1 - Introduction: some notes on ritual

Summary

One may envision the task of an ethnography as opening a culture to readers, unfolding it, revealing it, providing not only a sense of surface form and rhythm, but also a sense of inner connections and interactions. If this is one's vision of the task, certain ways of launching upon it will be more powerful and effective than others. One could of course begin with the standard categories – kinship, economy, politics, religion – yet this approach is problematic, not only because the categories are externally imposed but because they are undynamic. They do not carry one into an experience of the interconnections that must be at the heart of the discussion.

One could also proceed by way of, to borrow a phrase from Kenneth Burke, “the representative anecdote,” the little vignette of social life actually observed, that was for the field-ethnographer, and will ideally be for the reader, especially revealing of important cultural dynamics. One recalls, for example, the incident of the disturbed Javanese funeral described by Geertz (1957b), where the corpse could not get buried for the politics of the situation. The episode raised problems of religious and political interpretation for all present, Javanese and ethnographer alike. As in this example, the incidents that are used as representative anecdotes in ethnography generally involve breakdown or conflict, moments where the rules are called into question, or contradictory rules are invoked, where “reality bargaining” (Rosen) is called into play.