NOTES ON ASPECTS OF RITUAL AND IDEOLOGY

Mapping the Field of Ritual (Grimes)

We need both inter-subjective and analytical processes to understand ritual. All interpretive efforts are surrounded by implicit questions, making some explicit insures grounds for discussion. The kind of questions one asks as well as the way one thinks about those questions determine both the methods and style used in an investigation. These then are used as a basis for our theoretical formulations. Theory defines how we account for and sometimes predict regular patterns of co-variance and provides for the criticism of methods. In order to conduct an investigation of ritual in the field, anthropologists often will ask a number of key questions that help them define the characteristics of the ritual event. These generally include the following kinds of questions (Taken from Grimes, 1995. Beginnings in Ritual Studies, pp. 24-38):

1. Kinds of questions used to analyze ritual events

a. Ritual space - Natural setting? Boundaries - rigid/flexible, clear? Permanence? Access? History? Shape? Size?

b. Ritual objects - what & how many? Making & history ritualized? Nature of power associated w/ it? Owned? Status of keeper?

c. Ritual time/timing - Time of day/season? More than one calendar? Coordination w/ natural cycles? Coincide/conflict w/ ordinary social time? Duration of ritual?

d. Ritual sound and language - Non-linguistic sounds? Presume literacy? Importance of language to performance of rite?

e. Ritual identity - Ritual roles and offices of significance? What groups receive ritual recognition? Who is excluded? Feelings while performing vs. after experience? What emphasized - action, feeling, thought, or intention?

f. Ritual action - Kinds of actions performed? Parts of body emphasized? Senses used most often? Activity or passivity most pronounced? Actions inner or outer directed?

2. Interpreting ritual Questions are aimed at uncovering indigenous responses, emic categories. Interpreting (even in the questions asked) has an etic dimension. A number of theoretical options that have been used include:

a. Describing ritual's phenomenology (Eliade, VanGennep);

b. Identifying underlying structures as a symbol system (Geertz), metalanguage (Bateson), structure (Levi-Strauss);

c. Considering its social functions (Durkheim), covariants (Douglas), processes in social fabric (Turner), roles (Goffman);

d. Considering how it is related to individual and group psychology and thus regarding ritual as a set of archetypes (Jung); mazeways (Wallace); developmental stages (Erikson);. or games (Huizinga, Caillois);

e. Explaining it as an ecological (Rappaport) or biogenetic (d'Aquili; Laughlin) operation

f. Tracing historically and theologically its precedents & consequences

g. Entering into imaginative participation and concentrating on style of constructing life-worlds (Ricoeur) or ultimate realities (Tillich)

Modes of Ritual Sensibility ≠ Grimes discusses 6 modes of ritual sensibility which characterize the different ways in which ritual may function within our lives. These include the following:

1. Ritualization - stylized repeated gesturing and posturing, the ritual part of ordinary life.

2. Decorum - from civic, social life, Goffman "interaction ritual", patterning that leads to expectations that become part of tacit culture, conventionalized behavior.

3. Ceremony - less ordinary, more intentional, different from decorum in that is a large group socio-political interaction; e.g, courtroom sessions, Turner's "social drama", sometimes conflict ladden, power, a central consideration

4. Liturgy - any ritual action with an ultimate frame of reference and doing which is felt of cosmic necessity, zen meditation, shamanic trance, spiritual exercise, "re-present" events in enactments, "eventualize" structures.

5. Magic - pragmatic ritual work, means of influencing the supernatural/unknown

6. Celebration - root, play, form of expressive ritualized play.

Religious Specialists (Shamans, Priests and Prophets) and the Way of the Shaman

A. Definitions/ Overview of Religious Specialists -- Characteristics of religious specialistsãare present in almost all societies, however, the emphasis on religious specialists is greater in food producing societies. The more complex the society, the more likely it is to have religious intermediaries. An anthropological approach also focuses on studying the functions of religion and its specialists within society. Roles become more problematic with the issue of defining what is religion (vs magic and the occult). Significant points of Turner's discussion of religious specialists, distinction between magic (manipulation of an impersonal transhuman controlling power by magicians) and religion (personalized transhuman controlling power--spirits, ghosts, ancestors, gods, etc.). Most cultures contain a combination of both.

1. Priest - Priest is associated with functioning of a regularly organized and permanent enterprise, full-time occupation, petitions supernatural (thru prayer, supplication) on behalf of congregation/community; authority derived from service in sacred tradition (oft marked by calendrical series of rituals); power is based on learned standarized ritual lore; are usually found in agricultural or more complex food-producing societies. Priests rarely are innovative, "dramatists" (office, role and script are sacred not the person) -- are institutional functionaries.

2. Shaman and Medium - Usually contrasted w/ role of priest, shamans are usually personally called (via a "divine stroke"), part-time specialists, predominate in foraging societies; their primary role is as a curer for individual clientele (within the family context). Emphasis is on their ability to manipulate the supernatural world. Their control over spirits makes a shaman a distinctive type of spirit medium (medium - one is controlled by a spirit and can serve as a means of communication with supernatural world). Operates in a person to person fashion; shamans & mediums are classified together with prophets as inspirational functionaries. Shamans usually work in small-scale, "folk" communities (marked by mechanical solidarity); prophets come in when society is becoming more stratified or impacted from without.

3. Divination and Doctors. Divination focuses on inquiry about future events directed to deity who responds w/ tokens, or analysis of past events (e.g., to determine guilt). Preliterate societies, divination and therapy (doctor/curer) are closely intertwined; illness viewed as attack on soul by others--often denotes tension in social fabric.

4. Note distinctions between types of societies re: religious specialists. In complex societies, religion is limited to its own domain and is often closely tied to politics.

B. Significance of Shamanic Perspective. Shamanism is a very old, coherent, broadly diffused mental paradigm; draws its powers of persistence from its capacity to organize knowledge about the world by way of a simple set of symbols and assumptions. Premises: (a) spiritual force that all humans experience is ambient, of the world, cosmos and everything in it; birth, death, illustrate capacity of spirit to move thru material forms. Are two ways to view the divine: as a transcendent Creator out there (Eurocentric/Western view) or as an immanent creation potentially manifest everywhere (shamanic view); (b) shamanism can function as guide in complex societies as a way or organizing knowledge about the world which can help us meet the challenge of rethinking our relationship to the lifesystem that spawned us all (From: Freidel, Schele, & Parker, 1993, Maya Cosmos, Three Thousand Years on the Shaman's Path, pp.12-13).

1. Note main points of Langdon's discussion of shamanism and anthropology (key for Eliade, significance of estatic state/shamanic trance (relationship between shaman and spirits - seeks to control them for specific purpose); focus on various forms and expressions as a dynamic cultural-social complex in various societies. Notes issues of concern: (a) debates re: psychic stability of shamans (need to look at collective representations vs. external behavior to understand normality/marginality, is culturally relative); (b) effectiveness of role in therapy, (shamans access altered states at will, fulfill needs of community, mediate between sacred & profane); (c) problems in defining as a form of magic or religion -- early anthropologists classed it as magic, distinguishing it from religion; need to recognize shamanism as a central expression of the worldview of a culture that is not separate from the ideological system of which it is a part.

2. Importance of symbolic anthropological perspective (work of Geertz, Turner, Douglas etc.) in understanding nature and functions of shamanism, concern with symbolic representations in ideological systems and rituals as well as their relationship to society and human motivation. Shamans mediate between worlds and are thus liminal.

3. Langdon also notes that a key concept of many shamanic systems is concept of power which enables shaman to mediate between extra-human and human and legitimizes his/her various social roles w/in society. A South American shaman is distinct from ordinary individuals in his/her power illustrated in (a) mastery of ecstatic state leading to the (b) acquisition of auxiliary spirits thru this experience and (c) attainment of (power) songs.

4. Harner's main points; significance of cognicentrism (view that our way of knowing and understanding things is the only viable/most "correct" one, that other views of the world are thus less valid/"true", i.e., "superstitious"); concept of non-ordinary reality (N.O.R); means of approaching non-ordinary reality; discuss major features of the shamanic journey, significance of power animals, techniques used to restore power and extract harmful intrusions.

5. Note major features of Turner's concept of structure -- organization of statuses, roles and norms, features of hierarchy, classification, differentiation, stability; and anti-structure -- reverse of structure, exists outside structure, between structural categories (e.g. as seen in 3 stages of rites of passage ≠ (1) separation, (2) transition--liminality and communitas, and (3) incorporation) and at the bottom of structure. Power of anti-structure lies in perception of it with ambivalence (as the liberation of human spirit and a potential threat to social order).