Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The ritual form
- 3 Self-referential messages
- 4 Enactments of meaning
- 5 Word and act, form and substance
- 6 Time and liturgical order
- 7 Intervals, eternity, and communitas
- 8 Simultaneity and hierarchy
- 9 The idea of the sacred
- 10 Sanctification
- 11 Truth and order
- 12 The numinous, the Holy, and the divine
- 13 Religion in adaptation
- 14 The breaking of the Holy and its salvation
- Notes
- References
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology
4 - Enactments of meaning
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The ritual form
- 3 Self-referential messages
- 4 Enactments of meaning
- 5 Word and act, form and substance
- 6 Time and liturgical order
- 7 Intervals, eternity, and communitas
- 8 Simultaneity and hierarchy
- 9 The idea of the sacred
- 10 Sanctification
- 11 Truth and order
- 12 The numinous, the Holy, and the divine
- 13 Religion in adaptation
- 14 The breaking of the Holy and its salvation
- Notes
- References
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology
Summary
The complex relationship between the self-referential and the canonical streams of ritual's messages is best approached through further exploration of the relationship between saying and doing. After a preliminary discussion of general principles of efficacy we will consider a crucial indexical message, intrinsic to ritual's very form, alluded to at the end of the second chapter, in the absence of which the canon would be inconsequential. We approach here what I understand to be ritual's fundamental office and will discuss in this light the establishment of convention in ritual and the social contract and morality that inheres in it. These observations provide grounds for taking ritual to be humanity's basic social act.
At the end of the last chapter I argued that participation in rituals might not only indicate aspects of performers' contemporary states but impose transforming decisions on those states. A clumsy bit of sleight-of-hand may seem to be poorly hidden in that argument. To claim on the one hand that supercision, for example, indicates the achievement of a certain stage in a boy's maturation and, on the other, that it imposes a dichotomous decision on that process, may seem either ingenuously confused or disingenuously confusing. To indicate a condition would be one thing, to transform it another. The two, however, are not being confused. They are being conflated. Some, if not most, of the self-referential messages occurring in ritual do not merely “say something” about the state of the performer.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity , pp. 107 - 138Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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