Rituals in Religion

The development of anthropology as an academic discipline in the first half of the twentieth century effaced the distinction between ethnographic description and theorization that characterized the work of the evolutionists, as well as Durkheim and Van Gennep.

American approaches.

In the United States, Franz Boas and his students were especially critical of the speculative nature of their predecessors' theories. Working for the most part among Native Americans, they provided richly detailed accounts of rituals while deliberately avoiding presenting their own interpretations. Paul Radin, in The Winnebago Tribe (1923), devoted a large portion of his text to descriptions of ceremonies, translated as literally as possible from informants' accounts. In his discussion of fasting and the vision quest, he juxtaposed a variety of individual accounts in order to demonstrate the importance of distinguishing between "the actions and testimony of the religious man from that of the intermittently religious and the nonreligious man" (1990 ed., p. 229). However, another of Boas's students, Ruth Benedict, was able to find a means of interpreting ritual that avoided both intellectualist and sociological approaches. In Patterns of Culture (1934), she contrasted the Apollonian ethos of Pueblo culture with the Dionysian timbre of their neighbors, using examples largely drawn from ritual contexts. The vision quest and the Sun Dance among Plains cultures exemplified the extent to which they "valued all violent experience, all means by which human beings may break through the usual sensory routine" (p. 80). On the other hand, "There is nothing wild about [Pueblo dances]. It is the cumulative force of the rhythm, the perfection of forty men moving as one, that makes them effective" (p. 93). Rituals were an expression, not of individual ideas, but rather of the overall style of a culture, in the same way that Gothic architecture expressed the style of the later Middle Ages.

French approaches.

Unlike their American counterparts, French and British anthropologists were self-conscious heirs to the Durkheimian tradition, though in very different ways. In France, an important school of thought developed around the work of Marcel Griaule among the Dogon in West Africa. In Conversations with Ogotemelli (1948), he related a series of interviews with a knowledgeable elder who gradually exposed an intricate, secret cosmology to the anthropologist, providing interpretations of major Dogon rituals in the process. For Griaule and his school, the true, deep meaning of rituals lay in esoteric traditions of exegesis, fully known only to a few initiates, the most knowledgeable of elders. If nineteenth-century theorists had argued that rituals were the key to understanding religious ideas which "natives" were incapable of articulating, Griaule suggested on the contrary that highly articulate native intellectuals held the key to understanding the inner significance of their culture's rituals.

British approaches.

Of the various national traditions, British anthropology was perhaps the most sociologically inclined. No doubt for this reason, early British ethnographic studies tended to focus on institutions—economy, law, politics, and especially kinship. The notable exception was Gregory Bateson's Naven (1936), which centered on a transvestite ritual among the Iatmul of New Guinea; to honor a boy or a young man, his mother's brother dressed in grotesque female attire and symbolically offered himself to his nephew, while his paternal aunt proudly donned male attire. The book was an extraordinary experiment in analysis, exploring the cogency and limits of four different approaches to explaining the ritual: a "structural" analysis in terms of the cultural logic of different kin relationships; a "sociological" analysis in terms of the contribution of the ritual to maintaining solidarity within the community; an "ethological" analysis examining the emotional component of Iatmul culture, especially in gendered terms; and an "eidological" analysis in terms of patterns of dualistic thought among the Iatmul.

In the 1950s, other British anthropologists turned increasingly to studies on religion and ritual. E. E. Evans-Pritchard's experience of fieldwork among the Nuer of southern Sudan in the 1930s had led him to convert to Roman Catholicism. Years afterwards, in his study Nuer Religion (1956), he suggested that "Those who give assent to the religious beliefs of their own people feel and think, and therefore also write, differently about the beliefs of other peoples from those who do not give assent to them" (p. vii). This attitude was evident in the rich and complex analysis of Nuer sacrifice that accounted for about one-third of the entire book. Sacrifice was a means of communication between the sacrificer and kwoth, "God" or "Spirit," comprehensible only in terms of the complex Nuer representations of "Spirit" but also of "sin," especially when the purpose of sacrifice was to restore the moral imbalance in the relationship between Spirit and the believer that the commission of a fault had occasioned. The sacrificer identified himself in the most intimate way with the spear with which he transfixed the victim, but equally with the ox, the victim, itself, so that sacrifice ultimately represented a gift of the self to God—a relationship that Evans-Pritchard refused to reduce to a sociological, psychological, or ideological explanation.

Audrey Richards's Chisungu: A Girl's Initiation Ceremony among the Bemba of Zambia (1956) was a pioneering study that focused centrally on women's performance, ideas, and attitudes. She paid special attention to the explanations of different sorts of participants, ritual specialists as well as initiates or their mothers, and showed how the ritual simultaneously expressed dogmatic cultural values—the deference of juniors to elders and of females to males—and unconscious tensions connected with the ambivalent attitudes about sex and marriage.