Turner V. — From Ritual to Theatre

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Бібліографія: Turner V. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. — New York: PAJ Publications, 1982. (Performance Studies Series, vol. 1; ред. серії Brooks McNamara, Richard Schechner.)

Зміст оригіналу:

Розділ	с.
Introduction	7
Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology	20
Social Dramas and Stories About Them	61
Dramatic Ritual / Ritual Drama: Performative and Reflexive Anthropology	89
Acting in Everyday Life and Everyday Life in Acting	102
Index	124

Чому це джерело важливе окремо від збірника 1983: саме тут уведено різницю liminal / liminoid, якої в російському виданні немає. Розбір → Liminalne_i_liminoidne.

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AULVAHL OL TWOL WOW

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lay

Printed in the Uni ues of America on acid-free paper

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

ozoficka fakulta Univerzity Karlovy v Praze

From Ritual to Theatre

The Human Seriousness of Play

Victor Turner

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‘This is the first volume of the Performance Studies Series edited by Brooks McNamara and Richard Schechner. ‘The Series is published by Performing

Arts Jou

al Publications.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION ‘TO THE PERFORMANCE STUDIES SERIES

What is a performance? A play? Dancers dancing? A concert? What you

see on T’V? Circus and Carnival? A press conference by whoever is Presi- dent? The shooting of the Pope as portrayed by media—or the instant replays of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot? And do these eyents have anything to do with ritual, a week with Grotowski in the woods outside of Wroclaw, or a Topeng masked dance drama as performed in Peliatan,

Bali? Performance is no longer easy to define or locate: the concept and structure has spread all over the place. [t is ethnic and intercultural, historical and ahistorical, aesthetic and ritual, sociological and political. Performance is a mode of behavior, an approach to experience; it is play, sport, aesthetics, popular entertainments, experimental theatre, and more be

written about with precision and in full detail. The editors of this series

But in order for this broad perspective to develop performance mus

have designed it as a forum for investigating what performance is, how it works, and what ils place in post-modern society may be. Performance Studies is not properly theatrical, cinematic, anthropological, historical, or artistic—though any of the monographs in the Series incorporate one or more of these disciplines. Because we are fostering a new approach to the study of performance, we have kept the Series open-ended in order to in-

corporate new work. The Series, we hope, will measure the depth and

breadth of the field—and its fertility: from circus to Mabou Mines, rodeo to

healing rites, Black performance in South Africa to the Union City Passion Play. Performance Studies will be valuable for scholars in all areas of per- formance as well as for theatre workers who want to expand and deepen their notions of performance

Brooks McNamai Richard Sche

Contents

INTRODUCTION / 7

LIMINAL TO LIMINOLD, IN PLAY, FLOW, RITUAL: / 20 An Essay in Comparative Symbology

SOCIAL DRAMAS AND STORIES ABOUT THEM / 61

DRAMATIC RITUAL/RITUAL DRAMA: / 89 Performative and Reflexive Anthropology

ACTING IN EVERYDAY LIFE AND / 102 EVERYDAY LIFE IN ACTING

INDEX / 124

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Introduction

The essays in this book chart my personal voyage of discovery from traditional anthropological studies of ritual performance to a lively interest in modern theatre, particularly experimental theatre. In a way, though, the trip was also a ‘‘return of the repressed,’’ for my mother, Violet Witter, had been a founding member and actress in the Scottish National Theate: located in Glasgow, which aimed, in the 1920s, at being the equivalent of, if not the answer to, the great Dublin Abbey Theater. Alas, Scots Celts, tainted by Norman and Calvinist forebears, could not emulate the heady nationalist eloquence or stark political metacommentary of an Ireland struggling to be free, an Ireland rich in bards and playwrights. The Na-

tional Theater soon folded. But my mother remained a woman of the theatre to the end, and, Ruth Draper-like, would give solo performances, drawing her repertoire from such (then) rebel voices as Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, O’Casey, Olive Schreiner, and Robert Burns (“A Man’s a Man for a’ That””). She was also something of a feminist and included in her stock of roles a selection entitled ‘“Great Women from Great Plays,” which ranged fr reve and Wycherly, MeLcod (i

1 Buripid

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From Ritual to Theatre/8

‘drag’’), Clemence Dane (Queen Elizabeth in ‘Will Shakespeare”’), and Shaw once ‘again (“Great Catherine” and Candida”). The recurrent theme was female charisma, the sort of willed or innate queenliness that

cowed would-be dominant males. My father, though, was an electrical (in American terms, ‘“electronic’’) engineer, an inventive businessman who had worked intensively with John Logan Baird, a pioneer in the develop- ment of television. He had little interest or insight into theatre, though he adored the novels of H. G. Wells (particularly his science fiction), whom he

had once met. Inevitably, in those G. P. Snow days of the ‘‘two cultures,” that even more than Kipling’s ‘‘East and West,’ could ‘‘never meet,” they divorced, and stranded me, a fervent Scots nationalist, though only eleven years old, with retired maternal grandparents in the deep south of England, Bournemouth. Although this seaside haunt had been graced in- termittenty by Verlaine and Rimbaud, Walter Scott, Tolstoy, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Elroy Flecker, and other authors of less note, its

nature, not its culture, moved me, its seascapes and headlands, its proximi-

ty to the New Forest, its aromatic pine trees. Separated effectively from

both my parents (my mother moved around Southern England, teaching

Delsarte principles and elocution to young ladies in sundry ‘‘Free Schools,”’ while my father, still in Scotland, ‘“‘went broke’? in the ‘‘Thir- ties”’ slump), I slithered between arts and sciences, sports and classics. T

won a prize for a poem on ‘Salamis’ at age twelve, which excited the der

sion of my schoolmates for many years and forced me to win attention as a soccer player and cricketer of some violence—I shamefully acquired the

proud title of ‘“Tank’’—to erase the stigma of sensibility.

No wonder, then, that in time 1 became an anthropologist, a member of

a discipline poised uneasily between those who promote the ‘science of

culture, and

enc

on the model of the nineteenth century natural y of

those who show how ‘‘we’? (Westerners) may share in the huma others (non-Westerners). The former speak in terms of monointentional matcrialism, the latter of mutual communication. Both approaches are pro- bably necessary. We should try to find out how and why different sets of human beings in time and space are similar and different in their cultural manifestations: we should also explore why and how all men and women, if they work at

can understand one another, At first T was taught by British

“structural-functionalists,’’ descendants not only of the Britis!

philosophers, Locke and Hume, but of the French positivists, Comte and Durkheim, Armchair Marxists

ye accused those of us who lived close to

age ructural functionalism to provide the

the ‘‘people’’ in the 1950s in African, Malaysian, and Oceanian

often for s

eral years, of “using”’

scientific?” objectification of an unquestioned ideology (colonialism in modern ‘‘Round-

m of Moral Ma-

prewar anthropology, neoimperialism now). ‘These do

fra-red band on the worl

‘s spect

Introduction/9

jorities—have become so obsessed with power that they fail to sense the

ivabi

of human lives ex-

many-leveled complexity (hence irony and fo

enced at first hand.

My training for fieldwork roused the scientist in me—the paternal lized the maternal gift of theatre. I

heritage. My field experience re and analysis which I called

compromised by inventing a unit of descripti

In the field my family and T lived in no “ivory tower’?: we spent nearly three years in A ges (Ndembu, Lamba, Kosa, Gisu), mostly in grass huts. Something like “drama

“social drama

ran vill

was constantly ving, even crupting, from the otherwise fairly even surfaces of social

life. For the scientist in me, such social dramas revealed the ‘‘taxonomic

relations among actors (their kinship ties, structural positions, social class,

pol

tus, and so forth), and their contemporary bonds and opposi- tions of interest and friendship, their personal network tics, and informal

relationships. For the artist in me, the drama revealed individ personal style, rhetorical skill, moral and aesthetic differences, and choices proffered and made. Most importantly

de me aware of the power of symbols in human communication. This power inheres not only in the

but

tten languagt 0 in

shared lexicons and grammars of spoken and w

the artful or poetic individual crafting of speech through persuasive tropes:

ymor:

metaphors, metonyms, 0 “wise words’ (a Western Apache

specch-mode), and many more, Nor is communication through symbol

limited to words. Each culture, each person within it, uses the entire sen-

sory repertoire to convey messages: manual gesticulations, facial expres-

sions, bodily postures, rapid, heavy, or dividual leve chronized movements such as marching, the moves and “plays” of games,

ght breathing, tears, at the in-

; stylized gestures, dance patterns, prescribed silences, syn-

sports, and rituals, at the cultural level. Claude Levi-Strauss was one of the

first to call our attention to the diverse ‘sensory codes’? through which in-

formation may be transmitted, and how they may be combined and mutually “translated.”

Perhaps if T memory of a performance was Sir Frank Benson’s ve

t clear

ad not had carly exposure to theatre—my fir ion of The Tempest

en 1 was five years old—I would not have been alerted to the

heatrical’’ potential of social life, especially in such coherent com- tunities as African villages. But no one could fail to note the analogy

deed the homology, between those sequences of supposedly “spontancous sting in those villages, and

n Aristotle on-

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response.”’ No doubt, had I possessed isurement, [ would have been able to discover i igmented sympathetic discharges”’ as ‘‘increased

re, sweat secretion, pupil

ry dilation, and the in- gastro-intestinal motor and secretory function,”’ (Barbara Lex, “Neurobiology of Ritual Trance,’ in The Spectrum of Ritual, 1979: 136) In other words, during social dramas, a group’s emotional climate is full of thunder and lightning and choppy air currents! What has happened is that a public breach has occurred in the normal working of society, ranging from some grave transgression of the code of manners to an act of violence, a beating, even a homicide, Such a breach may result from real feeling, a crime passionel perhaps, or from cool calculation—a political act designed to challenge the extant power structure. Again, the breach may take the form of unhappy chance: a quarrel round the beer pots, an unwise or overheard word, an unpremeditated quarrel. Nevertheless, once an- tagonisms are out in the open, members of a group inevitably take sides.

Or else they seek to bring about a reconciliation among the contestants. Thus breach slides into crisis, and the critics of crisi

8 seek to restore peace. Such critics are usually those with a strong interest in maintaining the status

quo ante, the elders, lawmakers, administrators, judges, priests, and law en- forcers of the relevant community. All or some of these attempt to apply redressive machinery—to “patch up’ quarrels, ‘mend’? broken social ties, “seal up punctures” in the ‘social fabric,”’ by the juridical means of courts and the judicial process or the ritual means provided by religious institu- tions: divination into the hidden causes of social conflict (witchcraft, ancestral wrath, the gods’ displeasure), prophylactic sacrifice, therapeutic ritual (involving the exorcism of malefic spirits and the propitiation of “good”? ones), and finding the apt occasion for the performance of a major ritual celebrating the values, common interests, and moral order of the widest recognized cultural and moral community, transcending the divi- sions of the local group. The social drama concludes—if ever it may be said to have a “last act”’—either in the reconciliation of the contending parties or their agreement to differ—which may involve a dissident minority in seceding from the original community and seeking a new habitat (the Ex-

odus theme, but also exemplified on a smaller scale by the splitting of Cen- tral African villages).

In large-scale modern societies, social dramas may escalate from the local

level to national revolutions, or from the very beginning may take the form of war t

Of tany

med tn Mterare

Introduction/11

segments. In small-scale societies there are oppositions among clans, sub- clans, lineages, families, age-sets, religious and political associations, and many more. In our own industrial societies, we are familiar with opposi- tions between classes, sub-classes, ethnic groups, sects and cults, regions, political parties, and associatons based on gender, division of labor, and relative age. Other societies are internally divided by caste and traditional craft. Social dramas have a habit of activating these ‘‘classificatory’’ opposi- tions and many more: factions (which may cut across traditional caste, class, or lineage divisions in pursuit of immediate, contemporary interests), religious “‘revitalization’’ movements which may mobilize former ‘ tribal enemies in joint opposition to foreign, colonizing overlords with superior military technology, international alliances and coalitions of ideologically disparate groups who see themselves as having a common enemy (often equally heterogeneous in national, religious, class, ideological, economic make-up), and common immediate interests—and turning them into con- flrcts. Social life, then, even its apparently quietest moments, is characteristically ‘“‘pregnant’’ with social dramas. It is as though each of us has a ‘‘peace’’ face and a ‘‘war’’ face, that we are programmed for co- operation, but prepared for conflict. The primordial and perennial agonistic mode is the social drama. But as our species has moved through time and become more dexterous in the use and manipulation of symbols, as our technological mastery of nature and our powers of self-destruction have grown exponentially in the past few thousand years, in similar asure we have become somewhat more adept in devising cultural modes of confronting, understanding, assigning meaning to, and sometimes cop- ing with crisis—the second stage of the ineradicable social drama that besets us at all times, all places, and all levels of sociocultural organization. The third stage, modes of redress, which always contained at least the germ of self-reflexivity, a public way of assessing our social behavior, has moved of the domains of law and religion into those of the various arts. The growing complexity of the social and economic division of labor, giving ialization and professionalization their opportunity to escape from bedment in the total ongoing social process, has also provided complex cultural systems with effective instruments for scrutinizing By means of such genres as theatre, including puppetry and ional story-telling, performances

Ives.

nce drama, and prof

probe a community’s weakness ts leaders to ac-

ics and

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Greek playwrights. But theatre in complex, urbanized societies on the scale

of ‘civilizations’? has become a specialized domain, where it has become legitimate to experiment with modes of presentation, many of which depart radically (and, indeed, consciously) from Aristotle’s model. But these sophisticated departures are themselves implicit in the fact that theatre owes its specific genesis to the third phase of social drama, a phase which is essentially an attempt to ascribe meaning to ‘“‘social dramatic’? events by the process which Richard Schechner has recently described as ‘‘restoring the past.’’ Theatre is, indeed, a hypertrophy, an exaggeration, of jural and ritual processes; it is not a simple replication of the ‘‘natural’’ total pro- cessual pattern of the social drama. There is, therefore, in theatre something of the investigative, judgmental, and even punitive character of law-in-action, and something of the sacred, mythic, numinous, even “supernatural’’ character of religious action—sometimes to the point of sacrifice. Grotowski hit off this aspect well with his terms, ‘‘holy actor,’’ and ‘‘secular sacrum.’’

The positivist and functionalist schools of anthropology in whose con- cepts and methods I was first instructed could give me only limited insight into the dynamics of social dramas. I could count the people involved, state their social status-roles, describe their behavior, collect biographical infor- mation about them from others, and place them structurally in the social system of the community manifested by the social drama. But this way of treating “‘social facts as things,’’ as the French sociologist Durkheim ad- monished investigators to do, gave little understanding of the motives and characters of the actors in these purpose-saturated, emotional, and ‘‘mean- ingful’’ events. I gradually gravitated, with temporary pauses to study symbolic processes, theories of symbolic interaction, the views of sociological phenomenologists, and those of French structuralists and “‘deconstructionists,’’ towards the basic stance delineated by the great Ger- man social thinker, whose photographs remind one of a grizzled old pea- sant, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911). This stance depends upon the concept of experience (in German, Erlebnis, literally ‘‘what has been lived through’). Kant had argued that the data of experience are ‘‘formless.’’ Dilthey disagreed. He conceded that any distinguishable ‘‘manifold,’’ whether a natural formation or organism, or a cultural institution, or a mental event, contains certain formal relationships which can be analyzed. Dilthey called these the ‘‘formal categories

unity and multiplicity, likeness and difference, whole and part, degree, and similar elementary concepts. As H. A. Hodges, writing on Dilthey (1953:68-9) summar ““All the forms of discursive thought, logi

analyzed in , and

the fundamental concepts of categori

m 1

Introduction/13

thought, but they express the peculiar nature of none of them (my emphasis); and, as without them nothing can be understood, so nothing can be understood with them alone’’ (my emphasis).

Dilthey goes on to argue that experience, in its formal aspect, is richer than can be accounted for by general formal categories. It is not that the ex- periencing subject imposes such categories as space, substance, causal in- teraction, and so forth on the physical world, or duration, creative freedom, value, significance, and the like on the “world of mind.’’ Rather, the data of experience are ‘‘instinct with form,’’ and thought’s work is to draw out ‘‘the structural system’’ implicit in every distinguishable Erlebnis or unit of experience, whether this be a love affair or a historical cause célébre such as the Dreyfus Affair—or a social drama.

Structures of experience, for Dilthey, are not the bloodless ‘‘cognitive structures,’’ static and ‘‘synchronic,’’ so beloved of the ‘‘thought- structuralists’’ who have dominated French anthropology for so long. Cognition is, of course, an important aspect, facet, or ‘‘dimension’”’ of any structure of experience. Thought clarifies and generalizes lived experience, but experience is charged with emotion and volition, sources respectively of value-judgments and precepts. Behind Dilthey’s world-picture is the basic fact of the total human being (Lawrence’s ‘‘man alive’’) at grips with his environment, perceiving, thinking, feeling, desiring. As he says, “life em- braces life.’” As Hodges continues: ‘‘All the intellectual and linguistic structures which philosophers study, and from whose complexities and obscurities the problems of philosophy arise are incidents in this interaction ween man and his world”’ (op. cit., p. 349).

For me, the anthropology of performance is an essential part of the an- pology of experience. In a sense, every type of cultural performance, including ritual, ceremony, carnival, theatre, and poetry, is explanation and explication of life itself, as Dilthey often argued. Through the perfor- nce process itself, what is normally sealed up, inaccessible to everyday vation and reasoning, in the depth of sociocultural life, is drawn — Dilthey uses the term Ausdruck, ‘‘an expression,’’ from ausdrucken,

press or squeeze out.’? ‘‘Meaning’’ is squeezed out of an has either been directly experienced by the dramatist or poet, ( for penctrative, imaginative understanding (Verstehen). An ex- expression’’ which

ly,

s which ‘‘presses out’’ to an ”” may give us a helpful form,’’ but derives from Old French A performance, then,

i f the five

a proce

the etymology of ‘‘performance

to do with

ly con-

of rlebn ho Lerlebniy on

may be fell more mat

nected, I ive experic

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From Ritual to Theatre/14

behaviors; (2) images of past experiences are evoked with ‘unusual clarity of outline, strength of sense, and energy of projection’’ (cited in R.A. Makreel, 1975:141). (3) But past events remain inert unless the feelings originally bound up with them can be fully revived; (4) ‘“‘meaning’’ generated by ‘‘feelingly’’ thinking about the interconnections between past and present events. Here Dilthey distinguishes between “‘meaning’’ (Bedeutung) and value (Wert). Value belongs essentially to an experience ina conscious present. Value inheres in the affective enjoyment of the present. Values are not inwardly connected with one another in a systematic way. As Dilthey put it: ‘From the standpoint of value, life appears as an infinite assortment of positive and negative existence-values. It is like a chaos of harmonies and discords. Each of these is a tone-structure which fills a pre- sent; but they have no musical relation to one another.’’ But it is in bring- ing past and present into “‘musical relation’’ that the process of discovering and establishing ‘‘meaning’’ consists. But it is not enough to possess a meaning for oneself; (5) an experience is never truly completed until it is ““expressed,’’ that is, until it is communicated in terms intelligible to others, linguistic or otherwise. Culture itself is the ensemble of such expres- sions—the experience of individuals made available to society and accessi- ble to the sympathetic penetration of other ‘‘minds.’’ For this reason Dilthey thought of culture as ‘‘objectified mind’’ (objectiver Geist). Accor- ding to Dilthey, ‘our knowledge of what is given in experience is extended through the interpretation of the objectifications of life and this interpreta- tion, in turn, is only made possible by plumbing the depths of su jective ex- perience’? (Dilthey: Selected Writings, 1976:195-6). Thus, we can know our own subjective depths as much by scrutinizing the meaningful objectifica- tions ‘‘expressed’’ by other minds, as by introspection. In complementary fashion, self-scrutiny may give us clues to the penetration of objectifications of life generated from the experience of others. There is a kind of “hermeneutic circle’? involved here, or rather, “spiral,’’ for each turn transcends its predecessor.

Expressions, for Dilthey, may be of several classes. There are “ideas,’” which can be transmitted precisely, since they have a high degree of generality. But they tell us nothing about the particular person’s con- sciousness in which they first appeared. ‘‘Our understanding here is precise, but it is not deep,’’ says Dilthey (op. cit., G.S., VII, 205-6). ‘It tells us what idea someone has, but not how he comes to have it?’ (ibid.). A second class of expression is that of human ‘‘acts.’’ Every act, Dilthey argues, is the execution of a purpose, a volition, and, since the relation bet- ween act and purpose is regular and intimate, the purpose the act. The act was done not to expr theless to an ou op. cil., p. 130).

be read in

de observ

Introduction/15

avior of masses of peo-

but also to the public acts of legislators, and the I pe ple in public situations. In describing and analyzing social dramas in Africa and elsewhere, for instance, I have become very much aware of the rela- onship between acts and purposes and goals, though I would go further

than Dilthey and see many acts as expressing and fulfilling unconscious pur-

poses and goals.

This unconscious formative component is even more important where the third class of expressions—works of art—is concerned. Dilthey must ve been aware of its importance when he wrote (Gesammelle Schriften, enceforth cited as ‘‘G.S.,’’ Vol. VII, 1927:206): ‘‘I set before myself the sum of Goethe’s artistic, literary, and scientific publications, and the rest of s writings… . Here the problem can be solved of understanding the in- ner reality, in a certain sense better than Goethe understood himself.’’ Works of t are vastly unlike many expressions of political experience, which lie ider the power of selfish or partisan interests, and hence suppress, distort,

counterfeit the products of authentic experience. Artists have no motive

for deceit or concealment, but strive to find the perfect expressive form for their experience. As Wilfred Owen wrote: ‘‘The true poets must be iruthful.’” In some way they have an innocent prehension of that strange liminal space—in all of us, but more speakingly so in artists—where, as Dilthey writes, ‘‘life discloses itself at a depth inaccessible to observation, reflection, and theory’? (Vol. VII, 1927:207). Once ‘‘expressed,”’ however, as works of art, readers, viewers, and hearers can reflect upon them since they are trustworthy messages from our species’ depths, humanized life disclosing itself, so to speak.

Recapitulating, then, we have traced a path from the third phase of social drama to theatrical performance, which is then connected with the “‘fifth ment”’ of a Diltheyan Erlebnis, or as structured unit of experience. It is s moment that the poet, artist, or dramatist ‘‘freely unfolds images beyond the bounds of reality’? (Dilthey, G.S., VI, 1924:137). The artist (rics to penetrate the very essence of the Erlebnis. In so doing he allows free

access to the depths where ‘‘life grasps life.’’

the past five years, I have been directly introduced by Richard ner to the workings of the experimental theatre which flourished in United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but appears regrettably merely sputtering today. Several of the essays in this book relate to theories and practice as a producer. Schechner’s theatre was il dramas of our time, and sought ‘‘by freely unfolding im- to lay hold of the nature of its predica-

schne

» the

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CESS W ssetin t

gupona rms of

ta tra MAO AT

Mrleb

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TIPESUESpereeesa se eeer eves

From Ritual to Theatre/16

ingful, aesthetic outcome as a work of art. ‘Direct experience’ was usually some problem in Schechner’s own life or in that of the Performance Group, of which he was director. He then set about finding a ‘‘text’’ or “‘script”’ which would give him a mirror, serve as a reflexive device, for scrutinizing his problem, ‘‘Direct experience’’ whose complexities I have no room to discuss here. Next began the ““Workshop’’ process, which often lasted for over a year, and which I once

was also involved in the casting process,

likened to the forest camp where novices are initiated in African circumci- sion rituals, dedicated to the imparting of esoteric knowledge, training in useful, practical techniques, subjecting the neophytes to ordeals, confron- ting them with masked, numinous figures representing remote tribal ancestors and deities, portraying origin myths, and, in effect, dissolving their former social personalities in order to ‘‘regrow’’ them, to use a widely known African expression, as self-disciplined, mature persons. As is customary in ‘‘postmodern’’ (i.e., post-World War II) theatre, the text is sometimes composed—or playwrights’ texts are decomposed, then recom- posed—during rehearsals. Texts are not privileged. Theatrical space, per- formers, director, media used (amplification and distortion of speech, television screens, films, slides, tapes, music, lip-synch performing, fireworks, and many more), sustained separation of role and performer by many devices, all such units and devices are flexibly combined and recom- bined as reflections of a common will arising from rare moments of com- munitas among the human components of the theatric ensemble.

These multiple and indeterminate means and codes are tentative and ex- perimental responses to the experience of members of the postmodern theatre subculture as members of the new biosphere-noosphere (in Teilhardian terms) created by the qualitative leap in global communications and transportation, the computerization of myriad ‘‘bits’’ of information, the tentacular spread of multinational corporations headed by invisible oligar- chies who eschew direct political recognition, and above all the Damocles- sword of nuclear destruction which objectively threatens all and subjective- ly halts humanistic, ‘‘modern’’ progressivism in mid-stride. Schechner

makes this point in a recent article, ‘“The End of Humanism”? in Performing Arts Journal, 10/11. However, in this article, he equates ‘‘experience”’ with “ordinary happenings along a linear plane,”’ ‘‘narrative’’ (p. 11) and “the meaningful’ (p. 13) and consigns it to the now surpassed ‘‘modern,’’ essentially Renaissance view of human action. But the term cannot be cir- cumscribed so narrowly in space and time. ‘‘Experience’’ is a word which has survived, in many cognate forms, in many languages derived from Proto-Indo-European. By analogy with geology, archaeology, and depth

psychology, it may be possible to regard the etymology of key terms

Introduction/17

“

all, a mode of ‘“‘restoring the past,’’ a form of linguistic ‘‘self-reflexivity.”” The many-leveled or ‘“‘laminated”’ geological crust of the earth is still “alive’’ (think of the Mt. St. Helen’s eruption); even more so is the human “mind” or ‘‘psyche,”’ with its conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious levels, each subdivided into layers or bands laid down by repeated dramatic or ‘“‘traumatic experiences.’’ Neurobiologists of the central nervous system recognize surviving “archaic”? structures in the brain, forebrain, and autonomic systems, which continue to interact with the neocortex. Similar- ly, a modern word’s past ‘‘senses’’ have influenced its present penumbra of meaning.

Scholars, such as Julius Pokorny (Jndogermanisches Etymolgisches Worter- buch, 1959), trace ‘‘experience’’ right back to hypothetical Indo-European base or root *per-, ‘‘to attempt, venture, risk,’’ whence the Greek peira, “experience,’’ the source of our word “empirical.”’ It is also the verbal root from which derives the Germanic *feraz, giving rise to Old English faer, “danger, sudden calamity,’’? whence Modern English ‘‘fear.’’ Already, then we see ‘‘cognitive’’ directions taken by *per-, through the Greek route, and affective ones, through the Germanic—which would have interested Dilthey, one may be sure! But more directly ‘‘experience’’ derives, via Middle English and Old French, from the Latin experientia, denoting ‘‘trial, proof, experiment,”’ itself generated from experiens, the present participle of experiri, “‘to try, test,’’ from ex-, “out’? + base per as in peritus, ‘‘experienc- ed,”’ “having learned by trying.’’ The suffixed extended form of *per- is *peri-tlo, whence the Latin periclum, periculum, “trial, danger, peril.’’ Once more, we find experience linked with risk, straining towards ‘‘drama,”’ crisis, rather than bland cognitive learning! The-suffixed form of I. E. *per-, *per-ya, emerges in the Greek petra, as mentioned, but what failed to be mentioned is that the English ‘‘pirate’’? comes from that Greek word, via peirates, an “‘attacker,’’ from peiran, ‘‘to attempt, attack.’’ Going further back, etymologists, such as Walter Skeat and Pokorny, hold that the verbal root “per- is part of a phonetically similar group, whose central concept is perhaps the base of prepositions and preverbs with the core meaning of “forward,’’ ‘“‘through.’’? Thus the Greek verb perao, means ‘“‘I pass through.’’ If cultural institutions and symbolic modes are to be seen, in Diltheyan terms, as the crystallized secretions of once living human ex- perience, individual and collective, we may perhaps see the word ‘‘ex- perience’’ itself as an experienced traveler through time! Or we may metaphorize it as “‘tree,’’ whose tap-root is the idea of ‘‘perilous passage,”’ even “rites of passage.’’ From *per-, too, derive our words ‘‘fare’’ and “ferry’’—by Grimm’s Law describing the regular changes undergone by Indo-European stop consonants (in this case, p to f) represented in Ger- i xperience,’’ is derived from Latin

I Finally, “experiment,”” like

1s senses together we have a nee,’’ which portrays it

OCR 9

From Ritual to Theatre/18

as a journey, a test (of self, of suppositions about others), a ritual passage, an exposure to peril or risk, a source of fear. By means of experience, we *“fearfully’’ through ‘“‘perils,’’ taking ‘experimental’? steps. It all sounds rather like Dilthey’s description of erleben, ‘‘living through”’ a se- quence of events—it may be a ritual, a pilgrimage, a social drama, a friend’s death, a protracted labor, and other Erlebnisse. Such an experience

‘fare’

is incomplete, though, unless one of its ‘‘moments”’ is ‘‘performance,’’ an act of creative retrospection in which ‘‘meaning”’ is a to the events and parts of experience—even if the meaning is that ‘‘there is no meaning.’’ Thus experience is both “‘living through’? and ‘‘thinking back.”’ It is also ‘‘willing or wishing forward models for future experience in which, hopefully, the errors and perils of past experience will be avoided or eliminated.

““Experimental’’ theatre is nothing less than ‘‘performed,’’ in other words, ‘‘restored’’ experience, that moment in the experiental pro-

i.e., establishing goals and

cess—that often prolonged and internally segmented ‘‘moment’’—in which meaning emerges through ‘‘reliving’’ the original experience (often a social drama subjectively perceived), and is given an appropriate aesthetic form. This form then becomes a piece of communicable wisdom, assisting others (through Verstehen, understanding) to understand better not only themselves but also the times and cultural conditions which compose their general ‘‘experience’’ of reality. Both Richard Schechner and I, ap-

proaching the issue from different directions, envision theatre as an impor- tant means for the intercultural transmission of painfully achieved modalities of experience. Perfect transcultural understanding may never be achieved, but if we enact one another’s social dramas, rituals, and theatrical performances in full awareness of the salient characteristics of their original sociocultural settings, the very length and intensity of what

Schechner calls ‘‘the training-rehearsal-preparation process’? must draw the actors into ‘“‘other ways of seeing’’ and apprehending the “‘reality’’ our symbolic formations are forever striving to encompass and express.

I began this introduction on a autobiographical note and end it with an appeal for global cultural understanding. In Charlottesville, Virginia, where I now teach at the university, the phrase ‘‘Mr. Jefferson would have approved of that, correlatively that ‘‘Professor Dilthey would have approved’’ of attempts being made by a handful of anthropologists and theatre scholars and practi- tioners to generate an anthropology and theatre of experience which seek to “understand other people and their expressions on the basis of experience and self-understanding and the constant interaction between them’? (Dilthey: Selected Writings, 1976:218). Here the ‘‘other people’’ include those of every culture and every land for whom we have rich enough records to

is the final seal of approval for any action. I imagine

draw on for performative purposes. The ¢ and theatri

now

Introduction/19

new transcultural communicative synthesis through performance. For the first time we may be moving towards a sharing of cultural experiences, the manifold ‘‘forms of objectivated mind’’ restored through performance to something like their pristine affectual contouring. This may be a humble step for mankind away from the destruction that surely awaits our species if we continue to cultivate deliberate mutual misunderstanding in the in- terests of power and profit. We can learn from experience—from the enact- ment and performance of the culturally transmitted experiences of

others—peoples of the Heath as well as of the Book.

References Dilthey, Wilhelm. Gesammelte Schriften, Stuttgart: Teubner; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Vol. VI, 1924; vol. VII, 1927.

—. Selected Writings. Ed. and introduced by H.P. Rickman, London: Cambridge University Press (1st published 1883-1911), 1976.

Hodges, H.A. The Philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953

Lex, Barbara. ‘‘Neurobiology of Ritual Trance’ in The Spectrum of Ritual. Eds. E. d’Aqu C. Laughlin, Jr., and J. McManus, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 117-151,

Makreel, Rudolf A, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.

s. Indogermanisches Etymolgisches Worterbuch. Bern, 1959

Pokorny, Ju

Schechner, Richard. ‘‘The End of Humanism,’’ Performing Arts Journal, 10/11, vol. IV, nos 1-2, 1979.

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Liminal to Liminoid,

in Play, Flow, and Ritual

An Essay in Comparative Symbology

First I will describe what I mean by ‘‘‘comparative symbology’? and how, in a broad way, it differs from such disciplines as ‘‘semiotics’’ (or “semiology’’) and ‘‘symbolic anthropology,’’? which are also concerned with the study of such terms as symbols, signs, signals, significations, in- dexes, icons, signifiers, signifieds, sign-vehicles, denotata, etc. I want rather to discuss some of the types of socio-cultural processes and settings in which new symbols, verbal and non-verbal, tend to be generated. This will lead me into a comparison of ‘‘liminal’ and “liminoid”’ phenomena, terms which I will consider shortly. , /

According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, ‘‘symbology”’ is ‘‘the study or interpretation of symbols’

it is also “‘representation or expression by means of symbols.”? The term ‘‘comparative’’ merely means that this branch of study involves comparison as a method, as does, for example comparative linguistics. Comparative symbology is narrower than “‘semiotics’’ or ‘‘semiology’’ (to use Saussure’s and Roland Barthes’s term), and wider than ‘‘symbolic anthropology” in range and scope of data and problems. ‘‘Semiotics’’ is, as everyone knows, “a general theory of signs and symbols, especially the analysis : signs in language, usually

of the nature and relationship of z sy!

rcluc

ng three brane

Liminal to Liminoid/21

and pragmatics.’

(1) Syntactics:) The formal relationships of signs and symbols to one another apart from their users or external reference; the organization and relationship of groups, phrases, clauses, sentences, and sentence structure.

(2) Semantics: The relationship of signs and symbols to the things to which

they refer, that is, their referential meaning. 3) Pragmatics: The relations of signs and symbols with their users.

”

In my own analysis of ritual symbols, ‘‘syntactics’’ is roughly similar to

is similar to

what I call ‘‘positional meaning’’, ‘‘semantic xegetical meaning’; and ‘‘pragmatics’’ is similar to “operational meaning.”’ Semiology seems to have rather wider aspirations than semiotics, since it is defined as the ‘‘the science of signs in general’? whereas semiotics restricts itself to signs in language, though Roland Barthes is now taking the posi- tion that ‘‘linguistics is not a part of the general science of signs … it is semiology which is a part of linguistics’ (Elements of Semiology, p. 11).

Comparative symbology is not directly concerned with the technical aspects of linguistics, and has much to do with many kinds of non-verbal symbols in ritual and art, though admittedly all cultural languages have im- portant linguistic components, relays, or “‘signifieds.’’ Nevertheless, it 7s involved in the relationships between symbols and the concepts, feelings, values, notions, etc. associated with them by users, interpreters or ex- egetes: in short it has semantic dimensions, tt pertains to meaning in language and context. Its data are mainly drawn from cultural genres or sub- systems of expressive culture. These include both oral and literate genres, and one may reckon among them activities combining verbal and nonverbal symbolic actions, such as ritual and drama, as well as narrative genres, such as myth, epic, ballad, the novel, and ideological systems. They would also include non-verbal forms, such as miming, sculpture, painting, music, ballet, and architecture. And many more.

But comparative symbology does more than merely investigate cultural genres in abstraction from human social activity. It would become semiology if it did, whose corpus of data ‘‘must eliminate diachronic elements to the utmost’’ and coincide with a ‘‘state of the system, a cross- section of history’? ( Barthes, 1967:98). In 1958 (Forest of Symbols, p. 20), when considering ritual data collected during my fieldwork among the Ndembu people of north-western Zambia, I wrote that ‘‘T could not analyze [these] ritual symbols without studying them in a time series in relation to other ‘events’ [regarding the symbol, too, as an ‘event,’ rather than a ‘thing’ ], for symbols are essentially involved in social processes |and, I would now add, in psychological processes, too]. I came to see perfor- mances of ritual as distinct phases in the social processes whereby groups became adjusted to internal changes (whether brought about by personal or

ns and confli

or by technical or organiza-

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From Ritual to Theatre/22

tional innovations), and adapted to their external environment (social and cultural, as well as physical and biotic). From this standpoint the ritual symbol becomes a factor in social action, a positive force in an activity field. Symbols, too, are crucially involved in situations of societal change—the symbol becomes associated with human interests, purposes, ends and \means, aspirations and ideals, individual and collective, whether these are explicitly formulated or have to be inferred from the observed behavior. For these reasons, the structure and properties of a ritual symbol become those of a dynamic entity, at least within its appropriate context of action.” [We shall take a closer look at some of these ‘‘properties’’ later, But I want ‘to stress here that because from the very outset I formulate symbols as social and cultural dynamic systems, shedding and gathering meaning over time and altering in form, I cannot regard them merely as ‘‘terms’’ in atemporal logical or protological cognitive systems. Undoubtedly, in the specialized genres of complex societies such as philosophical, theological, and formal logical systems, symbols, ‘and the signs derived from their decomposition, do acquire this “‘algebraic’’ or logical quality, and can be effectively treated in relations of ‘“‘binary opposition,’’ as ‘‘mediators,’’ and the rest, denatured by the primacy of specialist cognitive activity. But ‘‘les symboles sauvages,’’ as they appear not only in traditional, ‘‘tribal’’ cultures but also in the ‘‘cultural refreshment’ genres, of poetry, drama, and painting, of post-industrial society, have the character of dynamic semantic systems, gaining and losing meanings—and meaning in a social context always has emotional and volitional dimensions—as they ‘‘travel through”’ a single rite or work of art, let alone through centuries of performance, and are aimed at producing effects on the psychological states and behavior of those exposed to them or obliged to use them for their communication with other human beings. I have always tried to link my work in processual analysis, for ex- ample, studies of the ongoing process of village politics in Schism and Con- tinuity, with my work in the analysis of ritual performances.

This is perhaps why I have often focused on the study of individual sym- bols, on their semantic fields and processual fate as they move through the scenario of a specific ritual performance and reappear in other kinds of ritual, or even transfer from one genre to another, for example, from ritual to a myth-cycle, to an epic, to a fairy tale, to citation as a maxim in a case- at-law. Such a focus leaves the semantic future of each symbol, as it were,

open-ended, where formal analysis of a total set of symbols, assumed a priori to be a system or a gestalt, treated as closed, atemporal, and synchronic, a “corpus,”’ or finite collection of materials, tends to emphasize a given sym- bol’s formal properties and relations and to select from its wealth of mean-

on wh makes i

ing only that spec de

dal

some bi

ry O

Liminal to Liminoid/23

cognitive system. Binariness and arbitrariness tend to go together, and both are in the atemporal world of ‘‘signifiers.’? Such a treatment, while often seductively elegant, a frisson for our cognitive faculties, removes the total set of symbols from the complex, continuously changing social life, murky or glinting with desire and feeling, which is its distinctive milieu and context, and imparts to it a dualistic rigor mortis. Symbols, both as sensorily perceptible vehicles (signifiants) and as sets of ‘‘meanings’’ (signifiés), are essentially involved in multiple variability, the variability of the essentially living, conscious, emotional, and volitional creatures who employ them not only to give order to the universe they inhabit, but creatively to make use also of disorder, both by overcoming or reducing it in particular cases and by its means questioning former axiomatic principles that have become a fetter on the understanding and manipulation of contemporary things. For example, Rabelais’s disorderly, scatological heaps of symbolic forms stan- ding for the disorderly deeds and attributes of Gargantua and Pantagruel challenged the neatness of scholastic theological and _ philosophical systems—the result, paradoxically, was to blast away logically watertight obscurantism. When symbols are rigidified into logical operators and subordinated to implicit syntax-like rules, by some of our modern in- vestigators, those of us who take them too seriously become blind to the

creative or innovative potential of symbols as factors in human action. Symbols may ‘‘instigate’’ such action and in situationally varying com- binations channel its direction by saturating goals and means with affect and desire. Comparative symbology does attempt to preserve this ludic capacity, to catch symbols in their movement, so to speak, and to ‘‘play”’ with their possibilities of form and meaning. It does this by contextualizing symbols in the concrete, historical fields of their use by “‘men alive’’ as they act, react, transact, and interact socially. Even when the symbolic is the in- verse of the pragmatic reality, it remains intimately in touch with it, affects and is affected by it, provides the positive figure with its negative ground, thereby delimiting each, and winning for “‘cosmos’’

Narrower in scope than semiotics, comparative symbology is wider than symbolic anthropology, for it proposes to take into account not only ‘ethnographic’ materials, but also the symbolic genres of the so-called “‘advanced”’ civilizations, the complex, large-scale industrial societies. Un- doubtedly, this broader perspective forces it to come to terms with the methods, theories, and findings of specialists and experts in many disciplines which most anthropologists know all too little about, such as history, literature, musicology, art history, theology, the history of ions, philosophy, etc. Nevertheless, in making these attempts to study solic action in complex cultures, anthropologists, who now study sym- y in “‘tribal’’ or simple agrarian myth, ritual, and art, would be norable tradition of their

a new territory.

no more than ng to an

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From Ritual to Theatre/24

predecessors, such as Durkheim and the Anné Soctologique school, and Kroeber, Redfield, and their successors, such as Professor Singer, who have examined cultural sub-systems in otkoumenes (literally ‘inhabited worlds,’’ used by Kroeber to indicate civilizational complexes, such as Christendom, Islam, Indic, and Chinese civilization, etc.) and Great Traditions.

In my own case, I was pressed towards the study of symbolic genres in large-scale societies by some implications of the work of Arnold van Gennep (which drew principally on the data of small-scale societies) in his Rites de Passage, first published in French in 1908. Although van Gennep himself seems to have intended that his term ‘‘rite of passage’’ should be used both for rituals accompanying an individual’s or a cohort of individuals’ change in social status, and for those associated with seasonal changes for an entire society, his book concentrates on the former type; and the term has come to be used almost exclusively in connection with these “‘life-crisis’’ rituals. I have tried to revert to van Gennep’s earlier usage in regarding almost all types of rites as having the processual form of ‘‘passage.’? What does this term mean?

Van Gennep, as is well known, distinguishes three phases in a rite of passage: separation, transition, and incorporation. The first phase of separation clearly demarcates sacred space and time from profane or secular space and time (it is more than just a matter of entering a temple—there must be in addition a rite which changes the quality of time also, or constructs a cultural realm which is defined as

‘ ”

‘out of time,’’ i.e., beyond or outside the time which measures secular processes and routines). It includes sym- bolic behavior—especially symbols of reversal or inversion of things, rela- tionships and processes secular—which represents the detachment of the ritual subjects (novices, candidates, neophytes or ‘ initiands’’) from their previous social statuses. In the case of members of a society, it implies col- lectively moving from all that is socially and culturally involved in an agricultural season, or from a period of peace as against one of war, from

plague to community health, from a previous socio-cultural state or condi- tion, to a new state or condition, a new turn of the seasonal wheel. During the intervening phase of ¢ransition, called by van Gennep ‘‘margin’’ or “‘limen’’ (meaning ‘‘threshold’’ in Latin), the ritual subjects pass through a period and area of ambiguity, a sort of social limbo which has few (though sometimes these are most crucial) of the attributes of either the preceding or subsequent profane social statuses or cultural states. We will look at this liminal phase much more closely later. The third phase, called by van Gen- nep, ‘“‘reaggregation’’ or “‘incorporation’’ includes symbolic phenomena and actions which represent the return of the subjects to their new, relative- ly stable, well-defined posi th

ion in the total society, For those undergoing

USL

e-cycl

prese

Liminal to Liminoid/25

along life’s culturally prefabricated road; for those taking part in a calen- drical or seasonal ritual, no change in status may be involved, but they have been ritually prepared for a whole series of changes in the nature of the cultural and ecological activities to be undertaken and of the relation- ships they will then have with others—all these holding good for a specific quadrant of the annual productive-cycle. Many passage rites are irreversi- ble (for the individual subjects) one shot only affairs, while calendrical rites are repeated every year by everyone, though, of course, one may attend the passage rites of one’s kin or friends innumerable times, until one knows their form better than the initiands themselves, like the old ladies who “never miss a wedding’’ as compared with the nervous couple at their first

put people set people up,”’ i.e., initiations

“

marriage. I have argued that initiatory passage rites tend to down’’ while some seasonal rites tend to “‘ humble people before permanently elevating them, while some seasonal rites (whose residues are carnivals and festivals) elevate those of low status transiently before returning them to their permanent humbleness. Arnold van Gennep argued that the three phases of his schema varied in length and degree of elaboration in different kinds of passage: for example, ‘rites of separation are prominent in funeral ceremonies, rites of incorporation at marriages. Transition rites may play an important part, for instance, in pregnancy, betrothal, and initiation.’’ The situation is further complicate by regional and ethnic differences which cut across typological ones. Never- theless, it is rare to find no trace of the three-part schema in “‘tribal’’ an “agrarian”? rituals.

The passage from one social status to another is often accompanied by a parallel passage in space, a geographical movement from one place to another. This may take the form of a mere opening of doors or the literal crossing of a threshold which separates two distinct areas, one associated with the subject’s pre-ritual or preliminal status, and the other with his post-ritual or postliminal status. (The army conscript’s ‘‘two steps forward’’ when he obeys his first military order may serve as a modern in- stance of a ritualized move into liminality.) On the other hand, the spatia

passage may involve a long, exacting pilgrimage and the crossing of many national frontiers before the subject reaches his goal, the sacred shrine—where paraliturgical action may replicate in microcosm the three- part schema at the shrine itself. Sometimes this spatial symbolism may be the precursor of a real and permanent change of residence or geographical sphere of action, as when, for example, a Nyakusa or Ndembu girl in Africa, after her puberty rites, leaves her natal village to dwell in her hus- band’s, or in certain hunting societies young boys live with their mothers until the time of their initiation rites into adulthood, after which they begin to live with the other hunters of the tribe. Perhaps something of this think-

ing persists in our own society, when, in | ganizations

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m Ritual to Theatre/26

on the national scale, such as the federal government or a major industrial

corporation, the university system, etc., promotion in status and salary usually involves movement in space from one city to another, a process described by William Watson in an article in the book, Closed Systems to Open Minds (edited by Max Gluckman, 1965) as ‘“‘spir m.’’ The ‘‘liminoid’’ phase between leaving one post and taking up another would repay study in terms of comparative symbology, both in regard to the subject (his dreams, fantasies, favorite reading and entertainment) and to those whom he is etc.). But

” and

there will be more of this and of the distinction between ‘“‘liminal

leaving and joining (their myths about him, treatment of him

“liminoid’’ later.

According to van Gennep, an extended liminal phase in the initiation rites of tribal societies is frequently marked by the phys ritual subjects from the rest of society. Thus in certain Australian, Melane-

al separation of the

sian, and African tribes, a boy undergoing initiation must spend a long period of time living in the bush, cut off from the normal social interactions within the village and household. Ritual symbols of this phase, though some represent inversion of normal reality, characteristically fall into two types: those of effacement and those of ambiguity or paradox. Hence, in many societies the liminal initiands are often considered to be dark, invisi- ble, like the sun or moon in eclipse or the moon between phases, at the “dark of the moon’’; they are stripped of names and clothing, smeared with the common earth rendered indistinguishable from animals. They are associated with such general oppositions as life and death, male and female, food and excrement, simultaneously, since they are at once dying from or dead to their former status and life, and being born and growing into new ones. Sharp symbolic inversion of social attributes may characterize separa- tion; blurring and merging of distinctions may characterize liminality. Thus, the ritual subjects in these rites undergo a “‘leveling’’ process, in which signs of their preliminal status are destroyed and signs of their liminal non-status applied. I have mentioned certain indicators of their

liminality—absence of clothing and names—other signs include eating

or not eating specific foods, disregard of personal appearance, the wearing of uniform clothing, sometimes irrespective of sex. In mid-transition the in- itiands are pushed as far toward uniformity, structural invisibility, and anonymity as possible. By way of compensation, the initiands acquire a special kind of freedom, “

a “‘sacred power’’ of the meek, weak, and humble. As van Gennep elaborates:

econ¢

During the entire novitiate, the usu modified, sometimes broke society,

Liminal to Liminoid/27

actually [in terms of indigenous beliefs] sacred and holy, and therefore untouchable and dangerous, just as gods would be. Thus, although taboos, as negative rites, erect a barrier between the novices and society, the society is helpless against the novices’ undertakings. That is the explanation—the simplest in the world—for a fact that has been noted among a great many peoples and has remained incom- prehensible to observers. During the novitiate, the young people can steal and pillage at will or feed and adorn themselves at the expense of

the community (1960:114).

The novices are, in fact, temporarily undefined, beyond the normative social structure. This weakens them, since they have no rights over others. But it also liberates them from structural obligations. It places them too ina close connection with non-social or asocial powers of life and death. Hence the frequent comparison of novices with, on the one hand, ghosts, gods, or ancestors, and, on the other, with animals or birds. They are dead to the social world, but alive to the asocial world. Many societies make a dichotomy, explicit or implicit, between sacred and profane, cosmos and chaos, order and disorder. In liminality, profane social relations may be discontinued, former rights and obligations are suspended, the social order may seem to have been turned upside down, but by way of compensation cosmological systems (as objects of serious study) may become of central importance for the novices, who are confronted by the elders, in rite, myth, g, instruction in a secret language, and various non-verbal symbolic genres, such as dancing, painting, clay-molding, wood-carving, masking, ., with symbolic patterns and structures which amount to teachings yut the structure of the cosmos and their culture as a part and product of 1 so far as these are defined and comprehended, whether implicitly or explicitly. Liminality may involve a complex sequence of episodes in sacred -time, and may also include subversive and ludic (or playful) events. factors of culture are isolated, in so far as it is possible to do this with ivocal symbols (i.e., with the aid of symbol-vehicles—sensorily percep- is) such as trees, images, paintings, dance forms, etc., that are susceptible not of a single meaning but of many meanings. Then the or elements of culture may be recombined in numerous, often 1c ways, grotesque because they are arrayed in terms of possible or ther than experienced combinations—thus a monster disguise ‘unnatural”’

nan, animal, and vegetable features in an same features may be differently, but equally

mbined i painting or described in a tale. In other

ty p Novelty ¢

1 the

rents of the familiar and

ions of

om unprece

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From Ritual to Theatre/28

Brian Sutton-Smith borrowed a term which I had earlier applied to “‘liminality’’ (and other social phenomena and events), namely, ‘“‘anti- structure’’ (meaning by this the dissolution of normative social structure, with its role-sets, statuses, jural rights and duties, etc.) and related it to a series of experimental studies he has been making of children’s (and some adult) games both in tribal and industrial societies. Much of what he says, mutatis mutandis, can be transferred back to the study of liminality in tribal ritual. He writes: ‘The normative structure represents the working equilibrium, the ‘antistructure’ represents the latent system of potential alternatives from which novelty will arise when contingencies in the nor- mative system require it. We might more correctly call this second system the protostructural system [he says] because it is the precursor of innovative normative forms. It is the source of new culture’’ (pp. 18-19). Sutton- Smith, who has been recently examining the continuum order-disorder in games (such as the English children’s game ring-a-ring-a-roses), goes on to say that ‘‘we may be disorderly in games [and, I would add, in the liminali- ty of rituals, as well as in such ‘‘liminoid’’ phenomena as charivaris, fiestas, Halloween masking, and mumming, ete.] either because we have an over- dose of order, and want to let off steam [this might be called the ‘‘conser- vative view”’ of ritual disorder, such as ritual reversals, Saturnalia, and the like], or because we have something to dearn through being disorderly’? (p. 17). What interests me most about Sutton-Smith’s formulations is that he sees liminal and liminoid situations as the settings in which new models, symbols, paradigms, etc., arise—as the seedbeds of cultural creativity in fact. These new symbols and constructions then feed back into the ‘‘cen- tral’? economic and politico-legal domains and arenas, supplying them with goals, aspirations, incentives, structural models and raisons d’etre.

Some have argued, notably the Gallostructuralists of France, that liminality, more specifically ‘‘liminal’’ phenomena such as myth and ritual in tribal society, is best characterized by the establishment of ‘‘implicit syntax-like rules’’or by‘‘internal structures of logical relations of opposition and mediation between discrete symbolic elements”’ of the myth or ritual. Claude Lévi-Strauss would perhaps take this view. But to my mind it is the analysis of culture into factors and their free or ‘“‘ludic’’ recombination in any and every possible pattern, however weird, that is of the essence of liminality, liminality par excellence. This may be seen if one studies liminal phases of major rituals cross-culturally and cross-temporally. When im- plicit rules begin to appear which limit the possible combination of factors to certain conventional patterns, designs, or configurations, then, I think, we are seeing the intrusion of normative social structure into what is poten- tially and in principle a free and experimental region of culture, a region

troduced—fa

Liminal to Liminoid/29

variation and experiment becomes more clearly dominant in societies in which Jeisure is sharply demarcated from work, and especially in all societies which have been shaped by the Industrial Revolution. Various Levi- Straussian models, such as the one dealing with metaphorical and opposi- tional logical relations and the transformation to humanity, from nature to culture, and the geometric model which utilizes two sets of oppositions in the construction of a ‘‘culinary triangle,’’ raw/cooked:raw/rotten seem to me to be applicable mainly to tribal or early agrarian societies where work and life tend to be governed by seasonal and ecological rhythms, and where the rules underlying the generation of cultural patterns tend to seek out the binary ‘‘Yin-Yang,’’ forms suggested by simple ‘‘natural’’ oppositions, such as hot/cold, wet/dry, cultivated/wild, male/female, summer/winter, plenty/scarcity, right/left, sky/earth, above/below and the like. The main social and cultural structures tend to become modeled on these and similar cosmological principles, which determine even the layout of cities and villages, the design of houses, and the shape and spatial placement of dif- ferent types of cultivated land. Analysis of spatial symbolism in relation to cosmological and mythological models has indeed become quite a thriving Gallostructuralist industry lately. It is not surprising that liminality itself cannot escape the grip of these strong structuring principles. Only certain types of children’s games and play are allowed some degree of freedom because these are defined as structurally ‘‘irrelevant,’’ not ‘‘mattering.”’ When children are initiated into the early grades of adulthood, however, variabilities and liabilities of social behavior are drastically curtailed and controlled. Children’s games cease to be pediarchic-and become pedagogic. Law, morality, ritual, even much of economic life, fall under the structur- ing influence of cosmological principles. The cosmos becomes a complex

” “

weave of ‘‘correspondences’’ based on analogy, metaphor and metonomy. For example, the Dogon of West Africa, according to Marcel Griaule, Genevieve Calame Griaule, and Germaine Dieterlen, establish a cor- respondence between the different categories of minerals and the organs of the body. The various soils are conceived of as the organs of ‘‘the interior of the stomach,’’ rocks are regarded as the ‘‘bones’’ of the skeleton, and various hues of red clay are likened to ‘‘the blood.’’ Similarly, in Medieval China, different ways of painting trees and clouds are related to different cosmological principles.

Thus the symbols found in rites de passage in these societies, though sub- ject to permutations and transformations of their relationships, are only in- volved in these within relatively stable, cyclical, and repetitive systems. It is to these kinds of systems that the term ‘“‘liminality’’ properly belongs.

When used of processes, phenomena, and persons in large-scale complex

societies, the word

tmart rite de

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passage, is applied to other aspects of culture—here in societies of far greater scale and complexity. This brings me to a watershed division in com- parative symbology. Failure to distinguish between symbolic systems and genres belonging to cultures which have developed before and after the In- dustrial Revolution can lead to much confusion both in theoretical treat- ment and in operational methodology.

Let me try to spell this out. Despite immense diversities within each camp, there still remains a fundamental distinction at the level of expressive culture between all societies before and all societies subsequent to the In- dustrial Revolution, including the industrializing Third World societies which, although dominantly agrarian, nevertheless represent the granaries or playgrounds of metropolitan industrial societies.

Key concepts here are work, play, and leisure. Placing a different ex- planatory stress on each or any combination of these can influence how we think about symbolic manipulation sets, symbolic genres, in the types of societies we will consider. Each of these concepts is multivocal or multivalent, it has many designations. Take work. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘‘work’’ means: (1) expenditure of energy, striving, application of effort to some purpose (which fits fairly well with Webster’s primary sense: ‘‘physical or mental effort exerted to do or to make something; purposeful activity; labor; toil); (2) task to be undertaken, materials to be used in task; (3) thing done, achievement, thing made, books or piece of literary or musical composition [not this application of “‘work”’ to the genres of the leisure domain], meritorious act as opposed to faith or grace; (5) employment, especially the opportunity of earning money by labor, laborious occupation; (6) ordinary, practical (as in workaday), etc. {where it has resonances with secular, profane, pragmatic, etc.]. Now in “‘tribal,’’ ‘‘preliterate, some extent, myth, are regarded as ‘‘work,’’ precisely in this sense, what the Tikopia call ‘“‘the work of the Gods.’? Ancient Hindu society

simpler,’’ ‘‘small-scale’’ societies, ritual, and to

also posits a ‘divine work.”’ In the third chapter of the Bhagavad Gita (v. 14-15) we find a conection made between sacrifice and work: ‘‘From food do all contingent beings derive, and food derives from rain; rain derives from sacrifice and sacrifice from work. From Brahman work arises.’’ Nikhilananda comments that ‘‘work’’ here refers to the sacrifice prescribed in the Vedas, which prescribes for ‘‘householders,”’ sacrifice or work (‘‘ac- tion’’). The Ndembu call what a ritual specialist does, kuzata, ‘‘work,’’ and the same general term is applied to what a hunter, a cultivator, a headman, and, today, a manual laborer, does. Even in fairly complex agrarian societies associated with city-state or feudal polities, well within the scope of historical documentation, we find terms like /iturgy which in pre-Christian Greece early became established as ‘“‘public service to the gods.’’

“Liturgy’’ is derived from the Greek leos or laos, ‘the people,’’ and

Liminal to Liminoid/31

“‘ergon,’’ ‘work’? (cognate with Old English weorc, German werk, from the Indo-European base, werg-, ‘‘to do, act.’’ The Greek organon, ‘‘tool, instru- ment’’ derives from the same base—originally worganon). The work of men is thus the work of the Gods, a conclusion which would have delighted Durkheim, though it could be construed as implying a fundamental distinc- tion between gods and men, since men cooperated in ritual the better to enter into reciprocal, exhange relations with the gods or with God—it was not simply that ‘‘the voice of the congregation was the voice of God.’’ A difference was construed beteen creator and created. Whatever may have been the empirical case, what we are seeing here is a universe or work, an ergon- or organic universe, in which the main distinction is between sacred and profane work, not between work and leisure. For example, Samuel Beal comments in his Travels of Fah-Hian Sung-Yun, Buddhist Pilgrim from China to India (A.D. 600 and A.D. 518), [1964: p. 4 ff.], on Chi Fah-Hian’s use of the term ‘“‘shaman,’’ as follows: ‘‘The Chinese word shaman represents phonetically the Sanscrit sramana, or the Pali samana. The Chinese word is defined to mean ‘diligent,’ ‘laborious.’ The Sanscrit root is ‘sram,’ to be fatigued.’’ (He was referring to the people of Shen-Shen, in the desert of Makhai, part of the Gobi Desert region.) It is, furthermore, a universe of work in which whole communities participate, as of obligation, not opta- tion, The whole community goes through the entire ritual round, whether in terms of total or representative participation. Thus, some rites, such as those of sowing, first fruits, or harvest, may involve everyone, man, woman, and child, others may be focused on specific groups, categories, associations, etc., such as men or women, old or young, one clan or another, one association or secret society or another. Yet the whole ritual round adds up to the total participation of the whole community. Sooner or later, no one is exempt from ritual duty, just as no one is exempt from economic, legal, or political duty. Communal participation, obligation, the passage of the whole society through crises, collective and individual, directly or by proxy, are the hallmarks of ‘‘the work of the gods’’ and sacred human work—without which profane human work would be, for the community, impossible to conceive, though no doubt, as history has cruelly demonstrated to those conquered by industrial societies, possible to live, or, at least, exist through.

Yet it can be argued that this ‘‘work’’ is not work, as we in industrial societies know it, but has in both its dimensions, sacred and profane, an element of ‘‘play.’’ Insofar as the community and its individual members ‘owners’ of ritual and liturgy, or as representatives of the ancestors and gods who ultimately ‘‘own’’ them, they

regard themselves as the masters or ‘

have authority to introduce, under certain culturally determined condi- ements of novelty from time to time into the socially inherited

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peculiarly conducive to such ‘“‘ludic’’ invention. Perhaps it would be better to regard the distinction between ‘‘work’’ and ‘“‘play,’’ or better between “‘work’’ and “‘leisure’’ (which includes but exceeds play sut generis), as itself an artifact of the Industrial Revolution, and to see such symbolic-

expressive genres as ritual and myth as being at once work and play or at least as cultural activities in which work and play are intricately inter- calibrated. Yet it often happens that the historically /ater can throw light on the earlier, especially when there is a demonstrable sociogenetic connection between them. For there are undoubtedly ‘“‘ludic’’ aspects in ‘‘tribal,’’ etc., culture, especially in the liminal periods of protracted initiation or calen- drically based rituals. Such would include joking relationships, sacred games, such as the ball games of the ancient Maya and modern Cherokee, riddles, mock-ordeals, holy fooling, and clowning, Trickster tales told in liminal times and places, in or out of ritual contexts, and host of other types.

The point is though, that these play or ludic aspects of tribal agrarian ritual myth are, as Durkheim says, ‘‘de la vie sérieuse,”’ i.e., they are in- trinsically connected with the ‘“‘work’’ of the collectivity in performing sym- bolic actions and manipulating symbolic objects so as to promote and in- crease fertility of men, crops, and animals, domestic and wild, to cure ill- ness, to avert plague, to obtain success in raiding, to turn boys into men and girls into women, to make chiefs out of commoners, to transform or- dinary people into shamans and shamanins, to ‘‘cool’’ those ‘“‘hot’’ from the warpath, to ensure the proper succession of seasons and the hunting and agricultural responses of human beings to them, and so forth. Thus, the play is in earnest, and has to be within bounds. For example, in the Ndembu Twin Ritual, Wubwang’u, described in The Ritual Process, in one episode women and men abuse one another verbally in a highly sexual and jocose way. Much personal inventiveness goes into the invective, though much is also stylized. Nevertheless, this ludic behavior is pressed into the service of the ultimate aim of the ritual—to produce healthy offspring, but not too many healthy offspring at once. Abundance is good, but reckless abundance is a foolish joke. Hence cross-sexual joking both maintains reasonable fertility and restrains unreasonable fecundity. Joking is fun, but it is also a social sanction. Even joking must observe the ‘‘golden mean,”’ which is an ethical feature of ‘‘cyclical, repetitive societies,’’ not as yet un- balanced by innovative ideas and technical changes. Technical innovations are the products of ideas, the products of which I will call the ‘‘/iminoid’’ (the ‘‘-oid’’ here derives from Greek-eidos, a form, shape; and means ‘like, resembling id’? resembles without being identical with ‘“‘liminal’’) and what Marx assigned to a domain he called ‘“‘the superstructural’’—I would prefer to talk about the ‘‘anti-,’’ ‘‘meta-,’’ or ‘‘protostructural.’’ “‘Superstructural,’’ for Marx, has the connotation of a distorted mirroring, even falsification or mystification of the

“Jimin’

or ‘‘infrastructural

ructura

Liminal to Liminoid/33

which is, in his terms, the constellation of productive relations, both in cohesion and conflict. Contrarily, I see the “‘liminoid’’ as an independent and critical source—like the liminoid ‘‘works’’ of Marx, written in the secluded space of the British Museum Library—and here we observe how “iminoid’’ actions of industrial leisure genres can repossess the character of ‘‘work’’ though originating in a ‘‘freetime’’ arbitrarily separated by managerial fiat from the time of ‘‘labor’’—how the liminoid can be an in- dependent domain of creative activity, not simply a distorted mirror- image, mask, or cloak for structural activity in the ‘‘centers’’ or ‘‘main- streams’’ of ‘‘productive social labor.’’ To call them a distorting mirror is to identify liminoid productions solely with apologia for the political status quo. ‘‘Antistructurt in fact, can generate and store a plurality of alter- native models for living, from utopias to programs, which are capable of in- fluencing the behavior of those in mainstream social and political roles (whether authoritative or dependent, in control or rebelling against it) in the direction of radical change, just as much as they can serve as in-

struments of politcal control. As scientists we are interested in demarcating a domain, not in taking sides with one or other of the groups or categories which operate within it. Experimental and theoretical science itself is liminoid’’—it takes place in ‘‘neutral spaces’’ or privileged areas—laboratories and studies—set aside from the mainstream of produc- tive or political events. Universities, institutes, colleges, etc., are “‘iminoid’’ settings for all kinds of freewheeling, experimental cognitive

behavior as well as forms of symbolic action, resembling some found in

tribal society, like ‘‘rushing’’ and “‘pledging’’ ceremonies in American col- lege fraternity and society houses, for example. This, of course, does not mean that liminoid products have no political significance: think of the Rights of Man and the Communist Manifesto, for example. Or Plato’s Republic or Hobbes’s Leviathan.

But let’s look more closely at this notion of the ‘‘liminoid,’’ and try to distinguish it from the ‘‘liminal.’’ To do this properly, we have to examine the notion of ‘‘play.’’ Etymology does not tell us too much about its mean- ing. We learn that the word ‘‘play”’ is derived from OE plegan, “‘to exercise oneself, move briskly,’’ and that the Middle Dutch pleyen, ‘‘to dance,”’ is a cognate term. Walter Skeat, in his Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (p. 355), suggests that the Anglo-Saxon plega, ‘‘a game, sport,”’ is also (commonly) ‘‘a fight, a battle.’’ He considers, too, that the Anglo-Saxon terms are borrowed from the Latin plaga, ‘‘a stroke.’’ Even if the idea of a ‘‘danced-out or ritualized fight’’ gets into subsequent denota- ions of ‘‘play,’’ this multivocal concept has its own historical destiny. Webster’s Dictionary, play is: (1) action, motion, or acti

ity, esp. when

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“

against work’s ‘‘necessary’’ or ‘‘obligatory’’ character, ‘‘rapid’’ as against the careful, reflected-upon style of work routines; (2) ‘‘freedom or scope for motion or action’’; (3) ‘‘activity engaged in for amusement or recreation’’—here, again, we are verging on the notion of activities disengaged from necessity or obligation; (4) ‘‘fun, joking (to do a thing in play)’ —emphasizing the non-serious character of certain types of modern play; (5) (a) ‘‘the playing of a game,”’ (b) ‘‘the way or technique of playing a game’’—here reintroducing the notion that play might be work, might be serious within its non-serious dimension, and raising the problem of what are the conditions under which ‘‘fun’’ becomes ‘‘technique’’ and rule- governed; (6) (a) ‘“‘a maneuver, move, or act in a game’’ (e.g., the “‘wishbone’’ or ‘“T’’ offensive formation in American football or a specific brilliant move by a team or individual), (b) ‘‘a turn at playing’’ (e.g., “‘there’s one play left in the game’’); (7) ‘‘the act of gambling”’ (and here we may think of the ‘‘gambling”’ character of divination in tribal and even in feudal society, and, of course, the very word ‘‘gamble’’ is derived from OE gamenian, ‘‘to play’’ akin to the German dialect term gammeln, ‘‘to ”; (8) “a dramatic composition or performance; drama,”’ “‘the play’s the thing’’—clearly this term preserves something of the earlier sense of ‘‘fight, battle’’ as well as those of ‘‘recreation,’’ “technique,” and ‘“‘turns (i.e., acts, scenes, etc.) at playing’’; (9) finally,

“play”? can mean ‘‘sexual activity, dalliance.’’ Here again we can see a

sport, make merry

shift from the meaning of sex as procreative ‘‘work,”’ (a persistent meaning often supported by religious doctrine in tribal and feudal societies) to the division of sexual activity into ‘‘play’’ or ‘‘foreplay,’’ and the ‘‘serious’’ work’’ of begetting progeny. Post-industrial birth control techniques make this division practically realizable, and themselves ex- emplify the division between work and play brought about by modern systems of production and thought, both ‘‘objectively, culture, and ‘“

business or

in the domain of subjectively’? in the individual conscience and con- sciousness. The distinction between ‘‘subjective’’ and ‘‘objective’? may itself be partly an artifact of the sundering of work and play. For ‘‘work’’ is held to be the realm of the rational adaptation of means to ends, of ‘‘objec- tivity,’’ while ‘‘play’’ is thought of as divorced from this essentially ‘‘objec- tive’’ realm, and, in so far as it is its inverse, it is ‘‘subjective,”’ free from external constraints, where any and every combination of variable can be ““‘played’’ with. Indeed, Jean Piaget, who has done most to study the developmental psychology of play, regards it as ‘‘a kind of free assimila- tion, without accommodation to spatial conditions or to the significance of objects.’’ (Play, Dream, and Imitation, 1962, p. 86).

In the liminal phases and states of tribal and agrarian cultures—in ritual, myth, and legal processes—work and play are hardly distinguishable in

many cases. Thus, in Vedic India, according to Alain Danielou (Hindu

Liminal to Liminoid/35

Polytheism, 1964:144), the ‘‘gods [sura and deva, who are objects of serious sacrificial ritual] play. The rise, duration and destruction of the world is their game.’’ Ritual is both earnest and playful. As Milton Singer has pointed out in his book on contemporary India, When a Great Tradition Modernizes (p. 160), the ‘‘Krishna dance’’ in an urban bhaqjana program (group hymn singing) is called /ila, ‘‘sport,’’ in which the participants “‘play’’ at being the ‘‘Gopis’’ or cowherdesses who ‘“‘sport’’ in a variety of ways with Krishna, Vishnu incarnate, reliving the myth. But the Gopis’ erotic love-play with Krishna has mystical implications, like the Song of Solomon—it is at once serious and playful, God’s ‘ soul.

Now let us consider the clear division between work and leisure which modern industry has produced, and how this has affected all symbolic genres, from ritual to games and literature. Joffre Dumazedier, of the Cen- tre d’Etudes Sociologiques (Paris), is not the only authority who holds that leisure ‘‘has certain traits that are characteristic only of the civilization born from the industrial revolution’’ (International Encyclopedia of the Social Sctences, article on ‘‘Leisure,’’ 1968:248-253, also Le Loisir et La Ville, 1962). But he puts the case very pithily and I am beholden to his argument. Dumazedier dismisses the view that leisure has existed in all societies at all times. In archaic and tribal societies, he maintains, ‘“‘work and play alike formed part of the ritual by which men sought communion with the ancestral spirits. Religious festivals embodied both work and play’’ (p. 248). Yet religious specialists such as shamans and medicine-men did not constitute a ‘‘leisure class’? in Thorstein Veblen’s sense, since they per- formed religious or magical functions for the whole conimunity (and, as we have seen, shamanism is a ‘‘diligent and laborious’’ profession). Similarly, in the agricultural societies of recorded history, ‘‘the working year followed a timetable written in the very passage of the days and seasons: in good weather work was hard, in bad weather it slackened off. Work of this kind had a natural rhythm to it, punctuated by rests, songs, games, and ceremonies; it was synonymous with the daily round, and in some regions began at sunrise, to finish only at sunset … the cycle of the year was also marked by a whole series of sabbaths and feast days. The sabbath belonged to religion; feast days, however, were often occasions for a great investment of energy (not to mention food) and constituted the obverse or opposite of everyday life [often characterized by symbolic inversion and status rever- sal]. But the ceremonial [or ritual] aspect of these celebrations could not be disregarded; they stemmed from religion [defined as sacred work], not leisure [as we think of it today] … They were imposed by reli

‘sport’? with a human

ious re-

ations knew more t

quirements … [and] the major European ci ays (p. 249) Gr

and Letst

(Of Time,

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the origins of leisure can be traced to the way of life enjoyed by certain aristocratic classes in the course of Western civilization. Dumazedier disagrees, pointing out the idle state of Greek philosophers and sixteenth century gentry cannot be defined in relation to work, but rather replaces work altogether. Work is done by slaves, peasants, or servants. True leisure only exists when it complements or rewards work. This is not to say that many of the refinements of human culture did not come from this aristocratic idleness. Dumazedier thinks that it is significant that the Greek word for having nothing to do (schole) also meant ‘‘school.’’ ‘‘The courtiers of Europe, after the end of the Middle Ages, both invented and extolled the ideal of the humanist and the gentleman’ (p. 249).

“‘Leisure,’’ then, presupposes ‘‘work’’: it is a non-work, even an anti- work phase in the life of a person who also works. If we were to indulge in terminological neophily, we might call it anergic as against ergic. Leisure arises, says Dumazedier, under two conditions. First, society ceases to govern its activities by means of common ritual obligations: some activities, including work and leisure, become, at least in theory, subject to individual choice. Secondly, the work by which a person earns his or her living is ‘“‘set apart from his other activities: its limits are no longer ‘natural’ but ar- bitrary—indeed, it is organized in so definite a fashion that it can easily be separated, both in theory and in practice, from his free time.”’ It is only in the social life of industrial and postindustrial civilizations that we find these necessary conditions. Other social theorists, both radical and conservative, have pointed out that leisure is the product of industrialized, rationalized, bureaucratized, large-scale socio-economic systems with arbitrary rather than natural delimitation of ‘‘work’’ from ‘‘free time’’ or ‘“‘time out.”’ Work is now organized by industry so as to be separated from ‘‘free time,”’ which includes, in addition to leisure, attendance to such personal needs as eating, sleeping, and caring for one’s health and appearance, as well as familial, social, civic, political, and religious obligations (which would have fallen within the domain of the work-play continuum in tribal society). Leisure is predominantly an urban phenomenon, so that when the concept of leisure begins to penetrate rural societies, it is because agricultural labor is tending towards an industrial, ‘‘rationalized’’ mode of organization, and because rural life is becoming permeated by the urban values of in- dustrialization—this holds good for the ‘‘Third World’’ today as well as for the rural hinterlands of long-established industrial societies.

Leisure-time is associated with two types of freedom, ‘‘freedom-from’”’ and ‘‘freedom-to,”’ to advert to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction. (1) It represents freedom from a whole heap of institutional obligations prescribed by the basic forms of social, particularly technological and bureaucra organization. (2) For each individual, i

freedom from t dace

chronologically regt

Liminal to Liminoid/37

recuperate and enjoy natural, biological rhythms again.

Leisure is also: (1) freedom to enter, even to generate new symbolic worlds of entertainment, sports, games, diversions of all kinds. It is, furthermore, (2) freedom to transcend social structural limitations, freedom to play … with ideas, with fantasies, with words (from Rabelais to Joyce and Samuel Beckett), with paint (from the Impressionists to Action painting and Art Nouveau), and with social relationships—in friendship, sensitivity train- ing, psychodramas, and in other ways. Here far more than in tribal or agrarian rites and ceremonies, the ludic and the experimental are stressed. In complex, organic-solidary societies, there are obviously many more op- tions: games of skill, strength, and chance can serve as models for future behavior or models of past work experience—now viewed as release from work’s necessities and something one chooses to do. Sports like football, games like chess, recreations like mountaineering can be hard and exacting and governed by rules and routines even more stringent than those of the work situation, but, since they are optional, they are part of an individual’s freedom, of his growing self-mastery, even self-transcendence. Hence, they are imbued more thoroughly with pleasure than those many types of in- dustrial work in which men are alienated from the fruits and results of their labor. Leisure is potentially capable of releasing creative powers, individual or communal, either to criticize or buttress the dominant social structural values.

It is certain than no one is committed to a true leisure activity by material needs or by moral or legal obligations, as is the case with the activities of getting an education, earning a living, or carrying out civic or religious ceremonies. Even when there is effort, as in competitive sport, that ef- rt—and the discipline of training—is chosen voluntarily, in the expecta- tion of an enjoyment that is disinterested, unmotivated by gain, and has no utilitarian or ideological purpose.

But if this is ideally the spirit of leisure, the cultural reality of leisure is obviously influenced by the domain of work from which it has been split by the wedge of industrial organization. Work and leisure interact, each in- dividual participates in both realms, and the modes of work organization affect the styles of leisure pursuits. Let’s consider the case of those mainly Northern European and North American societies whose preliminary in- dustrialization was accompanied and infused with the spirit of what Max Weber has called ‘‘the Protestant Ethic.’’ This ethical milieu, or set of s, which Weber thought was an auspicious condition for

ues and be

{ of mode

the letsure do

grow

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Adam as man. In its extreme form, Predestination, this meant than no one could be certain of being saved, or indeed of being damned. This threaten- ed seriously to undermine individual morale, and a get-out clause evolved at the level of popular culture, though it could not be made theologically watertight. This was that he who is in God’s grace and (invisibly) among the elect by God’s foreordaining does actually manifest in his behavior systematic self-control and obedience to the will of God. By these outward signs it may be known to others, and he can reassure himself that he is among the elect, and will not suffer eternal damnation with the reprobate. But the Calvinist is never finally certain that he will be saved and thus dedicates himself to an incessant examination of the conditions of his in- ward soul and outward life for evident indications of the work of salvific grace. In a sense, what was in cultural history previously the social ‘‘work of the Gods,’’ the calendrical, liturgical round, or, rather, its penances and ordeals, not its festive rewards, became ‘‘internalized’’ as the systematic, non-ludic ‘‘work’’ of the individual’s conscience.

Another Calvinist emphasis was on the notion of one’s calling in life, one’s vocation. As against the Catholic notion of ‘‘vocation’’ as the call to a religious life, framed by the traditional vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty, the Calvinist held that it was precisely a person’s worldly occupa- tion that must be regarded as the sphere in which he was to serve God through his dedication to his work. Work and leisure were made separate spheres, and ‘‘work’’ became sacred, de facto, as the arena in which one’s salvation might be objectively demonstrated. Thus, the man of property was to act as as steward of worldly goods, like Joseph in Egypt. He was to use them not for sinful luxury, but to better the moral condition of himself, his family, and his employees. ‘‘Betterment’’ implied self-discipline, self- examination, hard work, dedication to one’s duty and calling, and an in- sistence that those under one’s authority should do the same. Wherever the Calvinist aspiration to theocracy became influential, as in Geneva or in the transient dominance of English Puritanism, legislation was introduced to force men to better their spiritual state through thrift and hard work. For example, English Puritanism affected not only religious worship by its at- tack on ‘‘ritualism,’’ but also reduced ‘‘ceremonial’’ (‘‘secular’’ ritual) to a minimum in many other fields of activity, including drama, which they

yor

stigmatized as ‘‘mummery.’’ Their Act making stage performances illegal cut twenty odd years from Ben Jonson’s playwriting. Among the targets of such legislation, then, were significantly, such genres of leisure entertain- ment which had developed in aristocratic or mercantilist circles in the proto-industrializing period as theatrical productions, masques, pageants, musical performances, and, of course, the popular genres of carnivals, festivals, charivaris, ballad singing, and miracle plays. These represented

the “‘ludic’’ face of the work-play continuum that had formerly caught up

Liminal to Liminoid/39

the whole of society into a single process moving through sacred and pro- fane, solemn and festive phases in the seasonal round. The Calvinists wanted ‘‘no more cakes and ale’’—or other festival foods that belonged to the work and play of the gods. What they wanted was ascetic dedication to the mainline economic enterprise, the sacralization of what was formerly mostly profane, or, at least, subordinated to, ancillary to the sacred cosmological paradigms. Weber argues that when the religious motivations of Calvinism were lost after a few generations of worldly success, the focus on self-examination, self-discipline, and hard work in one’s calling even when secularized continued to promote the ascetic dedication to systematic profits, reinvestment of earnings, and thrift which were the hall marks of nascent capitalism.

Something of this systematic, vocational character of the Protestant ethic came to tinge even the entertainment genres of industrial leisure. To coin a rather than ludic,

term, even leisure became ergic, ‘‘of the nature of work, of the nature of play. Thus, we have a serious division of labor in the entertain- ment business, acting, dancing, singing, art, writing, composing, etc., becoming professionalized ‘‘vocations.’’ Educational institutions prepared actors, dancers, singers, painters, and authors for their ‘‘careers.’’ At a higher level, there grew up in the late eighteenth and especially in the nine- teenth centuries the notion of ‘‘art’’ itself, in its various modalities, as a quasi-religious vocation, with its own asceticism and total dedication, from William Blake, through Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Lermontov, and Rim- baud, to Cézanne, Proust, Rilke, Joyce, not to mention Beethoven, Mahler, Sibelius, etc., etc.

Another aspect of this influence of the Protestant ethic on leisure is in the realm of play itself. As Edward Norbeck has said (‘‘Man at Play,’’ in Play, A Natural History Magazine Special Supplement, December 1971:48-53): “America’s forefathers believed strongly in the set of values known as the Protestant ethic. Devotion to work was a Christian virtue; and play, the enemy of work, was reluctantly and charily permitted only to children. Even now, these values are far from extinct in our nation, and the old ad- monition that play is the devil’s handiwork continues to live in secular thought. Although play has now become almost respectable, it is still something in which we ‘indulge’ (as in sexual acts), a form of moral lax- ness.’’ Organized sport (‘‘pedagogic’’ play) better fits the Puritan tradition than unorganized children’s play (‘‘pediarchic’’ play) or mere dalliance, which is time wasted.

Nevertheless, modern industrial or post-industrial societies have shed many of these anti-leisure attitudes. Technological development, political and industrial organization by workers, action by liberal employers, revolutions in many parts of the world, have had the cumulative effect of

of industrial cultures. In this

the ‘‘free-tim

bringing more leisure i

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leisure, symbolic genres, both of the entertainment and instructive sorts, have proliferated. In my book, The Ritual Process, I have spoken of some of these as “‘liminal’’? phenomena. In view of what I have just said, is liminali- ty an adequate label for this set of symbolic activities and forms? Clearly, there are some respects in which these “anergic’’ genres share characteristics with the ‘‘ludergic’’ rituals and myths (if we contrast the Hindu and Judaic ritual style) of archaic, tribal and early agrarian cultures. Leisure can be conceived of as a betwixt-and-between, a neither-this-nor- that domain between two spells of work or between occupational and familial and civic activity. Leisure is etymologically derived from the Old French leisir, which itself derives from the Latin licere, ‘‘to be permitted,” and which, interestingly enough, comes from the Indo-European base *leik—‘‘to offer for sale, bargain,”’ referring to the ‘“‘liminal”’ sphere of the market, with its implications of choice, variation, contract—a sphere that has connections, in archaic and tribal religions, with Trickster deities such as Eshu-Elegba, and Hermes. Exchange is more “Jiminal’’ than produc- tion. Just as when tribesmen make masks, disguise themselves as monsters, heap up disparate ritual symbols, invert or parody profane reality in myths and folk-tales, so do the genres of industrial leisure, the theatre, poetry, novel, ballet, film, sport, rock music, classical music, art, pop art, etc., play with the factors of culture, sometimes assembling them in random, grotes- que, improbable, surprising, shocking, usually experimental combina- tions. But they do this in a much more complicated way than in the liminality of tribal initiations, multiplying specialized genres of artistic and popular entertainments, mass culture, pop culture, folk culture, high culture, counterculture, underground culture, etc., as against the relatively limited symbolic genres of ‘‘tribal’’ society, and within each allowing lavish scope to authors, poets, dramatists, painters, sculptors, composers, musi- cians, actors, comedians, folksingers, rock musicians, ‘‘makers’’ generally, to generate not only weird forms, but also, and not infrequently, models, direct and parabolic or aesopian, that are highly critical of the status quo asa whole or in part. Of course, given diversity as a principle, many artists, in many genres, also buttress, reinforce, justify, or otherwise seek to legitimate the prevailing social and cultural mores and political orders. Those that do so, do so in ways that tend more closely than the critical pro- ductions to parallel tribal myths and rituals—they are “Jiminal’’ or “pyseudo-’’ or “‘post-’” ‘‘liminal,’” rather than ‘‘liminoid.’’ Satire is a con- servative genre because it is pseudo-liminal. Satire exposes, attacks, or derides what it considers to be vices, follies, stupidities, or abuses, but its criterion of judgment is usually the normative structural frame of officially promulgated values. Hence sa Castlereagh, or Evelyn Waugh,

ical works, like those of Swift,

have a i’? form, in-

ating that ¢

rder is no |

Liminal to Liminoid/41

verts but also reflects an object. It does not break it down into constituents in order to remold it, far less does it annihilate and replace that object. But art and literature often do precisely these things, if only in the realm of im- agination. The liminal phases of tribal society invert but do not usually subvert the status quo, the structural form, of society; reversal underlines to the members of a community that chaos is the alternative to cosmos, so they’d better stick to cosmos, i.e., the traditional order of culture, though they can for a brief while have a whale of a good time being chaotic, in some saturnalian or lupercalian revelry, some charivari, or institutionaliz- ed orgy. But supposedly “entertainment” genres of industrial society are often subversive, satirizing, lampooning, burlesquing, or subtly putting down the central values of the basic, work-sphere society, or at least of selected sectors of that society. The word ‘‘entertain, incidentally, is derived from O.F. entretenir, to “hold apart,’’ that is, to create a liminal or liminoid space in which performances may take place. Some of these enter- tainment genres, such as the “Jegitimate’’ or ‘‘classical’’ theatre, are historically continuous with ritual, as in the cases of Greek tragedy or Japanese Noh theatre, and possess something of the sacred seriousness,

even the rites de passage structure of their antecedents. Nevertheless, crucial differences separate the structure, function, style, scope and symbology of the liminal in tribal and agrarian ritual and myth from what we may perhaps call the ‘‘liminoid,”’ or leisure genres, of symbolic forms and ac- tion in complex, industrial societies. I shall soon go on to discuss some of these differences.

The term limen itself, the Latin for ‘‘threshold,”’ selected by van Gennep to apply to ‘‘transition between,’’ appears to be negative in connotation, since it is no longer the positive past condition nor yet the positive ar- ticulated future condition. It seems, too, to be passive since it is dependent on the articulated, positive conditions it mediates. Yet on probing one finds in liminality both positive and active qualities, especially where that “threshold’’ is protracted and becomes a “tunnel,’’? when the ‘‘liminal’’ becomes the ‘‘cunicular’’; this is particularly the case in initiation rituals, with their long periods of seclusion and training of novices rich in the deployment of symbolic forms and esoteric teachings. ‘‘Meaning’’ in culture tends to be generated at the interfaces between established cultural subsystems, though meanings are then institutionalized and consolidated at the centers of such systems. Liminality is a temporal interface whose pro- perties partially invert those of the already consolidated order which con- stitutes any specific cultural “cosmos.’’ It may be useful heuristically to r in relation to liminality in ritual/myth Durkheim’s overall

rot which he regarded as that type

he achieve-

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From Ritual to Theatre/58

breaks flow—you have to be a believer, even if this means temporary ‘‘will- ing suspension of disbelief,’’ i.e., choosing (in liminoid fashion) to believe that the rules are ‘‘true.’’

(6) Finally “‘flow”’ is ‘‘autotelic,”’ i.e., i seems to need no goals or rewards out- side itself. To flow is to be as happy as a human can be—the particular rules or stimuli that triggered the flow, whether chess or a prayer meeting, do not matter. This is important for any study of human behavior, if true, for it suggests that people will culturally manufacture situations which will release flow, or individually seek it outside their ascribed stations in life if these are ‘‘flow-resistant.’”

Csikszentmihalyi goes on to link ‘‘flow theory’’ with information theory and competence theory, but I am not convinced by these speculations. I think he has superbly pinpointed and ascribed qualities to this ex- perience—which has to be dealt with phenomenologically in the first place «though we may be able to get more ‘‘objective’’ later with EEG patterns, changes in metabolic rate, etc.).

I would like to say simply that what I call communitas has something of a “flow”? quality, but it may arise, and often does arise spontaneously and unanticipated—it does not need rules to trigger it off. In theological language, it is sometimes a matter of ‘‘grace’’ rather than “‘law.’’ Again, “flow”? is experienced within an individual, whereas communitas at its in- ception is evidently between or among individuals—it is what all of us believe we share and its outputs emerge from dialogue, using both words and non-verbal means of communication, such as understanding smiles, jerks of the head, and so on, between us. ‘‘Flow’’ for me is already in the domain of what I have called ‘‘structure,’’ communitas is always prestruc- tural, even though those who participate in it have been saturated in struc- ture—being human—since they were infants. But ‘‘flow’’ for me seems to be one of the ways in which ‘‘structure’’? may be transformed or “‘liquefied’’ (like the famed martyr’s blood) into communitas again. It is one of the techniques whereby people seek the lost ‘‘kingdom”’ or ‘“‘anti- kingdom”? of direct, unmediated communionwith one another, even though severe subscription to rules is the frame in which communion may possibly be induced (the ‘‘mantric’’ frame, one might say).

In societies before the Industrial Revolution, ritual could always have a “‘flow’’ quality for total communities (tribes, moieties, clans, lineages, families, etc.); in post-industrial societies, when ritual gave way to in- dividualism and rationalism, the flow experience was pushed mainly into the leisure genres of art, sport, games, pastimes, etc. Since work was com- plex and diversified, its pleasurable, optational equivalent, palliative, or medicine, the domain of leisure genres, also became complex and diver- sified. However, it was often inversive of the work domain in form if not in function—since the function of many games is to reinforce the mental paradigms we all carry in our heads which motivate us to carry out to the ‘work’

es as belc

energetically the tasks our culture

Liminal to Liminoid/59

sphere.

The point here is that ritual (including its liminal phase) in archaic, theocratico-charismatic, patriarchal, and feudal societies (even a little in city-states becoming empires) and certain ancillary institutions such as religious drama provided the main cultural flow-mechanisms and patterns. But in those ages in which the sphere of religious ritual has contracted (as Durkheim puts it), a multiplicity of (theoretically) non-serious, non-earnest genres, such as art and sport (though these may be more serious than the Protestant ethic has defined them to be), have largely taken over the flow- function in culture. Communitas is something else, for it does not have to be induced by rules—it can happen anywhere, often in despite of rules. It is more like the ‘‘Witness’’ in Hindu thought which can only watch and love, but cannot act (i.e., cannot ‘‘flow’’ in games terms) without changing its nature.

One final point: I have left out both from communitas and ‘‘flow’’ an essential feature—the content of the experience. This is where the analysis of symbols begins—the symbols of chess, of Impressionist art, of Buddhist meditation, of Christian Marian pilgrimage, of scientific research, of for- mal logic, have different meanings, different semantic contents. Surely, the processes of communitas and flow are imbued with the meanings of the symbols they either generate or are channelled by. Are all ‘‘flows’’ one and do the symbols indicated different kinds and depths of flow?

References

Abrahams, Roger, and Richard Bauman. ‘Ranges of Festival Behavior.”” Paper presented to Symposium on ‘Forms of Symbolic Inversion.”’ American Anthropological Association, Toronto, December 1, 1972.

Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. London: Jonathan Cape, 1967

Beal, Samuel. Travels of Fah-Hian and Sung-Yun, London: Susil Gupta, 1964. First published 1869

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: Studies of Enjoyment, University of Report, 1974.

cago, PHS Grant

Play and Intrinsic Rewards,”’ Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 1975. Page references from

Beyond Boredom and A Bass, 1975

xperience of Play in Work and Games. San Fran\ Jossey-

New York: B

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Joffre. Le Loisir et la ville, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962.

ed., Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: . 1968.

—. Article on ‘‘Leisure,’’ in David S Macmillan and Free Press, pp. 248-2

nnep, Arnold van. The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960. First published 1909

Grazia, Sebastian de. Of Time, Work, and Leisure. New York: ° wentieth Century Fund, 1962

Gurvitch, Georges. “Mass, Community, Communion,” Journal of Philosophy. August, 1941.

Nikhilananda, Swami, The Bhagavad Gila. New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1969.

Norbeck, Edward. ‘Man at Play,’ in Play, @ Natural History Magazine Supplement, pp. 48-53, December, 1971.

Piaget, Jean. Play, Dream, and Imitation, New York: Norton, 1962.

Singer, Milton. When a Great Tradition Modernizes. New York: Praeger, 1972.

a-Smith, Brian. “Games of Order and Disorder.’’ Paper presented to Symposium on “Forms of Symbolic Inversion.’? American Anthropological Association, Toronto, December 1, 1972.

Turner, Victor. Schism and Continuity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1957.

—. The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.

—. The Ritual Process. Chicago: Aldine, 1969.

—. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Wthaca: Cornell University Press, 1974

n Industrial Commu

es,” 1965

Watson, William, ‘‘Social Mobi and Social Class Gluckman, ed., Closed Systems and Open Minds, Edinburgh: Oliver and Bo

Social Dramas

and Stories About Them

Anthropologists count and measure what they can in order to establish general features of the sociocultural fields they study. Although these ac- tivities have their irritating side, on the whole I found it eminently soothing, during my two and a half years of fieldwork among the Ndembu of northwestern Zambia, a West-Central Bantu-speaking people, to sit in villages before a calabash of millet or honey beer and collect numerical data on village membership, divorce frequency, bridewealth, labor migration rates, individual cash budgets, birth and homicide rates, and more strenuously to measure the acreage of gardens and dimensions of ritual enclosures. In a way these figures told me, if not a story, at least where to go to find stories. For I was able to infer from statistics based on censuses and genealogies of some seventy villages that these residential units con- sisted of cores of closely related male matrilineal kin, their wives and children, and sisters who as a result of frequent divorce had returned to their natal villages bringing their junior children with them, This was, of course, only the thin end of a massive wedge. I soon discovered that Ndem- bu married virilocally, that is, a woman goes after marriage to reside in her husband’s village. Consequently, in the long run, village continuity nce one’s right to reside in a given

rough one may

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reside in one’s father’s village during his lifetime. Clearly a sort of struc- tural turbulence is ‘‘built in’? to these normative arrangements. For a village can only persist by recruiting widows, divorcees, and their children. There is also a propensity for men, who reside in their own matrilineal village, to persuade their sisters to leave their husbands, bringing with them the children who ‘‘properly belong’’ to that village. Political authority, chieftainship, headmanship, and other offices are in male hands, even in this matrilineal society: however, a man cannot be succeeded by his own son, but by his uterine brother or his sister’s son. The chain of authority, therefore, demands that, sooner or later, a headman’s sister’s sons will leave their paternal villages and dwell with their maternal uncle. It is easier to do this if a young man is residing with his stepfather, not the father ‘‘who begat him.’’ Thus divorce works in various ways to reassert the ultimate paramountcy of the maternal line, despite the masculine attempt to pre- empt the present through virilocal marriage. It is far from my mind to insist on the mysteries of anthropological terminology with the spiky cacophonies of its neologisms, no spikier, it may be said, than those of other academic tribes, but it is pertinent to my discussion of the varied valencies of nar- rative, to show how certain entrenched features of a given society’s social structure influence both the course of conduct in observable social events and the scenarios of its genres of cultural performance—ranging from ritual to méirchen. To complete the simplified picture of Ndembu social structure I should mention, however, that in several books (1957, 1967, 1968, 1969) I have tried to work out how stresses between matrilineal succession, and other principles and the processes to which they give rise, have affected various mundane and ritual phenomena, processes, and institutions of Ndembu society, such as village size, composition, mobility, fissiveness, marital stability, relations between and within genealogical generations, the role of the many situationally invoked cult associations in counter- balancing cleavages in villages, lineages and families, the strong masculine stress on complex hunting and circumcision rites in a system ultimately dependent on women’s agricultural and food-processing activities, and the patterning of witchcraft accusations—which are often directed against matrilineal rivals for office or prestige.

I suppose that if I had confined myself to the analysis of numerical data, guided by knowledge of salient kinship principles and political, legal and economic contexts, I would have construed an anthropological narrative in- formed by what Hayden White (1973:16) in his book Metahistory surely would have called ‘‘mechanistic’’ presuppositions. Indeed, this was stan- dard practice in the British School of structuralist-functionalist an- thropology in which I was nurtured in the late forties and early fifties. One of its main aims was to exhibit the laws of structure and process which, in a given preliterate society, determine the specific configurations of relation-

ships and institutions detectable by trained observation. The ultimate intent by Ri

Brown, was by the comparative

Social Dramas/63

method to seek out general laws by successive approximation. Each specific ethnography sought for general principles that appeared in the study of a single society. In other words, idiographic procedures, detailed descriptions of what I actually observed or learned from informants, were pressed into the service of the development of laws. Hypotheses developed out of idio- graphic research were tested nomothetically, i.e., for the purpose of for- mulating general sociological laws.

There are, of course, many virtues in this approach. My figures did give me some measure of the relative importance of the principles on which Ndembu villages are socially constructed. They pointed to trends in the direction of individual and corporate spatial mobility. They indicated how in some areas particularly exposed to the modern cash economy, a smaller type of residential unit based on the polygynous family, called a ‘‘farm,’’ was replacing the traditional circular village whose nucleus was a sibling group of matrilineal kin. The method I used was also employed by col- leagues working from the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and facilitated con- trolled comparison of village structures belonging to different Central African societies. Differences of kinship and local structures were compared with differences in such variables as the divorce rate, the amount of bridewealth, the mode of subsistence, and so forth.

Nevertheless, this approach has its limitations. As George Spindler (1978:31) has argued, ‘‘the idiography of ethnography may be distorted by the nomethetic orientation of the ethnographer.’’ In other words, the general theory you take into the field leads you to select certain data for at- tention, but blinds you to others perhaps more important for the understan- ding of the people studied. As I came to know Ndembu well both in “‘men and women alive’’ (to paraphrase D.H. Lawrence), I become increasingly aware of this limitation. Long before I had read a word of Wilhelm Dilthey’s I had shared his notion that “structures of experience’’ are fundamental units in the study of human ac- ion. Such structures are irrefrangibly threefold, being at once cognitive, conative, and affective. Each of these terms is itself, of course, a shorthand for a range of processes and capacities. Perhaps this view was influenced by Edward Sapir’s celebrated essay in the Journal of Social Psychology (1934, 5:410-16), ‘‘Emergence of a Concept of Personality in a Study of

Julture,’’ in which he wrote: ‘‘In spite of the oft-asserted impersonality of culture, a humble truth remains that vast reaches of culture, far from being ‘carried’ by a group or community … are discovered only as the peculiar property of certain individuals, who cannot but give these cultural goods the impress of their own personality’ (p. 412). Not only that, but persons will desire and feel as well as think, and their desires and feelings im- pregnate their thoughts and influence their intentions. Sapir assailed cultural overdeterminism as a reified cognitive construct of the an- i f ed’ cult

and action s

stressful and uneventful times as

is hardly more than ‘‘an

, through

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verbal habit, can be made to assume the appearance of a closed system of behavior’ (p. 411), a position corresponding to some extent with Hayden White’s organicist paradigm—as prestigious among American an- thropologists as functionalism was among their British contemporaries. It became clear to me that an ‘‘anthropology of experience’ would have to take into account the psychological properties of individuals as well as the culture which, as Sapir insists, is ‘‘never given’’ to each individual, but, rather, ‘‘gropingly discovered,’’ and, I would add, some parts of it quite late in life. We never cease to learn our own culture, let alone other cultures, and our own culture is always changing. It also became clear that among the many tasks of the anthropologist lay the duty not only to make structuralist and functionalist analyses of statistical and textual data (cen- suses and myths), but also to prehend experiential structures in the actual processes of social life. Here my own approach, and that of many other an- thropologists, conforms to some extent with White’s contextualist model.

White, using Pepper’s term, sees contextualism as the isolation of some ele- ment of the historical field (or, in the anthropological instance, the socio- cultural field) as the subject of study, ‘whether the element be as large as the French Revolution or as small as one day in the life of a specific person. The investigator then proceedsto pick out the ‘threads’ that link the event to be explained to different areas of the context. The threads are identified and traced outward, into the circumambient natural and social space in which the event occurred, and both backward in time, in order to deter- mine the ‘origins’ of the event, and forward in time, in order to determine its ‘impact’ and ‘influence’ on subsequent events. This tracing operation ends at the point at which the ‘threads’ either disappear into the ‘context’ of some other ‘event’ or ‘converge’ to cause the occurrence of some new ‘event.’ The impulse is not to integrate all the events and trends that might be identified in the whole historical field, but rather to link them together in a chain of provisional and restricted characterizations of finite provinces of manifestly ‘significant’ occurrence” (pp. 18-19). It is interesting to pause here for a moment and compare how Sapir and White use the metaphor of “thread.’’ For Sapir points out (op. cit., 411) that the ‘‘purely formalized and logically developed schemes’’ we call ethnographies do not explain behavior until ‘‘the threads [my emphasis] of symbolism and implication that connect patterns or parts of patterns with others, of an entirely dif- ferent formal aspect’’ are discovered. For Sapir these ‘‘threads’’ are internal to the sociocultural space studied, and relate to the personality and temperament of individuals, while for White and Pepper, ‘“‘threads’’ describe the nature of connections between an “element’’ or ‘‘event’’ and its significant environing sociocultural field viewed, according to White, “synchronically’’ or “structurally”’ (p. 19). I find fascinating Sapir’s no- tion that his ‘‘threads’’ are ‘‘symbolic’’ and “‘implicative’’; for symbols, the spawn of such tropes as arise in the interaction of men and women alive,

Social Dramas/65

metaphors, synechdoches, metonymies new minted in crises, so to speak, really do come to serve as semiotic connectives among the levels and parts of a system of action and between that system and its significant environ- ment. We have been neglecting the role of symbols in establishing connexi- ty between the different levels of a narrative structure.

But I am anticipating. I shall shortly call attention to a kind or species of “‘element of the historical field’? or ‘‘event,’’ in White’s terminology, which is cross-culturally isolable and which exhibits, if it is allowed to come to full term, a characteristic processual structure, a structure that holds firm whether one is considering a macro- or micro-historical event of this type. Before I discuss this unit, which I consider to be the social ground of many types of “‘narrative,’’ and which I have called ‘‘social drama,’’ I must first mention for the benefit of my non-anthropologist readers another useful distinction made by anthropologists, that between ‘‘emic’’ and “etic”? perspectives, these terms being derived from the distinction made by linguists between phonemic and phonetic, the former being the study of sounds recognized as distinct within a specific language, the latter being the cross-lingual study of distinguishable human sound units. Kenneth Pike, who propounded this dichotomy, should be allowed to formulate it: “Descriptions of analyses from the etic standpoint are ‘alien,’ with criteria external to the system. Emic descriptions provide an internal view (or an ‘inside view’ in Hockett’s terms), with criteria chosen from within the system. They represent to us the view of one familiar with this system and who knows how to function within it himself’ (1954:8). From this stand- point all four of the strategies of explanation proposed by White drawing on Stephen Pepper—formism, organicism, mechanism, and contex- tualism—would produce ‘“‘etic’’ narratives, if they were used to provide ac- counts of societies outside that Western cultural tradition generatively triangulated by the thinking of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, and con- tinued in the philosophical, literary, and social-scientific traditions of Europe, North America, and their cultural offshoots. Indeed, members of such societies (the so-called ‘‘Third World’’) have protested (for example the Ethiopian anthropologist, Asmarom Legesse, in Gada, 1973:283), that Western attempts to ‘‘explain’’ their cultures amount to no more than “cognitive ethnocentrism,” diminishing their contribution to the global human reflexivity which modern communicational and informational systems are now making possible, if hardly easy. In other words, what we in the West consider ‘‘etic,’’ that is, ‘‘nomothetic,’’ ‘‘non-culture-bound,”’ “‘scientific,”’ ‘‘objective,’’ they are coming to regard as ‘‘emic,’’ the men- tal product of a portion of world-culture whose bearers could say, rather smugly, until very recently, with Thomas Hardy, but without a trace of his ironical intent, that ‘‘We have got the Gatling Gun, and they have not.’’

There are then both etic and emic ways of regarding narrative. An an- thropolog: led

1 the life of an at-first-wholly-other culture and

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separated, save in memory, from his own, has to come to terms with that which invests and invades him. The situation is odd enough. He is tossed into the ongoing life of a parcel of people who not only speak a different language but also classify what we would call “social reality’? in ways that are at first quite unexpected. He is compelled to learn, however haltingly, the criteria which provide the ‘‘inside view.”

I am aware of Hayden White’s ‘‘theory of the historical work,’’and that bears importantly upon how to write ethnographies as well as histories, but I am also aware that any discussion of the role of narrative in other cultures requires that an emic description of narrative be made. For the an- thropologist’s work is deeply involved in what we might call ‘‘tales,’’ “stories,” ‘folk-tales,’’ ‘‘histories,’’ ‘‘gossip,’’ and ‘informants’ ac- counts,’ types of narrative for which there may be many native names, not all of which coincide with our terms. Indeed, Max Gluckman has com- mented that the very term ‘‘anthropologist’’ means in Greek ‘‘one who talks about men,”’ in other words, a ‘‘gossip.’’ In our culture we have many ways of talking about men, descriptive and analytical, formal and in- formal, traditional and open-ended. Since ours is a literate culture, characterized by a refined division of cultural labor, we have devised numerous specialized genres by means of which we scan, describe, and in- terpret our behavior towards one another. But the impulse to talk about one another in different ways, in terms of different qualities and levels of mutual consciousness, precedes literacy in all human communities. All human acts and institutions are developed, as Clifford Geertz might say, in webs of interpretive words. Also, of course, we mime and dance one another—we have webs of interpretive nonverbal symbols. And we play one another—beginning as children, and continuing through life to learn new roles and the subcultures of higher statuses to which we aspire, partly seriously, partly ironically.

Ndembu make a distinction, akin to White’s division between cle’? and ‘‘story’’ as levels of conceptualization in Western culture, bet- ween nsang’u and kaheka. Nsang’u may refer, for example, to a purportedly factual record of the migration of the Lunda chiefs and their followers from the Katanga region of Zaire on the Nkalanyi River, their encounter with the autochthonous Mbwela or Lukolwe peoples in Mwinilunga District, battles and marriages between Lunda and Mbwela, the establishment of Ndembu-Lunda chiefdoms, the order of chiefly incumbents down to the present (the praise-names and praise-songs for chiefs themselves amoun- ting to a kind of chronicle), the raids of Luvale and Tchokwe in the nine- teenth century to secure indentured labor for the Portuguese in San Tome long after the formal abolition of the slave trade, the coming of the mis- sionaries, followed by the British South Africa Company, and finally e¢ an autobiographical ac-

‘chroni-

ay’s

*s words (op. ctt.:

Social Dramas/67

arranges ‘‘the events to be dealt with in the temporal order of their oc- “story,’’ in White’s usage, ‘“‘by the further arrangement of the events into components of a ‘spectacle’ or

currence,’’ Just as a chronicle becomes a

process of happening, which is thought to possess a discernible beginning, middle, and end… in terms of inaugural motifs … transitional motifs

and terminal motifs,’’ so does nsang’u become kaheka, chronicle becomes story. This term covers a range of tales which our folklorists would no doubt sort out into a number of “‘etic’’ types: myth, folktale, mérchen, legend, ballad, folk epic, and the like. Their distinctive feature is that they are part told, part sung. At key points in the narration the audience joins in a sung refrain, breaking the spoken sequence. It depends on the context of situation and the mode of framing whether a given set of events is regarded as nsang’u or kaheka. Take, for example, the series of tales about the ancient Lunda chief Yala Mwaku, his daughter Lweji Ankonde, her lover the Luban hunter-prince Chibinda Ilung’a, and her brothers Ching’uli and Chinyama (I use the Southern Lunda pronunciation of these names), their loves, hates, conflicts and reconciliations, which led, on the one hand, to the establishment of the Lunda nation, and, on the other, to the secession and diaspora of dissident Lunda groups, thereby spreading knowledge of centralized political organization over a wide territory. This sequence may be told by a chief of putative Lunda origin in his court to politically influen- tial visitors as an nsang’u, a ‘‘chronicle,’’ perhaps to justify his title to his of- fice. But episodes from this chronicle may be transformed into ¢wheka (plural of kaheka), ‘‘stories,”’ and told by old women to groups of children huddled near the kitchen fire during the cold season. A particular favorite, analyzed recently by the distinguished Belgian structuralist Luc de Heusch in Le Rot Ture, relates how the drunken king Yala Mwaku was derided and beaten by his sons, but cared for tenderly by his daughter Lweji Ankonde, whom he rewarded by passing on to her, on his death, the royal bracelet, the wkanu (made of human genitalia for the magical maintenance of the fertility of humans, animals, and crops in the whole kingdom), thus rendering her the legitimate monarch of the Lunda. Another tells of how the young queen is told by her maidens that a handsome young hunter, having slain a water- buck, had camped with his companions on the far side of the Nkalanye River. She summons him to her presence and the two fall in love at once and talk for many hours in a grove of trees (where today a sacred fire, the center of an extensive pilgrimage, burns constantly). She learns that he is the youngest son of a great Luba chief, but that he prefers the free life of a forest hunter to the court. Nevertheless, from love he marries Lweji, and, in time, receives from her the /ukanu—she has to go into seclusion during menstruation and hands Chibinda the bracelet lest it become polluted—making him the ruler of the Lunda nation. Southern Lunda folk

v? from

noun Wulunda, ‘‘love’’

se to recognize him,

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consequently spread the format of political centralization among stateless societies. Jan Vansina, the noted Belgian ethnohistorian, has discussed the relationship between this foundation narrative and the political structures of the many Central African societies who claim that they ‘‘came from Mwantiyanvwa,’’ as the new dynasty came to call itself, in his book, Kingdoms of the Savanna (1966). He finds in this corpus of stories more than myth, although de Heusch has illuminatingly treated it as such; Vansina finds clues to historical affinities between the scattered societies who assert Lunda origin; indications corroborated by other types of evidence, linguistic, archaeological, and cultural. As in other cultures, the same events may be framed as nsang’u or kaheka, chronicle or story, often accor- ding to their nodal location in the life-process of the group or community that recounts them, It all depends where and when and by whom they are told. Thus, for some purposes the foundation tales of Yala Mwaku and Lweji are treated as chronicle, to advance a political claim, for example, to “Tundahood,’’ as Ian Cunnison calls their assertion of descent from prestigious migrants. For the purpose of entertainment, in the village men’s shelter in the evening or women’s kitchens, the same tales are defin- ed as “‘stories,’? with many rhetorical touches and flourishes as well as songs inserted as evocative embellishment. Incidents may even be cited during processes of litigation to legitimate or reinforce the claims of a plain-

tiff in a dispute over boundaries or succession to office. For the anthropologist, however, who is concerned with the study of

social action and social process, it is not these formal genres of tale-telling and tale-bearing that most grip his attention, but rather, as we have seen, what we would call ‘‘gossip,”’ talk and rumors about the private affairs of others, what the Ndembu and their neighbors, the Luvale, call kudiyongola, related to the verb kuyong’a, ‘‘to crowd together,’’ for much gossip takes place in the central, unwalled shelter of traditional villages, where the cir- cumcised, hence socially ‘‘mature,’’ males foregather, to discuss communi- ty affairs, and hear the ‘‘news’’ (nsang’u) of other communities from wayfarers. The critic Frank Kermode once defined the novel as consisting of two components: scandal and myth. Certainly gossip (which includes scandal) is one of the perennial sources of cultural genres. Gossip does not occur in a vacuum among the Ndembu; it is almost always ‘‘plugged in’’ to

the unit of social process that I briefly described in the Introduction—the

social drama.

Although it might be argued that the social drama is a ‘“‘story’’ in Hayden White’s sense, in that it has discernible inaugural, transitional, and terminal motifs, cultural markers that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, my observations convince me that it is, indeed, a spontaneous unit of social process and a fact of everyone’s experience in every human socie- ty. My hypothesis, based on repeated observations of such processual units in a range of socio-cultural sy and on my reading in ethnography and i iving,’’ as Kenr Burke

history, is tt

Social Dramas/69

them, can be aptly studied as having four phases. These I label: breach, crisis, redress, and either reintegration or recognition of schism. Social dramas occur within groups bounded by shared values and interests of per- sons and having a real or alleged common history. Their main actors are persons for whom the group which constitutes the field of dramatic action has a high value priority. Most of us have what I like to call our ‘‘star’’ group or groups to which we owe our deepest loyalty and whose fate is for us of the greatest personal concern. We are all members of many groups, formal or informal, from the family to the nation or some international religious or political institution. Each person makes his/her own subjective evaluation of their respective worth: some are ‘‘dear’’ to one, others it is one’s ‘‘duty to defend,’’ and so on. Some tragic situations arise from con- flicts of loyalty to different ‘‘star’’? groups. A star group is the one with which a person identifies most deeply and in which he finds fulfillment of his major social and personal strivings and desires. There is no objective rank order in any culture for such groups. I have known academic colleagues whose supreme star group, believe it or not, was a particular faculty ad- ministrative committee, and whose families and recreational groups ranked much lower, others whose love and loyalty were towards the local Philatelic Society. In every culture one is obliged to belong to certain groups, usually institutionalized ones—family, age-set, school, firm, professional associa- tion, and the like. But such groups are not necessarily one’s beloved chosen star groups. It is in one’s star group that one looks most for love, recogni- tion, prestige, office, and other tangible and intangible benefits and rewards. In it one achieves self-respect and a sense of belonging with others for whom one has respect. Now every objective group has members some of whom see it as their star group, while others may regard it with indif- ference, even dislike. Relations among the ‘‘star-groupers,’’ as the first category may be called, are often highly ambivalent, resembling those among members of an elementary family for which, perhaps, the star group is an adult substitute. They recognize one another’s common attachment to the group, but are jealous of one another over the relative intensity of that attachment or the esteem in which another member is held by the group as a whole. They may contend with each other for the incumbency of high of- fice in the group, not merely to seek power but out of the conviction that they, and they alone, really understand the nature and value of the group and can altruistically advance its interests. In other words, we find sym- bolic equivalents of sibling rivalry and parent-child competition among “*star-groupers.’”

In several books (1957, 1967, 1968, 1974) I have discussed social dramas at some length, both in small-scale societies, such as Ndembu, at the village level, and on the scale of complex nations, as in the power struggle between Henry II of England and Archbishop Thomas Becket and the Hidalgo In- yoni

nth century Mexico, Whether it is large affair,

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like the Dreyfuss Case or Watergate, or a struggle for village headmanship, a social drama first manifests itself as the breach of a norm, the infraction of a rule of morality, law, custom or etiquette in some public arena. This breach may be deliberately, even calculatedly, contrived by a person or party disposed to demonstrate orchallenge entrenched authority—for exam- ple, the Boston Tea Party—or it may emerge from a scene of heated feel- ings. Once visible, it can hardly be revoked. Whatever the case, a mounting crisis follows, a momentous juncture or turning point in the relations bet- ween components of a social field—at which seeming peace becomes overt conflict and covert antagonisms become visible. Sides are taken, factions are formed, and unless the conflict can be sealed off quickly within a limited area of social interaction, there is a tendency for the breach to widen and spread until it coincides with some dominant cleavage in the widest set of relevant social relations to which the parties in conflict belong. We have seen this process at work in the Iranian crisis following the breach precipitated by the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran. The phase of crisis exposes the pattern of current factional struggle within the relevant social group, be it village or world community; and beneath it there becomes slowly visible the less plastic, more durable, but nevertheless gradually changing basic social structure, made up of relations which are relatively constant and consistent. For example, I found that among the Ndembu, prolonged social dramas always revealed the related sets of op- positions that give Ndembu social structure its tensile character: matriliny versus virilocality; the ambitious individual versus the wider interlinking of matrilineal kin; the elementary family versus the uterine sibling group (children of one mother); the forwardness of youth versus the domineering elders; status-seeking versus responsibility; sorcerism (wulojt)—that is, hostile feelings, grudges, and intrigues—versus friendly respect and generosity towards others. In the Iranian crisis we saw the emergence to public visibility of divisions and coalitions of interests, some of which are surprising and revelatory. Love may be ‘‘a many splendored thing,”’ but crisis is certainly a ‘“‘many-levelled thing’’ in all cultures. In social dramas, false friendship is winnowed from true communality of interests; the limits of consensus are reached and realized; real power emerges from behind the facade of authority.

In order to limit the contagious spread of breach certain adjustive and redressive mechanisms, informal and formal, are brought into operation by leading members of the disturbed group. These mechanisms vary in character with such factors as the depth and significance of the breach, the social inclusiveness of the crisis, the nature of the social group within which the breach took place, and its degree of autonomy in regard to wider sys- tems of social relations. The mechanisms may range from personal advice and informal arbitration, to formal juridical and legal machinery, and to

is, to the performance of public ritual. Such

resolve certain kinds of crisis

Social Dramas/71

ritual involves a ‘‘sacrifice,’’ literal or moral, a victim as scapegoat for the group’s ‘‘sin’’ of redressive violence.

The final phase consists either in the reintegration of the disturbed social group—though, as like as not, the scope and range of its relational field will have altered; the number of its parts will be different; and their size and in- fluence will have changed—or the social recognition of irreparable breach between the contesting parties, sometimes leading to their spatial separa- tion. This may be on the scale of the many Exoduses of history or merely a move of disgruntled villagers to a spot a few miles away. This phase, too, may be registered by a public ceremony or ritual, indicating reconciliation or permanent cleavage between the parties involved.

I am well aware that the social drama is an agonistic model drawn after a recurrent agonistic situation, and I make no claim that there are no other types of processual unit. Gulliver, for example, studying another Central African society, the Ndendeuli of Tanzania, directs attention to the cumulative effect of an endless series of minor incidents, cases, and events that might be quite as significant in affecting and changing social relation- ships as the more overtly dramatic encounters. Raymond Firth discusses “‘harmonic’’ processual units—which I call ‘‘social enterprises’ that also have recognizable phase structure. These stress ‘‘the process of ordering of action and of relations in reference to given social ends’’ and are often economic in type. Quite often, though, such ‘‘enterprises’’—as in the case of urban renewal in America—become social dramas, if there is resistance to the aims of their instigators. The resisters perceive the inauguration of the enterprise as ‘‘breach,’’ not ‘‘progress.’’ Nor does the course of a social drama—like ‘‘true love’’—always ‘‘run smooth.’’ Redressive procedures may break down, with reversion to crisis. Traditional machinery of con- ciliation or coercion may prove inadequate to cope with new types of issues and problems, and new roles and statuses. And, of course, reconcilation may only seem to have been achieved in phase four, with real conflicts glossed over but not resolved. Moreover, at certain historical junctures in large-scale complex societies, redress may be through rebellion, or even revolution, if the societal value-consensus has broken down, and new un- precedented roles, relationships, and classes have emerged.

Nevertheless, I would persist in arguing that the social drama is a well- nigh universal processual form, and represents a perpetual challenge to all aspirations to perfection in social and political organization. In some cultures its profile is clear-cut and style abrasive: in others, agonistic (con- testative) action may be muted or deflected by elaborate codes of etiquette. In yet others conflict may be—to cite Richard Antoun on Arab village politics in Jordan—‘‘low-key,’’ eschewing direct confrontation and en- counter in its style. Social dramas are in large measure political processes, that is, they involve competition for scarce ends—power, dignity, prestige, honor,

on of resources that

ar means and by the ut

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are also scarce—goods, territory, money, men and women. Ends, means, and resources are caught up in an interdependent feedback process. Some kinds of resources, for example, land, money, may be converted into others, for instance, honor and prestige (which are simultaneously the needs sought). Or they may be employed to stigmatize rivals and deny them these ends. According to my observations, the political aspect of social dramas is dominated by those I have called ‘‘star-groupers.’’ They are the main protagonists, the leaders of factions, the defenders of the faith, the revolutionary vanguard, the arch-reformers. These are the ones who develop to an art the rhetoric of persuasion and influence, who know how and when to apply pressure and force, and are most sensitive to the factors of legitimacy. In Phase Three, redress, it is the ‘‘star-groupers’’ who manipulate the machinery of redress, the law-courts, the procedures of divination and ritual, and impose sanctions on those adjudged to have precipitated crisis, just as it may well be disgruntled or dissident star- groupers who lead rebellions and provoke the initial breach.

The fact that a social drama, as I have analyzed its form, closely cor- responds to Aristotle’s description of tragedy in the Poetics, in that it is ‘‘the imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude … having a beginning, a middle, and an end,’’ is not, I repeat, because I have tried inappropriately to impose an “‘etic’’ Western model of stage action upon the conduct of an African village society, but because there is an interdependent, perhaps dialectic, relationship between social dramas and genres of cultural performance in perhaps all societies. Life, after all, is as much an imitation of art as the reverse. Those who, as children in Ndembu society, have listened to innumerable stories about Yala Mwaku and Luweji Ankonde, know all about ‘‘inaugural motifs’’—‘‘when the king was drunk and helpless, his sons beat and reviled him’’—“‘transitional’’ motifs—‘‘his daughter found him near death and comforted and tended him’’—and ‘‘terminal’’ motifs—‘‘the king gave his daughter the /ukanu and excluded his sons from the royal succession.’’ When these same Ndembu, now full-grown, wish to provoke a breach or to claim that some party has crucially disturbed the placid social order, they have a frame available to ‘‘inaugurate’’ a social drama, with a repertoire of “transitional’’ and ‘‘ending’’ motifs to continue the framing process and channel the subsequent agonistic developments. Just as the story itself still makes important points about family relationships and about the stresses between sex- and age-roles, and appears to be an emic generalization, cloth- ed in metaphor and involving the projection of innumerable specific social dramas generated by these structural tensions, so does it feed back into the social process, providing it with a rhetoric, a mode of employment, and a meaning. Some genres, particularly epic, serve as paradigms which inform the action of important political leaders—star-groupers of encompassing d

groups such as Church or S yn, and

Social Dramas/73

sometimes compelling them subliminally to follow in major public crisis a certain course of action, thus emplotting their lives. I tried to show in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (1975: chapter 2) how Thomas Becket, after his antagonistic confrontation with both Henry II and the bench of Bishops at the Council of Northampton, seemed to have been almost ‘‘taken over,”’ “‘possessed’’ by the action-paradigm provided by the Via Crucis in Chris- tian belief and ritual, sealing his love-hate relationship with Henry in the conjoined image of martyr and martyrizer—and giving rise to a subsequent host of narratives and aesthetic dramas. By paradigm I do not mean a system of univocal concepts, logically arrayed. I do not mean either a stereotyped set of guidelines for ethical, aesthetic, or conventional action. A paradigm of this sort goes beyond the cognitive and even the moral to the existential domain; and in so doing becomes clothed with allusiveness, im- plications, and metaphor—for in the stress of action, firm definitional outlines become blurred by the encounter of emotionally charged wills. Paradigms of this type, cultural root paradigms, so to speak, reach down to irreducible life stances of individuals, passing beneath conscious prehen- sion to a fiduciary hold on what they sense to be axiomatic values, matters literally of life and death. Richard Schechner (1977) has sought to express the relationship between social drama and aesthetic or staged drama in the form of a figure eight placed in a horizontal position and then bisected through both loops:

STAGE DRAMA

SOCIAL DRAMA

The left loop represents the social drama; above the line is the overt drama, below it, the implicit rhetorical structure; the right loop represents stage drama; above the line is the manifest performance, below it, the im- plicit social process, with its structural contradictions. Arrows pointing from left to right represent the course of action. They follow the phases of

the social drama above the line in the left loop, descending to cross into the

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lower half of the right loop where they represent the hidden social in- frastructures. The arrows then ascend and, moving now from right to left, pass through the successive phases of a generalized stage drama. At the point of intersection between the two loops, they descend once more to form the hidden aesthetic model underpinning, so to speak, the overt social drama. This model, though effective, is somewhat equilibrist in its implica- tions for my taste, and suggests cyclical rather than linear movement. But it has the merit of pointing up the dynamical relation between social drama and expressive cultural genres. The social drama of Watergate was full of “stage business’? during every phase, from the Guy Fawkes-like con- spiratorial atmosphere of the ‘‘breach’’ episode, signalized by the finding of the incriminating tape of the door, through the tough minded fictionality of the cover-up, and all that went into the ‘‘crisis’’ phase of investigation, with its Deep Throat revelations and combinations of high-minded princi- ple and low-minded political opportunism. The redressive phase was no less implicitly scripted by theatrical and fictional models. I need not describe the Hearings and the Saturday Night Massacre. Now we have plays, films, and novels about Watergate and its dramatis personae naturalis, which are shaped—to use the aseptic language of social science—in accord with the structure and properties of the social field environing and penetrating their authors at the time of writing. At the deepest level we may anticipate an interpretive shift towards accommodation of the most accep- table texts to some deeply entrenched paradigm of Americanity. The American ‘‘myth,’’ as Sacvan Bercovitch has argued in his book The American Jeremiad (1978), periodically produces ‘‘jeremiads’’ (polemical homilies in various cultural genres) against declension into ways of life which reek of the static, corrupt, hierarchical Old World, and obviate movement towards an ever receding but ultimately reachable promised land to be craved from some unsullied wilderness, where an ideal, pro- sperous democracy can thrive ‘‘under God.’’ Watergate is a superb target for the American jeremiad. Paradoxically, many of its personages have become celebrities, but this may not be so surprising after all. Pontius Pilate was canonized by the Ethiopean Church, and if Dean and Ehrlichman will never perhaps be seen as saints, their mere participation in a drama which activated a major cultural paradigm has conferred on them an ambiguous eminence they might otherwise have never achieved. The winners of social dramas positively require cultural performances to con- tinue to legitimate their success. And such dramas generate their ‘‘symbolic types”? (R. Grathoff, 1970; Don Handelman, 1979): traitors, renegades, villains, martyrs, heroes, faithful, infidels, deceivers, scapegoats. Just to be in the cast of a narrated drama which comes to be taken as exemplary or paradigmatic is some assurance of social immortality.

It is the third phase of a social drama, redress, that has most to do with the genesis and sustentation of cultural genres, both olk,’’

igh’’ and

Social Dramas/75

oral and literate. In Schism and Continuity, I argued that in Ndembu society when conflict emerges from the opposed interests and claims of protagonists acting under a single social principle, say, descent from a common ancestress, judicial institutions can be invoked to meet the crisis, for a ra- tional attempt can be made to adjust claims that are similarly based. But when claims are advanced under different social principles, which are in- consistent with one another even to the point of mutual contradiction, there can be no rational settlement. Here Ndembu have recourse to divination of sorcery or ancestral wrath to account for misfortune, illness, or death oc- curring before or during the social drama. Ultimately, rituals of reconcilia- tion may be performed, which, in their verbal and nonverbal symbolism, reassert and reanimate the overarching values shared by all Ndembu, despite conflicts of norms and interests on ground level.

Whether juridical or ritual processes of redress are invoked against mounting crisis, the result is an increase in what one might call social or plural reflexivity, the ways in which a group tries to scrutinize, portray, understand, and then act on itself. Barbara Myerhoff has written of cultural performances (‘‘Life History Among the Elderly: Performance, Visibility, and Remembering,’’ n.d., p. 5) that they are ‘‘reflective in the sense of showing ourselves to ourselves. They are also capable of being reflexive, arousing consciousness of ourselves as we see ourselves. As heroes in our own dramas, we are made self aware, conscious of our con- sciousness. At once actor and audience, we may then come into the fullness of our human capability—and perhaps human desire to watch ourselves and enjoy knowing that we know.”’ I tend to regard the social drama in its full formal development, its full phase structure, as a process of converting particular values and ends, distributed over a range of actors, into a system (which is always temporary and provisional) of shared or consensual mean- ing. It has not yet reached the stage of Myerhoff’s enjoying that we know that we know ourselves, but it is a step in that direction. I am inclined to agree with Wilhelm Dilthey (see H. Hodges, 1952:272-3) that meaning (Bedeutung) arises in memory, in cognition of the past, and is concerned with negotiation about the ‘“‘fit’? between past and present, whereas value ( Wert) inheres in the affective enjoyment of the present, while the category of end (Zweck) or good (Gut) arises from volition, the power or faculty of using the will, which refers to the future. The redressive phase, in which feedback on crisis is provided by the scanning devices of law (secular ritual) and religious ritual, is a liminal time, set apart from the ongoing business of quotidian life, when an interpretation (Bedeutung) is constructed to give the appearance of sense and order to the events leading up to and constituting the crisis. It is only the category of meaning, so Dilthey tells us, that enables us to conceive of an intrinsic affinity between the successive events of life,

or, one might add, of a social drama. In the redressive phase the meaning

of the soc on of itself, while the object to be ap-

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prehended enters into and reshapes the apprehending subject. Pure an- thropological functionalism, whose aim is to state the conditions of social equilibrium among the components of a social system at a given time, cannot deal with meaning, for meaning always involves retrospection and reflexivity, a past, a history. Meaning is the only category which grasps the full relation of the part to the whole in life, for value, being dominantly af- fective, belongs essentially to an experience in a conscious present. Such conscious presents, regarded purely as present moments, totally involve the experiencer, even to the extent that they have no intrinsic connection with one another, at least of a systematic, cognitive kind. They stand behind one another in temporal sequence, and, while they may be compared as “values,’’ that is, as having the same epistemological status, they do not form anything like a coherent whole, for they are essentially momentary, transient, insofar as they are values alone; if they are interconnected, the ligatures that bind them belong to another category—that of meaning, relex- ivity arrived at. In stage drama, values would be the province of actors, meaning that of the producer. Values exist in what Csikszentmihalyi would call the state of ‘‘flow.’’ Reflexivity tends to inhibit flow, for it ar- ticulates experience. Dilthey eloquently hits off the unarticulated quality of value: ‘‘From the standpoint of value, life appears as an infinite assortment of positive and negative existence-values. It is like a chaos of harmonies and discords. Each of these is a tone-structure which fills a present; but they have no musical relation to one another’’ [my emphasis]. To establish such a musical relation, the liminal reflexivity of the redressive phase is necessary if crisis is to be rendered meaningful. Crises are ‘‘like a chaos of harmonies and discords.’? Some modern modalities of music, I think, try to replicate this chaos, let it stand as it is—for the meaning-ligatures inherited from the past no longer bind. Here we must return to narrative.

For both the legal and ritual procedures generate narratives from the brute facts, the mere empirical coexistence of experiences, and endeavor to lay hold of the factors making for integration in a given situation. Meaning is apprehended by looking back over a temporal process: it is generated in the “‘narrative’’ constructed by lawmen and judges in the process of cross- examination from witnesses’ evidence, or by diviners from their intuitions into the responses of their clients as framed by their specific hermeneutic techniques. The meaning of every part of the process is assessed by its con-

tribution to the total result. It will be noted that my basic social drama is agonistic, rife with problem

and conflict, and this is not merely because it assumes that sociocultural systems are never logical systems or harmonious gestalten, but are fraught with structural contradictions and norm-conflicts. The true opposition should not be defined in these ‘‘objectivized’’ terms. It is between indeter- minacy and all modes of determination. Indeterminacy is, so to speak, in

yod,”’ s

the “subjunctive t which is not yet settled, concluded,

Social Dramas/77

and known. It is all that may be, might be, could be, perhaps even should be. It is that which terrifies in the breach and crisis phases of a social drama. Sally Falk Moore goes so far as to suggest that “the underlying quality of social life should be considered to be one of theoretical absolute indeterminacy’’ (1978:48). Social reality is ‘fluid and indeterminate,”’ though, for her, ‘‘regularizing processes’’ and ‘‘processes of situational ad- justment,’’ represent human aspirations constantly to transform it into organized or systematic forms. But even where ordering rules and customs are strongly sanctioned, ‘‘indeterminacy may be produced and ambiguities within the universe of relatively determinate elements.’’ Such manipula- tion is characteristic of breach and crisis. It may also help to resolve crisis. The third phase, redress, reveals that ‘‘determining’’ and “fixing’’ are in- deed processes, not permanent states or givens. They proceed by assigning meanings to events and relationships in reflexive narratives. Indeterminacy should not be regarded as the absence of social being; it is not negation, emptiness, privation. Rather it is potentiality, the possibility of becoming. From this point of view social being is finitude, limitation, constraint. Ac- tually it only ‘‘exists’’? as a set of cognitive models in actors’ heads or as more or less coherent ‘‘objectivized’”’ doctrines and protocols. Ritual and legal procedures mediate between the formed and the indeterminate. As Moore argues, “‘ritual is a declaration of form against indeterminacy, therefore indeterminacy is always present in the background of any analysis of ritual.’’ In 1979 I attended several sessions of the Umbanda religion at a cult center (¢erreiro) in Rio de Janeiro and found that the medium-possessing Orixa or Entity known as Exu, of West African Yoruba origin, where he is the Trickster deity of the Crossroads, in several ways personifies this “meonic’’? (to use Nicholas Berdyaev’s term) indeterminacy. He is sometimes represented on Umbanist altars as a being (Entitade) with two heads: one face is that of Christ, the other, Satan’s. Exu, whose ritual colors are black and red, is the Lord of the Limen and of Chaos, the full ambigui- ty of the subjunctive mood of culture, representing the indeterminacy that lurks in the cracks and crevices of all socio-cultural ‘constructions of reali- ty,’’ the one who must be kept at bay if the framed formal order of the ritual proceedings is to go forward according to protocol. He is the abyss of possibility; hence his two heads, for he is both potential savior and tempter. He is also destroyer, for in one of his modes he is Lord of the Cemetery. Like Shiva, Creator and Destroyer, he wields a trident. One may see his image and sign in New York and Montreal, if one scans carefully the costumes (known as ‘‘fantasies’’) of the Caribbean Mardi Gras car- nivals—for he is worshipped in Cuban and Puerto Rican Santeria religion, as well as in Brazilian Candomble and Umbanda. In all major cultural pro- cess, from ritual to theatre and the novel, of any complexity of meaning, there are both ‘‘sequence and secrets’’—to quote Kermode

again—‘‘secr

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which get into, and apparently seem to foul up all coherent protocols, scripts, texts, whatsoever little hints of the abyss of subjunctivity, that break in and out like Exu and threaten the measured movement towards climax on cultural terms.

The social drama, then, I regard as the experiential matrix from which the many genres of cultural performance, beginning with redressive ritual and juridical procedures, and eventually including oral and literary nar- rative, have been generated. Breach, crisis, and reintegrative or divisive outcomes provide the content of such later genres, redressive procedures their form. As society complexifies, as the division of labor produces more and more specialized and professionalized modalities of sociocultural ac- tion, so do the modes of assigning meaning to social dramas multiply—but the drama remains to the last simple and ineradicable, a fact of everyone’s social experience, and a significant node in the developmental cycle of all groups that aspire to continuance. The social drama remains humankind’s thorny problem, its undying worm, its Achilles’ heel—one can only use cliches for such an obvious and familiar pattern of sequentiality. At the same time it is our native way of manifesting ourselves to ourselves and, of declaring where power and meaning lie and how they are distributed.

In The Ritual Process and in these essays, I have discussed van Gennep’s discovery of the processual form of the rite de passage, and will refer to it again shortly. Rites of passage, like social dramas, involve temporal processes and agonistic relations—novices or initiands are separated (sometimes real or symbolic force is used (from a previous social state or status, compelled to remain in seclusion during the liminal phase, submitted to ordeal by initiated seniors or elders, and re-aggregated to quotidian society in symbolic ways that often show that preritual ties have been irremediably broken and new relationships rendered com- pulsory. But, like other kinds of rituals, life-crisis rituals, the most transfor- mative kind of rites of passage, already exhibit a marked degree of generalization—they are the fairly late product of social reflexivity. They confer on the actors, by nonverbal as well as verbal means, the experiential understanding that social life is a series of movements in space and time, a series of changes of activity, and a series of transitions in status for in- dividuals. They also inscribe in them the knowledge that such movements, changes, and transitions are not merely marked but also effected by ritual. Ritual and juridical procedures represent germinative components of social drama, from which, I suggest, many performative and narrative modes of complex culture derive. Cultural performances may be viewed as ‘‘dialec- tical dancing partners’’ (to use Ronald Grimes’s phrase) of the perennial social drama, to which they give meaning appropriate to the specificities of time, place, and culture. However, they have their own autonomy and

ther; with suffic evidence in

momentum; one genre may gene

certain cultural traditions one on

ght be sonably ac-

Social Dramas/79

curate genealogy of genres. (I use advisedly these terms derived from the Indo-European root gan, ‘‘to beget or produce,’’ as metaphors for their ready cultural reproductiveness.) Or one genre might supplant or replace another as the historically or situationally dominant form ‘‘social metacom- mentary”’ (to use Geertz’s illuminating term). New communicative techni- ques and media may make possible wholly unprecedented genres of cultural performance, making possible new modes of self-understanding. Once a genre has become prominent, however, it is likely to survive or be revived at some level of the sociocultural system, perhaps moving from the elite to the popular culture or vice-versa, gaining and losing audiences and support in the process. Nevertheless, all the genres have to circle, as it were, around the earth of the social drama, and some, like satellites, may exert tidal effects on its inner structure. Since ritual in the so-called

“‘simpler’’ societies is so complex and many-layered it may not unfittingly

be considered an important ‘‘source’’ of later (in cultural evolutionary

terms), more specialized, performative genres. Often when ritual perishes

as a dominant genre, it dies, a multipara, giving birth to ritualized progeny, __including the many performative arts.

In earlier publications I defined ‘‘ritual’’ as ‘‘prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in invisible beings or powers regarded as the first and final causes of all effects’’—a definition which owes much to those of Auguste Comte, Godfrey and Monica Wilson, and Ruth Benedict. I still find this formula- tion operationally useful despite Sir Edmund Leach, and other an- thropologists of his ilk, who would eliminate the religious component and regard ritual as ‘‘stereotyped behavior which is potent in itself in terms of the cultural conventions of the actors, though not potent in a rational- technical sense,’’ and which serves to communicate information about a culture’s most cherished values. I find it useful, because I like to think of ritual essentially as performance, enactment, not primarily as rules or rubrics. The rules ‘‘frame’’ the ritual process, but the ritual process transcends its frame. A river needs banks or it will be a dangerous flood, but banks without a river epitomize aridity. The term ‘‘performance’’ is, of course, derived from Old English parfournir, literally ‘‘to furnish completely or thoroughly.’’ To perform is thus to bring something about, to consummate something, or to ‘‘carry out’’ a play, order, or project. But in the ‘‘carrying out,’’ I hold, something new may be generated. The performance transforms itself. True, as I said, the rules may ‘‘frame’’ the performance, but the ‘‘flow”’ of action and interaction within that frame may conduce to hitherto unprecedented insights and even generate new symbols and mean- ings, which may be incorporated into subsequent performances. Tradi- tional framings may have to be reframed—new bottles made for new wine. It is here that I find the notion of orientation to preternatural and invisible singularly apposite. For there is undoubtable transfor-

“

beings a

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From Ritual to Theatre/80

mative capacity in a well-performed ritual, implying an ingress of power in- to the initial situation; and ‘‘performing well’’ implies the co-involvement of the majority of its performers in a self-transcending flow of ritual events. The power may be drawn from the persons of the drama, but drawn from their human depths, not entirely from their cognitive, ‘‘indicative’’ hold on cultural skills. Even if a rubrical book exists prescribing the order and character of the performance of the rites, this should be seen as a source of channelings, rather than of dictates. The experience of subjective and inter- subjective flow in ritual performance, whatever its sociobiological or per- sonalogical concomitants may be, often convinces performers that the ritual situation is indeed informed with powers both transcendental and imma- nent. Moreover, most anthropological definitions of ritual, including my own earlier attempts, have failed to take into account van Gennep’s discovery that rituals nearly always ‘‘accompany transitions from one situation to another and from one cosmic or social world to another’’ (Les Rites de Passage, p. 13). As is well known he divides these rituals into rites of separation, threshold rites, and rites of re-aggregation, for which he also employs the terms preliminal, liminal, and postliminal. The order in which the ritual events follow one another and must be performed, van Gennep points out, is a religious element of essential importance. To exist at all, writes Nicole Belmont about van Gennep’s notion, ‘‘a ritual must first and foremost be inscribed in time and space, or rather reinscribed’’ if it follows a prior model given in myth (Arnold Van Gennep: The Creator of Fench Ethnography, 1979:64). In other words, performative sequencing is intrinsic and should be taken into account in any definition of ritual. Here I would query the formal structuralist implication that sequence is an illusion and all is but a permutation and combination of rules and vocabularies already laid down in the deep structures of mind and brain. There ts a qualitative distinction between successive stages in social dramas and rites of passage which renders them irreversible—their sequence is no_ illusion—the unidirectional movement is transformative. I have written at some length about the ‘‘threshold’’ or liminal phase of ritual, and found it fruitful to ex- tend the notion of liminality as metaphor to other domains of expressive cultural action than ritual. But liminality must be taken into account in any serious formulation of ritual as performance, for it is in connection with this phase that ‘‘emic’’ folk characterizations of ritual lay strongest stress on the transformative action of ‘‘invisible or supernatural beings or powers regarded as the first and final causes of all effects.’” Without taking liminality into account ritual becomes indistinguishable from ‘‘ceremony,”’ “formality,’’ or what Barbara Myerhoff and Sally Moore, in their In- troduction to Secular Ritual (1977) indeed call ‘‘secular ritual.’’ The liminal phase is the essential, anti-secular component in ritual per se, whether it be labeled ‘‘religious’’ or ‘‘magical.’’ Ceremony indicates, ritual transforms,

and transformation occurs most. ré ly in the ritual

pupation’’ of

Social Dramas/81

liminal seclusion—at least in life-crisis rituals. The public liminality of great seasonal feasts exhibits its fantasies and ‘‘transforms’’ (akin here to the linguistic sense of ‘‘transform,’’ that is, [a] any of a set of rules for pro- ducing grammatical transformations of a kernel sentence; [b] a sentence produced by using such a role) to the eyes of all—and so does postmodern theatre—but that is a matter for a different paper. I have also argued that ritual in its performative plenitude in tribal and many post-tribal cultures is a matrix from which several other genres of cultural performance, including most of those we tend to think of as “aesthetic’?? have been derived. It is a late modern Western myth, en- couraged perhaps by depth psychologists, and, lately by ethnologists, that ritual has the rigid precision characteristics of the ‘‘ritualized’’ behavior of an obsessive neurotic, or a territory-marking animal or bird, and also en- couraged by an early modern Puritan myth that ritual is “‘mere empty form without true religious content.’’ It is true that rituals may become mere shells or husks at certain historical junctures, but this state of affairs belongs to the senescence or pathology of the ritual process, not to its ‘‘normal working.’’ Living ritual may be better likened to artwork than neurosis. Ritual is, in its most typical cross-cultural expressions, a synchronization of many performative genres, and is often ordered by dramatic structure, a plot, frequently involving an act of sacrifice or self-sacrifice, which energizes and gives emotional coloring to the interdependent com- municative codes which express in manifold ways the meaning inherent in the dramatic J/eitmotiv. In so far as it is “dramatic,’’ ritual contains a distanced and generalized reduplication of the agonistic process of the social drama. Ritual, therefore, is not ‘‘threadbare’’ but “richly textured’’ by virtue of its varied interweavings of the productions of mind and senses. Participants in the major rituals of vital religions, whether tribal or post- tribal, may be passive and active in turn with regard to the ritual move- ment, which as van Gennep, and, more recently, Roland Delattre, have shown, draws on biological, climatic, and ecological rhythms, as well as on social rhythms, as models for the processual forms it sequentially employs in its episodic structure. All the senses of participants and performers may be engaged; they hear music and prayers, see visual symbols, taste con- secrated foods, smell incense, and touch sacred persons and objects. They also have available the kinesthetic forms of dance and gesture, and perhaps cultural repertoires of facial expression, to bring them into significant per- formative rapport. Here I should mention in this connection Judith Lynne Hanna’s useful book To Dance is Human: A Theory of Nonverbal Communication (1979) in which she attempts to construct a sociocultural theory of dance. In song, participants merge (and diverge) in other ordered and symbolic ways. Moreover, few rituals are so completely stereotyped that every word, ry scene is authoritatively prescribed. Most often, in-

every ges 3 able p:

nt p

ges, in

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From Ritual to Theatre/82

which, both at the verbal and nonverbal levels, improvisation may not be merely permitted but required. Like the black and white keys of a piano like the Yin and Yang interplay in Chinese religious cosmology and Taoist ritual, constancy and mutability make up, in their contrariety, a total in- strument for the expression of human meaning, joyous, sorrowful, and both at once, ‘‘woven fine,’’ in William Blake’s words. Ritual, in fact far from being merely formal, or formulaic, is a symphony in more than music. It can be—and often is—a symphony or synaesthestic ensemble of expressive cultural genres, or, a synergy of varied symbolic operations, an opus which unlike ‘“‘opera’’ (also a multiplicity of genres as Wagner repeatedly emphasized) escapes opera’s theatricality, though never life’s in- expugnable social drama, by virtue of the seriousness of its ultimate con- cerns. The ‘‘flat’’ view of ritual must go. So also must the notion, beloved until recently by functionalist anthropologists, that ritual could be best understood as a set of mechanism for promoting a gross group solidarity as, in fact, a ‘‘sort of all-purpose social glue,’’ as Robin Horton characterized this position, and that its symbols were merely ‘‘reflections or expressions of components of social structure.” Ritual, in its full perfor- mative flow, is not only many-leveled, ‘‘laminated,’’ but also capable under conditions of societal change, of creative modification on all or any of its levels. Since it is tacitly held to communicate the deepest values of the group regularly performing it, it has a ‘‘paradigmatic’’ function, in both of the senses argued for by Clifford Geertz. As a ‘‘model for’’ ritual can an- ticipate, even generate change; as a ‘‘model of,’’ it may inscribe order in the minds, hearts, and wills of participants.

Ritual, in other words, is not only complex and many-layered; it has an abyss in it, and indeed, is an effort to make meaningful the dialectical rela- tion of what the Silesian mystic Jakob Boehme, following Meister Eckhart called “‘Ground’’ and ‘‘Underground,”’ ‘‘Byss and Abyss’’ (=the Greek a-bussos, °K (8V6-s-0S, from a-‘‘without,’’ and the Ionic variant of the Attic buthos, pu Gos, meaning ‘‘bottom,’’ or, better, [finite] “‘depth,”’ especially ‘‘of the sea.”’ So ‘‘byss’’ is deep but ‘‘abyss”’ is beyond all depth.) Many definitions of ritual contain the notion of depth, but few of infinite depth. In the terminology I favor, such definitions are concerned with finite structural depth, not with infinite ‘‘antistructural’’ depth. A homelier analogy, drawn from linguistics, would be to say that the passage form of ritual, as elicited by van Gennep, postulates a unidirectional move from the “indicative’’ mood of cultural process, through culture’s ‘‘subjunctive’? mood back to the ‘‘indicative’’ mood, though this recovered mood has now been tempered, even transformed, by immersion in subjunctivity; this process roughly corresponds with his preliminal, liminal, and postliminal phases. In preliminal rites of separation the initiand is moved from the indicative

quotidian social structure into the subjunctive antistructure of the liminal process and is then re

rne

formed by limin

experiences, by the

Social Dramas/83

rites of reaggregation to social structural participation in the indicative mood. The subjunctive, according to Webster’s Dictionary, is always con- cerned with ‘‘wish, desire, possibility, or hypothesis’’; it is a world of ‘‘as if,’ ranging from scientific hypothesis to festive fantasy. It is ‘‘if it were so,”’ not ‘‘it is so.’’ The indicative prevails in the world of what in the West we call ‘actual fact,’’ though this definition can range from a close scienti- fic inquiry into how a situation, event, or agent produces an effect or result, to a lay person’s description of the characteristics of ordinary good sense or sound practical judgment. Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoff, in their in- troduction to Secular Ritual, did not use this pair of terms, ‘‘subjunctive’’ and ‘‘indicative,’’ but, rather, saw social process as moving “between the formed and the indeterminate”’ (p. 17). They are, however, mostly discuss- ing ‘‘ceremony”’ or ‘‘secular ritual,’ not ritual pur sang. I agree with them, as I said earlier, that ‘‘all collective ceremony can be interpreted as a cultural statement about cultural order as against a cultural void’’ (p. 16), and that ‘‘ceremony is a declaration against indeterminacy. Through form and formality it celebrates man-made meaning, the culturally determinate, the regulated, the named, and the explained. It banishes from considera- tion the basic questions raised by the made-upness of culture, its malleabili- ty and alternability … [every ceremony] seeks to state that the cosmos and social world, or some particular small part of them are orderly and ex- plicable and for the moment fixed. A ceremony can allude to such proposi- tions and demonstrate them at the same time Ritual [sic, really “ceremony’’] is a declaration of form against [Moore and Myerhoff’s em- phasis] indeterminacy, therefore indeterminacy is always present in the background of any analysis of ritual’ (pp. 16-17). Roy Rappaport in his book, Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (1979:206), adopts a similar standpoint when he writes: ‘(Liturgical orders [whose ‘‘sequential dimension,”’ he says, is ritual] bind together disparate entities and processes, and it is this binding together, rather than what is bound together that is peculiar to them. Liturgical orders are meta-orders, or orders of orders … they mend ever again worlds forever breaking apart under the blows of usage and the slashing distinctions of language.’’

While I consider these to be admirably lucid statements about ceremony, which, for me, constitutes an impressive institutionalized performance of indicative, normatively structured social reality, and is also both a model of and a model for social states and statuses, I do not think such formulations can be applied with equal cogency to ritual. For ritual, as I have said, does not portray a dualistic, almost Manichean, struggle between order and void, cosmos and chaos, formed and indeterminate, with the former always triumphing in the end. Rather is it a transformative self-immolation of order as presently constituted, even sometimes a voluntary sparagmos or self-dismemberment of order, in the subjunctive depths of liminality. One

es of the ‘“‘shaman’s journey’’ where the initiand is

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broken into pieces then put together again as a being bridging visible and invisible worlds. Only in this way, through destruction and reconstruction, that is, transformation, may an authentic reordering come about. Actuality takes the sacrificial plunge into possibility and emerges as a different kind of actuality. We are not here in the presence of two like but opposed forces as in Manichean myth; rather there is a qualitative incongruence between the contraries engaged, though Jung’s daring metaphor of the incestuous marriage of the conscious ego with the unconscious seen as an archetypal mother, poses that relationship in terms of paradoxical kinship and affinity. Subjunctivity is fittingly the mother of indicativity, since any actualization is only one among a myriad possibilities of being, some of which may be ac- tualized in space-time somewhere or somewhen else. The ‘‘hard saying’’ “‘except ye become as a little child’’ assumes new meaning. Unless the fix- ing and ordering processes of the adult, soctostructural domain, are liminally

abandoned and the initiand submits to being broken down to a generalized prima materia, a lump of human clay, he cannot be transformed, reshaped to encounter new experiences.

Ritual’s liminal phase, then, approximates to the ‘‘subjunctive mood”’ of sociocultural action. It is, quintessentially, a time and place lodged between all times and spaces defined and governed in any specific biocultural ecosystem (A. Vayda, J. Bennett, and the like) by the rules of law, politics and religion, and by economic necessity. Here the cognitive schemata that give sense and order to everyday life no longer apply, but are, as it were, suspended—in ritual symbolism perhaps even shown as destroyed or dissolved. Gods and goddesses of destruction are adored primarily because they personify an essential phase in an irreversible transformative process. All further growth requires the immolation of that which was fundamental to an earlier stage—‘‘lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”’ Clearly, the liminal space-time ‘‘pod”’ created by ritual action, or today by certain kinds of reflexively ritualized theatre, is potentially perilous. For it may be opened up to energies of the biopsychical human constitution nor- mally channeled by socialization into status-role activities, to employ the unwieldy jargon of the social sciences. Nevertheless, the danger of the liminal phase conceded, and respected by hedging it around by ritual inter- dictions and taboos, it is also held in most cultures to be regenerative, as I mentioned earlier. For in liminality what is mundanely bound in sociostructural form may be unbound and rebound. Of course, if a society is in hairline-precarious subsistence balance with its environment, we are unlikely to find in its liminal zones very much in the way of experimenta- tion—here one does not fool around with the tried and tested. But when a “biocultural ecosystem,’’ to use Vayda’s terms, produce significant surpluses, even if these are merely the seasonal boons of a naturally well- endowed environment, the liminality of its major rituals may well generate cultural surpluses too, One thinks of the Kwakiutl and other Northwest

Social Dramas/85

Amerindian peoples with their complex iconographies and formerly rich hunting and gathering resources. New meanings and symbols may be in- troduced—or new ways of portraying or embellishing old models for living, and so of renewing interest in them. Ritual liminality, therefore, contains the potentiality for cultural innovation, as well as the means of effecting structural transformations within a relatively stable sociocultural system. For many transformations are, of course, within the limits of social struc- ture, and have to do with its internal adjustments and external adaptations to environmental changes. Cognitive structuralism can cope best with such

relatively cyclical and repetitive societies. ed

In tribal and agrarian cultures, even relatively complex ones, the in- novative potential of ritual liminality seems to have been circumscribed, even dormant, or pressed into the service of maintaining the existing social order. Even so, room for ‘‘play,’’ Huizinga’s /udic, abounds in many kinds of tribal rituals, even in funerary rituals. There is a play of symbol-vehicles, leading to the construction of bizarre masks and costumes from elements of mundane life now conjoined in fantastic ways. There is a play of meanings, involving the reversal of hierarchical orderings of values and social statuses. There is a play with words resulting in the generation of secret initiatory languages, as well as joyful or serious punning. Even the dramatic scenarios which give many rituals their processual armature may be presented as comedic rather than serious or tragic. Riddling and joking may take place, even in the liminal seclusion of initiatory lodges. Recent studies of Pueblo ritual clowns recall to us how widespread the clown role is in tribal and archaic religious culturé. Liminality is peculiarly conducive to play, where it is not restricted to games and jokes, but extends to the in- troduction of new forms of symbolic action, such as word-games or original masks.

But whatever happened to liminality, as societies increased in scale and complexity, particularly Western industrial societies? With deliminaliza- tion seems to have gone the powerful play component. Other religions of the Book, too, have tended regularly to stress the solemn at the expense of the festive. Religiously connected fairs, fiestas and carnivals do continue to ex- ist, of course, but not as intrinsic parts of liturgical systems. The great Oriental religions—Hinduism, Taoism, Tantric Buddhism, Shintoism, however, still recognize in many public performances that human ritual can be both earnest and playful. Eros may sport with Thanatos, not as a grisly Danse Macabre, but to symbolize a complete human reality and a

Nature full of oddities.

It would seem that with industrialization, urbanization, spreading literacy, labor migration, specialization, professionalization, bureaucracy, the division of the leisure sphere from the work sphere by the firm’s clock, the former integrity of the orchestrated religious gestalt that once constituted

ual has bu 1 many specialized performative genres have been

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born from the death of that mighty opus deorum hominumque. These genres of industrial leisure would include theatre, ballet, opera, film, the novel, printed poetry, the art exhibition, classical music, rock music, carnivals, processions, folk drama, major sports events and dozens more. Disintegra- tion has been accompanied by secularization. Traditional religions, their rituals denuded of much of their former symbolic wealth and meaning, hence their transformative capacity, persist in the leisure sphere, but have not adapted well to modernity. Modernity means the exaltation of the in- dicative mood—but in what Ihab Hassan has called the ‘‘postmodern turn,’’ we may be seeing a re-turn to subjunctivity and a rediscovery of cultural transformative modes, particularly in some forms of theatre. Dismembering may be a prelude to re-membering. Re-membering is not merely the restoration of some past intact, but setting it in living relation- ship to the present.

However, there are signs that those nations and cultures which came late to the industrial table, such as Japan, India, the Middle Eastern nations, and much of South and Central America, have succeeded, at least in part, in avoiding the dismemberment of important ritual types, and they have incorporated into their ritual performances many of the issues and pro- blems of modern urban living and succeeded in giving them religious meaning. When industrial development came to much of the Third World it had to confront powerfully consolidated structures of ritual performative genres. In the West similar institutions had been gradually eroded from within, from the revival of learning to the Industrial Revolution. Here the indicative mood triumphed, and subjunctivity was relegated to a reduc- ed domain where admittedly it shone brighter in the arts than in religion.

Religion, like art, /ives in so far as it is performed, i.e., in so far as its rituals are ‘‘going concerns.’’ If you wish to spay or geld religion, first remove its rituals, its generative and regenerative processes. For religion is not a cognitive system, a set of dogmas, alone, it is meaningful experience and experienced meaning. In ritual one lives through events, or through the alchemy of its framings and symbolings, relives semiogenetic events, the deeds and words of prophets and saints, or if these are absent, myths and sacred epics.

If, then, we regard narrative as an ‘‘emic’’ Western genre or meta-genre of expressive culture, it has to be seen as one of the cultural grandchildren or great-grandchildren of ‘‘tribal’’ ritual or juridical process. But if we regard narrative, ‘‘etically,’’ as the supreme instrument for binding the “values’’ and ‘‘goals,’’ in Dilthey’s sense of these terms, which motivate human conduct, particularly when men and women become actors in social drama, into situational structures of ‘‘meaning,’’ then we must concede it to be a universal cultural activity, embedded in the very center of the social drama, itself another cross-cultural and trans-temporal unit of social pro- cess. ‘‘Narrate’’ is from the Latin narrare, ‘‘to tell,’? which is akin to the

Social Dramas/87

Latin gnarus, ‘‘knowing, acquainted with, expert in,’’ both derivative from the Indo-European root, GNA, to ‘‘know,’’ whence the vast family of words deriving from the Latin cognoscere, including ‘‘cognition’’ itself, and “noun’”’ and ‘‘pronoun,”’ the Greek gigndskein, whence gnosis, and the Old English past participle gecnawan, whence the Modern English, ‘‘know.”’ Narrative is, it would seem, rather an appropriate term for a reflexive ac- tivity which seeks to ‘‘know’’ (even in its ritual aspect, to have gndsis about) antecedent events, and about the meaning of those events. Drama itself is, of course, derived from the Greek dran, ‘‘to do, or act,’’ hence nar- rative is knowledge (and/or gnosis) emerging from action, i.e., experiential knowledge. The redressive phase of social drama frames an endeavor to re- articulate a social group broken by sectional or self-serving interests; in like manner, the narrative component in ritual and legal action attempts to re- articulate opposing values and goals in a meaningful structure, the plot of which makes cultural sense. Where historical life itself fails to make cultural sense in terms that formerly held good, narrative and cultural drama may have the task of poiesis, that is, of remaking cultural sense, even when they seem to be dismantling ancient edifices of meaning, that can no longer redress our modern ‘‘dramas of living’’—now ever more on a global and species-threatening scale.

References

Belmont, Nicole. Arnold Van Gennep: The Creator of French Ethnography. Trans. by Derek Colt- cago: Chicago University Press, 1979.

man

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978

Gennep, Arnold van. The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960. First published 1908.

srathoff, R. The Structure of Social Inconsistencies: A Contribution to a Unifed Theory of Play, Game and Social Action, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970.

Handelman, Don. ‘‘Is Naven Ludic?’’ Social Analysts (published in Adelaide, Australia), no. 1, 1979.

Hanna, Judith Lynne. To Dance is Human: A Theory of Nonverbal Communication. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979

suc de, Le roi ture ou Uorigine de l’Etat, Paris: Ge

nard, 1972.

helm Dilthey. Vs Re

res, HA, The Philosophy of V Ige and Kegan

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Legesse, Asmarom. Gada: Three Approaches to the Study of African Society. New York: Free Press, 1973.

Moore, Sally Falk. Law as Process. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Myerhoff, Barbara. Life History among the Elderly: Performance, Visibility, and Remembering. n.d. —, and Moore, Sally Falk (eds.) Secular Ritual. Amsterdam: Royal van Goreum, 1977.

Pike, Kenneth L. Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior. Glen- dale, California: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1954

North American

Rappaport, Roy. Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Richmond, Califorr Books, 1979.

Sapir, Edward, ‘Emergence of a Concept of Personality in a Study of Cultures.”” Journal of Social Psychology, 5, pp. 410-416, 1934.

Spindle’ Califor

George D. (ed.) The Making of Psychological Anthropology, Berkeley: University of Press, 1978.

Turner, Victor. Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life. Man- chester: Manchester University Press, 1957

—. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.

—. The Drums of Afflictin: A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1968.

—. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969.

—. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca: Cornell University

Vansina, Jan, Kingdoms of the Savanna. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966

White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973

Dramatic Ritual/Ritual Drama

Performative and Reflexive

Anthropology

I’ve long thought that teaching and learning anthropology should be more fun than they often are. Perhaps we should not merely read and com- ment on ethnographies, but actually perform them. Alienated students spend many tedious hours in library carrels struggling with accounts of alien lives and even more alien anthropological theories about the ordering of those lives. Whereas anthropology should be about, in D.H. Lawrence’s phrase, ‘‘man alive’’ and ‘‘woman alive,”’ this living quality frequently fails to emerge from our pedagogics, perhaps, to cite Lawrence again, because our ‘‘analysis presupposes a corpse.”

It is becoming increasingly recognized that the anthropological monograph is itself a rather rigid literary genre which grew out of the no- tion that in the human sciences reports must be modeled rather abjectly on those of the natural sciences. But such a genre has no privileged position, especially now that we realize that in social life cognitive, affective, and volitional elements are bound up with one another and are alike primary, seldom found in their pure form, often hybridized, and only comprehensi- ble by the investigator as lived experience, his/hers as well as, and in relation

to, theirs. Even the best of ethnographic films fail to communicate much of what it

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means to be a member of the society filmed, A selected, often slanted, series of visual images is directed at a passive audience. Discussion in the classroom then centers on the items picked out for attention by the film maker. Though a good teacher will plausibly relate the movie to ethnographic contexts drawn from the literature, much of the sociocultural and psychological complexity of those contexts cannot be related to the film. Anthropological monographs and movies may describe or present the incentives to action characteristic of a given group, but only rarely will these genres catch up their readers or spectators fully into the culture’s motivational web.

How, then, may this be done? One possibility may be to turn the more interesting portions of ethnographies into playscripts, then to act them out in class, and finally to turn back to ethnographies armed with the understanding that comes from “getting inside the skin’’ of members of other cultures, rather than merely ‘‘taking the role of the other’’ in one’s own culture. A whole new set of problems is generated by this apparently simple process. For each of its three stages (ethnography into playscript, script into performance, performance into meta-ethnography) reveals many of the frailties of anthropology, that essentially Western traditional discipline. And the process forces us to look beyond purely anthropological accounts—to literature, history, biography, incidents of travel—for data that may contribute to convincing playscripts. Where social dramas do find their cultural ‘‘doubles’”’ (to reverse Antonin Artaud) in aesthetic dramas and other genres of cultural performance, there may well develop, as Richard Schechner has argued, a convergence betwen them, so that the processual form of social dramas is implicit in aesthetic dramas (even if only by reversal or negation), while the rhetoric of social dramas—and hence the

shape of argument—is drawn from cultural performances. There was a lot of Perry Mason in Watergate!

The ‘‘playing’’ of ethnography is a genuinely interdisciplinary enter- prise, for if we are to satisfy ourselves of the reliability of our script and our performance of it, we will need advice from various nonanthropological sources. Professionals in the field of drama in our own culture—script- writers, directors, actors, even stagehands—draw on centuries of profes- sional experience in performing plays. Ideally, we need to consult, better still, bring in as part of the cast, members of the culture being enacted. We may, sometimes, be lucky enough to enlist the aid of theatrical or folk pro-

fessionals from the society we are studying. But, in any case, those who know the business from the inside can help enormously.

I was given an opportunity to test these speculations in practice when, with fellow social scientists Alexander Alland and Erving Goffman, I was invited by Richard Schechner to take part in what was called ‘‘an intensive

workshop”’ to ‘‘explore the interface between ritual and the theatre . between social and aesthetic drama,”’ and other

imina between the socia

SSS

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sciences and performing arts. I had often thought about the relationship between processual forms of social conflict in many societies, described by anthropologists and genres of cultural performance. Several years earlier, mutual friends had made me aware of Schechner’s interest in the same pro- blem from the viewpoint of theatre. The collaboration of Colin Turnbull (The Mountain People, 1972) and Peter Brook which converted Turnbull’s study of the Ik of Uganda into a series of dramatic episodes alerted me to the possibility of turning suitable ethnographic data into playscripts. That experiment persuaded me that cooperation between anthropological and theatrical people was not only possible but also could become a major teaching tool for both sets of partners in a world many of whose com- ponents are beginning to want to know one another. If it is true that we learn something about ourselves from taking the role of others, an- thropologists, those cultural brokers par excellence, might be challenged to make this an intercultural as well as an intracultural enterprise.

Though many social scientists frown on the terms performance and drama, they seem to be central. Performance, as we have seen, is derived from the Middle English parfournen, later parfourmen, which is itself from the Old French parfournir—par (‘‘thoroughly’’) plus fournir (to furnish’’)—hence performance does not necessarily have the structuralist implication of manifesting form, but rather the processual sense of ‘‘bringing to comple- tion’’ or ‘‘accomplishing.’’ To perform is thus to complete a more or less in- volved process rather than to do a single deed or act. To perform ethnography, then, is to bring the data home to us in their fullness, in the plenitude of their action-meaning. Cognitive reductionism has always struck me as a kind of dehydration of social life. Sure, the patterns can be elicited, but the wishes and emotions, the personal and collective goals and strategies, even the situational vulnerabilities, weariness, and mistakes are lost in the attempt to objectify and produce an aseptic theory of human behavior modeled essentially on eighteenth century ‘‘scientific’’ axioms of belief about mechanical causality. Feelings and desires are not a pollution of cognitive pure essence, but close to what we humanly are; if an- thropology is to become a true science of human action, it must take them just as seriously as the structures which sometimes perhaps represent the exhausted husks of action bled of its motivations.

The term drama has been criticized (by Max Gluckman and Raymond Firth, for example) as the imposition on observational data of a schema derived from cultural genres, hence ‘‘loaded’’ and not ‘‘neutral’’ enough for scientific use (Gluckman, 1977:227-43; Firth, 1974:1-2). I have to disagree, for my notebooks are filled with descriptions of day-to-day events which, added together, undeniably possess dramatic form, representing a course of action. Let me try to describe what I mean by drama, specifically account of my theory of the social drama see my

social drama. (1

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Schism and Continuity in an African Society, 1957, and Chapter Three above.)

I hold that the social drama form occurs on all levels of social organiza- tion from state to family. A social drama is initiated when the peaceful tenor of regular, norm-governed social life is interrupted by the breach of a rule controlling one of its salient relationships. This leads swiftly or slowly to a state of crisis, which, if not soon sealed off, may split the community in- to contending factions and coalitions. To prevent this, redressive means are taken by those who consider themselves or are considered the most legitimate or authoritative representatives of the relevant community. Redress usually involves ritualized action, whether legal (in formal or in- formal courts), religious (involving beliefs in the retributive action of powerful supernatural entities, and often involving an act of sacrifice), or military (for example, feuding, headhunting, or engaging in organized warfare). If the situation does not regress to crisis (which may remain endemic until some radical restructuring of social relationships, sometimes by revolutionary means, is undertaken), the next phase of social drama comes into play, which involves alternative solutions to the problem. The first is reconciliation of the conflicting parties following judicial, ritual, or military processes; the second, consensual recognition of irremediable breach, usually followed by the spatial separation of the parties. Since social dramas suspend normal everyday role playing, they interrupt the flow of social life and force a group to take cognizance of its own behavior in relation to its own values, even to question at times the value of those values. In other words, dramas induce and contain reflexive processes and generate cultural frames in which reflexivity can find a legitimate place.

With this processual form as a rough guide for our work at Schechner’s summer institute, I tried to involve anthropology and drama students in the joint task of writing scripts for and performing ethnographies. It seemed best to choose parts of classical ethnographies that lent themselves to dramatic treatment, such as Malinowski’s Crime and Custom, with its young man threatening suicide from a treetop when his father’s matrilineal kin urged him to leave their village on his father’s death (Crime and Custom, 1926: p. 78). But time being short (we had only two weeks), I had to fall back upon my own ethnography both because I knew it best, and because I had already, to some extent, written a script for a substantial amount of field data in the form I have called social drama. My wife, Edie, and I tried to explain to a group of about a dozen students and teachers, almost equally divided between anthropology and drama, what cultural assumptions lay behind the first two social dramas that I described in my book Schism and Continuity in An African Society (pp. 95, 116). It was not enough to give them a few cognitive models or structural principles. We had to try to create the illusion of what it is to live Ndembu village life. Could this possibly be done with a few bold strokes, with a gesture or two? Of course not, but there may

Dramatic Ritual/93

be ways of getting people bodily as well as mentally involved in another (not physically present) culture.

The setting for all this was an upper room in the Performing Garage, a theatre in Soho where Schechner’s company, The Performance Group, has given some notable performances, including Dionysus in 69, Makbeth, Mother Courage, and, more recently, the Tooth of Crime and Rumstick Road (directed by Elizabeth LeCompte). I knew that Schechner set great store on what he calls the ‘‘rehearsal process,’’ which essentially consists of establishing a dynamic relationship, over whatever time it takes, among playscript, ac- tors, director, stage, and props, with no initial presumptions about the primacy of any of these. Sessions often have no time limit; in some, exer- cises of various kinds, including breathing exercises to loosen up actors, may go on for an hour or so; in others, players may cast themselves rather than be cast by the director. In this complex process, Schechner sees the ac- tor, in taking the role of another—provided by a playscript—as moving, under the intuitive and experienced eye of the director/producer, from the “‘not-me’’ (the blueprinted role) to the ‘‘not-not-me’’ (the realized role), and he sees the movement itself as constituting a kind of liminal phase in which all kinds of experiential experiments are possible, indeed mandatory. This is a different style of acting from that which relies on superb profes- sional technique to imitate almost any Western role with verisimilitude. Schechner aims at poiesis, rather than mimesis: making, not faking. The role grows along with the actor, it is truly ‘‘created’’ through the rehearsal pro- cess which may sometimes involve painful moments of self-revelation. Such a method is particularly appropriate for anthropological teaching because the ‘‘mimetic’’? method will work only on familiar material (Western models of behavior), whereas the ‘‘poietic,’’ since it recreates behavior from within, can handle unfamiliar material.

In an experimental session convoked by Schechner to rehearse Ibsen’s Doll House, for example, we came up with four Noras, one of whom actually made a choice contrary to Ibsen’s script. It happened that in her personal life she herself was being confronted with a dilemma similar to Nora’s: should she separate from her husband, leave her two children with him (he wanted this), and embark upon an independent career? In reliving her own problem through enacting Nora’s, she began to wring her hands in a peculiarly poignant, slow, complex way. Eventually, instead of detonating the famous door slam that some critics say ushered in modern theatre, she rushed back to the group, signifying that she was not ready—at least not yet—to give up her children, thus throwing unexpected light on the ethical toughness of Ibsen’s Nora. Schechner said that the hand-wringing was “the bit of reality’? he would preserve from that particular rehearsal and embody in the Nora-role in subsequent rehearsals. As these succeeded one

another, a b ge of such gestures, incidents, renderings of not-self into

ally into a processual

not-not-self wo together and molded art

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literature) as with the fidelity of that script to both the described facts and the anthropological analysis of the structures and processes of the group. Incidentally, I am not calling for a mandatory exclusion of anthropologists from the acting role! Indeed, I think that participation in this role would significantly enhance anthropologists’ ‘‘scientific’” understanding of the culture being studied in this dynamic fashion, for human science is con- cerned, as we have said, with ‘‘man alive.’? But I am aware of the evasiveness and voyeurism of my kind—which we rationalize as ‘‘objectivi- ty.”’ Perhaps we need a little more of the dsciplined abandonment that theatre demands! However, as second best, we can settle for the role of Ethnodramaturg.

The movement from ethnography to performance is a process of pragmatic reflexivity. Not the reflexivity of a narcissistic isolate moving among his or her memories and dreams, but the attempt of representatives of one generic modality of human existence, the Western historical ex- perience, to understand ‘‘on the pulses,’’ in Keatsian metaphor, other modes hitherto locked away from it by cognitive chauvinism or cultural

”

snobbery.

Historically, ethnodramatics is emerging just when knowledge is being increased about other cultures, other world views, other life styles; when Westerners, endeavoring to trap non-Western philosophies, dramatics, and poetics in the corrals of their own cognitive constructions, find that they have caught sublime monsters, Eastern dragons who are lords of fructile chaos, whose wisdom makes our cognitive knowledge look somehow shrunken, shabby, and inadequate to our new apprehension of the human condition.

Cartesian dualism has insisted on separating subject from object, us from them. It has, indeed, made voyeurs of Western man, exaggerating sight by macro- and micro-instrumentation, the better to learn the structures of the world with an ‘“‘eye’’ to its exploitation. The deep bonds between body and mentality, unconscious and conscious thinking, species and self have been treated without respect, as though irrelevant for analytical purposes.

The reflexivity of performance dissolves these bonds and so creatively democratizes: as we become on earth a single noosphere, the Platonic cleavage between an aristocracy of the spirit and the ‘‘lower or foreign orders’’ can no longer be maintained. To be reflexive is to be at once one’s own subject and direct object. The poet, whom Plato rejected from his Republic, subjectivizes the object, or, better, makes intersubjectivity the characteristically postmodern human mode.

It is perhaps perfectly natural that an anthropology of performance should be moving to meet dramatic performers who are seeking some of their theoretical support from anthropology. With the renewed emphasis

on society as a process punctuated by performances of various kinds, there ul

has developed the view that such genres as ri

ceremony, carnival,

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festival, game, spectacle, parade, and sports event may constitute, on various levels and in various verbal and nonverbal codes, a set of intersec- ting metalanguages. The group or community does not merely ‘‘flow’’ in unison at these performances, but, more actively, tries to understand itself in order to change itself. This dialectic between ‘‘flow’’ and reflexivity characterizes performative genres: a successful performance in any of the genres transcends the opposition between spontaneous and self-conscious

patterns of action. If anthropologists are ever to take ethnodramatics seriously, our

discipline will have to become something more than a cognitive game played in our heads and inscribed in—let’s face it—somewhat tedious jour- nals. We will have to become performers ourselves, and bring to human, existential fulfillment what have hitherto been only mentalistic protocols. We must find ways of overcoming the boundaries of both political and cognitive structures by dramatistic empathy, sympathy, friendship, even love as we acquire ever deeper structural knowledge in reciprocity with the increasingly self-aware ethnoi, barbarot, goyim, heathens, and marginals in pursuit of common tasks and rare imaginative transcendences of those

tasks.

References

Firth, Raymond. ‘‘Society and its Symbols,’ Times Literary Supplement, pp. 1-2, September 3, 1974.

Gluckman, Max. ‘On Drama, and Games and Athletic Gontests.’’ In Secular Ritual. ed. S. Moore and B. Myerhoff, Assen, Holland: Royal van Gorcum, pp. 227-243, 1977

Hornby, Richard. Script into Performance. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1977.

Turner, Victor. Schism and Continuity in an African Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1957.

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of huge industrialized polities is really in sharp dialectical contradiction to the modern mode of production whose diversity and constant response to new technology (for example, computers, miniaturization, robotization of industry, and the like) demand equal diversity in the sphere of culture, especially in those aspects of culture concerned with the redressal, direct or indirect, of the social dramas constantly erupting from the new relations of production and giving rise to new kinds of social conflicts. Paradoxically, retribalization, ‘‘one Law for the Lion and the Ox’’ as Blake might have put it (which ‘‘is oppression’), is being carried on under the aegis of evolu- tion to ‘‘a higher stage’’ of society. Retribalization, whether defined as “fascist,’’ ‘‘socialist,’? ‘“communist,’’ or any other mode of authoritarian or totalistic control, must seek to control crisis of all types not only by force but also by reritualization of the third phase of all social dramas, that of redress—hence elaborately ritualized trials of heretics and renegades, most recently the Gang of Four in China. Thus, as individual human inven- tiveness and collective traditions of technical know-how penetrate the economic infrastructure, a contradiction arises between manifold and diverse forces and means of production, and monolithic state structures whose control of the means of production stifles creativeness at the level of the forces and relations of production.

Ritual, unlike theatre, does not distinguish between audience and per- formers. Instead, there is a congregation whose leaders may be priests, par- ty officials, or other religious or secular ritual specialists, but all share for- mally and substantially the same set of beliefs and accept the same system of practices, the same sets of rituals or liturgical actions. A congregation is there to affirm the theological or cosmological order, explicit or implicit, which all hold in common, to actualize it periodically for themselves and in- culcate the basic tenets of that order into their younger members, often in a graded series of life-crisis rituals, passages from birth to death, through puberty, marriage, initiation into prestigious secret societies, measured progress through an educational system which involves cumulative indoc- trination, and so on. Theatre—from the Greek theasthai, ‘‘to see, to view’’—is rather different. Schechner (‘‘From Ritual to Theater and Back’’ in Essays on Performance Theory, 1977: 79) has recently argued that: ‘‘Theater comes into existence when a separation occurs between audience and per- formers. The paradigmatic theatrical situation is a group of performers soliciting an audience who may or may not respond by attending. The au- dience is free to attend or stay away—and if they stay away it is the theater that suffers, not its would-be audience. In ritual, stay-away means rejecting the congregation—or being rejected by it, as in excommunication, ostracism, or exile.’’ One might add, that it is not a mortal sin if one fails

to attend a play by Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht or Ionesco, but that it used to attend Sunday Mass—in this case, one

sin if one ed t

be a mortal

wonders whethe

Everyday Life/113

mode of theatre, even as it calls ironically for greater congregrational par- ticipation from those who do attend. In totalitarian states, it came to be regarded as sin if one did not attend a local rally for nationally dominant political figures—the non-attender was virtually a dissident.

Now back to my original point that everyday life is intrinsically con- nected with acting and vice versa. It seems to me that tribalism and would- be retribalization both stress the social structure and with it, the roles, statuses, positions that are its hierarchal components (summing up to the structural persona) at the expense of what social thinkers, from Durkheim to Kenelm Burridge, have called ‘‘the individual.’’ The ‘‘person,’’ Burridge argues, “is content with things as they are, the individual posits an alternative set of moral discriminations’’ (Someone, No one: An essay on Individuality, 1979:4). ‘The individual”’ or the individual-in-general is a concept arising rather late in most complex human cultures. Burridge relates its earlier forms to what I have called, following van Gennep, the liminal period, in rites of passage from one social state and status to another, at birth, puber- ty, marriage, death, and so on. The liminal period is that time and space betwixt and between one context of meaning and action and another. It is when the initiand is neither what he has been nor is what he will be. Characteristic of this liminal period is the appearance of marked ambiguity and inconsistency of meaning, and the emergence of liminal demonic and monstrous figures who represent within themselves ambiguities and incon- sistencies. As ambiguous figures, they mediate between alternative or op- posing contexts, and thus are important in bringing about their transfor- mation. In our society we might see the ‘‘Theater of the Absurd’’ of Ionesco, Arrabal, and Beckett, as ‘“‘liminal,’’ though I would prefer the term ‘“‘liminoid,’’ however gratingly neologistic, as being at once akin to and perhaps deriving from the liminal of tribal and feudal rituals, and dif- ferent from the liminal as being more often the creation of individual than of collective inspiration and critical rather than furthering the purposes of the existing social order. The incipient individual, in preliterate societies, does emerge, but often in veiled or restricted form. Burridge makes some interesting speculation about this proto- or ur- individual. He regards what he calls ‘‘the self,’’ not as a static entity, but as a movement, an oscillating energy between the structural persona and the potentially antistructural in- dividual. This enables him to write (ibid.: pp. 146-147): ‘‘The liminal period becomes an introduction to, and test of, moral being. Generally re- enacting the transformation from nature to culture, pubertal rites bring the components of being together and confront the cultural faculties with the oppositions and correspondences between animal, moral, and spiritual be- ings. To use another idiom, the initiand is asked to measure communitas and anti-structure—wherein human beings, stripped of their roles,

statuses, m

ioralities, are in communion as human i izati tructure.

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“In this situation,’’ he continues, ‘‘most initiands, responding to past pressures of kinfolk and conformists, yield to the more obvious and overt side of the ritual. Some, intuitively grasping that symbols and symbolic ac- tivities contain a mysterium—a latency, a promissory note, an invitation to realize that which lies behind the obvious and overt—may perceive and order a truth which, because they cannot withstand conformist pressures, they will hold in their hearts all the years of their lives. Others lose themselves in the chaos, unable to bring it into order. A few persevere and are led into areas which the overtness of the cultural symbols hide from most. But while the affirmation of a truth discovered calls a halt, one nega- tion breeds another and discovery becomes a continuing journey. Truth’s center seems to grow more distant with each successive launch from closing peripheries. Each arrival entails a further moral choice if it is to make a new point of departure, and each departure requires a further transformation of the self in relation to otherness.’? Man grows through antistructure, and conserves through structure. Elsewhere, and evidently thinking of Durkheim’s post-Renaissance ‘‘individual-in-general,’’ Burridge writes of the individual as ‘‘the moral critic who envisages another kind of social or moral order, the creative spark poised and ready to change tradition. Yet if some people are wholly individuals and others are persons, it is a matter of common observation that most people are in some respects and most fre- quently persons, while in other respects and at other times they can appear as individuals. And this apparent oscillation or movement between person and individual—whether in a particular instance the movement is one-way or a return is made—may be identified as ‘individuality’. Or, ‘individuality’ refers to the opportunity and capacity to move from person to individual and/or vice versa …”’ (tbid.: pp. 5-6).

Burridge presumably means that in a society already characterized by the possibility of making many choices, a biological individual can opt to be a persona in extremis, a ‘‘Southern Colonel,’’ ‘‘a Madam,’’ ‘‘a Great Actor,’’ ‘‘a Northern Senator,’’ ‘‘a dear old schoolmaster, a motherly eccentric,’’ or an individual who eschews identification with all available social personas.

Theatre, in Western liberal-capitalist society, is a liminoid process, set in the liminoid time of leisure between the role-playing times of ‘‘work.’’ It is, in a way, ‘‘play’’ or ‘‘entertainment’’ (which means, etymologically, “‘held-in-between,’’ that is, it is a liminal or liminoid phenomenon). Originally, I have supposed it is one of the abstractions from the original pansocietal ‘‘ritual’’ which was part of the ‘‘work’’ as well as the ‘‘play’’ of the whole society before the division of labor and specialization split that great ensemble or gestalt into special professions and vocations. Originally theatre was concerned, among other things, with resolving crises affecting everyone and as. ly arbitrary and often

1 or so

soul,’’ even an

sing meaning to

crue ice of events f I conflicts.

ig seqe

Everyday Life/115

The simple point I am trying to make—and much research is needed to bring in the necessary back-up evidence—is that in the simpler prein- dustrial societies, acting a role and exemplifying a status was so much a part of everyday life that the ritual playing of a role, even if it was a dif- ferent role from that played in mundane life, was of the same kind as one played as son, daughter, headman, shaman, mother, chief, or Queen- sister. The difference between ordinary and ritual (or extraordinary) life, was mainly a matter of framing and quantity, not of quality. In ritual, roles were separated from their embedment in the ongoing flow of social life and singled out for special attention, or else they were seen as points of entry and exit on a continuous process (boy-to-man, girl-to-woman, commoner- to-chief, villager-to-member-of-hunting-cult, ghost-to-ancestor, and so forth) with some interesting transitional symbolism, and the shadowy ap- pearance of the lineaments of the antistructural ‘‘individual’’ at some places and times. But in these societies acting was mainly role-playing; the persona was the dominant criterion of individuality, of identity. Thus, the great collective which articulated personae in hierarchical or segmentary struc- tures was the real protagonist, both in life and ritual.

Against this symmetry between everyday life and its liminal double, ritual, we find the asymmetry of ‘‘life’’ vis-a-vis ‘‘acting’’ in post- Renaissance, pre-totalitarian Western societies. But now we detect an in- teresting contrast, even a paradox. For Western theatre has often posited, like Western art generally, a contrast between everyday life, whether work or that part of non-work devoted to institutionalized concerns, membership of family, sports club, charity organizations, union locals, secret societies (Elks, Masons, Knights of Columbus, and so forth), and ¢ruly antistructural life (private religion, taking part in the arts as creator or spectator, and the

; the former is governed the former is in the in-

like). The persona ‘‘works,’’ the individual ‘“‘plays’ by economic necessity, the latter is ‘‘entertained dicative mood of culture; the latter in the subjunctive or optative moods, the moods of feeling and desire, as opposed to those cognitive attitudes which stress rational choice, full (if reluctant) acceptance of cause-and- effect, repudiation of mystical participation or magical affinities, calcula- tion of probable outcomes of action, and awareness of realistic limitation on action. But theatre, though it has abandoned its former ritual, claims to be a means of communication with invisible powers and ultimate reality, and can still assert, particularly since the rise of depth psychology, that it represents the reality behind the role-playing masks, that even its masks, so to speak, are ‘‘negations of the negation.’’ They present the false face in order to portray the possibility of a true face. Great theatre even brings in- cest and parricide on stage from behind the masks of kinship.

Theatre fact, become the domain of the individual-in-general, of 1 would call ‘‘the real self,’’ or her “De | De

an and wom

PP? wi rminate

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Identity.’’ In modern theatre stage-roles undermined, in fact, everyday-life roles, declaring the latter ‘‘inauthentic.’’ From this viewpoint, it is the mun- dane world that is false, illusory, the home of the persona, and theatre that is real, the world of the individual, and by its very existence representing a standing critique of the hypocrisy of all social structure which shape human beings, often by psychical and even physical mutilation (foot-binding, cor- sets, indigestible foods), in the image of abstract social status-roles. Of course, theatre, like a// cultural forms, once it has become a recognized genre of performance, can be manipulated to support both conformative and subversive social and political positions. I am merely arguing that the rise of modern and postmodern theatre contains within it the seeds of a fun- damental critique of all social structures hitherto known. The locus of ac- tion, such a view would hold, has shifted from ‘‘real life’’ in the ‘‘indicative mood’’ arenas of economics and politics to what has been hitherto held to be the world of play, fantasy, illusion, entertainment, known as theatre. This has been especially the case as religious ritual has been stripped of its flexible, ludic components, its sacred clowns, masked tricksters, riddling narratives, to make way for rigorous solemnity, serious and official discourse about privileged or transcendental ‘‘meanings”’ or ‘“‘signifieds,’’ to use the terminology of Saussure. Subjunctive ‘‘acting’’ is now what is “real,’’ “‘authentic’’; indicative ‘‘acting,’’ in the so-called ‘‘real world”’ is seen as “‘hypocritical,’’ ‘‘inauthentic,’’ ‘‘bourgeois,’’ ‘‘debasing’’—tho- ugh of late things social seem to be taking a reverse turn.

Some modes of ‘‘experimental theatre’? have recently addressed themselves to the problem of presenting the whole role-playing world of mundane modern society with ‘‘acting”’ as its creative alternative, the stage as the locus of the emergent individual, alienated from himself in a world which insists on men and women masking themselves in a flickering series of shadowy personae. These are not the grand personae of tribal or feudal cultures, where the creation of oneself as a ‘‘public man’’ or ‘‘public woman’’ was a work of art, involving high style in dress, manners, and deeds as Richard Sennet demonstrates, but the picayune personae of office, factory, or classroom underlings, with only vestiges of familial personae left to manipulate at home for the dregs of a weary day. Here mundane, indicative-mood acting seems to be the domain of the fictive, the false, the rejection of ‘‘definite and determinate identity.’’ It is against this ‘‘acting’’ that such masters of experimental theatre (who see theatre as the counterstroke which annihilates falsehood even when it ‘‘puts on plays’’) as Grotowski, Brook, Schechner, Suzuki, and others, with some ancestry in Stanislawski, Delsarte, Meyerhold, and even Artaud, have ‘‘re-acted’’ or “‘counter-acted.’’ Take, for example, some recent notions of Grotowski (On the Road to Active Culture: The Activities of Grotowski’s Theater Laboratory In- stitute in the Years 1970-1977, 1978:95-97). He is Trybuna Ludu:

ig an interview to

Everyday Life/117

Action in the sphere of active culture, such as gives one the feeling of fulfilling one’s life, widening its scope, happens to be the need of many, but remains the domain of very few. Active culture is cultivated, for instance, by a writer when writing a book. We cultivated it while we were preparing performances. Passive culture—which is important and rich in aspects not easy to talk about right here—is a relationship to what is a product of active culture, that is to say, reading, watching a performance, film, listening to music. In certain, let us say, laboratory dimensions, we are working on means to extend the sphere of active culture. What is the privilege of the few, can also become the property of others. I am not talking about a mass production of works of art, but of a kind of personal creative experience, which is not indifferent for the life of an in- dividual person, or his life with others. [Grotowski then states ex- plicitly the view that acting is being, not performance. ]

Working in the sphere of theater, preparing productions for many years, step by step we were approaching such a concept of active man/actor, where the point was not to act someone else, but to be oneself, to be with someone, to be in relationship, as Stanislawski us- ed to call it.

In the past few years Grotowski seems to have abandoned theatre altogether to set out on what he calls ‘‘culture searches’’ or ‘‘paratheatrical experiments’’ like the 1977 (Summer) pilgrimage to Fire Mountain near Wroclaw in Poland, and the Global Village, a ‘‘kind of university of research,’’ dispersed among many countries, ‘‘creative centers working alongside of various research and cultural centers in those countries’’ (ibid.: p. 103). The distinctive feature of those projects was the disap- pearance of the audience, and the development of ritualized experiences which, to my anthropologist’s eye, bear a striking resemblance to the in- structions and hazards typical of successive phases of boys’ and girls’ puberty rites in Central Africa. Here are some of the names of these ‘‘ex- periments’? in both small and large groups, which may suggest an- thropological comparisons to some readers: ‘‘Night Vigil,’’ ‘““The Way,” “The Area of Fear,”’ ‘The Circle of Rhythm,’’ ‘‘The Circle of Darkness and Voice,”’ ‘‘The Cutting” (not, we are relieved to learn, an exact parallel violent though precise’’ dance.

“

to the operation of circumcision, but a “Cutting’’ represents a vegetable cutting, ‘‘a seed of Meeting,”’ that is a direct encounter between persons).

I use the word ‘‘persons’’ advisedly, for it seems to me that Grotowski, who is very much persona grata with the Polish Communist party, has aban- doned the theatrical tradition in order to create new forms of ritual initia- tion which inscribe desirable personae on human prima materia, that is, form men and women in a humanistic image which is to replace older the great religious traditions. The pected

forn

nd and r

ence we

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its independent existence as the jury which decided on the rights and wrongs of the case presented by the dramatist, director, and actors. Here I would repeat what I wrote in a recent article called ‘Frame, Flow, and Reflection: Ritual and Drama in Public Liminality’’ (in M. Benamou and C. Caramello, Performance in Postmodern Culture, 1977:54): “I relish the separation of an audience from performers and the liberation of scripts from cosmology, ideology, and theology. The concept of individuality has been hard-won, and to surrender it to a new totalizing process of reliminalization is a dejecting thought.”’ [I had distinguished ‘‘liminal’’ from ‘‘liminoid,’’ by associating the first with obligatory, tribal participa- tion in ritual and the second as characterizing artistic or religious forms voluntarily produced, usually with recognition of individual authorship, and often subversive in intention towards the prevailing structures.] ‘‘As a member of an audience I can see the theme and message of play as one among a number of ‘subjunctive’ possibilities, a variant model for thought or action to be accepted or rejected after careful consideration.”’ [It may be that by paying for a ticket we have ‘‘bought’’ the author’s and theatre’s production as a ‘‘commodity,’’ but we have not thereby been forced to “‘buy’’ his ideas or vision of reality.] ‘‘Even as audience people can be ‘moved’ by plays; they need not be ‘carried away’ by them—into another person’s utopia or ‘secular sacrum,’ to use Grotowski’s phrase. Liminoid theatre should limit itself to presenting alternatives: it should not be a brainwashing technique.’’ To complete the sentence of William Blake I half-quoted earlier: ‘“One Law for the Lion and the Ox is Oppression.”’

It is true that one of the aims of the Night Vigil at Grotowski’s Laboratory Theater was to enable people to meet ‘‘out of their roles.’” But when one reads accounts of the way the ‘‘guides’’ of the Night Vigil “‘shepherd’’ persons towards the undertaking of certain physical acts (dan- cing, touching) or attaining certain psychological states, in such a way—to cite a psychologist disciple, Janina Dowlasz (op. cit.: p. 115)—‘‘that healthy human emotions could release themselves again,’’ one is uneasily reminded not only of circumcision rites in Central Africa but also of “Triumph of the Will.’’ The role-stripped self is to be remolded by what Grotowski calls ‘‘the guides’’ into … what?

Here I would like to return to Burridge’s argument for a moment before returning to postmodern theatre. After making the distinction between per- son and individual, he went on to consider individuality—which is the ‘‘ap- parent oscillation or movement between person and individual (for most people are both), whether in a particular instance the movement is one-way or a return is made, Or individuality may refer to the opportunity and capacity to move from person to individual and/or vice versa (op. cit., pp. 5-6). I have tended to regard the social dimension of the individual as com- munitas, essentially a liminoid, v istic mode of relating, a choosing

i ity of con-

an beings with |

of one anc r by total, al

Everyday Life/119

sciousness and feeling resulting, and sometimes the spontaneous generation of new ways of seeing or being. The social dimension of the person of per- sona is the activated social structure, the public domain of norm- or custom- governed relationships. But of course, nothing is so simple as that. Even Augustine had to admit that in real history the City of God and the Earthly City were hopelessly intermingled, and that compromises had continually to be made by the would-be denizens of the Urbs Coelestis if family life and urban politics were to be at all workable. Individuality seems to be something that has to be won—and one aspect of its winning, Burridge would say, is ‘‘an appreciation of own being in relation to traditional or alternative categories’ (op. cit.: p. 6). Burridge sees initiation rites as com- pressed means of posing the person-individual dilemma, especially in their liminal periods, in terms of the given culture’s experience and reflection of itself,

My own view is that the experimentalism of Schechner is directed toward the realization, through theatre, of individuality—somewhat in Burridge‘s sense—rather than toward the making of a new classless or ‘“‘unalienated”’ man, in the zealot Grotowski manner. Schechner sees himself, in Kierkegaardian language, as a ‘‘midwife’’ rather than a Pygmalion. There was a time, he records, when he did try to mold the actors of his Perform- ance Group in directions he considered ‘personally liberating.’’ But there grew a rebellion in the ranks, and Schechner came to realize that he had become somewhat of a dictator, at any rate more than a director. Both Grotowski and Schechner—and indeed all directors in postmodern ex- perimental theatre—advocate the supreme importance of ‘“‘the rehearsal process,”’ which involves very much more than the effectual realization of a playscript and the learning of parts. It involves innumerable workshop ses- sions, some lasting for hours, others all night, in which breathing exercises, voice workshops, ingenious games, psycho-dramas, dancing, aspects of yoga, and in Grotowski’s ‘‘paratheater’’ at least, jumping in mudholes in the woods, represent components. All these disciplines and ordeals are aim- ed at generating communitas or something like it in the group. André Gregory, who ran a workshop in Wroclaw, (On the Road to Active Culture, 1978:42) stressed that this process also ‘‘means reaching to the inner re- cesses of the actor and back into his past. . .an attempt to reach him—as a human being—in his undersoil and roots … It is not important whether one creates art, which one gives to people, but it is important that men—- beings not indifferent to one another in life and in work—are included in the creative process … I needed Grotowski’s theater not as someone con- nected with theater, or even as a spectator—I needed it as a human being.”

Again I would emphasize: the language favored by Grotowski has moved away from that of performing a play to that of self-discovery and unme 1 co ith and understanding of others. The rhetoric is owsk

nal

ples on is re-

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jected. One is reminded of Durkheim’s search for “secular substitutes’’ for both religion and ritual, and De Coubertin’s conviction that he had found these in international athletics—a conviction leading to his successful establishment of the Olympic Games, a Hellenistic, humanistic, post- religious, international, highly ritualized festival celebrating what all humans have in common: a body capable of being disciplined (a kind of profane ascesis) and an agonistic drive (though this Darwinian com- petitiveness proved to be mainly a feature of Western culture).

One can see the attraction, the lure, of Grotowski’s agenda. Let us create a liminal space-time ‘‘pod’’ or pilgrimage center, he seems to be saying, where human beings may be disciplined and discipline themselves to strip off the false personae stifling the individual within. There must clearly be a great sense of relief or release when the man and woman within emerge and are recognized. The idea of a return to nature is clearly connected with this emergence. But it is the experience of anthropologists that there are grave dangers in the initiatory processes. The initiand is usually being initiated into something; he or she may be released from one set of status-roles but only in order to be more firmly imprinted with another. The elders, the gurus, the masters of the circumcision lodge, the ‘‘guides,’’ are there to make indelible marks (not merely in the form of bodily mutilation, circum- cision, subincision, tooth-removal, scarification, and so forth, but also in the very psyche itself) on the generic human “‘prima materia’’ to which the initiands have been more or less willingly reduced. The subjective dimen- sion of initiation, of all types of passage ritual, indeed, has not been given sufficient attention by anthropological investigators. We can learn a good deal from experimental theatre here. But one can see how a totalistic or totalitarian polity or regime might find the sophisticated elaboration of new secularized rites of passage, guided by certificated ideologists who unders- tand the ritual process, very much to its taste.

To his credit Schechner has never forgotten that theatre is theatre and that entertainment is a fundamental part of it. Entertainment is liminoid rather than liminal, it is suffused with freedom. It involves profoundly the power of play, and play democratizes. Prospero realized this when he threw away his rod at the end of The Tempest. Schechner, though he has often been chided for taking liberties with an author’s playscript, has never thrown out such a script completely. Rather he regards the script as a vital component in the rehearsal process, though he does not treat it as sacrosanct. It is an essential preliminary frame, to say the least, through which the rehearsal process must flow, though the extent and character of this frame may itself be modified, sometimes quite drastically, by the inner logic of that process. Other components have almost equal weight: the director, the actor, the environment, that is, the stage setting which is created anew for every pro- duction. All these, and the i the rehe

“

, grow together, interact together, as i the child

ond of quot

proce

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psychologist Winnecott’s formulaton, ‘‘from me to not-me to not-not-me,’’ to express this process to theatrical maturation. The me, the biological- historical individual, the actor, encounters the role given in the script, the not-me; in the crucible of the rehearsal process a strange fusion or synthesis of me and not-me occurs. Aspects of the actor’s experience surface which tincture the script-role he or she has undertaken, while aspects of the dramatist’s world-view or message embodied in the script and particularly as understood from the perspective of the ‘‘character’’ being played penetrate the essence of the actor as a human being. The director’s role is mainly catalytic, he assists the alchemic or mystical marriage going on as the actor crosses the limen from not-me to not-not-me. The me at this third stage is a richer, if not deeper (I am unhappy about metaphors of “‘depth”’ here for they often rest on unconscious Western religio-philosophical assumptions): me than the me of the beginning.

But I am not here to attempt an exposition of Schechner’s rehearsal techniques—he can obviously do this much better than I can. What I am saying, though, is that by keeping in hand the life-line of the playscript, the saving fiction, as it were, Schechner saves his theatre from what Jacques Derrida has called ‘‘the monological arrogance of ‘official’ systems of signification.’’ And by keeping open the possibility of modifying the playscript—which, in a sense, also becomes a not-me and a not-not-me, like the actors themselves, the script itself may be saved from ‘‘the monological arrogance of official’’ interpretations which have tended to ossify poetic in- spiration into ‘‘classical modes of presentation.’’ Works of dramatic genius require many ages to be adequately, let alone fully, manifested; it is the task of each theatrical generation to rotate them anew in terms of its own experience. We are back with the loops of the horizontal figure eight again, the relationships of opposition and synthesis between social drama and aesthetic drama.

Entertainment! That’s a key word. Literally, it means ‘‘to hold between,’’ from OF entre between, and ¢enir, to hold. That is, it can be con- strued as the making of liminality, the betwixt and between state. Webster gives it both playful and serious valences, for it can mean (1) ‘‘to keep the interest of and give pleasure to; to divert; amuse,”’ or (2) ‘‘to allow oneself to think about; have in mind; consider.’’ Thus, in confession when the penitent told the priest that he had had lustful thoughts, the latter asked him, ‘‘But, son, did you entertain them?’’ His answer, honest enough, came quickly, ‘‘No, Father, but they entertained me.’’ This ambiguity is the soul of theatre, which is not a mechanism of repression or even of sublimation, but fantasized reality even while it realizes fantasy. It also allows the spectator his human dignity, his right to treat all he sees inan as- © way. Schechner has recently tried to move to a general

a binary,’’ one term of which is

subjunc of

racy-ritual’? (with transfor!

pe nce as

ng’’ the partici-

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From Ritual to Theatre/122

pant), the other being ‘‘entertainment-theater.’’ In my nomenclature these would represent a contrast between ‘‘liminal’’ and ‘‘liminoid’’ modes of performance. In actuality, they interpenetrate, though Grotowski would have the former prevail, and much of Broadway the latter. “‘Performance,’’ writes Schechner (Ritual, Play and Performance, 1977: 218), ‘‘comprehends the impulse to be serious and to entertain; to collect meanings and to pass the time; to display symbolic behavior that actualizes ‘there and then’ and to exist only ‘here and now’; to be oneself and to play at being others; to be in a trance and to be conscious; to get results and to fool around; to focus the action on and for a select group sharing a hermetic language, and to broadcast to the largest possible audiences of strangers who buy a ticket.’’

Back then, in the end, to our title whose ironies have been by no means dispelled by our peregrinations. When we act in everyday life we do not merely re-act to indicative stimuli, we act in frames we have wrested from the genres of cultural performance. And when we act on the stage, whatever our stage may be, we must now in this reflexive age of psycho-

analysis and semiotics as never before, bring into the symbolic or fictitious world the urgent problems of our reality. We have to go into the subjunc- tive world of monsters, demons, and clowns, of cruelty and poetry, in order to make sense of our daily lives, earning our daily bread. And when we enter whatever theatre our lives allow us, we have already learned how strange and many-layered everyday life is, how extraordinary the ordinary. We then no longer need in Auden’s terms the ‘‘endless safety’’ of ideologies but prize the ‘‘needless risk’’ of acting and interacting.

References Boulton, Marjorie, The Anatomy of Drama. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.

Burridge, Kenelm. Someone, No One: An Essay on Individuality. Princeton University Press 1979.

Dowlasz, Janina. ‘Psychologist at Grotowski’s,”” Zicie Literackie, No. 381538, pp. 111-1 September 18, 1977.

ed Genres: The Refi ng, 1980.

Road

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Hartnoll, Phy! The Concise History of Theater. New York: Harry N. Abrams, n.d

Schechner, Richard. Ritual, Play and Performance. New York: The Seabury Press, 1977.

—. ‘Performers and Spectators Tr 4, pp. 83-113, 1981

nsported and Transformed,’’ Kenyon Review, vol. IL, no.

Thomas, David Emil. ‘‘Mirror Images,’’ Scientific American, vol. 2/3, no. 6, pp. 206-228, 1980

ow and Reflection , Wisconsin

Turner, Victor. ame, F Benamou and GC. Carame

In Performance in Postmodern Culture, M Coda Press, 1977.

eds

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Index

Abrahams, Roger, 42-43 Acting, 102

Alland, Alexander, 90 Anthropology, teaching of, 89 Antistructure, 27, 33, 44 Antoun, Richard, 71 Aristotle, 9, 11, 72

Ausdruck, expression, 13

Barthes, Roland, 20-21

Bauman, Richard, 42-43

Beal, Samuel, 31

Becket, Archbishop Thomas, 67, 73

Beckett, Samuel, 37

Bedeutung, meaning, 14

Belmont, Nicole, 80

Belsnickling, 43

Bennett, John, 84

Benson, Sir Frank, 9

Bercovitch, Sacvan, 74

Berlin, Isaiah, 36

Bhagavad Gita, 30

Blake, William, 51, 82, 103, 10 112, 115, 118

Boehme, Jacob, 82

Boulton, Marjorie, 105

Breach, first phase in social drama, 70-71

Brook, Peter, 91, 116

Burke, Kenneth, 68, 106

Burridge, Kenelm, 113-114, 118-119

Calame-Griaule, Genevieve, 29 Cal sm, 37-39

Carnival, 42-44

Ceremony, 80-81, 83

Chronicle and story, 66-68

Communitas, 45-51; and flow, 55; defined, 45; ideological, 48; normative, 49; and Orc-Urizen cycle, 51; and Pentecost, 51; and social structure, 50; spontaneous, 47; and theatre, 15-17

Comparative symbology, 20; scope of, 23

Conflict, 11, 105

Cosmological principles, 29

Crisis, second phase of social drama, 70

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 48, 55- 57, 76

Culture as objectified mind, 14

Cunnison, Ian, 68

Danielou, Alain, 34

Delattre, Roland, 81

Dieterlen, Germaine, 29

Dilthey, Wilhelm, 18, 75, 86; on Ausdruck, expression, 13; on Be- deutung, meaning, 14; on Erleb- nis, experience, 11-15; on formal categories, 12; on, objectified mind, 14; on Verstehen, under- standing, 13; on Wert, value, 14

Dithyramb, origin of Greek tra- gedy, 103

Dogon of West Africa, 29

Doll House, A, 93

Drama-anthropology workshop

x/125

group, 91-100 Drama professionals, 90 Drama, social, see Social drama Dramaturg, 99-100 Dreyfus Case, 13, 70 Dumazedier, Joffre, 35 Durkheim, Emil, 12, 24,

collective representations, 54; on

la vie serieuse, 32

Eckhart, Meister, 82

Eliade, Mircea, 83

“Emic’’ and ‘‘etic,’’ 65-66, 86

Ergotropic, 9

Erlebnis, experience, 11-15

Ethnodramatics, 100-101

Etymology, 16

Etymologies: ‘‘act,’’ 103; ‘‘ambi- guity,’? 102; ‘‘entertainment,”’ 41, 114; ‘‘experience,’”’ 16-19; gan, to beget, 79; “‘leisure,’’ 40; “Jiminal,’? 24; “‘liturgy,’’ 30-31; “narrate,’’? 86-87; ‘‘-oid,’’ 32; “‘performance,”’ 13, 79, 91; “‘play,’’ 33-34; ‘‘shaman,’’ 31; “work,’’ 31-32

Experience: anthropology of, 64; artists’ expression of, 15; Erleb- nis, 12-15, 63; and postmodern theatre, 16; restored, 18

Experimental theatre, 15, 18, 116

Exu, deity of indeterminacy, 77

Firth, Raymond, 71, 91, 106

Flow, 55-58; and reflexivity, 76, 100

Franciscans, 50

“Freedom from, freedom to,’’ 36

Geertz, Clifford, 79, 82, 104; on ritual and theatre, 106-107; on text, 107

Gennep, Arnold van, 24-26, 41, 80- 81, 82

Gluckman, Max, 91, 106

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 15

Goffman, Erving, 90

Gossip, 68

Grathoff, R., 74

Grazia, Sebastian de, 35

Greek tragedy, 103-104

Gregory, Andre, 119

Griaule, Marcel, 29

Grimes, Ronald, 78

Grotowski, Jerzy, 12, 102, 116- 118, 119-120

Gulliver, Philip, 71

Handelman, Don, 74 Hanna, Judith Lynne, 81 Hartnoll, Phyllis, 103 Hassan, Ihab, 86 Heusch, Luc de, 68 Hodges, H.A., 12 Hornby, Richard, 99 Horton, Robin, 82 Huizinga, Johann, 85

Ibsen, Henrik, 93

Tk, The, 91

llomba, snake familiar, 96

Indeterminacy of social reality, 76- 77

Individual, the, 113

Initiation, 24-26

Iranian crisis, 70

Joking, 32

Kermode, Frank, 68, 77 Kuswanika jjina, name inheritance, 94

Leach, Sir Edmund, 79

Legesse, Asmarom, 65

Leisure, 35-37, 39

Levi-Strauss, Claude, 9, 28; models used by, 29

Lex, Barbara, 10

Liminal and liminoid: compared, 52-55; obligation and optionality, 42-44; seedbed of cultural crea- tivity, 28

Liminality, 25-27, 41-42, 46; tribal,

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29-30

Liminal period, dangers of, 84

Liminoid, 32-33, 52

Linguistics, 20-21

Liturgy, 30, 83

Loop diagram: social drama/aesthe- tic drama, 73, 90, 107, 121

Ludic: invention, 32; recombina- tion, 28; in tribal culture, 32

MacAloon, John, 55

Maine, Henry, 53

Makishi, Ndembu masked dancers, 43

Malinowski, Bronislaw, 92

Meaning, 14, 75-76

Metacommentary, 79, 104

“Mirror”? metaphor and the per- formative genres, 104-105, 107- 108

Moore, Sally Falk, 77, 80, 83

Myerhoff, Barbara, 75, 80, 83

Name inheritance ritual, Ndembu, 94-97

Narrative, 76, 86-87

Ndembu: chronicle, 66-67; gossip, 68; social dramas, 68-69, 92; social structure, 62-63

Nikhilananda, 30

Norbeck, Edward, 39

“not-not-me,’’ 121

Objectified mind, 14 Owen, Wilfred, 15

Paradigm, 73

Pentecost, 51

Performance: of ethnographies, 89- 101; transcultural synthesis through, 19

Performance Group, the, 16

Performing Garage, the, 93

Piaget, Jean, 34

Pike, Kenneth, 65

tual, 84-85

Poiesis, 87, 93

Pokorny, Julius, 17

Positivism, 12

Postindustrial symbolic systems, 29, 104

Postmodern theatre, 16

Pragmatics, 21

Processual form of Western drama, 9

Protestant ethic, 37-39

Puritanism and the theatre, 39

Rabelais, Francois, 23, 37

Rappaport, Roy, 83

Redress, third phase of social drama: as origin of performance genres, 10-12, 70, 74, 108-111; ritual as means of, 10, 75, 78

Reflexivity, 11, 76, 100; and ‘‘mir- rors,’’ 104-105

Rehearsal, 16, 18

Reintegration, fourth phase of social drama, 71

Religion, 86

Rites of passage, 24-30, 78, 80

Ritual, 10; and byss and abyss, 81- 82; and ceremony, 79, 83; de- fined, 79; drama, 96-98; as per- formance, 79-82; and theatre, 112-113; as work, 30-32, 35

Sacrifice, 10, 30

St. Vincent carnival, 42-44

Sandombu, 94-95, 96, 98

Sapir, Edward, 63

Satire, 40-41

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 20, 116

Schechner, Richard, 90-91, 99, 116; on end of humanism, 16;

and experimental theatre, 15,

119, 120-121; on performance

behavior, 105; and rehearsal, 18,

92-93; on restoring the past, 12;

/aesthetic drama

73, 90, 107; on

Index/127

Secular ritual, 80

Semantics, 21

Semiology, 21

Semiotics, 20

Sennet, Richard, 116

Sensory codes, 9

Shaman, 31, 83

Signifiants and signifies, 23

Singer, Milton, 24, 35

Skeat, Walter, 17, 33

Snake familiar, 96

Social drama, 9-12, 69-78; and Dilthey, 13; Ndembu, 69, 92, 94; performed, 91-92, 94; redressive phase as origin of performative genres, 10-12, 71, 75, 108-111

Social drama/aesthetic drama loop diagram, 73, 90, 107

Social dramas, examples, 69-71

Social process, 20-22

Spindler, George, 63

Star groups, 69, 72

Structuralists, 13

Subjunctive, 82-84

Sutton-Smith, Brian, 28, 52

Suzuki, Tadashi, 116

Symbolic anthropology, 20

Symbolic types, 74

Symbology, comparative, see Com- parative symbology

Symbols, 9; as dynamic, 22

Syntactics, 21

Tempest, The, 9

Text analysis, 107

Theatre: instrument for social self- scrutiny, 11; and social drama, 11; and the supernatural, 12; Western, 115

‘Theatre of the Absurd, 113

Thomas, David Emil, 105

‘Threads’? metaphor for historical and symbolic connections, 64

Transcultural synthesis, 19

Transition, 24

Turnbull, Colin, 91

Turner, Edith, 96

Twin ritual, 32

Unconscious purposes, 14-16

Vansina, Jan, 68 Vayda, Andrew, 84 Verstehen, understanding, 13, 18

Watergate, 70, 74

Watson, William, 26

Weber, Max, 37

Wert, value, 14

White, Hayden, 62, 64, 66

Wilson, Godfrey and Monica, 79

Winnecott, Donald, 121

Witter, Violet, 7

Work, definition, 31; of ritual, 31- 32, 35-36

Workshop: drama-anthropology, 91, 99; theatre, 16

Бескризисная экономика этногенеза

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Turner V. — From Ritual to Theatre (1982), OCR-текст

Turner V. — From Ritual to Theatre

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