history structure and ritual

History, Structure, and RitualAuthor(s): John D. Kelly and Martha KaplanSource: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 19 (1990), pp. 119-150Published by: Annual ReviewsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2155961 .

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Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1990. 19:119-50 Copyright ?) 1990 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved

HISTORY, STRUCTURE, AND RITUAL

John D. Kelly

Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, Princeton New Jersey 08544

Martha Kaplan

84 North Stanworth Drive, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

KEY WORDS: divine kingship, cargo cults, carnival, practice, social change

INTRODUCTION

Formal similarities sometimes clarify substantive differences. Consider the difference between Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and The Sword (25) and David Lan's Guns and Rain (161), or the difference between E. E. Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (85), and Michael Taussig's The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (243).

No one could fairly accuse Benedict of neglect of the historical terrain in her ethnography. She begins her study of Japan with historical inquiry and throughout her text is concerned with change as well as continuity. But as her subtitle indicates, her project was to investigate "Patterns of Japanese Cul- ture," to describe what anthropological structuralists would later call a syn- chronic structure or system in Japanese culture. On the other hand, Lan focuses explicitly on a specific historical situation. His Guns are not Bene- dict's Sword, a cultural archetype, but rather the means of destruction in a particular moment of Zimbabwe history. His subtitle, "Guerillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe," declares his intention to investigate historically specific connections. While his study is clearly rooted in structural- functionalism, his project is different, and inherently historical. Evans-

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Pritchard resists evidence of historical change as he depicts Zande modes of behavior and modes of thought. In contrast, the devil iconography and rituals in South America can only be understood, in Taussig's view, through attention to their historical context, as response to conquest, Christianity, and capitalist development. There has been a turn to history in the anthropology of the 1980s, reflected even in the titles of many published works: not only a turn to historical materials, but a turn from accounts set in a timeless "ethnographic present" to accounts that find history intrinsic to their subject.

Nowhere more than in the study of ritual has the turn to history raised fundamental questions for anthropology.' Definition of "ritual" has long been debated; proposed delimiting features range from biological bases (71, 258); to functional values (82, 178); to linguistic, symbolic, or semiotic forms (29, 104, 242); to rejection of the category altogether (115); to rejection of all general categories, and insistence that the proper starting point is indigenous experience and category (203). But the definitions of ritual that have been offered have tended to share a presupposition about their object. In part because many rituals are indigenously represented as "ancient" and unchang- ing, rituals unlike riots, for example-carry an albatross of connections to "tradition," the sacred, to structures that have generally been imagined in stasis. While riots are obviously events in history [it took an E. P. Thompson (249) to demonstrate that they also exist as types of events in cultural fields], scholars have had a great deal of difficulty conceiving of rituals as anything more concrete than types of events. Until recently the unique ritual event has been an anomaly, understood only when the function or transformation is discovered that identifies its place in structure. It is the possibility that rituals are historical events that now intrigues many anthropologists.

To review these changes in problematics, fascinations, and agendas in the anthropology of ritual, we examine powerful images that have come to stand for ways of connecting ritual, structure, and history. Kuhn (159:187) proposes that paradigmatic experiments become touchstones for whole "disci- plinary matrices" in natural sciences. Whether or not anthropology has or has had anything like Kuhn's paradigms (indeed, whether or not physics has), we propose that in anthropology, images of particular practices and particular

'Other debates within anthropology's turn to history merit their own review essays, including questions about the nature of "history" and "structure," two concepts which, however defined, always problematize each other. For example, we do not review discussion of practice (33, 74), world and local systems (270, 271, 281), or representation (47). Here we consider one distinct and distinctive dimension of the anthropological turn to history: the reconsiderations of the nature of "ritual." And because our focus is on ritual as historical, there are many important studies of ritual systems and even ethnohistorical reconstructions of ritual systems that are not reviewed here, because they do not engage the problem of the relation of ritual, structure, and history. For other reviews of issues in anthropology and history, see 51, 52, 201; for a recent general bibliography of ritual studies see 119.



HISTORY, STRUCTURE & RITUAL 121

analyses of them become touchstones, striking examples that orient anthropological imagination. Review by way of such images will inevitably be more disconnected and fragmentary than it might be otherwise, but we think that much is also gained.

By way of such images, anthropologists have studied comparative rationality (a falling granary, 85), cultures through their rituals (a cock fight, 103), the function of ritual rebellion (the Swazi ncwala, 112), the ritual process (rites of passage and rites of affliction, 256), and ritual responses to social change (cargo cults, 282). Not all of these images are of rituals, narrowly conceived, but all are vitalized by the way that they evoke an approach to ritual: A falling granary evokes the way a system of witchcraft, oracles, and magic can seem logical and necessary; the cock fight may or may not fit a definition of secular ritual, but it showed a generation of anthropologists how a type of event can reveal a social field of identities and relations (see e.g. 200:5). These images fashioned by Evans-Pritchard, Geertz, Gluckman, Turner, and others challenged and redirected scholars inspired by such earlier images as divine kingship, shamanism, priests and magicians, Malinowski's open-sea fishing magic (178), Frazer's dying god-king (99), Durkheim's effervescence (82). And the anthropological images of ritual have always existed in complex relations with a reservoir of images of ritual in Western culture more generally, relations of displacement, usurpation, inversion, subversion, incorporation, and transformation, of images authored by missionaries, travelers, conquerors, and others, such as juggernaut, suttee, yogic asceticism, vedic mystery, human sacrifice, cannibalism, head-hunting, firewalking, charlatan priests, and natives dancing in firelight.

In this review, we examine the fate of only three important anthropological images of ritual, in the turn to history: the divine king, the cargo cult, and carnival. We choose each for particular problems that have come to surround the image. Recent reconsiderations of the rituals and histories of kingship have reopened basic questions about the power of rituals to structure society. Do the rituals of kings make structure or superstructure? Do rituals make structure only in some societies, or in all? The questions about divine kings changed when anthropology abandoned evolutionary historical models, and they have changed again as anthropology returns to history. Next, the cargo cult is important in the anthropological imagination as an image of ritual in social change among "others" who are not simply different from, but also connected to a colonizing Europe. In the turn to history, anthropologists now ask, what is the role of ritual in a terrain of first encounters, missionization, colonized societies, exploitation, and nationalist struggles? Finally, carnival is of interest especially as a favorite image of anti-structure, from the Man- chester school to the postmodemists. How does carnival anti-structure relate to structure and to history?



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DIVINE KINGS: RITUAL MAKING STRUCTURE?

The rituals of divine kings were a central image in evolutionary anthropology, and have reemerged, transformed, in the new historical anthropology. Evolu- tionary theories of human history were not born in anthropology, and have yet to die in anthropology. Confident, positive accounts of human history as an evolution from acephalous societies, to divine-kingdoms, to nation-states, can be traced from Comte and the positivists proper through the anthropology of the 19th century to comtemporary versions (107). Feeley-Harnik (87:300) shows that there is also a line of scholarly doubts about divine kingship as a stage in an alleged "transition from superstition to rational thought," reconsiderations of divine kingship that are, simultaneously, reconsiderations of the ritual and political morality of European society. The use of the noble savage for the same meditation stretches at least to Montaigne's (190) invidious comparison of Brazilian cannibalism and European inquisition.

Befitting the ironic sensibilities of our discipline, this century's anthropology has pursued divine kings and noble savages in the tradition of Montaigne at least as often as in that of Comte. An increasingly ironic approach to the great evolutionary time line can be traced, again, through titles, from Frazer's The Dying God, to Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind, to Sahlins's "Captain James Cook; or, The Dying God" (99, 169, 220). In Frazer's high tragedy the king must die; in Levi-Strauss's bemused meditation, the Savage never really dies, but is merely domesticated within all of us; in Sahlins's black comedy, it is the European who misunderstands his divinity and pays for it. Yet, the tradition of irony that runs from invidious comparison to black comedy challenges the moral of the story of social evolution more often than it challenges the story itself.

Do we have an alternative to evolution as the model of history? Following Radcliffe-Brown, structural-functionalists deferred evolutionary questions in favor of questions about observable and comparable social structures and functions. Following Boas, American cultural anthropologists insisted upon plural culture patterns, each with its own past and future. In recent decades, a range of theories modernization, Marxist, structuralist, deconstructionist- have variously reinstated or challenged the evolutionary approach, each offering theories of structures, their pasts and futures. In the debates about the making and unmaking of structure in history the efficacy of the rituals of divine kingship has been a major battleground. In this light we review recent structuralist, Marxist, and Weberian uses of divine kingship to address basic questions about social evolution, social universals, and the depth of difference between societies in structure and history.

To Levi-Strauss, the rituals of kingship were an intellectual mistake and an historical failure, a scandalous interlude between the science of the concrete




and the science of the abstract. Sacrifice simply does not work: Practical action "produces returns" while ritual action does not (169:220). To call kings divine was to confuse the levels the savage kept nicely separate though synchronized, to allow "a non-existent term, divinity," to intervene, and to adopt "a conception of the natural series which is false" (169:228). Within the structuralist camp, alternative approaches to divine kingship have emerged, notably from de Heusch, Valeri, and Sahlins. The first two are concerned to investigate the efficacy of royal rituals. De Heusch seeks in ritual as universal a structure as that which Levi-Strauss seeks in myth (76; see also 75, 77). Valeri reconstructs the system of Hawaiian kingly sacrifice and finds that these rituals "accompany every important social act and reproduce mental and social structures." He argues that rituals are efficacious representations, that "sacrifice is efficacious insofar as ideas order or even constitute praxis" (261:ix-x), and indeed that the return that rituals, and especially sacrifice, produce is precisely the agent's understanding of "the constitutive concepts of action" (p. 347). If this puts Valeri very close to Lienhardt (170) and Durkheim (82), Sahlins's approach is closer to that of the Boasians and Hocart, and puts rituals into the making of history-especially in some societies.

Like Valeri, Sahlins addresses change as transformation of system in complex historical contexts (219, 221, 260). But to Sahlins, differences in cultural system or structure lead to differences in the way history is made. His main example of a different history coordinated with a difference in structure is a reinvigoration of Hocart's version of divine kingship, a depiction of societies wherein "the king is the condition of the possibility of the community" (221:36), in which and for which the life-giving rituals, focused on one person, structure life for everyone else. In contrast, in "praxiological" societies (the West, and also elsewhere-for example, the Ilongot of the Philip- pines) we each make our own way, and changes are made aggregately, from the bottom up-for example, in consumer tastes and preferences, and elector- al choice. In Fiji and other divine-kingship societies, social realities are constituted by the acts of kings and descend from the top down, especially in ritual interactions whose efficacy lies precisely in the way that they structure society in history. In Fiji, life really did hinge on ritual exchanges of land and sea goods, especially "raw women for cooked men," between the people of the land and their chiefs (221:73-103).

Sahlins depicts his view of structure and history as an extension of theses of Vernant and Durkheim (221:34), and of Sartre's search for "a structural, historical anthropology" (221:72; 227:xxxiv). He opposes this project to the "new history," contemporary historians' search for real history in an underlying population and their effort to give voice to an authentic folk beneath an elite surface. And indeed, Sahlins has been criticized by scholars who seek



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the history-making of non-elite "others" and of women, non-elite and elite, in the divine kingdoms he studies (101, 273). However, Sahlins's project is not a replication of the old history of elites. Instead, he is out to reveal and criticize the universalizations of Western premises about social structure and history in both old and new history, to "explode" the idea of one form of history: "The problem now is to explode the concept of history by the anthropological experience of culture. . . . We thus multiply our conceptions of history by the diversity of structures" (221:72).

If the Boasians challenged universalistic models of human evolution, then Sahlins's "structural, historical anthropology" challenges universalized models of society and history offered as alternatives to the evolutionary approach. The challenge can be posed not only to the "new historians" but also to anthropologists, from Levi-Strauss to Eric Wolf, who also seek to transcend evolutionism by means of universalistic models of how people make history. For Levi-Strauss, in both "hot" and "cold" societies history is a phenomenon of ongoing human classificatory operations. "Hot" societies (e.g. the West) acknowledge history and explain things by means of it, while "cold" societies try to annul history by explaining everything through finite systems of classification. Neglecting Levi-Strauss's insistence that the "cold" societies subordinate history to system "in theory" but "not in practice" (169:232-33), Wolf (281) reproduces Levi-Strauss's premise that there is one form of history, in the guise of challenging the idea that some people are "without history." Neither Wolf nor Levi-Strauss is interested in tracing an evolution through time from noble savagery through divine kingship to modem rational man. What is more interesting, both deploy archetypically the scheme of three (science of concrete, system of sacrifice, science of abstract; kin-ordered, tributary, and capitalist modes of production) but then explicitly deny an evolutionary relationship (169:22; 281:100) because both, as confidently as the "new historians," see a reality underlying the diversity: structures of the mind for Levi-Strauss, "the labor process" as "the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence" for Wolf (281:74). Sahlins counters such universalisms not by a turn to Geertz's (104:28-29) turtles-all-the-way-down interpretivism but by an equally confident assertion that "history is culturally ordered, differently so in different societies" (221 :vii). Rather than a doomed product of mental error, or one type of labor relation, divine kingship for Sahlins is a different and irreducible historical reality.

Divine kingship, and discussions of it by evolutionists Hocart, Dumezil, Frazer, and even Vico are revived by Sahlins-and here is the most interesting irony-precisely in order to combat universal schemes. Sahlins detaches the divine king from the models of evolutionary stages, and like the old New Englander giving road directions, argues that you can't get there from here. If Foucault (95), following Bachelard (20, 21), insists on epistemological




breaks to explode theories of intellectual evolution, Sahlins insists on ontological breaks to explode universalisms.

For those who are skeptical that cultural difference leads to ontological breaks in the making of history, the work of Maurice Bloch has provided a powerful synthesis of structural-functionalism and political economy, an approach that allows rituals to make functioning structures in some societies, without jeopardizing the ability of political economy to describe all real history. Bloch prefers continua to discontinuities in his theoretical constructs, and to define ritual he places it near the extreme, right next to meaningless- ness, on a continuum of communication practices. Rituals then are "highly formalised," repetitive, and marked not by the propositions or arguments they embody but by the way "they imply no alternative" (27:182). They reduce to little or nothing the choices of the agent: "Ritual is a kind of tunnel into which one plunges, and where, since there is no possibility of turning either to right or left, the only thing to do is to follow" (29:42). Rituals are the "special strategy" of "a special form of authority," "traditional authority" (29:45). They "hide reality" (29:33, 18) the reality we and everyone else know in real life, also known as the world, or alternatively, the Weberian "this world" (27:175) by constituting an imaginary, static, transcendental order using formal, repetitive, non-arguable means that "legitimate" traditional authority. This procedure "shares attributes with a semi-hypnotic spell" (27:184). Turn- ing the Hocartian view on its head, Bloch argues that "The particular form of different rituals varies but the basic point is the same: the cultivation of the hatred of life for the sake of authority" (27:175). In Bloch's view, rituals are not a necessary part of social life. Some societies have more, some fewer: "the amount of social structure, of the past in the present, of ritual communication, is correlated with the amount of institutionalized hierarchy and that is what it is about" (29:18, emphasis in the original).

From the perspectives of the others, each of these models works circularly. Specifically, Bloch's theory informs, and is vindicated by, his method of locating and delineating ritual. Some studies contest Bloch's arguments with ethnographic examples. Does the ritual participant "enter a tunnel"? Are there creative choices within decisions of when, where, how, and whether to perform even the most "formalised" rituals? (See 66, 143, 153; 113:140-52; 261:193.) Does ritual support "traditional authority" against other types of leadership? With examples from many places and times, Kertzer (155) argues that all political action develops a ritual dimension; further evidence for this could be drawn from Hobsbawm's (130) wary acknowledgment that rituals played an effective role in histories of labor movements. But argument through cases only goes so far when method and theory interact so vitally. It is perhaps more interesting to ask what Bloch's argument about ritual accomplishes in his own social context. Sahlins redeploys an image of divine



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kingship from evolutionary theory in order to revitalize Boasian assertions of cultural difference in a world of social theory that has turned from evolutionary premises to universalist ones. Bloch redeploys an even older, "hypnotic spell" theory of ritual in order to save a school of thought that was once its implacable foe: structural-functionalism.

Structural-functionalists insisted on the functional practicality of rituals that had been depicted by evolutionists, missionaries, and others as deluded and irrational. They sought to show how such phenomena as magic, priestcraft, and divine kinship worked for social equilibrium, harmony, and integrated collective interests. Not only did such analyses methodically exclude exploitation and conflict (see 13), but they also presumed stasis in social structure. Well aware of these problems, Bloch seeks a way to avoid "de- nunciation," and asserts that the approach was "evidently fruitful" (29:2). What the structural-functionalists were studying, he concludes, was real, but as "superstructure," not simply social structure. As such it could still be observed once reinscribed into a Marxist historical terrain: "In other words, people may be extensively mystified by the static and organic imaginary models of their society which gain a shadowy phenomenological reality in ritual communication; but they also have available to them another source of concepts, the use of which can lead to the realization of exploitation and its challenge" (29:15). Thus, from Bloch we get a very different "structural, historical anthropology." It reproduces and relicenses structural-functionalism for the study of others, at the cost of making sinister all those "others" who are particularly eloquent, elite, and religious, and giving absolute privilege to a political-economic conception of "this world."

Divine kingship is also important in some profoundly Weberian efforts to constitute a "structural, historical anthropology": Weberian in the self- consciousness of their interpretive theorizing, in their interest in charismatic as well as systemic phenomena, and in their characteristically Weberian assertions, simultaneously, of universals and of an inexhaustible individuality and complexity to historical phenomena. Tambiah chides Bloch for recourse to an image of ritual as "diabolic smoke-screen," and seeks to transcend the image of "exploitative strategies of priestly castes building castles out of esoteric knowledge" by applying a more complex model of communicative practice to ritual, depicting ritual as symbolic and performative, and different in different historical contexts. To Tambiah, ritual can turn right or left, and "our task is to specify the conditions under which" rituals turn "to the right when they begin to lose their semantic component and come to serve mainly the pragmatic interests of authority," and "to the left when committed believ- ers," in "the effervescence of religious revival and reform," reorder their world and infuse old forms with new meanings. Rejecting "that kind of formulation which sees a prior "real world" of "brute facts" that religion, as a




mystification, seeks to hide," Tambiah thus equates religious effervescence with revolutionary realization that can challenge exploitation (242:155,166).

For Weberians, the questions about divine kingship concern tradition, charisma, and rationality; Weberian anthropologists have studied the rituals and histories of divine kings to reconsider the relation of "tradition" and "modernity" and evolutionary concepts of inevitable trajectory. In his study of the dynamic history of the "galactic polities" of Thai kings, Tambiah sees with "modernization" the centralization and bureaucratization of a "theater state" (240:487), but also sees the emerging radial polity as "a transformation . . .that was a possibility of the system itself" (p. 528). In the modern, radial state the rituals of kings are still powerful, constitutions declare the king's sacrality, and coup leaders revive royal rituals. Tambiah reproduces Weber's (272:181-82) ambivalence about the relation between charisma and rationality, about the possibility of new prophets and the future of the iron cage. He is ambivalent in particular about the historical significance of "modernization"; he categorically separates the "galactic polity" from the modern "radial polity" but also compares the transformation to many other periods of transformation in Thai and Buddhist history, declaring it "difficult or even impossible . . . to separate continuities from transformations" and emphasiz- ing "deep-seated dialectical tensions as continuities" in history (240: 528,517).

Like Tambiah, Clifford Geertz studies divine kings in Bali first of all for lessons about political interpretation in general, finding that against more than three centuries of priority to the pragmatic over the symbolic in Western political theory, study of "the theatre state" in Bali "restores our sense of the ordering force of display, regard, and drama" (105:121). Ordering forces for others, in some different type of society, or also for ourselves? The Weberian is again ambivalent: On the one hand he sees the one wonderful theatre state now "locked . . . in Weber's iron cage," making it "difficult to recover the character of political struggle when its energies were parochial and its ambi- tions cosmic" (105:133); on the other hand, his book concludes not only that the dramas of the theatre state "were what there was" in Bali, but also that if Balinese politics was symbolic action, it was also "like everyone else's, including ours" (105:136). To the Weberians, ultimately, the significance of divine kingship is a matter of interpretation, and the irreducibility of the historical process of interpretation is itself the lesson when divine kingship is studied.

Three recent ethnographies of kingship continue the debate, not only over what kingship was and is, but also over the moral of its story for social evolution, universals, and difference. Do rituals make social structure in some societies or all, as superstructure or at the core of what there is? In a study of Moroccan kingship, Combs-Schilling (60) discusses Bloch (27), Bourdieu



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(33), and others. She argues that "great collective rituals" devised in a political-economic crisis in the 1500s explain the persistence of Moroccan kingship despite erosion of its political-economic base, because these rituals operate on universal givens of mind-body connection sexuality, mortality, and, she argues, longing for transcendence. She finds that the rituals "in- scribe" powerful categories and relations, notably connections of masculinity and rule, femininity and impurity, onto the bodies and minds of Moroccans, making resistance to kingship and patriarchy literally self-destructive.

Though she casts her study as historical, Combs-Schilling's rituals are archetypal and enduring, and her search is for universals. In many ways opposite, though equally archetypal, is Errington's study of personhood, potency, power, and kingship in the Indic states of Southeast Asia. Where Combs-Schilling seeks to work from underlying universals of mind-body, Errington [following Geertz (104)] insists on "inserting a local notion of the person (as near as I can fathom it) into the account rather than importing a putatively global one" (84:5). Where Combs-Schilling takes license from Said's critique of Orientalism (222) to apply political-economic theory uni- versally, Errington is skeptical of political-economic universals, with a tren- chant critique of Bourdieu (84:298-99)-and she seeks an Oriental essence. Errington depicts her study as an example of "the Occidental mind and sensibility . . . meeting the Orient," and even speaks of "the Occidental human condition" (84:25,300). Her study is, then, the delineation of a deeply different system of personhood and politics, and is ahistorical in the mode of the "other" she depicts. Here, the danger of asserting an ontological break and a radical difference becomes clear. The real history of the "other" can be obscured in the depiction of difference in structure. Is it possible, then, to turn to history without turning also to political-economic or other universalistic premises?

In a history of kingship in South India, Dirks endorses Sahlins's intention to "explode history" and seeks a history operating with a "reflexive critical technique, challenging our basic presuppositions at every point" (80:11). He finds that Hocart was right about caste and kingship in South India, that ritual and politics converged in a society in which castes were defined and ranks contested in relations of ritual service and exchange with kings (p. 284). Is this another Orientalist archetype of traditional India? Dirks himself is a critic of the Orientalist tradition in Indology (on this see 210). He demonstrates the dependence of Dumont's grand dualism (81) on colonial conditions and relations, and argues even that the famed Indic "theatre state" is itself a colonial phenomenon, a politics of colonized kings. In the end, what Dirks constitutes is not a new image of an Asian divine kingship but an image of colonial transformations and scholarly misapprehensions. Orientalism and




colonialism themselves decenter divine kingship as the problem, without differences between our history and India's being elided.

CARGO CULTS: RITUAL AGAINST HISTORY?

From the divine king to the cargo cult, we move from an image of ritual politics at the center of other societies to an image of rituals of "others" no longer conceived as separate, but instead as connected and colonized, responding to the Western, modern, or colonial presence. The search for a general theory of cults and movements has been an important locus for anthropological inquiry into social change,2 asymmetries of power, and the agency of "others" in a real world of culture contact, capitalist encroachment, and colonialism.3 More recently the image of the cargo cult has been crowded out by a wide range of new images of rituals and histories made in a connected, colonized, and resisting world. We begin with a discussion of the cargo cult, its implicit social theory and its fate, and then move to more recent images.

The "cargo cult" could not exist except in a post-contact terrain. It is an image of ritual systems trying and failing to cope with real historical change, of the (presumed static) culture of the "other" responding to the history of (presumed dynamic) colonialism. At the core of the image is the "native" confronting Western material goods and worshipping them. The image pre- sumes both an asymmetry between the advanced West and the primitive native, and misunderstanding of the situation by the native. Implicitly in the image, the cult has to be temporary, and the native is temporary too, inevitably to learn rational use of the modern goods, and the real ways to obtain them. Within the cargo cult literature this image is regarded with increasing irony; for many anthropologists it becomes the straw man against which they adduce more symbolically, culturally, politically, or economically complex explanations. To return to titles, the cargo cult literature rejects, except for ironic use, The Vailala Madness (277), the colonial diagnosis of the

2For early and important studies of ritual and social change outside the cargo cult literature, see Sharp (231) on gifts of steel axes disrupting a system of "totemic" cosmology and exchange in Australia, Gluckman (Ill) and Mitchell (189) on rituals in African colonial contexts, and Geertz (102) on a disrupted funeral in urban Java. From these and other touchstones a wide literature has developed on rituals coming to terms with changing contexts (206, 232, 233, 265, 266; 110, 188; 7, 100, 204; 30, 114, 144). Geertz in particular has influenced many such studies; see e.g. 266:148-52, and 7:220. Fernandez (90, 92) has been influential in the African literature on religious movements and beyond-e.g. 165, 275.

3Reviews of the vast literature on cults and movements include 160, 164, 194; analyses of the epistemology of scholarly theories of cults and movements include 86 and 141; see 268 on anthropology itself as a cargo cult.



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irrationality of the racial "other"; though some retain Magic and Cargo as organizing tropes (166, 279), others have turned to New Heaven New Earth or The Trumpet Shall Sound, generalizing to "others" the powerful imagery of people in struggle from a Christian past (41, 282).

Many scholars conceived the cargo cult as a moment in a social evolutionary trajectory, as a ritual system marking social crisis or transition in world view [from magical to scientific, traditional to modern, closed to open (e.g. 141, 279)]. In these studies, "others" are conceived as tradition bound, ideological, tied to ahistorical ritual means, lacking agency until and insofar as they advance (cf 208), and the cult itself is a failed effort to master the new with the means of the old. Other scholars of the cargo cult have suggested not evolutionary but universalistic interpretations. Worsley (282) privileged a political-economic terrain as the ground of all real historical action and argued that cargo cults are fundamentally to be understood as political mobilizations and proto-nationalist and/or counter-colonial responses to colonization and exploitation. Burridge (41) privileged a moral terrain as the ground of human social action and found cults to be searches for new moral order in fields of moral disruption and decay. In the universalistic approaches, the ritual response need not be sharply opposed to effective history-making. The local particulars of cosmology and ritual that inform the cult practices are merely the idiom in which political mobilization or moral ordering expresses itself.

What has happened to the image of the cargo cult? To begin with, in the New Guinea literature, where the image originated, studies concerned with ritual and social change are less interested in delineating cargo cults and more interested in wider study of social change and local apprehensions of structure and history. Can a cooperative association, a Protestant evangelical revival, and a "cargo cult" always be differentiated? Arguing that "cults do not exist" (in parallel with Levi-Strauss on "totemism"), McDowell (187) proposes that so-called cults are merely one way in which New Guinea peoples conceptual- ize and create change. While not all scholars follow her lead in rejecting the image, a reconsideration of it is under way (39, 40, 45, 147, 149, 174, 195). The problem of the "cargo cult" has been exploded; study of the rituals involving Western commodities is now subsumed within studies of ritual- politics and Melanesian history-making more generally (124, 158), within studies that question trajectories of modernization and Westernization (239), and within studies of the complexities and vitality of articulations being made between Melanesian exchange ritual and commodity exchange (34, 44, 63, 88, 118, 167). The study of ritual now intersects with study of new Melane- sian categories such as bisnis (business), lotu (religion), and kastam (custom) (34, 152, 185), and attention to counter-colonial and nationalist discourses in Melanesian history-making (127, 150, 151). (In parallel, a complex reconsideration of political-religious movements in colonial history in Africa




is under way; for comprehensive reviews see 86, 89, 211; see also 10, 140, 176, 177, 207. On South America see 128, 224, 225, 283. On money, commodities, and morality, cross-culturally, see 205).

While the New Guinea literature has found new ways to consider the trajectories of change and the history-making of the colonized, other scholars have called into question the rationality of the colonizers. In a study of new rituals among the colonized in South America that center on goods and money, Taussig (243) connects the problem of "the devil" with the problem of "commodity fetishism." He argues that as peasants become proletarianized, they struggle not with some more rational Western reality but with a constructed and unnatural commodity fetishism of a powerful colonial system. The colonizers, already mystified about the real workings of capitalism, cannot understand the critique offered in myth and ritual as the workers personify the evil in the system as the devil. (On this, see also 43, 116, 193, and 196:80-81.) And, in a study of the rise of the Watchtower movement in Malawi and Zambia, Fields (93) rereads colonial records as ethnographic texts and argues that the millennialism of Watchtower was shared (and read into African activities) by the Christian colonizers. Her study, like Ginzburg's (109) study of the Catholic Inquisition's vision of an agrarian fertility cult, suggests that "cults" may be constructed by authorities even as they seek to regulate or extirpate them (see also 145, 146).

The cargo cult image, the "native" worshipping Western goods, pre- supposed the rationality of colonials and a general trajectory of modernization. The New Guinea scholarship does not always call into question the rationality of the colonizers. The scholars who do, such as Taussig and Fields, do not always question historical trajectory; Taussig assumes that capitalism will inevitably overtake "pre-capitalist" systems; Fields sees colonial millennialism as itself "pre-modern" and implies eventual modernity for all concerned. But from these sources and others, new images are emerging that are crowding out the cargo cult as touchstones in the analysis of the ritual politics of colonial encounters. Two of them we have already introduced. In the anthropology of the Pacific at present there is great vitality in the study of kastam and bisnis, indigenous use of transformed Western categories to organize a social and ritual field. And Taussig's study of ritual critique of commodity fetishism and capitalist labor relations has inspired study of similar cases, notably Ong's study of fainting, spirit-possessed women workers resisting capitalism in Malaysian factories (199). In his more recent work on colonial terror and curative shamanism in Colombia, Taussig (244) recon- ceives the larger trajectory and its practical reason as the setting for the exchanges, rituals, and violence he studies, preferring techniques of montage and magical realism to evoke both terror and the curative powers of shamanism without a depiction of overarching, encompassing order or structure.



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As well as these two, other new images are in the making. Prompted by the growing anthropological literature on problems for the study of culture and history (as well as 26, 221, 240, 241, 243, 244, 281, see also 8, 54, 78, 120, 202, 216, 217), new general ways of locating ritual have emerged. Some scholars study rituals as expressions of relations between historically specific selves and others in theories of identity and alterity. Others study ritual within dynamic cultural systems and articulations in the colonial encounter. Still others focus on rituals of rule and resistance in studies of domination, which some, following Williams following Gramsci, call "hegemony" (278).

Alterity (self/other) theory provides one general model of differentiations and dynamics that bridges individual and society, system and history. In alterity theory, asymmetries of power at many levels are analyzed as instances of a general model of psychosocial life, inherently a dialectical or reflexive relation between powerful and subordinated, between self and other. Rituals then become one of many vehicles for making and expressing these self/other relations. Analyzing confrontations of knowledge and power in the Spanish conquest of America, Todorov (251) argues that rituals are the conservative vehicle for making and expressing self-other relationships. He opposes ritual to improvisation, just as he opposes the incapacities and failures of Montezu- ma to the improvisational powers, historical consciousness, and effectiveness of Cortez. Like cargo cultists, the Aztecs were doomed, and their dependence on ritual was to blame. Ohnuki-Tierney's (197) examination of monkey symbolism and rituals in Japanese history is very different. The history that concerns her is that of the changing relations between "dominant Japanese" (the majority population) and monkey-trainers among the "special status people" (outcastes). In Japanese culture the relation of people and monkeys is a mirror for self-other relations between different classes of people, and thus for Ohnuki-Tierney the changing monkey symbols and rituals are a lens through which to examine historical change. But further, she argues, monkey ritual itself is used by the "special status people" to comment upon the established order, to criticize it and to transform it. Scholarly interest in the relationship of "self" and "other" maps out unevenly in anthropological literature (as is the case for many other anthropological foci; see 9). Self/other questions seem to have particular salience for scholars of Japan and for scholars in the French tradition.

Scholars without a special interest in dialectics of "self' and "other" have also studied rituals as statements about identity and ethnicity in antagonistic terrains. For some, again, ritual is a relatively conservative form, a font of identity in relation to external pressures, as Hefner (126) shows in a study of "pre-Islamic" ritual and identity in the face of Islamization among the Teng- ger of Java. (For more on these issues in Indonesia see 157.) Other scholars see rituals among the vehicles of contest over identity, as in Fowler's (97)




study of contested symbols among generations and tribes of Plains Indians (see also 36, 49, 212, 265). In an ironic comment on the making of identity in an American town's "festival of nations," Errington (83) argues that the celebration of neighborliness mystifies realities of ethnicity, class, and history.

Other anthropologists locate ritual in the articulation of societies and cosmologies in historical colonial encounters. Many recent studies concern the incorporation of colonial rituals and cosmology into local systems of belief and practice during colonial encounters, even including a study of ritual incorporation of the Roman emperor into the local pantheons of colonized Greek cities in Asia Minor in the 1st to 3rd centuries AD (209; see also 179). The non-Western Christianities made within European colonialism have re- ceived more attention (23, 24, 35, 56-59, 139, 156, 223, 228, 236, 237, 253), raising general questions about the modalities and limits of what E. P. Thompson once called "the transforming power of the cross" (248). In this light, interesting issues are also raised in studies of changing ritual practices within European Christian history, especially by Asad (15, 16), who raises Foucaultian questions about ritual in history (and see also 37, 108, 246).

The dynamism of local cultural systems is the point of Sahlins's analysis of Captain Cook as Hawaiian dying God (219-221), which is emerging as a touchstone for study of colonial encounters. Ritual plays a central role in the creation of what Sahlins calls a "structure of the conjuncture." Cook's relation to the Hawaiians was established differently by Hawaiian chiefs and priests, in formal acts of sacrifice and exchange. In the contact situation, the agents who have the power to make and orient rituals objectify their own interpretations, creating "a set of historical relationships that at once reproduce the traditional cultural categories and give them new values out of the pragmatic context" (221:125). In Sahlins's account, rituals made history precisely because their forms, while established in a Hawaiian system, were applied as actors chose in the circumstances, creating the antagonisms and contradictions that led to the death of Cook and transformation of the Hawaiian system. The power of Sahlins's image is its assertion of the durability and dynamism of the cultural difference of "others," another form of antithesis to the cargo cult image of intrinsic Western superiority. (See also 79, 137, and 260.)

A different terrain is proposed for the understanding of ritual by scholars of domination, hegemony, and resistance interested in rituals of rule, rituals of resistance, and "struggle for possession of the sign." The study of rituals and routines of rule, as delineated by Corrigan & Sayer (61, 62) and Cohn & Dirks (55), turns attention to the techniques of rulers in the making of colonial and post-colonial societies. The cultural encounter is itself then shown to be structured by rituals of domination and taking possession: English, Spanish,



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and French men planting pennants, crosses, and other markers on a beach to "possess Tahiti" (79); formal readings of the (untranslated) Requerimiento proclamation by the Spanish at first encounters in the New World (35:6; 251:146-49).

Scholars now explore the varied means through which rulers, states, and colonizers have made their power visible and sought to order "others," describing projects we would include as rituals of rule: not only creating state shrines and rites (123, 162, 274, 276) but also reordering local ritual practice through inquisition (109; cf 218), sanitizing the colonized landscape (198, 247), and trampling the rural landscape (138) (see also 1, 215, 230, 252). Colonizers, especially the British, have represented authority and maintained and refined hierarchical racial and gender relations through rigid rituals of etiquette, from celebrating the king's birthday in the bush (264:148-51) to playing games of cricket throughout empire (181, 214, 238, 264). In other cases, precolonial rituals of rule are put to new use in support of colonial or post-colonial power, as when Balinese village authorities deployed a traditional drama to punish rebels against the colonial state (106), or when development officials do putatively "ancient" water-offering rituals in dam- building "modernization" projects in Sri Lanka (245; and see 163). Under Hobsbawm & Ranger's rubric of "invention of tradition" (131; see also 175) fall studies of the efforts of ruling classes, states, and colonizers to establish their authority through legitimating claims to historicity and tradition [e.g. British-run Durbars in colonial India (53), and English rituals of monarchy themselves (42; see also 12, 235)].

The making of history by the colonized is also studied, reframed as resistance to power and dominance, in forms from Scott's "everyday resistance" (229), to rituals. Rituals of resistance are not conceived of as ritual responses to a more fundamental material incursion (as "cults" were), nor as "rituals of rebellion" whose primary function was to reproduce an indigenous political system. Instead they are now constructed as moments of ongoing historical practice. For example, where Gluckman (112) analyzed the Swazi ncwala as the classic "ritual of rebellion," Lincoln (172) situates the 1930s ethnography of the ritual by Hilda Kuper in a colonial situation, finding that the ritual rallied a Swazi nation against both the fissiparous efforts of dissident Swazi and an unwanted fusion into the colonial order (see also 173). Else- where, Silverblatt (234) is particularly attentive to indigenous differentiations of hierarchy, gender, and power, as well as to those brought by colonizers, in her study of Andean women maintaining their powers within a "native religion." Their "witchcraft" was neither a cult nor simply a continuation of precolonial culture; in a colonial field in which the Spanish Catholic church branded them witches, "witchcraft, maintenance of ancient traditions, and conscious political resistance became increasingly intertwined" (p. 195).




Lan's (161) account of guerillas consulting spirit mediums in Zimbabwe shows the power of ritual in the context of armed struggle itself [see also Fischer (94) on Muharram in the Iranian revolution].

All studies of rituals of resistance depict what some call the "struggle for possession of the sign" (56:196; 125:17; following 267).4 But it is particularly clear what a ritual of resistance accomplishes when rule is analytically conceived of as a cultural hegemony (278). If a system of domination controls the representation of what is possible and what is natural, then a ritual of resistance breaks the hegemony over the subjective consciousness of the ritual participants. It makes them conscious of the oppression and allows them to envision new communities and possibilities. Kingdoms, nations, and utopias are forms in which some of these communities of struggle are envisioned. Studies explicitly exploring Gramscian "hegemony" theory bring together analyses of counter-colonial discourse and the powerful imagining of truth through ritual-politics. In her study of the Tshidi Kingdom of Zion movement in South Africa, Comaroff finds ritual to be "a form of historical practice" that is particularly important under oppressive conditions, conditions in which "'expressions of dissent are prevented from attaining the level of open discourse." The rituals she studies are both rooted and transformative-rooted in a local symbolic system and a particular encounter with colonialism, capitalism and Christianity; and transformative of consciousness, using "the polyva- lent metaphor of healing" to "alter the state of bodies physical and social" (56:196-98; see also 59).

Because these rituals do not directly change the "structural predicament of black South Africans" (56:199), Comaroff's study leaves open questions about what kinds of changes rituals of resistance can make. In our view, there is much still to be learned about the counter-hegemonic possibilities of rituals of resistance from cases within successful counter-colonial movements, notably satyagraha ("insistence on the truth") within Gandhian nationalism in India (cf 5, 64, 98, 153, 154). Do rituals of resistance create a historical consciousness needed to make history? Marx was disappointed, but aware, that revolutionaries "anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene in world history" (186:15). It seems likely to us that rituals of resistance do not raise consciousness in some universalistic sense, revealing a true world-historical situation, but instead have been effective where they move people from one definition of authority and power to another, where they find and exploit contradictions in colonial hegemony by re-encoding hegemonic culture into some other structure.

4Concerning reference 267, this work and others by "Volosinov" have been attributed by some to Bakhtin, who is discussed in the next section. See 46 and 250. For studies of ritual, cultural hegemony, and resistance between classes in England, see also 12?1.



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The cargo cult was an image of ritual against history, a response from the culture of the "other" to the historical practice of the colonizers; but anthropologists now seek vehicles for study of the culture and history of both colonizers and colonized. As the image of the cargo cult goes the way of the totem, it is being replaced by historically specific studies of ritual as a powerful vehicle of change in structure and history.

CARNIVAL: RITUAL AGAINST STRUCTURE?

In the mid-1950s, Edith Turner recounts (258:5), Victor Turner struggled with his dissertation:

A new term was needed. Vic and Bill sat with their beer mugs before them and wrestled with the problem. "Social drama," said Vic. "Of course." Returning home he wrote out his paper for Max's seminar the next day, introducing the new concept. Next morning he made the wearisome journey south by bus to the mid city, then a change of buses and two miles south in the rush hour to the dusty seminar room. With controlled excitement he read the story of Sandombu: and he analyzed its stages-breach, crisis, redress, reintegration-the social drama as the window into Ndembu social organization and values. Now you see the living heart. Max sat, his hands folded on top of his bowed bald head. When it was over he raised his head, his eyes burning. "You've got it! That's it."

"Bill" is A. L. Epstein, and "Max" is Max Gluckman. Not only did the approval of Max the professor reintegrate the liminal post-field graduate student into the life of the academy, but in this little social drama we also glimpse an early phase of the process of processualism remaking anthropology. By the 1970s, "social drama" and "ritual process," "communitas" and "liminality" were vital in anthropology, and influential in many related fields of ritual and historical study. Any serious student of ritual is still expected to grapple with the proposition that rituals, and with them societies, are not structures but processes. Each, as Turner describes "Society (societas)," at the conclusion of The Ritual Process, "seems to be a process rather than a thing-a dialectical process with successive phases of structure and communitas" (256:203).

The process model is powerful. The image of social life as "process" puts narrative at the living heart of description, and it also effaces the distinction between the unique and the typical, a distinction surely arbitrary and definite- ly optional to any effort to depict the ongoing flow. Turner's method, especially in combination with the interpretivism of Geertz (a favorite combination in ritual studies), enables sweep, selectivity, and great authority in boundary- and connection-drawing, licensing ritual analysts to capture the speech and practice of ritual and evoke the experience of it without making explicit claims about the ongoing reality of any system. Process theorists have




argued persuasively that they have captured elements of social life missing from accounts of social structures and cultural systems. Some structuralists contest Turner's theory as a universalization of one model of structure and anti-structure, as when Sangren argues that Chinese society is "a self- reproducing cybernetic system" (226:129; cf 255:54) without moments of communitas but instead with an indigenous and different logic of anti- structure and structure, yin and yang (226:132-51, 189-94). However, other structuralists now connect the efficacy of rituals to their dramatic, aesthetic, and multivocal character, their riotous surplus of meaning as well as their order (e.g. 254:239). In a recent review article, Vincent argued that the late 1970s and early 1980s were the scene of a shift in multiple subfields of anthropology, "from systemic to processual analysis" (263:112). We sense a further shift in ritual studies of the late 1980s: from images of dialectical processes to images of deconstructive ones; from successive phases of structure and anti-structure to relations of power and resistance; from processualism to chaotics. From Victor Turner to Mikhail Bakhtin.

From Turner to Bakhtin we move from drama to comedy, from social dramas of "breach, crisis, redress, reintegration" to parody, grotesque and voluptuous bodies, and the "forms of protocol and ritual based on laughter" (22:5). Bakhtin wrote his major study of carnival in the 1930s; it was published in 1965, and in 1968 became the first of his books to be translated into English, as Rabelais and his World. His first impact was in literary studies; and he arrived in anthropology, judging by the weight of references, only very recently. To Bakhtin the medieval carnival is neither a moment of anti-structure in a dialectical process of structure-making nor a place of nonstructure. It is the limit and opponent of "official" structure, its moving line of corrosive parody the counter to official power and proof of the futility of ruling efforts to hegemonize. Victor Turner himself was interested in carnival, play, and chaos (182, 257, 259). But in his theories, the human nature of all human beings contained the chaotic as the left hand (and by the end of his career, the right-brain) complement to "the classificatory nets of . . .quotidian, routinized spheres of action" (256:vii). The Dionysian was in the end the balance, not the challenge, to the Apollonian side of life (and brain), and was thereby defanged, limited in its capacity for real dissolution of structure, system, or context. Turner was aware that the poor, the lower class, the subaltern had a different and closer relationship to the chaotic potentialities of ritual action, but in his imagination their goals were alternately the "leveling" of communitas, and social mobility: "the structurally inferior aspire to symbolic structural superiority in ritual" (256:203). Similarly, Tur- ner was interested in play, but for him "play is a serious business!" This surmise led to evolutionary-biological speculation about the role of play in "mankind's cognitive and imaginative capacities" (258:160). Bakhtin took the



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laughter itself seriously and provided a new vision of "the living heart" (to continue Edith Turner's phrase) of speech and practice: a chaotic, carnivalesque dialog, irreducible and creative, with utterances not just polyphonic in their symbols but heteroglossic in their voices. Bakhtin's human being is on no set quest. Irony can override all official authority, including the interpret- er's.

Study of carnivals and festivals as "rituals of reversal" was inspired by Turner and by Gluckman's conception of "rituals of rebellion" (112). (For studies of carnival see 48, 67-70, 91, 180-184, 213; on whether carnival is a ritual, see 2 and 67). By the late 1970s, studies of carnival began to turn away from the idea of a functional role for anti-structure, in a functional synthesis of ritual process and structural necessity, towards "a greater tolerance for disorder" and a search for an "adequate account of expressions of disorder and license as persistent elements in culture" (3:207, 3:196; 17). More generally, many 1980s ethnographers have sought to avoid depicting one "system" or "structure" to rituals observed: Wagner studies men's houses and mortuary feasts in New Ireland and finds "ritual elicitation of meaning" there to involve not a closed system of institutions but "indirect and reactive, or competitive, inducement to action" (269:xvi,215). Holmberg's study of three types of ritual specialists among the Tamang in Nepal insists on "ritual complexity," contradictions between their practices and a paradoxical whole, a total field that "resists a final gloss and can only be apprehended in the apperception of its contrary versions" (136:8-9). Using Bakhtin in his study of lamas and shamans in Nepal, Mumford carries the point further, arguing that Tibetan Buddhist identity is layered and unbounded in an ongoing historical dialog, and that cultures are "inherently unbounded and implicated in a larger historical process of meaning formation" (192:245).

Historian Natalie Davis was perhaps the first to conjoin Turner and Bakhtin and to argue, with Bakhtin, that carnival "does not, however, reinforce the serious institutions and rhythms of society . . . it helps change them" (73:103; cf 19, 72). At present, Bakhtin is increasingly discussed in studies of carnival and other rituals (68, 117, 148, 171). Scholars have begun to look for, and find, carnivals and carnivalesque moments in periods of significant social change (4, 168, 280), and many have adopted a Bakhtinean vision of social relations more generally. The dialogical model of language and society is increasingly important in anthropological linguistics (122, 129, 262) and has become a pillar of the faith for those seeking a self-consciously reflexive and post-modern anthropology (47, 65).

Bakhtin's vision makes anthropology more difficult and less important. Max Gluckman's dusty seminar room can be the scene of a social drama but it is clearly also a venue of the refashioning of a part of official culture, vulnerable to the irony of those studied. The very earnestness with which we




now contemplate the implications is itself a limitation for the scientist, and we can all sense the ridiculousness of our quest for rigor in the study of carnival. Should we or shouldn't we intoxicate ourselves? Which investigations of the sensuous are appropriate? In an important sense, the moral and technical problems are irrelevant. Whatever we do or don't do, participant-observation and later evocation of the vital heart of the chaos of social life can never be more than a scholarly dream and abstraction, because it is our nature to put things into order. The limitation thus demonstrated to our prospects points out the futility of Turner's implicit functionalisms, and is part of the end of the quest to know human nature wholly (95, 142). Da Matta envisions an anthropology that is instead, like carnival, relativizing (68:170); Boon sees anthropology, like carnival, as multivalent and subversive, an anthropology that "inscribes values contrary to our rational order" (31:173; see also 32).

Where, in such a new anthropology, is the space for study of structure and history, for addressing the "structural predicament of black South Africans" (56:199)? Bakhtin's image of the carnivalesque is no more intrinsically historical than Turner's anti-structure. But because it is not the dialectical complement to structure, Bakhtin's chaotic, dialogical reality refuses to allow history to be submerged into any general model of system and its transformations in process. It makes all "official" structures, systems, and practices stand out as particular phenomena with their own modalities and contradictions. It makes structure intrinsically historical.

CONCLUSIONS: RITUALS MAKING HISTORY

In recent scholarship, new issues have been raised about structure, history, and ritual. In reconsiderations of divine kingship, scholars ask how important are differences in structure for the ways history is made in different societies. As the image of the cargo cult dissolves, scholars turn from an understanding of ritual as the ahistorical response of some societies to change, toward a theory of ritual as part of history-making in all societies. Contemplating carnival, scholars discover an irreducible heteroglossia in social life, changing our understanding of structure in history. In a heteroglossic world, what do rituals do?

To Geertz (104) rituals provide models of and models for. Asad (14, 15) criticizes Geertz for neglecting power in his focus on symbols, and following Foucault, wants to study the instrumentalities of rituals, what they do rather than what they mean. To Valeri (261:341-42), rituals are practices in which the participants do not believe themselves to be the authors of what they do, believing instead that their ritual significations are authorized and prescribed by a superior authority. Bloch (28, 29) dismisses Valeri's structuralism and identifies rituals as assertions that brook no arguments, that suggest no



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alternatives, and cannot be contested. Others then show that ritual is also a potent force for change, not merely a conservative power (155, 242). In Turner's hands drama and process encompass both order and change; in Comaroff's view (56) the drama is the struggle to control the sign, and ritual is historical practice, a highly encoded resistance to hegemonic order. We think these elements can be brought together (see also 147, 153).

Valeri's suggestion that rituals displace authority and authorship becomes most interesting if we do not suppose that there is an ongoing and totalizing structure or system behind practice. Rituals then are not productions from cultural templates or "expressions" of structure, but instead are acts of power in the fashioning of structures: acts that make gods, kings, presidents, and property-rights by declaring that the authority of the priest, judge, or police officer resides in a higher source, a mana, dharma or constitution. As Combs-Schilling (60:252) argues, "Rituals build definitions." But what gives ritual the "fullness, independence, and capacity to orchestrate experience" that "enables it to build definitions in pure and clarified form" (60:253)? Combs-Schilling and others (33:87ff) emphasize body imagery and inscription, which are important but do not distinguish ritual from other activity. Ritual has the power to define bodies and many other things besides. How?

The special power in ritual acts, including their unique ability to encompass contestation, lies in the lack of independence asserted by a ritual participant, even while he or she makes assertions about authority. To talk to a person in trance is to speak to the deity manifesting; to talk to the judge in court is to be in court. Engagement only adduces evidence of the presence of the god, or of the force of law. Laughter, parody, and other talk about ritual participants can be corrosive, and dangerous, but direct dialogue is restricted. Ritual is a crucial part of practice, then, precisely because the limits on agency in ritual presentations make the larger claims possible: Courtroom procedure appears to prove that a constitution, even an unwritten one, can exist; as Hocart (132-135) tells us, a chief in Fiji has the mana to support the people of the land because he incites ongoing sacrifice.

Hocart argues that rituals reproduce life. In his own arguments about "power over life" Foucault orients study of "discursive practices," and reorga- nizes the study of power in sexuality, medicine, penology, the state, and other aspects of "modern" life. But surely Foucault is wrong to locate in 17th- century Europe the first appearance of such "power over life," mechanisms of power characterized by "the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life" (96:139-40). On the same theme of "life," in Hocart the focus shifts from epistemology to ontology, from discursive practice to ritual practice; but again we find the inscription of capacities and limits, values and functions, onto bodies and persons; we find practices making and remaking powers that can only be understood within relations between people, even if




in Fiji it is relations between chiefs and people of the land, rather than doctors and patients, "cooked men" for "raw women" rather than prescriptions for symptoms. Hocart, unlike Levi-Strauss, would have agreed with Foucault's assertion that the important structures are not "systems of representation" but "economies" of practice, with intrinsic technologies, necessities of operation, tactics they employ, and effects they transmit (96:68-69). But when referring to the techniques of control over life, Hocart would probably still "prefer to call all its varieties by the name," not intrinsic technologies of discursive practice, but "ritual" (133:34).

We are constantly entering and exiting ritual roles in which our action is authorized outside of ourselves, and that is how we remake some forms of authority and disempower others. With the turn to history, and discovery of the chaotics irreducible within the possibilities of dialog, "practice" has usurped "structure" as the reigning image of the real in anthropology (cf 201, 202). When "structure" was the reality, "ritual" was its expression and vehicle of reproduction, and indeed, ritual still seems to us to be the practice that makes structures, the practice that defines and authorizes. But in the wake of criticism of privilege for cultural structures (e.g. 217:8), the new question is the place of ritual, and structure, in practice. Some privilege political economy in the definition of practice, and relegate ritual to a secondary, poetic, and even mystifying function, identifying as "traditional" the forms of authority structured by ritual. We follow Foucault and Hocart in not privileging a political-economic definition of the real, when they insist upon the discourse in all practices and the practice in discourse, the ritual in all politics and the politics in ritual. We argue that ritual plays a crucial role in practice, as a vehicle for all forms of authority. From the Foucaultian point of view, this makes all ritual sinister, and the best defense is ironic distance. We prefer the Hocartian sense of rituals as therefore life-empowering, and the Boasian conviction that many structures exist, have existed, and can exist in history. Indeed, we suggest that the rituals in ongoing practice are a principal site of new history being made, and that study of the plural formal potentialities of rituals could be basic to efforts to imagine possibilities for real political change. In either case, from either the Foucaultian or the Boasian view, a history of rituals is a history of reproduction, contestation, transformation, and-if we accept carnival as a ritual-deconstruction of authority. How can a new church, school, kingdom, colony, nation, party, "Common Market," or other "imagined community" (6) come into being except through its own characteristic rituals? Can a state be unmade by a carnival?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For readings, comments, and suggestions, we warmly thank Mark Auslander, John Comaroff, Mary Des Chene, Nancy Foster, Abdellah Hammoudi, Mary



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Huber, Gananath Obeyesekere, Larry Rosen, Marshall Sahlins, and Patsy Spyer, with special thanks to Robert Foster, Hildred Geertz, and Rafael Sanchez. For the interpretations and imperfections, we are responsible.

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150 KELLY & KAPLAN

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