Rituals in Religion

The 1960s saw the emergence of sharply divergent currents in American anthropology, with some anthropologists focusing on the elaboration of cultural meanings while others stressed the relationship of behavior to ecology, with the interaction of humans with their environment.

Ritual and ecology.

Marvin Harris was perhaps the most dogmatic of the latter, advocating a kind of analysis loosely inspired by Marx, which he labeled "cultural materialism." For Harris, ritual and ideology were epiphenomena of modes of production, a mechanism for adapting to specific environments. His most famous example was the "sacred cow" in India; in his analysis, he maintained that ritual prohibitions on eating beef (which did not in any case apply to the least privileged classes, including Muslims) were not instances of the irrational sway of religious ideology, but rather a highly efficient strategy for managing scarce resources, including manure needed for fuel, milk, and animal traction for plows.

Roy Rappaport's Pigs for the Ancestors (1968) analyzed the kaiko, a ritual cycle among the Maring of New Guinea, in terms of cultural ecology. The cycle began with the planting of a rumbim tree to signal a truce between warring groups. Some years later, the uprooting of the tree heralded the beginning of a year-long celebration whose climax involved a huge feast where most of the pig herd of the group was slaughtered and consumed, after which hostilities might resume. Rappaport included extensive discussions of the role of pork within the Maring diet, of the carrying capacity of the territory, of the balance between the human and the pig populations, and of warfare as a mechanism for controlling scarce agricultural resources. He concluded by comparing the kaiko cycle to a thermostat, an on/off mechanism for adjusting the relationship between different variables: human and pig populations, but also trade, marriage, and relations of alliance and hostility. Unlike some of his colleagues, Rappaport never dismissed the importance of cultural meanings out of hand, but instead bracketed consideration of meanings for the specific analytical purpose of examining the pragmatic functions of ritual.

Geertz The 1960s also marked the heyday of "symbolic anthropology," of a renewed interest in religion and symbolism, topics that for a long time, especially in the United States, had been marginalized in anthropology because they seemed intractable to scientific investigation. In an influential paper titled "Religion as a Cultural System" (1966), Clifford Geertz, the leading exponent of this approach, looked back to Durkheim when he postulated that "sacred symbols function to synthesize a people's ethos—the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood—and their actual world view—the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order" (1973, p. 89). Ritual served to integrate ethos to worldview by rendering the ethos intellectually reasonable and the worldview emotionally compelling. In this way it supplied "models of" as well as "models for" reality—compelling representations of the way the world really is and the way it ought to be.

Geertz had already applied this perspective in his monograph on The Religion of Java (1960). Though the overwhelming majority of Javanese identifed themselves as Muslims, Geertz identified three variants—abangan, santri, and prijaji—associated with three distinct strata of Javanese society: peasants, merchants, and bureaucrats. Santri were more preoccupied with doctrine than with ritual, whereas both abangan and prijaji variants were primarily associated with ritual expression. The core of abangan practice was the slametan, a communal feast shared with neighbors (not to mention local spirits), which "concentrates, organizes, and summarizes the general abangan ideas of order, their 'design for living'" by stating "the values that animate traditional Javanese peasant culture: the mutual adjustment of interdependent wills, the self-restraint of emotional expression, and the careful regulation of outward behavior" (p. 29). Similarly, the mystical prijaji ethos and worldview were best expressed in shadow plays. Geertz went on to apply a similar approach to the politico-religious rituals of the Balinese theater state or, more prosaically, to cockfights.

Turner.

The study of symbolism in ritual was already an important facet of British anthropology in the 1950s; in the 1960s, the next generation produced a dazzling array of detailed analytical studies of ritual, particularly in African societies, among which Victor Turner's work with the Ndembu of Zambia stood out as particularly rich and multifaceted. Turner was deeply interested in theater, and used the analogy of "social drama" as an analytical device even before he focused specifically on ritual as a means of presenting case studies of village conflict. The analogy lent itself particularly well to ritual performance, especially healing rituals, which simultaneously expressed and attempted to resolve specific conflicts generated by points of tension in Ndembu society. For the Ndembu, this tension revolved around conflicting principles of matrilineal descent and virilocal residence, whereby women were expected to live with their husbands; unstable communities were constantly being formed around men who would simultaneously strive to hold on to their wives and children while attracting their sisters and their sisters' children as well. Turner suggested that such conflicting principles were not only acted out in the course of rituals, but also deeply embedded in ritual symbolism. Key symbols in rituals connoted multiple and often contradictory meanings. For example, the milk tree central to Nkang a, the female rite of intiation, "stands for, inter alia, women's breasts, motherhood, a novice at Nkang a, the principle of matriliny, a specific matrilineage, learning, and the unity and persistence of Ndembu society" (1967, p. 28) Such meanings were clustered around two poles: an ideological pole, centered on the importance of group norms and values, such as matriliny; and a sensory pole, focused on emotional reactions to the body and bodily functions and fluids, such as milk. Loosely following Sigmund Freud, Turner suggested that such symbols were "a compromise between the need for social control, and certain innate and universal human drives whose complete gratification would result in a breakdown of that control" (p. 37).

Turner's concern with process as well as with symbols in ritual led him to explore a specific aspect of Van Gennep's scheme of rites of passage, the phase of "liminality." Liminality in rites of initiation was associated with the temporary breakdown of social distinctions among novices, their assumption of a status that was simultaneously lowly and symbolically charged, even potent. Turner associated such a state with "communitas," with the sentiment of common humanness, an antistructure in sharp contrast to the structured social relations before and after the ritual. If, for Turner, the dialectic between the ideological and sensory poles of symbolic meaning replicated the conflict between "self" and "society," then the dialectic between structure and communitas embodied a countervailing conflict between "selflessness" and "society."

Douglas.

Like her colleagues, Mary Douglas was initiated into the ranks of British anthropology through fieldwork in Africa. However, in her most important work on ritual, she turned from the particulars of her field experience to the elaboration of a more general model. In Purity and Danger (1966), she focused on ritual concerns with purity and pollution. As a central case, she analyzed Hebrew dietary prohibitions as detailed in Leviticus, pointing out that the logic of the prohibitions rested on a scheme of classification that identified species as in one way or another typical or atypical. Anomalous animals, such as fish without scales, were deemed unclean. She argued that such preoccupations with cleanness (defined ideologically and not hygienically) corresponded with attempts to maintain group boundaries between insiders and outsiders as sharply as possible.

In Natural Symbols (1970) she pursued the relationship between ritual, ideology, and social organization. She proposed a two-dimensional scheme for classifying types of societies, with one axis representing "grid" and the other "group." The "group" dimension referred to the extent of the emphasis placed on "insider" or "outsider" status; "grid" referred to the extent to which interpersonal relations were defined in terms of set, ascribed categories. Societies with high grid and high group had a firm commitment to ritual practice and place a higher priority on the group than the individual; societies that scored low on both counts (modern industrial societies among others) tended to de-value ritual in favor of personal expression. But it was possible to have one without the other. She furnished examples from Central African societies that placed high value on group membership but whose fluid role structure rated low in terms of "grid"; such societies, she suggested, were obsessed with their vulnerability to outside agencies of evil, notably witchcraft, and their ritual observances centered on the identification and expulsion of such threatening forces.