Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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killing of a fellow living creature. The communal nature of hunting functioned to assuage the individual’s fear and guilt, and at the same time functioned to cement a bond among hunters: ‘From a psychological and ethological point of view, it is the communally enacted aggression and shared guilt which creates solidarity’ (Burkert 1985: 58). The function of ritual for Burkert, as for Turner, Geertz, and Douglas, is social as well as individual.

Like Douglas above all, Burkert sharply contrasts the magical, practical, efficiacious, Frazerian view of ritual – ritual intended to secure rain, food, or fertility – to the symbolic, expressive one. Like Douglas as well, he dismisses the efficacious view and espouses the expressive one. For him, as for her, ritual makes a statement rather than carries out action. Where for Harrison ritual carries out an action and drama makes a statement, for Burkert and Douglas alike ritual, as drama, makes a statement rather than carries out an action. The shift in the study of ritual mirrors the shift in the study of myth and of myth plus ritual: for twentieth-century theorists, the efficacy of ritual is social, psychological, and existential, not physical.

Ritual as the reconciliation of contradictions

The English anthropologist Edmund Leach (1910–88) was well known for his structuralist analyses of, especially, biblical myths (1969). But unlike Claude Lévi-Strauss, who primarily analyzes myths, Leach analyzes rituals equally (1976). Also unlike Lévi-Strauss, who concentrates mostly on Native American myths – his programmatic structuralist analysis of the myth of Oedipus is an exception – Leach analyses modern rituals as often as ‘primitive’ ones. Still, as a Lévi-Straussian, he finds in rituals the same kinds of binary oppositions needing mediation that Lévi-Strauss finds in myths. For Leach, rituals are doing physically what myths are doing verbally.

In this later, structuralist phase Leach analyzes myths and rituals identically but separately. In his earlier, social functionalist phase he tightened the tie between myth and ritual beyond that of, so he assumed, even Harrison: ‘Myth, in my terminology, is the counterpart of ritual; myth implies ritual, ritual implies myth, they are one and the same … As I see it, myth regarded as a statement in words ‘says’ the same thing as ritual regarded as a statement in action’ (Leach 1965, pp. 11–12). He claimed to be carrying myth-ritualism to its limits. In fact, Leach is really drawing the same close tie as Harrison and also Hooke.7

Ritual as the instillment of belief

Where Tylor and Frazer view ritual as the application of belief, and where Turner, Geertz, and Douglas view ritual as the expression or, at best, the instillment of belief, American anthropologist Roy Rappaport (1926–97) credits ritual with actually creating belief. Where for the others ritual is at most the key part of religion, for Rappaport it is nearly the whole. Rappaport does consider myth, but he subordinates it to ritual.

Rappaport’s Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999) represents an extraordinary venture beyond the approach to ritual in the work that made Rappaport’s name, Pigs for the Ancestors (1968). There the function of ritual is ecological. The raising of pigs in abandoned gardens by the Tsembaga Maring farmers of New Guinea serves to clear the ground and make planting easier. The ritualistic killing of pigs serves to keep an increasing number from damaging the ground and making planting harder. The eating of pigs, which ordinarily happens only during rituals, provides protein to keep the people healthy. While Rappaport

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does note the social function of pig sacrifice – for example, the more pigs, the more dispersed the residents and so the less the social contact – he stresses the ecological function.

In Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (1979) Rappaport at once continues the ecological analysis of Pigs and moves radically beyond it. The key essay in the collection is ‘The Obvious Aspects of Ritual.’ Where, before, Rappaport had concentrated on the function of ritual, now he tends to the form of ritual. He tries to identify what makes ritual ritual by differentiating it from anything else. For example, ritual must be done precisely, repeatedly, and at set times and places. But an assembly line is equally formal yet scarcely a ritual. Ritual must, in addition, be performed. But so must dance. Ritual is a means to an end, not an end in itself. But so, too, is drama. Where, however, drama involves an audience, ritual requires a ‘congregation,’ which does not merely witness the action but also participates in it. Rappaport returns to the differentiation of ritual from drama found in Harrison. In Pigs Rappaport sees ritual as merely the human means of maintaining the ecosystem we share with animals. From ‘Obvious’ on, ritual becomes distinctly human.

Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity constitutes a grand elaboration of the ‘Obvious’ essay. Invoking concepts from fields as diverse as speech acts theory and cybernetics, Rappaport constructs one of the fullest and richest theories of ritual to be found. He claims that ritual does almost everything, not least things that others would automatically attribute to belief.

To take an example of which Rappaport would have approved, the biblical patriarch Isaac, wanting Esau, his firstborn son, to succeed in life, does not merely state his wish but utilizes the ritual of a blessing to ensure it (Genesis 27). Even when the blind Isaac discovers that he has been duped into bestowing his deathbed blessing on Jacob instead, the blessing cannot be undone. The ritual is itself efficacious, no matter what the intent of either party. To take a more positive example, most couples planning to spend their lives together still partake of the ritual of marriage. The ceremony binds the parties even if, let us say, one of them only pretends to be in love with the other.

Against Rappaport, one might note that even if Isaac’s blessing, once offered, cannot be rescinded, it still does not transform Jacob into Isaac’s firstborn or favorite. A wedding ceremony presupposes that the bride and groom are committed to each other and expresses, not establishes, that commitment. The ritual is hollow if the commitment is missing. And marriage, unlike Isaac’s blessing, can be annulled, albeit by another ritual.

Rappaport roots other aspects of religion in ritual. To participate in a ritual is to accept it, so that acceptance spells obligation and therefore morality. Yet one might argue that just as ritual seemingly presupposes belief rather than dispenses with it, so ritual seemingly presupposes morality rather than creates it. When two parties ritually shake hands after agreeing to something, the faith that they have in each other does not stem from the handshake, which merely expresses, not establishes, their mutual trust.

Rappaport argues that not even homicide is always immoral – unless it violates a ritual: ‘There are conditions, so common as to require no illustration, under which killing humans is laudable or even mandatory. What is immoral is, of course, killing someone whom there is an obligation, at least tacit, not to kill’ (Rappaport 1999: 132).

Having rooted morality in ritual, Rappaport is prepared to conclude that ritual is the center of social life: ‘In enunciating, accepting and making conventions moral, ritual contains within itself not simply a symbolic representation of social contract, but tacit social contract itself. As such, ritual … is the basic social act’ (Rappaport 1999, p. 138). Ritual socializes in other ways, too. Notably, it links what is private to what is public. A rite of passage turns the physiological changes in an adolescent into a change in status.

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Ritual ties human beings not only to one another but also to the external world. Ritual orders experience in many ways, with Rappaport emphasizing the experience of time over the experience of space. Most straighforwardly, ritual organizes time into clearcut divisions: the ritual of Christmas divides the year into two seasons. Above all, ritual, specifically religious ritual, connects humans to the cosmos. All rituals for Rappaport communicate, but religious rituals, which for him are the highest kind, convey something other than information since they are the most invariant and therefore the most repetitive. Their repetitiveness makes them ideal communicators of eternal, hence repetitive, ‘sacred’ truths. ‘Sacred’ truths are metaphysical. They provide certitude not only because they are unchanging but also because they lie beyond the realm of proof or disproof. Rappaport’s originality is his claim that, once again, religious rituals do not merely assume, evince, or inculcate transcendent truths but somehow also establish and validate them.

Ritual as the ordering of the world

Where Burkert draws on ethology and sociobiology, where Leach draws on structuralism, and where Rappaport draws on cybernetics and other fields, cognitive theorists of ritual draw on cognitive psychology. Led by the French anthropologist Pascal Boyer (b. 1940) (1994, 2001), cognitive theorists have become so numerous and so organized as to constitute what the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos would have called a ‘research program.’ Cognitivists analyze the cognitive constraints that direct thinking, including religious thinking. Strikingly, they focus not on myth, which barely gets considered, but on ritual. Like Leach and others, they see ritual as a cognitive enterprise. In stressing the constraints under which thinking and in turn acting occurs, they really echo Tylor, for whom myth, despite appearances, has an orderliness that reflects the orderliness of the mind. In stressing the centrality of supernatural agents – gods – to religion, they again echo Tylor, for whom the distinctiveness of religion is exactly the postulation of gods rather than, as in science, natural processes (see Chapter 31 on Religion and Cognition).

In the nineteenth century ritual was assumed to be the ‘primitive’ counterpart to modern technology, which rendered it superfluous and, worse, impossible. In the twentieth century ritual has been seen as almost anything but the outdated counterpart to technology. Ritual, it has been maintained, is about the human world and not or not just about the physical world. Consequently, its function is not physical but social, psychological, or existential. Even for cognitive psychologists, the focus is now on how humans think ritually, not on what ritual is intended to do.

Notes

1The classic attempt not to replace but to reconcile a theological account of the plagues and of succeeding events with a scientific account is that of the Jewish existentialist philosopher Martin Buber, for whom the believer, on the basis of faith, attributes to divine intervention what the believer acknowledges can be fully accounted for scientifically: see Buber 1958: 60–68, 74–79. Buber is the Jewish counterpart to the Protestant Rudolf Bultmann.

2The classic work on finding science in myth is de Santillana and von Dechend (1969).

3To be precise, Frazer, while assuming, like Tylor, that adherents read myth literally, himself reads it symbolically. The life – specifically, the death and rebirth – of the god of vegetation is a metaphorical description of the death and rebirth of the crops: ‘[T]he story that Adonis spent half, or according to others a third, of the year in the lower world and the rest of it in the upper world, is explained most simply and naturally by supposing that he represented vegetation, especially

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the corn, which lies buried in the earth half the year and reappears above ground the other half’ (Frazer 1922: 392). By contrast, Tylor insists that the only proper reading of myth is the literal one.

4The classical theorist of myth as ideology is Georges Sorel 1961), for whom, to be sure, myth serves not to bolster society, as for Malinowski, but to foment revolution.

5As Ronald Grimes, the organizer of the field of ‘ritual studies,’ writes of Turner’s status, ‘This academic generation’s intellectual task seems to be that of getting beyond Victor Turner. His work has exercised considerable formative influence on the initial phases of ritual studies’ (Grimes 1995: xvii).

6Sometimes for Turner ritual is itself social drama. Other times ritual is a response to a social drama, in which case the drama refers to the turmoil itself and the ritual to the depiction of the turmoil. More precisely, ritual is here the last stage within a social drama, which begins with the turmoil and ends with what Turner calls ‘redress.’ Ritual is only one form of redress. A lawsuit is another.

7Leach (1965: 13) lumps Harrison with Durkheim and Malinowski, neither of whom in fact brings myth and ritual so closely together, and is likely unaware of Hooke and other biblical mythritualists.

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