense that it is there before outsiders arrive, and it is also changing with or without them. The number of Hispanic Americans in the United States is growing rapidly, and the issue of illegal immigrants from Mexico has become a hot-potato issue, especially in Arizona, New Mexico’s more Republican neighbor. New Mexico is a border state, but Santa Feans will instruct you that New Mexico is not Arizona, Texas, or California. Santa Feans like to say it is “the City Different.” The state both participates in and dissents from the dominant national discourse on MexicanAmerican relations. Historically, it has played up its Spanish connections and played

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down its Mexican ones. New Mexico is officially bilingual. Until recently, the majority of the population of Santa Fe was Spanish-surnamed and Spanish-speaking. Many, if not most, Pueblos had Spanish surnames and spoke Spanish as a second language. Now their most common second, if not first, language is English. Despite the growing use of Spanish in the United States, the majority of Santa Feans now have non-Spanish surnames, and many young Hispanics now speak English as their first language. During fiesta, the substance of most public speeches is in English; Spanish is used more as a spice than as a staple. However, speaking Spanish is a requirement for fiesta royalty. As in Quebec’s struggle to maintain French, so in New Mexico many Hispanics and a few Anglos work to stem the tide of language and culture erosion. In some respects, the fiesta is a means of resisting Anglicization; in others, the fiesta facilitates Anglicization. You don’t have to do historical research to enjoy fiesta. Many of its tastes and colors are enjoyable even if your first and only language is Mandarin or Swedish. But if you really want to understand fiesta, you need not only dates and directions; you need a grasp of the social and historical dynamics that swirl about this place. Who is interacting with whom? Who stands to gain and who to lose from the annual celebration? How does the whole thing work? How long have things been going on this way? Historical inquiries are usually answered with some variation of the claim that the fiesta is “the oldest continuous community celebration in the United States.” Counting from the original proclamation of 1712, the 2007 Santa Fe Fiesta was referred to as the city’s 295th fiesta. By this reckoning, the 2012 fiesta, held on New Mexico’s 100th anniversary as a state, was the fiesta’s 300th anniversary. Unperturbed by the truth of mere math, people who echo this oldest-celebration claim ignore two facts. One is that nearby Pueblos and Hopis mount much older, continuously enacted community celebrations. The other is that the historical evidence points to pieced-together, lapsed, and reinvented multiple celebrations rather than to a single, continuously developing one. There is no documentary evidence of eighteenthcentury fiestas, and little of nineteenth-century ones until the 1890s. By my reckoning the Santa Fe Fiesta is 120 or so years old. However much rituals seem to endure unchanged, they share the fate of every performance, and, as Macbeth would have it, of life itself: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.” Rituals fade and age. They fall into disuse and are subsequently reinvented. The fiesta is no different; it is neither singular nor eternal. Even Angelico Chávez, a pious Franciscan devotee of La Conquistadora and, before his death, a locally respected historian of Hispanic religious history, questioned the accuracy of assuming that the Santa Fe Fiesta is a Hispanic creation celebrated continuously since 1712: “The present Santa Fe Fiesta, which this year [1953] will advertise itself as the 241st, dates from the period around the First World War, when public-minded citizens, ‘Anglos’ who appreciated the unique Spanish historical background of

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Santa Fe, became aware of the grand possibility inherent in this decree of 1712. They animated the ‘Hispanos’ with pride concerning their forebears, and got them to participate in one big spontaneous folk festival.”161 Chavez’s observation points to a complex history, most of it not yet written. My position differs from his in one fundamental way. Although both of us begin our histories earlier than the fiesta itself, I will begin in 711 with the Spanish reconquest of Spain (see Appendix 11: Santa Fe Chronology, 1521–2007). Chávez begins his telling in 1625 with the Franciscan Alonso de Benavides’s purchase of a statue of Mary in Mexico. This statue will eventually become La Conquistadora, a central religious symbol in Santa Fe. Chávez’s choice tells a story that puts Franciscan piety and Marian unity at its center. My version focuses on interreligious and interethnic negotiations over rituals and performances. As far as I can tell, Thomas (not Angelico) Chávez’s History Lecture of 1984 entitled “Santa Fe’s Own: A History of Fiesta” is the only attempt at writing a fiesta history.162 Since his article was only ten pages long, the treatment is not exhaustive. Neither is mine. I agree with his most fundamental claim, namely, that fiesta was not a single, evolving event but the outcome of several converging tributaries. Near the end of the twentieth century, as historians began to publish fragments of the history of Jews in the Southwest,163 some Conversos began coming out of the closet by either claiming or reinventing their past. At about the same time Santa Feans were being invited to contemplate exhibits announcing the newly rediscovered influence of “Moorish” (Arabic, Muslim) architecture and culture in New Mexico. Historians had begun to catch up with the Zunis, who like to say that the first white man they encountered was a black man (Estevanico, “the Moor”).164 So the place that is Santa Fe is a hotbed of religioethnic queries: What color is a Moor? Who is white? Who is really Christian? Who is not? What religions do Native Americans practice? Posing any one of these questions will get you into an argument if not serious trouble. To make sense of the Santa Fe Fiesta, one has to understand not only the geopolitics of Hispanic Catholicism and its relation to both Judaism and Islam but also the very ground on which today’s city now stands. Wherever there are excavations, especially if burial remains are discovered, controversies and compromises arise.165 Spanish colonists built Santa Fe on a site that had been occupied by Natives whose contemporary descendants, the Pueblo people, now live north, south, and west of Santa Fe, many of them along the banks of the Rio Grande. Ancestors of the Pueblo people were in the Santa Fe area at least by the year 1200. In addition to the nineteen pueblos comprising today’s All Indian Pueblo Council,166 there are also Zuni, Navaho, and Apache reservations in New Mexico. Hopis and Utes are a bit farther away. So historically, religiously, and ethnically, this “heroic” place is a bewildering, delightfully complex one. Santa Fe is a city preoccupied with its history. Santa Feans frequently offer historical accounts in response to inquiries about either religion or culture. The

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reasons for having an annual celebration are verbally articulated and rearticulated in local newspapers and official fiesta publications, but they are most potently embodied in the Entrada pageant, along with civic and religious proclamations and religious liturgies. The Entrada ritually enacts the fiesta’s founding story, its historical myth. The fiesta proclamations are what J. L. Austin called “performative utterances,” words that do things. In this case, they put that myth into civic force. Fiesta homilies both perpetuate and revise the meaning of the Santa Fe myth. In the Entrada, the speeches and actions of characters mediate between memories of past events and contemporary ways of imagining them. In public proclamations, one held at Rosario Chapel and the other on the plaza, city officials and religious leaders read the official, authorizing documents either in whole or in part. Deeds performed in liturgies, both indoors and outdoors, as well the words uttered in homilies, stitch together church teachings, local traditions, historical memories, and heroic fantasies. However true it may be that considerable southwestern historical writing is produced and consumed in Santa Fe, it is also true that this history writing is often in the service of things mystical or romantic. Santa Feans tend to “fiestafy,” or celebrate, their history. It is not often critical, or scholarly, history. For this reason it is not enough to say, as many do, that the Entrada is “based on history.” One has to ask, whose history? Which events are included and which excluded? Which aspects of the pageant are historical and which are not? Are the heroes really heroic? Because heroes are usually one-dimensional, this complexity presents a conundrum: How can citizens both celebrate and critique the characters they lionize, the places they celebrate, and the histories they venerate?

The Spanish Reconquest, 711–1492 Santa Feans narrating the fiesta begin with 1692, but I will begin with an earlier reconquest, setting the New Mexico event in the larger sweep of interactions among religions and paying special attention to the use of ritual and other performative genres. In an age of industry, science, and technology it is commonplace to explain historic European conquests in the Americas as economic-military ventures, to which religion, ritual, and myth are added as afterthoughts. Nothing could be further from the truth in the case of Spanish colonialism. Spreading religion and gaining wealth were twin motives, with myth and ritual suffusing the entire process. In 711 under the leadership of the Umayyad Caliphate, Berbers, recently converted to Islam, began crossing the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco, gaining a foothold in Spain. There Berbers were known as Moors. At the time, much of the Iberian Peninsula was held by Visigoths, practitioners of Arian Christianity.167 In the process of resisting invasion, carving out a territory, and forging a national identity, the

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Visigoths eventually traded their Arian theology for the Roman liturgy and mandated a single religion, Roman Catholic Christianity. This religious and liturgical transformation was accompanied by the creation of heroes and saints, a strongly mythologized and ritualized process.168 A key figure for understanding New Mexico’s reconquest and the Santa Fe Fiesta is Santiago Matamoros (in English, St. James the Moor-Slayer). This Christian saint is usually depicted on horseback trampling Saracens (Muslims, especially those from Italy or Sicily). His name, “Santiago,” was a war cry exclaimed by Spanish soldiers as they were entering battle against Muslims.169 According to tradition, Jesus’s disciple Santiago (St. James) appeared in Spain preaching the gospel around 40 c.e. Later he returned to Judea, where he was beheaded, becoming a martyr. His body then returned miraculously to Spain in a rudderless boat, they say, and his relics were laid to rest in Santiago de Compostela, one of the major destinations of European Catholic pilgrims. Thereafter, Santiago made miraculous appearances, assisting Iberian Spanish Catholics in defeating North African Muslims. For males it was a great honor to be inducted into the military, quasimonastic Order of Santiago, founded in the twelfth century to protect pilgrims and fight Muslims. Men demonstrating legitimate birth, orthodox Catholic practice, and noble ancestry could be considered as candidates to wear the red cross of St. James, the vertical member of which was a sword. Among the rights and responsibilities eventually accumulated by the order was that of protecting the Virgin Mary’s honor by defending the doctrine of her immaculate conception. Don Diego de Vargas, hero of the Santa Fe Fiesta, ardently hoped for induction into the Order of Santiago. In today’s Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Caballeros (or Knights) de Vargas are considered guardians of Mary’s honor. Inspired by Santiago and under the religious-political leadership of the Catholic “Kings,” Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille, Muslim forces were eventually defeated, even though many Muslims remained on the peninsula by converting, more or less, to Christianity. The final battle of the Reconquista was fought in 1492. In the same year, Columbus was busy “discovering” America. Santa Fe, New Mexico, is named after Santa Fe, Spain, the town just outside Granada used as the base camp from which the final, victorious battle was launched. The reconquest enacted in contemporary Santa Fe is an heir to this first reconquest.

Ceremonies of Possession Just as it is a distortion to overgeneralize about “Indians,” we commonly overgeneralize about “Europeans.” Even though there were common factors among the various colonial encounters, such as disease transmission and the exchange of trade items, there were important differences among the cultures and therefore among the modes of ritualizing these encounters. In Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s

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Conquest of the New World historian Patricia Seed compares English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish rituals for claiming possession.170 She minimizes the similarities while emphasizing the differences, thereby producing portraits that are perhaps a bit overdrawn but nevertheless provide a useful beginning for comparative ritual analysis of colonial interethnic and interreligious conflict. In the picture that Seed paints, the most obviously and elaborately ceremonial entries into the Western hemisphere were conducted by the French and Spanish. Those conducted by the English, Dutch, and Portuguese were less obviously so. Each nationality enacted possession in its own way, and each considered that way obvious and intelligible, while regarding others’ ways as opaque or invalid. Each nationality’s assumptions about the words and actions of their possession-taking ceremonies were culture-bound, therefore causes of misunderstanding and conflict among colonial powers. The English way of demonstrating possession was to remain in a place, occupying, building upon, and improving the land. The primary symbols of occupation and possession were a house, a garden or other kinds of planting, and fences to mark boundaries. In the English view, one “planted” a colony. Possession was not so much declared as demonstrated by moving in. Consequently, native people were obstacles to be vacated rather than hosts or allies. Following Genesis 1:28, the British felt that the target to be subdued was not so much the Indians as the earth. French practices were the most highly prescribed and elaborately theatrical. Modeled on royal French enthronement rituals, their aim was to secure an alliance with native people, thereby making them subjects. The mood of accomplishing this ritual task mattered. It should be joyful, so French accounts described the requisite joy whether or not the occasion was actually joyful. The conquered were “guests of honor.” Ideally, Indians themselves participated in the ceremonies, not only by dressing up in French costumes, participating in processions, and planting crosses but also by using gestures and body language to “invite” the French to colonize them. More fully and frequently than other European explorers, the French described the body language of natives. Remarkably, the French assumed they understood indigenous body language. Seed puts it tersely, “No other Europeans so consistently sought the political permission of the natives in order to justify their own political authority. Nor did other Europeans so reliably compose the history of expeditions to make it appear that the natives had invited European political domination.”171 The Portuguese way, known as “discovery,” was rooted in the highly prescribed, ritual-like practices of nautical astronomy, which had been learned largely from Islamic and Jewish scholars. Unlike medieval Christian science, Islamic research was open to other faiths.172 Among the Portuguese, the right to claim possession derived from charting, thereby discovering, a location. The right to ownership arose not merely in finding lands unknown to other Europeans or Arabs but in being able to return home from that land and then go back to the charted place.

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The charting had to be publicly verifiable; today we would label this practice “scientific.” During the sixteenth century other European countries did not recognize such charting, however accurate or useful, as the proper, legitimate way of laying claim to anything. In many respects the Dutch way of claiming possession followed the Portuguese way. The Dutch demonstrated possession less by occupying land or making ceremonial allies than in sailing to and mapping a region, then initiating and regulating trade. Rather than build monuments or houses, the Dutch more characteristically provided extensively detailed descriptions. “Authorized by one written form—the charter—and laying claim to possession by another—maps and descriptions—the Dutch enacted colonial power in writing: tracing coastlines, noting their exact latitudes, drawing locations, describing places, and inscribing names.”173 The English disparaged such practices as mere “paper possession.” We can now set into this brief comparative portrait of ritual practices the Spanish method, the one we are tracking to construct a context for understanding the Santa Fe Fiesta. At the core of Spanish ceremonies of possession was the required proclamation of the Requirimento, a legally written, ceremonially performed document written in 1610 for the explicit purpose of laying claim.174 Although sometimes ignored in practice, the Requirimento was royally mandated. Here is what was required, along with what was threatened if the requirement was not met: We ask and require you that you consider what we have said to you, and that you take the time that shall be necessary to understand and deliberate upon it, and that you acknowledge the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world, and the high priest called Pope, and in his name the King and Queen . . . and that you consent and give place that these religious fathers should declare and preach to you the aforesaid. If you do so, you will do well, and that which you are obliged to do to their Highnesses, and we in their name shall receive you in all love and charity, and shall leave you, your wives, and your children, and your lands, free without servitude, that you may do with them and with yourselves freely that which you like and think best, and they shall not compel you to turn Christians, unless you yourselves, when informed of the truth, should wish to be converted to our Holy Catholic Faith, as almost all the inhabitants of the rest of the islands have done. And, besides this, their Highnesses award you many privileges and exemptions and will grant you many benefits. But, if you do not do this, and maliciously make delay in it, I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their Highnesses; we shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may

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command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him; and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses, or ours, nor of these cavaliers who come with us. And that we have said this to you and made this Requisition, we request the notary here present to give us his testimony in writing, and we ask the rest who are present that they should be witnesses of this Requisition.175 In contrast to the French, who preferred displays of joy and whose threats were more covert, the Spanish request is backed up by an overt threat. However, in contrast to some other European countries, Spain did not permit overt slavery—except under certain, often unclear circumstances. There were ongoing debates concerning these circumstances. Even when Indians were not enslaved, tributes of labor or goods were still levied. Although not technically slavery, two Spanish policies, repartimento and encomienda, often resulted in something akin to slavery, especially in situations far removed from government or church authorities who might enforce regulations. Although conversion should proceed from free will, it often did not, since guns, armor, and war horses made the whole process seem something other than a free choice. “The threat of warfare contained in the Requirement was one of the most distinctive features of Spanish colonialism. No other European state created a fully ritualized protocol for declaring war against indigenous peoples.”176 Patricia Seed argues that the Requirimento is a hybrid, modeled unconsciously on the Muslim ritual, specifically the Māliki variant, for declaring jihad. After 1573 Spain prohibited use of the word “conquest,” instead requiring “pacification.” The instrument was no longer called a “Requirement.” Instead it was an “Instrument of Obedience and Vassalage.”177 This rhetorical shift from conquest to pacification is paralleled in Santa Fe by the shift from the name “La Conquistadora” to “Our Lady of Peace.” On the Iberian peninsula, says Seed, the Spanish, having witnessed Muslim messengers ritually delivering requirements of submission, borrowed certain of its principles, using them in the Americas to subdue others. One similarity, for example, was that of allowing time for unbelievers to consider submission (which is what the word Islam means). Islam teaches that “there is no compulsion in religion.”178 Those who did not convert immediately were levied a jizya, an annual head tax, a way of eliciting revenue as well as imposing a ritual humiliation. The Spanish levied a similar head tax on married indigenous males over the age of twenty. Eventually, women and blacks would be included in the tax. In return, Spanish Catholics, like the Muslims before them, agreed to provide military defense for the conquered. Following Muslim practices, Spanish Catholics were supposed to guarantee indigenous people the right to their own land, as well as the right to be judged according to their own community’s customs. However, in practice such ideas were often

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breached. A primary difference between submission in Islam and submission in Spanish Catholic Christianity was that the latter did not offer religious freedom. Whereas paying a head tax was supposed to grant those conquered by Muslim forces religious freedom, those conquered by Spain were denied the right to practice their own religions even when they paid tribute.179 A Spanish ceremony of reduction was sometimes followed by a ritual act of obedience and vassalage performed by Indians. Even though in Europe there were ongoing struggles between the spiritual authority of the church and the temporal authority of kings and queens, in the Americas there was no ceremonial separation of religious conversion from vassalage to the Spanish Crown. The two submissions were simultaneous and one.

The Conquest of Mexico, 1519–1521 The conquest of Mexico was launched in 1519 on the heels of the Spanish Reconquista, and it was as religious as it was military and economic. Religion was both motive and means. Hernán Cortés and his men landed on Good Friday and celebrated Mass on Easter Sunday. He and his soldiers recited the Angelus daily at the foot of a cross. He ordered masses, requested the presence of additional priests, facilitated baptisms, and violently destroyed temples. The conquistadors varied, of course, in the degree of their Catholic piety, but ceremony, ritual, drama, and pageantry were integral to most Spanish conquests in the Western hemisphere. In addition to important, much-debated theological questions (Are Native people human? On what grounds may a people be conquered?), overt ritualistic practices such as idol-smashing and temple-razing were integral to military strategy. Ritual objects and ritual spaces were first lines of attack, not afterthoughts. In the place of so-called idols, Christians erected their own statues of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and saints. Atop the ruins of temples they built churches. These substitutions were, however, fraught with difficulties. Sometimes they eased transitions, but they also enabled religious resistance and ritualistic subterfuge. On the surface, participants could display themselves as Catholic, while beneath their Catholicism an indigenous practice persisted. In addition to the effort to displace an indigenous religious system with an imported one, there were victory rituals and displays of defeat. Battle itself was shot through with ceremonial practices—some big, some small—that others might tag acts of piety, superstitions, displays of prowess, or magic. The labels themselves are less important than the array of practices. Possession-taking was sometimes preceded by or capped off with a performance of Moros y Cristianos (Moors and Christians). This auto de entrada, or triumphal entry play, performed on horseback, concluded with the Muslim characters renouncing Mohammed as “all lies.” Thus they are defeated and converted to Christianity.180 At

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a time when Spaniards and Indians were still learning each other’s languages, ritual gestures and plays had the advantage of communicating vividly and quickly the message that Indians, stand-ins for Muslims, were hereby reduced, humbled, and made vassals. Although the Spanish characters in Moros y Cristianos are in real life invaders of the land, they are cast in the imagined role of spiritual defenders and descendants of Santiago, whereas Indians are cast in the role of Moors. The Spanish are played not as aggressors but as fathers and protectors of Indians, ensuring their subjection to “two majesties,” God and king. In New Mexico, Moros y Cristianos is still occasionally performed on July 25, Santiago’s feast day, in Chimayó, a pilgrimage site north of Santa Fe. Moors are sometimes played by women.181 Although this play does not directly serve as a model for the Entrada, the two plays arise out of a similar cultural matrix. In addition to sharing the obvious formal feature of performing on horseback, there are thematic similarities as well: conquest, conversion, divine intervention, and Native submission to royal and religious authority. Until fairly recently it was commonplace for English-language texts to describe the Spanish conquest as brutal, as if the English conquest were not, or as if the Spanish one was by comparison especially violent. This depiction, increasingly regarded by scholars as prejudicial, constitutes the so-called Black Legend, a view that treats Spain as “Europe’s racialized internal other.”182 “Africa,” holds the European quip, “begins at the Pyrenees,”183 which is to say, Spain is actually “black,” the color of evil and impure blood. Not so much a legend as a stereotype, the Black Legend has multiple sources. For their own political purposes, the English demonized the Spanish, depicting them as morally and religiously compromised due to intermarriages with North African Muslims. In response, the Spanish became preoccupied with religious orthodoxy and blood purity (limpieza de sangre). Expelling Muslims and Jews and policing the orthodoxy of Muslim and Jewish converts to Christianity by instituting the Spanish Inquisition further reinforced the view that the Spanish were especially barbaric and cruel. The Black Legend, then, is the outcome of a vicious circle of stereotyping. Another source of the “legend” was the writing of the Spanish Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas, whose Short History of the Destruction of the Indies, published in 1552, was critical of the Spanish conquest. But rather than blame las Casas, one might credit him, and thus the Spanish, with facilitating an internal debate about slavery in a way the English did only much later. Although las Casas assumed the righteousness of converting Indians to Christianity, he condemned violence and enslavement as means of achieving that end. In attacking the methods of conquistadors and colonial politicians, he unwittingly fueled the fires of the Black Legend but also initiated the first sustained critique of injustices being perpetrated in the Western hemisphere. His writings, especially the Short History, were translated into many European languages, even as late as the nineteenth century. The book was used repeatedly by English, Dutch, and American writers

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to justify the seizure of Spanish goods and to legitimate incursions into Spanishheld land. In New Spain, Franciscans and Jesuits deployed plays, mass baptisms, and ceremonial destructions of other people’s sacred relics (“idols”) in the service of religious and political conquest. But indigenous people resisted, using many of the very same ritual gestures that they had been taught. Catholic historians ritualized warfare by writing stories depicting gruesome missionary deaths that warranted venerating them as martyrs, but those stories often included accounts of Native counter-rituals. For instance, in response to an official reading of the Requirimento in 1541 the Caxcan performed a burlesque Mass, sporting a huge white tortilla with which to mock the host.184 In the same year the Caxcan killed the Franciscan lay brother Juan Calero after mauling his speech organs so he could no longer preach his destructive gospel. Then, using his habit, they created an effigy that inspired a new ritually infused resistance movement and annual fiesta celebrating this victory. In an ironic but deadly reversal, Fr. Diego de Orozco was chopped “in sweetest holocaust” into a visual replica of the cross by the Tepehuan.185 In short, dramatically ritualized conquest was sometimes met with dramatically ritualized resistance.

The Conquest of New Mexico, 1598 In 1539 the Franciscan Marcos de Niza and the Moor Estevanico were sent as scouts into what is now New Mexico. On foot Estevanico had accompanied Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca for eight years during his famous postshipwreck journey across the Southwest.186 Estevanico had become ritually adept at using a rattle for healing purposes, but for wielding it too boldly and presumptuously he was killed by the Zunis, who later began to “dance the enemy” in the form of a black kachina (spirit personified by a masked dancer). There is a certain irony in the fact that this first encounter with a “white man” was actually with a morisco whose national origin, color, and faith might have rendered him suspect by the Inquisition. The myth of Cibola, probably dating to the twelfth century, concerns seven bishops who saved sacred Christian relics from Muslim attackers by fleeing Spain and eventually making their way to a faraway place where the cities were made of gold. Marcos de Niza, playing off this story and either exaggerating or having seen Hawiku, a Zuni pueblo, in the sunset, returned alone to Mexico claiming to have seen the Seven Golden Cities of Cibola at a distance. As a consequence of his report, between 1540 and 1542 Francisco Vázquez de Coronado conducted explorations of New Mexico and beyond. Inspired by stories about golden cities, he and his conquistadors accidentally introduced horses into North America, a fact the Spanish would regret as soon as Comanches and Apaches learned to breed and ride them. Conquests, however devastating and violent, are seldom one-way. The conquered resist and, in their own ways, colonize the colonizer. Ritual is a primary

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means for such resistance.187 A well-known example is that of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an apparition of an Aztec deity in the guise of the Virgin Mary, or vice versa, of a Christian holy figure in the guise of Tonantzin.188 Whereas La Conquistadora has historically been identified with conquest, Guadalupe has been identified with counterconquest, or resistance. Don Juan de Oñate’s “Act of Taking Possession of New Mexico, April, 30, 1598,” lays claim not only to land and indigenous people but to all creatures. It does so under the authority and guidance of the Trinitarian God, the Virgin Mary, St. Francis, and other elevated beings whom Oñate marshals to his aid. The document is as theological and liturgical as it is legal. By virtue of all-embracing papal and regal authority and on the basis of “well founded reasons,” Oñate defeats by declaration various “barbarous” nations which, unlike his own, act against “all natural law.” Both natural and supernatural powers authorize Oñate’s seizure: I take and seize tenancy and possession, real and actual, civil and natural, one, two, and three times, one, two, and three times, one, two, and three times, and by all the times that by right I can and should, at this said Río del Norte, without excepting anything and without limitations, including the mountains, rivers, valleys, meadows, pasture, and waters . . . together with the native Indians in each and every one of the provinces, with civil and criminal jurisdiction, power of life and death, over high and low, from the leaves of the trees in the forests to the stones and sands of the river, and from the stones and sands of the river to the leaves in the forests.189 Having uttered these magically ceremonial words, then notarized and stamped the document containing them with the great seal of his office, Oñate planted the cross, raised the royal standard, and, to the sound of gunfire and bugle, audaciously claimed everything. Thus, New Mexico was ritually born.

The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 If at first the Pueblo people were unsure what the various waves of exploration and conquest meant, the situation rapidly changed as the meaning of the conquest became inscribed in their bodies, work days, and landscape. Indians were captured, punished, forcibly converted, and sold into slavery or, under the Spanish policies of encomienda and repartimento, forced into “donating” labor and paying tribute. Although these systems changed across time, they were based on a feudal notion. Native labor and appropriated land were granted to Spaniards who rendered service to the Crown. Although the Laws of Burgos attempted to regulate such activities so they would not provoke rebellion among Indians, these and other laws were often ignored with devastating results. Disease, forced labor, tribute, slave-trading, drought,

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and intertribal warfare took their toll, so between 1600 and 1680 the Pueblo population fell from approximately sixty thousand to seventeen thousand.190 The consequences of Spanish and English conquests were similar. Both decimated Native populations. However, there were important contrasts. Whereas the English “declined to convert Indians into Christians until they had turned them into Englishmen,”191 the Spanish were under religious and legal obligation to convert Indians to Christianity. The papacy had granted the Spanish Crown this right and responsibility. Even after the search for golden cities had been abandoned as delusional, the great “harvest of souls” still provided an impetus for occupying New Mexico. Whereas English Protestants in the American Northeast could not mandate clergy bound by vows of obedience, the Spanish Crown, working in concert with the Roman Catholic Church, was able to commission Franciscans, celibate males organized hierarchically into religious orders, to carry out this missionary work. In return, they were granted land for churches and living quarters, along with the right to extract Indian labor for building churches and supplying their personal needs and the needs of the church. A few Franciscans were respected by Native people, but many were hated. Despite this history, in contemporary Santa Fe, Franciscans are objects of respect and veneration. Neither members of other orders nor secular clergy are so romanticized. During fiesta time, Franciscans are venerated as martyrs, although it is questionable whether the term should be applied to those who lost their lives while imposing a religion. The Pueblo Revolts of 1680 and 1696 were attempts to throw off the religious, economic, and political yoke of Spanish Catholic colonialism. The Spanish reasons for staying were religious, and the Pueblo reasons for resisting the Spanish were also religious. There were, of course, other reasons as well; there always are. Creating sufficient unity for the 1680 revolt took five years of ceremonially suffused preparatory work. Prior to 1680 the Pueblos did not share a common language or consider themselves a single people.192 They were not united, even though Spaniards, observing Native people living in towns (pueblos), distinguished them from nomadic Navaho and Apache people, and lumped them together as “Pueblos.” Prior to the 1680 Revolt there is no record of their having acted in such concert. Unlike Hollywood movies, the 1680 revolt is not easily reducible to good guys and bad guys. Pueblos were not only oppressed; they also benefited. They received the benefits of Spanish technology and protection against raiding Apaches (N’de) and Navahos (Diné). Depending on their relationship to horses, guns, building skills, and other similar benefits, some Pueblos banded together and revolted, while other Pueblos joined the Spanish either voluntarily or forcibly. Under the pressure of mounting conflict, a few Pueblos fled, joining other groups—Hopis, Apaches, or Navahos. Not only were Franciscans consumers of considerable labor and tribute; they also could not bring rain or establish cosmic balance. Instead they divided people, imposing Christian beliefs and practices, if not by physical force then by intellectual,

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ceremonial, and psychological coercion. Even though some Christian leaders imposed their sacred ways less forcibly than others, and a few priests selectively tolerated simultaneous Pueblo and Catholic practice, the obvious and overwhelming fact was that indigenous practices were decimated or driven underground. The conquests and reconquests were acts not of interreligious or intercultural cooperation but of religious and cultural imperialism. The Pueblo Revolt emerged from a revitalization of underground ceremonial chambers called kivas and a renewed interest in kachina rituals. The kachinas, rainbringing ancestors danced by Pueblo men, some of whom wore tall shoulder-puppet masks, were invoked by Popé, the Tewa-speaking leader from San Juan Pueblo who instigated the revolt. He had been among a group of Pueblos arrested by Governor Treviño for alleged witchcraft, idolatry, and murder. Having witnessed the hanging of three Indians, Popé escaped, fleeing to Taos Pueblo, where he and others planned the revolt. The myth authorizing the revolt declared that in a dark kiva Poheyemo appeared to Popé, ordering that tribute no longer be paid, Christianity be obliterated, and the Spanish be driven out.193 Runners delivered knotted yucca ropes to participating pueblos. By untying a knot a day, they could keep pace with the countdown. Threats were issued to Pueblos who refused to participate in the revolt. Eventually, three thousand Pueblo warriors converged on Santa Fe, burning Spanish documents and killing 380 colonists and twenty-one missionaries.194 Franciscans were sometimes the object of especially brutal or humiliating torture and death. The Pueblo attack was not only on persons but also on sacred spaces and ritual objects. Churches were burned, sacred vessels desecrated with feces and urine, crosses removed, and Christian-performed marriages dissolved. Invoking Christ, Mary, and the saints was forbidden, and Spanish was not to be spoken—all in an attempt to reinstate traditional rituals. The remaining Spanish fled to El Paso, carrying with them the statue that would eventually be called La Conquistadora. However, the unified Pueblo front did not survive for long. Popé, it seems, became a tyrant, demanding, in conquistador style, his own forced tribute. As a result, the Pueblos were soon factionalized, making them ripe for reconquest.

The Ritual Reconquest of Santa Fe, 1692 The year 1692 is a key fiesta date, but this choice only makes sense in the light of 1680. If there had not already been a conquest and a rebellion, there would have been no need for a reconquest. Other dates could have become the focus of celebration. In 1540, for instance, Coronado explored the area that is now New Mexico. In 1598 Oñate set up the first capital city, and in 1610 Peralta moved it to Santa Fe. These dates have occasionally been marked by celebrations but have not become staples of fiesta myth and ritual.

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Although September 1692 is historic in the sense that it refers to an actual historical event, it is also mythic in the sense that it refers to the founding story that justifies the enactment of the festival. As with all myths, its meaning exceeds its truth. But what is that meaning? The question has to be asked, since there are significant differences among historical accounts of the event, the event as reperformed in the Entrada, and the meanings attributed to it by clergy. We have no Pueblo accounts of the historic events considered to warrant the Santa Fe Fiesta, but neither are we entirely dependent on the Entrada or publicity materials. Don Diego de Vargas, the reconquistador himself, provides his own detailed account, and his journals, which were not merely personal diaries but also official government documents, tell a story that differs from the one most Santa Feans tell. Since his version is less well known, it is worth recounting to provide readers and viewers with a way of knowing what the Entrada and popular condensations include or omit. Compared with primary-source materials from other colonial sources, the journals seem relatively candid. However, since they are official reports, duly signed and witnessed, one must allow for the fact that de Vargas is performing himself, in writing, for an audience. He knows that his future depends on how this audience views him through his journal entries. The journals are as honest as, say, a scholar’s applications for funding. We would expect both kinds of documents to emphasize competence, play down incompetence, mask fear, display good judgment, and emphasize the worth of one’s accomplishments. Historian John Kessell, translator and editor of de Vargas’s journals and letters, rarely refers to the 1692 reconquista as a bloodless conquest, and even when he does, he speaks of it as illusory, because he knows what happened in 1693 and 1696.195 More characteristically, he refers to 1692 as the “ritual” or “ceremonial” reconquest, declaring, “Vargas knew the difference between ritual reconquest and actual reoccupation.”196 In view of the historical evidence, it is inaccurate to conceive the Santa Fe Fiesta as a mere ritual that celebrates a real conquest. Rather, the fiesta is the ritualizing of a ritual—an enactment, a “putting into force,” of a previous ritual conquest. The events of 1692 were not merely “like” ritual; they were ritual. De Vargas performed a ceremonial conquest first, then later a military one. His journals suggest that he hoped the ceremonial version would suffice and that bloodshed would be unnecessary. He did not rely on the power of a single ritual but hoped that a cycle of ceremonial visits designed to evoke awe and fear would convince indigenous people to allow his entry (entrada) into Santa Fe. In addition, he played off divisions among Pueblos, setting them against each other. In initially proceeding ritually and dramatically, he embodied the best of Spanish military tradition while avoiding some of its excesses. During his 1692 visits he performed a lack of fear, demonstrating courage and showing his unwillingness to resort too quickly to violence. In Mexico de Vargas had been named governor of New Mexico and authorized to recolonize it for several reasons: to reestablish the

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Spanish colony; to reclaim Indian converts to Christianity; to check out rumors about mercury and silver deposits; and to create a buffer against the French, who were already pressing westward from the Mississippi River. Although not many fiesta-goers make the connection between de Vargas’s reconquest and the Spanish Reconquista, making the connection helps explain why Santa Fe festivity takes the form it does. De Vargas’s reconquest of the Kingdom of New Mexico echoes in certain ways the Spanish Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula, as long as we don’t forget that the reconquest in Spain was about repelling invaders, whereas the one in New Mexico was about being invaders. De Vargas’s action continues some practices from previous conquests and introduces its own innovations. By proceeding ritually and dramatically, he not only avoids bringing vulnerable Spanish families into harm’s way but also learns accurately the state of affairs in Santa Fe and the surrounding area. By not precipitously and violently attacking Native people as some of his predecessors had done, he gains the confidence of some. By visiting pueblo after pueblo and reenacting ceremony after ceremony, he couples rituals of submission with a reconnaissance mission, a “tour of inspection,” as he calls it. By having the Franciscans accompanying him to baptize the newborn and rebaptize the lapsed, he gains intelligence concerning indigenous attitudes while carrying out the church’s official mission. The fiesta-warranting moment as recounted by de Vargas is worth considering in detail, since most of the details do not appear in the Entrada. It is mid-September 1692. De Vargas, accompanied by sixty soldiers and a hundred Indian auxiliaries, is approaching Santa Fe. Although the Spanish are taking the offensive, he speaks of the action as a “defense” of the holy faith.197 This offensive defense is riddled with acts of piety. Prior to his entry, de Vargas asks for and receives absolution as he gathers his men to confront the “apostate, rebel, treacherous traitors.”198 He is sure that the Virgin of Remedies is behind him and that devils inspire the barbarians, whom he hopes to make, or remake, into Christians. Contrary to the story told in Santa Fe pulpits and acted out in the Entrada, the statue of La Conquistadora does not accompany de Vargas in 1692.199 Entering, he and his men utter five times, “Praise be the blessed sacrament of the altar.” One of his most repeatedly employed ceremonial devices is the rosary. Not only does he display rosaries as signs of good faith; he also hands them out to Indians. Their wearing a rosary is not only a token of submission but also a badge guaranteeing safe passage. Indians not wearing rosaries risk being shot on sight. De Vargas couples liturgical with rhetorical work. It is worth hearing in his own voice how he weds the two: Divine mercy, however, permitted my entrada to this villa on 13 September and the siege I laid at daybreak to the fortress in its plaza. Its rebels gave me reason enough to begin war. I thought their reduction hopeless, though I tolerated their excesses in everything. Looking to the greater service of

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both majesties, it was possible by means of the Divine to successfully overcome their rebelliousness. They were stubborn unbelievers, but my repeated, effective arguments, which were pure and full of the fervent spirit of a Catholic’s zeal, could not persuade them. My intent was achieved. I attribute the parting of the shadows of their blindness to the aurora and guiding light of my thoughts and finally, the protectress of our holy faith, the one who might see to everything, the most holy Mary of Remedies. She protected this enterprise and guided my steps to conquer such a devil, removing us at once from danger and recovering for us the pleasure of happiness achieved at seeing those Indians who, having surrendered left their fortress to render obedience to me in its plaza and to the Divine Majesty as well.200 The Indians, painted red for war, complain about having been whipped, forced to build churches, and provide labor, but the captain-general counters, spending hours talking them down. When the Indians begin shouting “shameful things,” de Vargas, if we are to believe his self-portrait, is diplomatic. He plays a skillful hand, sometimes pleading, sometimes threatening, but regularly showing remarkable resistance to being provoked into combat. The Indians say they doubt his identity. As a demonstration that he is who he says he is, de Vargas displays a standard bearing the Blessed Virgin on one side and the king’s coat of arms on the other. This double display of “the majesties” is standard conquistador behavior. When the Indian resistors ask to hear a bugle as further proof, he orders it blown but ups the ante by adding the threatening rhythms of a war drum. The Indians speculate that maybe de Vargas is really an Apache in disguise, but it is unclear to what extent they actually fear that he is an impersonator and to what extent they are jockeying for time while awaiting further intelligence or additional reinforcements. Chief Domingo of Tesuque Pueblo, who will eventually become a character in the Santa Fe Fiesta Entrada, arrives, and de Vargas observes, “I saw he had a heart that could be reduced.”201 Is he a peacemaker? A pushover? A strategist? Since reduction is one of de Vargas’s primary goals, he uses Domingo to deliver the threat: Either obey or face destruction. The Indians defy both Domingo and Vargas, leaving Domingo saddened and worried, since he remembers what happened at Zia Pueblo to Indians who resisted conquest. De Vargas, who has cut off the town’s water supply, continues to request and require that the city’s occupants come out and “give him peace.” Eventually, after prolonged haggling and threatening, they begin to straggle out. De Vargas dismounts, shakes hands, and begins speaking “words of tenderness and love.” Thus begins the ritual process whereby Indians are transformed from warrior-idolaters into obedient Christians. They are ordered to wear crosses around their necks and to pay homage to a large cross that is erected. De Vargas makes it quite clear that the

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Indians are not being invited to the cross. Rather, they are being ordered to wear crosses, make the sign of the cross, pray, and attend services. On Sunday, de Vargas, demonstrating his piety and nobility, dresses up in finery and enters the village to attend the rite of absolution being performed by Franciscans upon the “newly reduced and conquered” Indians. By this process, the general reclaims not only the land but also the people. After the Te Deum and a sermon, the Indians receive absolution on their knees with their hands together, a gesture of fealty, which elicits a triple viva: “Long live the king, long live . . .” The triple viva is repeatedly uttered by today’s fiesta entourage and court. The Franciscans, de Vargas declares in his journal, baptize with love, and if the Indians submit to this action, he esteems them. If not, he will destroy them. It is possible that some Natives accept baptism willingly, perhaps even happily, but de Vargas would not have repeatedly issued his threat unless he detected resistance. Under these circumstances baptism is hardly reconciliation. At worst, it is surrender; at best, a survival tactic. The reconquest of 1692, however bloodless, was an act of religious imperialism and ritual humiliation accomplished, declares the captaingeneral, “without firing a shot” and “without requesting compensation.”202 Between August and December 1692, de Vargas visits twenty-three pueblos and brings home the “trophy” of 2,214 baptized Natives, for whom he and his men sometimes served as liturgical godfathers. He finds the whole scene of repeated submission-via-baptism quite moving. He offers the baptized as “gifts” to his superiors.203 Although he assures them that he does not expect compensation, he writes numerous letters pointing out his worthiness of reward. De Vargas’s entradas to the various pueblos of New Mexico are similar to his Santa Fe entrada, although the ritual elements are adapted in small ways to each situation. Sometimes the general is gentler; sometimes, more imperious. In some cases de Vargas helps make peace between groups that have become enemies. In others, he forges alliances, taking strategic advantage of Pueblo factionalism. The stakes are high and so are the theatrics. He says, for instance, that when he discovers a set of treasonous plans, he hides his knowledge of them behind a happy countenance.204 The conquistadors enter pueblos having received absolution, praising the Blessed Sacrament five times, and ready, if necessary, to shout, “Santiago!” the cue to unsheath swords for battle. In contemporary Santa Fe not many would see the connection between these swords and those of Santiago, El Cid, or the de Vargas figure. De Vargas’s view of his own behavior is that it is economical, compassionate, mature, prudent, and, above all, successful in securing what he came to get.205 “Having followed the wise decision of demanding peace from the pueblos before bloodying weapons,”206 he feels justified. The claim that there was no bloodshed in 1692 seems true enough. It is just not the whole truth. Judging de Vargas as more diplomatic and resourceful than other conquistadors, such as Juan de Oñate, is historically accurate, but the story does not end here, except in the Entrada pageant.

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Table 5.1. A Comparison of de Vargas’s Journals with the 2007 Entrada De Vargas’s Journals

2007 Entrada

The events of 1692 have integral connections with other dates and events, e.g., 1680, 1693, 1696.

Portrays events only from 1692.

La Conquistadora is not mentioned in connection with 1692, only with 1693.

La Conquistadora is linked to 1692.

Equal emphasis on the banner of Our Lady of Remedies.

Exclusive emphasis on the statue of La Conquistadora.

Reconquest is depicted as the reimposition of Spanish royal rule and Roman Catholic hegemony.

Reconquest is reinterpreted as the beginning of reconciliation.

Some Native people acquiesce; others resist.

Reconquest is welcomed by one Indian, Chief Domingo.

There are two conquests separated by a year. The first is a set of ceremonial submissions and rhetorical interchanges; the second is a desperate, violent assault.

The Entrada is portrayed as single paradelike entry on horseback.

De Vargas is judicious but calculating and De Vargas is not only brave, heroic, ready to resort to war or order executions. handsome, compassionate, and pious, but also eschews violence. Chief Domingo is a minor character. He is Chief Domingo is a key character but with acquiescent and ineffectual, especially in only a few lines. He is made to symbolize all comparison with don Luis Picuri, who Pueblos. plays a much more significant role.

It is revealing to set de Vargas’s journals from the seventeenth century alongside the 2007 fiesta (see table 5.1). The comparison shown in table 5.1 disrupts the assumption that the fiesta accords with de Vargas’s actions or wishes. The comparison also raises the possibility that attending more carefully to history might produce a better play. For instance, in de Vargas’s journals, don Luis Picuri, governor of Picuris pueblo, is more pivotal than Domingo, governor of Tesuque Pueblo. Don Luis not only brings his brother for baptism and is more successful than Domingo at mediating but he is also one of the leaders of the 1680 revolt, so his turnaround is more dramatic. In return for Picuri’s assistance, de Vargas mediates between Picuri and the people at Pecos pueblo. Because de Vargas and Picuri seem to exercise mutuality as peers in a

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way that de Vargas and Domingo do not, Picuri would, in my view, make a more compelling choice as token Indian leader in the fiesta Entrada. In other words, a fuller, more historically accurate pageant would not necessarily be less dramatic.

The Military Reconquests of Santa Fe, 1693 and 1696 After completing ceremonies of reduction in Santa Fe as well as in most of the Rio Grande pueblos, de Vargas returned in November 1692 to El Paso to recruit colonists. In Mexico City the ceremonial reconquest of New Mexico was itself played up ceremonially. The cathedral bell was rung, and a service of thanksgiving was offered. A court chronicler was hired to write a thirty-six-page tract extolling de Vargas’s accomplishment.207 The chronicler, knowing the Spanish were in dire need of something to celebrate, vaunted de Vargas’s deeds into high heroism. Some began to speak of him as a second Cortés.208 Thus began the process of inflating de Vargas’s image beyond that presented in his own journals. When de Vargas left the villa of Santa Fe, he had imagined its inhabitants, to use one of his own rhetorical flourishes, “humbled, reduced, and conquered.”209 Returning in late 1693, this time carrying with him the statue of La Conquistadora, he did not quite vow, as current myth would have it, to celebrate a fiesta in her honor. Rather, he declared an intention with those who may enter and with the soldiers who go, personally to build the church and holy temple, placing in it the patron saint of that kingdom and the villa, Our Lady of the Conquest, which is the one they freed from the ferocity of those barbarians. . . . The barbarians, once reduced, will be moved to build their churches in their pueblos with pleasure.210 When he arrived in Santa Fe for the second time, the Indians had reoccupied the city. Having had second thoughts, they were not so willing to yield this time. De Vargas tried the same strategies as on the previous expedition, arguing “with tenderness and love,”211 but his arguments failed to convince. The Indians declared that they would kill the Spaniards and reduce the Franciscans to slaves then kill them as well. The Indians were defiant, breaking images of Mary and stoning the cross before which they had been compelled to kneel on de Vargas’s first visit. De Vargas waited, but it was winter, and the cost, which was mounting rapidly, was illness and death in his own camp. Shortly before Christmas, the colonists petitioned de Vargas for relief. People, including children, were dying from the cold and lack of food; twenty-two had already been buried. Because of the situation’s dangers and complexities, de Vargas convened a general junta, consulting with and recording the opinions of the camp’s leaders. Then, after a sermon framed with liturgical acts of contrition and absolution, de Vargas mounted his horse, ordered the raising of a

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standard bearing an image of Our Lady of Remedies, and, since one did not just charge into battle, ceremonially declared war: Arriving at the entrenchments and place readied for the outbreak of the war, I, the governor and captain general, gave the order that to do so, first, they should shoot three times at the call of “Lord.” Second, they should leave it to me to tell them when. After we said the Praise be, the enemies had scarcely seen us nearby when they repeated their furious shooting of both darts and arrows and many rocks from slings. They shot with shouts that forced me to say immediately to the men, “Santiago, Santiago, kill those rebels!”212 In the name of St. James, disciple of Jesus, eighty-one Native people died, seventy by execution (ceremonially preceded by absolution) after the battle was over.213 The Native captives, including women and children, were distributed as booty to the soldiers. Indian servitude was to last ten years. De Vargas laid down certain rules, for example, that prisoners were not to be transferred without reason and that their land was not to be seized. “They neither lack protection nor are they mistreated,”214 he assures his readers. His aim was not to decimate but to colonize, so the strategy was servitude, not slavery. De Vargas considered this a merciful alternative to death or a lifetime of servitude. Set alongside other bloody conquests of the day, this one was, he felt, comparatively humane. Momentarily defeated but remembering their victory of 1680, Pueblos soon began considering another uprising, which they launched in 1696, killing five Franciscan missionaries and twenty or so mission residents.215 Lacking unified leadership, this final revolt failed after six months, so Pueblos began the accommodation-resistance process that continues to the present day. Pueblos were accustomed to selectively adopting spiritual beings, sacred stories, and ritual practices from people incorporated into their lineages, but the celibate Spanish priests stridently insisted on the exclusivity and ultimate dominance of Christianity. Both before and after 1696, Pueblo medicine men and war chiefs wavered among several strategies: overthrowing, undermining, and accommodating Catholic missionaries and, later, American Protestant missionaries. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sedentary Pueblos and Spanish were forced to band together to defend themselves against raids conducted by the more mobile Navahos, Apaches, and Comanches. During this period de Vargas as well as other New Mexicans became preoccupied with ennoblement, which was usually gained through exemplary military services. De Vargas’s father and grandfather had been military men and members of the Order of Santiago. De Vargas aspired to membership in the Order but was never admitted to it. As the Spanish settled into the villa and countryside, rituals of conquest began giving way to rituals of precedence, but even these, argues Ramón Gutiérrez, were inextricably linked to conquest:

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Whatever the fact or fiction regarding the nobility’s ancestry, their superiority before the law was real and promoted a value system in which honor was all. Men of honor owned slaves. They rode horses and carried arms while their inferiors needed special license to do so. They trampled the fields of the peasants without fear while out for an afternoon of sport. They cursed and they gambled and they staged their fandangos. They eschewed physical labor, instead reveling in their rituals of precedence in ostentatious displays of lavish clothing and consumption of luxury goods, and in respectful forms of address and titles. Their sense of noblesse oblige was great, for after all, it was their superior birth, blood, and honor that defined what society was all about.216

The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries The Santa Fe Fiesta Proclamation, originally issued on September 16, 1712, noting that on September 14, 1692, General de Vargas had reconquered Santa Fe, observes that no fiesta had been celebrated for the intervening twenty years. The proclamation, therefore, mandated “for all time a fiesta in honor of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross . . . for its being patron and title of this villa of Santa Fe.” The celebration should include vespers, Mass, procession, and sermon. Nothing is said about a historical reenactment or the veneration of La Conquistadora. Although the occasion was that of recalling de Vargas’s reconquest, the purpose of the event was to celebrate the feast day of the Holy Cross, which had been held throughout European Christendom on September 14 since the fourth century c.e. The proclamation emphasizes this purpose, mentioning the Holy Cross three times. Twenty-five pesos were to be paid to the person chosen to deliver the sermon, and thirty used to underwrite the costs of the other rituals. The “illustrious council” was inveighed to provide beeswax, presumably for candles, and, because of its scarcity, to gather up any bits that remained. Little is known about the immediate ritual consequences of the 1712 proclamation. Only from the late nineteenth century is there sufficient documentation for anything like a history of the fiesta, so it is impossible to say with certainty whether the mandated commemoration continued unbroken or lapsed and was periodically revived; the evidence seems to suggest the latter. There are many gaps and turns in any history connecting the mandated, exclusively Catholic liturgical celebration of the Holy Cross with today’s public event replete with effigy, dramatic reenactment, music, dance, food, entertainment, parades, and fashion shows. Today’s fiesta differs radically from what was mandated in 1712. The continuity of the mandated celebration with the spring novena and processions is much more obvious than continuity with the autumn fiesta. By 1714 de Vargas’s wish for a chapel in which to install Nuestra Senõra de La Conquista had been fulfilled. During the late 1700s, the first Sunday of October, the

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Festival of the Holy Rosary, was chosen as a time for honoring La Conquistadora with processions and a novena of masses. Women, not men, as in today’s processions, carried her. In 1807 her processions and novena were moved to the spring, and Rosario Chapel was built to serve as terminus for these processions, as well as to mark the spot where the Virgin is said to have rested while de Vargas negotiated his way into the city. In 1883 the city mounted the Santa Fe Tertio-Millennial Anniversary Greater Celebration and Industrial Exposition. The title was a misnomer, since the stated aim was to celebrate the 333rd anniversary of Santa Fe. The basic structure was a simplified version of the historical eras of Santa Fe: first an Indian day, then a Spanish day, and finally an American day. This framework was later adopted for early twentieth-century fiestas. The event included a reenactment of Coronado’s entrada of 1540 and a mock battle with Native people, as well as a performance of American General Stephen Watts Kearny’s occupation in 1846. With Kearny’s arrival in Santa Fe, the expanding American empire encapsulated the Spanish-become-Mexican colony. Like de Vargas, Kearny at first conquered Santa Fe “peacefully.” He raised his country’s flag on the city’s central plaza, but a year later, in 1847, the city had to be reconquered, this time violently—another parallel to the de Vargas conquest. That today’s Santa Fe celebrates neither Coronado’s nor Kearny’s conquest illustrates how selective public festivity and thus public memory are. Like most public celebrations, the Santa Fe Fiesta is as important for what it forgets, obscures, or denies as for what it recollects. Public celebrations are also important for what they embellish and whom they include or exclude. Pueblo governors actively participated in the 1883 celebration, and Spanish Day included a reenactment of de Vargas’s entrada to Santa Fe. A florid account published in the New Mexican Review is worth quoting: Jose D. Sena, chief marshal, attired as a Spanish chieftain in crimson, black and gold, with high boots, helmet and sword, and mounted on a spirited charger, led the pageant. . . . Then came in unique confusion, the various sections of the pageant, their appropriately inscribed banners floating triumphantly in the morning breeze. Those splendid specimens of physical manhood, the Apache chiefs, warriors and hunters, with their gleaming spears and buckskin robes adorned with beads of many hues; the Oriental and innocent looking Zunis of the sixteenth century, with bows and arrows; the sun dried and good hearted San Juan Indians; the mild mannered Pecuris [sic] with their Christ-like wreaths of native willow—made up the first section of this novel pageant, and aroused the admiration to the highest pitch by the characteristic wildness of their makeup.217 Walt Whitman, invited too late to read a poem, nevertheless wrote a letter that took aim at the Black Legend: “It is time to realize—for it is certainly true—that there

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will not be found any more cruelty, tyranny, superstition, etc., in the résumé of past Spanish history than in the corresponding résumé of Anglo-Norman history. Nay, I think there will not be found so much.”218 An obvious advantage of performing multiple historical encounters rather than a single one was that Anglos had to contemplate their own complicity in oppression. Today’s version of the pageant leads spectators to recollect only one of the conquests.

Festivity, American Pageantry, and the Myth of Santa Fe: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries The area called the Kingdom of New Mexico was so declared by Spain in 1540. Later, what became known to English-speaking Americans as the New Mexico Territory included all of Arizona. Even though this territory came under U.S. control in 1848, New Mexico did not become a state until 1912. To be accepted into the union, New Mexico had to advertise itself vigorously to convince other Americans, especially those in Washington, DC, that both the region and its citizens were truly American rather than Mexican. As well as having to declare, “We’re like you,” inhabitants of the territory wanted the rest of the nation to know, “We are also truly unique.” Pageantry and tourism, both key components of fiesta history, were crucial to this lobbying effort and self-advertising campaign. In the process of putting the city on the American map, Santa Fe reinvented itself as a tourist destination. Billing itself “the City Different,” it continues to take delight in multiplying “oldest” claims. Santa Fe is the site of not only America’s oldest capital (founded in 1610)219 but also of the oldest public building (Palace of the Governors), oldest house,220 oldest church (San Miguel Mission), and oldest shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe (Santuario de Guadalupe, 1776, 1796). Santa Fe remains a small town with a big, myth-laced reputation; in 2007 its population was only seventy-five thousand. Inspired by the British Arts and Crafts movement, Americans between 1908 and the 1920s began constructing historical pageants at a rapid rate and on a remarkable scale. Most of the pageants combined civic self-advertising with ethnic typecasting, military display, generic Christianity, and mythologized history. One thread in the tangled skein that was eventually woven into today’s fiesta was the 1911 Independence Day celebration, for which the de Vargas Entrada was revived.221 The events of 1911 were an anachronistic mix of locally and nationally focused performances that included parading, ceremonial and secular dancing, declarations, national anthems, and speech-making. An account in the Santa Fe New Mexican of July 5 refers to “Duke” Diego de Vargas’s reading of the proclamation as a “ritual.” The Entrada was performed again in 1912, but then dropped, only to be picked up again later. This pattern of adding, dropping, revising, and reviving was, and is, an integral part of festival-making in Santa Fe and elsewhere.

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By 1912 Santa Feans were boasting that their historical pageants were comparable to the Oberammergau Passion Play. The fiesta was advertised as a photographic and cinematic spectacle of commanding importance. Local news sources continually claimed that advertisers and filmmakers were vying to secure exclusive rights to put the event on postcards, posters, and film. The Santa Fe Railroad began advertising the fiesta, along with the Hopi Snake Dance, and organizing trains to bring easterners and midwesterners to the Santa Fe Plaza or the Hopi mesas. Thus began the struggle between those who would make the fiesta a tourist attraction and those who would keep it a local ethnic-religious celebration. Chris Wilson, author of The Myth of Santa Fe, observes that a major source of ritual knowledge informing early twentieth-century fiestas came from organizers who were Scottish Rite Masons.222 Shriners, that branch of Masonry given to ritual parody, also participated. Anglo-run Protestant civic organizations worked alongside the Catholicadministered Knights of Columbus, La Alianza Hispano-Americana, and other such organizations in putting on events that contributed to today’s fiesta. In 1919 the School of American Research (now, School of Advanced Research), led by Edgar Hewett, took charge of the fiesta, drafting it into the educational, cultural, and anthropological aims of the Museum of New Mexico and the SAR. The journal El Palacio asked rhetorically: Where else than in Santa Fe do Pueblo Indians, descendants of the cave and cliff dwellers, descendants of Spaniards and of Moors, the AngloSaxon and all the other nationalities that have come to America from foreign shores, mingle so freely and so picturesquely, each true to his type in costume, in appearance, in gesticulation and in language. Add to this the Fiesta spirit, the throngs of cowboys and trappers, the players and mimers in costumes of centuries ago, and there are created impression after impression, ethnic picture upon picture, a moving, stirring, kaleidoscopic grouping of humanity in stupendous settings bound by the turquoise skies, the snow-tipped Blood of Christ mountains.223 As the myth of Santa Fe grew, romanticizing interethnic harmony did not displace stereotyping; rather, stereotyping fed off romanticizing. The 1919 fiesta began “before Santa Fe was,” by calling “ancient people from the Four World Quarters,” and it ended with the American occupation and ensuing “peace.” In between were a procession of Franciscans, the raising of the cross, an equestrian entry by de Vargas, and a miscellany of characters and stereotypes. The de Vargas Pageant celebrated the reconquest of 1693, not the so-called bloodless one of 1692. It justified its own existence by including a reading of the 1712 proclamation.224 The 1920 fiesta advertised a massive “grand spectacular commemorative historical pageant” called The Commerce of the Prairies. It consisted of thirty-five sections

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processing down the Santa Fe Trail. A veritable history book on wheels, it included not only aboriginals, Spanish, and Americans but Mexicans and French as well. The pageant concluded by a reenactment of the admission of New Mexico to the union. By 1921 publicists were telling tourists that the Santa Fe Plaza was “a spot sacred in New Mexico’s history—a spot without superior from Plymouth Rock to the Pacific,” so one should approach it with a “reverent” attitude.225 The official program, filled with fine-print ethnographic, architectural, and historical details, compared the fiesta favorably with Mardi Gras and boasted that the former far exceeded the latter in “educational entertainment.” Dances and music were everywhere. Some were traditional; some, eclectic. Both Los Matachines and Comanche dances were performed. Even though the population of Santa Fe was much smaller then, the number of active participants—Native, Hispanic, and Anglo—was surprisingly high. The New Mexican described the Pueblos as gathering in “barbaric splendor” to do “weird tribal dances.”226 Despite the racist descriptions, Native participation was quite high. The Commerce of the Prairies continued thus: “Day by day in the Santa Fe Fiesta the history of Santa Fe is moving down the centuries.”227 Pueblos, although sometimes participating in large numbers, began to express reluctance to perform their own defeat, so in 1922 Hispanics and Anglos took on these roles.228 Alongside this shift, there emerged a deep longing, a pronounced sense of lack among Anglos, one of whom wrote: We not only doll up Anglos in Castillian or Mexican style, the bulk of the crowd of celebrants is Spanish-speaking; no costume is needed, they wear their own best cloths [sic]; if they don fancy dress, they get it out of the trunks of their grandmothers and grandfathers. No need to dig folk-music out of archives; they play and sing the songs, handed down from their ancestors. . . . We never see a Fiesta, moreover, without a feeling of incredulity at the Pueblo Indian ceremonials. They are an impossible anachronism; a dream of the past which will not disappear when we try to wake up; a beautiful and unreal thing, a figment of the imagination, a fairy-story which no imagination can rival.229 Such confessions have not gone away. The fiesta and, even more so, public Pueblo rituals reminded Anglos of the heritages they do not, for whatever reason, own or perform. Even when Anglos were controlling, organizing, instigating, and participating in the festival, they could not escape the nagging sense that they were borrowing or, worse, playacting. This awareness fed iconoclasm. Anglos began turning a critical eye toward that which they could not own or control. Soon detractors, critics, and counterperformers began mocking and parodying the heroes, memories, and values espoused by the establishment.

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In 1922 a fiesta melodrama emerged posing ironic and iconoclastic questions. Then, in 1924, social activists, intellectuals, and artists, many of them originally from the Northeast rather than the Southwest, introduced a carnivalesque counterfiesta called El Pasatiempo. Protesting the stodginess as well as the commercialization of the fiesta, it included a children’s pet parade and the predecessor of today’s Hysterical-Historical Parade. After the 1924 fiesta, Edgar Hewett wrote a letter to the Fiesta Council announcing that the Department of Indian Affairs was complaining that “our Pueblo Indians are devoting more time to participation in the summer and fall celebrations throughout the Southwest than is good for them.”230 Hewett did not question the paternalism of the bureau’s worries, and he added that this year’s fiesta had already cut the number of Indian ceremonies by 50 percent without any adverse affect. He advised spreading out the invitations to Native groups so no one pueblo would have too many demands on its time. The goal was to “preserve to each [pueblo] a unique character that will hold our visitors to the Southwest for both events [the Santa Fe Fiesta and Gallup ceremonies].” A 1925 editorial in the Santa Fe New Mexican waxed eloquent about the fiesta’s capacity to weld people together into a “strong amalgamating force, striking down what barriers the ignorant and those without vision seek to raise.”231 From then until now the fiesta has been described not merely as reflecting unity but as actively creating it. In the 1930s John Gaw Meem declared Santa Fe one of the most religiously tolerant cities in America and credited this fact to the fiesta.232 His judgment ignored the obvious Christian, specifically Roman Catholic, hegemony over the fiesta, and it did not include comparative data from other cities. In Santa Fe one sometimes encounters the easy assumption that the reinvented fiesta of the early twentieth century precipitated an Anglicization and secularization that continues unabated today. But the 1920s introduced the Cross of the Martyrs and Candlelight Procession. Later, from the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, under mounting pressure from local Catholics, the fiesta became more overtly religious. During this period, the dogma of Mary’s bodily assumption was declared by Pius XII. Meanwhile, locally, La Conquistadora underwent a coronation, went on pilgrimage around New Mexico, and then was crowned again by an apostolic representative of Pope John XXIII, so in crucial ways the Catholic religiosity of the event has expanded rather than contracted. As part of this religious expansion, the Caballeros de Vargas, founded in 1957, became La Conquistadora’s honor guard and took control of the Entrada script and production.233 The 1958 script, attributed to Edmundo Delgado, declared, “Blood or race should not be the primary qualification for the leading parts, although a Hispano would be preferable for the part of de Vargas because of the Spanish nature of the event.” The question, said Delgado, should be: “Does the man fit the part? Can he act and declaim.”234 The de Vargas figure of the 1958 Entrada was given blatantly accusatory lines. In a single paragraph, the Indians facing him were guilty of “apostasy,” “sacrilege,”

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“butchery,” “desecration,” “abominations,” and “contamination.” They were “cowardly,” “barbarous,” and “ruthless.” However, the 1958 script also noted the dilemma of Native people. The “experience of many years” was that Indians were “loathe to participate, and no one can blame them for not rejoicing with their conquerors.”235 When the narrator described Indian reactions to the approach of armed Spanish soldiers, the rhetoric became stereotyped: “They know too, the power of the large sticks carried by these men, who like evil spirits discharge fire.” Chief Domingo was portrayed as disgusted with other Indians and yet “forgetful of the debt which he owes his people.” In the play, Domingo returned to the Spaniards, now his friends, imagining that he might die with them. Even though he had chosen the “right side” and did not, in fact, die, the scriptwriter seemed ambivalent about Domingo, as if he were betraying his own people. A character named Bolsas uttered words that, with some editing, remained in the 2007 pageant but in the mouth of Chief Domingo: “White man . . . your coming was inevitable . . . For years you come like great herd of buffalo . . . Our land is now your land . . . Your religion is now our religion . . . Many nights will pass . . . and many braves will die of old age . . . but we will live in peace.”236 The many ellipses belong to the script. The Entrada script has been continually revised. The 1958 script was inconsistent about which event it commemorated. On page 1, the year is 1692. By page 5, with no intervening passage of time, the actions have become those of 1693. By the time of the 1967 script, the focus had shifted decisively to 1692. In June 1960, celebrating 350 years since Santa Fe’s founding, a pageant called Siglos [Centuries] de Santa Fe was performed on eight successive evenings at Fort Marcy Park. A professionally directed “John B. Rogers Spectacular Presentation,” it boasted over four hundred actors. For the last time, the de Vargas pageant was embedded in a larger historical sweep running from 1610 to 1960. The festival was organized thematically by days (Ladies Day, Indian Day, Pioneer Day) and eras (Indian, Spanish, Mexican, gringo, and American). Contained in scene 8 of the American Era was a performance of the fiesta itself. By the mid-1960s Pueblo protest was making its way into print. On September 15, 1966, Mr. and Mrs. John F. Torres of San Juan Pueblo wrote a letter to the editor of the New Mexican objecting to the fiesta’s “blatant demand to repent as dramatized in the Entrada script.” The couple recommended that “Fiesta scripts and speeches should also be modified with a careful regard as to who was being mean to whom and so as to avoid typing one party as heathenish and implacably belligerent and the other like as unto an angel sent from God.” A year later, in 1967, the Entrada script underwent a major revision and expansion, leaping from seven to twenty-four pages and adding a ten-page preface. Its history-teacher redactor and author, Pedro Ribera-Ortega, wanted to be sure that actors and audiences understood the meanings of events being enacted onstage. There were at least two major innovations in his revision. One was the script’s

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attempt to ratchet up the drama. Compared with the 1958 script, the 1967 script was littered with exclamation points and great swells of emotion. Another innovation was an attempt to give Indians a larger share of airtime. This script attempted to represent not only 1692 but also 1680, the revolt that made the reconquest necessary. Whereas the Native figures Popé and Domingo Naranjo were labeled “ghosts from the past,” de Vargas and his cuadrilla were depicted as transcendentally present heroes. The play ended with de Vargas himself declaring that for all time a yearly fiesta should celebrate the reconquest. The narrator concluded, “Our tri-cultural coexistence—in neighborly peace and harmony—is the fruit of Don Diego’s ‘peaceful reconquista.’ ”237 The causal link between seventeenth-century reconquest and contemporary harmony had been dramatically scripted and enacted. By the mid-1970s American Indian protest movements were emerging across America. In 1977 Pueblos publicly announced a boycott of the fiesta. One reason for it was a letter requesting that Indians be prevented from selling crafts during fiesta in front of the Place of the Governors. Another reason, argued Ernest Lovato of Santo Domingo Pueblo, was that “Don Diego de Vargas and his men violated their own Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not steal.”238 Protests continued the pattern of flaring up periodically and then dying down again. In 1980 Pueblos formally and openly celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the Revolt of 1680. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed further interpretive moves by clergy. The fiesta was not about the conquest of Indians but about the conquest of violence. The Burning of Zozobra was “purgative” rather than “sacrificial.”239 Fiesta Queens were stand-ins for Our Lady of the Conquest. Our Lady of the Conquest was really Our Lady of Peace. People began to speak of fiesta not only as “tradition” but as also as a continuous process of “reinvention.”240 Local people speak of the fiesta as a more or less unbroken tradition. However, they also regularly issue criticisms and call for renewed creativity. Speeches by those seeking the presidency of the Fiesta Council have repeatedly called for reevaluation. As the author of one letter to the Fiesta Council put it, “Without revision it’s [the fiesta’s] future is on the balance.”241 Such sentiments are more or less continuous throughout recent fiesta history. The film Gathering Up Again: Fiesta in Santa Fe, released in 1992, documented the 1990 fiesta, creating a firestorm. Central to the controversy over the film was a backstage scene. A description of the film currently posted on Folkstreams describes the scene as “unwitting.”242 Although the camera crew was hardly unwitting—the filmmakers intended to track backstage activity—they had no way of knowing what would happen on this particular day of the fiesta. In the film Randy Kaniatobe, a Pueblo Indian, returns to New Mexico one summer from his home in Los Angeles, and one of his Hispanic friends invites him to play Chief Domingo Naranjo of Tesuque Pueblo. Since Randy now lives in California rather than in one of the New Mexico pueblos, he does not realize that

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most Pueblo people have been quietly boycotting the fiesta pageant, that no Indian has played Chief Domingo for quite some time. It is the day of the Entrada pageant, the ideological heart of the fiesta, and it seems there has not been a full dress rehearsal. Randy arrives, greets his buddies, sees their ragtag stereotypical “Indian” costumes, puts up with their mock threats about making “Indian” jokes, and prepares to perform. We witness Randy as the meaning of the play and his part in it begins to dawn on him. He is humiliated and embarrassed. The camera notices him offstage crying. At one point it seems that an organizer is pushing him onstage to finish playing his demeaning part. Interviewed after the pageant, Randy admits that if he had known what was going on, he probably would not have participated at all. The “proud” Spanish figures confess that they feel ashamed. After releasing Gathering Up Again, codirector Diane Reyna went on to direct Surviving Columbus: The Story of the Pueblo People, a PBS film on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival. Meanwhile, director Jenny De Bouzek submitted Gathering to the New Mexico Quincentenary Commission, asking for funds to distribute the film to the state’s public schools. The debates became so contentious that the attorney general and the governor had to intervene. In addition to charges concerning improprieties in the decision-making process, there was a debate over the film’s contents. Among those contesting its financial support by the state were representatives from the Santa Fe Fiesta Council,243 Caballeros de Vargas,244 and members of the Department of History at the University of New Mexico.245 The Fiesta Council’s letter seemed to assume that funding had already been granted but was being reconsidered. This letter sounded at least one conciliatory note in its last paragraph by looking forward to “positive dialogue.” However, the letter also quoted its official position: “The video is not a true and accurate depiction of the Santa Fe Fiesta or an accurate representation of the current status of relationships between our respective cultures.” The author feared that “the film has the potential to aggravate tensions that we feel have been long ago forgiven.” The Caballeros’ letter was the most detailed, criticizing specific sequences, scenes, captions, and other details. The letter laid down editorial directives: “This portion should be deleted.” The Caballeros threatened legal action: “If Jeannette De Bouzek will not compromise to some degree, the Caballeros De Vargas with the financial support of an outside organization will consider legal action.” The Caballeros’ letter attached a copy of a third letter “from four learned people of New Mexico.” Submitted on University of New Mexico Department of History letterhead, it was from the hands of scholars who boasted that their “aggregate represents some eighty years of research and writing on the Spanish, Hispanic, and indigenous history of New Mexico and Latin America.” This letter, signed by scholars, was the least nuanced. Whereas the Fiesta Council letter was ceremonially conciliatory and the Caballeros’ letter at least laid out specific editing

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recommendations, the historians’ letter was a vitriolic broadside. It put its most serious charge this way: “If the thesis [of the film] was to perpetuate the Black Legend, to take every action of the Spaniard over the past five centuries out of context, it was a success.” By “Black Legend” the authors said they mean the set of stereotypes that includes “the evil, ignorant Spaniard; the noble Indian; and the wise and understanding Anglo.” The authors demanded a thesis or plot and accused the filmmakers of having no focus, theme, or motive. The letter provided none of the detailed critique of the other two letters. Instead, it resorted to name-calling: “This video serves as yet another monument to the ignorance and arrogance of a sector of our society that has a powerful tool and is too stupid to use it constructively.” Individuals expressed other views in local newspapers. For instance, one person wrote, I see the video as a powerful catalyst for healing dialogue and genuine interactions. . . . As I listened to the Hispanics, Anglos and Indians portrayed and watched their faces and actions, their individual personalities emerged for me and I began to care about each one of them. And I cared deeply as the tragedy of the general insulation of each group from the others— with the resulting misunderstandings and poor communications—was revealed bit by bit.246 In the end, the combined forces of the Fiesta Council, Caballeros de Vargas, and University of New Mexico scholars achieved its goal of blocking funding for distribution of the video. The year of the film’s release, 1992, was also the Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee, the five hundredth anniversary of what is known popularly as Columbus’s “discovery” of America, although some Latin American countries apparently convinced Spain to reframe 1492 as a “meeting of two worlds.”247 As the Quincentenary approached, few were in a mood to celebrate unabashed colonialism.248 After all, many were speaking of the world not only as postmodern but also as postcolonial. Protests, demonstrations, and anticelebrations were planned across the Americas. Native Americans, sometimes joined by non-natives, were intent on reframing the event, hoping to dispel the notion that someone else had discovered the Americas or that the continents were empty when Europeans landed on their shores. In July 1992, as the Quincentenary was ramping up and controversy over Gathering Up Again was winding down, Robert Sanchez, archbishop of Santa Fe, announced “as a gesture of peace” that he was changing La Conquistadora’s name to Our Lady of Peace. There was such local outrage at the idea of changing her historic title that the church quickly “clarified” its stance, explaining that her name was not being changed. Instead, she was being given another name in addition to her traditional name. A spokesperson for the archbishop explained that her name “was meant to mean [sic] ‘the mother of conquering love.’ ”

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In the heated atmosphere of Santa Fe in the mid-1990s, the video Gathering Up Again threatened the local Hispanic sensibility in a way that mere books could not have done. The video didn’t merely refer to ritual and interethnic difficulties; it reenacted them, making them cinematically present. De Bouzek’s video had the capability of renewing an event over and over again, in effect ritualizing the behind-the-scenes revelation captured by the camera. In her film, the real drama is not onstage but backstage. Before viewers’ eyes Randy awakens, his Spanish and Indian compatriots feel shame, and the pageant begins to unravel. Viewers not only witness Randy’s humiliation but also hear an utterance that one does not hear in Santa Fe: “I was ashamed of being Spanish.” If the video were funded, this scene would have been heard in public schools all over New Mexico. It is not difficult to understand why some Santa Feans would be embarrassed and therefore angry about the film. It airs dirty laundry in public. However, the question is, whose dirty laundry? I have shown the film in several Canadian classes as well as at international scholarly meetings. The first reaction among viewers is puzzlement and embarrassment. Confronted by the guitar-playing young fire dancer, “Anglo” students ask, “Is that us? Is that what we sound like? Are we that inept?” Native students watching it feel embarrassed as well: “Are we that indecisive, that unaware of our identity?” So when Hispanic viewers see themselves symbolized by a guy belting out mock Indian yells in a gunny-sack costume, it makes sense that they too experience embarrassment. There is more than enough egg to smudge every face, but this fact is one of the strengths of the film. No group is pleasingly portrait-perfect in it. The film is not beyond criticism. Like the videos that accompany this book, it is an exploratory work by two young filmmakers new to their craft. It is neither mean-spirited nor blindly prejudicial. Is the film an example of the Black Legend, the notion that somehow the Spanish conquest was “blacker” and more violent than the English conquest? I think not. It neither argues nor implies such. There is the unavoidable fact that the Entrada is, in fact, about the Spanish, rather than the English, conquest. An enactment of 1848, the English equivalent, if it were acted out in a pageant as the basis for fiesta would be every bit as questionable. It simply is not true that there is only one kind of Hispanic, “the evil Spaniard,” in the film. There are many. In fact, there is only one Anglo figure to identify, or disidentify, with, whereas there are several Hispanics, almost all of them thoughtful and articulate. The de Vargas figure, for example, seems genuinely (not stereotypically) heroic because of his willingness to support his friend Randy and because of his courage in admitting complicity with the dramatic exploitation. To my outsider’s eye, the Hispanic community appears strong, varied, and confident enough to be unafraid of airing disagreements. In any case, the situation in 1992 made it all too clear that scholars studying the fiesta are walking through a minefield, that no one can stroll it with immunity, and that any ritual criticism, especially coming from non-Hispanics, risks being accused of indulging in the Black Legend.

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Under the leadership of San Juan Pueblo governor Herman Agoyo, Fiesta Council president Rick Berardinelli, and Archbishop Robert Sanchez, the 1991– 1992 fiestas underwent changes intended to be more respectful of Indians. In addition to the “peace offering” of modifying La Conquistadora’s title, Indian costumes were made more historically accurate. Seating arrangements were designed to be less segregated (that is, with Indians on one side and Spanish on the other). Standing arrangements were revised to be less hierarchical, so Indian and Spanish princesses stood on the same level. Cacique Domingo was moved from the middle of processions to near the front. Church officials decided to knight de Vargas with a cross rather than a sword. In addition, Berardinelli challenged the Caballeros de Vargas to revise the Entrada script. He called on people not to dwell on the problems of the past but to move on. Finally, in a large-scale ritual gesture, Catholic clergy invited Native people to join in a Mass of Reconciliation on September 12, 1992.249 Moving on, however, was not easy. A year later, Herman Agoyo, then director of the Eight Northern Indian Pueblos Council, continued to express public dissatisfaction with the fiesta. In fact, he called for a permanent cancellation of it.250 A brief but thoroughgoing critique of the fiesta was written by Joseph Dispensa in 1998. Not only did he mount the usual argument against performing pageants in which one people conquers another; he also went after Zozobra: Maybe it’s time to look at Zozobra and the rest of Fiesta to see whether it actually reflects what the community is about now. Do we really want to whip up a lot of violent emotions and burn a big puppet as a symbol of our town? As a Santa Fe resident for 22 years, I am finding Fiesta increasingly embarrassing. I don’t want to “banish the community gloom,” and I don’t want to commemorate the “peaceful re-conquest” of Santa Fe by the Spanish. I am thinking that community Fiesta plain and simple—a coming together of the people of town—is all that is necessary. It doesn’t have to be tied to pagan ritual, religious underpinnings, or the solemnization of Spanish domination. I suggest we throw out all the religious and pagan stuff and just have a big community party—one that celebrates the diversity of the town’s cultures.251 The cycle, in which ritual criticism is followed by a ritual “gesture” of appeasement, continued. In 1999 Monica Maestas, of Hispanic and Pueblo heritages, was disqualified from competition for the role of Fiesta Queen. Alleging that the reason for her disqualification was her mixed heritage, she withdrew, charging the Fiesta Council with racism.252 In 2002 the author of a report by the Fiesta Council’s Indian Participation Committee pointed back to the Mass of Reconciliation as a high point and noted the continuing lack of desire among Indians to participate in the fiesta and, consequently, the low budget provided for his committee. In that same year, when the rhetoric of

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pluralism and multiculturalism was everywhere, the fiesta by-laws continued to assume the centrality of Catholicism. Fiesta Council minutes show that meetings opened and closed with prayer, as well as the Pledge of Allegiance. The religion of the Fiesta Council’s Religious Committee was still obviously Christian, if not specifically Catholic. The only religious group mentioned in the 2002 by-laws was the Catholic Church, and its clerical representative was appointed by the archbishop of the Diocese of Santa Fe. There was a single Native American representative, and that person was appointed directly by the president of the Fiesta Council. In 2003, the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, mounting another gesture of considerable proportions, erected a large statue of Kateri Tekakwitha in front of the cathedral. Although a Catholic convert and saint venerated in New Mexico, Kateri was Mohawk-Algonquin, not Pueblo, Hopi, or Navaho. Also in 2003, spurred by publication of the journals of de Vargas, fiesta organizers initiated an attempt to educate the public about the history of the city and its fiesta. The first Historical Lecture, “Diego de Vargas and His Household in Santa Fe,” was delivered in 2003 by University of New Mexico historian John Kessell.

Contours of Fiesta History To ensure grounding, I have presented a specific fiesta from a specific year, then set it in a historical context. However, as soon as a scholar infers the fiesta by distinguishing persistent dynamics from evanescent ones, summarizing, amalgamating, comparing, and abstracting are inevitable. Like most rituals, the Santa Fe Fiesta exceeds any single enactment of it, especially for those who experience it repeatedly. For local participants, the fiesta is a residue, an accumulation of selected but fading memories. People speak of the “heart” of fiesta. They know “what fiesta is really all about.” They grasp “the true meaning of fiesta.” Such notions, however concrete they may sound, are abstractions, the function of which is to put any single instance in perspective. Although in a given year fiesta can be marred with controversy or go flat, in another year it can seem wonderfully and generously embracing. Comparing any year’s version with the fiesta helps situate each year’s version. Speaking of fiesta as having a heart, or core meaning, most often leads to Catholic religion and Hispanic ethnicity rather than mere civic cooperation. Even civicmindedness, a more generic version of the heart of fiesta, is usually understood to be underwritten by religiosity, and that religiosity is not interfaith in nature. There is still an assumed primacy, historical if not ontological, of Hispanic Catholic tradition. People have died defending it; some still would. Ritually speaking, then, the espoused heart of the fiesta consists of masses plus the Entrada. But could the fiesta survive without Catholic values and liturgies? It has. Could it go on without the Entrada? It has. Could it survive alongside other kinds of pageants? It has. Could the fiesta die out altogether? It has. Could it be reinvented and resurrected? It has.

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Festivals thrive and shrivel depending on their abilities both to adapt and preserve, not on their having a heart or core. There is more to a body than a heart. In fact, it may not even be necessary for a festival to have a heart. And how does one decide which element is the heart? No one would die for Zozobra, but he draws more people in one evening than all the religious events put together. People say they “don’t believe in him,” but they lay out enough money in support of him to endow several Kiwanis scholarships. Actions speak louder than words. No one would die for the parades in the streets, but fiesta would not be the same without them. Kids would take their parents to task if they allowed the parades to disappear. The sales tents are, perhaps, the wallet rather than the heart of fiesta, and people do die defending their wallets. One hears that contemporary fiestas are more secular and commercial, but archival evidence points in the opposite direction. From the fiesta’s reinvention in 1919 until the early 1940s, fiesta programs do not display much overt religiosity, but from 1942 on, Catholic religious dimensions appear fairly consistently. Currently, Hispanic Catholicism is center stage and neither Native nor Anglo history is performed in a pageant. Earlier fiestas were educational, historical, and either multicultural or multihistorical, but more recent fiestas are thinner on all these accounts. Since the Entrada itself has shrunk, it no longer commands the attention it once did. In contrast to the large, attentive crowd attending the 1973 Entrada, the crowd watching the 2007 Entrada was smaller, and many simply strolled by, paying little attention to it. In 1973, an oil-and-water interpretation of fiesta was tempting: Anglos controlled some parts of fiesta, and Hispanics other parts. Hispanics tended to be most engaged in the serious religious events, while Anglos clustered around the secular, iconoclastic events. In 2007, however, exceptions were easy to find; Anglos and Hispanics were more visibly working side by side. Historically, the ethnic divides have not been static. The 1929 program, for instance, pointed out that management of El Pasatiempo, the carnivalesque spoof, had passed over from Anglos to Hispanics. The de Vargas pageant in 1920 was Anglo-directed, but in 2007 it was Hispanic-directed. This kind of oscillation makes it difficult to summarize trends. Depending on the historical benchmark used for comparison, the current fiesta can be seen as either a broadening or a shrinking of the ethnic, religious, and historical range of earlier fiestas. If one were to compare the 2007 fiesta with the 1712 proclamation, there is an apparent broadening of fiesta to include secular, non-Catholic elements, but this kind of comparison is less than perfect, since we have only the proclamation, no descriptions of actual eighteenth-century fiestas in Santa Fe. A more reliable comparative procedure would be to set the 2007 fiesta alongside one of the reinvented fiestas of the first two decades of the twentieth century, say that of 1919, the first of the new fiestas. Without a thorough historical study, plotting the recent fiesta history is risky, but some contours of changes from 1919 to 2007 emerge even from this brief historical

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excursion. Fiesta attendance has grown as the population has increased, although there were some exceptions—during World War II, for example. Native participation has declined, but erratically rather than steadily. The range of historical eras performed and historical characters enacted has decreased, while trying on each other’s cultures by cross-cultural costuming has declined. The Entrada has shifted focus from including the violent reconquest of 1693 to focusing solely on the “bloodless” reconquest of 1692, and the length of the Entrada has shrunk. The performance of triumphal moments (in which one people conquered another) has become less explicit, although it is still implied in the ceremony of submission. Iconoclasm and parody in the parades emerged in the mid-1920s in the so-called counterfiesta but then declined to almost nil, except in the Fiesta Melodrama. The Burning of Zozobra is no longer countercultural but mainstream. Except for the Historical Lecture, educational elements associated with fiesta are now largely confined to schools rather than embedded in the fiesta itself. Crowd participation has shifted from active involvement to passive entertainment. Tensions between religious and commercial motives have persisted, as have tensions between keeping fiesta local and making it a tourist attraction. However, across the last decades Roman Catholic liturgical elements have been heightened and the appeal to tourists curbed. Other religious traditions continue to be marginal to fiesta. Leadership of certain events, notably the Burning of Zozobra and the Fiesta Melodrama, has become more ethnically diverse. This summary, I hope, makes the Entrada seem like the comprehensible outcome of a long, deeply complex process, although it probably also makes the festival seem anomalous in today’s multicultural world, so one could tag my summary as an Anglo or outsider’s view, which, of course, it is. Would I be as critical of performances growing out of my own culture? Yes. If I had worked on, say, Billy the Kid or the Easter pageant, both once performed at the Caprock Amphitheatre near my hometown,253 or if I were to work on, say, Texas, the outdoor musical drama performed in Palo Duro Canyon, I would be much more critical.254 We have looked at the Santa Fe Fiesta audiovisually and considered it historically, so the case study is now before you. It only partially illustrates the method, and it does not quite imply or warrant the theory. Other, more fully developed cases would be required to achieve either aim. In some respects this case is a conclusion to the research project I started in 1973, making it a longitudinal study. In other respects it is an opening gambit, since the videos are built on an intense, two-week foray in 2007 and a follow-up in 2012. Insofar as the case is unfinished and imperfect, I offer it as grist for the mill of methodological and theoretical inquiry. Even in presenting the case here I’ve been chewing it up, pointing out its limitations and problems. Insofar as the case is finished, readers are invited to treat it as a conversation piece, one they can compare with their own cases, enabling critics to question my methodological and theoretical claims.

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PA RT I I I

THEORY

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6

Theorizing Ritual

Theories of ritual do not arise automatically out of data like mist arising from a lake. Even so, theorizing began as soon as I started trying to organize and summarize my data. At first the theorizing was low-level, hovering down on Santa Fe and its fiesta. It was a theory of this recurring event, not every ritual or every festival. To theorize ritual one has to levitate, making the whole enterprise a bit grandiose, a little foolish. To theorize ritual is to propose something big hat-in-hand. As nineteenth-century men are reputed to have done when tendering that other sort of proposal, I have to puff up my chest, bolster courage, and, doing what the ceremony requires, deliver the big question on bended knee: Will you accept my proposal? Will you buy what I am hawking? Do you believe what I am saying? Proposing either theory or marriage is scary business, so it is tempting to stray from the plan, forgetting your memorized speeches. The temptation is to become circumlocutious and, stalling for time, lapse into summarizing or defensively anticipating unwanted responses. Too often the result of theorizing in print about ritual is either a patchwork or summary of other theories rather than a theory of ritual and a method for studying it. Hoping to avoid such a pitiful outcome, I am determined to play bold, put patches over patches, expose the seams, and say what I have to say so others can get at it. From you, dear reader, I hope for assent, but I prefer rejection to indifference. In the halls of academe, theories are reputed to do important work, although the term “work” usually flies beneath the radar of metaphor detectors. “Work” is not heard as metaphoric, even though it is. Other metaphors are possible. For instance, one could say that theories should not only work but also be played out, or with. In Jacob Bronowski’s words, “It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.”255 In popular parlance, theories are strangely abstract devices that, by definition, don’t work. On the streets, theory, like myth and ritual, has a bad reputation. In popular parlance, the phrase “in theory” is the opposite of “in reality.” A street definition of “theory” equates it with an unproved idea, a statement out of touch with reality. In scientific parlance, “theory” denotes concepts and procedures that facilitate testing, explanation, prediction, and public verification. A theory is a more or less 165

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accepted hypothesis. In theory (to invoke the street sense of the term), scientists question theories, but in reality they sometimes resist questioning them, because science, like religion, is a tradition with its own inertia, its own engrained resistance to change. Because of the hegemony of science, one sometimes has the impression that theory belongs to science and that any other use of the term “theory” is an act of theft. In humanities debates about theory and method, some of your colleagues will instruct you that you must use the terms to mean what scientists mean or be accused of indulging in covert theology.256 But who really owns the word “theory”? Who is stealing from whom? One has only to scratch the surface of the term to encounter meanings that diverge from both the popular and the scientific ones.

The Meaning of “Theory” To theorize about something as cross-culturally widespread and as scientifically suspect as ritual is to be forced into asking what it means to theorize. When people talk about theory—“theory of religion,” “feminist theory,” “theory of relativity”—it is not at all evident that they are talking about the same thing. Are theories in the humanities the same as theories in the social sciences or the same as theories in the physical sciences? Are there different kinds of theory? What is the history of the term? In ancient Greek, theorein means “to look at.” More specifically, it connotes the contemplation of a dramatic action. Theoria is what an audience does when it allows itself to be drawn into rapt identification with deeds transpiring onstage. In its ancient Greek sense, theoria is not a passive gaze. It is an act of deep receptivity. Theoria is what happens when spectatorship is transformed into visual and emotional participation. Early Christian usage appropriates but transforms the classical Greek idea. Gregory, Bishop of Nazianzus, treats theoria and praxis as a pair. Theoria is the divine vision that restores human beings to their original nature. Praxis is the resulting service to humanity that arises from theoria. Theory and practice are necessarily a pair, each requiring the other. In contemporary arts and humanities the term “theory” has at least two connotations. In one usage, it labels almost any collection of terms or concepts used to frame discrete bits of information. In a second usage, characteristic of postmodernism, the term “theory” refers to concepts capable of orienting a transformation or intervention. In critical-theory circles, “theory” has an activist ring. A common feature of all these uses of the term is their assumption of a chasm between perceiver and perceived. Another feature is their visualist epistemology, one that conceives the act of knowing as analogous to looking at something at a great distance or across a chasm, as if using a telescope to spy a deer across a canyon.257 Even though the lens analogy is useful in reminding us that distortions necessarily

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accompany insights, it also signals the reduction of theorizing to a single sense.258 “Visualism,” this reductionistic prioritizing of sight above others senses, is a serious methodological mistake. It amounts to ethnocentrism not in the form of ethnic prejudice but in the form of an epistemological bias.259 Rooted as deeply as a dandelion at a preconscious level, epistemological ethnocentrism is notoriously difficult to eradicate. Visualist metaphors are everywhere: “Oh, I see” for “I understand”; “gaining perspective” for “treating fairly.” A partner in crime is “logocentrism,” word-centeredness. When visualism teams up with logocentrism, the result is a daunting, dominating epistemology: “Oh, I see what you are saying.” Following this model, theory is writing that helps you see. Theory consists of researchers’ basic, orienting statements about how they plan to see what they propose to study. Theorizing on this model may function well enough in the sciences, where researchers test, verify, or replicate results, but in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences such theories have a very different function. Humanities researchers are rarely asked, how would you know if your claims were false? Our theories are infinitely debatable because they are rarely testable or falsifiable. Despite the lack of clarity about the meaning of “theory,” the phrase “theory and method” exercises incantatory force. Research grant applications must display their theories and methods or go unfunded. Deans instruct students that graduate research is distinguished from undergraduate study by “advancements in knowledge” and that such advancements are possible only through the use of explicit theories and tested methods. Graduate students complain about being saddled with such baggage, and faculty sometimes confess in private that theory and method are the bane of their academic existence. Even so, both students and faculty pledge allegiance to “theory and method.” The pledging renders theorizing a scholarly ceremony, a performance of ultimate values espoused by the academy, and to question those values is to venture into a snake pit. When the object of theorizing is ritual, a special antagonism arises. In the gossip columns, theory and ritual are not a happily married couple. Their relationship is torqued into an overdrawn dualism. In academic parlance, theory is the senior partner. In popular parlance, however, theorizing is desensualized inactivity. Ritual dances, the feet pounding upon the ground, while theory thinks, the head floating abstractly above a desk. Ritualizing is collective and bodily; theorizing is individualistic and disembodied, a captive of the academic ivory tower. Ritualizing is something ordinary people do; theorizing is something the educated do, or, worse, a cover-up for doing nothing at all.260 Suspicion of theory haunts the halls of academe as surely as it strolls the streets. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), one of the major practice theorists of the twentieth century, was critical of what he calls variously “the theorization effect” and “fictitious totalization.”261 The effect, he says, is created by theory, with its “instruments of eternization—writing and all the other techniques for

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recording and analysing, theories, methods, diagrams.”262 Whereas practitioners, he claims, have no need either to observe or to ask questions, theorists do both. Bourdieu complains: The shift from the practical scheme to the theoretical schema, constructed after the event, from practical sense to the theoretical model, which can be read either as a project, plan or method, or as a mechanical programme, a mysterious ordering mysteriously reconstructed by the analyst, lets slip everything that makes the temporal reality of practice in process. Practice unfolds in time and it has all the correlative properties, such as irreversibility, that synchronization destroys. . . . Practice is inseparable from temporality, not only because it is played out in time, but also because it plays strategically with time and especially with tempo.263 According to Bourdieu, practice is good and theory is not because it necessarily falsifies practice. He accuses theorists—is he among them?—of destroying the very things they wish to study. His is not merely the familiar complaint that theorizing turns lively people and active animals into static, therefore dead, specimens. Rather, he is arguing that the synchronic, time-negating methods of theorizing miss one of the most crucial dimensions of practice and performative events, namely, their ways of playing with time.264 Consequently, Bourdieu concludes that there is “no chance of giving a scientific account of practice.”265 This conclusion does not stop him from theorizing. Instead, it means that theory as he conceives it should become ethical and political or maybe formal and aesthetic but not scientific. I agree with Bourdieu that theorizing about practice is rarely, in the strict sense of the term, scientific, but he overlooks the ways in which theorists practice and practitioners theorize. He believes “there is every reason to think that as soon as he [the practitioner] reflects on his practice, adopting a quasi-theoretical posture, the agent loses any chance of expressing the truth of his practice. . . . The very nature of practice is that it excludes this question.”266 Bourdieu assumes that practitioners (ritualists or musicians, say) do not reflect on their actions. However true it may be that they do not, or should not, during a performance, it simply not true that questioning, critiquing, theorizing, and analyzing do not take place before or after such events. For me, the question is not whether performer-practitioners reflect, query, or criticize but when and where they do so. Bourdieu’s critique of theory bumps those of us who theorize into pondering metatheoretical questions: What is theory? How does one theorize? Where do theories come from? How is a theory related to practice, method, data, and case? It is easy to say that method is how one handles data using theory, but it is difficult for a student of ritual to answer the series of daunting questions that necessarily arise: Are there better and worse theories? Better and worse ways of theorizing? Where do I find the right theory for this task? What do I do with a theory? Do I derive a

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method from a theory or vice versa? To what extent should I display theory and method in publication, and to what extent should I keep them behind the scenes, “seen but not heard”?267

Working with Theories A common way of describing the relations among theory, method, and data is this: First you find a theory, then, following the guidance of an appropriate method, you apply the theory to data, thereby creating a case study. Collect and compare enough case studies and you will be able to critique and revise the original theory or propose a new one. In this paradigm, theory and method are tools for “cooking” data into a case study.268 This sequence—theory, method, case—is deductive, as if the generalizations of a theory frame, warrant, or give rise to a case. Graduate students sometimes tell me this way of describing research seems natural to them, even though this set of chronologically arranged phases is a recent scholarly artifact. The triad makes a certain emotional sense. Since fieldwork implies immersion in “the real thing”—actual ritual enacted by living, breathing human beings—interposing theory and method as intermediate steps between home and the field can feel like necessary preparation. Theoretically and methodologically armed, you can enter the field without feeling like an ignoramus. The inverse sequence—immersing yourself in a thicket of local events, crafting them into a case study, and then, by comparing one case with other cases, constructing a theory—can seem like a risky way to enter the field. However, to anthropologists, this inductive order may seem more intuitive. It is how they learned, so it is how they teach. Get students’ feet wet by immersing them in the swamp of lived social practice. Send them to the field to map minute cultural particulars, hoping somehow to generate generalizable conclusions on the basis of the data that they find there and “thicken” with their own interpretations. If you talk with scholars who are candid in narrating their own research process, you notice that their trajectories typically involve more shuttling back and forth than either paradigm, deductive or inductive, would have it. As with music, so with fieldwork: There is more than one way to learn it. You can learn music in the “classical” way—study theory, learn to read music, and then, prompted by the page, play brilliantly before a rapt audience or small group of adjudicators. Alternatively, you can start the other way around by learning to improvise. After learning in this more intuitive way, maybe you learn to read music or theorize it. Maybe you care about theory, maybe not. Either way—by ear, hand, or sight—you make music, just different kinds in different ways. Method is how you operationalize theory; theory is how you rationalize method; and cases are either the basis or outcome of the interaction. But are the relationships logical entailments? Are they as seamless as this way of putting it

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sounds? The relationships are rarely so tight. Theory does not arise automatically from method, or method from theory, or either from the data of cases. Almost always they are stitched, made to fit. If they appear seamless, someone has done a good job of stitching. Either way of studying ritual—deductive or inductive—is a bit of conceptual magic, since the whole process is inescapably recursive. Pick any starting point (theory, method, case study) or use any kind of method (inductive or deductive), and you will soon be enmeshed in the others, eventually losing track of both the order and the number of times you returned to the starting point. It matters less where you begin the process than that you understand how utterly looped it is and that you remember how to construct a story or argument line from this recursivity. For now, let’s use “theory” in its broad contemporary sense to mean any set of generalizations, key concepts, root metaphors, and determinative vocabulary that animate the characteristic moves of one’s method. Most students of ritual don’t use a theory even in this loose and open sense. They rarely utilize and test a single theory, much less invent one; rather, they cherry-pick multiple theories. Searching for trenchant, supportive quotations, they cite this writer and that (Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Harvey Whitehouse, and Roy Rappaport), opt for some of the well-known pairs (Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley or Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw), or select a school of thought (symbolic anthropology, biogenetic structuralism, or, cognitive anthropology). It is easy enough to know that Lawson and McCauley as well as Humphrey and Laidlaw are writing theory. It is more difficult with Turner and Geertz, since some of their writings are ethnographies or essays rather than theories. Turner’s Chihamba the White Spirit is a day-by-day ritual account.269 However, part 2 begins to theorize about Ndembu symbolism, and part 3, about the symbolism of whiteness, is comparative and cross-cultural, setting Christian scripture and an American novel alongside Chihamba. The book shifts, but readers can keep up with the shifts because they are distinct and overt. However, figuring out what’s theoretical and what’s not is not always so easy, because genres have a habit of getting themselves mixed. Theoretical reflection can be blended with any number of genres, including ritual description, personal essay, and travel diary. Theory is a genre not only of thinking but also of writing, so it is crucial that we learn to recognize it. Not everything a theorist writes is theory (any more than everything that appears in a ritual is a symbol). “Liminality,” “communitas,” and “social drama” are key concepts in Turner’s theory of ritual. These are the ideas that scholars lift, time and again, from his writings. Why? Because the terms sound technical, because Turner himself repeatedly used them on widely varying data, because he provided charts and diagrams that schematized them, and because they provoked readers to think about things in ways that seemed new and revelatory. But Turner wrote about much else, and he sometimes wrote about ideas in ways that were celebratory rather than theoretical or analytical.

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The “what’s theory and what’s not” question arises just as surely with Grimes if you read his books with a view to extracting and applying his “theory.” Does he have one? If so, where is it? Is it in some works and not others?270 Or only in some parts of some works? Or maybe it “lies behind” his writing, just waiting for an astute reader to discover it? When is he theorizing, and when is he merely stating an opinion, reciting a fact, or summarizing someone else’s view? When he turns phrases, speaks ironically, or plays out metaphors, is that theory or not? Grimes, I can assure you, would have trouble analyzing his own works and answering such questions, because he writes with mixed intentions, and those intentions have changed across time. Because change is a fact of human life, we get into the sticky business of distinguishing between the early and late Wittgenstein, the early and late Heidegger. Nothing prevents a writer from having two different, or even contradictory, theories. We scholars collude to stay in business by changing our minds. Theories, like soulmates, do not always announce themselves. Soulmates may or may not exist, and even if they do, they do not come with labels. I am tempted to legislate—insist that we call “theory” only those verbal formulations that announce themselves as such. Accordingly, we could label as “theorizing” reflection that is either piecemeal or tacit.271 If we require that a piece of writing be neither piecemeal nor tacit before we called it “theory,” there would be few theories of ritual and lots of theorizing about ritual. The terminological distinction is less important than recognizing that many academic writers theorize without ever writing a theory. Authors are sometimes regarded as theorists even though they may not have thought of themselves this way. In addition, some deny they are theorizing when they actually are. And a few who think they aren’t later decide they were. In addition to the genre question (How do you know a theory when you see one?), there is the representation question: When is an author presenting her own views, and when is she representing the views of others? Most writers represent other people’s views as well as their own. Take Catherine Bell. Emerging ritual studies scholars like to quote her: “As Bell says . . . (p. 123).” Sure enough, you turn to page 123, and Bell in fact says what the author says she said. However, if you read more closely and fully, you notice that Bell is summarizing someone else’s view, characterizing a field, describing a movement, or laying out the common understanding of ritual. When writing about “Bell’s theory,” inattentive readers amalgamate her views and the views of those whom she represents.272 Readers should read more carefully, and writers should write in ways that discourage this kind of conflation. Authors who write popular works about ritual may not use a theory at all. With a few exceptions, however, most academic students of ritual at least pay lip service to ritual theory. Most of the time, we students of ritual are theory-consumers. We don’t make up theories. Instead, we buy, or buy into, someone else’s. As undergraduates, we are content with mere summarizing or nontheoretically driven analysis. As graduate students, we learn to use theories and then post what are, in effect, consumer

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reports on them. We evaluate our chosen theory, pointing out its weakness and strengths. We critique in order to improve or displace the theory we have been using. If we’re really enterprising graduate students, perhaps aspiring to be professors, we may even suggest an improvement or two. But few humanities academics, professional or otherwise, set out to write theories, and when they do, they often find that funding agencies are less than eager to support purely theoretical research and writing. So theorizing that takes the form of deliberate, systematic theory construction is rare. Assuming your aims are more modest, that you can locate what’s theoretical and figure out what name to connect to the theory, then you face the question that confronts every student of ritual: How shall I decide which theory is a good match for my research project? Does consonance between theory and data signal a good match? Or would dissonance serve me better by making me more critical? If I am studying, say, a ritual that is undergoing rapid ritual change, should I go looking for a theory that assumes ritual change is a normal fact of social life? Or should I look for some other kind of theory, one that assumes rituals are slow to change? In other words, is the aim to illustrate, thus confirm, a theory? Or is it to question, even disconfirm, a theory, thereby creating the possibility of a theoretical advance? It is not as easy as you think to know what to do with a theory. Suppose you have a theory in hand. Do you “test” it? “Apply” it? Set it into “dialogue” with data? Often it is the burdened graduate student who notices that the means of application are anything but obvious. How do you “apply” Rappaport or Bordieu or Turner? Merely by mobilizing their vocabularies? By casting everything in a Turnerian or Bordovian or Rappaportian light? To apply a theory is to interpose a conceptual screen between yourself and the data. To query data with theoretically driven questions is to know, in some sense, what to expect before you encounter the data. It is this fact that makes theory provocative or productive; it is also what makes theory duplicitous or dangerous. If researchers begin the study of ritual by reading theories in classrooms, and then they go elsewhere to conduct fieldwork, they often find there is no obvious way to get from theory here to method there. In the humanities, too few theories explicitly propose methods. Many theories are amethodological or even antimethodological, resisting application and posing serious obstructions to teaching and learning. Carl Olson’s textbook Theory and Method in the Study of Religion contains almost nothing methodological.273 Students who read it hoping to be instructed on how to study religion are disappointed. This kind of dilemma is widespread, leaving students to learn a hard lesson: Theories can dangle. Theorizing shorn of method resembles an ideology, a secular creed insofar as it provides no way to put the theory to the test of fieldwork. Scholars can use the phrase “theory and method” but write exclusively about theory, allowing method to fall by the wayside as a lower-order task. Besides the problem of amethodological theorizing, there is the trouble created when theories become their own subject matter. Hermeneutics and phenome-

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nology, for example, originated as ways of studying texts and human consciousness, respectively. However, in both schools of thought writers began to displace their original objects of study. Hermeneutics was no longer about this or that text but about hermeneutics. Phenomenology was not about this or that mode of consciousness but about phenomenology. Much the same thing has happened with postmodern, deconstructionist, and postcolonial theories. As a result, writers sometimes apply these theories merely by lacing their writings with the current jargon. This writing-by-referencing becomes circular, writers referring to other writers who play the same language game.274 Deployed in this way, derivative postmodernism, deconstructionism, and postcolonialism function more as ideologies than as theories coupled with appropriate methods. We should worry if the only method implied by a theory is that of writing in a way that echoes the writing that inspired it. As with recipes or songs, theories may be deployed in ways that abuse or improve them. Among North American English-speaking academics, a common way of describing what one does with a theory is to say that we “apply” it. The application metaphor itself needs to be peeled back. One imagines the finished product as a base of data sporting a thick, glossy top layer of theory. The rhetorical function of theory in such instances is to make the writing sound advanced and scholarly, thus warranted and true. At its worst, this kind of theory-usage is a smokescreen covering up the fact that an author has little to say in his or her own voice. Researcher-writers sometimes doubt whether they can get away with saying what they really think, so a theorist is invoked to provide clout. The quoted and footnoted theorist is someone behind whom a cautious author can hide. Underwritten by a named theory or theorist, an author who is not yet a Name can at least say something that will be read as correct. And there is another benefit: If there is a barrage of criticism, the theorist, not the author, can take the heat. Regardless of how we imagine theory (as substance applied, map followed, or question-set posed), we do not escape metaphor.275 And one’s theoretical, thus metaphoric, choice has considerable consequences for both the act of gathering data and the act of interpreting it. A vice of the application metaphor is that it can make us content with a theory superficially related to data. A vice of the map metaphor is that it can lead users to believe someone has been there before them, someone who really knows the territory. A vice of the question metaphor is that it can lead us to assume there are correct answers.

Testing Theories Even in the humanities and social sciences theories are supposed to be open to testing. They should be public rather than esoteric. We students of ritual ought to query paradigm-generating scholars’ work with probing questions: Is the theory of liminality a theory of ritual? Or is it a theory from ritual? And if it is a theory of ritual, is

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it a theory of all kinds of ritual, and is it applicable to all parts of a ritual? Would it still be a theory if its range of applicability were limited geographically to, say, Africa or if it worked more effectively on men’s rituals than on women’s? Pursuing such simple-sounding questions can set your head spinning, but head-spinning is the first, perhaps disorienting step toward thinking critically about theory. One way to test a theory is by using it to generate predictions. To know beforehand the effects of a cause is to have great power. Even if one cannot reliably predict consequences but can only lay odds with a better-than-random chance of being correct, doing so is a powerful move. Counting and quantifying, scientists inspire awe by making such moves. Striking awe, they come to be regarded religiously whether or not they deserve veneration. But rituals don’t usually happen inside labs, so, really, how scientific can one be about ritual? Inside the laboratory, things behave. Outside, where people consort and cavort, things are messy and unpredictable. Even so, one has to admit, we humans sometimes behave as predictably as rats or neurons, so aspects of human social behavior can be successfully studied by using methods of quantification and applying predictability criteria. Granted, some things about human behavior are tractable using the tools of science, but other aspects of human interaction are intractable, resistant to lablike precision. So at some point in your research on ritual you have no choice but to get out your hammer and nails or brush and canvas. Much social scientific theory and all arts and humanities theory has little or nothing to do with either predictability or experimental replicability. Consequently, public intelligibility, imaginative stimulation, moral accountability, practical utility, internal coherence, and comprehensiveness become criteria for adjudicating what is better and worse theorizing. Whether you consider the study of ritual a science, art, or craft, you still have to grapple with part/whole relations. Suppose you say that a ritual should be painted, not predicted. Fine: What are you painting? All of the ritual you’re studying? Some part of it? Why that part? Why that perspective on the whole? Theoretical forays, by which I mean piecemeal theorizing, have a function, namely, opening up theoretical discourse, but those who theorize in piecemeal fashion should at least specify what is left out and what is yet to be done. No theory can actually contain every possible variation, but a theory of ritual should at least sketch the innermost core and outermost boundaries of the phenomenon, knowing full well that these determinations are tentative, culture-bound, scholarly inventions. Whereas a hypothesis concerns the relation between two parts, a theory attempts to lay out a whole. A theory of ritual should aspire to be comprehensive, even though no theory of anything is ever in fact comprehensive. A theory must represent the whole, even though responsible theorists are the first to admit that wholeness is, by definition, not graspable. For this reason, the only possibility is that of imagining the whole. No part should be allowed conceptually to determine the whole, as happens, for example, when rites of passage are used as models for understanding every ritual

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of every kind or when symbol theory is treated as if it accounts for all the dynamics of ritual. It is fine to argue that a specific component, such as action or space, or a specific dynamic, such as transformation or deference, is more determinative of the ritual whole than some other component. In the face of such an argument, at least it is possible to mount counterarguments using different examples. But to discuss a single quality, dynamic, or element without recognition of the partiality of the perspective is to sidetrack the enterprise of constructing a theory of ritual. It is therefore necessary that we ask of a theory: Does it propose to account for the whole of a ritual? If not, and it accounts only for some part, how is that part related to the whole? The requirement of comprehensiveness should at the very least compel those of us who read, write, or use theories to ask, what is missing from this picture? Comprehensiveness is one criterion. Another is consistency. A theory of ritual ought to be aware of—and willing to eliminate, if possible—internal contradictions. For the purpose of theory-building, internal consistency matters. Rituals themselves may or may not constitute systems, and they may not be consistent, but the systematicity of a theory does matter. Systematicity in a theory is what helps us recognize lack of it in a ritual. If we are busy stumbling over contradictions and gaps in our theory, we will be too preoccupied to notice them in rituals. Having a systematic theory does not mean that one then imposes a contrived systematicity upon ritual. Rather, it means that we are prompted to ask: How this feature related to that one? Where is the connective tissue in this ritual? Where are the disconnects? A third requirement: A theory of ritual should be explicit about its methods so students of ritual (including those with faculty status) can put it to work organizing research and generating interpretations, hypotheses, and conclusions. A theory of ritual must be applicable, translatable into action by people conducting research on rituals. However, a theory should not predetermine conclusions, only enable them. Insofar as a theory predetermines conclusions, it is an ideology. A fourth necessity: A theory of ritual should provide orientation by (a) specifying how the word “ritual” will be used; (b) proposing a way to classify the types of ritual; (c) identifying the constitutive elements, phases, and layers of ritual; (d) demonstrating how these work internally as a system or tradition; (e) showing how a ritual functions, that is, how it interacts with whatever is conceived as outside of ritual; and thereby (f) grounding interpretations or facilitating hypotheses, explanations, and predictions.

Constructing Theories It is a rare and beautiful thing when an inquiring mind, confronted with an anomaly in ritual practice, constructs a theory that explains or interprets it. More commonly,

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a scholar reading someone else’s book or journal article encounters an interesting idea and sees some connection with some other interesting idea or bit of data.276 The connection becomes a minor revelation: “Gee, what Christopher Small says here is like what Erving Goffman says there,” or “Aha, what Susan Sered says about Jewish women as ritual experts fits with what I am seeing in this Hindu village [or, more likely, this book about that ritual in some Hindu village].” Perceived similarity and “fit” are taken as confirmation. There is nothing inherently wrong with this procedure. After all, it can be the beginning of a conversation. And, as with most conversations, such beginnings are usually marked by an awkward groping toward superficial similarities, the common ground on which a more serious conversation may emerge. But similarity-hunting alone does not make for robust theory. Where do theories come from? Rarely are they constructed in the way a contractor builds a new home from an architect’s blueprint; rather, they tend to be constructed in the way a couple renovates an old farmhouse: by filling cracks in walls and cobbling together cabinets out of recycled flooring from the attic. Theory construction can happen by critique and revision.277 But theories, unlike refurbished houses, are too seldom put to the test of sustained use over time. They are not critiqued in any sustained or systematic manner. And even when criticism happens, the academic world is sufficiently large that the author of a theory may or may not read the criticism of it or have a chance to respond to it and revise the theory. In short, criticism of a ritual theory may happen, but the process is disappointingly hit-and-miss. The failure both to nurture and to assess theories is a serious flaw in humanities research. Scientists carry out both tasks more effectively. As a result, in the humanities the consumption of theories outpaces their production. Theories are often created not by people who, thinking of themselves as theorists, sit down at a computer to author a book that uses the word “theory” in the title. Rather, theory is created when authors require concepts or generalizations with which to connect themselves and their data to a larger discourse. It’s not that no one sets out to write a theory, just that doing so is not the only, or even the main, way in which theorizing finds its way into print. Theories come from data, but not in the way flowers sprout from seeds. There is nothing genetic or inherent in data that generates a theory. A theory—more like a house than a flower—is built, not grown, from data. Theorizing, especially in the arts, is an act that is implicitly metaphoric, tacitly narrative, and peculiarly imaginative. I say “peculiarly” because we are more accustomed to associating imagination with poetry or painting than with theorizing. But if we read closely, we discover that theories are built on the backs of generative metaphors, for example, the threshold, or limen, that underlies the rites-of-passage theories of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner.278 Even if theories seem to contain no discernable metaphor, they may propose models, and models are implicitly metaphoric, because they both are and are not the things or processes they model. So let us say it out loud: In the humanities, arts, and humanistic social sciences theories are imaginative construc-

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tions. To theorize is to leverage something big using a small conceptual tool that is metaphoric and imaginative. Metaphoric moves sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, condition both ritual and theorizing about it. Like the metaphoric moves of priests and actors, those of scholars consume as well as reveal their subject matter. A theory can be either chicken or egg. Inductively, it can be an outcome, or deductively, it can be a beginning point. Usually it is a bit of both. It is, or arises out of, an interactive, circular process requiring constant shuttling back and forth between theory and data. Such theorizing is messy and troubling but utterly normal. It is quite common to read scholarly works whose premises strangely resemble their conclusions. In such works either the author or the theory may not have done its work. Everything depends on the degree and nature of the circularity. In any case, theories cannot be judged good or bad solely on the basis of their origin; rather, they must be judged on their utility. In the view I am proposing here, theory construction is a craft, which is to say, a hybrid—partly art, partly science. One has to observe, critique, and test, but one also has to imagine. Imaginative labor is undergirded with data and inferences from data, but in the final analysis, a theory is a piece of intellectual handiwork, with no more (or less) status than pottery-making. I am tempted to call it an art, but I pull up short because the word “art” is so fraught with Romantic individualism. Among Romantics, a work of art was the expression of an artist’s genius, therefore it was untouchable. One could not question it, only appreciate it or not. A theory is not an art in this Romantic, protectionist sense but rather in the way “art” is used in “the faculty of arts.” To say that something is an art in this respect is not to stake claims for special status, only to admit that imaginative, collaborative construction is the horse that draws the cart of research. Thinking of theory construction as a craft reminds us not to romanticize or elevate the activity, and it encourages us to judge it by its fruit. Craftspeople are supposed to have fewer pretensions than artists or scientists about their work. They are supposed to be humble, thinking of what they do as useful labor, not as a calling or expression of genius. Images, analogies, and metaphors, with which this book is riddled, are the tricky tools with which so much artistic (and scientific) labor is done. Having written “Mixed metaphor!” in the margins of many a student paper, my intention is not to multiply them. In the throes of reading and writing theory, however, it dawned on me how persistently figures of speech become figures of thought, framing scholarly arguments. Like weeds, they spring up everywhere and need to be thinned or eliminated, but some of them, more like anchors, actually work to tether theories. Some scholarly metaphors are openly acknowledged, but others are not noticed. We speeding readers seldom pause over abstractions—“ritual structure,” “dimensions of ritual,” “ritual dynamics”—to ask what images, analogies, or metaphors they imply. Because such phrases tend to induce sleep rather than imagination, it requires considerable effort to disinter their implications for the study of ritual.279

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In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, two American scholars, show how entire worldviews are encoded in innocent-sounding adjectives, like “right” and “left,” or mere prepositions, like “up” and “down.” Together, these are determinative of entire value systems. In clusters, they model ordinary life with great but almost invisible social power. Lakoff and Johnson lead readers to wonder who is metaphorically or physically below whom and to notice who is expected to sit to the left of whom. As in everyday life, so in theories: Invisible metaphors can be even more determinative than visible ones. For this reason it is important to spy and reflect on them. One of the most persistent is that of “structure.” Jan Snoek observes that “most ritual behavior is more formally stylized, structured, and standardized than most common behavior.”280 Eugene d’Aquili defines ritual behavior as “a subset of formalized behavior that involves two or more individuals in active and reciprocal communication and that is structured.”281 Catherine Bell treats ritualization less as a noun than as a verb. Even so, for her, ritual is “the strategic production of expedient schemes that structure an environment.”282 “Structure,” whether appearing as a verb or noun, may not sound like an metaphor, but it is. Even though none of these theorists would claim that ritual is unchanging, the architectural metaphor “structure” connotes something solid, reinforcing the widespread assumption that rituals are comparatively stable, that they either don’t change or change very little. Many other concepts sound like abstractions but hide analogies or metaphors that can lead their users into absorbing attitudes conditioned by the images that lie beneath. Ponder Émile Durkheim’s notion of “solidarity.” Don’t just think about it; feel it, sense it. What feeling does “solidarity” evoke? Ritual solidarity is hardwood. Oak or ash, it is safe and supportive. Or consider Durkheim’s claim that rituals are marked by “collective effervescence.” The image makes me want to rise up, like bubbles in a drink. I can’t contemplate the image-idea of collective effervescence without wishing that a cold glass of homemade Jamaican ginger beer were bubbling down my throat. Sigmund Freud attempted to overcome the statics of mental “structures” by making extensive use of hydraulic metaphors. Hydraulics is the branch of science that studies liquids in motion. Libido was liquidlike energy welling up from the unconscious, exerting upward “pressure,” like water heated in a boiler system. For Freud, catharsis was a kind of “emptying,” and cathexis a kind of “filling.” Sublimation amounted to “channeling.” Hydraulic metaphors helped nineteenth-century thinkers get beyond the image of information as discrete bits by enabling people to embrace the idea of continuous flow. But the metaphors carried other implications, and they were often unrecognized. Communication came to be imagined as flowing through “lines,” and those lines, like pipes, could get “clogged.” Consequently, neurotics required therapists for the same reason that sinks and toilets require plumbers: to help clean out the grunge. Nuancing the hydraulic model by imagining “multichannels” does not get beyond the root hydraulic metaphor of a liquid flowing

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through a pipe or through several discrete channels. We bump up against the limits of the metaphor when we try to imagine multiple voices “flowing” through a single telephone wire. Since the mid-1960s, to counteract theories rooted in static metaphors like “structure,” it has become fashionable to speak of ritual as “dynamic.” Now rituals compete with racy sports cars and motivational speakers. Ritual is no longer stodgy and unchanging but dynamic (it changes) and transformative (it changes things). But this idea too rides the back of a metaphor, since, literally speaking, the term “dynamics” refers to that branch of mechanics which studies motion and equilibrium. In speaking of ritual as “dynamic,” we are transposing the notion of driving forces from physics and hydraulics to psychology, politics, and religion, where the sources of action are motivations rather than physical causes. In constructing Ritual Studies Dot Com, a now defunct website for international, interdisciplinary discussion, we had to choose an appropriate image for the site’s homepage.283 We could have taken the easy way and posted a picture of a ritual, but we decided to be suggestive rather than literal. We used two images. The first one, a photo of frozen water in Laurel Creek, had a caption that said, “It flows, but it stays the same.” The second one was a picture of the rear end of the Dragon Court Restaurant; it has been patched many times with mismatched bricks. Its ironic caption was “Always one, ever the same.” Each image teased viewers into asking how they imagine ritual: as a flow that seems static? As a structure that is always being de- and restructured? By pointing out the metaphoric roots of concepts, I am not suggesting that we should jettison the notion of ritual dynamics or structures, only that we should recognize the metaphoric nature of the enterprise. If “dynamics” leads us to imagine rites as causes or effects and not also as motivated human interactions, we have been seduced by the hidden metaphor, so both the construction and the criticism of theories require recognition of their core metaphors. Theorizing is strategic as well as imaginative, and in this respect it is similar to advertising. We who theorize want you to buy into our theories. To theorize is to make a pitch, mount an argument for choosing this over that. The choice of key metaphors is not merely arbitrary, nor is it innocently aesthetic, a matter of turning cute phrases or deploying attractive images. It is culturally and historically conditioned, and it expresses strongly, if not sacredly, held values. Theorizing, however much it appears to mask or play down passion, is passionate. Do not be fooled by desiccated academic prose. Most of the theorists I know, regardless of how they write, will fight to defend their theories. The metaphors that drive a theory, then, should not tranquilize us but provoke us to query them: If a ritual is a “structure,” what kind? What does it look like? A set of interlocking stones? A hierarchically arranged pyramid? If a ritual is a “system,” is it like a subway system? A nervous system? A solar system? If a ritual is a “dynamic” process, how does it work? What does it look like? A circular set of feedback loops?

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A river’s course? The aerodynamics of a speeding automobile? If a ritual is “deep” or “layered,” how many layers are there, and what are their names? How does one know which layers are superficial and which ones deep? If ritual exercises “power,” what kind of power? Where and how is it generated? How is it transferred? By what means? If ritual is “embodied,” in whom? Where specifically? In the muscles? In the brain? If a ritual has “dimensions,” what are they? Do they have length and width? If ritual is a “language” constructed of symbols, and they mean things in the ways that words mean them, what “language” does ritual speak? How does one learn to “speak ritual”? If ritual is constructed of “elements,” how many are there, and what are their names? If ritual has “building blocks,” what are their shapes, and of what are they made? If rituals have a “backstage” area and a “front of house,” how do we know when we’ve entered the one zone and exited the other? If a rite of passage transports a person across a threshold, how shall we envision these “betwixt and between” zones? To what extent are they geographical? Can one pass through territory that is not marked? You might object that no one takes such terms literally, that in scholarly discourse these are abstractions rather than figures of speech. However, all of them are meant to be mimetically representational in some ways but not others. By attempting to visualize or concretize a theory into a model, we can learn much more about how it works. So it is fair to ask of any theoretically deployed image, analogy, metaphor, or model: In what respects does it hold, and in what respects does it not? Images matter because they shape and reflect attitudes, so the more explicit we become about them, the more effective we can be in both constructing and criticizing theories of ritual. An elementary distinction is in order: that between analogy and metaphor. For a mom to boast about her son, “Paul is like a lion” is an analogy, a mere comparison, but when Paul’s classmate Heather screams, “Paul, you are a skunk,” that is a metaphor, although not a very strong one, because we all know Paul is not really a skunk but a mere boy who has been bugging Heather. Literally, she probably means either “I don’t like you, Paul,” or maybe, “You smell bad.” Weak metaphors are easily reducible to analogies, and analogies are easily explained as comparisons that typically hinge on one or two similarities. Analogies can be useful but they are typically weak and often flat. A strong metaphor, on the other hand, can be powerful but also become pernicious. A metaphor is an especially strong kind of symbol, because it equates the “vehicle” (the symbol that points) with its “tenor” (that to which it points). A metaphoric equation is not simple (merely x = y) but complex (x = y and x ≠ y). A metaphor simultaneously and paradoxically posits identity and disidentity. The most rooted, or radical, metaphors are those that resist translation or reduction. If a ceremonially authorized person dresses up in robes and hands you a piece of bread while saying, “This is my body,” the action is radically metaphoric, especially if you’re Catholic, because by participating you are declaring both “This is bread” and “This is not bread.”

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On the one hand, metaphors can be tenacious and determinative. On the other, we can lose sight of them. “Head” and “foot” of the table are rarely recognized as metaphors until someone comments on them or shows us an image that reactivates them. Where is the head of a table? Where is the foot of a table? If your society expects you sit at the foot of the table, you are in a metaphorically reinforced position of subservience. The metaphor has clout whether or not it is recognized. In fact, it has more clout if it effects behavior without being recognized, because then it seems so natural that no one thinks to remark upon it. Mechanistic metaphors (“driven” to act) have been undergoing criticism for quite some time. They are out of favor. Dramatistic metaphors (ritual as “performance”) came to the rescue, but they too are falling out of favor along with textual metaphors (“reading” the meaning of a symbol). None of the three quite captures the networking nature of ritual traditions. Consequently, ritual has recently become a “web.” Dramatistic models are homocentric, so we need something more “ecological,” such that a change in one part ripples through another and finally through the whole system. A web is suggestive of systematic interconnection, reminding us that, although we may be talking about a ritual, this ritual may embedded in a ritual system, which is embedded in a cultural system, which is embedded in a global system. Systems-thinking keeps returning in different guises, not only in mid-twentiethcentury cybernetics but also in more recent neurophenomenology, cognitive science, computer-modeling, and complex systems theory. Thinking of ritual as a form of web-making helps reconceive its interconnectivity and boundaries, because it attends to the relations between rites and their contexts—social, economic, and environmental. Even the technologically sophisticated, ever more necessary World Wide Web (www) raids its key image from the lowly web-spinning spider. Computer hubs connected by communication lines resemble spiderwebs that resemble the human nervous system, which utilizes a set of nodes connected by axons. Presently, there is great interest in complex systems modeling that would enable us to connect various kinds of systems: ritual systems with nervous systems, computer systems, economic systems, and ecosystems. Both the Santa Fe Institute284 and the New England Complex Systems Institute285 foster complex systems modeling. The New England Complex Systems Institute uses visual images that include many of the metaphors and analogies that we have discussed: levels, hierarchy, dynamics, plotlike directionality, and recursive circularity.286 Once we humans model a single system and then another, we begin trying to imagine a metasystem that contains the two. Soon we are conceiving a series of nested, interacting systems and calling on images of fractals. A fractal is a microgeometrical structure which, when repeated, accounts for a macrostructure. The Sierpenski Triangle, for instance, is a big triangle is made of smaller triangles, which are, in turn, made of even smaller triangles. In a fractal, the pattern appears to be the same regardless of the level of magnification. The branches of a tree replicate the

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pattern of the entire tree. A stalk of broccoli consists of hundreds of repetitions of each floret. The strength and weakness of all modeling is simplification. You try to explain the most complicated things by identifying the fewest number of simple things out of which they are constructed. The impulse is to leap, to stitch together the entire universe, the macrocosm, by imagining it as a repetition, reiteration, or reflection of something much smaller. There is something hypnotic about seeing how the coast of Norway as seen from outer space seems be a fractal of a microscopic photo of a capillary in a blood vessel. Fractals, used as models, sit on a precipice where science meets art and mysticism. I am not so much recommending the fractal model as trying to illustrate the range of metaphors and models on which one might draw in trying to theorize ritual. A decade ago I assumed the chair of ritual studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. As I marveled at the herds of Dutch bikes that swarmed the streets, an odd sentence lodged like a thorn in my brain: A rite is like a good Dutch bike; if it is broken, it’s worth fixing. There is a certain comfort and utility to the notion that a theoretical model might be as practical, reliable, and imaginative as a Dutch bakfiets. Exiting Velorama, Nijmegen’s tightly packed little bike museum, I jokingly said to a colleague, “The Dutch imagination is profoundly bicycular.” He laughed. Each time I returned to Nijmegen, I had to walk past a bike shop. I would stop and press my nose to the window. Shouldn’t a man ensconced upon a Dutch chair of ritual studies ride a fine Dutch bike? The high prices of those hardy, brilliantly engineered machines only intensified my lust. Lusting after a good Dutch bike felt more seemly than lusting after beautiful Dutch women or chasing after handsome Dutch men. I made the mistake of telling some Radboud doctoral students about my desire for a fine Dutch bike. In response one afternoon they loaned me a “true,” rather than a “fine,” Dutch bike—you know, only one gear, a fender needing to be wired on, and its paint fading. The experience tempted me to modify the sentence in my head: A rite, like a true Dutch bike, probably needs repairing. I latched onto an analogical theory-question—“How is a rite like a bike?”—partly because no one, including me, would be fooled by it. No one thinks a bike is a rite in the same way one might think a rite is really a structure, really dynamic, or really dramatic. You immediately understand that one could select other analogous objects (airplanes, computers, dresses, saxophones, or even Chinese bikes). Pick any two things and you can find similarities. Both rites and bikes can seem either necessary or optional. Both can be appreciated for their beauty. Both take you from here to there. Both are wholes assembled from parts. However, we critically minded scholars will insist on playing the opposite game too, asking, how is a rite unlike a bike? A rite disappears immediately after it is performed; a bike doesn’t disappear after it’s ridden (unless it is unlocked in Amsterdam). A rite is not like a bike; rites don’t rust. A rite is not like a bike; a rite cannot be invented or tossed in the junkyard.

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Well, maybe they can, but you get the point: not only that critical thought can be playlike, and that play is a form of critical thinking, but also that metaphors and analogies have consequences and limits; we can only ride them so far. Then what? We get off and proceed on foot, without benefit of analogy, metaphor, or model? I think not. I doubt that it is possible to do metaphor-free theorizing. So either we stop, admitting that we have gone as far as we can go, or we shift to another metaphor, in the way high school physics teachers used to shuttle between particle theory and wave theory. By now maybe you have had enough of my web and bike horseplay. Probably you just want to know where all this gets us regarding ritual theory. Fair enough. Here’s the argument line: Western theories of ritual are constructed largely out of words. Sometimes these theories are grounded on actual rites, but just as likely they are based on the words of other theories. Beneath theoretical verbalizations are images, analogies, and metaphors. Because theorizing is imagination-driven, it is as artistic as it is scientific. Core metaphors are not mere illustrations but either generative forces, creating new insights, or inhibitive blockers, obstructing insight. Unrecognized, they can be either irrelevant or perversely determinative. Because of these dangers, sustained criticism of theories is essential to the construction of new ones. In the humanities and social sciences, a crucial form of criticism is that of querying theories to expose the assumptions buried in their determinative metaphors. Although theoretical critique can dislodge such images, it is not possible to circumvent them altogether; you escape one root metaphor only to land in another. Out of critically examined and appropriated images, analogies, and metaphors, models can be built. For a model of ritual to be adequate, it should enable us to either explain or construct a ritual by taking into account its static elements (using, e.g., mechanical metaphors), internal dynamics (using, e.g., narrative or dramatic metaphors), interactions with their contexts (using, e.g., complex systems, cybernetic, ecological, or cognitive metaphors). Any theory that fails to account for all three, regardless of the metaphors it uses, is inadequate for ritual studies research. Why would anyone want to model ritual? Probably, if all is going well with a ritual, participants would not want to model it, but if things are going badly, then they may be forced to create a model. If your ritual is broken, or if there is an important occasion with no ritual means of marking it, then having a model can be helpful. If you are a scholar, you may want to model ritual to facilitate cross-cultural research and enable conversations with other ritual studies scholars. Whatever your aim, if it is to be theoretically cogent, it should invite critique (see Appendix 18: What’s in a Theory?). The devil, if given his due, might put this question to my argument: What do you do about mixed metaphors? Let’s say that a student wrote in an essay, “Milking the workers for all they were worth, the manager barked orders at them.” An instructor would write “mixed metaphor” in the margin, and this would be a criticism. First the manager is a milker of cows, then a dog? The professor is advising, “Choose one or

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the other but not both.” Mixing two metaphors in the same sentence makes it sound ridiculous. So the hard question you should ask about my view of theorizing is this: How many metaphors can a theory tolerate? Must there be only one? If more than one, how many? These are among my several killer questions. Here are a couple for you: What’s your own most frequently deployed theory of ritual, and what images, analogies, or metaphors inform it? If your model for understanding ritual is not a Dutch bike, web, steam engine, story, or stage play, what is it? What is it good for? Not so good for?

7

Defining and Classifying Ritual

The meaning of “ritual” depends on the context. In Santa Fe the word miscommunicates as often as it communicates. Although people attending fiesta know the word, I don’t hear them use it unless they have heard me use it first. Use the word often and you will be flagged as an outsider or an academic. Some say, “Oh, yes, we have rituals in the cathedral,” but in the cathedral they talk about liturgy or celebration, and if they use the word “ritual,” they mean something different by it than I do. If I ask, what is this event, the reply is simple: fiesta. “Fiesta” is usually translated into English as “festival.” You can hear the linguistic continuity between the Spanish and English terms. In Santa Fe, English-speakers quickly adopt the Spanish term. No one says “Santa Fe Festival.” Spanish-speakers sometimes use the plural, fiestas, an apt way of highlighting the multiplicity of the event and perhaps of cautioning against premature attempts to locate a single essence. In English there is a tendency to drive a wedge between the solemnity of liturgy and the playfulness of festivity. Imposed in Santa Fe such a distinction would violate the tenor of the event.287 The local understanding of festivity also calls into question too rigorous a distinction between insiders and outsiders. Compared with liturgies, festivals are more open. In Santa Fe those who sing, process, dance, and role-play are primary actors, but outsiders are necessary witnesses; they too act. They spend, buy, eat, and spectate. Although outsiders are the butt of complaints by locals— tourists use up all the parking spaces and jam the streets—without them neither the city nor the fiesta would thrive. Visitors to most festivals, if they do not violate local decorum, are welcome. Festivals are not private rites of passage, much less secret initiations. The Santa Fe Fiesta, however much it resembles a party, is not designed mainly for tourists or only for fun. In New Mexico history fiestas and other festivals have even been peace-making occasions. During the eighteenth century, when both bloodshed and captivity were rife, as Comanches raided Pueblos and attacked Hispanic settlers, periodic truces were called. These respites were not only for trade but also for festivities; eventually they led to a practice aptly called “dancing with the enemy.”288 Fiesta is a time for hostilities to cease, at least temporarily. 185

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Festivals are daunting examples for ritual studies scholars, because they are magnets that, by attracting add-ons and plug-ins, challenge our definitions and taxonomies. Are rituals and festivals distinct genres, or variants of the same thing? Is a festival a kind of ritual, or ritual a kind of festival? If festivals can contain rituals, can rituals contain festivals? By forcing us to question our categories, festivity threatens to grind the machine of theory to a halt—either that or make theorists earn their keep.

Using the Term “Ritual” There are two language games, one in the field and one in the academy. Participants have their own terms, and the first responsibility of a student in the field is to learn and use them. The first responsibility of a student in the academy is to define key theoretical terms, facilitating conversations with other scholars. If academics were ever to succeed in the impossible task of constructing a consensus definition of “ritual,” it might occasionally be of use in Santa Fe and elsewhere when people inquire about our research. But defining “ritual” is like defining “jazz.” Barry Ulanov, in his history of this musical form, warns readers that answers to the question “What is jazz?,” although amusing, are not entirely satisfying. Glenn Miller: “Something you have to feel; a sensation that can be conveyed to others.” Jess Stacy: “Syncopated syncopation.” Terry Shand: “A synthetic cooperation of two or more instruments helping along or giving feeling to the soloist performing.” Louis Armstrong: “My idea of how a tune should go.”289 Cultural anthropologist Pascal Boyer writes, “I do not propose to give a new ‘theory of religious ritual’; indeed, one of the main points of the argument is that there is no unified set of phenomena that could be the object of such a theory.”290 You would think such a claim would reduce Boyer, if not the rest of us who theorize and define ritual, to silence, but no, we’re scholars, so we keep talking. Boyer himself tenders what he calls an “intuitive discrimination” that sounds a lot like a definition: “I posit that human rituals are generally recognized as such by virtue of features that apply to many types of animal displays as well. Stereotype, repetition, and the rigid sequencing of elementary actions are all aspects that make animal and human ritual structurally similar.”291 Whether or not this is a definition, we should not expect too much of definitions. Having spilled much ink constructing or defending them, we writers tend to ignore or improvise on them anyway. Having a definition can seem either very important and or not important at all. In scholarly debate, having a succinct definition may be decisive to the outcome. In ordinary discussions an explicit definition may prevent our talking past each other but may make us sound pedantic. Having one might be useful if we intend to document a ritual with a video camera, because the definition might help us decide what not to shoot. But let’s face it, much of the world’s

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population gets along perfectly well without a formal definition of ritual, just as it does without definitions of other complex human activities—love, art, or war. We don’t have to know the definition of ritual to participate in one. In ordinary conversations people usually assume they and others know what they’re talking about when they utter the word, and it may make little or no difference whether this assumption is even correct. Sometimes we can avoid definitional confusion by circumventing the generic term and using proper nouns: bar mitzvah, confirmation, fasting during Ramadan. Alternatively, people can just point to some exemplary event and say, “That’s a ritual.” An example often suffices, making a formal definition unnecessary. But you’re a student of ritual and you want to interview people about ritual, especially people living in a culture different from your own, so you anticipate being asked what you study. Do you use your labels or theirs? If you have thought about your definition carefully and it has been chastened in a scholarly forum, you will be tempted to cling to your own hard-won terms. However, if you are on someone else’s turf, poking around in their celebrations, it is common courtesy, as well as good ethnography, to use theirs. Learn their lingo; that is part of ethnographic method. But then, if you become accustomed to using indigenous, or participant, terms, you may have difficulty finding equivalents in academic English. In this respect, “ritual” is like every other key term. Tailored to fit “us,” it may look ill-fitting on “them.” Any key term represents only one way of naming the world. Different linguistic traditions pursue different pigeonholing strategies. When fieldworkers return home, wishing to communicate with other students of ritual, we may have to renegotiate usage. Do we use the terms we learned over there or the ones we use here, in these academic circles? And how are the two terms related? How precisely do they translate? And what if the match is only partial? “Bilingualism,” using two sets of terms—one scholarly, the other indigenous—is commonly necessary. Even if two conversation partners use the same term, they may use the terms in different ways. Even in English, the term “ritual” has meant different things at different times. The word once designated a book that prescribes actions. Later, it referred to geographically and stylistically differentiated families of Christian liturgy. Now it refers to actions regarded as special. The term “ritual” can mean different things for different kinds of people. To your local newscaster or plumber, should she or he use the word at all, it probably means “something repeated more or less mindlessly,” just as “myth” means “something untrue, a lie.” There is nothing unusual about changing, multiple, or prejudicial meanings. Little is to be gained by insisting that others use the terms the way academics do. The important thing is not to be ignorant of the changes. The terminology of research, no less than the terminology of the street, is culture-bound. Always, no exceptions. The cross-cultural study of most topics typically runs amok in a definitional bog similar to those encountered in the study of ritual.

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In this respect, there is nothing special about ritual or the study of it. Our categories never neatly match theirs. Over there, there is terminological wrangling among practitioners, so it should be no surprise that we scholars also wrangle. Current writing about ritual tempts one to conclude that the phenomenon is either everywhere or nowhere. On the one hand, scholars expand the term until it excludes no human activity. On the other, they become so preoccupied with the history and politics of the term that ritual itself appears to be a mere scholarly construction or invention.292 We who use the word “ritual,” or any of the other terms in the bourgeoning ritual studies glossary, should ponder the history and function of key terms and be ready to negotiate usage both in the field and across the boundaries of academic disciplines. However, we should also resist pressures to resort to all-or-nothing defining strategies. There are other possibilities: We can point to an example (“The Mass is a ritual”), describe what a ritual is like (“A ritual is like an exclamation point”), say what it is not (“A ritual is not a game”), or specify what it is (“A ritual is any repetitive action carried out in a religious attitude”). Formal definitions usually require specification of what is excluded and included. Having done so, what we arrive at is not the unchanging core of either a ritual or the idea of ritual but an agreement about how we will use the word on this occasion in this place. Deconstructionists have made it fashionable to insist that ritual is not a permanent essence just sitting there in the way a stone sits on a riverbank. We are advised not reify it as if it were a “natural object.”293 We are told that ritual, like religion, is a scholarly construction or even an invention. Although I agree, the incantation grows tiresome. Of course a ritual is not an “object,” whether natural, unnatural, or supernatural. Sure, the use of a noun for any event makes it tempting to speak of it as if it were an object, but in this respect ritual is no different from a soccer game. Just because the concepts are constructions does not mean that the events don’t exist or that we can’t define the words we use to refer to them. The question “What is ritual?,” then, is probably more effectively posed as “In such-and-such a circumstance how shall we use the term ‘ritual’?” Debating the question “How shall we use the term ritual?” would be a waste of time if it were not for the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary aspirations of ritual studies and if it were not for the complications of field research. Both are replete with situations demanding that you deploy this term or some other and then explain your reasons for making such a choice. You discover in both the field and the library that few religions or cultures, even those in which English is the dominant language, use the word “ritual,” so ritual studies scholars need to say what they mean when they use the word. Students of ritual faced with so-called cultural performances in their field research are forced into definitional dilemmas. They find themselves asking their supervisors or colleagues, “What exactly do I point my camera at?” or, more desperately, “What can I avoid shooting?” Such questions are the tips of icebergs. Fieldwork supervisors cheat if they dodge by replying, “Ask the natives, and if

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they call it ritual, shoot it.” If this were the main or only criterion, only a certain group of English-speakers could be said to engage in ritual.

Examples of Scholarly Definitions To embrace any definition of ritual is, in one fell swoop, to make friends and enemies. Consider these definitions of ritual, all from reputable scholars of ritual.294 Victor Turner: I consider the term “ritual” to be more fittingly applied to forms of religious behavior associated with social transitions, while the term “ceremony” has a closer bearing on religious behavior associated with social states, where politico-legal institutions also have greater importance. Ritual is transformative, ceremony confirmatory.295 Roy Rappaport: I take the term “ritual” to denote the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers.296 Jonathan Z. Smith: [Ritual is] . . . a means of performing the way things ought to be in such a way that this ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled course of things.297 Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley: Religious rituals . . . are those religious actions whose structural descriptions include a logical object and appeal to a culturally postulated superhuman agent’s action somewhere within their overall structural description.298 Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw: Action is ritualized if the acts of which it is composed are constituted not by the intentions which the actor has in performing them, but by prior stipulation. . . . In adopting the ritual stance one accepts . . . that in a very important sense, one will not be the author of one’s acts.299 Definitional strategies differ. Every workable definition rules out something. By systematically distinguishing ritual from ceremony, Turner rules out the possibility of transformative ceremonies. Rappaport rules out ritual change, creativity, and innovation. Smith rules out, or overlooks, the possibility that humans actually forget what they practice in a ritual. Lawson and McCauley rule out religions without superhuman agents.300 Humphrey and Laidlaw rule out personal intentions and improvised ritualizing. We shouldn’t make too much out of definitions, since, standing alone, they don’t constitute theories. Definitions are put to several uses, and theory-building is just one of them. Defining ritual is complicated not only by the existence of so many definitions but also by the fact that scholars can ignore their own definitions in either theory-construction or field research (Victor Turner); use the same defini-

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tion for two different terms (Roy Rappaport); create multiple, competing definitions (Catherine Bell); never fully ensconce their own definitions in full-blown theories ( Jonathan Z. Smith); or write definitions that few can understand, apply, or test ( Jan Platvoet). (See Appendix 1 for definitions.) Lawson and McCauley are demanding to read, but some of their claims are testable. Rappaport’s book is much longer than the other two and also difficult to fathom. It is, to my mind, the most provocative, but it is also the least testable. Although Rappaport himself produced some of the finest, most nuanced data on ritual, his theory does not really lay out a method; rather, it presupposes one. Humphrey and Laidlaw are the most readable and most fully grounded in case study data, but their major claims seem to me the least testable. Because of the confusion and conflict, students of ritual often wish for a consensus definition, but one scholar says this longing amounts to a search for the Holy Grail—an ever-elusive, just-beyond-the-horizon sacred object.301 I am more pragmatic and less romantic about the issue. Borrow or invent a definition and, imperfect though it is, work with it. Figure out what it facilitates and inhibits. Repair it if you can, and keep on pedaling. If that doesn’t work, trade it in on a new model. One scholarly tactic for cutting through the welter of definitions is to examine the history of the contested term. Talal Asad offers a cursory one, emphasizing the tentativeness of his claims by calling them “notes,” “preliminary explorations,” and a “genealogy” rather than a history.302 Genealogies account for descendants in a way that histories do not, but they also evoke loyalty or rebellion. His genealogy is not based on ordinary usage of the term “ritual,” and his sources are quite limited, mainly encyclopedia entries and secondary sources. He takes it as axiomatic that changes in institutional structures and in what he calls “the organization of the self ” precipitate changes in the understanding of the term “ritual” in a given historical era. Generalizing from the example of St. Benedict’s Rule, Asad says that in the European Middle Ages “liturgy” did not denote enacted symbolism, nor was ritual a separate category of behavior. Rather, liturgy was a disciplinary program for acquiring Christian monastic virtues. Such a discipline ensured that inner motives and outer behavior coincided. Tracking entries in the Oxford English Dictionary and the New Catholic Encyclopedia, Asad points out that the word “ritual” designated the book that prescribed liturgical actions; it did not denote the actions themselves. One of his sources claims that rituals (meaning “books”) appeared in ninth-century monasteries; another source dates the emergence of this use of the term to the seventeenth century, when the first Roman Ritual was published. In the first Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in 1771, the term “ritual” designated the book that directs the ceremonies of the church. Books called “rituals” contained instructions for “rituals” and “ceremonies.” Citing the example of Bacon’s “Of Simulation and Dissimulation,” Asad traces the rise, during the Renaissance, of a more individualistic and power-focused society

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and of mind/body, private/public dualisms that underwrote a distinction between figurative and real actions. In these circumstances, ritual, he claims, was less about the disciplining of a self or the creation of an attitude than it was about practices of representation and misrepresentation. “My point here,” he says, “is simply that when conventional behavior is seen as being essentially representational and essentially independent of the self, the possibility is opened up of deploying it in games of power.”303 By 1910, in the eleventh edition of the Britannica, “ritual” had quite a different meaning, and other religions, not only Christianity, now had rituals. In fact, “ritual” was no longer contained by religion at all. Ritual was now a practice—specifically, a symbolic one—rather than a script prescribing a practice. This understanding of ritual as something in need of interpreting or decoding is “entirely modern,” says Asad, even though it was also a strategy appropriated from Christian exegesis.304 However opaque Asad’s genealogy is as a history, his primary claim is clear. He believes that he observes a major shift in understanding the term “ritual.” First it is a means of cultivating fundamental attitudes and morality, and then it becomes a means of symbolizing or codifying things that need to be read or interpreted. This argument in “The Concept of Ritual” parallels another one in “Religion as an Anthropological Category.”305 Although the first piece is about ritual and the second about religion, in both cases Asad is intent on showing the shift from a discipline requiring practice or obedience to that of a text, symbol, or code requiring a reading or interpretation. The conclusion in both instances is that neither concept, religion or ritual, is universal. Therefore, he says, one should unpack “the comprehensive concept which he or she translates as ‘religion’ [or ‘ritual’] into heterogeneous elements according to its historical character.”306 In other words, because each concept, religion or ritual, is, in fact, particular, it is merely a beginning point and should be qualified or even displaced by the terms and meanings encountered in specific situations. In The Dangers of Ritual Philippe Buc advances an argument similar to Asad’s. A major difference is that Buc’s is a book-length case, while Asad’s is article-length. The claim of both scholars is that the word “ritual” has not always meant what it does now. The writing practice of the two men is similar as well. Having made such a claim, each continues using the term in much the same way as it is used now. The outcome is less a revolution in the ritual studies glossary than a pronounced tentativeness regarding the assumptions one can make about the cross-cultural or historical and comparative usefulness of the word “ritual.” In many ways Dangers is a tour de force. In rich detail it paints scenes of medieval and Renaissance wrangling over ritual (regardless of what they actually called it). A wealth of indigenous terminology is brought into play, not only “sacrament” and “ritual” but also caerimonia, solemniter, honorifice, cultus, and other terms. Although Buc never provides readers with a glossary, the context usually helps nonspecialist readers absorb the connotations of the terms.

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More remarkable than the wealth of participant terminology, which invites us to rethink our use of their modern-day descendants, is the thick tangle of ritual description. Buc is skeptical that one can penetrate these accounts to ferret out the rituals behind them. To put it in terms introduced in the method section: One can’t get past the representational problem to carry out formal or any other kind of criticism. Why? Because the descriptions themselves constitute a genre, one that is mobilized frequently as a political weapon. A reader can’t afford just to look at ritual and other associated words but has to study the genres of the documents in which they are embedded, as well as the historical circumstances in which both the documents and the words are used. Doing so consistently and thoroughly is a tall order. The methodological and practical implications of Asad’s and Buc’s views are twofold: Be cautious in what you assume about the obviousness and purview of the term “ritual,” and read ritual writings in terms of their historical contexts and the genre of writings in which they appear. So let us sin bravely. I have written more than one definition of ritual. The first, published in 1982, ran, “Ritualizing transpires as animated persons enact formative gestures in the face of receptivity during crucial times in founded places.”307 This definition is rarely cited. For one thing, it is a definition of ritualizing, which is to say, ritual emergence and incubation, not ritual as such. For another, it appeared in a scholarly journal rather than a book. And for yet another, when dislodged from the article that provided an exposition, the definition’s terminology, however evocative, is opaque. What is an animated person? What is a formative gesture? Which times are crucial? Although I myself do not use the definition in field research, I did use it in the Ritual Studies Lab, because it helped make sense of what we did there. Outside the Lab, in the field or in scholarly debate, the definition has not fared well. Publishing it was probably a mistake not because I have changed my mind, but because I assumed the wrong readership. By 1990 I was taking a double tack, resisting the urge to define the term “ritual” substantively while trying to say clearly what I meant by the various r-words.308 I proposed a terminological division of labor among “rite,” “ritual,” “ritualizing,” and “ritualization.” As I now use the terms, “rite” (from the noun ritus) denotes specific enactments located in concrete times and places; I use “a ritual” synonymously.309 Often a ritual or rite is named: bar mitzvah (the rite of becoming a man in Judaism), baptism (the rite of becoming a Christian in some denominations). Rites are the actions enacted by ritualists and observed and studied by ritual studies scholars. The term “rite” as used here refers to a set of actions widely recognized by members of a culture. Rites are differentiated (compartmentalized, segregated) from ordinary behavior. Typically, they are classified as “other” than ordinary and assigned a place discrete from such activities. A rite is often part of some larger whole, a ritual system or ritual tradition that includes other rites as well. As I use it, “ritual” (from the Latin adjective ritualis) refers to the general idea of which a rite, or a ritual, is a specific instance. As such, ritual does not “exist,” even though

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it is what scholars try to define; ritual is an idea scholars formulate. Strictly speaking, then, one would not refer to a ritual or rituals as “ritual.” Ritual is what one defines in formal definitions and characterizations; rites, or rituals, are what people enact. “Ritualizing” is the act of cultivating or inventing rites.310 I use it synonymously with “ritual construction” and “ritual making.” The “-izing” ending is a deliberate attempt to suggest a process, a quality of nascence or emergence. Ritualizing is not often socially supported. Rather, it happens in the margins, on the thresholds; therefore it is alternately stigmatized and eulogized. In performance theories it is common to distinguish social drama (Victor Turner’s term) and interaction ritual (Erving Goffman’s term) from stage drama, or theater. What you find in a theater is a compression and transformation of what you encounter in daily life (Goffman) or times of conflict (Turner). I use the term “ritualization” similarly. In studying ritual, we need a concept, ritualization, to designate the basic, ordinary stuff out of which special rites emerge. My usage of the term “ritualization,” also used by ethologists, is modified so it refers not only to the aggressive and mating behavior of animals but also to activity that is not culturally framed as ritual and that someone, often an observer, interprets as if it were potential ritual. We might think of it as infra-, quasi-, or preritualistic. Ritualization is the repetitious bodily stylization that constitutes the baseline of quotidian human social interaction. Just as everyday life is dramatic, enabling playwrights and actors to select, condense, and arrange performances we call plays, or dramas, so ordinary life is ritualized, enabling participants to select, condense, and arrange enactments we call rituals or, if they are religious, liturgies. Domestic life is ritualized even if no one decides to do anything special.311 First you wake up, and then you . . . The sequence is fairly predictable. If you don’t think so, try reversing a few things. If you usually have coffee first, try having it last. If you usually put on your right sock first, put on your left one. Switch up who sits where at the table. The ritualization of everyday domestic life has not been thoroughly studied, and when it has been, the hermeneutic has usually been one of suspicion. Both Erving Goffman’s ritualization and Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus are polemical. They name the phenomenon in order to expose and question it. I have no objection to either naming or exposing. I do, however, insist that there is more to ritualization than making us submissive and docile. Habitual thinking, although dangerous, has survival value. It allows humans to engage in “heuristics,” the selective tuning out of excess information. Events cannot be usefully understood using only two options: “ritual” or “not ritual.” Rather, actions display degrees of ritualization. Actions are not binary, either ritual or not-ritual. Instead, there is a continuum, and events are more or less ritualized, depending on the qualities that appear in them. When writing Ritual Criticism I examined a hundred or so scholarly definitions, searching for the family characteristics of ritual that scholars invoke in their definitions.312 The latest, revised iteration suggests that ritual contains the following family characteristics.

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List 4. Family Characteristics of Ritual

Actions can become ritualized by: • traditionalizing them, for instance, by claiming that they originated a long time ago or with the ancestors • elevating them by associating them with sacredly held values, those that make people who they are and that display either how things really are or how they ought to be • repeating them—over and over, in the same way—thus inscribing them in community and/or self • singularizing them, that is, offering them as rare or even one-time events • prescribing their details so they are performed in the proper way • stylizing them, so they are carried out with flare • entering them with a nonordinary attitude or in a special state of mind, for example, contemplatively or in trance • invoking powers to whom respect or reverence is due—gods, royalty, and spirits, for example • attributing to them special power or influence • situating them in special places and/or times • being performed by specially qualified persons313 As gangly as this list is, it is not infinite. The original was sixteen items long; this one is eleven. After Ritual Criticism I began recasting the family characteristics so they were less dependent on summarizing other people’s definitions and so the list was less exhaustive (and exhausting). Some have treated the family characteristics scheme as if it were Grimes’s definition, but it isn’t. It is, rather, a way of circumventing formal definitions by appealing to a “family resemblance” or “fuzzy set” theory.314 This move has had wide appeal, and one could use such a set to quantify the rituality of an event. One could, for example, code events, first on a traditionalizing scale, then on a sacrality scale, then on a repetition scale, and so on. Another reason for the popularity of family resemblances and fuzzy sets is that these strategies don’t require anyone to give up anything. The scheme’s virtue is its vice. It facilitates research insofar as it stops incessant debating so scholars can get on with their work, but it also obfuscates by getting people off the hook so they don’t have to make hard choices. Whereas tight, formal definitions are implicitly argumentative, specifications of family resemblances is less so, since it includes almost every adjective or adverb that scholars have used in defining ritual. You may wish to argue that only one or two (for instance, prescription and repetition or repetition and sacredness) are definitive of ritual. To do so would be to argue, at least implicitly, with other scholars who choose to treat other qualities as definitive. These are choices, not inevitabilities, so determining which is the definitive quality is neither a moral nor a metaphysical matter, only a practical one. The

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best questions to ask of a definition are not “Is this definition true?” or “Are rituals really out there?” but “How does this definition work, and in what situations is it most, and least, effective?” Although I continue to fret about the magic of terse, formal definitions, I recognize their necessity on some occasions. Ceaselessly begged by students, I sometimes offer a formal definition in class, hoping they will memorize, use, and criticize it: Ritual is embodied, condensed, and prescribed enactment.315 The advantage of this one is its simplicity and portability. Since the long list of possible qualities is here shrunk to four qualities, students without sticky memories facing an inquisitorial professor can chant it hoping to stop the beast in its tracks. The definition comes with an exposition:316 Ritual is embodied. An obvious feature of ritual is that it is a human activity. People do it, and they do it in overt, bodily ways. Because it is in and of bodies, ritual is also cultural, since bodies are enculturated. Ritual is not only in the mind or the imagination, even though it can be both mindful and imaginative. If an action is purely mental, it is not ritual even though mental processes clearly underlie ritual action. However important ritually inspired memories or fantasies may be, we should not call them ritual. Ritual, insofar as it can become the object of study, is evidenced by gross motor movements (or a studied, practiced lack of them) in the body, hence the qualifier “embodiment.” Ritual is condensed. Although ritualization is rooted in ordinary human interaction, ritual is not ordinary action. It is more condensed or elevated than quotidian behavior. In this respect, it is like theater. Just as theater originates in the dramatization of everyday life, so ritual originates in the ritualization characteristic of the daily round. But ritual stands out against the background of ordinariness; it is, we might say, extraordinary ordinariness. To use a metaphor, it is packed tightly, hence, “condensed.” Therefore, unpacking is often necessary for outsiders to make sense of it, although ritual may also suffer from such unpacking. Ritual is prescribed. Most human interaction is in some way prescribed. Cultures shape or channel behavior. As a result, we “just know” how to do certain things. Ritual illustrates this basic human fact but goes one step further. In ritual circumstances, things are overtly prescribed; one might even say “overprescribed.” There are right and wrong ways to enact rituals. Ritual is rubric-driven action. A rubric, etymologically, is something “printed in red,” words specifying what is to be done. Sometimes it is the “what” that is prescribed: Say this; show that; walk here; go there. But sometimes it is the “how,” the stylization, that is prescribed: Clean the space attentively; dance with humility; offer sacrifice with a good intention.

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Ritual is enacted. Ritual is a kind of action, but not just any action. It helps to remind ourselves of its difference from ordinary action by assigning it a special verb, “enact.” To “enact” is to put into force or into play. Since ritual acting is different from stage acting as well as from quotidian activity, we need a verb different from but related to “act.” Ritual action is special; in this respect, it is similar to “acting,” the sort that transpires onstage or in film. But ritual is not identical with pretending. However made up, it is not regarded by participants as mere fiction or a game—hence the term “enactment.”317 Ritual is embodied, condensed, and prescribed enactment.318 This is a minimal definition. Some will find it too open and want to impose other qualifiers: Ritual is repetitive; ritual is sacred; and so on. The advantage of narrowing beyond the family resemblance set is that doing so facilitates a tighter focus, thereby enhancing research efficiency by enabling students of ritual to tune out “noise.” The disadvantage of more restrictive definitions is that they obscure ritual’s connections with other forms of human activity. The “noise” may be revealing, but your portable definition may lead you to overlook its overlap with other kinds of human activity. Although I sometimes accede to requests for a concise definition in class, I am happier with family-resemblance strategies than with boundary-marking ones. Formal definitions make some people happy. To me, they are gnawed bones, leftovers from scholarly squabbling. They lead us into believing that boundaries are clearer than they actually are. They lead us into thinking that such things matter more than they really do. At the beginning of our study of ritual, we students play a definitional “is it ritual or not” game, but an infinitely variable sliding scale, a set of family resemblances, is more effective than a binary choice insofar as it staves off category mistakes.319 Working with both a formal definition and a specification of qualities can engender confusion, because the two tactics are in some respects incommensurate. Each has its advantages at different stages of research. The terse definition is portable and preliminary. The list of qualities is heavy baggage, but it enables finer distinctions. So each defining strategy works better in a different context. Cultures and traditions differ in the permeability of their ritual boundaries. So maybe a definition is more useful in situations where boundaries are hedged, as it were, with barbed wire. Likewise, a set of family resemblances is probably more useful in situations where boundaries are faintly marked. Since I have not built religiosity into either way of defining ritual, the question of ritual’s relation to religion inevitably arises even outside religious studies courses. The conception of religion itself is changing. It is increasingly common for North Americans to say they are spiritual but not religious. Since erecting a conceptual wall between religion and spirituality can be misleading, I define the terms in ways

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that assume their interconnectedness. Spirituality is life lived in search of, or in resonance with, fundamental principles and powers, usually symbolized as first, last, deepest, highest, or most central. Religion is spirituality organized into a system (understood synchronically) or tradition (understood diachronically) by utilizing the structures in the following list, each with its associated processes (indicated in parentheses).320 List 5. Structures and Processes of Religion

• Ritualistic-performative processes (e.g., enacting, performing, imitating, singing, making, touching, wearing, giving, sharing) • Experiential-personal processes (e.g., experiencing, feeling, encountering, praying, being healed, being possessed, undergoing a revelation) • Mythic-historical, or narrative-temporal, processes (e.g., telling stories, reciting, naming, remembering, recording, transmitting) • Doctrinal-cosmological processes (e.g., believing, knowing, having a worldview, systematizing, ordering, arguing, thinking, explaining) • Ethical-legal processes (e.g., prescribing, valuing, legislating, obeying, choosing, behaving, commanding) • Social-cultural processes (e.g., instituting, organizing, exchanging, governing, being-kin-to, following, leading) • Physical-spatial processes (e.g., building sanctuaries, making objects, leaving artifacts)321 I use these interlocked definitions in situations where I am trying to resist the tendency to define religion in ways that make it the opposite of spirituality, casting both as enemies in a conceptually dualistic morality play. I also use it to counteract the popular tendency to identify religion solely with belief. My point is less to defend these definitional ploys than to say that they should be used pragmatically in specific situations for specific purposes.

Classifying Rituals As far as I can tell, no one has made a list of the world’s rituals. On a fool’s errand and as a devotee of the Umberto Eco we-like-lists-because-we-don’t-want-to-die school, I spent several months trying. Since electronic databases can now catalog all the words in a language or all the DNA sequences in the human genome, the most daunting task was not the length of the list but the boundaries of the genus ritual and the lack of a taxonomy for organizing its species. There are plenty of keywords, both technical terms and ordinary words used in special ways: sacrifice, magic, ceremony, liturgy, interaction ritual, rituals of exchange, rituals of mobility, rituals of

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rebellion, secular ritual, status conferral rituals, status maintenance rituals, status reversal rituals. The list goes on, but the terms are ill-defined and overlapping. Because “ritual” is such a sprawling category, it would make good practical sense to divide rituals up into smaller piles. But as far as I know, no one has succeeded. There is no full, formal taxonomy of ritual. Flowers and bugs are more reliably classified. Even if we could give a satisfactory answer to the questions “Why create a list of the world’s rituals?” and “What criteria determine inclusion?” there still is no cogent answer to the question “What kinds of ritual are there?” The definitional problem and classification issue are entangled. Together they bedevil most attempts to theorize ritual. Just as the reigning definitions are dependent on too polarized a view of ritual, so existing classificatory devices are dependent on too few types. After starting the Journal of Ritual Studies (JRS) with Fred Clothey and Madeline Duntley, I created a filing system, using it to categorize and cross-index articles and books submitted to the journal (see Appendix 2: Ritual Studies Codes). Each item was categorized in multiple ways—not only by ritual type but also by tradition, historical era, and academic discipline. If an item arrived using a keyword not on the list, I added it. The JRS system was not based on ethnographic glossaries derived from terms that ritual participants use. Neither was it a scientific taxonomy derived from a systematic analysis of ritual behavior. It was empirical only in the sense that it reflected terms that scholars actually used in print. The system worked well enough for organizing articles submitted for publication and books submitted for review, but it does not work for theory-building. The JRS filing system implicitly challenges preemptive attempts to define the whole of ritual on the model of a specific kind, but it also exposes a conceptual mess. Students of ritual may need to know names and key ideas associated with “sacrifice,” “rites of rebellion,” “magic,” or other categories on the list, but any attempt to find precision in the scholarly usage fails. I tried several times, unsuccessfully, to revise the type codes (see Appendix 3: Types of Ritual). One problem was how little the JRS classification system excludes. Another was the fuzzy distinction between a ritual and a part of a ritual, also between a ritual and a ritual type. Take sacrifice, for example. Is it a ritual, an action within a ritual, or a type of ritual? One finds all three usages in the literature. Any submitted article about ritual typically fell into more than one category. The categories were fuzzy and overlapping, but an article had to be filed somewhere. It could not be everywhere, anywhere, or nowhere. So a choice has to be made. Having done so, we could associate keywords with an article and, given the speed of computers, staff could usually file a submission and later find what they were looking for. For short-run, practical reasons we were driven to pigeonholing and cross-referencing, but in the long run this tactic is not theoretically fruitful. I tried reformulating the typology question: not “What kinds of ritual are there?” but “On what basis can we most effectively classify a myriad of rituals?” What criteria shall we use? Intention? Function? Timing? Length? Some prominent feature

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that strikes casual observers? “Seasonal rituals” are often lumped together because of their timing, whereas secular rituals are lumped together because they lack explicit religious reference. Sacrificial rituals are pigeonholed because something is given up, given away, or burned, while commemoration rituals are stashed in the same cache because participants remember and recollect during them. Most of the actual rituals that one would use to illustrate these types contain interesting or remarkable features, but how do we decide which feature will provide the cue that determines the label? Others have struggled with the taxonomy problem. Catherine Bell deals with it by picking and choosing among currently used categories. She settles for six “fairly standard ritual genres.”322 She does not claim that the set is consistent, complete, or definitive. Bell’s move helps keep her book a reasonable length, but it also leaves the taxonomy problem unresolved. Her tactic is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It in effect says, “This is how some scholars use some of the most common terms” rather than “I propose this as a way to classify rituals.” Among the genres she identifies are “political rites,” “feasting, fasting, festivals,” and “rites of exchange and communion.” Since a reader can see that she is lumping categories together, questions immediately arise: Do leaders ever serve food at political rallies? Aren’t exchanges fraught with status and power considerations? Can fasting or communion ever be part of a political rite? If the answers are affirmative, what do we really gain by clumping rites into these genres? The obvious gain is to illustrate that the conventional categories used by scholars are folk categories. There are a few constructive (as distinct from descriptive) attempts to typologize rituals. Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw’s The Archetypal Actions of Ritual is an extended case study rooted in richly nuanced field research on the Jain ritual of puja at Dadabari temple in Jaipur, India. On the basis of this set of particulars the two scholars construct a theory of ritual informed by a key typology. Devoting an entire chapter to the question “What kind of theory do we need?,” they claim that they are not advancing a new theory of ritual so much as a new kind of theory. In my view they offer not so much a new kind of theory as a seemingly new definition of “ritual.” They define it not as a kind of event or as an aspect of all action but as a quality that actions can come to have. The supposedly new definition at which they arrive is this: “Action is ritualized if the acts of which it is composed are constituted not by the intentions which the actor has in performing them, but by prior stipulation.”323 Ritualized acts, they argue, are ordinary acts performed from a nonordinary standpoint, a standpoint that they dub “the ritual stance” or, alternatively, “ritual commitment.” The ritual stance is one in which an actor’s actions are decontextualized, by being “torn from instantaneous and purposeful everyday existence.”324 The phenomenon of actions that are stipulated and separated from everyday action before they are performed is, they claim, both invariant and universal. Humphrey and Laidlaw hold that ritual actions are institutionally prescribed, not the expression of personal motives or even social purposes. “In performing an

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act in ritualized form, as a ritual act, you perform it as you do, and not some other way, just because it is so prescribed, and not because it makes sense to you to do so, or because you have reasons for doing so.”325 Ritual acts are “archetypal” not in the Jungian sense of being rooted in a collective unconsciousness but in the sense of having hallowed precedents. An archetypal action is separated, objectified, and named; it is already there waiting for actors to enact it. To act ritually, then, is to be committed to not being the author of one’s actions.326 This is, in effect, their definition of ritual. They couple it with a twofold typology. They distinguish performance-centered rituals (found in shamanistic or initiatory situations) from liturgy-centered rituals (such as appear in the scriptural religions). In shamanism and initiation, which are quasi-theatrical, it is more important that the audience be convinced, or at least appear to be convinced, than to follow a stipulated sequence of actions. The question usually asked of a performance-centered ritual is “Has it worked?,” whereas the question asked of liturgical ritual, the other type, is “Have we got it right?”327 Performance-centered rituals are not only more audience-oriented but also more subject to improvisation. Although sometimes formulaic, they are not fixed. Humphrey and Laidlaw introduce the distinction between performative and liturgical rituals, but they soon drop it and begin drawing conclusions about ritual in general based on data representing only liturgical ritual. Their interpretive move seems to imply that liturgy is the prototypical form of ritual and that performancecentered ritual is somehow a weaker or less pure form of ritual. Like Rappaport, they treat the more performative kinds of ritual as outside the purview of their definition. Not only do Humphrey and Laidlaw distinguish performative ritual from liturgical ritual and then drop the former from consideration; they also introduce considerable confusion by continuing throughout the book to speak of ritual and liturgical “performance.” Although they deny that liturgy is performative (liturgies, they claim, do not have audiences), they continue to employ the rhetoric of performance. Harvey Whitehouse also works on the basis of a twofold typology.328 For him there are two modes of religiosity, each with its distinctive ritual style.329 On the one hand, religions operating in a “doctrinal” mode are characterized by frequently repeated rituals. Because their redundancy and high frequency enable participants to go on autopilot, doctrinal rituals risk the “tedium effect.” On the other hand, rituals appearing in “imagistic” religions are episodic. The high arousal of these less frequently celebrated rituals is more likely to generate long-lasting memories coupled with a protracted search for meaning, but they also risk inducing shock and stress. Whitehouse connects these religious-ritualistic modes with cognitive theories. If nothing else, this connection seems to ensure that his modes will have a longer shelf life than most typologies, because they can be plugged into empirical research

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agendas. With extended application and criticism, the scheme of two modes could even generate additional modes, avoiding the dualisms that disable many other typologies. But if the types are used simply to slot either religions or rituals into two categories, his theory will go the way of most definitional divides, for example, the one that separates rites of passage from seasonal rites. Such divides may be handy sorting devices, but they do little to facilitate or instigate sustained research. Another example of typologizing in the service of theory, this one of a slightly different order, is proposed by Adam Seligman and his colleagues in Ritual and Its Consequences.330 One of their aims is to rescue ritual from the bad reputation it has in North America, a society they consider to be dominated by sincerity-seeking. Since they set ritual in contrast to sincerity, their classification is less of rituals than of cultural behavior or attitudes. In their view ritual’s virtue is that it is capable of embracing the subjunctive. Ritual participants can act “as if,” so they are able to embrace life’s inherent ambiguities. In contrast, sincerity seekers are unhappy if they cannot access the unvarnished truth, embracing things as they really are. Sincerity, Seligman and company say, is the prime mode of fundamentalists, while ritual, they imply, is the way of moderates (like themselves). What remains largely outside the purview of this typology are examples in which the one mode collapses into the other, in other words, sincerity-seeking rituals and ritualized sincerity. Although Seligman and associates find “sincerity” represented in many religions and cultures, they shackle it mainly to Protestantism and show a persistent preference for “ritual.” However openly they admit that theirs as an idealized typology, it is clear that one of the two parties, ritual, is preferred over the other, sincerity. They insist that their typology should not be reduced to mutually exclusive types, but the tenor of their argument and choice of examples is slanted that way. The two types seem locked into a hard dualism in which a third or fourth type not only does not arise, but also could not, given the construction of their theory. In this respect, their typology resembles that of Humphrey and Laidlaw. It does not exhibit the possibilities for self-correction that are implicit in Whitehouse’s theory. Where does this foray into typologies of ritual leave us? It is easy to understand the desire for a classificatory device for managing the complexity of rituals. Typologies can be useful starting points, but twofold ones should evoke our suspicion, because they too readily become dualisms, the forces of good arrayed on one side and the forces of evil on the other. There seem to be at least four classificatory strategies. The librarian’s option is to use the terms employed by scholars regardless of whether they denote carefully or consistently delineated types: “rites of passage,” “rites of rebellion,” “seasonal rites,” and so on. The bipolar option is to assume or state that there are two fundamental types, for instance, doctrinal versus imagistic (Harvey Whitehouse) or performance-centered versus liturgy-centered (Humphrey and Laidlaw). In this option all types of ritual are interpreted as variants between these two poles. The singular option implies that there is only one prototype and that all rituals are variations on it; Arnold van Gennep turns all rituals into rites of passage. The radically

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local, or ethnographic, option insists that there are no types, only distinct rituals. Each one is different from all the others; the differences so overwhelm the similarities that there is no point in classifying or comparing rituals. It is worth examining one type in detail in order to understand what the act of classifying enables and inhibits. One of the most widely recognized, longest-used categories is “rites of passage,” sometimes distinguished from “seasonal rites.” Rites of passage are pegged to the life passages of individuals or cohorts, whereas seasonal rites are tied to calendrical moments and are more oriented to groups than to individuals. Although the Belgian folklorist Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957) created the basis for rites of passage theory, others contributed to its growth and reformulation. List 6 is my attempt to articulate the theory that eventually emerged out of the type. List 6. Rites of Passage Theory

• A society is composed of a set of positions (sometimes called “statuses”) that are relatively static. • An individual passes through these positions dynamically. • This passage generates patterns that are stable, and it transpires in stages that are predictable. • Transitions between stages precipitate crises (sometimes called “life crises”). • They are crises because transition evokes social and psychological disequilibrium. • Equilibrium can be restored by means of rites of passage (also called “transition rituals” and “life-crisis rituals”). • Rites of passage are concentrated on birth, maturation, marriage, and death. • The paradigmatic ritual of passage is initiation. • The paradigmatic form of initiation is into adulthood (as distinct from ordination or initiation into secret societies). • The paradigmatic form of adulthood is male (seldom said but often assumed). • In most cultures, rites of passage (e.g., initiation into male adulthood) have three phases: separation, transition, incorporation. • Therefore, other rituals of passage—not to mention other rituals, nonritualistic processes, and the cosmos itself—can be seen as passages marked by phases. • The middle, or liminal, phase is the most important, because it is the culturally creative one. • During the liminal phase, the status system allows for communitas (a temporary nest of face-to-face, nonhierarchical relations), creating the necessary social and psychological conditions in which transformation can happen. • Therefore, authentic ritual transforms. Ritual that merely confirms should be called something else—“ceremony,” for instance. • Ritual transformation is a kind of death and resurrection, a rebirth of sorts. • Therefore, ritual is essentially religious, a way of evoking the sacred.

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Although no one scholar espouses all these claims, it is the consolidated platform, or theory, inferred from the writings of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner supplemented with developments by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, as well as Mircea Eliade. The last two planks, borrowed from Eliade, are often found in popularized versions of rites of passage theory, where they are stitched onto ideas from van Gennep and Turner. Other parts of the summary are my inferences. For instance, none of these writers says, “The paradigmatic form of adulthood is male,” but this claim is implied in the writings of van Gennep and Turner. So one could debate which planks in the platform are generally assumed and which are not. Van Gennep alone seems to have extended the term “rites of passage” to apply to almost every kind of ritual—in fact, to the cosmos itself—although Turner comes close. What initially sounds like one kind of ritual among others becomes a model determinative of all other kinds. The platform works less like a classificatory device than the central axiom of a theory or worldview. Even though rites of passage theory has often been oversimplified or overdrawn, it has both generated fruitful scholarship on ritual and inhibited its study. On the one hand, it has been a major factor in motivating scholars to recognize and study ritual change. On the other, it has been obstructionist in imposing a supposedly universal threefold phasic structure on that change. Like all theories, it simultaneously enhances our vision and obscures it.

Ritual Modes Unable to find or construct an adequate taxonomy of rituals, I have taken another tack. In Beginnings in Ritual Studies I identified six ritual modes.331 The third chapter of Beginnings, which is an exposition of them, has been more frequently quoted and reproduced than any I’ve written. It has also been used to organize dissertations and frame books. Despite this apparent success, I remain dissatisfied and continue to rebuild it like an old bike I can’t bear to throw away. The current version is presented in table 7.1. Using a musical metaphor, the first column imagines ritual as having six modes.332 Since there could be more or fewer of them, the device is heuristic, a construct rather than a set of facts. Although the modal terms may sound like a set of ritual types, they don’t work well for classifying rituals. A good taxonomy should be able to organize all of the examples that fall into its purview, but six modes are insufficient for such a task. A taxonomy needs explicit, consistently applied criteria for inclusion and exclusion, and the modes scheme does not provide them. There are too many rituals that would find no pigeonhole in the scheme. Where would a funeral go? Or sacrifice? Almost as troublesome is the fact that many examples of ritual would fall into multiple slots, in which case we would be classifying only aspects or parts of a ritual.

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Table 7.1. Modes of Ritual ModesØ

Layers/Levels

Examples

Actions/Verbs

Ethos/Moods/ Motivations

Ritualization

bodily ecological psychosomatic

mannerisms habits symptoms

being doing embodying being related to

matter of fact ordinary driven genetic instinctual

Decorum

interpersonal formal

greeting departing

cooperating being together

polite respectful expected appropriate

bowing Ceremony

intergroup political economic

inaugurations rallies legalities

competing ranking deferring

contentious competitive enforced compelled obedient declarative

Magic

causal means-end oriented technological

healing fertility divination sacrifice

making causing manipulating

ambivalent anxious desired imperative

Liturgy

religious sacred ultimate

meditation invocation praise

valuing aspiring

reverent attuned right correct

Celebration

expressive ludic dramatic aesthetic

festivals birthdays feasts

playing pretending

festive exuberant creative spontaneous subjunctive

Since the modes don’t really work as types, most of the time I treat them as layers, as suggested by the second column. Instead of lumping together magical rites and liturgical rites, I would look for magical and liturgical layers, as if imagining a ritual to be like a palimpsest, a piece of parchment from which writing has been erased to make room for another text, requiring the curious to read the bottom-most layer through the topmost.

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Even though “layers,” like any analogy, has limitations, its aim is to suggest that a ritual has density or depth, requiring an interpreter to read or dig through it. In doing so, you might find layers of varying thickness, a magical layer that is “thicker” than the decorous layer, in which case you might call it a magical rite, but this typological labeling is secondary rather than primary. The fourth column, verbs/actions, introduces a dynamic note by associating each mode with some of the verbs, or basic actions, performed in rituals. Since rituals often do one thing by doing another, the basics quickly ramify into complexity. By burning such-and-such a substance, ritualists are feeding a deity, and by feeding the deity, they are nourishing the people, if not the cosmos. The fifth column suggests that the modes of ritual have an associated tone, or ethos, suffusing and motivating participants. Since any action can be ritualized in any mood or combination of moods, I am not claiming that these are all the possible ritual activities or that these are the only underlying sentiments, just that we should notice the tenor of actions in each layer. The layers, I imagine, are like tectonic plates, interacting, combining, and modifying one another. Celebration, for instance, may sound like fun and games, but ancient Aztec rites braided celebration with the ceremonial sacrifice of humans. The playfulness of the one mode is compromised or enhanced—what a terrible thought—by the coerciveness of the other mode. Since the layers interact, the connection between a mode and its row of associations is suggestive rather than automatic. Is decorum always polite and liturgy always reverent? No. Can magic be ludic and celebration, anxietydriven? Yes. Since there is no necessary connection between each mode and its linked moods, it is best not to apply them woodenly but to use them as provocations for interrogating a ritual: What is the tenor of decorum as played out in this ritual? Where do competition and contention happen in this liturgy? The scheme implies that scholars should ask motivational questions: Why are these ritual actors doing what they are doing? Motives are usually mixed. One motive for a ritual act might be that participants are hardwired for it; they have inherited tendencies to act in such a manner. However, they might also engage in a ritual action because an authority figure expects them to. The chart should not become a prison. It is a prod: Think about this, consider that. However neat the boxed-in modes appear on the page, the scheme is still makeshift, even ramshackle, so I don’t glibly apply the modes. I edit and tinker with them, inviting you to do the same; either that or invent your own. When thinking modally starts to shut down my research process, I pop open some portion of it into a laundry list. For instance, stymied when trying to describe the mood of a particular fiesta event, I began asking about the possible moods of a ritual (list 7). List 7. Ritual Moods

• polite, civil, courteous • celebrative, expansive, exuberant, excessive, festive, ludic

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• • • • • • • • • • •

creative, imaginative solemn, dignified, reverent, respectful mysterious, awesome reflective, thoughtful anxious, ambivalent, resigned assertive, contentious, resistant, manipulative, devious ostentatious, flamboyant indifferent, routinized, flat, matter-of-fact expectant, hopeful sad, mournful, pensive warm, friendly, cozy

Like most lists, this one is a set of reminders, as well as an invitation to add your own or create another.333 Lists are good for playing out possibilities, but as soon as we turn to a specific ritual, we are forced to shrink the list, picking, choosing, and refining: This moment in the ritual was designed to be reflective, and that one, mournful. Then, we are forced to ask, did either moment do what it was designed to do? Was it really reflective, or merely flat? I have played the same kind of game with the verbs by asking two questions: What have ritualists told me they are doing? What are the most typical ritual actions? Together, the two questions generated the set of ritual actions in list 8.

List 8. Ritual Actions

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

worshipping, venerating, praising remembering, commemorating, making something or someone present celebrating, being grateful, thanking paying dues/debts, offering, carrying out duties exchanging, gift-giving, giving, receiving being good, doing good cleansing, purifying, protecting, banishing feasting, fasting, sacrificing marking transitions, marking time marking space, sanctifying, consecrating making things, using things praying, contacting, being receptive to, communicating with, becoming aligned with, becoming attuned to causing, effecting, influencing becoming one with, embodying, learning, practicing competing, empowering, making, doing ordering, putting things in their proper places showing, displaying

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• telling, reciting, preaching, reading • pretending, playing, exaggerating, inverting Making this list was not quite the fool’s errand of trying to list all the rituals in the world. For one thing, even if it is long, it is not infinite. For another, the simple verb forms might be a better basis for classifying rituals than the existing scholarly terminology. Anyway, the exercise is just an exercise, and it necessarily comes to a halt when faced with a specific example. What were the Hopis doing? Captain John Bourke reported that participants in a dark sequestered space were herding snakes with feathers. Is “herding” the right verb? Why not “tickling”? Whose verb is it? According to Bourke, the Hopis were thereby controlling evil. So Bourke’s implied verb phrase is something like “controlling evil by herding.” Further ethnographic research by Jesse Fewkes made it more likely that Hopis would have said something more like “bringing rain by treating our ancestors with respect.” This verbal construction appears nowhere on my laundry list. One could add it, but that is not the point. The point is rather to ask in the simplest, most direct terms: What is going on here? What are they doing? What do they think they are doing? What do they say they are doing? And what do I think and say about what they are doing? The simplest questions precipitate the most nuanced answers.

Comparing Rituals The modes scheme is not a substitute for a taxonomy but rather a device for mining a rite. Even so, the third column implies clumping and clustering, a taxonomic activity. A major reason for creating taxonomies is comparison and contrast, that is, identifying meaningful similarities, variants, and differences. Without comparing and contrasting examples, ritual studies scholars would quickly run out of something to talk about.334 If I can only talk about the one ritual I’ve studied carefully, and you can only do likewise, no conversation is possible. In the absence of a taxonomy, we can take another tack: setting rituals alongside one another. By comparing and contrasting two of them, maybe it is possible to spark the slow process of building a range of examples that can lead to grounded generalizations. Since I assisted Barry Stephenson in Wittenberg, and he assisted me in Santa Fe, and both of us were studying festivals, we brainstormed similarities of the two festivals (list 9). List 9. Similarities of the Santa Fe Fiesta and the Wittenberg Lutherfest

• Both are festivals sponsored by the city for residents of the region. • Tourism, commerce, trade, sales, and shopping are important to both cities’ economies.

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• The old central plazas of Santa Fe and Wittenberg were designed as spaces for public ritual. • Each festival exhibits both cooperation and tension between religious and civic authorities. • Each festival claims foundational historical events as reasons for being. • In the interest of maintaining and building local identities, both festivals choose local residents to play central historical figures. • Heroic males (Diego de Vargas and Martin Luther) paired with supportive females (the Fiesta Queen and Katrina von Bora) perform regal gestures, even though none of the characters is a king or queen. • The festivals are a mix of ritualistic and performative genres: liturgies, civil ceremonies, parades, processions, theater, dance, art, sculpture, architecture, and music. • Walking, wandering, watching, eating, drinking, indulging are staples in both festivals. • Both festivals have a dark side. In Santa Fe: the two conquests, Hispanic, then Anglo. In Wittenberg: German nationalism, imperialism, fascism, and the Holocaust. • Both sides have a website: http://www.santafefiesta.org/ and http://www. lutherhochzeit.de/ After a brief exercise in similarity-hunting, we charted some apparent differences (table 7.2), later naming the categories we had used for our comparison. In addition to charting contrasts and comparisons, Barry Stephenson and I edited parallel video montages. My Sights and Sounds of the Santa Fe Fiesta was designed not only to introduce readers to the fiesta but to create a visual and auditory parallel to his montage in Performing the Reformation.335 Ad hoc comparisons and contrasts such as these can be an effective but preliminary way to provoke scholarly discussion, but a more sophisticated comparison could be generated using the modes (Table 7.1) as axes of comparison. The ad hoc tactic leaves unanswered some key questions: Theoretically considered, what is the status of our makeshift matrix? When comparing rituals, festivals, and public events, what exactly should we be comparing? The declared aims of participants? Functions as determined by scholars? How many examples would we need to arrive at conclusive generalizations? What does such charting not tell us, or, worse, obscure? What examples provided by other scholars would fit most easily alongside ours? Which examples would not fit or would imply a revision of the matrix in the left column?

Table 7.2. The Santa Fe Fiesta Contrasted with Wittenberg’s Lutherfest

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Category

Santa Fe Fiesta, New Mexico, USA

Lutherfest, Wittenberg, Germany

1 Historical reference

Refers to 1692 Links to Counterreformation

Refers to 1521 Links to Reformation

2 Origins

Late nineteenth century

Late twentieth century

3 Temporal orientation

Contemporary continuity with tradition

Renewal through return (“medieval,” “Renaissance”); revitalization of lost traditions

4 Geographical location

Santa Fe, USA; New Mexico as “Land of Enchantment”

Wittenberg, Germany, UNESCO heritage and culture site

5 Ethos

To display Santa Fe as “the City Different”

To make Wittenberg a “Renaissance city,” a “capital of culture”

6 Ethnicity

Pronounced ethnic overtones: Native/Hispanic/ Anglo Emphasis on Spanish (not Mexican) descent

Muted ethnic overtones Intra-Lutheran (German vs. American; liberal vs. evangelical) tensions “The presence of an absence”: Wittenberg’s Jews

7 Religious sources

Predominantly Catholic; being a Catholic is required for playing certain roles

Predominantly Protestant; non-Catholics dress up as Catholic nuns

8 Central characters

Don Diego de Vargas, used as an ideological center, has lines in the Entrada, a public performance

Martin Luther, used as an occasion, has no lines in public, only in Table Talk plays

Table 7.2. (Continued)

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9 Commercial use of central characters

De Vargas is not used to sell commodities

Luther is used to sell commodities, e.g., beer, T-shirts

10 Scope

Main figure is of regional significance

Main figure is of international significance

11 Audio-Visual documentation

No feature films about central figure or event

Several feature films about central figure and event

12 Supporting characters

The Fiesta Queen has no historical counterpart; she symbolizes virginity

Katie, Luther’s wife, has a historical counterpart; symbolizes loss of virginity and the value of childbearing. (Sometimes she is made to play out the role “Behind every good man stands a good woman.”)

13 Key events

Several: Entrada, masses, Zozobra, parades

Two: parade, cake-cutting

14 Major issues

Peace/conflict; cooperation/violence; festival as renewal of triethnic harmony

Promises and prospects of German reunification; festival as tool for cultural and economic renewal

15 Countervailing activities

Melodrama, letters to the editor, occasional boycotts

Graffiti, as well as mild forms of carnival-like satire and inversion

16 Photographic and cinematic documentation

Heavily photographed but less of a media event. No official films produced.

Heavily photographed and more of a media event. Official films produced.

17 Accessibility to research

Has recently become difficult to access for research

Usually open access for research

8

Mapping Ritual

At the beginning of courses on ritual, I lure students out by handing them this table (table 8.1) with the far right column left empty and asking them to fill it out.336 In this version I’ve laid in some typical responses.

Table 8.1. A ritual is not . . . A ritual is not a

party

because

parties are mainly about having a good time.

A ritual is not a

play

because

plays are make-believe rather than believed.

A ritual is not a

performance

because

performances are more audience oriented, and they aren’t really believed in.

A ritual is not a

game

because

games are more competitive, so there are winners and losers.

A ritual is not a

spectacle

because

rituals are not about showing or being seen.

A ritual is not a

habit

because

rituals are thoughtful and meaningful rather than mindless.

The aim of the exercise is to uncover assumptions about ritual’s place on students’ cultural maps.337 Where is ritual situated in relation to other activities with which you might compare it? Usually they find it easier to specify ritual’s differences from other activities than to identify the similarities. They find this second exercise (table 8.2) more difficult than the first, but it helps them understand that genres of action can bleed into one another.

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Table 8.2. A ritual is like . . . A ritual is like a party

insofar as both

can be fun if the ritual is a celebration.

A ritual is like a play

insofar as both

are not about practical results.

A ritual is like a performance

insofar as both

allow people to see other people act.

A ritual is like a game

insofar as both

have rules and spatial boundaries.

A ritual is like a spectacle

insofar as both

can be awesome to watch.

A ritual is like a habit

insofar as both

are done regularly without much thought.

Asked to identify cultural domains, students quickly name a few without much hesitation: politics, economics, entertainment, the arts, education, religion . . .338 Ritual is not usually on the list, because it is not perceived as a cultural domain.339 Rather, it is an activity or a genre of action that most students consider as belonging to the domain of religion. With a little coaxing and a few examples they can be convinced that religion doesn’t own ritual and that rituals may appear in, or crosscut, several domains. One could do something similar with music, a cultural domain more important to students than ritual. Like ritual, music shows up in many places—concerts, shopping malls, car radios, religious institutions, homes—so conceiving of it as a single, habitable space makes it seem one-dimensional and static. But thinking of music solely as a kind of performance event makes it seem too momentary and ethereal. Whether or not ritual or music is a cultural domain, while rites are being enacted, they take up literal space. People singing, dancing, and orating require places to perform. Because people and their stuff take up space, so do rituals. It is less obvious that rituals also occupy cultural “space.” Even though ritual is not a named domain in the way that religion or politics is, rituals jostle for people’s attention and resources. As an exercise, it can be revealing to calculate the number of square meters, work hours, or dollars required for a year’s worth of ritual activity. Students list weddings, funerals, Halloween, Christmas, Hanukkah, or Ramadan, domestic celebrations, civic holidays, and occasionally courtroom formalities. The list varies from individual to individual, and there are debates about what to put on or leave off. Even so, the exercise shows that, although ritual may not be on most folk’s list of cultural domains, it nevertheless occupies cultural space and therefore might be mapped as if it were a domain. Mapped out, ritual would appear “next to” and “far away from” other cultural domains. Even though all domain-mapping is history- and culture-bound, a richer sense of ritual’s cultural entanglements can emerge from mapping ritual’s relations to other domains or activities.

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Ritual and Sport Popularly, sport is considered secular and competitive, having little in common with theater and even less to do with ritual and religion. But sport has historical, even prehistoric, connections with all three. Even though archaeological and historical evidence can be ambiguous, few doubt that ancient sport was fundamentally ritualistic and thoroughly religious. The most widely cited examples are Greek, but there are many others as well: Sumerian, Egyptian, Chinese, medieval European, Aztec, and Cherokee. In English the best-known and most widely cited scholarly book on sport is Allen Guttmann’s From Ritual to Record.340 He shows how sport developed from an ancient preoccupation with religious ritual to a modern obsession with record-keeping and record-breaking. His argument, a variation of ideas articulated by Max Weber and Talcott Parsons, identifies the set of qualities that mark modern sport: secularism, equality of opportunity (in the conditions and rules of competition), specialization of roles, rationalization (means-end, or practical, reasoning), bureaucratic organization, quantification (comparison and measurement), and the quest to set or break records.341 For Guttmann, these features together differentiate “primitive, ancient, and medieval” sports from modern ones, which are consonant with a capitalistic and industrial way of life. He thinks that pervasive Euroamerican secularism leads scholars to underestimate the importance of ritual to premodern societies. Although he does not explicitly present a profile of premodern sport, one can infer from his writings that it was religious and ritualistic (sacred rather than secular), exclusive (open to certain kinds of people and not others, for example, slaves), less specialized (fewer people dubbed athletes, and athletes less likely to play only one sport or one position in one sport), traditional (rules not a deliberate invention or means to an end but rather an expression of cumulative practice), governed by priests or other ritual adepts, little interested in measurement, and prone to interpret winning as an expression of divine will or fate rather than as evidence of progress. As Guttmann discusses the ritual/record, ancient/modern typology, it is not quite as rigidly polar or doggedly linear as it sounds. Dissenting from the German sport theorist Carl Diem, who regarded all of ancient life as ritualistic and religious, Guttmann is aware of exceptions. In the ancient world there were nonreligious activities—children’s play, for example. Likewise, in today’s sports world there are religious elements such as prayers; they appear not only among Apaches and Zulus but also in secular societies. Medieval sport, he says, was less, not more, specialized than Roman sport. Since the historical shift “from ritual to record” has not been strictly unilinear, Guttmann’s argument is historically qualified rather than statically dualistic. He does not claim that sacredly ritualized sport has been

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entirely displaced by thoroughly quantified sport. He is describing emphases, not absolutes. Having acknowledged the existence of exceptions, Guttmann does not, however, concede that calling the Olympics a secular religion or speaking of baseball, football, and basketball as a “holy Trinity” overcomes the rift between the sacred and the secular.342 The addition of a few evangelical prayers before American football games does not change the basic situation: There is . . . a fundamental difference between obligatory pregame lockerroom prayers and the worship of the gods by means of an athletic festival. For the Jicarilla Apache running between the circles of the sun and the moon or the Athenian youth racing in the stadium built above the sacred way at Delphi, the contest was in itself a religious act. For most contemporary athletes, even for those who ask for divine assistance in the game, the contest is a secular event. The Sermon on the Mount does not interfere with hard blocking and determined tackling. Religion remains on the sidelines.343 Although Guttmann synthesizes much of the previous scholarship and illustrates his thesis both cross-culturally and historically, his claims about the ritualistic nature of ancient sport are not entirely original. Others held variations of it before him. In 1907, Stewart Culin, for example, conducted a massive but never finished study of Native American games and concluded that they were played “ceremonially, as pleasing to the gods, with the object of securing fertility, causing rain, giving and prolonging life, and expelling demons, or curing sickness.”344 A possible counterargument to Guttmann’s thesis is that sport remains steadfastly ritualistic. In The Joy of Sports theologian Michael Novak interprets sports in the United States as liturgies without creeds, ritual expressions of American civil religion.345 Although Novak does not restrict himself to the rhetoric of ritual—he includes as well that of religion and myth—the ceremonial aspects of sport occupy a major place in his argument: Sports owe more to the ritual grammar of religion than to the laws and forms of entertainment. Millions become involved in the rituals of sport to a depth of seriousness never elicited by entertainment. Millions do not care about comedians, or variety shows, or films, or books—to these they turn for diversion. But they are deeply affected by participation in the ritual struggle of a football game.346 Culture is built on cult. Accordingly, a religion begins with ceremonies. At these ceremonies, a few surrogates perform for all. They need not believe what they are doing. As professionals, they may perform so often that they have lost all religious instinct; they may have less faith than any of the

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participants. In the official ceremonies, sacred vestments are employed and rituals are prescribed. Customs develop. Actions are highly formalized. Right ways and wrong ways are plainly marked out; illicit behaviors are distinguished from licit ones. Professional watchdogs supervise formal correctness.347 Waxing polemical against an obsessive work ethic, Novak advances a play ethic— play is action engaged in for its own sake—and in so doing he infers the ethics and metaphysics of various sports popular in the 1970s, the decade in which he wrote The Joy of Sports. Baseball, he says, is a mirror of white Anglo-American myth and rural Protestant culture. Not driven by the clock and played in a space dominated by the actions of individuals, baseball games epitomize the aspiration for precision and fair play. By contrast, basketball is dominated by African American myth and ritual. The game, he says, is collective, bodily, full of feigning and sideways moves: “Basketball is jazz: improvisatory, free, individualistic, corporate, sweaty, fast, exulting, screeching, torrid, explosive, exquisitely designed for letting first the trumpet, then the sax, then the drummer, then the trombonist soar away in virtuoso excellence.”348 Stereotyping and racism threaten some of Novak’s descriptions, a worrisome feature that a nuanced historical perspective on the development of the various sports might weed out. But his central claim is less about the link between sports and ethnicity than about the values and worldviews encoded in various kinds of sport ritualization. Novak’s description of football is less ethnically specific than his depiction of basketball, and he exposes football’s gender preoccupation, a concern that the next generation of feminist scholars takes up. In football he finds ceremonies of macho masculinity that consolidate players into businesslike organizations deployed in the service of force. In football, the “bond of brotherhood” reaches its apex. Twenty-five years after Novak’s The Joy of Sports, Varda Burstyn develops this theme more fully and convincingly in The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics, and the Culture of Sport.349 Her critique of the “sport nexus,” or sport-media complex, is reminiscent of treatments of the military-industrial complex. Like Novak, she argues that contemporary sport, most obviously football, amounts to the ritualization of manhood.350 Like Guttmann, she notices the alliance between capitalism and sport, but she also discovers an entrenched gender bias that he largely overlooked. Like Novak, she finds contemporary sport to be just as ritualized as ancient sport. In her view, contemporary sports are initiatory rituals dedicated to the cult of the warrior, with its claim to coercive entitlement. Sport’s dependence on myth and ritual, Burstyn argues, enables its values to “soak through the membrane of critical consciousness.”351 She does not believe that contemporary people feel compelled to choose between secularization and ritual. Instead, sport is a secular sacrament, a ritual activity in service of the myth of hypermasculinity.

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A myth is not a falsehood but a partial truth selected to emphasize distinct political values and to garner support for a specific distribution of power. The sports industry generates a worldview in which the athlete is a dominant, living symbol of the values of this mythology. “The rites of men,” she argues, “condition the rights of men, and hence the culture of sport influences broader political consciousness and capabilities. The rites of sport create value-bearing mythologies around particular kinds of heroic figures: large, strong, often violent, record-setting champions.”352 So far we have considered scholars whose view of ritual-sport relations either sets the two kinds of action into a historical sequence or equates them, as if they were one and the same thing. John MacAloon’s treatment of Olympics ritual is more complex. He has written a history of the modern Olympics as well as formulated a theory that construes the Olympics as a “ramified performance type,” a set of nested genres with each type having its own metamessage: “All statements within this frame are . . .” (see figure 8.1). As a result, ritual does not sit alongside sport with a border dividing the two. Rather, ritual, festival, and game are “contained” by spectacle, the largest of the Chinese boxes.353 The creativity of MacAloon’s theory lies less in his genre definitions than in how he understands the relations among them. They do not merely sit alongside one another but operate inside and through each another.354 The metaphoric shift from “beside” to “within” is significant. Like Richard Schechner’s “braid,” MacAloon’s “nested” boxes help us reflect in a more nuanced way about the way rituals can interact with their contexts.

Spectacle: All statements within this frame are grandiloquent and alluring but merit suspicion. Festival: All statements within this frame are subjects of joy and happiness. Ritual: All statements within this frame are true and represent the most serious things. Game: All statements within this frame are untrue: We are the same; we are different. We respect each other; we disparage each other. Truth: We respect each other because we are the same in our differences.

Figure 8.1. Nested Genres of the Olympic Performance System by John MacAloon Source: John J. MacAloon, “Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies,” in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984), 258, fig. 251.

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Ritual and Music Music is an activity or domain that, although it displays close kinship ties with ritual, has rarely been theorized in relation to it. Since songs, chants, and instrumental music are a common feature of ritual events, it is stating the obvious to say that music is a component of ritual. More important is mapping their relative cultural placements. Almost no one claims ritual is musical in the same way they claim ritual is dramatic or ritual is performance.355 One reason the ritual-music relation has hardly been theorized is that many who write about ritual lack a theoretical and historical knowledge of music. In addition, because instrumental music does not appear to have wordlike, or symbolic, meaning, ritual studies scholars find it difficult to discuss. After saying, for instance, that rituals have rhythm or patterns, where do you go? Plays are easier to compare with rituals because most rituals, like most plays, involve words, sometimes in the form of scripts, and scholars are accustomed to words. If they can’t comment on the postures and gestures, they can always resort to the words—myths, theologies, or ritual texts—that accompany many rituals. Religious traditions vary in their carrying capacity for music. Every tradition has its tacit and explicit canons, rendering some styles of music worthy and others unworthy of inclusion in worship. Few, if any, traditions exclude all forms of music. In some there is a religion/music divide. In others, there is little or no separation. In early Christianity, for example, vocal music, or song, was praised as spiritual, while instrumental music was excluded as pagan.356 In some periods of its history the Christian church feared the emotional power of music almost as much as it did that of theater. Swiss church reformer Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) allowed simple chanting but worried about congregational singing. He achieved considerable notoriety for wanting to get rid of Geneva’s pipe organs. In Burmese Buddhism music is disallowed, but chant, because it is defined as prayer rather than music, is allowed. The distinction is similar to that made in some African American Baptist churches, where dancing is prohibited while movement in the spirit is actively fostered. Since so few scholars have theorized the ritual dimensions of music, it is worth tracking one who has. Christopher Small has spent much of his scholarly career arguing that a classical European symphony concert is a musical ceremony. For him a classical music performance is a ritual, and the history of European music is a “mythological landscape.” In the Euroamerican West masterpieces are “immortal,” and the lives of composers, like the lives of characters in operatic works, are centers of mythmaking activity. The makers of music are themselves both heroes and priests in the magical-ceremonial activity of preserving and transmitting masterpieces. Small contrasts classical European music with African and African American music. We are used to thinking of African music as ritualistic, at least in its origins. Small claims that the European musical performance tradition is no less ritualistic. The difference is not between ritual and nonritual. Rather, it is between the values

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each tradition ritualizes. Like Durkheim, Small treats ritual as organized group activity in which a society reflects on, performs, and venerates itself. Ritual is not only a mirror of how things are but also of how they ought to be. To some extent a musical performance reflects the world, but more importantly, it articulates an ideal, longed-for cosmos where proper relationships are “affirmed, explored, and celebrated.”357 The idealized world enacted in a rite not only displays that world, but also helps bring that world into existence. A classical music performance is a ritual that not only celebrates the values of the middle and upper classes but helps define and make those classes. Small writes several variants of his definition of ritual: • “the acting out of desired relationships and thus of identity.”358 • “[an] activity in which the identity and the values of the members of a group are explored, affirmed and celebrated.”359 • “an action which dramatizes and re-enacts the shared mythology of a social group.”360 • “a form of organized behavior in which humans use the language of gesture, or paralanguage, to affirm, to explore and to celebrate their ideas of how the relationships of the cosmos (or a part of it), operate, and thus of how they themselves should relate to it and to one another. Through their gestures, those taking part in the ritual act articulate relationships among themselves that model the relationships of their world as they imagine them to be and as they think (or feel) that they ought to be.”361 Like some who try to avoid reification by speaking of “ritualization” rather than “ritual,” Small talks about “musicking” rather than “music.” He wants to examine the whole process rather than just the product.362 Like many contemporary performance studies scholars, he resists abstracting music from the event of its performance. As a social event, musicking is an expression of a musical culture and musical tradition. “First came performance,” says Small.363 Whether speaking historically or phenomenologically, he locates the priority of musicking in the same place—not the score, not the genre, not even the conductor, but the performance. Everything serves the performance and not the other way around. However, Small argues, among classical concert musicians one became preeminent: the conductor. Small compares him (the dated pronouns are always masculine) to a ceremonial head of state. On stage he is an autocrat, even though behind the scenes, others—the manager, for instance—may pull the strings of power. The conductor’s appearance on the platform has brought the event into focus. His power over the performance and over the rehearsals that have preceded it appears all but absolute. His authority comes from his control of the score lying open on the desk before him, which he alone among the

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musicians sees and has the power to interpret. He is a larger-than-life, even heroic figure who, even with his back to the audience, dominates them into stillness while with facial expressions and gestures of his hands he imposes his will on the sophisticated and often bored or stressed professional musicians before him, galvanizing them into life and guiding and shaping their performance.364 The conductor’s control is as near to absolute as is humanly possible. During performance, his presence puts an end to conflict, randomness, and chaos. He is a performer positioned outside, but central to, the semicircle of performing musicians. Whereas in jazz, the leader’s authority is negotiated from within the group, in a symphony orchestra, the conductor imposes authority from outside. Small believes the practice of having a leader who stands outside the circle of performing musicians and who himself makes no musical sound is an anomaly in world of music, one that first arose in the Renaissance church.365 Through him unity is achieved and then communicated to an audience. He embodies the audience’s social dream by resolving conflicts through carefully controlled passion and almost unlimited power over the musical performance. Small compares conductors who enter into scores with shamans who mysteriously journey into other words to animate or retrieve spirits. The conductor channels a deceased composer whose vision of sonic order must be rendered present and powerful.366 Despite the best intentions of performers, the social relationships among them are not in perfect harmony. Wrangling, bitterness, and argument may have surfaced just before the concert, or it will emerge after the concert ends, so the performed musical perfection is in the subjunctive. The performance is a semblance of social harmony that lets an audience momentarily see and hear how things are ideally. For such pronounced unity to be possible, the freedom of individual musicians to improvise must be curbed. Small insists that however much listeners may be moved by witnessing or otherwise participating in a European classical music concert, they are not invited into it. They are there to contemplate it at a distance, from the outside. They do not help construct or complete the performance by, say, dancing to the music. Instead, they contemplate the movement of sounds toward their resolution into a unified whole. Small admits that audiences in other cultures sometimes simply listen, and some of Mozart’s audiences expressed appreciation or disdain during performances, not only at the end of them, but the detached, contemplative listening becomes, in the classical concert, a dominant feature and purpose of performance. Audiences did not always behave as they do now. The presumption of a sedate, restrained, receptive audience developed through time. For most of the world’s history and in most of the world’s cultures, performers and audience have been members of the same community, but in the late seventeenth century, in emerging mercantile society, tickets began to be sold to anyone who could afford them. Audiences became

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gatherings of strangers. Maybe a kinship of sensibility was present, but there was no actual, organic community in the musical gatherings. In contemporary classical music concerts as portrayed by Small listeners sit together, but they are essentially alone. How they relate to others is incidental, secondary to the definition of the event. Musicians can count on having a quiet, disciplined audience, most of whom know how to arrive on time, sit still, and render applause when it is due. Although audience members may attend in order to see and be seen, they also expect their privacy to be respected; unviolated privacy is an essential condition of their enjoyment. The same is true of audience-performer relations. Performers leave by a different door. So their interaction is carefully restricted to the musical performance itself. “Great Composers,” argues Small, are the sources of classical music. For the average music lover, the history of music, which includes bits and pieces of composers’ lives along with “immortal masterpieces,” constitutes a “mythological landscape.”367 Music lovers owe them fealty. Small blames composers and musicologists for treating musical scores as if they were sacred texts, eternally unchanging sources to which aficionados are obliged to return.368 Small compares scores to construction toys such as Meccanos or Legos. The very nature of their construction, size, and shape imposes limits on what one can built, but within those limits many things are—or should be—possible. In Small’s account, although there are living composers, those with the most power to shape human experience and imagination are both dead and few. The canonical composers, like the canonical books of the Bible, appeared on the scene in a relatively short timespan from Mozart to Mahler, between 1756 and 1911—a period of about 150 years. By virtue of their performatively evoked presence, the magisterial perfection of the Great Composers renders them paradigms of elite culture to whom ritual deference is owed. The barbs of historical or biographical criticism bounce off them as surely as wooden arrows glance off steel armor. Small is sometimes descriptive, at other times prescriptive or even polemical. When he insists that musical performance is for performers and listeners, he really means that it ought to be.369 Scores should be treated as modules with which to play and build. Small’s obvious preference is for jazz rather than the European symphony. His own preferred way of ritualizing is predicated on mutability and improvisation. Trying to shatter hagiographical attitudes toward the Great Composers—Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven—Small shows that none of them was solely dependent on notation; they were adept at improvisation and “nonliterate” performance.370 He does not argue against musical literacy but insists that a healthy tradition of literate composition depends on the existence of a parallel, nonliterate musical tradition. When there is no musical text to prescribe music making, a piece can go on changing, since there is no “authentic” version against which all others should be measured. In an improvisational ethos the distinctions between composing, rehearsing, and performing are much more fluid and permeable. In a nonliterate tradition,

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music can even die, making room for other creative works. There are other options besides jazz and classical symphonies, but Small says little about them. Those who perform and attend classical music concerts may say their purpose is to enjoy classical musical works, but Small, the interpreter, thinks he spies a subtext, a function not easily recognized or admitted. Classical music performance does not exist only in order to present musical works. Rather, musical works exist to “make possible the performance that forms the center of the event.”371 This way of putting it sounds less like it flies in the face of common sense if we assume a distinction between purpose and function. Although the terminology here is mine, not Small’s, he systematically separates what music makers say about their purposes from what he thinks the actual function of musicking is. So, to keep things clear, I treat as a purpose any aim that is intentional, explicit, and articulated, whereas a function is unintentional, tacit, or preconscious. Whereas purposes are tendered by participants, functions are inferred by observers. Regardless of the originating purpose of an artist, the function of a piece or a tradition of music may change. Even though Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony struck fear in local authorities and had a powerful vision behind it, its performance today, says Small, is confirmatory.372 It sends a message of reassurance rather than of danger or subversion; it “belongs to the authorities,” functioning as an informal European anthem. The emergence of the concert critic occurred in the nineteenth century and coincided not only with the development of a mercantile society but also with a decline in amateur music and rise in musical professionalism. The buying public, now less likely to be musically engaged at home, required a consumer’s guide to inform its shopping for musical events elsewhere. In other eras, kings or bishops dictated musical taste. In other cultures—among the Ewe of Ghana, for instance—people danced their criticism.373 Even though Small pays little attention to journalistic and scholarly music criticism, he depicts the classical music scene itself as critical and evaluative. The very notion of a classic implies a hierarchy of worth and a set of standards invoked to maintain it. Classics, it seems, are as rare as orchids or diamonds. Their very scarcity enhances their worth, and because they are invaluable, other kinds of music are worth less. Because Small himself does not buy into the symphony scene, he notices how often a tradition that claims to be both discerning and critical actually generates something akin to religious advertising. He cites one of his favorite New York Times ads for a series of Beethoven concerts: The greatest music of the greatest composer the world has known, distilled into a rare and unforgettable experience for each privileged listener by the supreme mastery of the world’s greatest string quartet. . . . The whole-souled dedication and devotion to the master’s work of this unique ensemble has earned clamorous ovations and paeans of press praise in performance after performance the world over. . . . One of the rare unforgettable experiences

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of a lifetime, a spiritual renewal for those who return year after year, an indescribable revelation for anyone encountering this marvelous music for the first time.374 You don’t have to stretch your imagination to hear in this invitation notes that are distinctly religious. The consumer who buys into it is no less than a believer, practitioner, or convert. We are used to imagining fictive worlds and works of art spatially, as edifices one approaches from the outside and then enters. Small does as well, but he goes further. The musical world is not only inside the concert hall but also outside, in the world that surrounds the concert hall. Traffic across the threshold separating made-up and real runs both ways, and the threshold is permeable. The social world of aficionados penetrates the sonic world of the concert hall, and the sonic world reverberates into the social world of the musicians and the audience. Resisting this hegemony, Christopher Small poses a counter-worldview: “If to music is to explore, affirm and celebrate one’s link with the great pattern which connects the whole living world, then all musicking is serious musicking.”375 Espousing a less hierarchical musical terrain, he would dethrone classical music, not so it disappears but so it controls less of the world’s turf. He wants it to have legitimate but circumscribed cultural space. A reader can hear in Small’s critique the voice of the music educator. In defense of the world’s children and music students, as well as the vast array of the world’s ethnicities, he wants to soften judging and standard-setting for the sake of universal participation. He will have none of a musical culture in which teachers serve as agents for discovering potential, talented professionals. If Small is going to make judgments about the best music, he is going to look for the best musicking, which is to say, the richest performance event. “If the function of musicking is to explore, affirm, and celebrate the concepts of ideal relationships of those taking part, then the best performance must be one that empowers all the participants to do this most comprehensively, subtly and clearly, at whatever level of technical accomplishment the performers have attained.”376 The obvious strengths of Christopher Small’s treatment of the ritual dimensions of classical Euroamerican symphony concerts is that it forces one to question too clean a division between cultural domains—religious ritual, on the one hand, and secular music, on the other. But there are obvious weaknesses as well. One can’t help sensing in Small’s writing a preference for African musical culture over European musical culture. He is one of the few theorist-educators to overtly declare that he does not like the classical tradition. Although this perspective also gives his writing an edge, his tone would lead critics to discount his arguments. There is nothing wrong with preferring the one over the other, but when comparisons begin to sound like caricatures, they lose some of their power to convince. Another issue has to do with method. Small plays and teaches music. Undoubtedly, he attends concerts too. But how does he know that hearing classical music models

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behavior outside the concert hall? How does he arrive at the conclusion that concertgoers are exploring a cosmos? And that this cosmos buttresses the values he says it does? What is his evidence, and how would he, or we, know if he were wrong? He presents readers with impressions grounded in his own experience, and his view of ritual’s function is grounded in conventional Durkheimian ritual theory. But impressions and theories are not data. Small reports no systematic observations or interviews that might call his convictions into question. The lack of an ethnographic basis does not disprove his claims, but their absence does mean that they are suggestively posed rather than definitively demonstrated. A third reservation concerns his relatively ahistorical presentation. He avoids the typologizing trap of merely setting ritual and musical performance into polar opposition, but he does not avoid the summarizing picture, the synchronic, synthetic depiction lifted out of the flow of historical change. It would not be fair to demand of him that he produce a cultural history, since that is not his aim, and he does sometimes set descriptions in a brief historical context, but in general his composites and abstractions do not allow readers to see moments in which one kind of (rather than “the”) classical music concert is displaced by another variant. He shows us what he considers the rule, the dominant performance pattern, but rarely does he show us the exceptions to the rule.

Ritual and Theater Nervousness about too closely associating ritual with theater has a long history. European Christendom was nervous about it. Actors, like prostitutes, were sometimes excluded from membership in the early church. The medieval church, which for a time tolerated, even nurtured, plays, eventually put players back out on the streets. Actors were deemed unruly, and theatrical performances sometimes provided stiff competition for liturgical ones. This historical divide resulted in a conceptual one. The secularized and pluralistic contemporary European-American West is heir to this expulsion, leading many habitually to segregate ritual and theater. Because they are associated with different social institutions (the synagogue and the Broadway stage, for instance), Western scholars tended to stash them in different mental drawers until the emergence of the Cambridge Myth and Ritual School in the early twentieth century.377 Since then the theater-ritual nexus has been more frequently and more fully explored than that of ritual and any of the other arts. The main proponents of this kind of research have been Erving Goffman, Victor Turner, and Richard Schechner, but since I have examined their treatments of the ritual-drama connection elsewhere,378 I will not do so here. Instead, I will consider David Cole’s The Theatrical Event: A Mythos, a Vocabulary, a Perspective, because Cole systematically explores the elements of performance, and we will soon be considering the elements of ritual.

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Cole uses a set of six categories—script, actor, audience, scene, language, and interpretation—as a grid for comparing theater with shamanism.379 In the 1970s shamanism served as a conceptual hinge swinging between ritual and theater. Shamanism contains both ritualistic and theatrical elements, and it would be difficult to reduce shamanism to the one or the other, or to make one of the dimensions primary and the other secondary. Insistent that his approach is not so much a theory as a mythos, a way of rendering theatrical experience coherent, Cole says he is proposing analogies rather speculating about origins. His aim is not to render theater religious by locating its source in religion but rather to analogize theater with shamanic ritual. Cole thinks the Cambridge School—Jane Harrison, James Frazer, Francis Cornford, Gilbert Murray, Theodor Gaster, and others—compared the wrong kind of ritual with performance. Their mistake was in making seasonal rather than shamanic ritual the key to the comparison, because seasonal rites commemorate by means of mimesis, whereas shamanic rites do so by means of embodiment. For Cole, theater is “an opportunity to experience imaginative life as physical presence.”380 He claims that theater, and only theater, renders imaginative truth physical in the present. He elevates theater above the other arts. The other arts can ask what imagination has to do with the present, but only theater, he asserts, experiments with making presence. Theater, he believes rather imperialistically, acts on behalf of all the arts.381 He never explains why dance and music are less shamanic, less capable of instantiating presence. What exactly is made present? Images (he capitalizes the “I”) from illud tempus, “that other time.” The power of performance to make present Images from that other time is most evident, says Cole, in ritual performance. In it, the other “world” is not merely remembered but re-presented. Cole, borrowing from Mircea Eliade,382 is not so much talking about a past time as about an eternal now, a time beyond time. Cole, it seems, is more willing than Eliade to speak of the other world in a way that equates it, or reduces it, to the human imagination. Both actors and shamans make imaginative journeys to retrieve eternal verities from illud tempus. Actors, like shamans making a spiritual ascent, bring Images here, to audiences. Then, like houngans, shamans become possessed by the Images.383 Journeying and becoming possessed are not two different kinds of spiritual experience but successive phases of the same process. “Rounding” is the name Cole gives to the turn from being a masterful, shamanic explorer to being a mastered, “hounganic” vehicle.384 Just as a shaman retrieves images on behalf of the community from the other world, so actors journey into scripts and into themselves, then return, embodying what is found there. The journey in both cases is outward and inward, and often participants speak of it using metaphors of flying or diving. The result is not so much a message from the other side, says Cole, as a presence conditioned by passage to and return from the other side. Cole says that audiences, whether religious or theatrical, are ambivalent about actors transported from here to there and back again. Line-crossing, whether

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by a witness drawn into the vortex of action or by a participant who transgresses the protective space around observers, is dangerous. The ambivalence that audiences feel toward Images from that other place is easily displaced onto the actor who has ventured there and returned, identified with the Image. Whereas such Images, and the actors embodying them, are objects of reverent attention, they also elicit nervous watchfulness.385 The very fact of a shaman’s separation from the collective is a source of group unification. As the shaman rounds the bend to become houngan, the group becomes regressive, devolving from active to passive. “The conclusion to which we seem driven is that the responses of theater audiences are likely to be characterized by passiveness, ambivalence, and vulnerability.”386 Cole does not attack this passivity. Unlike Jerzy Grotowski and others whose ritualizing of theater led to greater audience participation and even the abolition of audiences altogether, Cole celebrates audience passivity, treating it as essential to the theatrical event. Audience participation, he claims, destroys rather than enhances the theatrical event. “Audiences have not learned to be anywhere near passive enough.”387 Actors and shamans do not teach us to journey; rather, they journey on our behalf. Cole construes stages, backdrop, lighting and other scenic means as revelations of the cosmos traversed by shamanlike actors. Scenic means are sites of epiphany, aids to meditation. In fact, Cole exclaims, “all theater is an apparition at a tomb.”388 Accordingly, theatrical language is hierophantic even when it is not imitating ecstatic speech or meditative contemplation. Cole’s project is not so much a performative approach to ritual as a ritualistic approach to theater, utilizing a specific ritual type, shamanism. Except perhaps for works by the Cambridge School, Cole’s study is one of the most fully developed comparisons. And the comparison is not based on a single feature of either theater or shamanism, so it is more nuanced than similar treatments by other writers. However, Cole’s approach seems more useful in understanding alternative than mainline theaters. It fits Jerzy Grotowski’s Tree of People and Theatre of Sources projects in the Polish forest better than it fits Fiddler on the Roof produced as a Broadway play in New York City. In the final analysis, Cole’s appropriation of the shamanic model is uncritical, not taking into account critiques of Eliade’s paradigm. In addition, Cole tends to slip from comparison and analogy into easy equations. He elides differences—for instance, those between a journey into a script and a journey into a dreamtime or other “shamanland.” That there are similarities I do not doubt, but I also do not doubt that there are important, even profound, differences. Further, journeying is not always by heroic individuals on behalf of communities. Sometimes communities enter trance and are anything but passive.389 Their receptivity (a better term than passivity) eventuates in activity. In short, similarity-hunting should be balanced with difference-gathering; otherwise the temptation to oversimplify and equate is too great.

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Ritual as a Domain There are at least three basic ways of imagining the relation of ritual and theater. In the first one, they are construed as historically, or developmentally, related: Prior to historical times there was an “ur,” or ancient, activity that was holistic in nature.390 Across a long period of time, it fragmented, differentiating into several parts, two of which are ritual and theater. Eventually, theater became a secular activity, and ritual, no longer holistic and integrative, become special, or sacred. Variations on this narrative-argument constituted the view of the Cambridge myth-and-ritual school. → Ritual Ritual-drama (the undifferentiated”ur” activity)

→ → Theater

A second way is analogical: Ritual and theater are from different domains but share certain similarities. This is Cole’s way of conceiving the relation. The problem with it is that if the analogy is strictly maintained, ritual and drama are parallel, not convergent. The relation is like that of parallel play between two children; neither permeates or penetrates the other. If the analogy is forgotten, as sometimes happens with Cole, ritual and theater are too easily equated, as in the following figure. Analogy maintained: Ritual Theater Analogy forgotten:

→ →

Ritual = Theater

A third way is to posit a common matrix: In the present, as in the past, both ritual and drama arise out of the same fundamental source, or sources, called variously social interaction, social drama, or cultural performance. In some circumstances ritual and drama emerge tightly braided; in others, loosely braided or even segregated. Variations of this view are proposed by Goffman, Turner, and Schechner. Ritual and Theater ↑↑(gives rise to) Social Interaction, Social Drama, Cultural Performance The first model is an evocative myth, but there is no convincing historical or archaeological evidence that specific ritual traditions or specific rites developed in this way. Even if there were evidence, it would probably apply to specific cultures, not to all of them. The second model has the virtue of keeping the boundaries clear, but sometimes it slips into completely erasing them. Either way, it provides little sustainable interpretive traction. The third makes sense only with a threefold proviso:

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One should articulate both the similarities and the differences between ritual and theater; one should resist making either party serve the other; and one should allow for both the convergent and parallel interaction of ritual and theater. I treat ritual and theater as two ways of acting, or two kinds of action, alongside other kinds: play, sport, dance, or music. The gerund “acting” emphasizes the processual rather than the static qualities of ritual and theater. It has two connotations: that of doing and that of pretending or playing a role. Compare “She was acting the part of Portia” and “He was acting in good faith.” The first sentence carries the theatrical sense of the term; the second uses it as a synonym for “behaving,” as almost equivalent to “doing.” Unlike “acting,” the noun “action” does not work both ways. We can say, “Her action was done in good faith,” but we do not normally use the word “action” to mean “pretending” or “playing the part of.” The verb “perform” has a duality similar to that of “acting”: “She performed in Aida”; “He performed his jury duties with great integrity.” When either term, “acting” or “performing,” is applied to ritual, especially to religious rites, conceptual trouble can arise. Practitioners hear such usage as impugning their integrity, as if speakers were saying “He was merely performing the (Roman Catholic) Mass” or “She was only acting the part of a loa (a Haitian spirit in Vodoun).” Theorist and theater director Richard Schechner tries to avoid this dilemma by defining performance as the “showing of a doing.” By his definition, both ritual and theater are species of the genus performance. For him, ritual performances emphasize efficacy, whereas theatrical performances highlight entertainment, thus this conceptual hierarchy: Kinds of performance (showings of doings) ritual (emphasizing efficacy) theater (emphasizing entertainment) Schechner’s conceptual move is helpful, but it presents problems for the study of religion. Ritualists don’t usually say their primary intention is to show their doings. More characteristically they say that they are doing and that their doings may, incidentally, be seen or overheard. If one uses the terms “showing” and “doing” carefully, certain rituals—sequestered ones, for instance—would not count as performances at all. To show such rites would be to violate them. Also, certain examples of theater are, in fact, mere showings; they do not really constitute doings, that is, social transformations. When both terms are handled too loosely, rendering all human activity as both showing and doing, Schechner’s terminological distinction loses much of its utility. Schechner’s conceptual move is similar to that of Erving Goffman, for whom performance is “all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some effect on the observers.”391 Both Schechner and Goffman imply that the mark of a

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performance is action in front of others, a showing before an audience.392 Since human beings internalize the expectations of others (in effect, carrying around expectant audiences in their imaginations), performance, by this definition, can occur even without the presence of a literal other. Such a conception of performance is helpful insofar as it leads one to notice the performative dimension of all human activity, but it is not useful in discriminating among cultural domains. In the final analysis, any analytical tool consisting of a single polarity such as Schechner’s efficacy/entertainment dyad may be a handy device for a brief discussion, but it is too blunt for extended or precise use.393 In a chapter called “Magnitudes of Performance” Schechner identifies four performative genres: aesthetic theater, sacred ritual, secular ritual, and social drama.394 He compares and contrasts the differing ways the genres deploy space and time. The resulting chart, replete with examples from around the globe, is a tour de force, hence his hyperbolic reference to it as “a figure for all genres.” Implicitly, the chart’s way of distinguishing aesthetic theater from sacred ritual goes beyond his earlier and simpler entertainment/efficacy dyad. Nevertheless, it still works with only two components, space and time, and therefore does only partial justice to the differences between ritual action and theatrical action. In my view, it is less confusing to use “action” as the parent term and to use a distinctive verb for what ritualists do. When speaking strictly, I prefer to say that ritualists “enact” rituals, whereas actors “perform” plays: Two kinds of action/ways of acting: ritual enactment dramatic performance I still use both phrases, “ritual performance” and “ritual enactment,” depending on what I want to emphasize. For instance, you can say about ritualists that, although they intend to “enact,” they also sometimes also “perform” occasionally or incidentally. You can still hear in “enact” the kinship with “acting,” but the term’s main connotation, “putting into force,” reminds us that there are distinctions between ritual and performance that shouldn’t be occluded. We could go on mapping ritual’s relation to domains other than theater and to activities other than performing. Politics might be next, then geography or economics. If you ask people to name the domains that make up their societies, the answers would vary according to their historical and geographical locations, and respondents may or may not label these units “domains.” In Euroamerican societies we use several terms: private “sector,” public “sphere,” political “arena.” If you ask scholars, their ways of naming cultural domains often resemble the division of universities into departments: art, politics, psychology, business, literature, biology. The situation with ritual studies is similar to that of ritual. It is not a department in most universities, so what is it? A discipline, a major, a program, a field, or a topic?

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As a topic, ritual is studied in several disciplines. As a field, it is the focus of scholars who sometimes gather to collaborate and debate. But there are other ways to imagine ritual studies, for instance, as a small, winding path connecting larger, more fully institutionalized disciplines. I have been playing with ritual as if it were a domain, but also suggesting that rituals crosscut or interconnect domains, making them more like paths than city blocks. Domain maps are conventional agreements, not natural landforms, so their boundaries are constantly being contested and redrawn. Is the Santa Fe Fiesta a cultural domain? I’m guessing that residents and tourists wouldn’t say so, because “domains” sound permanent and mappable. Education, government, religion, art, and business might be on Santa Feans’ domain map, but rituals and festivals would not. Like art exhibits and baseball games, festivals are events, not domains. But the difference between event and domain is relative, and it depends largely on the persistence and visibility of organizations. Government is a domain because there are government offices and officeholders. Religion is a domain because there are religious buildings and named, recognized leaders. However, even if the fiesta is an event, organizations lie behind it: The Fiesta Council persists through most of the year. It has a meeting place, leadership, and minutes. It is part of the domain “not-for-profit, volunteer organizations.” The fiesta is a recurring event that crosscuts domains. So the proper, parallel comparisons would be the fiesta and the inauguration of a new mayor (events) and the Fiesta Council and the city council (organizations). To treat ritual as a domain alongside sport, music, and theater is to play it out as if it had a boundary. In one sense rituals are bounded. They begin and end, and they happen in a place. But even if a ritual can be said to have a boundary, it may be more like a membrane than a wall. A ritual’s “skin” filters input and output. Sometimes the filtering is passive, sometimes active. A ritual’s permeability is controlled by the degree of boundary-maintenance exercised by it or over it. Below or outside this membrane is a ritual’s environment, the social-cultural, historical, and geophysical swirl that conditions, permeates, and interacts with it.395 Treating ritual as if it were a domain, mappable alongside some other kinds of activity into spatially contiguous areas or side-by-side columns, is useful but can make ritual seem flat. The impression of flatness is misleading in the same way thinking of a ritual as unfolding chronologically along a timeline can make us miss a ritual’s recursive loops and curves. Since experiences of depth, or multidimensionality, are widespread among both practitioners and theorists, resting content with a two-dimensional model would have unfortunate consequences. Therefore, we also need to make a three-dimensional move, something like the modes scheme (table 7.1) for excavating the dimensions, or layers, of a ritual that are not immediately apparent on the surface. Although I have been playing out the notion of a domain as if it were a piece of flat land, there are more multidimensional as well as more dynamic connotations.

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Dictionaries define “domain” as a field of action, and interactive fields, like magnetic ones, are neither static nor flat. Ecologically, a domain, characterized by specific kinds of flora, fauna, and climate, spreads up and down as well as out. Legally, a domain, not merely spatial but also political, is a territory governed by a single ruler or government. We could even stay with the mapping metaphor by replacing our flat road maps and columnar spreads with stratigraphic cutaway maps. Ah, now you can “see” the multidimensionality of a ritual by paying attention to the colored layers. Conceptual gardens of delights, laid out neatly with column dividers acting like lawn edgers, inevitably grow wild below the surface. Since rituals go “down” as well as “out,” not everything is visible from a single perspective. Rituals that survive have deep cultural roots reaching down and across to other domains, subverting what may on first glance appear to be impenetrable boundaries. Although ritual seems to have multidimensionality partly because we scholars approach it from the different angles prescribed by various disciplines, it also has depth in itself. Rituals point elsewhere; they defer, hedge, stash, and quote. Almost every ritual, even an utterly ordinary one, has something of the fantastic or impenetrable about it. Whether enacting or studying it, you enter a door that leads to another door, through which you see an image reflected in a mirror reflecting another mirror. One needs the eyes of Alice to navigate the underground terrain of a ritual.

9

Elements of Ritual

Suppose you’ve written a book designed around this single-sentence definition (a worthy exercise but risky venture): In rituals sensorily engaged participants congregate in selected places to bide their time artfully cultivating attitudes conducive to enacting their core values. Let’s boldly imagine that a press has bought into your plan and you’ve hired an artist to paint your kingpin definition into an illustrative cover design; you’ve done your homework and know the press would never pay for such an extravagance. She slogs through your carefully wrought (she does not say “tortured”) prose, making notes and posing questions (see list 10), to help transform your abstraction into an image capable of enticing a reader to pick up, buy, and read, thereby keeping you in the business of thinking and writing.396 List 10. An Artist’s Notes for a Cover Design

• • • • • • • •

Participants: Who is coming? Sensorily engaged: What actions do they perform that might keep their attention? Congregate: What groups form? Who is related to whom? Selected places: Where does the event take place? What is possible in the available space? Biding time: In what time period is the event set? How long does it last? Artfully cultivating attitudes: What is the tone of the event? Which arts contribute to the event? What kind of food, and how much? Conducive to enacting: What do the figures on the cover expect to happen? What are the main activities? Who does what? Who says what? Core values: What matters most in this event? What ritual work needs doing here? What’s peripheral, and what’s “to die for”?

The artist may not think of these as discrete “parts” of the whole scene, and even if she did, she might well design the painting so they overlap and interact. Even so, each aspect of your idea has to be put somewhere in her painting, so she momentarily fractures the whole into its constituent factors so she can artfully recombine them. Why? Because her brain, like yours and mine, depends on part-whole 231

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thinking. Creating, an act of synthesis, requires analysis, the act of pulling apart a thing in search of its constituents. Imagine stretching a piece of fabric to see its threads. What are the “threads” of this ritual? she asks. What is the smallest unit of study or construction? What is the largest unit? What constitutes an entire ritual? Where and when does it begin and end? What are the mediating structures or processes that knit the elements of a ritual into whole cloth? I call the smallest unit of ritual studies research an element, as if a rite can be factored into its constituents. Using a notion from math, you could say ritual is the product, rather than the sum, of these factors. Using an idea from chemistry, you might imagine a periodic table of the elements as long as you realize that ritual elements do not exist in nature; they are cultural or scholarly constructions. Whether for artistic or scholarly reasons, rituals can be disassembled, and they can be cobbled together. Stitched in tandem (imagine a team of horses pulling a two-wheeled buggy), rituals ramify into systems and traditions. Ritual traditions and ritual systems are two sides of the same coin, the same thing conceived from different perspectives, each a corrective to the other. A ritual system is a synchronic, dynamic, interacting whole. A ritual tradition is diachronic, emerging, developing, and declining through time, its duration quite long or very brief. By this division of labor, a ritual is a midlevel unit, from which a student of ritual can shift attention to either small-scale micro units (elements) or large-scale macro units (traditions or systems). Like any whole—a person, a planet, or ecosystem—a ritual exceeds the sum of its parts. Without one of its parts it may not function properly. However much you may worry that “parts” is a mechanistic metaphor, makers and interpreters (not to mention cover designers) find themselves making lists of props and participants, implying that the whole of a ritual includes parts even if people might not agree on how to conceive or name them. Ideally, you as a ritual studies scholar wish to do it all: analyze the parts of a ritual, synthesize a model of one, map its cultural location, lay out its system, trace its tradition, plumb its depths, and explain its dynamics. In actuality, we merely human ritual studies scholars are forced to focus our research by foregrounding some things and backgrounding others. Rendering something as background, or context, actively shapes how you interpret a focalized object. The focal metaphor suggests that a background does not disappear even when it goes out of focus. If you focus on a ritual performance, its constituent elements and the system in which it is embedded may momentarily drop into the background. Rituals are designed assemblages. Something is designed when it is planned and constructed in a way that enables form and dynamic to follow one another. When something is skillfully designed, its form and dynamic are well “attuned”; the interaction is “choreographic.” However, an assemblage is a sculptural technique of composing a group of unrelated, fragmentary, or discarded objects into a work of art. There is a certain randomness or uselessness to an assemblage. Rituals show signs of both, design and assemblage.

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Regardless of whether your intentions are constructive or analytical, ritual studies scholars must eventually think about forms and dynamics, as well as partwhole relations. You can imagine elemental units in a variety of ways. Imagined chemically, combining the two elements hydrogen and oxygen creates water. Imagined mechanically, assembling a box of parts, if they are the right ones and you know what you are doing, can produce a bicycle. But more than assembly is required even for a bike. It is still necessary to pedal your way home, so you need to know how to balance something that rolls on two wheels. If anything goes wrong, you will need to understand how bikes work: The foot, by exerting pressure on the pedals, drives the chainwheel around, which transfers the force to the rear hub, which exerts torque on the rear wheel . . . and since the chain came off . . . In short, you have to take account of not only parts and wholes but also dynamics. Some castigate the notion of an “element” or “part” on the grounds that it mechanizes and reifies ritual.397 A ritual, you are sometimes instructed, is an event, not an object. True enough, but I still find mechanistic metaphors useful, and they show up everywhere, for instance, when a writer refers to rituals as being constructed of “building blocks.”398 Critics may be able to dispense with the “part” metaphor when theorizing, but they are less likely to do so when constructing a ritual. Getting rid of the idea of parts is as difficult as dispensing with the term “ritual” if that’s what you want to study. I continue to use “element” and “part” as theoretically useful metaphors, although they are not to be literalized or died for. Thinking of a ritual as containing elements or as being contained by an ambient culture arises in part because of the Western predilection for container metaphors. I imagine ritual as floating in its matrix, or ambient culture. However, it should be no surprise that stuff “out there,” say, politics and economics, leaks into “here,” the precincts of the ritual you’re studying. The container analogy is imperfect, because culture is not only ambient; it also permeates a ritual. Culture is not only “around” a ritual but also “in” a ritual, forcing us to inquire into a ritual’s permeability as well as its insularity: What kinds of entries and exits are facilitated by this ritual? What kinds are blocked? Since we Westerners think habitually with container metaphors, we should pay attention to what we’re doing. There is nothing natural or universal in conceiving of ritual this way. Even in the postindustrial West, container metaphors have their limits. Container metaphors may help visualize part-whole relationships, but, because they are static, they are less effective at helping us imagine how things move or interact. For this task, we sometimes resort to dynamics metaphors. Dynamics are the rules governing a system of interacting forces. Based on mechanics and physics, dynamics theories construe rituals as having the capacity to move or do things, as exercising power. Another frequently invoked option is organic metaphor, of which there are many variations. The most popular one conceives ritual as a collective “body.” This collective body contains individual bodies connected by . . . something. This something is

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variously named “culture,” “society,” the “collective unconscious,” and so on. Recently this organic whole has been imagined as a spider’s web or an energy network. But it is worth noticing that even organically conceived rituals typically smuggle in container metaphors and analogies from physics and electronics. Like all metaphors, mechanical and organic ones are enlightening in some ways and blinding in others. Even if one prefers to imagine a ritual as an organic, collective body, there is no good reason to avoid also thinking of it mechanically. In fact, playing organic and mechanical conceptions off each other can prevent us from literalizing either. A rite is not a body or spider’s web any more than it is a bike or pressure cooker. Either way, a ritual, if it works, is a set of interconnected processes working in an integrated, dynamic fashion. Although rites are not bikes, for the purpose of ritual construction it can be useful to think of rituals mechanistically.399 Anyone who has ever made or conducted a ritual knows that it implies parts, some tangible, some not: people, bowls, books, words spoken, actions enacted, spaces set up. From parts to a parts list is a short leap, often made. Especially long or complex rituals may require entire books to supplement the flagging memories of participants. If you are a ritual leader, you forget key parts of a ritual at your peril. In addition to costumes made, scripts written, and lighting properly aligned, there are places to be rented and food to be prepared. You effectively exercise ritual leadership by knowing how to make good use of the nuts, bolts, and wheels of ritual. In addition to sheer, countable properties, there are spatial divisions that may require enumerating: entryway, central space, exit; floor, ceiling, walls. Even the temporal phases of a ritual—minimally, a beginning, middle, and end—are modular units of design. Likewise the intangibles: First people should feel welcomed, then included, then challenged, and finally, they should depart feeling joyful (or sad, if it’s a funeral). Even though you might insist that joy is not a thing, if it’s not there, you’ll likely be heard muttering, “Joy was missing” as if it were. Ritual parts, like body and bike parts, are interconnected, and it is not always easy to tell where one ends and the other begins. In bodily systems there are mediating structures—neurons, tendons, and ligaments—so it may be hard to tell exactly where the upper arm and lower arm or the brain and nerves begin and end. They are systematically interconnected. The risk of speaking about a ritual “system” is imagining it as self-sufficient, sealed off from the rest of the world, when, in fact, it is not. Claiming that a ritual is systemic does not mean that it is disconnected from everything else, that everything about it works well, or that everything in it is consistent with every other thing. A bike is a mechanical system, but you can ride one with a flat tire or without fenders. Likewise, rites can work even when some parts are “broken.” Doing an elemental analysis of a ritual serves ritual theory as well as it does ritual construction. One reason for analyzing a ritual into elements is to resist oversimplification. Analysis forces you to notice a ritual’s complexity, to understand how each

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element contributes to, or detracts from, the whole. Planned or analyzed in detail, a ritual unfolds, becoming far more complex than formal definitions might lead you to believe. Another reason for analysis is to assist in noticing ritual transformations: What was an entryway on one occasion is made into an exit on another. What looks at first like the ending of a ceremony becomes, on a second look, a new beginning. What looks linear from one participant’s perspective appears recursive from someone else’s. Tracking the details of a ritual has an effect similar to that of transcribing, word for word, the stories or views of an interviewee. The task is laborious and timeconsuming, but there is no other way to grasp their nuance and texture. Probing a ritual’s elements and dynamics, we uncover subspaces and notice subphases. To treat a ritual as having elements is a formalist tactic, drawing attention to the form, or design, of a ritual, staving off premature leaps to the whole ritual’s social or ecological functions.400 Functional considerations are necessary, but not at the expense of formalist ones. The two require each other. In any case, I should no longer postpone the act of carving the carcass of ritual. (I multiply metaphors so no one, including me, is tempted to seize on any one of them as sacred.) If you skin the organically grown, grain-fed turkey of ritual, where does the knife go? How might you divide it up? Figure 9.1 schematizes the elements of ritual as a set of overlapping spheres floating in a limitless sea of social context, two areas of which have been singled out and numbered, thereby selected for analysis. One context might, for instance, be other rituals in the same system, in which case a student of ritual might examine how one element, say a hymn, migrates from ritual A to ritual B. Another context might be, say, the local economic system and its bearing on who benefits financially

context 1 1. actions

2. actors

3. places

7. groups

Ritual 6. languages

4. times

5. objects context 2

Figure 9.1. Elements of Ritual, Simplified

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from the fact that the ritual you’re studying endures. My assumption is not only that parts make up the whole but that they do so dynamically, by interacting: Ritual language interacts with ritual time, transforming it in its interaction with ritual objects, and so on. As each element does what it is designed to do, the dynamics become increasingly complex. If an element is poorly designed, well, things may grind to a halt and the poor riders will just have to limp along. Probably you will not be surprised if I say that one can carve up the sacrificial bird of ritual into other parts, naming them in alternative ways. Maybe you are already sketching your own elemental scheme in the margins. In other families or countries does Dad cut out the wishbone so the kids can squabble over it? Do they even call it a “wishbone”? When I’ve shown the diagram to others, asking what’s missing, the responses have included: “Where’s the music and food and costumes? What about feelings, don’t they matter? Beliefs, hmmm, are they held by actors or by institutions?” No matter how many elements, and no matter how they are named, if students of ritual were to export the scheme to multiple cultures, trying to use it to analyze an ancient Coptic or a contemporary Javanese ritual, they would discover what they already know: There are many ways to carve a turkey. No one except your father says you must carve the beast in this way. You would discover other, nonEnglish terms for the parts of a ritual, and you would encounter participants who feel no desire at all to name them. The chart is merely one way of marshaling a minimal vocabulary to facilitate scholarly discussion. If nothing else, it can serve as a prompt for researchers to ask: How do participants in the ritual I’m studying disarticulate the beast? What parts do they name, and what parts do they leave unnamed? Does a ritual costume, for instance, count as part of the ritual actor who wears it, or should it be numbered among ritual objects? And are objects that act best treated as objects or as subjects? Is a musical score an object or a kind of language calling for a set of actions? There is nothing sacrosanct about the diagram; it is a starting point, a tool for getting the work of analyzing ritual started. The scheme’s constructedness can be rendered obvious by recounting a bit of its revision history. At one time, for example, “Attitudes” was a category alongside “Actors” and “Actions.” At another, “Actors” included “Actions” and “Attitudes.” “Groups” was not one of the original categories, and “Texts” were once among the “Objects.” The distinctions are not quite arbitrary, but neither are they natural or universal. They are academic improvisations, highly dependent on purpose and situation. I assume their critique and further development. More fully unpacked into a chart of considerations and questions, the elements look like they do in table 9.1. The most important feature of this table is not how it names the categories, because you will likely recast them when studying a specific ritual. Rather, the table’s importance is twofold. First, it schematizes the whole and its parts without predetermining which elements are most important or how they interact. Interactional priorities among the elements should not be predetermined by theory but inferred

Table 9.1. Elements of Ritual, Expanded Elementsfl

Considerations

1. Ritual Actions • the ritual event, the whole rite, the “plot” of the action as it moves from beginning through middle to end • constituent actions that make up the ritual, their phasing, rhythm, and style, the connections or disconnections among them, habitual vectors of bodily movement • genres and styles of action, their form, medium, pacing, mood, tone • facilitating, preparatory, or behind-the-scenes actions, clean-up and take-down activities • influences on the actions, precedents, causal forces, and covariants (actions that vary in tandem with other actions) • reactions, or responses, to the ritual, consequential actions, functions of the ritual • actions that change things, actions that keep things the same • acts of avoidance, actions avoided • acts of receptivity, instances of passivity • actions that mirror or allude to other actions, mimesis • artistic actions, e.g., singing, dancing • the framing of the ritual, its social-cultural placement, takenfor-granted assumptions about it, definition of the ritual situation

Sample Research Questions

What constitutes “the ritual”? How is it named? Are some actions more essential than others? What actions are variable? Not? What actions merely facilitate (rather than constitute) the ritual? What actions can be subtracted? Added? What types of activity can participants identify? How did this ritual come into being? What is this ritual said to do? What does it, in fact, do? Does it transform? Confirm? Enhance? Subvert? What happens after the ritual? What does the ritual effect? Ritually considered, what actions should one not do? How do participants perform ritual receptivity? What actions resemble or refer to other actions? Which, if any, actions are considered artistic? For participants, what are the categories, kinds, or genres of action?

(continued)

Table 9.1. Continued

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Sample Research Questions

2. Ritual Actors

• bodies in motion, bodily comportment • persons performing gestures and postures • the senses, sensing, sensory preferences • ritual actors’ self-awareness and other-awareness • participants’ personal feelings, attitudes, values, beliefs, purposes (explicit and conscious), intentions (tacit, preconscious) • identities, personal and collective, of ritual participants • ritual agents constructing, enacting, maintaining, and revising rites • ritualists’ attribution of agency to non-human ritual actors • ritual actors entering and exiting rituals • ritually inflected behavior outside of ritualistic circumstances • participants interpreting, evaluating, and talking about rituals

Who enacts? Who witnesses? Of what does a person consist? Is the body valued, devalued, ignored? What parts of the bodily are emphasized? Which senses are emphasized? Deemphasized? Which senses are linked, the one activating the other? What kinds of movement are valued? Avoided? Which actors perform alone? Together? Who can change the ritual? Who resists change? How is agency understood? Is there a human/nonhuman divide? A natural/supernatural divide? What do participants understand a person, especially a ritually engaged person, to be? How do ritual agents act outside of ritual circumstances? Who evaluates the ritual? Offers interpretations of it? Tells stories about it? How significant is the interiority of ritualists? What do participants say are their aims? What motives and goals are implied by their actions? What are practitioners expected to believe? How much does belief matter? What attitudes are cultivated? Discouraged? Which are precluded from ritual? Which are shared? Public? Private?

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Sample Research Questions

3. Ritual Places

• sacred places, nonsacred places, special places • proper placement, positioning, geographical and cosmological orientations; spatial contiguity • land, nature, cosmos • sets, settings, backdrop, backstage • off-limits or dangerous places • natural and constructed places • indoor and outdoor places • symbolic positions and prepositions: above/below, center/ periphery, up/down, open/closed, private/public

Which places are special or sacred? Which ones are not? Special how? Who sits beside whom? Who walks behind whom? Who or what is placed next to whom or what? Do directions matter? Why? Which ones do not? Is land bought and sold? Protected? What does the cosmos of this ritual include? Exclude? What things are used as sets? Are they built? Taken down? Destroyed? Reused? Is this an indoor or outdoor ritual? What would happen if it were moved? How placeless or place-specific is the ritual? What are the operative spatial distinctions (center/periphery, up/down, at home/in exile, etc.)?

4. Ritual Times

• duration, phasing, rhythm • kinds of time, e.g., ordinary and special, lunar/solar • seasons • cycles, life cycles • eras • the beginning of time, the end of time • temporal markers in the ritual • tradition, accumulation across time • timing, appropriateness • calendrical time, clock time, experienced time • tenses, tense usage

How does time unfold within the ritual itself? To what times does the ritual refer or allude? Are there special, or sacred, seasons? Are there down times? Ordinary times? Is there a ritual calendar? Are some eras valued over others? What is the shape of time, e.g., circular or linear? Does duration matter? Why? How are past and future ritually construed? How are the beginning and end imagined? How “big” is the present? What constitutes bad timing? Good timing? What kinds of time are reckoned? Who keeps time? Which transitions are marked? Which are not? How are past, present, and future conceived and attended to (or disregarded) in ritual? (continued )

Table 9.1. Continued

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Sample Research Questions

5. Ritual Objects

• properties, material culture, possessions • classes of things: distinctions, divisions, dualisms: owned/not owned, inherited/bought, made/found, animate/inanimate, valuable/valueless, treasure/trash, displayed/hidden • the construction, preservation, and disposition of ritual paraphernalia • costume, dress, e.g., masks, clerical garb • art objects, e.g., paintings, sculpture • edible things, foodstuffs

What things are alive? Not alive? Do the dead act? Can things be persons? Can persons be things? What can be owned? Not? How is wealth counted? Of what does poverty consist? Who makes what? Who is custodian of what? What are the classes and kinds of things? What is treasured? What is trash? What is disposable? What, if any, objects are venerated? Who dresses up? How? On what occasions? How integral is costume to office? To personhood? What is edible and not? What foods become offerings?

7. Ritual Languages

• nonlinguistic utterances, e.g., speaking in tongues • things said and words sung during ritual performance • words that do things (performative utterances) • words, written or spoken, that facilitate the rite, e.g., texts, scripts, scenarios, rubrics, instructions • backstage and pre-ritual talk • words after or about the rite, e.g., interpretation, exegesis, criticism, theorizing • oral teaching about ritual • linguistic genres, kinds/ways of speaking regarding ritual • texts, writing, books, libraries, and other sources of ritual knowledge • views of language, uses of archaic or languages • expressions of belief, creeds, worldviews

How valued, or not valued, is speech? What are the kinds of ritually significant language, e.g., myth, testimony, oratory, narrative, poetry, prayer, praise, ecstatic sounds, animal sounds? What forms do they take? Where and when are they are encouraged or discouraged? Which are cultivated? Devalued? What is said? Written? Read? Sung? Which rituals, or parts of ritual, are scripted? Are there secret or hidden scripts? What ritual knowledge is only passed on orally? Who can interpret? Who does not? When is critique allowed? Inhibited? How are ritual texts handled? What is theorized? Not? Is the ritual language considered sacred? Archaic? Are there official, or canonical, statements of belief? A written or codified ethic?

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8. Ritual Groups • ritual groups and organizations • social distinctions, e.g., gender, class, ethnicity, age; the ritual buttressing or subversion of these; inclusion and exclusion • collective ideas, worldviews, attitudes—both espoused and implied • values or virtues, e.g., kindness, bravery, generosity, truthfulness • vices, taboos, things forbidden or rejected • means of transmitting values and practices • the politics and economics of ritual • collective and individual agency • ritual hierarchy, power, equality • ritual leaders, ritual followers, facilitators • ritual’s relation to various cultural domains, e.g., politics, arts, medicine

Sample Research Questions

What social distinctions or discriminations are in force? Which ones count most? Least? Which distinctions are most powerfully reinforced by the ritual? What institutions and organizations sustain the ritual? Who acts? Individuals? Groups? How are individuals and groups orchestrated? How are individuality and selfhood viewed? What social roles are named? Valued? Devalued? What cultural domains are recognized? Which domains are densest with ritual? Which are least ritually significant? Which values are reinforced by the ritual?

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from observing specific cases. Second, the questions signal the importance of persistent, systematic querying. Question-asking takes priority over categoryformation, because the former is the basis of the latter. The main purpose of the list of elements is not to help scholars file things or catalog books but to provoke questions.401 Whether one classifies Mount Rushmore Monument as a stone object, collective sacred personage, or institutional logo is less important than how one queries it.

Ritual Actions Analyzing a ritual can begin with any element, say, a place or an object. In the archaeological study of ritual these may be the only possible places to begin. Archaeologists studying ritual have to infer both actors and actions from remains. Although places and things may accompany or facilitate a ritual, they rarely drive one. An exception might be pilgrimage to a sacred place in order to view our touch a sacred object. Without further study it would be impossible to say whether the going, touching, and returning, the place itself, or the object is central. Each requires the other. Unless I have a good reason for doing otherwise, I begin with human interaction, bodies in motion, because they are what most often appear in a camera’s viewfinder when shooting a ritual. Unless people tell me otherwise, I take actions to be the living, throbbing heart of the matter, and I assume that objects and places facilitate rather than constitute what they do.402 Even if I do eventually discover that participants think a place or venerated object is the heart of the matter, I will likely have figured this out by watching or talking with the ritual actors. Choosing ritual action as the default starting point is both pragmatic and a reminder to focus on ritual. In any case, even if you begin with things or places, you eventually arrive at people acting, if you do your work thoroughly. We can legitimately and usefully speak of “ritual actions,” “ritual performances,” “ritual enactments,” “ritual practices,” ritual behaviors,” and “ritual events,” depending on what we wish to emphasize. For example, although rituals are events— appearing, disappearing, and reappearing—they may also be based on or made into practices, repetitious attitude-building scenarios. A ritual performance is an evanescent social event. However long a ritual has persisted, and however often it is repeated, the performance of it begins and ends. People arrive at it and go home from it. Although a ritual may be enduring, it is not an object; you can’t bounce it like a ball, deposit it in a bank, or ride it to work (no matter how often I have compared it to a bicycle). Ritual events, unlike ritual objects, tend to be pegged to bodily and cultural rhythms. Things move but people act.403 Human intention is what distinguishes action from movement. The most obvious thing about a ritual is that it consists of human actions (even if they are a response to something prior or more fundamental).

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Although these actions may be performed by individuals, more typically they are undertaken by groups. Because social density is so typical of ritual, ritual actions are usually interactions, and these interactions differ in certain ways from ordinary kinds of interaction. Whether they differ so much that uninstructed outsiders can recognize them as ritualized is debatable. Perhaps, if those outsiders have witnessed enough ordinary interactions, they can perceive the differences, especially if costuming and high levels of stylization are involved. But if the observed ritual is mainly a matter of proper intention, as it is when Zen Buddhists clean house, then probably not. Without instruction, a student of ritual might confuse ritual actions with other kinds, such as dramatic ones. Suppose we witness people donning masks and walking down the street in odd ways. Is that clowning, possession, or drunk and disorderly behavior? In and of themselves, the formal characteristics of these actions do not tell us the answer. Participants have their own vocabularies, and we students need to know them, but we need our own terms too. Often ordinary verbs suffice. In ordinary speech we talk about “doing” or “going to” a ritual. The first way of putting it emphasizes active participation; the second way is more passive. Theorists sometimes speak of ritual “performance,” treating a ritual as “a showing of a doing.”404 Many rituals are showings, not only royal weddings but also private, ordinary ones. The groom wants to show his sincerity; the bride, her beauty; or vice versa, his beauty and her brains. In some traditions what one shows is not wealth and pageantry but simplicity, plainness. These actions too are not mere facts but the displaying of aspirations. When we speak of ritual as performance, we emphasize its ability to show forth. Rituals may do more than show, however. For this reason I also use the term “enactment” when discussing ritual’s distinctive kind of action. To enact is not only to do something in front of someone, but also to put into force. We enact legislation, taking it from being a mere recommendation to being “on the books.” On the books, a law requires recognition and response. Similarly, enacting a ritual can set things in motion. Its gestures and postures are designed to achieve something. Their aim is not merely to entertain but rather to effect, so I usually say that people enact rituals, especially when a rite seems capable of accomplishing a deed or bringing about an effect. If I say “perform,” it is usually to call attention to the fact of being witnessed by an audience or to an as-if attitude among participants. Ritual is performed when participants act in front of spectating others or when they play roles in a subjunctive mode. Some scholars distinguish action from behavior, “behavior” connoting what can be observed, and “action” taking into account what actors intend. To my mind, these are two perspectives, emic and etic, on the same thing. “Behavior” objectifies and “action” does not. Although objectifying can be dehumanizing, objectification is a normal, necessary thing.405 It is okay to objectify a person or a ritual, provided that is not the only thing you do to “it.” By this usage, the more ritualists act predictably, the more they behave and the less they act.

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Some interpreters speak of ritual as practice rather than as action, enactment, or performance. Pierre Bourdieu, who has written the most insightfully on practice, treats it as complementary to rather than the opposite of performance or ritual. Performance theories usually hinge on one or two factors. Events are performative insofar as they have audiences (people are watching) or are framed as fictive (belief is not required). Practice theories focus instead on the ways cultural meanings seem natural, obvious, or taken for granted. Thus, the “practice” in “practice theory” is not quite like the “practice” in “baseball practice,” since this kind of practice is preparatory for some other event, the game. Nor is it like the “practice” in “Buddhist practice,” which is conscious and deliberate. Bourdieu sometimes writes about especially elevated actions such as ritual, but the core of his theory is grounded in ordinary, practical activities such as eating and wearing clothes. His theory explains how societies reproduce their values in individuals, or, to put it another way, how individuals come habitually to hold the views and attitudes expected of them. Habitus is the name Bourdieu gives to this set of engrained dispositions that one begins imbibing at birth. He describes it variously as a “system of cognitive and motivating structures,” “embodied history, internalized as a second nature,” and “the persistence of the effects of primary conditioning.”406 Unfortunately, Bourdieu tends to reify. He makes statements like, “The habitus tends to favor experiences likely to reinforce it” and “The habitus tends to protect itself from crises and critical challenges by providing itself with a milieu to which it is as pre-adapted as possible.”407 As a reminder to myself that he is talking about a process rather than an entity, I prefer to speak of “habituating” and “habituation” rather than “the habitus.”408 Another key concept advanced by Bourdieu is that of a field, by which he does not mean either a place where wheat grows or a site to which ethnographically inclined researchers go when they want to observe other people’s behavior. Although the term sounds spatial, it is not. Rather, a field is a set of interrelated actions in which people strive for advantage in their competition for limited goods. A field is less a place than the activity of contesting; it is the sort of behavior one expects in arenas. Bourdieu calls the fundamental presuppositions of an interactive field its doxa (Greek for “belief ” or “opinion”). “Doxa,” he writes, “is the relationship of immediate adherence that is established in practice between a habitus and the field to which it is attuned, the pre-verbal taking-for-granted of the world that flows from practical sense.”409 To return to the question “How is ritual action related to performance and to practice?,” Bourdieu sometimes sounds as if he takes ritual to be the prime instance of habituation, or, if you prefer, the habitus. In one of his clearest statements about ritual, he observes, Thus the attention paid to staging in great collective ceremonies derives not only from the concern to give a solemn representation of the group

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(manifest in the splendour of baroque festivals) but also, as many uses of singing and dancing show, from the less visible intention of ordering thoughts and suggesting feelings through the rigorous marshaling of practices and the orderly disposition of bodies, in particular the bodily expression of emotion.410 Bourdieu claims that placing bodies in prescribed postures re-evokes their associated feelings and states of mind. Because of the way rituals choreograph and classify, they create what he variously labels “deposits,” “schemes,” or “structures,” which are sufficiently efficacious that bodies (read: people) come to take things for granted, a state more entrenched than merely believing. Regardless of whether one imagines ritual as depending on inherited deposits or re-created actions, Bourdieu thinks that knowledge passes among practitioners without the necessity for intervening, intermediary discourse or consciousness. The outcome is a seamless integration of bodily space with social and cosmic space.411 In other words, he implies that people ritualize without thinking. My view: Although they sometimes do so, I do not think they necessarily do. In the video “Vespers in the City of New York,” a group simultaneously practices and enacts a ritual.412 Learning while doing, they halt, hesitate, and bump into each other as they try to learn the circle dance. They are also carrying pieces of paper, learning the lines of song and prayer. Even so, this is vespers, not merely preparation for it. It is practice in both senses of the term (see the glossary): actions preparatory to the performance of a ritual, as well as actions repeated for the sake of deepening a ritual’s permeation of body and psyche. In “Enacting What We Say We Believe,” Patrick Evans, the director of the vespers ritual, reflects on the process and even critiques it (see especially 51:51ff ). Together the two videos pose a serious challenge to the assumption that people engaged in ritual practices cannot be thinking critically and analytically. Bourdieu distinguishes logical logic from practical logic. By calling them both “logics,” he connects as well as distinguishes them. Ritual, it seems, is the epitome of practical logic: “Rites, even more than most practices, might almost be designed to demonstrate the fallacy of seeking to contain in concepts a logic that is made to do without concepts.”413 Bourdieu thinks that when we either explain or interpret rituals, we are making them say what, for a practitioner, goes, or should go, without saying. If ritual practices and representations are practically coherent, this is because they arise from the combinatorial functioning of a small number of generative schemes that are linked by relations of practical substitutability, that is, capable of producing results that are equivalent in terms of the “logical” requirements of practice. This systematicity remains loose and approximate because the schemes can receive the quasi-universal application they are given only in so far as they function in the practical

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state, below the level of explicit statement and therefore outside the control of logic, and in relation to practical purposes which require of them and give them a necessity which is not that of logic.414 According to Bourdieu, although rituals are practiced, they are not practical, and although they are outside the control of logic, they have their logic. Notice how Bourdieu implies that he himself grasps this logic. But if he can understand this hidden logic, who is to say that practitioners can’t? If nothing else, they can read Bourdieu. Although I agree with Bourdieu in many ways, there is, I think, a fundamental difference between habituation and ritualization. Habituation is a sociobiological process that begins at, or even before, birth and is carried out automatically, much as one breathes. Habituation happens. Ritual, on the other hand, happens deliberately, at least partly by design. Someone or, more typically, some group constructs it, even if they later forget or obscure this fact. Across time, people may habituate their participation and understanding of their own rituals, just as most of us do in other activities, but that habituation does not alter the fact that, however natural a ritual is supposed to feel, it is not a natural event or cultural inevitability; it is an imaginative human creation. And this fact can in many instances be recollected. So I do not agree that “practice excludes attention to itself.”415 Certain practitioners may wish to inhibit reflection or quell criticism of their rituals, but, to reify momentarily in Bourdovian fashion, we could say that rituals themselves sometimes announce their own fictionality in the same moment that they attempt to hide it. Now that several terms are flying through the air, it would help to summarize and distinguish among several “action” words (list 11) in the ritual studies glossary. List 11. Action Words

• • • • • • • • • • •

event: occurrence with a discernible beginning and ending motion: movement in or through space action: movement to which intention and/or meaning is attributed behavior: action regarded as an object of analysis performance: action insofar as it is either witnessed or fictive enactment: action insofar as it puts something into force, exerts influence, or has effect beyond itself practice: actions engraining, or designed to engrain, persistent attitudes or skills witnessing: the action of supportive watching and listening spectating: the action of watching while minimizing or eliminating participation receptivity: the action of “taking in” avoidance: the action of “not doing”

The surface of a ritual consists of bodies in motion during events bounded with discernible beginnings and endings. When scholars study a ritual, they necessarily

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objectify it as behavior. However, knowing that ritual bodies are human, scholars typically attribute subjectivity, intention, or meaning to them. Ritual actions are not only overly active but also receptive, including actions such as witnessing or avoidance that may look on the surface like inaction. Rituals are practices insofar as they engrain persistent attitudes; performances insofar as they are either witnessed or framed as fictive; and enactments insofar as they exercise force beyond their own boundaries. Whether we consider sensing (seeing, hearing, smelling, and so on) kinds of action or think of “the senses” as attributes of ritual actors is not very important, but the choice becomes strategic if your decision brings with it methodological choices. Studying people’s ways of, say, making sounds and responding to them, you might proceed ethnomusicologically. Or, studying their ways of moving, you might proceed ethnochoreologically. In either case you would start from actual performances of singing and hearing singing, of dancing and witnessing dance. Alternatively, informed by a psychology of the senses, we might prefer to start with ritual actors themselves. A thorough study of ritual actors would include their senses, just as a full study of ritual action would treat the actions of seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. However we approach the task, theorizing about ritual should attend to the way rituals mobilize and perform the senses. All human experience is mediated by the senses, even though there are debates about how many there are; proprioception, your kinesthetic sense, is a recent addition to the conventional five. Powerful ritual experiences heighten the senses’ interactions with one another, sometimes resulting in synesthesia, a cross-tabulating of the senses that can be either integrative or disorienting. An essential analytical move in the study of a ritual is querying its sensorium mobilization: Which senses do its performers heighten? Dampen? Ignore? How does a ritual transpose sensory data from one channel of sensory data to another? How are the ritual’s visual practices integrated with its auditory ones? How is smell echoed or denied by taste? Are a ritual’s kinesthetic practices consistent or inconsistent with its oral claims? Although Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have periodically railed against the senses, all three have ritually utilized them, even exploited them. These traditions share a common veneration of audition, especially the word—spoken, heard, and written—thus of books containing inspired words. Reading or listening to them is a ceremonial demonstration of faith. Some segments of these religions also value vision and in fact treat deeply revelatory religious experiences as “visions.” Other segments of these religious traditions are suspicious of things seen, shown, touched, and venerated. This suspicion has set loose periodic waves of iconoclasm, critiques and attacks on visual images, especially anthropomorphic ones set up as visual representations of the divine. Although vision and audition have dominated the three multinational monotheisms, the other senses—gestation (taste), olfaction (smell), and tactioception

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(touch)—have played persistent but secondary roles. Gustatory sensations have been enhanced by eating rituals and dietary restrictions. Kinesthetic and tactile senses have been aroused on pilgrimages walked by participants hoping to touch some sacred object or edifice. Once you lift out a ritual element for analysis, students of ritual begin to recognize what we have left out. If I were to return to Santa Fe, I would take a much less frontal view. The actions shown in my videos are almost all big and public, with brief sideways glances at ordinary participants doing ordinary things like eating. I would, for instance, like to follow preparatory actions, playing them off one another by asking whether there is a consistent relationship between prep time and the importance of the performances. Does a mother dressing her son for a Zozobra rehearsal spend more or less time than the archbishop preparing his sermon for delivery at Rosario Chapel? Is the ratio direct or inverse? How does backstage bell ringing in the cathedral compare with front-stage song leading? Both are considered facilitating actions, but is one valued more than the other?

Ritual Actors Students of ritual aspire to study whole persons in their relevant contexts. But we can’t get at a whole person any more than we can experience a whole fiesta. Knowing this limitation, we have to begin somewhere: with the semblance of a body, regardless of what one makes of the idea of the body or what contexts one aspires to paint. Maybe people have auras or souls, maybe not, but most of us cannot see, much less video them. Maybe bodies don’t ultimately matter, but bodies are what researchers have to work with and work on. Both constrained and empowered by bodies—ours as well as theirs—we students of ritual train our eyes, thus the crosshairs of our cameras, on bodies. Bodies in motion trigger the brain. Animals that we are, we’re hardwired to notice other bodies in motion. They could be friends; they could be foes. When a body ceases moving, humans notice the stillness. Is he dead? Does she see something I don’t? With a camera we can document an action, but only by simultaneously documenting an actor, so it might seem pointless to distinguish ritual actors from ritual actions. For some analytical purposes, we may not need to do so, but in most ritual circumstances, as in most theatrical ones, roles can stand apart from the people who enact them. Ritual actors are not always the “authors” of their own actions; rather, they may be “echoing” or “quoting” in a way that resembles a stage actor’s recitation of lines from a script. Although this disjunction between action and actor is not the distinguishing feature of ritual, it is widespread enough that we need to investigate the multiple ways in which actors identify or disindentify with their ritual roles. This analytical separability of actors and actions is reinforced by the fact that roles often outlive persons. Ritualists become infirm or die, and some other qualified person

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steps into their role. On the one hand, if scholars were to make ritual actors the sole focus of research, the risk would be that of reducing rituals to the biographies or psychologies of participants, thereby producing ethnographic life history rather than ritual studies. On the other, if scholars were to focus exclusively on ritual actions, ignoring the people who enact them, these people would likely resist. Maybe ritualists can’t always explain their rituals articulately. Even so, we query them, because they are persons who inhabit their rituals. We would not enter a home without paying respects, nor should we enter a ritual without inquiring after those who enact it. However much ritual behavior interests us, we cannot study only it, at least not during fieldwork. No element of ritual is intelligible as a hermetically sealed unit. Ritualists not only perform their actions (as subjects); they are also constituted by these actions (as objects).416 Likewise, ritual actions, even if carefully observed and fully described, do not speak for themselves. An action’s meanings are modified not only by the actions that precede and follow it but also by the intentions of those performing it, even if their intention is to have no intention of their own. Consequently, observing actions quickly leads to interviewing participants, who not only enact gestures and assume postures but also interpret and evaluate rituals. Since intentions are not directly accessible, researchers ask questions: What does that gesture mean? Why did you say that? And even after participants reply, interpreters continue to puzzle: How do words about rituals function? How do they differ from words in rituals? Are verbalized meanings the only kind? What are the other kinds? What are the implied (as distinct from the overtly stated ones) meanings? Ritual actors, unlike stage actors, are not supposed to be pretending (although they may in fact be). Although they may be performing, because they are aware of being observed, they are also supposed to enact something as agents who accomplish something. Ritual agents are also social persons, not merely agents or performers, so usually they interact; they do not act alone. They do what they do among and with other people. Although ritualists typically act in groups, they also sometimes act as individuals. Since no one escapes socialization and enculturation, even solitary ritual actors interact, because others inhabit their brains and bodies, if not genetically then culturally. Since all human actors are affiliated—whether marginally or centrally, whether by choice or dint of birth—no ritual actor stands outside of gender, race, class, age, or the myriad other means of social classification. However vigorously participants may wish or claim that ritual participation vitiates the markers of such distinctions, ritual studies researchers take note of them. Who is acting in concert with whom? Who is avoiding whom? Such questions are keys to understanding the power of ritual. Ritualists are not only performers acting among or in front of others; they accomplish things. An agent is one who acts—sometimes strategically, sometimes naively—to effect or inhibit change. Because everyone, even the most passive participant, exercises some kind of agency, all participants are doers, even if they do nothing more than show up or stay away. Some actors are leaders; others are

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followers. Still others both lead and follow. It is not uncommon for participants to shift between leading and following. Ritual roles can be few or many, and they can be hierarchically arranged, as if on a ladder, or democratically flattened, as if on an even plane. Some roles, usually the most important ones, have formal names; others are generic, without proper title. As well, there may be behind-the-scenes actors whose activities have an impact on actions in central ritual spaces. Drummers, like custodians, may be scarcely visible, considered outside the ritual, but they may also be paid and regarded as utterly essential to the ritual, because they provide the rhythmic ground on which ritual participants walk. The video “Caribbean Carnival: Animating Bacchanal” tracks Benjamin Alunyo, a photographer, during a massive, highly photogenic festival.417 Deciding which is the primary action in the festival—costuming, dancing, or being photographed— would be difficult. On the one hand, Alunyo is an outsider to the action; his act of picture taking is parasitic upon the insider action of dancing in costume. However, if you watch him closely, you’ll notice that he moves into a group and animates it. He doesn’t just shoot what’s there. He’s helping making the event what it is. More shy with my camera and worrying about invading people’s privacy, I got some quizzical looks. After following Alunyo for a while, I figured out why. I wasn’t doing my part. Dancers were inviting my camera’s attention, posing for it, competing for photographic attention. They weren’t only enacting their Caribbean-Canadian cultures, thereby carving out cultural space in Toronto; they were performing those cultures, showing and showing off for spectators with and without cameras. On the one hand, you could say that photographers like Alunyo were objectifying the dancers. On the other, you could say that he was responding to their agency. Don’t decide too soon who or what can be an agent. The range, as described by participants, is considerable, and it includes not only individuals, corporate entities, organizations, and collectives but also deities, the dead, animals, and spirits. Often it helps to ask where such actors and actions are located. Do they show up in the here and now in ritual, or are they confined to myth and religious talk? Theorists tend not to mobilize supernatural agents for explanatory purposes, but instead cast abstractions—Culture, Society, the Market—as agents. The danger is less in the reifying than in not recognizing what you are doing. It is widely assumed among scholars who study ritual that the “proper” or “real” ritual agent is the collective, the so-called corporate body, excluding individuals, gods, places, and objects. If you define ritual as collective effervescence, then of course individuals do not act ritually. But the fact is that individuals do things in closets and forests that they call ritual. You can ignore such activity as outside the purview of your definition of ritual, as socially insignificant or deluded, but you are also sidestepping the basic question: How shall we understand ritual-like activities in closets or forests, regardless of what we or they call them? And how shall we handle participants’ attribution of agency to gods and objects and places? My preference is to leave the matter as a set of open questions for investigation: Who do

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participants say is acting here? Whom do we observe acting? How do they know who or what is acting? How do we know? Having to respond to such questions might precipitate a dialogue or debate between researchers and the researched. Even if there is disagreement over supernatural agency, and even if practitioners supernaturalize their rituals, they are human social events carried out by human agents. However much practitioners may model their actions after nonhuman agents, human actors are a prerequisite. No people, no ritual, no ritual studies. Maybe the gods ritualize in transcendent realms, but if they do, our cameras cannot go there. The focus of ritual studies research on human agency is practical and provisional, not ontological or absolute. As with studying ritual action, studying ritual actors can become theoretically dense, because many roles (list 12) and several distinctions come into play. List 12. Ritual Roles

• person: human being in the fullest, most complex sense • ritualist: ritual participant, ritual actor, ritual insider, a person in ritual circumstances • ritual leader: primary ritual actor, front-stage ritual participant • ritual follower: secondary ritual actor, backstage ritual participant • ritual facilitator, facilitating agent: one who helps make the ritual possible • ritual witness: a participant who observes and whose observation contributes to the action • ritual agent: any ritual actor who acts, influences, or exercises power • collective ritual agent: a group acting in concert • nonhuman ritual agent: e.g., gods, spirits, animals, the deceased as ritual actors; also places or objects as ritual actors • participant-observer: one who studies ritual by participating as well as observing, often a scholar • ritual studies scholar: student of ritual, a person who studies ritual academically • observing participant: participant who assumes an observer’s role and whose observation is intrinsic to the action • spectator: one whose watching or listening is extrinsic to the action, usually an outsider, e.g., a tourist • ritual interpreter — indigenous interpreter: an insider who offers exegesis of a ritual — outside interpreter: an observer who offers exegesis of a ritual — ritual critic: an evaluative interpreter, sometimes indigenous, sometimes an outsider I have opted for ordinary English terms. There may, of course, be other roles and other ways to name them. The point is to suggest casting a wide net, noticing not

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only front-and-center ritual leaders but also those who facilitate or witness, even those who appear to be doing nothing. During fieldwork it is rude if not imperialistic to reduce people to their roles. In theorizing, however, scholars usually study roles even though we observe participants outside ritual settings to remind ourselves of their personhood. As observers we may participate, just as participants themselves may observe. Each party has its perspective. Expressed, these perspectives become interpretations. Although one or the other kind of interpretation may be privileged, and although one interpretation may in fact be better than another, neither is in principle superior to the other. Role construction, formation, and maintenance are among the functions of ritual, so studying ritual actors requires an inquiry into identity. Rituals can be formative, exerting pressure on participants’ sense of themselves. In ritual, you become, one might say, more than who you normally are. Either that, or you become more yourself than you are without the power of ritual; you enter a ritual arena in order to become other. You feel fully seen, accepted, and understood in a ritual. Alternatively, you are immersed, not seen at all. Maybe you enter a ritual’s precincts flamboyantly arrayed or spiritually naked. Perhaps you become a spirit; perhaps you become “one of us.” You are connected, let us say, not only with some others but also with the others who count, perhaps with Otherness itself. In ritual whatever was outside the self is now inside the self. Whatever was split off is now interlaced and interconnected. Alternatively, while ritualizing, you are supremely alone. There is only one; you contain all; all contains you. Any way you put it, many ritual actors aspire to consolidate or transform. However participants express it—and there are a myriad ways—in ritual something is supposed to happen to their identity. It is confirmed, established, transformed, transposed, transmogrified, transcended. What’s the right word? If something doesn’t happen, well, there are several possibilities. The ritual didn’t work; the ritual actor wasn’t prepared. His or her expectations were wrong. The performance was flawed. Failing an identity transformation or confirmation, a ritual actor has alternatives. He or she can pretend, not worry about it, redo the whole thing, or blame the ritual. Still, the question remains for both insiders and outsiders: Who do ritualists become by enacting rituals? Ritualists know, or at least they should know. And scholars know, or at least wish they knew. How do we students of ritual access identity and its transformation? In many ways, but most immediately by examining talk and comportment: How do ritual agents embody themselves? How do they enact others? How do they manage their identities? Which self is displayed, and which hidden? What names and roles do ritualists claim? What do they understand a person, especially a ritualizing one, to be? Of what does a ritual agent consist—body? soul? spirit? atman? jiva? A major problem in conceptualizing ritual actors is that the scholarship has been strongly biased in favor of adult male ritual leaders, thereby sidelining others. Focused on ritual leaders, scholars have paid less attention to ritual followers, females, LGBT people, people with disabilities, children, and the elderly (except in

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cultures where they have an elevated status as “elders”). Feminist and queer scholars have begun the work of rectification, but the entrenchment is deep.418 There is no similar movement to understand the ritual sensibilities of children. With the exception of Erik Erikson and the few scholars who have built on his research, the phenomenon of ritual development and age-specific ritual competence has been severely understudied (see Appendix 5: Stages of Ritual Development). It is unproductive, if not irresponsible, to consider persons in general or ritual actors more specifically without also taking into account kinds of people and their stages in life. For this reason the study of ritual actors necessarily leads to the study of ritual groups, especially those disadvantaged by ritual studies itself. Along with the question, who is acting in this ritual, is whether this acting constitutes ritual? It is not always easy to know when people are engaging in a ritual act. See that woman sitting on a bench, head down. Is that sleeping or praying? We need more information. Is she whispering words? If so, maybe that’s a prayer. But what if she is only imagining words? If the words are only in the head or heart, is that ritual? Should we call it something else if there are no obvious actions—no bowed head, no moving lips? Ritual can transpire by subtracting from, rather than adding to, ordinary action. A ritual can consist of the cessation of action, of, for example, becoming still and quiet. But what if there is no telltale gross motor behavior? What if a person is just walking down a road, but inside, in the imagination or heart, she is entertaining a practiced sequence of colors or images? Is that ritual action? My first inclination is to say no, but that’s probably because I am a Westerner conditioned to distinguish between bodies and something else (minds, souls, spirits . . .). So let’s put it another way: If ritual action is completely interiorized, we must look for ways of studying it other than participant observation. Even though we can study brain activity, we cannot yet monitor internalized ritual activity. So, rather than say that interior ritual is not ritual, let’s more modestly admit that there are not yet good methods for studying such rituals. We who study ritual remind ourselves repeatedly that, although we can observe, document, and infer, we do not have direct access to everything. Some facet is always turned away from view, like the dark side of the moon. No one can peer into the head of another, spying the mind or heart, seeing how that person understands the world. So, although ritual studies starts with the obvious, moving bodies and the exterior surfaces of things, it is necessary to posit a human interiority as well, because people don’t say everything they think or express everything they feel. Whether we speak of attitudes, beliefs, or values, we Westernized academics tend to imagine such things as metaphorically interior to actors. One can imagine them otherwise, for instance, as the products of institutions. That said, attitudes are embodied, therefore displayed if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, so the student of ritual tries to infer them from words and actions.419 Attitudes are not mere habits, and they are conditioned by both emotions and beliefs. Attitudes condense values, beliefs, worldviews, images, and feelings into

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predispositions to act.420 Attitudes are partly revealed, partly hidden. A sailboat’s attitude is its tilt, or cant, in response to the wind. It is visible even though the wind is not. Displays are imperfect, and so are our perceptions and interpretations of them, so what we conclude about attitudes is partly inference and partly conjecture. There is no single, definitive ritual attitude, although some attitudes are probably more recurrent than others. Ritual is associated with a wide range of attitudes, and some of them seem opposite, or contradictory. On the one hand, ritual actions can be done in a perfunctory manner without apparent enthusiasm or commitment; those engaged in it seem disengaged, their commitment superficial or apathetic. On the other hand, rituals are performed with either concentrated attentiveness or mindfulness to detail; those engaged in them are sure they are supremely important, more life-giving than other life-enhancing activities such as working or cooking food. In meditation rituals, the attitudinal aspiration is attentive clarity. Although attention may be either focused or diffuse, no particular emotion is required. Meditating, one may feel happy or sad, indifferent or ecstatic, but fluctuations of thoughts and emotions are attended to with detachment rather than indulgence. By contrast, celebrations and festivals cultivate expansive sociability, and funerals typically, but by no means exclusively, expect somber attitudes. In studying ritual actors it is crucial to distinguish espoused beliefs, values, and attitudes from implied ones. Espoused ones are those people say they hold or consciously display. They may offer words as exegesis of their actions when queried by others, and they may, in fact, hold the beliefs expressed in those words, but they may, in fact, not. Among humans, even those aspiring to tell the truth, there is an imperfect fit between what we say and what we do. We can lie either verbally or gesturally, we can be self-deceived, or we can be ignorant. Since perfect self-knowledge is unlikely, astute observers try to infer the values, attitudes, and beliefs that participants “give off ” (as distinct from those they willingly display). And, make no mistake about it, we observers or theorists are just as subject to these distortions as participants are. People engaged in ritual acts may not necessarily believe what they say they do, and they may not believe the same things that other people beside them believe. Collective ritual engagement may seem to imply shared assumptions and values, but a scholar has to discern, rather than assume, which are shared and which are not. Scholars may begin by inquiring after those held in common, but they ought not to stop there. Since all social configurations include subgroups and divisions, there are likely corresponding differences not only of opinion but also of core beliefs and formative attitudes. Perhaps we can posit a loose link between ritual actions and ritual beliefs, but we cannot infer belief from action or predict action from belief. Human interiority—the zone where beliefs, values, and attitudes are cached— is, in effect, an offstage area. To put it another way, ritual action can serve as a mask, a display calling attention to itself and away from one’s interiority. I can be performing one thing while thinking or feeling quite another. Dissembling is a fact of all life, not

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only ritual life. Since impression management is so rife in ritual circumstances, the dissonance between attitude and performance can be particularly intense. Because rituals are sometimes occasions during which collectively held beliefs, values, and attitudes are powerfully displayed, sincerely held personal beliefs, values, and attitudes may be the least visible during them. Whether and how beliefs and worldviews are displayed or masked during a ritual is a question that can only be answered in specific cases, not in general. Because dissonance between saying and doing is common among humans, it is worth posing dramatistic questions about ritual acts: Who is acting how in front of whom? Who benefits from being perceived in what ways? What benefits are gained from being perceived to hold certain attitudes, values, and beliefs? For ritual studies the center of observation may be a group of participants enacting a ritual, but there is a circumference as well as an inferred interiority. People exit their rituals, sometimes taking leave of their ritual personas. People are not always ritual actors. People’s lives go on, and we need to know how their extraritualistic lives interface with their ritual activities. How do they make the transition? Do they change clothes? Who are they when they leave? When a ritual concludes and its participants depart, does a behavioral curtain drop? Do the ritual actors continue to perform? Are their quotidian postures and gestures ritually inflected? Do participants bring stuff home? Do they sing songs they heard? Are their values changed or reconfirmed? Who are these people when they are enacting rituals, and who are they when they are not? The only way to answer such question is by tracking extraritualistic behavior. David Trujillo played General Diego de Vargas in 2007. Given more time I would have tracked him with a camera onstage and off, as he interacted with his cuadrilla, schoolkids, and city and church authorities. What does he say? Avoid saying? What signals does his body language emit? When, where, and why does he switch from being David to being de Vargas? What are his other roles? During his knighting he becomes, with some apparent resistance, the son of his mother, who insists on repeatedly straightening his cape. How does he verbalize these shifts as he sees them played back on video? Who or what, I would ask, acts through you? Besides yourself, whom else do you embody? Your ancestors? God? De Vargas? And how long do they stay with or in you? To what extent is Trujillo acting as an individual and to what extent, as a representative of an age cohort, organization, ethnic group, religious group? What does he claim are his most compelling values and beliefs? I would ask his friends, “What values and beliefs does David’s life imply?” I would elicit from David memories about ordinary things: What does he recall from his stroll through the plaza this morning? Does he talk about smells and tastes or sounds and sights? Does he feel his boots thudding on the sidewalk? I would pose similar questions about other venues: church, stage, workplace. Because David speaks so generically in Behind the Scenes of the Santa Fe Fiesta, I would ask him to talk specifically about the Entrada he

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has just performed by showing him footage and asking him to stop it and comment on it as often as he wished. Tracking him in and out of his fiesta role, I would be in a better position to paint a portrait of David as a ritual actor.

Ritual Places Ritual fantasies and ritual theories can happen anywhere; ritual events, only in a place. Whether or not ritual actors value their locations, most rituals are sited, sometimes in one place, sometimes in several. Like every other human activity, ritual activity arises from physically embodied, geographically situated, socially embedded people. Some participants will tell you otherwise, insisting that God is universal, that the body is not real, or that their rituals transcend the mundane. In ritual, as in myth, participants may tell you they are transported to other times and places, but they do so from here and now. They may be right, or they may be wrong, but if you want to study ritual, you cannot afford to ignore the spatial rootedness of human life. Ritual space is often conceptualized on an either/or model: architectural/ natural; inside/outside; central/peripheral; static/mobile; permanent/temporary; sacred/nonsacred; high/low; near/far; public/private; paid for/free; space (abstract, empty) / place (specific, geographical); set (constructed) / setting (given, there). Actual human activity often happens between, not at the extreme ends of, such oppositional polarities. Some places are less easily polarized: ecological niches, transitional zones, dividers, boundaries, performance spaces, memorials, commemorative places, places close to something else such as water, shrines, or disaster sites. It is easier to conceptualize ritual space if the example is a mosque or megachurch building, but even when there is no built edifice with walls separating inside from out, a boundary is often implied by ritual actions, generating a center and circumference, both of which can fluctuate, the center receding and advancing or momentarily disappearing altogether as subgroups disperse and recongeal. Even so, one can usually trace the spatial patterns implied by ritually choreographed movements. Mapping them is fundamental to the study of ritual space. The permanent/temporary distinction is worth pondering, because it opens up the question “When is a ritual space a ritual space?” A cemetery remains a ritual space even when no burial or ash-scattering is going on, but after the Woodstock Festival of 1969 Max Yasgur’s field became what it was before this era-defining festival. After Peter Schumann’s annual Domestic Resurrection Circus in Glover, Vermont, the performance grounds revert to the farmer from whom they are rented so the crops and weeds can resume their ordinary lives. These spaces are made ritual spaces by the actions occurring in them. Once the actions stop, the spaces are no longer ritualistic.

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Ritual space is any place where a ritual occurs, but as a definition, this way of putting it is not only minimal but also circular, ignoring the fact that specific places matter enormously for some rituals. If these rituals do not happen in the right place or facing the proper direction, they lose force. For other rituals, place is incidental, hardly mattering at all. The actions matter, but their location is irrelevant. So even though rituals happen in places, making them ritual spaces, not all ritual spaces are sacred spaces, and not all sacred spaces are permanently so. The sense of a place can change, and a single person can hold conflicting attitudes toward a place. In documenting the deconsecration of a rural Canadian United Church in southern Ontario, my colleague Barry Stephenson and I initiated a place-focused research project. Its first result was an online album of still photographs, which seemed appropriate to a building. Church members responded by saying the pictures made them see things they had overlooked or never even seen, because they were too familiar with the building, a rare round church. They had only come to appreciate the place, they said, when outsiders showed up taking pictures and considering the fate of the place. We were gratified but soon realized that by studying only the building we would be replicating what was already going on: the severing of the people from the place. So to put people and place together, we turned to video.421 One of the videos, “The Deconsecration of a Canadian Church,” weaves the liturgy of deconsecration together with reflections and memories of church members, most of whom are mourning the loss of their church even as they try to celebrate its life and comprehend the demographic shifts that are destroying many other rural churches in Ontario.422 On the one hand, since they are Protestants, the place shouldn’t matter, because ideally, theologically, the church consists of people, not buildings. Referring to another church that died while she was a member, Mary Attridge, the oldest member of the congregation, declares, “It was just bricks and mortar” (19:54ff.). However, she adds, “I have a brick from that building.” The building doesn’t matter; the building does matter. Weeping, Bonnie Fenton, another member insists, “It’s not just a building.” Later she calls the building their church “home.” Her husband, a farmer who is helping to lead the deconsecration service, is fighting back tears, because the place matters. Losing the place as a church, he feels he has failed his ancestors. These conflicting sentiments are played out not only between people but within individuals. The dissonant voices are lifted out and replayed side by side near the end of the film (31:25ff.). Another video, “Highgate United,” picks up where the first one leaves off.423 The church is now becoming the Mary Webb Centre for culture and arts.424 While some former members are still insisting, “It will always be a church,” others seem more content to let it be a fabulous-looking place with great acoustics. The sense of a place can change whether or not people want it to change, and place matters even to people who adhere to creeds that say it doesn’t. Even if rituals are said to happen in transcendent space, they necessarily happen in a location. Consequently, rituals also orient even if that is not their primary intention.

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Orienteering is the science and art of finding one’s way, usually with map and compass, sometimes with only stars and the sun. Ritual is a means of being oriented in the cosmos, and a cosmos is the world as ritually and mythically constituted. Even an initiation rite, containing phases of deliberate disorientation, aims to orient participants so they know how to find their way as adults in their culture’s world. When one’s world is ritually oriented, space is no longer abstract, and one place may not be as good or powerful as another. Ritually considered, some places are more generative than others. To go to them is orienting, therefore life-giving. Most of us intuitively understand that a synagogue, mosque, or cathedral is in some sense sacred regardless of how Judaism, Islam, and Christianity theologically conceptualize space. If nothing else, such places are sacralized behaviorally. People comport themselves differently in them as they move from outside to inside or from front to back. As spaces become sacred they also become qualitative, not merely quantitative and geometric but also value-laden. People and things occupy positions relative to one another. Some are above; some below. Some are to the left, others to the right. These positions matter: The sun rises in the East; from it Christians expect the resurrection to come. If you are a Muslim in the West, the Kaaba stone, located in Mecca, is symbolically east. Sometimes in mosques there is an arrow pointing out the qibla, the direction of prayer. Literally, geographically, from where I live Mecca is 53.77 degrees north, so “northeast” is a more accurate description of the proper orientation for prayer.425 Righteousness is to your right. Upward is onward, therefore better. In ritual, prepositions are no longer “mere”; they have consequences. Location in architectural or geographical space has symbolic valence. To be down is to submit to a lower status, to show humility or respect. To be up is to be venerated as important. Literal positions are metaphoric insofar as they stand for social positions. Sheep on the right and goats on the left are not merely two separate but equal lines. Those on the one side will bask in eternal sunlight and walk streets of gold (with green pastures on both sides and a fish fry at the end).426 Those on the other will go to hell and suffer eternal torture. “Space speaks.”427 It has meaning. Sometimes people can articulate this meaning in words; sometimes the meaning has to be inferred from their actions. No one has to tell you that it is rude to converse while turning your back to listeners or standing on a chair and looking downward at them. However, a Masonic friend might have to instruct you that the checkerboard floor on which you are standing symbolizes life, checkered as it is with good and evil. Space sometimes speaks more clearly to those who have ears trained to hear what it says. In some cultures, spaces not only mean; they also act. Not merely containing or framing actions, a sacred place exerts force, becoming an agent on par with, or even greater than, a ritual leader. The mountains and rivers were here before we mere mortals strolled the face of the earth. Those places—beings, actually—acted, thereby facilitating the emergence of creatures like us.428 So space is not necessarily

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passive, the spectator or butt of human design. Sometimes it can be a lead actor, to whom (yes, whom) human actions are but a response. Human ritual activity is secondary, even a little pretentious. Because a ritual is necessarily spatialized, it implies an ecology, a mode of engaging its locale and the world. However, ecologically attuned practice doesn’t necessarily follow from this fact. A ritual conditions its practitioners to ignore or attend to the place they inhabit, to treat it as theirs, or themselves as belonging to it. Ritualists, like producers and consumers, can minimize or tune out the environments in which they conduct their business. Even though rituals are necessarily on the planet, they do not necessarily attune participants to it. Rituals can insulate practitioners from the ground they walk and the air they breathe. In the 1950s, rituals of consumption taught us it was okay to drive blithely down highways tossing candy wrappers out car windows.429 Rituals operate in environments that are simultaneously biological, geographical, social, political, historical, and cultural.430 A ritual’s environment is the totality of whatever surrounds it and interacts with it. The traffic is two-way, although not necessarily equal. Participants walk into ritual precincts and then walk out, carrying with them in both directions ideas, feelings, images, and predispositions to act (or not). Some rituals are designed to minimize this traffic, others to maximize it. In either case, to study a ritual by whittling away its contexts without ever reconstructing them is to make a serious mistake. Environments suffuse rituals, and rituals touch or even create environments. Although condensed into events with beginnings and endings or ensconced in thick walls, rituals nevertheless leak, exerting influence and being influenced. Not only shaped, rituals shape environments, even after their enactments conclude. The words and songs may have evaporated, but the legs remember; so do the back and neck. Transposed into kinesthetic memories, rituals take up mental and social space. Because they are oriented (do it here, not there, please), they orient; by engaging in them, you learn the appropriate posture for navigating the world. Rituals happen in settings, geographical environments that are “there,” but they also happen on constructed sets used to frame them. The set of a ritual is an artifact, whereas its setting is more or less a given. Both are relative, of course, since there is no such thing as either an absolute given or construction out of nothing. As a given, a ritual environment precedes and exceeds the ritual itself; it is a force field encircling a ritual, those who enact it, and even those who study it. As an artifact, a ritual set is built of all sorts of things, some of it tangible, some of it conceptual, thereby transforming the given into the made-over. Scholars too construct—actually, reconstruct—rituals by setting them in a context, which is itself constructed out of scenes selected from a ritual’s actual environment. Just as ritualists select actions for rituals, so authors construct ritual descriptions by hunting for causes that determine their shape, looking for their consequences, and mapping their connections and disconnections with the surrounding environment.

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Every scholarly query requires an excision of some part of a ritual’s actual environment as the relevant context for interpreting or explaining that ritual. The interpretively reconstructed environment never equals the actual environment. To study a ritual by setting it in a selected context, then, is to craft a frame. As in matting and framing a picture, you can use contrasting or complementary colors, select heavy or light stock. The frame can be thin and wiry, or it can be heavy, grabbing more attention than the picture itself. Scholars may claim their frames are scientifically constructed, but frames are also determined by aesthetic considerations. Is the boundary of a studied ritual imagined as permeable impermeable? To what extent does the ritual allow itself to be changed by permeation? What things are filtered out? What passes through? In which direction? In? Out? Both ways? How densely bounded is this ritual? Who frames it this way? Participants? Select groups of participants? Scholars? Students of ritual should notice not only the actual spaces of a ritual but also the spatial metaphors used by ritual actors and scholars of ritual. Speaking of cultural and mental “space” is widespread. Container metaphors are beguiling and insidious; we quickly lose track of them, and they readily take over. So ritual studies scholars should notice when people shift from speaking of bodily or geographical space to using spatial metaphors in reference to nonspatial things. Posing the right questions can help us keep track of them: For participants, what is literally central and peripheral? What is metaphorically central and peripheral? Who sits or stands above and below whom? Who is socially higher and lower? Where are the physical boundaries of their rituals? What are the theological or mythological boundaries? Which way is inside, and which way is outside? Who is an insider, and who is an outsider? By posing such questions we are less likely to erase the difference between physical and metaphoric space. Religious studies scholar Jonathan Z. Smith proposes a spatialized theory of ritual.431 Although both spatial and “actional” rhetoric appear in To Take Place, spatial metaphors assume a pronounced theoretical ascendancy. Smith makes statements that sound like they could support an action theory of ritual: for example, “Ritual is, first and foremost, a mode of paying attention.” However, these statements are often displaced by a spatial reductionism evident, for instance, in the chapter’s epigraph, “Nothing shall have taken place but place,”432 and in repeated assertions such as “Sacrality is, above all, a category of emplacement.”433 Thus, the “where” of ritual becomes theoretically more important than the “how” of it. Smith speaks of “place” rather than “sacred space” to differentiate himself rhetorically from phenomenologists such as Mircea Eliade and to evoke the more specifically social meanings of “place.” Nevertheless, spatiality and placement remain determinative of Smith’s conception of ritual. It is treated not simply as one dimension of ritual but as the fundamental one. For him, ritual action does not make space sacred; rather, placement renders actions sacred. Whereas Eliade construes the center as sacred to religion, thus to his theory of religion, Smith renders placement central, thus privileged, to his theory of ritual.

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Essential to maintaining the primacy of place in Smith’s theory of ritual is his deployment of the notion in both a literal and a metaphoric fashion. Sometimes his topic is an actual geographical place—Jerusalem, for instance—but often it is placement, that is, mental schemes and social classifications. Too often he slips between one usage and the other, making the shift without calling attention to it.434 In To Take Place temple rites ground Smith’s generalizations about ritual. He construes temple ritual as “exemplary of ritual itself.”435 He argues that within the temple, “all was system from which nothing could distract.”436 For Smith, the temple was, metaphorically speaking, a map. In effect, he implies that there is a process whereby geographical sacred places give rise to nonspatialized modes of emplacement, that is, to intellectual systems. He argues that places facilitate a “prescission,” an abstraction, from place while at the same time maintaining the centrality of place. He goes even further, claiming that there is no rift between the literal or geographical level and the conceptual or metaphoric one: “There is no break with the dynamics of ritual itself.”437 My view is that there is a break and that interpreters, not places, make the move from geography to mental classification. Smith implies the existence of a smooth and necessary connection between intellectual and social order, on the one hand, and ritual, on the other. However true such a claim may be of temple ritual, I see no reason to conclude that this connection is definitive of ritual everywhere or ritual in general. For Smith, place is not only central; it is active. As he imagines it, a place is not a mere empty or passive receptacle.438 It is not just the context or backdrop of action but rather a force that forms actions and actors. As Kenneth Burke might have put it, “Scene acts.”439 Smith rejects performance theory in favor of a spatial theory, but he does so by casting place as lead actor. I have no doubt that in some ritual systems space is a primary ritual actor, but in others it is a mere backdrop. In the Santa Fe Fiesta some of David Trujillo’s actions and roles are space-specific. Playing de Vargas, he removes his helmet in the cathedral. Onstage he walks with theatrical pride. But how does he stroll Santa Fe’s central plaza? How should he and other fiesta royalty walk and talk there? The plaza was there long before Trujillo walked it. On the one hand, it is spoken of as sacred space and as an apt symbol of Hispano displacement from Santa Fe, hence the importance of reclaiming it by performing the Entrada there.440 On the other, the plaza is castigated as the center of an Adobe Disneyland, where Anglo “culture vultures” produce Santa Fe style for consumption by the rest of the world.441 How does one behave in such a place? Everything depends on who “one” is. The place alone does not dictate behavior. The central plaza monument, which is an obelisk, was originally inscribed “To the heroes who have fallen in various battles with savage Indians in the Territory of New Mexico.” Later, “savage” was removed. If you are a Pueblo, perhaps you keep your distance from the obelisk. If you are a tourist, you stroll around it, enjoying the space and thinking little about what is etched in or chiseled out of stone. If you are

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local and it is fiesta time, you avoid the plaza or you hang out there for the same reason: The area is jammed with people. Perhaps you go there to perform, but some performance spaces on the plaza are elevated, while others are not. The raised platforms command attention, while flat, grassy spaces merely invite it. It would not be easy to determine whether action or space dominates the plaza, because we would first have to answer tributary questions: Action by whom? In which subspace?

Ritual Times Imagining ritual as a spatial process, researchers search out its center and circumference. The ritual begins when, for example, participants walk through the door or enter the sanctuary, and it ends when people walk out the door or offsite. The ritual whole is everything between entering and exiting. Considering a ritual as a temporal process, students of ritual listen for its beginning and ending. A ritual begins, say, when someone says, “Let us begin,” and it ends when a bell is struck with a certain recognizable rhythm. The ritual is what transpires in between. The beginning and ending of a ritual can also be less overt. It may begin when a single person is inspired to convene it. It may end when all feel that the work of the ritual is complete. Timing is not always determined by clocks and calendars. The meaning of “ritual time” is not self-evident, because the phrase can refer to several different ways of reckoning a ritual’s orchestration of time (see list 13). List 13. Kinds of Ritual Time

• • • • • • • •

ritual duration: how long a ritual performance lasts ritual endurance: how long a ritual has survived historically ritual timing: when a ritual happens ritual phasing: the temporal patterning (“rhythm”) of a ritual; a ritual’s articulation of its beginning, middle, and end (“plot”) ritual regularity: the evenness of intervals between enactments ritual frequency: how often a ritual happens ritual recursivity: a ritual’s tendency to loop or turn back on itself ritual cross-temporality: time(s) to which a ritual refers or with which it aspires to connect

Just as rituals have spatial layouts, they have temporal qualities: a long ritual / a short ritual, ordinary time / holiday time. Rituals are temporally embedded, signifying multiple modes of measuring time: phases of the moon, seasons, holy days, auspicious times, definitive historical eras. In turn, rituals host temporal markers ranging from brief inhalations and exhalations to turns in cosmic cycles. The temporality of ritual is axiomatic for the same reason that its spatiality is: There is no escaping it.442

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That a ritual is an event seems so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning, but one often hears “ritual” or “the ritual” used in ways that make a ritual seem like an object that transcends time and space. Regardless of which “other” kinds of time ritualists may claim to occupy, ritual studies scholars who expect to engage in public discourse necessarily inhabit the ordinary kind. Like games, plays, and concerts, rituals begin and end, and usually their beginnings and endings are marked—even if the marking is fuzzy—so people don’t miss them: time to start; time to quit. Like the performing arts, rituals “eventuate.” They arise, persist for a while, and then disappear, perhaps leaving traces on the environment, in memory, or in a text. In Western proscenium theater, the curtains part, then people perform actions that other people witness. When the curtains close, the event terminates, and people go home. Whereas a work of plastic art persists even if it is on display this month but not next, a work of performing art disappears in the doing unless captured in some other medium, such as film or painting. A ritual’s duration is the length of its performance, the time it takes to unfold as measured by whatever means: clock, bodily tiredness, position of the sun. The duration of rituals varies enormously. They can be as short as a handshake or as long as a life of monastic practice. The short ones can flit by unnoticed, perhaps even by those who perform them habitually, and in the long ones, surely there are flat moments when nothing ritually significant is going on. How to determine a ritual’s duration is not always evident. Suppose a cremation is followed a few days later by a funeral and interment, then by a memorial a year after, followed in a decade by the moving of flesh-free bones to a collective site. What is the duration of the ritual? Do the days and years between events count? Is this complex sequence best construed as one ritual comprised of several phases or as several rituals? What do you do when some participants declare that, in truth, their liturgy never ends, because even when it is not going on down here on earth, it is going on up in heaven or in the recesses of the human heart? And what about preparation? When a rabbi prays as she studies the Torah in preparation for a sermon, does that count as part of the ritual? Does the memorial that takes place a year after a Jew’s death count as part of the death ritual? And what about the fact that a ritual may branch out, hooking into another ritual, generating an entire ritual system? Where does a ritual begin and end? The question is neither rhetorical nor pedantic. Just as a performance can be captured on film and then re-presented, so a ritual can disappear and reappear. Having done something they consider necessary and good, people can come back together and do similar (but never exactly the same) things as they did before in pretty much the same way. They can repeat the sequence over and over again. When a ritual repeats, thereby enduring, similarities may come to overshadow differences, making it alluring to think of ritual as if it were an architectural structure. This view is even more tempting when those similarities congeal into a script containing words and rubrics that prescribe or authorize

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actions. When a ritual goes from being a one-time event to being a repeated event underwritten by an authorized text, it appears to sit there the way a rock does. Consequently, two analogies, ritual-as-unchanging-structure and ritual-as-timelessidea, are tempting theoretical models for scholars, since each seems to remove ritual from the ravages of time. With the emergence of repetition, persistence, and textuality, it is becomes likely that someone will transpose a ritual practice into an idea, something to think about, or, more complexly, to think with. A ritual’s endurance is how long the ritual lasts historically. Research on ritual endurance considers questions such as these: Did the ancestors perform this ritual? Where did it come from? What has been its life course? Did anyone invent it? Revise it? Buy the rights to it? Receive it as a gift? Resist changing it? In the course of a ritual’s lifespan it can change shape, maybe even undergo a name change. Through time a ritual also probably changes functions, and participants change their intentions. Because rituals emerge, they can also die. In fact, entire ritual systems have died out. Rituals and even ritual traditions have lifespans. Some persist for months, fewer for years or decades, fewer still for eons. No one practices ancient Greek or Roman ritual, not even Greeks or Romans. A few North American neopagans practice “ancient” Greek religion, but the performers are neither ancient nor Greek. Contemporary Egyptian rituals are for the most part Islamic, quite unlike ancient Egyptian rituals, which were, for part of their history, polytheistic rather than monotheistic. Where is ancient Egyptian pharaonic ritual now? Nowhere, although much of its residue—mummies, pyramids, inscriptions—is scattered throughout the world’s museums. Echoes of ancient Egyptian rituals are found in Masonic and Mormon rituals, and symbols borrowed from the tradition appear on the backs of certain denominations of U.S. currency. The rituals are gone, but some of their elements endure. When something endures, it can generate a history, written, oral, or mnemonic. A ritual’s historicity has two facets. One is the history of the ritual itself: Is it known? Who tracks it and how—in writing or by memory? Are there conflicting versions? The second is its location in some broader (world, regional, national) history: At what points does the smaller history of the ritual itself break out into the larger cultural or political history? What was going on when the ritual emerged? How and how long did the ritual endure? How did it morph? How did it meet its demise? Ritual timing denotes when rather than how long—the day, hour, week, month, or season of a ritual’s occurrence. When are the ripe times? Sunrise? Sunset? The end of the year? The founder’s birthday? The end or beginning of the week? The equinox or solstice? Who decides which are the auspicious or proper moments? By which group’s calendar is the determination made? The same actions performed at sunrise and midnight impact bodies and crowds differently. The timing of some rituals is set; the timing of others varies. Easter is a “movable feast,” its date varying from year to year. For complex historical and religious reasons, it is the Sunday following the full moon that comes on or after the spring equinox. In many

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instances the reasons for a ritual’s timing are not obvious. Birth rituals may happen near the time of birth, or after a year, when survival is more likely, but people can choose to celebrate, say, their saint’s day instead of their birthday. It might seem appropriate for coming-of-age rituals to coincide with biological puberty, but often they do not. The timing of a ritual can serve different purposes. A ritual can be held at night because that’s when people are not working or because darkness enhances mystery. Timing can also be motivated by conventional, accidental, or strategic considerations. An enthronement can be held on a holiday because that date is the legally mandated date for such events or because rulers know they can garner popular support if their coming to power is suffused with festivity. November 17 is the anniversary of the Czech Republic’s “Velvet Revolution” of 1989. On this day groups annually commemorate, celebrate, and compete. On the morning of November 17, 2012, a massive demonstration conducted by labor unions was held on Wenceslas Square. The mood was militant, calling for the downfall of the current government. Preceding the demonstration was a very angry, provocative counterdemonstration. Riot police were called, and arrests were made. You can witness the scene by watching “Ritualizing the Czech ‘Velvet’ Revolution.”443 Later on the same day, the first Sametové Posvícení—literally, “Velvet Feast”— was scheduled. Since this event was more of a procession than a protest, organizers referred to it in English as “Velvet Carnival.” Countering the demonstration and counterdemonstration, it was designed to transform anger into creativity, so its tone was playful, ironic, and gently iconoclastic. The idea of having such an event originated with Olga Věra Cieslarová, a student of religious studies and theater who studied Basel’s Fasnacht, wrote a thesis about it, and then returned to Prague to create a similar festival, the first one happening in 2012. Musicians from Basel were enthused about the idea and sent a delegation from Switzerland to participate. The parade units were created by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and civic organizations, each with distinctive masks, music, and leaflets explaining their causes. Shortly before the procession was to begin, the morning’s labor demonstration flooded into the streets, surging toward the National Theater, where the Velvet Carnival was assembling. Because the police could not stop the massive crowd, carnival processants were forced to leave early, barely avoiding a collision on the streets. November 17 is sacred to Czech nationalism and identity; so are Wenceslas Square and the National Theater courtyard. Not only are the spaces competitively contested, but the time-space nexus is so powerful that any ritual actions occurring in them are markedly enhanced and warped. Ritual timing concerns not only the group and its shared social clock but also individuals and their felt sense of timing. If you are in your forties, all your friends are married, and you have yet to undergo “that special day,” this postponement has consequences. It colors how you imagine the deferred or rejected ceremony—even

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the actual one, should you opt to undergo it. If you live in a retirement home for seniors and attend two or three funerals a month, the frequency changes the ethos of the rites. Perhaps they remind attendees of their own mortality, but such occasions also offer residents things they enjoy and anticipate: a bus ride, socializing, or special food. Ritual time is not only about when a ritual occurs but also about how often. Ritual regularity is about the evenness of intervals between enactments. A ritual that happens every 150 years is regular, but it is also infrequent. A ritual that happens daily but at varying times and for varying lengths can feel quite irregular. Irregularity can be either a source of disorientation and therefore criticism or of surprise and therefore anticipation. Ritual frequency is about how often a ritual happens, and it affects participants’ feelings about how special or quotidian an event is. Rituals that happen frequently elicit lower expectations, while rituals that happen infrequently elicit higher ones. The difference is like that of a staple contrasted with a dessert. Each works on embodied memory in a different way. Harvey Whitehouse distinguishes between rituals in doctrinal mode and those in imagistic mode. The former are routinized and high in frequency. They tend to elicit extensive exegesis, but they are also subject to the tedium effect. The latter are infrequent, highly arousing, generative of a conscious search for meaning, and more likely to create long-lasting, episodic memories.444 Ritual phases are chronological subunits. They can be mechanically marked by, say, drumbeats or clappers, or they can simply flow without benefit or necessity of explicit dividers. Sometimes they are recognized, named, and written out by leaders or teachers, who subdivide a ritual to facilitate the teaching and learning of it.445 They can even be computer-generated.446 Sometimes phases are discovered in analysis. Sometimes they are only felt or experienced by ritualists themselves, in which case the phases must be inferred and named by observers. There has been a persistent tendency to conceptualize ritual phases as narrativelike (with a beginning, middle, and end), dramalike (with rising and falling, climactic action), or musiclike (therefore rhythmic), but such metaphors are not necessarily those of participants. Ritual accounts by observers can either loop by free association or chronicle sequences in order: This happens, that happens, and something else happens.447 The subdivisions perceived by an observer may or may not match those of participants. The fact that rites unfold in time means that when you try to film or take notes on one, you have little choice but to track it in a linear fashion from beginning to end, because that is how it eventuates. Even if you are scurrying in circles trying to study a festival in which there are multiple simultaneous events, the event itself, like a clock, still runs forward. Later you may code your notes into nonchronologically ordered constituents or edit footage in a nonlinear fashion, but initially, the enactment or performance, regardless of whether it alludes to a mythic time before time or to timeless acts of ancestors, moves relentlessly forward through time. In this

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respect, following a ritual is similar to reading a novel. The story may circle and cycle chronologically, but readers are expected by authors to turn pages one by one in chronological order. The difference is that ritual accounts are seldom narratively compelling in the way good novels are. The theoretically inspired idea that rites of passage have preliminal, liminal, and postliminal phases is sometimes helpful, sometimes not. This threefold phasic scheme espoused by Arnold van Gennep, then developed by Victor Turner, may be useful for organizing articles about ritual, but seldom are ritual phases so neatly laid out. Often there are phases within phases. There are macro- and micro-phases, as well as recursive loops. The course of actual rituals often makes havoc out of the theory that rituals are three-phased. Even if one discovers three phases in an initiation rite, this discovery is no guarantee that they will show up in other initiations, much less other kinds of ritual. Thinking of a ritual in terms of “rhythm” is probably more to the point but also less seductive than thinking of it as “narrative,” because most of us nonmusicians would have difficulty identifying rhythmic patterns with any degree of accuracy. The temporal rhythm of a ritual may in fact be musical, but it is not necessarily musical, nor is it necessarily singular or linear. Just as spaces can overlap, creating a veritable palimpsest, so time—musical, mythical, and ritualistic—can loop. Ritual recursivity seems to invite musical metaphors. Although there are studies of music in ritual, there is little research on the rhythm or musicality of rituals themselves. The fact that rituals are so widely defined in terms of recurrence and repetition ought to make us wonder whether something other than metaphor-making is going on when people say the drum is Mother Earth’s heartbeat or that practice is about assimilating ritual values into breath cycles or heartbeats. Is the notion of a ritual’s rhythm metaphoric or literal? What’s the connection between the rhythm of seasons, the rhythm of a ritual’s unfolding, the rhythm of a piece of music within that ritual, and the rhythmicity of the ritual itself?

Ritual Objects The paraphernalia of ritual can be minimal or enormous but always something of a puzzle. Which of these counts as a ritual object: an icon on an iconostasis? An icon in pilgrimage gift shop? An icon for sale in a flea market? A chalice? A chalice filled with wine? A chalice filled with beer? Money? Money in a collection plate? A piece of clothing once worn by your deceased child? In “The Disposition of Cremation Ashes in the Netherlands,” a video interview with Dutch researcher Meike Heessels, she tells the story of an ash-scattering in which a young boy accidentally spills some funerary ashes.448 At first everyone is horrified, but then they begin to laugh and improvise, because the father, whose ashes are being released, was “like that.” One kid says, “Oops, maybe that was his

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leg,” and another retorts, “Oh, and there goes his heart.” Mourners can treat them either way: Ashes are a person; ashes are not a person. Shortly after death, it’s probably impossible to resolve your attitudes one way or the other. The laughing and joking express both feelings at once: He is alive and would enjoy this; he is dead and won’t mind. Human ashes cross the boundary between life and death. They refuse to be cast out; families don’t trash corpses. Ashes are as sacred and inviolable as living persons; otherwise first responders and soldiers wouldn’t fight so hard to recover dead bodies and treat them with ceremonial respect.449 It is tempting to equate ritual objects with sacred objects, but the two are not identical. “Sacred” is about value; “ritual” is about use. “Sacred” means “ultimately valued,” but there are penultimate things as well: treasures, memorabilia, and keepsakes. Ritual objects are implements actively used in rituals, but what about things merely occupying a ritual space? What about food eaten, food offered to gods, and food left over? And what about ritual implements carried beyond the ritual precincts? Are they still ritual tools? If a ritual object away from its home is treated ritually, it remains a ritual object. If it is treated as mere disposable stuff, it is not. Not all rituals require paraphernalia. Some traditions play down the possession of material goods, but these traditions do not escape materiality altogether regardless of how vigorously ritual specialists espouse nonmaterial goals. While some traditions make a project of disengaging from materiality by dispensing with ritual hardware, minimizing costs, or descrying things tangible, other traditions accumulate sacred treasures, venerate icons, and invest in liturgical hardware. Either way, stuff accumulates and things deteriorate from neglect or protracted use. The laws of physics and chemistry apply even in the most sanctified settings. In the face of deterioration, and confronted by the possibility of theft, every group has to determine how to use and value material culture. Participants debate among themselves: Is ownership bad? Can sanctified property be deconsecrated, sold, given away, or traded? Should a sacred pipe be preserved in a glass case or be allowed to deteriorate naturally? A host of other questions arise with regard to iconic images: Are they semblances or embodiments? Is their veneration idolatrous? How should devotees treat the statue of La Conquistadora when they are not displaying or parading “her,” when not dressing and undressing “it”? Which is it, “her” or “it”? How should the statue be cared for? La Conquistadora, Our Lady of the Conquest, is the symbolic matrix of genealogical lines leading to some of the most prominent families around Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Rio Grande valley. As symbolic mother, she is a source of cultural identity. Some who venerate her express great pride in their family trees and coats of arms. Contemplating the complex, heartfelt connections between this particular version of the Virgin Mary and New Mexico’s Hispanic culture, some Santa Feans are moved to tears.450 Devotion to La Conquistadora is a way of sustaining loyalty to family lines. The Virgin Mother is the keystone of a family-centered cosmos. Those who express filial devotion to her are not only implicitly her knights and daughters but also children of

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the conquistadores. La Conquistadora is an ancient heirloom jointly possessed by a multitude of interlocking families. Hence, when they speak of “our” mother, they are doing more than using a customary term. La Conquistadora is “ours” in two senses: She is both an heirloom statue and a material embodiment of a spiritual mother. For her papal coronation La Conquistadora’s devotees sent out a formally printed invitation that began, “Hijos mios . . .” (“My children . . .”) and continued as if it were a personal note from the Lady herself. This intimate, first-person style is exemplified by Angelico Chávez’s La Conquistadora: The Autobiography of an Ancient Statue.451 The book is written as if La Conquistadora herself had dictated it. As queen and lady she has champions and intermediaries, but as mother she speaks directly to her children. The dedication page of Chávez’s Autobiography reads, “To the memory of these and scores of other ‘Conquistadora’ progenitors and their consorts.” Devotees say that La Conquistadora belongs to everyone in the Southwest, but this concept applies mainly to her role as queen and patroness. As mother, she belongs to Roman Catholics generally, especially to families claiming conquistador descent. The novena processions, during which she goes in procession from the cathedral to Rosario Cemetery, are times of family reunions and remembering the dead. So even though there is an outer circle of inclusivism allowing La Conquistadora to reign ceremonially like a civic queen over the city, there is also an inner circle of ethno-familial particularism. Publicly, she belongs to all residents regardless of race, color, or creed, but privately, devotees jealously guard La Conquistadora as one would a revered, aged mother. As a statue, she is “Catholic family property,” although no one properly owns a mother, much less the Mother of God. In ritual circumstances, the boundary between people and things can be extraordinarily fluid. Objects become subjects, and subjects, objects.452 People are objectified, rendering them thinglike, and objects become animate, humanlike actors. Animated, they animate. Like spaces, things can live, or at least be said to be living. Receiving flowers and being showered with milk, they take initiative and confer blessings. Animate and powerful ritual objects elicit care: This ring was your grandfather’s; look after it well. That staff belonged to the deceased archbishop; hang it there; do not use it. This image was painted by a saint in a state of deep prayer. For twelve generations this shofar was passed from father to son, all rabbis, so do not drop it. Not only “material culture,” such things are also “materialized spirituality.” They incarnate (in stone or wood rather than flesh) what they signify. Ritually animated things are often wrapped in stories and myths resembling biographies of famous persons.453 Treasured finds are stolen and sold like slaves, hauled across frontiers, and then shown off in museums, originally sanctuaries of colonialism. In such settings, other people’s ritual objects are encountered by tourists gazing at bartered ceremonial goods displayed in oak-trimmed glass cases. As museum pieces, ritual objects are singularized, construed as one of a kind, therefore precious, maybe even priceless. Displaying them touts a nation’s power by

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demonstrating the range of its travels and the elevation of its taste. Viewing them defines a class of cultural elite. A fetish is a potent object evoking ritualized behavior. The word arose in the seventeenth century among Portuguese traders, who used it to refer to talismans, probably from the Guinea coast of Africa. So it connoted any object that other people regarded as potent. Later, in the nineteenth century, the term picked up two additional meanings. Freudians gave it a sexual turn: A fetish was an object that stirred an irrational erotic desire focused on an object or body part. Then Marx and his followers used the phrase “fetishism of commodities” to describe the dynamics of mystification surrounding exchange. A commodity was fetishized when a transcendent charge was attributed to it, resulting in a value beyond that of the labor required to produce it.454 The reverse process is commodification, which takes place when something sacred (valued for noneconomic reasons) is reduced to its economic value. Commodified objects are produceable, often reproduceable and sellable, therefore regarded as common. Goods crossing boundaries develop complex economies of exchange. Gifts go from being mine to being yours. Food moves from outside to inside, from being not-me to being me. Sacrifices, sometimes in the form of food, move from humans to deities, who in turn bestow gifts on humans who themselves are transformed into sacrificial material. So it is not enough merely to identify and label ritual objects. Students of ritual must follow the migration of paraphernalia, studying how their life cycles are caught up in processes of exchange. A thing may travel not only in space but also in status from, say, being a mere commodity to becoming a singular, therefore valued object to being an icon. Icons are a particularly rich source of insights for reflecting on ritual objects. The video “A Brush with Silence” follows George Kordis, a Greek iconographer, teaching Western students the art of painting (technically, “writing”) icons.455 Orthodox Christianity and icon painting are often romanticized in North America, but traditional icon writing can be more doggedly practical or piously liturgical than romanticism usually allows. This workshop was for beginners, and its tone was practical. The most mystical dimension was the insistent whistling wind outside. George, although a serious Orthodox practitioner, is no romantic. You can see him joking as he edits students’ strokes and remixes their colors. The workshop’s ethos is not liturgical. In fact, its most ritualized activity was that of checking cell phones and watches. Since quotidian ritualization rules, the video is wrapped in the driving rhythms of Patrick Lee’s “Quittin’ Time.”456 Much of the day was marked by instructional pedagogy and collaborative chatter, along with waves of consternation and delight. The workshop produced a set of almost-finished icons, along with much inadvertent art created on blotters and plates of glass used for mixing colors. By the day’s end, most participants had fallen into silence, “quittin’ time,” the stilled state of mind and spirit in which sacred art can begin, because, finally, in these circumstances, a painter can almost hear the stroke of the brush.

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By the end of the day were the icons holy? Most participants said not, even though the subject matter was. After a later workshop some said that finishing the painting at home in silence moved the paintings in that direction, but that the paintings would probably only be sanctified by relocation into a church or by protracted meditative use. So whether a painting becomes a ritual object isn’t only a matter of its formal qualities, content, or conditions of its production but also of its use. Narrowly defined, icons are ritually executed representations of holy beings (God, Christ, the saints, angels) painted with egg tempera on wood in a Byzantine style cultivated by Orthodox Christianity. The non-Orthodox West typically refers to icons as if they are objects designed to be seen, but in practice icons are also touched, carried, addressed, offered incense or candles, and even kissed. Apt illustrations of the way one kind of ritually framed sensory activity triggers the other senses, icons are experienced not only visually but also in tactile, kinesthetic, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory ways. As a hedge against idolatry, traditional Orthodox icons are deliberately flat rather than three-dimensional. Traditional iconographers resisted the move toward realism that perspective offered. Even so, for iconophiles icons were considered to incarnate, or embody, divine reality. Icons did not merely refer to something sacred or only remind worshippers of the divine. For iconoclasts, however, icons were false substitutes, idols. Broadly conceived, iconoclasm means the critique of iconicity, the refusal to treat something as sacred. Narrowly understood, it refers to two brief periods of eighth-century Byzantine history. Illustrating the fierceness of the debates and attacks, a church council in 754 declared: If anyone ventures to represent the divine image of the Word after the Incarnation with material colours, let him be anathema! The evil custom of assigning names to the images does not come down from Christ and the Apostles and the holy Fathers; nor have these left behind then, any prayer by which an image should be hallowed or made anything else than ordinary matter. The only admissible figure of the humanity of Christ, however, is bread and wine in the holy Supper. This and no other form, this and no other type, has he chosen to represent his incarnation. Bread he ordered to be brought, but not a representation of the human form, so that idolatry might not arise.457 For the iconoclasts the only acceptable icon was the liturgy itself, because in it Christ, the image of God, was actually present in bread and wine and not merely hinted at by representations. Although visual images such as paintings and statues were unacceptable, actions (kinesthetic, tactile, and gustatory) enacted with food

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(bread, wine) were not. In short, early iconoclasm did not apply to every thing or every action. Iconophilia and iconoclasm are not confined to theological and liturgical debates of eighth-century Christianity. Broadly conceived, an icon is any venerated image, not only of a divine being but also of a beloved musician, vaunted movie star, celebrated sports hero, or lionized politician. By epitomizing the aspirations of devotees, iconic personages receive homage. Icons in this sense are not limited to statues or things holy. Even photos can become iconic. Iconicity can be attributed to a family photo capturing “the last time the family was all together,” or to a journalistic photo of a crucial historical moment in Tiananmen Square. Journalistic photos become iconic when they become widely recognizable, shaping attitudes or subsequent photographic practices and sometimes even determining political decisions. Family photos become iconic not merely by resemblance but also by the power they exercise on behavior. Family members don’t only look at treasured pictures; they touch, carry, frame, hang, and even kiss them.458 In the documentary Looking for an Icon, Geoffrey Batchen, who teaches the history of photography, observes that echoes of Christian art often appear in iconic photos not because photographers decide to embed such allusions but because their perceptions are conditioned by compositional practices that suffuse art history.459 In the same documentary, Italian photographer-designer Oliviero Toscani remarks, “The church used religious icons to give expression to its power. Later on, art was put in the service of politics and put in the service of industry, in order to promote and sell products.” Later Toscani concludes, “So communication is an instrument of authority. And an authority that wants to assert its power has to create icons. That means that everyone who believes in an icon is a servant. We are servants of authority.”460 In short, icons, whether paintings in Orthodox Christianity or photos in secular journalism, are not merely seen or touched; they also act. Senior citizens in Glasgow produced a series of photos called Iconic Moments of the Twentieth Century.461 One picture shows a senior citizen with his pistol to the head of another senior, who is facing the camera. The picture is a parody, but it reinforces the iconicity of the original photo by asking viewers whether they recall Eddie Adams’s 1968 picture of police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Vietcong guerrilla during the Vietnam War.462 Younger viewers may not get the seniors’ allusion, in fact, might not even recognize the original photo if it were shown to them. The possibility of nonrecognition forces us to ask: If iconic images are neither universal nor eternal, what is the cultural and historical purview of an iconic painting or photo? Iconicity is as much a function of contexts as of the contents of pictures themselves. Religious icons and iconic photos may be widely recognized, but they have a limited constituency as well as a lifespan. If someone were to test us by describing some iconic photos, we may recognize a few, but not all of them, and even though we may recognize the photos themselves, we may not remember either the photographer or the situation.

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Like any object, a ritual object is a sensorily perceived medium. The media of traditional icon painting are egg yolk, water, and wine on wood, so we oversimplify by speaking in the singular, “medium.” Even the apparently simple medium of an Orthodox icon is, in fact, a multimedium. Debates over icons, whether ancient or contemporary, are struggles to comprehend the multiplicity of media and their way of making sense. Think of the ways we use the term “medium” and its derivatives. A medium is a sticky substance (for example, egg white) that binds color for artistic use. The senses mediate data to our brains. Organizations that broadcast news electronically are media. Adepts who enter trance to communicate with spirits are mediums. Any means of communication that operates in a middle position, thereby linking two parties, is a medium. Like words spoken or images transmitted, objects, texts, places, and clothing are also media of communication insofar as they bear messages. With this broader understanding of media, the central problem is less that of defining terms than of distinguishing and relating various media and understanding their different ways of mobilizing the senses. What happens to a picture when it is set alongside a text, and what happens to the text as well? Why do televisions seem out of place in one ritual but not in another? Is the textuality of textmessaging the same as the textuality of a Koran passage or that of a textbook? Is a virtual wedding in Second Life as efficacious as an embodied wedding in “First Life” (this life)? If couples married in Second Life prefer to minimize the differences between Second and First Life, why, in defending their video gaming, do adolescent players of violent video games prefer to maximize the differences between onscreen and in-world violence? Objects are not just “there.” The senses mediate them to humans through the brain. All knowledge is mediated—in fact, doubly so: not only through the brain’s sensory apparatus but also through what we now call “the media.” The media include not only electronic broadcasts and websites but also older media such as broadsheets and newspapers, ancient media such as paintings and statues, and things we don’t usually think of as media, such as clothing and carts. In politicized ritual settings media tend to multiply, and as they multiply, they net other senses. A medium, them, ramifies into multimedia, and multimedia elicit multisensory perception. Icons are sacralized images, and holy books are sacralized writings. The dynamics of the two kinds of ritual objects are similar. You can carry, touch, or kiss a book as you might an icon. A sacred text may exist only orally in performance, but it may be objectified into a tangible codex or intangible but visible electronic medium. In each instance, sacred texts speak, assisted by their human animators. People not only touch sacred texts; they also listen to them. Like icons, holy texts display personlike characteristics, offering not only consolation but directives: Do this, don’t do that. Although they may be objects in need of dusting, they are also subjects that act. Like people, books “tell” stories. As with icons, holy books are also acted upon, becoming bones of contention. What they say is incontestable, therefore infinitely contested.

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Ritual Languages Literate as well as oral traditions ritualize sound, mainly in the form of speech and music, both of which may be accompanied by sonic markers such as the sounds of clappers or bells. By demarcating a beginning, ending, transition, or high point, sounds can lay out a narrative track even when they don’t contain narratives. Other sounds such as animal cries, sacred syllables, and nonlinguistic ecstatic utterances are widespread. Although ritual sounds are typically prescribed, they may also be improvised. Suffusing deliberate ritual sounds are ambient sounds in ritual, the ordinary, incidental “noise” generated by ritual activity such as shuffling feet, turning pages, and restless children. Ordinarily, participants tune out ambient sounds as most of us do the white noise in a restaurant. Ambient sounds may, however, constitute a kind of sonic metacommentary on the ritual itself. The methodological difficulty of studying them is like that of trying to read uncodified body language: How do interpreters know when their interpretations are off-base? Two videos in the online album “Ritual Creativity, Improvisation, and the Arts” can nuance our grasp of ritual language by complicating it.463 In “Improvising Spiritually” two women are vocally improvising in a soirée. Dominique Gauthier uses words and seems to be telling bits of a story. Victoria di Giovanni is vocalizing, using lots of rich vowel sounds but no words. In Dominique’s case a listener can speculate about what the words mean. There seem to be characters and a social situation, but not quite a plot. In Victoria’s case, listeners could say how the sounds coming out of her mouth made them feel or how they imagined Victoria felt as she sang, but only by free association could anyone say what her singing was “about.” However, fellow student Shadrack Jackman exclaims enthusiastically and repeatedly that both are “spiritual.” Questioned by me, he explains what he means by this word. He won’t agree that it is “ritualistic,” because to him that word suggests a scripted performance, and these two were spiritual because they were unscripted and because the two women made themselves vulnerable. In “A Vulnerable Moment in Vocal Improvisation,” I interview Victoria as she watches her own improvisation on video.464 She can’t explain what happened except to say that she was improvising sounds while watching another classmate who was moving to her vocalizations. There was a feedback loop between them. To her, the important thing about the improvisation was not meaning but effect, tears among audience members. What constitutes a ritual word, ritual sound, ritual music, or ritual noise is not immediately evident from an analysis of the formal properties of sounds themselves. The difference between meaningful sound and meaningless noise is a matter of intention and definition, and also a matter of perspective and reception. When a milk steamer goes on at a local coffee shop, rendering the lyrics of the piped-in music impossible to decipher, that sound, the inescapable accompaniment to the

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act of making a latte, is not obviously ritualistic. In fact, for most of us it would be extraneous not only to ritual but even to the event of going out for coffee. The sounds, however, are ritualistic for the writer who arrives every morning at 6:30 a.m. for her coffee and writing ritual.465 She calls it that. The barista notices the “morning lady” enjoying the sound of the frother and one day overhears her describing it as “music to my ears.” Later the lady tells him that the sound is the trigger for her morning “writing ritual.” So, with no further cueing and without further planning, discussion, or analysis, he “plays” his machine, and they celebrate the early morning hours. The woman is “religious” about her writing; the barista is “religious” about serving his “Starbuckians” what their brains crave. The morning lady could have spoken differently, becoming irritated by the frothing “racket,” but she doesn’t. Is the sonic interchange at Starbuck’s ritualization? Is the lady merely turning phrases? The determining factors are not only what she says but also what she does. Is she cultivating core values? Does she follow the form, as a devotee might do puja in a temple, or does she take a seat and listen, as one might do in a concert? Using the rhetoric of religion and ritual in a coffee shop and coupling it with repetitive, highly valued behavioral patterns is not all that different from myth-making in ritual. Sound is often mythologized or mystified: The sound of a Native American drum is Mother Earth’s heartbeat; the sound of a chanted “OM” has causal, even curative, force. Scientific research seems to confirm that sound, beyond its role as a vehicle for linguistic meaning, can exert formative influence.466 Rhythmic pounding can induce trance, and music can change or create with such force that it can inspire people go to war. Think about the highly mythologized bagpipe or the fife and drum combination. Sound instruments can entrain sympathetic resonances in objects, including human bodies. Receptors vibrate “sympathetically” with emitters. The Mozart effect, popularized as the claim that listening to classical music makes you smarter, has been roundly criticized.467 Still, less grandiose versions of this basic insight have been demonstrated. Certain frequencies, rhythms, or genres of music have verifiable and predictable effects. If an apt musical ambience can sprout more okra and zucchini seeds over a seventy-two-hour period than mere “pink” noise can, the sound-action and sound-feeling connections in ritual are worth studying.468 The scientific and artistic reception of Your Brain on Music suggests that “your brain on ritual sound” is a viable research topic.469 Languages, even when written, remain tacitly sonic. Sometimes the investment in language is so heavy that ritual itself is construed as essentially verbal and linguistic. If you think that rituals act out meaning and that meaning consists of words, it is tempting to play up ritual language, to treat rituals as mere frames for words rather than the other way around. Catholics “say” Mass, and Navahos “sing” their ceremonies. In both instances words are understood to have the power to act. It is even more tempting to treat ritual as a kind of language if you believe words can make the world or bring about fundamental transformations. Even though my “periodic table” of elements distinguishes sounds from actions, nothing stops either practitioners

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or theorists from construing speech as a kind of action or even as kind of object. After all, making a sound is an action, and words not only declare facts or convey meanings; they also accomplish tasks. Words in ritual settings describe, state, narrate, and even question, but one of their most distinctive functions is that of doing things. “I pronounce you husband and wife” is not merely a pious wish or a description of a fact but, rather, the performance of a deed. Saying so makes it so.470 List 14 contains some of the kinds of language that ritual studies scholars examine. List 14. Kinds of Ritual Language

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

canonical, or sacred, texts ritual texts the words of songs, hymns, chants performative utterances, declarations authoritative oral speech: homilies, sermons, exhortations prayer, petition praise, thanksgiving readings of sacred texts, poetry, letters, etc. testimony (personal narrative) magical incantations ecstatic utterances, in-the-spirit speech speaking for or as a deity, possession talk words of consecration words of decorum, e.g., introductions, recognitions facilitating directives, announcements, rubrics incidental talk, e.g., gossip, greetings, polite exchanges official, public words of exposition, exegesis, or interpretation unofficial, informal commentary by participants behind-the-scenes shoptalk among leaders liturgical theologies, theories of ritual

Performative utterances are sometimes singled out as the quintessential form of ritual language, leaving the impression that “real” rituals necessarily and effectively transform things, but such performative pronouncements are rare, leaving many other linguistic forms to be identified and studied. An exclusive focus on ritual words, either performative utterances or canonical texts, can deafen us to words and deeds outside ritual. Words before and after rituals, along with offstage verbal exchanges, are worth examining because they are often more candid. If we do not study unofficial commentaries and incidental talk, we will never know whether they are mere echoes of the rituals themselves or implicitly subversive countercurrents. Participants may be excluded from professional shoptalk, but scholars should tune in to it, asking what it might “say” about the rituals themselves.

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In addition to documenting words before, after, or about a ritual, we scholars should ask whether performative utterances and canonical words actually do what either clergy or theorists claim they do. The relationship between performative utterances (“I pronounce you husband and wife”) and magic (“Be healed”) is complex. The distance between a pronouncement and command is small, but how can we explain it? Is it enough to say that performative utterances depend on prior social agreement and that magical utterances are either delusional or just figurative ways of speaking and doing? One way of characterizing magic is as “words that compel,” but compelling is not the only way things work. Prayers often contain petitions. Although praying participants might deny having the power to compel a divine being, they may believe that things are more likely to happen if accompanied by praise and polite petitions. Prayer is not altogether dissimilar to magic, since the difference is that between influencing and causing. The opposite of words that do things are words that don’t. Nominalism (“nameism”) is the view that a word is merely a vocus flatus, a mouth-fart, or, more politely, a blowing out of breath. Nominalism holds that a word is an arbitrary label rather than an efficacious agent. The contrary view holds that words, especially proper names, are causal agents. In some religious traditions—Orthodox Judaism, for instance—one does not write or say the holy name but utters a circumlocution, because the name is connected with the reality. One can hold a nominalist view of cursing as well as praying. If someone “uses God’s name in vain,” by cursing your mother or damning you to hell, how do you regard the utterance? As just so much hot air? As a desecration? As affecting the very being of you and your mom? Even though languages are sonic, they leave sediment. Like implements and edifices, ritual texts are a major form of residue deposited by long-lived traditions. Theological study has privileged the study of texts not only because they have endured but also because they contain written language, privileged as an enduring echo of divine words. Although objects and spaces may be treated as sacred and therefore approached ritually, texts have long been privileged by the so-called religions of the book. As a consequence, ritual studies scholarship on literate traditions has tended to be textually preoccupied. For centuries, theology, the religious study of religion, has been book-centered. Not only have books been the focus of meditative study, the documentary sources of law and ethics, and the authoritative repositories of ritual knowledge; they have also been the primary means of demonstrating competence in the study of ritual. All of these activities have benefited from—but also been trapped by—the sacralization and ritualization of words in books. A peculiarity of religious life is that authorities who worry over the idolizing of material objects don’t always worry about the sacralizing of language in its many manifestations: sacred texts, prophetic declarations, inspired creeds, words of consecration. Even secular North American newspapers seem to privilege words, for example, by referring to weddings as the “exchanging of vows.” So it is worth noticing whether words, when compared with objects, are regarded as equally facilitating or

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inhibiting of human-divine communication. It is worth inquiring what else besides words acts, and how it does so. Music, for instance, acts; it moves bodies and emotions. If music can rouse inert feet into tapping out rhythms, how does this power compare with that of a ritual pronouncement’s ability to bond or a prayer’s capacity for moving divine beings? Words may “do,” but so does music, so do places, and so do things; clearly language is not unique in its capacity to do work. Sacred texts such as the Torah, Bible, and Koran contain ritual accounts as well as warrant ritual performances. Although in their respective traditions each of these is theologically the one privileged book, other books sit alongside and, in fact, within them. Each book is a really a collection of smaller books. In practice each text is supplemented and extended by other authoritative but noncanonical texts, some of which also shape ritual enactments. Although liturgics, like ritual studies and the history of religions, has recently begun conducting research on ritual performances, the bulk of writing and research continues to be on historic ritual texts. “Ritual text,” like “sacred text,” is an oversimplified label, since many ritual and sacred texts contain other kinds of material. Seder Nashim, which governs Jewish marriage and thereby weddings, is legal and ethical as well as ritualistic in import. This mixing of what we consider separate genres is typical of many traditions, so it is not always easy to know what counts or does not count as a ritual text. Ritual texts facilitate ritual performances in at least two ways. In one of these ways a community decides that performance is served by a mnemonic device, so a script is prepared as an alternative to memorization. Texts used as scripts sit behind performances like a prompter’s notes or playwright’s script sits behind a performed play. In a second way ritual texts appear in rituals, read aloud by leaders, tracked silently by followers, touched, fanned, elevated, or revered. They function like ritual objects. However, these alternatives (text behind a performance, text as prop in a performance) are not always acceptable. Because scripts can be a distraction or substitute, Navahos and Hindus, for example, lay great emphasis on learning by rote or heart. Other traditions, valuing spontaneity or openness to the movement of the spirit, also shun text-driven ritual performances.471 Saint Lydia’s is a “dinner church,” a small, fairly new congregation meeting in the Brooklyn Zen Center. Its central ritual, which includes cooking and eating a meal, is at once experimental and traditional. In a video of one of their services, Emily Scott, pastoral minister, delivers a brief, read sermon.472 However, it is completed, responded to, and amplified by a “collective sermon” in which other community members react, confess, ruminate, and storytell. The process maintains a clergy/parishioner distinction—she reads her previously prepared part—but it also democratizes the process by giving others their say. The homiletical portion of the liturgy is a hybrid— partly textualized, partly improvised. In historical and archaeological research, ritual texts are sometimes referred to as either primary sources or the sources of ritual. There is nothing wrong with this usage provided you realize that textual sources are only the immediate or accessible

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sources rather than the ultimate sources. The ultimate sources of ancient or long-lived rituals are seldom known. In any case, ritual texts are just as commonly the effects of ritual as they are the causes of it. Even in the case of recent ritual scripts, it is not common to sign them as one signs a book, claiming authorship to it. Anonymity, borrowing, and collective or cumulative authorship of ritual scripts remain the rule even in literate cultures. Often there are intermediate sources—in effect, a chain leading from actual performances to peoples’ memories and oral traditions, then to the inscription of rituals into print or in today’s megachurches, writ large onscreen. Many rituals are cued without benefit of writing. People know the words, and cues are delivered in ways other than written scripting. However, one of the marks of so-called high, literate liturgical traditions is that they are more book-guided than the low ones are. Both ritual performance and ritual revision are approached as if written and read words are more central than performed actions or as if the words are the actions. In Christian liturgical texts one sometimes finds rubrics (printed in red) or italics that, although they direct action, are considered secondary. A priest or parishioner does not speak these cues aloud but, rather, does what they direct. A basic rule of field research on ritual, then, is never to assume that texts and performances mirror each other even if ritual leaders say they perform according to the book, rule, or tradition. Maybe they do, but it is entirely possible that they do not. Ritual texts may or may not be followed, and they may be followed in some respects but not in others. Participants can adhere to them selectively without even recognizing that they are being selective. Queried, informants may describe what they think they should do instead of describing what they actually do. They may not even notice that they are not following their own ritual books.

Ritual Groups Rituals are built on affiliation. Friends join the same civic club or sorority. Only those of a certain age can be initiated. Only those able to afford an exorbitant membership fee can participate in the rites of decorum at a local golf club. Men only. Women only. Whites only. Adults only. We can’t study a ritual without understanding the groups, both formal and informal, that run it, and without understanding how those groups interconnect with the social dynamics of the larger, surrounding society. The collective element of a ritual can be so broad that it may not seem to be merely a constituent of ritual but rather the whole of it. The social scientific study of ritual is often so concentrated on the social dynamics of collectives that rituals themselves tend to become incidental to anthropological and sociological accounts of them; the study of ritual is the study of collectives. I put this element last not to say it is less important but so that the other elements are not short-changed. However we label ritual’s collective element, list 15 lays out several considerations for students of ritual.

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List 15. Collective Considerations in the Study of Ritual ◦

◦ ◦ ◦ ◦ ◦ ◦ ◦ ◦

social distinctions, e.g., gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, age; the ritual buttressing or subversion of these; ritually reinforced inclusion and exclusion the political dimensions of ritual: community-, tribe-, and nation-building the exercise of power, the pursuit of justice, laws, ethics hierarchy, equality, inequality the economics of ritual, exchange, gift giving, sacrifice collective agency, ritual leaders, ritual followers, ritual facilitators the cultural patterns of collective behavior that permeate and frame a ritual social movements and cultures insofar as they permeate rituals and ritual systems ritually supported ideologies, e.g., those that shape state-building, revolutions, and other concerted social efforts

Theoretically, one has to account for the fact that ritualists don’t only act individually; they also act together, forming groups and subgroups. Ritualists have social ties outside their rituals, and they transmit ritual know-how among themselves and to newcomers. Rituals forms and the social structures for their transmission frequently outlive the actors who inhabit them. There is no satisfactory way to name this element, so, as with the others, I have chosen the simplest label I could find. You can photograph a ritual group. A divorced dad and his daughter dressed up for Halloween trick-or-treating constitutes a ritual group. There are other kinds of collective actors in Halloween celebrations: roving bands of teenagers, neighbors and their kids, extended families. They utilize ritual elements such as objects (costumes, candy, lights, and decorations) and verbal formulas (“Trick or treat” and “Thank you”). They use spaces, sidewalks and front doors, in a distinctive manner. Typically, kids perform front stage while adults, some costumed, some not, hold the backstage by waiting on sidewalks as guardian-witnesses of front-door performances. There is more to Halloween than the holiday itself, the expected actions, the spatial choreography, or the accumulated stuff. Behind the candy and plastic jack-olanterns are organizations: businesses that manufacture and market sweets; city councils that pass by-laws to protect the innocent; churches that rail against these “pagan” practices hoping to displace them with proper worship; and civic organizations aspiring to transform commercialized Halloween practices into newly imported Day of the Dead processions. Insofar as businesses serve holidays, they are temporary ritual organizations, but organizations, unlike groups, are not photographable. You can take a picture of the front of a Nestlé factory or gudwara (Sikh place of worship), but that’s only the shell of the organization, not the organization itself. This is both the advantage and disadvantage of the category “group.” Sustained and transmitted, a ritual event or holiday can ramify, pulling groups and organizations into its orbit. Its gravitational energy can constellate groups into organizations, and when organizations endure, generating a widely recognized ideology

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coupled with ritualized behavior and a set of moral values, the result is an institution. Institutions, organizations, and other forms of collectivity generate what we usually call “society” or used to call more polemically “the system.” Although you can conceptualize or even diagram a society or social system, you cannot video one. At best you can symbolize it by recording a conversation among ritual leaders gathered around a table or by taking a picture of a group of elders sitting on the ground. Like impressive long-standing buildings, they may serve as visual stand-ins for the whole society, but they do not constitute it no matter how much power they have. Whereas organizations come and go, institutions are supposed to be lasting. Ritual actors can die off, but something is still left standing: an institution.473 New ritualists can enter it, and it is passed on. The stuff passed on consists of the knowledge, skills, attitudes, patterns, and values, as well as the artifacts and behaviors that encode them. We usually call this “culture.” Like “ritual” and “religion,” the concept is incessantly debated, defined, and redefined. Some advocate dumping all three ideas, but they keep coming back, even in the vocabularies of those who argue for their summary dismissal. Among the reputable but debatable definitions are these: • Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn: “Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other, as conditioning elements of further action.”474 • Clifford Geertz: [Culture is] “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life.”475 • Fred Plog and Daniel Bates: [Culture is] “the system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviours, and artifacts that the members of society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning.”476 Rituals are contained by ambient cultures, but they also contain internal cultures, and these are necessary for the survival of both an institution and its rituals. Ritual organizations and institutions, like businesses, persist by generating organizational cultures. The Santa Fe Fiesta is a recurring three-day event performed by actors of various sorts. When organizers and actors go home each year, the event dies. As with most deaths, this one leaves remains—memories, photos, videos, and purchased goods—but these remains are not enough to resurrect the fiesta. It comes to life each year because there are organizations and institutions (the Fiesta Council,

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the Caballeros de Vargas, the city of Santa Fe, the Roman Catholic Church) working on the event throughout the year. Although they must collaborate for the fiesta to happen, each has its own identity. As a result, the groups sometimes disagree and argue. Although they generate the semblance of a common fiesta culture atop the multiculture of Santa Fe, each group has its own organizational culture. Large, multinational organizations may even have subcultures, such as that of CEOs in contrast to that of custodial staff. Interviewees in two Caribbean Carnival videos, “Judging the Junior Parade” and “The Toronto Revellers,” speak of the yearly festival as a “cultural” event.477 Although none of them defines “culture” formally, their assumptions are largely in line with these anthropological definitions. Participants talk about songs, music, and costumes but also about attitudes, values, and beliefs, about “our ways of doing things.” They also assume that culture is passed down historically and can be deliberately taught as well as absorbed in food and conversation. Both women, Marion Magloire, maitre (mother) of the Revellers, and Marline Jones, judge and head-judge-intraining, are active culture-producers, not mere consumers. Having long participated in mas bands (“masquerade groups”), Marline and her compatriots also judge cultural performances on streets, stages, and runways, as well as assess material culture in the form of costumes and floats. The “Judging” video catches Marline while she is formally evaluating the Junior Parade, and Marion, in the “Revellers” video, is helping assemble Junior Revellers for parading down Jane Street toward Finch Avenue. In 2011, the Junior Revellers won first place in their competition. Similar competitions mark the adult parades as well. The social dynamics preceding and during the Toronto Caribbean Carnival are complex, because the mas bands, which run for most of the year, can crosscut or connect diverse groups: youth and adult, immigrants from different Caribbean islands, people from different religious groups, and longtime residents from different neighborhoods and social classes. For the sake of the annual event there is an organizational culture generating (and generated by) the Toronto Caribbean Carnival, but below it are many subcultures. At any given event or moment, celebrants can mute the one and accent the other. Organizational cultures, whether they infuse businesses, volunteer organizations, or ritual groups, typically underwrite divisions of labor, thus of power. Not every person can participate in every aspect of every ritual. There are requirements of qualification and status, differently priced tickets of admission, and privileged locations. It sometimes seems that rituals are deliberately designed for the purpose of creating not only insiders and outsiders but also hierarchies of insiders: You can come in; you can’t; you can, but you must sit over there behind that curtain; we wear this but you must wear that; we don’t eat this but those others do, so they can’t come in, and we don’t sit with them. Groups create rituals that enshrine their values. The values seem naturally to underwrite the group that perpetuates the rites. This circularity can be so tight that it seems natural and given, thus impenetrable and unbreakable.

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Some groups seem more like givens than others. Kinship and gender groups seem more natural than class or nationality. You don’t get to choose your mother or father, or even your daughter or cousin. They are not very changeable; you can’t divorce your cousin. Even though one may be born into a class or nation, people sometimes do manage to change their allegiances. But kinship is not quite as given or simple as it seems. Half-siblings, stepsiblings, adoptions, god-parenting, and ritual kinship complicate and compromise the seeming naturalness of kinship. In addition, your gender or income level, however changeable in theory, can make it difficult for you to escape your class or nation, making them practically unalterable. Just as rituals necessarily imply a sociology and anthropology, they also imply a politics and economics. Rituals cost. In 2011 the average American wedding cost $27,000 ($65,824 in New York City).478 In 2012 the average cost of a funeral in the United States was around $10,000.479 President Barack Obama’s first swearing-in ceremony cost $1.24 million, but with the extras, the total bill was $170 million. Because rituals cost, they have an economics, a way of accumulating and distributing the media of exchange, a way of reckoning debt and ensuring fairness or reciprocity.480 Even if grain, money, or pigs are not involved in formal ritual transactions, gifts and sacrifices often are, and even if they are not, time and labor are. Even if there are no tickets to buy and rituals appear to be freely offered services, donations or contributions are probably expected. A ritual ethic can rail against money, arguing for a barter system, but there is no avoiding an economic undertow. People sometimes resist the notion that money or its equivalent is necessarily involved in ritual, especially if the rituals are religious, but it is worth considering the possibility that, because money itself is literally worthless, even its exchange is a ritualized act. The substitutionary logic—this stands for that and therefore can be traded for or used instead of that—is one of the core principles of ritual the world over. Money is not just necessary to run most rituals; money is a ritual object. Not only do rituals cost, and costing itself displays a ritualistic dynamic, but people sometimes buy or own rituals. There are obvious ways—ritual books like the Book of Common Prayer are copyrighted or held under letters patent—but there are subtle ways as well. Say you are a “keeper” of a particular ritual. As custodian, you not only serve but also control, not only sacrificing time and labor to perpetuate the rite but also profiting from the relationship.481 Rituals, however much they may be spiritual events, are also commodities bought, sold, and traded.

Ritual Structures and Processes Whether or not a theorist can satisfactorily name the elements of ritual, they interact, generating a whole ritual. But what is the nature of this whole? Scholars who study ritual frequently speak of it as either a “structure” or as “structured.” “Elements,” especially when imagined as building blocks, sounds similarly static.

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But ritual elements and structures are only apparently unchanging. The difference between the structures and elements of ritual, on the one hand, and the dynamics of ritual, on the other, is relative, like the difference between a dramatically sweeping second hand and a stubby but faithfully moving hour hand. However inert elements may appear when divided into spheres on a chart; they overlap, interacting and generating ritual processes. Ritual “parts” are abstractions momentarily isolated for the sake of analysis. In this sense the elements are not real, and neither are whole rituals. No one experiences a whole ritual, any more than one experiences a ritual part in isolation. One’s experience of a ritual is like one’s experience of any event (e.g., an auto accident or a concert): It is a “take” on that event, a framed selection shot from a particular angle. Because attention drifts, perspectives are blocked, and interests are vested, the whole has to be inferred or imagined. So when one interprets a ritual, a crucial question is which parts are allowed to stand in for the whole. The process is not very different from selecting twelve of two hundred photos, shot across forty years, to represent the life of a deceased relative at that person’s funeral. To say that ritual studies is the study of rituals is more an aspiration than a description. What we usually write about are aspects of a ritual from one or two perspectives. The point in suggesting that descriptions, like interpretations, are partial, tendentious, or vested is not to scare off interpreters but to elicit a degree of humility. It is essential that you attempt to see the forest, not just count the trees, but since the whole eludes everyone’s grasp, the only choice is to construct its semblance using gathered documentation, recalled memories, and active imaginations. Having done so, you take up this element or that function, not all the elements or all the functions. Breaking out a ritual into its elements isn’t only for theory-building. There are methodological uses as well. Using the elements, I set up a shot list for the Santa Fe Fiesta (see Appendix 13: Shot List for Santa Fe Fiesta). A shot list is not a storyboard. Storyboards follow a narrative arc: Shoot this, then this, and finally that. And storyboards are visual; on the basis of hand-drawn sketches, storyboards suggest visual perspectives and ways of composing shots. A storyboard for fiesta would include at least as many elements are there are events, probably a lot more. By contrast, my elemental shot list was categorical rather than chronological. In effect, it says to a fieldworker, “Don’t forget this; remember that.” Partway into the shooting of the fiesta, I began cataloging actions documented on video and realized that I had been shooting big events with complex actions and had been ignoring ordinary but utterly constitutive fiesta acts such as walking, talking, and eating. The shot list grounded me, but it also had another effect, that of naming aspects of the festival that I could not shoot: time, for example. You can capture the passage of time by shooting a dark 6 a.m. mass and then a midday, brightly lit dance, or you can shoot clocks, but you can’t video time, even though your video has an embedded time code. If you tried to make a film on the basis of the Santa Fe shot list, you would not be telling a story; you would be illustrating a theme or category. Whereas a storyboard

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anticipates a narrative film, a shot list anticipates analysis. Since the list is neither narrative nor argumentative, it would not, unassisted, generate an engaging film or a convincing argument. The shot list implies a generic claim, namely, that rituals are made up of necessary ingredients. Leave one out and the recipe will fail, the cake will fall. Leave out an element and you will not make an engaging ritual or a compelling interpretation of a ritual. An elemental analysis of a ritual differs from more usual ways of presenting rituals, such as a summary narrative or a condensation of the mythic-historical story that is thought to explain the rite. Another problem the Santa Fe shot list exposes is that ritual elements rarely appear in isolation. Shoot a space, and there are objects in your photo. Shoot an object, and it resides in a place. How do you distinguish an actor from an action? Can you shoot an actor who is not acting? Can you shoot an attitude except as it is embodied in a ritualist engaged in action? Despite these limitations the elements can be useful in ritual criticism and construction as well as in the field. Scholars in organization studies are now using ritual models to diagnose the misalignment of ritual elements used in strategy workshops. They then propose alternatives, as well as formulate hypotheses for predicting success and failure.482 The more complex the ritual, the longer the list of elements, and the longer the list, the more pairs of interactions needing analysis and diagnosis: guests and chairs, bottles of champagne and length of speeches, and so on. The best way to understand what makes a bicycle sail like the wind or merely bump along is either to build one from the pedals up or, having dismantled one down to its ball bearings, tune it up in the rebuilding process. Even if you are seldom in a position to witness the building or dismantling of a ritual, it is not that difficult to witness, even participate in, the revision or repair of one. Participating in ritual construction, diagnosis, or criticism paves the road to ritual theory more efficiently than armchair theorizing does. Analyzing a ritual into its elements can serve theory, method, or both. One could, for example, transform the elements into planks in the platform of a theory by defining ritual as “stylized gestures and prescribed postures assumed by ritualists on the basis of scripts, written or not, while deploying symbolic objects in set-aside spaces.” You could then use the definition to guide a method by instructing a camera operator to shoot actors, scripts, and objects, then instructing a video editor to select gestures and postures, emphasize stylization and recurrent patterning, and attend to boundary-crossings from ordinary into special places.

Elements and Domains We have now considered ritual’s relation to other cultural domains (sport, theater, and music) and factored ritual into constituent elements. In table 9.2 I have assembled the two theoretical constructs to illustrate the cross-domain possibilities of

Table 9.2. The Elements in Four Domains Elementsfl

Domain A: Religion, for example, Roman Catholic liturgy

Domain B: Theater, for example, Domain C: Music, for example, classical Western proscenium theater symphony (as interpreted by Christopher Small)

Domain D: Sport, for example, professional American baseball (as interpreted by Michael Novak and Varda Burstyn)

1. Actions

ritualization elevated into liturgical action

social dramatization reimag- sounds composed into scores for ined as theatrical performance musical performance

competition framed as professional game

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enactment—circular and performance narratively performance musically organized into no plot; high and low points of redundant rather than narratively organized into a plot animated a concert with coherence, variety, excitement; outcome unknown linear by characters and dramatic effect but without a until the end narratively driven plot preparation: spiritual and/or intellectual

preparation: actor-training and rehearsal

preparation: practice, rehearsal

preparation: training, practice

ultimate acts are metaphysical

ultimate acts are fictive and imaginative

ultimate acts are auditory and emotional

ultimate acts are physical and strategic

purposes: praise and thanksgiving, transformation, facilitating salvation, forming ethical values, inspiring moral action

purposes: entertainment, aesthetic appreciation, cultural awareness; sometimes: education, social criticism

purposes: entertainment, aesthetic appreciation, cultural awareness; sometimes: education, social criticism tacit function (Small): construction of idealized self in an industrial society484

purposes: entertainment, winning, skill-building; tacit function (Burstyn): construction of masculinist ideology

2. Actors

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participants who deny role-playing and who express belief along with community membership; claims to matter ultimately

actors playing roles as if they musicians playing music as if it were its competitive players playing were real; audience members own reality; role playing denied or games played as if they matter suspending disbelief minimized ultimately even though they do not

individual emotional expression discouraged

individual emotional expression encouraged

individual emotional expression encouraged but only at appropriate times

limited range of emotions displayed on field, e.g., anger, determination, joy, sadness; only emotions appropriate to men’s athletic culture

body largely ignored and regarded as secondary

body trained and regarded as crucial

musicians’ “ears” are trained along with physical skills necessary for playing a specific instrument or voice

gross motor skills (running, throwing, catching, batting) are essential

witnesses participating by virtue of shared values and tradition and functioning as congregation, or community

audience acting as spectators by virtue of paid admission and not integrally related to actors

audience acting mainly as listeners ticket-buying fans watching, (secondarily as watchers) by virtue of cheering, booing, and interactpaid admission and not integrally ing with events on the field related to actors

favorable reception not expressed during event; informally (but probably unreliably) indicated by compliments after the event and by continued participation

favorable reception indicated favorable reception indicated by applause, standing ovation, encores, by applause or standing ovation, also by recommend- also by recommending to others ing to others

favorable reception indicated by cheering and repeated attendance

unfavorable reception sequestered or withheld

unfavorable reception indicated by silence

unfavorable reception indicated by booing or heckling

unfavorable reception indicated by silence

(continued)

Table 9.2. Continued Elementsfl

Domain A: Religion, for example, Roman Catholic liturgy

3. Places

cathedrals, churches, pilgrimage sites theaters

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4. Times

5. Objects

Domain B: Theater, for example, Domain C: Music, for example, classical Western proscenium theater symphony (as interpreted by Christopher Small)

concert halls

Domain D: Sport, for example, professional American baseball (as interpreted by Michael Novak and Varda Burstyn)

baseball fields

elevated platforms, reserved places

reserved seats, better and reserved seats, better and worse views, reserved seats, better and worse worse views, higher and lower higher and lower prices views, higher and lower prices prices

near the altar, places distant from altar; nonliturgical places, e.g., vestry, social halls; aisles, pews directional symbolism: up/ down, east/west

performing spaces, listening spaces, performing spaces, viewing food and socializing spaces, aisles, spaces, food and socializing spaces, aisles, seats, balconies, seats, balconies, orchestra pit, lobbies backstage, dressing rooms, lobbies

the diamond, in-bounds, infield, outfield, out of bounds, change rooms, aisles, seats, benches, dugout

liturgical seasons, Sundays, feast days

performance season, evenings, weekends, weekdays

performance season, evenings, weekends, weekdays

playing season, weekends, weekdays

introductory rites, liturgy of the word, liturgy of the Eucharist, concluding rite

acts, often two or three

first half, second half

innings, seven

costume conveys office

costume conveys character

formal wear for musicians, casual to dressy clothing for audience

uniform displays team name or logo along with personal identifiers (e.g., name, number); fan costumes (e.g., hats, shirts, banners)

bread, wine, water, paintings, statues, stained glass

sets, props

instruments, music stands, chairs

dialogical language used to express plot and character

vocal song; spoken language is authoritative declarations of minimal, for introductory or contextu- umpires, encouragement and alizing purposes only chatter of players in field, silence of batters, cheering and shouting of fans

music sometimes constitutes prayer; worship sometimes facilitates prayer and worship

music and sound effects enhance plot and character

lyrics: words set to music

musical introduction: usually the national anthem; sometimes musical interludes and postludes; no music during play

liturgical texts from anonymous sources (scripture, tradition, or liturgical councils); also spoken or written sources from leaders selected on the basis of calling, appointments, or ordination

plays written by named playwrights employed on the basis of skill, reputation, or training

written musical scores that prescribe the playing precisely and in detail with little room for improvisation; named composers, usually deceased, selected on the basis of their classical status

records as maintained by administrative authorities, journalistic accounts in sports sections of newspapers and fan magazines

high need for interpretation; deep resistance to criticism

moderate need for interpreta- low need for verbal interpretation; tion; high susceptibility to high susceptibility to public criticism public criticism

6. Languages formulaic language used for prayer, praise, or proclamation

equipment (e.g., gloves, bats, uniforms)

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little need for interpretation; high need for quantifying performance; moderate interest in interviewing athletes and tracking careers biographically (continued)

Table 9.2. Continued Domain B: Theater, for example, Domain C: Music, for example, classical Western proscenium theater symphony (as interpreted by Christopher Small)

Domain D: Sport, for example, professional American baseball (as interpreted by Michael Novak and Varda Burstyn)

Elementsfl

Domain A: Religion, for example, Roman Catholic liturgy

7. Groups

sacralized hierarchy of authority: production hierarchy: papacy, bishops, clergy, the playwrights, producers, people directors, actors, playgoers; popularity hierarchy: actors, directors

hierarchical system with conductor as operative pinnacle and composer as historical pinnacle; autocratic and/or charismatic conductor conducting a large group of musicians who consent to follow

owner-management hierarchy: owners can trade players; popularity hierarchy: baseball stars whose names are known; positions on the field: high value placed on hitters and pitchers

theological seminaries

actor training academies

music lessons, music camps, music schools

training camps

ecclesiastical hierarchy

star system

recording industry, sales-ranking charts

records: keeping, holding, breaking

clergy offering homiletical interpretations of rites

drama critics writing criticism music critics writing criticism in in newspapers to inform newspapers to inform potential potential ticket-buyers ticket-buyers

sports reporters engaging in sport journalism

theologians writing apologetic or dogmatic theology and serving religious traditions by teaching in educational institutions

literary scholars writing interpretations of plays, playwrights, and theater history

sport historians and theorists writing histories and theories; kinesiologists studying bodily dynamics

authorized versions are canonical best and/or most enduring are classics

musicologists and music historians writing books and articles, music publishers publishing music

best and/or most enduring are classics winners, championships, all-star games

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elemental analysis. The left column sets up the elements as axes of comparison. The columns to the right summarize some salient differences among religion (as illustrated by the Roman Catholic Mass), theater (as illustrated by Western proscenium theater), music (as illustrated by the classical music symphony), and sports (as illustrated by American baseball). To keep the comparison from become even more labyrinthine than it already is, I restrict the characterizations of music and sport, as I did in chapter 8, to Christopher Small on music, along with Michael Novak and Varda Burstyn on sport.483 Setting domains in columns like this not only exposes the generic nature of the elements, but also risks creating the illusion that domains are easily separable. Although they may be in theory, they are not in practice. Bleeding the boundaries between dramatic and ritualistic domains characterized the theater of classical Greece, the mystery and morality plays of the Middle Ages, and experimental theater of the 1960s in North America. Another problem is that rites, plays, concerts, and games do not exist in the abstract, only in particular forms and in specific eras. They happen in overlapping local and global cultures. Any theory-driven comparison is bound to reflect examples in a theorist’s mind. No one can take into account all kinds of ritual, much less other kinds of cultural performance, so here I made choices largely for pedagogical reasons. Mainline Roman Catholic liturgy (an example of a dominant Western ritual) and mainline proscenium theater (an example of a dominant Western performance mode) have no privileged status. I chose them simply because they are familiar to many readers. The categories, “Catholic” and “proscenium,” although more specific than “ritual” and “theater” in general, gloss over variants in each category, so even this more precise way of naming them risks overgeneralization inasmuch as the chart ignores differences between periods of liturgical and theatrical history and minimizes continuities between ritual and other domains for the sake of charting their respective differences. My purpose here is simpler than such a mapping operation makes it seem. It is to engender a perspective capable of grounding a theory and method for studying ritual that attends simultaneously to its connections with and differences from other domains. But that job is not finished until the scheme is played off actual rites and performances in specific places and real times. In one respect I have oversimplified things by working with one kind of performance and one kind of ritual. In another respect I have complicated and nuanced things by suggesting that comparisons and contrasts between domains should not depend on one or two factors such as the presence or absence of an audience, or the presence or absence of belief. An effective way to critique the sort of element-and-domain thinking I am attempting here would be to apply it to instances of cross-cultural performance such as Vodoun in nightclubs in Port-au-Prince or Japanese Noh drama performed for North American audiences. In Haiti the same actions can be performed as entertainment for tourists in the city and as religious practice in the villages.

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Observers cannot always tell from the form or content of a performance whether it is ritualistic or dramatic; one is forced to consider function and cultural setting as well. If we were to use, say, a California Buddhist liturgy and a Quebec folk dance performance as examples, the resulting typology would be somewhat different. Depending on the specific liturgies and plays that we use as examples, we can tinker infinitely with the details. In the process of studying an actual event, any or all of these characterizations would have to be revised. Suppose we were to specify, for instance, a post–Vatican II Mass in Amsterdam, an “American” baseball game played in twenty-first-century Japan, a classical music concert conducted by Gustavo Dudamel in Los Angeles, or The Gospel at Colonus as directed by Lee Breuer in 1985 in New York City. Would changing the examples in this way precipitate changes in the way we name the elements themselves? If so, we’ve just made a theoretical revision. How many revisions would we make before concluding that some of its assumptions are so erroneous that we need a new theory? We have now given the domain and element metaphors a workout. Surely you are asking what good it is to be able to identify all the parts of a ritual. Let’s return to our trusty, rusty bike. First, you have a better chance of being able to ride it if you know that the handlebars are for guiding and balancing, whereas pedals are for pushing. Second, you can order more parts. Ever go into a bike store trying to describe a thingamajig? Do you need to know the names of parts to ride a bike? Certainly not. But even if you are not mechanically inclined, it’s crucial to know the functions of a few key parts: seats, handlebars, pedals, and tires. Third, you are better able to repair a bike if you can identify the function of each part. And fourth, you might—given the resources and some knowledge of bike engineering principles— be able to build a bike if you were so inclined, but you’d need to know what each part is called and what it does. To tighten, loosen, or adjust things you need to know how components interrelate, which is to say, some basic engineering principles that determine a bike’s workings. It helps to know that round things roll with less effort than square or oval things. If you do, you’ll understand why it’s harder to pedal with a flat. After an exercise in analytical fragmenting and fracturing, you may want to resist, objecting that all things ritualistic are inseparable, that they work together as a whole or not at all. It borders on silliness, I hear you saying, to separate actors from their actions, and surely every action takes place in space and time; it can hardly be otherwise. So why bother separating space from time or both from actions and actors? You object: After Einstein, Grimes, you should know better. After decades of ecologists insisting that all things are connected, you should know better. Fair enough. Let us be modest in what we claim for elemental analysis. In itself, a set of elements does not constitute a theory any more than a formal definition does. You can argue with the premise of “constituents” by claiming that there aren’t any or that thinking of them in the way I’ve laid out is misleading. You can argue that there are other parts, less confusing ways of naming them, or more efficient ways of

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clumping and separating things. You can argue for other models. But even those fond of thinking of a ritual as a “language” and wanting to formulate its “grammar,” or rules for usage, are still faced with the task of identifying “parts” of speech. Ritual conceived as a language is no less a metaphor than ritual conceived as a machine or an organism, and all three lend themselves to factoring as well as rules or models for combination and recombination. Let me be the first to admit it: The elements, by themselves, do not explain anything. On their behalf I make no substantive claim except the most obvious one: To analyze or construct a ritual, you have no choice but to break it down into its constituents. If you don’t use my way, you’ll use some other.

10

Dynamics of Ritual

So far, I have treated ritual as an event. If it is recurrent, it may function temporarily like a mappable cultural domain with boundaries ranging from flexible and permeable to rigid and impermeable. I have proposed that we imagine a ritual as constructed of, or deconstructable into, a set of elements that, by interacting, generate ritual processes. Listing a ritual’s elements is no more (or less) enlightening than sorting a bucket of bolts, nuts, and washers into three piles. Likewise, mapping ritual alongside other cultural domains, if we were to stop here, would result in a flatlander analysis: “This is here, and that is there.” Cataloglike elemental analysis and maplike domain analysis produces something like a two-dimensional cartoon lacking both depth and dramatic energy. Mapping domains and labeling components, although necessary, do not explain a ritual any more than an exploded diagram or parts list explains what makes bikes go forward instead of backward, why they can be balanced when they look as if they can’t, or how bikes do what they do: cart you off to school in September or fill you with pleasure in June. So it is necessary as a final theoretical move to introduce dynamism into what has so far been painted as a fairly static picture. Having dwelled in the land of nouns, we need to migrate to the land of verbs, where we will be required to make difficult verb-choices. If we say rituals “act,” we impute humanlike intentions to the rituals themselves. If we say rituals “operate,” we render them machinelike, as if their powers were akin to those studied by physicists. If we say rituals “work,” we circumvent this dilemma, since both bikes and people can be said to work, but we also sound like Protestants devoted to their “work ethic.” Other ways of putting the matter that are less captive of anthropomorphic/mechanistic polarizations are “process” and “function,” but there is no perfect choice. However you put it, rituals only appear to be as permanent and static as the Rock of Gibraltar (and even stones have histories of change). Rituals not only “are,” they also “change” and “do.” Rituals are dynamic. The notion of “dynamics,” like the notion of “structures,” rides on the back of a metaphor, since, literally speaking, the term refers to the branch of mechanics that studies motion and equilibrium. In calling ritual “dynamic,” we are transposing the idea of driving forces from physics and hydraulics to domains congenial to ritual, such as politics, 294

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religion, or theater. By speaking of “dynamics,” we risk missing the fact that human actions are not only caused by forces but also motivated by intentions. In the study of ritual, one way of taking this difference into account has been by invoking the metaphor “drama,” because it suggests that movement and change happen through the strategic interactions of human characters rather than by being driven forward the way a truck is. Rituals can function in ways that are, or appear to be, mechanically “caused,” especially in instances where the activity is highly repetitive and therefore predictable, but rituals also change in ways that are unpredictable and therefore “dramatic.” So I try to keep both metaphoric sets, one from physics and the other from drama, in play. Since a ritual, the target of ritual studies theory, is a moving one, and its movement happens along several vectors, an adequate description of a ritual should capture its dynamism, or drama. A static, frontal “portrait” alone will not do. Because rituals have several ways of being dynamic, analysis is best facilitated by refusing to lump the different kinds of dynamism into a single term. So I propose to use “ritual dynamics” as a cover term that includes the kinds of action in list 16. List 16. Ritual Dynamics

• ritual activity (or, actions in ritual): the totality of human movements (or cessation of movements) in a ritual. All the actions in a ritual, including supposedly insignificant activities, for example, women exchanging glances, a man scratching, kids yawning • ritual acts (or, ritual gestures and postures): a subset of ritual activity, specifically, those that are prescribed or officially recognized as “in bounds”; human movements deemed legitimate parts of a ritual • primary (core) ritual acts: a subset of ritual acts, specifically, those actions without which the ritual is not considered legitimate, real, or efficacious • secondary (tributary) ritual acts: a subset of ritual acts, specifically those actions regarded as supportive of the core ritual acts • ritual action: the diachronic, phased sequence of gestures which, when completed, constitute a ritual; the unfolding trajectory, or “plot,” of an unfolding ritual • ritual processes: the synchronic, internal workings of a ritual; interactions among the elements of a ritual • ritual changes: diachronic alterations in the way a ritual is performed or prescribed. For instance, North American brides and grooms once said “man and wife.” Later the words were changed to “husband and wife.” • ritual functions: what a ritual does in, for, to, or in response to the systems (social, ecological, etc.) in which it operates; a ritual’s shaping and being shaped by its environment; a ritual’s capacity to make things happen, prevent them from happening, or respond to things outside itself

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Together, these constitute the dynamics of ritual. Ritual may well have other dynamics, and we could use alternate terms as long as we don’t overlook the multiple ways in which ritual can be dynamic. In ordinary speech it would make little sense to use all these distinctions all of the time, but in scholarly analysis, making such distinctions helps eliminate confusion. By making them, we can, for instance, show how a ritual can be dynamic in one respect while being static in another. The study of ritual processes and functions has been too easily parceled out to disciplines. Liturgical studies has paid more attention to the historical, practical, and internal workings of rituals, whereas anthropology has concentrated on the functions of whole rituals in their social contexts, but the two kinds of study are complementary. Ritual processes (interactions among the elements of a ritual) and functions (interactions of a ritual with its environment) are analytically distinguishable but interrelated. To return briefly to the bike analogy, the relationship of a brake pad to a wheel is, by this usage, a process; the relation of a bike to a streetcar rail is a function. If you notice what happens when you slam on your bike’s front brakes while passing over a wet trolley rail, you have taken the first step toward grasping the interplay of process with function. When I have to stash my bike metaphor in the basement because its mechanistic nature inhibits more than it facilitates, I usually turn to performance. My particular academic tribe venerates dramatistic metaphors. Dramatism and the resources of performance studies can do theoretical work that bikes and mechanistic metaphors or stories and narrative metaphors cannot. Dramatistic theories suggest that movement and change occur through the interaction of human characters, that things are “driven” forward not in the way bikes and trucks are but in the way interactions among characters drive a plot forward. However helpful for grasping part-whole relations, the bike analogy isn’t very useful for understanding progression through time. Since a rite unfolds through time, it is common to use narrative metaphors: A ritual is, or is like, a story, because it has a beginning, middle, and end. This is a popular notion partly because it makes ritual seem synchronous with myth and the human life cycle. As with any metaphor, we should look for its limitations. You could expose some of the problems with this one by trying to create a plotline or storyboard for the ritual you are studying. Does the rite really follow a plotlike course? Are the phases more like turns in a plot or rotations of a kaleidoscope? If you were to film it, would your film tell a story? Do the actions of the ritual start at point A and go to point B, like a story, or do they just go round and round a center? How far does the narrative metaphor take you? What does it obscure or cause you to misunderstand? Whereas the bike analogy compares ritual to something distant (a mechanical object), dramatistic ones affiliate ritual with something close, namely theater. The strength of performance approaches is that they compare one kind of strongly bounded human activity with another kind of strongly bounded activity. When we compare ritual with theater, it’s at least like comparing apples with oranges rather

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than apples with gnats. The kinship between ritual and drama is so strong that some consider ritual to be performance, not merely like it. I don’t, because there are significant differences. One difference is that the roles and actions of plays are typically framed as not real or make-believe, whereas in rites, the roles and actions are framed as believed or at least accepted. Another difference is that, plays have audiences, whereas rituals have congregations, tribes, or communities. Theater audiences are not, or not for very long, communities; they are, at least in the West, consumer groups. Having paid admission, people sit side by side for a couple of hours, but they do not feel obligated to look out for each other’s welfare. Ritually engaged people are supposed to be connected by a web, whereas playgoers are connected by a thread.

What Rituals Do Some theorists think of rituals as noninstrumental, associating them more closely with children’s play or art than with bikes or chairs, but a little thought produces a range of ritual tasks. Religious liturgies are designed to facilitate praise, minimizing their utility, whereas magical rites may be designed to heal, and political rites, to win votes. So the instrumentality of rituals varies. But so does the instrumentality of a practical object such as a chair. Chairs can be decorated so ornately and strategically that they become works of art, but these works of art, when used as thrones, work as symbols of authority, making those who sit in them look and sound authoritative. Some would argue that the very notion that rituals “work” is either a category mistake or tacitly Protestant. Rites, they claim, don’t “work” any more than a song or painting does. Ritual, they insist, is a collectively expressive rather than a personally pragmatic medium, and we are misguided if we expect rituals to achieve practical ends.485 But the expressive/pragmatic dichotomy is not as clean as it appears. If two songwriters are composing a song, and one says to the other, “That line just doesn’t work,” he or she is not assuming a pragmatic or functionalist view of music which holds that its proper aim is to achieve social good. Rather, he or she is expressing a formal judgment about how the line operates within the song and, possibly, how it will affect, or not affect, a song-buying audience. So “working” has at least two connotations. One is about fit; the other, about achievement. Art, like sport and ritual, has its social uses regardless of how much artists may wish to celebrate the uselessness or playfulness of art. Likewise, certain kinds of ritual— liturgy as distinct from magic—may aim at uselessness even while doing social or political work.486 Religious people sometimes deny that rituals accomplish anything. Speaking modestly, they claim that their rituals only generate conditions under which divine action is possible. Rituals don’t “work,” they say; rather, the beings or powers addressed in a ritual do the work. In this view ritual is simply a way of connecting

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people to responsive entities or universal energies. Rituals are merely the performative occasions to which such beings and forces are invited. These beings and forces, not ritualists or rituals, are the primary agents. In this view a ritual is not a tool that does work, merely an occasion during which superior beings may deign to arrive. Then they, not those enacting the rite, decide whether or not to do the work being requested. Human action is but reaction, a derivative, secondary response to primary powers. A ritual has the persuasive power of “Please,” not the legal force of “I pronounce you husband and wife.” Scholars struggle to say what, if anything, rituals accomplish. Some make ritual’s apparent lack of means-end reasoning a definitive trait. Jack Goody declares that ritual is “a category of standardized behavior (custom) in which the relationship between the means and the end is not ‘intrinsic,’ ”487 and Edmond Leach says the term “ritual” “denotes those aspects of prescribed formal behavior which have no direct technological consequence.”488 One problem with such statements is that they apply equally to art, sport, or even sleep. Another difficulty is that means-end reasoning does have a place in certain kinds of ritual—healing or fertility rites, for instance. In fact, a possible counterargument is that ritual itself is sometimes considered a spiritual or ecological technology. Even if you don’t think rituals themselves can do much, no one doubts that ritual can be used, just as you might use a painting to cover a hole in wall or music to sell goods or cover awkward social silences. Just as art can be indentured to politics or good causes, so a ritual can be put to use. The minimal claim, then, is that sometimes, in some situations, certain aspects of a ritual achieve something, even if indirectly. Rituals work, maybe not all the time or always well, but they do have consequences, and these require theorizing. To invoke a pharmaceutical analogy, we could say that rituals have placebolike “side effects” and that they can be greater than, less than, or different from the hoped-for results. When speaking of side effects, the usual implication is that they are undesirable; one just weathers them, provided the intended benefits are worth the risk and there are no other ways of achieving the same aim. Advertisers know that the most effective way to sell a product is to link it to an experience in which it is embedded. Going out for a coffee isn’t necessarily about the nutritional value of coffee or even the buzz of caffeine but about the atmosphere. Maybe that atmosphere facilitates conversation; maybe it facilitates writing on a laptop or surfing the Net. Whatever a ritual (like a coffee) causes, influences, or facilitates is part of its work, or function. The question, what does ritual do, is related to the question, why do people engage in ritual? “Why” questions are bedeviling because two hide in the one. Inquirers can be asking about either the motives (“behind”) actors or the goals (“in front of ”) them. It is never easy to say why anyone does anything, even such obviously practical things as building shelters, dressing warmly, or cooking food. We struggle with such questions because the answers seem self-evident, leaving us to reply lamely, “Why not?” or “Because they are necessary.” Answers to other kinds

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of “why” questions—why people sing, marry, or desire solitude—easily get reduced to practicalities or treated as unexplainable givens. So it should not be surprising that both practitioners and theorists struggle with the question, “Why do you, or they, engage in ritual?” The answers are typically dissatisfying. Ritualists say to inquirers: Because we enjoy it. Because our grandparents did so. Because we feel better. Because doing so makes us who we are. Because it is meet, right, and fitting so to do. They make us a people and display who we are. They bring the rain, keep the ancestors happy, and transform adolescents into adults. While some theorists suggest that rituals do little or maybe nothing at all, others ask that we students of ritual be more precise in attributing agency, that we speak of people as doing things in or with rituals, and that we refrain from speaking about rituals themselves as doing anything.489 At first it seems easy to figure out what rituals do: Ask a ritualist. But many ritualists, like many bicyclists, “just do it.” Bicyclists are not engineers or mechanics, so the majority of us just ride along in the same way that processants move down a street. Once you’ve learned to bike, balancing comes naturally (because you’ve forgotten how unnatural it seemed in the beginning). Thinking in too self-conscious a manner about the act of cycling, while pedaling down a bumpy road, is an invitation to horizontality. Likewise ritual: Explaining it will not help you do it better. In fact, explaining may ensure that ritualists participate self-consciously, therefore awkwardly. Ask participants whether or how their rituals work, and you will be laughed at, escorted out, or greeted with a thunderstruck look—silent but articulate commentary on your presumptuous, ignorant-observer question. Stoves work, roofs work, and computers, at least some of the time, work. No one considers an inquiry into their workings to be a stupid question, even though most of us don’t make such inquiries. Ponder relationships, families, governments, and concerts. How do they work? Why do they work? When they are running smoothly, the why question can seem pointless, but when things go wrong survival requires understanding how things work. If you need to repair or invent a ritual, you need to know how they work, even though you know there are no definitive, one-size-fits-all answers. Some argue that the appropriate question is never “How does a ritual work?” but only “What’s proper to do?” When someone says, “Good morning,” the appropriate reply is something like, “Good morning to you too.” Ritual, in this view, is about propriety rather than accomplishment. Maybe, but what does propriety accomplish? Not good weather, obviously. The good-morning exchange signals recognition and initiates a polite connection while keeping two parties distanced. Ritual gestures, even when they are about sanctioning intimacy, as they may be in weddings, are about distancing. So there doesn’t have to be a forced, bifurcated choice, because in this instance propriety accomplishes distanced connectivity. Even if you think that rituals are useless actions undertaken when all other avenues are blocked, ritual can be both an end itself and a means to an end. Unable to alter their environments, stymied people can alter themselves ceremonially, and therefore

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the environment indirectly. Rituals can have direct and indirect functions. They can serve one or several functions, and these functions may operate not only with each other but also against each other. A ritual may, for instance, inhibit one kind of change while precipitating another. So an important decision for theory construction is whether claims about function are treated as taken-for-granted axioms or hypotheses awaiting confirmation or disconfirmation. I prefer the latter, so I usually query a ritual in an agnostic frame of mind: I don’t know what you do. Do you do anything? Do you do it effectively? Badly? In theoretical discourse, rituals sometimes appear as weak agents, sometimes as strong ones. Roy Rappaport argues the strong case; his is one of the most “ritocentric” theories. For him, not only the sacred and religion but also social convention, morality, and cosmology are entailments of ritual. For him, ritual is the basic social act, the fabricator, the device for world- and meaning-making. There is nothing social of which ritual is not the father.490 As Kenneth Burke might have said, “Ritual” (with a capital R) is Rappaport’s “god term.” Rappaport’s theory is really a scholarly myth, a foundational academic narrative. In making such claims, the god whom Rappaportian myth serves is not the god of anthropological science nor the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but the Great God Ritual. A major difficulty with Rappaport’s theory is that his readers are asked to believe that one kind of human activity is responsible for generating so many other kinds of human activity. A nagging question lingers at the end of his magnificent magnum opus, where he argues his case. In what sense is ritual generative? His term “entailment” makes the connection between a ritual and its consequences sound purely logical. But no amount of pure logic can unpack so much from either a single term or the generic human activity it designates. Catherine Bell argues the opposite view. She considers ritual a weak means for accomplishing social ends. Reading through Maurice Bloc’s eyes, she does not think ritualization (her preferred term) has the power to achieve anything very effectively; it is “a rather blunt tool.”491 Bell’s view seems understated and Rappaport’s overstated. Hers is probably more representative of Western scholarship than Rappaport’s. A suspicion among educated Westerners is that rituals are primitive, inefficient means of trying to achieve ends that other tools more readily accomplish. Although this view is not often articulated aloud by theorists in the presence of ritual participants, it is often assumed in the academy. Arriving at the Santa Fe Fiesta as a tourist, it would be easy to conclude that the fiesta is a weak means, that it is a decorative rather than a constitutive event. Flags, banners, costumes, and other decorative elements are everywhere. They go up a few days ahead of time, and they come down at the end. Decorations are added last, attached to a surface, and not intended to endure. They not only symbolize the temporary; they are temporary. But a tourist, noticing such obvious facts, might also hear counterarguments holding that fiesta is a powerful tool. The Santa Fe Fiesta, as America’s “oldest community celebration,” renews peaceful relations among diverse

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ethnicities. If an event endures and keeps the peace, can it be merely decorative? Our skeptical tourist, perhaps made skeptical by the obvious commercialism of the festival, might argue: Even if the fiesta has persisted for many years, it is a celebration, by definition temporary, a mere decorative layer on top of the city, which is real. Can something so limited in time really be determinative of anything? The fiesta does not result in roads repaired, homes built, or the poor fed. Can anything so obviously impractical be socially constitutive? For analytical purposes, it is worth distinguishing ritual intentions from both ritual effects and ritual functions. Ritual intentions are “in people’s heads.” Sometimes intentions come out of mouths in words; sometimes scholars infer them from behavior. A mom says her intention in putting on a birthday party for her daughter is “for the kids to have a great time,” but one effect of the daughter’s birthday celebration is a dirty kitchen. The function, however, is indirect, needing to be inferred. One possible function of the birthday party is to make the daughter feel a bit older and thus act with a bit more maturity. Whereas the dirty-kitchen effect is so obvious that it is not questionable, the function is debatable. Does a birthday party really bring about such a change? Or does the child’s parent only hope for that result? Do birthday celebrations always mature the person who undergoes them, or only in certain circumstances? Functions are harder to demonstrate than effects.492 Neither functions nor effects necessarily match intentions. As in life, so in ritual, the consequences of actions may not correspond with the aims of those who perform them. Mismatched intention-and-consequence pairs happen all the time. A shaman intends for a ritual to heal, but performing it also fortifies divisions between squabbling factions. Festival organizers intend for their celebration to make people ecologically aware, but participants trash the environment and consume fossil fuel. Conscientious parent that you are, you intend to prolong the life of your fourteen-year-old skateboarding son by hollering at him at a dangerous intersection. Meanwhile, his girlfriend, who just happens to be approaching swiftly from behind, overhears your parental advice. He notices that she notices and fires you a dirty look. Instead of saving your would-be man from automotively delivered mutilation, you have just humiliated him, albeit unwittingly. In the argument that ensues at home, parent and “child” talk past each other. The parent argues intentions (“I love you; I was just looking out for you, hoping to see you reach middle age”), while the son argues consequences (“She will think that I am not capable of making my own judgments”). The paradoxicality of ritual coupled with the multiplicity of perspectives and disciplines contributing to ritual studies makes it is difficult to say what rituals are supposed to do, more difficult to demonstrate that, they in fact, do these things, and most difficult to explain how they do them. It is easier to say what rituals are reputed to do. Because so many of the functions articulated by theorists seem paradoxical, if not contradictory, it is probably more theoretically honest to argue both a thesis and a counterthesis. Proceeding in this way enhances the spirit of debate and keeps one

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from treating hypotheses as if they were axioms. Set in opposition, some of the more persistent claims about the functions of rituals are that they empower and disempower groups, attune and disattune bodies, enact transformation and reinforce the status quo, render meaningless and inculcate values. There are many others, such as routinizing and making special or giving rise to thought and dampening it, that I will not treat here. I state the functions of ritual as paradoxes to represent the glut of scholarly claims and counterclaims, also to balance attitudes that make ritual sound like a good thing with those that treat it as dysfunctional. Because there are so many rituals that disempower groups, disattune bodies, retard worthy changes, provoke unwanted changes, warrant false forms of knowing, and render the world meaningless by overloading things with “meanings,” no theory of ritual should make ritual sound like an unmitigated good. I will treat only a few of the key dynamics. As I spin out a claim, notice how it starts to bend toward its own opposite. One can avoid turning each pair into a blatant contradiction in a several ways, for instance, by showing how a ritual enables in one respect but disables in some other.

Rituals Empower and Disempower Groups Rituals constitute individual identities by embedding persons in groups, which are thereby empowered. In some contexts, the arrangement may be a zero-sum game: Power subtracted from individuals is added to groups. But most theories of ritual are more dialectical and less dualistic in their conception. However repetitively and predictably Hollywood movies pit heroic individuals against oppressive groups, individuals and groups are recursively and inextricably linked. However genetically distinct or creatively unique individuals are, they are embedded in social and biological environments that not only surround them but permeate them. Social systems and ecosystems are not only ambient (“out there”) but in-dwelling (“in here”). So even when individuals resist the status quo by assuming countercultural stances, selves and others are necessarily dyadic. Societies are to individuals as parents are to children. Even if children do not know or rebel against their parents, the former are “made” by the latter. Eventually, the latter, in turn, may remake the former. Since the publication in 1915 of Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, the most widely accepted scholarly theory of ritual has been that it consolidates groups, thereby exercising, maintaining, or constellating power 493— not the divine power as described by the Dutch philosopher and historian of religions Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890–1959),494 but social, political, and economic power that divine power masks or symbolizes. According to this theoretical tradition, rituals work by embedding individuals in groups and mobilizing collective

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effervescence in the service of social solidarity. Even though participants may declare that the goal of a ritual is serving gods or venerating ancestors, these figures are really collective representations of society itself. Thus ritual, like good carpenter’s glue, helps hold together a society, nation, or tribe. By constituting “us” as an in-group, ritual necessarily creates “them,” an out-group of others. Ritually excluded others have several choices: Ignore, circumvent, or exit the dominant ritual system. Those who resist can work to revise the ritual or resist by means of a counter-ritual. Ritualists can perform “against,” taking issue with, or providing alternatives to, rituals that exclude them and values they cherish. Across time, if counter-rituals become the dominant ones, they often continue to perpetuate embedded polemical impulses even when they buttress the status quo. The study of ritual is closely entwined with the swinging pendulum of power balances and imbalances. So ritual studies scholars are always asking: Who is empowered and disempowered by this ritual? Who is most inside and who is farthest outside this ritual? Who monitors its boundaries, and how do they do so? However, assuming that power in a ritual translates automatically into power outside ritual is overly simple. It is easy to repeat the incantation “Rituals exercise power,” but explaining how they do so is difficult. When we make such statements, do we mean that people exercise power by means of rituals, that rituals display powerful people, or that rituals display people, thereby making them powerful? Do we really want to claim that rituals themselves exercise power? If so, how? Are rituals like swords? If not, then what exactly do we mean when we talk about the power of ritual? 495 Popular culture generates excessively masculine images of power: a musclebound weightlifter, a raised fist, a skyscraper, a turbo engine. Advertisers construe power as “power over” or the power to do, the capacity for work or achievement. Power rises up, is exercised from above, or thrusts forward, penetrating other things. Consequently, royalty and gods are at the top; peasants and the oppressed, at the bottom. It may seem natural to assume that rituals exercise power over us when the examples are royal or martial spectacles with dazzling displays of armor and marching manpower, but there are other ways to imagine power—for instance, power within the self or power with others. If we scholars are going to use the language of power, we should choose our metaphors with care so the full range of models for power is made visible. To my mind the crucial question is not whether rituals have power but how ritualists and scholars imagine that power. This imagining conditions usage. Rituals and power are associated in several ways. In ritual circumstances priests and shamans may have more power than ordinary participants. Since they are specialists, they know more of the ritual. They have the power of office construed as quantifiable. But rituals have another sort of power that resides in their ability to incubate symbols deeply into bone, belly, and breast, which is to say, in their capacity to establish webs of connectedness. Less quantifiable and less able to be used over others, such rituals work by making links. Conceived in this way, ritual functions, or

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“does things,” by combining the power to connect with the power to enact with the power to show. In this model people weld together actions, feelings, values, and ideas, a combination that may or may not serve the kind of domination that proceeds by dint of force or the threat of it. Sarah Horton’s The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented, published in 2010, is the only other book-length treatment of the fiesta.496 Just as my Symbol and Conquest concentrates on 1973, a single year’s fiesta, her book focuses on the 2000 fiesta.497 Her thesis about the fiesta’s dynamics is evident in the subtitle, Staking Ethno-Nationalist Claims to a Disappearing Homeland. She treats the fiesta as an invented Hispanic strategy for launching a “veiled protest.” This is her scholarly metaphor for the way Hispanic Santa Feans exercise power in the fiesta. Hispanos, the city’s “rightful occupiers,” use fiesta as a way of resisting Anglo gentrification.498 Critical of Symbol and Conquest’s synchronic treatment of the fiesta’s main symbols, Horton offers a more richly diachronic, or historical, picture.499 Horton, a non-Hispanic, non–Santa Fean doctoral student, gains people’s trust to the point of being regarded as an “honorary caballero.”500 Listening sympathetically to Hispanic Santa Feans’ stories, she is able to “unveil” the strategic function of their fiesta, namely, staking a claim to public symbolism in a time when their economic and linguistic supremacy is being undermined by the swelling population of wealthy “amenity migrants,” Anglos who drive up the prices of their homeland, thereby displacing them.501 Despite the historical contextualizing of her ethnographic research, Horton is eventually describing the 2000 fiesta in the ethnographic present and speaking of “the” Hispano fiesta, describing it as “a celebration of Hispano culture for and by Hispanos.”502 However applicable this claim may be to the Entrada, masses, and Candlelight Procession, it is not true of many other fiesta events and, by her own account, not true of the fiesta’s most popular event, the Burning of Zozobra. If the Entrada, de Vargas, and Fiesta Queen are means of consolidating Hispanos for the purpose of resisting Anglo economic domination, should we also take Zozobra as an Anglo way of retarding Hispanic cultural ascendancy? And what if every other fiesta event were interpreted as a form of resistance or dominance? What would we conclude about the rhetoric of peace and interethnic harmony that audiences hear from almost every public voice during fiesta? Even though Sarah Horton traces the fiesta’s rise historically, her theoretical stance, derived from multiple sources, reduces the fiesta to a single power dynamic, that of staking a claim to cultural and historical territory. She uses other metaphors, but the spatial-territorial one of claim-staking dominates. This interpretive move is powerful but questionable, since no one ever says in public that the fiesta is about resisting Anglo domination. Horton has to infer this claim-staking function, hence her repeated reference to it as “veiled.” I have little doubt that claim-staking is a fiesta function for some Hispanic participants in some fiesta events, but I also believe that in the fiesta as a whole there are

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multiple, contradictory dynamics. The Entrada not only reinforces the implied Hispanic declaration to Anglos, “We were here first”; it also provokes Hispanic dissent.503 Lots of basic questions are left unanswered by Horton’s repeated declaration that the fiesta ritualizes the strategic staking of an ethno-nationalist claim: Is that strategy successful? How would we know if it were or were not? How does the strategy differently impact Native people, Hispanics, and Anglos? Do Natives and Anglos have their own veiled strategies for fiesta? In what respects does the claimstaking succeed? In what ways is it dysfunctional? How might the fiesta be more effective in achieving its goal? What would the ideal fiesta look like? Horton says her aim is not to deconstruct, but the effect of unveiling the veiled could well be deconstructive, especially if that veiling was strategic in the first place.504 The critical, iconoclastic effect of unveiling is amplified by other rhetorical choices, such as referring to La Conquistadora as a “fetish object,” Angelico Chávez’s book as “ventriloquism,” and the fiesta as an “invention.”505 I have no objection to scholars’ taking critical stances. Every theory, even those that insist on historicizing a ritual, implies a set of values, therefore a critique. However, I prefer that both become overt, thus debatable. Just as scholars unveil fiestas and rituals, we should unveil scholarship. I once overheard someone quip, “The fiesta empowers Hispanics and disempowers Native people, while Anglos pay to watch the fray.” On the surface, the remark seems to condense a sentiment similar to Horton’s thesis about the fiesta’s function. The trouble is that the quip rides on the backs of several clichés. Many Native people don’t feel disempowered by fiesta; they just ignore it. Many Hispanics don’t feel empowered by it; it’s just what they do. And some Anglos neither watch nor pay. Some members of all three groups sometimes participate, pay, and watch. Other members refuse to participate, pay, or watch. So the subquestions multiply: Are people’s feelings an accurate barometer of a ritual’s power? Can you feel powerless when you actually have power, and vice versa? If we admit the likelihood of a feeling/ function disjunction, we have to sharpen our question: not merely “Who has power?” but “Who has what kind of power to accomplish what, when?” Another complication is that ethnicity shapeshifts. This person, of mixed Pueblo and Hispanic heritage, self-identifies as Pueblo. That person, of mixed Navaho and Anglo heritage, self-identifies as Anglo. This group once dominated by Hispanics is now dominated by Anglos. That group is a mixture of Anglos, Pueblos, and Hispanics. There are several candidates for “group,” not only ethnic groups but also civic groups, religious groups, neighborhoods, economic classes, and temporary groups such as a concert audience or the group that happens to be shopping at Villa Linda Mall when an “incident” happens. So it is worth asking: Which groups are empowered? When and where does this empowerment or disempowerment happen? During the ritual? Immediately afterward? All the time? It is simple enough to claim that rituals constitute identity by empowering groups, but difficult to demonstrate the claim and rule out counterarguments. In the

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Santa Fe Fiesta, which individuals and which groups are empowered? In my view, there is no single, obvious answer, so I am much less certain than Horton about what the fiesta actually does. If one counts dollars, merchants and businesses are empowered. If one is talking about the power to make decisions about the fiesta itself, it’s the city council and Fiesta Council. If one thinks of the fiesta as essentially religious, it’s the Catholic Church. If one takes the Entrada as the fiesta’s ideological core, the Caballeros de Vargas are the ones empowered. If “power” means the ability to capture media attention, the answer would be the Kiwanis Club, which sponsors the Burning of Zozobra. If power means the ability to influence policy and legislation in either the city or the state, you would have to track relationships and influences for decades. If you think that power questions are about ethnic groups, then arguments could be mounted for either Hispanics or Anglos, maybe even Native people, since the fiesta implies that they occupy the moral high ground. There is no effective way to argue any of these cases without specifying what kind of power and which specific fiesta event you are talking about.

Rituals Attune and Disattune Bodies However much rituals may inhabit ritual scripts or sacred texts, they also reside in bodies. No body, no ritual. Bodies—enspirited, colored, brained, aged, enculturated, gendered, skinny and fat—are methodologically primary. Although such polemical flourishes rarely need repeating now, their truth seemed less obvious in the 1970s, at the inception of ritual studies. Then, it was necessary to insist that ritual is a bodily activity. The term “body” had an edge, a polemical force reminding everyone, especially those of us who earned our keep by sitting on our butts and exercising our brains, that we were not minds alone. Ritual studies emerged in North America in the wake of black, performance, and women’s studies, which were coursing through the academy, sometimes under different names. Later, Native, queer, and cultural studies added their influence, likewise postcolonialism and postmodernism. Currently, cognitive psychology and scientific research into the brain continue drawing attention to ritual’s basic physicality and bodiliness. Early in ritual studies history, we were instructing ourselves and others to speak of “the whole person.” We would no longer carve things up into bodies and . . . whatever else makes up a human being. Rapidly, however, the phrase became the captive of pop psychology. Whole persons did not spank their kids, make war, or wantonly pollute the environment. Whole people loved weekend seminars and espoused green causes. “Holism” became another -ism among those desperate to change the spelling of its name to “wholism.” “The body” also buddied up with other concepts. Gender, race, ethnicity, and class became a matched set. A major thematic link among them was “power.” Thus, power and the body are now required considerations when discussing ritual.

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Most academics now rhetorically eschew Cartesian dualism: the assumption of a hard conceptual divide between the body and whatever is considered its beloved or despised opposite—the soul, mind, or spirit. But dualism insidiously crept, and continues to creep, back into popular and academic usage, partly because it is inscribed in so many Euroamerican languages. The problem with polemical usage is that it often reinstates what it rejects. There is a certain irony, then, that some of the most disembodied writing about “the” body was eventually produced by feminist writers such as Judith Butler.506 You can say “the body” as a way of insisting that bodies count as much as minds, but it can easily sound as if you’re granting the mind independence, or as if you think the body and the mind are separate entities. Whereas bodies, mine and yours, are tangible and distinct (except perhaps in trance or lovemaking), “the” body belongs to no one. “The body” is an abstraction. There is nothing wrong with abstractions; we need them, as long as we remember that they are abstractions. Although “the body” is a fairly recent usage, “the self,” “the person,” “the mind,” and other such abstractions have had a long shelf life in Western philosophical discourse, so there is little point in pretending that they will fall into disuse overnight. Even though there are periodic conceptual attempts to link the individual physical body with the collective social body, the reified generic phrase “the body” is easily co-opted back into the service of individualism. People enact rituals with their bodies, but since our relationships with our bodies differ from relationships with either pets or bikes, it is more accurate to say “as” bodies. Because we are embodied beings, rituals can attune us. Those of a Skinnerian persuasion might say “condition” us; those inclined to postmodernism might say “inscribe” meanings in bodies; and those influenced by cognitive science might say “entrain” bodies or brains. Whatever the preferred terminology, scholars need ways of referring to ritual’s physiological infrastructure. Think roads and bridges. Think sewers. Rituals require a bodily infrastructure as surely as they need a social one. Because human bodies are not vehicles that we own or in which we ride, we remind ourselves that we are our bodies, even if we also believe that there is something else that transcends the body. The verb “embody,” used often in ritual studies, is useful for reminding us that even though we are our bodies, we can also be alienated from them. To “embody” something is to incarnate it, suggesting the possibility that people can also be disembodied even though they have, or are, bodies. Rituals model bodily comportment outside rituals by prescribing actions inside rituals. In this manner, rituals attune not only ritual bodies but social bodies. Behavior outside is less a mirror than a “transform,” a contextually determined adaptation, of action inside. In the martial arts a kata is a prescribed routine consisting of kicks, punches, and blocks. It is abstract in the sense that it can be done alone and the opponent is imaginary. Dojos are replete with humorous stories about fledgling martial artists who, in situations of actual attack outside the dojo, begin executing a kata only to get themselves beaten up. They had not yet absorbed the crucial notion that katas are formal and mnemonic rather than directly practical.

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Practical use requires selectivity and constant adaptation to a fast-changing situation. Rituals, like katas, model bodily actions, but not in a directly mimetic way. Speaking of “bodies” or “the body” is polemical, therefore a risk, the same kind a teacher takes in speaking of a good student as a brilliant “mind.” Just as minds are “embodied,” so bodies are “minded.” Bodies are enculturated by rituals, but because bodies are also genetically formed, the infrastructure of ritualizing bodies is more or less a given, therefore more or less universal. Neither specific rituals nor ritualizing “instincts” are hardwired, but bodies, however, personally and culturally differentiated, and however different men are from women, are also profoundly similar because they share a common genetic “code” and “architecture,” a brain connected to a nervous system. Whereas scholars conceptualize local variations by using ethnographic methods to study ritual performance, they use theories variously labeled as cognitive, ethological, psychological, evolutionary, biogenetic, and neurobiological to study ritual competence.507 Borrowing the performance/competence distinction from linguistics, some scholars use the term “performance” to designate the way people actually speak, and the term “competence” to denote the rules implied by their speech. Performance is what people do; competence is what facilitates and shapes what they do. Performance appears on the surface and is culturally malleable; competence lurks below the surface and is not so malleable. Ritual competence, then, is similar to grammar. Most of us learn to speak before we can articulate the rules of grammar. Scholars sometimes even learn to edit manuscripts without knowing those rules. A person can be articulate, competent in observing the requirements of proper speech or writing, without necessarily being able to specify what the rules are. Such a person’s knowledge of grammar may be real but tacit rather than explicit. To use a computing analogy, performance is what appears on the screen. Competence is the operating system that underlies the programs that organize the words on the screen. Whereas performance can be observed, competence can only be inferred, inviting theorists to imagine competence as “behind” or “below” ritual performance. Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley do not study the obvious, which is to say, performed ritual actions. Instead, they work to discover its implied “grammar,” which, in the language of linguistics, is said to “generate” actual, observable performances. Lawson and McCauley say that what they study is not the grammar embedded in the brains of specific ritual participants, but that embedded in the mind of an idealized participant.508 So, in effect, their cognitive theory requires them to take two steps back from specific ritual performances. The object of their study is not an actual participant, but an idealized one. Then, they take a step back from that: not even an idealized participant’s actions, but the representations of those actions in the ideal participant’s mind. The value of such a theory, say Lawson and McCauley, is that it “employs a finite system of rules which can account for an indefinitely large number of representations and, thereby, explains the competence of participants to

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have systematic intuitions and insights into a wide range of features of both actual and possible religious rituals (including ones they have never confronted). In short, it explains both participants’ competence and their creativity with their ritual system.”509 The theory and method that I am espousing here is a performance theory insofar as it begins with observable surfaces. Whereas Lawson and McCauley have to work their way toward the surface, I have to work my way toward the depths of the mindbody. Eventually competence theories and performance theories have to meet. If we construe them as mutually exclusive alternatives rather than as differing perspectives on the same thing, we make a serious mistake. Performance approaches and cognitive approaches need one another for mutual correction. Cognitive science is interdisciplinary, drawing on psychology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, and anthropology. The term “cognitive” has problems similar to the one that plagues body talk. It can sound inherently dualistic, as if “cognitive” implies something like “bodiless,” “heartless,” or “merely intellectual.” But it is none of these. Most cognitive approaches assume that cognition is a bodily function fully wired into emotion and intellect. Cognitivism, insofar as it is rooted in evolutionary biology, hypothesizes that ritual behavior evolved across eons and that it can be either adaptive or maladaptive. For cognitivists there is something peculiar about rituals that requires explaining. Rituals make communication difficult; they assume extraordinary kinds of actors; their goals are unlike those of practical, meansend-oriented activity; they resist change; they require a nonordinary attitude, or stance; they must be performed exactly; participants’ explanations don’t really explain anything but only further elaborate the ritual. Cognitivism attempts to explain one or more of these peculiarities by piecing together empirical research with evolutionary and epistemological modeling. A key premise is that the human brain and nervous system constrain, if not actually construct, religious and ritualistic experience. What anyone, religious or not, can know is dependent on the “hardware” of the human body-mind. There is no special religious faculty or transcendent way of knowing anything. Rituals operate in a matrix that is both cultural (therefore variable) and cognitive, or genetic (therefore invariable). Links between ritual actors and either their brains or cultures are not direct; rather, they are mediated by mental representations. Ritual is a behavioral technology employing various techniques such as sonic rhythm to “penetrate” the psyche, thereby “driving” cultural meanings into human bodies. Feminist philosophers have criticized not only the masculinist metaphors (such as “penetration”) that suffuse cognitive science, but also the stereotyped picture it tends to paint of emotion.510 “Emotion” too often rings “female,” and “cognition,” “male.” Influenced by this criticism and further research, a different picture is now slowly emerging, one that paints emotion and cognition as necessary partners for evolutionary survival and adaptive functioning.511 My way of trying compress cognitivist and feminist insights about ritual is to say it attunes. The metaphor implies that bodies (minded, cultured, and gendered)

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“vibrate” or “resonate” with something else: other bodies, environments, whatever is deemed holy. These vibrations may also be dissonant, or disattuned. “Disattune” is an obsolete but useful word. To disattune a radio is to turn it off-station; to disattune a guitar is to put it out of tune. Rituals can attune and disattune simultaneously. It is possible to attune individuals to each other while disattuning a group to its environment. How do rituals attune or disattune? Do they do so by entraining brains? By altering or fixating social patterns? Probably both. To put the question as if a choice is required would be to miss the point. Even if we cannot adequately answer the question, a good alternative is: How do participants know when their ritual slips out of tune, disattuning them to their world? Who notices dissonance, and how did they learn to hear being off-key? Closely allied with claims about the centrality of the body and various body parts—from brains and nervous systems to hearts and genitalia—are claims about the senses and emotions. Not only do rituals attune or disattune bodies, rituals can awaken, suppress, or integrate the senses. Considered ideally, rituals stir the emotions and activate the senses just as the arts are supposed to do. But this way of putting the matter is an aspiration, not a description of a fact. Actual rituals may do the opposite: routinize emotions and dull the senses. On the one hand, uttering words in a ceremonial, liturgical, decorous manner elevates them beyond their usual status. On the other, saying things ritually risks cloaking actual feelings. Ritualized emotion can be a perfunctory substitute for experienced emotion. There is little question that one of ritual’s functions is evoke the collective effervescence, but this function can also be viewed as a dysfunction, since it can render participants easy to dupe and susceptible to manipulation. Stirring emotion, like formalizing order, is a two-edged sword. Documented in “A Footwashing Ritual for Maundy Thursday,” Chapel on the Green is a weekly outdoor service sponsored by Trinity Episcopal Church, New Haven, Connecticut.512 On Maundy Thursday, 2012, off to one side of an improvised altar is a labyrinth, its winding course marked with orange flags. Banners fly; one of them reads, “All I need is an address.” In the background are the tents of Occupy New Haven. Grounded by the percussive rhythms of the group, Drums Not Guns, volunteers, church members, and clergy combine the ancient ritual of footwashing with medical foot care for people who walk the streets. After many feet are washed, massaged, and outfitted with new socks, vouchers are given for a pair of shoes, then an outdoor meal is served. The entire rite is about bodiliness and service. The theological and liturgical premise is that Christians on this occasion perform what Jesus once enacted. “Jesus gave out free food. So do we,” announces a flyer. Accordingly, church members share food and wash the feet of those who come, many of them homeless. The proclaimed message is that of caring and humility: We are no better than you; we are demonstrating ritually that we care. However, one of the first times I showed the video, someone complained about the distancing effect of the rubber gloves. “What do

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those blue gloves say?” she asked. On the one hand, the Maundy Thursday ritual is about Christians becoming attuned to the poor and homeless, about enacting gestures and postures they understand and appreciate: receiving food and having tired or sore feet washed. On the other, the gloves are to protect hands, all white, from the harshness of Epsom salts and rubbing alcohol. Would one dare ask if the gloves are used to protect from disease? The question sounds indecorous, like it impugns the integrity of the liturgical servers, and I do not question their good intentions. But notice that the hierarchy doesn’t disappear; the service of washing another’s feet is not mutual. Participants never lose track of who is “master,” to use the language of scripture, and who is servant, although the roles are being momentarily inverted by the liturgy. In the short run, the rite attunes and connects the bodies of haves and have-nots, but in the long run it also ceremonially separates their bodies, thereby disattuning them. What are the bodily consequences of the Santa Fe fiesta? What is a “fiestafied” body? By participating, you are supposed to be happier, more bonded with family and friends, more sensitive to your neighbors (especially those of a different ethnicity), more appreciative of Santa Fe’s history, and eager for next year’s fiesta. When families attend, they carry away memories, souvenirs, and photos. Some of these are passed on to succeeding generations. But the fiesta-suffused body doesn’t only remember the event fondly, it is also sated and weary—too much food and alcohol, too much noise, too little sleep, too many hours on tired feet, too much pious and patriotic rhetoric, too many bodies, too close. Does postfiesta letdown amount to sheer dissipation, or is it like the good tiredness you feel after a vigorous workout? Do the bodily consequences matter? Do they carry over? If so, for how long? Some of the smells linger in your clothes until the next load of wash. Some of the scenes and sounds stick in your brain. You find yourself replaying or humming them. Occasionally, an image or action creeps into dream sleep. But there is a problem with this way of thinking and speaking. It is generic: “It is tired and sated.” “You find yourself humming”? Who is this “it,” this “you”? No one in particular, everyone in general? Only empathy, imagination, and projection allow me to talk this way. Research on the bodily consequences of the 2007 and 2012 fiestas is no longer possible. Assuming you can overcome the divide between cognitivist approaches to ritual in general and ethnographic approaches to specific ritual performances, you can study the bodily consequences of the fiesta of 2024 without having to rely on my videos, but if you do, how many bodies will you study and how will you study them? The most sustained bodily attunement during fiesta is probably among the de Vargas figure, his cuadrilla, the Fiesta Queen, and her court. For them, fiesta does not last for a weekend but rather from May through mid-September. They are constantly being groomed, choreographed, and displayed. They shift in and out of role, in and out of costume. They are constantly being encouraged, coaxed, and corrected so they will properly embody dignity and pride. Although on video you can see

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them tired, yawning, and sagging, you can also see them bolstering up their energy to model good behavior. You can watch chaperones touching an elbow or otherwise prompting someone to embody what he or she symbolizes. With a little offstage querying, cuadrilla and court members readily talk about how tired and sleepdeprived they become during fiesta or how much food and drink they consume, but they have been coached to put their best faces forward, to resist the urge to complain, and to represent their people with dignity. How might you as a student of ritual slip past “best” faces to glimpse “real” faces?

Rituals Reinforce the Status Quo and Enact Transformation The association of ritual with tradition is so pervasive that many practitioners and theorists consider ritual a primary means of resisting change and maintaining the status quo. Ritual is construed as a means of constructing the present on the basis of a heavily mythologized past treated as the generative model with which people wish to remain in contact. Conceived in this manner, rituals and the values they enshrine reside in the hands of the most powerful members of society who use them to perpetuate the most conservative human institutions. There is little doubt that rituals can be deployed to conserve, but how? What’s an apt analogy? Pickling? Rust-proofing? Taxidermy? Taxidermy kills what it preserves, so no practitioner would embrace this analogy. Pickling and rust-proofing work by eliminating agents that rot or corrode. Anyone who has ever owned a vehicle for a decade in a wet climate with salted winter roads knows that rustproofing doesn’t proof much. Although both undercoating and rituals may inhibit unwanted changes, both are penetrable, thus subject to corrosion. Maybe a more apt analogy is a preserve, a tract of land removed from normal use and set aside for the purpose of safely harboring endangered species. Change happens in plant sanctuaries, but certain kinds of it, such as erosion, are deliberately inhibited. Other kinds, identified as natural, are allowed to happen or are actively induced. Caretakers might burn the land, imitating what lightning occasionally does. Sometimes these burns are even performed ritually.513 On this model rituals are interventions designed to inhibit change or, by making radical changes, to revert to an earlier state. Two conserving dynamics are worth distinguishing: the work of people in conserving rituals (refusing to give up Latin in the Mass, insisting that lyrics be in Hebrew or Arabic rather than English), and the conserving work of ritual (using a ritual to reinforce traditional family values). The first dynamic is formal, the second functional. Formal conservatism emphasizes certain ritual qualities, namely, prescription (“Do this”), stylization (“Do it this way”), and repetition (“Do it again and again”). Canonization, selecting certain sources as authoritative, thereby ruling out others as lacking sacrality or credibility, is prescriptive: “Read these books, not

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those.” Canonization is a form of counterchange that can profoundly ritualize the reading habits of a community if the imperative multiplies stylization commands (“Read this from an elevated platform”) and repetition commands (“Read it every Sunday, on special occasions, and at bedtime”). Ritual actions are sometimes used to ensure that treasured persons or paradigmatic historical events are not forgotten. Rituals are devices for hanging on to values, making sure they are honored. Old Order Mennonites wear clothing that was once inexpensive and unremarkable. Now, that same style, because the times and circumstances have changed, is costly and extraordinary, calling attention to itself despite wearers’ intentions. Since the values reinforced by the ritual act of wearing plain clothes have changed because the situation has changed, it does not follow, then, that unchanged ritual practices necessarily produce unchanging values. For rituals to conserve effectively, they themselves may have to change. Changing may be the most effective way to keep things the same. Ritual activity consumes human energy, environmental resources, and social capital, but ritual stasis also requires energy. Whether rituals appear dynamic or static, they require an outlay of resources to keep the wolves at bay. Either way, ritual costs. Whether you are trying to invent a new ritual, patch up an existing one, or protect an old one, the social and physical environments have to be mined, bought, or imported. The normal drift of human history is powerful enough to erode everything, so rituals, like other human activities, are in constant need of repair. Since rituals do not preserve themselves, maintenance is required. Since rituals are events rather than things, there is no chemical preservative option. So a more apt analogy is that of trying to keep an untethered canoe situated atop a fishing hole. The only way to stay in the same place in a swiftly flowing current is by paddling furiously. You can only go nowhere by acting as if you are going somewhere. So a ritual in its conserving function is not merely an action but a counteraction. Even if it is not enacted against some “other,” it is enacted against time (if you assume it is time that changes things), and it requires burning the spiritual equivalent of fossil fuel in order to do so. In the video “The Deconsecration of a Canadian Church” a dwindling congregation numbering barely a dozen people, most of them middle-aged or elderly, is overtaken by time and rapid change. The people have to admit publicly and liturgically that they can no longer keep their church afloat.514 Ray Fenton, a board member participating in the ceremony, confesses at the end of the service that he feels like he has failed his founding ancestors.515 Residents of rural Ontario know that a torrent of change has destroyed many family farms and rural churches, so no one blames him or the members for being unable to maintain the status quo. A new form of worship or a new plan would not have saved the church. The “magical” moment— and there are few such moments in United Church worship—occurs at 19:30–47, when Bonnie Harvey, an official from Kent Presbytery, declares the building “no longer a place of meeting of the United Church of Canada.” In a few seconds, the status of the place is transformed. The declaration introduces a cleavage between

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the place and the people and declares that the people, not the building, constitute the church. In this ritual, conservation happens by transformation; the one doesn’t preclude the other. The ritual utterance, backed up by the signing of legal documents, transforms the building into a nonliturgical space and cuts the members loose with the homiletically declared hope that they will reintegrate into other nearby churches. Rituals are rendered traditional by constant microchanges, but when changes occur in sufficient volume or frequency, participants may be forced to recognize that their rituals are in fact dying or need reinventing. This way of putting it may sound odd, since inventions are new and inventors known, whereas ritual traditions are supposed to emerge gradually and anonymously across long periods of time. Although historians have long tracked the complex, changing courses of specific rituals, providing ample illustration of the fact that rituals really do change, it came as something of a revelation when, in 1983, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger published The Invention of Tradition.516 Although it is now common to speak of traditions, including ritual ones, as “inventions,” it was not common then. Hobsbawm and Ranger taught students of ritual that just as a craftsperson can antique a newly built bookcase to look well-worn, so communities can mint activities to seem weathered, reeking with the odor of sanctity. Not all that looks old is. So it is always worth asking: What and to what degree does this ritual transform or conserve? What does it leave unchanged or insignificantly changed? Memory is both individual and collective, although the two kinds work in different ways.517 Although we remember, we do not quite “have” memories. They are not stored in brains like bottles of wine in a cellar. They are, rather, encoded, like sets of instructions in a photo editing program. If you edit a picture in Picasa, for instance, it does not clobber your original by saving the cropped and color-corrected version over the original. Instead, it preserves the original along with an coded set of editing instructions, which you the user never see. However, each time you view the photo, those instructions are reinvoked, thus reinventing the edited version of your photo. Each time you view it, the program re-creates the edited version from the original version, even though you do not witness that activity on the screen. Because the program works this way, you can always “undo” your editing. On this model a ritual tradition is not transmitted hand-over-hand like an old heirloom. Rather, it is re-created each time it is performed. Sometimes the instructions for doing so are culturally encoded in a book, script, artifact, or even a place, in which case you might be able to discover its codes or prompts if you have the means of access. However, sometimes the instructions are tucked away in the muscle memories and brain folds of ritual leaders, and these instructions are passed on by verbal or gestural imitation. Whether any kind of universal ritual imperative (for instance, “Repeat what you value and thereby survive”) is inscribed in human genes is debatable. Even if people are hardwired to use rituals for conserving traditions, humans are not hardwired for any particular tradition.

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On the one hand, rituals may keep, or appear to keep, things as they are. On the other hand, there is inevitably an undercurrent, a swirling dynamic threatening to upend apparently static ritual traditions. So practitioners build dikes to contain, or canoes to ride, this current. Containing and riding are not necessarily opposing strategies. You might build a dike precisely to harness the hydrostatic energy of watery surges. Since form and dynamic, structure and process, are necessarily a pair, rituals can not only resist change, they can induce it, transforming their participants and environments. Rituals can construct, create, even subvert. By means of rituals, people generate ideas, ignite imaginations, inspire art, and foster ecological attunement. Rituals have the capability of evoking change, renewing what is decaying, and rendering social constellations anew. The two functions, retarding change and fomenting it, are not always balanced, nor do participants always value them equally. Whether conserving or transforming, rituals model actions into paradigms that wrap ideas and values in a blanket of feeling and multisensory stimulation. Effective rituals incubate sensibilities that are simultaneously good to perform, good to think, and good to feel. Rituals accomplish this kind of networking—at once cognitive, ethical, social, and environmental—by incubating what we conventionally call “the arts.” Art is the process of imaginative world-making. Whether performative, plastic, literary, visual, or digital, art transforms what is into what might be. Since arts have their own dynamics, they can as easily upend a ritual as sustain it. The arts are potentially dangerous to ritual in the way gas, water, and electricity are dangerous to homes. They make in habitable, but set loose inside your walls or basement, they can also destroy it. Ritual and the arts have in common the ability to create a gap between the quotidian and the extraordinary. They differ insofar as the default mode of ceremonial and liturgical rites tends to be declarative or imperative, whereas the default mode of art tends toward the subjunctive.518 Whereas the arts thrive on creativity and elicit criticism, liturgical and ceremonial rituals tend to value tradition over creativity and to discourage criticism. The twin processes of creativity and criticism more readily and directly foster transformation, whereas the pairing of tradition with countercriticism favors conservation. The notions of ritual creativity and criticism, which later informed so much of my research, first occurred to me in Santa Fe because there I witnessed people unabashedly inventing ceremonies and openly criticizing the fiesta. Santa Fe is saturated with talk about the traditional and the natural, the former stereotypically associated with things Hispanic, Native, and Catholic, the latter with Anglos, especially newcomers and artists. But you soon figure out that “the traditional” has its own ways of innovating and critiquing and that “the natural” quickly becomes predictable and formulaic, which is to say, traditional. Once you begin to recognize the “invention of tradition,” you can no longer maintain an overdrawn polarization between tradition and creativity. Initially, I deemed the fiesta creative because it was not like anything I had ever witnessed, but if seeming unusual is all that’s meant by

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“creativity,” every ritual ever witnessed by a tourist would be creative. Asked now, is the Santa Fe Fiesta creative, I would recast the question: What are the different kinds of ritual creativity in the fiesta? There is the creativity of Zozobra, invented by an artist; the creativity of the Misa Panamericana, a mariachi Mass sung in Santa Fe using unique musical interpretations of traditional liturgical elements; the creativity of each year’s melodrama, which gains its critical leverage by parody, inversion, and irony; the creativity of the Children’s Parade, in which kids, parents, and friends play together with cultural forms; and the creativity, if this is the right word, of using a traditional but constantly revised pageant to reinvent a past. If you think of creativity as synonymous with something invented from whole cloth or made up on the spot, you may resist the notion of ritual creativity altogether, especially if you consider ritual repetitive, conventionalized, and prescribed by authorities.519 Everything depends first on how you define both creativity and ritual and then on how you value each activity. Joseph Ratzinger, a German theologian who was pope from 2005 to 2013, rails against improvisation, creativity, and experimentation in liturgy. For him, invented, human rituals, the archetype of which is the Israelites’ worship of the Golden Calf, are expressions of arrogance, self-centeredness, and idolatry.520 Ratzinger’s normative view doesn’t mean that ritual creativity doesn’t happen, only that he values it much less than received, approved tradition.521 Like Ratzinger, some Santa Feans fret that today’s rituals aren’t what they used to be. They have deteriorated, become commercial, or overstepped their bounds. Others counter that fiesta is too traditional, stuck in the Dark Ages, out of touch with the contemporary world. So which is it—does fiesta instigate change or inhibit it? And what exactly has it changed or kept from changing? Itself? The city? Participants? Like festival love, festival memories are short and notoriously skewed. The answer to the first question is usually some version of “The fiesta has changed in this respect but not in that respect.” We usually have to attach qualifiers: This change was huge, but that one didn’t matter much. Big changes in the Mass, for example, may hardly cause a ripple among participants, while a change in the way fiesta food is spiced can be experienced as an outrage. (Does it matter to the “true” spirit of Thanksgiving whether your family bakes a turkey or the cook puts sage in the dressing? Does spicing matter more or less than the giving of thanks?) The main reason for writing a historical chapter on the fiesta was to question popular assumptions about the religiosity, ethnicity, scale, and creativity of the Santa Fe Fiesta. Has it changed since the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth? Clearly, it has. Significantly. But overall, has it functioned as an inhibitor or maker of change? Probably both. In general, we have been taught to expect less change in things religious than in things commercial. The sacred Ohkay Owingeh Turtle Dance, say tourist viewers, should remain as it has “always” been, whereas secular fancy dancing on a raised platform on the Santa Fe Plaza in front of tourists should display creativity and innovation. Catholics in Santa Fe tend to

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assume that the Mass has changed more slowly than, say, the parades or the Burning of Zozobra. The assumptions about both rituals may be false, so we should treat them as hypotheses in need of testing rather than as facts or, worse, axioms. Without taking multiple perspectives and studying a ritual across a time depth greater than a single lifetime, there is no reliable way to inquire into its capacity to instigate or inhibit change.

Rituals Make and Unmake Meaning Graduate students in philosophy sometimes mock their discipline by parodying its arcane questions. One of the most persistent is: What is the meaning of “meaning”? Over the decades, several publications have struggled with this question while feeding into its parody. In 1923 Ivor Richards and Charles Ogden published The Meaning of Meaning, arguing that words alone are meaningless, that meaning is the function of a semantic triangle consisting of the interactions among a word, its referent, and the associations of speakers and hearers.522 More recently, Dan Sperber’s book Rethinking Symbolism and Frits Staal’s article “The Meaninglessness of Ritual” have made strong cases declaring that symbols and rituals are meaningless.523 It is worth hearing Staal in all his stridency: A widespread assumption about ritual is that it consists in symbolic activities which refer to something else. It is characteristic of a ritual performance, however, that it is self-contained and self-absorbed. The performers are totally immersed in the proper execution of their complex tasks. Isolated in their sacred enclosure, they concentrate on correctness of act, recitation and chant. Their primary concern, if not obsession, is with rules. There are no symbolic meanings going through their minds when they are engaged in performing ritual. . . . To performing ritualists, rituals are like dance, of which Isadora Duncan said: “If I could tell you what it means there would be no point in dancing it.”524 . . . Ritual has no meaning, goal or aim. . . . Ritual is pure activity, without meaning or goal. . . . Ritual is for its own sake. . . . To say that ritual is for its own sake is to say that is meaningless, without function, aim or goal. . . . Whatever value it has is intrinsic value. . . . In ritual activity, the rules count, but not the result.525 Now contrast this [ritual activity] with an ordinary activity. I am about to transport my suitcase from my house to the bus stop, which is about a mile away. There are no rules I have to follow, provided I obtain the desired effect. I may put my suitcase on a skate board. Or my brother may appear on a bicycle, and the two of us use this vehicle to transport my suitcase to its intended destination. The two kinds of activity, ritual and ordinary, can

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be juxtaposed without conflict or contradiction. . . . A distinctive feature of ordinary activity is that it runs risks which ritual activity avoids. In ordinary activity, the entire performance may fail to have the desired effect. The bicycle together with its load may fall into a canal, or the suitcase may be seized by armed robbers. In ritual activity, the activity itself is all that counts. Not only have we established the rules ourselves, so that we are completely in control; we are also assured of success. If one rite goes wrong, another takes its place.526 I am grateful for the return of our bicycle by Frits Staal. Since it is the one thing he and I have in common, I will momentarily dredge it up out of the canal. I sometimes ride mine in the way the Vedic priests Staal studied perform a ritual: for its own sake, without aim, function or goal. At other times I ride it to the grocery store for milk. The useless and the useful do not preclude one another. In many instances, Staal is right, rituals do not refer to meanings in the way words do. If they have meaning at all, it is more akin to the way in which dance or music is meaningful. I also agree with Dan Sperber that ritual meanings are extrinsic rather than intrinsic. Meanings are laid atop rituals, so they are infinitely variable. When participants talk about rituals, they aren’t really explaining them so much as extending them. The meanings are more akin to rationalizations than explanations. Even so, I persist in treating rituals as meaningful. Outside academe, debating the meaning of “meaning” sounds silly, but the misunderstandings arising from its multiple connotations are, in fact, troublesome. The most basic meaning of “meaning” is semantic, in which case the word signifies “that to which something refers,” as in “the meaning of a word.” The second sense of the term can be heard in the phrase “the meaning of an action or object.” Here it alludes to the motivation, intention, or goal behind doing or making something. A third usage connotes the value, purpose, or significance of things, as in “the meaning of life.” Regardless of whether ritual meanings are more choreographic than wordlike, rituals are vehicles of meaning in these last two senses of the word. The counterclaim to “Rituals are meaningless” is “Meaning happens.” A good example is Burning Man.527 Supposedly meaningless, the big effigy and many of the tributary side events nevertheless accumulate meanings. Even Staal eventually has to admit that rituals have “side effects.”528 Whether or not rituals are ever intentionally created as vehicles for meanings or values, they are magnets for both. A painter’s making a painting for its own sake does not prevent its buyer, the local bank manager, from using it to declare her commitment to the local arts community by hanging in her office. In the process of performing rituals, meaningful communication inevitably happens even if one considers it a side effect. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to enact a ritual that did not communicate something to someone. But rituals are supposed to communicate something important. They are designed to display intentional messages writ large. They do so in part by redundancy, saying or doing the

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same thing over and over again. Rituals communicate little new information to insiders. Insofar as ritual is redundant, the information it communicates is proportionately reduced. Compare ritual with the evening news. News is not supposed to be redundant or old. We call it “news” because there is supposed to be something new about it. But what about the fact that it always comes on at six? Or that each report ends, “Peter Mansbridge, CBC News”? The evening news is ritualized by the sacrality of its personages, the dependability of its hour, and its formulaic redundancy. If rituals communicate, but what they communicate is not even information, much less news, are they therefore meaningless? And if they are meaningless, why do so many people think of rituals as meaning-making or meaning-bearing events? There are situations in which the questions, “What does your ritual mean?” or “What does that ritual accomplish?” sound like nonsense. It is a fairly recent and largely Western notion that rituals have meaning and that they work. Sometimes the two assumptions are combined: Rituals work because, or insofar as, they mean something, or they mean something because, or insofar as, they work. In popular parlance “meaning” and “working,” when used in reference to ritual, often amount to the same thing. “That wedding was deeply meaningful” suggests something like “That wedding got them married with a bang!” The idea that rituals communicate information is different from the idea that rituals communicate meaning. Meaning is about resonance rather than either information or reference. To say that a ritual or an aspect of one is meaningful is not to say that it can be decoded, that symbol X refers to meaning Y. Rather, it is to say that X has a “hook” or that it “connects.” Regardless of whether individual participants feel that the rituals in which they participate are personally meaningful, rituals bear, carry, or conjure meaning. The sort of meaning rituals can make is not the small sort implied by the question “What does the word ‘cat’ mean?” Here “meaning” is just a synonym for “refers to.” Instead, rituals can generate meaning, the sort that seems to require a big M, as in “the Meaning of life” or “make your birthday Meaningful.” Not all rituals have such a high purpose, but many ritualists aspire to meaning-making, whether they achieve it or not. Rituals make meaning by performatively activating sets of symbols, thereby embedding values in webs of significance.529 It is an overstatement to claim that rituals are symbols or that they are made exclusively of symbols. More accurately, they contain and animate symbols. Even though anything can become a symbol, not everything in a ritual is symbolic. Just because water in a ritual may symbolize, that does not mean the bucket containing it symbolizes something. If everything in a ritual were symbolic, it would become a bog, and practitioners would be swamped with meanings to such an extent that the ritual would, in fact, become meaningless. If everything were to become symbolic, there would be no foreground or background, so you could not tell the difference between things central and things peripheral. To

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render something symbolic is to put it in the foreground, inviting contemplation and perhaps interpretation, but it is also to relegate other things to the nonsymbolizing background. Since there is much about a ritual that is not symbolic, offering symbolic interpretations typically leaves a remainder, something else to be made sense of. Even though scholars debate whether and how symbols mean, summarizing a consensus position on ritual symbolism would produce something like the theory outlined in list 17. List 17. A Theory of Ritual Symbols

1. Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols.530 2. Symbols can appear in many different genres and media, e.g., ritual, myth, advertising. 3. Rituals orchestrate, or choreograph, key cultural symbols. 4. Symbolism can attach to any element of a ritual, e.g., objects, actions, persons, words, places. 5. Symbols attract each other, sometimes linking into systems and traditions. 6. A symbol typically has many meanings, not all of which are active at any one time. 7. A symbol has different kinds of meaning (synonyms are in parentheses): a. exegetical (verbal)—what people say about, or in relation to, a symbol; the meanings that can be accessed by talking or asking questions. b. emotional—feelings associated with a symbol; accessed by both talk and observation. c. positional (syntactic)—meanings implied by placement; accessed by observation and inference. d. pragmatic (operational, behavioral, functional)—meanings implied by actions with or in response to the symbol; also accessed by observation and inference.531 8. Symbolic meanings may be coherent or dissonant. 9. Symbolic meanings may be intrinsic or extrinsic. 10. Symbolic meanings may be wordlike (dependent on semantic reference) or dance- and musiclike (dependent on kinesthetic or sonic patterning). 11. The emergence or decline of meanings is situational, determined partly by the intentions of ritual participants and partly by social context. 12. Some symbols are core while others are tributary or instrumental. 13. Merely conventional, or weak, symbols are reducible to analogies or manners of speaking (e.g., head of the table), and their metaphoric power is negligible. 14. Symbols can either point to or be identified their affiliated meanings. 15. When they are materially or causally connected, the one is an index of the other.532

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16. When they become identified with their referents, they are metaphoric. 17. Metaphoric symbols are often treated as ultimate and therefore protected by a shroud of sacrality. 18. In religious rituals participants enact their ultimate values, highest aspirations, and most intense feelings. Not all rituals are religious, but many are, so no theory of ritual can perpetually evade the Principalities and Powers, whether or not they deserve capital letters. Since I don’t cast ritual as, by definition, religious, I usually attach the adjective “religious” or “liturgical” if I’m talking about a religious rite. “Religious” doesn’t mean only “concerning a named religious tradition.” For sure, religions sometimes have names—Sikhism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism—but sometimes they don’t. However you put it, some rituals are pervaded by such a sense of their supreme importance that participants, like observers, search for an adjective to label these kinds of rituals. “Sacred,” “religious,” and “spiritual” are common ways of flagging either a whole class of rituals or certain moments in a ritual as so thoroughly constitutive that they are valued as ultimate concerns. The problems with defining “religion” are as stubbornly entrenched as those that haunt attempts to define “ritual.” There are two defining strategies, one substantive and the other functional. The substantive ones identify as religious only those rituals that include transcendent actors such as gods and spirits. Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley say, “Religious rituals . . . are those religious actions whose structural descriptions include a logical object and appeal to a culturally postulated superhuman agent’s action somewhere within their overall structural description.”533 These two theorists do not claim that religious rituals are in fact connected with such agents, only that participants postulate “CPS-agents.”534 The scientific-sounding rhetoric (structural descriptions, logical objects, postulation, agency, and CPSagents) is easy to parody, but it enables Lawson and McCauley to avoid being read as theologians while allowing them to acknowledge that some rituals treat believed-in gods, spirits, or other supernaturals as central. In Lawson and McCauley’s view, ritual’s secondary qualities, such as its resistance to change or repetitiveness, arise from the postulate of superhuman agency. Lawson and McCauley’s theory is less a theory of ritual than a theory of mind, or cognition, for application in ritual circumstances. They write not about ritual in general but about religious ritual, and, I would add, only those religious rituals predicated on superhuman agency—and, in fact, not superhuman agency in general but agency modeled on human agency. Lawson and McCauley consider religious ritual the kind of ritual, therefore theoretically determinative of how one should conceive all kinds of ritual. Perhaps a case can be made that the most ritualistic rituals are, in fact, religious. This is a hypothesis worth investigating, but I resist preemptive moves that make ritual by definition religious or that treat liturgies as models or standards by which to judge other kinds of ritual. In addition, I reject definitions of religion

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that identify it exclusively with suprahuman agents. They show up only in some of the movements that students of religion regard as religious; in others they do not. In any case, the narrowness of their aim enables Lawson and McCauley to be scientific in modeling their theory. To their credit, they are able to propose scientific tests of their claims.535 Their theory predicts, for instance, that participants will distinguish religious rituals from other religious actions; that rituals with superhuman agents are more likely to be considered a group’s constitutive rituals; that the fewer superhuman agents and the less robust their personalities, the more ritually impoverished the system; and that if a ritual’s connection with superhuman agency is broken, the ritual will become ineffective. Other scholars are now busy testing these claims empirically. Instead of requiring superhuman agents, functional definitions consider values and functions. These may or may not be derived from or symbolized by superhuman agents. Three well-known functionalist formulations are these: • “Religion is the dimension of depth . . . , the state of being ultimately concerned.”536 • “Religion is one’s way of valuing most comprehensively and intensively.”537 • “A religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men [sic] by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”538 The functional net is bigger than the substantive one. Much is included that you might not consider religious, because, by these definitions, a person or group can be religious about politics or money or the environment. But even the substantive alternative is not as tight as you might imagine. Do sacred mountains to which people attribute intention and action count as superhuman agents? Are sacred animals serving as messengers superhuman agents? Are they super- or infrahuman? Is “superhuman” even the right adjective? Isn’t it too human-centered? And what about personified collectives and abstractions such as the State, the Crown, or Justice: The state owns this; justice demands that. In addition to all the “-isms”— Maoism, Communism, Capitalism—there are many ways to reify and thereby mystify agents: Culture, the Market, Society, the Global Economy. However one alludes to grand powers in theories, these forces resemble gods in generating both mythic thought and symbolic deed. Scholars therefore feel the need to demythologize Culture as much as they once demythologized scripture.539 We could object that these are mere figures of speech, but are we so sure that gods and spirits are not figures of speech? And what should we make of the fact that people die or labor for lifetimes in service of these “abstractions”? Functionally, they are gods, and functionally, gods may in some circumstances be mere manners of speaking.

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The advantage of substantive definitions is that they narrow the scope of research, making it easier to rule out certain kinds of activity as religious or ritualistic. The disadvantage of narrow substantive definitions follows from their strength. They risk obscuring connections between religious ritual and others kinds of human activity. Either way is a risk. I usually take the functional risk. If informants say “god” or “spirit,” I flag it as religious, and if they fight and die for “something” they believe in, I also flag that as religious regardless of whether I think of it as an abstraction, value, object, or supernatural. Functional definitions of religion sound a lot like definitions of spirituality. As usual, there are narrow and broad ones. The narrow ones tend to identify spirituality with a theistic worldview, Christian piety, or even Catholic monastic practice. Among the broader ones are these: • “Spirituality is the manner in which a person is oriented in being, through which one’s meaning is recognized, embraced, disciplined, and enhanced. Expressed more simply, spirituality is the way in which the whole of me responds to the whole of life.”540 • “[Spirituality is] the experience of consciously striving to integrate one’s life in terms not of isolation and self-absorption but of self-transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives.”541 • “Spirituality means a search for meaning and significance by contemplation and reflection on the totality of human experiences in relation to the whole world which is experienced and also to the life which is lived and may mature as that search proceeds.”542 Since ritual is simultaneously cognitive, emotional, and physical, it is not surprising that SBNRs, as one now hears the Spiritual-But-Not-Religious labeled, sometimes consider ritual an apt means for cultivating spiritual knowledge. Ritual knowing is not a matter of collecting mere facts but of generating networks, both neural and social. Even though the body’s center of coordination may be concentrated in the brain and neural system, the entire body, physical and social, receives, generates, and performs. Brains, thus knowing, are as environmental as they are physiological. So during this particular historical moment early in the twenty-first century, ritual and spirituality are not cast as enemies. Rituals not only communicate meanings laced with values; they also foster ways of teaching and learning those values. Schools can make it seem as if knowledge consists of words in books or facts in heads, that it is a substance worth paying for, and that it is transferrable through teachers first into brains and then onto exams. This is only one kind of knowledge, probably not the kind most determinative of survival. Other kinds of knowledge perhaps less cerebral and verbal, are learned not by brains and words alone but also by whole selves or groups. When you run, play a piano, type, drive a car, or cook and paint by instinct rather than recipe or number,

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you demonstrate know-how, a kind of knowledge different from facts repeated on exams. Know-how is not only in heads but in hands, feet, and other ritually animated portions of the anatomy. Know-how is more deeply embedded and thoroughly embodied than the stuff popularly called “knowledge.” Religious rituals are designed to enhance interaction with the sacred, but they are not proofs for the existence of God. The necessity for ritual implies the absence of the sacred. Symbols presume an absence. The need for a connecting device implies a disconnection of some sort. Ritualists account for the rift in many ways: We are blind or deaf; the sacred is around and in us all the time. We have offended the gods. Divine beings are by nature distant. However participants rationalize the rift, it is there, so students of religious ritual must theorize absence along with presence. Perhaps making contact is its own end, but religious ritualists usually aim to make contact thereby ratifying their identity and values: We are who we are because the ancestors gave us this place. We are who we are because we emerged from sacred sources. In any case, when rituals are sanctified as holy or regarded as ends in themselves, their ends become hidden, making them more deeply resistant to challenge. National values, for which people die in wars, are often religiously defended. Not merely stated, they are sloganized: for example, the French “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” the American “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and the Canadian “peace, order, and good government.” These ultimate values are ceremonially reconstituted with each enactment. By wearing a uniform or waving a flag, practitioners both introject and project the values suffusing the ceremony. Surrounded and permeated, a ceremonially engaged person absorbs spiritual (substitute your preferred adjective: “cultural,” “soul”) food in the way a digestive system absorbs nutrients.543 We speak of them as being “in the blood” or “absorbed through the pores” for good reason. One way of cultivating an ethic is to recommend it on the grounds that it is natural, good, or right, even to command it on the grounds that you will be punished if you do not obey, but recommendations and commands produce compliance or conformity followed by resistance. The likelihood of success increases if an ethic can be repeatedly enacted in an effective ritual system.544 Rituals cultivate values by making them seem inevitable or desirable, then, through practice, rendering them automatic, operating without the necessity for conscious reflection.545 Rituals associate a set of values with memorable events and recurrent practices by eliciting sentiment and rendering ideologies persuasive.546 In effective rituals participants do not merely listen to others extolling treasured values; they steep themselves in those values by enacting them in concert with others. Like any practiced activity, a ritual action can eventually seem second nature. Values are implied by the choices people make, and these values can be cultivated ritually in different ways. Some kinds of ritual—meditation and prayer, for example—can be doggedly repetitious. An entire ritual is performed, almost in the

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same way, again and again. Within mediation and prayer the same words, patterns, and tones appear and reappear. The redundancy is high. Insofar as ritual is redundant, participants are deepening, or inscribing, what they say they value. They are reinforcing what they already take to be true and reembodying important things that they do not want to forget. People repeat words, ideas, and gestures, because of the all-too-human tendency to overlook or take for granted what is important. Like soccer practice, ritual practice can be merely preliminary, something like rehearsal, but ritual can be practice in a deeper sense. Like the practice of law or medicine, ritual practice tends toward something like a profession or calling: I ought to perform these acts; I must sustain them. Everything depends on the enactment. The risk of repeated, practiced ritual, however, is that it will become rote and disconnected from the values it is supposed to inculcate. Besides frequent repetition, the other way to make meaning is by scheduling actions that are rare or even once-in-a-lifetime events.547 For initiates, rites of passage can be special and rare. Not redundant, these rituals impress themselves into individual and collective bodies by virtue of their sensory, attention-grabbing, never-to-be-repeated qualities. Especially when such events are built up through anticipation and reinforced with explicit social consequences, they stick, becoming tenacious memories and fantasy fodder, thereby continuing their formative power long after the event itself expires. The risk of this kind of ritual is that it can traumatize. Although the phrase “flashbulb memory” is used to refer to the indelible impressions made by a once-in-a-lifetime event, the metaphor itself flags a problem: The effect, although “bright,” may be short.548 I’ve been talking as if ritual actually does the work of moral formation, but really I should say that it can do such work. There is nothing automatic about the process. That a ritual inescapably inculcates some value is obvious, but whether it drives home the values that participants believe it does is best determined by ethnographic and empirical research, not predetermined by some theory. It is essential to ask what participants say they value and to compare their answers with the values implied by the ritual itself and by extraritualistic behavior. It is easy enough to say that rituals inculcate values and that they may be either more or less effective at doing so. It is quite another thing to show that a ritual inculcates good, right, or intended values. Rituals, whether deeply traditional or secularly ceremonial, can be instruments of healing or of abuse. Rarely, if ever, are they morally neutral. Since the moral worth of rituals is contested, ethical debates about them are normal, perhaps universal. When either moral positions or the rituals enacting them are sacralized, they may become more efficacious, but they also become more intractable. This intractability is one of the primary reasons for ritual criticism. In 2001 the Norwegian Medical Association declared that “ritual circumcision of boys is not consistent with important principles of medical ethics, that it is without medical value, and should not be paid for with public funds.”549 The declaration enabled doctors, as a matter of

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conscience, to decline performing the procedure, which some considered a ritual procedure. For these Norwegians, whether circumcision symbolized Jewishness or manliness was immaterial. Even the “merely hygienic” rationale can amount to the ritualization of manliness. The Norwegian position, which is at once medical and ethical, does not in itself prevent the practice, but the withdrawal of moral and medical support will likely contribute to its decline in that country. No one calls the Santa Fe Fiesta a healing rite, but clergy do refer to it as “healing the wounds that divide us.” This aspiration is suffused with religious rhetoric. The conventional view is that the religiosity of the Santa Fe Fiesta consists primarily of Roman Catholic masses and processions and secondarily of the civic religiosity infusing public invocations and concluding prayers. Few think of the entire fiesta as religious, even though a devoted minority feel that fiesta is essentially religious. Santa Fe Catholicism, insofar as it is activated during fiesta, is thoroughly ancestral. It resembles Mormon, Japanese, or Korean piety insofar as the human-divine connection is mediated through deceased ancestors whom it is important to remember and commemorate by name. Healing comes not only from divine sources but from the ancestors. For believer-practitioners fiesta predicates an ancestral absence which must be overcome by ritual means. In fact, one could even say that fiesta creates this sense of absence in order to fill it with celebrative presence. A Protestant equivalent is the evangelical preacher who rhetorically generates a conviction of sinfulness in order to make the need for salvation felt. Fiesta time, although not an official season of the Roman Catholic liturgical year, is a crucial season of the civicreligious year. Like Christmas, it animates the entire city, drawing everyone into its wake. Like Jews or Hindus living in Christian cultures, secular Santa Feans may resist by leaving town, refusing to attend, or tuning out the sounds. They may neither miss their dead ancestors nor long to renew sacred ties. For them, the absence may not constitute an invitation to divine presence. Even so, they are surrounded. Whether or not God, Christ, the Virgin, and the ancestors are present, the rituals that enact their presence are. Rituals are ways of knowing; they imply an epistemology as surely as they imply a politics or economics. Fiesta knowledge is of multiple kinds. There is the factual knowledge of budgets, city regulations, chains of command, and sources of revenue. Much of this kind of knowledge can be found in Fiesta Council minutes or other codified documents. Some of it is kept private and passed on from one leader to the next. Another kind of knowledge is traditional. Although it could be written and codified, it usually is not. Examples include knowing how to sew costumes, knowing the words of traditional canticos (hymns), knowing how to do traditional dance steps or cook fiesta foods. People learn these by watching, listening, and imitating. There is a third way of knowing that is much less focused and deliberate. Ambient knowledge orients. It comes from being surrounded by fiesta. You soak it up like a sponge, through the pores. By basking in it you feel at home and sense you

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are among your own. If you don’t soak it up, you become disoriented by feeling that you are elsewhere, in an exotic space permeated by values different from your own. This kind of knowledge, although it permeates, is difficult to teach directly or strategically. A fourth kind of knowledge is reflexive. Reflexive pronouns are redundantly self-referential. “I wrote this sentence” makes its point simply, but “I myself wrote this sentence” uses “myself ” as a grammatical intensive to ensure you get the point that I, not someone else, wrote it. If I write, “I gave myself an A,” the “myself ” is no longer intensive but fully reflexive. Like pronouns, rituals can become reflexive. They do so when ritualists perform themselves in ways that enable participants to contemplate who they really are, which is to say, who they aspire to be. In the fiesta Santa Fe performs itself not only for tourists but also for itself. Reflexive ritual knowledge is not just about how a ritual goes or what it means; it is self-knowledge that situates individuals within collectives. In religious rituals, participants practice ontological knowing, by means of which they learn “what’s really real,” and it grounds ethical knowing, “what really matters.” During fiesta participants practice this ontological and ethical knowing by imitating and absorbing idealized images of what they aspire to be. Actively practicing ritualists come to think of themselves as real _______ (fill in the blank: Santa Feans, Sikhs, Masai, Iranians, Jews, Swedes . . .). “Images” is too limiting, because, in ritualizing ritualists are not only taking in visual data but also learning action sequences, mood sets, and built-up associations: This attitude belongs with that sound in that place; this taste accompanies that tone made by those voices heard alongside the smells of this kind of food. Rituals, especially those ramified into systems that permeate the fabric of a culture, encode visions and cultivate “good desire.”550 The Santa Fe Fiesta, aiming to foster the desire for interethnic harmony, is ensconced in a web of civic, religious, and ethnic organizations. This webbing is empowering but blinding. In learning to see the world in one way, participants also learn not to see it in some other way. Rituals blind in the same moment they enhance a vision of the world. By enticing participants to assume one stance toward reality, they also learn not to assume some other posture. Just as bodybuilders can become so muscle-bound that they are barely able to comb their own hair, serious ritual practitioners are “muscled up” in such a way as to foster both strength and weakness. Since a ritual inscribes a particular way of knowing, it simultaneously courts a corresponding kind of weakness or ignorance. So the tenacious student of ritual queries: To what does this ritual blind (or deafen, or . . .) its participants? Although the fiesta is instrumental insofar as it generates tourism, thus income, for the city, it is also noninstrumental. Festivity shares certain features with other noninstrumental processes and artifacts such as songs and plays, novels and works of art. Insofar as the fiesta is a celebration, it is a form of ritualized play. Even so, it is expressive of cultural and personal meanings and does cultural and personal work.

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Meanings happen. Rituals, like the arts, communicate a worldview or articulate a sense of purpose, and, by connecting its creators and appreciators with each other, enable people to foster community. In a ritually interconnected community bare presence and sheer absence speak. Even when you don’t intend for your absence to communicate, others read it as saying something. Your absence from a wedding or funeral speaks. It enacts something whether you want it to or not. Scholars usually distinguish meaning and function, and they currently debate whether rituals mean anything as well as whether they do anything. Even scholars like me, who believe rituals both mean and do, sometimes question whether rituals mean or work in the way that participants assume. And among theorists who believe that rituals work, there is debate about how they work. So what I’m saying opens a glut of difficult questions: Do rituals mean? If so, how? Do rituals work? If so, how? My short answer is that rituals work by making meaning. They make meaning by deploying symbols to communicate networks of embodied knowledge. Religious rituals protect these networks by shrouding symbols in cloaks of sacrality. One aim of sacralization is to insulate them from critical questioning, but an effect of sacralization is also to provoke questioning and doubt. At the heart of religious, ritually driven meaning-making, then, is a double bind, as if religious rituals (liturgies) were to declare: “Ask ultimate questions as if your life depends on them, but do not ask them of me, and do not point out or comment on this message.”551 More than any other kind of ritual, liturgy provokes and discourages critique.

Modeling Ritual In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Cambridge Myth and Ritual School debated whether myth came first and then ritual, or the other way around. It was assumed that myth and ritual were necessarily a pair and that the one more or less mirrored, or modeled, the other. Contemporary scholarship no longer makes this assumption of interdependence. Instead, it theorizes ritual in relation to some other phenomenon, sometimes a science, sometimes an art. The implied model for explaining ritual locates its interpretive fulcrum elsewhere, not in an ancient myth but in mythologized science or art, both of which are rooted in images and narratives, as well as in demonstrations and arguments. The history of theorizing about ritual is replete with scholarly myth-making, narratives and descriptions treated normatively as models. In courses on ritual, to illustrate the kinship of theorizing to myth-making, I sometimes assign students the job of turning myths into theories and theories into myths. Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, and Karl Marx are inviting but challenging figures to work with. Each scholar considered his own work scientific, but each is now viewed as a myth-maker. Scholars call Freud’s account of ritual’s emergence from the slaughter and cannibalizing of the tyrannical father by the rebellious sons the “myth of the primal horde,” thereby

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denying its scientific worth. You can push these and other thinkers in either direction, myth or theory. You can take Einstein`s theory of relativity and, by emphasizing its storytelling dimensions, push it in the direction of myth,552 but since many still believe in Einstein’s theories, the exercise does not result in the same kind of write-off as it does with Freud. You can work in the other direction by taking biblical, Greek, or ancient Near Eastern myths and rendering them more abstractly and philosophically as theories. Running these sorts of transpositions in both directions, thereby working the turf between a theory of ritual and a myth of ritual, relativizes both, keeping us from too easily assigning myth to bygone primitive worlds or inflating theory into a sacred science. By rendering actions into words, a mere description of a specific ritual performance is a tacit or quasi-model inasmuch as it is a scholarly representation of the real thing.553 Having described a ritual, we scholars tend to generalize from it to some larger unit—if not to ritual in general, then, say, to some particular kind of ritual. As soon as anyone, participant or scholar, makes a leap from the 2007 Santa Fe Fiesta to “the”` Santa Fe Fiesta, “the Hispano fiesta,” or “festivity,” conceptual modeling has begun. Once we begin to generalize, the resulting abstraction can sound a lot like a myth. Suppose I offer this summary description of the Santa Fe Fiesta: Motivated by the desire to have a good time and to engage in acts of devotion, festival-goers, some of whom attended last year’s celebration and some of whom did not, enter the city’s central, public space, as well as other venues, carrying out conventional but not quite prescribed acts such as eating, walking, buying, listening to music, and enjoying performances. Some carry out heavily prescribed activities such as participating in liturgies or watching scripted plays. Following printed schedules, people go to see and to be seen. Some dress up for this special occasion; others take the occasion as an opportunity to dress down. Some, adults and children alike, recount fond memories of past celebrations (often regarded as better); others complain and criticize. Festival values such as piety, civicmindedness, and interethnic peace, although widely celebrated and publicly declared, are occasionally reflected upon and debated in newspapers. As a consequence of the festival, memories are created, social and historical links, renewed. Afterward, some people have more money, others, less. Afterward, many bodies having grown plump or sated, festival spirit quickly dissipates, the city showing little or no sign of it after clean-up. Each year, as festival time rolls around again, a small group makes plans, while others begin to dread the event. Some groups regard the fiesta as an anchor or crowbar, a tool for ensuring personal identity and group survival. Others avoid the fiesta altogether. Various groups cooperate; otherwise there would be no festival.554

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Since we’re in experimental mode, let’s take a second run at it, this time trying to model not the fiesta but the life cycle of a ritual. If, with a few words, I wanted to model a ritual’s emergence and decline (rather than its yearly cycle, as in the example above), the resulting summary might sound something like this: Motivated by multiple aims, ritualists, following intuitions or precedent, and in accord with an inspiring leader or authoritative text, enter set-aside spaces and, by utilizing sanctioned objects to interact with predicated powers, they enact aspiration-infused sequences. After the ritual concludes, ritualists, embodying treasured memories and espoused values, enter their respective social and physical environments, shaping them to be resonant with the ritualized cosmos they have enacted. Since memories fade, values decline, bodies age, and meanings scramble, participants feel compelled to return, executing the sequence of acts again and again. Since again-and-again events become routinized, losing their sensory hold, authorities also construct once-in-a-lifetime events. This twofold strategy is sufficiently powerful that groups deploying it are sometimes convinced that their rituals are necessary for personal identity, group solidarity, even planetary survival. To ensure continuation of the ritual, and thereby its people, participants construct institutions and appoint ritual authorities who, with the best of intentions, guard, rigidify, and rarify the rituals, unintentionally provoking ritual criticism and generating a felt need for ritual improvisation, experimentation, and creativity. These activities seem artificial or dangerous to the guardians, but newcomers, motivated by multiple aims and following intuitions and precedents . . . This is a narrative model of the emergence, decline, and death or renewal of a ritual. It has a circular, mythlike arc, but it also says what rituals are made of, illustrates how their elements interact, and suggests how they function in their environments, fall into dysfunction, and are challenged and transformed, renewed or replaced. Your question should not be whether this tale is true but whether it is capable of inspiring or irritating you into doing research. It is sufficiently generic that it might apply to many of the events we call rituals. But it may not fit the examples you know best, so, naturally, you will want to critique and revise or reject it. If you are less than inspired by these two little excursions, fine. Tell a better story, or translate one of these into hypotheses, thereby shifting it from being a narrative to being a problem.555 Go to work hammering out potential hypotheses: (1) If actions in a ritual are unsanctioned, the ritual will be unsuccessful. (2) The more routinized a set of actions, the less hold it has on ritualists’ loyalties. (3) Forgetting is one reason why people repeat ritually. Then ask yourself which hypothesis would lead to the best research project or book. The aim of this modeling exercise is not to advance either the theory, the myth, or the model of ritual but to reflect on the uses and limits of modeling in a way that

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sets you to tinkering and crafting. Pick one and test it, or else figure out what question really matters to you and work on that. “It is in fact a great virtue of a good model that it does suggest further questions, taking us beyond the phenomena from which we began, and tempts us to formulate hypotheses which turn out to be experimentally fertile. . . . Certainly it is this suggestiveness, and systematic deployability, that makes a good model something more than a simple metaphor.”556 Rituals are enacted models for how things ought to be. Like ritualists, scholars also need models—small , simple things that represent complex things. Mapping ritual, laying out its elements, and sketching its dynamics hints at the possibility of crafting models.557 Whereas theories rise up in abstraction, models press down toward tactility. The movement from data to theory to model is recursive: A ritual is transposed into a description; a description is generalized into a theory; and a theory is a concretized into a model. A model is a miniature, a toy that facilitates understanding. A model can be descriptive, prescriptive or both. A model airplane is a selective mirroring of a real airplane insofar as it is visually descriptive of the real thing.558 If, however, you use a model for building or testing an airplane, the model then takes on prescriptive force. Models of can morph into models for. Barbie is a model girl, more or less. If your daughter models herself after Barbie, the model of has become, I regret to inform you, a model for. If someone says, this is what a festival looks like, someone else, or even you yourself at another time, may assume, this is what one ought to look like. If I write, “The Santa Fe Fiesta is like this,” and you attend next year, it would be easy for you to assume that it ought to be as I described it. Modelusers have to remain alert to slippage created by the force of habit or the magic of the printed word. In one respect, the very notion of modeling ritual may seem silly, especially if the model sounds prescriptive. No one who studies rituals overtly argues that one ritual does, or ought to, determine what all other rituals actually look like or should look like. So why model? The short answer is: to converse, compare, test, play out, and expose. Every ritual a scholar studies tends to become its own little world. But as soon as you and I are chatting over lunch at a conference on ritual, we’re going, “Yeah, yeah” and “Yes, but . . .” “My” ritual is a lot like “yours,” but it’s also different from yours. As we compare and contrast, we also begin to explain and interpret, creeping up on theory even though we may fret about its pretensions. As we continue discussing late into the night, skipping our colleagues’ brilliant papers, the normative judgments begin to emerge. We slip from describing to comparing, from comparing to generalizing and theorizing, and then—it’s the conference camaraderie—into prescribing. We begin making judgments, taking sides, and assuming moral or political positions in a way we would never do in the field or public. Even though I’m parodying and poking fun, I’m not actually against making judgments and assuming moral positions. I’m only against their privatization. I want us to expose them in public so they can be called into question by colleagues and the people we study.

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One way of making both our theoretical and our ethical commitments public is by modeling. Arguments, scientific and otherwise, are driven by root, sometimes barely visible, metaphors.559 Not all of them are strong enough to generate models. In fact, most don’t. In ordinary speech, metaphors are often no longer heard as such. In poetry, metaphors sustained too long or made too explicit lose their power to suggest. However, if you sustain a scholarly metaphor, teasing out its implications so its dissonances and resonances with the thing modeled become evident, you can unearth the taken-for-granted assumptions and values that lie below the explicit theories and methods.560 Modeling is risky because it exposes commitments. Models in the humanities, arts, and social sciences are fictive. The two experiments above are heuristic fictions, speculative instruments made up and played out, not for the purpose of entertainment but for the purpose of learning, teaching, studying.561 That said, we still expect models work, just as kids expect the joints of their action figures to bend and their toy trains to whistle and chug. Without a working model, it is not easy to say what accomplishes what. In theories, rituals are usually construed as functioning wholes. If a theorist says a ritual transforms, we assume that it is the whole ritual that does the transforming. If a ritual conserves, it is the whole ritual that conserves. But who knows? Maybe it is a single element in the ritual that does most of the work. For instance, it might be a pilgrimage’s spatial aspect, the long trip away from and back to home, that transforms pilgrims. Or, it may be that a pilgrimage is only transformative if pilgrims are immersed in supporting rituals both before and after the journey. Assertions that rituals generate collective effervescence or embody values are statements, not explanations or models, whereas identifying a ritual’s elements and describing its dynamics comes closer to explaining how rituals do what they do. But still, without a model we’re still a neat, clean quarter inch away from an explanation. Stack nails, bolts, boards, and shingles on a tarp near a sugar maple, and you still do not have a tree house, but, with a lot of persistence and a little skill, perhaps you can build one. But how do you know what does what? Maybe you should design a model first. Less risk to life and limb. If your model tree house falls apart, that’s not a failure. If modeling tells you that building the tree house a certain way will injure your child, it’s worth its weight in gold. There is more to modeling than assembling pieces. For a model airplane to fly there must be a certain mathematical proportion between its weight and curvature, as well as the power of its engine; otherwise the thing won’t develop enough lift to clear the ground. Even in designing objects, not to mention human events, you need to consider not only parts but also their relationships, proportions, and interactions. A model that models everything is a replica, so a model necessarily oversimplifies by mirroring its object partially and selectively. Just as model airplanes have wings and model cars have wheels, so model rituals require that you model something in particular and that you identify its most crucial working parts—if not ritual actions, then ritual spaces or ritual time. Oversimplification alone doesn’t make a model

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bad, only limited, requiring that you use it with care. A model is a toy, a little thing enabling you to play with possibilities without taking big risks. If you buy into my suggestion that modeling is a fruitful activity, you still have to decide what your model is of and for. Ritual in general? A particular kind of ritual? A specific ritual? For construction? For critique? For prediction? Both kinds of model-users, ritualists and ritual studies scholars, have to make a decision about the medium. If a model is possible at all, what might it be made of? If not boards and nails, what? Although rituals may incidentally include tangible stuff, even boards and nails, they are events, and they usually involve less tangible materials. With what stuff might we model events? In the humanities and arts, our most persistent medium is the written word, but there are other possibilities: verbal images, visual images, or even kinesthetic activities in studios and labs.562 In the Ritual Studies Lab we don’t make rituals. We make models, using objects and spaces and actions and, of course, ourselves. There is a distinct advantage in working with the same media as the thing being modeled. Even though I actually do ritual-like things with students, here in print I have no choice but to revert to words. So imagine carrying out a simply designed exercise to model how ritual elements might work together or against each other. Demarcate a space with a rope, chalk line, or lighting. Select a time and set up a timing device such as a metronome, drum, or clock. Put one or more ordinary objects in the space. Invite part of the group to participate in the actions. Their task is simply to interact with the objects. Select at least two others to observe or document the whole interaction by taking notes and writing them into a description and interpretation. Select two other observers, asking them to choose a single element for observation. For instance, one attends mainly to things heard, the other to things seen; one attends mainly to males, the other to females. Prescribing different foci will ensure varying, perhaps even conflicting, interpretations. When the interactions with the objects conclude (either because the doers quit doing or because the time runs out), repeat the event, keeping some things the same and making other things different. For instance, experiment with varying degrees of prescribed or open rubrics, or vary the duration and rhythm (very short, very long; very slow, very quick). Also, try word-laden and wordless events or events in which all words are sung. Change the objects. For instance, work with food or identifiably “sacred” objects; work with trash or other negatively valued things. Finally, collectively reflect on the documentation, comparing not only the notes of observers but also the recollections of participants. Even though the focus of this kind of acted-out modeling, conducted many times in the Ritual Studies Lab, is on an object, all the elements come into play. Keeping the event simple and experimenting with variations helps dramatize what happens when a single element is modulated. Having the exercise observed, recorded, and interpreted (even if only by replaying a video of it), facilitates reflection on the differing perspectives of the people who participate in an event and those who observe or study it. Even if participants do not consider the exercise ritual-like, it can generate

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reflection on the interactions among elements, for example, the influence of a place on the interactions that occur there; the relation of one action to those preceding and following it; the effect of prescriptions on actions; the nature of repetition; the influence of words on actions and actions on words. This kind of acted-out modeling can be used in another way, to test the limits of elemental theorizing. You could, for instance, argue that all of the elements are merely extensions of a single element, say, ritual actors. They select the space, prescribe the acts, speak the words, choose the objects, and set the time frames. Alternatively, you could argue for the primacy of another of the elements, say, ritual space. People are born into environments, physical and social, and these condition their actions, including the ones ritually enacted in the exercise. The point of the modeling is the debate it instigates.

Reimagining Theory and Method On occasions when I have treated theories as heuristic fictions and methods as improvised performances, colleagues have sometimes reacted religiously, protesting that a sacred boundary has been violated.563 In European and North American academic circles storytelling, singing, and dancing are given bit parts, not leading roles. Like rituals, they are data, objects of study. Stories and rituals and songs are cast as dependent, not independent, variables. They are stigmatized as “local,” “ethnic,” or “indigenous,” while theories are exalted as “empirical” or “academic.” I don’t think there should be a social hierarchy between those who ritualize and those who theorize about ritual. In fact, my argument implies that there isn’t even a logical hierarchy. The relation is recursive and interactive rather than hierarchical. Theories and methods are not superior to rituals; they are just different uses of metaphor resulting in different kinds of narratives and performances.564 Research, I believe, is a worthwhile activity provided we can curb its arrogance. One way to do so is by remembering who is doing it. No matter how heady, theorizing, like ritualizing, is a personal, bodily action. Reimagined as sensory, if not sensual activity, ritualizing is the act of stepping in to be, whereas research is the act of stepping back to know. A ritual studies scholar continually traverses the distance from circumference to center and back. This shuttling, which is both bodily and conceptual, generates perspective by constantly shifting the angles of observation and the vectors of participation. Although research requires stepping back or returning home, these places are still places; they are not everywhere or nowhere. As Apaches say, “Wisdom sits in places.”565 The researcher’s reflex of stepping back is not only strategic and methodological, it is also a kinesthetic response to disorientation. In search of orientation, we students of ritual step away from sanctuaries, plazas, and kivas in order to cope. However godlike this disappearing act may appear, we who do it are all too human.

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However much theorizing is governed by data, it is also driven by a very human desire to escape alive, tell the story, and generate academic capital. Like ritualizing, the theory-and-method dance is both performative and fictive, with its own geographical and conceptual space as well as its own sensorium organization. Because even theoretical research is place-specific, it transpires in a setting or on a set. We are used to locating rituals in space but not used to locating research and teaching protocols in specific places.566 However much the magic of print or film makes it appear that researchers dwell either nowhere or everywhere, research, in fact, arises and declines somewhere. However true it is that research enables perspective, the theorizing eye is not panoptic, neither universal nor divine. So it behooves those of us who follow methods and formulate theories to do so as if the places and times of performance matter.567 Like ritualizing, acting methodologically and thinking theoretically are driven by scenarios. Academic scenarios require research, teaching, memos, reports, and applications. These, like rituals, are most effectively critiqued by being set in their social and historical contexts.568 By studying theories and methods in the context of the lives and times of those who create and consume them, we can cultivate intellectual modesty. Theoretical arrogance arises in part from construing theory in the arts on the model of the physical and biological sciences, but I’ve argued that we should not accept handme-downs from the sciences. In a science-dominated era, the study of ritual will be more productive when it is less production-driven, when our teaching and research scenarios require of us multiple styles played out in counterpoint. Methods not only ensure the efficient completion of tasks and fairness, they also insulate us from danger and disorientation. This insulation is itself a danger. Management-by-method easily drifts toward an attempt to control an object of perception experienced as unmanageable. We who study ritual in the field manage, sometimes barely, by stepping back and taking up a tool that transposes a ritually dangerous event into an ethnographic description or video that is more predictable and less threatening. We need methods, but we also need to hold them lightly while improvising freely and creatively. Whereas the methods of science require double-blind testing, experimental replicability, and other processes for curbing erroneous or exaggerated claims, we in the humanities and social sciences have only peer review. I’m not suggesting that we need more safeguards, only that we need to practice being less defensive and less enamored of control. If we need guardians, let them be guardians of scholarly play and imagination. Our research flourishes when we notice the metaphoric roots of theory and the necessity for improvisation in method. This recognition can then lead to a critique of the conventions that ritualize scholarly writing and the scenarios that drive cross-cultural encounters in the field.569 Graduate students, especially those aspiring to PhDs, don’t like exposing their ignorance to critique any more than their mentors do. Occasionally, however, there is one who acts in accord with that proverb said to be both old and Chinese: “The person

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who asks the question is ignorant only for a moment, whereas the person who does not is ignorant for a lifetime.” This student asks the impertinent-kid questions: “So, Dr. Grimes, what kind of a theory are you proposing in this book? And what exactly is it we’re supposed to do if we buy this method and theory of yours?” This kind of student usually speaks for others who hesitate to ask stupid questions but secretly long for a summary of sufficient portability that they can haul it into the field.570 I have no proper name for the approach I espouse here, but I can summarize its key features. The theory is antiessentialist inasmuch as it resists the identification of ritual with some single quality or dynamic. It is antifunctionalist in its refusal to assume that ritual has either a single or unparadoxical social role such as that of maintaining social equilibrium. The theory is a middle-range theory.571 Although it sometimes tinkers and toys with grand theorizing, it repeatedly undermines grand hyperbolic gestures by casting them in the subjunctive, rendering them into stories or performances, or stepping back from them to point out reflexively what has just happened.572 Repeatedly, I’ve reined in the incipient grandiosity of theorizing by cautioning: It’s a matter that can’t be settled by theory but only by examining specific instances. In this way I’ve sometimes traded in budding universalism for studied localism. The theory might be labeled systemic, cybernetic, or ecological because it assumes the radical interconnectedness of all things and attempts to conceive parts in relation to some imagined whole that is in turn treated as part of some other imagined whole. The theory is a symbolic and functional theory, because it holds that rituals attract meanings, cultivate values, and do certain kinds of work.573 The method is pragmatic, tethered to a style of querying that both arises from and is aimed at facilitating field research, filming, and writing. It is action-oriented insofar as its opening gambit is usually that of attending to what people do, what they enact, and how they perform. It borders on being activist, by embracing public judgment-making and espousing well-informed, ethically attuned advocacy. It is critical insofar as it searches out trouble spots and looks for vested interests. It is grounded, although not in the classical sense that it restricts itself to generalizations that can be made on the basis of a single case.574 Instead it uses a case study along with other fieldwork data to pull theoretical flights of abstraction back to earth. At the end of Ritual Studies Lab courses we sometimes play “dethrone the teacher,” a game modeled on the way some dads galumph with their kids on the floor. Since theories are to be played out rather than died for, I invite you to play “dethrone the theorist.” To that end Appendix 15: Major Claims of The Craft of Ritual Studies lifts out major theoretical and methodological assertions advanced in this book. Mentioned here at the end, they may seem like conclusions, but in academe, as in family life, no one really gets the last word, so, please, be my guest and treat them as propositions for debate. Although I may have imagined much, you, the astute reader, know very well that I have not proven anything. This appendix is less a to-die-for summary than a parting shot and yet another illustration of Umberto Eco’s aphorism “We like lists because we don’t want to die.”575

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At the end of a career but nowhere near death as far as I can tell, I sit on a blue exercise ball writing on a computer in the house where my kids were born in a country that adopted me. However free cases, methods, and theories are supposed to be of the first-person singular, marks of “me” are all over this book, so readers have an easy out. You can, if you’re so minded, reduce the whole thing to covert autobiography. But why would you? I’m not inviting you to follow me on Twitter, because I am not there. Instead, I’m hoping to provoke you to do your own reimagining of ritual, its theories, and the methods for studying it—even if you do so against what I have written here.576 As fate would have it, my concluding sentiments are those of philosopher René Descartes, the bad-boy nemesis of all who would overcome body/mind dualism. For his Discourse on Method, which too many of us like to denounce without having read, he penned these kind words in 1637: My design here is not to teach the method which everyone should follow in order to reason well, but merely to reveal the way in which I have tried to conduct my own reasoning. Those who take it upon themselves to give precepts must consider themselves more skilful than those to whom they give them, and if they are missing the slightest thing, then they are culpable. But since I intend this text only as a history, or, if you prefer, a fable, in which, among some examples which you can imitate, you will, in addition, perhaps find several others which you will have reason not to follow, I hope that it will be useful to some people, without harming anyone, and that everyone will find my frankness agreeable.577

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G L O S S A RY

Phrases using “ritual” as an adjective are inverted. For instance, “ritual account” is listed as “account, ritual.” Words or phrases formally defined by, or closely associated with, a scholar are so designated. Thus, authenticating conventions is flagged “Following Elizabeth Burns . . . ” account, ritual. A descriptive or narrative rendering of a ritual. Compare and contrast narrative, ritual; also text, ritual. act, ritual. A subset of ritual activity, specifically, one that is prescribed or officially recognized as “in bounds”; human movements deemed legitimate parts of a ritual. action. Movement to which intentions or meanings are attributed. Contrast behavior. action, ritual. The diachronic, phased sequence of gestures which, when completed, constitute a ritual; the trajectory, or “plot,” of an unfolding ritual. activity. Movement initiated by a subject. Contrast passivity. activity, ritual. All of the actions during a ritual, including supposedly insignificant activities, for example, women exchanging glances, a man scratching, children yawning. aftermath of a ritual, the. Whatever follows a ritual as a direct or immediate consequence of its performance, e.g., cleanup activities, bodily tiredness. agent, collective ritual. A group acting in concert in a ritual. agent, nonhuman ritual. Gods, spirits, animals, the deceased, places, or objects regarded as ritual actors. agent, ritual. Anyone who acts, influences, or exercises power in or on a ritual. aim of study. One’s explicitly stated or consciously held intentions in studying something, e.g., ritual. Contrast motive of study. authenticating conventions. Following Elizabeth Burns, conventions governing interaction between actors in theater. Contrast rhetorical conventions. avoidance. The action of “not doing.” backstage of a ritual, the. Whatever is behind, offstage, or backgrounded by a ritual performance. behavior. Action regarded as an object of analysis. Contrast action. boredom. Monotony from which the actor is alienated; pathologized monotony. celebration. 1. Etymologically, “to assemble to honor.” 2. Popularly, a joyously enacted rite. 3. Following post–Vatican II, the “celebration” of mass is a synonym for “enacting” or “performing” it. 4. Following Ronald Grimes, ritual play; ritual enacted as an end in itself. ceremony (or “ceremonial” as noun). 1. Following conventional Roman Catholic usage, the actions of worship as opposed to its words, which are referred to as “ritual.”578 2. Following Victor Turner, rituals that confirm rather than transform. 3. Following Berard Haile (in the study of Navaho religion), religious rituals. 4. Following Ronald Grimes, the legally or politically significant layer of a ritual.

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change, ritual. Alterations in the way a ritual is performed or prescribed. For instance, North American brides and grooms once said “man and wife.” Later, the words were changed to “husband and wife” classification, ritual. Any set of groupings presupposed, implied, or imposed by a ritual or ritualists. Contrast type, ritual. communitas. 1. Following Victor Turner, a pronounced, egalitarian sense of community. Cf. Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” relation. 2. Following Roberto Esposito, a community of persons united not by property but by a debt, lack, or sacrifice.579 compulsion. Repetition characterized by drivenness; action from which the actor is alienated. context of a ritual, the. Whatever surrounds a ritual but is not regarded as a part of the ritual. counterchanges, ritual. Interventions in a ritual designed to inhibit change or to revert to an earlier state. critic, ritual. An evaluative interpreter, sometimes indigenous, sometimes an outsider. cross-temporality, ritual. Time(s) to which a ritual refers or with which it aspires to connect. cult. 1. Pejoratively and popularly, a bizarre, faddish, or dangerous practice. 2. A group engaging in such practices. 3. In liturgiological usage, a synonym for cultus, or “worship.” 4. Etymologically, “to cultivate” (from the Latin word colere). decorum. Following Ronald Grimes, the ritual dimensions of face-to-face interaction, usually involving exchange of polite gestures. Cf. Erving Goffman’s “interaction ritual.” deed. Decisive action of mythic proportions, therefore worthy of remembrance or imitation; action writ large. description, thick. Following Clifford Geertz, ethnographic descriptions that, in hovering close to the data, take into account contexts, motivations, and interconnections. Long, excessively detailed descriptions are not thick descriptions. discipline, ritual studies as a. Ritual studies undertaken as a practice based on commonly shared attitudes and methods. Contrast field, ritual studies as a. drama. 1. Popularly, action that employs the plot-oriented playing of roles in the presence of an audience. 2. Following Aristotle, conflictual action moving toward a climax or catharsis. 3. Following Richard Schechner, written narrative dialogue, the written text of a playwright. 4. Etymologically, “the thing done” (from the Greek dromenon). dramatism. The use of drama as an analogical or metaphoric basis of a scholarly method, e.g., social conflict and change interpreted as a social “drama” or social interaction seen as a “dramatic” process. Associated with Kenneth Burke, Erving Goffman, Victor Turner, and others. dramatistic. Pertaining to the use of drama as a metaphor, e.g., Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage.” dramaturg. A playwright’s confidant-critic. dramaturgy. The principles of dramatic construction and criticism, e.g., actor, act, scene, audience. duration, ritual. The length of a ritual’s performance. dynamics, ritual. The totality of actions and activities in and around a ritual, including its consequences and changes through time. effect, ritual. The direct, observable consequences of a ritual. Cf. ritual intention and ritual function. element, ritual. The most basic unit for building or analyzing a ritual. enact. To put into force. enactment, ritual. A ritual event insofar as it does something or puts something into force. endurance, ritual. A ritual’s capacity to persist in history. environment, ritual. The social, cultural, historical, and geographical surroundings of a ritual. ethos, ritual. The mood, tenor, ambiance, disposition, character, or tone of a ritual. event. An occurrence with a discernible beginning and ending. event, ritual. A ritual as it actually occurs in space and time, e.g., the Mass as enacted at St. Francis Cathedral on January 10, 2013; a single instance of a ritual.

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expression. Action regarded as communicative. facilitator, ritual. Facilitating agent, one who helps make a ritual possible. fealty. An oath, or pledge of allegiance, rendered on the basis of a sacred object, e.g., a Bible or saint’s relic. fetish. A potent object evoking ritualized behavior. field. A region entered for the purpose of study; a charged interactive arena. field, ritual studies as a. Ritual studies defined as a subject matter on which scholars of various persuasions converge using their respective disciplines to make sense of it. Contrast discipline, ritual studies as a. follower, ritual. Secondary ritual actor, backstage ritual participant. frequency, ritual. How often a ritual happens. function, ritual. What a ritual does in, for, to, or in response to the systems (social, ecological, etc.) in which it operates; a ritual’s shaping and being shaped by its environment; ritual’s capacity to make things happen, prevent them from happening, or respond to things outside itself. Contrast ritual intention. gesture. Conventionalized bodily expression, usually of the face, head, and limbs; a dynamic bodily expression. Contrast posture. habit. Action repeated until engrained. habituation. Habit saturated with boredom. habitus. 1. Following Marcel Mauss, “the techniques and work of collective and individual practical reason.”580 2. Following Pierre Bourdieu, a set of historically engrained, culturally inscribed, taken-for-granted dispositions. homage. Medieval ceremony in which a feudal tenant, or vassal, pledged exclusive service to a lord in exchange for a title and position. Fealty is less exclusive; it can be offered to more than one lord. icon. 1. Following Orthodox usage, ritually executed representations of holy beings (God, Christ, the saints, angels) painted with egg tempera on wood in a Byzantine style. 2. More generally, any representation that both resembles and embodies that to which it points. impression management. Following Erving Goffman and Edward E. Jones, attempting to control how one is perceived by others; more specifically, the presentation of self so as to be perceived by others in a favorable light. inaction. The ceasing, minimizing, or restricting of action. index. 1. Commonly, a sign that directs the attention of one who perceives and interprets it. 2. Following C. S. Peirce, “a sign which refers to the object it denotes by being really affected by the object.”581 infrastructure of a ritual, the. Whatever a ritual depends on but which is not regarded as a part of the ritual. intention, ritual. The aim of a ritualist in performing a ritual. Cf. ritual effect and ritual function. interpreter, inside ritual. An insider who offers exegesis of a ritual. interpreter, outside ritual. An outsider who offers exegesis of a ritual. investiture. A formal installation into public office that includes taking charge of its insignia. In the Middle Ages, the transfer of a fief (land) from a lord to a vassal, who takes an oath of fealty to the lord. Also refers to conferring the symbols of spiritual office upon a cleric. leader, ritual. Primary ritual actor, front-stage participant liminality. 1. Etymologically, “threshold.” 2. Following Victor Turner, the quality of being “betwixt and between” characteristic of the middle phase of a rite of passage. liminoid. Following Victor Turner, an expansion of the idea of liminality, applying it to optional situations outside the context of obligatory rites of passage. liturgics. The study of liturgy; a largely North American term, often connoting the study of liturgy in relation to, or for the sake of, practice. liturgiology. The comparative study of liturgy; a largely European term, often connoting the historical study of liturgical texts. Adj. liturgiological.

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liturgy. 1. From Greek leitourgia, “work of the people,” i.e., a public work for the benefit of others. 2. Following conventional Christian usage, a synonym for the Mass. 3. Following Christian theological usage, Christian sacramental rites. 4. Following Ronald Grimes and Roy Rappaport, a religious rite. magic. 1. Following Tom Driver, ritual that transforms, ritual that works. 2. Following Ronald Grimes, ritual intended to produce empirical results. 3. Following Robert Neale, ritual work. method. Research know-how. Guidelines, procedures, rules, or guidance for carrying out a task, e.g., conducting or evaluating research, organizing or designing a ritual. Compare and contrast style. methodology. The study of methods, their construction, use, and critique. mode, ritual. Following Ronald Grimes, a “layer” or type of ritual. model. A simplified, working representation of selected aspects of something. monotony. Comparatively unmodulated rhythm often associated with ritual, particularly meditative rites. Contrast boredom. motion. 1. Commonly, mere movement in or through space. 2. Following Kenneth Burke, movement regarded as having no discernible purpose and/or meaning. Contrast action. motive of study. The complex of psychological, social, and other forces that lead one to study something, e.g., ritual. A motive is usually implicit; contrast aim of study. narrative, ritual. A story occurring inside a ritual. Contrast account, ritual. observing participant. Participant who assumes an observer’s perspective. participant-observer. One who studies ritual by participating as well as observing, often a scholar. passion. Extreme passivity or receptivity to the point of suffering. Contrast action. passivity. Being the object, rather than the subject, of action. Contrast activity. patient, ritual. Following E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley, the ritualist acted upon, as distinct from the ritualist doing the acting; the recipient rather than the initiator of a ritual action. pattern, ritual. The relatively stable relationships between phases of a rite, for instance, the sequence “adoration, confession, proclamation, dedication” (sometimes found in Christian worship). performance, ritual. 1. Following Ronald Grimes, a ritual event insofar as it is either witnessed, subjunctive, or fictive. 2. Following Richard Schechner, the entire event in which a rite or drama is enacted; theater insofar as it includes the interaction of audience and actors. performative utterance. Following J. L. Austin, language insofar as it acts, does, or accomplishes— as distinct from words that merely state or indicate. person. Human being in the fullest, most complex sense. Contrast agent or subject. phase, ritual. The temporal patterning (“rhythm”) of a ritual; a ritual’s articulation of its beginning, middle, and end (“plot”); any temporally, or chronologically, defined subunit of a ritual, e.g., the canon of the Mass, the national anthem at an athletic contest. play. Following Johan Huizinga and Robert Neale, action treated as an end in itself; action framed as “not real,” “imitative,” or “as if.” Contrast work. posture. Conventionalized bodily expression, especially of the torso; usually connotes a static bodily expression. Contrast and compare gesture. practice, ritual. 1. Actions preparatory to the performance of a ritual. 2. Ritual actions repeated for the sake of deepening a ritual’s permeation of a ritualist’s body and psyche. 3. Following Bourdieu, actions that are so repeated and habitual that they are almost invisible even though they are constitutive. preparation, ritual. The work preceding a ritual that is necessary for its performance. primary ritual act. A subset of ritual acts, specifically, those core actions without which the ritual is not considered legitimate, real, or efficacious. See secondary ritual act. process, ritual. Following Ronald Grimes, the synchronic, internal workings of a ritual; interactions among the elements of a ritual.

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querying. Following Ronald Grimes, conversational interviewing propelled by a stream of questions adapted to the responses of the one being queried and also recursive toward the theory that engendered the questions. rebellion, rituals of. Following Max Gluckman, rituals in which behavior toward rulers in authority is temporarily abrogated; the enactment of conflict in such a way as to banish the threat of group disunity. receptivity, ritual. The action of “taking in”; cultivated or “active passivity” in a ritual. recursivity, ritual. A ritual’s tendency to loop or turn back on itself. regularity, ritual. The evenness or unevenness of intervals between ritual performances. rhetorical conventions. Following Elizabeth Burns, the conventions that govern interaction between actors and audience in theater. Contrast authenticating conventions. rhythm, ritual. The temporal patterning, or rising and falling action, of a ritual performance; a ritual’s articulation of its beginning, middle, and end. rite. 1. In liturgics, sometimes used to designate the words sung or spoken in worship as distinct from ceremonial, what is done. 2. Also used in liturgics to designate one of the seven Christian liturgical “families,” e.g., the Roman rite, the Byzantine rite, the Gallic rite. 3. Following Ronald Grimes, a specific enactment in a specific place and time, synonym for “a ritual.” rites of conflict. Following Edward Norbeck, rites expressing institutionalized conflict, resentment, and hostility but not necessarily rebellion. rites of intensification. Following Eliot Chapple and Carleton Coon, rites that intensify the life of the group. Contrast rites of passage, which focus on the life crises of individuals. rites of passage. Following Arnold van Gennep, rites insofar as they enable people to make social transitions; any rite transpiring in three phases separation (preliminal), transition (liminal), incorporation (postliminal). ritologist. A person who studies ritual. Synonymous with “ritual studies scholar.” Contrast ritualist. ritual. See Appendix 1: Definitions of Ritual. ritual as a domain. Ritual conceived as occupying cultural space alongside other cultural domains such as politics, art, or religion. ritual studies scholar. Student of ritual, a person who studies ritual academically. ritualism. 1. Following Mary Douglas, pronounced concern that efficacious symbols be correctly manipulated and the right words be pronounced in the right order.582 2. Following Robert Merton, “punctilious adherence to formalized procedures,” adhering to formalities (“sheer conformity,” “going through the motions,” “merely playing by the rules”) without inner commitment to the values or goals of the social system.583 ritualist. 1. Following Ronald Grimes, a participant in a rite, ritual actor, ritual insider, a person in ritual circumstances. Contrast ritologist. 2. Following Mary Douglas, “one who performs external gestures without inner commitment to the ideas and values being expressed.”584 rituality. The degree to which something has ritual qualities. ritualization. 1. Following general usage in ethology, repeated, stylized behavior of animals, usually associated with aggression or mating. 2. Following Ronald Grimes, activities not normally viewed as ritual but treated metaphorically as if they were ritual, e.g., house cleaning, canoeing, or TV watching as ritual. 3. Following Catherine Bell, “a way of acting that distinguishes itself from other ways of acting in the very way it does what it does.”585 ritualizing. Following Ronald Grimes, the act of deliberately constructing a ritual or increasing the degree to which an activity is ritualized. rote. Action performed mechanically. routine. Action repeated and patterned but not elevated or paradigmatic. routinization. Process whereby a paradigm loses its capacity to “figure” the “ground” of ordinary interaction. Cf. Max Weber’s “routinization of charisma.” scenario. The plot, or outline, of a sequence, around which actions are improvised.

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scenario, ritual studies. Following Ronald Grimes, the plot, or outline, around which ritual studies scholars improvise a sequence or cycle of pedagogical, methodological, and theoretical activities. script. 1. Playwright-constructed writings that prescribe the words and actions of a play. 2. Following Richard Schechner, the drama as transformed by director and actors. seasonal rites. Calendrical rites performed only during specified seasons. For participants, such rites are usually recurrent rather than one-time, as is the case in rites of passage. secondary ritual act. A subset of ritual acts, specifically those actions regarded as supportive of, or tributary to, the core ritual actions. sense for ritual. One’s attitudinal (i.e., emotional, bodily) comprehension of ritual. Contrast sense of ritual. sense of ritual. One’s intellectual comprehension of ritual. Contrast sense for ritual. sensibility, ritual. Having a keen awareness of, appreciation of, sensitivity to, or strong response to ritual. sensorium organization. Following Walter Ong, a person’s or culture’s way of organizing, selecting, and attending to sensory data, often tuning in some kinds and tuning out others. sets, ritual. Constructed spaces, platforms, or frames for ritual actions. settings, ritual. Given, or natural, geographical environments in which rituals are performed. sounds, ritual. Sounds deemed as part of the ritual by participants. sounds in ritual. Incidental sounds occurring in a ritual. spectating. The action of watching while minimizing or eliminating participation. spectator. One whose watching or listening is extrinsic to the action, usually an outsider, e.g., a tourist. structure, ritual. A ritual, or part of one, conceived as comparatively unchanging. Contrast process, ritual. studies, ritual. The interdisciplinary, cross-cultural study of ritual in all its forms. Synonymous with “ritology” (not widely used). style. The distinctive manner in which something is done. Whereas a method is public and teachable, style is more idiosyncratic and less teachable. style, ritual. The distinctive qualities of a ritual or ritual tradition, by virtue of which either participants or observers recognize it. symbol, ritual. 1. Etymologically, a “putting together of two things.” 2. A symbol in a ritual context. symbol system. Following Clifford Geertz, a set of symbols condensing the ethos of a culture; may include symbols from rituals but is not limited to them, e.g., the symbol system of a Canadian Jew might include the maple leaf flag, the star of David, and the French fleur-de-lis. symptom. Expression regarded as signifying a crisis. system, ritual. Any ritual or family of rituals (e.g., Christian sacraments or Navaho chantways) conceived synchronically, as if it exists only in the timeless present. Contrast ritual tradition. tedium effect. Following Harvey Whitehouse, “a state of low morale arising from overfamiliarity with religious formulae and routine.”586 text, ritual. A book, instruction, or other device that prescribes how a ritual should be performed. theater. Following Richard Schechner, the event (usually based on a script) as enacted by performers. theorizing. The activity of interacting with theories by constructing, using, studying or evaluating them.587 theory, a. Following Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Strausberg, “an abstract and coherent set of statements that are based on empirical observation, hypotheses, and laws. It is empirically testable and explanatory and allows one to make predictions.”588 timing, ritual. When a ritual happens, for example, its time of day or season or the year.

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tradition, ritual. Any ritual or family of rituals (e.g., Christian sacraments or Navaho chantways) conceived diachronically, as unfolding through time. type, ritual. Groupings, or genres, of rituals thought by scholars to share resemblances of form or function., e.g., rites of passage, sacrificial rites, seasonal rites. Compare and contrast ritual classification. witness, ritual. A participant who observes and whose observation contributes to the action. worship. 1. Etymologically, “to attribute worth to” (from the Old English weorthscipe). 2. A rite dedicated to the veneration of one or more divine beings.

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van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Venbrux, Eric, Meike Heessels, and Sophie Bolt, eds. Rituele Creativiteit: Actuele Veranderingen in De Uitvaart-En Rouwcultuur in Nederland. Zoetermeer, The Netherlands: Meinema, 2008. Voth, H. R. The Traditions of the Hopi. Millwood, NY: Krause Reprint, 1973 [1905]. Wallas, Graham. The Art of Thought. London: Jonathan Cape, 1926. Weber, David J., ed. What Caused the Pueblo Revolt of 1680? Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1999. Whitehouse, Harvey. Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ——— . The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology versus Ethnography. New York: Berg, 2001. ——— . Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Cognitive Science of Religion Series. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004. Wiebe, Donald. “Why the Academic Study of Religion?” In Theory and Method in the Study of Religion, edited by Carl Olson, 36–41. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson, 2003. Wikipedia, s.v. “Requerimiento,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requerimiento. Accessed July 3, 2013. Wikipedia, s.v. “Schenkerian Analysis,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenkerian_Analysis. Accessed July 3, 2013. Wilson, Chris. The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997. Wilson, Monica. “The Wedding Cakes: A Study of Ritual Change.” In The Interpretation of Ritual: Essays in Honour of A. I. Richards, edited by J. S. La Fontaine, 187–201. London: Tavistock, 1972. Winkelman, Michael J. Shamans, Priests and Witches. Anthropological Research Papers no. 44. Arizona State University, 1992. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. Woodland, P. J. “Flickr Photostream.” http://www.flickr.com/photos/pjwoodland/. Accessed July 3, 2013. Young, David Earl, and Jean-Guy Goulet, eds. Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Zadeh, Lotfi A. “Fuzzy Sets and System.” In System Theory, edited by J. Fox, 29–39. Brooklyn, NY: Polytechnic, 1965. Zuesse, Evan M. “Meditation on Ritual.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43, no. 4 (1975): 517–530. ——— . “Ritual.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Mircea Eliade, 405–422. New York: Macmillan, 1987.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man: A Personal View (London: BBC Books, 2011 [1973]), 115–116. 2. Graham Wallas, The Art of Thought (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926), 106. The quotation is sometimes mistakenly attributed to E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927). For a discussion of the source of the quotation see http://forum.quoteland.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/99191541/ m/4031943806.

Chapter 1 3. I use the term in the broadest sense to mean “based on fieldwork,” not in the narrower anthropological sense. 4. For more on ritual formation see Ronald L. Grimes, “A Teaching Space for Liturgical Formation,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/teaching-liturgical-formation. Also see Patricia Q. Campbell, Knowing Body, Moving Mind: Ritualizing and Learning at Two Buddhist Centers, Oxford Ritual Studies Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 5. Based, in part, on Ronald L. Grimes, “What Kind of an Act Is Theorizing about Ritual?,” paper presented at the Ritual Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion, Philadelphia, November 20, 2005. 6. John Gregory Bourke, On the Border with Crook (Glorieta, NM: Rio Grande, 1971 [1891]), 124. 7. A scene similar in certain respects to that encountered by Bourke might be imagined on the basis of the Hopi photographs taken by Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian: The Complete Portfolio (London: Taschen, 1997). 8. John Gregory Bourke, Snake-Dance of the Moquis (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984 [1884]), 150. 9. Later he was promoted to captain. 10. Bourke, Snake-Dance of the Moquis, 156. 11. He had been adopted by the Zunis. 12. Bourke, Snake-Dance of the Moquis, 150. 13. Jesse Walter Fewkes, Hopi Snake Ceremonies (Albuquerque, NM: Avanyu, 1986 [1894–1898]), 307. 14. For example see the following: Earle R. Forrest, The Snake Dance of the Hopi Indians (New York: Tower, 1961 [1906]); H. R. Voth, The Traditions of the Hopi (Millwood, NY: Krause Reprint, 1973 [1905]). 15. Bourke, Snake-Dance of the Moquis, xv.

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16. Bourke later writes other important works such as Scatalogic Rituals of All Nations, which is on the religious character and ritualistic use of urine and human feces. He also writes important treatments of Mexican nativity plays. He lectures, serves on panels, and in 1893 plays a role in the World’s Columbian Exposition, which hosts the World’s Parliament of Religions. He becomes an active critic of governmental Indian policy and is eventually disillusioned with the military, as well as in trouble with Washington bureaucrats. His friend Frank Cushing writes that Bourke is “killing himself with too many hours a day at the Congressional Library.” Bourke is wearing himself out, Cushing thinks, trying to turn fifteen years of journal writing into publications. Bourke’s doctor tells him that nature is calling a halt, but soldiers do not obey orders from nature. 17. Enlightened by postcolonial and postmodern theory, we know better than to dissemble in conducting field research, push our way into sacred precincts, or assume there are primitive minds inferior to ours, right? 18. Bourke, Snake-Dance of the Moquis, 141. 19. A person’s or culture’s way of organizing, selecting, and attending to sensory data, often tuning in some kinds and tuning out others. The term is from Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 1–16. 20. On the relation of photography to postmodern theory, see Thomas Docherty, After Theory: Postmodernism/Postmarxism (London: Routledge, 1990), chap. 3. 21. Bourke, Snake-Dance of the Moquis, 141. 22. Terry Eagleton writes, “At the very moment when the United States government is flexing its muscles more insolently than ever, some cultural theory has begun to find the very word ‘theory’ objectionable. This has always been the case with some so-called radical feminists, who distrusted theory as an imperious assertion of the male intellect. Theory was just a lot of callow, emotionally arrested men comparing the length of their polysyllables.” Eagleton, After Theory (London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2003), 54. 23. For more on sensorium organization see Ronald L. Grimes, Ritual Criticism: Case Studies in Its Practice, Essays on Its Theory, 2nd ed. (Waterloo, ON: Ritual Studies International, 2010), 53, 94. 24. Since scholars do sometimes write histories of theories, we are more accustomed to recognizing a theory’s time-boundedness than its space-boundedness. 25. Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1996). 26. Spatializing theory helps counteract the danger that words assume a “godlike agency in western culture.” Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 5. 27. Terry Eagleton articulates a similar view: “If theory means a reasonably systematic reflection on our guiding assumptions, it remains as indispensable as ever. But we are living now in the aftermath of what one might call high theory.” See Eagleton, After Theory, 2. 28. For example, Victor Witter Turner, Chihamba the White Spirit: A Ritual Drama of the Ndembu (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1962); Ndembu Divination: Its Symbolism and Techniques (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961). 29. It now calls itself the School for Advanced Research on the Human Experience. See http:// www.sarweb.org/. 30. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, A School of American Research Advanced Seminar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 31. This book, the outcome of an Advanced Seminar in 1984 at the School of American Research (SAR) in Santa Fe, was much on my mind when I was invited in 1988–1989 to be a Fellow of the SAR. 32. Ronald L. Grimes, Symbol and Conquest: Public Ritual and Drama in Santa Fe, New Mexico, ed. Victor Turner, Symbol, Myth and Ritual Series (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976). It

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34. 35. 36. 37.

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was translated into Spanish as Symbolo y conquista, trans. David Huerta y Paloma Villegas (Mexico City: Fond de Cultura Economica, 1981). After going out of print in English, it was reissued by the University of New Mexico Press, then again by Ritual Studies International. A small group of undergraduate students asked if they could accompany me. Foolishly, I consented. Foolishly, they hoped to learn from me what I did not know. Sometimes you teach what you don’t know but desperately need to learn. What you actually know, you don’t teach; you embody. Sarah Bronwen Horton, The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented: Staking Ethno-Nationalist Claims to a Disappearing Homeland (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2010). When that was not the burr under everyone’s saddle, writing was. The writing issue was, and is, as persistent as the theory-and-method issue. But that is another story. It is no longer as evident that this hierarchy holds. Grimes, Ritual Criticism. A further development of thinking about ritual criticism can be found in Ute Hüsken, ed., When Rituals Go Wrong: Mistakes, Failure, and the Dynamics of Ritual, vol. 115, Numen Studies in the History of Religions (Leiden: Brill, 2007). It was then called School of American Research. Later I would be led by a Caballero to Pete’s resting place beneath the sod on the north side of Rosario Chapel. See Ronald L. Grimes, Ute Huesken, Udo Simon, and Eric Venbrux, eds., Ritual, Media, and Conflict, Oxford Ritual Studies Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For more on the relationship between rituals and cameras see Ronald L. Grimes, Rite out of Place: Ritual, Media, and the Arts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 3.

Chapter 2 42. These hints are gathered from multiple researchers across many years, but in my experience, your students, like your kids, either forget or lose such lists, preferring to learn things the hard way. 43. Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology. 44. Schensul and LeCompte, Ethnographer’s Toolkit. 45. Spradley, The Ethnographic Interview; Participant Observation. 46. Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw, Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 47. Martyn Hammersley, Reading Ethnographic Research: A Critical Guide (London: Longman, 1998). 48. Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor, Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 49. John Collier Jr. and Malcolm Collier, Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986). 50. Karl Heider, Ethnographic Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976). 51. Regarding the connection between ritual and negotiation see Ute Hüsken and Frank Neubert, eds., Negotiating Rites, Oxford Ritual Studies Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 52. For the reader’s sake, the ethical principles with which I am complying are in boldface type. 53. Parents or guardians must sign the consent form for children. 54. See Russell McCutcheon, ed., The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion (New York: Continuum, 2000). 55. A classic case in American ethnography is that of Frank Hamilton Cushing, who moved in with the Zunis, and Matilda Cox Stevenson, who chose to camp outside Zuni. 56. David Earl Young and Jean-Guy Goulet, eds., Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 57. A good example is Edith Turner, Experiencing Ritual: A New Interpretation of African Healing (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).

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58. Chapter 2 of my Beginnings in Ritual Studies (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1982) was almost exclusively questions. Even though one of the book’s editors wanted to cut it, university teachers now assign it more frequently than any other chapter I’ve written, partly because it validates question-asking over answer-giving. The chapter prods students of ritual to uncover their own questions. 59. Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert [Pensées], edited and translated by Paul Auster (San Francisco: North Point Press, [1842] 1983). 60. This list draws on and expands Spradley, The Ethnographic Interview, 86, figure 84.81. 61. The proper term for “Voodoo” is “Vodoun.” 62. Unfortunately, scholars sometimes describe, paraphrase, summarize, and theorize without advancing an argument, and their writings still find publication venues. It is a truism of the academy that thesis-bereft writing is inadequate for a scholarly article or book. However much we may wish it were true that articles without a thesis did not get published, they often do.

Chapter 3 63. For an illustration of ritual’s importance to environments and environmentalism see Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World, Oxford Ritual Studies Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 64. The container metaphor is less than perfect. To understand why, try turning each item into a sentence: “X contains Y which contains Z . . .” 65. Such as Emerson et al., Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. 66. Unlike film, digital data are no longer measured in feet. Even though it takes up hard-drive space, it is not really spatial. 67. The so-called ethnographic present. 68. Nikki Bado-Fralick, Coming to the Edge of the Circle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 106. 69. Charlotte Johnson Frisbie, Kinaaldá: A Study of the Navaho Girl’s Puberty Ceremony (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993 [1967]), 63. 70. Ibid., 85–88. 71. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3ff. 72. There are a few exceptions. See, for instance, Niels Gutschow and Axel Michaels, Handling Death: The Dynamics of Death and Ancestor Rituals among the Newars of Bhaktapur, Nepal (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2005), a detailed account of death and ancestors rituals among the Newars. 73. See, for example, Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas (London: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1948]). 74. For more on the relation of life story to conversation and interview see Ronald L. Grimes, “Negotiating Religious Life Histories in North American Religious Studies,” International Journal of Practical Theology 2, no. 1 (1998): 65–83. 75. For an example that makes ritual and narrative more or less synonymous, see Langdon Elsbree, Ritual Passages and Narrative Structures, American University Studies (New York: Peter Lang, 1991). 76. Paul Henley, “Narratives: The Guilty Secret of Ethnographic Film-Making,” in Reflecting Visual Ethnography: Using the Camera in Anthropological Research, ed. Metje Postma and Peter Ian Crawford (Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2006), 376–377. 77. Patrick Rael Read, “Reading, Writing, and Researching for History: A Guide for College Students,” http://www.bowdoin.edu/writing-guides/ (accessed June 27, 2013). 78. Rolf Norgaard, Ideas in Action: A Guide to Critical Thinking and Writing (New York: Longman, 1997). 79. Regarding the Bad Writing Contest, see Dennis Dutton, “The Bad Writing Contest: Press Releases, 1996–1998,” http://denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm (accessed June 27, 2013). In

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82. 83. 84.

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1998 Judith Butler won the Fourth Bad Writing Contest for this sentence: “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.” A spirited debate about scholarly writing ensued. See Judith Butler, “Further Reflections on Conversations of Our Time,” Diacritics 27, no. 1 (1997): 13–15, https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/diacritics/v027/ 27.1butler02.html. Among important local terms that may, but don’t necessarily, imply performance are tradition, culture, devotion, remembrance, faith, and honoring. Here is a typical way of making the distinction: “Schenkerian analysis is a subjective, not an objective, method. This means that there is no mechanical procedure for arriving at an analysis for a given piece of music; rather, the analysis reflects the musical intuitions of the analyst. Therefore, this form of analysis is more art criticism than science. The analysis represents a way of hearing a piece of music.” Wikipedia, “Schenkerian Analysis,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Schenkerian_Analysis (accessed June 27, 2013). Theology, although it may be systematic, is confessional, allowing appeals to faith, so it is not usually considered a scientific discipline in the way “religion sciences” (religious studies) are. I treat explanation as a kind criticism. For one thing, ritualists often experience explanations as critiques, but, more importantly, scientific explanations can, in fact, implicate practice. The distinction between manifest and latent functions is from Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968 [1949]), 60–69. Peter Berger illustrates the concept this way: “The ‘manifest’ function of antigambling legislation may be to suppress gambling, its ‘latent’ function to create an illegal empire for the gambling syndicates. Or Christian missions in parts of Africa ‘manifestly’ tried to convert Africans to Christianity, ‘latently’ helped to destroy the indigenous tribal cultures and this provided an important impetus towards rapid social transformation.” See Berger, Invitation to Sociology (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1963), 40–41. Pierre Bourdieu and, following him, Catherine Bell assume that ritual is regularly “misrecognized” by participants but, apparently, not by themselves. I have little doubt that rituals are misrecognized and misunderstood, but theorists do so as regularly as participants. Kenneth Burke coined the phrase “god term” as a way of referring not to language about God but to scholarly words that do the “divine” work of grounding discourse: “Whereas Anselm propounded the ‘ontological necessity for the existence of God,’ we base our position on the analogous linguistic necessity for the existence of god-terms. Since language derives its materials from the cooperative acts of men in sociopolitical orders, which are themselves held together by a vast network of verbally perfected meanings, might it not follow that man must perceive nature through the fog of symbol-ridden social structures that he has erected atop nature?” Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 378. Grimes, Ritual Criticism, 12. Part of this section is adapted from Ronald L. Grimes and Ute Hüsken, “Ritualkritik,” in Ritual und Ritualdynamik: Schlüsselbegriffe, Theorien, Diskussionen, ed. Christiane Brosius, Axel Michaels, and Paula Schrode (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013). Ute Hüsken and her colleagues have gone further in investigating the dynamics of ritual mistake-making. See Hüsken, When Rituals Go Wrong. Catherine M. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 37–46. Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual: A Theory of Ritual llustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 263, 268n262.

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92. Grimes, Rite out of Place, chap. 4. The terminology differs partly because in that chapter the focus was on a film, whereas here it is on a rite. The terminology in both instances is less than perfect, since most of the terms have long, complicated histories. 93. I did not realize how fundamentally it changes the enterprise until Jerzy Grotowski, then director of the Polish Theatre Laboratory, invited me to attend a workshop provided I did not come in order to publish. 94. With others I have founded and edited one scholarly journal and edited three book series, so my reflections reflect these specific experiences: the Journal of Ritual Studies, the Life Passages Series (with Robbie Davis-Floyd for the University of California Press), the Religion on the Ground Series (for the University of California Press), and the Oxford Ritual Studies Series (for Oxford University Press). 95. Cele Otnes and Elizabeth Pleck, Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding, Life Passages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Robert Kastenbaum, On Our Way: The Final Passage through Life and Death, Life Passages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 96. For example, compare Ronald L. Grimes, “Velvet Carnival, Prague,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/velvetcarnival, with Ronald L. Grimes, “Ritualizing the Czech ‘Velvet’ Revolution,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/ritualizingvelvet-revolution. 97. For example, Ronald L. Grimes, “Icon-Writing with George Kordis: A Rough-Cut,” online video, 2013, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/kordisiconroughcut. 98. Parts of this section are adapted from Ronald L. Grimes, “Ritual, Media, and Conflict: An Introduction,” in Grimes et al., Ritual, Media, and Conflict. 99. On the relation of physical to epistemological screening see Grimes, Rite out of Place, 87–99. 100. Grimes, “Ritual, Media, and Conflict,” 15ff. 101. Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture. 102. “Virtual” means “influencing by physical virtues or capabilities,” from Middle Latin virtualis and from Latin virtus “excellence, potency, efficacy,” literally “manliness, manhood.” The meaning of “being something in essence or fact, though not in name” was first recorded in 1654. The meaning “not physically existing but made to appear by software” dates to around 1959. From Online Etymological Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term= virtual (accessed June 27, 2013). 103. Second Life is available at http://secondlife.com/. 104. Simone Heidbrink, Nadja Miczek, and Kerstin Radde. 105. An exception is Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. M. Banton, ASA Monographs (London: Tavistock, 1966). 106. See especially chapters 2 and 4 in the bonus materials section called “The Journey of The Apostle,” in Robert Duvall, dir., The Apostle, Butcher’s Run Films, 1998. 107. Lucius Apuleius, “The Golden Ass,” Project Gutenberg E-text, http://www.archive.org/ stream/thegoldenasse01666gut/old/gldns10.txt. 108. For several examples of fictive ritual see Ronald L. Grimes, Reading, Writing, and Ritualizing: Ritual in Fictive, Liturgical, and Public Places (Washington, DC: Pastoral Press and Oregon Catholic Press, 1993), part 3. For an example of creative, nonfictive ritual see Susan L. Scott, Temple in a Teapot (Waterloo, ON: Westmeadow/Harland, 2010). 109. On virtual methods for studying ritual see Simone Heidbrink, Nadja Miczek, and Kersin Radde-Antweiler, “Contested Rituals in Virtual Worlds,” in Ritual, Media, and Conflict, ed. Ronald L Grimes, et al., Oxford Ritual Studies Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Christine Hine, Virtual Ethnography (London: Sage, 2000). 110. Parts of this section are modified from Grimes, Rite out of Place, chap. 3. 111. Lucy R. Lippard, ed., Partial Recall (New York: New Press, 1992). 112. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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113. Paul Adjin-Tetty. 114. Steven Feld and Dick Blau have been instrumental in convincing people, including scholars, to value soundscapes and photos of ritual events. See Dick Blau, Agapi Amanatidis, Panayotis Panopoulos, and Steven Feld, Skyros Carnival (Albuquerque, NM: VoxLox, 2010). Also see VoxLox, http://voxlox.myshopify.com/. 115. Some exemplary photographers include Dick Blau, “Ethnography of the Emotions in Family and Field,” http://www.dickblau.com/; Robert Harwood, “Flickr Photostream,” http://www. flickr.com/photos/rwharwood/; and P. J. Woodland, “Flickr Photostream,” http://www. flickr.com/photos/pjwoodland/. 116. There is no point in recommending specific brands and models of equipment. They change so rapidly that any good advice would be dated as soon as this book is in print. So I restrict myself to more general reflections. 117. Since Emerson et al., Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, is an excellent book on the art of making field notes, I will not repeat what it says here, only advise students of ritual to read and absorb it. 118. One of the values of NVivo (http://www.qsrinternational.com/) and other such coding tools is that they remind note-takers and coders of the importance of both accuracy and fullness. In my view, the power of conclusions drawn from coded and analyzed notes is often weak when compared to the labor of coding.

Chapter 4 119. I was once contacted by someone from Rocket Science Laboratories, a television production company known for its reality TV shows. Would I be interested in working for a show, the premise of which would be that I would be “parachuted” (I was not sure if the term was literal or metaphoric) into a village, where, shadowed by a camera crew, I would undergo initiation and other colorful rites and then talk about it? 120. I make home movies, some of them bearing the logo “Dad’s Productions.” That logo doesn’t appear on this DVD because readers and viewers are not family. The distinguishing features of home videos are less the bouncing camera and bad sound than the fact that the makers and viewers are the same group. 121. This argument is articulately advanced by Jay Ruby, “The Viewer Viewed: The Reception of Ethnographic Films,” in The Construction of the Viewer, ed. Crawford Hafsteinsson and Sigurjon Baldur Hafsteinsson (Hojberg, Denmark: Intervention, 1995). 122. This is, in fact, how some students in my classes have viewed it, a response that worries me. 123. One exception is the implied chronological spacing of the Children’s Parade and the HistoricalHysterical Parade. In the second video they are shown back-to-back instead of on separate days. 124. This issue kept a documentary about Mama Lola from being aired by a major television network when Karen Brown insisted that Mama Lola rather than a white male narrator should be the voice of authority (source: personal conversation with Brown). See Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 125. The phrase is from Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, chap. 1. 126. On writing as practice see Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones (Boston: Shambhala, 1986), and Grimes, Rite out of Place, 69ff. 127. See, for instance, Ken Burns, dir., Jazz, PBS Home Video, 2001; also The Dust Bowl, PBS Home Video, 2012. 128. Rereading James Clifford’s reflections on tourism and travel made me feel less uneasy about letting this video stand as a more or less obvious “tourist” piece. See James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 17–46.

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129. An account of La Merienda de la Fiesta can be found in Sarah Bronwen Horton, The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented: Staking Ethno-Nationalist Claims to a Disappearing Homeland (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2010). 130. Presented by Henrietta Christmas. The topic of women in the Santa Fe Fiesta is of enormous importance, but as far as I know, there is no scholarly study of it other than “The Feminine Icon,” a now very dated section of Ronald L. Grimes, Symbol and Conquest: Public Ritual and Drama in Santa Fe, New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992 [1976]), chap. 5. 131. Thanks to Patricia Cunliffe for providing footage of the spring events. 132. Laws of the Indies, no. 112, makes it clear that a key function of the plaza is ritualistic: “The main plaza is to be the starting point for the town. The plaza should be square or rectangular, in which case it should have at least one and a half its width for length inasmuch as this shape is best for fiestas in which horses are used and for any other fiestas that should be held.” King Philip II, Spanish Laws Concerning Discoveries, Pacifications, and Settlements among the Indians, trans. S. Lyman Tyler (Salt Lake City: American West Center, University of Utah, 1980 [1573]). 133. Dora P. Crouch, Daniel J. Garr, and Axel I. Mundigo, Spanish City Planning in North America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982). 134. In 2001 a symposium, “New Plazas for New Mexico,” was initiated. See http://www.charrettecenter.com/newplazas/newplazas.asp?a=spf&pfk=1&gk=1&plk=11 (accessed June 27, 2013). 135. Horton, The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented, 120. 136. From the application forms required of candidates for de Vargas and Fiesta Queen: “Candidates must understand that it is the responsibility of the Candidate to conduct himself at all times during their tenure in a dignified and respectable manner and that if the Santa Fe Fiesta Council, Inc. determines that the public conduct of the candidate by way of intoxication, language, behavior or any other comportment in any way, which in the opinion of the Santa Fe Fiesta Council compromises the reputation of himself/herself, the Santa Fe Fiesta Council, or the Fiesta de Santa Fe, that the candidate may be removed from his or her role and title.” 137. From the List of Requirements for Candidates for General De Vargas. See “Online Forms,” http:// www.santafefiesta.org/participate (accessed October 21, 2009). For an updated version see “Forms and Applications: Fiesta Royalty Application, http://www.santafefiesta.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/2013-SFFC-Application-Portfolio.pdf (accessed June 27, 2013). 138. Erika Davila, “La Reina Candidate Leaves Court, Saying Competition Is Fixed,” Santa Fe New Mexican, September 8, 1999. 139. Santa Fe New Mexican, September 4, 1926, 6. 140. Kiwanis International, “The Burning of Will Shuster’s Zozobra: History,” http://burnzozobra. com/history/ (accessed June 27, 2013). 141. Library of Congress, “American Folklife Center’s Local Legacies: Celebrating Community Roots,” http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/legacies/NM/200003356.html (accessed June 27, 2013). The original submission was made by Senator Pete V. Domenici. Horton complains that this choice “obscures” and “overshadows” Hispano values. Horton, The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented, 34. 142. In this respect they resemble participants in Burning Man, a festival that initially borrowed some of its iconography from Zozobra. See Lee Gilmore, Theatre in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Horton repeatedly identifies the Burning of Zozobra as “bohemian” and takes its ascendency as a symbol of Anglo domination. See Horton, The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented, 34. 143. In my view Horton’s repeated description of it as “bohemian” is a misnomer. 144. Ronald L. Grimes, “The Entrada of the 2012 Santa Fe Fiesta,” online video, 2012, http:// vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/2012-sf-fiesta-entrada. 145. Established in 1922 by Mary Austin. See http://www.santafeplayhouse.org/index.php4 (accessed June 27, 2013). 146. The distinction is from Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 5.

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147. Ronald L. Grimes, “Aaron’s Zozobra,” online video, 2011, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/ aarons-zozobra. 148. For a discussion of the genres see Barbash and Taylor, Cross-Cultural Filmmaking, 19. 149. On this topic see Ronald L. Grimes, “Ritual, Media, and Conflict: An Introduction,” in Ritual, Media, and Conflict, ed. Ronald L. Grimes et al., Oxford Ritual Studies Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 150. John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith Dodge, eds., By Force of Arms: The Journals of Don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1691–1693 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), 407. 151. Ibid., 461. 152. Ibid., 486n455. 153. Ibid., 522. 154. “The just-so story we tell to all first year anthropology students is that modern anthropology emerged largely as a result of Malinowski’s desire to stay away from Europe during the First World War. As a result, he ‘discovered’ the ethnographic method and ‘participant observation.’ While Malinowski was certainly not the first writer of ethnographies, nor even the first to get involved with his subjects, we can certainly give him credit for the popularization and institutionalization of this methodology. To this day, participant observation is a ritual that nearly every anthropologist must complete in order to secure a place in the discipline.” Kerim Friedman, “Armchair Anthropology in the Cyber Age?,” Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology, posted May 19, 2005, http://savageminds.org/2005/05/19/armchair-anthropology-in-the-cyber-age/ (accessed March 12, 2009). 155. Much more is available in Ronald L. Grimes, Marrying and Burying: Rites of Passage in a Man’s Life (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995).

Chapter 5 156. See Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997). 157. A reliable one is Henry Tobias, Santa Fe: A Modern History, 1880–1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001). 158. Cited in David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 69. 159. During the heyday of American historical pageants such characters appeared on stage. In Thetford, Vermont, during its 1911 pageant, “Vermont” appears mounted on a white horse. “Vermont,” in turn, calls “America.” So Langdon’s approach would require an interpretative leap, since there is no character, a Miss or Mr. Santa Fe, playing such an allegorical role. 160. According to the Digital Atlas of American Religion, 28.4 percent of New Mexico was Catholic in 2010: http://religionatlas.org/?page_id=44 (accessed June 28, 2013). 161. Cited in Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 222–223. Wilson calls Santa Fe’s rhetorical practice “sleight of words.” 162. Thomas E. Chávez, “Santa Fe’s Own: A History of Fiesta,” in Vivan Las Fiestas!, ed. Donna Pierce (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1985). 163. See, for example, David M. Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002). 164. He was also called Estevan, Esteban, Estebanico, Esteban de Dorantes, Black Stephen, and Stephen the Moor. 165. For instance, the construction of a new civic center required extensive negotiations with Tesuque Pueblos. See Tom Sharpe, “Civic Center Excavations: Board Clears Way for City to Rebury Artifacts,” Santa Fe New Mexican, January 16, 2008. 166. AIPC, http://www.19pueblos.org/.

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167. A non-Trinitarian version of Christianity, thus heretical if judged by the doctrinal formulations of the Nicene Creed. Arianism holds that Jesus was not eternal but a being created by God. 168. The Christian counterattack, or Reconquista, is said to have been initiated in 718 by the heroic figure Pelagius of Asturius, popularly known as Pelayo. 169. The “Santiago” war cry was used by Don Diego de Vargas and his soldiers in 1693 in dislodging, then executing Indians barricaded inside the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe. 170. Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 171. Ibid., 62. 172. Ibid., 117. 173. Ibid., 170. 174. The Santa Fe Fiesta is initiated by different kind of proclamation (pregón), but the Entrada contains a proclamation that resembles this one insofar as it is a formal way of taking possession. 175. “Requerimiento,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requerimiento (accessed June 28, 2013). 176. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 70. 177. Ibid., 95. 178. Koran 2:256. 179. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 96–97. 180. Enrique R. Lamadrid, Hermanitos Comanchitos: Indo-Hispano Rituals of Captivity and Redemption (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 23. This book contains the best discussion of such plays and their ritual dynamics. 181. Ibid., 22. 182. Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds., Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 9. 183. Ibid., 9. 184. Maureen Ahern, “Martyrs and Idols: Performing Ritual Warfare on Early Missionary Frontiers in the Northwest,” in Religion in New Spain, ed. Susan Shroeder and Stafford Poole (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 283. 185. Ibid., 291. 186. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, The Account: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación, trans. Martin A. Favata and José B. Fernández (Houston: Arte Público, 1993 [1542]). See also Nicolás Echevarría, dir., Cabeza de Vaca, 1991. 187. This is the theme of Salvador Carrasco, dir., The Other Conquest [La Otra Conquista], Carrasco & Domingo Films, USA, 1999. 188. For a discussion of this dynamic see Luis D. León, La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 189. George P. Hammond and Rey Agapito, eds., Don Juan De Oñate: Colonizer of New Mexico, 1595–1628, vol. 5: part 2, Cuarto Centennial Publications (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1953), 335. 190. David J. Weber, ed., What Caused the Pueblo Revolt of 1680? (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1999), 5. 191. Ibid., 4. 192. The Pueblo language groups in use at the time of the Revolt were Hopi, Keresan, Piro, Tano (with its three variants: Tewa, Tiwa, Towa), Tompiro, and Zuni. 193. There are debates about this character’s identity, specifically whether he was an actual person. 194. J. Manuel Espinosa, ed., The Pueblo Indian Revolt of 1696 and the Franciscan Missions in New Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 35. 195. John L. Kessell, ed., Remote beyond Compare: Letters of Don Diego de Vargas to His Family from New Spain and New Mexico, 1675–1706 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 62. 196. Ibid., 61.

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Kessell et al., By Force of Arms, 386. Ibid., 388. Chávez, “Santa Fe’s Own,” 8. Kessell et al., By Force of Arms, 416–417. Ibid., 395–396. Ibid., 619; if one does not count Apaches. Ibid., 607. Ibid., 615. See, for example, Kessell et al., By Force of Arms, 434, 459. Ibid., 468. Kessell, Remote beyond Compare, 61. John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith Dodge, eds., To the Royal Crown Restored: The Journals of Don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1692–1694 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 68. 209. Ibid., 35. 210. Ibid., 112. In a letter to Conde de Galve, he describes his accomplishment in this way: 197. 198. 199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208.

Thus, I have given your excellency an account of everything and of taking its patron saint and protectress, Our Lady of the Conquest, to set her up there. The glory and pride are mine in that I am the one who brings her back, not only to establish her again in her villa of Santa Fe, but also to set her in her place on a new throne, which I am to rebuild for her sovereign and divine majesty. Thus, with such a divine polestar and guide of my impulses, she will govern my actions so that they will foster, not only the propagation of our holy faith, but also the royal service. I hope, if Our Lord gives me life, to serve her so well that even your excellency will admire the speed, ease, and expedience I have demonstrated for such an undertaking, which is completely fulfilled in that kingdom: the settlers and presidio established in the villa, its districts, and the surrounding area with its ministers in their places so that they may employ themselves in the exercise of the holy gospel. Your excellency will please see fit that I do not lack payment for what I may have furnished when I send the bill, since I have undertaken this on my credit, availing myself of my friends. (Ibid., 384) 211. 212. 213. 214. 215. 216. 217. 218. 219. 220.

221. 222. 223. 224.

225.

Ibid., 528. Ibid., 530. Ibid., 553. Ibid., 536. Espinosa, The Pueblo Indian Revolt of 1696 and the Franciscan Missions in New Mexico. Ramon A. Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 150. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 187. Ibid., 189. St. Augustine, Florida, was established in 1656 and Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, but neither is a capital city. The oldest house built by a European in this country, 215 E. De Vargas St. in Santa Fe, was probably constructed around 1646, although it sits atop a foundation built by Pueblos in the 1200s. A rival claim is made concerning 14 St. Francis St., the Gonzalez-Alvarez house, in St. Augustine, Florida. Chávez, “Santa Fe’s Own,” 11. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 192. Ibid., 202. If there is any doubt, the “Synopsis and Personnel of Pageantry and Plays” for the 1924 fiesta makes exceptionally clear that the De Vargas Pageant reenacted the events of 1693, not those of 1692. In other words, it was a celebration of conquest, not of bloodlessness or peace. Official Program of the 1921 Santa Fe Fiesta.

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226. Santa Fe New Mexican, September 5, 1921, 1. 227. Ibid., September 7, 1921, 1. 228. Remarkably, the 1920 fiesta includes a play in which four Pueblos, two of them governors, are court marshaled for their role in the 1696 rebellion. 229. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 217–218. 230. Edgar Hewett, letter to members of the Fiesta Council, archived correspondence in the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, 1924. 231. August 8, 1925. Cited in Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 214. 232. Ibid., 220. 233. As far as I can tell, the first Entrada script published was in the 1922 fiesta program. After the Caballeros took charge, the script has not been generally accessible to the public, although I have copies, provided by Pedro Ribera-Ortega, of a 1958 and a 1967 script. 234. Edmundo Delgado, “Scenario and Scheme: The Reconquest of Santa Fe by General Diego De Vargas” (unpublished manuscript, Santa Fe, NM, 1958), A. 235. Ibid. 236. Ibid., 5. 237. Pedro Ribera-Ortega, “The De Vargas Fiesta Entrada Pageant” (unpublished manuscript, (Santa Fe, NM, 1967), 34. A more detailed account of this script can be found in Grimes, Symbol and Conquest, 130ff. 238. Ernest Lovato, letter to the New Mexican, 1977. 239. John Bienvenu, “Our Fiesta,” New Mexican, September 11, 1980. 240. See for instance David Bell, “Fiesta Represents the Fusing of Many Different Social and Cultural Elements,” Santa Fean Magazine, September 1991. 241. Julian Sanchez, archived correspondence in the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, September 23, 2002. 242. Jeanette De Bouzek and Diane Reyna, “Gathering up Again: Fiesta in Santa Fe,” online video, 1992, Quotidian Independent Documentary Research, http://www.folkstreams.net/ film,160. 243. Rick Berardinelli, archived correspondence in the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, May 11, 1992. 244. David Pike, Damian Martinez, and Albert Gallegos, archived correspondence in the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, April 8, 1992. 245. Joseph P. Sanchez, Alfred A. Lopez Brichta, Jolane Culhane, and Robert Himmerich y Valencia, “The video ‘Gathering Up Again: Fiesta in Santa Fe,’” archived correspondence in the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, March 12, 1992. 246. Carol Decker, “Fiesta Video Inspires Healing of Cultural Wounds,” New Mexican, June 7, 1992. 247. Alan Riding, “Madrid Journal: 500 Years Later, Latin America Can Forgive Spain,” New York Times, February 13, 1992. 248. Since it is a widespread practice to speak of our era as “postcolonial,” one might assume that “the conquest” is finished. There are two problems with this assumption. The first is that there was more than one conquest. The second is that many of those conquests are far from finished. 249. Rick Berardinelli, “From the Fiesta Council: A Look at Some Fine Points for 1992,” New Mexican, July 19, 1992, 1. 250. Keith Easthouse, “Leaders Call Fiesta Offensive,” New Mexican, September 12, 1993, A-1. 251. Joseph Dispenza, “Fiesta Is Way Politically Incorrect,” New Mexican, August 19, 1998, A-1. 252. Erika Davila, “The Annual Commemoration of Santa Fe’s Origins and Its Spanish Heritage Appear to Be on Divergent Paths,” New Mexican, September 7, 1999, A-1. 253. Near San Jon, New Mexico. 254. See Panhandle Heritage Foundation Texas, “Texas: Outdoor Musical Drama in Palo Duro Canyon,” http://www.texas-show.com/.

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Chapter 6 255. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man: A Personal View (London: BBC Books, 2011 [1973]), 360. 256. Two Canadian religious studies scholars, Don Wiebe and Russell McCutcheon, equate “academic” with “scientific.” They do so religiously and caricature or attack others who think differently. In their view, the only alternative to “scientific” is “theological.” They exclude models grounded in the arts and humanities rather than the sciences. See Donald Wiebe, “Why the Academic Study of Religion?,” in Theory and Method in the Study of Religion, ed. Carl Olson (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson, 2003); Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 257. One could argue that the paradigm is verbal or auditory rather than visual. After all, we tend to identify knowledge with what is written in books. I admit that there is some truth to this caution; however, books, as distinct from talk, are visual. The truth of spoken words is regularly questioned in Western courts, whereas the written word more nearly approaches sacrality. Our words aren’t as legally binding as our signatures. 258. The analogy of a lens might also suggest that theories are no more successful than myths and theologies at explaining rituals. Myths and theologies, in effect, extend or add to rituals, but they do not really explain them. Or, if they do, they obscure as much as they reveal. 259. The most sustained critique of visualist bias in ethnographic research is Paul Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). 260. Robert Campany puts it this way: “Until quite recently, our discourse on other cultures and religions was premised—almost totally unconsciously—on at least one fundamental difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’: we had the theory, while what they could provide amounted only to ‘raw’ data; we theorized about their practices; we philosophized, they acted. To study ritual theory as a mode of practice is to look [in some detail] at what we [and others] do when we theorize about ritual.” See Robert F. Campany, “Xunzi and Durkheim as Theorists of Ritual Practice,” in Readings in Ritual Studies, ed. Ronald L. Grimes (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), 87. 261. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980), 86. 262. Ibid., 83. 263. Ibid., 91. 264. See Peter Hatch, “A Talk about Time. And Syntax in Music,” paper conceived, prepared, and delivered at the Thirty-Fourth Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik at Darmstadt, Germany, 2012, http://web.wlu.ca/music/Hatch/textDetails.php?writ=13. Also see Peter Hatch, “Phenomenological and Music Time,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4untysMrugc. 265. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 82. 266. Ibid., 91. 267. Advice I was given by a university press editor. 268. The “cooking” metaphor was popularized by Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983 [1964]). 269. Turner, Chihamba the White Spirit. 270. Michael Stausberg, one of the editors of Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts (Leiden: Brill, 2006), told me that they had this problem with my writing. 271. The theory/theorizing distinction would then parallel the ritual/ritualizing distinction. 272. In Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice Bell denies that she is proposing a theory. In Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, she speaks, retrospectively, as if she has proposed one, or is proposing one. In any case, if Bell has a theory, before you can apply it, you have to extract it from her writings, since not everything she writes is either theoretical or her own idea. See Catherine M. Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

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273. Carl Olson, ed., Theory and Method in the Study of Religion: A Selection of Critical Readings (Toronto: Nelson Thomson, 2003). 274. The phrase is from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953). 275. “A memorable metaphor has the power to bring two separate domains into cognitive and emotional relation. . . . The extended meanings that result, the relations between initially disparate realms created, can neither be antecedently predicted nor subsequently paraphrased in prose. . . . Metaphorical thought is a distinctive mode of achieving insight, not to be construed as an ornamental substitute for plain thought.” Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), 236–237. 276. For this reason Kreinath, Snoek, and Stausberg resist using the verb “theorize” to refer only to the act of creating new theories. For them it also refers to the acts of reading and evaluating existing theories. See Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg, Theorizing Rituals: Annotated Bibliography of Ritual Theory, 1966–2005 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), x , xxi. 277. Since public revision of one’s views on the basis of critique by other scholars is sufficiently rare, it is worth looking at one good example. Laidlaw and Humphrey revise their way of talking about performance-centered rituals on the basis of a critique by Houseman and Severi. See James Laidlaw and Caroline Humphrey, “Action,” in Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, ed. Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 280–281; Michael Houseman, Naven or the Other Self: A Relational Approach to Ritual Action (Leiden: Brill, 1998). If scholars regularly read and responded overtly to each other with such care, advances in knowledge would be more common. 278. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Victor Witter Turner, “Liminality and the Performative Genres,” in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, ed. John MacAloon (Philadelphia: ISHI, 1985); The Anthropology of Performance (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1987). 279. In arguing that metaphors matter and explaining how they work, I am indebted to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 280. Jan Snoek, “Defining ‘Rituals,’” in Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, ed. Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg, 3–14 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 13. 281. Eugene G. D’Aquili, Charles D. Laughlin, and John McManus. The Spectrum of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structural Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 29. 282. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 140. 283. The site no longer exists. 284. The Santa Fe Institute: http://www.santafe.edu/. 285. The New England Complex Systems Institute: http://necsi.edu/. 286. Ritual studies scholars have yet to propose theories based on complex systems modeling. In religious studies the most explicit complex systems theorizing has been carried out by theologian-philosopher Mark Taylor. See Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

Chapter 7 287. Robert ter Horst notes “the ambiguity in Spanish of the word fiesta, which unlike the English, has not decomposed into ‘holy day’ on the one hand, and ‘holiday’ on the other.” He adds, “Much of the vitality of Spanish culture during its Golden Age derives from that period’s fusion of elements which other times and societies have seen as distinct or even hostile kinds of commitment. Historians and critics uneasily note the Iberian tendency in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to confound the sacred with the secular, the serious with the frivolous,

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288. 289. 290. 291. 292.

293. 294. 295. 296. 297. 298. 299. 300.

301. 302. 303. 304. 305. 306. 307. 308. 309.

310.

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work with play. Yet it is precisely this unwillingness or inability of the Spaniard to purge his amusements of significance or to expunge amusement from his devotions that constitutes so much of the richness of classical Spanish art.” Robert ter Horst, review of Juan de Zabaleta, El dia de fiesta por la manana y por la tarde, ed. and intro. Christobal Cuevas Garcias, Hispanic Review 53, no. 4 (1985): 498, 497. Lamadrid, Hermanitos Comanchitos, chap. 2. Barry Ulanov, A History of Jazz in America (New York: Viking, 1955), 3–4. Pascal Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 185. Ibid., 189. Compare, for example, Samuel Snyder, “New Streams of Religion: Fly Fishing as a Lived, Religion of Nature,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75, no. 4 (2007): 896–922. Also see Russell McCutcheon, “Words, Words, Words,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75, no. 4 (2007): 969. Snyder volatilizes fly-fishing first into religion, then into ritual. McCutcheon, following in what he calls “the Smith-Sharf-Lopez tradition,” repeatedly deflects attention away from religion, ritual, or myth to the terms and tools of research. See William Sax, Johannes Quack, and Jan Weinhold, eds., Ritual Efficacy, Oxford Ritual Studies Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 1. For more definitions see Appendix 1: Definitions of Ritual. Victor Witter Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 95. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 63. E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 176. Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual: A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 97–98. “Typically, priests sacrifice goats, ritual participants burn offerings, and pilgrims circle shrines. But in religious contexts people also pray, sing, chant, and kneel. Even though such activities may be parts of religious rituals, such activities, in and of themselves, do not qualify as religious rituals in our theory’s technical sense. All religious rituals—in our technical sense—are inevitably connected sooner or later with actions in which CPS-agents play a role and which bring about some change in the religious world.” Lawson and McCauley, Rethinking Religion, 13. Even Zuesse claims that it is. See Evan M. Zuesse, “Meditation on Ritual,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43, no. 4 (1975): 517–530. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 55–79. Ibid., 69. Franz Steiner, Taboo (London: Cohen and West, 1956), 60. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 27–54. Ibid., 54. Ronald L. Grimes, “Defining Nascent Ritual,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 50, no. 4 (1982): 539–555. A modification of Ritual Criticism, 2nd ed. (Waterloo, ON: Ritual Studies International, 2010), 7. Partly in response to Jan Snoek’s critique. See Jan Snoek, “Defining ‘Rituals,’ ” in Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, ed. Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Strausberg (Leiden: Brill, 2006). For a study of ritual invention see Maria Liljas Stalhandske, Ritual Invention: A Play Perspective on Existential Ritual and Mental Health in Late Modern Sweden (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala

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311. 312. 313. 314.

315.

316. 317. 318. 319.

320.

321. 322. 323. 324. 325. 326. 327. 328.

329. 330. 331. 332. 333. 334.

Note s to Pag e s 1 9 3 – 2 0 7 University, 2005). For a video representation of ritualizing see Cailleah Scott-Grimes, “Making It Up as We . . . Go,” online video, 2012, http://www.vimeo.com/22743987. For a video representation of ritualization see Bryn Scott-Grimes, “O Mother, Where Art Thou,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/omother. The original list is in Appendix 16: Family Characteristics of Ritual. From Ronald L. Grimes, “Religion, Ritual, and Performance,” in Religion, Theatre, and Performance: Acts of Faith, ed. Lance Gharavi (New York: Routledge, 2012), 39. Family resemblance theory is usually attributed to Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, and fuzzy set theory to Lotfi A. Zadeh, “Fuzzy Sets and System,” in System Theory, ed. J. Fox (Brooklyn, NY: Polytechnic, 1965). Another variant: “Rites are sequences of action rendered special by virtue of their condensation, elevation, or stylization.” From Ronald L. Grimes, “Forum on American Spirituality,” Religion in American Culture 9, no. 2 (1999): 145–152. Based on Grimes, “Religion, Ritual, and Performance,” 36ff. Ibid., 38. An alternative: Ritual is a set of actions embodying espoused values enacted in prescribed and extraordinary ways. Appealing either to a family resemblance model or to “fuzzy logic” is increasingly widespread in the study of ritual. See, for instance, Nick Crossley, “Ritual, Body Technique, and (Inter) Subjectivity,” in Thinking through Rituals: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Kevin Schilbrack (London: Routledge, 2004), 32. Family resemblance theory is generally traced to Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. The idea of fuzzy logic was introduced by Zadeh, “Fuzzy Sets and System.” For those who refuse to use “spirituality” as a legitimate scholarly concept and want instead a freestanding definition of religion, I sometimes say that religion is the animation of sacrally shrouded symbols and metaphors for whatever is valued as first, last, deepest, highest, most pervasive, or most central. The scheme is partially indebted to Ninian Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, 91ff. Humphrey and Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual, 97. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 167. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 11. Classifying rituals into two opposed categories that underwrite a particular theory has a long history. Émile Durkheim, for instance, distinguishes “negative” and “positive” rituals, and they parallel his most fundamental division between sacred and profane. See Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965 [1915]), book 3. Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission, Cognitive Science of Religion Series (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2004). Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon, eds., Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). The original version is in Ronald L. Grimes, Beginnings in Ritual Studies, rev. ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995 [1982]), 57. Modern musical theory identifies seven modes: Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian. See the special issue of the New Quarterly titled “To List Is Human”: New Quarterly: Canadian Writers and Writing 114 (Spring 2010). For a critical view of comparison as a scholarly strategy see Smith, Imagining Religion, chap. 3. Also see Kimberley Christine Patton and Benjamin C. Ray, eds., A Magic Still Dwells (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

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335. Barry Stephenson, Performing the Reformation: Public Ritual in the City of Luther, Oxford Ritual Studies Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Also see his “Wedding Montage” at http://oxrit.twohornedbull.ca/?page_id=355 (accessed June 29, 2013).

Chapter 8 336. Modified from Grimes, “Religion, Ritual, and Performance,” 37. 337. The second chapter of Beginnings in Ritual Studies used the mapping metaphor to refer to the elements of ritual. Here I put it to a different and, I hope, better use, that of referring to cultural “space.” 338. If the student list seems ridiculously short, it is enlightening to look at the ridiculously long list provided by Wikipedia’s “Outline of Culture,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_ culture (accessed June 29, 2013). 339. For more on cultural domain analysis see Spradley, The Ethnographic Interview. 340. Allen Guttman, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); John Marshall Carter and Arnd Kruger, eds., Ritual and Record: Sports Records and Quantification of Pre-Modern Societies (New York: Greenwood, 1990). See also James Carey, ed., Media, Myths and Narratives: Television and the Press (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989). 341. Guttman, From Ritual to Record, 16. 342. Michael Novak, The Joy of Sports: End Zones, Bases, Baskets, Balls, and the Consecration of the American Spirit (New York: Basic, 1976). 343. Guttman, From Ritual to Record, 25. 344. Cited in Stewart Culin, Games of the North American Indians (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1907), 34. 345. Novak, The Joy of Sports, 3. 346. Ibid., 48. 347. Ibid., 29. 348. Ibid., 101. 349. Varda Burstyn, The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics, and the Culture of Sport (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 350. In this respect she is less nuanced than Novak, who does not lump all sports together. 351. Burstyn, The Rites of Men, 149. 352. Ibid., 22. 353. John J. MacAloon, “Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies,” in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984), 258, fig. 251. 354. For more on rituals and games see Ronald L. Grimes, “Rituals and Games,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/ritualsandgames. 355. An exception is Frits Staal, whose claims about the “meaninglessness” of ritual are based in part on musical analogies. A rite, like a piece of music, can be meaningless in the sense of “cannot be translated into words.” It may, nevertheless, have meaning in the sense of “being deeply moving or important to one’s life.” 356. See, for instance, Johannes Quasten, ed., Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (Washington, DC: National Association of Pastoral Musicians, 1983). I am indebted to Helen Phelan of the Irish World Music Centre for guidance on this topic. 357. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 185. 358. Small, Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music (New York: Riverrun, 1987), 77. 359. Ibid., 357. 360. Ibid., 75.

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361. 362. 363. 364. 365. 366. 367. 368. 369. 370.

371. 372. 373. 374. 375. 376. 377. 378.

379. 380. 381. 382. 383.

384. 385. 386. 387. 388. 389. 390. 391. 392.

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Note s to Pag e s 2 1 8 – 2 2 8 Small, Musicking, 95. Small, Music of the Common Tongue, 50. Small, Musicking, 218. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 87. Small, Music of the Common Tongue, 358. Small, Musicking, 217. Ibid. Because of the prejudicial connotation of “nonliterate,” Small suggests, alternatively, “notationdependent” and “notation-independent.” See A. F. Droogers, The Dangerous Journey: Symbolic Aspects of Boys’ Initiation among the Wagenia of Kisangani, Zaire (The Hague: Mouton, 1980), 233. See also Ronald L. Grimes, “Organ Improvisation: An Interview with Jeffrey Brillhart,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/organimprov. Small, Musicking, 185. Ibid., 192. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 212. Ibid., 215. See Robert A. Segal, ed., The Myth and Ritual Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Ronald L. Grimes, “Performance Theory and the Study of Ritual,” in New Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. Peter Antes, Armin Geertz, and Randi Warne (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004). Sherry Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 1 (1984): 126–166. Ibid., x. Ibid., 5. Cole’s understanding of shamanism is borrowed from Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964). Cole is generalizing both terms beyond their original contexts. Strictly speaking, a houngan is a male priest in Haitian Vodoun, and a shaman is a practitioner of trance, healing, and divination among Tungusic speakers in circumpolar regions of northern Asia. Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,” 15. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 102. See, for instance, Richard Katz, Megan Biesele, and Verna St. Denis, Healing Makes Our Hearts Happy (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1997). See Ernest Theodore Kirby, Ur Drama: The Origins of Theatre (New York: New York University Press, 1975). Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), 22. More about Schechner is available in Ronald L. Grimes, “Performance,” in Theorizing Rituals: Classical Topics, Theoretical Approaches, Analytical Concepts, Annotated Bibliography, ed. Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Strausberg (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 387ff. Kenneth Burke’s “dramatistic pentad” (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose) were more useful for understanding rhetoric than ritual. Besides, only the first two were actually dramatistic, and Burke seldom worked with actual performances or rites. Richard Schechner and Willa Appel, eds., By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 20–21.

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395. As always, other metaphors are possible. Outside a ritual is its “backstory” or “social drama.” Victor Witter Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), chap. 1.

Chapter 9 396. The cover of Grimes, Rite out of Place, was designed by artist Carolina Echeverria, so I am not merely indulging a fantasy. 397. One definition of “reductionism” is “a doctrine that maintains that all objects and events, their properties, and our experience and knowledge of them are made up of ultimate elements, indivisible parts.” Russel Ackoff, Redesigning the Future (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1974), 8. 398. And what are these blocks? Symbols, of course. Symbolic anthropologists tend to talk as if all components of ritual are symbolic. I no longer do so. It requires interview and observation to determine which, if any, are. 399. “The bicycle, that technological throwback from the nineteenth century, is for them a literal and metaphorical organizing principle for a new vision of the world, one that stands not simply against the most obvious form of petro-consumption, the automobile, but that heralds and celebrates—in advance of its actual arrival, and with bright little bicycle bells and radical cheers—a new, post-petroleum era.” Mark Svenvold, “Send in the Clowns: Bicycle Nomads, Texas Utopianism, and the Post-Petroleum Era,” Orion, January/February 2008, http://www. orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/505. 400. Roy Rappaport describes his own theory of ritual as formalist. See Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 27–28. 401. Chapter 2 of Beginnings in Ritual Studies was the first version of this scheme. Although I have discarded the “mapping” metaphor, putting it to another use here, I remain convinced of the worth of publishing an entire chapter consisting of questions. 402. I am making a practical recommendation, not a claim that action takes precedence over the other elements. A theory of ritual should not predetermine that one or another element is primary. Jonathan Smith’s theorizing construes place, or placement, as primary. 403. The distinction is from Kenneth Burke, Dramatism and Development (Barre, MA: Clark University Press, 1972), 21. 404. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), 33. 405. Martin Buber distinguished between I-thou and I-it relations. He venerated I-thou relationships but also recognized the inevitability and necessity of I-it relations. See Martin Buber, I and Thou, 2nd ed. (London: Continuum, 2004 [1937]). 406. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, book 1, chap. 3. 407. Ibid., 61. 408. Since Bourdieu is critical of mechanistic renditions of practice, poking fun at the positivist who recorded 480 elementary units of behavior during twenty minutes of observing his wife in the kitchen, I am aware that a Bourdovean might balk at my bicycle metaphors. But the sociologist himself talks repeatedly about “structures,” so neither the presence of metaphors that sound static nor the reification of verbs into nouns necessarily signals a mechanistic theory, one that reduces processes to parts and construes human interactions exclusively on the model of firing engines, bumping billiard balls, or other physics-inspired models. 409. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 68. 410. Ibid., 69. 411. Ibid., 77. 412. Ronald L. Grimes, “Vespers in the City of New York,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ ronaldlgrimes/vespersnyc. 413. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 92. 414. Ibid., 94.

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415. Ibid., 92. 416. “We are constituted as subjects through practice.” Amy Hollywood, “Spiritual but Not Religious: The Vital Interplay between Submission and Freedom.,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 38, nos. 1–2 (2010): 93–115, http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news-events/harvard-divinitybulletin/articles/spiritual-but-not-religious. 417. Ronald L. Grimes, “Caribbean Carnival: Animating Bacchanal,” online video, 2012, http:// vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/animatingbacchanal. 418. See, for instance, Susan Starr Sered, Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem (Oxford: New York, 1992); Leslie A. Northup, Ritualizing Women (New York: Pilgrim, 1997); Marjorie Procter-Smith and Janet R. Walton, eds., Women at Worship: Interpretations of North American Diversity (Louisville, KY: Westminster, 1993); Björn Krondorfer, “Bodily Knowing, Ritual Embodiment, and Experimental Drama: From Regression to Transgression,” Journal of Ritual Studies 6, no. 2 (1992): 27–38. 419. For an example of festive attitudes and stylized photographic performances see Ronald L. Grimes, “Caribbean Carnival: Animating Bacchanal,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo. com/ronaldlgrimes/animatingbacchanal. 420. I find John Dewey’s definition of “habit” quite acceptable: “The essence of habits is an acquired predisposition to ways, or modes, of response, not to particular acts, standing predilections and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of specific acts.” Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York: Holt, 1922), 32. 421. The photo album: Ronald L. Grimes, “Highgate United Church: A Photographic Study,” online photo album, 2012, https://picasaweb.google.com/110779451079822593112/ HighgateUnitedChurchAPhotographicStudy. The video album: Ronald L. Grimes, “Highgate United Church of Canada,” online video album, 2010, https://vimeo.com/album/1510075. 422. Ronald L. Grimes, “The Deconsecration of a Canadian Church: Highgate United, 1834– 2010,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/highgate-deconsecration. 423. See Barry Stephenson, “Highgate United,” online video, 2011, https://vimeo.com/album/ 1510075/video/18807637. 424. The Mary Webb Centre, http://marywebbcentre.ca/. 425. See Qibla Locator at http://www.qiblalocator.com/. 426. If you think not, see Marc Connelly and William Keighley, dir., The Green Pastures (Warner Bros. Pictures, 1936). 427. The phrase belongs to Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (New York: Anchor, 1973). 428. See Alfonso Ortiz, The Tewa World: Space, Time, Being, and Becoming in a Pueblo Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). 429. See Cele L. Otnes and Tina M. Lowrey, eds., Contemporary Consumption Rituals (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003). 430. On ritual and the environment see Philip P. Arnold and Ann Grodzins Gold, eds., Sacred Landscapes and Cultural Politics: Planting a Tree (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001); J. Peter Brosius, “Anthropological Engagements with Environmentalism,” Current Anthropology 40 (1999), 277–309; E. N. Anderson, Ecologies of the Heart: Emotion, Belief, and the Environment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. 431. Part of this section is modified from Ronald L. Grimes, “Jonathan Smith’s Theory of Ritual,” Religion 29 (1999): 261–273. 432. Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 96. The epigraph for the chapter, “To Take Place,” is from Stéphane Mallarmé. 433. Ibid., 104. 434. A danger of this slippage is the overextended metaphor. For example, in American Sacred Space Chidester and Linenthal conclude their introduction by brandishing an analogy with astonishing implications. “In an important sense,” they claim, “the authors of the essays collected in this book have rediscovered America. Not content with the guidebooks, formulas, and

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comforts of academic tourism, the authors have risked the uncharted dangers of exploration to see America new.” A reader’s “itinerary” through the book is construed as the equivalent of a pilgrimage to sacred sites. See David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, eds., American Sacred Space (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 31. Smith, To Take Place, 112. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 26. Burke’s formulation of the synecdochic relation between scene (place) and agent (actor) is, in my opinion, more balanced and thus more acceptable. See Kenneth Burke, Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), chapter 1. Also see Appendix 17: Kenneth Burke’s Dramatistic Categories. Sarah Horton, “The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented: Sacralizing Ties to a Disappearing Homeland” (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2003), 23. See Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 232–273. Time and space are among the categories of Aristotle and Immanuel Kant. In their usages, categories are not pigeonholes for classifying things but inescapable qualities of anything and everything that exists. For Aristotle the categories included substance (e.g., throne, chair), quantity (e.g., three hundred years, two princesses), quality (e.g., hot, red), relation (e.g., causal, reciprocal), place (e.g., at home, in the field), time (e.g., fiesta time, Saturday), posture (e.g., mounted horseback, kneeling), state (e.g., believes in Mary, has armor on), action (e.g., raising fist, shouting), passivity/passion (e.g., being chosen, being out of work). For Aristotle the categories are characteristics of the real world (hence, his “realism”); for Kant, of the mind that perceives the world (hence, his “conceptualism”). See Aristotle, The Categories, trans. E. M. Edghill (Adelaide, South Australia: University of Adelaide Library). Also see Amie Thomasson, “Categories,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/win2012/entries/categories/ (accessed June 30, 2013). See Grimes, “Rituals and Games.” See Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity. See, for instance, Appendix 14: Phases of the Roman Catholic Liturgy. See, for instance, Service Builder, http://servicebuilder.net/. Also, for a discussion of Pentecostalism’s resort to computer-scheduled worship, watch Ronald L. Grimes, “Improvisation and Pentecostalism: An Interview with Adam Stewart,” online video, 2011, http://vimeo.com/ ronaldlgrimes/improvisation-and-pentecostalism. Most ritual accounts don’t make good stories. Like dreams, however good they are to undergo, they are not so good to listen to. Ronald L. Grimes, “Ritual Improvisation and the Disposition of Cremation Ashes in the Netherlands: An Interview with Meike Heessels,” online video, 2011, http://vimeo.com/ ronaldlgrimes/cremationashes. A good example is Ross Katz, dir., Taking Chance, HBO Films, 2009. The entire film is a ritual for repatriating a soldier’s body. Parts of this section are adapted from Ronald L. Grimes, “Ritual,” in “Key Words in Material Religion,” special issue, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 7, no. 1 (2011). Angelico Chávez, La Conquistadora: The Autobiography of an Ancient Statue (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild, 1954). It is both amusing and revealing to watch some “object speeches” on YouTube. Ronald L. Grimes, “Ritual Criticism of Field Excavations and Museum Displays,” in Ritual Criticism: Case Studies in Its Practice, Essays on Its Theory, 51–70 (Waterloo, ON: Ritual Studies International, 2010). In 1867 Karl Marx wrote: A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and

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Note s to Pag e 2 7 0 theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” Capital, vol. 1 (1867), http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm. Marx’s idea has been amplified in various strands of Marxist thought. No one makes the ritual nature of contemporary commoditization more transparent than Guy Debord (1931–1994), who wrote: Consumers are filled with religious fervor for the sovereign freedom of commodities whose use has become an end in itself. Waves of enthusiasm for particular products are propagated by all the communications media. A film sparks a fashion craze; a magazine publicizes night spots which in turn spin off different lines of products. The proliferation of faddish gadgets reflects the fact that as the mass of commodities becomes increasingly absurd, absurdity itself becomes a commodity. Trinkets such as key chains which come as free bonuses with the purchase of some luxury product, but which end up being traded back and forth as valued collectibles in their own right, reflect a mystical self-abandonment to commodity transcendence. Those who collect the trinkets that have been manufactured for the sole purpose of being collected are accumulating commodity indulgences— glorious tokens of the commodity’s real presence among the faithful. Reified people proudly display the proofs of their intimacy with the commodity. Like the old religious fetishism, with its convulsionary raptures and miraculous cures, the fetishism of commodities generates its own moments of fervent exaltation. All this is useful for only one purpose: producing habitual submission. Guy Debord, “Unity and Division within Appearances,” trans. Ken Knabb, The Society of the Spectacle, vol. 3 (1967), http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_ Spectacle (accessed June 30, 2013).

455. Ronald L. Grimes, “A Brush with Silence,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/brush-with-silence. 456. The video implicitly raises the question: how much artistic license should we grant a scholar? By speeding up the action and laying unexpected music beneath it, I am commenting on, not merely presenting, the workshop. Is it okay to interpret using images and sounds rather than words on a printed page? George Kordis, the iconographer, responded positively with gusto to the video. The students were divided, most saying they enjoyed the humor and irony, but a few saying they would have preferred a soundtrack containing the ambient chatter, silence, or Orthodox chant. I justify my interpretation by calling attention to repeated cell-phone checking and the howling wind, but is this sufficient warrant? To facilitate a comparison and reflection on the editing-interpreting process, there is a fifteen-minute rough-cut version with no music,

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458. 459. 460. 461.

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transitions or adjustments to volume and lighting: “Icon-Writing with George Kordis: A RoughCut,” online video, 2013, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/kordisiconroughcut. The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church, “Epitome of the Definition of the Iconoclastic Counciliabulum, Held in Constantinople, a.d. 754,” http://www.fordham.edu/ halsall/source/icono-cncl754.asp (accessed June 30, 2013). See Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Hans Pool and Maaik Krijgsman, dirs., Looking for an Icon, 55 min., black and white, United States, 2007. Quoted in Hans Pool and Maaik Krijgsman, dir., Looking for an Icon (Icarus Films, 2007). Henry VIII’s Wives, “Iconic Moments of the Twentieth Century,” http://h8w.net/work/ im.html (accessed June 30, 2013). For other refractions of the photo see “Covers and Citations,” http://search.it.online.fr/covers/?m=1968 (accessed June 30, 2013). The image is easily available on the Internet by conducting an image search using “Eddie Adams” and “Nguyen Ngoc” as search terms. Ronald L. Grimes, “Ritual Creativity, Improvisation, and the Arts,” online video album, 2012, https://vimeo.com/album/1524902. “A Vulnerable Moment in Vocal Improvisation,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ ronaldlgrimes/vulnerablemoment. I’m riffing off Scott-Grimes, “O Mother, Where Art Thou?” See, for instance, Bridget Doak, “Effects of Shamanic Drumming on Anxiety, Mood, States of Consciousness, Imagery, and Brain Patterns in Adult Subjects,” Dissertation Abstracts International, 67 (2007) #9-A, 3215; Michael J. Winkelman, Shamans, Priests and Witches, Anthropological Research Papers no. 44, Arizona State University, 1992. For the original claim see Alfred A. Tomatis, The Conscious Ear: My Life of Transformation through Listening (Paris: Station Hill, 1991). For the popularized version see Don Campbell, The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit (New York: HarperCollins, 2001 [1997]). For a critique see C. F. Chabris, “Prelude or Requiem for the ‘Mozart Effect’?” Nature 400 (1999): 826–827. Katherine Creath and Gary E. Schwartz, “Measuring Effects of Music, Noise, and Healing Energy Using a Seed Germination Bioassay,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 10, no. 1 (2004): 113–122. See Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Penguin, 2007), and Charles D. Laughlin, John McManus, and Eugene G. d’Aquili, Brain, Symbol and Experience: Toward a Neurophenomenology of Human Consciousness (Boston: Shambhala, 1990). The key text in explaining how performative utterances work is J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). Listen to Patrick Evans and Siobhán Garrigan discussing paperless worship: Ronald L. Grimes, “Enacting What We Say We Believe,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/ we-say-we-believe; “A Teaching Space for Liturgical Formation,” online video, 2012, http:// vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/teaching-liturgical-formation. Ronald L. Grimes, “St. Lydia’s,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/st-lydias. Notice the metaphor-making going on here. Just as I talked about ritual beliefs as if they are contained “inside” ritual actors, now I’m talking as if the social bonds of ritual are “outside” and “between” these actors, and as if social structures, like buildings, can be left “standing.” Of course, none of these claims is literally true, but you have no choice: Pick your metaphors and pay your dues. A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, “Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions,” Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology Papers 47, no. 1 (1952): 181. This definition attempts to condense the hundreds reviewed in this book, which is the best single source for other definitions. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures.

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476. Fred Plog and Daniel G. Bates, Cultural Anthropology, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1988). 477. Ronald L. Grimes, “Caribbean Carnival: Judging the Junior Parade,” online video, 2012, http:// vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/junior-parade; “Caribbean Carnival: The Toronto Revellers,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/revellers. 478. Patricia Reaney, “Average Cost of U.S. Wedding Hits $27,021,” Reuters, March 23, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/23/us-wedding-costs-idUSBRE82M11O20120323. The author is citing a study conducted by TheKnow.com and WeddingChannel.com. 479. An often quoted figure is $6,500, but the amount is dated and includes only fees paid directly to a funeral director. 480. Little is written about the economics of the Santa Fe Fiesta. The most thorough treatment of the financial impact of Santa Fe’s several festivals is Romella S. Glorioso and Laurence A. G. Moss, “Santa Fe, a Fading Dream: 1986 Profile and 2005 Postscript,” in The Amenity Migrants: Seeking and Sustaining Mountains and Their Cultures, ed. Laurence A. G. Moss (Cambridge, MA: CABI). 481. For instance, Sobonfu Somé, a teacher of African spirituality in the West, says she is a keeper of rituals for the Dagara Tribe of Burkina Faso. See http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/ teachers/teachers.php?id=300 (accessed June 30, 2013). 482. See, for example, Gerry Johnson, Shameen Prashantham, Steven W. Floyd, and Nicole Bourque, “The Ritualization of Strategy Workshops,” Organization Studies 31, no. 12 (2010): 1589–1618, doi: 10.1177/0170840610376146, http://oss.sagepub.com/content/31/12/1589 (accessed June 30, 2013). 483. The characterization of sport’s tacit function is largely that of Varda Burstyn, The Rites of Men. She demonstrates that contemporary sport amounts to the ritualization of a masculinist ideology. She and Christopher Small are critics, employing the notion of ritual not merely to analyze but to mount critiques of music and sport. Her use of the idea of ritual, like his, works like a crowbar for prying the lid off a cultural activity and exposing what is inside or underneath. Neither writer is entirely happy with what she or he sees. Since they utilize the idea of ritual as a key to comprehending other kinds of action, the issue for them is not whether ritual has a connection with music or sport but how that connection is understood. 484. I have included tacit functions in this column because they are such a prominent part of Christopher Small’s argument. One could do the same for the other columns by invoking other critics.

Chapter 10 485. See, for example, Dadisi Sanyika, “Gang Rites and Rituals of Initiation,” in Crossroads: The Quest for Contemporary Rites of Passage, ed. Louise Carus Mahdi, Nancy Geyer Christopher, and Michael Meade (Chicago: Open Court, 1996). 486. The Lutheran denial of “works righteousness” is a theological way to resist turning worship into a form of spiritual achievement. 487. Jack Goody, “Religion and Ritual: The Definitional Problem,” British Journal of Sociology 12, no. 2 (1961): 164. 488. Edmund Leach, “Ritual,” in A Dictionary of the Social Sciences, ed. J. Gould and W. Kolk (London: Tavistock, 1964), 607. 489. I sometimes follow Kenneth Burke in distinguishing agents from agency (see Appendix 17: Kenneth Burke’s Dramatistic Categories). “Agent” refers to the “who” of ritual; “agency” refers to the “how” or “means” of it. Ritual actors do things with or in rituals. However, one could say the same of guns and or drugs. Guns don’t start wars; people do. Drugs don’t use people; people use drugs. Even so, it makes good, albeit nonliteral, sense to speak of either drugs or guns, and thus ritual, as agents capable of acting. Rituals, like people, not only do things, they even have “intentions,” but they are only implied, requiring an interpreter to infer them.

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490. I would have added “or mother,” but his theorizing is distinctively patriarchal. 491. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 212, 222. 492. See especially William Sax, “Ritual and the Problem of Efficacy,” in The Problem of Ritual Efficacy, Oxford Ritual Studies Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 493. The currently reigning theoretical orthodoxy maintains that the primary, or even the only, function of ritual is the exercise of power, and “power” (in contrast to “action”) is understood to be in the service of a vested interest. See, for example, Ursula Rao, “Rituals in Society,” in Theorizing Rituals: Classical Topics, Theoretical Approaches, Analytical Concepts, Annotated Bibliography, ed. Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Strausberg (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 158. 494. Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). 495. See Robbie Davis-Floyd and Charles D. Laughlin, The Power of Ritual (New York: Random House/Schocken, forthcoming). 496. Horton, The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented. 497. Both of us supplement our research with subsequent visits, fieldwork stints, and library research. 498. Horton, The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented, 2–3. 499. It is much more common now for religious studies scholars to combine ethnographic and historical approaches to the study of religion in America. See, for instance, Robert A. Orsi, Thank You, Saint Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Pamela E. Klassen, “Blessed Events: Religion and Gender in the Practice of Home Birth” (PhD diss., Drew University, 1997); Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Anna Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France, Oxford Ritual Studies Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Sarah M. Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 500. Horton, The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented, 15. 501. Horton borrows the phrase from Sylvia Rodriguez, “Tourism, Whiteness, and the Vanishing Anglo,” in Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West, ed. D. M. Wrobel and P. T. Long (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001), 195. 502. Sarah Horton, “Where Is the ‘Mexican’ in ‘New Mexican’? Enacting History, Enacting Dominance in the Santa Fe Fiesta,” Public Historian 23, no. 4 (2001): 52. 503. Prime examples are the comments of Ray Valdez and Hugo Martinez-Serros. See Ronald L. Grimes, “Behind the Scenes of the Santa Fe Fiesta,” online video, 2012, https://vimeo.com/ album/1557600. 504. Horton, The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented, 73. Ann Gold asks, “If anthropologists see through the ‘invention of tradition’ and point to the ways indigenous peoples’ forms of self-representation may be deliberately and purposefully constructed, are they breaching not only disciplinary research ethics but their own ideals and moralities?” Ann Grodzins Gold, “Environment/ Ritual/Research Ethics: Crisscrossing Issues in Anthropology and Religious Studies,” http:// www.brown.edu/research/research-ethics/environment-ritual-research-ethics-crisscrossingissues-anthropology-and-religious-studies (accessed July 2, 2013). 505. Horton, The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented, 77ff., 110, 158. 506. For an early and a late work, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993) and The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). See also Ellen T. Armour and Susan M. St. Ville, Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 507. Among the important works are Laughlin et al., Brain, Symbol and Experience: Toward a Neurophenomenology of Human Consciousness; Harvey Whitehouse, Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Whitehouse, Modes of

388

508. 509. 510.

511. 512. 513. 514. 515. 516. 517.

518. 519.

520. 521.

522.

523. 524. 525. 526.

Note s to Pag e s 3 0 8 – 3 1 8 Religiosity; Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas; Robert N. McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Harvey Whitehouse, The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology versus Ethnography (Oxford: Berg, 2001). E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 171. Ibid., 71. The two metaphors have been severely criticized by feminist philosophers. See Carolyn Merchant, Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); Brian Easlea, “Patriarchy, Scientists, and Nuclear Warriors,” in Counterbalance: Gendered Perspectives for Writing and Language, ed. Carolyn Logan (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1997); Carolyn Logan, Counterbalance: Gendered Perspectives for Writing and Language (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1997). See Kevin N. Ochsner and Elizabeth Phelps, “Emerging Perspectives on Emotion–Cognition Interactions,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 8 (2007): 317–318. Ronald L. Grimes, “A Footwashing Ritual for Maundy Thursday,” online video, 2012, http:// vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/foot-washing-green. See William R. Jordan III, The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). See Ronald L. Grimes, “The Deconsecration of a Canadian Church: Highgate United, 1834– 2010,” online video, 2011, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/highgate-deconsecration. You can’t actually hear his remarks on the posted version of the video. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See Robert N. McCauley, “Ritual, Memory, and Emotion: Comparing Two Cognitive Hypotheses,” in Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual, and Experience, ed. Jensine Andresen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). In Figure 2 (p. 148), the celebrative mode is associated with the subjunctive, suggesting that art and ritual are the most compatible when the kind of ritual involved is celebrative. For more on improvisation and ritual creativity see Eric Venbrux, Meike Heessels, and Sophie Bolt, eds., Rituele creativiteit: Actuele veranderingen in de uitvaart-en rouwcultuur in Nederland (Zoetermeer, the Netherlands: Meinema, 2008); Grimes, “Ritual Creativity, Improvisation, and the Arts.” For examples of ritual creativity in the context of a traditional setting see Fedele, Looking for Mary Magdalene. Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000), 22–23. For a very different view of the relationship between liturgy and creativity see Ronald L. Grimes, “Improvisation, Imagination, and Christian Worship: An Interview with Janet Walton,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/improv-imag-worship; “Ritual and Worship in James Chapel: An Interview with Troy Messenger,” online video, 2012, http:// vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/jameschapel; “Enacting What We Say We Believe: An Interview with Patrick Evans,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/we-say-we-believe; “A Teaching Space for Liturgical Formation: An Interview with Siobhan Garrigan,” online video, 2012, http://vimeo.com/ronaldlgrimes/teaching-liturgical-formation. Ivor Armstrong Richards and Charles Kay Ogden, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989 [1923]). Dan Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Frits Staal, “The Meaninglessness of Ritual,” Numen 26 (1979): 9–14. Frits Staal, Ritual and Mantras: Rules without Meaning, 1st Indian ed. (New Delhi: Jainendra Prakash Jain at Shri Jainendra Press, 1996 [1990]): 115–116. Ibid., 131. Ibid., 133.

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527. See Gilmore, Theatre in a Crowded Fire. 528. Staal, Ritual and Mantras, 134. 529. On the relation of ritual to ethics and social transformation see Tom F. Driver, Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transformative Power of Ritual (n.p.: Booksurge, 2006). 530. See Kroeber and Kluckhohn, “Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.” For a synthesis of thinking about symbolism as the foundation of culture see Mary LeCron Foster, “Symbolism: The Foundation of Culture,” in Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold (London: Routledge, 1994). 531. This way of speaking about symbols comes from several sources, notably, Turner, The Forest of Symbols; Charles Morris, Foundations of the Theory of Signs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938); James Fernandez, Benjamin N. Colby, and David Kronenfeld, “Toward a Convergence of Cognitive and Symbolic Anthropology,” American Ethnologist 8, no. 3 (1981): 442–450. 532. On indexicality see Charles Sanders Peirce, The Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover, 1955), 109ff. 533. Lawson and McCauley, Rethinking Religion, 176. 534. McCauley and Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind, 13. Donald Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori use the term “S factor.” David E. Miller and Tetsanao Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 219ff. 535. Lawson and McCauley, Rethinking Religion. 536. Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 7–8. 537. Frederick Ferre, Basic Modern Philosophy of Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967), 69. 538. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 90. 539. For example, see Sherry Ortner, ed., The Fate of “Culture”: Geertz and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 540. W. Paul Jones, Trumpet at Full Moon: Introduction to Christian Spirituality as Diverse Practice (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), 8. 541. Sandra M. Schneiders, “Theology and Spirituality: Strangers, Rivals, or Partners?” Horizons 13 (1986): 266. 542. Eric James, Spirituality for Today (London: SCM, 1968), 61. 543. David Craig, writing about the relation of ritual and ethics in the America civil rights movement, says, “I define ritual as a semiscripted performance, the formal structure and frequent repetition of which helps make participants’ desires into meaningful expressions of the identities, bonds, and purposes upheld by a religious community or a political association.” David M. Craig, “Debating Desire: Civil Rights, Ritual Protest and the Shifting Boundaries of Public Reason,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 27, no. 1 (2007): 164. 544. “Anthropology has taught us that when a society wishes to express and preserve its values, it ensconces them in rituals.” Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus: The Book of Ritual and Ethics (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2004), xiii. 545. Unlike Christianity (especially Protestantism), rabbinic Judaism did not drive a wedge between ethical and ritual practices. Midrash halakha, as a method of studying Torah, was as ritualistic as it was ethical. 546. See Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3, 9. 547. Harvey Whitehouse transforms this distinction into a theory that posits two modes: doctrinal and imagistic. The former is frequent and redundant and requires extensive exegesis. The latter is extraordinary, episodic, and capable of high arousal. Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity, chaps. 5 and 6. 548. The phrase was coined by Roger Brown and James Kulik, “Flashbulb Memories,” Cognition 5, no. 1 (1977): 73–99. Later, it was applied to religion by Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity. See also István Czachesza, “Long-Term, Explicit Memory in Rituals,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 10 (2010): 327–339.

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549. P. Gulbrandsen, “Rett og urett: Rituell omskjæring av gutter [ Justice and Injustice: The Ritual Circumcision of Boys],” Tidsskrift for Den norske Legeforening [Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association] 121, no. 25 (2001): 2994, http://tidsskriftet.no/article/419642 (accessed July 3, 2013). 550. David Craig discusses rituals as means to cultivating “good desire,” by which he means “those socially recognized patterns of desiring and striving that enable specific people to develop the virtues, pursue the goods, and inhabit the roles and relationships that serve the ‘ideal purposes’ of societal institutions.” According to Craig, a protest is ritualized by the introduction into public discourse of pathos (sentiment) and ethos (character). Craig, “Debating Desire,” 159, 162. 551. For more on double-bind theory see Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). 552. See, for instance, the film by David Kennard and Patsy Northcutt, dirs., Journey of the Universe, Yale University Press, 2011. 553. Max Black would call this an “analogue model” because it is in a medium (words) other than the medium of the thing being modeled (actions). Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), 222. 554. If one were to run the same kind of exercise on Sarah Horton’s The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented, it might begin, “Motivated by the desire to reclaim their disappearing homeland, local Hispanos began staking a claim by strategically co-opting the fiesta. However, it was necessary to veil this move, because . . .” 555. Jonathan Z. Smith says that teaching students to turn narratives into problems is the primary task of college introductory courses. Smith, “‘Narratives into Problems’: The College Introductory Course and the Study of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56, no. 4 (1988): 727–739. 556. Stephen Toulmin, The Philosophy of Science: An Introduction (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1953), 38–39. 557. Among the best sources on models and their relation to metaphor-driven theorizing are Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Black, Models and Metaphors; Mary Gerhart and Russell Allan, Metaphoric Process: The Creation of Scientific and Religious Understanding (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1984); James W. Fernandez, “The Performance of Ritual Metaphors,” in The Social Use of Metaphor: Essays on the Anthropology of Rhetoric, ed. J. David Sapir and J. Christopher Crocker (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977); James W. Fernandez, “The Mission of Metaphor in Expressive Culture,” Current Anthropology 15, no. 2 (1974): 119–145. 558. Clifford Geertz distinguished models “of ” from models “for.” See Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 93. 559. My understand of the metaphoric process and its relationship to models is largely based on Mary Gerhart and Russell Allan, Metaphoric Process: The Creation of Scientific and Religious Understanding (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1984), and Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. 560. The best exposition of the metaphor-model relation is Black, Models and Metaphors, chap. 13. 561. The phrase “heuristic fiction” to describe a model is from Black, Models and Metaphors, 228. “Speculative instrument” is from I. A. Richards’s book Speculative Instruments (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955). 562. Even in the physical sciences, images and diagrams buttress verbal theories. 563. Ritualization is, in itself, neither good nor bad. But once we reimagine theorizing in this way, we can no longer assume that it is either superior to, or utterly different from, the Snake Dance or any other liturgy. 564. Terry Eagleton articulates a similar view: “If theory means a reasonably systematic reflection on our guiding assumptions, it remains as indispensable as ever. But we are living now in the aftermath of what one might call high theory.” Eagleton, After Theory, 2.

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565. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places. 566. Since scholars do sometimes write histories of theories, we are more accustomed to recognizing a theory’s time-boundedness than its space-boundedness. 567. Spatializing theory helps counteract the danger that words assume a “godlike agency in western culture.” Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 5. 568. See Appendix 18: What’s in a Theory? 569. Arjun Appadurai writes, “All these expressions [art, myth, dream], further, have been the basis of a complex dialogue between the imagination and ritual in many human societies, through which the force of ordinary social norms was somehow deepened, through inversion, irony, or the performative intensity and the collaborative work demanded by many kinds of ritual.” Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 5. 570. Actually, I was once asked these very questions by an astute, theoretically minded professor who studies ritual. 571. The term is Robert Merton’s. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure. 572. “Grand theory” was originally a charge leveled at sociologist Talcott Parson by C. Wright Mills. See Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). 573. By “functional” I mean “having a function,” or “doing something.” By “functionalist” I mean the school of thought associated with Herbert Spenser, Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton, and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. 574. Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology, 492ff. 575. Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris, “We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die: Interview with Umberto Eco,” Spiegel, November 11, 2009, http://www.spiegel.de/international/ zeitgeist/spiegel-interview-with-umberto-eco-we-like-lists-because-we-don-t-want-to-die-a659577-2.html. 576. Kenneth Burke, replying to a student in class, remarked, “I know you’re a Christian, but what are you a Christian against?” Burke, Grammar of Motives, 33–34. 577. Descartes, Discourse on the Method for Reasoning Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences (Nanaimo, BC: Vancouver Island University Press, 2010 [1637]), part 1, para. 5. http:// records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/descartes/descartes1.htm.

Glossary 578. This distinction is sometimes presupposed in Christian discussions of the Eucharist; see, e.g., Horton Davies, Bread of Life and Cup of Joy: Newer Ecumenical Perspectives on the Eucharist (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), viii. 579. Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 580. Marcel Mauss and Ben Robert Brewster, Sociology and Psychology: Essays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 101. 581. Peirce, The Philosophical Writings of Peirce, 102. 582. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Vintage, 1973), 26, 28. According to Douglas, ritualism is most highly developed where symbolic action is held to be most certainly efficacious. 583. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 188, 203ff., 253. 584. Douglas, Natural Symbols, 20. 585. Catherine M. Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 586. Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity. 587. See Kreinath et al., Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, xxi. They use the term in a similar way, although they do not include the forming of theories in their definition. 588. Ibid., xix–xx.

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INDEX

1492 (year of the reconquest of Spain), 126, 129–130, 156 1680 (year of the Pueblo Revolt), 107, 112, 115, 138–139, 144, 146, 154 1692 (year of the reconquest of New Mexico), 106–107, 110–112, 122, 129, 139–141, 143, 145, 147, 150, 153–154, 161 1693 (year of the first violent reconquest), 107, 140, 145, 150, 153, 161 1712 (year of the original Fiesta Proclamation), 107, 109, 127–128, 147, 150, 160 1973 fiesta, the, 4, 25–27, 32, 35, 40, 53, 111, 113, 119, 121, 124, 160, 161 2000 fiesta, the, 304 2007 fiesta, the, 53, 96, 97, 98, 111, 115, 121, 127, 144, 153, 160 2012 fiesta, the, 127 accounts, ritual, 85, 170, 278 mediatizing of, 97 seldom good narratives, 267 “Act of Taking Possession of New Mexico,” 137 action the middle of the, in a film, 124 words, a list of, 246 action, ritual, 82, 103, 121, 199, 206, 228, 242, 244, 247–249, 253–254, 256, 260, 295 and mental processes, 195 as default starting point for analysis, 242 as interaction, 243 interiorized, 253 kinds of, 206 actions ritual, 242–48 activity orienting, 12 actors ritual, 248–56 actors, ritual, 242, 248–249, 251–252, 254–256, 260 and costumes, 236

and the senses, 247 as distinct from ritual studies scholars, 6 as starting point, 247 brains and cultures, 309 can die and be replaced, 281 contrasted with stage actors, 249 acts, ritual, 103, 121, 196, 206 of obedience, 134 acts, secondary ritual, 251 Africa, 135 aftermath of a ritual, the, 96, 117 agency supernatural, 251 agency, ritual, 168, 189, 249–251, 277, 280, 299, 300, 312, 322 and supernatural forces, 298 superhuman, 189, 321 agent, ritual place as a, 258 agents and agency according to Kenneth Burke, 386n489 Agoyo, Herman, 158 Albuquerque, New Mexico, 106 Algonquins, 159 Alianza Hispano-Americana, La, 150 All Indian Pueblo Council, 128 Altena, Marga, xvii Alunyo, Benjamin, 250 American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), 103 American Folklife Center, 109 American Folklore Association., 20 Amsterdam, 182, 292 analysis, 98, 131, 225, 228, 232, 246, 291, 294–296 and storyboarding, 285 best in writing, 121 elemental, 234, 292 nontheoretically driven, 171 of audiovisually recorded data, 12

393

394

Ind e x

Anglos, 108, 111, 114–115, 124, 127, 149–151, 156, 161, 208, 215, 261 and cultural domination, 304 and domination, 304 as all wise and understanding, 156 as monied, 305 dressing up in Spanish or Mexican style, 151 in Gathering Up Again, 157 lack of traditional heritage, 151 not central to fiesta, 160 resisting, 304 the term, 126 anthropologists, 7, 20, 30–31, 44, 66, 88, 95, 101 and induction, 169 anthropology, 6, 25, 26, 44, 296 armchair, 123 cognitive, 170 late nineteenth-century American, 22 symbolic, 170 Apaches, 16–17, 19, 24, 128, 136, 138, 142, 146, 148, 213, 214, 334 The Apostle, 84 Apuleius, Lucius, 84 Arabs, 131 archaeologists, 79 archbishop, the, 34, 62, 107, 110, 122, 156, 159 Archdiocese of Santa Fe, 159 The Archetypal Actions of Ritual, 199 argumentation and scholarly writing style, 67–69 and this book, 3 contrasted with telling, 120 Aristotle, 340 Arizona, 16, 18, 51, 126, 149 Armstrong, Louis, 186 art, 4, 11 as unteachable, 4 ritual studies as an, 4, 174 the term, 177 arts martial, 307 Arts and Crafts movement, the, 149 arts, the, 106–107, 231, 315 and emotions, 310 and prediction, 174 and the written word, 333 and theater, 224 as a cultural domain, 212 as elevated, 8 in deconsecrated churches, 257 models in, 332 theorizing in, 176 theory in, 335 arts, the manual, 4 Asad, Talal, 190–192 audience fieldworkers as, 44

audiences crafting presentations for, 12 for ritual studies research, 92 audio, 92 and contemplative pacing, 89 as afterthought, 88 as secondary, 89 importance of underestimated, 89 audio recorders, 91 audio tracks, 91 audiovisual media, 81, 85, 91, 97–98 and bodiliness, 79 as requisite of fieldwork, 12 as summary, 102 the labor of producing, 99 theory and method, 95 Austin, J. L., 129 auto de entrada (triumphal entry play), 134 avatars, 81–83 avoidance, 246, 247 Aztecs, 106, 122, 137, 205, 213 Bach, 220 backstage areas, 32–34, 74, 104, 117–118, 154, 157, 180, 251 parents in, 280 Bado-Fralick, Nikki, 63 baptism and conquest, 134 Basel, 265 Batchen, Geoffrey, 272 Bates, Daniel, 281 Beethoven, Ludwig, 220–221 Beginnings in Ritual Studies, 4, 203 Behind the Scenes of the Santa Fe Fiesta (video 4), 255 beliefs, 46, 74, 95, 138, 253–254, 281 as interior, 253 espoused and implied, 254 Bell, Catherine, 171, 178, 190, 300, 343 and the types of ritual, 199 Berardinelli, Rick, 158 Berbers, 129 Bible, the, 48, 220, 278, 341 bicycles, 4, 182, 184, 233, 242, 292, 294, 296 compared with rites, 182 Dutch, 182 learning to ride, 299 rites are not, 234 Billy the Kid (pageant), 161 Black Legend, the, 135, 148, 156, 157 and Gathering Up Again, 156 Bloc, Maurice, 300 “bloodless” reconquest, 107, 161 Bloor Street, Toronto, 90 body, the, 82, 85, 122, 131, 242, 245, 248, 256, 268, 275, 278, 306 and ritual, 312–317 and the mind, 253

Ind e x and the study of ritual, 78 as beginning point for ritual studies, 253 as collective, 233 as dangerous polemical term, 308 as minded, cultured, and gendered, 309 as part of a dualism, 307 conquest inscribed in, 137 cultural meanings driven into, 309 disattuning, 302 in motion, 246 its orientation while shooting video, 88 rituals reside in, 306 the orderly disposition of, 245 Bolsas, 153 Bolt , Sophie, xvii The Book of Common Prayer, 85 boundaries, 84, 131, 229–230, 256, 260, 268, 270, 294, 296 and rituals, 246 between cultural domains, 291 between people and objects, 269 definitional, 196 imagining as webs, 181 in models, 226 monitoring, 303 of a ritual, 256 of academic disciplines, 188 of the genus ritual, 197 of the phenomenon studied, 174 violating sacred scholarly, 334 Bourdieu, Pierre, 167–168, 193, 244–246, 341–342 and the term practice, 244 his view of theory, 168 Bourke, John, 16–22, 24, 65, 207 as student of ritual, 16–24 critiques of, 20 the trajectory of his research, 21 Boyer, Pascal, 186 Brecht, Bertolt, 100 Breuer, Lee, 292 Bronowski, Jacob, 165 Brooklyn Zen Center, 278 Brown, Karen, 369n124 “A Brush with Silence” (video), 270 Buber, Martin, 340 Buc, Philippe, 191–192 Buddhism, 6, 48, 244, 292 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, 20 Burke, Kenneth, 19, 21–22, 261, 300, 340, 342 his dramatistic pentad, 381n393 Burning Man, 318 and Zozobra, 370n142 Burning of Zozobra, the, 34, 115 access to, 118 leadership in, 161 Burns, Elizabeth, 339, 343 Burns, Ken, 88, 103

395

Burstyn Varda, 215, 291 Butler, Judith and the Bad Writing Contest, 366n79 Caballeros de Vargas, 32–34, 110–112, 121, 130, 152, 155–156, 158, 282, 306 letter to Jeanette De Bouzek, 155 Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez, 136 Calero, Juan, 136 California, 76, 126, 292 Cambridge Myth and Ritual School, 223, 328 Camino Real, El, 125 Candlelight Procession, the, 115 canticos, 326 capturing the term, 85 Carleton, Coon, 343 case studies, 35, 96, 99, 199 and reigning in abstractions, 336 arise from immersion, 169 as related to method and theory, 3, 11 as starting points, 170 theory and method, 169 categories Aristotle’s and Kant’s views of, 383n442 Catholicism, 27, 102, 106–107, 110–115, 130, 134, 136, 138–139, 142, 150, 152, 158–159, 190, 323 and hegemony over fiesta, 152 and indigenous religions, 134 growth of in fiesta history, 160 Hispanic, 27 in Santa Fe, as ancestral, 326 primacy in fiesta, 159 required of Queen, 107 Spanish, 134 Caxcan, the, 136 CBC News, 319 celebration, 110, 116, 127, 129, 139, 147–148, 152, 185, 212 America’s oldest community, 300 braided with ceremony, 205 domestic, 105 of Hispanic culture, 304 religious, 150 the expansivity of, 254 center ritual, 262 ceremonies Native, 86 of possession, 130–34 possession-taking, 131 Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 130 ceremonies, 190 ceremony, 87, 110, 112, 122, 131, 132, 134, 141, 152, 161, 189, 197, 208, 215, 275

396

ceremony (continued) as distinct from ritual, 189 as the root of religion, 214 merely confirms, 202 musical, 217 of possession, 113 of reduction, 145 scholarly, 167 Ceres (the goddess), 84 change, ritual, 172, 295 and rites of passage theory, 203 ruled out by Roy Rappaport, 189 Chapple, Eliot, 343 Charles University Prague, xvii Chávez, Angelico, 127, 269, 305 Chávez, Thomas, 128 Cherokees, 213 Chief Domingo, 110–113, 121, 142, 144–145, 153–155, 158 as portrayed in 1958, 153 Chihamba the White Spirit, 170 children, 90, 107, 108, 111–112, 119, 146 and music, 222 and parallel play, 226 and the Burning of Zozobra, 109 and the study of ritual, 252 Native, 115 of conquistadors, 268 Children’s Parade, 114 Chlup, Radek, xvii Christianity, 17, 130, 134–135, 138–139, 217, 247, 258, 271–272 Arian, 129 dominance of, 146 eighteenth century, 272 generic, 149 Native conversion to, 141 Orthodox, 270 the meaning of, 191 Christians, New the term, 126 Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee (1992), 156 church and state separation of, 110 Cibola, 136 Cieslarová, Olga, xvii, 265 circumcision ritual, 325 circumference ritual, 262 City Different, the, 149 the title, 126 classicism, 80 classification, 175, 203, 249 and simple verbs, 207 Journal of Ritual Studies’ system of, 198 mental, and geography, 261

Ind e x of ritual types, 198 of rituals as a poblem, 198 what it enables and inhibits, 202 classroom, the, 28, 99 and this book, 3 reading theories in the, 172 Clifford, James, 26 Clothey, Fred, 198 clowns, 23 Cole, David, 223–225, 226 Collier, John Jr, 39 Collier, Malcolm, 39 colonialism, 6, 22, 103, 130–132, 140 Spanish, 133 Comanche dances, 151 Comanches, 136, 146, 185 Coming to the Edge of the Circle, 63 communitas, 170, 202 comparison, 118, 144, 180, 207–208, 213, 224 and higher order knowledge, 12 and the origin of theorizing, 6 axes of, 291 historical, 160 of shamanism and theater, 225 theory-driven, 291 comparisons by John Bourke, 19 competence ritual, 308 components ritual. See also parts, ritual and elements, ritual. comprehensiveness as a criterion for theory, 174 computers, 85, 198, 299 and embodiment, 82 and notetaking, 91 and virtuality, 82 for audiovisual editing, 91 for writing and for video editing, 99 use inmodeling, 181 “Concept of Ritual, The,” (article) 191 Concordia University, 86 conferences scholarly, 78 conflict, 111, 121, 126, 131, 138, 193, 219 and peace in the fiesta, 121 and performance, 120 intercultural and interreligious, 114 not resolved in festivity, 116 Confucian Book of Rites, 85 conquest, 107, 117, 122, 126, 134–137, 139–140, 142, 146, 148, 158 and cameras, 86 and counterconquest, 137 the Spanish, 129–30 use of the word prohibited, 133 of Indians versus the conquest of violence, 154

Ind e x of Mexico, 134–36 of New Mexico, 136–37 Spanish and English compared, 138 Conrad, Joseph, 61 consequences, ritual, 147 consistency as a criterion for theory, 175 contexta the importance of in studying a ritual, 41 cultural, as constructed by participants, 126 conversion and fieldwork, 46 Conversos, 126, 128 coparticipation in rituals, 46 coperformance, 48 Cortés, Hernán, 134 counterchange, 313 Counterreformation, the, 126 courses theory-and-method, 29 cowboys, 125, 150 craft, 4, 106, 107 as practical, 4 ritual studies as a, 69, 174 using method as a, 11 The Craft of Ritual Studies, 4, 26 a summary of key features of its theory and method, 336 crafts selling on the plaza, 154 creativity ritual, 315 criticism and interpretation, 69, 71 as a variant of interpretation, 71 kinds of, 74–75 positive and negative, 73 ritual, 315 criticism, reception, 92 criticism, ritual, 71–75, 121, 158 definition of, 72 differences from art criticism, 73 local, 100 reasons for, 325 risks of, 157 ritual elements and, 285 Cross of the Martyrs, 115, 152 crosses planting, 131 cuadrilla (de Vargas’s entourage), 105–107, 110, 112–115, 119, 121, 154, 255, 311–312 Culin, Stewart, 214 culture definitions of, 281 curriculum reforms, 28 Curtis, Edward R., 18, 86 Cushing, Frank Hamilton, 17, 20, 22

397

cutting the term, 87 cxplanation as “hard,” 69 Czech Republic, the, 265 d’Aquili, Eugene, 178 Dadabari temple, 199 data raw, 61 Davis-Floyd, Robbie, 76 Day of the Dead, 280 De Bouzek, Jeanette, 31, 155, 157 de Vargas figure, the, 105–107, 122, 143, 152, 157 and attunement to his cuadrilla, 311 de Vargas pageant. See Entrada de Vargas, Diego, 27, 105–106, 109–114, 117, 119, 121–122, 130, 140–148, 150, 153–155, 208, 255 his journals, 140 his mistress and illegal children, 107 his own account of the events leading to fiesta, 141 his own self-portrait, 142 his route to Santa Fe, 125 his wish for a chapel, 147 negotiations with Indians occupying Santa Fe, 145 publication of his journals, 159 “The Deconsecration of a Canadian Church (video),” 257, 313 decorum, 35, 39, 41–42 , 46, 205, 276 local, 185 defining in dictionaries, 11 definitions, 84, 189, 195, 216, 256 all-or-nothing, 188 and elemental analysis, 285 as polarized, 198 as strategies, 196 challenges to, 186 functional, of religion, 322 ignoring while building theory, 189 not expecting too much from, 186 of performance, 227 of religion, 321 of religion and spirituality, 197 of religion as requiring suprahuman agents, 321 of ritual, 186 of ritual and rite, 193 of ritual that make religiosity a criterion, 196 of ritual, family characteristics, 193 substantive, of religion, 323 the advantage of restrictive, 196 the history of, 190 versus descriptions, 235 Denison University, xvii Denninger, A.W., 108

398

depth, ritual, 229–230, 294 the metaphor of, 205 Descartes, René, 337 description, 62–65, 90, 96, 101, 122, 132, 154, 170, 171, 189, 192, 214, 258, 276, 295, 328 and comparison, 331 and theory, 331 as the task of dictionaries, 11 ethnographic, 335 full ethnographic, 64 idealized, 279 racist, 151 structural, 321 thick, 64 versus actual rite, 81 written, 102 de Wildt, Kim, xvii dialogue as tool for ritual studies research, 65 Diem, Carl, 213 discourse communities of, 68 Discourse on Method, 337 Dispensa, Joseph, 158 dissertationese, 68 characteristics of, 68 dissertations theory-and-method chapters in, 68 written as books, 68 distancing, 46 and rubber gloves, 310 documentaries, 101 documentation, 85, 91, 147 forgoing, 91 performance, 104 the partial nature of, 98 wedding, 86 documents of field research, 41 domains, 226, 228–229, 285, 294 and elements, 291 cultural, folk ways of classifying, 212 in columns, 291 musical, 217 ritual, 212 Dortmund University, xvii Douglas, Mary, 343 Driver, Tom, xvii Drums Not Guns, 310 Dudamel, Gustavo, 292 Duncan, Isadora, 317 Duntley, Madeline, 198 duration, ritual, 262 Durkheim, Emile, 178, 218 Durkheim, Émile, 29, 178, 302 Duvall, Robert, 84 dynamic ritual as, 294–297

Ind e x dynamics, ritual, 295 and human motivation, 179 dysfunctions, ritual, 310, 330 Eco, Umberto, 197, 336 ecological nature of ritual, the, 125, 181, 183, 235, 256, 259, 295, 298 economics and ritual, 283 editing, video, 87 effects, ritual, 301 efficacy, ritual, 71, 82, 227, 228 El Palacio, 150 El Pasatiempo, 152, 160 El Paso, 107, 139, 145 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 302 elements and domains, 285–293 ritual as consisting of, 231–35 ritual, used to creat a shot list, 284 elements, ritual, 223, 232, 280, 283 a figure illustrating, 235 problems with using, 285 Eliade, Mircea, 29, 203, 224, 260 embodiment, 82, 85, 256, 281, 307 and attitudes, 253 and ritual, 180, 195 and shamanism, 224 and theory, 5 Bourdieu’s view of, 244 icon as, 81 maternal, 269 of minds, 308 physical and virtual, 84 Emory University, xvii emotion ritualized, 310 emotions and attitudes, 253 enactment, 196, 228, 242, 244, 246, 247, 324 and rites of reduction, 86 the term, 243 enactments single versus conflated, 159 encomienda, 133, 137 endurance, ritual, 262, 264 English, the, 77, 86, 114, 126, 131, 135, 138, 157 and ceremonies of conquest, 131 and conquest, 157 entertainment, 56, 65, 69, 73, 95, 99, 110, 161, 214, 228 and efficacy, 227 as a cultural domain, 212 educational, 151 Haitian rituals performed as, 291 entertainment mode as a way of viewing, 56

Ind e x Entrada, the, 27, 32, 110–117, 119, 121, 124, 129, 135, 140–145, 152–153, 155, 157–161, 261 as declaring Hispanic primacy, 305 changes in, 161 in 1973, 160 shrinking of, 160 Entrada, the, of the Santa Fe Fiesta access to, 118 as based on history, 129 in 1911, 149 in 1912, 149 revision of 1967, 153 scripts, 153 the 1958, 152 women and, 119 entradas, 143 environment seizing the natural, 137 environments, 4, 229, 259–260, 295, 296, 299, 302, 313 ritual traces on, 263 rituals operate in, 259 trashing, 301 tuned in our out, 259 equipment as symbolic of being a fieldworker, 40 equipment, fieldwork, 90 Esposito, Roberto, 340 Estevanico, 128, 136 ethics fieldwork, 104 ethics fieldwork, 42–44 of fieldwork, 104 of using cameras in religious activities, 35 review, 12, 42 ethics, 113 ethics research, 118 ethics, 121 ethics, 168 ethics and legal texts, 278 ethics, 294 ethnocentrism epistemological, 167 visual, 19 Ethnographer’s Toolkit, 38 Ethnographic Film, 39 The Ethnographic Interview, 38 ethnography, 18, 21, 22, 26, 85, 103 and philosophical reflection, 3 ethos, 205 academic, 5 improvisational, 220 of an icon-writing workshop, 270 Europe, 29, 69, 130, 134–135 Europeans, 25, 130–131

399

and colonialism, 156 Evans, Patrick, 245 Exaltation of the Holy Cross, 147 exchange rituals of, 197 explanation, 110, 141, 175, 245, 293–294 and interpretation, 69–71 and ritual, 309 and simplification, 182 as requiring prediction and verification, 165 participant, 70 questions required for, 70 Facebook, 103 facilitators, ritual, 251, 280 family resemblances, 194, 196 and definitions of ritual, 196 Fasnacht, 265 feminism and the study of ritual, 253 theories and methods, 46 Fenton, Ray, 313 Ferdinand of Aragon, 130 Festival of the Holy Rosary, 148 festivity, 98, 101–102, 125, 128, 141, 148, 160–161, 208, 214, 216, 229, 256 and fiesta, 185 and peace-making, 185 and playfulness, 185 and research on children or the elderly, 117 and video, 88 as container of rituals and ceremonies, 110 as difficult examples for ritual studies, 186 as lacking a core, 160 as noninstrumental, 327 as photographic object, 103 as protean, 120 as transporting but not transforming, 115 following, 100 photogenic, 250 simultaneity and surfeit, 98 the comparative study of, 207 the dark side of, 208 the expansivity of, 254 the simultaneity of events in, 266 festivity, Caribbean, 282 fetish definition of the term, 270 La Conquistadora as a, 305 fetishism commodity, 270 Fewkes, Jesse Walter, 19, 20, 22, 207 fiction, 82 fictionality, 84, 90, 147, 196, 246 as parasitic on life, 82 Fiddler on the Roof, 225 field, the, 6, 12, 40–41

400

Ind e x

field, the, (continued) and home, 123 as research context, 81 as a dangerous place, 7 entering armed with theory and method, 169 preparing to enter, 37–40 fields as arenas of interaction, 40 fieldwork, 100, 118, 279, 336 and going elsewhere, 172 and immersion, 169 and participant observation, 12 and reading, 56 and texts, 12 and the sequence of the Santa Fe Fiesta videos, 96 and video, 79 as a pedagogical problem, 28 as an art, 37 as easy to teach, 30 as initiation, 40 by a Ghanaian student, 87 multiple ways of learning, 169 narratives of, 11 qualifications for teach, 30 reasons for conducting, 92 the author’s trajectory in conducting, 4 using definitions in, 192 versus textual research, 81 with a camera, 3 fieldworkers, 40, 46–47, 55, 60, 81, 88, 90, 118 and machines, 91 and the intention to produce texts, 81 in ethnographic films, 123 who return home, 187 fiesta. See also Santa Fe Fiesta, the. the 1919, 150 the 1920, 150 the word, 376n287 Fiesta Melodrama ethnic diversity in, 161 fiesta melodrama, the, 114 as counterperformance, 152 Fiesta Proclamation, 107 Fiesta Queen, 27, 74, 105–107, 119, 154, 158, 208, 311 fiesta, the as an abstraction, 97 fiestas, 107, 114, 148, 150, 158, 160 eighteenth century, 127 secular, 160 plural usage of the term, 185 film ethnographic, 65, 66, 101 filmmakers, 32–33, 66, 95, 118, 150, 154 accused to racism, 156 ethnographic, 120 feature, 124 young, 157

films and the Santa Fe Fiesta, 95–99 and the sensory qualities of ritual, 124 documentary, 96, 116, 118, 120 entertainment, 95 ethnographic, 65, 98 feature, 116, 118 Fire Dancers, 109 flow filmic, 87 imagining, 178 in a current, 313 of action, 92 ritual, 178, 179, 266 focus as a research metaphor, 232 followers, ritual, 250, 252, 280 “A Footwashing Ritual for Maundy Thursday” (video), 310 Fort Marcy Park, 104, 109, 153 Foul Flimflam Filches Fiestas, A, 114 fractals, 181 Franciscans, 111, 115, 127–128, 136, 138, 139, 143, 145, 150 as consumers of labor, 138 as gatherers of intelligence, 141 killed in 1696, 146 French, the, 47, 131, 133, 141 frequency ritual, 262, 266 Freud, Sigmund, 29, 178, 328 Frisbie, Charlotte, 63 From Ritual to Record, 213 front stage areas, 104 functions of ritual, 297–302 functions, ritual, 175, 252, 295, 301–303 as paradoxes, 302 Gathering Up Again: Fiesta in Santa Fe, 32, 33, 154, 155, 156, 157 gaze, the, 86 Geertz, Clifford, 29, 64, 170, 281, 340, 344 genres mixed, 170 Germans and nationalism, 208 gestation, 247 gesture, 217–218, 295, 339–340, 343 gestures distancing, 299 hyperbolic, 336 gestures, musical, 218 gestures, ritual, 122, 156, 158–159, 192 false, 121 of fealty, 143 Ghana, 87

Ind e x ghosts from the past, 32, 111, 154 in the Entrada, 111 Giovanni, Victoria de, 274 glance, the, 121 globalization, 181, 291 Globe and Mail, 83 Gloomies, 109, 119 Gluckman, Max, 343 god terms Kenneth Burke’s idea of, 367n86 Goffman, Erving, 176, 193, 223, 226–227, 340, 341 critique of, 227 The Golden Ass, 84, 85 Golden Calf, the, 316 Golgotha, 90 Goody, Jack, 298 The Gospel at Colonus, 292 grammar ritual, 308 Granada, 130 Granoff, Phyllis, xvii Greece, 19, 27, 291 Grimes, Ronald, 5, 101, 102, 120, 171, 194, 292, 336, 339–340, 342–344 Grimes, Ronald his research trajectory, 116–17 his theory, 171 Groen, Bert, xvii Grotowski, Jerzy, 225 groups ritual, 279–283 ritual, conside`rations in studying, 280 groups, ritual, 282 Guadalupe, Our Lady of, 137 gustation, 22, 44–45, 271 Gutiérrez, Ramón, 146 Guttmann, Alan, 213–215 habit John Dewey’s definition of, 382n420 habits reading, 313 habituation, 99, 136, 244, 246, 253 and habitus, 193 and the habitus, 244 Haile, Berard, 339 Haiti, 227 Halloween, 280 hands, 3 and manual arts, 5 Hawiku, 136 Heessels Meike, xvii, 267 Heidegger, Martin, 171 Heider, Karl, 39 Henley, Paul, 65–66 hermeneutics, 172 Hewett, Edgar, 150

Highgate United Church of Canada, 257 Hindus, 278, 326 historians of religion, 102 Historical Lecture, the, 105, 107, 161 Historical-Hysterial Parade (Desfile de la Gente), 114 histories of the Santa Fe Fiesta, 125 Hobsbawm, Eric, 314 holism, 306 Hollywood, 84, 99, 102, 138, 302 editing conventions, 87 Holy Cross, the, 147 Holy Week, 108 homilies Fiesta, 129 Hopis, 16–23, 90, 127–128, 138, 150, 159, 207 learning from, 23 Horton, Sarah, 28, 304 houngans, 224 Hualpi, the pueblo of, 18 Huichols, 90 Huizinga, Johan, 342 humanities, the and peer review, 335 and the written word, 333 models in, 332 Humphrey, Caroline, 170, 189–190, 199–201 rules out personal ritual intentions, 189 Hüsken, Ute, xvii hypotheses, 174 Hysterical-Historical Parade, the, 152 iconoclasm, 114, 151, 247, 271, 272 iconoclasts, 114, 271 iconophiles, 114, 271 icons, 81, 267, 268, 270–273 as holy, 271 as recognizable, 272 narrow definition of, 271 traditional ingredients, 273 Ideas in Action: A Guide to Critical Thinking and Writing, 67 illud tempus, 224 imagination, 81, 85, 177, 182, 220, 224, 234, 253 actions committed only in the, 83 and historical events, 129 and theory, 176, 183 guardians of the, 335 historians and archaeologists rely on, 79 of ritual and theater, 226 of wholes, 174 theoretical and methodological expressions of, 334–337 impression management, 255 “Improvising Spiritually” (video), 274

401

402

Ind e x

inaction, 247 incorporation, 202 Independence Day, 149 indexes of articles and books about ritual, 198 on video cameras, 91 Indian as a category, 27 Indiana Jones, 90 Indians, 100, 106–107, 110, 112–113, 121–122, 125, 130–131, 135, 137–139, 141–146, 148, 150–152, 154, 156, 157 and 1970s protest movements, 154 and Edward R. Curtis, 86 and participation in fiesta, 158 and stereotypes, 155 and vassalage, 134 angry, in the Entrada, 111 as objects of possession, 137 as participants in ceremonies of conquest, 131 becoming more respectful of, 158 converting to Christianity, 135 in the 1967 and 1958 scripts, 154 noble, 156 playing the role of Muslims, 135 ready for war, 142 under Spanish rule, 133 who use cameras, 86 individuals, 6 infrastructure, 308 of rituals and festivals, 118 ritual, 307 Inquisition, the Spanish, 126 insider/outsider problem, the, 6, 84, 98, 250–251 arriving as a stranger, 12 intentionality, 171, 189, 195, 199, 233, 246–247, 264, 274, 294–295 and good intentions, 311 and ritual actions, 249 as what distinguishes human action from mere motion, 242 attributable to objects, 322 versus function, 301 intentions, ritual and ritul effect, 301 interaction ritual, 193, 197, 340 interiority, 79, 254–255 the necessity to posit a human, 253 Internet, the, 83, 181 and publicationpossibilities, 79 research on, 83 ritual on, 80 interpretation, 121–122, 160, 224, 276 and environment, 260 and the application of theory, 173 as “soft,” 69 of ritual scripts, 191 of symbols, 191

participant versus scholarly, 70, 252 interviewers effective, 47 interviewing, 47–54, 119, 249 about ritual, 187 and fieldwork, 12 and online transcripts, 79 and transcribing, 91 as different from chat or interrogation, 47 transcribing, 91 Victoria di Giovanni, 274 with video, 91 The Invention of Tradition, 314 irony, 90 Isabella of Castille, 130 Islam, 128–129, 133, 247, 258 Jackman, Shadrack, 274 Jaipur, India, 199 jazz, 215, 219, 220 Jemez Mountains, 125 Jerusalem, 261 Jesus playing, 90 Jews, 51, 126, 128, 135, 326 John XXIII, Pope, 152 Johnson, Mark, 178 Jones, Marline, 282 Joseph, Norma, 86 Joubert, Joseph, 47 Journal of Ritual Studies, the, 198 The Invention of Tradition, 314 Judaism, 128, 192, 247, 258, 277 Judea, 130 “Judging the Junior Parade” (video), 282 Jung, C. G., 52, 328 kachinas, 136, 139 Kaniatobe, Randy, 154 Kanitobe, Randy, 154–155, 157 katas, 307 Kent Presbytery, 313 Kessell, John, 122, 140, 159 kinesthetic activity, 22, 23, 247, 271 of researchers, 334 kivas, 17– 20, 23, 139, 334 snakes in, 23 stepping back from, 23 Kiwanis Club, 33–34, 108–109, 117, 306 and scholarships, 160 projects for children, 34 Kluckhohn, Clyde, 281 knighting of de Vargas, 122 Knights of Columbus, 150 know-how, 86, 280, 324 and method, 12 knowing

Ind e x ontological and ethical, 327 knowledge boundaries of, 13 how-to, 12 kinds of, 326 Koran, the, 48, 273, 278 Kordis, George, 270 Kreinath, Jens, 344 Kroeber, Alfred L., 281 Kukai his treatment of Japanese Shingon Buddhist ritual, 6 La Conquistadora, 27, 32, 68, 107, 109, 110–115, 122, 127–128, 137, 139, 141, 145, 147–148, 152, 154, 156, 158, 269 and family lines, 268 as fetish, 305 as Our Lady of Peace, 133 coronation of, 269 her honor guard, 152 the statue of, 268 La Conquistadora: The Autobiography of an Ancient Statue, 269 lady, the morning, 275 Laidlaw, James, 170, 189–190, 199, 200, 201 rules out personal ritual intentions, 189 Lakoff, George, 178 Lakotas, 16, 19 Langdon, William Chauncy, 125 language, 110, 131, 224 and music, 236 as tacitly sonic, 275 body, 274 body, as emitted, 255 kinds of ritual, 276 of gesture, 218 ritual as a, 180 ritual as a, with a grammar, 293 the sacralizing of, 277 the Spanish, 127 theatrical, 225 language barriers, 80 language games, 186 languages learning other people’s, 135 of the field and academy, 31 Pueblo and Spanish, 138 ritual, 274–79 las Casas, Bartolomé de, 135 Laws of Burgos, the, 137 Laws of the Indies, the, 106 Lawson Thomas, 170, 189, 190, 308–309, 321, 322 Lawson, Thomas, 170, 189, 308, 321, 342 Leach, Edmond, 298 leaders, ritual, 251, 252, 258, 279–280 and Aaron, 116

403

and forgetting parts of a ritual, 234 as males, 252 as symbols of a ritual collective, 281 children as, 119 LeCompte, Margaret, 38 Lee, Patrick, 270 Lensic Theater, 33 LGBT people and the study of ritual, 252 Library of Congress, 109 Life Passages Series, University of California Press, 76 lifespan, the, of ritual, 264, 272 limen the term, 176 liminality, 170, 173, 202, 267 literature reviews in dissertations, 68 liturgy, 88, 107, 130, 141, 143, 190, 197, 200, 205, 271–272, 276, 296, 316 and celebration, 185 and food, 310 and legality, 137 and pageantry, 113 and perfomrance, 200 and solemnity, 185 and the reconquest of Santa Fe, 145 and theater, 223 -centered rituals, 201 deconsecration, 257 families of, 187 improvised, 278 reenacted, 110 versus performance, 200 Visigothic, 130 logocentrism, 167 Looking for an Icon, 272 Lord’s Prayer, the, 110 Lovato, Ernest, 154 Luther, Martin, 208 MacAloon, John, 216 Maestas, Monica, 158 magic, 197, 205, 277 and liturgy, 297 as a label, 134 conceptual, 170 of definitions, 195 of film, 95 of print and film, 335 Magloire, Marion, 282 Mahler, Gustav, 220 Mama Lola, 369n124 Mansbridge, Peter, 319 mapping, 132, 228, 230, 291, 294 consequences, 259 domain, as culture-bound, 212 domains, 217 spatial patterns, 256

404

Ind e x

maps and Dutch conquest, 132 Marcus, George, 26 Mariachi Extravaganza, 105 Martinez-Serros, Hugo, 117, 119 martyrs, 115, 136, 138 Marx, Karl, 270, 328 Mary of Remedies, 142 mas bands, 282 Masons Scottish Rite, 150 Mass of Reconciliation, 158 Mass, the Roman Catholic, 100, 107, 110, 113–115, 121, 136, 147, 316 and the conquest of Mexico, 134 as the beginning of fiesta, 109 changes in, 316 Latin in, 312 saying, 275 Matachines, Los, 151 Maundy Thursday, 310–311 Mauss, Marcel, 341 McCauley, Robert, 170, 189, 190, 308–309, 321–322, 342 rules out religious without superhuman agents, 189 meaning as about resonance rather than reference, 319 Meaning of Meaning, The, 317 “The Meaninglessness of Ritual,” (article) 317 Mecca, 258 media, 78, 80, 84, 97, 111, 215, 273 and the study of ritual, 78–92 as means of discovery, 79 iconic, 273 verbal, 79 meditation rituals, 254 Meem, John Gaw, 152 memory flashbulb, 325 kinesthetic, 259 Merton, Robert, 343 Messenger, Troy, xvii Messing, Damiaan, xvii metaphor, 177–81 and analogy, 180 metaphors hydraulic, 178 static, 179 Metaphors We Live By, 178 method, 11, 78–79, 168, 192 and media dependence, 79 and mood, 83 and the lives and times of theorists, 335 as about grounding, 12 as attempt to control, 24 as bodily action, 21 as related to case and theory, 3

as related to case studies and theory, 11 as tool of intervention, 23 assumptions lying below, 332 being explicit about, 175 broadly construed, 69 camera-in-hand, 35 Christopher Small’s, 222 does not arise automatically from theory, 170 ethonographic and historical, 12 how to operationalize theory, 169 illustrated by a case, 161 lack of books on ritual, 37 learning participants’ language as part of, 187 negotiating center and periphery, 21 reflecting on, 12 scientific, 335 the kind advanced in this book, 12 methodology as meta-activity, 12 as requiring two kinds of knowledge, 12 two forms of, 11 methods ethnographic, 308 for studying interior ritual, 253 Mexico and the Inquisition, 126 microphones, 80, 88–89, 105 Middle Ages, the, 82, 190, 291, 341 Miller, Glenn, 186 Misa Panamericana, 316 missionaries, 139, 146 missionizing, 103, 136, 138 mobility rituals of, 197 models acted out, 334 as selective, 332 of and for, 331 of the emergence, decline, and death of a ritual, 330 scholarly, 331 visual, 44 wholes and parts, 332 modes according to Harvey Whitehouse, 200 of consciousness, 173 modes, ritual, 130, 200, 203, 205, 208, 229, 261, 291 and fundamentalism, 201 and layers of ritual, 205 and musical metaphors, 203 as makeshift, 205 do not work as ritual types, 204 multiple, 262 not a substitute for taxonomy, 207 Mohammed, 134 Mohawks, 159 money in ritual, 283

Ind e x moods impact on research, 83 moods, ritual, 83, 156, 205, 265, 322 in French ceremonies of conquest, 131 Moors, 129, 135, 150, Also See Muslims Moqui. See Hopi Moran, Peter, 18 Moriscos, 126, 136 Mormons, 19 Morocco, 129 Moros y Cristianos (the play), 134–135 motion, 78, 179, 242, 246, 248, 294 Mozart effect, the, 275 Mozart, Wolfgang, 219–220 multisensory experience, 21, 45, 98, 273, 315 Museum of New Mexico, the 150 music African, 222 classical, 220 musicking, 218, 221–222 Muslims, 126, 130, 133, 135 myth the Santa Fe, 129 The Myth of Santa Fe, 150 mythos, 224 Nanahe, 19 Naranjo, 154 narration, 11, 183, 276, 296, 330 and dialogue, 65–67 and ritual, 267 and storyboarding, 284 and the first three videos, 120 and theory, 176 Entrada, 112 in interviewing, 119 of fiesta, 110 of method, 11 of research, 169 narrative academic, 300 audiovisual, 102 difference from ritual, 66 personal, 67 structures in ritual, 66 narratives journey, 22 “Narratives: The Guilty Secret of Ethnographic Film-Making,” (article) 65 National Endowment for the Humanities, 25 National Theater, the (of Prague), 265 Native people. See Indians and specific groups. Navahos, 18, 63, 126, 128, 138, 146, 159 as singing their ceremonies, 275 Nazianzus, Gregory, Bishop of, 166 Ndembu, the, 170 Neale, Robert, 342 negotiation

405

as a fieldwork process, 41–44 neopaganism in the Santa Fe Fiesta, 109 nesting, 110, 181, 216 of Olympic genres, 216 neurophenomenology, 181 New England Complex Systems Institute, 181 New Mexico, 3, 16, 25–26, 32, 35, 62, 106–107, 109, 125–128, 130, 135–136, 138–139, 143, 145, 151–152, 155, 157, 159 governed by de Vargas, 140 history, 18th and 19th century, 147–49 prominent families in, 268 reconquest of, 130, 141 resettling, 112 Spanish presence in, 112 the Kingdom of, 149 the ritual birth of, 137 the role of the church in settling, 115 Night-Light Parade, the, 114 Niza, Marcos de, 136 Norbeck, Edward, 343 Norgaard, Rolf, 67 Norwegian Medical Association, the, 325 notes fieldwork, 61 handwritten versus audiovisual, 62 Novak, Michael, 214–215, 291 novenas, 69, 115, 147, 148, 269 Oberammergau Passion Play, the, 150 objectivism, 46 objects analogous, 182 contrasted with events, 95 enlivened by cinematic editing, 88 of study, 173 photographing, 89 objects, ritual, 103, 134, 139, 225, 232, 236, 242, 249, 251, 267, 270–271, 273, 267–273, 280, 285 as distinct from sacred objects, 268 as museum goods, 269 as subjects, 269 found object as, 3 resonances with bodies, 275 texts as, 278 worry about idolizing, 277 observers, 45, 73, 118, 193, 221, 225, 227, 251–252, 292 and interpretations, 121 and the inference of values, 254 ignorant, 299 scholarly, 73 observing as a fieldwork task, 45 Occupy New Haven, 310 Ogden, Charles, 317 Ohkay Owingeh pueblo, 316

406

Old Man Gloom. See Zozobra, See Zozobra Old Order Mennonites, 313 olfaction, 17, 18, 21–22, 44, 45, 247, 271 Olson, Carl, 172 Olympics, the, 214, 216 Oñate, Juan de, 137, 143 Ong, Walter, 344 Ontario, 257, 313 ophiolotry, 19, 21 Order of Santiago, 130, 146 orientation as a criterion for theory, 175 Orozco, Diego de, 136 Ortiz Mountains, 116 Our Lady. See the Virgin Mary or specific titles Our Lady of Peace, 32, 111, 133, 154, 156 Our Lady of Remedies, 146 Our Lady of the Conquest. See La Conquistadora. outsiders, 45, 84, 87, 98, 126, 157, 161, 185, 251, 257 and insiders, 185 photographers as, 250 Oxford Ritual Studies Series, 77 Oxford University Press, 77 pageantry, 110, 125, 134 American, 125 and tourism, 149 criticisms of, 158 historical, 150 historical, in America, 149 Palace of the Governors, 106, 149 Palo Duro Canyon, 161 parades, 114, 121, 147, 160, 208, 282 and children, 152, 316 iconoclasm and parody in, 161 in the 1911 fiesta, 149 in the Velvet Feast, 265 Night-Light, 107 Parsons, Talcott, 213 participant observation, 3, 25, 30, 44–47, 251 and fieldwork, 12 Participant Observation, 38 participants, ritual, 250–251 as participating selectively, 46 ritual, 80 their muteness about ritual, 47 participation in observed rituals, 46 parts and wholes, 182 interacting, 236 ritual, 234 passion controlled, 219 played down by theory, 179 passivity, 225 and receptivity, 225

Ind e x peaceful re-conquest the phrase, 158 Peelen, Janneke, xvii Pehal, Martin, xvii Peirce, C. S., 341 performance, 200–201, 216–217, 224, 226–228, 242, 244, 245–247, 256, 262, 279, 296 a conductor’s control over, 219 and attitude, 255 and liturgy, 200 and place, 335 and texts, 81 as a disappearing act, 97 as constructed by film, 100 as different from ritual texts, 80 as dramatistic metaphor, 181 as evanescent, 127 as showing, 243 as the showing of a doing, 227 as what appears on the screen, 308 captured on film, 263 classical music, 217, 221 critique during or after, 168 critique of, 161 cultural, 188, 226 describing, 5 front-door, 280 General Kearny’s occupation of Santa Fe, 148 negotiations over, 128 nonliterate, 220 of peace, 120 of sacred texts, 273 of social harmony, 219 of triumphal moments, 161 scholarly, 167 scholarly methods as, 334 scripted as not spiritual, 274 theories, 193 versus competence, 308 versus liturgy, 200 versus ritual fantasy, 85 performance studies, 306 performative utterances, 276 Performing the Reformation, 208 permeability, 220, 229, 233, 260, 294 of the musical world, 222 permission to document a ritual, 35 phases, ritual, 111, 175, 202, 224, 258, 262–263, 266–267, 296 as dramalike, 266 minimal, 234 Phelan, Helen, xvii phenomenology, 172 photographers, 78, 86, 89–90, 250 photography, 32, 35, 39, 86, 89, 272 in Symbol and Conquest, 28 photos, 14, 27, 61, 81, 86, 96, 103, 272

Ind e x and amnesia, 86 iconic, 272 still, 89 tourist, 86 Picasa, 314 pictures, 18, 28, 92, 113–114, 272 and words, 95 as booty, 86 of Highgate United, 257 used to jazz up an account, 102 Picuri, 144 Pius XII, Pope, 152 Place of the Governors, 154 places ritual, 103, 250, 256, 257, 256–262 ritual, as first lines of attack, 134 play and critical thinking, 183 plays equestrian, 134 in conquest, 135 Plog, Fred, 281 plots, 56, 58, 64, 74, 101, 109, 121, 156, 274, 295–296 absence of in festivity, 116 and rituals, 66 and the beginning, middle, and end of rituals, 262 and the development of community, 125 Poheyemo, 139 Polish Theatre Laboratory, the, 368n93 Popé, 139, 154 Port-au-Prince, 291 portraiture, ritual, 63 Portuguese, the, 131–132 and the term, 270 posture, 6, 168, 217, 295 for navigating the world, 259 interpreting, 121 messages encoded in, 121 polemical, 80 prescribed, 245 power and ritual, 302–306 and the study of ritual, 42 rituals and, 303 PowerPoint, 78 practice, ritual, 242, 245, 264 as preliminary, 325 praxis meaning of the term as paired with theoria, 166 prediction and theory, 174 Prefiesta events, 107 preparation for fieldwork, 169 ritual, 98, 117, 245, 263 presentations

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multimedia, at conferences, 78 scholarly and public, 77 princesas (Spanish princesses), 106–107 processes ritual, 142, 226, 284, 294–296 processions, 84–85, 115, 131, 147–148, 150, 152, 158, 208, 265, 269 candelight, 304 Day of the Dead, 280 in the Velvet Feast, 265 proposals grant, 60 proprioception, 247 Protestantism, 102, 146, 150, 215 and the idea that rituals work, 297 Protestants, 138, 257, 294 publication and presenting on ritual, 75–78 as a goal of research, 13 as reason for research, 75 cultures of, 77 Pueblo revolt, the, 137–39 Pueblo Revolt, the, 138, 139 Pueblos, 18, 27, 31–32, 51, 106–107, 110–111, 112, 122, 126–128, 137–140, 144–146, 148, 150–152, 154, 158–159, 185 and ceremonials, 151 and factionalism, 139 and factionalism, 143 and protest, 153 and the1696 uprising, 146 and the Santa Fe monument, 261 as a category, 27 boycotting fiesta, 154 divisions among, 140 in the 1921 fiesta, 151 in the Entrada, 111 participation in fiesta, 151 puja, 199 qibla, 258 quantification, 174, 213 Quartier, Thomas, xvii Queen of Gloom, 109 queen’s court, the, 106 querying, 247, 336 and being human, 5 as interrogatory activity, 79 systematic, 242 theories, 183 questions “why,” 298 as the engines of research, 47 audience, 53 counter, 50 kinds of interview, 48 meta-, 50 personal, 50

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questions (continued) reception, 53 reframing research, 53 research, 49 theory, 54 thesis, 53 question-sets, 49 “Quittin’ Time” (music), 270 Radboud University Nijmegen, xvii Ranger, Terence, 314 Rappaport, Roy, 170, 172, 189–190, 200, 300, 342 Ratzinger, Joseph, 316 reading fieldwork accounts, 38 in search of theory and method, 55–59 reading and writing as foundational methodological skills, 55 as methodologically important, 28 Reading Ethnographic Research: A Critical Guide, 39 rebellion, rituals of, 198 receptivity in fieldwork, 38 receptivity, ritual, 166, 192, 225, 246 reconquest, 107, 112, 129–130, 139–141, 143, 145, 147, 150, 154, 161 of New Mexico in 1692, 139–145 of New Mexico, 1693 and 1696, 145–147 of Spain, 128 Reconquista, the. See reconquest recorders, 90 recursivity methodological, 170, 262, 267 Refiguring Death Rites project, the, xvii reflexivity, 35, 46, 87, 123 regularity ritual, 262, 266 religion, 7, 125, 128, 130, 134, 159, 166, 189, 191, 201, 214, 217, 224, 227, 229, 277, 291, 295, 300 ancient Greek, 264 and ritual, 196 and spirituality, 197 and sport, 213 and the center, 260 as a cultural domain, 212 as a scholarly construction, 188 as heart of fiesta, 159 as rooted in ceremony, 214 being addicted to, 84 imposing a, 138 in doctrinal mode, 200 its role in conquests and reconquests, 129 Muslim policy of no compulsion, 133 Native and Catholic, 153 on the sidelines of secular sport, 214 studying by way of sacred texts, 80

Ind e x the grammar of, 214 the rhetoric of in a coffee shop, 275 the structures and processes of, 197 theory of, 166 “Religion as an Anthropological Category,” (article) 191 Religion on the Ground Series, University of California Press, 76 religions interactions among, 129 religious studies combining ethnographic and historical approaches in, 387n499 repartimento, 133, 137 repetition, 267 and fractals, 182 and meaning, 325 as definitive of ritual, 194 in ritual, 186 ritual, 264 representations are not what they represent, 97 Requirimento, the, 132, 133, 136 research as a narrative practice, 13 as a performative practice, 13 as a ritual practice, 13 as a tradition, 13 as narrative, 13 as performative, 22 ritual studies, as personal, 36 scenarios, 335 terminology of, 187 the narrative arc of, 13–15 Research Methods in Anthropology, 38 Rethinking Symbolism, 317 Revellers, the, 282 revision ritual, 279 Reyna, Diane, 31, 155 rhythm cinematic, 87 Ribera-Ortega, Pedro (Pete), 32, 153 Richards, Ivor, 317 Rio Grande River, the, 125, 128 Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics, and the Culture of Sport, 215 rites of passage, 82, 87, 201, 202, 203, 267 as distinct from festivity, 185 as models for all kinds of ritual, 174 as special, 325 as three-phased, 202 theory, 202 rites, seasonal, 201, 224 ritual and communication, 318 and meaning, 317–28 and meaning-making, 328

Ind e x and models, 328–34 and power, 302–6 and the body, 312–17 and transformation, 312–17 as a dependent variable, 5 as a domain, 226–30 as a means of resistance, 136 as blinding, 327 as central focus, 41 as condensed, 195 as enacted, 196 as meaningless, 317 as prescribed, 195 as transformative, 179 as undramatic, 87 as working, 297 books on, 37 Christopher Small’s defintions of, 218 David Craig’s definition of, 389n543 defining the term, 185–97 evaluating, 72 modes of, 203–7 reasons for studying, 5, 75 virtual, 81 why study, 5 Ritual and Its Consequences, 201 Ritual Creativity, Improvisation, and the Arts (project), xviii “Ritual Creativity, Improvisation, and the Arts” (video album), 274 Ritual Criticism, 96, 120, 121, 193, 194 ritual participants, 80 and theorists, 300 ritual roles, 248 ritual studies as interdisciplinary, 7 broad and narrow uses of the term, 7 Ritual Studies Lab, the, 192, 333, 336 ritualists, 5, 168, 206, 228, 251, 299, 303, 317, 319 and the environment, 259 as acting or behaving, 243 as model-users, 333 as ritual actors, 192, 249 as ritual practitioners, 6 in groups, 249 new, 281 their intentions, 227 who they become by enacting rituals, 252 rituality, 194 ritualization, 193, 246, 275, 300 according to Catherine Bell, 178 and representation, 97 and ritualizing, 192 definition of, 193 degrees of, 193 internal, 82 of everyday life, 193 of manhood, 215

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of manliness, 326 of words in books, 277 quotidian, 270 the term, 193 ritualized acts according to Humphrey and Laidlaw, 199 ritualizing, 85, 116, 130, 157, 225, 265 and improvisation, 220 and ritualization, 192 and theorizing, 167 as embodied, 5 definition of, 192, 193 improvised, ruled out Humphrey and Laidlaw, 189 of conquest, 140 rituals as enacted models of how things ought to be, 331 as meaningful, 318 as musiclike, 266 as narrativelike, 266 as windows on culture, 95 classifying, 197–203 comparing, 207–10 secular, 198 the life cycle of, 330 videoed, 81 ritus the Latin term, 192 Roach, Joe, xvii Rocky Mountains, 125 roles ritual, list of, 251 roles, ritual, 248 Roman Missal, the, 62 Romantics, 177 rosaries, 141 and safe passage, 141 Rosario Chapel, 35, 100, 107, 109, 129 built as terminus for processions, 148 rounding, 224 routinization, 118 Russell Bernard, H., 38 sacrality cloaks of, 328 sacrifice, 197, 198 Saint Lydia’s (video), 278 San Miguel Mission, 149 Sanchez, Archbishop, 32 Sanchez, Robert, 156, 158 Sangre de Cristo Mountains, 150 Santa Fe as capital of New Mexico, 125 as fieldwork site, 31 meaning of the name, 126 named after Santa Fe, Spain, 130 the religious complexity of, 126 Santa Fe Cathedral, 107, 122 Santa Fe County, 106

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Santa Fe Fiesta, the, 4, 99, 100, 102, 105, 107–108, 110–111, 115, 117, 119, 121, 126, 127–130, 132, 140, 142, 144, 147–148, 150, 152, 153–155, 158, 160, 207–208, 229, 281, 284, 327 a summary description of, 329 and religious politics, 128 and space, 261 and the body, 311 and the notion of festivity, 185 as a big party, 185 as a means of resisting Anglicization, 127 as a ritual celebrating a ritual, 140 as a weak means, 300 as an invention, 305 as an unbroken tradition, 154 as beginning with the Burning of Zozobra, 109 as distinct from videos of it, 97 as filmed, 116 as non-religious, 109 as oldest celebration, 127 becoming more religious, 152 cataloging the actions of, 284 commercialization of, 152 compared with Mardi Gras, 151 contrasted with specific fiestas, 159 criticism of, 315 dangers to scholars studying, 157 followed from beginning to end, 103 from 1919 through 2007, 161 function of, 305 historical context of, 124 histories tributary to, 125 history of in the 20th and 21st centuries, 149–64 homilies in, 115 in context, 125 kinds of knowledge in, 326 mounted by people with differing opinions, 119 mystified by video, 97 narrating the history of, 129 proclamations in, 109 resistance to, 121 ritual criticism and the, 120 Santa Fe as the hero of, 125 the ideological core of, 110 “The Santa Fe Fiesta, 2007” (video) responses to viewing, 116 The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented, 28, 304 Santa Fe Fiesta Council, 32–35, 98, 105, 107, 110–111, 115, 121, 152, 154–156, 158, 159, 229, 281 charged with racism, 158 Jeannette De Bouzek, 155 minutes, religious actions recorded in, 159 Participation Committee, 158 president of, 33 Santa Fe Fiesta Council president, the, 98 Santa Fe Fiesta Proclamation, the, 147

Ind e x Santa Fe New Mexican, the, 149, 151, 152 Santa Fe Opera, the, 105, 126 Santa Fe Playhouse, the, 114 Santa Fe Plaza, the, 23, 33, 102, 105, 106, 109, 110–112, 129 as sacred place, 151 as sacred symbol, 261 avoiding, 262 Santa Fe Tertio-Millennial Anniversary Greater Celebration and Industrial Exposition, 148 Santa Fe Trail, the, 151 “Santa Fe’s Own: A History of Fiesta,” (article) 128 Santiago (St. James), 130 Santiago de Compostela, 130 Santiago Matamoros (St. James the Moor-Slayer), 130 Santiago! (the shout), 143 Santuario de Guadalupe, 149 Saracens, 130 Satapatha Brahmana, the, 6 SBNRs (spiritual-but-not-religious people), 323 scenarios, 242, 335 scholarly, 335 scenery in theater, 225 Schechner, Richard, 340, 342, 344 critique of, 227 Schensul, Jean, 38 School of Advanced Research, 26, 31, 150 science, xviii, 11, 183 and method, 335 art and mysticism, 182 as a tradition, 166 as having clout, 4 cognitive, 181, 307, 309 medieval Christian, 131 ritual studies as a, 4, 174 the term, 69 Scott, Emily, 278 Scott, Susan L., xvii Scott-Grimes, Bryn, xvii Scott-Grimes, Cailleah, xvii script ritual as a, 191 scripts, 111, 121, 152, 153, 158, 217, 224, 225, 248 as read, 120 elipses in Entrada, 153 Entrada, 112 struggles with, 113 the 1958 Entrada, 153 Second Life, 82, 83, 85, 273 Secretary of the State of New Mexico, 100 secularism, 213 secularization, 52, 152 of sport, 215 Seder Nashim, 278 Seed, Patricia, 131, 133 Sekaquaptewa, Emory, 20

Ind e x Seligman, Adam, 201 senses,the and ritual studies, 80, 95, 245, 247, 271, 273, 310 in theory, 167 ritual studies and the, 78 the psychology of, 247 and the three multinational monotheisms, 247 sensibilities musical, 220 ritual, 157, 253, 315 sensorium organization, 247 of theories and methods, 335 Sered, Susan, 176 sets, ritual, 176, 216, 259, 295, 331 settings, ritual, 259 Shakespeare, William, 340 shamanism, 200, 224, 225 Shand, Jess, 186 Sheehan, Archbishop Michael J., 122 Shinohara, Koichi, xvii Short History of the Destruction of the Indies, 135 show and tell the phrase, 99 Shriners, 150 Shuster, Will, 108, 117–118 “Simulation and Dissimulation, Of,” (publication) 190 sincerity according to Adam Seligman and his colleagues, 201 Small, Christopher, 176, 217, 222, 291 Smith , Jonathan Z., 189–190, 260 Smith, Robertson, 6 Smithsonian Institute, 17 Snake Dance, Hopi, 16–23, 150 Snake-Dance of the Moquis, 18–20 snakes, 18, 19 as enemy, 22 herding with feathers, 23 Snoek, Jan, 178, 344 social drama, 52, 170, 193, 226, 228 social sciences and peer review, 335 and the study of ritual, 279 models in the, 332 Sokol, Casey, xvii sound person the term, 88 Southwest, the American, 106, 118, 125, 128, 136, 152 and La Conquistadora, 269 histories of, 125 space, ritual, 103, 250, 256–257, 262 and ritual objects, 268 Jonathan Z. Smith’s view of, 260 Spanish (people, language, and culture), 27, 86, 100, 102, 106–107 , 109–115, 119, 121, 124, 127, 129–139, 141, 145–146, 148, 151–153, 155–158

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and the English language, 107 and fiesta control, 160 and fiesta, 159 and the speaking of Spanish in Santa Fe, 127 and the Virgin Mary, 268 and veiled protest, 304 and Zozobra, 108 arrival in the New World, 126 attached by Native people, 185 de Vargas as exemplar of, 140 demonization of the, 135 empowered by fiesta, 305 geopolitics of Hispanic Catholicsm, 128 Spanish Crown, the, 107, 110, 111, 113, 134, 138 spectators, 246, 251 and performance, 243 Sperber, Dan, 317 spirituality and religion, 197 definitions of, 323 sport, 213–215, 226, 229 and ritual, 213–16 Spradley, James, 38 St. Benedict’s Rule, 190 St. Francis, 114, 137 St. James, 130, 146, See also Santiago Staal, Frits, 317 Stacy, Jess, 186 Starbuck’s, 275 Star-Spangled Banner, the, 110 static dimensions of ritual, 160, 168, 179, 183, 202, 227, 230, 233, 256, 294–296, 313, 315 Stausberg, Michael, 344 Stephenson, Barry, xvii, 98, 207, 208, 257 stereotyping, 6, 114, 135, 150, 156, 215 in ritual, 186 stories, 11, 13, 30, 36–37, 58, 65, 74, 103, 117, 136, 296, 304 about fieldwork, 11, 35, 65 about rituals, 66 and arguments, 68 and books, 273 and ritual objects, 269 and theories, 336 and warfare, 136 as source of orientation, 3 Pubelo, 146 told during fiesta, 110 storytelling, 11, 15, 65, 88, 120 as advice, 11 treated as inferior to theorizing, 334 Strait of Gibraltar, 129 structuralism biogenetic, 170 structure a metaphor in ritual theory, 178 ritual, 177 ritual as a kind of, 179

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Ind e x

structures ritual, 284 students graduate, 8, 335 ritual studies, 83 students of ritual and theory usage, 170 as synonym for “ritual studies scholar,” 6 studies, ritual, 80–82, 92, 98, 102, 183, 191, 207, 217, 228, 233, 246, 251, 253, 260, 295 and ethnographic life history, 249 and festivity, 186 and methods, 78 and the tutelage of anthropology, 6 as a craft, 4 as a manual art, 4 as a manual art, 5 as cross-cultural in scope, 6 as encompassing all forms of ritual, 6 as younger than the study of ritual, 6 chair of, 182 disciplines contributing to, 301 history, 306 interdisciplinary aspirations of, 188 interiority and exteriority, 255 orientation in, 3 possible focii of research, 56 recommendations for, 122 teachers of, 8 the root of, 82 units of research, 232 style, 99, 139, 151, 269 Byzantine, 271 fieldwork, 90 in scholarly writing, 69 of Mennonite clothing, 313 of querying, 336 of using scholarly instruments, 11 Santa Fe, 261 subjunctivity, 83, 85, 219, 243, 315, 336 ritual and, 201 surfaces, 229–230, 253, 308 and bodies, 246 and decoration, 300 as beginning point, 309 Surviving Columbus: The Story of the Pueblo People, 155 symbol, 158, 170 and metaphor, 180 as requiring interpretatin, 191 La Conquistadora as a, 128 Symbol and Conquest, 26– 28, 31–32, 103, 304 evaluation of, 26 symbolism, 110, 170, 190, 217, 268, 281, 317 a theory of, 320 and ritual, 317 and the nonsymbolic, 320 as language, 180

of occupation, 131 queenship and the Virgin Mary, 107 ritual and, 191 rituals’ power to incubate, 303 spatial, 258 symbols as presuming absence, 324 athletes as, 216 reading, 181 systematicity. See consistency ritual, 245 systems, ritual, 181, 263–264 and rites, 192 and ritual traditions, 232 compared with other kinds of systems, 181 tactility, 18, 21–22, 44–45, 248, 271 tactioception, 247 “tales from the field,” (expression) 30, 65 Taos Pueblo, 139 taxes, head in Islam, 134 taxonomy, 203 teaching, xvii, 172, 270 about ritual, 13 as methodologically important, 28 of ritual, 266 scenarios, 335 theory as a pedagogical problem, 7 values with ritual, 323 teaching, team, 99 tedium effect, 200, 266 Tekakwitha, Kateri, 159 Tepehuan, the, 136 Terence, the Roman comedy writer, 5 terminology indigenous, 69 technical, 69 testing in the humanities and social sciences, 173 Tesuque Pueblo, 142, 144, 154 Tewa, 139 Texas, 126 Texas (pageant), 161 texts primary source, 80 ritual, 80, 85, 217, 276, 279 and ritual performances, 278 as primary sources, 278 as sonic residue, 277 as stand-ins for actual rituals, 80 history of studying, 79 sacred, 6 scholarly writing about, 12 textualism, 80 theater, 193, 208, 213, 217, 224–226, 228–229, 265, 295–296

Ind e x and ritual, 223–226 and ritual as two ways of acting, 226 prescenium, 263 proscenium, 291 ritualistic approaches to, 225 The Theatrical Event: A Mythos, a Vocabulary, a Perspective, 223 theology as insider reflection, 46 theoria etymological meaning of the term, 166 theories as performances, 336 constructing, 175–184 using, 169–75 theorizing, 167–168, 171, 176, 184 amethodological, 172 and comparing, 331 and dancing, 7 and deliberate theory construction, 172 and ritualizing, 167 and scholarly myth-making, 328 and the senses, 247 armchair, 285 as imagination driven, 183 as personal, 334 as piecemeal reflection, 171 as place-specific, 24 as proposal, 165 as storytelling, 335 grand, 336 metaphor-free, 183 the consequences of ritual action, 298 theory, 11 and metaphor, 177 and method, 7, 8, 14–15, 28–29, 56–59, 166–167, 169 as about gaining perspective, 12 as coming after doing, 6 as craft, 177 as related to case studies and method, 3 as related to method and case studies, 11 as shield, 173 basic questions about, 7 compared with ritualizing, 5 consumption of, 176 feminist, 166 hunger for, 30 in critical theory, 166 meaning of the word, 166–69 meaning of the word on the street, 165 performance, 309 practice, 244 Robertson Smith, 6 symbolic, 175 the importance of contextualizing, 24 the origin of, 176 the term in contemporary arts and humanities, 166

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the word in book titles, 176 without method, 165 theory and method as requiring display, 7 the phrase, 172 Theory and Method in the Study of Religion, 172, 375n256 time, ritual, 110, 168, 262, 266–267 and cross-temporality, 262 kinds of, 262 times ritual, 262–267 To Take Place, 260–261 Tonantzin and Our Lady of Guadalupe, 137 tone, 90, 231, 265 and modes of ritual, 205 Torah, the, 48, 263, 278 Toronto Caribbean Carnival, 282 “The Toronto Revellers” (video), 282 Toronto Towneley cycle of mystery plays, 90 Torres, Mr. and Mrs. John F., 153 Toscani, Olivero, 272 tourism, 103, 327 and pageanty, 149 tourists, 95 tradition, ritual, 181, 226, 264 and ritual systems, 232 transmitting, 314 traditions, ritual as distinct from ritual systems, 192 transformation and ritual, 312–317 ritual, 175 transition, 189, 202, 206, 255 beginning and ending, 274 Tree of People project, 225 Treviño, Governor, 139 triculture Santa Fe’s, 27 Trinity Episcopal Church, 310 Trujillo, David, 117–119, 122, 255, 261 Turner, Victor, 25–28, 30, 52, 66, 87, 170, 172, 176, 189, 193, 203, 223, 226–267, 339–341 Turtle Dance, the, 316 types, ritual, 175, 198, 201, 225 and the modes, 203 Journal of Ritual Studies classification of, 198 typologies, 201 Ulanov, Barry, 186 Umayyad Caliphate, the, 129 United Church of Canada, the, 313 United States, the Hispanic Americans in, 126 universities, 5, 98, 119, 155, 159, 228 supporting research for this book, xvii University of Amsterdam, xvii University of Bern, xvii

414

University of California Press, 76 University of Colorado, xvii University of Exeter, xvii University of Heidelberg, xvii, 83 University of Limerick, xvii University of Lund, xvii University of New Mexico, 156 Department of History, 155 University of Oslo, xvii unknowing as way of preparing for fieldwork, 38 ur drama, 226 Utes, 128 utterances, performative, 129, 276, 277 Valdez, Ray, 117, 119 values ritual as a means of creating, 325 van der Leeuw, Gerardus, 302 van Gennep, Arnold, 52, 66, 72, 176, 201, 202–203, 267, 343 Vatican II, 292, 339 Velorama, 182 Velvet Feast (Sametové Posvícení), 265 Velvet Revolution, the, 265 Venbrux, Eric, xvii verfremdungseffekt, 100 “Vespers in the City of New York” (video), 245 Victoria College, 90 videographers, 34, 78, 86, 88, 98, 102 wedding, 86 videography, 89 videos teaching, 98 Virgin Mary, the, 107, 130, 134, 137, 268 Mary as the Virgin of Remedies, the, 141 Virginia Tech, 83 virtuality, 82, 84 Visigoths, 129 visual anthropology, 39 Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method, 39 visual culture, 35 visualism, 167 and hypervisualization, 22 visuality, 18 vocus flatus, 277 Vodoun, 227, 291 von Bora, Katrina, 208 “A Vulnerable Moment in Vocal Improvisation” (video), 274 Walpi (Hopi village on First Mesa), 17 Walton, Janet, xvii Weber, Max, 29, 213

Ind e x webs, 181, 184, 234, 297, 303 as metaphors for ritual, 181 of meaning, 319 Wenceslas Square, 265 Whitehouse, Harvey, 29, 170, 200–201, 344 doctrinal and imagistic mode, 266 Wilson, Chris, 150 wisdom as situated in space, 24 witnessing, 87, 111, 113, 116, 121, 133, 139–140, 154–155, 157, 246, 251–252, 265, 280 and possession-taking, 112 as a receptive act, 247 as key element in performance, 243 classical music concert, 219 necessary to performance, 185 shamanic performances, 225 the Requirimento, 133 Wittenberg, 207–208 Wojtkowiak, Joanna, xvii women and cameras, 86 women’s studies, 306 work ethic critique of, 215 worldviews participant versus scholarly, 70 worship, 165, 217, 316 and athletics, 214 writing, 59–62 “academic,” 68 ethnographic, 25, 26, 46 good scholarly, 68 kinds of academic, 59 Writing Culture, 26, 81 Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, 38 Yale University, xvii Institute of Sacred Music, xvii YouTube, 82, 103 Zen Buddhists, 243 Zozobra, 27, 33–34, 104, 107–109, 114–119, 154, 158, 304 as no longer countercultural, 161 as scapegoat, 108 belief in, 119 the creativity of, 316 Will Shuster’s, 33 worth dying for?, 160 Zulus, 213 Zunis, 128, 136 and Estevanico, 136 Zwingli, Ulrich, 21