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582 DO N HANDELMANTheorizing ritual framing leads one to question the universal valid-

ity of the Durkheimian separation of the sacred from th e profane.Th e Durkheimian distinction, one fitting well with the Theory ofLogical Types and one essential to the modem study of ritual inanthropolo gy and religious studies, issues from the more monotheticpremises of monotheistic theologies. This likely is no less so for otherof the clean-cut distinctions that have gained great prominence inritual studies, like those of the Van Gennepian tripartite scheme ofri tes de s passage , especially as adapted by Vctor Turner.31 Lineal fram-ing, premised on hierarchical ordering ancl th e surgical incising ofoutside from inside, has validity for many instances of ritual analy-sis. Yet this framing fits much too neatly within monothetic ideas ofritual organization. The ways in which lineal framing is formulatedlimit, skew, and reduce our comprehension of how change in ritualemerges from ritual practice itself, and draw attention away fromcomplexities of the interpenetration of the interior and exterior ofritual. Seeding ritual framing with fuzzier qualities, more Moebius-like and b raided, may enable the whole concept to flourish in waysmore compatible with the complexities of r itual phenomena.

LANGUAGEGarlo Se veri

"To us anthropologists, the meaning of any significant word, sen-tence or phrase is th e e f f e c t i v e change brought about by the utterancein the context of the situation to which it is wedded." "Now, a mag-ical formula is neither a piece of conversation, or a statement ora communication. What is it? We were led to the conclusin thatthe meaning of a spell consists in th e e f f e c t of the words with in their r i t -ua l conte x t . "1 Since Bronislaw Malinowski made these famous remarksin Coral Gardens a n d their M a g i c , the analysis of ritual acon and thestudy of language have been closely related in the field of anthro-pology. Language has been seen as a paradigmatic model in three !respects: as a way to study the construction of meaning in the rit-ual context, as an image of the internal order that structures ritual :actions, and eventually as a pragmatic context for understanding th eeffectiveness of ritual.

Ritual, L a n g u a g e , a n d t h e C o n s t r u c t i o n of M e a n i n gThe study of the construction of meaning in ritual generally dependson two very different 'paradigms'. The first could be described asintellectualist and is based on a conception of religin inherited fromEdward B. Tylor and James G. Frazer.2 Rituals, like other mani-festations of religin, are considerad to be the expression of 'worldpictures' or 'theories' about the world, either of a cosmological kind 3or comparable, at least in their function, to scientific theories.

4Ritual

51 V.W. Turner 1969.

B. Malinowski, Coral Gardens an d their Magic (London, 1935), II, 214 and 241.See E.B. Tylor, Pr imi twe Cultu re . R e s e a r c h e s mt o t l i e D e u e l o p m e n t of M y t h o l a g y , P h i l o s o p h y ,Ar t , an d Cus t o m , 2 vols. (Loncion, 1871); J.G. Frazer, Th e G o i d e n Bougk. AStudy in A ' l a g i c an d Rel ig in (London, abridgcd ed. , 1923).3 E.g., M. Griaule, Dieu f 'eau. En t r e n i s a n e e Ogolemmeli (Paris, 1948).' E.g., J. Skorupski, Sy m bo l and Themy . A Philosop/ncal Study of Theories of Religin iu

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584 GA RL O SEVERI

actioii is then seen as merely th e translation into acts of this con-sistent and explanatory 'discourse', which is said to be bound up

i with each culture. In contrast to the intellectualist interpretation,: developments in structuralist anthropology havc led many anthro-pologists to propose a semiological view of ritual action. For thedescription places emphasis on the way in which each syrnbol isinc ludedthrough metaphor and metonymyin networks of arbi-trary signs.5 The field of ritual symbolism is thus described as thereorganization by analogy or contrast of notions present in otherreas of tradition, such as myths and proverbs.

Where the study of meaning is concerned, the two approachesintellectualist and semiologicaldeny or minimize certain properdesof ritual which in the eyes of the participants are essential. Thusmost rituals carry obscure or contradictory messages and sometimesuse formulas and enunciatory situations that impede communication,

. contrary to what is assumed by an intellectualist approach. As forthe semiological approach, by neglecting the specific form of ritualsymbolismthe particular way in which it unites gestares, words,images, and objectsit not only disregards the ritual's emotional andcognitive dimensions but also fails to define what distinguishes rituali from any other aspect of a culture. Ritual is considered as maskedspeech. When w e follow this path, w e turn ritual action into th eredundant accessory of a socially regulated discourse or the impov-

' erished versin of a cosmology.In short, the specific complexity of ritual cannot be fully accounted

for by looking into th e discourse it implies or into its social func-tion. In both cases the concern is always with the premises or con-

I I sequences of ritual. What is really necessary, however, is to considerth e organization of ritual action itself.

,' j From this perspective, the reference to language for the study ofritual becomes even more essential. It ceases to focus solely on theprocesses of the construction of meaning and becomes a full episte-molgica! model. Like any lingustic phenomenon, ritual possesses a

f o r m . A fundamental approach to the problem of ritual form w asoffered by Claude Lvi-Strauss in the concluding section of T he Na k e d

Social A n t h r o p o l o g y (Cambridge, 1976); R. Horton, "Tradition and Modernity Revisited",M. Hollis and S. Lukes (eds), Ratwnal i l y an d Rela t iv i sm (Oxford, 1982), 201-260.3 E.g. Leach 1976 and Fernandez 1972.

LANGUAGE 585

M a n .6 Over and above the standard question of the relationships tobe established between myth and rite, the main part of his criticismconcerns the very nature of mythology:

[MJythology exists in two clearly different modalities. Sometime it isexplicit and consists of stories which, because of their dimensions andinternal organization, rank as works in their own right. Sometimes, onthe contrary, the mythic text is fragmentary, and is made up, as itwere, only of notes or sketches; instead of the f ragments being broughttogether in the light of some guiding principie, each remains linkecl toa particular phase of the ritual, on which it serves as a gloss, and itis only recited in connection with the performance of ritual acts.7

Y e t , he contines, "contemporary theoreticians of ritual",8 includingfirst and foremost Vctor W. Turner, approach ritual by illegitimatelymixing into it elements of "implicit" mythology, with th e result that"they fm d themselves dealing with a hybrid entity about which any-thing can be said: that it is verbal and non-verbal, that it has a cog-nitive function and an emotional and conative function, and so on".9Lvi-Strauss proposes that ritual be studied "in itself and for itself",10and that, accordingly, "we should on the contrary begin by remov-in g from it all the implicit mythology which adheres to it withoutreally being part of it, in other words, those beliefs and representa-tions which are connected with a philosophy of nature, in the sameway as myths . . ."."How, then, is ritual to be defined? Fo r Lvi-Strauss th e move-ments that compose ceremonial activities "serve in l o c o verbi; they are :a substitute for words",12 in order, through action, to actualize amythology: "ritual condenses into a concrete and unitary form pro-cedures which otherwise would have had to be discursive".13 It isprecisely this supplementary function that on his view distinguishes

6 Lvi-Strauss 1981.7 Lvi-Strauss 1981, 669.8 Lvi-Strauss 1981, 669.9 Lvi-Strauss 1981, 669. Meyer Fortes advances a similar positon when he saysthat "it is but a short step from the notion of ritual as communication to the non-existence of ritual p e r s e " (M. Fortes, "Religious Premises and Logical Techniquein Diviriatory Ritual", Phi losoplncal T t a n sa c t wn s Q J tk e Ro y a i S o c i e y ofLondon 251 (1966),409-422; cited after Rappaport 1979, 178)."' Lvi-Strauss 1981, 669.1 1 Lvi-Strauss 1981, 669.'-' Lvi-Strauss 1981, 671 .13 Lvi-Strauss 1981, 671 .

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586 GA RL O SEVER!

ritual acts from similar operations in everyday life. From this stand-point the specificity of ritual lies primarily in the particular way inwhich it enacts mythology. In other words, ritual is distinguished notby what it says but by how it says it. Lvi-Strauss then identifiestwo complementary 'procedures': repetiton and fragmentation, or touse the term adopted by his English translators , 'parceling'. The sys-tematic application of these procedures, he arges, may be thoughtto lead to a certain type of communication specific to ritual. Moreprecisely, he considers that these procedures have the effect of reduc-ing to a minimum in the experiential content of the ritual itself thecritical distinctions established by the classificatory thought charac-teristic of mythology. Whereas myth by definition dist ingus/ es betweenopposing pairs of terms, ritual cult ivates the illusion of a reconcilia-

i tion of opposites: "Ritual, by fragmenting operations and repeating1 them unwearyingly in infinite detail, takes upon itself the laborioustask of patching up holes and stopping gaps, and it thus encouragesthe illusion that it is possible to run counter to myth, and to moveback from the discontinuous to the continuous."14 A number ofauthors, including Turner himself, have seen in the establishment ofsuch a transcendent context a liminality that 'revitalizes' society orthe conditions for the participants' adherence to the actions theyundertake. Lvi-Strauss sees the ritual form in a completely differentlight: it is a "desperate, and inevitably unsuccessful, attempt"15. Thushe contines:

When Turner15 states that religious rites "crate or actualize the cat-egories by means of which man apprehends reality, the axioms under-lying the social structure and the laws of the moral or natural order",he is not fundamentally wrong, since ritual does, of course, refer tothese categories, laws or axioms. But ritual does not crate them, andendeavours rather, if not to deny them, at least to oblitrate, tem-porarily, the distincons and oppositions they lay down, by bringingout all sorts of ambiguities, compromises and transitons between them.17Henee, these two authors consider the place of ritual frorn radicallydifferent viewpoints. For Turner it is because the calling into ques-tion of the social structure during the ritual is first and foremost

Lvi-Strauss 1981, 674.Lvi-Strauss 1981, 675.V.W. Turner 1967, 7 .Lvi-Strauss 1981, 680.

LANGUAGE 587

symbolic that it may be regarded in positive terms as an essentialgenerative forc. For Lvi-Strauss, who gives obvious precedence tothe construction of meaning on the basis of a linguistic model, thestarting-point is a mental structure that corresponds to universal pat-terns. Consiclering that actions have only an expressive role, then,the calling into question of this structure during the ritual can beviewed only from a destructive angle. For one, ritual is the "qum-tessence of custom"18; for the other, "a bastardization of thou ght,brought about by the constraints of life".1!l However, at a more gen- eral level these two authors are in agreement since both view ritualaction as the expression of a disorder: the distinctive feature o rit-ual action lies precisely in a relative lack of structure.

While perceiving ceremonial activity in a perhaps more positivelight than Lvi-Strauss, a number of authors have pursued the analy-sis of ritual along lines similar to those he has suggestecl. We find,for example, an equivalent standpoint, developed in a more sys-tematic fashion, in the writings of Roy A. Rappaport, who pleadsin a seminal article of the same period for a study not of the "mys-terious, symbolic or functional depths" of rituals but of the variousformal properties that constitute their "obvious aspects".20 This sharedperspective, then, sees ceremonial behavior in terms of a set of spe-cial 'procedures' or characteristic morphological features: conven-tionality, repetition, fragmentation or 'parceling', fixity, framedness,condensation or fusin of meaning, numinou s experience, etc.51

Gonfronted by the highly stylized and often obscure or non-expres-sive nature of ritual ut terances, most of these authors have lookedonce again to the study of language for inspiration. Some22 havesought to adapt to the analysis of ceremonial phenomena the con-cept of 'performatvity' derived from the work ofJ.L. Austin:23 regardedin the aggregate as performative statements, rituals are held to real-iz e the very actions they describe (linguistic examples of performa-tives include 'promising', 'condemning' , and 'baptizing'). The limits

8 V.W. Turner 1967, 50.9 Lvi-Strauss 1981, 675.Rappaport 1979, 173-174.See, e.g., Moore and Meyerhoff 1977, 7-8; Tarnbiah 1981, 119; and Grimes1990, 14, for sample lists of such attr ibutes.

- E.g., Finnegan 1969; Bloch 1974; Tambiah 1973; Grimes 1990.' J.L. Austin, H o w t o D o Tkoigs w i t h W or ds (Oxford, 1962).

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588 GARLO SEVERIof such a perspectiva, however, are soon reached: if Austin's con-cepts can be rigorously applied at all, then only to a small portionof ritual activity (certain types of speech), whereas metaphorical appli-cations of these concepts, insofar as they leave the mechanisms oftheir performative effects unexamined, are of litde theoretical inter-est.24 Th e conclusin drawn from this state of affairs is that th e anal-ogy between ritual and linguistic phenomena is not satisfying, at leastinsofar as its application is restricted to semantics. For many authors,another crucial aspect of language has to be taken into accountinstead: syntax.

Language as an Image o f OrderOne attempt to develop such an approach within the framework ofan analysis of "ritual in itself and for itself"25 ha s been provocativelyadvanced by Frits Staal, who has drawn on an extensive study ofVedic ceremonial.21 ' Both music and ritual, Lvi-Strauss has remarked,especially when considered in their 'pur' formsinstrumental music

; and ritual actionclearly lie outside the realm of language.27 However,he seems to suggest that, whereas it is possible to recognize in musicenvisaged as a particular system of sounds certain overall structuralqualides, 28 ritual as a simple aggregate of acts has no global form.

i By contrast, Staal takes a more positive stance, arguing that ritualan d musical forms are basically of the same kind:29 in ritual, actsand sequences of acts are composed (and re-composed) in much thesame way as are sounds (notes or musical phrases) in music, that is,according to definite syntactic rules.

The ritual (and musical) structures generated by such rules, how-ever, have no necessary link with a semantic component: they "d onot mean anything apart from and beyond the structural complex-

, ity they display".30 They are in this regard 'meaningless' and must24 Se e Gardner 1983 for a critique.25 Lvi-Strauss 1981, 669.-" Staal 1979; F. Staal, Ag n i . Th e V e d i c R i t ua l of the Fi re Altar , 2 vols. (Berkeley,1983); Staal 1989.27 Lvi-Strauss 1981, 670-671.- Lvi-Strauss 1981, 646-647.' - ' ' Staal 1989, 165-190.30 Staal 1989, 182.

L A N G U A G E 589

therefore be analyzed in formal rather than symbolic terms. Indeed, ritual, Staal suggests, is best viewed not as consisting "in symbolic :activities which refer to something else"31 but as "primary activity"governed by explicit rules and pursued for its own sake.32 Althoughhighly organized, it "is pur activity, without meaning or goal".33 Thus,

It is characteristic of ritual performance . . . to be self'-contained andself-absorbed. The performers are totally immersed in the proper exe-cution of their complex tasks. Isolated in their sacred enclosure, theyconcntrate on correctness of act, recitation and chant. . . . There areno symbolic meanings going through their minds when they are engagedin performing ritual. . . . The importan! thing is what you do, not whatyou tliink, believe or say.34As a consequence, Staal's analysis of ritual is essentially modeled on ;linguistic syntactic stru ctures. His acco unt of ritual form is essentiallycombinatoria!: ritual sequences are explicated in terms of other rit- ;ua l sequences, where ritual episodes are envisaged solely as com- >posed of and/or as components of other ritual episodes. As a result, (the distinctive characteristics of ritual actions as such, that is, beyond their formal associative features an d their supposed lack of intrinsicmeaning, remain unspecified. Indeed, on Staal's view th e structureof any ritual act, whatever the level of aggregation one cares to con-sider, is always exactly equal to the sum of its parts.

This may be partly because Staal's theory of ritual is in the end 'basically a theory of ritual recitation. Action as such clearly occu-pies a subordnate role. He treats structure and performance as dis- :tinct domains, where performance is something of an epiphenomenonas far the formal properties of ritual activity are concerned. Thusfor Staal the purely theoretical ceremonies constructed by Indian rit-ualists (the sa t t ra rituals) and hose rituals actually undertaken areindistinguishable from a structural point of view: they are equallyamenable to being described in terms of explicit syntactic rules.35A 'cognitive' account of religious ritual, similar in some respects to the syntactic approach proposed by Staal, has recently been pu t

Staal 1989, 115.Staal 1989, 131.Staal 1989, 131.Staal 1989, 115-116.Staal 1989, 88.

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59 0 GA RL O SEVERIforward by E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley.36 Theiraim, which is also mformed by a cise analogy with generative lin-guistics, is to provide a theory of ritual competence: they set out toidentify in abstract terms the type of (largely implicit) knowledge thatidealized participants must have in order to evalate th e 'well-formed-ness' of their religious rituals. From this perspective, then, a religiousritual will be recognized as well-formed if it obeys the syntactic rulesof the 'action rep resentatio n system ' and if it incorporales the par-ticipation of a superhuman agent.

Competence schemas such as those advanced by Staal and Lawsonand McCauley are able to provide a formal account of ritual eventsas particular totalities. However, such accounts are not widiout anum b e r of problems, many of which derive from a disregard ofactual ceremonial interaction as a possible source of structure. Inlight of this, it is worthwhile to confront these global 'syntactic' per-spectives with a number of new approaches introduced in recentyears which, by contras!, look at the organization of performanceitself in order to identify certain formal characteristics of ritual action.

Language and Ritual I n t e r a c t i o nIn a recent work, Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw have putforth the interesting claim that a body of religious doctrine, andindeed the entire symbolic universe of a religin, may be largelyfounded upon inferences drawn from ritual action.37 They stronglyunderline the pre-eminence of action as the crucial clue for under-standing the nature of ritual. Inverting th e form of a traditional argu-ment abou t religious ceremonies, they suggest that if we want tounderstand religious discourse as a social practi.ee and grasp the struc-ture of religious experience, it is necessary to stop considering actionsin a religious context as mere illustrations of an established set ofideas. The appropriate task, they maintain, is instead to understandhow the internal organization of a sequence of ritual acts may pro-vide the grounds for a continuous exercise of personal interpreta-tion. Religious experience, in other words, involves drawing relatively

Lawson and McCauley 1990.Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994.

L A N GU A GE 591free inferences from a sequence of traditionally fixed actions. Fromthis perspective, the reference to the stucly of language changes again.Ritual ceases to be seen as an analog to a linguistic form. Rather,it becomes similar to a special pragmatic context in which a num-ber of speech acts are performed.33

In other words, the linguistic model, which has been based suc-cessively on seman tic and syntactic structures, leads now to anotherapproach, one based on the construction of a special pragmatic con-text of communication. Seen from this perspective, ritual is charac- terized by the particular kind of pragmatics that is illustrated by theconventional form imposed to ritual action.From a similar perspective M ichael Hou seman and I have claimedthat th e anthropological analysis of ceremonial enactments shoulclfocus on the o rganizatio n of ritual action itself.39 According to thisview, ritual form refers to the special system of relationships actedout in performance. We have devcloped this perspective in dctail inan analysis of a ritual of the latml of Papua-New Guinea: the na v e n .Conditioned by the relational form of the ritual, the ritual symbol-ism is based, first, on constant reinvention and, secondly, on theconstruction of a particular kind of interactive context.Actually one of the essential clues for understanding the contextof ritual communication is the way in which, through the establish-ment of a particular form of interaction, a special identity of theparticipants is constructed. Drawing on this conclusin, I have recentlyoutlined a pragmatic model for ritual communication which aims togeneralize some of the conclusions of our study of ritual action inthe naven and to extend it to the analysis of other ritua l situation s,where action seems to play a less important role.40 This pertains, forinstance, to American Indian shamanistic recitations, where ritualaction is replaced throug h the recitation of cha nts by a special useof language. This new perspective focuses on the pragmatic definitionof the ritual enunciator as well as on the perlocutionary effect of rit-ua l communication.

i8 Humphrey and Laidlaw m this volume." s Houseman and Severi 1998; Houseman in this volume.* Severi 1993a; Severi 1993b; C. Severi, "Cosmology, Crisis and Paradox. Onthe Image of White Spirits in kuna Shamanistic Tradition", M. Roth and C. Salas(eds), Disturng R e n m i m . A Compara twe htquiry in to ilu Re p r e s e n ta ro n of Cn s i s (Los Angeles,2001), 178-206; Severi 2002.

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ir59 2 GARLO SEVERI LANGUAGE 593

In the anthropological study of ritual symbolism much attentionhas been devoted to the various ways in which language as it is usedin ritual performances transforms th e usual representation of theworld and constructs its own universe of truth. A typical way to doso in American Indian shamanism, fo r instance, is to establish ametaphorical link, a set of analogies, or a group of 'mysticaF rela-tionships between ritual objects and living beings. From this per-spective (as, fo r instance, in the Kuna shamanistic chants) a newbornboy or girl can be ritually defined as a 'fruit1, and as a 'pearl'. Hisor her mother will be called in this context 'a tree'. Consequently,the childbirth will be referred to as the 'growing of a bleeding fruit',etc.41 Here as elsewhere, the linguistic instrument of these meta-morphoses is parallelism, a "way to thread together verbal images",as Graham Townsley ha s called it, 42 which is virtually omnipresentin American Indian shamanism. In this context, for the shamanisticchant to refer to a 'bleeding fruit' is to refer to the real experienceof the woman giving birth to a child and simultaneously to a myth-ical Tree-Mother bearing fruit. I have argued that the same instru-ment, parallelism, can be used in a reflexive way in order to definenot only the wor ld described by the ritual language bu t also th e iden-t t y of the p e r s on e nu na a t i ng z . 43 The image of the shaman, being madeof contradictory yet non-exclusive and simultaneous identities (suchas a tree, a deer, a monkey), en t er ta in s a doubt about th e always-

.possible assimilation of his ordinary identity into a supernatural one.His image progressively becomes paradoxical and therefore raisesu na n s we r a b l e q w s t i o n s : Is he a Vegetable' (positive) or an 'animal' (neg-ative) spirit? Is he a boar, a deer, a monkey, or a jaguar? Was hereally transformed into a spirit during the recitation of his chant?Will he be able, as he claims, to perform that transformation againand again? Ritual action builds a particular kind of fiction, a spe-cial context of communication, in which any positive answer willimply doubt and uncertainty, and vice versa. Everybody is supposedto believe it, and yet no one can really be sure.

This complex definition of the enunciator has an immediate per-locutionary effect: here a certain kind of uncertainty is always gen-

erated. If w e follow Fierre Smith's suggestion that we should con-sider 'real' rituals to be only those ceremonies that lead to the estab-l ishment of a belief,'14 we can conclude that linguistic communicationbecomes ritualized when a particular way of elaborating a compleximage of the enunciator unleashes that particular tensin betweenbelief and doubt that defines a ritual-reflexive stance. The pragmatic ;analysis of shamanistic recitation shows that the context of the rit-ual use of language is not defined solely by the use of any specificlinguistic form but by the reflexive elaboration of the image of thespeaker and by its perlocutionary effect: that particular tensin betweenfaith and doubt that characterizes any belief.

W e have seen that a large proportion of the anthropological the- ories of symbolism are explicitly or implicitly based on the transla-tion into linguistic utterances of the many modes of expression usedin ritual. Sounds, gestures, images, etc., are always considered, asLvi-Strauss puts it, in l o c o verb i . It is possible to move beyond anexpressive conception of ritual symbolism to a perspective in whichlanguage ceases to act as a model in order to understand the wayin which a tradition oprales. We have thus proposed that the movebe made from the study of actions in L o c o verb i to the study of v e r b ain l o c o ac tus . From the (sociological or semiological) interpretation ofsymbolism to the establishment of a model that accounts for its per-sistence in time in terms of the organizatioii of a sequence of acts.From this new perspectiveonce the analogy of linguistic structures, syntactic or semantic, has shown its l imi tsthe 'internal form'of ritual action becomes a matter of context, identification, andpragmatics.

41 Severi 2002.12 G. Townsley, "Song Paths. Th e Ways and Means of Yaminahua ShamanicKnowkdge", L'Homme 33 (1993), 449-468, here 457. See Severi 2002. Smith 1982.