WIDLOK, Thomas

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Title Introducution to Part IIAuthor(s)WIDLOK, ThomasCitationAfrican study monographs. Supplementary issue (2001), 27:99-102Issue Date2001-03URL http://dx.doi.org/10.14989/68416RightType Departmental Bulletin PaperTextversionpublisherKyoto UniversityAfrican Study Monographs, Suppl.27: 99-102, March 2001 99INTRODUCTION TO PART II: RITUAL PRACTICEThomas WIDLOKMax Planck Institute for Social AnthropologyInitially the division of this collection of papers into two parts, labelled “symboliccategories” and “ritual practice,” followed merely pragmatic reasons for groupingpapers which seemed to share some similarities. There was no explicit overarchingtheory demanding such a division into two parts except for the entrenched habitof anthropologists to divide the study of religion into that of “symbolism” and“ritual.” This is not the place to review the history of this distinction in anthro-pological thought. It should suffice to remind us that after protracted debatesabout the primacy of myth (read: symbolic categories) versus that of cult (read:ritual practices) studies of mythless rites - and riteless myths - were establishedas fields of enquiry in their own right (see Stanner, 1989 [1966]). It was then con-sidered common ground that symbolism could not be reduced to ritual activityor vice-versa. As a consequence, research in the two fields developed more or lessindependently of one another. In this context it is interesting to note that, at leastimplicitly, the papers of this collection do comment on the relation between the twofields of enquiry. Sugawara defines symbolism as that which is “non-tangible,” i. e.that which cannot be heard, felt or smelled, after all hallmark properties of ritualexperiences. Conversely, in my own paper I note that ritual is not just a messageclothed in a particular format but that it adds something to whatever is being en-coded symbolically. Or, to repeat R. Rappaport’s recent definition, ritual is “theperformance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances notentirely encoded by the performers” (Rappaport, 1999:24, my emphasis).Tsuru’s contribution in this volume gives very detailed evidence for the factthat Pygmy rituals tend to move from their source of encoding once they havebeen created. In fact the spirit rituals are exchanged and even sold in a way thatmany practitioners of rituals in other religions would consider to be shocking anddisgraceful. This Pygmy example not only exemplifies that attitudes to rituals maydiffer considerably in different contexts and that rituals need not be ceremonial toproliferate. It also shows that unceremonially acquired rituals meet the desiresof their Pygmy performers and that they work well for those who practice themeven after they have been disconnected from their original setting. Whatevermeanings may be encoded in these rituals, a full encoding is not sought after bypractitioners who value these rituals to the extent that they spend their scarceresources on acquiring something that was encoded by someone else who may noteven be known to them personally.Symbols and rituals both play fundamental roles in human evolution. Withlanguage comes not only the human ability to communicate meanings, to allowfor concerted social action and cooperation, to enlarge the pool of available in-formation but also the possibility to create categories that have no necessary andpre-determined link to empirical events and objects (Rappaport, 1999:21). In other100 T. WIDLOKwords, language, including the ability to create symbols, not only creates new pos-sibilities for humans but it also creates problems, above all the problem of lying andof representations which are misleading and possibly harmful to social relations ofthe present and detrimental to survival in the future. Rappaport argues that rit-ual, with its emphasis on repetition and form and on disallowing the practitionersto fully encode all meanings themselves, is the prime tool for dealing with lies.Rituals provide some security and some supra-individual means for taking actionagainst the fact that for all that symbolically matters to humans, for instance theexistence of a God or the desirability of a moral order, there is the possibility offormulating alternatives and the opportunity for lying (Rappaport, 1999:18). Herethe scope of individual human creations and imaginations has potentially harm-ful effects. Unfortunately, Rappaport and many other theorists of religion discusstheir thesis only with regard to the ritual practices of Australian Aborigines andother groups with particularly embroidered and elaborated religious systems butnot with regard to African hunter-gatherer cases. We consider this volume to be afirst step in redressing this bias.Approaching ritual as a safety net against harmful lies, not only has repercussionsfor our study of human origins but also for our study of current processes and ofthe future prospects of human life. In my own contribution to this volume I haveoutlined how the current changes that affect the Hai om medicine dance maywell produce a particular ritual format, with voluntary participation and forcefulritual experiences that are connected to everyday life. I suggest that these maywell be very successful in a future civil society, at least as it is envisaged by somesocial thinkers. “Enlightened” thought now takes relations and practices of hunter-gatherers as a model, not as a romantic look back to unspoiled origins but ratheras a forward-looking attempt to deal with the most pressing problems at hand.Dealing appropriately with the environment is probably the most urgent of theseproblems and hunter-gatherers have a reputation for being successful in this field,incorporating animals and plants into their considerations without disregardingtheir own needs as human beings. The two contributions dealing with southernAfrican hunter-gatherers, Imamura’s and my own, underline that hunter-gatherersare preoccupied with death and suffering. With rituals like the medicine dance,the Hai om hope to be “on the winning side,” not necessarily overcoming “nature”but also not forfeiting their peculiar situation as human beings.Imamura, in her contribution about Gui and Gana rituals, emphasizes thattheir rituals are typically not preventative but that they are curative as they dealwith events after they have occurred. That is to say, rituals are not an escape fromthe “real world,” nor are they a means of preventing anxiety and wrong behaviour.Rather, they are an everyday complement to the everyday social practice of theGui and Gana which is full of contingencies and choices that need to be made. Therites of the Central Kalahari Bushmen do not exempt individuals from deciding asto whether they want to eat the meat of a particular animal and whether they wantto enter an extra-marital sexual relationship but it helps them to mutually assureone another that they have done everything in their power to prevent any negativespin-offs that these decisions may entail. It is noteworthy that in the search foruseful means for carrying out their curative rituals the Gui and Gana do notIntroduction to Part II 101primarily make use of wild plants, as some may expect from hunter-gatherers,but of bodily fluids as well as of items taken from animal bodies. This suggeststhat hunter-gatherer rituals are not marked off from the rituals of their neighbourswith regard to the substances that they use but rather through the way in whichthey connect the experience of their own body, and other embodied entities, toritual procedures. At this point the papers on ritual seem to match closely thecontributions dealing with symbolic categories in the other part of this volume.The contributions to this volume do not explicitly investigate the relation be-tween ritual and cognition but at least implicitly anthropological research on ritualsuggests a new conception of cognition, namely as a process which is not limited tothe confines of individual human brains. The re-conceptualization of cognition asa process of propagating representations across different media - of which humanbrains are but one such medium amongst other embodied media - has recently beenformulated in detail by E. Hutchins and readers are referred to his work (Hutchins,1995). Here it is sufficient to point out that the assumption that rituals do alterreality and not only express meanings, need not lead to mysticism if we allow forthe possibility that the cognitive processes that do alter reality, make use of mediawhich are outside human brains, media which alter the representations that arepropagated across their particular forms. Cognitive problems get solved as repre-sentations are transported, or propagated, across a number of media and as thesemedia are brought into correspondence with one another. Hutchins’ ethnographicexample is the navigation of a large ship a task solved by making use of spatialarrangements, procedural routines, pre-defined social rules, tools and documentscreated by humans of previous generations whose problem solving has been cap-tured in these products and so forth. But what he writes about shared cognitionwould equally well hold true if we were to consider rituals to be parts of largercognitive systems. Rituals may not be particular good media through which toexpress oneself, even among hunter-gatherers where the distance between thosewho create rituals and those who practice them is rather short. But rituals maybe very suitable tools to alter reality in a way that is desirable in the long run,going beyond individual rationalism. Rappaport has pointed out that individualrational thought is unlikely to bring about the necessary protection of ecologicalresources and the desired balanced exchange between humans. Rituals, by con-trast, because they take place in the public (or at least supra-individual) spaceoutside human brains, provide an opportunity for achieving ecological and socialeffects that rational individual thought does not produce.REFERENCESHutchins, E. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cam-bridge.Rappaport, R. A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge.Stanner, W. E. H. 1989. On Aboriginal Religion. Oceania Monograph 36. University ofSydney, Sydney.102 T. WIDLOKAccepted September 25, 2000Author’s Name and Address: Thomas WIDLOK, Max-Planck-Institut fu¨r ethnologischeForschung, Postfach/P.O. Box 110351, 06017 Halle/S. Germany.E-Mail: widlok@eth.mpg.de

Introducution to Part II

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Introducution to Part II

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