Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual: II: Body, Performance, Agency and Experience

Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual General Editor Axel Michaels Editorial Board Michael Bergunder, Jörg Gengnagel, Alexandra Heidle, Bernd Schneidmüller, and Udo Simon

II

2010

Harrassowitz Verlag · Wiesbaden

Body, Performance, Agency, and Experience Including an E-Book-Version in PDF-Format on CD-ROM Section I Ritual and Agency Edited by Angelos Chaniotis Section II Ritual, Performance, and Event Edited by Silke Leopold and Hendrik Schulze Section III The Body and Food in Ritual Edited by Eric Venbrux, Thomas Quartier, and Joanna Wojtkowiak Section IV The Varieties of Ritual Experience Edited by Jan Weinhold and Geoffrey Samuel

2010

Harrassowitz Verlag · Wiesbaden

Publication of this volume has been made possible by the generous funding of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Cover: The young Louis XIV in the role of Apollo, in the Ballet „Royal de le Nuit“ by Jean-Baptiste Lully (1653), drawing, after 1653. Original in Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Picture credits:: „bpk | RMN | Bulloz“

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Table of Contents Section I: Ritual and Agency Edited by Angelos Chaniotis Angelos Chaniotis Introduction: Debating Ritual Agency

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Alexis Sanderson Ritual for Oneself and Ritual for Others

9

Thomas Widlok What is the Value of Rituals? Effects of Complexity in Australian Rituals and Beyond

21

Christian Meyer Performing Spirits: Shifting Agencies in Brazilian Umbanda Rituals

35

Claudia Weber Prescribed Agency – A Contradiction in Terms? Differences between the Tantric adhikāra Concept and the Sociological Term of Agency

59

Section II: Ritual, Performance, and Event Edited by Silke Leopold and Hendrik Schulze Andrea Taddei Memory, Performance, and Pleasure in Greek Rituals

87

Reinhard Strohm Memories of Ancient Rituals in Early Opera

109

Angela Bellia Music and Rite: Representations of Female Figures of Musicians in Greek Sicily (Sixth–Third Centuries B.C.)

127

VI

Table of Contents Kathryn Soar Circular Dance Performances in the Prehistoric Aegean

137

Rachele Dubbini Agones on the Greek Agora between Ritual and Spectacle: Some Examples from the Peloponnese

157

Edward Venn Evoking the “Marvellous”: Ritual in Michael Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage

183

Section III: The Body and Food in Ritual Edited by Eric Venbrux, Thomas Quartier, and Joanna Wojtkowiak Anke Tonnaer Fear and Fascination for a White Maggot: Savouring the Other in Tourist Ritual

197

Hans Stifoss-Hanssen and Lars J. Danbolt The Dead and the Numb Body: Disaster and Ritual Memory

211

Sophie Bolt and Eric Venbrux Funerals Without a Corpse: Awkwardness in Mortuary Rituals for Body Donors

221

Janneke Peelen Social Birth of Stillborn Children: The Body as Matter, the Body as Person

235

Meike Heessels From Commercial Goods to Cherished Ash Objects: Mediating Contact with the Dead through the Body

247

Joanna Wojtkowiak Living through Ritual in the Face of Death

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Thomas Quartier “This Is My Body”: Physical, Spiritual, and Social Dimensions of Embodiment in Roman-Catholic Funerals

277

Body, Performance, Agency, and Experience

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Section IV: The Varieties of Ritual Experience Edited by Jan Weinhold and Geoffrey Samuel Geoffrey Samuel and Jan Weinhold Introduction: The Varieties of Ritual Experience

295

Geoffrey Samuel Inner Work and the Connection Between Anthropological and Psychological Analysis

299

Etzel Cardeña and Wendy E. Cousins From Artifice to Actuality: Ritual, Shamanism, Hypnosis, and Healing

315

Michael Winkelman Evolutionary Origins of Human Ritual

331

Jay Johnston Physiognomy of the Invisible: Ritual, Subtle Anatomy, and Ethics

351

Daniel Böttger Empirical Test of the Effect of Facial Feedback on the Subjective Experience of Ritual

361

Magnus Echtler A Real Mass Worship They Will Never Forget: Rituals and Cognition in the Nazareth Baptist Church, South Africa

371

David Thurfjell Ritual, Emotion, and the Navigation of the Self

399

Andreas Odenthal Ritual Experience: Theology and Psychoanalysis in Dialogue about the Liturgy of the Catholic Church

409

Barbara Gerke The Multivocality of Ritual Experience: Long-Life Empowerments among Tibetan Communities in the Darjeeling Hills, India

423

Angela Sumegi Being the Deity: The Inner Work of Buddhist and Shamanic Ritual

443

VIII

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Beatrix Hauser Dramatic Changes? The Experience of a Religious Play in the Mega-City of Delhi

459

Yolanda van Ede Differing Roads to Grace: Spanish and Japanese Sensory Approaches to Dance

481

W. Gerard Poole Emotional Cultivation and the Chaotic Emotion: Towards a Theory of Ritual, Musical, and Emotional Parallel Morphology, as Encountered in Andalusian Ritual Practices

505

Sarah M. Pike Performing Grief in Formal and Informal Rituals at the Burning Man Festival

525

Jan Weinhold Navigating the Inner Work: The Experience of Ayahuasca within Santo Daime Rituals

541

Abstracts

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Section I: Ritual and Agency Edited by Angelos Chaniotis

Angelos Chaniotis

Introduction: Debating Ritual Agency Around the mid-second century CE news spread along the south coast of the Black Sea that a new god had manifested himself. This god could predict the future, give advice, heal the sick, and offer salvation after death. His name had a nice and familiar sound: “the sweet god, the New Asclepius” (Glykon Neos Asklepios). However his appearance was quite unusual, even for populations accustomed to divine diversity. He was a big snake with human features and long hair which resembled that of contemporary philosophers. The contemporary author Lucian provides a detailed, at times exaggerated, but not entirely fictitious account of the emergence of this new religion. If his account was not corroborated by other evidence (archaeological finds, inscriptions, images of the god on coins and statues, etc.), modern historians of religion would find it hard to believe any of Lucian’s information.1 But there is no doubt that the cult of Glykon the New Asclepius acquired great prominence in the second half of the second century CE and that hundreds of pilgrims came to his sanctuary in the small town of Abonou Teichos. Everything started with the discovery of a bronze tablet in the sanctuary of Apollo in Kalchedon. It contained an oracle with which Apollo announced that Asclepius would shortly arrive and take the city of Abonou Teichos into his possession. In expectation of the gods’ arrival, the inhabitants of Abonou Teichos started the construction of a new temple. It was in its foundation that a certain Alexander discovered an egg, out of which a snake emerged: it was the new god. From his temple the new snake-god gave oracles speaking with a human voice and performed healing miracles. Hundreds of pilgrims submitted their enquiries in sealed rolls of paper; even a Roman provincial governor consulted the oracle before a military enterprise, alas with disastrous results. Glykon also gave instructions for the establishment of a mystery cult. If agency is the power to transform

1 Victor 1997; Sfameni Gasparro 1996 and 1999; Chaniotis 2002 and 2004 (with further bibliography).

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the world,2 this snake-god surely had agency. But are we dealing with the agency of a transcendental being? Lucian attributes all this to Alexander. The man who discovered the egg in the foundations of the temple and became the god’s prophet discovered an egg that he himself had placed there. If Glykon spoke with a human voice, it was only because Alexander gave him a voice. Seated on a couch in a dark chamber, with majestic clothes, he held in his bosom a snake of uncommon size and beauty, hiding its head under his arm and showing instead a linen head to which cranes’ windpipes were attached. A collaborator spoke into this tube from the outside, answering the questions and giving the impression that the snake was speaking. Lucian presents the establishment of the new cult as a well-planned scheme, the result of skillful staging. Alexander is portrayed as a cunning man looking for the best method of acquiring power: realizing that human life is governed by hope and fear, and consequently by the desire to foretell the future, he concluded that the foundation of an oracular shrine, if successful, would make him rich and prosperous. Alexander had the power to transform the world, and he used it. He used his agency to give agency to the new god. Doing this, he set a process in motion which did not stop with his death. The rites continued to be performed; oracles continued to be given. Thus Alexander’s ritual innovation presents an interesting case of agency which transcended the physical existence of the agent: it was transferred from the agent (Alexander) onto a living creature to which supernatural powers were attributed; after Alexander’s death, a next generation of priests received their agency as ritual experts not directly from Alexander but from Alexander’s creation. This incident exemplifies the significance but also the complexity of agency in connection with ritual dynamics. The concept of “agency” – in close relation with notions of authority, intentionality, and efficacy – is essential for the understanding of the complex processes through which rituals change or resist change. In the study of rituals, the concept of “agency” has hitherto been primarily applied in connection with the role of individual ritual experts in the development and transmission of ritual norms and practices. However, the study of the dynamic of rituals has shown the necessity of a complex approach that closely considers the dynamic relations and negotiations between individuals and groups, “authors” and recipients of ritual traditions and innovations, and the part played by virtual, non-human, and supernatural agents (divinities, ancestors, oracles, etc.). The four papers, which are

2 Sax 2006: 474.

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presented in this section,3 examine four different manifestations of agency in the context of rituals in non-Western societies: India (Claudia Weber and Alexis Sanderson), Australia (Thomas Widlock), and Brazil (Christian Mayer). Two chapters, written by Alexis Sanderson and Thomas Widlock, approach agency in the context of negotiations between groups and focus on the operation of agency in practice. Another two chapters, written by Christian Meyer and Claudia Weber, have concrete case studies as their starting point but address more theoretical questions about ritual agency. Alexis Sanderson’s keynote address explores the factors that allowed Tantric Śaivism not only to survive but also to increase its influence outside the original community of experts and worshippers. These factors include the development of “rituals for others” through the modification of the core rituals by Śaiva officiants, the creation of a repertoire of ritual services that could appeal to royal patrons, the design of ritual duties that were less onerous than those of the initiates, and the opening of initiation to all four cast-classes. In addition to holding the position of royal perceptors, the gurus increased their hold over society also through their involvement in the rituals of the concentration of temples, palaces, irrigation works, and settlements. The relation between gurus and royal patrons was that of reciprocity: they imbued the king with the numinous power of Śivahood and at the same time they were imbued with the numen of royalty. Alexis Sanderson’s paper shows how agency works in practice in the relation between a group of ritual practitioners and others. The significance of agency in religious change stimulated by the complex relations between groups is the focus also of Thomas Widlock’s study. Using the concept of ritual dynamics and focusing on the rituals of the Australian aborigines, Widlock examines how rituals provide room for continual change and how ritual performers take into consideration the needs of others. In the context of negotiations between groups, rituals can reduce “transaction cost”; but this sometimes requires a modification of the ritual. Although such changes are stimulated from outside, they have to be generated by internal ritual agents. This kind of ritual innovation may add value to a traditional ritual and results in the emergence of “altruistic effects”. Seen from this perspective, ritual adaptations contradict the tra-

3 Six papers that treat “agency” in the context of rituals in the ancient Mediterranean will be published in Chaniotis 2010: Flavia Frisone, “A view inside the construction of consensus (homonoia): rules and change in ancient Greek funerary ritual”; Fritz Graf, “Ritual restoration and innovation in the Greek cities of the Roman Imperium”; Mireia López-Bertran, “Where are the priests? Ritual mastery in Punic shrines”; Ioanna Patera, “Changes and arrangements in the Eleusinian ritual”; Elisa Perego, “Engendered actions: Agency and ritual in pre-Roman Veneto”; Eftychia Stavrianopoulou, “‘Promises of continuity’: the role of tradition in the forming of rituals in ancient Greece”.

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ditional opposition between rational behavior and irrational ritualism. Modifications of rituals can thus be understood as part of a socially oriented agency. Christian Meyer’s study is dedicated to Umbanda, one of the syncretistic Brazilian religions, in which the agency of virtual powers (“spirits”) is of central importance. It is for this reason that in Umbanda religion it is very difficult to determine the exact locus of agency, and so Meyer introduces the concept of “shifting agencies”. Meyer denies that ritual agency is located at some clearly definable site and argues that “moments where the actors closely follow ritual rules alternate with moments of individual creativity or even of strategic deployment of the ritual frame”. This invites us to rethink the categorisation of rituals as “liturgical” or “performance-centred”.4 As the form and content of rituals is continually contested and negotiated, rituals change. In this process some rituals, instead of removing agency, seem to empower their protagonists (e.g. women) in ways opposed to social structure and in a manner that provokes important questions such as whether human actors are performing ritual or the ritual is performing itself through human actors, or whether agency can be attributed only to individual humans or to nonhuman agents as well. Finally, Claudia Weber critically reviews how the sociological term of agency has been used in connection with Western religion and in particular the way it has been connected with the concept of free will. For Weber agency entails different aspects: intentionality, the ability to act, and the choice to act otherwise. As a case study she proposes to examine how agency is constructed in non-Western cultures by focusing on a single term: the term adhikāra, used in Hindu Tantra. Adhikāra is normally attributed to individual persons; it consists of mental attitudes and corporeal qualifications; and it sometimes requires a certain social status (birth into a qualified family) and the approval of the man who has the custody over a potential female initiate. Criticizing the one-sided discussion of agency in connection with Western cultures, Weber urges us to consider divergent concepts by studying relevant terms in non-Western cultures. In connection with ritual studies, agency may still defy a generally accepted definition. But these four studies as well as the other papers that were presented in this panel (see note 3) make clear that case studies in different cultures, periods, and ritual contexts are still needed in order to fully comprehend the significance of agency for ritual dynamics.

4 Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994.

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References Chaniotis, Angelos 2002. “Old Wine in a New Skin: Tradition and Innovation in the Cult Foundation of Alexander of Abonouteichos”. In: Tradition and Innovation in the Ancient World (Electrum 6), Edward Dabrowa (ed.). Krokow: Jagiellonian University Press, 67–85. Chaniotis, Angelos 2004. “Wie erfindet man Rituale für einen neuen Kult? Recycling von Ritualen – das Erfolgsrezept Alexanders von Abonouteichos”. Forum Ritualdynamik 9. Heidelberg. (www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/archiv/5103). Chaniotis, Angelos (ed.) 2010 (forthcoming). Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean: Agents and Changes. Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag. Humphrey, Caroline & James Laidlaw 1994. The Archetypal Actions of Ritual. A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sax, William S. 2006. “Agency”. In: Jens Kreinath & Jan Snoek & Michael Stausberg (eds.). Theorizing Rituals. Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts. Leiden & Boston: Brill: 473–481. Sfameni Gasparro, Giovanna 1996. “Alessandro di Abonutico, lo ‘pseudo-profeta’ ovvero come construirsi un’identità religiosa. I. Il profeta, ‘eroe’ e ‘uomo divino’”. In: Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 62: 565–590. Sfameni Gasparro, Giovanna 1999. “Alessandro di Abonutico, lo ‘pseudo-profeta’ ovvero come construirsi un’identità religiosa. II. L’oracolo e i misteri”. In: Les syncrétismes religieux dans le monde méditérranéen antique. Actes du colloque international en l’honneur de Franz Cumont, Corinne Bonnet and André Motte (eds.). Bruxelles-Rome: 275–305. Victor, Ulrich 1997. Lukian von Samosata, Alexander oder Der Lügenprophet. Eingeleitet, herausgegeben, übersetzt und erklärt. Leiden, New York, Cologne: Brill.

Alexis Sanderson

Ritual for Oneself and Ritual for Others During the early medieval period of the Indic world, from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries, the old ritual order based on the archaic Vedic tradition became progressively complemented and overshadowed by another, developed and propagated by devotees of the god Śiva. In the first centuries of the Christian era the activities of these theistic sectarians were mostly restricted to brahmin celibate ascetics; but around the beginning of our period we find the first evidence that Śaivism had developed new forms that had moved beyond these narrow confines to propagate themselves in the broader society, creating in this process a new repertoire of rituals. This new Śaivism is known in Indian sources as the Mantramārga or “Path of Mantras”, as opposed to the purely ascetic “Atimārga” or “Path Outside the World” of the preceding period. The Indological term Tantric Śaivism may also be used to refer to it, though I prefer to avoid this expression, because the term Tantric has become contaminated by notions that apply only to certain forms that were mostly outside the mainstream of the Mantramārga. By the seventh century, the Mantramārga had emerged into a position of dominance, attracting widespread royal patronage, and from this time onwards exerted a profound influence on all the other religious systems that had to compete with it for patronage: Śāktism, Saurism, Vaiṣṇavism, Buddhism, Jainism, and the long established Brahmanical substrate. Śāktism and Saurism were largely subsumed by Śaivism as it rose to prominence; and Vaiṣṇavism, Buddhism, and Jainism reacted by developing new ritual systems along Śaiva lines: Pañcarātra, the Buddhist Mantranaya, and the Jain Mantravāda. The Brahmanical tradition was also deeply influenced, responding to Śaivism’s success by incorporating, and to some extent expurgating, forms of Śaivism in its ever-growing corpus of scriptural texts. The Śaiva literature, which we are still in the process of discovering, comprises in the first instance a huge body of scriptural compositions from the fifth or sixth century onwards, teaching the procedures for the propitiation of Śiva and, in more esoteric and transgressive texts, of the god Bhairava and a variety of ferocious goddesses, worshipped either as Bhairava’s consort or on their own. From the seventh century onwards, but in much greater abundance from the ninth, there emerged a learned tradition of commentaries on what were then the principal works of this scriptural corpus, and this was supplemented by the production of lucid, practical guides, which set out systematically the procedures of ritual, claiming to be rooted

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in this or that scripture, but in reality drawing eclectically on various scriptural sources, developing their own standardised procedures, and, to a large extent, shifting the emphasis of those texts, as well as homogenising their content. When I entered this terra incognita in the 1970s, the learned literature of commentary and systematisation was the natural starting point of my investigations, since, for all its shortcomings, it provided the only avenue of access to what was then a largely impenetrable mass of discordant scriptural texts and manuals, a mass which was, in fact, much vaster than I then imagined. Many works which seemed to have been lost, being known only by name or through citations in the learned commentaries, and many others besides, were still awaiting recognition in manuscript collections, principally in the Kathmandu valley, where the climate has been much kinder to palm-leaf than in other parts of the subcontinent, allowing the survival of numerous manuscripts copied in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, and some from the ninth and tenth. The world of ritual presented in this exegetical literature of commentaries and ritual manuals, which was my starting point and remained the basis of most discussion of Śaivism until recent years, is one of rituals for personal religious benefit, performed or commissioned for the purpose of salvation at death, conceived not as the attainment of some heaven, but the final cessation of rebirth through the attainment of liberation. The great selling-point of this religion was that it promised that this liberation could be attained effortlessly, by passing through a ceremony of initiation in which Śiva himself, or Bhairava, or the Goddess, would destroy the soul’s bonds, acting through the person of an initiated and consecrated officiant, who enacted an elaborate sequence of rites in which the individual was introduced before the Maṇḍala of his initiation deity, freed of his bonds through the offering of many oblations into fire, and then united with his deity through a visualisation in which the officiant drew the candidate’s soul into his own, and then raised it with his own up the central channel of his vital energy, and out through his cranial aperture to fuse it with the deity. Thereafter, the initiate was bound to observe a discipline which entailed the regular performance of a complex and time-consuming ritual of worship of his initiation deity, at least once a day and ideally thrice, until his death, combined with the regular study of scripture and the performance of yet more elaborate rituals on special occasions, both calendrically fixed and incidental. Here, then, was a religion for which ritual was everything. Ritual performed by an officiant, while one remained a passive presence, would gain one the goal that other systems offered only at the cost of intense asceticism and disengagement from the social world. Thereafter one had only to perform regular rituals of worship until that goal, so far achieved in advance on a subliminal level, became fully manifest simply through the natural process of death. However, since it was initiation itself that guaranteed salvation, the problem of maintaining commitment to this exacting routine between the time of initiation and

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death was acute. Theoreticians strove to construct theoretical justifications for what appeared to be redundant, and I examined these strategies in 1995 in my study Meaning in Tantric Ritual. The problem was to keep alive a sense that these obligatory rituals have a higher purpose than those of the brahmanical mainstream, which offered as justification for adherence to its own ritual obligations the realistic view that they were to be performed simply out of a sense of duty and adherence to tradition, to avoid the sin of their omission, or, as we might wish to translate this, to maintain one’s credentials as an observant member of one’s caste. The most intellectually brilliant of the Śaiva theoreticans, the Śākta Śaiva exegetes of Kashmir in the ninth to eleventh centuries, adopted two strategies to this end. One was to read meaning into the rituals in such a way that their performance could be presented as a liturgical contemplation of the reality that would be realised at death, thereby opening up the possibility that an élite among initiates could, through their rituals, experience liberation here and now, without waiting for death; and the other was to support this mystical trend by insisting on the preservation of the transgressive and ecstatic elements of their tradition, such as the consumption of meat and wine and ritualised sexual intercourse as a means of activating an inner aesthetic of transcendence of the inhibited norms of brahmanical life, thereby resisting a welldocumented trend to eliminate these elements as these traditions became routinised. But while these strategies make fascinating and, for some, inspiring reading, they were ultimately doomed to failure. They substituted knowing for doing in the first strategy, allowing the possibility of liberation in life through knowledge alone, and in the second by stressing that the purpose of the transgressive elements of ritual observance was to awaken an inner experience they opened the way to the substitution of non-ritual and non-transgressive means of producing the same effect. In later centuries the brahmins of Kashmir among whom this Śākta Śaiva tradition had become dominant, duly abandoned all its rituals, thinking Śaiva but regressing on the level of rites to the received brahmanical traditions of their caste, reverting to the brahmanical duality of doing without knowing and knowing without doing. How, then, one wonders, did Śaiva ritual survive, as it did, outside this community, whose literature forms such a conspicuous part of high Śaiva culture? What is it that set that community apart, and how did Śaiva ritual succeed in exerting such a tremendous influence in early medieval India, affecting all the other religions, when the presentation of ritual in this learned literature with its high soteriological purpose seems to promise a very different trajectory? The purpose of the rest of my address is to propose answers to these questions.

Ritual for Others The difficulty arises from the fact that the élite literature which has formed our natural point of entry into the study of Śaivism provides an entirely inadequate

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representation of the historical realities of the religion. It privileges the Śaivism of a social élite conforming to the brahmanical ideal of personal religious self-cultivation, an élite whose social identity was already sufficiently established by its conformity to the brahmanical stratum of its observance, an élite for whom distinctively Śaiva ritual was a supererogatory adornment, rather than a necessity, and was therefore always in danger of evaporating in favour of a purely devotional or gnostic Śaiva identity. What kept Śaivism alive, and enabled it to exert this influence, was ritual for others, as the professional activity of officiants who operated outside the narrow confines of self-cultivation. In the élite literature, the officiant is presented as a spiritual guide acting for the benefit of liberation-seekers. In the broader reality, revealed both by the Śaiva literature that has been coming to light in recent times and by the epigraphical record, Śaiva officiants were professional ritualists who, while insisting on the superior spiritual character of their religion, succeeded in modifying its core rituals to create a repertoire of ritual services that made it increasingly attractive to royal patrons. For these officiants, conformity to the post-initiatory discipline, however difficult it may have been to justify theoretically, was a professional necessity. It was the visible, and therefore objective, proof of their qualification to apply modifications and elaborations of these rituals for the benefit of their clients; and it was equally vital for their disciples, who are best seen as officiants in waiting. For them, it was gnosis not ritual that was the supererogatory adornment. A reputation for learning and spiritual insight could greatly heighten the appeal of an officiant to a royal patron, but Gurus who claimed that learning and insight were sufficient were the enemies of their profession. What mattered to these Śaivas was verifiable qualification, certificates of ritual entitlement bestowed by recognised officiants, rather than spiritual charisma based on unverifiable mystical experience, that threatened to undermine their pre-eminence. In extending their influence by these means, they showed little concern, as we might expect, to maintain the theoretical coherence of the doctrines of their faith, compromising this in several ways as they adapted their rituals to strengthen their hold on society. Accordingly, the traditionalist theoreticians, while no doubt fully aware of these developments, tend to keep them out of the picture that they present, addressing themselves to a learned élite that likewise held itself apart from these changes. They largely conceal from us, therefore, an outstanding example of how inventive and adaptable the propagators of ritual systems can be in the drive to extend the power, wealth, and influence of their faith, a creativity that in this case set in motion waves of competitive innovation in the religions around them that completely changed the character of Indian religion and thence that of Inner Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Far East. None is more striking than the astonishing efflorescence of Tantric Buddhism during this period, which, following the lead of the Śaivas, developed a system of rituals that eventually died out in India but survives to this day in Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia, and Japan. But the Vaiṣṇavas, too, made strenuous

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efforts in this direction, producing an entirely new ritual system closely modelled on the Śaiva and enshrined in the scriptures of the Pañcarātra. In a recently published study, entitled The Śaiva Age, I have set forth the innovations that brought Śaivism to its position of dominance during the early medieval period, both on the subcontinent and in Southeast Asia, and I have offered an hypothesis that seeks to explain this success, namely that it extended and adapted its ritual repertoire to legitimate, empower, or promote the key elements of the social, political, and economic process that characterises the early medieval period, while at the same time taking steps to integrate itself with the brahmanical substrate in ways that rendered it accessible and acceptable to a far wider constituency, and therefore all the more appealing to rulers in their role as the guardians of the brahmanical social order. I shall end by summarising these innovations.

Initiating the Monarch The first of these key elements is the spread of the monarchical model of government through the emergence of numerous new dynasties at subregional, regional, and supraregional levels. From the seventh century onwards, inscriptions and prescriptive religious texts reveal that Śaiva Brahmin Gurus were holding the position of royal preceptor (rājaguruḥ) in numerous new kingdoms, both on the Indian subcontinent and in Southeast Asia, and in this capacity empowering and legitimating the monarch’s rule by granting him Śaiva initiation (Śivamaṇḍaladīkṣā). It might be thought that this would have been an unappealing step for any but the most reclusive and ineffectual of kings, since, as we have seen, after initiation Śaivas were obliged to adhere to a complex and time-consuming programme of daily and occasional rituals. However, early in the development of the Mantramārga, the Śaivas, no doubt in order to extend their recruitment and hence their influence, admitted a category of initiates who, in consideration of the fact that they were incapable of taking on these onerous duties, were exonerated from doing so. The king was considered to qualify for this less arduous route to liberation by reason of his royal obligations. He was therefore required to adhere only to the obligations of an uninitiated devotee of Śiva, which in his case were principally to support the religion and its institutions, and to sponsor and appear in conspicuous ceremonies in the civic domain. Moreover, according to prescriptive sources, the king’s initiation was to be followed by a Śaiva modification of the brahmanical royal consecration ceremony. In this way the monarch was incorporated as a new kind of Śaiva office-holder: while others were to be consecrated for purely Śaiva functions, the king was to be consecrated to take up office as the “head of [the brahmanical social order of] the casteclasses and religious disciplines” (varṇāśramaguruḥ), the role already assigned to him by brahmanical prescription.

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As the function of the Śaiva consecration is modified in this case, so its form, though in general Śaiva, incorporates distinctive non-Śaiva elements appropriate to its mundane and brahmanical aspects, such as the inclusion of the royal banners, weapons, and armour in the objects of worship. Just as this brahmanical rite is subsumed within the Śaiva process of initiation and consecration, so its outcome, the king’s entitlement to rule as guardian of the brahmanical social order, now entails the additional requirement that he should ensure that the authority of brahmanical prescription be subsumed within, and subordinate to, that of the Śaiva scriptures, an injunction supported by the promise that, by enforcing this hierarchical relationship, he would guarantee the stability of his rule and kingdom, implying that by neglecting to do so he would bring about their collapse. The Śaivas also adapted the theory of their ritual practice to enable them to claim that those rulers who underwent their initiation ceremony would be empowered in their efforts to maintain their supremacy and extend it through conquest, a blatant but effective amnesia of the rite’s purely salvific character. Nor was it only the theory that was adjusted to suit their patrons. The Śaiva Guru was to close the initiation ceremony by sprinkling the horses, elephants, chariots, and soldiers of the army with the water from the vase of the Weapon-Mantra (astrakalaśaḥ), one of the two main vases prepared in the course of the ceremony, “in order to remove all obstacles and to ensure victory in battle”. They also developed an array of apotropaic, invigorative, and hostile Mantra-rites that could be performed on demand for the benefit of the realm, to promote the success of royal patrons, and to frustrate their enemies. Just as the Guru imbued the king through these ceremonies with the numinous power of Śivahood in the exercise of his sovereignty, so the Śaiva rites by which the Guru assumed his office ensured that he, as Śiva’s agent among men, was imbued with the numen of royalty. As in the brahmanical consecration of a king, in which the royal astrologer was to provide him with the royal elephant, horse, throne, parasol, fly-whisk, sword, bow, and jewels, so at the time of a Guru’s consecration he received from his predecessor the non-martial symbols of sovereignty (rājāṅgāni, rājacihnāni), such as the turban, crown, parasol, fly-whisk, elephant, horse, palanquin, and throne. Furthermore, according to the prescriptions of the Śaiva scriptures, the residence to be built for the Guru by his royal disciple was in many respects similar in its layout to the royal palace. It included, for example, an arsenal for the storage of weapons of war. That Gurus should have needed the means of warfare may surprise those whose expectations are conditioned by the prescriptive literature. But on this point, as on many others, the epigraphical record shows the limitations that that literature imposes. For a twelfth-century inscription from the Kalacuri kingdom in Central India reveals that the activities of the Rājaguru Kīrtiśiva extended beyond the spiritual to those of a successful military com-

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mander, who expanded his monarch’s realm and thereby added to his own through the appropriation of temples in the territories gained. Kings rewarded their Śaiva Gurus for initiations and other rituals with lavish gifts, most notably with grants of the revenue from designated lands and the donation or construction of monasteries (maṭhaḥ); and this largesse enabled these Gurus to behave like royal patrons themselves, making land-grants to brahmins and founding temples, new settlements, and further monasteries, thus facilitating the expansion of their institutions into new areas. In this way there developed a farreaching network of interconnected seats of Śaiva learning. Figures at the summit of this clerical hierarchy therefore exercised a transregional authority whose geographical extent was greater than that of any contemporary king. Clearly the Śaiva Rājaguru had become a far grander figure than the king’s brahmanical chaplain, the Rājapurohita, who was tied to the service of a single king and was unambiguously his subordinate. Yet, it appears that the Śaivas did not rest with this, but sought also to encroach on the territory of that lesser office. For the Netratantra shows the existence of a new class of Śaiva officiants who were to function in almost all the areas traditionally reserved for that officiant: the performance of the king’s recurrent duties to worship the various deities on the days assigned to them, to celebrate the major annual royal festivals of the Indrotsava and Mahānavamī, to protect the royal family through rites to ward off ills, to restore them to health after illness, to ward off or counter the assaults of dangerous supernaturals, to empower through lustration (nīrājanam) the king’s elephants, horses, and weapons of war, and to protect the king with apotropaic rites before he eats, sleeps, and engages in his regular practice of martial skills. We see here one of several instances in which the Śaivas used their authority to colonise downwards, producing modifications of their ritual procedures for this purpose. These adapations inevitably entailed loss of status for those that implemented them, but we should understand that this did not affect those of the summit of the clerical hierarchy, the king-like Rājagurus, but only the humbler clones that extended their authority into domains that those Gurus would not deign to enter.

The Consecration of Royal Temples The second element of the early medieval process that I have in mind is the proliferation of land-owning temples. All but the most ephemeral sovereigns during this period, both in the subcontinent and in Southeast Asia, gave material form to the legitimacy and solidity of their power by building grand temples in which images of their chosen God were installed, animated, named after the king (svanāmnā), and endowed with land and officiants to support their cult. The great majority of these temples enshrined Śiva, in the form of the Liṅga. The Śaivas of the Mantramārga soon extended their operations into this territory too, providing

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the specialised officiants and rituals to establish these Śivas following Mantramārgic models, and developing, in the course of time, a secondary body of scriptural authorities, the Pratiṣṭhātantras, devoted exclusively to this domain.

The Temple Priesthood The involvement of the Śaivas of the Mantramārga in the temple cult, covered in early Śaiva scriptural sources and all the early manuals up to at least the twelfth century, does not extend beyond the performing of the rituals necessary to initiate the cult by consecrating the images and the temples that house them. The texts are silent on the nature of the worship that would be performed before those images once the Śaiva Guru had completed his task. It would appear, therefore, that the temple worship was in the hands of officiants of a different kind. However, the texts lagged behind reality in this regard. For at some point, well before the Śaiva literature was prepared to admit this fact, there had appeared yet another class of Mantramārgic officiants, working as the priests that performed the regular rituals in the Śaiva temples, a function that entailed a serious loss of status in the eyes of orthodox brahmins, who considered any brahmin who derived his living from serving as a priest to have fallen from the caste of his birth.

The Consecration of Palaces, Settlements, and Irrigation Works The early Śaiva Pratiṣṭhātantras show that the authority of the Śaiva Sthāpaka, the officiant who specialises in the installation of images and the consecration of temples, extended to the creation of the palaces of their royal patrons. They prescribe the layout of the royal palace in detail, and the design includes a section of the palace for teachers of the Śaiva Mantramārga. Moreover, the layout of the palace taught in these Pratiṣṭhātantras is only part of the layout for an urban settlement to be established by the king around the palace, complete with markets and segregated areas for the dwellings of the various castes and artisans, with instructions for the size and plan of these dwellings determined by caste status. Thus, we find the Śaivas involving themselves in what I consider to be the third key element of the medieval process, namely the creation of numerous new urban settlements from above. The epigraphical record demonstrates that any king of substance felt it incumbent upon him to demonstrate his sovereignty, not only by the building of temples, but also by the creation of new urban settlements (puram), which, like the deities he established, were generally named after him. The creation of new settlements entailed the provision of the means of irrigation. Rituals for the consecration (pratiṣṭhā) of wells (kūpaḥ), step-wells (vāpī), and reservoirs small (puṣkariṇī) and large (taḍāgaḥ), were already provided by the

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brahmanical tradition. There is no trace of irrigation rituals in the early Śaiva scriptures, including the Pratiṣṭhātantras. But in due course Śaiva officiants, seeking to add this important domain to their ritual repertoire, produced their own versions.

Social Inclusivity The last respect in which I believe that the Śaiva Mantramārga can be seen to have played an active role in the historical process is that of the assimilation of the communities that were caught up in the extension of the reach of the state that characterises this period. For the Śaivas opened initiation to candidates from all four casteclasses, thus enabling the integration of powerful agriculturalist communities classed as Śūdra, that were often dominant in the countryside, and providing a means of articulating a social unity that transcended, at least in certain contexts and to a greater or lesser extent, the rigid mutual exclusions of the brahmanical social order. Moreover, the non-Saiddhāntika traditions of the worship of Bhairavas and the Goddess, while perfectly adapted to support kings in the aggressive or punitive aspect of their function, also served as the means of assimilating the local deitycults of the territories being drawn within this Śaiva-brahmanical culture through the expansion of state-formation at the subregional level; and while the Saiddhāntikas came to initiate only members of those communities classed as Śūdra who had already been assimilated by brahmanical culture to the extent that they had abjured alcohol, the Śākta Śaivas had no such reservations, opening initiation even to those that brahmanism considered untouchable.

The Integration of Brahmanism Finally, while extending its influence beyond the confines of the orthodox brahmanical world, the Śaivism of the Mantramārga sought to guard itself against dissociation from that world. It elaborated an inclusivist model of revelation that ranked other religious systems as stages of an ascent to liberation in Śaivism, the religion of the king manifest in his initiation, his consecration, and his royal temples, thus mirroring and validating the incorporative structure of the state’s power. But though it thereby asserted, especially in its Śākta forms, the limited nature of the brahmanical observance that formed the lowest level and broad base of this hierarchy, it was careful to insist not only that the brahmanical scriptures that govern this observance are exclusively valid in their own domain, but also that their injunctions are as binding on Śaivas after their initiation as they were before it, if they remained in that domain as active members of society. Śaiva ascetics were allowed a degree of choice in this matter, at least in theory, but householders were not. The religion of the Śaivas, then, was not Śaivism alone, but rather Śaivism and

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Brahmanism, a fact borne out not only by their literature, but also by biographical data and the epigraphic record of the activities of Śaiva kings. Moreover, the determination of the Śaivism of the Mantramārga to be fully embedded in the brahmanical tradition is manifest not only in this rule that initiates should maintain their brahmanical obligations, but also in the fact that they extended their own ritual repertoire in order to bring it into greater congruence with the brahmanical. To this end, they created a Śaiva ritual of cremation and a series of rituals to mirror the numerous brahmanical postmortuary rituals in which the deceased receives offerings first as a hungry ghost (pretakriyā) and then in Śrāddha rituals as an ancestor, after his incorporation with the immediate ascendants of his patriline (sapiṇḍīkaraṇam). It is clear that the creators of these additions were motivated by nothing but the desire to be seen to conform to the norms of brahmanical society, once they had moved to extend recruitment beyond the inevitably restricted circle of ascetics into the more numerous ranks of married householders. After all, these rituals, and especially the Śrāddhas, make no sense in strictly Śaiva terms, since initiates are held to attain liberation as soon as they leave their bodies, and therefore should require no ceremonies designed to ensure their well-being after death. This accommodation of Brahmanism no doubt gave Śaivism a distinct advantage over those religions, such as Jainism and Buddhism, that had denied outright the authority of the brahmanical scriptures, and there can be little doubt that this would greatly have increased its acceptability in the eyes of kings, who could thus draw on the power of the new religion to sanctify their rule and enhance their might – the former predominantly through the Siddhānta, the latter predominantly through the Śakta Śaiva systems – while at the same time maintaining their legitimacy in their ancient role as the protectors of the brahmanical social order.

Conclusions As Śaivism advanced by developing these strategies, it achieved a transregional organisation and a consequent standardisation of its rituals and doctrines; and this transregional uniformity, I propose, would have heightened its appeal to kings by enabling it more easily to be perceived as a transcendent means of legitimation, empowerment, and the integration of regional traditions, as an essential part of a pan-Indian socio-religious order that each kingdom sought to exemplify. It was by virtue of its great success in attracting royal patronage that it came to exert such a pervasive influence on the religions around it; and it was also on the basis of this success that it could construct the impressive edifice of a literature that, in its focus on ritual for oneself, is almost entirely silent about these vital but less elevated rituals for others, with the consequence that scholars who have at-

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tempted to read this literature have mostly neglected to look in and beyond it for evidence of the factors that enabled and sustained this high-cultural efflorescence.1

1 Most of the arguments presented here in outline have been presented by me in detail elsewhere, cf. the bibliography.

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References Sanderson, Alexis 1995. “Meaning in Tantric Ritual”. In: Anne-Marie Blondeau & Kristofer Schipper (eds.). Essais sur le Rituel III: Colloque du Centenaire de la Section des Sciences religieuses de l’ École Pratique des Hautes Études. LouvainParis: Peeters: 15–95. — 2003–2004. “The Śaiva Religion Among the Khmers (Part I)”. Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 90–91: 352–464. — 2004. “Religion and the State: Śaiva Officiants in the Territory of the Brahmanical Royal Chaplain with an Appendix on the Provenance and Date of the Netratantra”. Indo-Iranian Journal 47: 229–300. — 2007a. “Swami Lakshman Joo and His Place in the Kashmirian Śaiva Tradition”. In: Bettina Bäumer & Sarla Kumar (eds.). Saṃvidullāsaḥ. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld: 93–126. — 2007b. “The Śaiva Exegesis of Kashmir”. In: Dominic Goodall & André Padoux (eds.). Mélanges tantriques à la mémoire d’Hélène Brunner. Pondicherry: Institut français d’Indologie / École française d’Extrême-Orient: 231–442; 551–582. — 2009. “The Śaiva Age: The Rise and Dominance of Śaivism During the Early Medieval Period”. In: Shingo Einoo (ed.). Genesis and Development of Tantrism. Tokyo: University of Tokyo: 41–349.

Thomas Widlok

What is the Value of Rituals? Effects of Complexity in Australian Rituals and Beyond Introduction: Ritual and Rational Economic Action What type of agency is to be found in ritual? In this contribution I shall look at one aspect of this issue by investigating the relation between economic rationality and ritual action. There is a tendency in current economics to be “imperialist”, insofar as it claims to be able to provide a theory of all human behaviour in terms of a bounded rationality geared towards maximization. This claim does not exclude ritual, which is no longer seen as the antonym of rational economic behaviour, but, instead, to be ultimately following the same principles. Ritual action therefore has become subject to explanation through economic theory. In this contribution, I sketch this development and I provide a critique and an alternative account of the relation between economic and ritual behaviour on the basis of some ethnographic examples from Australian Aboriginal religion. Initially, Western economics (like Western medicine) largely defined itself as a distinct discipline and enterprise in terms of the ways in which it “purified” human rational behaviour from irrational ritualizations.1 In the aftermath of this development, ritual was conceived of as the opposite, or at least a possible opposite, to rational economic behaviour. Especially with regard to liberal capitalist economizing, any ritual with its repetitions, routines, and fixed structures seemed to be the opposite of the innovative and dynamic action that came to stand for economic success. This was always in stark contrast to the way in which ritual action was conceptualized outside the sphere of North Atlantic economic theory. In the ethnography of rituals in the Pacific, for instance, ritual and economic success were seen to be intimately linked in concepts and practices surrounding the notion of “cargo”.2 Australian Aborigines, when speaking English, talk of ritual as “religious business”, refusing to separate out a ritual sphere that was completely unlike the sphere of economic everyday action. While the opposition of ritual and economics may still dominate the public discourse in the West, there are indicators that this 1 Carrier and Miller 1999: 39. 2 See Wagner 1975.

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perspective is now also changing in the Western discourse, at least in some respects. This may have partially to do with dissenting views as to what constitutes economic success (measured against “sustainability” rather than infinite growth, for instance), but also with a changed perspective on ritual as being both functional and in many ways dynamic, and as involving human agency. This last point, relating to a changing perspective on ritual, is underlined by the conference on “ritual dynamics” that gave rise to this and the other contributions of this volume. Here, ritual is seen, despite its structurating form, as highly adaptive and as providing room for creativity, change, and human agency.3 In fact, the structuring form may also be considered to be highly adaptive and functional. In economic terms, a supportive institutional framework helps to organise coordinated action, and ritualisation may help to provide such a framework.4 In other words, rituals may help to reduce transaction costs that inevitably occur as different individuals and groups encounter one another and need to negotiate the terms of their trade, or, more generally, their interaction. Examples for such reduced costs can be observed in many places where people with very different backgrounds meet. Tourists and local hosts commonly develop ritualised forms of interaction that allow them to interact without conflicts and for mutual benefit. In present-day Australia, for instance, tourists take over the ritualised role of “ignorant Westerner”, while locals take over their role of “benevolent host”.5 Smoking rituals, formerly used by Aborigines in intergroup gatherings and in mortuary rituals, have been successfully appropriated by contemporary Australian civil society to facilitate the reconciliation between indigenous and other Australians.6 Rituals “work” in the sense that they allow participants to achieve a change of status, or an agreement of terms and positions, through performance. This functionality is accepted also by those who otherwise are highly critical of rituals and of the religious worldviews that are commonly associated with them. Teachers today may no longer feel the need to have prayers at the beginning of a school lesson, but they frequently recognise the usefulness of a short ritual, a phrase uttered in unison, a change of bodily position, etc., which marks the boundary between break time and school time. Rituals achieve this marking through their performative properties, which are not easily replaced by non-ritual statements. Australian Aborigines, whose history is shaped by rigid rituals in pre-colonial times, and, frequently, an equally rigid period of mission and state control thereafter, also see this functionality, and see the breakdown of ritual life in direct relation with the breakdown of relations between the generations and of their social order more generally.7 Conse3 4 5 6 7

See Venbrux & Bolt & Heessels 2008. See Seele 2010. See Tonnaer (in press). See Altena & Notermans & Widlok (in press). See Kolig 1981; Swain 1993.

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quently, in Aboriginal English ritual is labelled as “business” and “law”, and not as a separate sphere of irrational behaviour. There is a tradition of exchanging or even “selling” rituals and their elements (songs, designs, dances, objects) from one community to another.8 And this is not only true for Australia, but for a number of cases outside the Western world, where rituals have – probably long before the globalised commodification began – also always had an economic dimension, and where they have been used as a resource, not only of power, but also of economic income.9 With knowledge about the functionality of ritual spreading in the West, it may not come as a complete surprise that ritualisation is sought after in many domains of life, from medicine, therapy, organisational and personnel management, to the events in mediatised politics and in shopping malls.10 Contributions to the panel “Ritual and Economics”, as well as to other panels of the 2008 conference on the “Science of Ritual”, bear witness to this movement towards embracing ritual as a practical and rational means to fulfil certain social functions. When trying to deal with situations in which rituals seem to be rationally and even more narrowly economically useful, two main theoretical strands have emerged: Ritual is either covered under the notion of symbolic capital, following Bourdieu and others, or it is considered to be an adaptive simplification, reducing transactional costs of choices, following the Institutional Economics approaches of North and others.11 As I shall point out below, I think that both these approaches go some way, but that they only relate to the extrinsic or strategic value of rituals; however, they do not do justice to the value attached to rituals by the practitioners, nor to some of the long-term evolutionary processes that involve rituals as complex systems. Many rituals are carried out in the subjective conviction that one performs a ritual not for the sake of oneself, but also for the sake of some person or entity different from oneself, or at least for its own sake. In other words, there is an assumed intrinsic value to ritual. How are we to account for such an intrinsic value of rituals? How do we account for the possibility that the fundamental driving forces behind participation in rituals may not necessarily or predominantly be personal economic advantage, or a complete lack of choice, but rather that it forms part of socially oriented agency? When ritual is considered to be “symbolic capital” that can be converted into other forms of capital within the institutional limitations set by human culture, the “costs” of doing things ritually are treated as either direct or indirect modes of investment bounded by a substantial amount of uncertainty. In such a framework, there is very little room for explaining phenomena of apparently “altruistic” aspects of ritual activities. Similarly, when ritual is considered to be a tool for reducing 8 9 10 11

See Widlok 1992. See Tsuru 2001. See Sorgo 2008. Bourdieu 1977; North 1990.

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costs, the assumption is that the tool is usefully and purposefully employed by selfinterested agents. Ritual may not necessarily follow egoistic desires, but it is still considered to be an individual choice, informed by it having advantages over other ways of doing things. Again, this does not take into account that ritual performers often see their action as being demanded by the situation, and of their action being only partly a sovereign act of choice, and more often a requirement defined by the needs of others. Moreover, given the varied history of rituals12, it seems that calculating the costs and benefits of a ritual becomes highly arbitrary, depending on where one sets the limits in time and in terms of the circle of beneficiaries. It seems that both, the symbolic capital theory and the transaction cost theory, are not sufficient for accounting for the perspectives of participants in a ritual, nor in the long-term perspective that an outside observer might gain in a transgenerational and translocal view of ritual agency. The alternative approach that I want to sketch here looks at ritual as a complex phenomenon that, due to the complexity involved, gives room to both apparently altruistic and apparently self-interested behaviour.

Ritual as a Complex System In what sense, then, should we consider ritual, and Australian Aboriginal ritual in particular, a complex system? After all, there are no huge temples in Australia, the number of participants involved is comparatively low, and no large superstructures, kingdoms, or states rely on these rituals, politically or economically. In fact, one of my arguments is that, if we can understand Australian Aboriginal rituals in terms of their complexity, this would hold a forteriori for other settings as well. In the Australian context, complexity refers to the location, the ritual structure itself, the social agents, the timeframe, and the ritual roles involved. Complex Location As has been documented elsewhere13 the so-called “travelling rituals” in Aboriginal Australia cover great distances, and may take a number of possible routes as they are transferred from one place to another.14 Not only are rituals enmeshed in a cross-regional network of mythological tracks connecting the whole continent, there are also rituals that are handed over from one community to the next, and they cover large parts of the continent this way. Frequently, they follow established routes of exchange for other items (both everyday utilitarian items such as axes, and ceremonial items such as ochre), but since each local community can influence 12 See for example Bloch 1986. 13 Widlok 1992. 14 See Kolig 1981; Swain 1993; Redmond 2001.

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the flow of goods and rituals, each ritual may form its own trajectory with diverse points of origins, at times opposite overall directions, and diverse routes covering large areas. Moreover, since rituals are usually not handed over in a single go, but rather in a piecemeal fashion, the various items that make up a ritual complex may travel independently of one another, adding to the complex regional pattern across individual localities. Complex Ritual Form Travelling rituals in Australia consist of many parts and facets that may be owned and transferred independently of one another. In fact, one of the major enticements to own and to transfer rituals is exactly this property of some items being disclosed and handed on, so that they create a demand for more to follow. The arrival of a new ritual may announce itself through individual body designs, individual objects, or elements of songs and dances. Moreover, as in any system of oral tradition, the existing body of elements that belong to a ritual may be enriched as the ritual moves across the country and picks up elements in the course of this movement. The prevalent timeframe therefore plays an important role in the constitution of ritual complexity. Complex Timeframe Not only are facets of the ritual transferred piecemeal between communities, thereby stretching the transfer, the period of keeping a ritual without handing it over may also be subject to negotiations. We have evidence for a number of travelling ritual complexes15 that indicate intervals between transfers that differ considerably in length. Moreover, some communities seem to maintain the right to perform a ritual even after it has been handed over, while others stop performing. In all likelihood, this has to do with the piecemeal fashion of transaction, but also with the possibilities of adding new elements to the ritual in the process. Ultimately, the speed of transferral is also influenced by larger regional features, including the arrival of other travelling rituals that may lead to shifts in demand, but also very basic facts of population movements and population density, the critical mass needed for attracting and for carrying out rituals. Frequently, different parts of the ritual are owned and performed by different sections of the Aboriginal community. Complex Roles Apart from the distinction between initiated “bosses” of a ritual and the non-initiated, the most frequent pattern observed with regard to travelling rituals in Australia is an alternation of roles for the “bosses” between ritual “owners” and “work15 See Widlok 1992.

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ers”, whereby “owners” may formally be in charge, but practically rather restrained in what they are expected to do, whereas the ritual performance is left with the “workers”. This division may follow the existing division of group moieties, but it may be complicated further by the fact that many Aboriginal communities are constituted through a system of sections and subsections, the “skins” with which individual Aborigines commonly identify.16 These internal divisions are a dynamic mix of mutual cooperation, but also of competition, and this dynamic is therefore also reflected in ritual matters, in so far as one part of a local Aboriginal community may advocate the introduction of a new ritual and push for it, while a counterpart in the society may be more conservative. At least in the colonial situation, but probably even in pre-colonial settings, the picture is complicated further by the fact that each potential participant and ritual owner is him- or herself a complex agent, in that he or she unites a number of individual roles in the Aboriginal domain and in the emerging domain of Western law and labour. Complex Agents Although moiety membership seems to be particularly important in Aboriginal ritual life, there are a number of other social identities that also play a role. These may be local allegiances, allegiances according to gender, and allegiances according to generation. Agency is widely dispersed within a complex structure of local, trans-local, descent-based, generation-based, and purely individual interests. Ultimately, every potential participant is a unique constellation of interests due to genealogical links, but also through the engagement with fellow group members as a consequence of individual biographies. Aboriginal ritual, with its different layers of secrecy and initiation,, inherently creates differences between participants, who may have more or less access to the knowledge that is associated with the ritual. Depending on this constellation, individuals may want to foster the introduction of a new ritual (or ritual element) or to prevent this, and they may use their resources selectively, thus adding to the overall complexity of the ritual system.

The Implications of Complexity Given the situation as sketched above, I think that Aboriginal rituals need to be considered as complex phenomena, irrespective of the fact that, in comparison to temple rituals in India or elsewhere, they involve fewer people, fewer material resources, and arguably less “capital” that can be transferred into the political or economic sphere. The result of this complexity, I argue, is – in its basic dynamics –

16 See Keen 1994.

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very similar for all these cases of complexity, and it can be outlined by referring to the Australian case. As we have seen, the interests that participants pursue only partially overlap, because participants hold different positions in a setting characterised by a complexity of locations, forms, timeframes, and roles. It is therefore not to be expected that a single ritual would satisfy the complex needs generated within the complex system as a whole. Instead, we are to expect a process of constant renewal and invention, generated from the inside, often further stimulated from the outside, owing to the diversity of positions and constellations that make up the field in which rituals develop. As I have pointed out with regard to a different set of rituals elsewhere, the San healing dance in southern Africa,17 in each ritual performance there are a number of cooperative projects involved, for which participants seek the support of others. Some of these cooperative projects are widely shared, others more narrowly, but the dynamic between these projects will inevitably lead to changes in the ritual. In other words, for ritual dynamics and ritual change to occur, there is no need to assume “external” influences, since they can be readily explained on the basis of “internal” agency involved. A long-term perspective on rituals in a certain region, such as northwestern Australia (or southwestern Africa for that matter), exhibits bundles of trajectories of growth and decline that, in their sum, cater to diversified needs and interests. When looking at any individual ritual from the perspective of ritual agents, the picture that emerges is not so much one of a ritual functioning in different settings and being adapted successfully, but rather a much more diversified process, which is open with regard to its outcome. The dynamics of rituals is not just a convienient safety-net for participants, but, given its open nature, it also creates insecurity for those involved. While ritual life in general may provide a scaffolding to do certain things in a certain way,18 the existence of any particular ritual and any particular role played by the persons involved is not guaranteed, because it has the properties of a complex system. The crucial property of complexity is its dynamism, which allows for any ritual to be either perpetuated in different forms, or to be ultimately replaced by something else, without it being consciously or purposefully abandoned or being abolished. One of the properties of complex systems is that they not only have the intended consequences that participants may bring to them (for instance healing, entertainment, accumulating power, being initiated etc.), but that they almost inevitably also have unintended consequences that may not be in the interest of any single participant, but that emerge as a consequence of the dynamics of the complex system itself. We may divide these implications, that follow from rituals being complex 17 See Widlok 2007. 18 See Rappaport 1999.

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systems, into two broad categories, namely, negative unintended consequences and positive unintended consequences. Among the negative unintended consequences, the following two seem to be particularly prominent: – Rituals are a drain of resources. In Aboriginal Australia feeding the sheer number of participants has traditionally been a major drain on local natural resources, and a major aspect when organising a ceremony. Today, it is above all the costs of getting people together across large distances. In economic terms, therefore, the transaction costs for having rituals are high, and they remain high, because rituals are typically not one-off events, but ratehr repeated regularly; they may ease a situation or follow demands in any given situation, but they do not resolve it once and for all; they create new obligations for the future, and may therefore continue to produce “costs” in the sense of institutional economic theory. – The symbolic capital that rituals may embody is always under pressure. This is certainly very true for the travelling rituals in Australia, where the position of individuals as owners of strong rituals, and the position of places and whole communities as ritual hot spots, is potentially challenged with every new ritual or ritual element appearing on the scene. To stay with economic imagery: there is always a danger of inflation, and the introduction of new currencies that replace the old lead currency. Moreover, there is only limited power to convert from one form of capital into another. In Australia there has been a long debate suggesting that there was certainly no automatic spillover from ritual expertise to political power.19 Among the positive unintended consequences, the following two seem to be particularly prominent: – The number of people affected by a ritual as a complex system is larger than that of those participants who pursue any particular cooperative project at any one time. It also affects their relationships in more ways than they have deliberately chosen. In Aboriginal Australia, this becomes clear in any ritual event, in which one group (or individuals thereof) is initiated into a new ritual, and receives a new ritual from another place. In this process, links are established beyond the limits of an individual or a single descent group, since cross-cutting cooperation is needed for performing and transferring a complex ritual. Moreover, given that this is a regional system of exchange, even those who are not initiated are affected; they may for instance feel pressure to become involved in the future, or to mobilise their own network of relations in order to become involved in ritual exchange. 19 See Bern 1979; Tonkinson 1988.

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– Ritual cooperation opens up a venue for what may be called “altruism”, not necessarily in the sense of an ideology of generosity, but as moves that recognise and support the welfare of “others” (see below). The pursuit of the interest of others becomes possible in ritual by extending the boundary of who is “me” or “we” to include a growing number of others. Even in rituals that rely on complementary groups of participants (the “owners” and “workers” as described above), there is a recognition that the benefit of conducting the ritual successfully includes everyone, also those who – outside the ritual framework – may consider one another as having opposing interests, for instance in marriage alliances. Moreover, it is the ritual action itself that shifts the boundary of whoever was thought to be “we”, and therefore the boundary for whom the individual is prepared to spend energy and resources. Therefore, to say that rituals realise a common good, enjoyed by everyone, does not presuppose that ritual participants are behaving more virtuously in rituals than outside rituals, or that they reach that good on the basis of explicit choices. Given the plurality of rituals, they may have made a deliberate choice to participate, but once that decision has been made, we can account for altruistic effects of rituals in terms of positive unintended consequences as a result of the complex nature of ritual processes. This opens a new perspective on establishing the value of ritual for the participants, beyond the notions of reduced transaction costs and accumulated symbolic capital. What exactly are the kinds of common goods created by means of a particular ritual? These may be cooperative projects that are only partially shared by the participants, for instance, the enjoyment and entertainment they experience, the security achieved against possibly dangerous forces, the satisfaction of having a share in powers larger than oneself or the local group. Apart from delivering some of these shared goods to some of the participants, the underlying value of the ritual is that – as a complex system – it allows these cooperative projects to be linked in a shared collective activity. There is disagreement among economists as to whether the term “altruism” is usefully employed in such a context, given its ambivalence of comprising a behavioural and a motivational aspect.20 What may appear to be altruism in effect, may in fact be motivated by egoism, and altruistic ideas can lead to damaging results.21 Interestingly, in the case under consideration here, there is an altruistic (or benevolent) effect, as well as an altruistic (or committed) attitude of the participants, who see themselves as responding to a situation that requires ritual participation and action. The point that needs to be underlined, though, is that there is no direct link between the two, since it is the complexity of ritual dynamics that mediates between the altruistic/benevolent outcome and the altruistic/committed 20 Görlich 1992: 63; see also Margolis 1982. 21 Carrier & Miller 1999.

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attitude. There is no necessity that ritual action, as such, would lead to benevolent results, or that ritual, by itself, would create an attitude of altruism. Rather, what ritual as a complex system does is that it allows the boundary to be shifted that includes those “others”, whose welfare is recognised and supported beyond predefined categories of kin (or indeed non-kin) by including those who are affected by the ritual. Therefore, the altruism (if we choose to use that term) involved here is not necessarily the result of consciously strategic individual action, but it can be the positive unintended consequence of a complex process, such as a ritual. The subjective impression that participants have about a ritual being done for “its own sake”, or because it is demanded by the situation or the needs of others, is thus not an illusion, but a fair impression of what is happening. Moreover, our understanding of what “value” is and what “ritual” is, may be mutually informative, as I shall point out in the remainder of this contribution.

Generating Value It has been observed that ritual may have been instrumental in the emergence of inequalities.22 In this context, we can argue that, similarly, ritual may be instrumental in the emergence of altruism, or at least the broadening of a recognition of needs and interests of others. We tend to consider moral phenomena, such as altruism, as ideas and as being derived from ideologies, moral codes, etc. The alternative account that ritual studies suggest is that, instead of seeing this kind of behaviour as being generated from an abstract idea, a rational thought, or an emotional obligation of the individual mind, it may be more usefully considered a phenomenon that involves subjects in complex trajectories of life, over which they have incomplete control. Ideas of deliberate altruism, for instance, may thus be post facto rationalisations of altruistic inclusion that initially was generated through the complexity of ritual activities. At the same time, research on the production of value may shed more light on the work of rituals. After all, rituals, just as any other social institution, do not operate like giant machines that work without human input, or without being influenced by conscious human action. “Incomplete control” is not to be confused with “no control at all”. Agents still maintain some control over how they invest their energies (economic resources, their own acting body), for instance when deciding whether to participate in a ritual or not, and whether to import it from elsewhere or not. Furthermore, in a situation such as that in Australia, it also matters how exactly Aboriginal people in various places participate in the larger networks of the transfer of rituals. The fact that the outcome is not completely predictable and can-

22 See Woodburn 2005.

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not be determined by one group of agents does not take away the centrality of agency in the overall process. Finally, a comparative view of the relationship between ritual and economics can help us to develop a more “relational” view of social phenomena, and to do this more generally. Above, I have suggested such a relational view for the economic aspect of ritual and for altruism. It is relational in the sense that we can only meaningfully talk about it as something that is created, not out of isolated individual selves, but in specific social contexts. The participants of rituals see their investment of energies and resources in rituals as a contribution to (and as being demanded by) a shared good, and not as “wasted”, because they see the ritual taking a momentum of its own and following a process of growth. We may use this line of thinking also to approach the opposite(s) of altruism and the creation of value, namely, phenomena such as greed and the destruction of value. Again, if we take greed to be a relational term of a similar form, then we may explain current processes in the economic crisis not as a result of more and more individuals being infected by an abstract negative sentiment called greed when compared to earlier times or other places. Rather, in terms of a mirror image of what I have tried to outline for altruism, the greed that we perceive in the current situation today may be considered to be, first and foremost, the effect of a changing complex system. In other words, it does not require us to assume that individuals have radically changed their attitudes in large numbers, but that it is the combined effect of agency in a complex system that leads to the results that we observe. Furthermore, the fact that the current crisis is regarded as being a result of greed may be seen as an appropriation of resources that does not support a process of growth, but, quite to the contrary, inhibits growth and destroys value in a double sense.23 Resources, in this case money, are not seen as being part of a living performance, but rather of a sterile siphoning off, creaming off, and extracting from the dynamic process of exchange. As such, the deregulated financial market is the ultimate counter image of a ritual, even of a dynamic ritual exchange as we see it ethnographically in Aboriginal Australia and elsewhere. In contradistinction to the Australian case, agents are here not feeding into a process of growth, but are cutting themselves off from it.

Conclusion In my previous research I have looked at ritual life in Aboriginal Australia, where rituals are known to have emerged and to be transacted across the continent in what appears to be an enormously “costly” manner.24 I have argued that these ritual in23 See Robertson 2001. 24 Widlok 1992; 1997.

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novations and transactions are not readily explicable in terms of the kind of purposeful behaviour presupposed in the prevalent approaches in economic theory. On the contrary, I have suggested that ritual innovation and transaction constitute a complex system, whereby numerous individual actions lead to unpredictable results, both positive and negative in nature. Among the positive unintended consequences of ritual as a complex process is the emergence of altruistic effects. Altruistic effects, the pursuit of the interests of “others”, need not be based on ideologies of generosity, but can be explained as emerging from ritual activity that shifts the boundaries between “us” and “them”. In this process, participants are tied into shared cooperative projects, and they are provided with the sense that, by participating in rituals, they are not (only) pursuing self-interested goals of reducing transaction costs or accumulating symbolic capital, but that they contribute for the sake of the ritual as demanded by a specific situation. Constant renewal and invention are not only generated from the outside through exchange, but also as a demand from the inside. A single ritual cannot satisfy the needs generated by the complexity of cooperative projects within the complex ritual system at large, which is made up of complex locality, ritual forms, complex timeframes, roles, and agents. As with all complex systems25 every ritual will eventually have to fail, in the sense that it “asks for more”, which, eventually, also leads to its replacement, usually in a piecemeal fashion. This is where the notion of ritual dynamic becomes critical, namely in the sense not only of rituals being more varied and dynamic in themselves, but also of being subject to processes of growth and decline. This dynamic of ritual creates opportunities, but also insecurity, for those involved in ritual. While ritual does provide a scaffolding for doing certain things in a certain way, the existence of the ritual itself is not guaranteed unless there is sufficient support for it. This is due to the fact that rituals have the properties of complex systems, and one of these properties is the dynamic nature and the prospect of ultimately being replaced by something else. Eventually, every ritual will have to fail, in the sense that it fades away and falls into disuse, or becomes changed beyond recognition in the process of ongoing change. This is not because rituals do not “work”, or do not fulfil their function adequately. On the contrary, we might say that they fulfil more functions than what is constituted by the sum of individual participant projects involved. The diversity of demands made by the social agents leads to a situation in which there is a constant demand for more, or at least for changes that will lead to a piecemeal replacement of a ritual in the end.

25 See Ormerod 2005.

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References Altena, Marga & Catrien Notermanns & Thomas Widlok (in press) “Sacred Sites: Tradition, Place and Community in Internet Rituals”. In: Ronald Grimes et al. (eds.). Ritual, Conflict, and Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bern, John 1979. “Ideology and Domination: Toward a Reconstruction of Australian Aboriginal Social Formation”. Oceania 50: 118–132. Bloch, Maurice 1986. From Blessing to Violence: History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Madagascar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977. Towards a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — 1979. La distinction: Critique Sociale du Jugement. Paris: Éditions de Minuit (Le sens commun). Carrier, James & Daniel Miller 1999. “From Private Virtue to Public Vice”. In: Henrietta Moore (ed.). Anthropological Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press: 24– 47. Crandall, David 1996. “Female over Male or Left over Right: Solving a Classificatory Puzzle among the Ovahimba”. Africa 66: 327–48. Görlich, Joachim 1992. Tausch als rationales Handeln. Zeremonieller Gabentausch und Tauschhandel im Hochland von Papua Neuguinea. Berlin: Reimer. Keen, Ian 1994. Knowledge and Secrecy in an Aboriginal Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kolig, Erich 1981. The Silent Revolution. The Effects of Modernization on Australian Aboriginal Religion. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Margolis, Howard 1982. Selfishness, Altruism, and Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. North, Douglas 1990. Institutions. Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ormerod, Paul 2005. Why Most Things Fail. Evolution, Extinction and Economics. New York: John Wiley. Rappaport, Roy A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Redmond, Anthony 2001. “Places That Move”. In: Alan Rumsey & James Weiner (eds.). Emplaced Myth. Space, Narrative, and Knowledge in Aboriginal Australia and Papua New Guinea. Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press: 120–138. Robertson, Alexander 2001. Greed. Gut Feelings, Growth, and History. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rumsey, Alan & James Weiner (eds.) 2001. Emplaced Myth. Space, Narrative, and Knowledge in Aboriginal Australia and Papua New Guinea. Honululu: University of Hawai’i Press. Seele, Peter 2010. “Is there an Economic Benefit in Participating in Rituals?”. In: Bernd Schneidmüller (ed.). “Rituals of Power and Consent”, section II of Ritual

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Dynamics and the Science of Ritual. Volume 3 – “State, Power, and Violence.” (ed. by Axel Michaels et al.). Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz: 277–291. Sorgo, Gabriele 2008. „Rituale an Übergangsorten: Events in einem städtischen Einkaufszentrum“. Paper presented at the Conference Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual, 29 September–2 October, Heidelberg. Swain, Tony 1993. A Place for Strangers. Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tonkinson, Robert 1988. “‘Ideology and Domination’ in Aboriginal Australia: A Western Desert Test Case”. In: David Riches & Tim Ingold & James Woodburn (eds.). Hunters and Gatherers. Vol. 2: Property, Power and Ideology. Oxford: Berg: 32–46. Tonnaer, Anke (in press) “Indigenous Tourism and the Intricacies of Cross-Cultural Understanding”. La Ricerca Folklorica 59. Tsuru, Daisaku 2001. “Generation and Transaction Processes in the Spirit Ritual of the Baka Pygmies in Southeast Cameroon”. In: Thomas Widlok & Kazuyoshi Sugawara (eds.). Symbolic Categories and Ritual Practice in Hunter-Gatherer Experience. Kyoto: Center For African Area Studies: 103–123. Turner, David 1999. Genesis Regained. Aboriginal Forms of Renunciation in JudeoChristian Scriptures and Other Major Traditions. New York: Lang. Venbrux, Eric & Sophie Bolt & Meike Heessels 2008. Rituele creativiteit. Actuele veranderingen in de uitvaart- en rouwcultuur in Nederland. Zoetermeer: Meinema. Wagner, Roy 1975. The Invention of Culture. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Widlok, Thomas 1992. “Practice, Politics and Ideology of the ‘Travelling Business’ in Aboriginal Religion”. Oceania 63: 114–136. — 1997. “Traditions of Transformation. Travelling Rituals in Australia”. In: Ton Otto & Ad Borsboom (eds.). Cultural Dynamics of Religious Change in Oceania. Leiden: Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde: 11–22. — 2007. “From Individual Act to Social Agency in San Trance Rituals”. In: Mirjam de Bruijn & Rijk van Dijk & Jan-Bart Gewald (eds.). Strength beyond Structure. Social and Historical Trajectories of Agency in Africa. Leiden: Brill: 163–188. — & Kazuyoshi Sugawara 2001. Symbolic Categories and Ritual Practice in HunterGatherer Experiences. Kyoto: Center for African Area Studies (African Study Monographs Supplementary Issue 27). Woodburn, James 2005. “Egalitarian Societies Revisited”. In: Thomas Widlok & Wolde Tadesse (eds.). Property and Equality. Vol. 1. Oxford: Berghahn: 18–31.

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Performing Spirits: Shifting Agencies in Brazilian Umbanda Rituals Prologue At the crack of dawn on 20 August, 1979, in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, the 25 year-old female M.L. murdered the sleeping male A. with a gunshot to the back of his head. As the police later found out, several persons had acted as instigators of this sneaking murder. The victim’s wife, S., who frequented a cult house of the Umbanda religion1, had contacted a spiritual being named “Maria Padilha”, who is a specialist in issues of matrimonial quarrels and who regularly incarnated in the body of the priestess C. The priestess’s body gave “Maria Padilha” the opportunity to act and speak on earth. In one of her manifestations, “Maria Padilha” had charged the male adept W. with finding a weapon, and the Umbandist M.L. with killing A. The victim’s wife was entrusted with staying awake and opening the door for the murderer. During the police questionings and the court hearings, “Maria Padilha” constantly descended from the netherworld to incarnate in the body of the priestess and persuade the audience that she alone had instigated the crime and that the priestess herself had been unaware of it and was thus innocent. A psychiatrist, the president of the Brazilian Spiritualist Association, and a Catholic priest, whom the court had appointed as experts, were at odds relative to the authenticity of the spirit incorporation. Whereas the psychiatrist entirely doubted it, the spiritualist diagnosed an “under-developed trance”. The Catholic priest, in contrast, who had failed to exorcise the “demon” with holy water and Christian prayers, identified an extraordinarily evil and powerful spirit, who evidently had taken possession of the woman. The court finally sentenced all four persons involved to between 12 and 72 years in prison. There were the murderer M.L., the victim’s wife S., the accomplice W., who had procured the gun, and the priestess C.2 1 Umbanda is one of several syncretic Brazilian religions and integrates ideas and practices of different African religions with popular Iberic Catholicism and French Spiritualism. Its central ritual practice consists of spirit incorporation and will be explained below. 2 The case is extensively described in Contins & Goldman 1984.

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However, was the priestess actually involved in the crime? Could she be made responsible for her acts in trance? And was “Maria Padilha” not also a social person involved in the crime, as the participants, at least, believed in her existence? These questions about the authority of, and responsibility for, ritual actions, in short about ritual agency in Brazilian Umbanda, which is characterised by spirit possession in trance, will be the focus of this chapter.

The Discovery of Ritual Action In recent decades, ritual theory has constantly moved toward a notion that asks less about the meaning or function of ritual, conceptualising it instead as performative action. Early theorists had treated ritual mostly as a symbolic system whose single elements needed to be understood in order to find out its meaning.3 As a symbolic system that is enacted, ritual had, starting with Durkheim at least, one clearly assigned social macro-function: the production and reproduction of group solidarity.4 In focusing on function and meaning, these theories carried out, as Streck critically puts it, “a recoding”, they told “a story about a story”5, instead of viewing the ritual itself as a code through which people perform social acts. Such a representational view of ritual has now been widely displaced by a more immanentist understanding.6 Today, it is less some supposed macro-function or meaning of ritual that ritual theorists focus on – some, like Staal, explicitly claim that rituals are in fact meaningless7 –, but the performance and (micro-) effects of ritual action. This new strand of ritual theory has developed two separate branches that mirror the opposed connotations of the concept of performance itself: The first branch goes back to Austin’s speech-act theory8 and its introduction to ritual theory by Tambiah9, and puts the communicative function of ritual at the centre of interest. For this branch, ritual is primarily a communicative action with which the community (or individual addressees) are informed of social matters, such as basic norms of society or status changes of its members. These messages are launched by enacting them. Within this branch of theory, two positions are competing: whereas Rappaport views ritual as a means of communication that produces “indexical signs” in their purest possible form und thus represents (contrary to, say, language) the best and only reliable channel for the communication of so3 E.g., Smith 1889; Tylor 1871; Frazer 1890–1894; Durkheim 1912; Radcliffe-Brown 1922; Malinowski 1935. 4 Durkheim 1912. 5 Streck 1998: 58. 6 Turner 1967, 1968; Geertz 1965, and Douglas 1970 were important mediators. 7 Staal 1979, 1989. 8 Austin 1962. 9 Tambiah 1979.

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cial messages10, Strecker11, and also Rappaport’s critics12, hold that ritual communicates in rather ambiguous ways that charge it with power13. The second branch understands performativity, differently from Austin, in the sense of theatre anthropology14 and performance art15. Performance here becomes “action in itself”, i.e., the process and performance of action becomes itself the goal of ritual. Seen from this perspective, performance stands for actions in which procedures of figuration and form-giving are routinised and aesthetically exaggerated. Rules of ritual, or, sometimes, its “syntax without semantics”16 and “ritual commitment”17, are particularly heavily spotlighted in this theoretical branch.18

From Action to Agency The salient difference between both branches of ritual theory can be formulated in terms of agency: The first theoretical branch conceives of ritual as an intentional, power-exerting communicative action that furthers the interests of some community members. The second theoretical branch mainly views it as rule-following having a psychic and aesthetic effect on those who perform the ritual. Whereas, in the first branch, agency is clearly assigned to some participants, in the second it is completely extinguished in favour of ritual as structure. Humphrey and Laidlaw have tried to give consideration to both branches by making a general distinction between “liturgical rituals”, where human agency is completely abandoned in favour of rule-following, and “performance-centred rituals” where the ritual experts (typically shamans) retain a high degree of individual performative creativity.19 Both branches mentioned above thus differ in the interpretation of who is the author of the ritual, as, on the one hand, it is canonised in liturgies and symbols, while, on the other, it only exists in its very enactment. In analogy to Lévi-Strauss’ famous saying that it is the myth telling itself through men20, one could ask: are human actors performing the ritual, or is the ritual performing itself through human actors? Who acts in ritual for which purposes and for whose interests?

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Rappaport 1999. Strecker 1988. Robbins 2001; Watanabe & Smuts 1999. Cf. Meyer 2007b. Schechner 1988, 1993. E.g., Abramovic 2001. Cf. Staal 1989: 108. Humphrey & Laidlaw 1994. For a critique see Köpping 1997; also cf. Meyer 2007b. Humphrey & Laidlaw 1994: 11–12 et seq. Lévi-Strauss 1955.

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Even if some have called agency an “abstraction greatly underspecified, often misused, much fetishised”21, the notion has, in recent years, become a central concern not only in ritual theory, but in social theory in general. Two well-established examples are Bourdieu (1977) and Giddens (1979, 1984). There is no space here to introduce their attempts at reconciling structure and action, or structure and practice.22 Of relevance here is that they conceive of neither a completely free and rational, nor a structurally completely determined actor. Actors, for them, are characterised rather by their ability to projectively and reflexively influence social structures through their practices or actions. It is true of these and many other contemporary social theories that, when they come to speak of ritual, they explicitly allocate it to the structural pole, as something that, through its being canonically predefined, constitutes a structural social factor external to individual agents. Actors, from this perspective, refer to rituals in order to reproduce social structure. Rituals, comparable to institutions, represent conventionalised solutions to problems humans face again and again, i.e. when they reproduce solidarity, in-group sentiments, and optimism23, when they make public new definitions of situations and persons,24 when they settle conflicts and negotiate social contradictions25, when they encounter and separate from social persons, or when they tolerate intimacy with unfamiliar persons (e.g., with physicians or hairdressers26). With rituals, as with any other social institution, people can shift individual responsibilities and uncertainties to socially predefined, accepted, and reliable paths of action. Bloch therefore views rituals as “extreme forms of traditional authority”.27 Religion and ritual, for him, serve the reproduction and consolidation of hierarchies. This is the traditional way of looking at rituals in social theory. However, more and more studies reveal that it would be one-sided to look at rituals merely as constraining, and not as institutions that also enable individual action28. Firstly, rituals change, as their forms and functions are also negotiated and contested. Secondly, some rituals, instead of removing agency, seem to empower their protagonists (e.g., women) in ways opposed to social structure. Thus, questions of the location of agency in ritual, and of the relationship between agency and ritual in general, are more pressing than ever. 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Comaroff & Comaroff 1997: 37; cited in Ahearn 2001: 112. Cf. Krüger & Nijhawan & Stavrianopoulou 2005. Durkheim 1912, Malinowski 1923. van Gennep 1909. Gluckman 1954: Turner 1967, 1968. Goffman 1967. Bloch 1989. Houseman & Severi 1998; Keane 1997; Miyazaki 2000; Mitchell 2004; Sax 2006; Hanks 2006; Feuchtwang 2007.

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Any attempt at defining agency will be highly contested, owing to the implications that such a definition has for social and cultural theory. Currently, there are two notions contesting each other in sometimes fairly vigorous ways: a strong and a weak notion of agency.29 Weak notions only demand of agents the ability to produce effects in the physical or social world.30 They thus focus on the potential to transform the world (e.g., to turn wine into blood, as Sax mentions as an example), and so especially relate to the emic perspective on agency. This notion is also sometimes called the symmetrical perspective, since it accords to human and nonhuman actors – or actants, as Latour calls them – the same status of agency. Strong notions, in contrast, additionally require intentionality and control over the actions performed as part of the definition of agency.31 They thus include reflexive knowledge of the world to be transformed, and of resources to be employed. In their focus on the intentional control and knowledge of actions and effects, these notions are ultimately targeted at questions of responsibility and authorship, and so usually adopt an etic perspective on the issue. Such an approach generally assumes a principal asymmetry between human (i.e. capable of knowledge and consciousness) and non-human agents. The unanswered question remains as to whether agency can be categorically attributed only to individual humans, or whether there might be collective or nonhuman agents, such as organisations, states, computers, gods, or spirits. With regard to this question, the two positions mentioned above are in stark opposition to each other. Representatives of a more traditional sociology of knowledge32, and scholars who adhere to a Durkheimian methodological agnosticism33, regard the assumption that collectives or things could act as a false ascription of human qualities to these entities, i.e. as an anthropomorphism34. Actor-network-theorists35, as well as some ritual theorists36, argue in contrast that the assumption that only humans could possess agency constitutes a “substantivist fallacy”37. The example of ritual demonstrates very clearly that, through its canonical form, agency is at least partly released by the individual to an external pattern.38 I therefore strongly support Sax’s idea of a “distributed” or “complex ritual agen29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Cf. Wooldridge & Jennings 1995: 116–17. Examples are Latour 1996; Emirbayer & Mische 1998; Sax 2006. Examples are Sewell 1992; Badura 2001. Collins & Yearley 1992. Cf. Smart 1973. Braun-Thürmann 2002: 38, 63; Rammert & Schulz-Schaeffer 2002: 33. Callon 1986; Callon & Latour 1992. Gell 1998; Sax 2006. Sax 2006: 478. Cf. the polyphonic warã ritual of Graham (1993) and the passiones principle of Kramer (1993: 58–63).

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cy”39 that he develops by drawing on Hutchins’ idea of “distributed cognition”40. Ritual agency, according to this model, is located in complex networks of individuals and institutions, as well as in past and present actions. And, as Sax adds, ritual agency is only effective and real in the social world because it is manifest and public.41 “[R]ituals themselves have agency – that is, the power to transform the world – precisely because they are the occasions when definitions of social reality are publicly and officially confirmed”42. Thus, “[r]itual is the point at which the agency distributed among other persons, relationships, and social institutions is articulated and made manifest”43. Instead of asking where agency is located in ritual, as Sax does in his essay, I go a step further and ask who uses public ascriptions of ritual agency in what ways, for what reasons, and for what purposes? Or, put differently, when, why, and how, and for which purpose, is ritual agency publicly assigned to whom? Furthermore, I suggest that the question “where is agency located?”44 is imprecisely worded, since (1) there is not necessarily one dictatorial agency in ritual, but possibly several competing ones, and (2) these are constantly changing their locations, so that it makes sense to speak of “shifting agencies”. Sometimes, agency can be ascribed to well-defined individuals who control the situation; sometimes it is inherent in the social situation or in the conditions that, in turn, control the individuals.

Agency and Discursive Performance in Umbanda Ritual The study of Brazilian Umbanda rituals is particularly fruitful for the understanding of ritual agency, since they do not merely dislocate agency from human to transcendental actors, but rather embody the tension between human and transcendental agency within their very form. On the one hand, they demand a high level of performative creativity from their protagonists, in order to be entertaining and attractive. On the other hand, they also require an equally high level of performative accuracy, in order to authentically represent typified spirits in trance and to credibly stage their manifestation. The incorporation of spirits descending from the afterworld has been essential for the Umbandist doctrine ever since it developed, drawing on existing religious traditions, largely Bantu-derived syncretic practices and popular Catholicism. At the beginning of the twentieth century, notions from Yoruba religion and from 39 40 41 42 43 44

Sax 2006. Hutchins 1995. Sax 2006. Ibid.: 477–78. Ibid.: 478. Ibid.: 474.

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French spiritism became integrated into these practices.45 The emergence of Umbanda was also a reaction to the abolition of slavery, and to the rapid urbanisation and industrialisation of the subsequent decades.46 Today, Umbanda is characterised by a great innovative creativity and variation, which is also caused by the competitive situation of multi-religious Brazil. The specific character of each cult house is shaped by the personality and the preferences and positions of the directing priest.47 The central principle of Umbanda is charity, which allows dead souls to rise to paradise (aruanda, juremá). The extent of charity that an individual has performed during his or her life on earth determines the degree of enlightenment after death, and thus the status in the afterworld. In order to rise up to paradise, dead souls must continue practicing charity on earth; to achieve this, they must come back and incarnate themselves in ritual practitioners, who fall into trance and place their bodies at the disposal of these spirits. Trance is mainly induced through rhythmical drumming, and leads to physiological changes in the mediums.48 The mediums in trance sometimes exhibit extraordinary abilities, such as touching fire without getting burnt, drinking large quantities of alcohol without getting drunk, or making eloquent impromptu speeches for hours. These actions are considered by the people present as proof of the authenticity of the spirit incarnation. After such rituals, the mediums themselves say that their own consciousness has been “pushed down” or “away” during the incorporation, and that they have been “without” or “at half consciousness”. Similarly to French spiritism, they conceptualise their bodies as material containers, which the spirits of the dead (as well as their own consciousness) can occupy and vacate. Corresponding to their degree of enlightenment, the dead souls are arranged under the Catholic God (sometimes called by his Bantu [Kimbundu] name Zambi) in a hierarchy of categories (called linhas, i.e. lines), beginning from above with orixás (deified natural forces of the Yoruba pantheon), caboclos (Indio and mestizo spirits), crianças (child spirits), preto velhos (spirits of dead African slaves), and the povo da rua (“street folk” including Exús, Pomba Giras, and other spirits of criminals, prostitutes, witches, gypsies, Bohemians, demonic figures, etc.). Other, less canonised spiritual categories are individual guardian angels (guias) and unclassified evil souls. The spirits who are called up, and who incarnate during the different Umbanda rituals (festive, teaching, or healing-oriented), are individuals who unambiguously belong to one of these categories, and all of them possess a personal name and a specific personality which they represent, e.g. in terms of individual preferences. 45 46 47 48

Cf. Meyer 2006a, 2006b. Cf. Brown 1986. Cf. ibid.; Gonçalves da Silva 1994. Cf. Goodman 1988: 35-43.

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Moreover, all the spiritual categories have assigned days, colours, substances, powers, and sometimes associated Catholic saints.49 The fact that ritual practitioners fall into trance and incorporate alien spirits, who take over the control over their bodies, has consequences, of course, for the notion of agency in Umbanda ritual. During the incorporation of a spirit, the practitioners are expected to authentically perform the alien character in deeds and speech. Since the use of creative and spontaneous speech constitutes an important part of an authentic performance, the prudent agency of the person in trance, necessary for this quality, is consequently required. An authentic performance is crucial for the credibility of Umbanda religion as a whole. In the competitive situation of multi-religious Brazil, authentic and appealing rituals are essential for the survival of Umbanda religion, since people rather easily switch their affiliations between different religious traditions. Speaking is an activity where agency becomes particularly apparent, since speaking, when it is creative and spontaneously adapted to the situation at hand, is associated with an intentional subject making a physical effort to articulate meaningful utterances.50 These utterances also represent social acts, and more generally, as Strecker has put it, “encode the speaker’s interpretation of the situation”.51 When, in contrast, speaking is reproducing a pre-established and canonised liturgical form, as is often the case in ritual, the western language ideology of a speaking intentional subject is subverted.52 Agency, then, cannot be located easily. Before discussing this difference with examples of the ways of speaking employed in Umbanda spirit embodiment, I will clarify some presuppositions about the act of speaking in, as they have formerly been called, “possession rituals”. Goodman, for example, describes the speaking of Pentecostalists who speak in tongues (glossolalia) as a “beautifully rhythmic vocalisation, pulsing like poetry, and rising in intonation until the end of the first third of the utterance unit, then steadily dropping toward the end”53 In this case, the form of the utterance makes clear that it is the Holy Spirit talking through a human medium. In other religious groups, such as the Quakers in the U.S., the fact that God is speaking is recognised merely through the time and the place of the utterance. The utterance itself is “plain speech”, similar to utterances of the human medium him- or herself.54 These examples are two poles of a range of possibilities for marking the fact that the speaking subject has changed to an external force that is merely making use of the articulating apparatus of the medium. Visitors either recognise by the 49 50 51 52 53 54

Cf. Janowski & Meyer 2005. Also cf. Keane 1997: 676. Strecker 1988: 168. Keane 1997, Duranti 1993. Goodman 1988: 37. Cf. Irvine 1982: 248–51.

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form of speech (e.g., a formalised or distorted way of speaking or a particular code) or by the situation (e.g., a formalised point in the ritual liturgy or a defined locality), that it is not the human medium, but a transcendental entity who is speaking at the moment. “There is an inverse relationship between the symbolic forms and their setting, such that if the one is marked or special, the other may be unmarked or ordinary. ‘Ritual,’ that is to say some special, conventional organisation of behavioural sequences, is most required in just those cases where spirits use the speech of everyday life. Where spirits use a different code, a ritual context does not seem to be required, although it may occur.”55 Applied to the question of structure and agency, this implies that if it is the spoken text itself that makes an alien agency recognisable, only a weak ritual framing (or none at all) is necessary. In contrast, ritual speech that – similarly to everyday speech – is creative and deliberate, must be framed by a strong ritual context in order to be recognisable as originating from a transcendental source and not from the everyday person of the medium. Structure (formula, stringent liturgy) and agency (free speech, no or weak ritual framing) thus reciprocally condition each other. Conversely, only a relatively loose ritual structure allows for deliberate individual agency in conversation, whereas strong formal requirements constrain it.56 In Umbanda rituals, speech is not, as among the Pentecostalists or in Eastern Indonesian ritual speech, “formal, formulaic, and parallelistic”57, but rather very creative and spontaneous. The embodied spirit has a great deal of leeway in the expression of individual ideas. As one might expect, the ritual liturgy and movements mark clearly the transition of the agentic subject from the medium to the spirit, i.e., the point when a spirit enters the human body of the medium and when it leaves it again. But in contrast to the “inspired” Quakers, the speech of the spirits is also distinguishable from the everyday speech of the mediums. There are several memorable characteristics of the speech of the specific spirits, such as a distorted phonology and an unusual lexicon. Visitors thus recognise from both the fixed situations in the ritual liturgy and a specific style of speech whether it is a spirit who acts and speaks through the medium. Sometimes, mediums are even dressed by the members of the cult house in the same way as particular spirits are commonly represented in religious statues and icons.

55 Ibid.: 252. 56 Cf. Gibson 2000. 57 Fox 1988: 12.

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Performing Credibility Spirit incorporation is the core topic of Umbanda religion, and its credibility is the main resource of legitimising Umbanda rituals as plausible and pertinent. This may count as one reason why practitioners in trance employ a whole variety of “means of impressing”, as Figge has called them, i.e. devices which sustain the reality of spirit incorporation.58 A credible use of language and action by supposed spirits is one of them and thus constitutes a main requirement for a successful and attractive ritual. Though the spirits are classified into several categories, they always represent one clearly identifiable dead person with a well-determined individual character. A well known example is Doctor Fritz, who is a spiritual surgeon practicing in some Brazilian Umbanda houses. As a Pomeranian army doctor who died in World War I, he speaks, at least in the eyes (and ears) of the attendants, German during his incarnation. Studies have shown that this effect is reached by speaking in a southern Brazilian dialect (which sounds harsher since it is closer to Spanish) and interspersing German words that appear in Hollywood films about the Nazi times, such as “Achtung!” (Attention!) or “Rechts um!” (Right turn!)59. I have not witnessed any ritual with Doctor Fritz, but I once observed the manifestation of an Indian spirit who presented himself as a Cheyenne Indian and spoke in his putative mother tongue for a while, so that nobody present could understand what he was saying. But not only lexical and phonetic choices help to create an authentic manifestation of a dead soul. The discursive strategies employed produce a specific social relationship between speaker and listener, and thus also take part in the creation of a credible spirit manifestation.60 The Caboclo (Indian) spirits, for example, establish a hierarchical relationship to the practitioners and visitors through mainly using the registers commanding, directing, instructing, and punishing.61 To give an example: In April 1997, the Caboclo Sete Estrelas (Seven Stars) checked whether all practitioners wore a white collar dedicated to the creator god Oxalá. Caboclo: “(…) Você vai fazer uma guia de Oxalá pelo menos. Então você faça direito e bota. Você, cadê a sua guia de Oxalá?” Medium: “Não tenho.” Caboclo: “Então você faça. Cadê a sua guia? Ah! Tá certo. Pode continuar. Eu já falou o que quis.” Medium: “O senhor quer (…) mais alguma coisa?” Caboclo: “Desenvolvimento qua- qua-” 58 59 60 61

Figge 1973. Ibid.: 185. Cf. Meyer 2000. Ibid.: 66–72.

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Medium: “Quarta-feira que vem?” Caboclo: “Isso.” (Transcript Santa Teresa, 23 April, 1997, p. 34)62 Caboclo: “You need at least a collar for Oxalá. So, make it right and attach it. You! Where is your collar for Oxalá?” Medium: “I don’t have one.” Caboclo: “Then secure yourself one. Where is your collar? Ok, all right. You can continue. I have said what I wanted to say.” Medium: “Do you need ( ) something else?” Caboclo: “Desenvolvimento [Teaching ritual, C.M.] next wedn..., wedn...?” Medium: “Next Wednesday?” Caboclo: “Exactly.” The commands of the Caboclos are short and do not use strategies that would diminish the “illocutionary force” (such as subjunctives or “please”63). Thus, their discursive strategies are explicitly “not face-oriented”64, or they even have the purpose of destroying the faces of the hearers (as is done through military discipline65). The discursive strategies are emphasised by directive gestures. Moreover, the communicative conditions created by spirit embodiment in Umbanda rituals themselves already lead to a heavy violation of normal conversational maxims – as I have put it elsewhere, institutionalised “exploitation of the hearer”66. In Umbanda rituals, attendants are in a situation where the physical individual who utters sounds is not identical with the social person who speaks. Since the place and time concepts for the “place” the spirits live in sometimes differ from those of the mediums and cult house visitors, deictic expressions (such as I, here, and now) refer in the communication with embodied spirits to the time-space-agent-location (origo) of the spirit, and not that of the medium. To give an example, I cite another utterance of the Caboclo Sete Estrelas (Seven Stars) from the same day in April 1997, Rio de Janeiro: “Na nossa terra, na nossa Jurema tem muita mironga. (…) Então chegou (eu), diz eu, (minha) minha pai, diz eu: minha pai, você foi a única boca que

62 The interaction sequences which are used for the subsequent analyses were recorded during a field trip of eight months in 1997 in two cult houses in Rio de Janeiro by Nicole Janowski and myself. The transcripts were made together with an Umbandist and student of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. 63 Cf. Holmes 1984. 64 Brown & Levinson 1987: 97. 65 Also cf. Koike 1992: 45. 66 Meyer 2006c.

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Christian Meyer acertou, hoje faz três anos que eu tô na sua terra. Eu diz: o moço, eu diz: eu sei quantos anos foi, não é mesmo?” [Transcript Santa Teresa, April 30, 1997, p. 13] “In our world, in our Jurema, there is a lot of bickering. (…) So, (I) arrived, I said, (my) my father, I said, my father, you were the only mouth that hit the mark, today I am in your lands since three years. I said, boy, I said, I know how many years it was, isn’t it?”

How can the people present understand what Seven Stars says in deictic expressions about the afterworld and the people acting within it, even leaving aside the numerous grammatical mistakes he makes as an Indian speaking a foreign language? The permanent cognitive translation of these deictic elements and their reference to the imagined world of the spirits is demanded of the hearer. As I interpreted it,67 this ultimately leads to a cognitive dissonance that can only be resolved by the intensification of faith in Umbanda religion.68 Thus, there are certain structural conditions in its rituals that lead to the reproduction of the belief in Umbanda religion. However, in order to work, these structures must be acted out by the mediums in trance. This means in this case that the religious practitioners act in the interest of the Umbanda community as a whole, an interest undoubtedly centred on the reproduction of the credibility of the religion. This is critical in order to position Umbanda religion on the religious market of Brazil. The practitioners are the actors, whereas agency (in the sense of the authorship of the action) lies with ritual structure. In a very real way, the ritual is depriving the actors of their agency, and although they are the only ones who physically act, they do this in a predetermined form that has the sole systemic goal of sustaining itself.

Performing Creativity Other spiritual categories establish different kinds of social relationships than the Caboclos do: Child spirits act deferentially, as do (idealised) Brazilian children, even though they are assigned a superior status as transcendental spirits by their hearers. Preto Velhos create a more affective relationship, and the street folk spirits establish a kind of peer group relation, yet remain very difficult to assess and sometimes sinister.69 In particular, the verbal performance of a credible street folk spirit requires the usage of creative language including situational comedy and

67 Ibid. 68 Also cf. Graeber 2001. 69 Cf. Meyer 2000.

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puns. An example is the dialogue of the street folk spirit Exú Tranca Ruas (Roadblocker) from May 1997, Rio de Janeiro: Tranca Ruas: Medium: Tranca Ruas:

Medium: Tranca Ruas: Medium: Tranca Ruas: Medium: Tranca Ruas: Medium: Tranca Ruas: Medium:

(…) “Só falta quantos anos pra chegar dois mil? Quanto tempo falta?” “Tres anos só.” “Tres anos só? Ah, isso é pouco. Três anos dá pra mim casar três vezes. Três anos dá pra mim casar três vezes. Eu me caso todo ano. Como diz? Cada ano eu tô casando. Até agora nas idas de (maio) não pintou nenhum Trancaruazinho. Como diz? Quer dizer então, tá tudo certo, né? Como diz?” “Não apareceu nenhum pequenininho ainda.” “Não apareceu não. Agora, do outro lado já apareceu Exumirim, tá entendendo? E o pai que é o Exu pai dele, já tá pagando pensão pra mãe. Como diz?” (…) “Porque na linha de Exu não tinha caminho pra criança, então ele tem que ficar no caminho de erê mesmo. Então tem que pagar lá, como diz? Você já pensou que…” “Tem que pagar pedágio, né?” “Pior que o garoto já bebe Coca-Cola com cachaça, ainda bota cocada dentro. Bota cocada, bota bala, faz aquele volotof, como diz?” “Molotof.” “É. Aí quando manda pra dentro aquilo chega a explodir.” “Coquetel Molotof.”

[Transcript Irajá, May 17, 1997, p. 55] Roadblocker: Medium: Roadblocker:

Medium: Roadblocker:

Medium:

(…) “How many years are left until 2000? How many?” “Only three years.” “Only three years. Oh, that’s not much! Three years are enough for me to get married three times. I get married every year. How do you say? Every year I marry once. But until the ides of (May), they haven’t foisted any little Roadblocker on me. How do you say? That means that everything is alright, isn’t it? How do you say?” “No little boy has shown up yet.” “No, no one showed up. Now, on the other hand, Exú-mirim [the child Exú; from tupí: mirim = small, C.M.] has appeared, you understand? And the father, the Exú who is his father, is already paying support to the mother. How do you say?” (…)

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Medium: Roadblocker: Medium: Roadblocker: Medium:

“In the line of Exús, there is no path for children, so that he has to stay in the path of the Erês [child state in the Candomblé embodiment; Roadblocker here refers to the childrens’ line in the Umbanda, C.M.]. So he has to pay there. How do you say? Did you ever think of …” “He has to pay a road charge, doesn’t he?” “But even worse is that the little boy already drinks Coca Cola with rum, and then he adds coconut cream. He puts coconut cream, puts a bullet, he makes this Volotov. How do you say?” “Molotov.” “That’s it. And when he knocks it back, it explodes.” “Molotov cocktail.”

Roadblocker’s performance was accompanied by constant loud laughter from the audience. Such a creative and situationally adapted language use is part of a credible verbal performance of the spirits, the “street folk” in particular. Just as the “performance of credibility” of the Caboclo Sete Estrelas quoted above, it thus supports the structural moments of the ritual, namely the credibility of the spirit manifestation. In this manner it equally signifies the release of agency away from the medium. But since a credible verbal performance, especially in the case of the street folk spirits requires precisely creativity and spontaneity, it also demands the retention of agency with the medium in order to successfully perform the entertaining character of the spirit.

Pursuing Individual Ends This issue of agency in incorporation can be even more involved, as when Umbanda ritual empowers individuals to act in a framework legitimised by religion. Every performance of the mediums during trance is at first given the credit of representing a transcendentally inspired truth. Thus, the ritual can also be used by individuals as an impersonalisation strategy for personal ambitions. This was probably the case in the crime of Maria Padilha, mentioned above. Gabriel (1985) portrays how, sometimes, mediums use knowledge gained about practitioners during trance in order to plot against them, and Maggie (1975) observed how a secular cult house president machinated against the priest by questioning the authenticity of his spirit incorporation. They finally succeeded in unsettling him in such a way that his performances lost credibility.70 Here, factors addressed to the medium have influenced the behaviour of the spirit who, as a social persona, is completely independent of his or her medium, according to Umbanda doctrine. 70 Also cf. Turner 1985.

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Precisely the unclear allocation of agency during spirit incorporation was also exploited by a priest in a conversation in a cult house in Rio de Janeiro that I recorded in August 1997. The priest used his status as a spirit, as I have interpreted it, in order to settle a conflict between a visitor and himself.71 The conflict had emerged some weeks before, when neighbours of the cult house were gossiping that the young man had spoken badly about the priest. Both the priest and the young man knew of the rumour, and both also knew that the other knew of it. The young man entered the priest’s cult house when a street folk spirit (Zé Pelintra, i.e. “Joe Wannabe” or “Joe Coxcomb”) was already embodied in the priest. Zé had performed dances and songs and chatted with the visitors about his favourite, yet (for the audience) delicate, subjects like nightlife and love. He began to talk with the young man, making jokes and (as street folk spirits like to do) embarrassing him. He then suddenly asked him about his initiation into Umbanda and whether he was frequenting any Umbanda cult house. The young man answered that he had been initiated in another cult house, and that he was attending the rituals there. The reconciliation was then achieved by negotiating, but not directly speaking about the conflict, that is without an explicit excuse for or an explicit dispute about the subject which caused the conflict. Zé and the young man interacted rather in an indirect and symbolic way, negotiating the subject implicitly, and finally arranged things so that both parties could save face. There were several interesting moments in the conversation: At the beginning, Zé spoke of himself in the third person. In doing so, he referred to his status as a good spirit of the afterworld, but, even more importantly, he stressed his impersonalisation, i.e. his being another person than the priest. Zé: “Quando o senhor quiser, se o senhor confia no Zé, o Zé não vai enganar não, entende? A minha porta tá aberta.” [Transcript Irajá, August 16, 1997, p. 27] Zé: “When you like, if you trust in Zé, then Zé won’t deceive, you understand? My door is open.” “My door is open” can either have been said by Zé (in a metaphor) implying, “I am open for you, I cooperate and comply with you”. Or it can be the priest saying (in a metonymy), “I let you come into my cult house, I even invite you to enter my house as a practitioner”. Thus, the priest/Zé apparently offered his cooperation, but remained ambiguous, not saying explicitly what he meant, nor who it was who was speaking at the time, for the risk of losing face (not succeeding in settling the conflict) at this moment was still too high. 71 Meyer 2007a.

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Throughout the conversation with Zé, the young man spoke of the priest as “your boy.” In doing so, he explicitly supported the face of Zé/the priest, since he did not question the authenticity of the spirit incorporation, even though Zé sometimes switched from the first to the third person and back when speaking about the priest. At one moment the young man used an argument that had to leave Zé/the priest disarmed. He used Zé’s spiritual knowledge as a support for his claim that the gossip was all lies. Young Man: “(…) Agora o que o seu menino ouviu que falaram pra ele é tudo mentira, entendeu? Isso é gente que não tem saber. Eu não preciso nem me explicar muito pro senhor porque o senhor é uma entidade de luz, entendeu? E o senhor sabe o que foi falado ou não, entendeu?” [Transcript Irajá, August 16, 1997, p. 28] Young Man: “(…) So: what your boy has heard, what he has been told, it‘s all lies, you know? These are people who don’t know anything. But I don’t have to tell you all this, as you are a spirit of light, you know? And you know well, what has been said and what hasn’t, right?” This argument was particularly suggestive, because a contradiction by Zé could have called his spirit status and enlightenment into question. Zé was virtually forced to agree, and so, subsequently, he even amplified what the young man had said. The young man then confirmed Zé’s amplification, apparently happy for having passed the active part of the conversation back to Zé. Zé finally declared the conflict implicitly to be resolved when he said that there was nothing against the young man. Neither God nor the priest, nor anybody would be against him. Then he said: Zé: “E eu tô abrindo a minha porta do meu patrão, é porque eu sabe que nessa terra não tem nada contra o senhor. Nem meu menino, nem o patrão e nem ninguém. Poeiras são poeiras.” [Transcript Irajá, August 16, 1997, p. 28] Zé: “And I am opening my door of my boss only, because I know, that in this world there is nothing against you. Neither my boy, nor the boss, nor anybody. Dust is dust.” Just like in the opening, it remains unclear whether the personal deixis relates to the priest and Zé or to Zé and God. This ambiguity is one source of illocutionary power.

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It may be important to note that before and after the “conflict talk”, Zé had abundantly used performative elements emphasising his credibility as a being of transcendental origin. Among them were songs, jokes, charming stories, and the generous consumption of his favorite drink, Martini. But especially convincing was a long and impressive interlude of impromptu rhymes sung and directly addressed to, and at the same time commenting on, the people present. This artful performance is typical for Zé's assumed birthplace, Recife, in the Brazilian Northeast.72 Thus, should the preceding “conflict talk” have questioned the authenticity of Zé's incorporation to any extent, these devices would restore its credibility. Thus, ritual sequences that bear the risk of throwing doubts on the authenticity of spirit incorporation must be framed by other ritual sequences that prove its truth. This case demonstrates that Umbanda spirit embodiment can be used as a publicly accepted framework by the individuals involved for the assertion of their interests. It can serve as an impersonalisation strategy facilitating reconciliation with a much smaller risk to the face (of all persons involved) than there would be if the two parties had confronted each other directly. The spirit embodiment seems also to have permitted both parties not to be too deeply involved emotionally. Moreover, it also amplified the social pressure on the young man to accept the offer of Zé/the priest to settle the conflict. For if the addressee of the impersonalised offer had refused to comply, he would have offended the Umbanda religion as a whole. Ritual structures, as we have seen, thus sometimes provide the resources for individuals to reach their individual goals.

Conclusion In many of the situations observed during Umbanda rituals, such as healing, giving advice, teaching, joking, conversing with, or exhorting the people present, the mediums in trance easily stay the course of authentically acting out the incarnated transcendental character. For the audience, the incorporation of a spirit signifies the release of the medium’s agency to an external power, or, to put it in etic terms, to the established and approved ritual rules. But precisely this publicly acknowledged release of agency also provides the individual actor in Umbanda rituals with a framework that empowers and enables him to act for his own strategic ambitions in a disguised form. This polarity between the public release of agency and its individual retention constitutes a permanent resource for legitimating the authenticity of spirit incarnation in Umbanda ritual, but at the same time it represents a constant danger, as it is precisely here that the plausibility of performance (and thus of the entire practice) can be challenged. Time and again, spirits all-too obviously act on behalf of their 72 On the repentista rhyme singers cf. Roazzi & Dowker & Bryant 1993; Travassos 2000.

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respective mediums, e.g. motivated by ambition or in situations of conflict, so that the reality of the spirit incarnation is questioned by those in attendance, in private or even publicly. But then, since casting doubt on the reality of spirit incarnation is quickly branded as a challenge to the Umbanda religion as a whole, such expressions of distrust always also imply a risk for the sceptical participant. For the Umbandists, at least ideally, alien agents come to earth from the afterworld in order to act here. Incarnations that obviously reveal their author are considered in conversations directly after the rituals to be “ugly” (feio) and to have failed, owing to voluntary deceit or incompetence. Umbanda ritual, as we have seen, can be instrumental for two goals: (a) the reproduction of the authenticity of spirit embodiment and thus of the legitimacy of Umbanda religion as a whole, or (b) the empowerment of ritual actors. Thus, Umbanda rituals are instrumental for different, inexplicit interests, individual as well as collective. Individual actors have to be acquainted with the established liturgy of a ritual and with the right moments for possible individual intervention, as well as for the rigid observance of the canonical form. They have to be aware of the tools that produce credibility, and of the right instant to use them. Moreover, ritual actors have to know about past ritual events, the actors participating, and many other important and relevant contexts. This requires constant self-reflexivity and self-reactivity on the part of the actors. On the other hand, ritual knowledge is also distributed in the sense of Sax mentioned above: rituals consist of a concerted action by several actors who share knowledge which none of the participants entirely possesses as an individual. Rituals therefore are discussed and contested, too, drawing on diverse interpretations of different actors. Informal evaluative discussions, as are common after every Umbanda ritual, have precisely this effect, and the results are often implemented in subsequent rituals. Thus, whereas individual self-reflexivity and self-reactivity can be implemented immediately (e.g., through a change of behaviour), collective (or distributed) agency produces its effects only later. As we have seen, individuals can also exploit the ritual structure itself as a resource for pursuing their own individual ambitions. In the same way, the ritual community, as we have also seen, can use individual actors (who would then give up their agency) as resources to accomplish its interests, mainly their reproduction as a group. The public ascription of agency can hence become a resource either for individuals or for the ritual community to follow their respective goals. Individuals can empower the ritual community by outstandingly credible performances. But the ritual framework can also empower ambitious individuals to further their own goals. It is thus impossible to answer the question of who acts in ritual and where ritual agency is located. Ritual agency is simply not located at some clearly definable

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site (such as, say, a collective, an individual, a network, a treasure of shared knowledge, an institution). Rather, it is one of the defining criteria of ritual agency that it is constantly shifting its location and that it defies localisation. Moments where the actors closely follow ritual rules alternate with moments of individual creativity or even of strategic deployment of the ritual frame. It is precisely this ambiguity of agency and authorship (in its strong version), that renders ritual socially effective. Ritual mediumship thusly becomes a Latourian “hybrid agency”73, which is first closer to the human medium, and then closer to the spirit, with respect to the shared ritual knowledge. Throughout the whole ritual, agency keeps dynamically shifting. Agency should thus not be reified. Instead, we should observe how it is used as an asset by the actors themselves. Precisely the ascription and non-ascription of ritual agency can be employed as resources for the pursuit of individual and collective goals. How is ritual agency situationally ascribed by the actors? What is accomplished by this ascription in the social realm with regard to, say, power or credibility? The finding that ritual agency constantly shifts its location also entails that, instead of categorising entire rituals as “liturgical” or “performance-centred”, as Humphrey and Laidlaw (1994) have done, it seems more appropriate to approach single ritual events with a microscopic sequential analysis74 in order to identify singular sequences within one ritual as being inclined to one or the other side of the polarity. Some sequences reveal a “joint agency” where the situation masters its actors, and others reveal individual agency where single actors master the situation. Moreover, the struggle of the actors to gain mastery over the situation, as well as over the established mechanisms of ritual structure to preserve it, then become visible.

73 Latour 1994: 488. 74 See Abbott 1995 for an overview.

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References Abbott, Andrew 1995. “Sequence Analysis: New Methods for Old Ideas”. Annual Review of Sociology 21: 93–113. Abramovic, Marina 2001. Public Body; Installations and Objects, 1965–2001. Milano: Charta. Ahearn, Laura M. 2001. “Language and Agency”. Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 109–137. Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon. Badura, Albert 2001. “Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective”. Annual Review of Psychology 52: 1–26. Bloch, Maurice 1989. “Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation: Is Religion an Extreme Form of Traditional Authority?” In: Maurice Bloch. History, Ritual and Power. London: The Athlone Press: 19–45. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braun-Thürmann, Holger 2002. Künstliche Interaktion. Wie Technik zur Teilnehmerin sozialer Wirklichkeit wird. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. Brown, Diana DeG. 1986. Umbanda. Religion and Politics in Urban Brazil. New York: Columbia University Press. Brown, Penelope & Stephen Levinson 1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Callon, Michel 1986. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of Saint Brieuc Bay”. In: John Law (ed.). Power, Action and Belief: A new Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge & Kegan: 196–233. Callon, Michel & Bruno Latour 1992. “Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley”. In: Andrew Pickering (ed.). Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 343–368. Collins, Harry M. & Steven Yearley 1992. “Epistemological Chicken”. In: Andrew Pickering (ed.). Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 301–326. Comaroff, Jean & John Comaroff 1997. Of Revelation and Revolution; vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Contins, Márcia & Marcio Goldman 1984. “‘O caso da Pomba-Gira’: Religião e Violência. Uma análise do jogo discursivo entre Umbanda e Sociedade”. Religião e Sociedade 11/1: 103–132. Douglas, Mary 1970. Natural symbols. Explorations in Cosmology. London: Barrie & Rockliff. Duranti, Alessandro 1993. “Truth and Intentionality: an Ethnographic Critique”. Cultural Anthropology 8/2: 214–245.

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Durkheim, Émile 1912. Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: le système totémique en Australie. Paris: Alcan. Emirbayer, Mustafa & Ann Mische 1998. “What is Agency?” The American Journal of Sociology 103/4: 962–1023. Feuchtwang, Stephan 2007. “On Religious Ritual as Deference and Communicative Excess”. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 13: 57–72. Figge, Horst 1973. Geisterkult, Besessenheit und Magie in der Umbandareligion Brasiliens. Freiburg und München: Karl Alber. Fox, James J. 1988. “Introduction”. In: James J. Fox (ed.). To Speak in Pairs. Essays on the Ritual Languages of Eastern Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1–28. Frazer, James George 1890–1894. The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion. London: Macmillan. Gabriel, Chester E. 1985. Comunicações dos Espíritos. Umbanda, Cultos Regionais em Manaus e a Dinâmica do Transe Mediúnico. São Paulo: Ed. Loyola. Geertz, Clifford 1965. “Ritual and Social Change: a Javanese Example”. In: William A. Lessa & Evon Z. Vogt (eds.). Reader in Comparative Religion: an Anthropological Approach. New York: Harper & Row: 547–559. Gell, Alfred 1998. Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon. van Gennep, Arnold 1909. Les rites de passage: étude systématique des rites. Paris: Nourry. Gibson, David R. 2000. “Seizing the Moment: The Problem of Conversational Agency”. Sociological Theory 18/3: 368–82. Giddens, Anthony 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. London: MacMillan. — 1984. The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration. California: University of California Press. Gluckman, Max 1954. Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa. Manchester: University Press. Goffman, Erving 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behaviour. Chicago: Aldine. Gonçalves da Silva, Vagner 1994. Candomblé e Umbanda. Caminhos da devoção brasileira. São Paulo: Ed. Ática. Goodman, Felicitas 1988. Ecstasy, Ritual and Alternate Reality: Religion in a Pluralistic World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Graeber, David 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: the False Coin of our own Dreams. New York: Palgrave. Graham, Laura 1993. “A Public Sphere in Amazonia? The Depersonalized Collaborative Construction of Discourse in Xavante”. American Ethnologist 20/4: 717–741. Hanks, William F. 2006. “Joint Commitment and Common Ground in a Ritual Event”. In: Nick J. Enfield & Stephen C. Levinson (eds.). Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction. Oxford and New York: Berg: 299–328.

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Holmes, Janet 1984. “Modifying Illocutionary Force”. Journal of Pragmatics 8: 345– 365. Houseman, Michael & Carlo Severi 1998. Naven or the Other Self. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Humphrey, Caroline & James Laidlaw 1994. The Archetypal Actions of Ritual, a Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hutchins, Edwin 1995. Cognition in the wild. Cambridge: MIT Press. Irvine, Judith 1982. “The Creation of Identity in Spirit Mediumship and Possession”. In: David Parkin (ed.). Semantic Anthropology. New York: Academic Press: 241– 260. Janowski, Nicole & Christian Meyer 2005. „Ungeheure Heilige. Gottheiten, Geistwesen und Blutopfer in den afro-brasilianischen Religionen“. Neue Rundschau 116/4: 53–64. Keane, Webb 1997. “From Fetishism to Sincerity: On Agency, the Speaking Subject, and their Historicity in the Context of Religious Conversio”. Comparative Studies in History and Society 39: 674–693. Koike, Dale April 1992. Language and Social Relationship in Brazilian Portuguese. The Pragmatics of Politeness. Austin: University of Texas Press. Köpping, Klaus-Peter (ed.) 1997. The Games of Gods and Man. Essays in Play and Performance. Münster: LIT. Kramer, Fritz 1993. The Red Fez: Art and Spirit Possession in Africa. New York: Verso. Krüger, Oliver & Michael Nijhawan & Eftychia Stavrianopoulou 2005. „Ritual“ und „Agency“. Legitimation und Reflexivität ritueller Handlungsmacht. Heidelberg: Universität Heidelberg, Philosophische Fakultät (Forum Ritualdynamik 14). Latour, Bruno 1994. “On Technical Mediation. Philosophy – Sociology – Genealogy”. Common Knowledge 3/2: 29–64. — 1996. “On Actor-Network Theory. A Few Clarifications”. Soziale Welt 47: 369– 381. — 2005. Reassembling the social: an introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Law, John (ed.) 1999. Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell. Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1955. “The Structural Study of Myth”. Journal of American Folklore 78/270: 428–444. Maggie, Yvonne 1975. Guerra de Orixá. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar. Malinowski, Bronislaw 1923. “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages”. In: Charles K. Ogden & Ivor A. Richards (eds.). The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of Influence of Language Upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World: 296–336. — 1935. Coral Gardens and their Magic. A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands. 2 Vols. London: George Allen. Meyer, Christian 2000. Das Sprechen der Geister. Eine Untersuchung zur Rhetorik in der brasilianischen Umbanda. unpublished manuscript.

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— 2006a. „Afro-amerikanische Religionen“. In: Christoph Auffarth & Hans Kippenberg & Axel Michaels (eds.). Wörterbuch der Religionen. Stuttgart: Kroener: 12– 13. — 2006b. „Umbanda“. In: Christoph Auffarth & Hans Kippenberg & Axel Michaels (eds.). Wörterbuch der Religionen. Stuttgart: Kroener: 542–43. — 2006c. „‚Tranca Ruas schlachtete seine Katze, wollte aber nicht alleine essen…: Deixis, Ritualgesänge und die Glaubwürdigkeit der Geistverkörperung in der brasilianischen Umbanda‘“. Anthropos 101/2: 529–540. — 2007a. “‘Dust is Dust’. Rhetorical and Interactional Strategies of Conflict Management in Brazilian Umbanda Religion”. In: Ulrich Demmer & Martin Gaenszle (eds.). The Power of Discourse in Ritual Performance. Rhetoric and Poetics. Münster: LIT: 74–99. — 2007b. „Ritual“. In: Gerd Ueding (ed.). Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik; vol. 8. Tübingen: Niemeyer: 246–260. Mitchell, Jon P. 2004. “Ritual Structure and Ritual Agency: ‘Rebounding Violence’ and Maltese Festa”. Social Anthropology 12/1: 57–75. Miyazaki, Hirokazu 2000. “Faith and its Fulfilment: Agency, Exchange, and the Fijian Aesthetics of Completion”. American Ethnologist 27/1: 31–51. Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R. 1922. The Andaman Islanders: a Study in Social Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rammert, Werner & Ingo Schulz-Schaffer 2002. „Technik und Handeln. Wenn soziales Handeln sich auf menschliches Verhalten und technische Abläufe verteilt“. In: Werner Rammert & Ingo Schulz-Schaffer (eds.). Können Maschinen handeln? Soziologische Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Mensch und Technik. Frankfurt (Main): Campus: 11–64. Rappaport, Roy A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roazzi, Antonio & Ann Dowker & Peter E. Bryant 1993. “Phonological Abilities of Brazilian Street Poets”. Applied Psycholinguistics 14/4: 535–551. Robbins, Joel 2001. “Ritual Communication and Linguistic Ideology: A Reading and Partial Reformulation of Rappaport's Theory of Ritual”. Current Anthropology 42/5: 591–614. Sax, William 2006. “Agency”. In: Jens Kreinath & Jan Snoek & Michael Stausberg (eds.). Theorizing Rituals; vol. 1: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts. Leiden: Brill: 473–481. Schechner, Richard 1988. Performance Theory. New York: Routledge. — 1993. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. New York: Routledge. Sewell, William H. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation”. The American Journal of Sociology 98/1: 1–29. Smart, Ninian 1973. The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge. Some Methodological Questions. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Smith, W. Robertson 1889. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions. London: Black. Staal, Frits 1979. “The Meaninglessness of Ritual.” Numen 26: 2–22. — 1989. Rules Without Meaning. New York: Lang. Streck, Bernhard 1998. „Ritual und Fremdverstehen“. In: Alfred Schäfer & Michael Wimmer (eds.). Rituale und Ritualisierungen. Opladen: Leske & Budrich: 49–60. Strecker, Ivo 1988. The Social Practice of Symbolization. An Anthropological Analysis. London and Atlantic Highlands: Athlone Press. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1979. “A Performative Approach to Ritual”. Proceedings of the British Academy 65: 113–169. Travassos, Elizabeth 2000. “Ethics in the Sung Duels of Northeastern Brazil: Collective memory and contemporary practice”. Ethnomusicology Forum 9/1: 61–94. Turner, Victor W. 1967. The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. — 1968. The Drums of Affliction. Oxford: Clarendon. — 1985. “Conflict in Social Anthropological and Psychoanalytical Theory: Umbanda in Rio de Janeiro”. In: Edith Turner & Victor Turner (eds.). On the Edge of the Bush. Anthropology as Experience. Tucson: University of Arizona Press: 119–150. Tylor, Edward Burnett 1871. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom. 2 vols. London: Murray. Watanabe, John M. & Barbara B. Smuts 1999. “Explaining Religion without Explaining it Away: Trust, Truth, and the Evolution of Cooperation in Roy A. Rappaport’s ‘The obvious Aspects of ritual’”. American Anthropologist 101/1: 98–112. Wooldridge, Michael & Nicholas R. Jennings 1995. “Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice”. The Knowledge Engineering Review 10/2: 115–52.

Claudia Weber

Prescribed Agency – A Contradiction in Terms? Differences between the Tantric adhikāra Concept and the Sociological Term of Agency Introduction1 When I chose the title for my paper, I thought on the one hand of Western scholars like the philosopher and action theorist Donald Davidson (1917–2003). He wrote in 1971: “a man is the agent of an act if what he does can be described under an aspect that makes it intentional.”2 On the other hand, I had in view a Tantric ritual sequence which may be performed only after a peremptorily prescribed initiation and which proceeds, according to theory, always in the same way.3 Nevertheless, the practitioner of such rituals has adhikāra, a term corresponding to agency in some respects. I wondered whether one can speak of a practitioner’s agency with regard to the performance of rituals. To put it in a nutshell: on the one hand, we have free will as a characteristic of Western philosophical agency. On the other hand, initiation is a prescribed condition if one wants to obtain the adhikāra for Tantric rituals. In fact, it is not at all obvious that the participants of rituals can be described as true agents. Humphrey and Laidlaw may have thought about similar arguments when they developed their ritual theory, according to which “‘ritual commitment’ consists precisely in abandoning agency altogether. When performing a ritual, one gives up, or defers, the ‘intentional sovereignty’ of the individual agent.”4 1 My contribution is part of a research project on the PKS at the University of Münster which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Project leader is Prof. Annette Wilke from the “Seminar für Allgemeine Religionswissenschaft”. 2 Davidson 1971: 46. 3 Looking at the written material of the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra tradition, the performance of rituals is not prescribed in all its details. There are at least three different editions of the Śrīvidyā-Saparyā-Paddhati by Cidānandanātha (Bombay 1987 with forword by GodaVenkateswara Sastri; Madras 1984 by Padmananda Natha; Reprint Varanasi 2003 by Sankara Rama Sastri). These three sources often differ with respect to the sequence of the mantras (and the rituals which accompany them). 4 Humphrey & Laidlaw 1994: 99, cited by Sax 2006: 478.

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Our investigation into agency and adhikāra will begin with some theories of (secular) agency and the modes of action (will, can, must). These will be compared with concepts of ritual agency. In a second step, adhikāra will be analysed, mainly on the basis of two commentaries on the Tantric ritual manual ParaśurāmaKalpasūtra. It will be pointed out that adhikāra depends not only on an agent who wants to act, but also on someone who may and who shall act. Moreover, the different holders of adhikāra have different degrees of agency. We will also see that some kinds of adhikāra may be mutually exclusive. The last part of this analysis compares agency and adhikāra. Regarding the differences between the two words, I will consider whether we have to extend the meaning of the term “ritual agency”, and I will finish by stating that concepts and terms, even scientific ones, depend on the specific civilisation in which they have developed.

1. Western Theories of Agency 1.1 Secular Agency and the Modes of Action 1.1.1 What about “free will”? (will-aspect) First of all it should be emphasised that the discussions about agency in the Western hemisphere are concerned with various aspects of the term. They have not brought about a definite and uniform result yet. This article will only choose a few selected issues. Lawson describes an action by these basic elements: “Agent – Act (by means of instrument) – Patient.”5 I would like to extend the pattern in the following manner: Agent – Act (in specific modes and by means of instrument) – Patient. Let me explain this extension. If one wants to describe actions without giving their particular content, one can add to the predicate a modal verb (can, will, may, must, etc.). For someone who is an agent (not simply an actor), the verb “will” seems a good choice if one takes into consideration the quotation of Donaldson given above: “a man is the agent of an act if what he does can be described under an aspect that makes it intentional.” Obviously “free will” is an important keyword for the examination of the term “agency”. Someone who has to do something that he does not want to do is not an agent, but an actor. So we may state: “An agent will / wants to act for achieving specific aims: he acts intentionally.” This statement is problematic in some respects, but I cannot discuss all of these problems extensively: 1. Of course free will does not mean the same as intentionality. There is, however, a relation between these two attitudes. If an actor is forced to do a particular 5 Lawson 2006: 312.

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deed, it will be “a lucky chance” if it corresponds to his/her intentions. He/she can bring about his/her intentions more easily, if he/she can choose between several options of action. 2. Some scientists (Gerhard Roth, Wolf Singer) deny the existence of free will with human beings entirely, because human action, as well as any event in the world, is determined by the natural law of cause and effect. If one agrees to this questionable statement, one should consider that the majority of the scientists do not believe all that happens in the universe to be completely determined. (Remember, for instance, the impossibility of predicting the movements of the elementary particles in an atom). Moreover, there is a host of different factors which influence the decisions of human beings. Therefore we feel indeed as if we had the freedom to choose between several actions. 3. Does it make sense, from a sociological point of view, to speak about the free will of acting people? Apart from actions to which the actor is forced to a lower or higher degree, the acting person is not entirely free while doing things willingly or with pleasure. It is extremely rare (or does not happen at all) that actions are carried out only of one’s own free will. If someone wants to act intentionally, he does not know all conditions of his action. Therefore it may have unintended consequences. Perhaps he cannot achieve his aim at all.6 The acting person, however, can reflect these relations and he can learn for future decisions. Giddens spoke in this connection of “‘intentionality’ as process.” This means that the agent who does reflexive monitoring of his actions is learning permanently, so his motivation for action can change and he is more and more able to achieve his intentions and aims. Apart from corporeal and mental conditions, sociological structures (Giddens), and the habit (Bourdieu), it is above all ideas and behaviour patterns which exercise an influence on a person’s decisions. The structures of a given society tend towards their reproduction. Thus, the decisions concerning action which are made by a person are influenced in such a manner that – if possible – the structure remains unchanged. In reality we observe the stability of societies, although we recognize at the same time that societies are changing during a certain period. In view of these facts, sociology is asked to explain the changes of sociological structures, although they always tend to reproduce themselves.7 The term “structure” is used in different meanings in the scholarly literature.8 Some scholars speak of “structural-functionalism”, others of “structuralism”. For 6 Giddens 1979: 56, Figure 2.1. 7 Neither Giddens nor Bourdieu can explain in detail why a given society is changing. To achieve this aim, it would be fruitful to analyse inter-cultural interactions and processes of acculturation. 8 Giddens (1979: 59ff.) names for example Durkheim, Derrida, Hjelmslev and the Prague group, Lévi-Strauss etc.

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his own sociological theory Giddens coined the three terms of structure, system, and structuration.9 Giddens emphasizes that in his theory structures and systems are not unchangeable entities, but that they are subject to the influence of time and space.10 Unchangeable structures have no real, but only a virtual existence. Although Giddens does lay stress on the fact that societies are changing, it is difficult to perceive the reasons for change in his theory. As far as I can see, Giddens fails to investigate the processes which occur when cultures with more or less different features meet. If it is true that the members of a given society act for most of the time in such a manner that the structural properties of this society remain unchanged for a certain time (reproduction of systems), it is not possible that their actions are always guided by free will in the true sense of this word. On the contrary, their actions are to a certain degree determined. It would be wrong, however, to state that all the action of an individual person is predetermined. In this context Bourdieu (1979) decided to examine the specific ways of acting on the part of the different groups who make up a society. Each of these groups, who have been called “social classes” since the times of Marx and perhaps earlier,11 prefers certain drinks and dishes, certain sports, certain musical instruments, certain games, etc. To Bourdieu, this distinction, the judgement of taste, was of special interest. The above-mentioned groups are not defined exactly. Their individual members do not necessarily have the same preferences, but the individual persons can be related with significant features to a certain degree of probability. Such preferences for some pieces of art are part of the habit of particular persons. During a shorter or longer period of time these relations may change. Boxing, for example, was a very popular sport for the aristocracy at the end of the nineteenth century. Today, one might sooner connect boxing with low-ranking social classes. In his analysis, Bourdieu takes into consideration different forms of capital, school education, professions, and moreover the age of the social groups he examines. To summarise: the habit at which we have looked by selecting the judgement of taste has no unchangeable structure, but nevertheless it allows autonomous action and agency only in a restricted manner.

9 He gives short definitions of these terms in Giddens 1979: 59ff. (see also his Figure 2.2, p. 66). 10 Giddens 1979: 64. 11 In German we distinguish between “sozialen Klassen” (a term used by scholars of Marxism and Communism) and “Volksschichten” (a term used by persons who want to keep their distance from Marxism). In English one may express both “soziale Klassen” and “Volksschichten” by “social classes”.

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1.1.2 Increasing Agency by Different Forms of Capital – Who can Achieve his own Aims? (can-aspect) It is a home truth of economics that one needs capital to earn money and to achieve economic success. Apart from financial resources, one needs, for example, mineral resources, well trained employees as “human capital”, profound knowledge of the “market”, etc. Capital, however, is an important condition not only for economic success. Bourdieu, who spoke of economic and social, cultural, symbolic, or political capital,12 made us aware of the fact that different persons have different resources for action to bring about their aims. In other words, the consequences of a single person’s actions depend on his talents, his economic power, his reputation, etc. All these qualities can be used by a person to succeed in the field of economics, or science, or political power, etc. With regard to this fact, there are some theorists of agency who call agency a characteristic of important personages (or of “Great Men”).13 Now we can state that a person with true agency will not only act to enforce his will, but the agent can also act successfully. Giddens remarks about the relation between the will-aspect and the can-aspect: “Agency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place.” This is important for him: the “agent: [is] one who exerts power or produces an effect.”14 1.1.3 No Agent “must” act in a Prescribed Way (no “must”-aspect) We have seen that the freedom of action which is necessary for agency may be limited by reasons bound up with the person of the actor or by the conditions relevant for the action. Despite these limitations, the will-aspect remains – in my opinion – fundamental for agency. If a person must act in a prescribed way, one can hardly speak of agency. An agent must have the choice between at least two options. Perhaps he can only decide whether he will perform a particular action or not. Therefore resistance is one possible form of agency, especially for those who have not many options to act, such as e.g. the lower social classes.15 To Giddens agency is: “To be able to ‘act otherwise’.”16 These are the reasons why nobody who has agency has to act under compulsion. The modal verb “must” is alien to agency. 12 Bourdieu (1986): economic capital, social capital (a term used since 1972), cultural capital (a term used since 1973). Forms of capital not mentioned in this article: symbolic capital (a term used since 1978), political capital (a term coined in 1989). 13 Compare Ahearn 2001: 114. 14 Giddens 1984: 9. 15 Ahearn 2001: 115f. 16 Giddens 1984: 14.

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So, if we want to define agency in a secular context, we have the following result: – the agent will / wants to act to achieve specific aims: he acts intentionally,17 – the agent can act: he has the necessary resources for acting successfully, – not: the agent must act according to the given conditions: he is always able to act otherwise. 1.2 Ritual Agency 1.2.1 “The ability to transform the world” (Sax) The approaches to agency which were summarized above concern all kinds of actions. With regard to ritual context, things seem to be different compared with secular situations. Thus, Humphrey and Laidlaw came to the conclusion that a practitioner in a ritual is abandoning his/her agency completely (see above). Another characterisation of agency also fits into the ritual context: Krüger, Nijhawan, and Stavrianopoulou propose the German terms “transformative Handlungsmacht” and “Handlungskompetenz” for the translation of (English) agency.18 The two words emphasize that there is a change, a transformation, and that the mode of action is “can”, a special capability or competence. And transformations can be effected by human beings, but also by rituals. William S. Sax offers a similar solution.19 He tries to define agency as “the ability to transform the world”.20 He has in mind any kind of agency, but he gives examples from the ritual sphere: “Rituals transform boys into men, and men into kings. They transform dead persons into ancestors, wine into blood, and blood into sacrifice.” Changing, transforming, achieving an effect or a result: we could see that these are features of ritual agency as well as of their non-ritual counterpart. Is it possible to define the specific ritual agency in contrast to other forms? 1.2.2 What is the role of the “culturally postulated superhuman agents”? The approach of McCauley and Lawson (2002 in its fully developed form) tries to distinguish ritual agency from other forms of agency. Starting with their pattern of action (Agent – Act (by means of instrument) – Patient), they state that one single action (e.g. a man pours water over a child’s head) can be secular or ritual (Christian baptism). It depends solely on the context. If it is a ritual action, it 17 Can only persons be agents? Although most sociologists would agree, there is an interesting approach by Gell (1998), who describes inter-“actions” between things (e.g. masterpieces of art) and human beings. But of course: things do not act intentionally. 18 Krüger & Nijhawan & Stavrianopoulou 2005: 4. Before they gave their defintion, Giddens pointed out the effect of action (he defined the agent with the following words: “one who exerts power or produces an effect”, see above). 19 Sax 2006: 474. 20 The word “ability” indicates the can-aspect of agency (C.W.).

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belongs to a cluster of actions which can finally be traced to “culturally postulated superhuman agents”. According to Lawson, these culturally postulated superhuman agents are comparable to Boyer’s agents with “counterintuitive” properties.21 Lawson describes Boyer’s religious agents as follows: “the properties that set them apart from ordinary agents typically involve minor violations of the default assumptions of our basic ontological categories.”22 1.2.3 Is Ritual Action in any case Non-intentional? It has been assumed that an actor in a ritual cannot decide independently how he/she wants to act. In most cases he/she is following prescribed rules. (There are, of course, also rituals which are created anew or are changed in parts.) Laidlaw and Humphrey describe ritual action summarily in three terms: (1) non-intentional (but conscious and reflexive, not automatic or unaware), (2) stipulated, and (3) pre-existing, or elemental/archetypal, respectively.23 In calling rituals “non-intentional”, we have to distinguish between two things: (a) the actions during the ongoing ritual and (b) the whole cluster of actions which form one ritual. During the ritual, actions are prescribed. In the Indian fire sacrifice which is called homa (e.g. in the ritual manual Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra24), the place for the fire is prepared, mantras are recited while the fire is kindled, and prescribed offering are burned. The practitioners have to do this, whatever their intentions may be, but the fact that they are performing a homa ritual may indeed depend on their own specific intentions. There are so-called kāmya-rituals in the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra (= PKS). Kāmya means something like “desirable, optional”. This indicates firstly that the practitioner can decide on his/her own, whether he/she wants to perform the ritual and when he/she wants to do so. Secondly, the aims of the ritual performance are related to secular desires of the practitioner: cooling down fever, long-lasting life, money, luck, a young woman for marriage, etc.25 From an “objective” point of view, kāmya-rituals are not suitable to achieve the aims attributed to them: e.g. if someone is offering clarified butter into the fire, this will not promote the attainment of peace according to the natural law of cause and effect. The only result is the butter’s burning. The aim of the practitioner, the attainment of peace, is basically a “culturally postulated effect”. In spite of this, it is possible that these “unsuitable” rituals have the intended result. E.g. if both opponents are convinced that the burning of butter in the homa fire will lead to peace, they may be willing to cooperate. Here we have a particular form of the “self-fulfilling prophecy”. 21 22 23 24 25

Boyer 1994: e.g. 113ff. Lawson 2006: 312. Laidlaw & Humphrey 2006: 276–279. Chapter 9. PKS 9.24, see below.

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Having in mind rituals like the kāmya-rites, true agency is not only to be found with the culturally postulated superhuman agents or the ritual itself, but also with the ordinary practitioner. He/she may feel as if he/she can achieve desired “effects” also by performing the regular (and obligatory) rituals. The fact that the performance of the daily rituals gives the practitioner in his/her opinion power will be demonstrated below. The will-aspect of agency is not lost completely in rituals.

2. Examination of adhikāra, its Modes of Action, its Holders: 2.1 Why is it Fruitful for the Discussion of Agency to Analyse a Sanskrit Term? Scholars like Webb Keane (1997) and Laura M. Ahearn (2001) have successfully introduced linguistic inquiries into the agency discussion. Keane investigated the language of the Indonesian island Sumba. The speakers of Sumbanese feel that their language is very powerful. It is the language which has agency, rather than the members of the Sumbanese society. Ahearn analysed specific structures of some languages in mutual comparison.26 She finds her examples particularly in Samoan and Nepali. She stresses the fact that the vocabulary and grammar of different languages always exist in a specific social context. Not only do children learn their language and their social patterns step by step, but adults, too, constantly have to orient themselves anew.27 It can be meaningful to approach the construction of agency in other civilisations by focusing on one single term. The tradition of one ritual manual of the socalled Śrīvidyā (belonging to Hindu Tantra) will be the focus of my investigation: the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra. This text is dedicated to the cult of a goddess. The Śrīvidyā belongs to the Śaiva Śākta traditions in India. The text may date from about 1600 A.D. The oldest manuscript known so far is from 1675 A.D. It may be mentioned by the shortened version of its title (Kalpasūtra) in two sources from Bengal, dating to approximately 158028 and 1687 A.D29, respectively. Later, four 26 Laura M. Ahearn (2001: 120) points out that subjects in grammar are not automatically agents (if you think for example of the passive voice). (You must also distinguish perception from action, etc.) Moreover, Ahearn (2001: 121) distinguishes, with regard to transitive sentences, between languages with accusativity (the “being an object” is marked) and languages with ergativity (the “being subject” is marked). Split forms also exist (for example in Nepali). In Nepali accusativity or ergativity is used, respectively, according to the social status of the agent (2001: 124). 27 Ahearn 2001: 126. 28 Tantrasāra by Kṛṣṇānanda 2007: vol. 1, 492: compare PKS 3.12f.; vol. 1, 537: compare PKS 3.8; vol. 2, 857: compare PKS 9.21 (?). 29 Āgamatattva-Vilāsa by Raghunātha Vāgīśa (see Kavirāja 1972: 28–32, esp. 31).

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brahmins from Mahārāṣṭra30 commented on the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra or wrote their own works on the basis of this ritual manual. They made the text popular in South India (Tamil Nadu, Kerala). The Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra also enjoyed great esteem in Benares from the 1950s onwards. There are other places in India (e.g. Devipuram in Andhra Pradesh) where this ritual manual is followed. The rituals which are described in the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra belong to the liturgical-centred type according to Humphrey and Laidlaw.31 Consequently, the prescriptions for them are very detailed. To make us understand the individual ritual elements (mantras, “seed syllables” in the mantras,32 diagrams, etc.) according to the scriptural tradition, there are many intricate philosophical interpretations. Obviously, it was important for the authors of the texts to load the ritual with meaning. The ritual criticism of the Jainas, on which Humphrey and Laidlaw report,33 has certainly no place in Tantrism. The Sanskrit terms which are important for our discussion of agency are the word karman – this is the common Sanskrit term for “action”, “deed”, and sometimes “religious ritual”34 – and particularly the word adhikāra, as the title of my paper promises. 2.1.1 What Does “adhikāra” Mean? If one inquires about the Sanskrit term adhikāra,35 one will come across a surprising number of correspondences to agency. From an etymological point of view, adhikāra, like “agency”, comes from a verb meaning “to act, to do”. “Agency” derives from the Latin agere, adhikāra derives from the Sanskrit verb karoti plus the prefix adhi.36 Not only the etymology, but also the significance of the two words are in some sentences almost identical. Brunner, Oberhammer, and Padoux define adhikāra in the field of Śaiva Tantra with these words:

30 Bhāskararāya (?), Umānandanātha (1745 A.D.), Rāmeśvara (1832 A.D.), Lakṣmaṇa Rānaḍe (1889 A.D.). 31 Like ourselves in our project, Humphrey & Laidlaw (1994) were concerned with Indian civilisations. The Jaina rituals of pūjā which they describe can be compared with their counterparts in the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra in some respects. 32 The most famous seed syllable in India is certainly OṂ. 33 “The Jains, who do not have an authoritative priestly office, provide a clear illustration of how meanings are not found in rituals, but must be given to them. [...] Jains are nevertheless aware that ritual is only one path in the religious life and they generally insist that it must be made meaningful” (Humphrey & Laidlaw 1994: 7). 34 See e.g. MW 258bc (s.v. karman). The term karman derives from the root kṛ, karoti (to do) and means: action, deed, ritual, retribution of actions, compare English “action”. 35 See e.g. MW 20c (s.v. adhi-kāra). In contrast to karman it can be translated with competence, authority, qualification, right and responsibility; compare English “agency”. 36 MW 20b: 2. adhi: ind., as a prefix to verbs and nouns, expresses above, over and above, besides.

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If the origin of this quotation were unknown, one might assume that it is a definition of agency (in its can-aspect). A closer investigation of the term adhikāra, however, will show its many facets. According to the PW (Großes Petersburger Wörterbuch), the word has been used since pre-Christian times, esp. in the dharma (“law”) and ritual literature (Kātyāyana-Śrautasūtra, Manusmṛti), but also in the Bhagavad-Gītā. In their Tantra dictionary, Oberhammer, Brunner and Padoux propose for adhikāra this English translation: “authority, qualification, right and responsibility”, Gengnagel works with the meaning “Amt” (duty, function),38 I myself have chosen “competence” in my translation of parts of Rāmeśvara’s commentary on the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra. I shall now present some passages of the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra, Rāmeśvara’s commentary on it, and the related Tantra tradition, in order to explain other features of the term adhikāra. 2.2 adhikāra and its Modes of Action: adhikāra as Qualification (can-aspect) Beginning with adhikāra as qualification or as competence, it is in any case 1. competence for something which 2. is confirmed by some kind of authority: (Ad 1) Adhikāra may be limited e.g. to one particular mantra. One Tantra runs as follows: “The (persons), however, who have attained the purity of their mind are competent for the mantra (vidyā).”39 (Ad 2) The “authority” who decides whether one has the necessary adhikāra for a specific mantra is usually the teacher (guru), who teaches his pupil the mantra in question only after the latter is ripe for it. There is also a complete inauguration (pūrṇâbhiṣeka), which gives the adhikāra for all mantras from all religious traditions (also from Vaiṣṇavism and others). This is at least the opinion of some people. As far as I can see, the normal case is that adhikāra is attributed to individual persons, not to a whole group as a community or to a ritual itself.40 The problem of 37 38 39 40

Brunner & Oberhammer & Padoux 2000: 105, s.v. Gengnagel 1996: 51 and passim. citta-śuddhiṃ tu saṃprāptā vidyāyām adhikāriṇaḥ | Paramânanda-Tantra 12.113. Sax 2006: 474, however, criticises Western examinations of agency which proceed from individuals, since this is not in accordance with ritual agency.

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speaking about impersonal non-intentional agency has already been mentioned. Gell suggested distinguishing between primary and secondary agency. It may be that Tantrism is more consistent: an impersonal adhikāra seems to violate the linguistic instinct. For initiation (dīkṣā) into the religious tradition of Śrīvidyā, love of the deity (bhakti) is the main condition according to Rāmeśvara (who comments on PKS 1.141). The age of the person who will be initiated, his or her gender, and the social position (caste) are not of relevance if we have the ideal case. U. Hüsken investigated the situation in the temple city of Kanchipuram.42 The ordinary believers who come to Kanchipuram think that the family background is important if they want to estimate the individual adhikāra of one of the priests. Therefore initiation (dīkṣā) is not the only condition for the adhikāra of a priest. Here we see the importance of Bourdieu’s “social capital” in Indian society. Now we return to Rāmeśvara. The qualification for the Tantric form of religion does not contradict the Vedic form, which is thought to be the higher one by many Indian people (but not by Rāmeśvara, of course). Some critics of Tantra assume that there is such a contradiction.43 Lakṣmaṇa Rānaḍe, another commentator of the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra, declares that, in his opinion, a Tantric initiation without a Vedic initiation is only possible for the fourth Indian caste, the Śūdras. The three higher castes (Brahmins, Kṣatriyas, and Vaiśyas) should practise only Vedic cults, or, if they are advanced, they should combine the Vedic and the Tantric form of

41 See esp. PKS(Ba) 13,22 (Such a qualification of the bhakti level is only perceptible for one’s own heart (and) not visible for other (persons). – etādṛśa-bhakti-bhūmikā-‘dhikāraḥ svântaḥkaraṇaika-vedyaḥ, na pareṣāṃ pratyakṣaḥ |) and 14,7ff. (Therefore: having reflected about the qualification in one’s own mind, the (person) who is fit for ascending this level – (may he be) brahmin, kṣatriya, vaiśya, śūdra, from a mixed caste, woman, or neither depressed in the circuit of wordly life, nor unattached (to it) –: (someone) who has subdued the senses is indeed qualified. The qualified one is not fallen from the Veda. – ato ’dhikāraṃ sva-cetasā vicārya nirukta-bhūmikām āroḍhuṃ yo yogyaḥ sa eva brāhmaṇaḥ kṣatriyaḥ vaiśyaḥ śūdraḥ saṃkara-jātīyaḥ strī yo vā ko vā saṃsāre na nirviṇṇaḥ na câsaktaḥ jitendriyaḥ sa eva adhikārī; na śruti-patha-galitaḥ adhikārī |). 42 Hüsken 2008. She is the head of a project called “Initiation, priestly ordination, temple festivals and ritual traditions in the South Indian temple city of Kancipuram” which she started during her time at Heidelberg. 43 Rāmeśvara in PKS(Ba) 7,15ff. Rāmeśvara (7,19) quotes the Sūtasaṃhitā: atyanta-galitānāṃ tu prāṇināṃ veda-mārgataḥ – living beings (in Gen.pl.) who are fallen away far from the Veda way.

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religion.44 Women, however, may not seek after the Tantric dīkṣā of their own accord. They need the permission of their husbands. Girls need the consent of their fathers. To the initiation of widows their sons must agree. Generally, Lakṣmaṇa recommends husbands to take the initiation together with their wives, because they make up “half part of their body”. In another passage of Rāmeśvara’s commentary (on PKS 3.31, p. 132) we are advised of an additional condition for the performance of Tantric rituals (besides bhakti): Because a very large amount of liquor is drunk after the worship of the deity, a person who cannot stand alcohol (ajitendriya – “who cannot control his senses”) is not qualified for this form of Tantric religion. An alcoholic has to look for another kind of religion. This condition for Tantric adhikāra is remarkable, if one takes into account the refusal of alcohol by the Hindu mainstream, which is under the influence of Vedic brahmins. These brahmins also view four additional “forbidden” substances (together with liquor called the pañca-ma-kāra) with disfavour. The “five things whose names start with m-” in Sanskrit play an important role in some branches of Tantra, to which for example the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra belongs. So adhikāra consists in the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra tradition of: mental attitudes (bhakti, not fallen from the Veda), corporeal qualification (to be hard-drinking), sometimes also: birth into a qualified family (or caste), if a woman wants to be initiated, the person who has the care and custody of this woman must agree. The adhikāra is confirmed by a legal act, the dīkṣā or initiation.45 If one compares the conditions for practising the Tantric ritual with the modes of action of Western-styled sociological agency, all of them can be seen to belong to the can-aspect, which means that they represent the necessary capital (according to Bourdieu) for the right to perform ritual agency.

44 STV(A) I,8f. Lakṣmaṇa quotes the Tripurā-Rahasya: “The state of having qualification, however, is mixed (from Vedic and Tantric), perceptible as being mixed, and compliant to Veda and Tantra. It gives a great fruit (result). With regard to this it is for the ‘twice-born’. [...] For the ‘twice-born’ with a pure mind, however, the state of having mixed qualification arises.” – miśrā tu miśritā-jñeyā veda-tantrânurodhinī | mahā-phala-pradā tatra dvijānām adhikāritā | [...] śuddha-citta-dvijānāṃ tu bhaven miśrâdhikāritā | 45 A different list with conditions for adhikāra is to be found in the Gandharva-Tantra: “In the second chapter of the Gandharva-Tantra (you can read): ‘Now there is (someone who is) believing in the Veda, pure, clever, free from dualism, with subdued senses; (he is) the best brahmin and he speaks the brahman, he owns the brahman, he studies the brahman; he has left all injury, he delights in the well-being of all breathing (creatures). He may be qualified for this science, otherwise he (would) not (be) an accomplishing (one).’” – gandharvatantra-dvitīya-paṭale | āstiko ’tha śucir dakṣo dvaita-hīno jitendriyaḥ | brahmiṣṭho brahmavādī ca brahmī brahma-paryāyaṇaḥ | sarva-hiṃsā-vinirmuktaḥ sarva-prāṇi-hite rataḥ | so ’smin śāstre ’dhikārī syāt tad-anyatra na sādhakaḥ || Prāṇatoṣiṇī 1, Sargakāṇḍa 1861: 10.

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In order to grasp the importance of special capabilities and qualifications for the adhikāra (can-aspect), consider that the temple priests of Kanchipuram (as mentioned above) are able to impress many pilgrims deeply if they do not exercise the ritual in the old traditional way, but if they place some emphases differently.46 These changes do not cause tradition to lose its significance, but vary it. A. Wilke speaks in connection with such variations of “traditionsgebundene Phantasie” (“tradition-conscious invention”).47 It can be traced in Vaiṣṇavism and Śaivism. 2.2.1 “Adhikāra” as “Right and Responsibility” (may/shall-aspect) To someone who was initiated because of his bhakti and because of his ability to controll his senses, adhikāra means more than I have explained hitherto: he can, he may, and he shall exercise the daily ritual. Therefore Brunner and Padoux speak of “right and responsibility”.48 The religious “right” of the initiated person is here restricted to performing the ritual in the prescribed way. Tantric rituals are often divided into three (or four) groups:49 (1) the “eternal” ones (nitya), which are normally to be followed every day (in some translations they are called obligatory rituals), (2) the occasional ones (naimittika), which are to be performed only sometimes, but which are also obligatory, (3) the optional ones (kāmya), which are to be performed if one has particular aims, wishes, intentions, and (4) the forbidden ones (niṣiddha). During the daily rituals of the ParaśurāmaKalpasūtra it looks as if the worshipped deities are provided with things which they need (water, perfume, incense, food, etc.). Although this gives the impression that the gods and goddesses depend on the rituals of their believers, and that the ritual is performed on their behalf, the deity is invited to come from its place in the heart of the practitioner, who identifies himself with it by using specific techniques, and eventually the deity returns to the bhakta’s heart. The services (upacāra) which the worshipper offers to the deity (giving water etc.) are not carried out in reality, but in imagination.50 The (obligatory) service for the deity is at the same time a service for one’s self. In view of this, the following objection is not too grave: The initiated one who may perform the ritual only in the prescribed way does not seem to have any considerable agency. Does not “the adhikārin shall act: he practises the (prescribed) daily rituals” mean “the adhikārin must act according to prescriptions”? The pre-

46 47 48 49 50

Hüsken 2008. Wilke 2003: 143. Brunner & Oberhammer & Padoux 2000: 105. Ibid. 2004: 88f. (s.v. kāmya). PKS 4.4 uses the expression: kalpayāmi – “I prepare (mentally)”. The verbal root kḷp in the causative form can simply mean “to prepare, produce” (MW), but also refer to production in the mind (see MW s.v. kalpana: “[...], forming in the imagination, [...].”).

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scription that the ritual shall be performed daily, however, sounds like a must. And the must-aspect of agency was excluded by us above! To decide whether the initiated one is acting under duress, consider also the following: according to Tantric philosophy, the practitioner becomes “competent for (all) the mantras without any exception”51 by initiation. These mantras are for the believer “of inconceivably great power”.52 The right to make use of the mantras, which has been obtained by initiation, grants the practitioner incredible power, which he can exercise in the “secular” world, too. The adhikāra which he was given by initiation makes him able “to transform the world”. Although the practitioner must perform the cult in reality, performing the cult means to him that he may use the power which is gained by Tantric practices. The possible profit of a believer in the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra which he gains by his worship become clearer if one looks at some aims of optional rituals:53 “One may offer with sesame and clarified butter for (attaining) peace, with cooked rice for cooked rice and immortality (amṛta), with sprouts of samiccūta (some kind of mango?) for cooling down fever, with panic grass for a long-lasting life, with (the tree) kṛtamāla for money, with blossoms of the blue water-lily (a sort of Nymphaea) for luck, with leaves of the Bengal quince for royal authority, with blossoms of the (true) lotus (a sort of Nelumbo) for great royal authority, with pure fried grain for a girl (or virgin), [...].”54 When we observe the modes of action with regard to adhikāra, the picture looks like this: the adhikārin can act: he has the qualification for practising rituals properly; the adhikārin may act: he may use empowering Tantric rituals; the adhikārin shall act: he practises the (prescribed) daily rituals for tapping their efficacy / power. 2.3 The Different Degrees of adhikāra and its Holders There are degrees of adhikāra which differ in intensity: 1. It differs according to the age and experience of someone: We have already stated this fact in connection with the temple priests of Kanchipuram, whose success in impressing the pilgrims varies greatly. The development of their

51 PKS 1.43: śiṣyo 'pi pūrṇatāṃ bhāvayitvā kṛtârthas taṃ guruṃ yathā-śakti vittair upacarya vidita-veditavyo 'śeṣa-mantrâdhikārī bhaved iti śivam | 52 PKS 1.8: mantrāṇām acintya-śaktitā | 53 PKS 9.24. 54 tilâjyaiḥ śāntyā – annenânnāyâmṛtāya – samic-cūta-pallavair jvara-śamāya – dūrvābhir āyuṣe – kṛta-mālair dhanāyotpalair bhāgāya – bilva-dalai rājyāya – padmaiḥ sāmrājyāya – śuddhalājaiḥ kanyāyai – [...] |

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competence takes a lifetime. This process begins when they are children, watching their fathers, who are priests. It lasts until old age. 2. The degree of adhikāra differs according to the specific initiation (dīkṣā), e.g. sāmayin (“like-minded one”), putraka (“son”), sādhaka (practitioner), and ācārya (teacher).55 3. Different persons have different attitudes towards the Tantric philosophy: From the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra tradition we learn that, if a Śaiva-Tantric person has a weak adhikāra, he shall always reflect upon the mantra of the deity, but a Tantric person with adhikāra for relevant things is living with the constant reflection on his own godly being.56 2.3.1 “Adhikāra” of the Tantric Master (and his “Gestaltungsmacht”) We have seen that a candidate for initiation may have another form of adhikāra than the initiated one. The initiated practitioner,57 however, has a minor form of adhikāra compared with the teacher or master (guru). Like the practitioner, the teacher, too, has a particular ritual act (abhiṣeka), during which his position is confirmed. Through this act, the guru obtains a more powerful kind of agency than the initiated pupil. The master may change already existing rituals or introduce new ones. He has performative agency in the sense of “Gestaltungsmacht”. A guru’s agency is quasi-institutional. Therefore it may be compared with social agency emanating from a political post (social capital according to Bourdieu). The master’s influence on his pupils is often stronger than that of a political official on his subjects. The pupils are to support the master and his family financially (PKS 10.6058: “(You shall show) respectful behaviour towards the teacher as well as towards the teacher’s wife and children.” PKS 10.7459: “(You shall) eagerly try to preserve body, property, and life of the teacher.”). The pupil shall worship his 55 See Vaiṣṇava Jayākhyasaṃhitā 16.1. On the pages of the Digital Library of Muktabodha e.g. http://www.muktalib5.org/DL_CATALOG/DL_CATALOG_USER_INTERFACE/dl_user_i nterface_create_utf8_text.php?hk_file_url=..%2FTEXTS%2FETEXTS%2Fjayakhyasamhita HK.txt. 56 Rāmeśvara in PKS(Ba) 33,11 on PKS 1.17 and 1.18. “The previous rule (PKS 1.17: (You should) always (be) in contact (= reflection about [...]) with the mantra) concerns a person with weak qualification. This (rule) (PKS 1.18: (You should) always (do) the entering into the state ‘(I am) Śiva’.) concerns a person with excellent qualification.” – pūrva-dharmo mandâdhikāriṇaḥ, ayaṃ mukhyâdhikāriṇaḥ | 57 According to the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra (10.68), there are different mystic degrees for Tantric persons. These degrees do not seem to have their particular kinds of initiation. The three kinds of initiation in PKS 1.32 are performed quickly, one after the other. They are not connected with the single degrees in PKS 10.68. In other Tantric texts there are mystic degrees which differ from the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra to some extent, as well as other forms of initiation. 58 guru-vat guru-putra-kalatrâdiṣu vṛttiḥ | 59 adhijigamiṣā śarīrârthâsūnāṃ gurave dhāraṇam |

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master like a god (PKS 1.2060: “The worship of his only teacher (may be performed) without (any) doubt.”). 2.3.2 “Adhikāra” as Administrative Agency in the Religious Field In a dictionary article, Brunner61 refers to monasteries in which a single master reigns over pupils belonging to different religious degrees (compare PKS 10.6862 on the so-called ullāsas). In a quasi-legal act, he could hand over his authority or power. The Sanskrit term for this action is adhikāra-samarpaṇa. It seems that today nobody knows the meaning of this ritual any more. The transmission of the teacher’s authority belongs to the sphere of administrative agency. The temple priests of Kanchipuram, whom I have mentioned in this paper from time to time, are not only obliged to show their religious qualification, they must also present official documents concerning the status of their families.63 Thus, we can speak in this respect of administrative agency in the true sense of the words. 2.3.3 “Adhikāra” of the Deity The most powerful form of religious agency is attributed to the highest god or goddess him- or herself. In the Śrīvidyā religion, which is dedicated to the goddess Śrī/Lalitā, the highest deity may be identified as the goddess. This becomes manifest in many pictures: the goddess is sitting on the corpse of Sadāśiva, who is lying on a platform which is carried by Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Rudra, and Īśvara.64 On the other hand, there are actions in Śrīvidyā which can be performed only by Śiva. According to Rāmeśvara65 a special kind of ritual sex between the god and his consort belongs to these actions. It is called – in translation – “sacrifice to the (female) messenger” (dūtī-yajana). If Śiva performs such actions (or also other deeds), he is named adhikāra-śiva, “Śiva in an active condition”.66 Thus, Tantric philosophers use the term adhikāra with regard to the deities, too. This is similar to some theorists of ritual agency: Lawson and McCauley coined the term “CPS agents” (culturally postulated superhuman agents; see above). Here, the difference between the commentators of some Tantric texts and Western scholars is not very great. According to that form of Śaiva-Śāktism to which the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra belongs, the god (Śiva) and a human person do not differ substantially. The soul of

60 eka-gurûpāstir asaṃśayaḥ | 61 Brunner et al. 2000: 107, s.v. adhikāra-samarpaṇa. 62 ārambha-taruṇa-yauvana-prauḍha-tadantonmanânavasthollāseṣu prauḍhântāḥ samayâcārāḥ | tataḥ paraṃ yathā-kāmī | svaira-vyavahāreṣu vīrâvīreṣv ayathā-mananād adhaḥ pātaḥ | 63 Hüsken 2008. 64 PKS 3.10. 65 Rāmeśvara in PKS(Ba) 278,14ff. on PKS 10.63. 66 Brunner et al. 2000: 107, s.v.

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a human individual is a Śiva who is imprisoned in a body. If the soul is liberated from its body, it is identical with the highest deity.67 2.3.4 Some Remarks on “Adhikāra” Beyond the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra-tradition 2.3.4.1 The “Adhikāra” of the “Mantra”-souls A different Śaiva tradition than that of the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra holds the following ideas: In realising their own divinity, souls (śivas) may appear in different conditions. Some śivas remain as liberated souls (muktâtman) without any specific function, others take up an “office” (or duty, function). Gengnagel translates the Sanskrit term adhikāra in this connection by the German word “Amt”.68 Souls with a function become “mantra-souls” or “souls of mantra rulers” (mantreśvara, mantramaheśvara). While carrying out these functions, their ability to act and know, which is originally absolute, is restricted. In other words, surprisingly some texts speak of the restriction (literally “soiling”) of agency by adhikāra (adhikāramala). Exercising a specific agency may restrict absolute agency in some cases! Indirectly, the lack of adhikāra of the liberated souls is more highly estimated than the presence of adhikāra of the souls with function. In this article, the fact can only be stated without giving an explanation. 2.3.4.2 Who are the Holders of “Adhikāra” (= “adhikārin”)? The following adhikārins with different degrees of intensity were described above: the believer before his initiation, the practitioner (sādhaka), the teacher (guru) who possesses “Gestaltungsmacht”, and the deities (devatā) Śiva or Śakti, or both. Unfortunately, I could not detect in my sources whether the term adhikāra is used with regard to the religious community of Tantric believers which is called the “family” (kula). It would be interesting to know from a sociological point of view. The Tantric “family” is present in the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra in the form of its customs and rules, and as the community who consumes the remainder of its daily rituals at the end of the ceremony. Moreover, it appears that adhikāra is connected with persons only. So far as I can see, there is no hint that “things” (like mantras69 or the ritual process itself) may have adhikāra.

67 PKS 1.5: “Śiva who is armoured with the body is the (individual) soul, without armour it is the highest Śiva (himself).” 68 Gengnagel 1996: 67–71. 69 Gengnagel mentions souls who appear in the shape of mantras. These mantra souls own adhikāra (s.o.).

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2.4 Further Details 2.4.1 “adhikāra-bheda” – Some Kinds of “Adhikāra” are Mutually Exclusive Some Indian philosophers coined the term adhikāra-bheda for forms of adhikāra which are mutually exclusive. Rāmeśvara (in PKS(Ba) 5,24–26; 6,2f.70 on PKS 1.1) refers to theories according to which the qualification (adhikāra) for the Vedic way of religious practice contradicts the Tantric way. The result of these considerations is that different adhikāras can lead to salvation. Rāmeśvara himself is not of the opinion that Veda and Tantra cannot be combined. Lakṣmaṇa, too, believes that members of the first three principal castes (varṇa) are not only allowed to mix Vedic and Tantric rites, but that this is even desirable for them (see above). The fact that some rituals are mutually exclusive is also known outside Indian religions. The three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) expect their members not to worship other gods: they must not participate in rituals of other religions; someone who has taken Catholic orders must not marry; etc. 2.4.2 “Adhikāra” as a Motive for Action By PKS 9.2771 a further feature of adhikāra can be exemplified: “Therefore all that which is thought, said, or done [...] for reasons of vitality, intellect, (requirements of the) body, customs, or adhikāra may become a gift to the Brahman.” Besides issues of vitality (prāṇa), intellect (buddhi), requirements of the body (deha), and customs/duties/laws (dharma), the motive of adhikāra belongs to the reasons for which human beings think, speak, or act. In other words, one has to act because of one’s specific adhikāra. The perfomance of the obligatory daily ritual is caused by this motive of adhikāra. With this view of the shall-aspect of adhikāra, we will finish our journey through the Indian mind.

70 “Therefore Mahādeva gives salvation quickly only on the Vedānta way, nowhere else. On another way (than the Vedic one) he gives the highest salvation, however, step by step. – So the eternal Veda (says). [...] Therefore the mortal (person) who is standing in the Veda may not rest upon another way. Therefore, by the distinction between the qualified (ones), the (several) ways are the proof. (There is) no doubt.” – ato vedānta-mārga-stho mahādevo ’cireṇa tu | muktiṃ dadāti nânyatra sthitaḥ so ’pi krameṇa tu || dadāti paramāṃ muktim ity eṣā śāśvatī śrutiḥ || [...] ato veda-sthito martyo nânya-mārgaṃ samāśrayet | ato ’dhikāri-bhedena mārgā mānaṃ na saṃśayaḥ || 71 itaḥ pūrvaṃ prāṇa-buddhi-deha-dharmâdhikārato jāgrat-svapna-suṣupty-avasthāsu manasā vācā karmaṇā hastābhyāṃ padbhyām udareṇa śiśnā yat smṛtaṃ yad uktaṃ yat kṛtaṃ tat sarvaṃ brahmârpaṇaṃ bhavatu svāhā, iti brahmârpaṇâhutiṃ kṛtvā |

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3. Comparison Between Agency and Adhikāra: 3.1 Similarities and Differences 3.1.1 The “Shall”-aspect of “Adhikāra” During our discussion of the terms agency and adhikāra, we focused on different modes of action. While (secular) agency is defined by an agent who will act according to his intention, and who can do so, because he has the necessary resources for acting successfully, an adhikārin in the Tantric ritual can act, since he has the qualification for practising rituals properly, and he may use empowering Tantric rituals, but he also shall perform these rituals every day. In contrast to the duty of an adhikārin, a (secular) agent never must act according to the given conditions; he is always able to act otherwise. It looks as if the difference between ritual agency and ritual adhikāra is far greater than in the case of their secular counterparts. As far as secular adhikāra is concerned, the term is used for designating secular authority (similar to secular agency in the West). In Hindi an adhikārin is “an officer; an authority; a title-holder; an owner”.72 Agency, however, embraces more actions than adhikāra: agency is to be found in any action which is carried out by an agent according to his intentions. In contrast to this, adhikāra requires a special qualification, e.g. in a state office (like the adhikārin) or in rituals which may not be performed by everybody. When we find similarities between agency and adhikāra in the secular sphere, can we also infer some features of ritual agency from ritual adhikāra? Can we say as a rule that ritual agency (1) is only possible with specific qualifications of the agent, (2) gives the agent some kind of power, and (3) makes it the agent’s duty to repeat particular rituals? I will neglect points 1 and 2 and reflect on point 3: One cannot say that the practice of rituals is always a duty. There are, however, often social forces which make it more difficult or impossible for the individual to neglect some rituals; or when a new ritual is created, for instance a specific way of celebrating Christmas in a family, the members of this family will feel obliged to carry on the tradition, although abandoning it would easily be possible, and would not prove a disadvantage to them. The point, however, in the case of adhikāra, is that one is obliged to perform the ritual which one has the permission to perform. It is adhikāra which compells an individual, not the individual’s community. Again my question: what is the situation in the case of agency? There are also particular agents who are expected to perform rituals regularly because of their profession (e.g. priests). Moreover, some religious communities want persons who are initiated in a specific act of worship to participate in this act in future. What is the value of the first Holy Communion if it is not followed by others? So agency in ritual might have more 72 Chaturvedi & Tiwari 1982: s.v. adhikārin.

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obligatory features than the ones which have been worked out by scholars until now. Some details can be found in Roy Rappaport’s work.73 When a ritual is obligatory, it is often represented as necessary for one (or several) of the following parties: (1) the deity needs the ritual services, demands them, or is pleased by them; (2) the social community to which the participant belongs expects the performance of the ritual, e.g. for strengthening solidarity or for other reasons; (3) the participant him- or herself profits from the ritual in some way – fertility, wealth, success, salvation, etc. It seems to me as if there is an obligation concerning the performance of rituals, especially in the case of a particular qualifying ceremony, e.g. an initiation. With regard to the Tantric adhikāra, the practitioner’s duty is made less onerous by the fact that the ritual leads to the experience of being one with the deity, and by the power which he attains in the ritual. We have many cases in which rituals must be performed and promise the practitioner profit, but this is not always true. The shall-aspect which belongs to ritual adhikāra exists sometimes, but not necessarily with regard to ritual agency. Is adhikāra indeed the suitable Indian equivalent of “agency”, as we assumed in the beginning? Or is it rather the equivalent to action? Karp defined an actor as “a person whose action is rule-governed or rule-oriented”.74 According to our analysis, adhikāra appeared as “rule-governed”. The agent is defined by Karp as “a person engaged in the exercise of power in the sense of the ability to bring about effects and to (re)constitute the world”. This description, too, fits an adhikārin. Our result is that agency and adhikāra have some features in common, but they are not identical. 3.1.2 The Transforming Power of Ritual Agency Sax and others (see above) have seen in agency a transforming power which was confirmed particularly by rituals. Can we call the Tantric adhikāra a transforming power, too? In Tantric rituals (as well as e.g. in the Christian transsubstantiation) there are “transformations”. Mantras which are manifestations of the deities are “placed” in prescribed nyāsas (ritual “placing”) by the practitioner on his own body, which is purified and sanctified by this.75 Another example is the alcohol which is prepared during the arghya76 ritual. It is offered to the deity, and the practitioner and other members of his religious family (kula) drink it at the end of the whole ritual sequence as “rest of the sacrifice”, or they “make it their own” (svīkuryāt) according to PKS 6.36. In spite of these examples of transformations, I do not think that the 73 74 75 76

Rappaport 1999 (quoted according to Laidlaw & Humphrey 2006: 270f.). Karp 1986: 137, cited by Ahearn 2001: 113. E.g. PKS 3.14–3.21. The arghya is basically water which is offered to a guest. In Śrīvidyā and related Tantric cults we find complex methods of preparation.

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adhikāra is the transforming power (as is agency), but adhikāra is the right and the qualification of the practitioner to use transforming powers like nyāsas and mantras aptly. It was explained above that I could not find a hint of any adhikāra of a ritual or any other impersonal form of adhikāra. Our result is again that adhikāra and agency differ slightly from each other. 3.2 Do we Have to Define Agency Anew? How can we deal with these apparent similarities and differences between the Indian term adhikāra and the Western concepts of agency? Is it possible to integrate both into one single theory? Or is it better not to combine them and to see in adhikāra and agency two different options for describing rituals? If we decide to integrate adhikāra into the agency concept, the theories of “fuzzy sets”77 and “polythetic classes”78 may be useful. Snoek refers to these two terms for defining ritual itself.79 The may-aspect, i.e. the fact that permission is needed to exercise ritual agency, and also the shall-aspect, which means that the possession of agency compels a person to perform the ritual in question, can be fuzzy characteristics if they are somehow connected with ritual agency in any case, but in variable degrees.80 The permission to perform a particular ritual can be conferred according to standards which are more or less strict. The duty to perform it can also be more or less strict. I am not sure, however, whether ritual agency is always connected with permission and duty. At least these two characteristics are valid in many (most?) cases. So it seems possible to use them in the sense of polythetic classes.81 I think that the concepts of agency and ritual adhikāra complement one another and that it makes sense to combine them. 3.3 Scientific Terms Depend on the Specific Civilisation in Which They Have Developed Ahearn held that “Speakers of a given language are constrained to some degree by the grammatical structures of their particular language, [...].”82 One could add: the vocabulary which is available for formulating a sentence has an influence on the speakers’ way of thinking, too. Grammar, however, is far more important for the 77 78 79 80

Zadeh 1965. Needham 1975. Snoek 2006: 4–7. “A fuzzy set is a class of objects with a continuum of grades of membership. Such a set is characterized by a membership (characteristic) function which assigns to each object a grade of membership ranging between zero and one.” (Zadeh 1965: 338) 81 “Polythetic characteristics [...] are not present in all members of a polythetic class, but each occurs in a majority of them.” (Snoek 2006: 5) 82 Ahearn 2001: 120.

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manner of thinking than vocabulary. The definition of agency in modern science bears the imprint of Western civilisation with regard to its intellectual content and way of formulation. Sanskrit, however, is cognate to the other Indo-European languages. We have thus met a particularly great number of similarities, but our analysis has also brought to light some differences. Even if we take the Western term of agency as a basis for our research, Ahearn’s statement remains true: “Agency refers to the socioculturally mediated capacity to act.”83 In this paper “Western” philosophy (action theory etc.), “Western” sociology/social anthropology (Bourdieu, Giddens, Gell), “Western” studies of religion (Sax; Lawson and McCauley; Humphrey and Laidlaw), and religious texts which originate from the ritual tradition of Hindu Tantra have been brought together. Here the question may arise as to why Indian sociologists were not taken into account in addition to the primary religious sources. Is it, however, possible to separate the various academic disciplines correctly? We have seen in our discussion of the term agency that there are interactions between philosophy, sociology, and also sciences (Roth, Singer), etc. Moreover, sociology in India is not a traditional discipline. If we agreed that only Western sociology may be compared to Indian sociology, we would take for granted that in (all) other civilisations there are the same disciplines as in the Western hemisphere. Today, the influence of the Western modes of thought can be found all over the world. So, if we compare Western sociology with (modern) “Indian” sociology in order to define adhikāra, we will not learn much about the genuine Indian position: “The point, however, is that [...] this is the genealogy of thought in which social scientists find themselves inserted. Faced with the task of analyzing developments or social practices in modern India, few if any Indian social scientists of India would argue seriously with, say, the thirteenth-century logician Ganesa or with the grammarian and linguistic philosopher Bartrihari84 (fifth to sixth centuries), or with the tenth- or eleventh-century aesthetician Abhinavagupta.”85 Among traditional Indian scholars, philosophy was known, but nothing comparable to Western sociology. One may call Rāmeśvara, the main commentator of the Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra, a philosopher.86 Many of the “genuine” Indian disciplines, such as grammar or the numerous branches of philosophy, developed in connection 83 84 85 86

Ibid.: 112. Read: Bhartṛhari (C.W.). Chakrabarty 2000: 5. Rāmeśvara lived during the nineteenth century and knew European thought, so he is not a “genuine” Indian philosopher in the strict sense. (But are there “genuine” thinkers of one single nation in a strict sense?)

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with religious texts (e.g. the Vedic corpus). Therefore it is fruitful to start with such religious texts in order to find Indian conceptions which are comparable to agency. One of my points was to show that the term of agency which is discussed today among researchers in ritual is a Western one. This means that it originates in a specific cultural complex, and there are other terms in other regions which are also worth considering for a ritual analysis. If, however, we integrate such terms in our scholarly metalanguage, it will become richer, but it will remain a predominantly Western metalanguage. It would be good if scholars from other civilisations (and not only Western Indologists, Sinologists, Africanists etc.) could join the academic discourse.

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References Ahearn, Laura M. 2001. “Language and Agency”. Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 109–137. Bourdieu, Pierre 1979. La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. — 1986. “Three Forms of Capital”. In: John G. Richardson (ed.). Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood Press: 241– 258. — 1994a [1984]. Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. — 1994b [1991]. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boyer, Pascal 1994. The Naturalness of Religious Ideas. A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brunner, Hélène & Gerhard Oberhammer & André Padoux (eds.) 2000 & 2004. Tāntrikābhidhānakośa. Dictionnaire des termes techniques de la littérature hindoue tantrique. 2 Vols. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. (Beiträge zur Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens 35 & 44; Sitzungsberichte / Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse 681 & 714). Chakrabarty, Dipesh 2000. Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Reprint 2008] Chaturvedi, Mahendra & Bhola Nath Tiwari 19829. A Practical Hindi-English Dictionary. New Delhi: National Publishing House. Davidson, Donald 1971. “Agency”. In: Donald Davidson. Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 43–61. [Reprint 1980] Gell, Alfred 1998. Art and Agency. An Anthroplogical Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gengnagel, Jörg 1996. Māyā, Puruṣa and Śiva. Die dualistische Tradition des Śivaismus nach Aghoraśivācāryas Tattvaprakāśavṛtti. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Giddens, Anthony 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory. Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. London et al.: Macmillan Press. — 1984. The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press. [Reprint 2007] — 19973 [1989]. Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hüsken, Ute 2008. “Dīkṣā of Temple Priests in Kanchipuram”. Paper for the International Symposium “Hindu and Buddhist Initiations in Nepal and India”. Heidelberg, IWH, 28–29 May 2008. [Presented 29 May 2008] Humphrey, Caroline & James Laidlaw 1994. The Archetypal Actions of Ritual. A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship. Oxford: Clarendon Press. HyperBourdieu@WorldCatalogue. http://hyperbourdieu.jku.at/. [accessed 27 August 2008]

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Karp, Ivan 1986. “Agency and Social Theory. A Review of Anthony Giddens”. American Ethnologist 13,1: 131–137. Kavirāja, Gopīnātha 1972. Tāntrika Sāhitya. Lucknow: Rājarṣi Dāsa Taṇḍana Hindī Bhavana (Hindi Samiti Granthamala 200). [in Hindi] Keane, Webb 1997. “From Fetishism to Sincerity. On Agency, the Speaking Subject, and Their Historicity in the Context of Religious Conversion”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 39: 674–693. Kreinath, Jens 2006. Semiose des Rituals. Eine Kritik ritualtheoretischer Begriffsbildung. (Dissertation, University of Heidelberg) [URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-opus65702; URL: http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/archiv/6570]. Krüger, Oliver & Michael Nijhawan & Eftychia Stavrianopoulou 2005. “‘Ritual’ und ‘Agency’. Legitimation und Reflexivität ritueller Handlungsmacht”. Forum Ritualdynamik 14 (September 2005). [URN: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-opus-57859; URL: http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/archiv/5785/]. [accessed 25 August 2008] Laidlaw, James & Caroline Humphrey 2006. “Action”. In: Jens Kreinath & Jan Snoek & Michael Stausberg (eds.). Theorizing Rituals. Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts. Leiden & Boston: Brill: 265–283. Lakṣmaṇa Rānaḍe 1889. Sūtratattvavimarśinī [PKS commentary]. Manuscript No. TR 587.1 and TR 587.2 (old book No. 38 C 20 de 802 [saṃ 1, 2]). Chennai, Adyar: Adyar Library. [= STV(A)] Lawson, Ernest T. 2006. “Cognition”. In: Jens Kreinath & Jan Snoek & Michael Stausberg (eds.). Theorizing Rituals. Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts. Leiden & Boston: Brill: 307–319. McCauley, Robert N. & E. Thomas Lawson 2002. Bringing Ritual to Mind. Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr. MW = Monier-Williams, Monier 1899. A Sanskṛit-English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Needham, Rodney 1975. “Polythetic Classification. Convergence and Consequences”. Man 10/3: 349–369. [URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2799807]. [accessed 4 June 2009] Paramânandatantram 1985. Edited by Raghunātha Miśra. Varanasi: Sampurnanand Sanskrit Vishvavidyalaya Pr. [in Sanskrit] PKS(Ba) = Paraśurāmakalpasūtra with Rāmeśvara’s Commentary 1923. Edited by A[lladi] Mahādeva Śāstrī. Vadodara: Oriental Institute (Gaekwad’s Oriental Series 22). [Sanskrit with English Preface] [Reviewed and Enlarged 1950 by Sakarlāl Yajñeśwar Śāstrī Dave; Reprint 1979, 1999] PKS(Ka) = Paraśurāmakalpasūtram. Mūla saṃskṛta o baṅgānubāda sameta 1978 [= 1385 (Bengali Era)]. Edited and Translated by Upendrakumar Das. Calcutta: Nababhārata Pābaliśārsa. [Bengali Script and Commentary] PKS(Be1) = Paraśurāmakalpasūtram. Rāmeśvara-vṛtti-mukhyâṃśa-samalaṅkṛtam; Paramahaṃsamiśra-viracita “Nīrakṣīraviveka” bhāṣā-bhāṣya-samvalitam 2000. Edited by Vidyānivāsa Miśra. Varanasi: Sampūrṇānanda-Saṃskṛta-Viśvavidyālaya

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(Yogatantra-granthamālā 28). [Sanskrit with Hindi Commentary by Paramahaṃsa Miśra] PKS = Paraśurāmakalpasūtra 2007. Input by Claudia Weber. http://www.sub.unigoettingen.de/ebene_1/fiindolo/gretil.htm#Paraks PKS(Be2) = Paraśurāmakalpasūtram. Rāmeśvara-kṛta-vṛtti-sahitam; Kalyāṇī-hindīṭīkā-yuktaś ca 2008. Edited by Mṛtyuñjaya Tripāṭhī. Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office (Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series 128). [Sanskrit with Hindi Commentary] [Prāṇatoṣiṇī] Rāmatoṣaṇa Bhaṭṭācārya (Compiler) 1861. Prāṇatoṣiṇī 1, Sargakāṇḍa. In: Tantrasārādi-vividha-Tantrasaṃgraha. Calcutta. PW [Großes Petersburger Wörterbuch] = Otto Böhtlingk & Rudolph Roth (eds.) 1855– 1875. Sanskrit-Wörterbuch. 7 Vols. Saint Petersburg: Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften. [Reprint 1990: Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass] Rāmeśvara 1832. See: PKS(Ba), PKS(Ka), PKS(Be1), PKS(Be2). Rappaport, Roy 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rehbein, Boike & Gernot Saalmann & Hermann Schwengel (eds.) 2003. Pierre Bourdieus Theorie des Sozialen. Probleme und Perspektiven. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft. Sax, William S. 2006. “Agency”. In: Jens Kreinath & Jan Snoek & Michael Stausberg (eds.). Theorizing Rituals. Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts. Leiden & Boston: Brill: 473–481. Snoek, Jan A.M. 2006. “Defining ‘Rituals’”. In: Jens Kreinath & Jan Snoek & Michael Stausberg (eds.). Theorizing Rituals. Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts. Leiden & Boston: Brill: 3–14. STV(A) = Lakṣmaṇa Rānaḍe 1889. [Tantrasāra] Kṛṣṇānanda 2007. Bṛhattantrasāraḥ. 2 Vols. Varanasi: (Caukhambā Surabhāratī Granthamālā 431). [Vaiṣṇava Jayākhyasaṃhitā] Jayākhyasaṃhitā. 1931. Embar Krishnamacharya (ed.). (Gaekwad's Oriental Series 54). Baroda: Oriental Institute. See also: http://www.muktalib5.org/DL_CATALOG/DL_CATALOG_USER_INTERFACE/ dl_user_interface_create_utf8_text.php?hk_file_url=..%2FTEXTS%2FETEXTS%2 FjayakhyasamhitaHK.txt Wilke, Annette 2003. “‘Traditionenverdichtung’ in der Diaspora. Hamm als Bühne der Neuaushandlung von Hindu-Traditionen”. In: Martin Baumann & Brigitte Luchesi & Annette Wilke (eds.). Tempel und Tamilen in zweiter Heimat. Hindus aus Sri Lanka im deutschsprachigen und skandinavischen Raum. Würzburg: Ergon: 125– 168. Wulf, Christoph 2003. “Performative Macht und praktisches Wissen im rituellen Handeln. Bourdieus Beitrag zur Ritualtheorie”. In: Boike Rehbein & Gernot Saalmann & Hermann Schwengel (eds.). Pierre Bourdieus Theorie des Sozialen. Probleme und Perspektiven. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft: 173–185. Zadeh, Lotfi A. 1965. “Fuzzy Sets”. Information and Control 8/3: 338–353.

Section II: Ritual, Performance, and Event Edited by Silke Leopold and Hendrik Schulze

Andrea Taddei

Memory, Performance, and Pleasure in Greek Rituals1 In Ancient Greece, ritual is associated with memory and pleasure through different and interesting connections, which deserve attention and further exploration. I shall be considering the threefold relationship between the role of memory (a particular kind of memory, as we shall see), the performance of a ritual, and the action of giving and sharing pleasure. More particularly, what we may call “ritual pleasure” seems to be a crucial element for the celebration itself, not only as an emotion shared among the participants in the ritual, but also as a feeling perceived by the god celebrated.

1. Memory, Ritual, Pleasure Let us consider, first, memory and ritual. There are, at least but not only, two kinds of “memory” in archaic Greece: remembering facts and formulas for producing poetry, and remembering acts and words that must be put together to build up a framework that we call “ritual”. Many scholars have devoted much attention to the former (the so-called “mnemonic memory”), less of them to the latter (what we may call “ritual memory”). The importance of memory in the celebration of ritual has been recently investigated by Angelos Chaniotis, with particular emphasis on Hellenistic and Roman times: Chaniotis deals mainly with the effect caused by a ritual on “mnemonic”, or “affective” memory after the celebration of a sad or pleasant ritual.2 The observations of Chaniotis are very pregnant, and could be retrospectively extended also to classical times,3 but I would like to start focusing my attention rather on the opposite side of the matter (both chronologically and with specific reference to the performance of rituals). I am dealing with the role played by memory, by “ritual 1 I would like to thank Riccardo Di Donato, who has discussed with me every single topic of this paper and has enriched my text with useful suggestions. 2 Chaniotis 2006: especially 216–226. 3 See Soph. Ai. 520–1, where Tecmessa says: ἀλλ'ἴσχε κἀμοῦ μνῆστιν· ἀνδρί τοι χρεὼν / μνήμην προσεῖναι, τερπνὸν εἴ τί που πάθοι (“Remember even me; a man should keep it in his memory if perhaps he has enjoyed some pleasure”). We can incidentally observe here a distinction between mnestis (that is “the act of remembering”) and mneme (“memory”): see the commentary of Kamerbeek 1963: 113.

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memory”, before, and not after the celebration of a ritual, by quickly discussing some texts of Archaic and Classical times. In other terms: memory seems to be crucial not only for the effects generated by, but also for the presuppositions to, rituals. Mortals must remember to perform rituals in honour of the gods: if they forget about them, they are considered impious and are punished; on the other hand, if they do not forget to make sacrifices, they are entitled to pray to the gods, to ask for something, and can obtain, in some cases, special privileges.4 Remembering to sacrifice is, however, only the first, albeit fundamental, step for mortals in their relationship with gods, and it is as important as keeping in mind how a ritual must be performed, and to act accordingly. What, then, is the role of memory in performing (rightly and correctly performing) a ritual? And what is the relationship between this “ritual memory” and the production of pleasure? The first text I would like to consider is a passage of the so-called Homeric Hymn to Apollo, where the idea of memory is important both for the production of poetry and for the performance of a ritual. Homeric hymns would be better defined as prooimia, because they used to be sung (in dactylic hexameters, the same metre of the Iliad and Odyssey) before the performance given by aoidoi. The word prooimion means “something that was sung before (pro) the path” (oime is the technical term) suggested by the public to the aoidos, in order to let him develop and sing by working on a specific theme (e.g. Ares and Aphrodite’s Love, The Funeral of Patroclos, The Shield of Achilles). By using poetical memory, asking the Muses for help, and working on and with formulas, the aoidos, the singer, would then sing in front of an audience.5 The aim of these performances was to bring pleasure (the poetic and musical pleasure, terpsis) to the listeners, as many passages of the Iliad and Odyssey show.6 If a listener 4 Greek prayers usually start by enumerating what the worshipper has previously done in order to be entitled to ask for something (see, for instance, the prayers of Crises at the very beginning of the Iliad, with the commentary of Di Donato (2001a: 163–173, but see also 173– 183). For the opposition between forgetting about the gods (and therefore being impious) and remembering them, see e.g. Aesch. Suppl. 772 (μὴ ἀμελεῖν θεῶν), Hdt. II 133 (cf. II 128: an exception that confirms the rule), on one side, and Il. XXIV 426–8, on the other. Hector did not forget about the gods: that’s why they did not forget about him, even in the face of death (Priam says to Achilles: οὐ ποτ'ἐμὸς πάϊς, εἴ ποτ'ἔην γε, λήθετ'ἐνὶ μεγάροισι θεῶν, οἵ Ὄλυμπον ἔχουσι· τῶ οἱ ἀπομνήσαντο καὶ ἐν θανάτοιό περ αἴσῃ). See also Il. XXIV 32–35. There are also cases in which men try to make an offering in order to obtain something, but the gods do not take care of them (see Aesch. Sept. 699–702, where the verb ἀμελέω is used, as in Suppl. 772). See also Soph. Trach. 1222. 5 We can observe an aoidos singing in front of an audience in the Odyssey (VIII 40 ff.). On this topic, see the observations of Di Donato (1999: 15–30, 145–65). 6 Cf. e.g. Il. IX 185–189 and Od. VIII 74. On the oime see the remarks of Di Donato 1999: 147–148.

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is not enjoying the performance and is not taking delight (terpsis) in what he is listening to, the aoidos is explicitly asked to stop, and start again on a new theme and path (oime).7 The ancient Greek language used specific words for the particular delight that derives from listening to poetry and music. The semantic field of pleasure has been investigated and extensively classified; in general, we can assume that terpsis is the specific term for poetical pleasure, not being the only word used for this, nor itself being used specifically just for poetic pleasure. Nevertheless, terpsis is, so to speak, the technical word used to designate the pleasure deriving from aoide (Od. VIII 45). When considering Greek verbs, we must remember that in ancient Greek the middle voice of a verb is used in order to indicate “doing something in the interest of the doer".8 We can, accordingly, distinguish between “to bring pleasure” (active voice: terpein) and “to take pleasure for oneself, to take pleasure intensively” (middle voice: terpesthai). In the field of poetic pleasure there is, on this basis, a clear-cut distinction between the aoidos, on the one hand, who is singing (aeidein is the verb from the same root) and gives pleasure to the others (active: terpei), and the public, who take pleasure (middle: terpetai, terpontai) while listening (akouon9), on the other. 1.1 Making a God Happy with Ritual Pleasure Let us now consider verses 146–150 of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. “ἀλλὰ σὺ Δήλῳ Φοῖβε μάλιστ᾽ ἐπιτέρπεαι ἦτορ, ἔνθα τοι ἑλκεχίτωνες Ἰάονες ἠγερέθονται αὐτοῖς σὺν παίδεσσι καὶ αἰδοίῃς ἀλόχοισιν. οἱ δέ σε πυγμαχίῃ τε καὶ ὀρχηθμῷ καὶ ἀοιδῇ μνησάμενοι τέρπουσιν ὅταν στήσωνται ἀγῶνα.” “But it is in Delos, Phoibos, that your heart most delight, where the Ionians with trailing robes assemble with their children and wives on your avenue, and then they have seated the gathering they think of you and entertain you with boxing, dancing and singing.”10

7 As one can see in Hom. Od. VIII 83 ff., 536 ff., with the commentary of Di Donato (1989: 23–24, 74–76). The subject of the relationship between orality and the figure of the aoidos has been deeply investigated by Riccardo Di Donato since 1969, and I do not need, therefore, to discuss it in depth. I am assuming some conclusions of his, and try to argue in another, but related field. See Di Donato 1969, 1989, 1999, 2006b. 8 See George 2005: 4–8, Humbert 1972: 103–106. 9 On terpo/terpomai see Latacz 1966: 174–219; Chantraine 1968, τέρπομαι, Calame 1996, Perceau 2006. 10 Transl. West 2003: II., 146–150.

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As I have argued elsewhere,11 this passage (in particular, the words mnesamenoi terpousin) has been variously interpreted and translated ranging from “remembering about you they delight you”, to “delight thee […] making mention of thy name”, and “remembering about you they get pleasure/enjoy themselves”. The main point of the translation is: what is the role of memory? And what, if it exists, is the importance of memory in the production of pleasure (the Greek text roughly says: “having remembered they give pleasure to you”)? Modern translations are very different from one another, and they often simply bypass the problem with general interpretations. This section of the hymn is also quoted by the historian Thucydides (III 104), who indirectly helps us to reconstruct the specific context of the performance. Quoting this passage when recounting the history of Delos, Thucydides informs us about a festival of the Ionians (the Delia), restored and reshaped by the Athenians in 425,12 during which this hymn used to be sung. To be more precise: he discusses the rituals of Delos using, among other sources, verses 146–510 of the Hymn (that he correctly defines as a prooimion) as evidence for his reconstruction. “The Athenians celebrated the Delia. There had indeed, in ancient times, been a great gathering at Delos of the Ionians and the inhabitants of the neighbouring islands; and they used to resort to the festival with their wives and children, as the Ionians now do to the Ephesian games; and a contest was formerly held there, both gymnastic and musical, and choruses were sent thither by the cities. The best evidence that the festival was of this character is given by Homer in the following verses, which are from the hymn to Apollo: ‘[…] there they delight thee with boxing and dancing and song, making mention of thy name, whenever they ordain the contest’ ” (Thuc. III 104, 1: transl. Ch. Forster Smith, Loeb Classical Library, 1958). There are two points, among many others, that deserve our attention. The first is the context itself, as it is shaped by Thucydides. He describes a quite complex and historically layered ritual (a procession; death and birth purification; boxing, dancing and singing as part of a general ritual), within which the hymn is being sung. This ritual is a part of a festival (Delia), where people, men and women of every age, celebrate the god with sport and music.13

11 Taddei 2007. 12 On the political meaning of the Delia, as well as on Delos as an “epicentre for the spreading of cults” see Kowalzig 2007: 69–71, 110–118 (quotation on p.72). On the festival of the Delia see Parker 1996: 150–1, 2005: 80–1; Calame 2006. 13 Thuc. III 104: Kαὶ ἀγὼν ἐποιεῖτο αὐτόθι καὶ γυμνικὸς καὶ μουσικός, χορούς τε ἀνῆγον αἱ πόλεις. See the commentary. On Thycidides Chris suggests “Thucydides” using Homer as a source, see Butti de Lima 1996: 136–51.

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If we try to translate the text of the Hymn as it stands, we have: “the long-robed Ionians gather together with their children and their honoured wives. Then, with boxing, dancing, and songs, they recall you and delight you, each time they prepare the contest.” The ritual is thus a mix of sport, dance, songs, and prayers, and “ritual memory” seems to play a very important function: remembering Apollo, the Ionians delight the god celebrated. The active voice of the verb terpo is used here, that is: to bring a sort of musical pleasure to the god. Thus, not only by means of their songs, but also by means of dances and sporting events, the Ionians intend to delight their god, and not simply to delight themselves.14 Furthermore, we can observe a sort of specific as well as direct relationship between memory and performance or, to be more precise, between the simple act of remembering to (and how to) perform a ritual, and the act of giving pleasure by this specific ritual. We are dealing, consequently, with practical, “ritual”, memory and not simply with the poetical one:15 memory is used here not simply to remember facts and formulas, but in order to perform a multi-layered and complex ritual consisting of sport, prayers, dance, and songs. To sum up: (1) the pleasure is being generated in the god celebrated; (2) this specific pleasure (terpsis) is generated not only by means of singing poetry, but also within the framework of a quite complex ritual; (3) the production of pleasure is achieved by the “simple” act of remembering. The main point is, in my opinion, the role of memory in rituals, and for how it bears on the role of ritual pleasure. 1.2 Ritual Pleasure But we can go one step further, in trying to examine the general status of a ritual. Is there a direct and inevitable link between ritual and pleasure? Are all (“sad” and “happy”) rituals on the same level? And lastly, is the fact of bringing pleasure to the god one of the specific aims of rituals in Archaic and Classical Greece? I would like to make myself clear on this last point: I am not asking if the god must appreciate the ritual (which is obvious, in a relationship of reciprocity in which the performer wants to make the god happy in order to be entitled to ask for 14 This is a crucial point, because the ordinary process for the generation of terpsis normally passes through the musical performance: the aoidos calls for the help of the Muses, then remembers and sings, thus producing pleasure in the listeners (memory → singing → bringing pleasure). Now we have a sort of odd short circuit: memory → bringing pleasure (to the god). 15 One can compare the sections of the hymns in which the singer announces that he or she is going to remember, and not to forget, about the god in another poem (for instance Hymn. Dem. 495, αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ καὶ σεῖο καὶ ἄλλης μνήσομ᾽ ἀοιδῆς. Hymn. Ap. Μνήσομαι οὐδὲ λάθωμαι Ἀπόλλωνος ἑκάτοιο). On this see Calame 2005.

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something), but rather if there is a specific relation between the celebration of ritual and the production of terpsis – or other kinds of pleasure – in the god. We are informed about cases in which men complain about a god’s failing to help and to fulfil their wishes.16 but what about the reaction of gods to sacrifices and, more generally, to rituals? This latter is, in my opinion, a quite different question, involving the role of communication and separation between gods and men at the moment of celebrating and performing rituals. As Jean-Pierre Vernant has shown, Greek sacrifices are occasions on which mortals communicate with the gods, while definitively separating and differentiating from them.17 A sacrifice is a moment in which men get in touch with the gods, and establish the relationship of philia with them.18 Riccardo Di Donato has shown, considering prayers in the Iliad, different aspects of philia in the relationship between heroes, priests, and “their” gods. If we take into consideration, for instance, the prayers of Crises at the very beginning of the Iliad, we can observe many important facts about Greek religion and the relation of philia between men and gods. Moreover, when Crises has completed his last prayer, “the ritual goes on”19 with a big sacrifice. After this sacrifice, a feast takes place, with people singing the Paean for the god Apollo, who “enjoys while he is listening”. As has been argued by Di Donato, in this passage Apollo seems to be one of the participants in the feast and banquet, rather than a foreign and far-off god.20 I am wondering if this situation (the god who shares the same pleasure as the participants) can be found elsewhere, and if terpsis can be originated by the ritual itself, besides the poetic and musical pleasure. The matter is a bit complex, but step by step it can be analysed, if not altogether sorted out.

2. Rituals in Drama So far we have been dealing with a text, a hymn to Apollo, whose main aspects we have been describing: a prayer in performance, composed in the same verse as epic poetry, considered within a religious and layered ritual reconstructed with the help 16 See e.g. Hdt. II 128–31 and Aesch. Sept. 772. 17 See Vernant & Detienne 1979, Vernant 1981, and the afterword by Di Donato in the Italian translation of Mythe et religion en Grèce antique (Vernant 2003). On the articulations of philia in Greek prayers and sacrifices see Di Donato 2001a: 163–184. More generally, see Bremmer 1996 (esp. 248–265) and Mylonopoulos 2006: 71–73. On Greek prayers see Pulleyn 2006. 18 See Calame 1995: 8–10. On reciprocity between men and gods, see Scheid-Tissinier 1994 and Di Donato 2001a: 163–184. Cf. also Graf 2001. 19 Di Donato 2001a: 174. 20 Di Donato 2001a: 175.

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(but also through the filter) of a great historian; we have a chorus, a group, that is not only sharing emotions with the god, but is trying to generate pleasure in him. The connection between ritual and pleasure can be further explored following a different route, and in a different literary context (as long as we consider Greek drama simply as “literature”: actually, however, Greek theatre was deeply involved in religion).21 The staging of rituals in drama is a very important topic, long investigated, and, in recent times, reconsidered by many scholars.22 The problem is very wideranging and cannot be simply reduced to terms of “the origin of drama” (whether tragedy or comedy), nor can it be dealt with in detail here. I am fully aware that when we look at, and try to examine, a ritual performed or narrated in a tragedy, we have neither photographs nor an anthropological documentary film of the characters performing rituals.23 Nevertheless, putting a ritual on the stage (and doing it within the framework of the very important Athenian festival of the Greater Dionysia) in front of the politai, as well as in front of allies, had to conform to the general and particular way of celebrating this particular kind of ritual, even though it had some dramatic amplification. I do not think, for example, that the swearing of the oath described in Euripides’ Suppliant Women is an exact “photograph” of how things really went when an oath was administered in fifthcentury Athens:24 “Now hear from me with what vessel you are to perform this sacrifice. In your house there is a bronze-footed tripod. When Heracles had destroyed the foundation of Troy, he bade you to dedicate it near the Pythian hearth as he set off on another mission. Over this tripod you must cut the throats of three sheep and inscribe the oath on its curved hollow, and then give it for safekeeping to the god who rules Delphi, a memorial of the oath and a witness to it in the eyes of Hellas. The sharp-bladed knife (machaira) with which you

21 Greek drama was a part of important festivals dedicated to the god Dionysos. There were, at least, two important religious festivals at Athens, during which tragedies and comedies were staged: the Lenaia (held in winter) and the City Dionysia (held in spring). The Sanctuary of Dionysos Eleuthereus was located just in front of the theatre of Dionysos, where performances were given. See, in general, Rabinowitz 2008; Seaford 2006: 87–103; Wilson 2007; Di Donato 2001b; Csapo & Slater 1994. 22 See Csapo & Miller 2007; Wilson 2007. 23 We face here a very well-known problem for any anthropologist, that is the reliability of a mock ritual. 24 On Greek oath-Rituals see Berti 2006. Oaths were, among other things, a regular feature of judicial and political life in Ancient Athens. See, for instance, Gernet 1968: 175–260; Gernet 2000: 122–127 (with further bibliography).

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Yet I think that the general tenure of an oath-ritual, the single images (namely: “hiding a prestigious object as a ritual of consecration”, rather than: “hiding a machaira under a tripod as the precise way in which an oath was sworn in classical Athens”) ought to conform to the everyday religious life of the polis.26 Moreover, in drama we are able to consider the reaction of characters when they face ritual events that, by way of contrast are “simply described” in other kinds of sources. We can take into account, for instance, not the mere presence of the relationship between ritual and pleasure, but rather the negation of this specific relationship on the tragic stage. In particular, it will be useful for our purpose to observe some cases in which the nexus ritual and pleasure is ruled out. 2.1 “I forbid you to weep”: Iphigenia and Her Mother In Iphigenia at Aulis Euripides has Iphigenia, the daughter of king Agamemnon, being sacrificed to the gods, in order to let the Greeks sail to Troy under a favourable wind. Iphigenia offers herself to be sacrificed in honour of Artemis and asks, for this purpose, to be carried on to the altar of the goddess. A specific location must be established and, in a sense, built up: while she asks twice to be carried (lines 1459 and 1475), a fire must be lit (l.1470) and her father must stand on the right of the altar (l.1472). Addressing the chorus (which is composed of young girls), and continuing to give accurate instructions about how the ritual must be performed, the heroine states that she does not want tears to be shed (1.1466: ouk eò stazein dakry), and then adds some further instructions. “οὐκ ἐῶ στάζειν δάκρυ. ὑμεῖς δ᾽ ἐπευφημήσατ᾽, ὦ νεάνιδες, παιᾶνα τἠμῆι συμφορᾶι Διὸς κόρην Ἄρτεμιν· ἴτω δὲ Δαναΐδαις εὐφημία. κανᾶ δ᾽ ἐναρχέσθω τις, αἰθέσθω δὲ πῦρ προχύταις καθαρσίοισι, καὶ πατὴρ ἐμὸς ἐνδεξιούσθω βωμόν· ὡς σωτηρίαν Ἕλλησι δώσουσ᾽ ἔρχομαι νικηφόρον.” “I forbid you to weep. You young women, because of what has happened to me, raise a paean in honour of Zeus’s daughter Artemis! Let the sons of Da25 Transl. Kovacs 1998: ll. 1196–1207. 26 On the idea of “image” in the study of Greek Myth, cf. Gernet 2004. For an analysis of the passage cited see Collard 1975: II. 413–416. An even more detailed religious scene (a sacrifice) is described in Eur. El. 791–813 (see the detailed commentary of Denniston 1939: 147– 149).

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naius keep holy silence! Let someone prepare the sacrificial basket; let the purifying barley meal make the fire blaze up! Let my father make his rightward course about the altar! For I am departing to give the Greeks salvation and victory!”27 The sequence of instructions is described in detail: a Paean-song must be performed in honour of Artemis, the Greeks must pronounce only propitious words (euphemia ito dè Danaidais: 1469),28 baskets must be introduced (kana enarchesto tis: 1470,29), and then water for cleansing must be carried for Iphigenia and for the chorus, who are also asked to start a dance for Artemis, around the temple (naos) and the altar (bomos) of the goddess. Finally, we hear about a thyma to be filled, perhaps with the blood of the heroine (l. 1485).30 At this stage, Iphigenia shouts again her desire for a sacrifice without tears (1486), although the general situation is extremely sad and many laments have been cried by her mother Clytemnestra. “ὦ πότνια πότνια μᾶτερ, οὐ δάκρυά γέ σοι δώσομεν ἁμέτερα· παρ᾽ ἱεροῖς γὰρ οὐ πρέπει.” “O lady, lady mother, I shall not tender you my tears: tears are not proper at a sacred rite.”31 Iphigenia’s words are very important, at least for us, and state, not simply within the micro-context of the plot, but in the form of a general rule, that tears are not appropriate for sacred rituals (par’hierois ou prepei). Addressing her mother (l. 1487), Iphigenia thus stops any ritual lament, and there seems to be a general and reciprocal exclusion between tears and rituals, despite the sadness of the occasion.32. 27 Transl. Kovacs 2002: 1466–1473. 28 On euphemia and its interpretations see Stockert 1992: 608. 29 We find the same ritual instruction at l. 435 of the same tragedy, when the preparations for the wedding ceremony are described. 30 I am not sure this is just a “verbal ritual”. For this interpretation, see Casabona 1966: 1461. Cf. Collard 1975: II. 185–186. 31 Ibid. ll. 1486–1489. 32 We find the same kind of general rule also in Euripides’ Suppliant Women (Eur. Suppl. 289: “raise up your white head, do not shed tears as you sit by the holy altar of Deo”, transl. Kovacs, Loeb Classical Library 1998), where the instruction is more precise and, in a sense, more general: tears must not be shed on the altar. See Collard (1975: 185–6) who compares this passage with Eur. Ion 245 ff. (cf. also. Eur. Hel. 458). See Soph. Trach. 1193 (Heracles asks his son to perform a funeral without shedding tears and without any lament: ἀστενακτος κἀδάκρυτος […] ἔρξον· εἰ δὲ μή, μενῶ σ'ἐγῶ καὶ νέρθεν ὢν ἀραῖος εἰσαεὶ βαρύς).

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I do not think that, in Iphigenia’s words, we find the expression of a rule as universal as generic, if intended to stand separately from the societies within which this sort of rule has been elaborated. Rather, I would like to differentiate and consider social groups within their own space and their own time. Working with the tools of the historical anthropology of the ancient world, I am interested not in a universal “Esprit humain”, but in the relationship between forms of thought and forms of societies.33 What can we say, then, about the relationship between pleasure and ritual in Greek societies of Archaic and Classical times? 2.2 Being in the Mood for a Festival: Ion and Electra In Euripides’ Ion, when Ion is talking with Thoas about his “job” in the temple of Apollo, he says he’s happy because there he has many advantages and benefits, and, among other things, he spends his time praying and attending people who “are in joy, not sorrow” (l. 639). “ἃ δ᾽ ἐνθάδ᾽ εἶχον ἀγάθ᾽ ἄκουσόν μου, πάτερ· τὴν φιλτάτην μὲν πρῶτον ἀνθρώποις σχολὴν ὄχλον τε μέτριον, οὐδέ μ᾽ ἐξέπληξ᾽ ὁδοῦ πονηρὸς οὐδείς· κεῖνο δ᾽ οὐκ ἀνασχετόν, εἴκειν ὁδοῦ χαλῶντα τοῖς κακίοσιν. θεῶν δ᾽ ἐν εὐχαῖς ἢ λόγοισιν ἦ βροτῶν ὑπηρετῶν χαίρουσιν οὐ γοωμένοις.”34 “Hear, father, what good things I have enjoyed here. First, I have a peaceful life, one with little trouble, a thing mortals hold most dear. Unworthy people do not shove me forcibly from the road – and to step out of the path and make way for those beneath me is something I cannot endure. I have spent An exception that confirms the general rule (I would prefer not to speak of a kultische Tabu, Stockert 1992: 614) can be read at Eur. IT 860 (παρὰ δὲ βωμὸν ἦν δὲ δάκρυα καὶ γόοι, “there were tears and laments near the altars”), because these words refer to what has been correctly interpreted as a “distortion of the songs which normally would accompany the wedding” (Kyriakou 2006: 285). We can observe, even if we cannot indulge in this subject, a little shift between the world of epics and the world of tragedy: in epics, heroes can “have the desire” of tears, and want to appease this through the ritual lament: when Priam asks for the body of his son Hector, for example, he and the Trojans would like to fulfil their desire for tears, before and through funerals. See Il. XXIV 785–787. Cf. also Od. VIII 83–93 with the commentary of Di Donato 1989: 23–24. 33 On the Anthropology of the Ancient World as shaped in France through the interaction of the sociologist and classicist Louis Gernet, the ethnologist Marcel Mauss and the founder of historical psychology Ignace Meyerson, see Di Donato 1990; Meyerson 1948; Mauss 1998. 34 Euripides Ion: II. 639–645.

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my time in prayer to the gods or in conversation with mortals, serving those who are in joy, not sorrow.”35 Furthermore, in the same tragedy Ion, in amazement, had previously asked his mother Creousa the reason why she was crying in front of the temple of Apollo, that is, at the same place where people were, instead, in the habit of chairein.36 The reciprocal exclusion of tears and sacred rituals seems, therefore, to be a crucial point, at least in tragedy,37 and can be observed as well in a passage in Euripides’ Electra, where Orestes’ sister is invited by the Chorus to participate in the sacred festival in honour of Hera held in Argos (ll. 166 ff.). This festival included (and perhaps culminated with) a procession of young girls and probably a sacred marriage.38 While Electra is waiting for her brother’s return, Orestes, in disguise, arrives on the stage and informs the characters about the public announcement given by the Argives (karyssousin, they proclaim) of a festival with dances at the temple of Hera. Electra is extremely sad (175–177), and refuses, accordingly, to take part in the festival and in the dances, while all the other girls are going to participate: she does not want to share the dance (ll. 178–9) with them, and explains, in a dialogue with the Chorus, the reasons for her refusal. “[…] οὐκ ἐπ'ἀγλαίαις, φίλαι θυμὸν οὐδ'ἐπὶ χρυσέοις ὅρμοις ἐκπεπόταμαι τάλαιν᾽, οὐδ᾽ ἐνστᾶσα χοροῖς Ἀργείαις ἅμα νύμφαις εἱλικτὸν κρούσω πόδ᾽ ἐμόν. δάκρυσι νυχεύω, δακρύων δέ μοι μέλει δειλαίαι τὸ κατ᾽ ἦμαρ. σκέψαι μου πιναρὰν κόμαν

35 Transl. Kovacs 1999: II. 639–645. 36 “Why are you so distraught, lady? Where all others are glad to see the god’s sanctuary, can it be that there your eyes run with tears?“ (Eur. Ion. 244–246, transl. D. Kovacs). Cf. also what Ion says at ll. 655–657: “For the present I shall take you to my lodging as a foreign friend and give you the pleasure” (terpso, fut. active of the verb terpo) of a feast: this last passage is, however, slightly different, for Xuthus is speaking about a private feast (deipnon) and not about a religious festival. Lee (1997: 233) is right in observing that the terpsis of the banquet is proverbial, and he quotes a passage of Medea (ll. 200 ff.) and one of Pindar (Pyth. 9.19). 37 See Eur. IT 860, cited above, where instead of the expected joyous song there were unexpected inauspicious laments near an altar. 38 See Hdt. I 31, Paus. II 22.1. On the Heraia see Calame 1977: 218–220. On the passage of Electra, see the commentary of Denniston 1939: 70–71.

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Andrea Taddei καὶ τρύχη τάδ'ἐμῶν πέπλων εἰ πρέποντ'Ἀγαμέμνονος κούραι τᾶι βασιλείαι […]”39 “My heart is not aflutter, my friends, at feasts or gold necklaces, unhappy woman that I am, nor shall I take my stand in a chorus together with the wives of Argos, to whirl my feet about and strike the ground. In tears my nights are spent, and tears for me in my wretched state are the burden of my days. Look at my filthy hair and these tatters that are my clothes, see if these befit a princess, Agamemnon’s daughter […]”40

Once again, we are dealing with tears. Electra is more than simply sad: she passes all her nights in tears (l. 181: dakrysi nycheuo: in tears the nights are spent), and she is interested only in her tears (dakryon de moi melei). Moreover, she is not properly dressed for the sacred festival (“Look at my filthy hair and these tatters that are my clothes”). We are not dealing here – as some commentators have observed41 – only with the topos of a girl who does not want to participate in a feast or festival because she is not properly dressed (a very productive image in western folklore). Rather, we have here, in a sense, the “practical effect” of the general assertion that we have just found in Iphigenia at Aulis, because a character – although deeply involved in a community – chooses explicitly to differentiate herself from all the other girls (pasai parthenikai mellousin steichein, “all the unmarried girls will go to the temple of Hera”, l.174), and does not go to a public festival (as it is announced by heralds), because she is not going to take pleasure (l.175: “my heart is not aflutter […] at feasts”). It is not simply a question of not being “in the mood”, but a sort of “dramatisation” of the exclusion, that involves the general status and the general perception of a ritual. We have thus seen two different rituals: the first is a sad one (a girl is immolating herself), and the second is not, because maidens are going to dance in a sacred public festival for Hera, and a girl – an unmarried girl – does not want to go.42 We can observe the double-sided nature of the relationship of pleasure towards a festival: in order to be (correctly) felt, ritual pleasure must be shared. 39 Eur. Electra, ll. 175–187. 40 Transl. Kovacs 1998: II. 175–187. 41 See Denniston 1939: 70 “A festival, for a woman, at once suggests the question, ‘What shall I wear?’” 42 In tragedy, we can observe the same mutual exclusion operating with Ares (Aesch. Supp. 600; Eur. Phoen. 785; El. 167). The most striking example of the connection between rituals, music, hymns and pleasure is a famous passage in Euripides’ Suppliant Women, where Adrastus says (l.180) that he who composes hymns must compose them while himself taking pleasure. On the contrary, he cannot give pleasure (terpein, active voice of the verb) to others.

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3. The Divine Side of the Matter We have been sketching a quite complicated web of relationships that involves many layers but which can be summarised as follows: memory is a fundamental function not only for producing poetry, but also for correctly performing a rite. This rite is a shared experience, in which memory seems to produce pleasure, and pleasure must be shared by the participants and by the god celebrated. I have tried to describe how these threads are linked together in Greek tragedy, where we have observed some characters who react to rituals in a way that excludes sorrow and tears, and includes only the possibility of delight. Those who participate in a ritual must take delight in it: if this does not happen (or it is not supposed to happen), people prefer not to take part in a festival, because tears are not appropriate to (at least some) rituals. 3.1 Goddesses Taking Delight in a Procession I would like to describe now some aspects of the divine side of the matter. We have, so far, been sketching some aspects of the human side of this particular series of relationships. Let us then see what happens with gods, by considering a case in which the pleasure (terpsis) of the god celebrated is perceived not by the ordinary process of poetry, but by a “shorter circuit” that directly involves ritual, without passing through music and poetry. Aeschylus offers a very interesting example in a famous as well as philologically complicated passage, at the very end of the Oresteia (Eum. ll. 1033 ff.). At the end of the plot of the trilogy, Orestes, having killed his mother in order to avenge the death of his father, has been acquitted by the Areopagus, thanks to the decisive intervention of the goddess Athena. The goddesses of revenge (Erinyes), whose cult was perhaps celebrated at Athens,43 are transformed into Eumenides (“the kindly ones”), and these latter goddesses are escorted to their new home by Athena herself, by Athenian people, and by propompoi (lit.: those who precede the procession44), who perhaps sing the final song while carrying torches (l. 1005). As commentators have observed, “the trilogy that began with a solitary watchman […] ends in a blaze of torchlight and in cries of rejoicing”.45 Athena has just completed a glorification of the power of Athens, as well as of the decision taken by the Athenians at the tribunal of the Areopagus concerning Orestes. There is a very crowded procession composed of men (for example the

43 See Parker 2005: 46, and Parker 1996: 298–299. 44 Perhaps: “Athena’s women cult-personnel”, but some commentators think of the Areopagites (see Sommerstein 1989: 276–277, 282–283). 45 Ibid.: 276.

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Areopagitai), girls, women and old women (l.1027), perhaps also “supernumeraries”46 including the priestess of Athena Polias and her cult-servants. “Νυκτὸς παῖδες ἄπαιδες,ὑπ᾽ εὔφρονι πομπᾷ, (εὐφαμεῖτε δέ, χωρῖται.) γᾶς ὑπὸ κεύθεσιν ὠγυγίοισιν τιμαῖς καὶ θυσίαις περίσεπτα τύχοιτε. (εὐφαμεῖτε δὲ πανδαμεί.) ἵλαοι δὲ καὶ εὐθύφρονες γᾷ. δεῦρ᾽ ἴτε, Σεμναὶ <θεαί>, πυριδάπτῳ λαμπάδι τερπόμεναι καθ᾽ ὁδόν. (ὀλολύξατε νῦν ἐπὶ μολπαῖς.) † σπονδαὶ δ᾽ ἐς τὸ πᾶν ἔνδαιδες οἴκων † Παλλάδος ἀστοῖς· Ζεὺς <ὁ> πανόπτας οὕτω Μοῖρά τε συγκατέβα. (ὀλολύξατε νῦν ἐπὶ μολπαῖς.)” “Go on your way, as is right, mighty ones, jealous of honour, dread Children of Night, under our honest escort. Let your speech be of good omen (euphameite, l. 1035), people of the land! Beneath earth’s primeval caverns, may your fortune be one that involves great reverence. Let your speech be of good omen, people one and all! Gracious and propitious to the land come hither, venerable ones, rejoicing (terpomenai, 1042) on your way in the torch the flame devours! Raise a glad cry, echoing our song! There shall be peace forever […] for the citizens of Pallas; thus have all-seeing Zeus and Fate come to our aid. Raise a glad cry in echo of our song!”47 The goddesses – the Erinyes transformed into the Eumenides – are qualified as joyful (ilaoi) and righteously minded (euthyphrones), and are invited to take pleasure from the pompe (religious procession) itself, which is qualified, at l.1034, as euphron (euphroni pompai). Each word of this final scene of this tragedy would deserve attention and specific commentary, but for my purpose it is important to put the stress on the phrase terpomenai pompei (taking delight in the procession). The procession consists of its typical elements, such as dances, songs and torches.48 There is the usual ritual injunction, addressed both to the chorus and to 46 Ibid.: 276. 47 Transl. Lloyd-Jones 1970: 73; modified following Sommerstein 1989: 284–286. 48 See the analysis of Kavoulaki 1999: 307–309 and, more generally, 295. On torches at festivals see Parker 2005: 183 (Panathenaia), 383 (Eleusinian Mysteries). On torch-races: Parker 2005: 472. In Eur. Hel. 722 the torches of a nuptial ritual are remembered as a joyous moment: the servant remembers torches (μεμνήμεθα λαμπάδων) and states that good servants are supposed to share with their masters their pleasure and grief. Torches seem to be a very important element of festivals (namely Dionysiac Festivals): likewise, in a passage of

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the Athenian people as a whole (ll. 1035, 1039), to refrain from inauspicious speech (euphemein),49 the same instruction that we often find when rituals – a wide range of rituals – are engaged in. The new goddesses are twice invited by the Chorus to shout at the singing and dancing of the group (l.1043 = l.1047: ololyxate epì molpais), and this ritual shout (ololyge) is explicitly connected (epi, that is: “at, after”) with the (ritual) songs and dances (molpè)50 executed by those who are participating in the pompe. The procession and its related components are thus said to be the origin of the pleasure, as well as of the ritual shout raised by the goddesses, who are accompanied by fiercely blazing torch-light and taking pleasure from them. Taking pleasure from torches means that the goddesses take pleasure from the procession itself, and the result will be that they are going to raise a joyful shout when people sing and dance for them (ll. 1041–2). The pleasure of the goddesses is thus the result of a double process: they take delight in the procession described (and represented in the theatre) as composed of music, dances, torches; on the other hand, they are asked to confirm and manifest their appreciation with a joyful ritual. 3.2 The Divine Side of Memory? The second passage deals with memory, considered not only as a human presupposition, but also as a divine function of a ritual. At the beginning of the Seven against Thebes, after the speech of the king Eteokles and a brief intervention by a messenger, who reports that the seven warriors have arrived before Thebes and are ready to attack the city, the Chorus (composed of Theban women) enters and pronounce a long supplication51 to the gods. The women are very scared and pray to the gods, whose statues are supposed to be placed in the orchestra, to take heed of their invocations (kluete […] kluete, l. 171).

the lyric poet Alcman (fr. 125 Calame) usually interpreted as an allusion to a Dionysiac festival we read about “a festival” (described in detail) “with many torches that are appreciated” (ὄκα σιοῖσι πολύφανος ἐορτά ἄδῃ) by the gods. Polyphanos means with many torches, eorta is the “technical” word for “religious festival”. See the commentary of Calame (1983: 522). 49 Citti (1962: 108–110) observes that Euphemein must refer to ritual practice and adds some useful remarks about the use of this verb in the parodying of ritual context (see Ar. Av. 959; Vesp. 868; Thesm. 295; Ach. 237 and 241; Pax 433, as well as this passage and Eur. IA 1563). For the interpretation of the passage, see also Sommerstein 1989: 283–284. One can compare perhaps Aesch. Suppl. 695–698, where the singers (aoidoi) are asked to put a euphemon song on the altar, in order to celebrate the success obtained by the supplication. 50 On molpe and its religious meanings see Di Donato 2006b: 10–12. 51 See, for instance, l. 185 with the commentary of Hutchinson (1985: 74).

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Let us examine lines 174–180 of this supplication: “λυτήριοί <τ᾽> ἀμφιβάντες πόλιν δείξαθ᾽ ὡς φιλοπόλεις, μέλεσθέ θ᾽ ἱερῶν δημίων, μελόμενοι δ᾽ ἀρήξατε· φιλοθύτων δέ τοι πόλεος ὀργίων μνήστορες ἐστέ μοι.” “O deities whom we cherish, with deliverance surround and guard our city; show clearly that you cherish it. Bethink you of the city’s sacred offerings, and, as you think of them, bring rescue! yes, and the city loving rites of sacrifice – be mindful of them, we pray you”52 These words are very important for us, because the gods, qualified in line 173 with an adjective which is, in my opinion, less odd than some commentators have made it out to be (philoi),53 are asked to take care of public rituals (melesthe th’hieron demion), and then (dè) to help the worshippers (melomenoi dè arexate). Using a very rare word (mnestores), whose interpretation is still a matter of discussion, the gods are then invited to do something in relation with memory. Translating the text as it stands, the Theban women say: “take care of the common sacrifices, and always remember the rites and sacrifices that you have received from our polis”. In this case, the memory of the gods is used, in my opinion, in a double sense: the first, and more obvious, is the request to remember the sacrifices that have been offered (as usual within the reciprocity of the prayer), but there is, perhaps, also a demand for the preservation of rites in their correct form. If we try to analyse the ordinary function of the memory of the gods in tragedy, we find that when “divine” memory is evoked, it is usually because the gods keep memories of the evil done by mortals and are able to punish them, even after many years and generations. For instance, Menis (the goddess Wrath) is qualified in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon as mnamon teknopoinos,54 that is “able to retain memory and exact revenge on sons”. In addition, we can observe the same epithet being given to the Erinyes in the Eumenidai (ll. 382–383: κακῶν μνήμονες, “able to retain memory of evil”). 52 Transl. Dawson 1970: 46–47. 53 See Hutchinson 1985: 73. Gods are here defined as philoi because they are to be considered in a relation of reciprocity (“vertical reciprocity”: see Scheid-Tissinier 1994) with Theban citizens who are praying for their help. On the philia between men and gods see Di Donato 2001a: 163–84. 54 Mnamon is also an important figure in the administration of law: see Gernet 1968: 286–287.

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However, in this passage we find a different word (mnastor, not mnamon), and the termination -tor attached to the root of the memory (mne/mna) indicates a nomen agentis: we have here gods who must “make their memory operate”. I wonder, therefore, if the divine side of the memory in this ritual of supplication may be connected with the quite frequent cases in which the members of the chorus, before starting a specific ritual or a prayer, ask themselves aloud: “what shall I do now? How shall I pray? How must I perform this rite? What shall I do in order to rightly perform this rite and make happy the one I am praying to?”55 3.3 A Hymn Engraved on Stone The last document that I would like to present is an inscription from Delphi, in which we read a hymn dedicated to Hestia, traditionally attributed to a poorly known author of the fifth century.56 “Ἐρανιστῶν ἄνασσαν, Ἑστίαν, σὲ ὑμνήσομεν, ἅ, καὶ Ὀλύμπου καὶ ξυνὸν γαίας κατέχουσα, ναὸν ἀν'ὑψηλὸν Φοίβου χορεύεις, τερπομένα τριπόδων θεσπίσμασι καὶ χρυσέαι φόρμιγγ' Ἀπόλλωνος, ἡνίκ' ἂν ἑπτάτονον κρεκων μετὰ σὺ θαλιάζοντας θεοὺς ὕμνοισιν αὔξῃ. Χαῖρε, Κρόνου θύγατερ καὶ Ῥέας […]”57 “Lady of Eranistai, Hestia, we are about to sing this prayer for you. Your preferred place is Olympus, and you dance (or: you prepare the choruses) in the very high temple of Phoibos, taking pleasure in the responses given on the tripods, and at the phorminx of Apollo […]” Once again, many aspects of this inscription would deserve our attention, starting with the curious invocation to Hestia (se hymnesomen) as eraniston anassa.58 (l. 1: the Lady of eranistai, quite difficult to explain). However, I am concentrating here just on the pleasure of the gods. In less than four lines, the goddess is described as having power (katechousa) over the temple of Phoibos, and as dancing (or preparing choruses of eranistai? choreueis) in this very high temple (ll. 4–6), while taking pleasure from both as55 See, for instance, within the same trilogy, Aesch. Agam. ll. 1541–1545 (who is going to perform the rite and how?), Coeph. ll. 855–859 (πόθεν ἄρξωμαι τάδ'ἐπευχομένη κἀπιθεάζουσ', ὑπὸ δ'εὐνοίας πῶς ἴσον εἰποῦσ' ἀνύσομαι), Eur. Hel. 165, HF 1025 ff. (funeral lament). The cases of self referentiality in which the Chorus asks “Why should I dance?” are very different from the one here examined. See, on this subject, the fundamental study of Henrichs 1995. 56 The verses are attributed to Aristonous of Corinth, perhaps the same person mentioned in Plut. Lis. 18.10. See Käppel 1992. 57 Inscription from Delphi: FD II, XI 192. 58 On eranos see Gernet 2001.

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pects of Apollo’s divinity: prophecy and music (terpomena thespimasi kai chryseiai phormingi, ll. 6–7). What is striking here is that we are not confronted with the “ordinary” situation, in which mortals and the god share the same pleasure, generated by the former for the latter. We have not – as in the passage of the Eumenides mentioned above – a god who is taking delight in some aspects of a festival (torches, dances, songs), nor a god who enjoys listening to a hymn performed during a banquet after the last prayer of Crises. Rather, we have here a goddess who dances, lets other dance, in the temple of Apollo. Moreover, she is taking pleasure (terpomena) from the responses given on the tripod (we may add that they would have been sung), as well as from the phorminx, the musical instrument of the god. The verb terpomai is here used to describe the pleasure of the goddess, who enjoys the pleasure of music, as well as of the responses given by the god. Pleasure is something that must be taken into account when men are celebrating a ritual, even for the reason that gods too take the same pleasure when they dance with other gods. As I have been arguing and trying to show, there seems to be a quite intricate web of relationships between memory, ritual, and pleasure in ancient Greece. This web is a sort of knot, that can be disentangled and examined in some detail, if one tries to pin down the specific kind of memory involved (the one I have called “ritual memory”, rather than “mnemonic memory”, so far as this distinction can be used), the specific relationship between this memory and the provision (or denial) of pleasure, and the general role of pleasure in rituals of Archaic and Classical times.

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References Berti, Irene 2006. “Now let the Earth be my Witness and the Broad Heaven above, and the down Flowing Water of the Styx […] (Homer, Ilias XV 36–37): Greek OathRituals”. In: Eftychia Stavrianopoulou (ed.). Ritual and Communication in the Graeco-Roman World. Liège: Centre International d’Étude de la Religion Grecque Antique: 181–209. Bouvier, David 2003. Le sceptre et la lyre. L’Iliade ou les héros de la mémoire. Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon. Bremmer, Jan 1996. “Modi di comunicazione con il divino”. In: Salvatore Settis (ed.). I Greci. 1, Noi e i Greci storia cultura arte società. Turin: Einaudi: 239–283. Butti de Lima, Paulo 1996. L’inchiesta e la prova. Turin: Einaudi. Calame, Claude 1977. Les choeurs des jeunes filles en Grèce archaïque. Vols. 1–2 (Filologia e critica 20–21 ). Rom: Edizioni dell’Ateneo. English transl. of vol. 1, Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece by Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield 1997, rev. 2001. — 1983. Alcman: Fragmenta edidit, veterum testimonia collegit Claudius Calame. Rome: In Aedibus Athenaei. — 1995. “Variations énonciatives, relations avec les dieux et fonctions poétiques dans les Hymnes homériques”. Museum Helveticum 52: 2–19. [rev. and repr. in: Calame 2005. Masques d’Autorité. Fiction et pragmatique dans la poétique grecque antique. Paris: Belin: 43–71.] — 1996. L’Éros dans la Grèce antique. Paris: Belin. — 2005. Masques d’Autorité. Fiction et pragmatique dans la poétique grecque antique. Paris: Belin. —2006 “Récit héroïque et pratique religieuse. Le passé poétique des cités grecques classiques”. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 61/3: 527–551. Capponi, Matteo 2003. “Fins d’hymnes et sphragis énonciatives”. Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 75/3: 9–35. Casabona, Jean 1966. Recherches sur le vocabulaire des sacrifices en Grec des origines à la fin de l’époque classique. Gap: Ed. Ophrys. Chaniotis, Angelos 2006. “Rituals between Norms and Emotions: Rituals as Shared Experience and Memory”. In: Eftychia Stavrianopoulou (ed.). Ritual and Communication in the Graeco-Roman World. Liège: Centre International d’Étude de la Religion Grecque Antique: 211–238. Chantraine, Pierre 20093 [1968]. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque. Paris: Klincksieck. Citti, Vittorio 1962. Il linguaggio religioso e liturgico nelle tragedie di Eschilo. Bologna: Università degli Studi di Bologna. Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia. Collard, Christopher (ed.) 1975. Euripides: Supplices. Edited with Introduction and Commentary by Christopher Collard. Groningen: Bouma’s Boekhius B.V. Publishers.

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Csapo, Eric & William J. Slater 1994. The Context of Ancient Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Csapo, Eric & Margaret C. Miller 2007. The Origins of Theatre in Ancient Greece and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dawson, Christopher M. (ed. & transl.) 1970. The Seven against Thebes. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Denniston, John Dewar 1939. Euripides: Electra. Edited with Introduction and Commentary by J. D. Denniston. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Di Donato, Riccardo 1969. “Problemi di tecnica formulare e poesia orale nell’epica greca arcaica”. Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 38: 243–294. — 1990. Per una antropologia storica del mondo antico. Florence: La Nuova Italia. — 1999. Esperienza di Omero. Pisa: Nistri Lischi Editore. — 2001a. Hierà. Prolegomeni ad uno studio storico-antropologico della religione greca. Pisa: Plus Edizioni. — 2001b. “Spazio e pubblico nella tragedia”. In: Riccardo Di Donato. Geografia e storia della letteratura greca arcaica: contributi a una antropologia storica del mondo antico. Florence: La Nuova Italia: 111–125. — 2006. “Una lettura di Omero. Commento all’ottavo canto dell’Odissea. Nuova edizione ad uso didattico interno”. Pisa (unpublished manuscript). — 2006a. Aristeuein. Premesse antropologiche ad Omero. Pisa: Edizioni ETS. — 2006b. “Moysiké. Premesse antropologiche allo studio della poesia greca”. In: Donatella Restani (ed.). Etnomusicologia storica del mondo antico. Per Roberto Leydi. Ravenna: Longo Editore: 8–16. George, Coulter H. 2005. Expressions of Agency in Ancient Greek. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005. Gernet, Louis 1968. Anthropologie de la Grèce antique. Paris: François Maspero. — 1999. “Eranos”. Introduzione, trascrizione e note di A. Taddei. Dike. Rivista di diritto greco ed ellenistico 1999, 2: 1–55. — & Andrea Taddei (ed.) & Riccardo Di Donato (foreword) 2000. Diritto e civiltà in Grecia antica. Florence: La Nuova Italia. — & Antonella Soldani (ed.) & Riccardo Di Donato (foreword) 2004. Polyvalence des Images. Pisa: Edizioni ETS. Graf, Fritz 2001. “Prayer in Magic and Religious Ritual”. In: Christopher A. Faraone & Dirk Obbink (eds.). Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 188–213. Henrichs, Albert 1995. “Why should I dance? Choral Self-Referentiality in Greek Tragedy”. Arion, Third Series 3/1: 56–111. Humbert, Jean 19723 [1945]. Syntaxe grecque. Paris: Klicksieck. Hutchinson, Gregory O. (ed.) 1985. Aeschylus: The Seven against Thebes. Edited with Introduction and Commentary by G.O. Hutchinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kamerbeek, Jan Coenraad 1963. The plays of Sophocles. 1: The Ajax. Leiden: Brill.

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Käppel, Lutz 1992. Paian: Studien zur Geschichte einer Gattung. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. Kavoulaki, Athena “Processional Performance and the Polis”. In: Simon Goldhill & Robin Osborne (eds.). Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 293–320. Kovacs, David (ed. & transl.) 1998. Suppliant Women: Electra, Heracles. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press (The Loeb Classical Library 9). — (ed. & transl.) 1999. Trojan Women: Iphigenia among the Taurians. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press (The Loeb Classical Library 10). — (ed. & transl.) 2002. Bacchae: Iphigenia at Aulis. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press (The Loeb Classical Library 495). Kowalzig, Barbara 2007. Singing for the Gods. Performance of Myth and Rituals in Archaic and Classical Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kyriakou, Poulheria 2006. A Commentary on Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. Latacz, Joachim 1966. Zum Wortfeld „Freude“ in der Sprache Homers. Heidelberg: Winter. Lee, Kevin H. (ed. & transl.) 1997. Euripides. Ion. With Introduction, Translation and Commentary by K.H. Lee. Warmister: Aris & Philip Ltd. Lloyd-Jones, Hugh (ed. & transl) 1970. The Eumenides. Englewood Cliffs: PrenticeHall. Marrucci, Lucia & Andrea Taddei (ed.) & Riccardo Di Donato (foreword) 2007. Polivalenze epiche. Pisa: ETS. Mauss, Marcel 1998. I fondamenti di una antropologia storica. Turin: Einaudi. Meyerson, Ignace & Riccardo Di Donato (afterword) 1995 [1945]. Les fonctions psychologiques et les œuvres. Paris: A. Michel. Mylonopoulos, Joannis 2006. “Greek Sanctuaries as Places of Communication through Rituals: An Archaeological Perspective”. In: Eftychia Stavrianopoulou (ed.). Ritual and Communication in the Graeco-Roman World. Liège: Centre International d’Étude de la Religion Grecque Antique: 69–110. Parker, Robert 1996. Athenian Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — 2005. Polytheism and Society at Athens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Perceau, Sylvie 2006. “Réjouir son cœur avec la phorminx au son clair (Iliade IX v. 189): le plaisir musical dans l’épopée homérique”. In: Odile Mortier-Waldschmidt (ed.). Musique & Antiquité: Actes du colloque d’Amiens. Paris: Les Belles Lettres: 43–62. Pulleyn, Simon 2006. Greek Prayers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rabinowitz, Nancy S. 2008. Greek Tragedy. Oxford, New York: Blackwell. Seaford, Richard 2006. Dionysos. London, New York: Routledge. Scheid-Tissinier, Evelyne 1994. Les usages du don chez Homère. Vocabulaire et pratiques. Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy. Simondon, Michèle 1983. Mémoire et oubli dans la pensée grecque. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

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Sommerstein, Alan H. (ed.) 1989. Aeschylus. Eumenides. Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stockert, Walter 1992. Euripides. Iphigenie in Aulis. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Taddei, Andrea 2007. “Mneme e terpsis. Rammemorazione e rituale nell’Inno omerico ad Apoll”. In: Marrucci, Lucia & Andrea Taddei (ed.) & Riccardo Di Donato (foreword). Poluvalenze epiche. Pisa: ETS: 79–93. Vernant, Jean-Pierre & Marcel Detienne 1979. La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec. Paris: Gallimard. Vernant, Jean-Pierre 1981. “Théorie générale du sacrifice et mise à mort dans la thysia grecque”. In: Jean-Pierre Vernant & Jean Rudhart & Olivier Reverdin (eds.). Le sacrifice dans l’Antiquité: Huit exposés suivis de discussions: Vanduvres-Genève, 25–30 août 1980. Geneva: Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique de la fondation Hardt. — & Riccardo Di Donato (afterword) 20092. Mito e religione in Grecia antica. Rome: Donzelli Editore. West, Martin L. (ed. & transl.) 2003. Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, Lives of Homer. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press (The Loeb Classical Library 496). Wilson, Peter (ed.) 2007. The Greek Theatre and Festivals. Documentary Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Reinhard Strohm

Memories of Ancient Rituals in Early Opera The Project Writers on opera frequently remark, although rarely expand, on a relationship of opera with ceremony and ritual. This connection inevitably occurs in a culture that has largely replaced attendance at religious services, or participation in community and family rituals, by cultural consumption such as opera-going. The discourse about opera and ritual exists in various modes. One of these is the anthropologicalanalytical mode of identifying ritual structures in particular works, often only their plots. Another is the mode of social satire, as when opera-going or opera-producing is described as a “ritual” to highlight its artistic pointlessness, repetitiveness, and social elitism. Yet another is the cultural-historical mode of describing connections between epochs and art-forms by relating them to shared or universal rituals or myths. This paper aims to contribute to the cultural-historical enquiry about opera of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It will also touch upon the relationship between the fictional representation of rituals in opera and the rituality of the operatic practice itself. On one hand, the practice of opera may have been a manifestation of deeper cultural patterns; on the other, the performative, fictional use of rituals in opera also functioned as a deliberate semantic device. To give an example, the allusions to Dionysiac rites found in early opera may be interpreted as evidence of subconscious Dionysiac leanings in this art-form, but there is also the question of why they were so self-consciously emphasised in that particular cultural environment. The investigation of rituals in early opera should enlarge our knowledge of the textual and scenic vocabulary and grammar of these works, and at the same time highlight the self-consciousness of classicism and of the so-called “reception of antiquity” in early modern culture.

Alterity European theatre as a whole testifies to our cultural awareness of rituals, ceremonies, religious or secular rites, and ritual behaviour: but the genre of opera seems especially involved in this topic, and almost seems to reinscribe and refresh it as it develops. Greek and Roman rituals are particularly frequent in European musical

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theatre, and their imitations, derivations, or transformations are innumerable. Without Orpheus, Ariadne, Iphigenia, Helen no Zauberflöte or Aida, no Sacre du Printemps and not even Nozze di Figaro or Bartered Bride. No doubt there is a connection with the fact that opera originated, at least ostensibly, as an imitation of ancient theatre, which was itself a ritual. But only a minority of the rituals displayed in early operas are actually drawn from ancient dramas – more often they are distilled from the epic poets, the historiographers and mythographers. The attraction of the topic did not reside in the literary genre of its sources, but in the alterity value of its transmitted cultural practice. Ancient rituals on stage offered a glimpse of a foreign culture, not exactly comparable to early modern rituality. Religious scenes in early opera – taken from any cultural context – obeyed the law of “paganisation”, so to speak: coronations, funerals, weddings, and other rituals also observed in the Christian tradition were often artificially translated into fictitious ancient forms – whether to avoid offending the Church or to make them seem more intriguing to spectators. To authenticate these hybrid creations with the help of ancient testimonies, to create true or false etymologies of the ritual vocabulary, was a standard obligation of early modern poets, genealogists, and antiquarians. We may conclude that the alleged derivation of the operatic genre itself from ancient drama was not the primary reason for the theatrical representation of ancient rituals, although it could play an important legitimising role in the discourse; the primary stimulus must have been the cultural imagination itself and the alterity value of the associations evoked.

Interpretations As already mentioned, modern writers rarely expand on rituals in early opera; comments on their aetiologies or etymologies are particularly scarce. The subject of the theatrical ritual is still only vaguely defined; when opera plotlines or scenographies involve myth, magic, or incantation, it is usual to equate ritual with one of these, although the presence of religious or metaphysical aspects in many rituals are insufficient criteria for defining the whole field.1 Anthropologists and literary theorists adducing folkloric and other secular roots of ritual (Mikhail Bakhtin, for example) have provided important glimpses for the analysts of opera and its practices.2 But no meaningful picture can emerge where, for example, carnival, myth, and religion are treated as near equivalents. Let us rather ask about the exact relationship between ritual and myth. If we follow the view of a Bronislav Malinowski or Mircea Eliade, that myths explain and legitimise rituals, the importance of 1 Contrasting approaches to the aspects of magic and ritual may be observed in Pirrotta 1968; Tomlinson 1999; Feldman 1995. 2 Bakhtin c.1968.

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Ovid’s Fasti for early opera will be emphasised: like the tales of the poet, so the modern operas were fables, intended to embroider and legitimise the calendrical ritual of courtly entertainment. If we accept Walter Burkert’s theory that myth and ritual are not the same, but may reinforce each other to a socialising effect, we may ask how mythical opera plots, so frequent in the early phase, related to the social practices of their audiences.3 Rituals appear not only in mythical operas, but also in plots taken from history, archaeology, or literary fable, without necessarily being either supernatural or carnivalesque. Recent research has also brought the keyword “ceremony” into focus. I consider “ceremony” to be a form of ritual, although perhaps lacking the important criterion of repetitiveness and being more often created ad hoc for a special performative display. Nevertheless, in early modern courts, an army of ceremonialists usually stood by to explain why these ceremonies were based on ancient traditions or were legitimised by ancient precedent. The ceremonialists created new myths, aetiologies, and false etymologies for rituals with a repetitiveness that might itself be called ritualistic. Opera was an important tool of this ritualisation of the procedures of the emerging modern state, and the rituals represented in it could be read as precedents for, or interpretations of, a public practice. The representation of rituals on the stage is certainly a form of transmitting or communicating awareness about wider human practices and thus of social reality, as Victor Turner might have said4 – but it is also in itself a ritualistic practice that depended on conscious ideological premises. Recognising this relationship, Martha Feldman has proposed analyses, based on ritual theory, of opera seria.5 Her search of meta-meanings in the plot of Metastasio’s Artaserse and their repercussions in the audience may now also be read against Francesco Giuntini’s account of the many “throne and altar ceremonies” in Metastasio’s drammi per musica, or my own survey of the ritualistic practice of opera pairs, to ground the anthropologicalanalytical approach in a notion of the practical circumstances of performance and repertoire.6

Expiation In a recent study of sacrifice in literature and opera, Derek Hughes offers important thoughts on the relationship between these representations and what he calls “the real thing”.7 It is exactly at this intersection that the scenes of human sacrifice and 3 4 5 6 7

Burkert 1979. Turner 1969. Feldman 1995. Giuntini 2006; Strohm 2006. Hughes 2007.

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other ancient rituals in early opera – however fictitious – become so relevant for cultural studies. It seems unlikely that these presentations were entirely literaturedriven. Real human sacrifices had allegedly been observed in the Aztec culture of freshly-conquered Mexico, although direct references to that practice were rare in opera before the eighteenth century. I suggest, however, that ancient and exotic rituals in opera were parallel topics. They functioned as supposed realities, as a verisimilitude, so to speak, whether they were taken from the past or other continents, whether derived from the literary tradition or from ethnographic reports. Ritual sacrifice, for example, was presumed to have existed out there and was perhaps still to be tamed through the medium of theatrical re-enactment. Early opera placed itself in the aetiological position of a revived ancient practice; thus it did with rituals of its own time what the ancient Greek dramas had done with ancient rituals. To give examples, the Bacchic tradition and the Iphigenia myth, discussed by Derek Hughes, are fundamental plots for the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theatre (respectively), not just because the particular ancient texts narrating them were popular reading, but because these topics related to an ongoing cultural concern with barbaric memories. All sorts of allegorical applications, rationalisations and expiatory adjustments of these plots were still feasible and apparently necessary. Early opera was not yet “Literaturoper”, where the literary author provides the fiction ready-made. Racine’s Iphigénie en Aulide (1674) and Apostolo Zeno’s Ifigenia in Aulide (1718)8 even reintroduce, for reasons of verisimilitude, the human sacrifice Euripides had eliminated – although they do this slightly differently, as in an ongoing debate over the genuine function of the ritual. Pietro Metastasio’s libretti, by contrast, often enact in their very plots a supposed extinction of violent rituals, for example in actions where the ritual abuse of power, or vendetta, or human sacrifice, are averted through magnanimity or common sense. Even Le nozze di Figaro is still such an action. From the existence of plots of pacification, expiation or aversion we may conclude that in the consciousness of early opera the memory of violent rituals was still reverberating, like a reality still to be purged by fiction. This cathartic process, usually ritualised in itself, was in line with ancient practice, for example with the long history of ritual representations and festivals in Roman culture.

Public Function Since opera had been launched as a revival of ancient drama, ancient culture had to furnish a raison d’être for its modern practice in society. Whereas the early favole in musica were like private re-enactments of ancient stories for the benefit of noble spectators or academic readers, in the subsequent Venetian drama musicale an os8 The latter is only fleetingly mentioned in ibid.: 106.

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tensible public reception of the classical tradition took place. The Venetian state, the Serenissima Repubblica, considered itself a legitimate successor to the Roman republic; as Ellen Rosand has emphasised, opera enacted this near-equation on the stage, broadcasting the cultural and political ambitions of the city-state.9 In becoming both “political” and “public”, opera ostensibly regained that representative position amidst the culture as a whole which the classical theatre had occupied. This position was, at first glance, comparable to that of other famous civic ceremonies in early modern Venice (whereas the palace operas of Florence and Rome did not correspond to any comparable civic actions). A significant difference from those ceremonies, however, was that the domain of Venetian opera was entirely nonChristian: in fact, opera permitted the staging of pagan religious rites. In antiquity, the presentation of religious rites in tragedies formed a perhaps unproblematic relationship with their existence in reality, but in modern times, the presentation of those same religious rites clashed with the Christian environment. A licence had to be invented that permitted the pagan intrusion. The Roman feast of Liber or Bacchus (17 March10) was conflated with medieval custom to form the locus of early modern opera altogether: carnival. Contemporary critics also compared the modern carnival with the Roman feasts of the Saturnalia (December) and Lupercalia (February) – feasts accompanied by public games and theatrical representations. As Wolfgang Osthoff was first to note, the Dionysiac myth provided the chronicler Cristoforo Ivanovich with an aetiology of the Venetian carnival itself, when he wrote: “There is no scholar of history who would not agree that the entertainments of the Venetian carnival are as exciting as the ancient Roman Bacchanals, which is why the whole world, then as now, went and goes on pilgrimage to witness them.”11 Ivanovich also compared the interplay between poets and patrons in Roman times (citing Virgil and Maecenas) with the poets’ varying successes on the Venetian musical stage.12 And Nicolò Minato observed in the preface to his libretto Scipione Affricano (1664), that the opera-house of the Grimani family emulated the ancient Roman theatres of Marcellus and Pompey.13 Thus a whole environment was designed to accommodate the ancient models in modern society.

9 Rosand 1991: 125–153. 10 Vaccai 1902. 11 “Non v’è alcuno pratico dell’Istorie, che non confessi i trattenimenti Carnevaleschi di Venezia, al pari curiosi di quelli degli antichi Baccanali di Roma, per cui e allora, e adesso se ne facea, e si fà pellegrino il Mondo, per osservar le Pompe.” Ivanovich & Dubowy 1993 [1681]: 370. See Osthoff 1960: 27–29. For the “Venetian myth” and its relationship with carnival see also Mehltretter 1994: 97–98. 12 Ivanovich 1993: 413–414. 13 “Lettore”: [1], in Minato 1664. See Rosand 1991: 139, n. 25..

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Moral Objections The identification of the modern carnival with ancient feasts is also amply demonstrated in the writings of those who used it to condemn the contemporary practice. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, many dissertations appeared in Germany on the “Bacchanalia” and the Dionysiac practices of antiquity, comparing them with the abominable customs of the modern carnival. These usually Pietistinfluenced writings originated in a geographic area that was quite familiar with opera.14 Although they do not usually mention the theatre, their condemnation of customs such as disguise and public music-making stands for a more widespread criticism of secular culture, and a decidedly anti-theatrical view. The same mindset also characterised English Puritanism, for example. Pietists and Puritans shared an anxiety that contacts with pagan culture, mediated by the theatre, would corrupt the morals of Christian audiences. A well-known controversy on opera was let loose in Hamburg in 1681 by Anton Reiser’s Theatromania, oder die Wercke der Finsternis in den öffentlichen Schauspielen. It focused on the question of whether opera could legitimately be compared with the “orgiastic Roman spectacles condemned by the Church Fathers”.15 The supporters of opera argued that it could not, since it was now Christian.16 Thus the same year, 1681, witnessed a striking contrast between the mentality of Ivanovich’s Venice, where people were proud of emulating ancient theatre, and that of Reiser’s Hamburg, where such an affinity caused moral indignation. The concern over the staging of pagan customs and lifestyles as possibly corrupting Christian morals was widespread. Ivanovich, himself a clergyman, had tried to sideline this problem by proposing that the splendour (pompa) of opera kept the people in a happy state, as they would otherwise begin to criticise the government (an argument for panem et circenses);17 this shows that even he did not radically doubt a potential osmosis between the fictional world on stage and people’s behaviour. In any case, nobody questioned the importance of staging good examples of morality, religion, and custom in opera, just as in other theatrical genres. Therefore, the examples of ancient morality, religion, and custom exhibited in opera must have been relevant to early modern mentalities.

14 Some titles are: Müller 1652; Fabricius 1691; Nicolai 1679; Zeumer & Kindervater 1699; Lakemacher 1724. 15 Flaherty 1978: 21–22; see also Döhring 1995; Haufe 1994. 16 Not an entirely convincing argument, since opera was, with few exceptions – some of which at Hamburg – secular in content. 17 Memorie Teatrali, as cited in Rosand 1991: 431, App. II, 6e and 6f.

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Consensus and Interruption Rituals on stage – whether fictional or not – had a didactic advantage over other elements of plot (over individual heroism, for example), in that they suggested a prior universal consensus within the culture shown. Giambattista Guarini’s Il pastor fido (1585) had presented the ritual death sentence for Amarilli as a self-evidential consensus of the pastoral community. The power of such a consensus is demonstrated by the later increasing tendency to undermine it: false aetiologies were accumulated as the self-evidentiality of the rituals diminished, or the rituals represented were increasingly avoided, dismantled, or abolished on stage – especially if they involved human sacrifices. The title of Peter von Winter’s opera of 1796, Das unterbrochene Opferfest, is a succinct formula for what happened to operatic rituals in the course of the ancien régime. Ritual significance was quite typically attributed to acts of interruption and transgression, their prototype being that perpetrated by Adam and Eve (the subject of the first opera performed at Hamburg in 1678). Thus, interruption and transgression themselves became ritualised in opera. Sometimes the validity of an ancient ritual was challenged from a perspective of historical hindsight. In Adriano Morselli and Giuseppe Felice Tosi’s Amulio e Numitore (Venice, 1689), the ritual sacrifice to Vesta is shattered by the discovery that the Vestal virgin Silvia’s mirror does not reflect the light, revealing that she has broken her vow and become pregnant. Since the outcome of this is the birth of Romulus and the foundation of Rome, the opera posits itself at an auspicious historical moment. Its significance can be estimated from hindsight: the modern audience can immediately see that a universal good was to come from Silvia’s transgression.

The Purging of Carnival? It may seem perplexing that the ancient ritual that was called upon to lend legitimacy to operatic practice in general, the Dionysiac tradition, also harboured a myth reporting the ritual assassination of Orpheus, the singer-poet who could be considered an embodiment of the genre of opera. (Dionysos/Bacchus was himself a patron of music, or at least of lascivious Phrygian musical idioms, imported into Greece.) The Roman Senate, in a decree of 186 B.C.E., prohibited the Dionysos rituals, supposedly because of the crimes and excesses connected with them. In the fifteenth century, the allegorical figure of Orpheus as a founder not only of music but also of religious rites and mysteries, inspired fictitious musical reconstructions of ancient song. The Orpheus legend binds excess and destruction together with music and poetry. Admittedly, the figure of Orpheus the musician-poet marks the confluence of many mythical tales, only some of which include the violence of the Maenads against him. Ovid, for one, narrates that Bacchus himself punished them

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for their misdeed. Euripides’s tragedy The Bacchae substitutes Pentheus for Orpheus, making the victim almost an accomplice in his own downfall. Striggio and Monteverdi’s favola in musica of 1607 ended with the Bacchantes threatening Orfeo’s demise, whereas the printed score of 1609 awards the singer an apotheosis through the assistance of Apollo – the opposite power to that of Bacchus. The Orpheus operas after Monteverdi (for example, Landi, 1619; Buti/Rossi, Paris, 1647; Aureli/Sartorio, Venice, 1672) treat the ending in different ways, but an association with Apollo or Jupiter, and implicitly a sublimation of Dionysiac art, is often present. If Orpheus himself were opera and his death the end of carnival (because it marked the end of musical and erotic licentiousness), his ritual killing would signify the purging of carnivalesque ecstasy through the symbolic sacrifice of its leader.

Visuality There were many different types of ancient rituals shown in operas of this period. The ancient sources provided a cornucopia of weddings, funerals, altar scenes, oracles, visions, omens, conjurations, coronations, dedications of temples or statues, ceremonies of state, public oaths, senatorial debates, funeral speeches, military triumphs, public executions, celebratory games, religious musical performances, ballets, sports competitions, gladiatorial combats, public duels, theatrical and amphitheatrical performances, processions, banquets, and so forth.18 The antiquarian expertise of these ancient ceremonies and rituals was ever-increasing in early modern Europe, also reflecting the activity of poets as court genealogists or antiquarians. Apostolo Zeno, for example, used his expert knowledge of Roman medals to “authenticate” some of his plots. Quite regularly, opera librettists described ancient sites, above all monumental architecture and statues (so-called “vedute”), which were often drawn by contemporary artists, enabling the productions to show them scenographically. In fact, the references to antiquity are so often visual as well as verbal that we may speak of “visions of antiquity” and of a tendency towards spatial assimilation. The images of ancient scenes not only identified the physical circumstances in which a ritual action was set, they also pointed to the skills of the producers and reflected their familiarity with antiquity. Classicism adores references: visual references on stage (for example, a triumphal arch in the Roman forum) were comparable in function and aesthetic appeal to citations of famous lines from the ancient writers. But whereas literary scholarship could boast a comprehensive familiarity with the classical texts, visual representation had to rely on a more restricted set of originals and an even more restricted familiarity 18 I have yet to find an example of ancient rite-of-passage rituals in early opera – perhaps they have not been well researched yet?

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with them on the part of the audience. People may have known what Rome looked like, but views of Carthage or Carthago Nova were largely a matter of speculation.19

Festivities Transformed The public festivities of classical civilisation were shown most frequently, because they provided both the splendour (pompa) that opera required as a genre of public art, and the legitimation – through ancient precedent – of being themselves a festive entertainment. The type and degree of spectacularity with which ancient scenes were shown could vary according to the type of patronage, theatre, and audience.20 In 1716, the Hamburg opera-house devoted a whole work (by Barthold Feind and Reinhard Keiser) entirely to the re-enactment of Roman religious festivities: Das römische April-Fest. Musicalisches Lust-und Tanz-Spiel. This consisted of little scenes presenting the various feasts which the Romans celebrated in April, to honour the birth of an heir to the Imperial throne in April 1716. It was an opéra-ballet in the wake of André Campra’s Les festes Vénitiennes (1710) and was related to other so-called “Festopern” of the time, which thematicised joyous rituality as such, often at the expense of continuous plotlines.21 The idea of combining the theatrical potential of such plots with visions of antiquity was followed up in Louis Fuzelier and François Collin de Blamont’s ballet en musique, Les Festes Grecques et Romaines (1723), which had many revivals in later years. Its three entrées were memories of specific ancient feasts: 1) Les Jeux Olympiques, containing a love story about Alcibiades and Timaea, set in the Olympic grove; 2) Les Bacchanales, set in Cilicia in the presence of Anthony and Cleopatra, where the Bacchantes are disguised as Egyptian women; and 3) Les Saturnales, set in the country house of Maecenas, with a dance of slaves disguised as their masters. That the point of Les Festes Grecques et Romaines was the legitimation of a modern genre – a semidramatic ballet – through visions of antiquity is made explicit in the prologue, set in the “Temple de la mémoire” between Apollo, Clio, Erato and Terpsichore.22

Sacrifice Avoided The presentation of rituals involving death, punishment, violence, and disaster served a cultural need for expiation and enlightenment. In this case, too, opera pro19 20 21 22

For more on the visual representation of Roman antiquity, see Strohm 2008. As demonstrated, for example, in Bianconi 1976. See Schröder 1996. This prologue was used, in turn, as the model for Handel’s operatic ballet Terpsicore (1734). See Dean & Knapp 1987: 221–222.

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vides allegorical images of alternative communities and public beliefs. But as with the balletic works, the ancient ritual, especially when expiated or avoided, became more and more a somewhat perfunctory excuse for legitimising modern ideas, for example philosophies of state and natural law. In the multi-layered ritualistic drama L’Olimpiade by Metastasio (August 1733), there is not only an averted human sacrifice on the steps of the temple of Zeus at Olympia (an archaeological vista), but, more importantly, an effective reversal of the death sentence through acclamation by the whole community. This happens at the moment of the dethronement of a “king for a day”, and thus at the moment of transition to a different constitutional status.23 The plot also involves an oracle which had predicted the attempted murder of a father by his son, causing the abandonment of the baby on the mountain – and thus leading exactly to that attempt, as in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King. Metastasio’s oracle, however, is now averted by an action of the whole community; several generous offers of self-sacrifice are interposed between the threatening father and his unrecognised son. Thus, the lieto fine becomes an achievement of both collective wisdom and individual heroism. The opera Motezuma by Alvise Giusti and Antonio Vivaldi, which was given in Venice only weeks later, in November 1733, concludes with the rescue of Motezuma’s daughter from the threat of being sacrificed to the Mexican gods to secure peace with the Spaniards; that peace is then achieved through her marriage to a Spanish hero instead.

Individual Actions We should ideally cast our net wider still, considering also private ritualistic actions and those expressing human relationships that were not necessarily given public visual expression. Private prayers, individual visions, ecstasies, invocations of the spirits (for example in the context of the so-called “ombra scenes”) were frequently shown in early operas, not only because they provided convenient soloistic performance opportunities. The briefest and simplest interpersonal actions, such as the giving and receiving of gifts, the relations between relatives, between servant and master, or between rivals and enemies, the bonding or separation of friends, lovers, or spouses, parting from the dead, had all been ritualised in the history of civilisation before they became dramatic subjects. In the heroic dramma per musica of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, such actions could form their own stage tradition. Some became ingrained emblems of virtue and heroism: a standard example is the mutual offer of friends to die for each other, as do Orestes and Pylades, not for the first time, in Nicolas-François Guillard and 23 The performance took place in August 1733, shortly after the contested election of Frederick August II of Saxony as King of Poland; the elective monarchy of Poland was unique in Europe.

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Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride (1779). And, lest it is suspected that the rituality of such actions was brought about by too many theatrical repetitions rather than by real life, we should also consider that most of them had already been described by ancient historians and moralists, including Livy, Plutarch, or Valerius Maximus, whose Facta et dicta memorabilia was used by opera librettists as a model book for standardised virtuous behaviour.

Scipio’s Three Rituals Scipione Affricano, the historical dramma per musica by Nicolò Minato and Francesco Cavalli (Venice, 1664), might be chosen as a concluding example.24 The libretto narrates the conquest of Iberia by P. Cornelius Scipio (Africanus Maior) in 210 B.C.E.; it was dedicated to Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, who served the Aragonese monarchy, later partly as their vice-king in Spain. The first act alone compounds three different ancient rituals, exhibiting different degrees of spectacularity. a. Having conquered Carthago Nova from Hasdrubal, Scipio introduces the Roman gladiatorial games in the city.25 His great authority therefore legitimises public entertainment and divertissement, in other words, courtly opera; this functions as a foundation legend and, at the same time, as a spectacular opening for the opera. The sinfonia anticipates the celebration with musical dance elements already in its last triple-metre section. A prologue with the goddess Fama makes a self-reflective pun on the drama itself; the games are introduced and intersected by several choruses of soldiers and gladiators; specific ritual actions are performed, for example, a charge of the gladiators, who throw their helmets in the air. There are, of course, speeches, by Scipio, and by those celebrating him; the courtier Catone (a caricature of Scipio’s later enemy M. Porcius Cato) pronounces a false aetiology of the games (they did not serve for victory triumphs, but as commemorations for the dead). b. Act One concludes (I.19–20) with Scipio’s visit to the Sybil, and her prediction of peace between Rome and Carthage; a rainbow appears, flying eagles drop olive branches; a Ballo di Spiriti exits from Sybil’s cave, two of whom carry her away through the air: these spectacular scenes are all themes taken from Roman 24 Noe 2004: 165–167, no. 163, documenting three original performances: 1664 (Venice), 1671 (Rome) and 1678 (Venice), plus revivals in Italy and abroad. 25 The argomento of the libretto mentions as one of the historical precedents: “Fece anco fare i Giuochi de’ Gladiatori per allegrezza delle sue Vittorie. ita Plut.” The reference to Plutarch is misleading (Plutarch’s Scipio is not preserved) and should rather have been to Polybius, Livy, Valerius Maximus, so too Erasmus in his comparison of Scipio with Philip the Fair, and Castiglione. Gladiatorial games originated from the Roman munus ceremony for the dead, first introduced in 264 B.C.E.

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religion and augury. The peace prediction is extendable to modern times, i.e. it predicts more than is understood within the drama by its characters, and makes the opera audience the witness of an extended super-prophecy, feeling confirmed in their role as continuators of Rome (translatio imperii).26 c. In the argomento we also read about the historical precedent for the famous episode known as “The Continence of Scipio”: the hero is offered a beautiful young woman (Ericlea) as part of his war spoils, but on hearing that she is betrothed to a local chief, gives her back to him and also returns the ransom money offered by her supplicating parents. “I.03: Scipione. Che bel crin, che bel labbro! Che ciglio risplendente! (a parte: Ove trascorri, Da te stessa diversa alma imprudente?) (Si rivolta, e non mira più Ericlea, se non quando parte.) Sia condotta alla regia. [...] Catone. Eroica continenza! Sci. Ma dura sofferenza. Cat. Così gloria s’acquista. Sci. E’l ben s fugge. Cat. Così l’alma trionfa. Sci. E’l cor si strugge.”27 The recitative dialogue modulates from A Major to D Minor across several intermediate cadences and is followed by a serious, imitative ritornello confirming D Minor, which seems to be intended as an image of the restrained and dignified Dorian mode. Not to seize captured virgins as sexual prey is praised as monarchic restraint and even heroism. The early modern associations of this ritualistic action again reach Le nozze di Figaro, via many other Scipio operas. Paintings of the scene exist by Bellini, van Dyck, Rubens, and others.28 Three representations entitled The Continence of Scipio may briefly be considered here, as they correspond almost exactly to the visual implications of Minato’s libretto – or rather, as they establish a code of representation of the famous scene that could also be followed on the opera stage in posture, gesture, mime, dress, and action.

26 Rome and Carthage are perhaps allegories in themselves. Colonna commissioned many paintings of scenes from the Aeneid especially from Claude Lorrain. Can Carthage be an allegory of the Ottoman Empire? 27 Sci. What beautiful hair, what beautiful lips! What a resplendent brow! (aside: Where are you transgressing, incautious soul, different from yourself?) (He turns around and no more looks at Ericlea until he exits.) Lead her to the palace. [...] Catone. Heroic continence! Sci. But hard suffering. Cat. Thus is glory acquired. Sci. And happiness left behind. Cat. Thus the soul triumphs. Sci. And the heart destroys itself. 28 On the cultural history of this topic as reflected in painting, see Kunzle 2002.

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Fig. 1–2: Francesco Cavalli, Scipione Affricano (Venice, 1664), facsimile of the score in Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, MS. It. IV, 371, with an introduction by Howard Mayer Brown. New York: Garland, 1978, fol. 13r–v. Courtesy of Biblioteca Marciana, Venice

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In Karel van Mander’s imposing canvas, Scipio is enthroned on the side of the battlefield; various scenes of war are visible to the side and in the background; the backdrop is the burning city of Carthago Nova. Scipio, crowned with laurels, is paying attention to the old parents kneeling to his right, who offer golden vases for ransom; with a green branch of clemency in his right hand he points towards Ericlea without looking at her; she is clasping right hands with Lucejo, as in a betrothal rite.

Image 1: Karel van Mander, The Continence of Scipio, 1600 Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, c. 1610–1662 (Musée du Louvre, inv. nr. 20350) concentrates the representation on the main figures, without the narrative of war around them; Lucejo is now a kneeling supplicant together with Ericlea’s father, whereas the mother stands behind them in assistance. Scipio, seated in front of his military tent, has Ericlea to his right (like her parents in van Mander’s painting) and slightly behind him; she seems to be walking forward, as if she had just emerged from the tent. Her arms and hands are holding up her dress to express modesty. Scipio uses both hands to point towards her while looking benevolently at the supplicants at his feet. Scipio’s headgear – peacock feathers – has a significantly non-military character. The rituality of poses and gestures is most poignantly concentrated in Nicolas Poussin’s canvas of 1640 (Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts). The story surrounding the ritual is told slightly differently: Ericlea’s father is not a supplicant, but has only just arrived, waiting to the right behind Scipio’s soldiers, who still seem to be

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deliberating as to whether to grant him access.29 Lucejo, however, has reached the throne – a formal seat on a stone pedestal – and supplicates, bending down and using his left hand (pointing to the ground) as a symbol of humility, his right as an offer of contract or friendship. Scipio, in Imperial garb, is just being crowned with the laurels by a Vestal virgin who stands behind the throne; he is looking straight at Lucejo, not at Ericlea, who stands to his left in the middle ground, facing the viewer but looking modestly towards the ground, with her hands covering her body and dress. Scipio’s left hand, however, is widely stretched out towards her and Lucejo, in a gesture of offering gifts, while his right is clasping the arm-rest of the throne, keeping contact with the symbol of his Imperial status, but also, perhaps, hiding his emotional strain. This painting has two main axes, which cross each other at rectangles: one between Scipio and Lucejo (and the possible Mercury), the other between Ericlea and the viewer: this counterpoint expresses the duality of the ritual action, which is not only about the woman, but also about the two men. In fact, Scipio’s act was not just an isolated example of magnanimity, but sensible diplomacy: he needed the support of the local leaders against the occupying Carthaginians. In the opera, he also becomes instrumental in Ericlea’s marriage to her assigned husband Lucejo, whom she has not yet met. This implies yet another ritualistic tradition, that of arranged marriages and of their role in male bonding: the return of Ericlea is in itself an exchange gift to a newly-recruited male ally. The action has been interpreted, with reference to Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles, as a male homosociality act, i.e. of exchanging women instead of possessing them.30

Statements about the Self Limiting the behavioural latitude for monarchs and heroes, and elevating the sexual status of women from that of mere property to objects of arranged marriages – well, it was a step on the ladder – were presumably aspects of the ancient story in which early modern audiences could recognise the social changes around them. The most important motif, emphasised by our librettist, was perhaps the new fiction that the monarch had a greater burden to shoulder than his subjects; while limiting the absolute power of the monarch through natural laws and new social restraints, the modern ideology awarded him the status of a sufferer for the common good (“dura sofferenza”). Thus, a common denominator of all those scenes of ancient rituals shown on the operatic stage, whether happy or cruel, obvious or mysterious, may in fact be ideology: an allegorical cultural interpretation of the self that attempts to diminish 29 The soldier in front, who is looking across the whole scene straight at Scipio, might be Mercury: it is unknown to me whether the god played a role in any of the versions of the story. 30 Schibanoff 2006: 270–273.

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social strain and friction.31 Whether the Greek dramas, by and large, served such a function within their society is difficult to say, but early modern opera probably did; its choice of antiquity was allegorical, a kind of ventriloquism. I imagine that there was hardly any other way of publicly addressing fundamental matters of culture, religion, and politics. But by doing so, and also through its use of music as a form of incantation, opera contributed to the emerging language of secular art in Europe.

31 Geertz 1973.

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References Bianconi, Lorenzo 1976. “L’Ercole in Rialto”. In: Maria Teresa Muraro (ed.). Venezia e il melodramma nel Seicento. Florence: 259–268 (Studi di musica veneta 5). Dean, Winton & J. Merrill Knapp 1987. Handel’s Operas 1704–1726. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Döhring, Sieghart 1995. „Theologische Kontroversen um die Hamburger Oper“. In: Axel Beer & Laurenz Lütteken (eds.). Festschrift Klaus Hortschansky zum 60. Geburtstag. Tutzing: Schneider: 111–123. Fabricius, Johannes Kilian 1691. Dissertatio philologica de Bacchanaliis, Leipzig: Fleischer. Feldman, Martha 1995. “Magic Mirrors and the Seria Stage: Thoughts toward a Ritual View”. Journal of the American Musicological Society 48: 423–484. Flaherty, Gloria 1978. Opera in the Development of German Critical Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Giuntini, Francesco 2006. “Throne and Altar Ceremonies in Metastasio’s Dramas”. In: Melania Bucciarelli & Norbert Dubowy & Reinhard Strohm (eds.). Italian Opera in Central Europe, vol. 1: Institutions and Ceremonies. (Musical Life in Europe, 1600–1900: Circulation, Institutions, Representation). Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag: 221–233. Haufe, Eberhard 1994. Die Behandlung der antiken Mythologie in den Textbüchern der Hamburger Oper 1678–1738. Frankfurt: Peter Lang (Mikrokosmos: Beiträge zur Literaturwissenschaft und Bedeutungsforschung 37). Hughes, Derek 2007. Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ivanovich, Cristoforo & Norbert Dubowy (ed.) 1993 [1681]. Minerva al tavolino. reprint. Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana. Kunzle, David 2002. “The Magnanimous Soldier: The Continence of Scipio”. In: David Kunzle. From Criminal to Courtier: The Soldier in Netherlandish Art 1550– 1672. Leiden: Brill: 507–536. Lakemacher, Johann Gottfried 1724. De ritibus quibusdam Bacchicis, a Graecis ad Iudaeos recentiores derivatis, et ab his Tabernaculorum festo usurpatis. Helmstedt: Schnorr. Mehltretter, Florian 1994. Die unmögliche Tragödie. Karnevalisierung und Gattungsmischung im venezianischen Opernlibretto des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Müller, Paul 1652. Bachanalia vetera et nova. Nordhausen: Hynitzsch. Nicolai, Joannes 1679. Commentatio de ritu antiquo et hodierno Bacchanaliorum. Helmstedt: Müller. Noe, Alfred 2004. Nicolò Minato: Werkverzeichnis. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Tabulae Musica Austriacae 14). Osthoff, Wolfgang 1960. “Antonio Cestis Alessandro vincitor di se stesso”. Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 24: 13–43.

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Pirrotta, Nino 1968. “Early Opera and Aria”. In: William W. Austin (ed.). New Looks at Italian Opera. Essays in Honor of Donald J. Grout. Ithaca: Cornell University Press: 39–107. Rosand, Ellen 1991. Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of Califorinia Press: 125–153. Schröder, Dorothea 1996. „‚Das römische April=Fest‘ – ein ‚Musikalisches Lust= und Tantz=Spiel‘“. In: Sibylle Dahms & Stephanie Schroedter (eds.). Tanz und Bewegung in der barocken Oper: Kongressbericht Salzburg 1994. Innsbruck-Vienna: Studien-Verlag: 125–138. Schibanoff, Susan 2006. Chaucer’s Queer Poetics: Rereading the Dream Trio. Toronto, London: University of Toronto Press. Strohm, Reinhard 2006. “Dramatic dualities: Opera Pairs from Minato to Metastasio”. In: Melania Bucciarelli & Norbert Dubowy & Reinhard Strohm (eds.). Italian Opera in Central Europe, vol. 1: Institutions and Ceremonies. (Musical Life in Europe, 1600–1900: Circulation, Institutions, Representation). Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag: 275–295. — 2008. “Romanità and Italianità: Ancient Rome in the Dramma per Musica, c.1660– c.1730”. In: Corinna Herr et al. (eds.). Italian Opera in Central Europe, vol. 2: Italianità: Image and Practice. Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag: 11–40. Tomlinson, Gary 1999. Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Turner, Victor W. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Routledge. Vaccai, Giulio 1902. Le feste di Roma antica. Turin: Bocca. Zeumer, Johann Kaspar & Johann Heinrich Kindervater 1699. Bacchanalia Christianorum, vulgo, Das Carneval indulgente incluta facultate philosophica. Jena: J.C. Müller.

Angela Bellia

Music and Rite: Representations of Female Figures of Musicians in Greek Sicily (Sixth–Third Centuries B.C.) Fontana Calda is a locality near Butera, a few kilometres north of Gela, a RhodianCretan colony founded in 689 B.C., and is identified with the “Sicana” Omphake (Fig. 1).1 Fig. 1: The Central South of Sicily

After a drawing by the author

In 1951, the archaeologist Dinu Adamesteanu discovered a votive offering belonging to a sanctuary placed outside the old town centre; however, this had been badly damaged by a nearby stream and by farmwork, that reduced the find to fragments which were carried away and lost by the numerous springs found in the 1 Adamesteanu 1996; Bejor 1985.

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area and along the banks of the stream. It was after examining these fragments that Adamesteanu started his exploration and identification of one of the richest votive deposits ever discovered in Sicily, which was already in use in the second half of the seventh century B.C.2 A large quantity of coroplastics has come from the votive offerings, most of it produced locally, going back to the period between the sixth and the third centuries B.C. This production was at its height between the second half of the fourth and the beginning of the third centuries B.C. The statuettes present motifs well known in Sicily, especially in the area around Gela and Syracuse.3 A significant find among the black painted vases is represented by fragments belonging to a large vase with the inscription “Polystephanos”, dated to the third century B.C.4 (Image 1). The dedication to a female divinity or a “much-crowned” nymph, or a nymph “of many crowns”, could bear witness that, at this period, the sanctuary of Fontana Calda was dedicated to the cult of the Nymphs, who formed 5 the retinue of the great goddesses of fertility, Demeter, Kore, and Artemis. This hypothesis is also supported by the particular location of the sanctuary near an abundant spring, and also by the typology of the statuettes.

Image 1: Black painted vase with the inscription “Polystephanos” Photo: courtesy of Museo Archeologico Regionale of Gela

2 3 4 5

Adamesteanu 1958; Guzzone 1998; 2003. Adamesteanu 1958: 623–668; Portale 2008. Adamesteanu 1954. For the Nymphs’ cult in relation to Demeter, Kore, and Artemis in Sicily, see Ciaceri 2004: 137–145; Angelini 1994; Lagona 1962: 33–35; Mertens Horn 1991.

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There are numerous representations of the “Sicula”-type Artemis6 with a bow or a torch, sometimes accompanied by a dog, a deer, or a panther (Image 2), dated to the first half of the fourth century B.C., and of Artemis Limnatîs. The number of examples reproducing a female divinity with polos decorated with little crowns and rosettes is quite significant. Some are surmounted by little leaves and female figures represented in the act of taking off their veils. Among the various types, there are female figures sitting on thrones, figures of pregnant women, small heads and busts of female divinities with tall polos, and statuettes in the pose of offerers. In the latter category, we have female figures holding a bird, probably a dove, against their breasts, a baby on their left shoulders, a distaff and a basket.

Image 2: Artemis “Sicula” Photo: courtesy of Museo archeologico Regionale of Gela

6 Kahil 1984.

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It is interesting to note the remarkable presence of statuettes of female figures holding musical instruments, that, together with hundreds of fragments presumably with identical representations, are kept in the Regional Archaeological Museum at Gela. It has been possible to identify forty-two-statuettes of female aulos players7 (Image 3), eleven female tympanon players8 (Image 4), three female figures holding kymbala on their knees9 (Image 5), and two female harp players (Image 6).10 A category of coroplastics with musical representations that is quite widespread in Sicily11 is the group of three female figures with double-reed aulos and tympanon, also found among the votive offerings (Image 7). However, only one example was recovered intact.12 7 The statuettes of female aulos players can be divided into three groups. In the first, dateable to the sixth century B.C. there is a female figure 8 cm high. She is wearing a chiton and a himation with a stephane on her forehead. In the second group, there are female aulos players wearing chitons and their heads are covered by a himation. The figures, about 16–18 cm high, can be dated to the fifth century B.C. In the third group, the female figures have hairstyles typical of the fourth century B.C., and they usually wear earrings. The statuettes, 14– 16cm in height, wear a himation that falls from the right shoulder and goes round over the left arm. Both the examples of the second group and those of the third group are made from clay from Butera, therefore they were made locally by means of moulds. See Bellia 2009: 255–296. 8 For the tympanon players, it is also possible to identify three groups. The first is represented by female figures wearing a pleated chiton, the hem of which is held in the right hand, and a himation that falls in pleats from over the left arm; on their heads they wear low polos. The figures, about 12–14cm high, can be dated to the fourth century B.C. The second group has the same characteristics as the first, but the figures are not wearing a himation. The tympanon, as in the figures of the first group, is held in the left hand. In some finds it is possible to identify the gesture of the hand reaching out to play the musical instrument. This group, 6– 8cm high, can be dated to about the fourth century B.C. The third group is made up of figures, 10–12cm high, with their hair gathered high up, according to the fashion of the second half of the fourth century B.C. The statuettes of the tympanon players, made of local clay, were produced by means of moulds. See Bellia 2009: 299–308. 9 The acephalous and nude figures have very small breasts and slim hips. These are very rare examples, 14–16cm in height. They can be dated to the fourth century B.C. See Bellia 2009: 309–312. 10 In the votive offerings of the sanctuary there were statuettes of women, probably made from the same mould; they are holding a curved object that can be identified as a harp. The figures are wearing spherical earrings, and, on their heads, a tall polos decorated with little crowns, from which falls a veil. These examples can be dated to the fourth century B.C., and up to now have been the only ones known in Sicily. They show no traces of the sand typical of the clay of Butera, so they are considered to be imported products. See Bellia 2009: 313–314. 11 For the other groups of female figures with musical representation in Sicily, see Bellia 2009: 479–483. 12 The three figures are standing on a rectangular plinth and are made of the clay of Butera. The figure on the left is playing a double-reed aulos. She is wearing a himation that falls from her

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Image 3: Female auloi player

Image 4: Female tympanon player

Photos: courtesy of Museo Archeologico Regionale of Gela

right arm and goes round and over her left arm. She is wearing spherical earrings and her hair is gathered in a chignon. The central figure is holding a tympanon on her left hip; her right hand seems to reach out to the instrument. She is wearing a chiton and a himation. On her head, she is wearing a truncated cone-shaped polos. The figure on the right is wearing a chiton, the hem of which seems to be held in her left hand, and a himation; her hair is gathered in a chignon. She may be a dancer or a singer. The figures of female triads with musical instruments discovered at Fontana Calda are about 11cm high. They were produced during the period between the end of the fourth and the beginning of the third century B.C. See Bellia 2009: 315–319.

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Image 6: Female figures holding a curved object can be identified as a harp. Photos: courtesy Museo Archeologico Regionale of Gela

Image 5: Female figures holding truncated cone shaped kymbala The typologies of the ex-voto found at Fontana Calda seem to refer to precise ritual and cultic spheres in relation to the life of women, especially of young women. The hypothesis is also supported by the discovery of other objects in the sacred place, such as beads from necklaces, rings, and bracelets, besides small vases for perfumed oils and cosmetics, or used as jewellery boxes. The cult practised in the sanctuary would be connected with initiation rites aimed at preparation for marriage and for the transition to womanhood. The other typologies of statuettes suggest this, in particular the one of Artemis.

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The dedication of these fictile objects to the goddess of fertility, childhood, and youth is in conformity with a practice relating to the propitiatory rituals of fertility, of the healthy growth of the young and their becoming adults. The presence of female figures playing or holding musical instruments might be proof at Fontana Calda of the role of music in female rites, perhaps even in connection with springs, which, by reason of their cathartic and curotrophic value, form an element that often recurs in purification rites and in initiation contexts, especially those rites relating to marriage and birth.13 In other sites, in South Italy and in Sicily, there is proof of places of worship being connected with springs. Among these is Grotta Caruso at Locri in Calabria, a nymphaeum near some water springs. Not only does the variety and typology of terracottas found there offer a comparison with those found in the sanctuary of Fontana Calda, but so does the significant presence of female musicians14 surprisingly similar to those found in the deposit of Butera (Image 8). Archaeological documentation that would testify to the presence, in Sicily, of music and dancing in the cult of Artemis and the Nymphs, would find corroboration in ancient sources. It is an important fact that Timaeus15 makes a reference to night feasts with dancing and wine, celebrated in Syracuse around idols, and in honour of the Nymphs. It is even more interesting to find references to dances accompanied by the aulos in Syracuse.16 These dances were dedicated to Artemis Angelos17 and Artemis Chitonea,18 “dressed in a chiton”, an epithet that probably recalls the offerings of the chiton to the goddess that women made after giving birth. If this suggestion is right, it will enlarge the documentation concerning the presence of music in the rites dedicated to Artemis and the Nymphs in Greek Sicily, from the point of view of interdisciplinary studies.

13 Piccaluga 1974: 58–76. 14 Tropea 1991. 15 Timaeus, FGrHist 566 F 32, in Atheneus, VI, 250a. See Angelini 1994: 34; Ciaceri 2004: 138; Larson 2001: 215–216. 16 Papadopoulou 2004: 265–266. 17 Atheneus, XIV, 629e. 18 Epicharmus, Sphinx, fr. 127 Kaibel.

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Image 7: Group of three female players

Photo: courtesy of Museo Archeologico Regionale of Gela

Image 8: Group of three female players found in the Grotta Caruso at Locri

Photo: courtesy of Museo Archeologico Regionale of Reggio Calabria

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References Adamesteanu, Dinu 1954, “POLUSTEFANOS QEA”. In: Rendiconti dell’Accademia dei Lincei 9: 467–469. — 1958. “Butera: Piano della Fiera, Consi e Fontana Calda. Fontana Calda. Scoperta della stipe votiva di un santuario campestre”. Monumenti Antichi dell’Accademia dei Lincei 44: 205–672. — 1996. “Butera. Sede temporanea di una colonia greca arcaica?”. Atti della Società Magna Grecia 3: 109–117. Angelini, Fabio 1994. “Sicani miti e culti. Capitolo II: culti delle fonti”. Mythos 6: 25– 41. Bejor, Giorgio 1985. “Butera”. Bibliografia topografica della colonizzazione greca in Italia e nelle isole tirreniche 4: 219–225. Bellia, Angela 2009. Coroplastica con raffigurazioni musicali della Sicilia greca. Roma, Pisa: Fabrizio Serra. Ciaceri, Emanuele 20042. Culti e miti nella storia dell’antica Sicilia. Catania: Clio. Guzzone, Carla 1998. “Butera: santuari e fattorie di età greca nel territorio”. In: Rosalba Panini (ed.). Gela. Il Museo Archeologico. Gela: Regione Siciliana: 243– 251. — 2003. “La stipe o deposito votivo di Fontana Calda”. In: Panvini R. (ed.). Butera dalla preistoria all’età medievale. Caltanissetta: Paruzzo: 121–131. Kahil, Lilly 1984. “Artémis de ‘type sicule’”. Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae 2/1: 693–694. Lagona, Sebastiana 1962. “Rappresentazioni multiple di divinità femminili”. Cronache di Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte 1: 28–35. Larson, Jennifer 2001. Greek Nymphs. Myth, Cult, Lore. New York et al.: Oxford University Press. Mertens Horn, Madeleine 1991. “Una ‘nuova antefissa’ a testa femminile da Akrai ed alcune considerazioni sul culto delle Ninfe in Sicilia”. Bollettino d’arte 66: 9–28. Papadopoulou, Zozie 2004. “Artemis”. Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum 2/4/b: 325–330. Piccaluga, Giulia 1974. Minutal. Saggi di storia delle religioni. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo. Portale, Elisa Chiara 2008. “Coroplastica votiva nella Sicilia di V–III secolo a.C.: la stipe votiva di Fontana Calda a Butera”. Sicilia Antiqua 5: 9–58. Tropea, Francesca 1991. “Suonatori”. In: Felice Costabile (ed.). I ninfei di Locri Epizefiri. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino: 180–185.

Kathryn Soar

Circular Dance Performances in the Prehistoric Aegean Introduction The fame of the Cretans as dancers was a common theme in ancient literature. From Homer to Athenaeus, Cretans are considered to have been the first people to have developed the art of the dance, and transmitted it to others.1 The first known allusions to this phenomenon come from Homer, the most famous being his reference to the dancing floor of “Ariadne of the lovely tresses”, built by the famed craftsman Daedalus “in the wide spaces of Knossos”.2 Other mentions of the subject in the Iliad include the reference to the Cretan leader Meriones as “a dancer”,3 and his ability in the dance enables him to dodge a spear. The general superiority of the Cretans in the field of dance is reflected in the attributed origins of various dances to Crete. The war dance of the Couretes was said to have originated on Crete, being not only the oldest Cretan dance, but the oldest dance in the world,4 and this is referred to in the works of Lucian5 and Strabo.6 These dances were apparently noisy, frenzied, leaping dances performed by men, where weapons were clashed, re-enacting the dances taught to the Couretes by Rhea to protect her infant son Zeus and drown out his cries. Other Cretan dances are mentioned, such as the Orsites, Epikredios, and the Telesias.7 Although the first two are mentioned by Athenaeus8 as being similar to the Greek Pyrrhic dance, nothing else is known of them. Another Cretan dance mentioned in literature is the Prylis,9 a funeral dance performed by men in armour. The focus of this paper is on the circle dance, which, according to literature, was also a Cretan dance. A fragment of Sappho says: “Thus once upon a time the Cretan women danced rhythmically with delicate feet around a lovely altar, tread1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Mouratidis 1989: 49. Hom., Iliad 18: 590–606. Hom., Iliad 16: 617–619. Lawler 1942: 59. Lucian, de Saltatione 8. Strabo, Geographica 10.4.16 Lawler 1964: 31. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists. XVI, 629c. Lawler 1964: 31.

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ing upon the soft, smooth flowers of the meadow”.10 This literary evidence suggesting that the Cretans practised this form of dance, as well as describing their long history in the dance traditions, is also confirmed by certain architectural and iconographical evidence which suggests that the circle dance was performed on Crete as far back as the Early Bronze Age. The purpose of this paper is to examine the performative use of circular dances in ritual. There are hundreds of different forms of ritual and ways to perform them. The introductory comments on Cretan dances in literature show that, even within that one genre, there were several variant forms. This paper seeks to examine why that particular form of ritual performance was chosen. For this purpose, an examination of these dances in terms of date and setting is undertaken, in an attempt to find underlying cultural factors which would explain the motivation behind this performance. By examining the contextual setting of these performances – spatially, temporally and ideologically – this allows for a “thick description” of these performances. Thick description is a means of interpreting action in terms of the role it plays within the culture in which it occurs; a term developed by Clifford Geertz,11 it allows us to examine actions as they are defined by their cultural meanings, rather than simply by their physical characteristics. As a result, we can see not only the physical form of the action, but also its symbolic content, allowing us “to plunge deeply into people’s lives”.12 Thick description can be utilised in order to place a particular event or occurrence – in this case Circle Dances – within a larger cultural context, to examine the underlying behavioural motivations of social action.

The Evidence Evidence for circle dances in the Aegean comes from a variety of sites (fig. 1), from a variety of chronological periods. Here, the fullest available extant evidence will be discussed, emphasising its physical form, as well as the contextual background in which it developed. Early Minoan Crete The first example comes from Crete in the Early Bronze Age. The settings of these dances were the Early Minoan cemeteries of south-central Crete. Tholos tombs are circular and were first constructed in the Early Minoan (EM) I period, c.3100–2900 B.C. The primary region for the development of the tholos tombs was south-central 10 Sappho fr. 54. 11 Geertz 1973. 12 Sinclair 2000: 475.

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Fig. 1: Map of Aegean

Map by the author

Crete, particularly the region of the Mesara plain (fig. 2). The earliest tholos tombs show a remarkable uniformity in their construction, with the primary features being a rounded chamber and a small anteroom. Zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figurines have been found inside and around these tombs, and a particular figurine from the site of Kamilari (Image 1) depicts four figures holding each other by the arms and shoulders, surrounded by a low wall decorated with Horns of Consecration. All the figures are nude, with a lock of hair projecting from the top of their heads. Most archaeologists concur that this group represents people dancing.13 Its archaeological context – the tholos tomb itself – and the imagery also suggest a setting for these performances – the courtyards, or paved areas of the tholos tombs.

13 Branigan 1993: 130; La Rosa 1985: 142.

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Map by the author

Image 1: Figurine from the Kamilari tholos tomb Image after Marinatos 1993, fig. 23

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Absent from the original tholos tomb architecture, these paved areas first appeared during EM II at the tomb Platanos B (Image 2).14 Here, the enclosure extends between the two largest tombs, A and B. At other tholoi, the enclosure extends all around the tombs in the cemetery, such as at Koumasa, where bluish slate paving extends over an area of at least 50m x 6m, a size which suggests considerable effort was put into its construction.15 Paved courtyards also appear at Platanos and Apesokari, while similar enclosed, but unpaved areas, are found at Kamilari and Moni Odigytria. As previously stated, the construction of these courtyards, paved or not, first develops in EM II, at Platanos and Ayia Kyriaki, and continues into the period Middle Minoan (MM) I, such as at Apesokari. They were a developmental feature of the tholos tombs, rather than a primary feature of the cemetery from the beginning.16 These enclosed areas do not appear at every tholos tomb site – they are represented, as far as the evidence will allow, at only six of over 70 known tombs. Wherever they appear, the enclosed areas are large enough to accommodate a gathering of considerable numbers of people, possibly the entire community. Their appearance in EM II does not preclude the existence of circular dances before this period, but does suggest that they became significant enough at this point to necessitate the development of permanent structures to host them. Thus during the EM II period, we begin to see architectural spaces which could host the performance of circular dances, the existence of which is confirmed through figural representation. Post-Palatial Crete Other representations of dancing appear in the artistic repertoire of Crete, but none specifically depict circular dances until we reach the Post Palatial period, roughly 1,500 years later. This is a period when the island of Crete is believed to have been taken over by Mycenaeans from mainland Greece, who operated out of Knossos. During this period, both architectural and iconographical evidence again attest to the existence of the circle dance. During Late Minoan (LM) IIIA1 (c.1400–1350 B.C.), architectural features were constructed which have been linked to the performance of dance by Professor Peter Warren in his excavations in the vicinity of the Knossos Stratigraphical Museum in 1982. This area is situated west of the Unexplored Mansion and the Little Palace, and roughly 350m northwest of the Palace itself. The evidence consists of three circular-built platforms standing in open ground (Image 3). The possibility that these platforms were used as dancing floors was put forward by the excavator on the basis of several criteria. Comparisons with

14 Branigan 1993: 129. 15 Ibid. 1998: 21. 16 Ibid. 1993: 129.

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the earlier Kamilari terracotta model and a similar one found at Palaikastro (to be discussed shortly) offer an iconographical parallel for circular

Image 2: Paved area at Platanos B tholos tomb Photo by the author

Image 3: Great Circle at Knossos Photo by author

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dancing floors, while a number of seals found within the vicinity of the Great Circular Building depict women dancing or performing ritual actions.17 Engraved mason’s marks were also found on slabs on the Small Circle and the Great Circle. At the Great Circle, the same, possibly unique, sign was used throughout on at least 12 blocks. This was a 3-stroke Z in reverse. The frequency of its appearance suggests a specific relationship of the sign to the building, possibly that it was connected with the function of the building.18 The excavator suggests that this particular mason’s mark was designed to symbolise the lines and zigzag movements of dancing.19 During this same period on Crete, iconographical evidence for circular dances comes from the site of Palaikastro in the east of the island (Image 4). Like many other sites in Crete, this town was burnt down at the end of the LM IB period (c.1600–1470 B.C. – the period of the destruction of the Minoan Palaces), but grew again in the Post Palatial period (beginning in Late Minoan II), until it became the largest town in eastern Crete. Evidence for the performance of circular dances comes from room 44 of Block Δ, which was a small shrine. The model shows three small terracotta women in long dresses dancing in a circle around a phorminx or lyre player, their arms held out from the shoulders.20 Like the Circular Platforms at Knossos, this model is dated to the Post Palatial period, in this case LM IIIA2 (1350–1320 B.C.). Post-Palatial Greece Outside Crete, we also see evidence for circular dances within a wider Aegean context. A representation of circular dance was found on the Cycladic island of Naxos, dating to LH IIIC (1200–1090 B.C.), the period after the destruction of the major palatial centres. A hydria discovered in the cemetery at Kamini depicts a circular dance involving at least eight figures (Image 5). Their hands are linked, they uniformly face towards the right, regulating the direction of movement,21 and are painted as a motif across the widest part of the belly of the hydria. The excavator has interpreted the vessel, in which a small cup was placed which functioned as a sieve, as a ritual vessel storing a special kind of drink used in libations in honour of the dead.22

17 18 19 20 21 22

Warren 1983: 69. Ibid. 1984: 315. Ibid.: 318. Younger 1998: 18. Garfinkel 2003: 19. Mastrapas 1996: 798–799.

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Image 4: Figurines from Palaikastro after Warren 1986, plate 4

Image 5: Hydria from Kamini, Naxos

Courtesy of The Archaeological Society of Athens – A.G. Vlachopoulos

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Geometric Greece Moving into the Geometric period in Greece (c.900–700 B.C.), we find a selection of bronze figurines from Olympia, several of which are representations of the circle dance (Image 6). These figurines represent arrangements of nude women, in groups of seven, five, and four, dancing in a circle. The circular shape of the action is emphasised by the base on which they are placed, and their arms, which intertwine at shoulder height, making a second ring.23 The figurines are small, measuring between 4cm and 7cm in height. Similar bronze figurines occur in Arcadia, between Magouliana and Methydrion. The unusual feature of this particular representation (Image 7) is that, instead of women, the figures, according to one interpretation, appear to be stags or rams,24 although it may also be possible that these are human figures wearing masks. Like the Olympia figurines, these dancers are joined together in a circle.

Image 6: Bronze statuette group from Olympia

Photo: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Athens, Neg. No.: NM .5969

Image 7: Bronze group from Arcadia

Photo: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Athens., Neg. No.: NM 5782

But what is the significance of these particular dances? What is their relevance to both their contemporary society, and to us as historians or archaeologists? As cultural and social behaviour, dance is reflexive of peoples’ values, attitudes and beliefs, and these can be partially determined through the physical production, style, and structure of dance. Dance is reflexive of, and influences patterns of, social organisation, and the relationships between individuals in groups and among groups. An examination of the contextual background of these depictions of circular dances suggests a commonality of ideological setting.

23 Schweitzer 1971: 155. 24 Ibid.: 155.

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The Contextual Background Early Minoan Crete The emergence of dancing, as depicted in figurines and the development of specific areas for their performance, appears to start at the Minoan tholos tombs in the EM II period. Despite the fact that the act of dancing may have been being practised for a long time previously, it is in this period that dance develops permanence, recorded forever in the artistic and architectural record, and therefore attaining an importance not hitherto considered. The EM II in Crete seems to be a watershed period. Large-scale and long-term developments became visible, before gaining momentum in the EM III-MM IA periods. While the preceding EM I period was relatively egalitarian and homogeneous, there were major socio-political developments in EM II that led to changes in the infrastructure and social organisation of society, shown by internal trade in pottery25 and the importation of Egyptian ivory for the first time.26 This is also a period when the individual seems to rise to prominence, rather than the group as a whole, as attested by the use of seals and sealstones27 and the change from communal drinking and feasting vessels to smaller individual goblets.28 Large-scale monumental buildings also appear in this period.29 These developments may be the result of population growth and settlement of new sites in EM II, and they may attest to the possible emergence of a form of central authority.30 Post-Palatial Crete The LM IIIA1 period, where the next evidence of circular dance is found, is known as the Final Palatial Period (c.1450–1350 B.C.), as the major palatial centres of Crete, with the exception of Knossos, have been destroyed and Mycenaean occupation seems to have developed, evidenced through the adoption of the Greek Linear B script and the development of new burial techniques, which reflect developments from the mainland. The Dancing Circles at Knossos would have been built in the aftermath of the LM II destructions, at a time when, it is argued, Knossos had been taken over by invaders from the mainland, who would have brought their own ideologies with them, and possibly attempted to impose them upon the native Minoan population of Knossos. The introduction of these ideologies can be seen in the widespread practice of the adoption of typically 25 26 27 28 29 30

Wilson & Day 1994. Krzyszkowska 2005. Branigan 1995: 38. Day & Wilson 2002: 151. Branigan 1995; Schoep 1999. Wilson & Day 1994: 85.

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mainland burial practices. During the Final Palatial period, burial practices across Crete, most significantly in the Knossos area, were typically “Mycenaean” in terms of artefacts, practices, and tomb types, such as burials with weapons, precious metal vessels, and mainland-derived ceramics, as well as interments in chamber tombs, shaft graves, and corbel-vaulted tombs.31 Whether or not these developments in mortuary practice actually symbolise the presence of Mycenaeans at Knossos, or the adoption of a mainland practice, they point to an ideological development that is rooted in that found amongst the Mycenaeans on the mainland. Opposition to the presence of Mycenaean ideology in Crete may have been felt as early as LM II, where partial damage to the Palace at Knossos, as well as the contemporary destruction of houses at Malia, may have been manifestations of hostility.32 The evidence for destructions and depopulation at the Unexplored Mansion, so near to the Dancing Circles, in LM IIIA1, could also suggest a continuation of turmoil or weakness in this period.33 The dancing circles could represent a physical manifestation of localised Minoan ideology, referring back to dances which had been practised on the island in the distant past, in contrast to the prevailing ideology of the Mycenaeans, who may have taken over at Knossos. Post-Palatial Greece LH IIIC, the period in Greece from which the hydria comes, dates to around 1200– 1100 B.C., and is the period immediately after the destruction of the Mycenaean citadels and palaces. Mycenaean civilisation, characterised by palaces, citadels, Linear B administration texts, etc., came to a crashing halt at the end of LH IIIB2, c.1190 BC, when the Palaces were destroyed and the palatial system collapsed. The fall of the Palaces did not portend the end of the Mycenaean civilisation in its entirety, as some of the material culture from the following period – LH IIIC – suggests prosperity, but during the course of this period this seems to diminish, with settlements gradually decreasing until finally being abandoned. Initially it was a period characterised by attempts to continue or revive the old Bronze Age life, however, it lacked the driving force of the palace economy. It ended in a new social structure and order. From a material culture perspective, the continuation of past tradition in LH IIIC is evident in house plans, domestic pottery, and artefacts, burial custom, and religion.34 However, this continuation is marked by an apparent limitation in skill, evidenced by such things as the general lack of complexity in buildings and architecture, and the prominence of clay (for religious figurines as well as pottery) over 31 32 33 34

Preston 2004: 141. Popham 1973: 59. Hatzaki 2004: 124. Dickinson 2006: 72.

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more exotic and expensive materials, which may now have been harder to obtain. Burial styles continue as before, although with a notable lack of the more impressive tholos-type tombs, small and unremarkable stone-lined cist tombs being preferred. This evidence of limited achievement within the realms of material culture is suggestive of a “shake-up” of the previous social hierarchy, through which resources were mobilised.35 A major feature of this Post-Palatial period, however, is the evidence for widespread decline and abandonment in settlements and population. Although the populations may have withstood the initial palatial collapse of 1200 B.C. and its aftermath, an overwhelming instability would have affected the population.36 A dramatic decrease in population was seen particularly in Messenia, Laconia, and Thessaly, shown by a widespread desertion of the countryside and the cessation of use of many burial grounds. The most likely scenario is that the populations of these areas moved to other parts of the Aegean.37 However, other sites witnessed an increase in population – including Chios, Salamis, Kephalonia, and central Greece. This evidence for population movements, abandonments, and destruction all underline the notion that Post-Palatial Greece was far from a peaceful period.38 Geometric Greece The Geometric period, which produced the bronze miniature sculptures from Olympia and Arcadia, was a time of dramatic transformation that eventually led to the establishment of the primary Greek institution, the polis. After the collapse of the Mycenaean palace civilisation and the subsequent “Dark Age”, the Geometric period (c.900–700 B.C.) saw the development of consolidation in social order, and an acceleration of the pace of material progress. This can be clearly seen in the development of the art style which gave the period its name, which included the first appearance of figurative art in the repertoire since the eleventh century B.C.39 A major new development of this period was the reestablishment of overseas contacts and the start of colonisation – Greek colonies were founded primarily in Italy and Sicily, but also in southern France, Spain, and North Africa. Related to this is the increase in the import of foreign goods, as well as the export of Greek goods, mostly pottery, to sites in the eastern Mediterranean, primarily the Levant and Turkey. Writing also developed in this period, with the Greeks borrowing and adapting the Phoenician alphabet. The earliest Greek inscription known dates to between 800–775 B.C. and was found on a vessel in a 35 36 37 38 39

Ibid.: 75. Ibid.: 71. Deger-Jalkotzy 2008: 394. Ibid.: 395. Osborne 1996: 129.

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grave in Italy.40 Burial evidence suggests the development of a social hierarchy, with an increase in wealth found in burials from the Middle Geometric period onwards (c.800 B.C.), and the increase in inhumation over cremation provides evidence for the development of family burial plots, suggesting the importance of consanguinity and the development of social status related to this.41 The roots of Classical Greece lie in the Geometric period. The changes which occurred during this period have been interpreted in different ways. Some scholars see these changes as a revolution, in which the old aristocratic social order was overturned, and replaced by a political order based on the idea of citizenship.42 Others, however, see this period as a renaissance, a period when the earlier Bronze Age traditions were revived.43 Whichever interpretation is correct, the Geometric was certainly a turning point in Greek history. The similarity in contextual background of the circular dances is clear, I hope – all of these periods are marked by transformation and transition, periods when old customs or traditions have died out and new ones are still in the process of being established. They were unstable times. But what is the relevance of the performance of circular dances against such a contextual background? Why, out of the myriad performance types to choose from, did the people of the prehistoric Aegean choose to immortalise the circular dance in the art and architecture of these periods? The Meaning of Dance Dance is a powerful performative tool, an important medium through which cultural principles are both forged and communicated.44 It is a communicative vehicle, consisting of the visual, kinaesthetic, and aesthetic aspects of human movement,45 which can sometimes be a more effective medium than verbal language for revealing needs and desire and masking true intentions.46 These movements are structured systems of knowledge, and form visual manifestations of social relations, which in turn may assist in understanding the cultural values and structure of the society.47 Dance is not only the context of personal and collective expression, but also the means by which participants conceptualise and express themselves,

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Gillis 2004: 59. Coldstream 2003: 120. Whitley 2001: 98. Ibid. Looper 2001: 115. Kaeppler 1992: 196. Hanna 1987: 4. Kaeppler 2000: 117.

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while at the same time being conceptualised and evaluated by others.48 In this sense, dance is both a product and a process.49 Part of the importance of dance is that it affects life from several different perspectives. It is a physical act, an action that is encoded into bodily memory. In this sense, memory is incorporated within the body itself, in bodily postures, activities, techniques, and gestures, learned through cultural practices.50 This physicality of action leads into the cultural aspects of dance, where peoples’ beliefs, values, and ideologies shape the style and production of the dance, and as a result reflexively comment on prevalent systems of thought.51 In this instance, dance can communicate how people feel about themselves, and therefore has a functional, formal use, in comparison with dances which are purely recreational. These “formal” dances act explicitly as symbols of identity and occur on occasions when there is a desire to create a feeling of group solidarity.52 This feeling of solidarity is just one aspect of the social behaviour of dance, in which patterns of social organisation, such as the relationships between individuals in groups, and among groups, is both reflected and influenced.53 Social organisation can lead dance into the realm of the political. Dance can therefore act as a vehicle both for the articulation of attitudes and values, as well as for control, adjudication, and change.54 Through the study of dance, it is possible to see and understand how identity is marked, shaped, and introduced. Styles of dance constitute social relations – thus changes in their transmission can help us ascertain the underlying ideologies which are attached to bodily movement and discourse.55 Within an archaeological approach to dance, the exact nature of the dance itself must remain unknown, as no amount of inference will ever recreate the dance exactly as it was practised. The depictions which remain are ultimately only a “snapshot” of the actual dance, a single moment in a larger event that is forever frozen in time. Also to be considered is the fact that iconographical representations of dance may involve elements of idealised notions of the performance, which may hinder our access to the reality of actual events.56 With regard to the depictions of dance, one must also remember here that dancing scenes are not the direct products of dance activity, but are an artistic transformation of reality into depiction, so they are intended to communicate a message and thus be comprehensible to the contemporary viewer. By de48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Cowan 1990: 18–19. Desmond 1997: 2. Connerton 1989. Hanna 1987: 3. Royce 1977: 163. Hanna 1987: 3. Ibid.: 4. Desmond 1994: 38. Inomata & Coben 2006: 31.

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picting these earlier dance scenes as circular activity, the prehistoric artist is emphasising an aspect of the dance which would resonate with the intended audience. So what is the significance of the circular dance? Why is this particular form the most prevalent during these periods? Dance is a primary method of emotional bonding – through rhythmic muscular movement, participants are affected independently of how they are connected or divided external to the dance performance. As such, dance is a method by which groups of people define themselves.57 Circle dances, in particular, create a feeling of solidarity amongst the participants, uniformity of movement being crucial to the harmonious performance of the act and ensuring that everything outside the circle remains unimportant or even forgotten.58 Circle dances can be interpreted on various different levels, namely the individual and the community, as well as the cosmological. On an individual level, a circle dance is created by the participation of each individual, who helps to create the circle with his or her body.59 Thus, the individual becomes something greater than him- or herself, and contributes to the group dynamic. However, the main focus of the circular dance is the community – in the act of moving in a circle, possibly holding hands, the individual is fused into the group, which becomes one entity.60 To dance together in a circle also implies mutual trust.61 The degree of co-ordination required would mean the community had to gather at specific times, at specific places, and that members of the community would have to perform the same actions at the same time and in the same direction.62 The circle delineates territory, and the participants are disconnected from the outside world, focusing solely on the event which is taking place within the circle.63 These circular dancing scenes thus express an ideology of equality between all members of community. In reality these were periods when dramatic changes were taking place in the social organisation of societies, including increased stratification, takeover by foreign sovereigns, dramatic de-population and decentralisation, and a revolution or renaissance in social and political organisation. In the artistic depictions and architectural features which depict circular dancing in the Aegean during these periods, we can perceive ideology reflected in performance and ritual which reverses the social processes which were occurring. The uniformity and similarity between all the dancers in dress and body movement stresses unity and 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

McNeill 1995: 52. Brandes 1990: 32. Garfinkel 1998: 228. Ibid.: 226. Brandes 1990: 32. Garfinkel 2003: 87. Ibid. 1998: 228.

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equality between members of the community. No single image is emphasised over the others. The circle dance was utilised as a method of creating social solidarity, creating symbolic bonds of equality and community in the face of asymmetric power relations or social inequality. The specific locations of these dances are also important. In three of the four examples discussed, the site of performance is a community area – cemetery sites, in the case of Crete and Naxos, and the sanctuary site at Olympia. In terms of social grouping and social memory, burial landscapes can act mnemonically, engaging the deceased in social discourse, and structuring social interaction among the living, which, through memory, articulates an individual’s personal identity.64 By performing at this site, people would have renewed their relationships with the ancestors. Tombs represent groups or clans, their identities dependent upon some form of ancestral connection with the place, and their position in the landscape acts as a lieu de memoire, a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community.65 Similarly, cult places have a strong public character and can be a way of integrating the individual into the community. The territorial aspect of ritual performances claims a territory for the collective body at hand, filling certain designated areas with prescribed actions.66 By doing so at cemeteries and sanctuaries, this only further emphasises the creation and maintenance of collective identity. The LM IIIA1 circular dances have a different location and thus intention, but they too work on the principle of group identity and collectivity. Some have argued that the circular dance spaces at Knossos were built by the incoming Mycenaeans,67 but I believe that they were built by the native Minoan population, resurrecting a form of dance which had cognitive and ideological resonance for them. The emotional power of the circular dance and its rural and egalitarian roots was seen as the most effective ideological tool to be wielded by the Minoans in the face of Mycenaean pre-eminence, reflecting continuity with the past that had been severed in the wake of the takeover of Crete by the mainland. The introduction of the Dancing Circles in the heartland of the Mycenaean occupation may have been an attempt by the native population to reconnect with their past.

Conclusion This paper has attempted to show that the heart of the performance of circular dances was the idea of community and integration. That these dances were “for64 65 66 67

Fisher & Loren 2003: 227. Nora 1989; 1996. Koster 2003: 217. Hatzaki 2004: 124.

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mal”, in Royce’s sense of the word, is emphasised by their adoption as artistic motifs and the development of specific, formalised areas for their performance. It is perfectly possible, and no doubt true, that circular dances occurred at other times, apart from the ones mentioned here. However, it was during these particular periods that the circle dance gained such cultural significance that it was immortalised in art and architecture. By applying a “thick description” to these performances, I hope to have shown not only the form of the ritual, but the conceptual structures upon which people drew and on which these performances were based, allowing us to see the symbolic content of these performances. Circular dance performances in the prehistoric Aegean allowed the formation of group identities, memories, and traditions via performance during times of social and political flux.

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References Brandes, Stanley1990. “The Sardana Catalan Dance and Catalan National Identity”. Journal of American Folklore 103: 24–41. Branigan, Keith 1993. Dancing with Death: Life and Death in Southern Crete c.3000– 2000 B.C. Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert. — 1995. “Social Transformations and the Rise of the State in Crete”. In: Robert Laffineur & Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier (eds.). Politeia: Society and State in the Aegean Bronze Age. Proceedings of the 5th International Aegean Conference, University of Heidelberg, Archäologisches Institut, 10–13 April 1994. Liège: Université de Liège: 33–42. — 1998. “The Nearness of You: Proximity and Distance in Early Minoan Funerary Behaviour”. In: Keith Branigan (ed.). Cemetery and Society in the Aegean Bronze Age. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press: 13–26. Coldstream, Nicholas 2003. Geometric Greece: 900–700 B.C. London: Routledge. Connerton, Paul 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cowan, Jane K. 1990. Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Day, Peter M. & David E. Wilson 2002. “Landscapes of Memory, Craft and Power in Pre-Palatial and Proto-Palatial Knossos”. In: Yannis Hamilakis (ed.). Labyrinth Revisited: Rethinking “Minoan” Archaeology. Oxford: Oxbow Books: 143–166. Deger-Jalkotzy, Sigrid 2008. “Decline, Destruction and Aftermath”. In: Cynthia Shelmerdine (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 387–416. Desmond, Jane 1994. “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies”. Cultural Critique 96: 33–63. — 1997. Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance. Durham: Duke University Press. Dickinson, Oliver 2006. The Aegean from Bronze Age to Iron Age. London: Routledge. Fisher, Genevieve & Diana DiPaolo Loren 2003. “Embodying Identity in Archaeology”. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 13: 225–230. Garfinkel, Yosef 1998. “Dancing and the Beginning of Art Scenes in the Early Village Communities of the Near East and Southeast Europe”. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 8: 207–237. — 2003. Dancing at the Dawn of Agriculture. Austin: University of Texas Press. Geertz, Clifford 1973. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture”. In: Clifford Geertz (ed.). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books: 3–30. Gillis, Carole 2004. An Introduction to Ancient Greece: The Aegean and Its Neighbours from c.7000–700 B.C. Lund: Institutionen för Arkeologi och Antikens Historia.

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Hanna, Judith Lynne 1987. To Dance is Human. A Theory of Nonverbal Communication. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hatzaki, Eleni 2004. “From Final Palatial to Postpalatial Knossos: A View from the Late Minoan II to Late Minoan IIIB Town”. In: Gerald Cadogan & Elena Hatzaki & Adonis Vasilikis. Knossos: Palace, City, State. Proceedings of the Conference in Herakleion organised by the British School at Athens and the 23rd Ephoreia of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities of Herakleion, in November 2000, for the Centenary of Sir Arthur Evans’s Excavations at Knossos. London: British School at Athens: 121–126. Inomata, Takeshi & Lawrence S. Coben 2006. “Overture: An Introduction to the Archaeological Theater”. In: Takeshi Inomata & Lawrence S. Coben (eds.). Archaeology of Performance: Theaters of Power, Community, and Politics. Oxford: Altamira Press: 11–46. Kaeppler, Adrienne L. 1992. “Dance”. In: Richard Bauman (ed.). Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments: A Communications-Centred Handbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 196–203. — 2000. “Dance Ethnology and the Anthropology of Dance”. Dance Research Journal 32/1: 116–125. Koster, Jan 2003. “Ritual Performance and the Politics of Identity: On the Functions and Uses of Ritual”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 4/2: 211–248. Krzyszkowska, Olga 2005. Aegean Seals: An Introduction. London: Institute of Classical Studies. La Rosa, Vincenzo 1985. “Haghia Triada”. In: Antonino Di Vita et al. (eds.). Ancient Crete: One Hundred Years of Italian Archaeology 1884–1984. Rome: De Luca Editore: 108–142. Lawler, Lillian B. 1942. “Four Dances in the Birds of Aristophanes”. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Society 73: 58–63. — 1964. The Dance in Ancient Greece. London: A. & C. Black. Looper, Matthew G. 2001. “Dance Performances at Quirigua”. In: Rex Koontz & Kathryn Reese-Taylor & Annabeth Headrick (eds.). Landscape and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica. Boulder: Westview: 113–115. McNeill, William H. 1995. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Marinatos, Nanno. 1993. Minoan Religion. Ritual, Image and Symbol. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press Mastrapas, Antones N. 1996. “Υδρία με ηθμωτό κυάθιο από το ΥΚ/ΥΕ IIIΓ νεκροταφείο Καμινιού Νάξου”. In: Ernesto de Miro & Louis Godart & Anna Sacconi (eds.). Atti e Memorie del Secondo Congresso Internazionale di micenologia, Roma–Napoli, 14–20 Ottobre 1991. Rome: Gruppo editoriale internazionale: 797– 803. Mouratidis, Jannis 1989. “Are There Minoan Influences on Mycenaean Sports, Games and Dances?”. Nikephoros 2: 43–63. Nora, Pierre 1989. “Between Memory and History”. Representations 26: 7–24.

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— 1996. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Osborne, Robin 1996. Greece in the Making 1200–479 B.C. London: Routledge. Popham, Mervyn R. 1973. “The Unexplored Mansion at Knossos: A Preliminary Report on the Excavations from 1967 to 1972”. Archaeological Reports 19: 50–61. Preston, Laura 2004. “Final Palatial Knossos and Post-palatial Crete: a Mortuary Perspective on Political Dynamics”. In: Gerald Cadogan & Elena Hatzaki & Adonis Vasilikis. Knossos: Palace, City, State. Proceedings of the Conference in Herakleion organised by the British School at Athens and the 23rd Ephoreia of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities of Herakleion, in November 2000, for the Centenary of Sir Arthur Evans’s Excavations at Knossos. London: British School at Athens: 137– 145. Royce, Anya Peterson 1977. The Anthropology of Dance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Schoep, Ilse 1999. “The Origins of Writing and Administration on Crete”. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 18: 265–276. Schweitzer, Bernard 1971. Greek Geometric Art. London: Phaidon Press. Sinclair, Anthony 2000. “This is an Article about Archaeology as Writing”. In: Julian Thomas (ed.). Interpretative Archaeology: A Reader. London: Leicester University Press: 474–488. Warren, Peter 1983. “Knossos: Stratigraphical Museum Excavations, 1978–1982. Part II”. Archaeological Reports 29: 63–85. 1984. “Circular Platforms at Minoan Knossos”. Annual of the British School at Athens 79: 307–323. 1988. Minoan Religion as Ritual Action. Göteberg: Gothenberg University Whitley, James 2001. The Archaeology of Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, David E. & Peter M. Day 1994. “Ceramic Regionalism in Prepalatial Crete: The Mesara Imports at EM I and EM IIA Knossos”. Annual of the British School at Athens 89: 1–87. Younger, John 1998. Music in the Aegean Bronze Age. Jonsered: Paul Åstroms Förlag.

Rachele Dubbini

Agones on the Greek Agora between Ritual and Spectacle: Some Examples from the Peloponnese* The lack of a specific study dedicated to the agonistic aspect of the Greek agora, illustrating the ritual significance of the competitions that took place there, was the inspiration behind this contribution to the history of ancient Greek rituals. Roland Martin was the first to explicitly address the “function agonale” of the agora in his fundamental 1951 study, Recherches sur l’agora grecque, and various scholars have touched on the theme subsequently. Two of them merit special notice here: Frank Kolb, who in 1981 analysed the relationship between agora and agon in the first part of his book, Agora und Theater. Volks- und Festversammlung; and Patrick Marchetti, who more recently, in several studies of the agora of Argos, has shed new light on the significance of competitions in the agora as rites of passage.1 Angelo Brelich has also treated agones as the decisive feature of Greek initiation rites, distinguishing Panhellenic agones from others reserved for the politai of the urban centre that organises the competition, which he defines as “atypical competitions.” These latter games caught Brelich’s interest particularly because they continue local traditions derived from the period prior to the adoption of the “Olympic”

* This contribution originates from my doctoral thesis on “Cult in the agorai of Peloponnesian cities”, undertaken at Sapienza University in Rome in a joint research programme with the Ruprecht Karls University in Heidelberg. I am particularly grateful to my supervisors (Prof. Marcello Barbanera and Prof. Tonio Hölscher) for their useful remarks and suggestions. I would also like to thank Prof. Enzo Lippolis, Prof. Patrick Marchetti and Prof. Paul Cartledge for their valuable observations and feedback. This research would not have been possible without the scholarships offered by the Ecole Française d’Athènes and by DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst). Last but not least, I would like to thank the Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene and the American School of Classical Studies in Corinth, expecially the Directors Emanuele Greco and Guy Sanders, for their great hospitality. This text has been translated by Dr. John Dillon, to whom I am very grateful. 1 Above all see Marchetti and Kolokotsas 1995, Marchetti & Rizakis 1995, and Marchetti 1996. Also Kenzler (1999: 213–238) explored the relationship between agora and agon, building upon the work of Kolb (1981), but without introducing anything substantially new.

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model. They accordingly should be more closely related to primitive rites of passage.2 It emerges from the works mentioned above that the term ἀγών, used generally in Greek to indicate all kinds of competition, was polysemous, before it was limited to a strictly competitive meaning. In the epics of Homer, besides funerary games and contests, agon also indicates the whole agora or the places in it used for competition, as well as the political and judicial assembly and those held for festivals.3 The relationship between agon and agora should not be understood merely as a topographical one, with dominant cultural and political links.4 Both institutions, in fact, trace their origins back to the burial sites of common ancestors in the protourban centres: it was here that the most ancient agonistic celebrations must have been held in honour of distinguished persons (those fallen in battle or prominent figures of the growing community); and the first political, military and judicial assemblies always took place beside the tombs of such persons and were thus under their protection.5 The civic character of these games is attested in the 8th book of the Odyssey, where the agones organised by the Phaeacians in honour of their guest Odysseus take place precisely in the urban agora, as would happen in a polis of the historical period.6 Here the people assemble, most prominent among them being the young men (νέοι) come to test their strength. A racecourse (δрόμος) is prepared, extending from the starting line where young runners raise a cloud of dust (ll. 109– 125)7. After the footrace, wrestling, jumping, discus, and boxing competitions follow. The poet, however, does not specify where they take place (ll. 126–130). After the athletic agones, while the action still unfolds in the agora, the Phaeacians offer choruses to Odysseus: nine judges chosen by the people arrive. It is their task to see 2 Brelich 1961; 1969; 1988. On the doubtful appropriateness of the definition of “gare atipiche” coined by Brelich for agones of a local nature, see Dubbini forthcoming. 3 Martin 1951: 48, 244; Kolb 1981: 8, n. 10; Laser 1987: 11–13, 83. In the Boiotian dialect, the term agon continues to mean agora even in the historical period: in addition to the examples noted by Kolb (1981); cf. Pind., Ol. X, 24 and Nem. III, 14, in which the agora is indicated as the place where agones take place. 4 Kolb 1981: 8; Kenzler 1999: 213. 5 This is not the place to discuss the subject, which has been amply studied already, further. See, in general, de Polignac 1996; in particular, cf. Martin 1951: 47; Kolb 1981: 7–8, n. 8, 9 (with further literature); Hölscher 1998: 30–38; Kenzler 1999: 237. 6 Book VIII of the Odyssey reflects an urbanised society, such as archaic Greece must have been, in several respects; the concept of the agora here reflects the reality of the historical period (Martin 1951: 22–41; Hölscher 1998: 38). 7 “τοîσι δ̉ απὸ νύσσης τέτατο δрόμος”. The same expression is found in Il. XXIII, 758 with respect to the preparation of the racecourse on the plain of Troy for the funeral games in honour of Patroclus. Bell 1990 prefers to interpret the term dromos as “race” rather than “racecourse”, while parallels in the literary sources confirm that the word νύσσης means the starting line.

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to the smooth progress of the contests (ἀγîνας), to sweep the area reserved for the choruses (χοрὸν), and to prepare a wide space for the contests (ἀγîνα). The singer Demodokos, lyre in hand, then takes position at the centre (of the chorus), while adolescent boys (κοàрοι πрωθÁβαι) “skilled in dancing” (δαήμονες ὀрχηθμο‹ο) stand around (ἀμϕὶ) him, stamping on the chorus area dedicated to the gods (χοрὸν θε‹ον).8 The entertainment then concludes with a scene of ball games (ll. 370–380). Previous scholarship has drawn on this Homeric text for precious information on the development of civic games, but it has not focused on the localities made available for them, i.e. the dromos and choros/orchestra, and their topographical relationship to the agora.9 We will therefore focus our attention first on these structures, their architecture, and the archaeological findings made in the agorai of Corinth and Argos. We will then compare the archaeological evidence with the literary sources relevant to other Peloponnesian sites, in particular in those with a proto-urban substratum that, along with their traditions, can attest to the most ancient rituals associated with the most important primitive needs of the inhabited centres. Already in the Homeric text it is obvious that the dromos and choros should not be understood as permanent structures. They appear to be particular areas of the agora that were prepared on the occasion of an agonistic event. The starting line seems to be the only fixed element of the racecourse, while there is no mention of any structures set up for the audience: the crowd seems to have lined up along the sides of the track spontaneously, following the races, perhaps, standing on earthen embankments prepared for the event.10 Temporary structures might also be indicated by the word stadion, meaning originally “the standing place”.11 While the stadion, by reason of the complexity of its construction – a result of the sum of the racecourse (dromos) and the stands constructed for the audience (stadion?) – was located in sanctuaries outside the city, the dromos, by contrast, prepared ad hoc for particular festivals, was a decidedly urban feature. The judges of the agon stood inside the space for the choruses: they prepared the choros by levelling the ground and perhaps also by pushing back the crowd so as to keep a wide enough space for the competitions; here too, we are not dealing with a permanent structure, but with an area of the agora that was neither paved 8 Hom., Od. VIII, 258-264 (loose translation by the author). For the terms related to dance, see Wegner 1968: 40–41; Kolb 1981: 8. 9 With the exception of Marchetti, on whom infra. 10 Romano 1993: 14–16. 11 The terms stadion and dromos would then have the same relationship as theatron and orchestra (Romano 1993: 41, 105). Further evidence of this is the fact that the word stadion does not seem to have been part of epic terminology; cf. Mette & Snell 1955–. Doubts on this etymology have been expressed by Fiechter Ernst 1929.

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nor provided with a platform for spectators. To understand such an agonistic setting, it will be useful to refer to the architectural form used for choral performances, i.e. the ὀрχήστрα. According to Photius, this term initially indicated the structure located in the agora at Athens, and later came to mean the hemicycle of the theatre.12 The orchestra is thus the area reserved for the action (in this case choral performances), while the spectators occupy the theatron, which consists of stands of stone or wood.13 The latter, called ikria, are temporary structures built as necessity required. In summary, the orchestra can be understood also as the architectural form of the χοрός, the place where lyric choruses perform, i.e. particular types of ritual dances accompanied by song; these choruses take place in an open and well defined area (conceptually the choros itself, architecturally the orchestra), often surrounded by spectators.14 Since, then, the orchestra is a structure in which any kind of chorus might take place (including, for instance, tragic choruses proper to dramatic performances), it is only natural that it assumed different forms throughout the Greek world according to use, occasion, and location.15 The choros, by contrast, appears to have been consistently constructed around a centre point. This point could be constituted by a choregos, who accompanied the dance with music and song (such as Demodokos in the passage cited above), or by a cult object (an altar, the statue of a god, or even a sacred tree).16 The choros itself, in fact, possessed a strong sacral character, even if it was not – as seems to be indicated by the Homeric text – a sacred space (χοрὸς θε‹ον) that could be located

12 Phot., under ὀрχήστрα. Cf. further Phot., under ἴκрια the Dionysiac agones were watched from such wooden stands until the Theatre of Dionysus (at Athens) was constructed. See, most recently: Lippolis & Liviadotti & Rocco 2007: 189–190. 13 See Polacco 1998: 72–75. The space for the audience is later indicated as the theatron, while the word koilon, as the technical term for this area, has no parallels in the ancient literary or epigraphic sources. 14 The term choros can in fact mean the act of dancing while singing, the group of participants in such an act, and the space where they perform (Lonsdale 1993: 229; Calame 1997: 16, 19). Cf. also Boedeker 1974: 56–58; Kolb 1981: 9, n. 16. 15 The quadrangular or trapezoidal shape of the most ancient theatre orchestras (as at Thorikos, Isthmia, Cyrene, Phlius, Tegea and perhaps the first theatre structure inside the temenos of Dionysus Eleutheros in Athens) might have depended on the arrangement of tragic choruses in rectangular form: only over time did it arrive at the canonical hemicycle (Gebhard 1974; Kolb 1981: 16–17; Calame 1997: 34, 39; Polacco 1998: 75, n. 102). 16 Calame 1997: 36–38, with the literary sources for the various examples cited. Choregos is the most ancient term to indicate the person, generally positioned in the middle of the chorus, who directed it after having organised and started the performance, accompanying it with a musical instrument, with song, or with dance (ibid.: 43–49 and 66–74).

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inside a public area used for civic purposes, such as the agora.17 Various literary evidence, including Hesychius, who defines the choros as “a circle, a crown,” clearly attest the circular form of the choros and, consequently, of the orchestra used for it.18 The choros should not be confused with the orchestra of “cultic theatres” prepared inside sanctuaries for the performance of ritual dramas: we find the latter within the temenos, the sacred enclosure around the temple altar.19 Archaeological remains of a racecourse for athletic competitions (dromos) and an area for choral performances (choros) seem to have been found in at least two Peloponnesian agorai, those of Corinth and Argos. For this reason they constitute ideal contexts for further considerations.20 The racecourse at Corinth, 165m in length (ca. one stadion), is the earliest archaeological evidence for a dromos in the Greek world: the first phases of the aphesis can be dated to ca. 500 B.C., while the course itself must be earlier, as the presence of layers of poros dust ca. 1cm thick seems to prove. These layers attest to the custom of always spreading a fresh surface of soft earth suitable for races, from at least the end of the sixth century B.C.21 This practice looks back directly to the passage of Homer cited above: the Phaeacian runners leave a cloud of dust in their wake, caused by the freshness of this kind of soil prepared for the race.22 The archaic starting line (aphesis) at Corinth was, exceptionally for the Greek world, slightly curved, and left considerable space between the toe grooves for the runners; these served to guarantee that all participants had the same distance to run in races that covered more than one stadion,23 and also prevented them from surging too far ahead at the start of the race, i.e. to keep them from beginning before

17 Hom., Od. VIII, 264. Cf. Pettersson 1992: 48: “choreia, the combination of dance and music, was a major religious expression in early Greek cult, on a par with the sacrificial practice” and ibid.: 52–55. Boedeker (1974: 85–91) stresses the etymological link between χοрός and χîрος, both places of contact between men and the gods. Furthermore there are the structures used for dramatic rituals, about which see Nielsen 2002. On the agora as a predominantly civic place where there was also room for sanctuaries: Hölscher 1998: 37, 43. 18 Hes., under χοрός κύκλος, στέϕανος. For further literary sources and general discussion, cf. Kolb 1981: 16–18; Calame 1997: 34–43. The only other form of a choros known is that of a procession (Wegner 1968: 59; Calame 1997: 38, 66–67). Lastly, on the circular shape of the choros in protohistoric Greece: Soas 2008. On the judicial and political significance of the orchestra and its use in the agora see most recently Kenzler 1999: 232–250. 19 Cf. Nielsen 2002: 16–17, 94–100, 278, who, however, confuses the two structures. 20 The identification of the post holes found on the northeastern edge of the Athenian agora with the aphesis of the civic dromos seems very unlikely (Lippolis 2006). 21 Williams & Russell 1981: 3, 8–10, 8 n. 8; Romano 1993: 43, 48–50, 50 n. 21; Romano 1999: 283–288; Kenzler 1999: 215–216. 22 Hom., Od. VIII, 121–122. 23 Stadion is of course here to be understood as a unit of measure.

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“Go!” even in the absence of a suitable starting mechanism.24 On the basis of this structure, it was possible for runners to cover the length of the dromos several times. It is thus plausible that races such as the hoplitodromos (the “race in armour” or “hoplite race” which varied from 2 to 4 stadia), the hippios (the “race on horseback” of 4 stadia), and the dolichos (a long-distance race of 7–24 stadia) also took place here.25 Fig. 1: The Corinthian ‘dromos’: Race course in archaic and classical times

Source: Romano 1993: 63 fig. 38.

24 In detail, see Williams 1978: 140–141; Williams & Russell 1981: 7–13; Romano 1993: 46– 48 and n.13, 57-62 and 104. The common starting system found in Greece consists of parallel lines and seems to date from the Hellenistic period: if that indeed were the case, the structure at Corinth would be merely the earliest example of an archaic/classical aphesis (Harris 1964: 69; Romano 1993: 90). In his rejection of this hypothesis, Williams (1978: 140) asserts the uniqueness of the Corinthian starting line with the hypothesis that it was used for special competitions. 25 Romano 1993: 62.

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Fig. 2: The Corinthian ‘dromos’: Race course in archaic and classical times

Source: Romano 1993: 64 fig. 39.

Some time after 270 B.C., a new starting line was built on the Corinthian agora, no longer curved but straight, and it was considered necessary to add a starting mechanism called the hysplex.26 Although the new aphesis otherwise shows the same architectural features as the old one, the races in the Hellenistic period must have differed from the earlier races: the new, straight shape of the starting line itself suggests the development of races down parallel lanes running the length of the dromos (i.e. one stadion); the construction of the hysplex, on the other hand, also suggests innovation: the moment of starting had now become decisive for the outcome of the race.27 The Corinthian orchestra, an irregular semicircle or parabola in shape, can be recognised on a terrace southwest of the starting line. Its terrace wall was plastered on the outside with a thick layer of red mortar and crowned by a cavetto moulding 26 Williams 1978: 16–17, 126–127, 139–142, 154; Williams & Russell 1981: 11–13; Romano 1993: 85–86. 27 Romano 1993: 88, and n.18.

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of the same material.28 A pavement of irregularly sized stones follows along the length of the wall.29 Ceramic finds have enabled us to date this first phase of the terrace to the fifth–fourth century B.C., but it cannot be ruled out that it is the monumental phase of an earlier structure that was laid out together with the late archaic racecourse.30 During the Hellenistic period, a new dromos was built, covering up the stone paving and levelling the northern end of the containment wall, which underwent some modification: its crown moulding was demolished, and a water channel was cut through a good part of its length, connecting three rectangular basins. This system of conduits is then connected to another at the starting line of the track, or rather to the general conduit system of the dromos with which it is contemporary. The water channel thus forms a new oval-shaped area on the west side of the terrace: the desire to harmonise both structures by means of a single water system seems confirmed by the strictly functional link intended to connect them.31 The presence of numerous post holes in different levels of the racecourse, used only once and subsequently refilled with earth, bears witness to the practice of constructing temporary wooden stands or tiers (ikria) to seat spectators during performances on the terrace.32 The discovery of a deposit of terracotta figurines in the central basin of the water system seems to suggest that the structure possessed some sacred function: the figurines, datable to the middle or end of the third century B.C., were burned and then thrown into the water, a circumstance that strongly suggests that they are votive in nature.33 All these findings seem to strengthen the interpretation of the parabolic structure as the orchestra, where musical and choral competitions took place. In the classical period, the stone paving would have served to guide the spectators to their seats in the theatron, which should be imagined as a series of rectilinear stands 28 29 30 31 32

Williams 1978: 147; Williams & Russell 1981: 15–18. Williams 1978: 149; Williams & Russell 1981: 15. Williams & Russell 1981: 19. Williams 1978: 147–149; Williams & Russell 1981: 16–19; Romano 1993: 87–88. Williams & Russell 1981: 18. Unfortunately, the poor state of preservation of the site after the excavations of 1937 has not permitted Williams to map the layout of the phase in such a way as to identify how the post holes were arranged. The terrace was initially interpreted as a podium for the judges of athletic competitions in the dromos, but the distance between it and the archaic-classical racecourse has proven to be too long to support this theory (Morgan 1937). 33 On the discovery of the figurines, Morgan 1937: 551. Cf. Williams 1978: 152; Williams & Russell 1981: 16. The desire to render the figurines no longer usable, by burning or breaking them, is a typical characteristic of votive deposits, on which see Davidson 1952: 9, 15. The figures present the types common on the Corinthian agora and are generally attributed to a heroic cult: a standing female figure, a relief of a rider, a male figure reclining on a couch, a stele with a serpent and helmet, shield (ibid.: 20; Williams 1978: 156).

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made of wood, placed facing the orchestra.34 In the Hellenistic period, the need was felt for permanent access to the stands, while the water channels that defined the new orchestra would have assumed the function of the euripus of the temporary theatre. The post holes might be interpreted as the imprints of turning posts or other structures along the racecourse: in this case, we might assume that the spectators of the orchestra took their seats on the slope to the south of the terrace. At any rate, because of embankments built during Roman times, there is no trace of the natural hill that could confirm or refute the existence of a theatron excavated in the rock.35 The only compelling archaeological parallel to the agonistic facilities of Corinth lies in the agora of Argos. There, the starting line of a late Hellenistic dromos, provided with a hysplex and 176.4m in length, has been found near the northwestern extremity of the agora.36 Despite the fact that no remains of an aphesis from before the second century B.C. have been found, the racecourse should be dated to at least the fourth century B.C. Its southeast-northwest orientation seems to follow that of a triangular basin on the sewer canal that crosses the area, built in the fourth century B.C.37 The course itself could thus be even older, its first phase reaching back to the fifth century B.C.38 A structure to the northeast of the starting line has been identified as the orchestra. Its shape comprises approximately three-fourths of a circle, that was built against the krepidoma of a monumental platform. It consists of two limestone steps laid on a euthynteria, and is crowned by a row of blocks, perhaps seats for spectators.39 The date of the structure varies between the late fifth century B.C. and the middle of the third century B.C. but it is possible in this case, too, that it was preceded by an earlier structure built for the same purpose, but not yet monumentalised.40 The discovery of poros blocks in the centre of the semicircular zone, be34 Polacco 1998: 90–91. There is no literary or archaeological evidence that attests a circular arrangement of ikria: such a notion is a construction a posteriori, based solely on the circular form of the orchestra. On the contrary, the sources show “il carattere frontale e assiale del vedere (in greco theasthai, donde theatron)” (ibid.: 74–75). It is, moreover, difficult to imagine that temporary structures, which would have stood for little more than a few days, would have been constructed in a complex, semicircular form, as the stone theatres were. 35 Cf. Romano 1993: 48, n.18. On the possible arrangement of the spectators on the hill: Williams & Russell 1981: 18; on the Roman destruction, ibid.: 16. The theory that the structure preceding the Roman “central workshops” might have been a platform for spectators of the Greek age seems to have been refuted by Williams, who prefers to identify offices or workshops that date to the first Roman phase of the site (ibid.: 28–29, n.42). 36 Thalmann 1987: 585–587; Piérart & Pariente & Touchais 1991: 667. 37 Thalmann 1987: 587. 38 As believed by Marchetti & Rizakis 1995: 455; on the excavations, see Piérart & Pariente & Touchais 1991: 667. 39 Pariente et al. 1988: 705–708; Marchetti & Rizakis 1995: 455. 40 Piérart & Pariente & Touchais 1991: 675; Marchetti & Rizakis 1995: 455.

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longing to a triglyph altar of the mid-fifth century seems to confirm this.41 The initial presence of only an altar should not excite surprise: functioning as the centre point around which the semicircular perimeter later developed, the altar explains the sacral character of the site. The name of the deity to whom the altar and, subsequently, the semicircular area were dedicated is probably the Apollo Lykeios who seems to have been the chief god of the agora of Argos; his sanctuary must have extended all the way to the monumental terrace located behind the semicircle.42 The semicircle itself, identified by most scholars as an orchestra,43 exhibits the same characteristics as the Corinthian structure: proximity to the starting line of the dromos, semicircular shape, sacral character, and a close tie to Apollo. A Middle Corinthian aryballos, probably dedicated in the sanctuary to Apollo on the Corinthian agora, seems to prove the relationship between the choros of Corinth and the god. It depicts a lyric competition: in front of a choregos, an adult man who accompanies the dance with a diaulos, the youth ПυрϜίας stands as prochoreuomenos (according to the inscription next to his name) at the head of a chorus of his peers.44 The link to Apollo is further confirmed by an epigram of Simonides, in which the poet calls Corinthian Apollo the “prytanis of the agora wellsuited to choruses.”45 A fresh comparison of the archaeological findings with the literary sources will enable us to understand the function of the agonistic structures presented above, as well as to broaden the scope of our inquiry. We are indebted to Pausanias for our knowledge that both these agonistic structures, dromos and choros, once stood in the agora of Sparta; concerning the choros, Pausanias explicitly states that it was an area of the agora, probably near the statues of Apollo Pythaeus, Artemis, and Latona, and that it was called the choros because the ephebes performed dances there in honour of Apollo as part of the 41 Pariente et al. 1988: 702–705; Piérart & Pariente & Touchais 1991: 675. 42 Roux 1953: 122–123; Marchetti 1994: 135; Marchetti & Rizakis 1995: 445–454, 470; Courbin 1998: 261–266. 43 So Marchetti 1994: 135; Marchetti & Rizakis 1995: 455. The proposal of Pariente 1988: 702; who saw there the boule of the Eighty, has not found favour. 44 Inv. No. C-54-1 in the Museum of Corinth. Calame 1997: 67–68; Bookidis & Stroud 2004: 413. The name of the choregos, Пολύτεрπος, appears above him, then the inscription continues with that of the victor, “ПυрϜίας, who leads the choros, to whom the oil-flask belongs,” that is a vessel for perfumed oil, the aryballos (for this interpretation, see Wachter 2001: 44–47, 328, n. COR 17). 45 Bergk 1867: 1179, Simonides n. 164. The attribution to Simonides is uncertain, and the invocation has recently been dated to the Hellenistic period (Page 1981: 284–285). The term πрύτανις for the god seems particularly well suited to Corinth, where, at least under the Bacchiades, that term indicated the supreme magistrate of the city, eponymous for the year (ibid.: 284).

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Gymnopaidiai.46 Nor is the situation of the dromos also on the Lacedaemonian agora to be ruled out: the monumental structures related to ephebic activities in Roman times, above all the agonistic structures, must have neatly separated the two and distinguished them from the more extensive and uniform context of the ancient agora. Thus Pausanias is led to describe them as distinct elements of the agora.47 Confirmation of this can be seen in the fact that the street Aphetais, the principal axis on which the agora is laid out, was probably used as the earliest racecourse, until it was replaced in the historical period by a proper agonistic structure, the dromos; by racing down this street, Odysseus is said to have won the race of the suitors and, as the prize, the hand of Penelope.48 The words of Pausanias also suggest the presence of at least a dromos near, yet not inside, the agora of Elis; apart (χωрὶς) from the racecourses where the athletes prepared to run at Olympia, which seem to have been inside the ancient gymnasium, he writes that “there is a dromos set aside (ἀποκεκрτμένος) for the competition of runners, called sacred by the inhabitants, while there (on the courses of the gymnasium?) the runners and pentathletes run to train.”49 This third racecourse was thus not part of the ancient gymnasium, which was – as the text specifies – reserved for training; it was used for ¤μιλλα, i.e. for “contests, competition”, and for this reason should be sought outside the gymnasium, though probably not very

46 Paus., III, 11.9. The complete lack of archaeological evidence for the Spartan choros prevents us from saying more about the structure, although other literary sources describe the space in which the gymnopaidiai took place with the word theatron – Her., VI, 67 (θεήτрου); Plut., Ag. 29, 3 (γυμνοπαιδίαι γὰр ἦσαν ἀγωνιζομένων χοрîν ἐν τù θεάτрῳ); Xen., Hell. VI, 4.16– , which would attest the custom of preparing ikria during the festivals before the orchestra, as has been proposed for Corinth. Thus already Martin 1951: 234–235; Kolb 1981: 79–80 and Ducat 2006: 266–268; contra Robertson 1992: 155 according to whom Plutarch, a contemporary of Pausanias, intended the known theatre in stone with the word theatron. It is nevertheless possible that he simply reused the word found in his source, i.e. Xenophon, without having completely understood it. 47 Marchetti & Rizakis 1995: 206–220 and Marchetti 1996 for a more detailed discussion of the problem. Pausanias cannot recognise the complex as a whole also because he did not know the agonistic structures of Corinth and Argos, which were no longer visible in his day, having been covered by the new Roman paving over the ancient sites. My conclusions will be presented at this point, in so far as going into the details of the topographical problems of the ancient site would take us too far from the subject at hand; on the various hypotheses on the position of the Spartan agora, see most recently Baudini 2006, who, however, places it on the plateau of Palaiokastro, imagining the dromos to have been “poco fuori da essa”. 48 Paus., III, 12.1; III, 12.4. Hölscher 1998: 76–78. On the Aphetais as the main axis on which the city of Sparta developed: Stibbe 1989: 66–68. We shall shortly turn to the significance of such competitions. 49 Paus., VI, 23.1–2, translation by the author. Maddoli et al. 2003: 380 already interpret this special racecourse as the place where local competitions were held or, less likely, trial competitions organised by the judges of the contests.

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Fig. 3.2: Corinth

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Fig. 3.3: Sparta (hypothetical reconstruction)

Figs. 3.1–3.3: Comparison between the agonistic structures dromos and choros in the agorai of Argos, Corinth and Sparta in classical times. Drawings by the Author

far from it.50 The name of the agora of Elis is, moreover the “Hippodrome”: the reason for this name derives from the fact that, according to Pausanias, the inhabitants exercised their horses there (VI, 24.2). More probably, however, the term should be viewed as evidence of ancient horse races (hippios), perhaps no longer held. In contrast, footraces (dromos) were still held in Roman times on a track, the attribute of which – ἱεрός – indicates it was sacred. Regarding the athletic competitions held in the dromos, we have already seen in the case of Corinth that they could include, both in the late archaic and classical age, the hoplitodromos (race in armour), the hippios (horse race), and the dolichos (long-distance race). The hoplitodromos, together with the stadion, numbered among the δαμοσίοι ἀέθλοι of Argos, as a votive inscription of the fifth century

50 The gymnasia cited by Pausanias seem, moreover, to stand directly adjacent to the agora of Elis: the so-called Malthò houses the bouleuterion (VI, 23.7) and one of its exits leads to the agora (VI, 24.1), while the first gymnasium cited contains a cenotaph of Achilles (VI, 23.3) that is then said to be past the aforementioned exit, and thus in the same general area. Maddoli et al. 2003: 385–386.

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B.C. attests.51 Although nothing stands in the way of accepting that various types of footraces occurred in the agora, it is difficult to prove that horse races and torch races might also have taken place there. The latter type of race, the lampadedromia, is documented at Corinth by the scholia on Pindar (Ol. XIII, 56), which mention it in connection with the celebration of the Hellotia in honour of Athena.52 They might also be presumed to have been among the celebrations of the Eukleia in honour of Artemis. According to Xenophon (Hell. IV, 4.2–3), these also took place in the agora of Corinth.53 A white-ground oinochoe of the classical period, found at the western edge of the agora, might also document the route of the lampadedromiai at this place: here a young man with barbula and mitra on his head is depicted as running; he holds a lit torch in his left hand and an oinochoe in his right, and is embraced by a bearded adult (his erastes?) also wearing a mitra, who holds a kantharos aloft in his left hand.54 We have spoken of a “route” in the agora, because the goal of the lampadedromia was for the fastest competitor to carry fire to the sacrificial altar. While the starting point was variable and could coincide with the aphesis in the agora, the finish line would have been the altar of the deity for whom the contest was held.55 Horse races held on the Corinthian agora seem to be attested not only by the curved shape of the archaic aphesis, but also by the discovery of numerous votive offerings of riders on horseback throughout the site, and bas-reliefs depicting a sacrifice of theoxenia to a heroic pair. This sacrifice occurs within a fixed space (probably the heroon itself), outside of which (generally in a frame cut into the background) there appears a protome of a horse, suggesting (pars pro toto) horse

51 IG IV, 561. The δαμοσίοι ἀέθλοι mentioned in the inscription might be the predominantly civic agones to which the first paragraph refers. It should be noted that the stadion is practised also at Corinth in the Hellenistic period, with the construction of a rectilinear aphesis. 52 Drachmann 1903: 368. There is no evidence, however, that confirms the holding of lampadedromiai in honour of Hellotis in the agora. 53 Dubbini forthcoming. The predominantly funerary meaning attributed to Hellotia and Eukleia in the past now seems forced; see Broneer 1942: 139–161; Martin 1951: 212–215. 54 Broneer 1942: 152. On the interpretation of the scene as a representation of a rite of initiation, see Dubbini forthcoming. The other evidence presented by Herbert (1986: 29–30) concerns processions by torchlight. A fragment of a Campanian krater refers to a similar contest; there a bearded man with a mitra holds a long torch in his right hand. Proof that the scene depicts a race is given by the fluttering clamys worn by the man (Herbert 1977: 49, n. 79, tab. 14). 55 Brelich 1969: 332–335.

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races that, along with the sacrifices, made up the rituals dedicated to the hero.56 This interpretation is suggested by some votive reliefs of the same kind found in other parts of Greece, in which the entire animal is depicted as either accompanied or ridden by an adolescent in a short tunic and clamys, i.e. in the typical garb of the ephebes.57 Moreover, in other examples, instead of the protome inside the panel, there are clearly depicted one or more young, semi-nude riders riding at a gallop, as indicated by their fluttering clamydes.58 This evidence attests, at least for Corinth – and perhaps also for Elis, as suggested by the name of the agora, “Hippodrome” – the custom of honouring local heroes with equestrian competitions that took place in the agora. These races should not be understood as contests organised at the tomb of deceased notables, an event that occurred only once in connection with funerary ceremonies. These competitions were, instead, probably part of the ritual agones that periodically occurred during the festivities in honour of heroes, in which the ephebes and perhaps also adults participated.59 Non-citizens may have been excluded from such festivals, as happened, for example, at Sparta during the annual competitions in honour of the local heroes Leonidas and Pausanias, in which only Spartans were permitted to take part.60 Equestrian contests in the agora, furthermore, should not surprise us, if we think of those held at Athens during the Panathenea, whose protagonists were precisely the ephebes.61 56 Broneer 1942: 135–136. Dentzer (1982: 438–441, 460–462), however, sees the equine protome as a representation of a horse as the particular animal of the hero according to the most ancient aristocratic standards of the ideal warrior; similarly, Fabricius 1999: 24, 58–60 interprets the presence of the horse as simply one of the attributes that define the status of the hero, just as the arms affixed to the wall in the background of the scene (helmet, shield, cuirass, sword). Broneer (1942: 130–131) had already shown, however, that, while the objects belonging to the hero appear inside the space dedicated to the sacrifice, the horse is outside the scene and should be regarded as part of another event. 57 These are reliefs R 83, R 462 and R 468 in Dentzer 1982: 578, 621. For direct comparison with ephebes on horseback, see Camp 1998: 25–30. 58 Svoronos & Barth 1911: 536, figs. 243, 244; Dentzer 1982: 594 no. R 226. See also the more complex monument in ibid.: 586, no. R 160. A relief from Theos is explicit in this respect, where a delicate drape hung in the background shows the busts of three horsemen facing left: Pfuhl 1905: 123, fig. 20; Fabricius 1999: 61, no. PM 1908, fig. 15. 59 See, for example the cases cited by Roller (1981: 6–10), in which the equestrian competitions are accompanied by athletic and musical or dramatic contests; cf. also Schörner 2007: 137– 138. According to Martin (1951: 220–221), the races in the agora-hippodrome of Elis were held in honour of the hero Oxylos, whose heroon stood in the agora. 60 The tombs of the two heroic generals must have stood in the vicinity of the agora (Baudini 2006: 29). The relationship between the heroic cults and the agonistic structures of the agora seems to be clear at Argos, where the precinct dedicated to the “Seven against Thebes” stood near the orchestra. Cf. Marchetti & Kolokotsas 1995: 264 with n. 129. 61 Camp 1998: 25–27. The Corinthian agora should not be considered too small to be the venue for this type of competition (Broneer 1942: 148 with n.57).

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As for the use of the choros, the only literary source that might refer to agones held in the Corinthian orchestra is again Xenophon (Hell. IV, 4.2–3), who tells us that (musical?) competitions were held inside the theatron in the agora on the last day of the Eukleia. There were perhaps choroi that concluded the festival.62 The notion that musical contests generally followed athletic contests, held on the last day or towards the end of the celebrations, is confirmed both in the passage of Homer cited above and in the ancient sources on the Spartan Gymnopaidiai.63 On this basis, a hypothetical reconstruction of the Corinthian agora has been attempted as it would have appeared during festivals that called for the holding of agones: on the days of the festival dedicated to athletic competition, the participants would have competed in the dromos, while the spectators would have lined up alongside; on the last day, attention would have shifted to the orchestra, and the temporary theatron built to house the crowd would have occupied part of the racecourse. In addition to these two types of ritual agones, which were part of celebrations held in honour of the Olympic gods or of heroes, a third category was held in the same manner as described above, but it draws its origin from primitive rituals of integration into civic society. Nuptial agones followed the mythical model instituted by Danaos of Argos, who organised games to find suitors for his daughters; on the basis of their agonistic abilities, as demonstrated in the dromos, the competitors could choose their brides (who meanwhile formed a choros near the finish line – the equivalent of the starting line, as seems to be the case in the most ancient racecourse of Corinth –) by, for example, touching their dresses.64

62 The reference to the presence of a judge of the competition (κрιτήν) inside the theatre attests the agonistic character of the performances. On the identification of the theatron cited by Xenophon with the Corinthian orchestra: Kolb 1981: 82; Kenzler 1999: 213. 63 Xen., Hell. VI, 4.16; Paus., III, 11.9. See also Lucian, Salt. 10, who describes how the competitions of the Spartan ephebes ended with dancing (εἰς ὄрχησιν αὐτοις ἡ ἀγωνία τελευτ´). The other competitions attested for the Gymnopaidiai, that is tests of endurance in which the youths struck one another in turn and ball throwing, must have occurred on the preceding days. Pettersson 1992: 42–56. 64 Thus Pindar (Pyth. IX, 196-213) describes the contests held by the Libyan king Anteos for the hand of his daughter in marriage. On the competitions at Argos, see also Apollodorus, II, 1.22 (Δαναὸς [..] τὰς δέ θυγατέрας εἰς γυμνικὸν ἀγîνα το‹ς νικîσιν ἔδωκεν); further Marchetti 1994: 152–153 and Marchetti & Kolokotsas 1995: 243. The space between the orchestra and the Corinthian racecourse seems too great to establish a relationship between the two, since the remaining structures are not older than the classical period, when the choice of the bride had probably become merely symbolic (Dubbini forthcoming). On similar nuptial agones even in modern Greece, see Nimas 2000.

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Fig. 4:

Fig. 4:

The use of the agonistic structures on the Corinthian agora fourth century B.C. during the ritual performances. During athletic competitions and races between the boys, we can imagine the standing crowd lined up along the sides of the racecourse, maybe on simple earthen embankments. Drawing by the Author

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Fig. 5:

Fig. 5:

The use of the agonistic structures on the Corinthian agora in the fourth century B.C. during the ritual performances. For those attending the musical competitions rectilinear stands or tiers made of wood (ikria) were temporarily placed facing the orchestra, as the presence of numerous post holes in the racecourse seems to prove. Drawing by the Author

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Fig. 6:

Fig. 6:

The use of the agonistic structures on the Corinthian agora in the fourth century B.C. during the ritual performances. “Nuptial competitions”: the suitors, by running on the dromos, choose their brides, who are dancing in the choros. The standing crowd was lined up along the agonistic structures. Drawing by the Author

This description of the contests reflects the topographical proximity of the choros and dromos already encountered in the agorai of Corinth and Argos, which accounts for their identical functional connotation: while the fathers judge the suitors from the stands on the basis of their athletic success, the future husbands, by running, choose their brides according to their beauty and grace, as shown in the choros.65 In this sense, even the girls’ choroi possess an agonistic character: all the participants aspire to have the beauty and grace that distinguish Artemis, tutelary

65 Lonsdale 1993: 207, 225.

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deity of parthenoi and choregos of female choroi par excellence;66 these characteristics conspire to set them apart from their companions so that they may be chosen by the best suitors.67 Such a view of the girls’ chorus implies a certain ambiguity: though the area in which the maidens dance is generally sacred to Artemis, in reality they invoke Aphrodite in their songs, so that the choros can become ἱμεрόεις, a place in which sexual desire blossoms.68 It is no coincidence that, in numerous Greek myths, irresistible maidens are ravished by suitors captivated by their beauty precisely while they are performing with their companions in a choros in honour of Artemis;69 this does not so much indicate behaviour outside societal norms, to be shunned by their male counterparts, as much as it reflects that such behaviour should occur in marriage rites, such as those of Sparta, which included precisely the abduction of the bride.70 The act of “touching the dress” of the chosen girl was thus symbolic of her capture by the suitor, reflecting the violence done to the girl, who is forced to leave behind her family and the world of her childhood. In reality, her capture fell under the control of the citizenry gathered for the event.71 Agonistic marriage rites seem to be closely tied to the Doric element of the Peloponnese: besides Argos, where nuptial games were held even in the historical period every five years,72 they are also found at Cyrene and Sicyon.73 At Sparta, besides the mythical race run by Odysseus to win the hand of Penelope, the karneatai, i.e. the “unwedded” (agamoi), chosen from among the Spartan νέοι, parti66 As the female counterpart to Apollo, Artemis possesses the same characteristics as her divine brother (Calame 1997: 111–113). Since the present study is concerned with rituals that occur in the agora, other female agones that form part of an individual’s coming of age, which took place outside of the city, are excluded from the analysis. Thus, for instance, the female races at Sparta on the dromos near the banks of the Eurota (on which, see Ducat 2006: 231– 234, with previous literature) or the Heraia at Olympia (cf. Serwint 1993: 403–422), which – though concerning exclusively the women of Elis – did not take place inside Elis but in its sanctuary outside the city. 67 Lonsdale 1993: 208–210, 224, 232. 68 Boedeker 1974: 43–55; Lonsdale 1993: 207; Calame 1997: 124–125. 69 Calame 1997: 91–93. 70 Thus Calame 1997: 100; contra Lonsdale 1993: 222–223. On the abduction of the spouse at Sparta, see Plut., Lyc. 15, 3.1–4; more general and with further bibliography, Lupi 2000: 71– 75. 71 Pind., Pyth. IX, 213. Plut., Mor. 249de attests an analogous case, in which the girls of Keos go together to the public festivals to play and dance before suitors, but under the control of the authorities. 72 Hyg., Fabulae, 170; Marchetti 1994: 153. According to Hyginus, these contests were called ἀσπὶς ἐν ῎Αрγει, although it is probable that the author has confused the marriage games with the more famous festivals in honour of Hera. See Amandry 1980: 211–253. 73 On the contests of Cyrene: Pind., Pith. IX, 196–213. Cleisthenes of Sicyon organised a race and had a dromos and gymnasium constructed expressly for the suitors of his daughter Agariste (Hd., VI, 126.3).

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cipated in the Karneia,74 games of the historical period which recall the age classes of young men observed in Gortyn. Because they were at the end of their ephebia, the dromeis were permitted to marry in collective ceremonies;75 the apodromoi, on the other hand, were excluded from the dromos, because they did not yet possess the necessary qualities to undergo the tests that took place there.76 The dromos thus becomes an obligatory rite of passage for young men to marry and enter the citizen body, just as the choros represents the official transition from the status of parthenos to that of nymphe for the girls.77 The transition of a person from childhood to adulthood is marked by a marginal period with respect to the civic community, spent generally by boys with their peers outside the city. Their integration into the citizen body by means of rituals of aggregation thereupon ensued; in the cases studied, the rituals took the form of athletic tests and lyric competitions in the urban centre, under the gaze of the assembled community and under the protection both of the deities who guaranteed civic order and of the heroes who embodied local history.78 The agones of passage become, in the historical period, part of the ceremonies in their honour during the chief civic festivals:79 Apollo stands out particularly as the most important god of the Peloponnesian agorai and as the model of the perfect kouros; but female deities were also important, such as Artemis, who as kourotrophos was patron of the growing youths and at the same time embodied the ideal parthenos.80 In the same way, it is no coincidence that such a goddess in the agora should protect the young men about to marry: the phenomenon of nuptial agones, which resulted in the union of matrimony fundamental for the survival of the community, naturally also takes place in this public space. The meeting of the groups of boys and girls of marriageable age is organised and controlled by the collective with precise rules that look back to an archaic society, but still seem to resonate even in the classical age. 74 On the Karneia: Pettersson 1992: 57–72; Ducat 2006: 274–277. Various evidence suggests that they took place in the agora: the existence of a cult of one Apollo Karneios Dromaios to be associated with the Spartan dromos (IG,V 1, nos. 497, 589, 608; Plut., Mor. 724c 8–9); the need for agonistic facilities such as a dromos and choros to hold the races of the staphylodromoi and the musical agones; and lastly, the need for a space sufficiently large to enable an army – real or fictitious in this case – to encamp at Sparta, already attested near the dromos by Liv. XXXIV, 27.4–5. 75 Ephor., FGrHist 70, 149.20; on communal weddings and the parallelism to Spartan institutions: Brelich 1969: 125. 76 Marchetti 1996: 167. 77 Andò 1996. 78 Brelich 1969: 22, 29–30, now discussed by Ducat 2006: 184–186 and Dubbini forthcoming. 79 Brelich 1969: 171–173. 80 For comparison with further tutelary deities of the dromos, see Marchetti 1996: 168–170. On the possible matrimonial significance of the Eukleia, see Dubbini forthcoming.

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This echo seems to be confirmed by the fact that, up until the Hellenistic period, the Corinthian aphesis maintains its particular curved shape, which permitted runners to run the length of the dromos several times, and used the starting line next to the choros also as the finish line in a manner analogous to “nuptial races”. The abandonment of obsolete rituals in the Hellenistic period in favour of new cultural expressions led less traditional places, such as Corinth and Argos, to dispense with part of their archaic ritual practices (the former now possessed a straight aphesis for the dromos; the latter, a monumental theatre that assumed some of the ancient functions of the choros). The preservation of archaic customs has, on the other hand, made conservative societies such as Sparta and Crete foci of scholarly attention, both ancient and modern.81 The comparison of archaeological remains and literary sources of the Peloponnesian agorai studied in this contribution seems to confirm the primary role played in ritual by the agonistic structures of the choros and dromos in the Greek agora. The agones held there are twofold in nature: they are both ritual, because they are dedicated to Olympic gods and to the heroes of the city, and yet, by virtue of the public setting, also spectacle. The performance of the ephebes, who show their agonistic maturity (i.e. their attainment of the physical ability to protect the city in the event of military conflict) before an audience of citizens, of the suitors who strive to excel in valour before their future fathers-in-law, and also of the maidens who put on display their grace to arouse the desire of their future husbands, is dominated by a strongly agonistic principle. The agon in the agora seems to have been the most important test that adolescents had to undertake to enter the adult world, a ritual the dynamics of which reflect the most basic interests of the citizen community: survival and reproduction.

81 Brelich 1969: 208–209.

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References Amandry, Pierre 1980. “Sur les concours argiens”. Etudes Argiennes (= Bulletin de correspondance hellénique supplément 5): 211–253. Baudini, Andrea 2006. “L’agora di Sparta. Dati, posizionamento e alcune considerazioni”. Workshop di Archeologia Classica 3: 21–35. Bell, David J 1990. “The meaning of dromos in Homer’s Iliad 23.758”. Nikephoros 3: 7–9. Bianchi, Ugo 1986. “Some Observations on the Typology of Passage”. In: Ugo Bianchi (ed.). I riti di passaggio. Ordine cosmico, sociale, individuale. Atti del seminario italo-finno-svedese tenuto all’Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, 24–28 marzo 1984. Rome: “L’ERMA” di Bretschneider: 45–61. Boedeker, Deborah Dickmann 1974. Aphrodite’s Entry into Greek Epic. Leiden: Brill. Bookidis, Nancy & Ronald S. Stroud 2004. “Apollo and the Archaic Temple at Corinth”. Hesperia 73: 401–426. Brelich, Angelo 1961. Le iniziazioni: parte seconda. Sviluppi storici nelle civiltà superiori, in particolare nella Grecia antica. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo. — 1969. Paides e Parthenoi. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo. — 1988. “Gare, città e religione”. In: Paola Angeli Bernardini (ed.). Lo Sport in Grecia. Bari: Laterza: 109–152. Broneer, Oscar 1942. “Hero Cults in the Corinthian Agora”. Hesperia 11: 128–161. Calame, Claude & Derek Collins & Janice Orion (transls.) 1997. Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece. Their Morphology, Religious Role, and Social Functions. Lanham, London: Rowman & Littlefield. Camp, John McKesson. & Craig A. Mauzy 1998. Horses and Horsemanship in the Athenian Agora. Athens: American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Davidson, Gladys R. 1952. Corinth XII. The Minor Objects. Results of Escavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Dentzer, Jean-Marie 1982. Le motif du banquet couché dans le Proche-Orient et le monde grec du VIIe au IVe siècle avant J.-C. Rome: Ecole Française de Rome. Dubbini, Rachele (forthcoming). “Le iniziazioni greche e gli agoni rituali nelle agorai del Peloponneso. Nuove prospettive interpretative”. In: Igor Baglioni (ed.). Storia delle Religioni e Archeologia. Discipline a confronto. Atti del Convegno, Roma 2–5 giugno 2008. Ducat, Jean 2006. Spartan Education. Youth and Society in the Classical Period. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Fabricius, Johanna 1999. Die hellenistischen Totenmahlreliefs: Grabrepräsentation und Wertvorstellungen in ostgriechischen Städten. Munich: F. Pfeil. Fiechter Ernst 1929. „Stadion“. In: Kroll, Wilhelm & Mittelhaus, Karl (eds.), Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft III A,2. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung:1930–1973.

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Gebhard, Elisabeth R. 1974. “The Form of the Orchestra in the Early Greek Theatre”. Hesperia 43: 428–440. Harris, Harold Arthur 1964. Greek athletes and athletics. London: Hutchinson. Herbert, Sharon 1977. The Red-Figure Pottery. Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens (Corinth 7/4). — 1986. “The Torch-Race at Corinth”. In: Darrell A. Amyx & Mario Aldo del Chiaro & William R. Biers (eds.). Corinthiaca, Studies in Honour of D.A. Amyx. Columbia: University of Missouri Press: 29–35. Hölscher, Tonio 1998. Öffentliche Räume in frühen griechischen Städten. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter. Kenzler, Ulf 1999. Studien zur Entwicklung und Struktur der griechischen Agora in archaischer und klassischer Zeit. Frankfurt: P. Lang. Kolb, Frank 1981. Agora und Theater. Volks- und Festversammlung. Berlin: Gebr. Mann. Lippolis, Enzo 2006. “Lo spazio per votare e altre note di topografia sulle agorai di Atene”. Annuario della Scuola archeologica di Atene e delle Missioni italiane 84: 37–61. — & Monica Liviadotti & Giorgio Rocco (eds.) 2007. Architettura greca. Storia e monumenti del mondo della polis dalle origini al V secolo. Milan: B. Mondadori. Lonsdale, Steven H. 1993. Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Lupi, Marcello 2000. L’ordine delle generazioni. Classi di età e costumi matrimoniali nell’antica Sparta. Bari: Edipuglia. Maddoli, Gianfranco et al. (eds.) 2003. Pausania. Guida della Grecia. Libro VI. L’Elide e Olimpia. Milan: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla: Arnoldo Mondadori. Marchetti, Patrick 1994. “Recherches sur les mythes et la topographie d’Argos II–III”. Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 118: 131–160. — & Kostas Kolokotsas 1995. Le Nymphée de l’Agora d’Argos. Fouille, étude architecturale et historique. Paris: De Boccard (Études Péloponnésiennes 11). — & Yvonne Rizakis 1995. “Recherches sur les mythes et la topographie d’Argos IV. L’agora revisitée” Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 119/2: 437–472. — 1996. “Le Dromos au coeur de l’agora de Sparte. Le dieux protecteurs de l’éducation en pays dorien”. Kernos 9: 155–170. Martin, Roland 1951. Recherches sur l’agora grecque. Paris: De Boccard. Mette, Hans Joachim & Bruno Snell 1955–. Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos. In Zusammenarbeit mit dem Thesaurus Linguae Graecae und mit Unterstützung der UNESCO und der Joachim-Jungius-Gesellschaft, Hamburg vorbereitet und herausgegeben von Bruno Snell. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Morgan, Charles H. 1937. “Excavations at Corinth, 1936–1937”. American Journal of Archaeology 41/4: 593–552. Nielsen, Inge 2002. Cultic Theatres and Ritual Drama. A Study in Regional Development and Religious Interchange between East and West in Antiquity. Aarhus, Oxford: Aarhus University Press (Aarhus Studies in Mediterranean Antiquity 4).

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Pariente, Anne & Gilles Touchais (eds.) 1998. Αργος και Αργολίδα. Τοπογραφία και Πολεοδομία. Πρακτικά διεθνούς Συνεδρίου Αθήνα-Άργος 28/4– 1/5/1990. (Argos et l’Argolide. Topographie et urbanisme. Actes de la Table ronde organisée par l’École française d’Athènes et la 4a Éphorie des antiquités préhistoriques et classique, Athènes-Argos, 28 avril–1er mai 1990). Paris: De Boccard. Pettersson, Michael 1992. Cults of Apollo at Sparta. The Hyakinthia, the Gymnopaidiai and the Karneia. Stockholm: Svenska Institutet i Athen; Gothenburg: P. Åström. Polacco, Luigi 1998. Kyklos. La fenomenologia del cerchio nel pensiero e nell’arte dei Greci. Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Letteri ed Arti (Memorie 76). de Polignac, François 19962. La naissance de la cité grecque. Cultes, espace et société. Paris: Découverte. Robertson, Noel 1992. Festivals and Legends: The Formation of Greek Cities in the Light of Public Ritual. Toronto, London: University of Toronto Press. Roller, Lynn E. 1981. “Funeral Games for Historical Persons”. Stadion 7: 1–18. Romano, David Gilman 1993. Athletics and Mathematics in Archaic Corinth: The Origins of the Greek Stadion. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. — 1999. “A Curved Start for Corinth’s Fifth-century Racecourse”. In: Lothar Haselberger (ed.). Appearance and Essence. Refinements of Classical Architecture: Curvature. Proceedings of the Second Williams Symposium on Classical Architecture held at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, April 2–4, 1993. Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania: 283–288. Serwint, Nancy 1993. “The Female Athletic Costume at the Heraia and Prenuptial Initiation Rites”. American Journal of Archaeology 97/3: 403–422. Stibbe, Conrad M. 1989. „Beobachtungen zur Topographie des antiken Sparta“. Babesch 64: 61–99. Trombetti, Catia 2006. “Ginnasi come santuari. Il Peloponneso”. Siris 7: 45–69. Wachter, Rudolf 2001. Non-Attic Vase Inscription. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wegner, Max 1968. Musik und Tanz. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (Archaeologia Homerica 3/U). Williams, Charles Kaufman, II 1978. “Pre-Roman Cults in the area of the Forum of Ancient Corinth”. University of Pennsylvania (unpublished PhD thesis). — & Pamela Russell 1981. “Corinth: Excavations of 1980”. Hesperia 50: 1–44.

Edward Venn

Evoking the “Marvellous”: Ritual in Michael Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage Among the many critical evaluations of the British composer Michael Tippett’s long career, claims of a lack of ambition are certainly not to be found.1 His first major opera, The Midsummer Marriage, composed between 1946 and 1952, exemplifies the excesses and the joyous artistic achievements that characterise his work. The composer has described the ways in which the opera belongs to the tradition embodied by The Magic Flute, in which two pairs of lovers, one high and one low, experience impediments to their union which are ultimately reconciled.2 Shaped by his own experiences with Jungian analysis in the late 1930s, Tippett decided that the impediments to the high couple were psychological rather than physical or social in nature.3 In short, before their union could happen, the main protagonists had to undergo successful Jungian individuation – that is, delve into their unconscious in order to balance the conscious and unconscious parts of their minds. This presented the composer with the considerable problem of how to portray dramatically this psychological journey. Tippett’s solution was to draw on another theatrical tradition, established by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which the natural and supernatural – in Tippett’s formulation, the conscious and unconscious – are juxtaposed.4 The Magic Flute and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are just two of the numerous sources that shape on some level the complex libretto and stage action; to these can be added an idiosyncratic range of mythic and ritual symbols, both occidental and oriental. One of the most pregnant examples of the sort of mixed mythological metaphor that can result can be found towards the end of the opera (figure 435), where the “high” couple appear from within a lotus flower, transfigured as Hindu Gods. At a glance, they kill the bride’s father (figure 439), himself in part a representation of the Fisher King myth from the Holy Grail legends. And if that juxtaposition of Hindu symbolism with the Grail legend wasn’t enough, the death is 1 2 3 4

See, for instance, Clarke 2001: 1–2. Tippett 1995: 202. Ibid.: 200. Ibid.: 199–200.

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then followed by a ritual fire dance that invokes a wide range of European midsummer festivities (figure 451). It is my intention to explore some of the aesthetic decisions behind such collisions of diverse sources, and the consequences for the music that result from these decisions. Therefore it suffices in lieu of a synopsis to say, in the words of Tippett’s biographer Ian Kemp, that Tippett intends his opera to act as a guide “during the journey the listener will make into the underworld, the unconscious. It will enact the dangers and delights of this journey, objectifying them and presenting them in a formalized dramatic framework”.5 In doing so, Tippett aims for the opera to have in some manner a transformative, if not ritual effect on the audience. Stephen Greenblatt has observed that the theatre is “an institution that never pretends to be anything but fraudulent, an institution that calls forth what is not, that signifies absence, that transforms the literal into the metaphorical, that evacuates everything that it represents”.6 Greenblatt is talking here of the Shakespearian theatre, and given Tippett’s indebtedness to Shakespeare, the comment can apply equally to him. What, then, should we make of the collision of ritual signifiers in The Midsummer Marriage? How can Tippett avoid, in Jerzy Grotowski’s words, the presentation of “degenerated ritual”, a mere “spectacle”?7 This is a significant problem to overcome, if the opera is to have the transformative power Tippett desires. Tippett’s answer to this problem begins by noting “a long tradition associating opera with the marvellous”, citing precedents in works such as Orfeo, Der Freischütz, Hänsel und Gretel, and The Rake’s Progress.8 In other words, opera-goers have long accepted that the natural and supernatural can coexist within the genre. And if this is true, then for Tippett the presentation of images from the unconscious in the guise of supernatural events should be relatively unproblematic, at least in theory. The presentation of the marvellous, in Tippett’s terms, “will allow the opera composer to present the collective spiritual experience more nakedly and immediately – the music helping to suspend the critical and analytical judgement, without which happening no experience of the numinous can be immediate at all”.9 Here lies the nub of the argument: if theatrical presentation of ritual signifiers can lead to an evacuation of their meaning, it is the music, through the suspension of belief that it can create, that has the capacity to reassert, reinvigorate, or replace this meaning. At the same time, it has the power to unify the otherwise disparate and disunited ritual signifiers presented on stage.

5 6 7 8 9

Kemp 1984: 215. Greenblatt 1988: 127. Cited in Osiński 1991: 105. Tippett 1995: 203. Ibid.: 204.

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1. In this paper, I will examine the ways in which music can have this function with reference to four Ritual Dances that punctuate The Midsummer Marriage. The first three of these Dances occur in the largely untexted second act, in which all of the singing characters have vacated the stage to pursue their psychological journeys; only dancers remain behind. One dancer, Strephon, transforms into a series of animals, to be pursued by a female dancer also in animalistic guise. In the third dance, it looks as if Strephon is to be killed; a horrified interruption from the secondary couple brings the dance to a premature close. The fourth Ritual Dance is the fire dance that I mentioned above, and appears at the climax of the final act. It follows the death of the figure representing the Fisher King, and during it Strephon is a voluntary sacrificial victim. The content of these dances is summarised in Table One. Table 1: Overview of Ritual Dances Figures Tempo 159 Allegro molto 351 376 451

Content First Dance, “The Earth in Autumn”: Hare (Strephon) pursued by Hound (female dancer) Adagio tranquillo Second Dance, “The Waters in Winter”: Fish (Strephon) pursued by Otter (female dancer) Allegro grazioso Third Dance, “The Air in Spring”: vivace Bird (Strephon) pursued by Hawk (female dancer) Allegro moderato Fourth Dance, “Fire in Summer”: – Presto Strephon offers himself as a voluntary sacrifice

What sort of music might accompany these dances? The British musicologist Jonathan Cross has described both the musical cues that characterise ritual as a topic within twentieth-century and contemporary music, as well as highlighting some of the expressive connotations of this topic.10 It is important to note that Cross explores ritual as a musical topic for expressive purpose within the concert hall, rather than music that is used within a ritual or sacred context. His immediate focus was on Stravinsky’s use of ritual theatre, and he teases out the ways in which it is representative of, if not an influence upon, subsequent twentieth-century developments. With reference to Stravinsky’s work, but metonymically standing for the topic of ritual as a whole, Cross describes the characteristics of ritual as a musical topic thus: “crudely put – […] repeating rhythms, regular pulse, ostinatos, static pedal points, symmetries, limited melodies and non-developmental structures are ideally 10 Cross 1998: 132–169.

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matched to the presentation of ritual”.11 Such musical cues abound in works such as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Les Noces, two of his best known, and most overt, depictions of ritual. Although Tippett’s music in general is deeply indebted to Stravinsky’s neoclassical practice, it is palpable, on a single hearing of the Ritual Dances, that there is a tension between the Stravinskian model of repetition as a structural punctuation and frame within a static whole and Tippett’s own musical solutions. By way of example, consider the introduction to, and the opening of, the first Ritual Dance. The passage begins with flute and celesta (figure 152), after which the on-stage trees begin to move, accompanied by brass fanfares (figure 153). To vigorous string figuration, punctuated by brass, a racecourse begins to be marked out by trees and dancers (figure 154). A further series of climactic chords (two before figure 158) announces that the stage is set for the first Ritual Dance, the pursuit of a male hare by the female hound. Here, the music is based on a blend of groundbass repetitions – that is to say, variations over a repeated bass line – with a developing strophic form. What this example suggests is that the music of the first Dance is delicately balanced between repetitive formal structures and more teleological developmental strategies, such as varied sequences and increased textural density. Later, the introductory material described above returns to punctuate and frame the dances (repetition), but there is concurrent harmonic and tonal enrichment (development). All this is expressed in a tonal language that recognises the emotional power of motion towards and away from clearly defined harmonic centres, but that rarely asserts such centres as a point of stability. It is clear that ritual is treated differently in the music of Tippett and Stravinsky; Jonathan Cross has discussed these differences with reference to Tippett’s second opera, King Priam, and his conclusions are relevant here, too. Of King Priam, Cross states that there is “a contradiction at the heart of the work: in order to project what is undoubtedly his most direct, linear plot, Tippett opts for a musical structure predicated on fragmentation, juxtaposition and discontinuity”.12 The Midsummer Marriage bends in the other direction while remaining contradictory: here, the supposedly timeless, cyclic rituals depicted on stage are supported with broadly developmental and continuous musical material. There is also a fundamental difference in the way that Tippett and Stravinsky use their material. Cross again: “Tippett, like Stravinsky, adopts familiar musical conventions but, unlike Stravinsky, he does not keep his critical distance”.13 For Cross, the lack of Stravinskian objectivity and stylisation leads in King Priam to a “compromise between a reactionary narrative genre and a radical non-narrative structure”.14 What emerges, and again the 11 12 13 14

Ibid.: 140. Cross 1998: 64. Ibid.: 65. Ibid.: 67.

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same charge can be levelled at The Midsummer Marriage, is a seeming mismatch between expression and content, for all the effectiveness of both of these operas in the theatre. I think that Cross is asking the wrong questions of Tippett’s music. Whereas Stravinsky depicts ritual practice through particular and subsequently conventionalised musical cues, Tippett’s approach to opera (as we have seen) demands a different function for the music, and hence different compositional strategies. In contrast to Stravinskian ritual, the music in the Ritual Dances is required to bind together and infuse with meaning the disparate ritual symbols in the libretto and stage action, rather than establish a particular objective stance. In other words, Tippett’s concern is with particular ritual signifieds or practices, for which there is no established musical signifier; his appropriation of Stravinskian elements is for dramatic and temporal purposes, and not topical. This much is clear from the lack of critical distance and retention of a narrative structure that Cross identifies in King Priam. To account for the ritualistic element of Tippett’s music in post-Stravinskian terms, therefore, is to miss the point. It is my thesis that the music of The Midsummer Marriage, and in particular the Ritual Dances, can be profitably viewed not as a collection of musical signifiers – though ritual signifiers appear on the stage – but rather as a dynamic ritual process. To explicate how this process works musically, I shall turn to the ritual theories of Victor Turner.15 In doing so, I signal my intention not to propose generalised rules or grammars of musical ritual, but rather to highlight ways in which musical phenomena can be explained by, or even as, ritual phenomena.

2. By orienting and framing Tippett’s own artistic beliefs in the light of Turner’s theories, it becomes increasingly clear that there exists a correspondence between the musical substance of The Midsummer Marriage and ritual processes. This is not to say that Tippett was influenced by Turner, or even consciously attempted to compose out these ritual processes. Nevertheless, the fact that there are correspondences provides us with a means of re-thinking Tippett’s work. Stated bluntly, those ideas of Turner that are of most relevance in such a re-thinking, and their connection to Tippett, are: 1) that the theatre can be a site in which social dramas can be articulated and remedies suggested.16 I have already observed that Tippett regards the opera house as an ideal venue for the portrayal of the marvellous, and that the marvellous has a

15 Turner 1969; 1982. 16 Turner 1982: 10–11.

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redressive psychological function. In The Midsummer Marriage the social drama is that of a psychological rite of passage, presented allegorically;17 2) that ritual symbols are not static objects, but dynamic entities within the unfolding ritual process.18 Similarly, Tippett’s musical language, which has the function of binding together all the ritual symbols presented verbally and visually, eschews the somewhat static nature of twentieth-century ritual topics and instead offers dynamic, forward-directed material within a nevertheless stylised ritual framework; 3) that the meanings provided by theatre emerge from the direct experience of the dramatist, or else the theatrical event portrays a situation that “cries out for penetrative, imaginative understanding”.19 Furthermore, social drama, and therefore theatre that represents social drama, has the capacity to express and fulfil unconscious purposes and goals on both an individual and collective level.20 The Midsummer Marriage scores on both these counts: not only does it emerge from Tippett’s own positive encounter with Jungian analysis and selfindividuation, but its allegorical presentation of a psychological rite of passage offers something that requires the penetrative reading that Turner suggests;21 4) that this allegorical presentation caused Tippett certain practical and theoretical problems. In order to address these, he formulated for himself a number of rules that crystallised the dramatic and conceptual issues involved.22 These rules, in practice, amount to an assertion and legitimisation of his artistic beliefs. Among them was the idea that if an experience was to be truly collective, it required a traditional mythological background that is nevertheless transmuted into terms relevant to the twentieth century.23 This is certainly what Tippett does in his opera, influenced by T.S. Eliot’s suggestion that the artist transmutes his or her “private and personal agonies into something rich and strange, universal and impersonal”.24 Yet in his idiosyncratic way, Tippett is also enacting the process described by Turner in the following terms: “In the so-called ‘high culture’ of complex societies, liminoid is not only removed from a rite de passage context, it is also ‘individualized’. The solitary artist creates the liminoid phenomena, the collectivity experiences collective liminal symbols”.25 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Kemp 1984: 210. Turner 1982: 22. Ibid.: 13. Ibid.: 15. See Kemp 1984: 209–211. Tippett 1995: 198–208. Ibid.: 203. Cited in Kemp 1984: 210. Turner 1982: 52.

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5) Just as these liminal symbols are in some way collective, so, too, are the stylisations through which we experience them. Turner notes the similarities between rites of passage, social drama, and Aristotelian tragedy, all of which are instances of a “universal processual form”.26 Tippett’s biographer Ian Kemp has described how the composer, influenced by Frazer’s The Golden Bough and particularly Jane Harrison’s Themis, consciously structured his opera around Greek theatrical precedents for ritual purpose.27 Once again, these ancient precedents can be taken as a means of legitimising Tippett’s practice, but also vouchsafing its collective message. 6) Turner’s notion that ritual should be studied from the bottom up, from the observance and interpretation of ritual symbols as they function within a specific rite, is of vital importance when studying Tippett’s musical processes.28 It was by trying to understand Tippett’s music from the top down – that is, how Tippett’s musical signifiers relate to a pre-existent twentieth-century musical trope – that enabled Jonathan Cross to tell us much about the differences between Stravinsky and Tippett, but little about the intimate relationship between music and ritual in Tippett’s work. These six points are by no means a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for approaching Tippett’s music from the point of view of ritual, but they provide a useful set of places from which to start. It is the sixth and final point that I shall elaborate at greater length here, with reference to the tripartite scheme for a rite of passage that Turner borrowed from Van Gennep.29 My focus will once again be the Ritual Dances. It is my belief that the comparison of the musico-dramatic aspects of The Midsummer Marriage to ritual processes obviates the need to get bogged down in artistic deviations from an underlying principle, as can be found in Kemp’s account of the opera, and more so in Odam’s reading of Tippett’s third opera, The Knot Garden, both of which try to explicate links between the libretto and Jungian concepts on which they were based.30 The first phase of a rite of passage, or a social drama, is that of separation.31 Tippett’s music enacts this by virtue of clearly defined timbral and thematic material that is used to cue other-worldliness. Such associations are grounded by intertextual reference to other magical operas, and in particular the flutes and bells of The Magic Flute (cf. figure 152). Not only does the “magical” music interrupt the dynamic flow of the “natural”, and vice versa, but literal repetitions of the 26 27 28 29 30 31

Ibid.: 9. Kemp 1984: 224–228. Turner 1982: 21–22. See, for instance, Turner 1982: 24–27. Kemp 1984: 220–224; Odam 1977. Turner 1982: 24.

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“magical” music throughout the opera are designed to give the impression that the action between these repetitions happens in parentheses, or even that no real time has passed at all. Turner describes the need for the act of separation to “change the quality of time […] or [construct] a cultural realm which is defined as ‘out of time’”.32 In essence, this is the process that Tippett is evoking, for the music enables the stage action to be framed separately from the rest of the dramatic action that unfolds in the opera, and presents what happens between these cues as liminoid. Indeed, the liminoid effect is to be heightened through the rotation of the stage, so that the audience sees the same scenery as in the “normal world” but from a different perspective. The resulting effect of physical dislocation matches that of the temporal dislocation provided by the music. Having been prepared by strongly defined framing devices, the music enters the liminoid phase, represented by the four Ritual Dances. Space prevents anything but the most cursory analysis of these dances, but I shall attempt here to tease out some of the performative cues that, positioned within these framing devices, turn a “musical event” into what I would call a “musical event as ritual”, and which, in turn, transform a potentially empty signifier on the stage into a “ritual symbol”. Firstly, and as with all liminoid phases, the Ritual Dances offer ambiguity.33 The first three dances together constitute the most extended instrumental passage in the opera. The lack of text thus robs the listener of any chance to perceive verbal meaning. Even the final dance, which does contain singing, contains ambiguities, for here Tippett sets much of the text to complex counterpoint or extended melismas, or both, that obscure the verbal content. Secondly, and whichever way you look at it, the music actively defamiliarises the material it presents. If we view the dances as dances, we find their function as set pieces compromised by teleological, forward-moving developmental tendencies in the musical language. Conversely, if we focus on the sweep of the music as it ushers us forward dynamically, we find it constrained by stylised, repeated gestures. In short, the dances are neither one thing nor the other: they are made strange. Thirdly, we have the presentation of social drama in ritual form. If theatre can be said to be mimetic of social drama, we find in the ritual dances the same mimesis, only at a remove. The first three dances are a brilliant, detailed depiction of the vicious hunts represented on stage; in so far as they are programmatic, they are mimetic. Indeed, the way in which the formalised dance schemes yield to the details of the hunts is the main reason for the intensely dramatic, dynamic quality of the music. But the processes they mime are themselves mimetic of the psyche, and the unconscious representation of a rite of passage. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid.

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Finally, we find in the final ritual fire dance the dramatic and musical culmination of the three dances in the second act.34 Dramatically, it resolves the increasing tension built up in the first three dances through a voluntary sacrifice of the male dancer. But without musical resolution, this effect would be undermined. The musical resolution is achieved in two ways. The first of these is formal: the fire dance completes a sequence of dances that together parallel the symphonic ordering of movements, namely fast, slow, scherzo, and finale (this much can be ascertained from the tempi given in Table One). The symphony since Beethoven has been an archetypal developmental genre, both dramatic and end-weighted, and the Ritual Dances prove to be no exception. In terms of musical content, I have already mentioned Tippett’s use of lengthy melismas. These, in combination with intricate counterpoint, itself a traditional signal for deep, weighty, and spiritual matters, provide both musical and dramatic closure to the individuation process. Fleetingly, one senses in this complex, yet ebullient, ensemble a sense of spontaneous immediacy of human relations that Turner has labelled communitas.35 It is here that the ritual draws to a close, and a return of the same musical framing devices that began the ritual marks its end (figure 476), and the beginning of the post-liminoid phase; the return of the music again suggests that perhaps no time has passed. The characters wonder if all they have experienced has been a dream (figure 490); the communitas that was experienced has become a memory.36 If the cues that I have described have the capacity to transform music into musical ritual, the question remains as to how they turn on-stage signifiers into ritual event. Put bluntly, the music provides a framework, within which the multivalent and multicultural ritual symbols are able to speak in a unified and purposeful manner. More specifically, Turner has identified the act of dancing, along with culturally rich symbols such as trees, hares, hounds, and so on, as potentially liminoid.37 It is my contention that it is only in conjunction with the liminoid phenomena I have ascribed to the music that these potentialities are actualised. In other words, the ritual meaning is emergent as a result of this conjunction. Without the music, the events on stage remain a stream of potent but ultimately empty signifiers, drawn from a variety of mythological and ritual traditions, but unable to interact. With the music acting as a binding agent, the audience is encouraged to tease out the connections between the diverse signifiers, and to make meaning from them (see also point 2, above).

34 Kemp has argued that the four dances, although separate temporally, are nevertheless in a sense continuous, but marked off (1982: 252). 35 Turner 1969: 132. 36 See ibid. 1982: 47–49. 37 Ibid.: 27.

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The audience at an opera, unlike many participants of rituals in pre-industrial societies, are faced with a series of choices that result from the freedoms of leisure time:38 for instance, whether to attend the opera or not; once there, whether to listen critically or to immerse oneself in the music; and whether or not to accept or reject its message. Thus, while it would be unrealistic to pretend that The Midsummer Marriage has a ritual function per se, we can nevertheless acknowledge that, by virtue of its analogous processes to ritual, it might possess the capacity, should the listener be willing, to effect some sort of transformative change, just as Tippett hoped it might. Even without the existence of a listener acting as a willing participant in a ritual, the notion of approaching Tippett’s music from the stance of ritual studies offers fruitful means of exploring those junctures in his work that cannot be answered by traditional musicological means. The examination of musical processes as ritual processes can provide a challenging insight into a wealth of music: not just Tippett, but other composers intent on providing what we might term spiritual, as well as musical, fulfilment, such as Stockhausen. Similarly, a greater awareness of the ways in which music can contribute to ritual effect may cause us to reconsider those composers who have made thorough explorations of ritual as a musical topic – I am thinking of people such as Stravinsky, Birtwistle, and Messiaen – but to date have not been analysed from a functional perspective. In this way, ritual might contribute to an understanding of musical effect, as well as music’s power over us.

38 Ibid.: 36–37.

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References Clarke, David 2001. The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cross, Jonathan 1998. The Stravinsky Legacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen 1988. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kemp, Ian 1984. Tippett: The Composer and His Music. London: Eulenburg Books et al. Odam, George 1977. Michael Tippett’s Knot Garden: An Exploration of Its Musical, Literary and Psychological Construction. (M.Phil. Dissertation, Southampton University). Osiński, Zbigniew 1991. “Grotowski Blazes the Trails: From Objective Drama to Ritual Arts”. The Drama Review 35/1: 95–112. Tippett, Michael 1995. Tippett on Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Turner, Victor 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. — 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York City: Performing Arts Journal Publications.

Section III: The Body and Food in Ritual Edited by Eric Venbrux, Thomas Quartier, and Joanna Wojtkowiak

Anke Tonnaer

Fear and Fascination for a White Maggot: Savouring the Other in Tourist Ritual Introduction The cultural Other continues to exert strong appeal, as can be seen in the current popularity of survival shows and extreme travel programmes on television. Acting like Robinson Crusoe on a tropical island, or experiencing a different culture, learning to live like the Other, appear regular fare in broadcasting world. For instance, in each episode of the Dutch programme Groeten uit de rimboe (“Greetings from the jungle”) a family is shipped to an exotic destination to reside with an indigenous group and live according to their “primitive ways of life” for a period of a few weeks.1 The entertainment value of the programme exists in seeing these usually maladapted white visitors having to act according to unfamiliar, often gendered rules, coping with different hygiene practices, and, not least, feeding on alien food substances. Indeed, I would argue that it is not so much the so-called “primitive Other” with his or her strange habits who is on display, as are these particular tourists whose alleged privileged position is subverted, being subjected to extreme sensual experiences that, even if only for a short term, are meant to profoundly affect their sense of self.2 We, the viewers, can revel in the culture shock of these rather daft representatives of “our world”, and simultaneously share in the aversion to the incomprehensible lifestyles of the Other, safely, however, from the comfort of our chairs at home.3

1 See Eindhoven & Bakker & Persoon 2007 for a critique of the general Dutch anthropological viewpoint on this type of programme. 2 Bruner (1991) has, however, argued that, despite the promises of transformative experiences in tourist discourse, in fact the opposite often occurs: whereas the tourist self is little changed by the cultural experience, the consequences for what he calls “the native self” are profound. 3 A somewhat more sophisticated example of this type of travel programme may be found in Tribe, a BBC production. Presenter Bruce Parry travels to remote parts of the world to stay with an indigenous, often “endangered” group of people. For a certain period of time he adopts their lifestyle and practices, showing their cultural adaptation to a, for Western viewers, harsh natural environment.

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The distinction between “us” and “them” in this and comparable programmes is drawn largely on the basis of bodily differences, that is, on the appearance and actions of the body. Recognising the central role of the body in the encounter with the cultural Other, Desmond (1999) has developed the notion of “physical foundationalism”. She states that the body has an epistemological function in validating authenticity; it parallels and functions as evidence of cultural difference.4 However, not only the different body that behaves in unfamiliar ways is of interest in cultural tourism; tourists, too, have a wider sensual experience than Urry’s well-known concept of the tourist gaze (1990) usually allows for, as Cohen and Avieli (2004) have recently pointed out as well.5 Tourists have been, they write, primarily studied as “uninvolved observers”, as a result of which “the place of the other senses in their experience” is generally overlooked.6 As Desmond therefore suggests, “a more fully embodied concept of the tourist” is required, and accordingly the notion of the tourist gaze has to be expanded “to include other embodied aspects of experience […] both in the physical and imaginary realms”.7 A comparable inclusion of the study of the sensory, bodily dimensions of cultural touristic practices seems appropriate, too, for the context of Australian cultural tourism. More to the point, there is no doubt that a touristic experience of Indigenous Australia has to assign a part to the so-called bush tucker, by which the diverse menus that Aboriginal people were able to hunt and gather from their natural environment are generally connoted. Apart from the essential elements, such as an explanation of Aboriginal traditional beliefs and religions represented in the central concept of the Dreaming, and, for instance, an introduction to the traditional Indigenous musical instrument – the didgeridoo –, tourists are, as a rule, invited to have a corporeal experience of Indigenous bush foods. Indeed, what to think of plucking a magpie goose, ripping out its bloody intestines, then baking it in the ashes and having it served with bread and maple syrup? Or what about sniffing some crushed green ants before trying their lemony and nutritious taste, or having a chewy bite of the equally healthful pandanus fruit?8 For most, the ultimate challenge or initiation into the realm of Aboriginal bush foods is, however, the witchetty grub. In advertising campaigns branding Australia as a tourist destination, ample images of this wriggly white caterpillar are used to symbolize Aboriginal culture, as well as to attract tourists to having an experience of it. As Hinkson has argued, the presence of Aboriginal culture has served to provide both “historical depth and a culturally exotic edge” to Australia, which the “coun4 5 6 7 8

Desmond 1999: xiv, 12. See also ibid.: 252. Cohen & Avieli 2004: 757. Desmond 1999: xxi. These food experiences were part of different Aboriginal cultural tours in the Northern Territory of Australia in which I participated during my fieldwork.

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try’s image makers” have eagerly tapped into.9 Accordingly, in the perception of many tourists, the witchetty grub has come to signify the culmination of the deviant menu said to have been consumed by Aborigines for “thousands of years”.10 Both the anxiety and the thrill of coming up close to and personally experiencing such a creature were encapsulated in the recurring question that I heard (in various modifications) in the Aboriginal cultural tours that I have studied in Northern Australia, which was: “are we going to eat witchetty grubs?”. Indeed, no matter that the witchetty grub is not a species available in abundance as it is in the central part of the country; this larva has become a recurring trope in tourists’ understandings of the Aboriginal Other. In this paper I will analyse the bodily dimension of Indigenous cultural tourism in Australia by focusing on the role of the food in the cultural encounter between tourists and Aboriginal people, starting with this little creature. However, rather than focusing exclusively on tourists’ interest in the Other or discussing Indigenous responses to such (perhaps queer) tourist obsessions, I will argue that food and the feeding of the body play an important role in establishing a ritual of exchange that, through a keen emphasis on mutual alterity, in fact reveals a shared, intercultural domain. In so arguing, I also move away from the general disposition to approach the study of tourism either with an emphasis on tourist perspectives, or on local indigenous responses to tourism. To obtain an insight into the tourist-indigenous encounter, an integrated comparative viewpoint is needed; I argue that the one cannot be described without the other, as it is precisely through their mutual articulation that the interpretations of tourists and Aborigines alike take shape.

Tourism and Food In the context of tourism, as Long has pointed out, food is, both as a social system and aesthetic system, “a powerful medium through which to enter another culture”.11 This is not strange when one considers Leach’s insights on the human tendency to differentiate between “us” and “them”, the Other.12 He has argued that humans differentiate between the “normal” and “abnormal” so as to create a sense of social order. Such category distinction, he suggests, “provides us with a map; it tells us where we are and who we are. We are the prototype of normality; abnormality is the other”.13 Food and the body are both tabooed categories by means of which such distinctions are made. 9 Hinkson 2004: 139. 10 This turn of phrase appears recurrently in various media to highlight the exclusivity of Australian Aborigines cultures, see for example Territory Discoveries 2009. 11 Long 2004b: 42. 12 Leach 1982. 13 Ibid.: 116

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Long further notes that “the manoeuvring between the realms of the exotic and the edible is a dynamic, creative process that is perhaps best thought of as a negotiation of the realms with the needs, interests, and aesthetics of all the actors involved”.14 The prominence of the witchetty grub in Australian tourism promotions, and its presence, either physically or in words, may be seen as exemplary in this regard. Explicitly, it is clear that the foregrounding of certain food species in the presentation of culture occurs at the expense of others; witchetty grubs with the occasional kangaroo alone would have made for a poor diet indeed, if that were all that Aboriginal people lived from. Therefore, Cohen and Avieli argue, “tourist cuisines” should be seen as “new, sui generis cultural products”.15 It is this creative and interactive process that I wish to examine more closely. In this paper I do so by focusing on the lunch experience at a specific Indigenous tourism venue in Northern Australia.

Eating the Lunch Manyallaluk Cultural Tours formed one of three Indigenous tourism sites where I conducted anthropological fieldwork during several periods between 2004 and 2006. Manyallaluk is an Aboriginal community, situated about 100 kilometres southeast of Katherine, a small regional town in the Northern Territory of Australia. Manyallaluk Cultural Tours offered a cultural day tour, consisting of various activities, including a so-called bush walk and demonstrations of basket weaving, painting with grass brushes, spear throwing, and traditional fire lighting, after which tourists would have the opportunity to have a go at these practices themselves. Since its start in the early 1990s, the vital touristic value of Manyallaluk Cultural Tours has lain in the possibility to meet and establish an exchange with an Aboriginal person. The cornerstone of the day, the event by which this is achieved, is (and was on the day in question) the lunch. The lunch consisted of a salad, damper16, steak, barramundi17, and kangaroo tail. The crucial organisational feat of the day was its preparation, taking into account that, occasionally, tourist groups could amount up to 60 people. Consequently, after the tourists had left for their bush walk with one or two guides, the rest of the guides would start carrying out the practical arrangements for the lunch, such as cutting the salad, baking the damper, and wrapping the barramundi wings in aluminium foil before putting them into the ground oven. The kangaroos did not have 14 Long 2004b: 36–37. 15 Cohen & Avieli 2004: 767. 16 Damper is a kind of bread that is normally baked on the coals, but on the tour a barbecue plate was used for this purpose. 17 Barramundi is a local type of fish much sought after by many tourists to the region.

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to be hunted first; instead the tails were collected from the country butcher in town. After being stripped of their skin, smeared with olive oil, and wrapped in aluminium foil, the tails, like the barramundi wings, had to go into the ground oven. Commonly, tourists return from the walk when the final touches are being put to the meal. The preparation of the lunch was thus also made part of the performance by the Aboriginal guides. Put otherwise, the lunch was a welcome topic of discussion, as well as providing excellent “photo opportunities”, both of the food and the cooks in action. Regina Bendix observes that fear is part of the touristic longing, and that seems to be true with regard to the mixed delight tourists showed at the possibility of sampling a piece of kangaroo tail;18 excitement alternated with aversion. During one of the lunches, one female tourist, for instance, remarked that she could not bring herself to eat the tail, because that reminded her too much of Skippy, the orphaned bush kangaroo that featured in an Australian children’s programme in the 1960s. This may seem an excessive response, but this tourist was certainly not the only one to feel that a cow, in the form of steak, was edible, but a kangaroo was not. For those tourists, its presence alone was sufficient to suggest that Aborigines are different, and therefore the idea that “they” are far removed from “us” appeared effectively authenticated. For tourists who had tasted kangaroo meat before, usually Australians, the tail was still out of the ordinary enough to elicit comments. For some, for example, it confirmed that Aborigines, as a resourceful and ecologically-friendly people close to nature, used the whole animal – up to and including the tail.19 The lunch could thus offer an embodied experience through the “thrill” of sampling unusual tastes. The lunch also alluded explicitly to a longing I have often noted among tourists, that is, to experience everyday “community life”. The lunch, as opposed to the other tour activities, had a particular interactive dimension in that regard. The nurturing quality of the lunch invited a level of intimacy which appealed directly to the tourist’s desire for the authentic.20 The so-called “backstage” that appeared so often out of reach21 could be approximated during the lunch. This was partly due to the sampling of unusual food, but also to the pace in which mealtime was unfolded. Reportedly it was the slowness – not being rushed from one activity to the next – that allowed tourists to get a feeling for the place. The Other 18 Bendix 2002: 474. 19 The reason for introducing the tail instead of another part of the kangaroo was, however, likely to have been financial rather than cultural; it was relatively inexpensive meat. Indeed, in the earlier years of Manyallaluk Cultural Tours kangaroo filet – a much more exclusive piece of kangaroo meat – had been served to tourists. However, in the long term this became too costly, and the decision was made to serve a piece of tail only. 20 See Edwards 1996: 209. 21 Cf. MacCannell 1976.

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as the “anti-thesis of modern man or woman”,22 their culture being an extension of the natural world in harmony with the essence of place – the “Outback” –, could be cultivated through, particularly, the lunch interval. Indeed, Lattas has stated that “[I]nvariably Aborigines are placed on the borders of nature and culture […] their symbolic function within Western culture is to mediate the transition from nature to culture”.23 The lunch was able to exemplify this, and seen from a tourist perspective, could effectively draw the distinction between the “whitefella” tourist and the “blackfella” tour guide. Yet, conversely, it is important to point out that tourists were not merely relishing in the experience of the Other, either through attraction to or repugnance for the unusual food, in particular the piece of kangaroo tail. Indeed, my point would be that they are not only passive spectators, literally “being served”, but active performers as well. Tourism expert Cohen (1985) already noted the willingness of tourists to play along and to display a so-called “suspension of disbelief”.24 Furthermore, Long has remarked that, with the general idea that tourism is voluntary and becoming a tourist a choice, there is also an implied openness to the new.25 Consequently, the tourist identity is a liminal one, suggesting preparedness for the extraordinary. However, tourist behaviour is still governed by certain ritualised principles and conventions. Accordingly, the incorporation of foreign food – taking the risk of possible health problems caused by ill-cooked food or eating in spite of anxiety caused by its unfamiliarity26 – was not only done for the sake of the experience itself. I suggest that for the notion and the presence of the “Other” to succeed – the Aboriginal performance as Other – an active participation of the tourists was required; not merely by asking questions and taking pictures, but by conforming to the social obligation to taste the food on offer, and by commenting on it.27 Accordingly, in their encounter with the Manyallaluk Tour guides, the majority of tourists took on the role of the flexible, likeable, and interested “guest”. Although there were tourists who opted out of the chance for a piece of kangaroo tail, the majority would not refuse an offering, even if they did not eat it, but instead gladly sneaked it underneath the table, where a few hungry camp dogs were already waiting for pieces to be discarded.

22 23 24 25 26 27

Edwards 1996: 202. Lattas 1997: 246. Cf. Bruner & Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994. Long 2004b: 21–22. Cf. Cohen & Avieli 2004. Cf. Long 2004b: 21–22.

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Serving the Lunch This additional perspective on the touristic experience may make the creative and collaborative process underlying the sharing of food more visible. To understand better, however, it is necessary to consider not only the “consumer” side, but the “producer’” perspectives as well – i.e. their needs and interests in the production of this particular version of an Aboriginal meal. For the guides the significance of the lunch on several levels interacted with a tourist reading of this part of the tour. For them, too, the lunch was an important part of the day. The lunch as the highlight of the day had created a pleasantly prestigious realm of performance. As mentioned earlier, usually the lunch was able to generate valuable affirmation from tourists. It would, for instance, occur that one of the senior tour guides playfully asked: “good lunch?” Playing along in equal measure, tourists would then often generously compliment “the cook” for a delicious meal. Some would say enthusiastically that their stomachs had been filled more than sufficiently, which in turn would bring forth laughter and approval from the guides. In the course of the fifteen years of tourism at Manyallaluk, their understanding of “sharing culture” had developed, amongst others, into this intimate act of feeding the tourist visitor. To share “blackfella culture” was to teach visitors, first and foremost, about how one used to hunt and gather. The kangaroo, for instance, featured also in the activity of spear throwing – as the imagined target –, and that of painting – one of the obvious topics to draw. A “true blackfella”, as I heard one guide giving this title to a bold tourist, would therefore sample the “catch” of the day, and let him- or herself be served a piece of kangaroo tail. The lunch experience, and the kangaroo tail in particular, were effectively tapped to facilitate a division between them and the tourist Other. Aboriginal culture could be demarcated as a result of tourism that helped to forge and sustain a local sense of identity.28 The guides displayed pride in their profession and about the place their community had become as a result of the ongoing attention from tourists. They showed a keen appreciation of the long journey visitors often had undertaken to learn from them about “blackfella culture”. The cultural tour and the successful lunch offered an appealing conception of Aboriginal culture and perception of self in relation to non-Indigenous others, which was authorised and valued interculturally. At a time in which much of Indigenous affairs and policy development was being (and continues to be) discussed negatively – indeed, under the former Howard government (1996–2007) Aboriginal communities were labelled as unviable heritage museums or depicted as resorts of teeming trouble – the significance of an affirmative interface becomes great. In another, different way, however, the daily lunch routine had come to act as an important anchor in the tour for the guides, and thus acquired another reference 28 Cf. Redmond 2005: 235.

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to “blackfella culture”. It presented not only an entry into the epitome of “culture”, that is, the standardised narrative that could be imparted to tourists. The lunch also revealed a merging of the “backstage” with the supposed tourist “front stage”.29 In the course of fifteen years, the presence of tourism had grown to provide the backdrop against which much of community social life continued. Access to the lunch – one’s entitlement to taking part – was an additional reward accompanying the job of tour guide. Also, any surplus was distributed among the guides when the tourists’ needs had been adequately met. My impression was, however, that frequently the generosity of the meal was arranged precisely with the covert intent of generating a surplus. The lunch and any leftovers could alleviate financial pressures bearing on most families. If the money paid through the government programme was not delivering a substantial payment, than at least there was remuneration of other, tangible nature.30 In this sense the lunch was not only a major feature of the tour for tourists; but it had also become connected to the guides’ commitment to their work. The lunch, accordingly, often assumed features of an Aboriginal sociality that appeared to develop in relative independence of a tourist presence. It attracted people who had not worked as tour guides on that day, or, conversely, often the number of guides dwindled shortly after the lunch, as for many the central event of the day had been completed. In short, though perhaps tourists remained unaware of this, the lunch represented an “authentic indigenous experience” on more than one level. The kangaroo tail, bought at a local butcher’s, had become the embodiment of a proper bush meal at Manyallaluk. The rest of Skippy’s body was not missing for the Aboriginal guides savouring their lunch, just as there was no essentially distinct backstage beyond the tourism area.

Mediating the Lunch Cohen and Avieli assert that tourism cuisine always involves transformation of local cuisine through innovative and creative elements.31 This becomes particularly 29 Cf. MacCannell 1976. 30 The guides were paid through the Community Development Employment Programme. CDEP is a Commonwealth funding programme that started in 1977 with the aim of creating employment opportunities for Indigenous people in various community development projects, and as an alternative to unemployment benefit. CDEP allowed greater flexibility to the tourism worker adjusting to cultural patterns. Furthermore, a much larger pool of employees could be maintained than would otherwise be commercially viable. CDEP has, however, undergone major changes since my fieldwork, and from 1 July 2009 more reforms will take place. It is not clear what this will mean for the nature of employment at Manyallaluk Cultural Tours. 31 Cohen & Avieli 2004: 767.

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clear for the touristic sharing of food at Manyallaluk, when a third perspective on the lunch is considered. Indeed, this will reveal further that the shared interest in, and classification of, the Other is what defines this tourist ritual as an intercultural domain. For, although in the eyes of the guides the lunch was the product of their cultural presentation, the influence of the non-Indigenous administrators or (noncommercial) cultural brokers who, in different roles, affected the encounters between tourists and the guides, was also clearly present in the arrangement of the lunch.32 These intermediaries may be seen as the personified outcome of the Australian policy of “self-determination”, which was introduced in the early 1970s. After a long era of assimilation, the intention of this policy was to provide Aborigines with the means to control their own affairs, with the eventual purpose of a withdrawal of state interference. Numerous non-Indigenous people were appointed in Aboriginal bodies to assist in this process, on both managerial and operational levels. Yet, the ironic and unintended consequence of this development has been that a large amount of government meddling has been, and continues to be, required to realise the policy.33 In the case of Indigenous tourism, the effect was that intermediaries were not working themselves out of a job, as the self-determination ideology has it; rather their mediating input was often what sustained it. Accordingly, in the case of Manyallaluk Cultural Tours, the intermediaries felt it to be part of their assignment to help create a viable tourism business by assisting the Aboriginal owners in the presentation and “sharing” of their culture. Although these intermediaries saw their role as non-interfering, in practice the intermediaries’ perception of an Aboriginal “cultural product” did interfere with the form of the tour, including the lunch. Thus, the kangaroo tail appeared to have been, originally, introduced to the menu by one specific intermediary. During his time at Manyallaluk, this intermediary reasoned that “we are in the bush, so why can’t we use more kangaroo?” His influence on the arrangement of the lunch was simultaneously guided by his interpretation of what Aboriginal culture is and what should be shared by Aborigines correspondingly on the one hand, and what could achieve customer satisfaction on the other. Indeed, apart from the kangaroo tail and the practice of smearing it with olive oil, he transformed the accompanying salad, introducing feta cheese and olives. Knowing that he was of Italian-Australian descent and that his line of reasoning was that “even if the tour day was bad, at least the food was good”, aspects of intercultural collaboration become quite striking, yet

32 Within tourism studies, several authors have pointed to the influential, indeed central position that intermediaries hold in the establishment of local-tourist interaction. See, for example, Bruner & Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994; Cheong & Miller 2000. 33 See, in particular, Sullivan 1996 and Batty 2005 for a more detailed analysis of the long-term effects of the self-determination policy for the organisation of Aboriginal community life.

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without compromising the “authenticity” of the tour in both the eyes of tourists and Aboriginal tour guides.

Conclusion A common methodological approach of the study of cultural tourism is to either look at tourists’ experiences and interpretations, or to place the analytical weight on the “host” side of the encounter, i.e. those who receive the tourists. In this paper I have attempted to show that an integrated perspective may be more useful in generating insights into the nature of the tourist ritual. In particular, the question of the Other that is enacted is challenged. As Nick Stanley (1998) has argued before, the so-called “being ourselves for you” in cross-cultural representations is never a oneway street. Put differently, who is the “Other” in touristic interfaces? The promotion of Australian tourism is aimed at creating and maintaining the image of the Aboriginal Other. The different actors – tourists, Aborigines, and cultural brokers – in the Indigenous cultural tours can be seen to endorse this image. From my description of one particular case study, it emerged that all parties are keen to establish an embodied narrative of self and other, suggesting that boundaries may be temporarily crossed, but ultimately reconfirmed. Indeed, such is also the assertion embedded in Desmond’s notion of physical foundationalism (1999). It is clear that the bodily encounter between tourists and Aborigines through the exchange of food – for instance, the interaction through the plucking and digesting of a magpie goose, savouring a witchetty grub, or trying a piece of kangaroo tail during the lunch at Manyallaluk – works to create difference and distance. The experience of anomalous food substances creates a clear division between the normal and the abnormal that in this setting effectively indicated the presence of authenticity. Turgeon and Pastinelli have noted that, through the close associations “between the biological, the geographical and the cultural domain”, food is indeed very effective in essentialising identities and domesticating space.34 Yet, my claim here is that we should move beyond this viewpoint. I propose that, in the tourist encounter, a slippage of cultural boundaries can be observed.35 As the lunch at Manyallaluk revealed, there is no clear-cut distinction between an Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal realm. The lunch was, in essence, the product of intercultural collaboration between tourists, Aborigines, and intermediaries. The sampling of strange food items, such as the kangaroo tail, afforded tourists an embodied entrance into a different culture. Simultaneously, tourists willingly accepted and “played along” in this cultural representation, even though they also realised, 34 Turgeon & Pastinelli 2002: 251. 35 In developing this point I have been greatly inspired by Adams 1996.

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in general, that olive oil, feta cheese, and olives were probably not part of the “traditional” menu. It was the act and intimacy of eating that defined their experience to a great extent. Likewise, kangaroo tail was perhaps “traditionally” not on the menu of the tour guides in the way it was served to tourists, but in the development of a long-standing intercultural tradition of tourism in the community, it had become part of their daily menu. The guides considered it a vital part of their presentation, even if this presentation had been greatly edited by interested and benevolent mediating outsiders. Those intermediaries were particularly concerned with creating a viable and satisfactory product on the competitive tourism market, “reading” Aboriginal culture from a non-Aboriginal perspective, and thus reworking typical bush foods into palatable but exotic dishes, or introducing them as such. Long has stated that “meaning is not necessarily negated by tourism”, rather “tourism calls for the construction and negotiation of new meanings”.36 It works as “a resource for expressing identity, satisfying aesthetic needs, and enacting social roles and relationships”. The sharing of food emerges as a particularly captivating form for doing so. In the tourist encounter, a piece of kangaroo tail or a wriggly witchetty grub take on different meanings as cultural subjects, which are not necessarily shared; the bodily experience of them – in taste, smell, touch – may certainly be different for the various actors involved. Yet, my argument is that, in defining these meanings, tourists and Aborigines are mutually entwined in this particular space; the one experience cannot be “savoured” without the other.

36 Long 2004a: 7.

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References Adams, Vincanne 1996. Tigers of the Snow and Other Virtual Sherpas: An Ethnography of Himalayan Encounters. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Batty, Philip 2005. “Private Politics, Public Strategies: White Advisers and Their Aboriginal Subjects”. Oceania 75/3: 209–221. Bendix, Regina 2002. “Capitalizing on Memories Past, Present and Future. Observations on the Intertwining of Tourism and Narration”. Anthropological Theory 2/4: 469–487. Bruner, Edward M. 1991. “Transformation of Self in Tourism”. Annals of Tourism Research 18/2: 238–250. — & Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994. “Maasai on the Lawn: Tourist Realism in East Africa”. Cultural Anthropology 9/4: 435–470. Cheong, So-Min & Marc L. Miller 2000. “Power and Tourism: A Foucauldian Observation”. Annals of Tourism Research 27/2: 371–390. Cohen, Erik 1985. “Tourism as Play”. Religion 15/3: 291–304. — & Nir Avieli 2004. “Food in Tourism: Attraction and Impediment”. Annals of Tourism Research 31/4: 755–778. Desmond, Jane C. 1999. Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Edwards, Elizabeth 1996. “Postcards – Greetings from Another World”. In: Tom Selwyn (ed.). The Tourist Image. Myths and Myth Making in Tourism. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons: 197–221. Eindhoven, Myrna & Laurens Bakker & Gerard A. Persoon 2007. “Intruders in Sacred Territory: How Dutch Anthropologists deal with Popular Mediation of Their Sience”. Anthropology Today 23/1: 8–12. Hinkson, Melinda 2004. “Rebranding Australia – In a Different Light?”. Arena Journal 22: 37–43. Lattas, Andrew 1997. “Aborigines and Contemporary Australian Nationalism: Primordiality and the Cultural Politics of Otherness”. In: Gillian Cowlishaw & Barry Morris (eds.). Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and “Our” Society. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press: 223–255. Leach, Edmund R. 1982. “Humanity and Animality”. In: Edmund R. Leach. Social Anthropology. Glasgow: Fontana Paperbacks: 86–121. Long, Lucy M. 2004a. “Introduction”. In: Lucy. M. Long (ed.). Culinary Tourism. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky: 1–19. — 2004b. “Culinary Tourism: A Folkloristic Perspective on Eating and Otherness”. In: Lucy M. Long (ed.). Culinary Tourism. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky: 20–49. MacCannell, Dean 1976. The Tourist. A New Theory of the Leisure Class. London: The Macmillan Press. Redmond, Tony 2005. “Strange Relatives: Mutualities and Dependencies between Aborigines and Pastoralists in the Northern Kimberley”. Oceania 75/3: 234–246.

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Stanley, Nick 1998. Being Ourselves for You: The Global Display of Cultures. London: Middlesex University Press. Sullivan, Patrick 1996. All Free Man Now: Culture, Community and Politics in the Kimberley Region. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Territory Discoveries 2009. “Aboriginal Culture”. http://www.territorydiscoveries.com /campaigns/aboriginalculture/ (accessed on 15 March 2009). Turgeon, Laurier & Madeleine Pastinelli 2002. “‘Eat the World’: Postcolonial Encounters in Quebec City’s Ethnic Restaurants”. The Journal of American Folklore 115/456: 247–268. Urry, John 1990. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage Publications.

Hans Stifoss-Hanssen and Lars J. Danbolt

The Dead and the Numb Body: Disaster and Ritual Memory Introduction We have studied ritualising in the wake of four disasters and major accidents in Norway, applying observation, interview, and theoretical analysis and discussion. Implicitly, bodies and a bodily dimension occupy significant space in the material – bodies, in that the participants knew of their loved ones’ bodies resting in the sea, the wrecked train, or in a coffin near by, and a bodily dimension in that the participants experienced sensual and physiological manifestations of shock and grief during the ritual. Provided that our material is read in this light, it yields a multitude of relevant stories to be interpreted, maybe pointing to a renewed understanding of the rituals – as rituals of containing and controlling bodily chaos. Embodied expectations and experiences seem to be closely linked to the creation of memory and meaning.

Background Since the late 1980s, disaster rituals in the form of memorial services have been a part of the common social efforts of coping after disasters and major accidents in Norway.1 The disaster rituals have become an important way of dealing with the crisis on a community, as well as an individual, level. The memorial services take place during the first days after the accident, parallel to and in cooperation with rescue work and psychosocial interventions. The efforts of rescuing are represented in the rituals by the presence of firemen, health personnel, police, etc, visible in their working uniforms, and participating in processions and the lighting of candles. The memorial services were performed within a context of other formal and informal rituals after the accident; ritual spaces – i e the local churches – were left open almost from the time when the accident was publicly known, providing a 1 See Danbolt & Stifoss-Hanssen 2007; Post et al. 2003.

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place where the bereaved could participate in brief services and light candles. There were arranged gatherings at the site of the accident, with information and symbolic activities such as lighting candles, laying down flowers and brief poems or pictures on the ground, and other spontaneous tributes.2 Some of the bereaved were also involved in the identification of the deceased, and rituals connected to seeing the dead – most often conducted by a hospital chaplain. In addition, many of the bereaved performed their more private rituals with family and friends at home, or at significant locations like the accident site. The funerals were normally held a week after the memorial service. This means that the memorial service is part of a ritual chain connected to the accident. Another ritual context important for understanding the memorial services in Norway (and Scandinavia), is the folk church (Norwegian Lutheran Church), which 85% of the population belong to. The regular church attendance on Sundays is variable, and comparatively low in the population in general (about 10% go frequently to church, and 30% for Christmas3). However, practically all church members participate in the life-cycle related services; baptism of children, confirmation, weddings, and funerals.4 This means ritualising related to significant life events, and it is likely to be important for the church members’ experience of belonging to the church, as well as for their ritual competence in and tradition of interpreting life in challenging passages.5 The disaster rituals we studied in the Norwegian churches were closely connected to structures and contents of liturgy that the church members could be expected to be familiar with. The memorial services had content and structure from the ordinary Sunday services and the funeral services, adapted to the actual accidents. The situation of the bereaved during the first few days after the accident was generally marked by shock and other psycho-physiologically manifested crisis reactions, and in their minds were the images of the bodies of their loved ones; maybe recently identified, or perhaps still not retrieved. Most bereaved people came together with friends and relatives. In addition, the churches were filled with participants and representatives of the local authorities, and people from the community.

2 3 4 5

Westgaard 2006. Høeg & Hegstad & Winsnes 2000. Ibid. Furseth 1994.

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Aim, Method, and Material In this paper we focus on the bodily ritual experience of memorial service in bereaved persons. How is the ritual experienced? And what is their memory of the ritual a year after the traumatic event? Four accidents are included; a ferry accident (16 dead), a train crash (19 dead), a van accident (four dead), and a family killing (four dead). During the following one to five days after the accidents, memorial services were held at a nearby church. Local clergy were in charge of the services, in cooperation with health teams and rescue workers. The study is qualitatively designed, and the material consists of interviews (with ritual leaders and ritual participants, in total 21 people), observations, recordings, and documents, from disaster rituals after the four accidents. We contacted the clergy in charge of the services. Altogether, 10 priests and one deacon were interviewed. The priests facilitated contact with the bereaved persons, who agreed to participation before we made contact. A total of 10 bereaved persons were interviewed, all in their own homes. In addition, we interviewed one rescuer, contacted directly by us. All interviews were recorded, and the transcriptions were analysed by phenomenological inductive content analysis.6 The interviews were open (semi-structured), and the informants talked about the ritual participation from memory. According to our reading of the interview material, it had a distinct bodily character. The state of the affected persons during the rituals struck us as overwhelmingly vegetative, sensual, or regressive, with little cognitive memory. At the time of the rituals, the bodies of the deceased persons might still be in the wrecked vehicle, lost at sea, or with the coroner, states of which the bereaved were highly conscious. In the services the dead were represented by ritual objects such as candles, flowers, etc,, and by reading their names, and the participants described different reactions to these ritual elements, to which we shall return. The project is a study of ritual memory – the affected participants recalled their experiences 1 – 2 years after the event. The direct memories of the ritual are largely mediated by bodily sensations, and limitation (distortion?) of cognitive perception. The ritual elements that are remembered, are mostly those involving bodily sensation, or including nonverbal sensory communication. This observation is in line with the argument of DeMarinis, where she points to the creation of memory as a central effect of ritual behaviour, her focus being the coping and healing dimension of meaning-making created by ritual memory.7 The study is a study of memory, which is a central product of ritual. In the ritual, the

6 Malterud 2001a; 2001b. 7 DeMarinis 1996b: 237.

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bodily dimension is fundamental, it creates a bodily memory that adds to meaning, coping, and healing.8 The bodily aspects of our materials can be distinguished in sensations and actions (horizontal axis), and in actual events and the memories of those events (vertical axis): Actual event performance Reproduced memory interviews

Bodily sensation 1

Bodily action 2

3

4

This sorting of the elements indicates that we could deal with the bodily material in four forms or versions: 1. The actual experience of bodily sensations during a ritual, as it can possibly be observed in the video recordings 2. The actual performance of ritual actions during a ritual, like lighting candles, stealing candles, as it can be observed in the video recordings 2. The memory of bodily reactions, shivers, inner chaos, tears, obstructions to singing, as reported by the persons in the interview texts 4. The memory of ritual actions, like lighting candles, stealing candles, as reported by the persons in the interview texts In this study, we present an analysis and discussion of body-related material as it was present in the interviewees’ memory, that was recorded during the interviews (points 3 – 4 above).

Analysis All rites had ritual candle lighting, which was experienced as the most central element. There was a link between the candle, the dead (missing) person, and that person’s name, but this was done in different ways in the four cases. In one memorial, the names were not released and known, and the candles were lit without reading names. In one, the names were read with the candle lighting, in one the candles were lit outside the sanctuary and carried in the procession, and later the names were read while the candles were placed on the altar rails. In one the names were known, but the candles were lit during the prelude without mentioning the names. We present the cases in more detail below. 8 Connerton 1989.

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Ferry Accident, 16 Dead The ferry had sunk due to a very strong wind. During the memorial, there was also a very strong wind – and for the opening of the ritual, 17 rescue personnel in uniforms made a ritual entrance holding burning candles. When the names of the deceased and missing were read, the candles were placed on the altar rails. The names were read by the county mayor, and the candles were carried by rescue professionals, police, a director of the ferry company, and a survivor. On the direct national TV broadcast, the names were titled on the screen. A bereaved husband (55), said: “For many this was sort of confirmation of what had happened. It was hard to understand. […] And when you hear the name of your wife read loudly, and they come forth with a candle, I mean, that is the strongest. […] I think that was a good thing to be done. It wasn’t something tumultuous, it was still […] I think it was important.” He experienced the reading of names as a dignified and valuable memorial of the deceased. For him, it was also a reality-confronting action of great importance, which he associated with other rituals, first of all the identification and the more intimate memorial ceremony at the hospital two days earlier, and the funeral at his local church a week later. In all three memorial rituals the dead body was either present, or represented by a ritual object (candle). Car Accident, Four Dead and Three Seriously Injured Seven candles were lit by local representatives of schools, etc., making clear through ritual statements whether each person was dead or injured. At the end of the service, the participants were invited to light candles. Almost all participated. Some of the informants reported that they had never lit candles in a church before, but despite their relative insecurity, the ritual was experienced as something of great significance. The father of a severely injured boy of nineteen said: “This is the first service I have been to where the minister had to come forward and say It’s over, you can go.” Int: “Did they just want to stay?” Father: “Everybody sat, nobody got up or left, so the minister said There’s no more program here.” The bells rang […]. Int: “We’ve heard that people stayed for a long time outside the church, talking […]” Father: “That’s right, they did […] Normally, I sing along with the others, all the time. But this time I just couldn’t. Maybe it was because I simply couldn’t see the words throught my tears, I was – simply not ready for it. […] And I do not remember what songs were sung – I couldn’t retrieve it from the back of my head if I tried very hard. […] I lit one of the small candles when the service was over […]

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When the big candle was lit for (x, son’s name), I knew I would grab it […] I had a plan […]” Int: “Did you bring it to the hospital?” Father: “Yes, and if things had gone wrong, I would have taken it out. I brought it all the time. Fortunately, we didn’t need it.” Train Crash, Nineteen Dead Two trains collided frontally, and the rescue work was very difficult due to intense fire. There was a memorial service which was broadcast on TV. A candle globe with a larger number of candles than the number of deceased was lit by rescuers, police, the director of the train company, a survivor, and the county mayor. There was no reading of names, because the names of the dead had not yet been made public, and the clergy wanted the candle lighting not to be solely a representation of the deceased, but more openly including the bereaved, the rescuers, the local community, as well as related to religious myths of hope (e g “Jesus is the light of the world”). A widow, (42 years) said: “It was very dignified, one candle after another being lit in that globe, and the names read. I was thinking of the fact that his name was going to be read aloud, and that it would sort of touch the button in me that would make the cup spill over; and it did.” Int: “What do you mean spill over?” Widow: “Well, you kind of hold back, inside. And then you give yourself over to the grief, and maybe, in a way you hadn’t done until then. It was so powerful, it just flooded and I cried and shivered and thoughts came. The body is a little out of control, it’s just like – you press a button, and then something starts and it goes on for a few seconds, and then it calms down – until they read the next name. And then you see the people in the pew in front of you reacting in the same way, and you think, at least it’s normal. If not, we would have been a bunch of mad people. […] Another good thing was the rescuers doing the lighting of candles. We trusted them, and we could see they felt sorry, for the people they didn’t manage to rescue.” As mentioned above, there was no reading of names in this ritual. This widow had a vivid memory of the ritual, not only with regard to the spurious memory of the reading of names, but also shown by the fact that she described her physical reactions several times in the interview. Family Killing, Four Dead A husband killed his wife, their two primary school age children, and then himself. The memorial service was five days after the incident. After the service, the participants left the church with torches in a march which ended up in the town hall.

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The ritual leaders did not enter the sanctuary ritually (in a procession), but just came in from behind the altar during the prelude. One candle for each deceased person was prepared in the front, but the ritual leaders had “forgotten” to plan the lighting of the candles. When they became aware of this, one of the leaders lit one of the candles from a candelabrum on the altar, and lit the other three candles from the first. In the interview, the priests remembered this act differently, namely that one of them had lit the four candles with matches. No doubt this was a difficult ritual situation, where they had been discussing the symbolism in the candles. In one view, the four were a family, in another, one of them was the killer of the others. Should they have four candles representing the four killed? If so, should the four candles stand together in a line? Should they be lit from the same flame? One of the priests said: “The four candles symbolised the four dead, as simple as that. […] We had a discussion, should the father’s candle stand along with the others, I mean, when you start thinking about it; the killer and the three victims […] What can you say? They were all in a way victims, but […] It’s more like a harmony model. […] I mean, in the church all people are equal, created in the image of the Creator. […] The candles do not reflect the relationship between the four persons.” In this case we do not have interviews with the relatives of those killed, as far as they did not participate in interviews but put their attention on the funerals. The memorial service was aimed firstly at the community, the schoolmates of the children and the colleagues of the parents, as well as neighbours and friends. We have interviewed the ritual leaders only.

Discussion In our view, these cases demonstrate that very powerful ritual memories have been created. In the minds of the affected persons, the memories of the rituals stand out as something that created meaning and coping abilities, and the importance of bodily sensations and performance can be seen in all four cases. The man who lost his spouse in the ferry accident seemingly accepted the ritual candle lighting and pronunciation of his wife’s name as an emotional confrontation with reality. The father of the injured boy gave great importance to his own efforts at getting hold of the candle that had been lit in support of his son’s healing, and the bereaved woman after the train crash even remembered things that had not been done (the reading of names, which did not take place). And the clergy that had served at the memorial after the family killing probably felt bodily uneasiness at the sight of the candles, reflecting the relationship between the family members in a deeply unjust way. According to DeMarinis, religious ritual, “[...] in actual experience and through its resulting memory, belongs to a category of experience and memoryformation that is psychologically powerful and which has a mangnitude of function

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not easily paralleled by other types of experience or memory”.9 In line with Connerton, who focuses on the memory of communities, we have found that this formation of memory is of a largely bodily origin.10 The body coming gradually into focus in the study of ritual is a distinct development that, in our opinion, can be observed in recent academic studies of ritual. In his paper, LaMothe writes about “[...] the role of bodily movement in the production of religious meaning”.11 LaMothe points to the art of the dancers I. Duncan and M. Graham as examples of how bodily expression contributes independently to religious meaning. LaMothe also points to the need of ritual studies to observe the methodological consequences of this bodily perspective; in his opinion, the study of body in religion requires bodily awareness. This observation bears some resemblance to the views of the phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty. He has been credited for having developed reflection on “the body as perception”, a powerful and intellectually advanced analysis of human existence as a bodily one.12 This analysis has, at least in Scandinavian gender and ritual research, been applied widely in attempts to counter destructive body-mind or body-soul dichotomies.13 Strathern & Stewart have contributed to this new kind of focus on the body, with discussions that are also aimed at bridging subject-object relations and mind-body relations.14 Their core term seems to be “embodiment”, which implies a view of human beings as a continuum of mind and body, fused together, and their idea of an undivided existence is described as cosmos – to us that resonates a great deal with the idea of meaning, and it seems fruitful to bring to the understanding of disaster ritual. But even more, the relationship between body and ritual is highlighted by all the attempts at understanding and describing ritual healing. Truly, ritual healing is a dominating arena for ritual, and even for the study of ritual. The analytical and empirical challenges in these studies are almost endless,15 but the recent preoccupation with the body in ritual studies is probably moving understanding in a constructive direction. There is broad agreement on moving toward a more sophisticated view of the body, consequently seeing the body-mind relation as a continuum, and an improved consciousness of the need to distinguish between cure and healing. The disaster rituals can, broadly speaking, be seen as interventions aimed

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

DeMarinis 1996a: 213. Connerton 1989. LaMothe 2008: 587. Merleau-Ponty 2002. See e.g. Engelsrud 2006. Strathern & Stewart 2008: 67. Strathern & Stewart 1999; McGuire 1988; Stifoss-Hanssen & Kallenberg 1996; Danbolt & Stifoss-Hanssen 2007.

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at helping victims deal with trauma, and therefore there are good reasons to interpret them in conjunction with healing rituals.

The Contribution of the Study Our idea has been that the disaster rituals should be described and analysed, because their emotional and bodily expressions are so overwhelming, – more so than can perhaps be brought out in writing. Hence, they provide extreme material for ritual studies. At the same time, the rituals were clearly ritualistic, and not designed as therapy – and yet they seemed able to contain the reactions – a chaos within a frame of cosmos. Hence, a description and discussion of the ritual should be of therapeutic interest. With its empirical material, we hope that the study can provide more knowledge about the body in ritual to ritual studies, and inform the psychosocial task forces about the potential of ritual, and of ritual memory.

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References Connerton, Paul 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Themes in the Social Sciences). Danbolt, Lars J. & Hans Stifoss-Hanssen 2007. Gråte min sang – minnegudstjenester etter store ulykker og katastrofer. [Cry My Song. Memorial Services after Major Accidents and Disasters]. Kristiansand: Høyskoleforlaget – Norwegian Academic Press. DeMarinis, Valerie 1996a. “Introductory Essay to Clinical Explorations”. In: Michael B. Aune & Valerie DeMarinis (eds.). Religious and Social Ritual – Interdisciplinary Explorations. Albany: State University of New York Press: 209–216. — 1996b. “A Psychotherapeutic Exploration of Religious Ritual as Mediator of Memory and Meaning”. In: Michael B. Aune & Valerie DeMarinis (eds.). Religious and Social Ritual – Interdisciplinary Explorations. Albany: State University of New York Press: 235–266. Engelsrud, Gunn 2006. Hva er kropp?. [What is body?]. Oslo: Universitetsfolaget. Furseth, Inger 1994. “Civil Religion in a Low Key: The Case of Norway”. Acta Sociologica 37: 39–54. Høeg, Ida M. & Harald Hegstad & Ole G. Winsnes 2000. Folkekirke 2000. [Folk Church 2000]. Oslo: KIFO – Centre for Church Research. LaMothe, Kimerer L. 2008. “What Bodies Know About Religion and the Study of It”. Journal of The American Academy of Religion 76: 573–601. Malterud, Kirsti 2001a. “The Art and Science of Clinical Knowledge: Evidence beyond Measures and Numbers”. The Lancet 358: 397–400. — 2001b. “Qualitative Research: Standards, Challenges, and Guidelines”. The Lancet 358: 483–488. McGuire, Meredith 1988. Ritual Healing in Suburban America. New Brunswick et al.: Rutgers University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 2002. “PART X, Embodied Perception”. In: Dermont Moran & Timothy Mooney (eds.). The Phenomenology Reader. London & New York: Routledge: 421–459. Post, Paulus G.J. et al. 2003. Disaster Ritual: Explorations of an Emerging Ritual Repertoire. Leuven: Peeters (Liturgia condenda 15). Stifoss-Hanssen, Hans & Kjell Kallenberg 1996. Existential Questions and Health – Research Frontlines and Challenges. Stockholm: Forskningsrådsnämnden. Strathern, Andrew & Pamela J. Stewart 1999. Curing and Healing. Medical Anthropology in Global Perspective. Durham: Carolina Academic Press. — 2008. “Embodiment Theory in Performance and Performativity”. Journal of Ritual Studies 22: 67–72. Westgaard, Hege 2006. “‘Like a Trace’: The Spontaneous Shrine as a Cultural Expression of Grief in Norway”. In: Jack Santino (ed.). Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York et al.: Palgrave Macmillan: 147–175.

Sophie Bolt and Eric Venbrux1

Funerals Without a Corpse: Awkwardness in Mortuary Rituals for Body Donors Survivors of body donors have to conduct a funeral without the corpse, if they want one, because the dead body is taken to an anatomical institute. In his seminal essay on mortuary rituals, Robert Hertz argues that “the materiality on which the collective activity will act after death, and which will be the object of the rites, is naturally the very body of the deceased”.2 When, however, the corpse is not available, the survivors of the body donor will have to adjust to the situation. How does the absence of the dead body affect the mortuary rituals for the deceased body donor? And if the corpse is indeed “the object of the rites”, what can substitute for it as “the materiality on which the collective activity will act after death”? To answer these questions, twenty-four cases of accomplished body donation in the Netherlands were examined. The cases in question were traced via death notices in newspapers. Fieldwork was conducted by Sophie Bolt from 2007–2008. Information was retrieved from interviews with the survivors, and from direct observation of the funeral rituals. It also followed from in-depth interviews with relatives of body donors, that the wish of the latter is respected, but often at odds with the survivors’ desire to have a proper funeral.3 The matter is further complicated by the fact that standard procedures to perform a mortuary ritual in the case of body donation do not exist. Relatives and friends left behind thus have to create a ceremony of their own, or according to the deceased’s wishes, taking into account that there is no body to be disposed of. Strikingly, in most of the cases of accomplished body donation that were studied, a ritual was held. In only three cases did it not occur, because the body donor had explicitly asked not to organise a ritual, and thereupon the bereaved granted this wish. The body donor also disapproved of a ritual in two other cases, but irrespective of the deceased’s desire not to have one, the survivors did gather for a fare1 This research is part of the project “Refiguring Death Rites: Post-Secular Material Religion in the Netherlands”, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), at Radboud University Nijmegen (www.ru.nl/rdr). 2 Hertz 1960: 83. 3 Bolt 2008.

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well ceremony. In our discussion here, we focus on the awkwardness, as perceived or experienced, of performing a funeral without a corpse. Surely, “death is an occasion for expressing relationships and making claims about relationships”,4 but how to relate to a newly dead person whose death is not evidenced by a corpse? In fact, the deceased person who is central to the ritual is not at the scene. In other words, the central character fails to attend the funeral. Unlike cases in which the body is missing and not retrievable as a result of a disaster, accidental disappearance, or some other cause, body donors have made a conscious decision to be absent at their funerals. Whether they like it or not, the survivors have come to terms with this intentional act of the deceased as well. In what follows we will first briefly discuss the problem of a funeral without a corpse. Next, to understand our particular case it is necessary to know a little more about the proceedings of body donation in the Netherlands. Following this, we will reflect on differences and similarities between death rituals for body donors and “normal” funerals. Finally, we will focus on what Ronald Grimes has called “cracks in the ritual”5 that lend its performance a certain awkwardness, as perceived or experienced by the participants.

The Quest for a New Ritual As Hirsch (1921) makes clear, until the fifteenth century, the Dutch word for funeral, uitvaart, referred to the procession of those who followed the corpse. Later, the term uitvaart gained the meaning of not just the funeral procession, but of the whole pomp and ceremony, from the house of death to the church and to the graveyard, concluded by the lowering of the corpse into the grave. For a period of time, however, corpses were not allowed in churches. Instead of preceding the burial, the religious rituals took place after the disposal of the body. Mostly this occurred in the next few days. The actual burial (begrafenis) and the other rituals in church thus became separated. These other rituals came to be known as the uitvaart. Because the corpse had already been interred, they took place with a catafalque. The funeral service absente corpore (without a dead body) could also be held elsewhere, and even in several places at once, particularly for the high and mighty. The funeral without a corpse is not without precedent in Dutch history. In the seventeenth century, the Protestants adhered to the older customs and reconnected the term uitvaart to the actual disposal of the body.6 In Catholic areas the practice of a funeral without a corpse was continued for occasions when the body was missing or the deceased buried in a too distant place for the funeral-goers (in, for 4 Dubish 1989: 197. 5 Grimes 2008. 6 Hirsch 1921: 105–107.

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instance, the place of birth) to attend.7 The Basques are a case in point,8 but also in the Netherlands Catholic priests sometimes use a catafalque, although more often a photograph, to substitute for the (absent) body.9 The Netherlands nowadays, however, is a highly secularized country and a great many body donors belong to the religiously unaffiliated. The processes of secularisation and individualisation have put the traditional religious rituals increasingly out of favour, resulting in “a quest for new rituals”.10 Especially in the inevitable death rituals, experimentation and innovation is taking place,11 facilitated by the consumer-oriented undertaking business, and leading to expressions of a more personalised religiosity in materialised form. Ritual creativity, in other words, may be expected to create a so-called personalised funeral (persoonlijke uitvaart). In the case of deceased body donors, of course, the absence of the corpse forces a measure of improvisation upon the ones who organise the final farewell. These are apt cases in which to study ritual dynamics, for the alternative method of bodily disposal provides a circumstance in which the active participants in mortuary ritual cannot perform it without obvious changes to what is considered a common funeral. In addition, such cases are rare enough for the people involved not to have a set example (if that would not conflict with the more general ideal of a personalized funeral) in most instances. What is more, these special cases might shed light on certain aspects of ritual dynamics in ordinary cases that are otherwise more difficult to detect. Because of the absent corpse, they might say something about the meaning of the presence of the dead body in ordinary funerals, in which it finds less succinct expression.

The Missing “Object” Hertz, as mentioned, considers the corpse “the object of the rites”.12 One might ask if and when a dead person becomes an object, but in the understanding of many Dutch people there is little doubt that the physical remains have to be treated with dignity. The ritual procession of the corpse in its disposal marks the transition of the deceased from the category of the living to the category of the dead.13 At the time of the funeral rituals, the newly dead person is on the threshold, in a liminal phase, betwixt and between the living and the dead. The “status passage” requires 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

See also Ariès 1983. Douglass 1969: 128–129. Eduard Kimman SJ, personal communication, Nijmegen, 15 May 2008. Wouters 2002. Venbrux & Heessels & Bolt 2008. Hertz 1960: 83. Van Gennep 1960.

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ritual expression.14 In the death rituals as crucial rites of passage, as Janssen and Verheggen (1997) argue, body symbolism is employed to disconnect the corpse from the living body, the only intrinsic symbol that refers to itself also, hence becoming a symbol in the sense of something that solely refers to something else. When the actual body, for one reason or another, is lacking, it will have to be imagined or substituted for to achieve the shift in meaning. For Hallam, Hockey, and Howarth, the corpse stands for “death”, and “in the absence of the corpse ritual time and space can be used to make more tangible that for which there is no material evidence”.15 The ritual use of a catafalque, either a structure for the lying-in-state of the body at funerals, or a pall-covered coffinshaped one, may be seen as a classic example. We will cite some examples from present-day mortuary rituals for body donors below. With regard to ritual symbols, it must be noted that a symbol, as Turner (1973) puts it, has both a cognitive and an “orectic” or emotional pole. The efficacy of ritual symbols hinges on both aspects. The emotional side of things is as important as the intellectual understanding. For the survivors, the dead body might refer to the person consciously known and remembered, as well as shared experiences and feelings. Hertz (1960) also notes that a death involves a painful process of emotional detachment for the survivors. The dead body seems to be the key in the realisation and acceptance of physical death of the person in question, allowing for a ritual of separation from the living. The quest of the bereaved to have missing bodies (in cases other than body donation) recovered is, it is often said, their only means to achieve emotional closure.16 The practice of viewing the embalmed corpse in the United States is motivated by the undertaking business as helping people to cope with their grief.17 Barley suggests that “the British obsession with recovering bodies after a disaster” might have to do with the fact that the “Church of England does not allow funerals without a body.”18 Notwithstanding this, it appears that the survivors of body donors, although informed about the whereabouts of the corpse, do not know exactly what will happen to it. This insecurity, especially for the bereaved unfamiliar with body donation, can leave a void behind, and block the possibility of a continuing relationship with the deceased.19 “Making sense of the dead and putting them in their place without bodies is a very troubling matter”, according to Laderman.20 Survivors of body donors can have a last look at the body, but time to do so is mostly very limited, as 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Glaser & Strauss 1971. Hallam & Hockey & Howarth 1999: 62–63. Bell 2006: 541. Laderman 2003: 105–118. Barley 1995: 100. Cf. Badone 1989: 155–156. Laderman 2003: 214.

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body donors have to arrive at the anatomical institute within twenty-four hours in order for the bodies to be properly preserved.

Body Donation to Science Body donation to science has gained popularity in the Netherlands to the extent that most anatomical departments have halted the registrations of new potential body donors. If people decide to donate their bodies, they have to make arrangements in advance, well before their death. It is only by personal approval, written down in a signed contract between an anatomical institute and a potential donor, that people can donate their bodies for medical training or research. The donors have to produce their last will in a handwritten document in which they declare their last wish. In the Netherlands there are eight anatomical institutes, each with its own rules and formal procedures. All advise the prospective body donor to tell relatives, friends, and the family doctor about the decision. After death the body has to arrive at the anatomical institute within twenty-four hours so it can be preserved. Therefore, obstruction of the actual body donation is possible, in theory, simply by delaying the announcement of death to the anatomical institute or by not reporting it at all. When the body or its parts are no longer of use to the anatomical institute, they are cremated. In the past, crematoria scattered the ashes of body donors on a field existing for that purpose on their property. Environmental legislation, however, foreclosed the overloading of these fields with the scattered ashes of body donors. The problem has been solved by most of the crematoria by subcontracting a company, named Aqua-Omega, to scatter the ashes on the North Sea. Most relatives of body donors, however, remain unaware of what will happen to the corpse, let alone its disposal. Just one anatomical institute in the Netherlands offers them the opportunity to be present at the cremation of the remains. The other institutes do not do so. Survivors of body donors often do not even know whether the donor’s body will be eventually buried or cremated. Frequently, the body has been cut up in different parts that will not be disposed of at one and the same time. Therefore, it is also difficult to have the donor’s survivors to attend these occasions for practical and logistical reasons. Imagine the anatomical institute contacting the relatives of a body donor, telling them about the cremation of a limb or other part of the body. What is more, some body parts happen to be used by the anatomical institute for many years, such as the ones preserved with the technique of plastination, whereas other ones – for instance, the skeleton – may never be disposed of. The process with regard to whole-body donation offers no guarantee that the dead body will be accepted. Consequently, there is also a measure of insecurity for the next of kin concerning the means of disposition of the body. The anatomical institutes advise potential body donors not to terminate their funeral insurance. When

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the body is accepted, it will no longer be available for a funeral. This raises the question of how the survivors relate to the newly dead person whose death is not evidenced by a corpse.

Funerals Without a Corpse Whereas one can avoid nearly all other ritualised moments, death is consistently the most difficult to leave symbolically undefined and meaningless. In earlier times, this was attested by the struggles over corpses between the next of kin and those who wanted to use them for dissection in anatomical theatres or otherwise. At stake were a proper funeral and grave (cf. the violation of graves by body snatchers), as well as the fate of the soul of the deceased. Buried at crossroads, for example, those executed would be denied a transition from the world of the living to the world of the dead.21 A double death was dealt them, so to speak. Concerns about the destiny of the deceased are nowadays less in the foreground than the needs of the survivors to cope with their grief. Yet an important purpose of mortuary ritual is also to mark or bring about the status passage of the newly dead from the category of the living to the category of the dead. Relating to the once-living person as someone who is dead usually involves the ritual processing of the corpse, or as Hertz puts it, “the materiality on which the collective activity will act after death”.22 In funerals we clearly see the “territorial passage”, that according to Van Gennep is identified with “the passage from one social position to another”.23 But in the case of funerals of body donors, there is no corpse (although an empty coffin might be used, but this has become very rare) to transport or move in space. Nevertheless, the mortuary rituals for body donors that were studied resembled the “ordinary” funerals with corpses in many respects. These rituals followed the same pattern, including the order of speeches, music, and poems. Remarkably, most of them took place within a week after the death. Although there is no requirement for the bereaved of body donors to do so, they complied with the time schedule for funerals with corpses. Following Dutch legislation, the dead body has to be buried or cremated between 36 hours and five days after the demise. Other resemblances include death notices in the newspaper, a gathering for the ritual at a special place, the (secular or religious) service or ceremony, and condolences to the bereaved. It is mainly the absence of the corpse in which these rituals differ most significantly from ordinary funerals. Some informants explained that it was an odd feel21 Blok 1984; Rupp 1990; Highet 2005. 22 Hertz 1960: 83. 23 Van Gennep 1960: 192.

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ing, when a loved one has died; to have an undertaker arrive within a few hours to take the body away for good and then being left alone, without the deceased. Some of the bereaved were taken by surprise by the impact this quick farewell had on them. They considered it a strange feeling, especially because nothing restrained them from continuing their day-to-day activities. They said that it was as if nobody had died, because there was no body of the deceased to take care of. Some of the bereaved, who had had the experience of organising “normal” death rituals, confided that they missed the compulsory social event after someone had died. In this very sad moment, they learned what it was like to be together with family, talking about memories, sharing emotional expressions, while preparing mourning cards and selecting a casket. It was a time to think about one’s relationship to the deceased, as well as of a social bonding of the survivors, working together to assure a good funeral ritual in honour of the deceased. Many did so also for body donors, and, as we will see, they sought to substitute objects for the body. The ritual gestures with material objects, however, simultaneously indicate that the corpse is absent. Gibson shows that, later as well, in mourning and remembrance “objects function as traces of corporeal absence”.24 But, whereas in ordinary cases the bereaved have a grave or other memorial place they can visit and somehow be close to the physical remains of the deceased, this has been lacking in the cases under discussion. Only very recently, in September 2007, the anatomical institute in Groningen established a monument for body donors in the Netherlands – the first, and until now only one, intended to serve as a collective place of remembrance. Apparently, survivors of body donors come to visit the monument, because fresh flowers are placed there regularly.25 At funerals without a corpse a similar desire for something tangible or visible prevails.

Filling in of the Missing Body To overcome the problem of the missing body, many bereaved people resort to alternative ways to relate to the departed by representing that body. Indeed, as Bell suggests: “A funeral without a body must, by eulogy or gesture or metonymic association, create a type of body that can be mourned, fondled by grief, and then laid very clearly to rest”.26 Van den Akker refers to a case in the Netherlands in which the bereaved of a deceased body donor placed flowers in the shape of the latter’s body on a billiard table.27 The actual body ended up at the dissection table, but the

24 25 26 27

Gibson 2004: 285. Peter Gerrits, personal communication, Groningen, 24 April 2008. Bell 2006: 542. Van den Akker 2006: 203.

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survivors needed some sort of body to enable them to cut their ties to the deceased in ritual fashion. Further examples can be given from the fieldwork conducted. In July 2007 there was a ritual for a female body donor. In his opening speech, the undertaker told this woman’s grandchildren that she had been brought to a big hospital, and that, therefore, the funeral ritual was slightly different than usual. He explained how: “We have placed a nice photograph of your grandmother, to make her still a bit present today, and there is a beautiful bouquet with wild flowers, because your grandmother liked them a lot.” In this ritual the vase with wild flowers and the photograph played an important role, directly referring to the deceased grandmother. Furthermore, the woman’s favourite sweet biscuits (stroopwafels), with which she always used to indulge her visitors, were handed out. The particular type of biscuit and the flowers were closely associated with characteristic gestures of the woman. Her presence was evoked both by these personalised ritual gestures and by the photographic portrait. A photo and flowers were central in another funerary gathering for a body donor, too. In a similar case where the bereaved had also placed a photo and flowers in the room of the commemoration, one of the informants explained that they had done this not for themselves, but to ease those present, so that they would recognise the ritual, in spite of the body being absent. At another memorial service, a bust, surrounded by bunches of white flowers, represented the absent body donor. The bust was located close to the altar. The son of the deceased addressed believers and non-believers in his eulogy; saying that he hoped that the service and gathering would support them all in dealing with the loss of his mother. He described her as self-willed, offering a number of anecdotes to underscore this characterisation. When the funeral service was over, quite a few people went to the bust, where they exchanged memories of the woman and commented on the likeness of the sculptured representation to her looks when she was young. On several occasions no mention was made of the body donation at all. These funeral rituals took place without a coffin, obvious to all who attended, but the matter did not receive any verbal attention. Apparently, non-verbal communication sufficed, or what was already known did not need to be stressed. For whatever reasons, it seems that a symbolic representation of the deceased had to speak for itself. In one case, a table stood for the dead body donor, who was named Anna. The table had been taken from her living room to the hall of the community centre where the farewell gathering was being held. It looked exactly as it was on the evening Anna died, with her last cigarettes in an ashtray, a bouquet of wild flowers, a box with a few cookies, water in a carafe, two burning tea-warmers, and her last cup of coffee. In the view of the organisers, this tableau aptly said who Anna was. At the same time, it might be seen as the last word of the deceased. The arranged table, all these things having been touched by her, was “a point of material contact

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with the body of a once-living person”.28 Moreover, the smell of Anna’s coffee and cigarettes, the memorable taste of her cookies, and the feel of the tablecloth, made her presence palpable. One could imagine sitting next to her at this very same table. It created an atmosphere of proximity, perhaps even more so than if her physical body had been there in a coffin. This impression was enhanced by a memorial card with the table (instead of Anna’s photographic portrait) printed on the cover, handed out at the conclusion of the celebration in the community hall.

Ritual Awkwardness Besides improvisation and the ritual use of substitutes for the actual body, the death-related rituals for body donors sometimes showed indeterminacy. In these instances, the uncertainty due to the absence of the corpse could produce unsettling ritual moments. We will illustrate this point with two examples of minor “cracks in the ritual”29 as observed during field research. In both cases, the funeral rituals for body donors took place in churches, the one a Protestant Church and the other one a Catholic Church. The undertaker and the priest, respectively, attempted to adhere to the ritual gestures they would have made had there been a coffin with a corpse, that is, the situation with which they (as ritual leaders) and the audience were familiar. The customary gestures, however, failed to convince the audience in these exceptional cases, because “the object of the rites” was not really there, and the pretence of “business as usual” made the ritual into an awkward act. Thus, one Friday morning, in a Protestant Church filled with relatives and friends of a deceased body donor, the reverend had just finished his speech. A photograph of the newly dead person had been placed in front of the altar. The undertaker, dressed in a traditional black costume, walked up to the photo. Next he bowed deeply to the portrait of the deceased. Although bowing to the coffin had been readily accepted as a means of honouring the dead, the people in church now were uncertain whether they should follow the funeral director, bowing to a mere photograph, or not. Undecided, they rose to their feet and were looking at each other, waiting to see what the one or the other would do. Usually all of them walked along the coffin and bade a farewell to the deceased, but now quite a number of people sneaked out of the church. Others went towards the altar and bowed to the photo. For those who left without further ado, the gesture probably did not entail the ritual value of honouring and bidding a farewell to the deceased. They chose to avoid this awkward moment, unprepared to make an empty gesture, simply because the dead person happened not to be present. Some may have left, too, when a greater social distance to the deceased made them consider the ritual 28 Hallam & Hockey 2001: 115. 29 Grimes 2008.

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gesture in these circumstances inappropriate to them. Moreover, uncertainty – signalled by swift glances, whisperings, people shrugging their shoulders, and facial expressions, could in itself have been a major factor in people willing to escape the awkwardness of the situation. The uncertainty of a priest, when it came to the moment in the Roman Catholic funeral mass for incense to be wafted about the coffin, provides another example of a minor crack in the ritual. At that point in time, the priest seemed to realise that, in this ritual for a body donor, there happened to be no coffin with a corpse to be blessed with holy water and to be perfumed with incense. At the conclusion of the funeral mass, when the moment for the ritual gesture presented itself, the priest adopted an indecisive attitude. When after his wavering he had made up his mind, however, he turned to the photograph of the deceased. Unwilling to forego the ritual act, the priest offered incense to the picture. Afterwards, the bereaved of the body donor were talking about this incident. They laughed, because they regarded it as odd to waft incense about a photo. They said they were also laughing about the priest, for he stuck to the standard ritual script, almost ignoring the fact that there was no coffin, forcing him to make a ritual gesture they considered inappropriate. Grimes comments on such criticism as follows30: “The moment in which a rite lurches or hesitates is a pregnant pause. However, most of us do not initially experience it that way. We do not want to pause here, calling further attention to what feels like a breach in decorum. Rather, we hurry past it. Then, after the funeral we criticize the funeral director or priests ‘They should have explained’, ‘They should have done it this way, not that’.”31 The “cracks in the ritual”, Grimes adds, can result in criticism after the fact, but they can just as well be moments of ritual creativity.32 Funeral rituals for body donors have to be performed without a corpse, unlike ordinary funerals in which the dead body is the most significant symbol. In spite of the awkwardness in these mortuary rituals, they bear testimony to ritual dynamics as a result of the necessary improvisations.

Conclusion The awkwardness in mortuary rituals for body donors, as perceived or experienced, was related to the absence of the corpse and drew attention to its significance as a 30 We would like to thank professor Ronald Grimes for his inspiring words spoken at the book presentation of “Rituele Creativiteit. Actuele veranderingen in de uitvaart- en rouwcultuur in Nederland” in October 2008. 31 Grimes 2008. 32 Ibid.

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ritual symbol in funerals. The dead body represents the person with whom the survivors shared a history and maintained social bonds. The corpse, in other words, materialises that person, is most closely identified with the person, and makes manifest the changed condition of the once-living person. The status passage from the living to the dead involves a redefinition of the social ties to the newly dead. Obviously, the body can no longer personify a living person, making it of utmost importance to mark the transition in mortuary rituals. We have seen that, in the funeral rituals for body donors, the dead body had to be substituted for or imagined in one way or another, allowing the bereaved to transform their relationship to the newly dead. The absence of the corpse affected the mortuary rituals for the deceased body donors, because it created uncertainty and ritual indeterminacy. These occasions, in spite of the sensed awkwardness at times, however, also provided an opportunity for ritual improvisation and renewal. The ritual dynamics of this particular type of funeral without a corpse, most remarkably, drew on the framework of ordinary funerals. Even without a corpse, the majority of survivors did not want to leave the death of the body donor undefined and meaningless, so they resorted to rituals resembling ordinary funerals.

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References Ariès, Philippe 1983 [1977]. The Hour of Our Death. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Badone, Ellen 1989. The Appointed Hour: Death, Worldview, and Social Change in Brittany. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barley, Nigel 1995. Dancing on the Grave: Encounters with Death. London: John Murray. Bell, Catherine 2006. “Embodiment”. In: Jens Kreinath & Jan Snoek & Michael Stausberg (eds.). Theorizing Rituals: Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts. Leiden: Brill: 533–544. Blok, Anton 1984. “Openbare strafvoltrekkingen als rites de passage”. Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 97: 470–481. Bolt, Sophie 2008. “Als ik dood ben ga ik naar de universiteit. Leven met de wens van een lichaamsdonor”. In: Eric Venbrux & Meike Heessels & Sophie Bolt (eds.) 2008. Rituele creativiteit. Actuele veranderingen in de uitvaart- en rouwcultuur in Nederland. Zoetermeer: Meinema: 48–57. Douglass, William A. 1969. Death in Murélaga: Funerary Ritual in a Spanish Basque Village. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Dubish, Jill 1989. “Death and Social Change in Greece”. Anthropological Quarterly 62/4: 189–200. Gibson, Margaret 2004. “Melancholy Objects”. Mortality 9/4: 285–299. Glaser, Barney G. & Anselm L. Strauss 1971. Status passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Grimes, Ronald L. 2008. “Seeds of Ritual Creativity”. Paper Presented at a Book Launch in the University Library of Radboud University Nijmegen, 9 October 2008. Hallam, Elizabeth & Jenny Hockey 2001. Death, Memory, and Material Culture. Oxford: Berg. — & Glennys Howarth 1999. Beyond the Body. Death and Social Identity. London: Routledge. Hertz, Robert 1960 [1907]. Death and the Right Hand. Glencoe: The Free Press. Highet, Megan 2005. “Body Snatching and Grave Robbing: Bodies for Science”. History and Anthropology 16/4: 415–440. Hirsch, René J. 1921. Het doodenritueel in de Nederlanden vóór 1700. Amsterdam: A.H. Kruyt. Janssen, Jacques & Theo Verheggen 1997. “The Double Centre of Gravity in Durkheim’s Symbol Theory: Bringing the Symbolism of the Body back in”. Sociological Theory 15/3: 294–306. Laderman, Gary 2003. Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rupp, Jan C.C. 1990. “Matters of Life and Death: The Social and Cultural Conditions of the Rise of Anatomical Theatres, with Special Reference to Seventeenth Century Holland”. History of Science 28: 263–287.

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Turner, Victor 1973. “Symbols in African Ritual”. Science 179: 1100–1105. Van den Akker, Piet A.M. 2006. De dode nabij. Nieuwe rituelen na overlijden. Tilburg: IVA. Van Gennep, Arnold 1960 [1909]. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Venbrux, Eric & Meike Heessels & Sophie Bolt (eds.) 2008. Rituele creativiteit. Actuele veranderingen in de uitvaart- en rouwcultuur in Nederland. Zoetermeer: Meinema. Wouters, Cas 2002. “The Quest for New Rituals in Dying and Mourning”. Body & Society 8/1: 1–28.

Image 1: Beschuit met muisjes

Photo: © Wieneke Hofland

Janneke Peelen

Social Birth of Stillborn Children: The Body as Matter, the Body as Person1 It is a Dutch tradition to serve “beschuit met muisjes” to celebrate the birth of a child.2 The delicacy consists of a rusk sprinkled with anise-flavoured grains, pink grains when a girl is born, and blue grains when a boy is born. Parents, often the father, serve this to visitors who come to see the newborn child. At work, parents treat their colleagues to “beschuit met muisjes”, and if there are older siblings, they serve the delicacy at school. In this way, new life is traditionally celebrated in the Netherlands. In March 2008, I assisted at a funeral for the undertaking business where I was conducting my fieldwork.3 While the undertaker was collecting the next of kin, I stayed behind in the church, where the funeral service was held, to prepare “beschuit met muisjes”. It was the funeral of a newborn baby. The girl was born premature and had died one day later. Her parents were shocked and grieved by their loss, but they were also very proud of their beautiful daughter. For them it was just as important to celebrate the birth of their first child and their introduction into parenthood. A way for them to do this was to serve “beschuit met muisjes” to the guests after the funeral ceremony. The consumption of “beschuit met muisjes” at the death of a newborn child is becoming a common practice. Some hospital staff ask parents after the birth of a stillborn child whether they would like to have “beschuit met muisjes”. And more and more undertakers present it to parents as a possible delicacy to be served after the funeral ceremony of their child. However, the celebration of birth, of new life, at the funeral of a newborn child is not without opposition. A mother I interviewed 1 This research is part of the project “Refiguring Death Rites: Post-Secular Material Religion in the Netherlands”, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and Radboud University Nijmegen (www.ru.nl/rdr). 2 Although nowadays a rusk is an ordinary breakfast product in the Netherlands, for long it has been a luxury product. It was only eaten on special celebrative occasions (for more information on birth customs in the Netherlands, see Strouken 1991). Anis was believed to be stimulating the production of mother milk. 3 This paper is based on anthropological research conducted in 2007 and 2008. The main data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with bereaved (mainly parents) and professionals involved in dealings with pregnancy loss. Another important data source has been participant observation at an undertaking business specialised in children’s funerals.

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about the death of her son said that they served “beschuit met muisjes” at the funeral as well, but that the plates returned almost full to the kitchen.4 Most visitors found it inappropriate to eat a delicacy associated with birth at a funeral, she said. The contradiction present in the consumption of “beschuit met muisjes” at a funeral, and the discomfort this provokes, indicate the ambiguity that arises when a newborn child dies. Stillbirth, and the loss of an unborn child in general, lingers in the twilight zone between two important passages in life: the passage to life and the passage to death. The possibility of multiple interpretations of the event makes it ambiguous. For many parents, the birth of the child, despite the fact that it is dead, indicates the arrival of a new person. Others might be uncertain about what has been lost. Can we already speak of a child? Is what is lost a human being or not? In this paper, I will argue that the attribution of social status and that of being a person to stillborn children is contingent on ritualisations5 surrounding the dead body that are oriented towards birth and life. To understand the significance of these ritualisations, we should see them primarily as processes of social integration, rather than social disintegration. This differs from general assumptions made regarding death rites. Robert Hertz argued in his seminal essay that death rites are aimed at the ritualised disintegration of the deceased from the world of the living.6 This idea is taken up far more broadly in theorisations of death rites.7 Within the integration process, which I emphasise in this paper, “life”-related objects fulfil a powerful role in the transformative process of the body from matter into person. Funerary professionals have an important role in the supply of these objects. In this paper I will illustrate my argument with an analysis of a company called “Prematuur” [premature], which produces funerary products specifically for the situation of the loss of a newborn child. With this specific focus on funerary professionals, I do not want to suggest that they are indispensable in the assignment of social status to stillborn children, nor do I suggest that parents cannot realise this process without their products and supports. I do claim that these funerary professionals and their products create a stimulating environment for the social integration of stillborn children.

4 Personal communication, 27 March 2008. 5 I borrow this term from Ronald Grimes (2000). He introduces the term “ritualisations” to understand actions and performances that are ritual-like in terms of their ritual qualities. For example, singing a bedtime song for a child can be seen as a functional action to comfort the child. When the child is dead, however, the symbolic level of this singing becomes more important. For parents it is an action through which they can relate themselves to the child as its parents. 6 Hertz 1960. 7 E.g. Metcalf & Huntington 1991; Palgi & Abramovitch 1984; Suzuki 2000.

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Social Status of Stillborn Children First, I will briefly elaborate on socio-cultural ideas concerning the social status of stillborn children. I will do so in order to introduce the uncertainties and ambiguities about human existence that occur when a child dies before or shortly after birth. It is in this complex context of categorising life and death that ritualised objects are employed. In the Netherlands, as was the case in many other “western” societies, stillbirth was for long perceived as a socially irrelevant event. Up to the seventies at least, most stillborn children were buried anonymously without ceremony in unmarked graves.8 Often it was the hospital or a church official who took care of the disposal of the dead child. The child was taken away immediately, and many parents did not see their child. Some parents do not even know whether their child was a boy or a girl. Parents were told not to grieve over the death of a stillborn child, and were stimulated to focus on a new pregnancy. Within society, there was little or no social requirement to mourn after the death of a newborn child. The main reason that stillbirth was not socially recognised as a “real” death was the fact that, in general, newborn children were not assigned a social status. This is in line with an accepted premise in anthropological literature on death and death rituals, to the effect that the social impact of a demise depends on the social status of the deceased.9 Stillborn children are easily excluded from social processes in which social status is granted to persons. For example feeding, name giving, baptism, circumcision, first communion, puberty rites, marriage are all rituals that take place after birth. Stillborn children are excluded from these processes of becoming a social person, because their death precedes or occurs simultaneously with biological birth. Therefore the social status of a stillborn child depends to a great extent on the degree to which human qualities and personhood are ascribed to foetuses. A growing amount of literature on the social status of foetuses shows that the extent to which unborn children possess personhood is a matter of continuous social and political negotiation.10 For example, the social status of foetuses is central to public and scientific debates on abortion, genetic research on embryos, and the legal status of the unborn child when it needs protection, e.g. from a drug and alcohol-addicted mother. These debates show that the unborn child is increasingly seen as a human person that needs protection from its social environment. Two developments have been very important for the growing social status of unborn children. First, the improvement of prenatal ultrasonic scans: several studies on the impact of ultrasonic scans on the experience of pregnancy show that 8 See also van Zweden 2008. 9 E.g. Hertz 1960; Seremetakis 1991; van Gennep 1960. 10 E.g. Duden 1993; Heriot 1996; Morgan 2002; 2006; Rapp 2000.

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pregnant women who have undergone ultrasonic scans and their partners report an increased sense of knowing the baby.11 Seeing the baby confirms its existence and identity. The pregnancy becomes more real, and the bond of the parents with the child grows. Parents-to-be increasingly involve their social network in the experience of pregnancy by showing the ultrasonic scans and revealing the sex of the child. Grandparents receive a copy of the scan and place it on the mantelshelf, as if it were the first photograph of their grandchild. And a quick search on the internet shows that the intimacy of pregnancy is made public on sites such as You Tube by sharing such ultrasonic scans. A second factor contributing to the social status of unborn children is formed by those medical developments that redraw the boundaries of human existence. Nowadays, a foetus is supposed to be viable outside the womb after 24 weeks’ gestation. In the Netherlands, active treatment and life support of a prematurely born child starts from 25 weeks of gestation. The medical developments and the improvement of prenatal ultrasonic scans have increased the valuation and visibility of the unborn child. Social integration and the acknowledgement of the existence of such children as human beings increasingly take place before birth. This has resulted in an increased acknowledgment of stillbirth as a socially relevant event in the last two decades. In the Netherlands we see that, for approximately 20 years now, stillborn children are no longer anonymously buried, and that the grief of parents over the loss of a stillborn child is more accepted socially. Full-fledged ceremonies and the development of funerary products especially for babies and infants is a phenomenon of the last 10 to 15 years. However, the fact that the unborn child has become more visible does not mean that there are no longer conflicting perspectives on the social status of stillborn children. Their existence and death is still surrounded by ambiguity. The willingness to grant personhood to a stillborn child may be contingent on factors that have little to do with the ontological status of foetuses or infants. Moreover, the experiences of parents could differ from the perspectives of their social networks, resulting in mutual incomprehension. To conclude this short elaboration on the social status of stillborns, I want to highlight that the categorising of life and death is not so much dependent on biological qualities. This definitional process depends more on cultural and social qualifications. People’s perspectives on stillbirth are formed out of a combination of medical facts, personal experiences with pregnancy, birth, and loss, social and religious background, and cosmological perceptions. Ideas about life and death are often very abstract and hard to express in words. Rituals, as symbolic performances, and symbolic objects are powerful tools to express these abstract ideas. Moreover, the implications of certain perspectives on life and death become trans11 E.g. Mitchell 2001; Williams 2005.

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parent in the way people deal with death. In my broader research on dealings with pregnancy loss, I have found that rituals and symbolic objects are actively employed to negotiate the boundaries of human existence. In the remaining part of this paper I will elaborate on the role of funerary professionals and their products in the assignment of social identity to the body of the dead child.

Professionals and the Child’s Dead Body Professionals who are involved in dealings with the dead child and its bereaved parents can have a decisive role in perceptions of, and dealings with, the dead body. A nurse at a neonatal intensive care unit told how she encourages bereaved parents to count, for instance, the toes, and to look for similarities between themselves and the child.12 She and her colleagues deliberately treat the dead child like any other newborn baby. Parents react very positively to this practice. They feel confirmed in their feelings of pride towards their child. On the other hand, professionals can dehumanise the child’s body. A mother, whose daughter died due to sudden infant death syndrome, still has a vivid image of her daughter lying on a metal table under a white blanket at the morgue.13 The mother was sent there to say goodbye. Her daughter was not wearing any clothes and a label with her name was attached to her toe. Ways of covering the body of the child turn out to be essential in the attribution of human personhood to the dead child. Clothes, for instance, are an important means for visibly transforming the body from dead matter into a person. For most parents, the dead child is their child, despite its death. Clothes confirm and express this towards the parents themselves, as well as towards the outside world. Clothes transform the image people have of the body. In the above example of the morgue, the nakedness of the child made her body into a clinical object. Recently, several entrepreneurs who focus on special clothes, blankets, and wraparound mufflers, baskets, and coffins for babies have entered the funeral business. Mari Jonker from “Sterrenkindje” [Starchild]14, for instance, makes baskets, coffins, and mufflers. She started her business in 2007. With her products she aims to contribute to a dignified and human farewell for deceased babies. She wants to express and pass on her love and respect for life from its very beginning. Concerning the ways of covering the body, she stated: “There has to be a difference in what you wrap in what. If you buy fried fish at the market, they wrap it in a newspaper. There has to be a difference. This [the child] was a life just starting. In [God’s] creation there is nothing apart 12 Personal communication, 27 February 2009. 13 Personal communication, 7 February 2008. 14 See: www.sterrenkindje.nl

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Janneke Peelen from human beings that has the ability of thinking. This being the case, you can’t wrap it in newspapers, can you? But if parents want it like that then it’s their choice, then it’s their dignified farewell. But it shouldn’t be wrapped in newspapers only because there isn’t an alternative.”15

Mari Jonker provides parents with an alternative. Ways of covering the body not only depend on the existence of nice clothes, mufflers, baskets, and coffins for deceased babies. Conceptions or beliefs are the main defining factors behind the absence or presence of these products. In the past, stillborn children were not buried in a carton box only because there was no alternative. People simply did not bother about an alternative, because the death of a newborn child was often seen as socially insignificant. Equally, the current presence of funerary products specially made for babies points at more than the need for an alternative. For example, Mari Jonkers’ designs are inspired by the shape of a star, because nowadays many parents think of their deceased child as a star in the sky. In the following section, I will elaborate in more detail on perspectives on stillbirth that transpire from funerary products. I will focus on the products of “Prematuur” [Premature], the first company, as far as I know, to produce clothes and coffins for deceased premature children. In the meantime, they have a (small) market outlet outside the Netherlands, mainly Belgium, as well.

“Prematuur” “Prematuur” is an internet shop that was started in 2005 by two women, Anita den Besten and Cordula Huisman.16 They produce two groups of products. One is clothing for prematurely born children. Normal commercial sizes of baby clothes are often too big for premature children. These clothes are purchased both by parents whose child has been born prematurely and is lying in an incubator, and parents whose premature child has died. A second type of product is a more typical funerary product, such as coffins and baskets, and wraparound mufflers. These funerary products are also adjusted to the size of premature children. Anita and Cordula started their shop as a small-scale business in 2005. But four years later, the clothes are manufactured in India, and they sell over 500 sets of clothes and 200 coffins and baskets a year. The number of perinatal deaths (stillbirth and neonatal deaths taken together) is declining year for year.17 The growing sales of clothes and coffins thus cannot be attributed to a growing number of child15 Personal communication, 7 May 2008. 16 See: www.prematuur.nl and www.kindermandjes.nl. 17 Official statistics concerning perinatal death in the Netherlands are published by “Stichting Perinatale Registratie Nederland” [Perinatal Registration Netherlands] and “Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek” [Statistics Netherlands].

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ren dying before or shortly after birth. The sales figures seem to indicate that the demand for these kinds of products is growing. The idea for the internet shop developed in 2002, two days after Cordula gave birth to a child that had died in the womb after 21 weeks of gestation. Cordula and her husband could not find any fitting clothes to bury their son in. Anita, who was already a close friend of Cordula’s in those days, remarked that Cordula was probably not the only one who was going through this experience of loss, and, more importantly for the start-up of their business, probably not the only one who could not find special clothes for premature children. Anita also knew that Cordula was very handy with a needle and thread, so she suggested that they could start a shop where they could sell clothing in small sizes and other things for premature children. Cordula was immediately very enthusiastic, but because both women became pregnant a short time thereafter, it took them a few more years to realise their plans. Cordula and Anita found their motivation to start their business in their own personal experience with the loss of a child. This is often the case with other professionals who focus on pregnancy loss, too. Undertakers who have specialised in children’s funerals, ritual guides18 who pay special attention to the funerals of stillborn children, or other producers of funerary goods for stillborn children, have often personally experienced the loss of a child, or have been close in some way to those suffering such a loss. They are bereaved parents themselves, or they have worked, for example, as nurses at the neonatal unit in a hospital. In starting their businesses, they felt, just as did Cordula and Anita, that there was something missing in the supply of funerary goods and services for stillborn children. Most of them stress that they felt that these children were treated as if they were not human beings yet. On the contrary, they state, stillborn children were treated as waste that had to be disposed of as soon as possible. This group of professionals are trying, on the one hand, to change this, and on the other hand, to make others aware of practices that are inhuman and disrespectful in their eyes. In analysing the provision by professionals of supplies for rituals, I have found three notable perspectives on pregnancy loss emphasised. I will explain how these general ideas have been transformed in the products of Cordula and Anita. The first idea that is transmitted in the work of professionals is that a stillborn or prematurely born child is a human being possessing human qualities and personhood. Although it did not live outside the womb, and although it is still very small, its existence is a reality. For this reason, they emphasise that a deceased baby should 18 In the Netherlands „Ritueelbegeleider“ [Ritual guide] is a new and increasingly popular profession. It denotes people who are specialized in the creation and guidens of ritual performances. Most of the times they are involved in life-passage-rituals, such as funerals and marriages.

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be treated with dignity and as a human being, or more specifically as a newborn child. Cordula and Anita, just like Mari Jonker, emphasise that the body of a deceased baby is not just waste, and therefore should not just be wrapped in old cloths or a newspaper to be disposed of. Dead children are children and should be dressed as such. The transformative effect of the clothes follows from the comments of bereaved parents in the guestbook at the internet site of Prematuur. For example, a mother wrote about the effect of the clothes on her daughter: “Full of surprise, I saw that all at once she had become a little human, one with her own personality”. To dress the child in real clothes causes the naked body of the child to change from just flesh and bones into a social person. The coffins and baskets alike emphasise the need for respectful treatment of deceased babies. A dead child, according to Anita and Cordula, should not be thrown away with medical waste as if it were rubbish. Equally, it should not be buried in a carton as if it were not worth anything. Similarly to adults, to other human beings, these children should be placed in a nice, comfortable coffin. The design of the coffins and baskets is striking. They resemble children’s beds. They include a small mattress, a blanket, and a cuddle toy. Another producer of coffins offers a coffin that only differs from a crib in that it has a solid cover. These designs emphasise the arrival of a new person, regardless of death. For many parents, this occasions the visualisation of their own experiences.

Image 2: A funerary basket designed as a child’s bed. Photo: © Prematuur

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Another vision of human existence that is transmitted in the work of this group of professionals is the idea of the uniqueness of every single life, and the idea that this life starts well before birth. Every life has its unique message for the world. A child in the womb already has its own significance for the life of the parents, grandparents, and others. Every child or every life is unique and irreplaceable. Cordula and Anita express this idea of uniqueness through the use of different colour combinations and the designs of their products. Every item, at least the coffins and baskets, is handmade and slightly different from the others. Moreover, parents can propose their own designs or material, corresponding, for example, with the planned decoration of the nursery. Thirdly, professionals emphasise the parental identity of the parents. Although the child has died, the parents did become parents and always will be. The clothes, as well as the design of the baskets as little beds, make it possible that the parents can symbolically care for their child. In this social process, the parents can relate to their child as its parents. Moreover, to dress the child and to tuck it in provide bereaved parents with extra memories of a shared life. For parents to have their identity as parents socially affirmed, it is important that they can share the birth of their child with their social environment. To serve “beschuit met muisjes” is one way. Equally important is to show their child to others. Cordula and Anita feel that nice clothes and a beautiful coffin provide a positive context for this social presentation. The products “Prematuur” offers could be seen as just practical objects. The effects these objects have for the social status of stillborn children, however, makes them into powerful ritualised objects. “Beschuit met muisjes” are easily recognised as ritual objects, because this delicacy is not eaten outside the context of birth. Clothes, blankets, and cuddle toys, on the other hand, have a daily and practical function. From a functional perspective, a dead child does not need to be kept warm or to be comforted. Nevertheless, these objects are used and desired in the context of stillbirth. If we look beyond the functional aspect, we find a powerful transformative effect of these objects. They communicate cultural ideas concerning the social status and identity of the dead child that transcend the functional aspects. The objects support ritualised actions that, on a symbolic level, attach social significance to stillbirth.

How do the Ritual Products Offered Support the Assignment of Social Status to Stillborn Children? The answer to this question is my conclusion as well. So let me first return to the “beschuit met muisjes”, and the discomfort of the guests at the funeral at eating this typical birth-related delicacy. Why is it that people feel that “beschuit met muisjes” is out of place during a funeral? I would like to suggest that this is caused by the

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confrontation of two life passages, birth and death, in a singular event. People need categories and clear boundaries to organise their lives. The sudden presence of birth related food in the context of death disrupts these categories and boundaries. The fact of stillbirth itself, birth and death mingled with one another, makes it even more confusing. “Beschuit met muisjes” is part of an existing ritual repertoire, as is the case with the specific clothes and coffins of “Prematuur”. There is nothing new about these things. However, the significance of these symbolic objects is transformed, because they are used in another and unexpected context. Eric Venbrux has written about the funeral, in a Swiss mountain village, of an 18-year-old unmarried girl, who was buried in a wedding dress.19 He argued that this reference to marriage in the context of death should be seen as a powerful metaphor for important cultural norms and values. Marriage in the Swiss village was seen as an important passage towards a completed and reproductive life. Therefore, the death of an unmarried girl signified a double loss. To dress the girl in a wedding dress was a way for the villagers to give the girl marital status posthumously, and by this means to give her a respectful funeral. The reference to marriage in the context of this death was necessary to effect fully, and with respect, the passage to death of this 18-year-old girl. In the same way, in the case of stillbirth and interruption of pregnancy in general, metaphors of birth and life are used to give the loss social significance. Before a demise can be seen as a “real” death, the social status of the deceased needs to be socially affirmed and acknowledged. In order to confirm the existence and human qualities of stillborn children, symbolic objects that refer to life and birth are employed. The transmission of ritual processes of birth to the context of the loss of an unborn child supports the social “birth” of such children. Because of this, the body of the child is no longer treated as just flesh and bones, as waste, but as the body of a social person. Professionals, such as Anita and Cordula of “Prematuur”, might offer parents the ritual objects by which they can transform their dead child into a social person. They fulfil the needs of bereaved parents. At the same time, through public advertisement and through the confrontation with their products at a funeral, they impress upon parents, a well as other their ideas of stillbirth. The symbolic objects and rituals of professionals are powerful tools in the negotiation of the social significance of stillbirth, and they help to put stillborn children through processes of social birth.

19 Venbrux 1991; 1994.

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank my colleagues of the “Refiguring Death Rites” research group for their comments on previous drafts of this paper. I especially want to thank Ronald Grimes for our fruitful discussions on this paper and my research in general that helped to sharpen and formulate the argument of this paper. This paper could not have been written without the co-operation of my informants, who entrusted their stories to me.

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References Duden, Barbara 1993. Disembodying Women. Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gennep, Arnold van 1960 [1909]. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Grimes, Ronald L. 2000. Deeply into the Bone. Re-Inventing Rites of Passage. Berkeley: University of California Press Heriot, M. Jean 1996. “Fetal Right versus the Female Body. Contested Domains”. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series 10: 176–194. Hertz, Robert 1960 [1907]. “A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death”. In: Robert Hertz. Death and the Right Hand. Glencoe: The Free Press: 27–86. Metcalf, Peter & Richard Huntington 1991. Celebrations of Death. The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, Lisa M. 2001. Baby’s First Picture. Ultrasound and the Politics of the Fetal Subject. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Morgan, Lynn M. 2002. “’Properly Disposed Off’: A History of Embryo Disposal and the Changing Claims on Fetal Remains”. Medical Anthropology 21: 247–274. — 2006. “When Does Life Begin? A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Personhood of Fetuses and Young Children”. In: William A. Haviland, Robert J. Gordon & Luis A. Vivanco (eds.). Talking about People. Readings in Contemporary Cultural Anthropology. New York: The McGraw Hill: 30–41. Palgi, Phyllis & Henry Abramovitch 1984. “Death: A Cross-Cultural Perspective”. Annual Review Anthropology 1: 385–417. Rapp, Rayna 2000. Testing Women, Testing the Fetus. The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. London: Routledge. Seremetakis, C. Nadia 1991. The Last Word. Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Strouken, Ineke 1991. Beschuit met Muisjes. En Andere Gebruiken rond Geboorte. Utrecht, Antwerpen: Uitgeverij Kosmos. Suzuki, Hikaru 2000. The Price of Death. The Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Venbrux, Eric 1991. “A Death-marriage in a Swiss Mountain Village”. Ethnologia Europea 21: 193–205. — 1994. “Een meisje en de dood. Een symbolisch huwelijk in een Zwitsers bergdorp”. In: Henk Driessen & Huub de Jonge (eds.). In de Ban van Betekenis. Proeven van Symbolisch Antropologie. Nijmegen: SUN: 217–246. Williams, Claire 2005. “Framing the Fetus in Medical Work: Rituals and Practices”. Social Science and Medicine 60: 2085–2095. Zweden, Corien van 2008. De kunst van het rouwen. Een persoonlijke geschiedenis. Amsterdam & Antwerpen: Uitgeverij L.J. Veen.

Meike Heessels

From Commercial Goods to Cherished Ash Objects: Mediating Contact with the Dead through the Body1 Cremation was prohibited in the Netherlands until 1955, due to the influence of Christian notions that were rooted in the legislation on body disposal.2 Since then, the number of cremations has increased enormously. While in 1955 only two percent of the dead were cremated, this percentage had risen to 54.4% in 2007.3 For a long time, the ashes were anonymously scattered by crematorium personnel. However, in 1978, a Buddhist family demanded to take the urn with their son’s ashes home to put it on a domestic shrine.4 Their request was refused, but it did set in motion a social discussion about the destination of human ashes. Increasingly, bereaved people demanded to be involved in the handling of their relatives’ ashes.5 In 1991 the Burial and Cremation Act was adapted and it was permitted to take the ashes home. At that point in time, though, it was forbidden to take the ashes out of the urn.6 This evoked problems as some bereaved people wanted to divide the ashes and incorporate a part of them in an article of jewellery or other object. In some cases, the survivors successfully pleaded with crematorium personnel to fill a matchbox 1 This research is part of the project “Refiguring Death Rites: Post-Secular Material Religion in the Netherlands”, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), at Radboud University Nijmegen (www.ru.nl/rdr). 2 The Catholic Church officially condemned cremation until 1963. Though the Protestant Church never formally banned cremation, generally burial was preferred. As the majority of the Dutch considered themselves Christian (60% in 1966 as opposed to 30% in 2006; see Bernts & Dekker & de Hart 2007), the rejection of cremation affected the legislation on body disposal in the Netherlands that rendered cremation a crime until 1955. In contrast, in the UK cremation was already legalised in 1884 (Jupp 2006). 3 http://www.lvc-online.nl/viewer/file.aspx?FileInfoID=7, more recent data from 2008, that remain to be confirmed by the Central Bureau for Statistics (CBS), point to a further increase in the number of cremations. 4 Cappers 1999: 290. 5 Heessels 2008: 19–20. 6 The ban on opening the urn was installed, because it was forbidden to divide the ashes. The fact that it was rendered important to keep the ashes together might have been the result of the Christian notion of the wholeness (and supposed sacrality) of the body.

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with ashes before sealing the urn.7 From 1994, even though it was officially forbidden to divide the ashes, some crematoria openly sold pendants in which a little bit of ashes could be saved.8 Eventually, in 1998, these informal practices resulted in an adjustment of the Burial and Cremation Act that permitted the division of the ashes. Today, approximately 13% of the bereaved possess an object containing ashes, and they are still growing in popularity.9 In this article I will analyse objects containing ashes as a focal point in which practices and ideas concerning the dead in the Netherlands intersect.10 Approximately since the second half of the eighties, a growing body of literature points towards the importance of the material and sensorial aspects of religion,11 emphasising the way people employ religious objects. With respect to the study of death, the analysis of material culture has also been proven fruitful, as death often provokes ways of remembering in materialised form. Spaces of burial or cremation12 and personal objects of the dead13 have been thoroughly investigated. However, while ash objects are sold internationally14, so far they have not been analysed.15 Even Hallam and Hockey’s book16 devoted to death, memory, and material culture, which addresses bones, flesh, and hair as material that is incorporated into memorial objects, neglects ashes as such a material.17 Ash objects are not considered inanimate things by the bereaved. The distinction between the object and the person from which the dead material is derived is not clear-cut. For their possessors, the objects refer to the person, and sometimes even become a substitute for the person. In this respect, I argue that there is a strong parallel between ash objects and medieval Christian relics. Both types of 7 Enklaar 1995: 89–90. 8 Cappers 1999: 315. 9 According to research conducted by funeral business Dela among 526 of their clients, published on their website on 12 December 2006 http://www.dela.nl/over_dela/nieuws/ 2006/ Dood_geen_definitef_afscheid. 10 With ash objects I mean objects in which part of the ashes are incorporated, thus differing from urns in which the whole of two and a half to three kilos of ashes are saved. 11 Appadurai 1986; Bowen 2005; Keenan & Arweck 2006; McDannell 1995; Molendijk 2003; Orsi 1997. 12 Flohr Sørensen 2009; Garattini 2007; Goody & Poppi 1994. 13 Gibson 2004; 2008; Miller & Parrott 2007; Venbrux 2007. 14 See www.funeria.com for an exposition called “Ashes to Art” organised in the United States, for glass sculptures see www.artfromashes.com and for paintings with ashes made by an American artist see www.ashes2art.com. 15 Davies 2005: 316 and Prendergast & Hockey & Kellaher 2006: 891 do shortly mention memorial objects with ashes, but neither of the articles describes or analyses the objects in detail. 16 Hallam & Hockey 2001: 4, 8, 131–141. 17 The ashes are only addressed in the context of scattering (Hallam & Hockey 2001: 93–97), but not as part of enduring material culture within the home.

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objects contain human remains. In addition, both are dealt with as if they possessed a certain agency related to the person from whom the remains are derived. I maintain that this is similar to the way devotees claim to receive power or consolation through Christian relics.18 Analysing the way in which ash objects are incorporated in the home shows clearly how transformed human remains can act as mediators between the living and the dead. While the funeral’s main objective is to mark the incorporation of the deceased in the world of the dead,19 thus enabling a transition from the world of the living to the world of the dead, the ritualising with ash objects seems to be directed at re-establishing or continuing contact with the dead. By investigating how bereaved people turn to domestic objects containing ashes to mediate contact with the dead, corresponding notions of a continued existence after death are explored. As Hallam and Hockey state, “the capacity of the corpse to trigger and shape the memories of the living crucially depends upon the ways in which death is conceptualised as either a continuity, a rebirth, or as the absolute end of life.”20 In order to tackle the practices and beliefs concerning these objects, the different actors that invest meaning in these objects, that is the creators and the users of these objects, should be taken into account. Firstly, objects acquire different meanings in different contexts.21 They have a different meaning for the producers of ash objects than they have for the bereaved at home. Secondly, the meaning that bereaved people attribute to objects associated with death and mourning can vary over time.22 Thirdly, objects become meaningful within specific patterns of relationships.23 The complex of meanings surrounding an ash object is influenced by the relations in which it is applied, as it is given away, inherited, or fought over. Taking the dynamics of material culture in space, time, and relations into account, I have investigated the meanings assigned to ash objects within different social contexts. I conducted anthropological fieldwork at a crematorium in Usselo.24 This provided insight into the interface between the bereaved and the professionals discussing the purchase of a memorial object. To grasp the ideals that producers hold about these objects, I conducted a representation analysis of ninety-three websites of artists, jewellers, and online shops. Finally, in order to acquire insight into the beliefs that the bereaved hold, as well as the actions they perform with the objects, I have conducted in-depth interviews at the homes of approximately thirty bereaved people, learning what the destination of the deceased’s ashes meant to 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Geary 1986: 169; McDannell 1995: 43; van Cauteren 1985. Van Gennep 1960: 3. Hallam & Hockey 2001: 131. Kopytoff 1986. Gibson 2004; Miller & Parrott 2007. Komter 2003; McDannell 1995: 4. I have worked in four crematoriums in the Netherlands for approximately six months.

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them.25 In this social context, the bereaved felt freer to discuss their personal ideas about the objects than during the informative talks I observed at the crematorium. Moreover, as the bereaved had already been in possession of the object for some time, it had become part of their daily life. In this article, the following questions are addressed: Which practices and ideals concerning objects with human ashes prevail among bereaved people, as well as professionals, in the Netherlands? How do the objects mediate contact between the bereaved and the deceased? And finally, what does an analysis of these objects convey about beliefs of the bereaved concerning a possible continued existence of the deceased?

Producing Memorial Objects with Ashes: Unique, Personal and Discrete? Before being put to use, objects containing ashes are produced and marketed by artists, craftsmen, jewellers, and salesmen aiming to ascribe certain functions to these objects. In order to inquire into this process, I have conducted a representation analysis of folders and websites promoting these items. I have distinguished four categories of products with ashes, also called ash objects, remembrance objects, memory objects, remembrance relics, ash relics, or urn objects26: 1) paintings, 2) domestic sculptures, 3) cuddle stones, and 4) jewellery.27 I aim to provide insight into the variety of objects by pointing out the common framework that all ash objects somehow refer to. Let me start with the paintings, in which a small amount of human ash is mingled with part of the paint. At this point, there are four artists selling these artworks in the Netherlands. 28 The artists promote their products as unique, personal, tangible, and everlasting. Three out of four artists emphasise the unique meaning of a painting with human ashes, claiming that the presence of a relative’s ashes causes an immediate attachment to the object. Renate, founder of Doodgewone Zaak, emphasises this transformation by inviting the bereaved to bring the ashes to her 25 I visited most of the interviewees repeatedly, in the context of a formal interview, but also during more informal events. 26 I have chosen to use the term “ash object” as this is the most matter-of-fact term. Moreover, instead of stating the memorial or relic-like qualities of these objects, this term enables me to question these features. 27 There are some other, less common, products with ashes for the home interior such as picture frames, candle holders, adorned bags, and boxes for ashes, that I will leave out of my analysis for reasons of space. 28 http://www.doodgewonezaak.nl, http://www.kdpaintstyle.nl/, http://www.eternalpaintings.nl/, http://www.creatas.be/. The last website is Belgian, but the artist also explicitly directs herself to the Dutch public.

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workshop, when the painting is almost finished. In their presence, she mixes the ashes and the paint after which she adds the ash-paint to the artwork. The painters stimulate the active participation of the bereaved people involved by visiting their homes to discuss a suitable idea for the artwork, by sending out extensive questionnaires, or by inviting them to their ateliers. They all claim that the painting can have a positive effect on the mourning process. “When the painting is ready, it can have a valuable contribution to the mourning proces. For some people the painting can serve as a type of altar in the home. In a way the deceased is brought ‘home’ again.”29 Despite the emphasis on remembering the deceased within the home, the artists contend that this need not disturb visitors, as is made clear by painter Renate: “The advantage of a painting with the ashes of your loved one incorporated in it is that you have a place to visit. Moreover, this place is within the privacy of your home. For visitors this is less confronting than the sight of an urn on the cupboard. One would not associate a beautiful painting with death as quickly as one would with an urn. The painting has a more positive atmosphere. Your loved one will always be close in a special way, without the fact that this is directly visible.”30 While the importance of being close to the dead is emphasised throughout websites promoting ash objects, it is made equally important that the objects are not overtly present. The second category of ash objects for the home interior is the sculpture. Three companies in the Netherlands are specialised in incorporating a small quantity of ash into, as they describe, unique, handmade glass objects.31 The ashes are inserted in the glass when it is blown. This way the ashes are solidified again in crystal balls, roses, figures, candleholders, or series of little urns that can be divided among family members. There are some comparable sculptures from other materials, such as copper, on the market.32 Just as the aforementioned paintings, the glass sculptures are meant to receive a central place within the home without confronting unsuspecting visitors. “It is a remembrance object for the future. It is not a sad domestic object, you are sad enough already. Therefore we do not design a so-called sad mourning relic that shocks every one. On the contrary, we have designed a 29 Text published on the website of Eternal Paintings, 02-04-2009. 30 Text published on the website of Doodgewone Zaak, 02-04-2009. 31 Kroes, http://www.kroesglasblazerij.nl/pagina/producten.htm/; Van der Schaaff, http://www. asbestemming.com/; Glasblazerij ‘t Quakeltje, http://www.glasblazer.nl/. 32 See for example http://www.insiemebeelden.nl/.

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Analogous to the painters, one of the manufacturers of the glass objects, Van der Schaaff, utters the hope that they can be of assistance during the mourning process. Elaborating on this idea, his company now offers the option for bereaved people to be present during the creation of a sculpture. Thirdly, the ashes can be encapsulated in a small hollow in a stone, called a knuffelsteen (a cuddle stone) or a remembrance stone. The precious stones are carved in the shapes of angels, Buddhas, elephants, crosses, hearts, or more abstract shapes. Generally, the stones are made to be touched. As they are polished, they feel soft and their shape is made to fit the hand. In some cases it is possible to adapt the stones to your own hands, such as in the case of the product called Voelvormen (Sensory Shapes).34 The stones are designed for domestic use, but also to carry around discretely in your briefcase or purse, as one of the sellers declares on the website.35 The stones thus make the ashes tangible, as well as transportable. Out of all categories, the fourth, jewellery, is the most popular. Different terms are used for jewellery in which a small amount of ash is contained: ash jewels, urn jewels, remembrance jewels, memory jewels, and mourning jewels.36 Judging by the representation analysis of 73 websites selling this type of jewellery, a distinction can be made between individual goldsmiths specialising in remembrance jewels (10), jewellers or bigger ateliers that sell ash jewels among other jewels (24), online shops specialising in ash jewels (10), and online funerary shops (29) that sell ash jewels among other funerary products, such as coffins and urns. The manner of work of the gold- and silversmiths specialising in remembrance jewels is comparable to a high degree with the practices of the painters. In this group, personal contact is equally central to the job. They also discuss a unique and personal design for the handmade article of jewellery in their ateliers or at the homes of their customers. Just as the suppliers of cuddle stones do, they also promote the fact that an ash jewel enables the bereaved to hold the deceased close to their bodies.

33 34 35 36

Text as published on the website of van der Schaaff 12-4-2007. http://www.zonnevogel.nu/assortiment/herdenken/voelvormen/. http://www.zonnevogel.nu/assortiment/herdenken/. I have googled all terms mentioned in the text and analysed the first six pages of hits to investigate the size and contents of the market for ash jewels. I will use the term ash jewels, as this differentiates remembrance jewels with ashes from other remembrance or mourning jewels (f.e made out of wedding rings or heirlooms).

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In correspondence with the paintings, the jewels are labelled as emotional.37 The designers stress that the wearing of an ash jewel has a positive effect on the mourning process, as Annahbelle declares on her website: “An everlasting memory of your loved one in the shape of a jewel. You will carry him or her with you forever and that provides comfort and power in difficult times.” In addition, two highly exceptional designs that actually show the ashes make clear that the general ash jewel is designed to hide the ashes, as do the paintings, the sculptures, and the stones.38 In the second subcategory of jewellers and bigger ateliers, most of the companies have broadened their collection as a result of the great demand for ash jewels. Generally, these shops sell their own line of ash jewels, next to the wholesale jewels that are also available through the online shops. All four subcategories, from gold- and silversmiths to online shops, relate to a shared framework to describe the ash jewels and their presumed function. Within this framework, the ash jewels are denoted as a tangible and unique memory of great emotional value that is everlasting and yet subtle. However, the way the bigger ateliers work, and even more so the online shops, corresponds less and less with these ideals. In the case of the online shops, they only pay lip service to the exclusivity and uniqueness of the jewels, as in fact they are mass-produced goods. Lastly, it is possible to have a small amount of ash processed into a diamond that is created out of the carbon in the ashes. There are two companies selling these diamonds in the Netherlands.39 These “ash diamonds”, as well as a lock of hair, can also be incorporated in ash jewels. In sum, all products with human ashes are meant to be cherished within the home, close to the bereaved, or even on the body of the bereaved. However, they are designed not to show that they contain ashes. The common framework that entrepreneurs refer to encapsulates notions of uniqueness, exclusivity, closeness, tangibility, discreteness, everlastingness, and great emotional value. These ideals are most elaborately expressed on the websites of artists and small-scale ateliers, and become more and more simplified on the sites of online shops. While the products made in small-scale workshops can be considered unique, as the process of creating them is different every time, objects in online shops are often unique only in presentation. In addition, ash objects are sometimes referred to as relics.40 The glass sculptures, for example, are called “mourning relics”, that translate the feelings of the 37 The emotional character that is attributed to the jewels is evident throughout different websites, for example: Annahbelle, jewels full of emotion (http://www.annahbelle.nl) or Ashes in glass. The emotional jewel (http://www.asinglas.nl). 38 http://www.seeyougedenksieraden.nl/, http://www.remember-me.nl/. 39 The American company Lifegem (http://www.lifegem.nl) and the Swiss company Algordanza (http://www.algordanza.nl). 40 http://www.kroesglasblazerij.nl/pagina/producten.htm, http://www.uitvaartwinkeldevlinder.nl/home/1, http://www.lancar.nl/nl/asrelikwieen.aspx.

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bereaved into a unique memorial. However, the term “relic” is not explained. I argue that it is used in an attempt to ascribe certain authentic qualities to the ash objects. Using the term “relic” as a sales pitch, while actually selling mass-produced articles, has also been applied by companies selling religious items.41 In the terms of Kopytoff (1986), it is a way of aiming to de-commodify these objects. By calling these goods “relics” and presenting them as handmade, authentic products, the producers hope that the users will take an object out of circulation, consider it special, and set it apart. In the view of the bereaved, this process of singularisation42 possibly starts with the unique design of an ash object, but at any rate it starts as the object is filled with ashes by professionals or by the bereaved themselves. From that moment on, the object is definitely considered singular, as it is filled with a unique, personal, and bodily material. Henceforth, bereaved people incorporate the object in their everyday lives, further emphasising its personal character as a keepsake, rather than a commodity. The meanings invested by manufacturers change as objects circulate from the professional sphere to that of the bereaved. One informant told me about the ash object she had developed together with an artist, a small sculpture in the shape of a human heart. The heart is made from polished copper so that it feels soft. The idea was that the heart would warm up by touch as it absorbs body warmth. While she anticipated touching it often, she had only laid it in her lap once. However, she did construct a home altar for her mother, with a central place for the heart. Every day, she dedicates a moment to her mother at the altar, while lighting a candle. The meanings that artists, as well as bereaved people, attribute to the objects beforehand can thus be elaborated upon, but also revised when the bereaved receive the object at home.

The Attribution of Meaning by the Bereaved: The Object as Mediator In order to investigate the personal bond that bereaved people have with their ash objects, I focused on the similarities and differences between contemporary ash objects and medieval Christian relics. Relics can be something that once was part of the body of a saint or martyr, such as bones or blood (primary relics), but it can also be clothing or another object that once was in contact with a saint or with the primary relics (secondary relics).43 In ash objects, as well as in primary relics, a piece of the body of a deceased person is incorporated. Just as pieces of wood all

41 McDannell 1995: 45. 42 Kopytoff 1986. 43 Van Cauteren 1985.

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over the world represented the Holy Cross carried by Jesus, a little ash reworked into a jewel or a precious stone represents the person as a whole for the bereaved. Christians venerated relics as physical representatives of people who led exceptionally spiritual lives and who were now supposedly in heaven.44 As the body of the saint had carried his or her righteous soul, after death it was believed that the body still possessed a certain holy power.45 By touching these objects, lay people aspired to participate in their powers. Bereaved family members who posses an ash object also touch it with a certain intention. A case in point is Hennie, a mother of three children, who lost her eighteen-year-old son three years ago. Today, she and her husband wear colliers with a pendant containing a little of their son’s ashes. They have put these on and never taken them off. During our conversation I observed that she took hold of the pendant every now and then. She explained that she is always in touch with it. It touches her skin, and if she feels she needs it because she is worried or upset, she takes it in her hand. She said that it makes her feel at ease. Touching an ash object can thus give a feeling of calmness to the wearer. Just as relics are considered powerful, bereaved people ascribe certain powers to these objects. Christian relics were believed to possess the power to mediate between this world and heaven.46 When “visiting” a shrine or holding a relic, pilgrims asked the saint with whom the relic was once in touch to intercede for them. Bereaved people also described incidents in which they explicitly longed for contact with the deceased and tried to enable this contact by means of the ash object. Miss Blom, a woman who lost her mother, cherishes a small silver heart-shaped box with some of her mother’s ashes. In one of our interview sessions she explained that she takes the heart in her hands when she misses her mother. She said: “Sometimes it feels weird that she was there so long and that she is gone now. Then I rub the silver, or when the silver has turned black, I polish the heart.” After a short pause she added: “I guess I do these things at the moments when I long for contact with her. I take the heart in my hands again and gently shake it. Sometimes I even jokingly tell her that I want to wake her up.” The objects thus not only contain material that once was part of the body. They are also worn on the body of the bereaved person, or held in the hands. By wearing, holding, or touching the object, the bereaved experience the bond they have with the deceased. In interviews, informants often interchangeably referred to the ash objects by the name of the object and by the name of the person. The gap between the living and the dead is bridged by means of a personal ash relic that symbolises their ongoing relationship. By wearing an ash jewel or carrying a cuddle stone in 44 McDannell 1995: 42. 45 Geary 1986: 169; McDannell 1995: 43; Rooijakkers 1996; van Cauteren 1985: 11. 46 Van Cauteren 1985.

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one’s pocket, the object moves along with its owner. Just as during life, the deceased follows the movements of the bearer and there is constant contact between the two. Even if it is only temporarily, the object becomes an extension of the deceased person.47 Still, a layer of metal, ceramics, stone, or glass obstructs direct contact with the ashes. Some bereaved people make this bodily contact even more direct by placing a tattoo with a mixture of ink and ashes on their very own skin. This way the body of the deceased is literally made part of the survivors’ body. When the bereaved touch their tattooed skin, they also symbolically touch their deceased relative.48 While an ash pendant can be taken off, in the case of a tattoo the ashes are incorporated into the body of the bereaved person. They literally become an embodied memory to their loved ones. A difference between medieval relics and contemporary ash objects is the fact that the persons symbolised through ash objects are not public figures such as saints. This causes a crucial difference in the meaning and function of the objects. Medieval relics were continuously or periodically exposed publicly. In order for a medieval relic to be deemed powerful, it had to be recognised by the devotees as well as by the Church. The Catholic Church even provided a certificate to acknowledge the authenticity of a relic, naming the source and place of discovery. Relics are meaningful to a community of devotees. Even lay relics, such as scapulars that are carried individually, are meaningful to a community of devotees that recognise their meaning.49 In contrast, ash objects do not reveal from which body the material is taken. They do not have a public function and are designed to hide, rather than exhibit, the human remains. The ashes in contemporary relics are hidden behind glass, stone, or metal, or made invisible in ink or paint. In this aspect, the ash objects bear a resemblance to the hair art that was created in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.50 While the relics of saints assisted the whole community and had to be publicly examined to strengthen their cult, the absent person in an ash object is anonymous to all but its intended bearer and its intimate surroundings. Public recognition is not necessary for its function. Ash objects are kept within the home and are believed to intercede only in intimate relations of the bereaved. The meaning and even the function of a memorial object can change when it is recognised by an outsider. Betsie took off the small heart-shaped pendant with the ashes of her daughter after her neighbour asked if her necklace contained ashes. She felt as if suddenly everyone knew what the object meant. Instead of an impetus to share 47 See Batchen 2004: 35; Hallam & Hockey 2001: 115. 48 In an interview Rachel Hazes, widow of folk singer André Hazes, said that she strokes her tattoo when she longs for contact with her deceased husband (Wilma Nanninga, de Telegraaf, 13 August 2005). 49 Spaans 2003. 50 Holm 2004.

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a personal story of loss, as the object was during our interview, in every-day contact these relics are mostly interpreted as private objects, whose meaning is only relevant for the bereaved. Finally, while the ash objects are perceived as highly personal and singular, just as is the case with other objects, their place in the lives of the bereaved can shift.51 Sometimes bereaved people take off their ash jewels, while in other cases they are rediscovered. Moreover, when the owner of an ash object loses it or dies without sharing its intimate significance, the meaning of the object is lost. In this case, an object containing ashes could become a commodity again. Some bereaved people, such as Miss Blom, explicitly take measures in order to prevent commodification: “I have already told my husband that when I am not here any more, one day, you never know, then, if nobody asks for it [the little heart shaped box with the ashes of her mother], please entrust it to me in the grave. Imagine what I am thinking about already because I do not want anything to happen to it.” Miss Blom registered in her will that when she dies, her ash object will be buried in her grave. In this way, its status as a singular object is guaranteed.

Notions of an Afterlife in a Secularised Context A national survey among 1212 residents of the Netherlands demonstrates that forty percent of the people who opt for cremation describe themselves as non-religious.52 Nevertheless, another national research on contemporary religion elucidated that even though the majority of the Dutch rejected traditional Christian rituals, they did express the need to ritualise moments of transition such as death.53 While people view themselves as non-religious, they might thus have ideas about a continued existence that religious studies scholars would define as transcendent. Twenty nine percent of the Dutch who are not members of the Church state that they believe in an afterlife, and another 33% declare themselves to be unsure.54 Their secularised ideas about the afterlife do not correlate with the Christian idea of heaven, but include notions such as reincarnation and a continued existence in remembrance.55 Most of my informants belong to this group, as they are not members of a religion, and view themselves as non-religious, yet apparently do hold certain ideas about a continued existence in remembrance, in spirit, or otherwise. 51 See Gibson 2004: 289; Miller & Parrott 2007: 154–155. 52 SOCON 2005. Joanna Wojtkowiak, who is studying death and identity in the Netherlands, kindly provided me with these figures. For more information on her research see Wojtkowiak & Venbrux. 2009. 53 Bernts & Dekker & de Hart 2007: 30. 54 Ibid.: 49. 55 Ibid.: 50.

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As their ideas are often vague, a focus on objects proved useful to me as a social researcher, as investigating the social biographies of objects can make salient what might otherwise remain obscure.56 In this case, not what people say, but what they express by their dealings with ash objects, is of the utmost importance. Upon travelling from the workshop or factory via the crematorium (or directly) to the bereaved, these objects undergo a transformation from commercial goods to cherished ash objects. The ash objects are liminal, as they enable contact between this world and the world of the dead. They materialise the deceased and give them a presence on earth. Some bereaved people experience this presence only through the fact that the object contains part of the human remains of the deceased. Others, as this article has shown, experience this presence as powerful and consoling. In this case, the ash objects are material anchors referring to the dead body, but also to a more transcendent, spiritual presence of the deceased. By mediating contact between the bereaved and the deceased, ash objects connect the material to the spiritual world. The bereaved perceive this contact as very personal and private. It is a personal way of remembering the deceased and of privately gaining strength from this person in a public sphere. So far, relics have been predominantly linked to burial practices and not to cremation.57 One of the reasons for the condemnation of cremation by the Catholic Church was the importance of the cult of burial relics. Nowadays in the Netherlands it is the other way around: while in the case of a burial the remains of the dead cannot be used as relics, human ashes are incorporated in all sorts of relic-like objects.

56 Kopytoff 1986: 21. 57 With the exception of Buddhist rituals with the human ashes, see for example Crosby & Collett 2005.

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References Appadurai, Arjun 1986. The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Batchen, Geoffrey 2004. Forget Me Not. Photography and Remembrance. New York, Amsterdam: Princeton Architectual Press, Van Gogh Museum. [Published in Conjunction with an Exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum] Bernts, Ton & Gerard Dekker & Joep de Hart 2007. God in Nederland, 1996–2006. Kampen: Uitgeverij Ten Have. Bowen, John R. 2005. Religions in Practice. An Approach to the Anthropology of Religion. Boston: Pearson Education. Cappers, Wim 1999. Vuurproef voor een grondrecht. Koninklijke Vereniging voor Facultatieve Crematie 1874–1999. Zutphen: Walburg Pers. Cauteren, J. van 1985. “Relieken en reliekhouders”. In: Adrianus M. Koldeweij & P.M.L. van Vlijmen (eds.). Schatkamers uit het Zuiden. Utrecht: Rijksmuseum het Catharijneconvent: 8–25. Crosby, Kate & Alice Collett 2005. “Buddhism”. In: Douglas J. Davies & Lewis H. Mates (eds.). Encyclopedia of Cremation. Aldershot, Butlington: Ashgate: 96–100. Davies, Douglas J. 2005. “Memorials and Memorialization”. In: Douglas J. Davies & Lewis H. Mates (eds.). Encyclopedia of Cremation. Aldershot, Burlington: Ashgate: 316–317. Enklaar, Jasper 1995. Onder de groene zoden. De persoonlijke uitvaart. Nieuwe rituelen in rouwen, begraven en cremeren. Zutphen: Alpha. Flohr Sørensen, Tim 2009. “The Presence of the Dead. Cemeteries, Cremation and the Staging of Non-Place”. Journal of Social Archeology 9/1: 110–135. Garattini, Chiara 2007. “Creating Memories: Material Culture and Infantile Death in Contemporray Ireland”. Mortality 12/2: 193–206. Geary, Patrick 1986. “Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics”. In: Arjun Appadurai (ed.). The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 169–191. Gennep, Arnold van 1909 [1960]. The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge, University of Chicago Press. Gibson, Margaret 2004. “Melancholy Objects”. Mortality 9/4: 285–299. — 2008. Objects of the Dead. Mourning and Memory in Everyday Life. Victoria: Melbourne University Press. Goody, Jack & Cesare Poppi 1994. “Flowers and Bones: Approaches to the Dead in Anglo-American and Italian Cemeteries”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 36/1: 146–175. Hallam, Elisabeth & Jenny Hockey 2001. Death, Memory and Material Culture. Oxford, New York: Berg.

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Heessels, Meike 2008. “Mam, ik heb je thuisgebracht. Rituelen rondom asverstrooiing in Nederland”. In: Eric Venbrux & Meike Heessels & Sophie Bolt (eds.). Rituele creativiteit. Actuele veranderingen in de uitvaart- en rouwcultuur in Nederland. Zoetermeer: Meinema: 17–29. Holm, Christiane 2004. “Sentimental Cuts: Eighteenth-Century Mourning Jewelry with Hair”. Eighteenth-Century Studies 38/1: 139–143. Jupp, Peter C. 2006. From Dust to Ashes. Cremation and the British Way of Death. Basingstoke et al.: Palgrave Mac Millan. Keenan, William J.F. & Elisabeth Arweck (eds.) 2006. Materializing Religion: Expression, Performance and Ritual. Aldershot: Ashgate. Komter, Aafke 2003. “Heirlooms, Nikes and Bribes: Towards a Sociology of Things”. Sociology 35/1: 59–75. Kopytoff, Igor 1986. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process”. In: Arjun Appadurai (ed.). The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 64–91. McDannell, Colleen 1995. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Miller, Daniel & Fiona Parrott 2007. “Death, Ritual and Material Culture in South London”. In: Belinda Brooks-Gordon et al. (eds.). Death Rites and Rights. Oxford et al.: Hart: 147–161. Molendijk, Arie L. 2003. Materieel christendom. Religie en materiële cultuur in WestEuropa. Hilversum: Verloren. Orsi, Robert 1997. “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion”. In: David D. Hall (ed.). Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press: 29–47. Prendergast, David & Jenny Hockey & Leonie Kellaher 2006. “Blowing in the Wind? Identity, Materiality, and the Destinations of Human Ashes”. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12/4: 881–898. Rooijakkers, Gerard 1996. “Cult Circuits in the Southern Netherlands. Mediators between Heaven and Earth”. In: Mireille Holsbeke & Gerard Rooijakkers (eds.). The Object as Mediator. On the Transcendental Meaning of Art in Traditional Cultures. Antwerp: Etnografisch Museum: 21–47. [Published on the Occasion of the Exhibition “The Object as Mediator”, Etnografisch Museum Antwerp, 30 November 1996 – 15 March 1997] SOCON 2005. Social and cultural developments in the Netherlands. National representative survey. Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands: Faculty of Sciences. Spaans, Joke 2003. “De democratisering van het religieuze accessoire”. In: Arie L. Molendijk (ed.). Materieel christendom. Religie en materiële cultuur in West-Europa. Hilversum: Verloren: 29–50. Venbrux, Eric 2007. “Destroyal of the Personal Belongings of the Deceased”. Journal de la Société des Océanistes 124/1: 137–143.

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Wojtkowiak, Joanna & Eric Venbrux 2009. From Soul to Postself: Home Memorials in the Netherlands. Mortality 14/2: 147–158.

Joanna Wojtkowiak

Living through Ritual in the Face of Death1 A Dutch woman commenting on the CD she had put together for her funeral: “The fun is to listen to it now. Later, I won’t have the chance to do it.” This quote is from Els, a 70-year-old lady that I met in the first year of my research on death rituals in the Netherlands. The last time I visited her she played the CD she had put together for her funeral.2 Every song has a meaning and is connected to important people and moments in her life. By now, we have had more than ten interview sessions, which were never shorter than three hours, and during which we even went to the graves of her relatives and to her daughter’s farm. Every time we met, we had so much to talk about that we did not notice at all how quickly the time went by. However, in a way, we do not have too much time left, because Els is suffering from incurable cancer. Els’ story is, on the one hand, extraordinary, as I will show in this paper, because she has prepared for her death with much creativity and detail. In her preparations, she has drawn on her past, because she has experienced death in all its facets. Apart from the death of both her parents; she had to cope with the suicide of her son, and she is now dealing with the progressive illness “spreading around her body like a virus”, as she says. One the other hand, this case is not so unusual, as planning one’s own funeral is becoming a trend in the Netherlands. About 70% of the Dutch adult population already has taken out insurance for their funeral, where the most important wishes are reported.3 Professionals, especially the big funeral undertakers, strongly stimulate this by explicitly advertising on television, in newspapers, and by means of flyers. Undertakers distribute magazines where one can fill in a test and see what kind of “funeral type” is most suitable. “I want to be remembered the way I am” is a title on the cover of such a magazine.4 At the end of the magazine one can fill in the official form to describe the actual funeral wanted. Next to one’s name and place of residence, there are fourteen questions about who 1 This research is part of the project “Refiguring Death Rites: Post-Secular Material Religion in the Netherlands”, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), at Radboud University Nijmegen (www.ru.nl/rdr). 2 In the Netherlands it is common to use music during funerals which has been chosen by the family, or sometimes by the deceased person prior to death. 3 Van Keulen & Kloosterboer 2009. 4 Monuta Magazine “Eindeloos” (“Endless”), 2009.

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one is, how one wants to be remembered, and what kind of atmosphere one wants for the funeral. Furthermore, this magazine tells us that 90% of the Dutch want to be remembered, whatever this might mean.5 Three quarters of the Dutch do not consider them too young to think about their funeral.6 The way people influence their own death rites is an interesting and increasingly important issue in studying rites of passage, for two reasons. Firstly, there is a social relevance, since the Dutch are becoming more and more concerned about their funeral rites. Processes of individualisation and secularisation in the Netherlands are reflected in the growing interest in having a personal funeral.7 “Personal” refers to a personal atmosphere for the bereaved and with the personal character of the deceased. Secondly, from a theoretical point of view, it offers stimulating material in the analysis of the subject of transformation in death rituals. The living (and those dying) are already dealing with how they want to be, and will “be”, after death. The survivors will have to decide at some point how to integrate the wishes of the deceased into the funeral. The dimensions of separation, transition, and integration8 will have to be nuanced, in view of this phenomenon, and studied from the different perspectives of the dying and the bereaved. In the case of terminal (incurable) illness, death suddenly comes very close, but the period before physical death occurs can last a long time. With the progress of the illness, the direct future, the weeks and days before death, are often centred on keeping the quality of life as good as possible. But the question of “what will happen after I die?” is not easy to answer for people who are not members of a religious group. A gap grows between the direct future and the ultimate future.9 Els once told me, “I am not religious, but I am religiously sensitive.” She is referring to a deep emotional connection with everything, a kind of “holistic connectedness”. As we know from earlier literature, death asks for meaning, and rituals help to give this meaning.10 Furthermore, ritual provides a place and a language for emotions that are difficult to verbalise. In the case of dying, the knowledge of inevitable death can result in loneliness of the dying, and incomprehension on the part of the others.11 Kastenbaum states that “the passage from life to death has long inspired powerful rituals worldwide”.12 In the past, when death and dying were structured by Christian churches in the Netherlands, people referred to their souls, which pass on 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

In: Monuta Magazine “Eindeloos” (“Endless”), 2009. Van Keulen & Kloosterboer 2009. Felling 2004; Venbrux 2007. Van Gennep 1960. Kübler-Ross 1981; Quartier 2007. Van Gennep 1960; Hertz 1960; Turner 1969. Elias 1985. Kastenbaum 2004: 99.

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to an afterlife. The dying process was ritualised by prayer and sanctification of the body. Walter (1996a) identifies the postmodern way of death as being preoccupied by the self, whereas in earlier times dying was more dominated by medicine, and before that by religion.13 In contemporary Dutch culture, religious rituals surrounding the dying process are less common.14 People who do not wish traditional religious rituals have to find or create their own. It is not clear any longer how dying is ritualised, as the conditions have changed drastically. The general question of this paper is: what is the role of ritualisation in the process of dying? How can one create a secular or personal existence after death without the traditional religious patterns? More specifically, I will address these questions by analysing the phenomenon of planning one’s own funeral before death. People who face death because of an incurable illness or old age, are able to create a future of symbolic existence, by focusing on their identity after death, here referred to as the “postself”.15 The postself is defined as the concerns of living individuals about their reputation and image after death in the minds of others.16 As I will show, the postself has an important social and symbolic dimension too, since the person who is to die is concerned about how to be “expressed” in the funeral. The concept of the postself fits in with the general theorising of believing and investing in continuity after death.17 Ritual plays a central role in shaping identity after death, because it offers tools and a language to keep a part of one’s identity alive after death. The ritual activity before the actual funeral can be interpreted as a form of ritualisation.18 Furthermore, the phenomenon of planning one’s own death ritual requires a deeper understanding of the ritual dimensions of separation, transition, and integration in death rituals.19 When dying persons are already dealing with their funeral, to what extent are they already transitioning themselves from the living to the dead? Think also of the survivors who will one day integrate the wishes of the deceased into their transition rite. The question may thus be asked of whether the phases distinguished in the rite of passage theory are recognisable as separable moments. Are the borders of rites of passage really sharply defined? Are the markers in rites of passage (separation, transformation, integration) moving, or are they becoming fuzzier in the process of dying? Van Gennep identified the complexity of rites of passage in the last chapter of his classic work on rites of passage: “to dem13 14 15 16 17

Walter 1996a. Goldsteen et al. 2006. Shneidman 1973. Ibid. The theoretical background for the subject of creating a sense of continuity after death is provided by Erik Erikson (1959), Robert Jay Lifton (1976) and Edwin Shneidman (1973). 18 Grimes 2000. 19 Van Gennep 1960.

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onstrate that it is really a rite of separation, transition, or incorporation [...] would require several volumes, since almost any rite may be interpreted in several ways”.20 In this paper, I will analyse the specific case of planning one’s own funeral from the theoretical perspective of rites of passage, in order to be able to apprehend this type of ritualisation in contemporary Dutch society. The rite of passage, as a rite with a fixed order in a temporal and social sense, might be modified significantly here. A typical expression I often came across during funerals was “(s)he wanted it that way”; this expresses nicely the interrelation between the living and the dead at a funeral. It seems that the dead are more dominant in their funeral ritual than would be the case if they were “only” being transformed from life to death.

Dying at Home or Dying Alone: Questions of Identity First, I want to ask what dying at home is actually like. The dying process has strongly changed over the last centuries. For instance, in the Netherlands the time between diagnosis and actual death has (for the most part) expanded, and the place where dying takes place has changed.21 From a historic point of view, dying at home was, until the end of the nineteenth century, very common in Western Europe. In the course of time, in line with the medicalisation and privatisation of death and dying during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was an increase in people dying in hospital.22 Since the 1980s, the medical sector has increasingly specialised in palliative care, which means medical treatment of a patient without aiming to cure a disease; this care is restricted to the management of pain and symptom reduction.23 Next to the hospice movement, a national network of homecare for the terminally ill has arisen in the Netherlands.24 The further development of terminal homecare with professionals and volunteers brought important changes to the context of dying in the Netherlands. In 2006, 32% of people with a chronic illness who died, died at home.25 The wish to die at home is strongly represented in the Dutch population. A national survey with 1804 respondents revealed that 73% would prefer to die at home, rather than in hospital or at a hospice.26

20 21 22 23 24 25

Ibid.: 166. Enck 2003; Nuland 1994. Ariès 1981. WHO 2009. Van der Heide et al. 2007. Van der Velden et al. 2007. For those who are curious: 27% died at a regular hospital, 25% at a nursing home (such as those for the elderly), and, finally, 10% at a special nursing home. 26 Van den Akker, Luijkx & van Wersch 2005.

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In my research, I have focused my fieldwork on the process of dying at home, using participatory observation, for three main reasons. First, it offered me insight into the private home, which tells me more about the living situation of the patient. James already described one’s home as part of one’s “material self”.27 In a context of the privatisation of death, the home becomes even more important. Second, dying at home is not embedded in a bigger institution (e.g. a hospice). These institutions often develop their own ritualisations of dying, which can be integrated into the personal ritual repertoire of the client. I tried to catch processes of ritualization in its very personal form which integrate the customs of the institutions, and, at the same time, the very personal customs of one’s home. Third, I was able to attend the funerals of the people I had accompanied in their last phase, having had personal contact with them before they died. In total, I have supported eighteen terminal patients and their families during my fieldwork as a volunteer. Besides this, I have collected ritual material by working at a cemetery, collecting announcements of death, and attending approximately twenty funerals.28 In many conversations and evaluations with other volunteers in the terminal homecare and the staff at the cemetery, I gained more insight into the professional side of death and dying. Most important was the information I gathered from the patients themselves: their narratives provide the central data for this paper. Although the dying process has become very much professionalised in the last decennia in the Netherlands, and people are supported by family and friends, dying remains a lonely process, as Nobert Elias makes clear with regard to modern society: “The social problem of death is especially difficult to solve because the living find it hard to identify with the dying.”29 The crucial point is that the problem of death, or more specifically the problem of dying, is based on the problem of identification. Identification is difficult for the living in the extreme situation of dying, when the end of life is inevitable. Dying patients have difficulties defining their identities, because of the short time left; the living are unable to encounter their dying “significant others” with empathy, because their own lives will continue. Identification with the dying is extremely difficult, if not impossible. An important factor in identity formation is that it is clearly temporally conditioned; 27 James 1891: 292. 28 I focused my field research on the context of the dying process and funerals. In the years 2007–2009 I conducted fieldwork as a volunteer in terminal home care and worked at a cemetery. I also collected funeral planning documentation and announcements of death written by the dying person. Here I would also like to thank my colleagues from the “Refiguring Death Rites Group” for their support in collecting these ads, and especially Ricky de Jong for the generous sharing of her ritual material. Further acknowledgement goes to Marja from the cemetery Rustoord in Nijmegen, who was incredibly supportive in my fieldwork. Last, but not least, my thank goes to Els for her openess and trust in sharing her personal story. 29 Elias 1985: 3.

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time has a central place in identity. When there is not much time left, people might have trouble finishing their life project.30 The term “identity” has been intensely studied in the social sciences, and is related to almost every behaviour in contemporary Western culture. Still, approaching the question of identity in the study of death can provide more insight into the dying process and the functionality of ritual in the dying process. Barbara Meyerhoff (1982) argues that, in the study on rites of passage, there is a lack of focus on the private, subjective, and psychological experiences of the participants of the ritual. Therefore, I combine the subjective view of the person who is going to die with the study on ritualizations around dying. In order to analyse the role of identity in ritualisation processes before death, we need a basic definition of identity. The well-known Canadian psychologist Albert Bandura offers a useful description: “Identity is perceived in memories that give temporal coherence to life, in the connectedness of human relationships and one’s life work over time, and in continuance of belief and value commitments that link the present to the past and shape the future.”31 In this definition, the most important tasks of identity that are relevant in the dying process are represented. The major “goal” of personal identity is to shape a feeling of continuance throughout life. This continuance is reflected in the connectedness of past, present, and future. For example, when I think of a bad memory from the past as my being unprepared for a particular event, I could reflect on that bad memory positively in the present: “Well, I’ve learned from that experience and I will be prepared better the next time.” This is a typical example of connecting past events and using them in creating a sense of identity in the here and now. “I was unprepared in the past, but now I am smarter.” Moreover, in this example I am also referring to the future; one could say “the past self” is used to create “the future self.” In addition, Bandura makes clear that “the self is the person, not a homunculan overseer that resides in a particular place and does the thinking and acting.”32 The term “self” refers to the embodied “physical and psychosocial makeup with a personal identity.”33 I have discussed the importance of the body in the dying process elsewhere, and so I will not go deeply here into the interrelation between the material and immaterial dimensions of the self.34

30 31 32 33 34

Howarth 2007. Bandura 2008: 91–92. Ibid.: 90. Ibid. Wojtkowiak 2009.

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In the case of terminal illness, or, in general, one’s closer approach to death (e.g. in old age), we find a threat to identity35 and an increase in self-reflection.36 While it is possible to connect one’s past to the present, there is no future, and the present is uncertain, too. The problem is how to shape a future in the face of death. In terms of giving meaning to life and death, James stated that death finally questions our disbelief and “here religion comes to our rescue”.37 In this paper, I want to nuance James’ point of view: “and here ritual comes to our rescue”. The problems of identity formation, the insecure feelings of the present and future, can be handled by focusing on the future after death (the postself) through the use of ritual. Shneidman’s concept of the postself refers to the idea of how one will be remembered, and how one wishes to be remembered, after death.38 I refer to the planning of the funeral as part of the process of ritualisation39 before death. This is also related to the symbolic power of dying and deathbed scenes.40 Shneidman developed the concept of the postself from his work on suicide, although he does not link the postself to unhealthy thoughts. On the contrary, he stresses that the postself is “a way that is seldom damaging to the psyche and is in most instances beneficial”.41 The postself is a psychological concept in the mind of the person who is (some day) going to die. We find similar concepts from other authors. Erik Erikson, for example, describes several psycho-social states during life, each with a central conflict.42 In order to create a satisfied feeling of identity, one has to solve these “obstacles” of identity formation. According to Erikson, in the second half of our lives, we start to focus on what we have already achieved in our lives, using “generativity”. “Generativity” refers to what one leaves behind to the world, e.g. one’s children or the fruits of one’s work. When someone reaches generativity, he or she can move to the last stage before death: integrity. “Integrity” means completing one’s life, by integrating one’s past with one’s present, and thus creating a feeling of identity continuity. Eriskon’s theory on identity formation throughout the lifecycle stresses the importance of shaping a feeling of continuity with the past, and a focus on the future after one’s death. The concept of generativity has a strong social dimension, which adds an important nuance to the concept of the postself. Another important author on the subject of continuity and death, Robert Lifton, introduces the theory of symbolic immortality, which refers to the sense of being 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Bury 1982; Charmaz 1983; Howarth 2007. Hallam & Hockey & Howarth 1999. James 1978: 63. Shneidman 1973. Grimes 2000. Kastenbaum 2000. Shneidman 1973: 43. Erikson 1959.

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connected to all times.43 He develops the personal dimension of the continuity of identity after death further by elaborating on the symbolic dimensions people can rely on. Symbolic immortality has similar characteristics to Erikson’s generativity, in that it gives meaning to a feeling of connectedness to past and future, but has a broader character. Symbolic immortality can also describe historical and sociological developments. Lifton states that, as a result of the Darwinian revolution, there has been a shift from “a predominately theological mode” of immortality to a nature and biological mode.44 Lifton describes different forms of symbolic immortality: e.g. the biological, creative, and nature modus. Rather than being a psychosocial concept, such as Erikson’s term of generativity or Shneidman’s postself, symbolic immortality refers to a bigger belief system, it describes a sense of immortality. This has two implications for the understanding of Lifton’s theory: firstly, an image of symbolic immortality is not absolute; it is not the one or the other, but rather a continuum. Secondly, symbolic immortality can also be found on a sociological level: it can describe developments in society and culture. The postself refers to an individual level of continuity after death (the person is concerned about his personal existence after death), but is always embedded in a social and cultural context.45 Moreover, the postself has important similarities with symbolic immortality, also the way Shneidman discusses it.46 Next to different modes of the postself, the term prescribes an inner striving for an existence beyond physical death. Reflecting on the three theories of continuity after death, it becomes clearer why people start to focus on their identity after death when they move closer towards their physical death. The desire to leave something behind, to have meant something during one’s life, even on a smaller (social) scale, is a natural habit of humankind. It is, then, no surprise that dying people are concerned with their postself, because there is a future of symbolic existence. Ritual helps in constructing and marking this identity for the time after death, by providing tools to the postself constructor. In the next section, I will go more deeply into the meaning of ritual in relation to the postself. In my fieldwork, especially, I found forms of postself constructions by the use of symbolic and ritual tools.

43 44 45 46

Lifton 1976. Ibid.: 34. Kamerman 2003. Shneidman 1973.

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“I don’t want more than 20 guests, and people should come dressed in white” At the beginning of this paper, I introduced Els, a lady who found her way to deal with her approaching death. Almost immediately after the diagnosis of her incurable disease had been made, she started to plan her funeral in a very detailed way. “Then that is finished and you can move on to the regularity of the day”, she told me during one of our interview sessions. Not only the practical things which have to be done, but the symbolic meanings, in particular, of actions, objects, and even little rituals within the bigger funeral ritual played an important role for her. During one of our meetings we listened to the CD with the songs that were to be played during her funeral. “First a quiet song, then a song like ‘I am going to get you one last time’, and finally a bright song. That is also how I am: unpredictable”, she said, and laughed. The songs had been important to her in the past; they expressed something about important relationships. When we listened to the CD, she recalled things, such as the day that her father’s body was carried out of the house and she put on “Don’t cry for me Argentina”. This song meant a lot to him, and she wanted to have it for her own funeral as well. The music chosen represents a part of her postself, because the songs tell something of who she is and what kind of life she has lived. The importance of connecting past, present, and future is also shown in the theories discussed earlier in this paper.47 In the example of the song for her father, we see a social dimension of the postself; here it directly refers to a significant relationship. She listens to the CD often, because later, as she says, she won’t have the chance to do this. By now, she has a feeling that everything is finished and that she is ready for death. Els’ preparation of her funeral has interesting implications for the theoretical framework of ritualisation and identity formation in the face of death. The music she has chosen reflects her past with “significant others”, and she wants it to be used in the future. This guarantees continuity and, hence, a feeling of identity.48 When she listens to the CD now, she says, it gives her peace and a moment to reflect on her life. After having finished the preparation, she feels “ready” for death. In this readiness for death, in particular, we recognise that through the agency of the funeral preparations some sort of transformation has taken place. Transformation has a crucial function in rituals.49 In terms of the postself, a part of Els is already prepared for after death. As what, and how, she will be memorialised in the funeral is written on paper. To use Turner’s term, she is in a state of liminality at

47 Erikson 1959; Lifton 1976. 48 Erikson 1959. 49 Grimes 2000; Kastenbaum 2004.

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the moment, since a part of her has moved on, while one part is in the here and now dealing with the illness.50 In general, the funeral has to be simple; as she writes, it does not have to cost overly much, since she never spent money on “unimportant” things herself. “Flowers are not necessary, but it would be nice if the family stood in a circle around the coffin holding hands for a moment, listening to one of my chosen songs, and calling up some memories about me”. The symbolic dimension of a social afterlife is constituted by this gesture. In the planning of her funeral we discover different layers of ritual. The circle of people around the coffin, holding hands and playing her music, seems to be for her a desirable, smaller ritual element within the bigger funereal ritual. Another “small” ritual element she describes is the washing and preparing of her body and the closing of the coffin. She advises her daughter to do it together with the nurse she has chosen beforehand, or someone who is close, and to play her [Els’] music to prepare the farewell. Other examples of how people construct their postself for the funeral are: video messages for the ceremony, self-written life stories, poems, or designing one’s own mourning card. People arrange everything around their mortuary ritual, which creates a feeling of control, whereas in contrast the progress of the illness is uncontrollable. Turner adds the term “anti-structure” to the state of liminality; the social structure is broken and has to be restored by ritual to be reconstructed.51 Another motivation is the wish not to be a burden for others, and, in some cases, not having anyone close who could take care of the funeral. But besides these more practical explanations, taking care of all these arrangements is a form of leaving a part of you behind after death. More generally, in studying both announcements of death and other selfplanned funerals, I have found various wishes of the dying: “everyone should bring a red rose”, “I want people to donate money to the cancer foundation”, and “blue was her favourite colour”. Next to the announcements of death, which were written by the postself creators themselves, there are announcements in which the survivors express the identity of the deceased. And in some cases it is not clear who has chosen to put the quote into the announcement. Some texts are clearly addressed to the people who stay behind, such as this: “Dear all, now it is time to say goodbye to you”, while others are more difficult to categorise, e.g. when there is a quote put into the advertisement without the name of the writer at the bottom. However, it is important to note that the postself has a strong social dimension, too. Thus, the postself, which was originally constructed by the dying, is represented and reshaped by the bereaved after death. The postself interrelates the image of the dying 50 Turner 1969. 51 Ibid.

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and the image of the bereaved. Unruh referred to this as “identity preservation strategies”.52 Van Gennep identifies the passage of the bereaved and the deceased as going parallel.53 For Els, the most important thing connected with the funeral is that her daughter feels good about it. The postself is thus never constructed in a vacuum, but always in interaction with the social environment, and in the context of the dying process; this interaction is mostly restricted to close family and friends. The social dimension of the postself is also important for the question of what the function of this ritualisation before death is. Is it part of a separation or transition rite for the dying? And, after death, could the ritual material left by the dying serve as integration for the survivors? The first thing to note is that there are two parties involved in this ritualisation of the funeral: 1) the postself constructor before death, and 2) the survivors who will react to it.54 For the analysis of what kind of rite of passage we are dealing with, we must take both parties into account. If we enquire into Els’ motives, ask why she has planned everything for the period of time after death, it becomes clear that it is to make things easier for her daughter. However, she also has the feeling that now it is “done”; since everything has been taken care of, death may now come for her. The personal and social dimensions of the postself are interrelated, and establish a function of the ritual: Els has, by planning her funeral, separated herself from life, and is, in a way, already transcended to the dead. But for her daughter (who also igores Els’ “hobby”, as she calls it, of preparing for her death) the separation has yet to come, in the form of approaching death, and finally physical death itself. When her daughter takes over the arrangement of the funeral, it will be more an integration of Els’ identity in the rite (her postself), and later a transition to the world of the dead. Van Gennep describes rites of passage, where different functions can be identified, such as the funeral ritual, where we find separation and transition.55 The analysis of the planning of Els’ funeral has shown that the dimensions of integration and separation differ for the one planning the ritual and the one acting it out.

Conclusion In this paper, I have discussed problems of identity formation and the function of ritual in the face of death. An answer to the threat to identity in the last stage of life can be found in the preoccupation of people with their postself, a preoccupation which is visible in the planning of their funerals. Although thoughts and ideas 52 53 54 55

Unruh 1983. Van Gennep 1960. Wojtkowiak & Venbrux 2009. Van Gennep 1960.

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about one’s postself can occur long before actual death,56 the closer one comes to death, the more prominent the questions become of what one has achieved in life and how one should be remembered.57 Ritual constructs identity; in the case of funerals, mainly the identity of the deceased and the survivors. Some postself constructors, like Els, have a lot of input for the funeral and leave many clues as to how to be remembered, but this is naturally not always the case. The story of Els is extraordinary, but at the same time an illustrative example of how the postself relates to ritual. Moreover, the dying are not only giving clues to how they want to be represented in their funerals, but the bereaved are reacting to this and can reshape the postself, the social postself so to speak. An important matter in the creation of the postself by survivors is also the material dimension, for example, personal belongings of the deceased.58 The funeral’s function of transforming the individual from living to dead is one way of looking at it. When we consider the subjective viewpoints of the postself constructor and the bereaved, we find different functions. Within the analysis of dying as a rite of passage, the element of transformation emerges in the form of the postself, or more concretely, in the planning of the funeral. For the dying person whose direct future is short or insecure, the planning of the funeral ritual makes it possible to transform a part of oneself to the world of the dead. The bereaved will some day have to deal with the wishes of the deceased, and integrate these into the funeral, or separate them from the funeral. We find that Van Gennep’s elements of rites of passage are not clearly distinguishable and have to be analysed from the different subjective points of view included in the ritual.59 By planning their own death ritual, the dying are able to transform a piece of themselves for the time after death; they transform their postself from mind into ritual. Although my analysis of rites of passage ends here, there is another important phase in death rituals, the mourning phase. There we can see that the relation between postself and survivors is further established, and the bond with the deceased is continued. The journey of the postself is not finished yet, and will be followed in my further research.

56 57 58 59

Shneidman 1973. Erikson 1959; Lifton 1976. Unruh 1983; Wojtkowiak & Venbrux 2009. Van Gennep 1960.

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References Akker, Piet van den & Luijkx, Katrien & Wersch, Sandra van 2005. Waar wilt u doodgaan? Keuzen en overwegingen. Tilburg: IVA. Ariès, Philippe 1981. The Hour of Death. Middlesex: Penguin Books. Bandura, Albert 2008. “The Reconstrual of ‘Free Will’ from the Agentic Perspective of Social Cognitive Theory”. In: John Baer & James C. Kaufmann & Roy F. Baumeister (eds.). Are We Free? Psychology and the Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 86–127. Bury, Michael 1982. “Chronic Illness as Biographical Disruption”. Sociology of Health and Illness 4/2: 167–182. Chamaz, Kathy 1983. “Loss of Self: A Fundamental Form of Suffering in the Chronically Ill”. Sociology of Health and Illness 5/2: 168–195. Elias, Norbert 1985. The Loneliness of the Dying. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Enck, Graves 2003. “The Dying Process”. In: Clifton D. Bryant et al. (eds.). Handbook of Death and Dying. Vol. 1. Thousand Oaks & London: Sage Publications: 457– 467. Erikson, Erik H. 1959. Identity and the Life Circle. New York: International Universities Press (Psychological Issues 1). Felling, A.J.A. 2004. Het process van individualisering in Nederland: een kwarteeuw sociaal-culturele ontwikkeling. Nijmegen: Janssen Print. Gennep, Arnold van 1960. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldsteen, Minke & Rob Houtepen & Ireen M. Proot & Huda Huijer Abu-Saad & Cor Spreeuwenberg & Guy Widdershoven 2006. “What is a good death? Terminally ill patients dealing with normative expectations around death and dying.” Patient Education and Counselling, 64: 378–386. Grimes, Ronald L. 2000. Deeply into the Bone. Re-Inventing Rites of Passage. London et al.: University of California Press. Heide, Agnes van der & Elsbeth de Vogel-Voogt & Adriaan Ph. Visser & Carin C. van der Rijt & Paul J. van der Maas 2007. “Dying at home or in an institution: perspectives of Dutch physicians and bereaved relatives.” Support Care Cancer, 15: 1413–1421. Hertz, Robert 1960 [1907]. “A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death”. In: Robert Hertz (ed.). Death and the Right Hand. London: Cohen & West. Hallam, Elizabeth & Jennifer L. Hockey & Glennys Howarth 1999. Beyond the Body. Death and Social Identity. London et al.: Routlegde. Howarth, Glennys 2007. Death and Dying. A Sociological Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. James, William 1891. The Principles of Psychology. 2 Vols. London: Macmillan & Co. — 1978 [1902]. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Image Books.

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Kamerman, Jack 2003. “The Postself in Social Context”. In: Clifton D. Bryant et al. (eds.). Handbook of Death and Dying. Vol. 1. Thousand Oaks & London: Sage Publications: 302–306. Kastembaum, Robert 20003. The Psychology of Death. New York: Springer Publishing Company Inc. — 2004. On Our Way. The Final Passage through Life and Death. Berkley: University of California Press. Keulen, Martijn van & Michael Kloosterboer 2009. Hoeveel vaart zit er in de uitvaart 2009? Amsterdam: TNS Nipo. Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth 1981. Leven met stervenden. Amsterdam: Ambo. Lifton, Robert J. 1976. The Life of the Self. Towards a New Psychology. New York: Simon & Schuster. Meyerhoff, Barbara 1982. “Rites of Passage: Process and Paradox”. In: Victor W. Turner (ed.). Celebration. Studies in Festivity and Ritual. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press: 109–135. Nuland, Sherwin B. 1994. How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Shneidman, Edwin S. 1973. Deaths of Men. News York: Quadrangle. Turner, Victor W. 1969. The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures). Unruh, David R. 1983. “Death and Personal History: Strategies of Identity Preservation”. Social Problems 30/3: 340–351. Velden, Leo F. J. & Anneke L.Francke & Lammert Hingstman & Dick L. Willems 2007. Sterfte aan kanker en andere chronische aandoeningen. Kenmerken in 2006 en trends sinds 1996. Utrecht: NIVEL. Walter, Tony 1996a. “Developments in Spiritual Care of the Dying”. Religion 26/4: 353–363. — 1996b. “A New Model of Grief: Bereavement and Biography”. Mortality 1/1: 7–25. Wojtkowiak, Joanna 2009. “The Postself and the Body in the Process of Dying”. In: Marius Rotar & Marina Sozzi (eds.). Proceedings of Dying and Death in 18th–21st Century Europe. International Conference, Alba Iulia, Romania, 5–7 September 2008. Cluj Napoca: Accent: 40–49. — & Eric Venbrux 2009. “From Soul to Postself: Home Memorials in the Netherlands”. Mortality 14/2: 147–158.

Websites WHO = World Health Organisation 2009. http://www.who.int/cancer/palliative/ definition/en/.

Thomas Quartier

“This Is My Body”: Physical, Spiritual, and Social Dimensions of Embodiment in Roman-Catholic Funerals1 The importance of embodiment in rituals has frequently been stressed.2 Especially when it comes to rites of passage, it is important that participants in the ritual not only shape their attitudes, beliefs, or intentions, but also experience the transition to be made in a bodily way. In funerals this is particularly clear, as there is an obvious bodily dimension: the body of the deceased is dealt with ritually. According to Bell, the importance of the body of the deceased is explicit when it comes to funerals where the body is missing. The deceased might be a body donor, which implies that the body is used for scientific purposes.3 In that case, the bodily dimension of the funeral seems to be missing, but still, people include embodiment of the deceased in the ritual: “A funeral without a body must, by eulogy or gesture or metonymic association, create a type of body that can be mourned, fondled by grief, and then laid very clearly to rest”.4 The fact that the body is essential here for the bereaved raises the question of what exactly the position of the body in funeral ritual is, and what dimensions of the body people experience. Next to the physical dimension of the body, there seems to be more. The “laying to rest” which Bell discusses points us to other dimensions of embodiment, which are constituted in the ritual, and which are important for the journey of the deceased and the bereaved that is made through death. According to Scheer, at least two dimensions of ritual embodiment can be distinguished in funerals, which dimensions are derived from two main functions of funerary ritual. In the first place, funerals are “transportation rituals”, as Scheer puts it. A physical body is transported from one place to the other. But beside this

1 This research is part of the project “Refiguring Death Rites: Post-Secular Material Religion in the Netherlands”, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), at Radboud University Nijmegen (www.ru.nl/rdr). 2 Cf. Bell 2006. 3 Bolt 2008. 4 Bell 2006: 542.

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dimension, funerary ritual has a “transformative” dimension.5 This means that the deceased and the bereaved are transformed in their social status. If we follow Scheer in his distinction, the process of transformation might also imply a third dimension in religious funerals, next to the physical and social ones just mentioned. The transformation not only concerns the group of participants in the ritual in a social sense, but also the ontological transformation in a spiritual sense. What we call the spiritual dimension of embodiment in funerals is intrinsically linked to the physical body. In funerals, the body of the deceased becomes a material manifestation of a spiritual move – what happens to the body of the deceased is, at the same time, an enactment of what happens to that person after death, and also of what happens to the bereaved in their relation to the deceased.6 Embodiment in funerals implies different dimensions, as these first investigations suggest. Along with physical embodiment, there is what we call social embodiment. It is a common phenomenon that the physical or “natural body”, as Mary Douglas calls it, is socially determined.7 This means that the “transportation” of the physical body in funerals is determined by a social “transformation”. Furthermore, there is a determination of the physical and social body by the spiritual representations of embodiment: a transcendent body into which the deceased is transformed, or to which the bereaved relate. In ritual, these different dimensions of corporality come together: “different bodies converge”, as Chauvet makes clear.8 How could these different dimensions of the body actually converge in concrete funerals? In many ritual traditions, funeral rites are found in which the dead body is dealt with in a particular way, in which a social body is acting and transforming, and in which a spiritual body is represented, often originating in a religious inheritance which offers representations of the spiritual body. A striking example is the body of Christ becoming present in Roman Catholic funerals. The Roman Catholic funeral consists of two main parts: in the first part, the body of the deceased is dealt with ritually. The second part often consists of the celebration of the Eucharist; the gospel is read and the body of Christ is symbolically consumed by the participants.9 Here one might see two dimensions of corporality directly represented in the liturgical order, physical and spiritual. Thirdly, the aspect of communion is stressed strongly in Roman Catholic liturgy: the communion of participants represents the community of saints – a form of social embodiment.10 The central liturgical saying “This is my body”, which aims at the body of Christ present in the Eucharist, might also imply that, in a liturgical sense, all three dimensions of em5 6 7 8 9 10

Scheer 1993. Hertz 1960; Venbrux 2007. Douglas 1973: 93. Chauvet 1995: 152. Rutherford 1990. Chauvet 2001: 65–66.

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bodiment are included in the ritual. But can the different dimensions of embodiment I have distinguished in funerals really be observed in Roman Catholic funerary practice? This question becomes particularly interesting when it comes to contemporary Roman Catholic funerary practice in Western Europe, especially the Netherlands, one of the most secularised countries in the world. Firstly, due to secularisation, questions can be asked concerning the spiritual embodiment in funeral liturgy. Is it really the case that the spiritual dimension of the transformation of the deceased is recognised by participants at Roman Catholic funerals when listening to the proclamation of the Gospel and receiving communion? Secondly, owing to individualisation, there is not necessarily a coherent group of believers participating in a Roman Catholic funeral. Do they experience themselves as a social body when participating in funerary liturgy? Thirdly, it might be the case that the physical body is not really present, not only because it is not available, but perhaps also because it is not present during the actual funeral service in the church building, or not really referred to. Do people experience the physical body of the deceased during the funeral service? In this paper I would like to explore the three dimensions of embodiment in funeral rituals in the Roman Catholic tradition. My main question is: which physical, spiritual, and social dimensions of embodiment can be found in Roman Catholic funerals and how do they interrelate? To answer this question, I will first explore the possible rituals performed during Roman-Catholic funerals which might relate to the physical body. After that, I will present some empirical findings, based on research among contemporary funeral-goers in the Netherlands to obtain an indication of what they experience when taking part in these rituals (1). In the second part, I will do the same for spiritual embodiment and concentrate on Eucharistic rituals (2). In the third part, I will focus on the experience of community among the funeral-goers, to obtain an impression of the social dimension of embodiment in the funeral according to them (3). In the fourth part, I will ask how the different dimensions of embodiment correlate according to the participants (4). Lastly, I will draw some tentative conclusions.

1. Physical Embodiment: Rituals Relating to the Body of the Deceased The contact with the dead body can be an ambivalent experience. For bereaved persons it might become “a part of that wider memory of the dead in a positive and more rounded sense of the past but, for some, that picture and sense of the dead can present an ongoing negative memory, one swallowing or overshadowing the mem-

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ory of the living person”, as Davies says.11 In funerals, the physical body of the deceased is an inevitable reality that participants need to relate to. Because this relation to the dead body can differ from case to case, depending on the condition of the body and the emotional state of the bereaved, ritual offers a way in which this relation can be transformed to a positive memory in the form of physical embodiment. This means that, in funeral ritual, one attempts to avoid the overshadowing negative relation to the dead body, and transform the relation to a level on which the body has been “laid to rest”, in the words of Bell.12 In Christian liturgy, this physical embodiment has frequently been stressed.13 The reason for this is to be seen in the role of embodiment in Christian religion in general: the body is the “temple that shrines our prime values”.14 From a Christian point of view, the dead body can never be neglected. By means of the body of the deceased one can experience the fate of death, but also the ongoing relationship with the deceased and the promise of salvation, as one shares the prime values with this person, which are substantially present in his or her body. I have already mentioned the ritual relationship to the dead body as “transportation”. This transportation character of the Roman Catholic funeral goes beyond the mere functional aspects of carrying the body. It has a symbolic dimension, which becomes obvious when looking at the funeral procession. According to the Ordo exsequiarum of the Roman Catholic Church, funeral ritual starts at the home of the deceased, goes on to the church building, and after that to the graveyard. In the procession, which consists of the participants carrying the dead body, the journey of the deceased is expressed, from life through death towards life after death.15 In funerary practice, what are the most important rituals relating to the physical body of the deceased and expressing the journey just mentioned? At the beginning of the church service, there is the Reception of the Body at the entrance of the church. The coffin is carried into the church and placed at the front of the nave. After that, the Service of the Word and the Service of Communion follow, with which I shall deal in the following section (2). The second moment at which participants are actively confronted with the dead body is when they walk past the coffin and the bereaved relatives, after having received communion. The third important ritual relating to the physical body is the blessing of the corpse during the Last Farewell. The fourth moment is when the coffin is carried out of the church. Usually the In Paradisum is sung at this moment. Fifthly, people relate to the dead body of the deceased when walking (or driving) behind the coffin in the Funeral

11 12 13 14 15

Davies 2008: 21. Bell 2006. Lukken 1994. Davies 2008: 4. Rutherford 1990: 39ff.

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Procession to the cemetery or the crematorium. Lastly, the placing of the coffin in the grave can be seen as a ritual of physical embodiment.16 I will not discuss the several rituals mentioned above in detail here, but rather try to answer the question of how they are experienced by contemporary participants. For this, I will rely on research that I conducted among 229 participants at Roman Catholic funerals in the Netherlands.17 In this research, a questionnaire was distributed among people who had recently participated in a Roman Catholic funeral. The aim of the research was primarily to investigate their notions about Roman Catholic funerals in general.18 Apart from this, questions were included about the actual experience of the funeral. More specifically, participants were asked to indicate the degree to which particular ritual elements evoked intense experiences for them. To aid in answering the question of whether rituals relating to the body played a role in the experience of the participants, I present the mean scores of their in Table 1. Table 1: Intensity of Experience of Rituals Relating to the Body19 Ritual Coffin being carried into the church at the beginning Walking past the coffin and family during communion Blessing of the body during the Last Farewell Singing of the In paradisum while the coffin is being carried out Walking behind the coffin in a procession to the grave or crematorium Placing the coffin in the grave or leaving it behind in the crematorium

Mean 4.0 3.6 3.8 4.2

Std. .84 .99 .97 .93

4.0

.97

4.2

.98

(1: “not intense at all” to 5: “very intense”)

In this table, we see that the rituals relating to the body are all experienced intensely by the participants. The actual transportation rituals are even experienced more intensely than the ones in which the coffin is not moved (walking past the coffin during communion, the blessing of the body during the Last Farewell). We 16 Ibid.: 160–211. 17 Quartier 2007. 18 The main concepts used in this research about the notions of funerals in general were: different kinds of memory in the funeral (Quartier & Hermans & Scheer 2004); different liturgical forms (Quartier & Hermans & Scheer 2006); and different forms of liminality (Quartier & Hermans 2009). 19 The question asked of the participants was: “Could you indicate how intense your experience was of the following moments during the funeral?” The possible answers were: 1: “not intense at all”; 2: “not intense”; 3: “neither intense nor not intense”; 4: “intense”; 5: “very intense”.

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can conclude that the embodiment, in the sense of rituals relating to the physical body of the deceased, is indeed important to contemporary participants, with an extra stress on the transportation aspect. I cannot answer the question, yet, of whether they ascribe to these rituals the meaning implied in the idea of “embodiment” in Roman-Catholic liturgy. That would indicate that the body is seen in a religious perspective. I will come back to this question later, when talking about converging dimensions in Section 4.

2. Spiritual Embodiment: Eucharistic Rituals As already indicated when talking about physical embodiment in the last section, there is a second dimension of embodiment in Roman Catholic liturgy, namely spiritual embodiment. In Christian liturgy, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ form the central message of faith, which can help people bridge the gap which occurs in the confrontation with death. But a message needs to be experienced to become meaningful for ritual participants. In the crisis of death, not just “legomenon” (talking) is important, but also “dromenon” (doing), as Schillebeeckx stresses.20 Faith is materialised by symbols which represent the reality they point to.21 This implies that a bodily representation of the message of faith makes participants in the liturgy experience a spiritual body.22 In Roman Catholic funerals, spiritual embodiment forms the centre of the service of the Eucharist, the Holy Communion. In the Communion, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are not only represented in a material way, but they can be received bodily. The body and blood of Christ are received body to body – the spiritual body converging with the physical body of the bereaved. It is interesting that the role played by this spiritual body is not limited only to funerals. If a person is about to die, the Viaticum is already a way in which the spiritual body of Christ and the physical body – in this case that of the soon-to-be deceased person – can converge.23 The link between the physical body and the spiritual body of Christ can theologically be understood in the sense of people being the Imago Dei: humans are, in their corporeal existence, a picture of God.24 This makes the link between the physical and spiritual embodiment central in all liturgies, which can be understood as an expression of exactly this relationship.25

20 21 22 23 24 25

Schillebeeckx 2000. Quartier & Hermans 2009. Davies 2008: 5. Richter 1973; cf. Quartier 2008. Mulder 2000: 80. Ibid.: 76.

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What are the actual rituals of spiritual embodiment in the Eucharist? Traditionally, after the coffin has been carried into the church, the funeral mass follows.26 This funeral mass is what is generally understood by the “Eucharist”. Within the mass, two parts can be distinguished, a Liturgy of the Word, and a Liturgy of Communion.27 In these two parts, speaking and acting are both representations of Christ and intrinsically belong together. Within the Liturgy of the Word, the texts read and the sermon held by the priest presiding over the liturgy are the most important elements. Next, there is the element of praying. When it comes to the Liturgy of Communion, the consecration of bread and wine is the central ritual. Next, wishing each other peace and the actual receiving of communion are important. Finally, the assembly is blessed by the priest at the end of the Eucharist. Again, I wish to address the question of how the participants of contemporary funerals experience the elements belonging to the funeral mass, relying on the answers of respondents from the Netherlands used earlier. The mean scores of the intensity of the experience are presented in Table 2: Table 2: Intensity of Experience of Eucharistic Rituals28 Ritual Lectures and sermon Praying Consecration of bread and wine Wishing each other peace Receiving communion Blessing at the end of the service

(1: “not intense at all” to 5: “very intense”)

Mean 3.7 3.4 3.3 3.5 3.4 3.5

Std. .80 94 1.1 1.1 1.1 1.1

We see that, generally speaking, participants experience these rituals as less intense than the ones relating to the body of the deceased. Still, they do not reject their experience. Nearly all of the rituals fall into the category of doubt (“neither intense nor not intense”), except the lectures and sermon, which people experience intensely. An explanation of this exception might be that the sermon, in particular, has changed its original character. Whereas in the past it was exclusively directed towards the message of Christ’s death and resurrection, today it also refers to the individual identity of the deceased, and sometimes even has the character of an In Memoriam.29 This could imply that it is directed more towards the physical dimen26 Rutherford 1990: 58. 27 Ibid.: 183–188. 28 The question asked to the participants about these rituals was the same as to the rituals in table 1 (cf. note 2). 29 Melloh 1993.

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sion of embodiment in the funeral, as the deceased, being bodily present, is referred to, and less towards the spiritual embodiment which culminates in Holy Communion. More research would be necessary to confirm this hypothesis. For now, we can conclude that participants have doubts about the intensity of experiencing Eucharistic rituals, except the one which is possibly directed towards the deceased.

3. Social Embodiment: Experience of Communitas When Douglas talks about the social determination of the human body, this implies that every embodiment occurs in a particular social constellation, which colours the way in which a human body is perceived and understood. The social embodiment forms a body in its own sense.30 With regard to the Roman Catholic funerary liturgy, this “social body” consists of the community which is gathered to celebrate the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus: the Church.31 Every human person’s body belongs to this social body. The core values ascribed to it are part of the larger body in a social sense, or, as Chauvet puts it: “The I-body exists only as woven, inhabited, spoken, by this triple body of culture, tradition and nature”.32 Ritually, the body of the deceased, with which I have dealt in the first section, is also embedded in a social network, a social body. But as this body is going to be “laid to rest”, as Bell said, there is a state of transition in the physical sense. This is expressed in the “transportation ritual”,33 as which the funeral can be interpreted. We have already seen the parallels between what happens to the physical body of the deceased, and what happens to him or her and the bereaved in a spiritual sense. The same parallels can be drawn with regard to social embodiment. The social body, the group of participants, is also in a state of transition, just as the physical body of the deceased is. Ritual transition states have often been interpreted as parts of rites of passage, which mark the transition from one stage of life to another.34 In this section, I am mostly interested in the social structure in the group. For this reason, I will focus on what Turner calls “communitas”. “Communitas” is an aspect of the anti-structure in the stage of transition, which at the same time offers a new kind of comradeship.35 “Communitas” means that, in the state of transition which Turner calls “liminality”, the usual social structures, limitations, and rules become irrelevant. There is no difference between people with a high status and a low, old people and young people, and people who are a member of the Church or not.36 At 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Douglas 1973: 93. Chauvet 1995: 152. Ibid.: 150. Scheer 1993. Van Gennep 1999. Turner 1969. Quartier 2007: 100ff.

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no other turning point in life is this social embodiment of a group of people stronger than when gathered around the dead physical body of a beloved one. But do people who participate in Roman Catholic funerals today indeed experience “communitas” in the sense of differences between them with regard to status, generation, or church membership disappearing? The data gathered among Dutch funeral-goers offer an answer to this question, too. The mean scores for three kinds of differences becoming irrelevant at a funeral (“communitas”), are presented in Table 3. Table 3: Intensity of Experience of Communitas37 Factor Communitas with regard to influence Communitas with regard to generation Communitas with regard to religion

(1: “not intense at all” to 5: “very intense”)

Mean 3.6 3.4 3.6

Std. .88 .98 .99

Our respondents do, in fact, experience “communitas” with regard to influence or status and religion or church affiliation, although they tend to have doubts about the experience. They agree less on the differences between old and young becoming irrelevant at a funeral (generation). From a sociological point of view, we can state that the processes of individualisation are not visible in the ritual. Participants do experience the social anti-structure in the sense of “communitas” at a Roman Catholic funeral. This might indicate some kind of social embodiment which occurs in the ritual. The question is, however, whether this social embodiment is linked to the spiritual embodiment of Eucharistic rituals (paragraph 2), or rather to the rituals connected to the physical body of the deceased (paragraph 1). Is the social embodiment of a religious, or rather of an anthropological nature? I am going to deal with this question in the next section.

4. Converging Dimensions? I have talked about the converging dimensions of embodiment above. The term implies that, at a funeral, all three dimensions should form one experience for the participants. Theologically speaking, the funeral is the ritual moment in which the sense of Christian embodiment can be experienced. Christians go to heaven “not in 37 With regard to different forms of communitas, respondents were presented with items about communitas (3 items for each form), and asked to indicate to what degree the item matched their own experiences at the funeral. On these items a factor analysis was carried out. The scores in the table are the means of the three factors which were the result of this factor analysis. Further details can be found in: Quartier 2007: 120ff.

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spite of their bodies – of desire, of tradition, of culture, of universe, but in their very bodies which through faith in Christ have become ‘temples of the Holy Spirit’”.38 If the core of the funeral is the transition of the deceased, and also of the bereaved in their perception of the deceased, this means that all aspects of embodiment should be touched on simultaneously in the funeral to make a full transition. I have dealt with data about experiences of the three dimensions of embodiment in the sections above. The question of how they converge according to the participants at contemporary Dutch funerals can be answered by checking the correlation between the answers of the respondents.39 Generally, we found not many significant correlations between what we can call “religious” and “non-religious” experiences. This means that the rituals relating to the body only correlate with Eucharistic rituals if they have a religious character (walking past the coffin and the bereaved during Communion, the blessing of the corpse during the Last Farewell, and the singing of the In Paradisum when carrying the coffin out of the church). Among the Eucharistic rituals, readings and sermons show the strongest correlations with rituals relating to the body, not the Service of Communion. The reason for this could be that the sermon often does not have an exclusively religious meaning. Overall, we can say that, according to our respondents, there is a clear distinction between their experiences of religious or spiritual rituals and non-religious rituals (related to the body of the deceased). How do these rituals correlate with the experience of social embodiment, according to the participants? In our correlation analysis, we found that rituals relating to the body of the deceased do correlate significantly with the experience of “communitas” among the respondents, except those ones which have a religious character, such as the blessing of the corpse or the singing of the In paradisum. An exception is the act of walking past the family after communion, but here the explanation could be, again, that this moment does not have a primarily religious meaning. The Eucharistic rituals do not correlate significantly with the experience of “communitas” among the funeral-goers who filled in our questionnaire. To sum up the correlations, religious and non-religious rituals do not correlate significantly with each other. The non-religious rituals related to the physical body of the deceased correlate with the experience of the social body, which can be interpreted as the social dimension of embodiment. The Eucharistic rituals, which represent the spiritual dimension of embodiment in the funeral, do not correlate with the experience of communitas.

38 Chauvet 1995: 114. 39 To answer the question about how the different ritual elements and the forms of “communitas” relate to each other, we performed a correlation analysis, which we do not present in detail here. The significant correlation values (Pearson’s r) can be found in the appendix. We only mention which significant correlations are to be found (reliability interval 99%).

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What does this mean for the dimensions of embodiment? The assumption of Chauvet was that in the rituals, the physical, the spiritual, and the social dimensions of embodiment should converge. In view of the answers I found among Dutch participants at funerals, this assumption needs to be nuanced. Social experiences and an intense experience of rituals related to the physical body of the deceased do converge, but neither converges with the rituals which represent spiritual embodiment: the Eucharistic rituals. These results raise questions about the coherence of Roman Catholic funerals according to the experience of the participants. Obviously, their experience of a religious or spiritual embodiment at funerals is separated from their experience of physical and social embodiment. Do participants perhaps not link what Schillebeeckx calls the “anthropological roots”40 of a religious ritual to the religious or spiritual dimension? More research would be necessary to answer this question.

Conclusion In this paper, I have asked which physical, spiritual, and social dimensions of embodiment can be found in Roman Catholic funerals, and how they interrelate. We saw that, according to the research I have conducted in the Netherlands, there are empirical indications that physical, spiritual, and social embodiment play a role in the perception of participants at the funerals. At the same time, we saw that the rituals connected to the physical body of the deceased have the greatest approbation among the respondents. Finally, we saw that there is a correlation between the experience of social embodiment and that of physical embodiment, as long as they are not religious in nature. This means that the assumption can be questioned that the Roman Catholic funeral combines, or even converges, the physical, the social, and the spiritual dimensions of embodiment. Of course, one explanation for this result is perhaps that the liturgical order followed in Roman Catholic funerals is not linked to the experience people have about what happens to the body of their beloved one. Perhaps this is what Schillebeeckx means with the “lost anthropological roots” of liturgy. The quesiton that can be raised about concrete ritual orders and the way they are followed in practice is an interesting question for further research: in what sense do they provide experiences of physical, social, and spiritual embodiment in funerals and connect them? This might depend greatly on the concrete form of the individual funeral. Qualitative research might offer an answer here, and contribute to further reflection on the question of dimensions of embodiment in Roman Catholic funerals, and religious funerals in general, as the quantitative data I have presented offer only a general indication. The meaning of the central saying of Jesus in the Eucharist, “This is my 40 Schillebeeckx 2000.

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body”, is multi-layered in Roman Catholic funerals. At the same time, embodiment relates primarily to the deceased, less so to the group, and even less to spiritual embodiment. Is this a new meaning ascribed to an old liturgy in modern society?

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References Bell, Catherine 2006. “Embodiment”. In: Jens Kreinath & Jan Snoek & Michael Stausberg (eds.). Theorizing Rituals. Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts. Leiden: Brill: 533–544. Bolt, Sofie 2008. “Als ik dood ben ga ik naar de universiteit. Omgaan met de wens van een lichaamsdonor”. In: Eric Venbrux & Meike Heessels & Sofie Bolt (eds.). Rituele creativiteit. Actuele veranderingen in de uitvaart- en rouwcultuur in Nederland. Zoetermeer: Meinema: 45–58. Chauvet, Louis-Marie 1995. Symbol and Sacrament. A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence. Collegeville: The Liturgical Press. — 2001. The Sacraments. The Word of God and the Mercy of the Body. Collegeville: The Liturgical Press. Davies, Douglas J. 2008. The Theology of Death. London: T&T Clark. Douglas, Mary 1973. Natural Symbols. Explorations in Cosmology. Middlesex: Penguin. Gennep, Arnold van 1999. Übergangsriten. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus Verlag. Hertz, Robert 1960. Death and the Right Hand. Glencoe: The Free Press. Lukken, Gerard 1994. “Liturgie und Sinnlichkeit. Über die Bedeutung der Leiblichkeit in der Liturgie”. In: Louis Van Tongeren & Charles Caspers (eds.). Per visibilia ad invisibilia. Kampen: Kok: 118–139. Melloh, John 1993. “Homily or Eulogy? The Dilemma of Funeral Preaching”. Worship 67: 506–518. Mulder, André 2000. Geloven in crematieliturgie. Een pastoraalliturgisch onderzoek naar hedendaagse crematieliturgie in een rooms-katholieke context. Baarn: Gooi & Sticht. Quartier, Thomas & Chris A.M. Hermans & Anton H.M. Scheer 2004. “Remembrance and Hope in Roman Catholic Funeral Rites. Attitudes of Participants towards Past and Future of the Deceased”. Journal of Empirical Theology 17/2: 252–280. — 2006. “Different Logics of Liturgy. Deductive and Inductive Forms of Catholic Funerary Rites as Perceived by Participants”. Jaarboek voor Liturgie-onderzoek 22: 217–242. Quartier, Thomas 2007. Bridging the Gaps. An Empirical Study of Catholic Funeral Rites. Münster: LIT Verlag (Empirische Theologie 17). — 2008. “Voorganger of begeleider? Rituelen rond sterven en dood in de moderne geestelijke verzorging”. Tijdschrift voor Geestelijke Verzorging 47/11: 15–25. — 2009. “Personal Symbols in Roman Catholic Funeral Rites”. Mortality 14/2: 133– 146. — & Chris A.M. Hermans 2009. “Transformation of the Bereaved. Forms of Liminality in Roman Catholic Funerals”. In: Paul Post & Benedikt Kranemann (eds.). Modern Ritual Studies as a Challenge for Liturgical Studies. Leuven: Peeters: 283–300 (Liturgia Condenda 20). Richter, Klemens 1973. Liturgie mit Kranken. Essen: Driever.

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Rutherford, Richard 1990. The Death of a Christian. The Order of Christian Funerals. Collegeville: The Liturgical Press. Scheer, Ton 1993. “Van gedachtenis tot verwachting”. In: Ernst Henau & Frans Jespers (eds.). Liturgie en kerkopbouw. Baarn: Gooi & Sticht: 158–174. Schillebeeckx, Edward 2000. “Naar een herontdekking van de Christelijke sacramenten”. Tijdschrift voor theologie 40 (2001): 164–187. Turner, Victor W. 1969. The Ritual Proces. Structur and Anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine. Venbrux, Eric 2007. Ongelooflijk! Religieus handelen, verhalen en vormgeven in dagelijks leven. Nijmegen: University Press.

Appendix Table 4: Significant Correlations Between Rituals Relating to the Body and Eucharistic Rituals Coffin being carried into the church at the beginning

Lectures .38 and sermon Praying Consecratio n of bread and wine Whishing peace to each other Receiving communion Blessing at the end of the service

Walking past coffin and family during communion

Blessing of the body during the Last Farewell

Singing of the In Paradisum while the coffin is being carried out

Walking behind the coffin in a procession to grave or crematorium

Laying down the coffin in grave or leaving it behind in the crematorium

.39

.31

.27

.22

.26

.30

.32

.48

.43

.37

.42

.23

.26

.36

.46

.40

.40

.45

.45

.41

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Coffin being carried into the church at the beginning Walking past coffin and family during communion Walking behind the coffin in a procession to grave or crematorium Placing the coffin in the grave or leaving it behind in the crematorium

Communitas Communitas Communitas influence generation religion .25

.28

.25

.23

.29

.26

.28

.32

.20

.20

.26

.20

Section IV: The Varieties of Ritual Experience Edited by Jan Weinhold and Geoffrey Samuel

Geoffrey Samuel and Jan Weinhold

Introduction: The Varieties of Ritual Experience This section, “The Varieties of Ritual Experience”, includes fifteen papers originally given at the conference on “Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual” at Heidelberg University in October 2008. This panel was originally proposed by Jan Weinhold, and was later expanded to include a panel on the “Inner Work of Ritual”, proposed by Geoffrey Samuel, since it became clear that, despite the differing titles, there was in fact extensive overlap between the two panels.1 Weinhold’s panel proposed a complementary focus to that usually adopted for the analysis of ritual. He suggested in the call for papers that the actual experience of ritual has often been neglected, with most analyses based on performance or on text. An alternative approach would attend to questions such as: What is the actual experience of participating in ritual, and what difference does this make to the social and structural dynamics of ritual? Are there differences between rituals that promote or that exclude self-awareness or critical reflection? Is it significant that some rituals are expected to evoke heightened emotionality, while others appear to be aimed at a calm and emotionless atmosphere? What is the significance of the fact that in some societies ritual is omnipresent, whereas elsewhere it may appear as a highly unusual and intense mode of experience, brought into play only at occasional critical junctures? All these questions point to experience as a vital and significant part of any fully adequate analysis of ritual dynamics. Samuel’s proposed panel again suggested a shift in the analysis of ritual towards an analysis of inner experience. Much analysis of ritual, he suggested, has necessarily concentrated on external aspects; the physical actions performed, the texts recited, the social context of participants and the relationships between them, the ways in which these are explained, understood, and commented on by the participants. Many types of ritual, however, also involve what could be called “inner 1 Eighteen papers were presented at the panel, and fourteen are included here. A fifteenth paper on a related subject, by Magnus Echtler, was presented at another session, but was included in this section because the series editors felt that it suited this context better. Four others (by Jason Throop, Henrik Jungaberle, Yulia Ustinova, and Ingrid Lutz) are being published elsewhere, or are otherwise unavailable for this volume.

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work”, which takes place within the mind and body of the ritual practitioner: consciously imagined interactions with spirits and deities, visionary journeys, cultivation of particular kinds of inner awareness or particular emotional states, the conscious transformation of how the practitioner interacts with the world of spirits and of human beings. Such “inner work” may follow a formal scenario (as with the elaborate “inner theatre” associated with Indic and Tibetan tantric ritual and similar Daoist practices), it may be an expected but largely unscripted accompaniment to practices specified in “external” ways (as with the movement of qi in some taiji or qigong practices), or it may be a relatively open process in which only the basic parameters are known in advance (as in many shamanic and divinatory practices). “Inner work” may also be a part of the patient’s role in healing ritual, and again may be scripted as part of the ritual, or be a more or less personal idiom of understanding and internalising the ritual’s action upon the patient. While, Samuel suggested, such “inner work” may be harder to document than the external aspects of ritual, that does not mean that it is unimportant. Practitioners may indeed see these internal processes as being at the core of what they are doing, and the external aspects as present essentially in order to facilitate them. At the same time, the practitioner’s or patient’s narrative about the nature of inner processes cannot be taken as self-explanatory. It raises as many questions as it answers, particularly if one takes into account the possibility that such “inner work” may correspond to significant changes within bodily systems (neural or hormonal), or significant restructurings of the relationship with the surrounding social environment. At this point, psychology and medical anthropology may serve as useful perspectives that lead to an integration of disciplines in the analysis of embodied ritual experiences and “inner work”. Samuel’s “inner work of ritual” clearly encompasses many of the same elements as Weinhold’s focus on “ritual experience”. Weinhold’s panel proposal also pointed to two further aspects. One is the question of modernity. The experiential dimension seems particularly critical to modern inventions or reinventions of ritual. What do these inventions allow for, what do they exclude? What concepts of personhood are involved? Which traditional and new forms of technology and behaviour are used to alter states of consciousness or experience by means of ritual? And in which modern or traditional discourses are the “experiental” narratives located? A second aspect is that of methodology: how do we deal with this whole question of ritual experience? How do we get at it? Here Weinhold was quite explicit about the need for methodological pluralism: “No single method can give a comprehensive account of this wide range of experiences in all its complexity. On the contrary, only by enlisting a variety of methods do we have a better basis for investigating all these various experiential dimensions.” In fact, both conveners saw methodological openness and pluralism as a key to approaching this complex subject area, so combining the panels made sense for

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both. While Weinhold’s background is mainly psychological and Samuel’s mainly anthropological, we were very much in agreement that this is an area where an multidisciplinary and indeed perhaps a transdisciplinary approach was essential. The resulting panel was methodologically pluralistic, but in this particular case, we suggest, this was a virtue. The following chapters include a wide range of approaches to the central theme of the inner experience of performing ritual, including approaches from philosophy, theology, and religious studies, as well as psychology, social anthropology, and evolutionary anthropology. The first five chapters deal primarily with theoretical and methodological issues. The first, by Geoffrey Samuel, discusses the theoretical and methodological problems involved in analysing the inner experience of ritual, and attempts to develop a framework for doing so, using some examples from his research on Tibetan longevity practices, themselves a form of Tantric ritual which involve a great deal of “inner work”. This is followed by Etzel Cardeña and Wendy Cousins, who present an account of hypnosis, shamanism, performance, and ritual from the perspective of experimental psychology, arguing that a science of states of mind and anomalous experiences must consider how ritual activities can bring about real changes for both individuals and societies. Michael Winkelman then provides a sketch of the possible evolutionary origins of human ritual, focusing on the similarity between basic ethological aspects of human ritual with those of chimpanzee ritual, and considering how the full panoply of human ritual behaviour might have emerged in the course of the Middle Palaeolithic. Jay Johnston’s chapter, from the perspective of feminist philosophy and ritual studies, looks at the concepts of the “spiritual” or “subtle” body as imagined in various forms of Asian and Western religious practice, and suggests that these concepts provide a way of describing and cultivating the ethical and interpersonal dimensions of spiritual practice. Finally in this group, Daniel Böttger, working from the standpoint of experimental psychology, provides an empirical approach to the investigation of the effects of mantra repetition, again found in many forms of Asian and Western spiritual practice. The next three chapters all consider aspects of ritual experience in Christian contexts. Magnus Echtler uses material on the Nazareth Baptist Church of South Africa to test Harvey Whitehouse’s cognitive theory of religion, arguing for a more subtle, nuanced, and socially embedded approach to the experience of sacred dance than is allowed for by Whitehouse’s perspective. David Thurfjell examines the emotional aspects of Christian revivalism among the Kaale Roma in Sweden, arguing that the use of emotion in ritual is key to its ability to effect personal and social change. The last chapter in this group, by Andreas Odenthal, presents a dialogue between theology and psychoanalysis, arguing that psychoanalytic theory can help to explain how Christian liturgy not only evokes a specific theological content, but does this in a way which resonates with fundamental aspects of human existence.

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Two chapters on Buddhist ritual follow, taking up themes adumbrated in Samuel’s opening chapter. Barbara Gerke’s ethnographic account of long-life empowerments in a Tibetan Buddhist community in Northeast India stresses the variety of ways in which different participants may experience such complex ritual occasions, while Angela Sumegi’s comparison of the ritual practice of lama and village shaman in Bhutan suggests that these two apparently contrasting religious modes nevertheless express a common “ontological instinct – that the essence of what is, is dynamic, cognizant, and communicative”. The three chapters after these examine ritual aspects of music and drama. Beatrix Hauser’s study of the ritual drama of Ramlila in contemporary Delhi, like Gerke’s Tibetan study, stresses the multiplicity of perspectives found among participants and audiences. She nevertheless shows how Ramlila, despite its thoroughly postmodern performance context, has retained the possibility of religious as well as secular modes of interpretation. Yolanda van Ede’s study of the learning of flamenco dance in Spain and Japan unpicks the different modes of sensory experience that may underlie an apparently similar performance. Her focus on the details of sensory experience moves us away from concerns with “authenticity” in dance or ritual, to focus on the meanings that performances may have for performers or audiences from contrasting backgrounds. Gerard Poole’s chapter, focusing on Andalusian ritual practices, explores the interplay of ritual structure, musical form, and emotional experience, arguing that the chaotic emotional intensity of the Andalusian salida, created by the interplay of ritual action and musical form, expresses something that draws from the specific symbology of Catholicism, but is at the same time “universal and distinctly human”. The final two chapters look at the “inner work” of ritual in two distinctly postmodern ritual contexts, the Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, and the rituals of the Brazilian religion of Santo Daime as performed in contemporary Europe. Sarah Pike shows how the Burning Man Festival provides a space and structure within which individuals can express grief and mourning, and demonstrates how private experience and public ritual are interwoven in their experience of the Festival. Finally, Weinhold shows how understanding the rituals of Santo Daime, which focus around the psychoactive substance ayahuasca, involves going beyond the classic reductions to pharmacology and to social and cultural context, and examining the ways in which participants learn actively to work with and guide the effects of the drug. As Weinhold notes, “ritual experience … is not a passive psychological by-product of prescribed ritual performances but an active psychological construction”, a conclusion which is echoed in different ways by many of the contributions here. We hope that this collection will help to bring about a wider recognition of the vital role of ritual experience and of the “inner work” of ritual in the analysis of ritual performances of all kinds.

Geoffrey Samuel

Inner Work and the Connection Between Anthropological and Psychological Analysis Introduction The central question of this paper is how to analyse what might be called the “inner work” of ritual, the conscious and deliberate internal processes which form a part of many rituals, but which are not necessarily visible or explicit to the observer. This is a particularly significant issue for me, since a central topic of my research for many years has been Tibetan Tantric ritual, which is a mode of ritual in which there is a great deal of such “inner work”. The practitioner is not just involved in performing external actions – making material offerings, reciting texts, or whatever – but also in performing “inner” actions that are often much more complex and elaborate than the external actions. These might involve, for example, imaginative visualisations of, and sequences of, interaction with elaborate assemblies of deities, such as the famous Tantric mandalas, typically comprising anything up to several hundred separate deities, each visualised in a specific form, with particular costumes and attributes, within a complex geometrical structure. In fact, though I use the word “visualisation”, which is often used in this context, it is really a word which directs the attention much too much to the visual mode. The practitioner may also be evoking internally other kinds of sensory experience, in particular sounds, and, perhaps more critically, also evoking emotional states, both in him- or herself and in the deities. What is supposed to be taking place is a kind of inner theatre, in which the responses of the various participants are in large part scripted in advance. The whole process may be described by Western scholars as intended to bring about a particular state of consciousness within the practitioner, but I am somewhat wary of using this rather Western terminology here. One thing we may need to do in investigating such practices is to examine the whole notion of “consciousness” rather carefully. All this leads to a second question: how does this inner theatre, which may, of course, be performed more or less precisely and with more or less conviction, and possibly in quite different ways by different practitioners, bear on the validity and effectiveness of the ritual?

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Theoretical Resources for the Study of “Inner Work” This chapter was written for a conference panel that included both anthropologists and psychologists, and our basic assumption was that a problem such as this was best approached through a variety of perspectives, moving towards a transdisciplinary approach. Certainly both anthropology and psychology have had quite a lot to say about ritual. The relationship between anthropology and psychology is, nevertheless, a complex one, and attempting to build a meaningful relationship between the fields is not necessarily straightforward. I am an anthropologist with a strong interest in ritual and in the “internal” aspects of ritual work, and a scholar who has never found disciplinary boundaries particularly helpful; thus, psychology has always been a presence alongside my work, but it has been a presence with which I have had limited direct involvement. In part, this reflects my training within British anthropology in the early 1970s. Psychology was “out of bounds” when I first studied anthropology at Cambridge in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I and my fellow students were for the most part discouraged from meddling with it. The argument for methodological purity was most clearly articulated by that classic of the Manchester School of anthropology, Closed Systems and Open Minds1, a book that was subtitled The Limits of Naivety in Social Anthropology. The point of this book was that one should know one’s disciplinary limits and not go beyond them. Anthropologists had their own disciplinary framework and should steer clear of the territory that belonged to other disciplines. When I first came across Closed Systems and Open Minds, as a still pretty naïve postgraduate student, I thought this was very odd advice, but in fact it was not altogether foolish. If the weakness of the classical period of British social anthropology was its relatively narrow theoretical and intellectual base, and its unwillingness to go too far beyond the field data of the particular situation or situations that each anthropologist knew well, it had the converse strengths: a solid body of systematic data referring to closely related peoples, which provided a holistic and comprehensive view of the minutiae of daily life and their connection to the larger-scale issues of human existence. The British anthropological emphasis on social relations did, at least, ensure a certain integrity and consistency. Whatever the merits of the case, we were more or less taught not to read psychology, and references to subjective emotional states or to inner experience were rigorously written out of the works of the senior generation of British anthropologists.2 1 Gluckman 1964. 2 Meyer Fortes, the then head of social anthropology at Cambridge, was a case in point. His own background was in psychology, but much of his anthropological writing could be seen as an attempt to rewrite psychological insights in social structural terms (e.g. Fortes 1959). The results were often highly insightful, but remained largely outside the mainstream of later developments.

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However, if the interaction between people in social contexts is at the centre of social anthropology, it can be difficult to analyse such interaction without eventually resorting to something that looks like psychology. British anthropologists by the 1970s were increasingly finding themselves with a large space somewhere in the middle of their intellectual models, and limited resources to fill the gap.3 Elsewhere I have discussed some of the responses within anthropology to this situation.4 The most prominent approach in the UK in recent years has been the attempt to reduce all psychological assumptions about human behaviour to purely cognitive models, most notably in the cognitive anthropology of writers such as Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, and most recently Harvey Whitehouse and his associates.5 This eliminates the issue in a certain sense, by denying that it is of any significance. This rigorous exclusion of the emotional and affective can also look quite scientific, always a good selling point, but it leaves out much of what is most important in human life: human beings are not just mechanisms for the processing of information, they have feelings and emotions, and they understand these in terms of internalised models of the self, in terms of stories they tell themselves about their lives. One can, I think, get rather further with these questions by going back to some of the earlier approaches to these issues, specifically to the work of Victor Turner, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Gregory Bateson, and looking at ways in which their work might be updated and extended so as to generate a model of what a genuinely anthropological psychology might consist of, and how it might be included within a more holistic understanding of human functioning.6 Victor Turner’s work in the mid to late 1960s (and later) on ritual as part of the social life of a Central African people, the Ndembu, presented a model (or more precisely a series of models) of how ritual might work, which depended on his analysis of the polysemic nature of ritual symbols. Ritual symbols, which in the Ndembu case meant specific objects of natural origin used in the complex ritual sequences characteristic of Ndembu society, had both physiological referents, such 3 American anthropology, unlike British, was already developing a tradition of psychological anthropology by the 1960s. Much of the work done under this label is of considerable value. For the most part, though, American psychological anthropology is an adaptation of a preexisting body of psychology into a cross-cultural context, and presupposes the basic categories of existing psychological understanding, including a relatively standard mind-body dichotomy and an essentially individual frame of reference. This seems to me to be largely true even of those authors who pay attention to mind-body relationships (see Samuel in press). What I am proposing here is somewhat different. 4 Samuel 2006 and in press. 5 See e.g. Sperber 1975; 1985; Boyer 1994; Boyer & Walker 2000; Whitehouse 2000; 2004; Andresen 2001. 6 Cf. Victor Turner 1968; 1969; 1970; Lévi-Strauss 1977 [1949]; Bateson 1973; Samuel 1990; 2001. Some of the following material appears in a different form in Samuel (in press).

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as breast milk, or blood, that tied in deeply to the psychological structure of each member of the society, as well as social referents (lineage, motherhood, etc) that directed those deep feelings towards central social elements of the society. The combination and manipulation of these symbols in ritual allowed the ritual to “work” on the psychological makeup of those undergoing the ritual. This enabled Turner to see ritual as acting effectively on the psychological makeup of the members of the society, in a process that was both individual and social. Such action might bring about passage between social roles, or bring about healing, which was associated with initiation into a specific healing cult, which, in its turn, was associated with a mode of spirit affliction.7 What Turner’s work did was to take the emotional side of human life, the psychological drives and conflicts that underlie our behaviour, seriously, but to treat these aspects as entangled with the social through symbolic resources that are shared among human populations. Turner’s own focus was on the analysis of symbolism, not on the psychology, and when he talks about psychology it tends to be in a rather common-sense sub-Freudian kind of way, but there is no doubt that Turner’s vision of human beings incorporated a complex inner life. It also included what we might refer to as a spiritual dimension. For Turner, the rituals of the Ndembu were genuine resources for spiritual growth, through which the Ndembu, individually and collectively, could work towards greater maturity and towards a sense of the wider human and trans-human collectivity to which they belonged.8 In more recent years, through the autobiographical writings of Victor’s widow and close collaborator on the Ndembu research, Edith Turner, we have learned more of what was perhaps left out of Victor’s books of the 1960s and 1970s because of the limitations posed by the social scientific conventions of their time.9 Turner’s work was continued and developed by a number of other theorists, including Bruce Kapferer, whose analyses of Sinhalese healing rituals explore in detail the ways in which these complex theatrical rituals might operate on the selfimage of the patient,10 and Suzette Heald, whose work on Gisu male initiation rituals demonstrated the ways in which these rituals acted to create a particular kind of adult male personality with a specific emotional patterning.11 7 Victor Turner 1968; 1970. Related aspects of Turner’s theory included his analysis of the liminal state as a ritually-created state of fluidity and “communitas”, within which shifts in psychological structure could take place, and his discussion of the work of the diviner as a “social analyst”, who identifies and prescribes the appropriate ritual solution for a given problem (V. Turner 1969, 1975). 8 Cf Victor Turner 1975. 9 E.g. Edith Turner 1987. 10 E.g. Kapferer 1979. 11 Heald 1999.

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It is worth noting that this line of approach is not necessarily linked to the structural-functionalist assumptions that formed Turner’s own starting point. Turner writes as if ritual is, in general, good for society, and this can easily be read in terms of ritual being an essentially conservative, and even politically reactionary, force. It is clear that this is not what Turner had in mind – like most of the Manchester school, he was politically on the left – and, as Kapferer and Heald’s later work demonstrates, an analysis of ritual processes as meaningful is not at all incompatible with an awareness of social and political inequality.12 In reality, Turnerian-style analysis adds an important dimension to the analysis of inequality and oppression, since ritual processes are typically part both of how inequality and oppression are maintained, and of how they are contested. The line of theorising which derives from Turner’s work allows one to see healing ritual as, in effect, psychotherapy, as working in complex and sophisticated ways to reshape the psychological patterning of individuals in order to restore their viability and reconnect them with their social context. It provides a sophisticated account of how meaning might heal, but remains committed to the mind-body divide; the ritual works at the psychological level, not at the physical. A second line of theorising which, by contrast, explicitly works across the mind-body divide can be traced back to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s classic, if problematic, study of a Cuna shamanic healing ritual for a breech-birth.13 Lévi-Strauss suggested that the imagery of the ritual enabled the woman to reconceptualise her chaotic and unbearable bodily sensations into a coherent and manageable form. Specifically, this reconceptualisation involved a journey of healing spirits inside the woman’s body, and Lévi-Strauss assumed that the woman also responded physically to the imagery, allowing her cervix to dilate and thus easing the childbirth. The details of Lévi-Strauss’s analysis have been contested, and it would seem unlikely that the woman’s body would react in the rigidly-scripted manner presupposed by his interpretation.14 My own preference would be to see the ritual less as dictating a particular series of changes within the woman’s body, and more as providing her with a range of images that might enable her to respond more positively to her predicament.15 This also points to the need to insert the woman’s experience more directly into the analysis, rather than treating her, in effect, as a passive subject on whom the ritual acts. This suggests that a key issue in such healing rituals – and perhaps in ritual more generally – is to understand how human beings experience their bodies, both in terms of their “internal” functioning and in terms of their interaction with their 12 13 14 15

E.g. Kapferer 1997; 2000; Heald 2002; 2003. Lévi-Strauss 1977 [1949]. Cf Sherzer 1989; Taussig 1992. Cf Samuel 2005: 232–233.

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surroundings. How we subjectively experience our bodies is, however, a far from simple matter. Typically, we experience ourselves as “having” a body and as interacting with the world in such a way that our experience is related back to an image of the body which we “inhabit”. Thus, for example, if we see an object in front of us, we perceive that object in a spatial relationship to our subjectively-experienced three-dimensional body-image. If we touch a hot object, we perceive heat in the relevant point of our concept of our body. This process (“homuncular vision”, in the terminology of Alex Comfort16), is much less obvious and straightforward than it might seem. Seen purely in terms of information-processing, some extremely complex and sophisticated processing is required to transform human sensory input into our perceived body-image. It should be noted here that sensory input may relate both to internal bodily processes and to our interaction with the external world. Our body surface, the boundary along which we subjectively experience our interaction with an environment which we conceive as external to us, is what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari referred to, following Antonin Artaud, as the “body without organs”. This is the boundary surface between what we experience as ourselves, and what we experience as the external world.17 In Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, they suggest that the true realm of psychology relates to how this boundary surface is formed and operates. This is meant in part as a critique of the Freudian analysis of the self as some kind of process internal to the individual; Deleuze and Guattari see the self rather as something that pertains to the nature of the boundary between individuals. Our sense of our embodiment does not stop at our bodily surface. It is also, centrally, about interaction with what we see as our environment. This environment includes other people and other living beings, which may or may not correspond to those defined by contemporary science (it may, for example, include spirit-beings and deities). It is also not necessarily restricted to the present moment, since much of the time we may be living in the past or the future in terms of our imagined interactions. A third anthropologist, whose work, like Turner’s, was in fact a major influence on Deleuze and Guattari, is also worth considering here. This is Gregory Bateson. The focus on communication in many of his best-known papers18 superficially 16 Comfort 1979: 27–32. 17 Deleuze & Guattari 1984; Samuel 2002. 18 Bateson never wrote a comprehensive theoretical statement or summary (unless one counts his early work Naven), and his writings are typically article-length rather than book-length, expressions of the particular point in an onward flow where he was at the time of writing. Their quality as stages on an ongoing journey, each of which presents partial insights, is part of their attraction, but can make it particularly difficult to summarise “Bateson’s views” at any given point.

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might seem to resemble the cognitive anthropologists of a later period, such as Dan Sperber or Pascal Boyer. Bateson, though, was never concerned only with the cognitive and intellectual level. He made this point himself in one of his greatest papers (“Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art”) by reference to Pascal’s famous aphorism: Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing”.19 For Bateson, much of the point was to trace and uncover those reasons, a process with a close relationship to what could again be called spiritual growth, best shown in the Buddhist references scattered through his later writings, and in his stress on the need for ecological awareness if our planet was to survive. Bateson was one of the first great ecological prophets of the late twentieth century. Psychological states for Bateson, however, could be translated or represented as systematic patterns of communication and interaction, an equation which I picked up myself many years ago when first trying to make sense of the complex selftransformative exercises of Tibetan religion.20 Bateson’s point here is that rather than treating – let us say – paranoia or depression as a quality pertaining to an individual (he or she is paranoid or depressed), one could treat it as a quality of the interaction in a social context (he or she is communicating and interacting with his or her environment in a way which exhibits certain “paranoid” or “depressive” features). This move immediately took the psychological into the realm of the social. In Bateson’s case, it was linked to his work on schizophrenia and alcoholism, as with the famous “double-bind” theory, and contributed to the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s, with its emphasis on psychiatric illness being an attribute of a family situation, or of a disturbed community or society, rather than of an individual. This is, no doubt, part of why Bateson’s work went out of fashion in more recent years, with the shift to drug-based rather than communication-based therapies in psychiatry. The reaction, though, was more one of fashion than of reason. In fact, Bateson’s approach is probably more open to integration with pharmacology than most intellectual frameworks of the time. What it does not easily allow, however, is a reduction to pharmacology alone, since patterns of communication and interaction between individual and environment are integral parts of his approach. It is nevertheless worth noting that, as Bateson noted in “Style, Grace and Information”, a very large part of the process of human life, is, and probably has to be, unconscious.21 Much of the richness of the sensory data we receive, both that referring directly to our bodies and that referring to other parts of the universe, necessarily has to be filtered out to simplify the picture to a point at which we can 19 Bateson 1973: 107. 20 Cf Samuel 1990; 2002. 21 Bateson 1973: 107–111.

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handle the amount of information involved. Our conscious body image may shift substantially from moment to moment, depending on which parts of the picture are in our conscious awareness; yet we remain, for the most part, aware of ourselves as a continuing self that retains its identity from moment to moment. One could put this in somewhat different terms; our experience of ourselves, which incorporates a dramatically reduced transform of our sensory input, forms a kind of ongoing narrative, in which we are a central actor, interacting with other entities. Some of these entities, including but not restricted to other human beings, have person-like qualities.22 We experience the ongoing transformations of our subjective experience as resulting, in part at least, from the events of this narrative. We feel cold, hungry, happy, angry, and we understand these feelings (while awake and conscious, and also in dreams) in terms of our ongoing internal narrative. Evidently, this narrative is deeply intertwined with our body physiology. As Varela and Depraz have argued, this is a “two-way street” in which self and neural/bodily base can be seen as mutually implicated and mutually constraining.23 Varela and Depraz’s perspective here, like those of Bateson and of Deleuze and Guattari, is essentially one of mind-body unity, not of mind-body interaction. It is not that self and neural/bodily base, to use Varela and Depraz’s terms, affect each other. They are different levels of analysis of the same unitary phenomenon. Each level only draws out part of the phenomenon; a complete description requires both. Consciousness (including cognition) arises through the biological development of the organism and is part of how human beings operate as biological organisms.24 Mind and body can thus be seen as different aspects of the same unitary process. Within this perspective, the existence of mind-body interaction is no longer some kind of logical paradox, but a simple possibility, which should be at least in part amenable to experimental investigation, of the nature of the emergent structure of self and the ways in which it might entrain and allow access to the lower-level processes of the neural/bodily base.25 Here one can begin to see why transforming, through ritual, the imagery through which we view the world, the elements of our personal narrative about ourselves in relation to the world, might make a difference at a number of levels, physiological and psychological. These might include, for example, patterns of 22 Here I am referring to the experience of a mature adult. Clearly there is a process of growth and learning through which a child comes to understand the world in this way. Clearly, too, there are significant individual and cultural differences. See Samuel (1990) for an approach to dealing with these issues. 23 Varela & Depraz 2003: 214. 24 Cf. Maturana & Varela 1980; Varela 2001. 25 The approach of these authors might be broadly termed Bergsonist, in the sense used by Sean Watson (1998). The critical point, however, is the need for a theoretical language within which mind and body are part of the same field, rather than separate entities dealt with by incompatible languages.

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tension and relaxation of the body’s musculature, and hormonal secretion and distribution, with its related physiological effects.

A Case-Study: Tibetan Tantric Rituals for Health and Longevity I turn back now to the Tibetan Buddhist Tantric ritual processes that have been a major focus of much of my own research, and the complex inner theatre to which I referred at the start of the paper. As I noted earlier, a central part of many Tibetan Tantric practices is a process of imagining oneself as, and identifying with, a Buddhist Tantric deity. Trying to understand what goes on in this process has been one of my starting points in relation to the experiential aspects of ritual. The Tantric deity is clearly not just an external spirit-being; he or she is something that one can identify with and in some sense become. One can certainly say that this is a symbolic process, but this does not really explain very much by itself. What does the process do (or what is it supposed to do), and how does it do it? Now, a Tantric deity is a figure drawn from a wide range of Tantric deities, each of which has different qualities and attributes, and one question one might ask is: how do they contrast? Their qualities are described in emotional terms such as anger or compassion, and also in terms of different kinds of action: compassionate action to convey Enlightenment, healing or prosperity; violent and forceful action to destroy malevolent forces and cut through inner or outer obstacles. One could see these deities in terms of Batesonian patterns of interaction, an equation which perhaps seems more natural if one also looks at the deity as a figure at the centre of the Tantric mandala, which is precisely a social construction, an image of the central figure or figures (they are often a male-female couple) in relation to an imaginatively transformed surrounding universe. So to meditate on oneself as a specific Tantric deity is to attempt to internalise a particular mode of relating with the universe, characterised by a particular patterning of interaction between oneself and the universe. In this sense the Tantric deity is a holistic image, a kind of summation of what one might be in relation to the universe. However, in meditating on oneself as the deity, “I” is at the “centre” only in a partial and provisional way. Since the deity is also a figure that is linked to an explicit denial of the solidity or permanence of the self, and anyone with the appropriate authorisation and training could link to the same deity, then one is, in fact, identifying with a patterning of interaction which is not centred on one’s self, and not centred on anyone, except perhaps in a rather notional sense of the community of fellow-practitioners, all of whom are (from time to time at least) seeking to actualise that particular mode of being within themselves. But such a process of internalising immediately raises questions about the nature of what it is that one is trying to bring into harmony or identity with the holistic image of the Tantric deity. Clearly it has to include one’s subjective sense of

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self, which brings us back to the question of inner work and religious experience with which we began. In reality, though, it includes one’s total psycho-physical organism, and goes beyond that to include one’s social environment – the people and other life-forms with whom one is interacting, in reality or conceptually – and one’s material environment, of which one’s body is anyway part. We can start with a simple case, that of a class of Tibetan healing practices (the so-called tshe grub [pronounced ts’edrup] or long-life realisation rituals) in which the central process consists of the practitioner identifying himself or herself with a healing deity. The principal deity is calm, self-controlled, healthy, and protected from harmful incursions of the external world. The visualisation is structured by a liturgy in which a central component is the repetition of the mantra of the deity, the verbal formula through which he or she is evoked. The surrounding world is seen as transformed into the mandala or palace of the deity. All beings become either transformations of the Buddha’s enlightened consciousness (as is the healing deity with whom the practitioner identifies), or inferior, malevolent entities totally subservient to the healing deity and his or her entourage.26 These tshe grub rituals involve a number of standard sequences. Typically, they include one in which the principal deity or deities generates healing and life-restoring nectar which pervades the practitioner’s body, and one in which a series of secondary deities is sent out into the surrounding universe to recover one’s depleted energy. These are often combined with specific breathing practices. Another common sequence involves the building of elaborate protective barriers to protect one from further loss of life-energy, assault by hostile supernaturals, or both. Here the operation of the ritual on the body image is clear and straightforward, with the transformation of the body image into the healthy, vital, and enlightened being of the deity at the centre. We notice, however, that the process also involves surrounding beings and places, and that a narrative, albeit a highly formalised one, is being constructed, according to which they play supporting roles in the dramatic action of the ritual. We also notice that a relationship with spirit-entities (specifically, the healing deity) is basic to the process.27 A closely related Tibetan healing ritual, the tshe dbang (pronounced tsewang) or (long) life empowerment, contains many of the same features, but differs in one important aspect. Here, the person whose health is being restored is distinct from the person performing the ritual. In the tshe dbang, the lama, in some cases with a group of assistants, invokes himself or herself as the deity, and then transfers the healing power of the deity to one or more recipients, up to several hundred in a large public empowerment, such as might be annually performed as part of a 26 Samuel 2008a; 2008b; 2009. 27 Similar rituals might be used, with different deities, to evoke good fortune, wealth, destruction of malevolent forces, or the attainment of enlightenment. The ritual technology is essentially the same in each case.

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monastic festival for the local community. Here, from the point of view of the recipient of healing, the transaction is an essentially dyadic one, with healing being conveyed from the lama to the recipient, and the focus is generally on a series of consecrated substances (liquids and pills) that are thought of as conveying the blessing. Depending on the recipient’s level of knowledge regarding the process, he or she may also be aware of the implied interactions with the outside universe, the recovery of lost life-force, and so on. The tshe dbang is closer to the conventional model of a healing ritual, in which one person (the shaman, healer, curandero, etc.) heals another through ritual action. It also bears a strong resemblance to the classical placebo model, in that a central element is the giving and consuming of “medicinal” substances, liquids and pills (ril bu), which are specifically not regarded as pharmacologically active.28 They are however regarded as being active in other respects. More precisely, their effect is held to result not from the substance, but from the power of the blessing (byin rlabs [pronounced jinlap]) conveyed by the substance. In other words, Tibetan theorisations of this kind of healing ritual could be seen as focusing, in biomedical terms, on how to get an effective placebo effect. This is germane to the point I am making here, since one could see the structure and detail of these rituals as ensuring in as dramatic a way as possible that the recipient feels himself or herself to be at the receiving end of a transfer of powerful healing energy from the deity via the lama. Much of the dramatic structure of healing rituals in other cultures can be seen in similar terms, as setting up a personal narrative for the person being healed such that harmful beings are displaced, extruded and destroyed, and relations with positive and healing beings put in their place. As Carol Laderman has noted, it is not too critical whether all the details of these processes are followed by the patient; what is important is that he or she is provided with enough healing imagery to construct an effective personal narrative of healing.29 One could say the same in the Tibetan case. Even with the tshe grub or personal longevity practice, where the practitioner is performing the practice on his or her own behalf and is likely to have repeated the condensed version of the practice text many hundreds of times, one could probably place too much emphasis on the exact details of the visualisation and recitation. This in any case includes a considerable amount of redundancy; one’s health is restored through visualised nectars, breathing exercises, and empowered pills, and a whole series of deities is typically invoked in turn to recover lost life-force and energy from the environment. In fact, the precise terms used to refer to energy, vitality, long life, and so forth, vary from 28 As opposed to other kinds of pills (also rilbu) used in Tibetan medical contexts, which contain herbal, animal, and mineral substances generally held to be pharmacologically active, independently of whether they are ritually empowered. 29 Laderman 1987.

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text to text, and my impression is that they do not necessarily reference clearlydistinguished aspects of the individual’s inner life. The point is rather, as with Laderman’s Malay healing ritual, that the individual is presented with a rich field of imagery and symbolism with which to construct an internal narrative of restoration and healing, built from imagery which reiterates messages of wholeness and integration.30 As for the tshe dbang, people may have quite varied and idiosyncratic understandings of what is going on (Gerke, this volume). More generally, the narrative created as a result of participation in a healing ritual is almost by definition going to be a compound of what the lama, shaman, or healer provides, and the contribution of the person being healed. In fact, one might suggest that this is necessary if it is going to work, since the person being healed has to integrate the structure of the ritual into his or her personal life-narrative, with its own individual elements deriving from his or her actual personal history, age, gender, physical condition, and social role. The key issue here, though, is that, in Varela and Depraz’s phrase, we have a two-way street, so that this ongoing work of the narrative of the self, within which the spirits become key personalities, both can and does feed directly into physiological aspects of the person concerned. This is not, of course, to say that the body or brain is infinitely malleable,31 but if the street were not two-way, we would not have a placebo effect in the first place.

Conclusion Incorporating the experience of ritual and the “inner work” that is involved in doing ritual into a model of ritual healing enables us to understand how the ritual may in fact heal. Experience here is the link between the performance of the ritual and its internalisation into the mind-body complex and social relations of the person being healed. I suggest that we can go further than treating the ritual as a generalised placebo, that we can treat the spirits as having a more focused and specific action, and as operating at both psychological and physiological levels, which are ultimately not really distinct from each other. To do this, however, we need to take the language of spirits, of magic, sorcery, and ritual healing more seriously; not in terms of occult forces, but as providing tokens and images for operating on the structure of human life at all levels, within a framework which does not dichotomise between mind and body.

30 Samuel 2008a; 2008b; 2009. 31 Though recent work on neuroplasticity has made it clear that even the adult brain is capable of considerable reshaping and reconstruction.

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If we are prepared to proceed in this way, the “inner theatre” to which I referred at the start of the paper can be seen as a meaningful way of operating with those aspects of mind-body process that are not accessible to direct conscious control, and so of bringing about healing and other significant change within both human beings and their wider social context. The boundary between what can be controlled through consciousness and what cannot is, of course, different for different people, and is certainly changeable to some degree through deliberate training. For most of us, much remains, and perhaps also, as Bateson argued, has to remain, inaccessible to direct conscious control, and it is these areas that the “symbolic” processes of ritual provide a way to access and to change. I hope that our ongoing work on the Tibetan longevity practices will provide a detailed and plausible account of how at least one set of ritual procedures in which experience plays a key role can be understood, and so help us to progress towards the wider question of how such “inner work” can be both meaningful and efficacious as part of the wider sphere of ritual processes.

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References Andresen, Jensine 2001. “Introduction: Towards a Cognitive Science of Religion”. In: Jensine Andresen (ed.). Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious belief, Ritual, and Experience. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press: 1–44. Bateson, Gregory 1973. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Frogmore: Paladin. Boyer, Pascal 1994. “Cognitive Constraints on Cultural Representations: Natural Ontologies and Religious Ideas”. In: Lawrence A. Hirschfeld & Susan A. Gelman (eds.). Mapping the Mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 391–411. — & Sheila Walker 2000. “Intuitive Ontology and Cultural Input in the Acquisition of Religious Concepts”. in Karl S. Rosengren & Carl N. Johnson & Paul L. Harris (eds.). Imagining the Impossible: Magical, Scientific, and Religious Thinking in Children. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 130–156. Comfort, Alex 1979. I and That: Notes on the Biology of Religion. New York: Crown. Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari 1984. Anti-Oedipus. London: Athlone Press. — & Félix Guattari 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fortes, Meyer 1959. Oedipus and Job in West African Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gerke, Barbara 2010. “The Multivocality of Ritual Experiences: Long-Life Empowerments among Tibetan Communities in the Darjeeling Hills, India”. In: this volume: 469–487. Gluckman, Max (ed.) 1964. Closed Systems and Open Minds: The Limits of Naivety in Social Anthropology. Chicago: Aldine. Heald, Suzette 1999. Manhood and Morality: Sex, Violence and Ritual in Gisu Society. London, New York: Routledge — 2002. “Domesticating Leviathan: Sungusungu Groups in Tanzania”. London: The London School of Economics and Political Science (Crisis States Programme Working Paper 16, Series 1) http://www.crisisstates.com/download/wp/WP16.pdf (12. 03. 2010). — 2003. “An Absence of Anthropology: Critical Reflections on Anthropology and AIDS Policy and Practice in Africa”. In: George Ellison & Melissa Parker & Catherine Campbell (eds.). Learning from HIV/AIDS: a Biosocial Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 210–237. Kapferer, Bruce 1979. “Mind, Self and Other in Demonic Illness: The Negation and Reconstruction of Self”. American Ethnologist 6: 110–33. — 1997. The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press. — 2000. “Star Wars: About Anthropology, Culture and Globalisation”. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 11: 174–198.

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Laderman, Carol 1987. “The Ambiguity of Symbols in the Structure of Healing”. Social Science and Medicine 24: 293–301 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1977 [1949]. “The Effectiveness of Symbols”. In: Claude LéviStrauss & Claire Jacobson & Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (transl.). Structural Anthropology, vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin: 186–206. (Originally published as “L’efficacité symbolique”. Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 135: 5–27. Maturana, Humberto R. & Francisco J. Varela 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Reidel. Samuel, Geoffrey 1990. Mind, Body and Culture: Anthropology and the Biological Interface. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. — 2001. “The Effectiveness of Goddesses, or, How Ritual Works”. Anthropological Forum 11/1: 73–91. (Reprinted in Geoffrey Samuel 2005. Tantric Revisionings: New Understandings of Tibetan Buddhism and Indian Religion. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass; London: Ashgate: 229–255). — 2002. “Book Reviews: The Other Side of Rationality: Desire in the Social System”. Public Organization Review 2/4: 415–427. — 2005. Tantric Revisionings: New Understandings of Tibetan Buddhism and Indian Religion. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass; London: Ashgate. — 2006. “Ritual, Efficacy and Healing”. Lecture for South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Nov. 22, 2006. — 2008a. “Tibetan Longevity Practices: The Body in the ‘Chi med srog thig Tradition”. Paper presented in panel “Theory and Practice of Healing, Medicine and Longevity in Buddhism”, 15th Conference of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (IABS), Atlanta, Georgia, Jun. 23–28, 2008. — 2008b. “The Development of Tantric Practices for Longevity and Health in Tibet”. Paper for International Conference “Transformations and Transfer of Tantra in Asia and Beyond”, Freie Universität Berlin, Dec. 1–3, 2008. — 2009. “Tibetan Longevity Practice and the Ecology of Mind”. Paper for the Society for the Anthropology of Religion/Society for Psychological Anthropology Joint Spring Meeting (Moments Of Crisis: Decision, Transformation, Catharsis, Critique), Mar. 27–29, 2009, Asilomar, California. — (in press). “Healing, Efficacy and the Spirits”. In: William S. Sax & Johannes Quack (eds.). Special issue (vol. 24) of Journal of Ritual Studies. To appear in 2010. Sax, William S. 2004. “Healing Rituals: A Critical Performative Approach”. Anthropology and Medicine 11: 293–306. Sherzer, Joel 19892. “Namakke, Sunmakke, Kormakke: Three Types of Cuna Speech Event”. In: Richard Bauman & Joel Sherzer (eds.). Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 263–282. Sperber, Dan 1975. Rethinking Symbolism. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. — 1985. On Anthropological Knowledge: Three Essays. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Taussig, Michael 1992. The Nervous System. New York, London: Routledge. Turner, Edith T. 1987. The Spirit and the Drum: A Memoir of Africa. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Turner, Victor W. 1968. The Drums of Affliction. Oxford: Clarendon Press. — 1969. The Ritual Process. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. — 1970. The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. — 1975. Revelation and Divination in Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Varela, Francisco J. 2001. “Why a Proper Science of Mind Requires the Transcendence of Nature”. In: Jensine Andresen (ed.). Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious belief, Ritual, and Experience. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press: 207–236. — & Natalie Depraz 2003. “Imagining: Embodiment, Phenomenology, and Transformation”. In: B. Alan Wallace (ed.). Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground. New York: Columbia University Press: 195–230. Watson, Sean 1998. “The New Bergsonism: Discipline, Subjectivity and Freedom”. Radical Philosophy 92: 6–16. Whitehouse, Harvey 2000. Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — 2004. “Modes of Religiosity and the Cognitive Science of Religion”. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 16: 321–335.

Etzel Cardeña and Wendy E. Cousins

From Artifice to Actuality: Ritual, Shamanism, Hypnosis, and Healing From a purely rationalist stance, it would seem that a number of ritual actions are absurd or require convoluted evolutionary explanations.1 In this paper, we will present converging lines of evidence, mostly from psychological and medical research, suggesting how specific behaviours and cognitions can alter the reality of individuals participating in rituals. Thus, apparently nonsensical actions, such as following intricate verbal formulations, or dressing up and imitating someone, can affect the actor’s and the audience’s experience and physiology, spinning reality out of mere pretence. In his 2005 Nobel Lecture, Harold Pinter stated that “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.”2 It was particularly trenchant that a theatre writer whose work revealed the extent to which speech hides rather than reveals, would conclude that some matters could be both true and false. Many rituals, which from one perspective can be seen as an elaborate ruse, may produce valid experiences, thus blurring the distinction between what is, and is not, real. The anthropologist Turnbull, while describing the molimo ritual of the Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri rainforest in Zaire, provided a good example of how becoming fully engaged in a ritual reveals a reality that participants seek, and that cannot be apprehended from a purely “objective” analysis.3 This is another example of the distinction between directly experiential and conceptual knowledge that William James, Bertrand Russell, and others have made.4 In this paper, we will describe how other phenomena besides rituals can begin as pretence or trickery5 and then become experientially, physiologically, and socially real. We will concentrate on three domains: the importance of language or incantation, the importance of the body or action, and the importance of other 1 2 3 4 5

E.g. Boyer & Liénard 2006. Pinter 2005. Turnbull 1993. James 1911; Russell 1970/1917. Cardeña & Beard 1996.

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people. We start with a review of relevant research in hypnosis and placebo, discuss the embodiedness of emotions and cognition, and then move to more social areas, while simultaneously making the case that the boundaries between the intrapersonal, the inter-personal, and the trans-personal are as shifting as those between artifice and actuality.

The Power of Incantation: Hypnosis and Placebo Hypnosis can be defined as a procedure, generally established by an induction, during which suggestions for alterations in behaviour and mental processes, including sensations, perceptions, emotions, and thoughts, are provided by another person or by oneself. An induction typically involves focusing on the experiences suggested (for instance to relax or feel alert), while disregarding other concerns. For our purposes, Tellegen’s description of the goal of hypnosis is particularly fitting: to “represent suggested events and states imaginatively and enactively in such a manner that they are experienced as real.”6 Hypnosis, whose modern history started, by most accounts, with the dramatic ritual/performances of Mesmer in group settings, is a particularly relevant area in the consideration of ritual, artifice, and actuality. It is not surprising that hypnosis has been analysed in dramaturgical terms, as believed-in-imaginings.7 In a related fashion, individuals who respond strongly to hypnotic suggestions often have a history of imaginative involvements, including participation in theatrical and other artistic activities,8 and share some characteristics with traditional shamans.9 A number of hypnotic inductions use tricks, such as reinterpreting naturally occurring bodily reactions (for example the arm becoming tired after holding it up for a while) as the effect of the hypnotist’s suggestions. This reinterpretation may change the individual’s expectations and focus of attention, in a similar way to the magical information that shamans and magicians provide.10 Hypnotic phenomena are partly based on the specific suggestions given. For instance, raising the participants’ beliefs that a hypnotic procedure will enhance memory will have that effect, while telling them that the procedure will impair memory will produce the opposite effect.11 Suggestions help not only to define but to shape experience, behaviour, and biology, as there is evidence that hypnotic strategies can be effective for a number of medical and psychological conditions, including acute or chronic pain, 6 7 8 9 10 11

Tellegen 1978/1979: 220. Coe & Sarbin 1991. Hilgard 1979. Cardeña 1996. Macknik et al. 2008. Orne 1959.

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nausea and vomiting, asthma, dermatological disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, anxiety, obesity, post-traumatic conditions, and others.12 For the purposes of this paper, however, what is most interesting about hypnotic strategies is not their clinical efficacy, but how suggestions of something unreal can become real in an experiential, physiological, and, sometimes, clinical way. A few examples should suffice. When given suggestions under hypnosis that they would perceive a gray geometric stimulus as being in colour, and vice versa, the experiential reports and brain activity related to colour processing (in the fusiform/ lingual regions of the human brain) of high hypnotisables was consistent with the suggestion given to them, rather than with the “objective” information in front of their eyes.13 In simpler terms, for some individuals under hypnosis “believing is seeing”. In the clinical arena, there is also evidence that suggestions to no longer have an allergic reaction to an allergen (or have allergic reactions to innocuous substances) can affect not only the individuals’ experience, but their actual immunological reaction.14 Hypnotic effects on experience and physiology depend to a large degree on the specific word formulation used, rather than on, say, a general response to a hypnotic state (thus recalling the importance of stating precisely the “magic incantation”).15 Thus, for instance, suggestions to decrease pain sensation instead of the associated emotional suffering, or using the word “imagination” instead of “hypnosis” will affect differently the individual’s experience and the corresponding brain activity.16 In the case of individuals with dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality), this effect seems to depend on the type of identity that the person exhibits at the moment,17 thus suggesting that believing to be someone else can also have an important effect. Hypnosis has been called a “non-deceptive placebo”,18 and it is on this that we will now focus. In 1955, the American anaesthetist Beecher brought the concept of placebos to the foreground of medical research. Derived from the Latin for “I shall please,” a placebo is an inactive substance or treatment that looks the same as, and is given the same way as, an active drug or treatment being tested. Beecher reported that, on average, about a third of patients with a range of conditions improved when they were given placebos. Although the term placebo tends to call to mind sugar pills, it is not necessarily pharmacological; there are also procedural placebos. For instance, in surgical placebo, a patient may be anaesthetised and su12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Lynn et al. 2000; Nash & Barnier 2008. Kosslyn et al. 2000. Benham & Younger 2008. Cavendish 1967. Oakley 2008. Cardeña, Pakianathan, & Spiegel 1989. Kirsch, Capafons, Cardeña, & Amigó 1999.

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perficial procedures such as skin incision are performed without the actual surgery,19 recalling fake operations by some traditional healers.20 Patient expectations are important in determining the placebo effect. Treatments that are perceived as being more powerful tend to have a stronger placebo effect than those that are perceived to be less so. Thus, placebo injections have more effect than oral placebo, brightly coloured placebos have more effect than light-coloured ones, larger placebos have more effect than smaller ones, two placebos are more effective than one, and higher status professionals further enhance the effect.21 It even seems that the perceived status of the pharmaceutical itself is of relevance, as the same compound has also been found to be more powerful in its effect if it carries a brand-name than when it is unbranded.22 Words carry power… Recent research has shown that several neurotransmitter systems, such as the opiate and dopamine ones, are involved with the placebo effect, and brain regions including the anterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the basal ganglia have been activated following placebo administration.23 Placebo studies are now being extended into clinically relevant models, and it has been argued that maximising this expectancy effect is important if clinicians are to optimise the health of their patients.24 Naturally, these mechanisms can be used malevolently25 and can spread within a group.26 Thus, we would argue that health professionals would benefit from studying the strategies and artifices of shamans and magicians.

The Power of the Body: Acting and Shamanism Artifices can be produced by words, as in hypnosis, but also by strategically using the body. Shamans (i.e. “technicians of the sacred”27 who use their alterations of consciousness for the benefit of the community) and actors typically use their bodies as much or more than they use words. In contrast to the theory that emotions are just abstract “hot cognitions,” a phenomenological approach long ago posited that having a specific body is central to all our experience, including cognition.28 In support of this stance, various studies have confirmed that the facial expressions and postures we adopt (and the resulting brain patterns) have measurable effects on 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Tennery et al. 2002. cf. Achterberg & Krippner 2000. Rajagopal 2006. Branthwaite & Cooper 1981. Oken 2008. Ibid. Pilcher 2009. Van Ommeren et al. 2001. Heinze 1991. Merleau-Ponty 1945.

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how we process emotional and non-emotional information.29 For instance, pushing a lever away from the body will increase the speed with which participants respond to negative images, whereas pulling the lever towards the body, conversely, will facilitate the response to positive images.30 The word acting is paradoxical, implying opposite meanings, very much as the word ritual does.31 Acting can be defined as artistic feigning, simulation, representation, or impersonation,32 although the word can merely refer to doing a bodily action. It is also significant that in many languages it connotes playing, e.g. English (play), French (jeu), and German (Spiel). While acting may be seen as faking, performers may engage in this practice specifically because the intention and focus that performing requires provide a greater sense of authenticity than other activities.33 In contrast, ordinary consciousness and activities may involve continuously changing shifts between perceptions, fantasies, repetitive thoughts, and so on.34 Paradoxically, ordinary behaviour, which is generally seen as more truthful than acting, involves a collection of automatic, semi-conscious behaviours, thoughts, and experiences,35 many of which are intended to misrepresent a given state of affairs (just watch any play by Pinter…). Actors can, of course, be less than fully committed to their actions and to the moment, and unsuccessful acting may be manifested in unintentional, incongruous behaviours. Gosselin, Kirouac, and Dor36 obtained samples from actors depicting emotions, some of them felt, some not. While the unfelt samples generally had all of the facial actions of the emotion portrayed, they were not in synchrony, in contrast with natural displays of emotions or the actors’ own felt portrayals. A fully realised performance involves the organic integration of experience, physiology, cognition, and behaviour, whereas less realised acting misses an element, or lacks proper harmony among various somatic and psychological components. In the study by Gosselin and collaborators, naive raters could not distinguish very well between the felt and unfelt manifestations, which may explain why mediocre acting often goes unpunished. A different disconnection can occur when the actor experiences an event, but a body indicator is incongruous with the report of that experience. Besides earnest but untalented actors, psychologists have described a group of individuals labelled “repressors”, who honestly claim to be calm while

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Niedenthal 2007. Duckworth et al. 2002. Turner 2006 Kirby 1972. Hanna 1979. Klinger 1978; Tart 1986. E.g. Bargh & Chartrand 1999. Gosselin, Kirouac & Dor 1995.

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talking, for instance, about their parents, while their electrodermal responses manifest great arousal.37 The latter are examples in which the initial artifice of acting does not transcend its initial status. By far the most interesting case is where a performer creates an illusion that becomes real for the self and for the audience. As compared with a magician who manipulates a number of special objects that help create an illusion, the actor’s main, and sometimes only, instrument is herself. One of the simplest strategies to induce the experience of an emotion is to shape one’s face and body to conform to the natural expression of emotions. Performers have known this for a long time. During the nineteenth century, the voice professor Delsarte38 provided a taxonomy of facial expressions, body postures, and gestures, along with an integrated view of emotions, thoughts, and behaviours. The early twentieth century influential theatre actor and director Stanislavski’s own work developed from an internalised method to a growing stress on physical actions.39 Michael Chekhov, perhaps his brightest student, proposed working with the actor’s imagination, but also with the body, as in one of his exercises using facial expressions and gestures to imitate the character's face, characteristic movements, and gestures.40 Many decades later, psychological research has confirmed that manipulating facial muscles and bodily postures can give rise to the emotions with which they are associated.41 It is noteworthy that the study by Ekman and collaborators found that directly changing facial expressions without any association to emotional labels and thoughts was more effective in evoking an emotion than thinking about personal memories associated with those emotions. Another example of the blurring between artifice and reality is described in a study by Lanzetta, Cartwright-Smith, and Eleck.42 They asked their participants to intentionally conceal or exaggerate their reaction to painful shocks of varying intensity. Measurements of their experience and physiology (skin conductivity) of pain showed that concealing their expression of pain decreased the objective and subjective reactions to pain, while exaggerating the pain increased those reactions. Although academics have usually studied one psychological indicator at a time, the simultaneous combination and interaction of facial expression, posture, breathing, and so forth, should produce stronger and more reliable experiences of an emotion than changing a single element.43

37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Weinberger 1990. Shawn 1974. Richards 1995. Chekhov 1984: 71. E.g. Duclos et al. 1989; Ekman & Levenson & Friesen 1983. Lanzetta & Cartwright-Smith & Eleck 1976. Bloch et al. 1987.

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However, sole concentration on body mechanics or inner experiences to elicit an emotion is unlikely to sustain the complexity of an actual performance. Actors need to have a strategy that will keep them fully engaged throughout the scene or the play. Stanislavski provided a good route map with his discussion of the actor’s objectives in the scene and his method of physical actions. Especially in the latter part of his work, he explored the actor’s commitment to specific physical actions, given the circumstances of the character, the play, and the ongoing interactions with other actors. Such actions are not just mechanical movements, but integrated behavioral and experiential events that involve a very clear intention, motivated by a very precise reason.44 Although physical actions may evoke particular emotions, energy levels, and so on, they also help provide a moment-to-moment direction and focus to what the actor does. The overarching objectives of cultural rituals probably have the same purpose. Ritual, shamanism, and performance have been linked throughout history, and remain in a dialectic relationship.45 Harrison, a theorist of the early Greek theatre movement and a member of the Cambridge school of classical anthropology, explored the relationship between emotion and dramatic or religious performance. She reversed the accepted view that ritual was the debased form of myth, suggesting instead that myth was shaped from ritual and that underlying ritual was an impulse “to utter, to give out a strongly felt emotion or desire by representing, by making or doing or enriching the object or act desired”.46 In analysing the principles on which “primitive” magic is based, Frazer noted what he refers to as the “Law of Similarity”,47 the concept that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; hence, the magician infers that he or she can produce any effect he or she desires merely by imitating it.48 Besides their knowledge of herbs and the community’s cultural history, shamans are required to be performers of the first order, to enact struggles with spiritual forces or magical flights to other realities, to sing, dance, and compose poetry. It is likely that at least some performance practices became separate specialisations of the original shamanic role as technician of the sacred/healer/performer/psychologist. Shamanic philosophy, motifs, and techniques have continued affecting contemporary theatre, music, and the visual arts.49 The story of Quesalid, a reluctant Kwakiutl shaman, as described by LéviStrauss from ethnographic work by Franz Boas, illustrates the complex interactions of various aspects of how artifice can become actuality.50 Shamanism includes a 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Richards 1995. Schechner 1988. Harrison 1913: 26. Frazer 1922. See also Cavendish 1967. Cardeña 1987; Tucker 1992. Lévi-Strauss 1969.

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number of tricks of the trade, including sleights of hand, ventriloquism, using informants to obtain information surreptitiously about the patient, and the prototypical sucking cure.51 Notwithstanding Quesalid’s doubts, he learnt well the tricks of the trade, especially the sucking technique, that has been observed as far apart as the Americas, Siberia, and Africa. This technique involves preparing a piece of down, cotton, or some other material, that the healer later extracts from her own mouth after she has “sucked” the disease/sorcery/bad medicine out of the patient’s body. The shaman prominently displays this object, which usually contains organic material such as hair and blood, to the patient and observers before disposing of it and, consequently, of the disease. Quesalid had learned his lesson well. He produced a foul object smeared with his own blood (produced covertly by making his gums or tongue bleed slightly) that represented the malignancy of the patient. Despite Quesalid’s skepticism about his own sleight of hand, he found that his services were sought after, because other healers, who were not as well versed in this technique, proved less effective than he. To a degree, Quesalid’s illusion-for-others became an illusion-for-himself, as he reluctantly became persuaded that this illusory cure of illness had concrete and real effects. As for the importance of actually displaying an object after a healing procedure, a study on lumbar surgery found that patients who were shown excised disc fragments had significantly better outcomes than those who were not shown anything.52 From a certain kind of third-person perspective, it would be concluded that Quesalid and other healers engage in deception and, perhaps, in self-deception, as both Frazer and Warner maintain.53 But there are alternative perspectives, among them, the interpretation that the healer gives concrete form and shape to a vague, ungraspable disease, and that by this and other means the expectations of a possible cure are enhanced. Strengthening of expectations, expression of emotions, and labelling of the ailment are among the factors that facilitate a cure, whether in a pre-industrial society or in a modern hospital.54 The healer’s own perspective may be that the sleight of hand represents the enactment of a spiritual struggle through which the healer is able to overcome a noxious influence on the patient’s welfare.55 Thus, it is not surprising that Victor Turner was not able to persuade any of the Ndembu healers he studied that they were engaging in deception. It is also significant for the topic of acting that he concluded: “whatever efficacy the rite possesses – and it does have ameliorative effects on patients [...] resides in the degree of skill wielded by the doctor in each instance of its performance”.56 Although Quesalid 51 52 53 54 55 56

Eliade 1972. Tait et al. 2009. Frazer 1922; Warner 1980. Frank 1973. Turner 1964. Turner 1964: 240.

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and other traditional healers may not be conversant with Aristotle’s explanation of the therapeutic effect of tragedy through catharsis, they still recognise that a performed illusion may achieve more than mere expressionless words. And there is some evidence that healing may also be effected by the conscious intention of others, even if the patient is not aware of this.57 It bears mentioning that even in science, holding a belief that something is real or not seems to partly determine what type of results the researcher obtains.58 Behavioral and even demographic characteristics of the experimenter59 help explain how this may come about, although some physicists60 have proposed that Quantum Mechanics imply that an observer’s intention may affect objects at a distance, something that is assumed in shamanic metaphysics.61

The Power of Other People: Who is the Audience and Who is the Actor? Thus far, our analysis has focused on the strategies of individuals, but in reality individuals are immersed in diverse systems, and a full understanding of, for instance, emotions, must go beyond the intra-psychic realm and include inter-personal and trans-personal domains.62 Recent research exemplifies how porous our personal boundaries are. Neuroscience has documented the existence of brain regions in primates and humans that become similarly active during both action and the observation of action in another.63 Gallese argues that this mirror neuron system acts as a basic functional mechanism of embodied simulation that gives us an experiential insight into other minds.64 Empirical evidence from brain imaging studies has found that both experiencing disgust and witnessing that emotion expressed by the facial mimicry of someone else activate the same neural structure.65 Relatedly, the first-person experience of having one’s body touched triggers the same neural networks activated by watching the body of another being touched.66 Thus, we do not just see another’s action or emotional display, but our own body states associated with these actions and displays are also evoked in us as if we ourselves were doing a similar action or experiencing similar emotions or sensations. 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Hodge 2007. Schlitz et al. 2006. Silverman 1974. E.g. Walker 2000. Heinze 1991. Cardeña 2008. Rizzolatti & Craighero 2004. Gallese 2004. Wicker et al. 2003. Keysers et al. 2004.

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The activity of the mirror neurons appears to represent a system that matches observed events to similar, internally generated actions, and in this way forms a link between the observer and the actor. Individuals may also purposefully imitate others. The Simulation Theory of the mind proposes that humans specifically simulate being others in order to understand their experience.67 Rossi & Rossi have argued that this experience of empathy and understanding of other minds is the essence of what has been called rapport and the rapport zone in the literature of hypnotic induction and the facilitation of the classical hypnotic phenomena.68 In support of this, they note Milton Erickson’s use of “pantomime techniques”, and his facilitation of therapeutic hypnosis in resistant individuals by surrounding them with highly hypnotisable participants whose behaviour they could carefully observe. Viewed from this perspective, it would seem that Erickson was thus activating and utilising the mirror neuron systems of resistant participants to facilitate their hypnotic induction. Although hypnosis is often thought of in terms of subjective experience, a particular state of consciousness, or some other formulation that de-emphasises social aspects, the ability to be hypnotised (i.e., hypnotisability) is positively related to measures of social influence, namely emotional contagion, that is the automatic mimicking or synchronising one’s behaviour and experience with the emotional experience of someone else,69 with empathy,70 and with the sense that the boundaries between the self and others are thin rather than thick.71 Performers do not act in a vacuum, but mould and are moulded by their audience. Ando found that acting development implies adopting simultaneously the viewpoints of the character, the actor, and the audience, without being completely swayed by the latter.72 The ability to elicit particular emotions in others seems to depend on the ability to feel an emotion strongly, being able to express it, and being unresponsive to the incompatible emotions of others.73 In many rituals, ritually based performances, and in some projects such as Grotowski’s paratheatrical activities, there is no distinction between performer and audience, or that distinction is mild, hence the previous considerations about acting would apply in some degree to all participants.74 But even in performances in which there is a strong distinction between performer and audience, the audience can mimic the actors’ actions through subtle gestures. The reaction of an audience is partly based on the em67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

E.g. Gordon 1986. Rossi & Rossi 2006. Cardeña et al. 2009. Wickramasekera & Szlyk 2003. Cardeña & Terhune 2008. Ando 2007. Hatfield & Cacioppo & Rapson 1994. Cardeña 1996.

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pathic response of its members. Hoffman has argued that there are various modes of empathy, from basic responses, such as mimicry, to more sophisticated cognitive processes, such as sympathising with the plight of another.75 An initial mode of empathy may occur in the infant’s imitation of the facial expressions of the caretaker, imitation that activates facial muscles and then generates a particular emotional response, an argument consistent with the evidence about mirror neurons and simulation reviewed earlier. A non-ordinary mechanism has also been proposed to understand non-local relationships across individuals.76 For instance, Stanislavski wrote that an actor could sometimes feel direct energy links with the audience, an assertion that has found an echo in reports by some modern actors77 and in descriptions of healing rituals.78 Whether these experiences of energy are metaphors for sensory and emotional responses, or describe other processes, remains an open question. Although Western performance is not ordinarily analysed in these terms, other traditions discuss the integration of physical, psychological, social, and spiritual processes within a performance.79 Stanislavski advised actors to act as if the circumstances of the character and the play were real. The magic of it all is that they may manage to persuade themselves and the audience that these circumstances are real and actually make them real in a number of ways. When intention is impeccable and the performers/ritualists achieve moment-to-moment presence, they and their audience may take a dizzying step from artifice to reality. There are certainly limitations to what may be achieved through these procedures,80 but they have to be ascertained empirically. Perhaps the consciousness researcher John C. Lilly said it most dramatically: “In the province of connected minds, what the network believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally.”81

75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Hoffman 1984. Cardeña 2009; Radin 1998. Bates 1988. Katz 1982. Cf. Zarrilli 1993. Benham & Younger 2008. Lilly 1972: xiii.

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Silverman, I. 1974. “The Experimenter: A (Still) Neglected Stimulus Object”. The Canadian Psychologist 15/3: 258–270. Tait. M. J. et al. 2009. “Improved Outcome after Lumbar Microdiscectomy in Patients Shown their Excised Disc Fragments: A Prospective, Double Blind, Randomised, Controlled Trial”. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 80: 1044– 1046. Tart, C., T. 1986. Waking up. Boston: Shambhala. Tellegen, A. 1978/1979. “On Measures and Conceptions of Hypnosis”. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis 21: 219–237. Tenery, R. et al. 2002. “Surgical ‘Placebo’ Controls”. Annals of Surgery 235: 303–307. Tucker, M. 1992. Dreaming with Open Eyes. London: Aquarian. Turnbull, C. 1993. “Liminality: A Synthesis of Subjective and Objective Experience”. In: R. Schechner & W. Appel (eds). By Means of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 50–81. Turner, V. W. 1964. “A Ndembu Doctor in Practice”. In: A. Kiev (ed.). Magic, Faith and Healing. New York: The Free Press: 229–267. Van Ommeren et al. 2001. “Trauma and Loss as Determinants of Medically Unexplained Epidemic Illness in a Bhutanese Refugee Camp”. Psychological Medicine 31: 1259–1267. Walker, E. H. 2000. The Physics of Consciousness. Boulder: Perseus Publishing. Warner, R. 1980. “Deception and Self-deception in Shamanism and Psychiatry”. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 1: 41–52. Weinberger, D. 1990. “The Construct Validity of the Repressive Coping Style”. In: J. L. Singer (ed.). Repression and Dissociation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 337–386. Wicker, B. et al. 2003. “Both of us Disgusted in my Insula: The Common Neural Basis of Seeing and Feeling Disgust”. Neuron 40: 655–664. Wickramasekera II, I. E. & J.P. Szlyk 2003. “Could Empathy be a Predictor of Hypnotic Ability?”. International Journal of Clinical & Experimental Hypnosis 51: 390–399. Zarrilli, P. 1993. “What Does it Mean to ‘Become the Character’: Power, Presence, and Transcendence in Asian In-Body Disciplines of Practice”. In: R. Schechner & W. Appel (eds.). By Means of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 131–148.

Michael Winkelman

Evolutionary Origins of Human Ritual Introduction Evolutionary and comparative perspectives illustrate homologies of human rituals with other animals’ displays, behaviours which constitute their most complex communicative capabilities. By focusing on behaviours (rituals), rather than beliefs (religion), we can establish the continuities between humans and other animals. This provides a basis for identifying the ancient functions of ritual and the origins of religion, using the perspectives of biogenetic structuralism.1 A baseline for animal-human ritual comparisons is provided by cross-cultural features of an ancient human ritual form known as shamanism.2 Shamanism is a social universal, found in hunter-gatherer societies around the world, going at least as far back as the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition, some 40,000 YBP.3 The cross-cultural similarities and their relationships to human biology provide the basis for a shamanic paradigm4 and a baseline for explaining the origins of the uniquely human ritual and religious capacities. The pre-human religious origins can be inferred from the characteristics of rituals of hominids, the family that includes the ancestors of humans and the great apes. These ancient ritual dynamics can be inferred from the commonalities found in the ritualised displays of contemporary great apes. These ritualised behaviours are examined through descriptions of the activities of the maximal displays of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and their associated individual and group functions. Hominid ritual capacities are illustrated by similarities of chimpanzee displays and shamanic rituals in group re-unification displays involving aggressive bipedal displays by males towards “others”; emotional group vocalisations (chorusing); drumming; and group protection and tension reduction. These implicate hominid ritual activities as involving similar individual and group activities that produced status adjustment and group integration surrounding these vigorous bipedal displays by alpha males, which included drumming with hands, feet, and sticks, and emotional vocalisations. Their adaptive foundations are illustrated by the many functions of 1 2 3 4

See d’Aquili et al. 1979; Laughlin & d’Aquili 1974; Winkelman & Baker 2008. Winkelman 1992; 2000. Winkelman 2002. Winkelman 2003; 2004.

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these threat displays in chimpanzee society: greetings, hierarchy maintenance, group integration, intergroup boundary maintenance, and release of tension and frustration. The differences between chimpanzee ritualisation and shamanic ritual are assessed to derive a framework for the evolutionary developments of human religiosity. This paper explores these in terms of factors that have produced mystical experiences, including: enhanced opioid systems; exposure to the selective effects of psilocybin-containing mushrooms for enhanced serotonergic systems; and the effects of long-distance running.

Shamanism in Cross-Cultural Perspective Cross-cultural research shows that shamanism is a valid etic concept, reflecting similar ritual healing practices and group ecstatic ceremonies, found primarily in pre-modern foraging societies around the world.5 These comparative findings validate the impressions of the comparative scholar of religion, Mircea Eliade, who characterised the shamanic ritual as an unparalleled activity in the lives of the community, which the entire local residential group was expected to attend.6 Core aspects of shamanism identified by Eliade included shamans’ use of “ecstasy,” an altered state of consciousness, to enter the spirit world in order to achieve goals for the community, particularly healing. This shamanic ritual is typically a nocturnal event, in which the entire local community congregates around a fire, clapping and singing, while the shaman dances for hours while drumming or rattling. The shaman’s vocalisations also include engaging in a dialogue with the spirits, exhorting them through ancient songs and chants, challenging, and, if possible, subordinating the spirits to come to the community’s assistance. The shaman would call for spirit allies or exhort evil spirits to leave and cease their afflictions, sometimes acting out struggles with the spirits, mimicking the behaviours of the animal powers summoned, or enacting the journey through the spirit realms. Key to the shaman’s ritual performances is the ability to enter into an “ecstatic” altered state of consciousness (ASC) through the effects of drumming, singing, chanting, dancing, and a variety of other procedures, including the use of psychoactive substances. These deliberately induced altered states of consciousness (ASC) are thought to enable them to enter the spirit world and acquire supernatural powers. A significant aspect of the shamans’ healing practices involves physical manipulations of the body, including massage. In the diagnostic phase, the shaman may carefully inspect all parts of the body, prodding lumps and abscesses and

5 Winkelman 1992; 2000. 6 Eliade 1964.

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cleansing them through a variety of procedures homologous with primate grooming activities. Such behaviours have the ability to elicit the body’s opioid response.7 These shamanic activities involve adaptations that expanded the biogenetic capacities for ritual communication and social coordination found in other animals, in order to facilitate social and psychological integration. The uniformities in shamanic practitioners and practices worldwide reflect: 1) the biological functions of ritual displays as social communication and coordination systems; 2) community bonding rituals that manipulate mammalian opioid-attachment mechanisms; 3) healing processes derived from ritually-induced altered states of consciousness; 4) metaphoric processes involving the use of animals as personal and social representations; and 5) visionary experiences reflecting the informational capacity of dreaming known as presentational symbolism.8 Shamanic rituals involve group activities, with vocalisations such as singing and chanting that originated in the same biological structures and functions involving similar activities in other animals, such as what Jane Goodall9 called chimpanzee “rain dances”, and similar displays called “carnivals” by Reynolds (2005). These include: group congregation; a bipedal charge and other threat displays; long distance vocalisations such as pant-hoots; group chorusing; drumming with hands and feet; beating with sticks; and staggering rhythmically, swaying from foot to foot. Goodall remarked that: “With a display of strength and vigor such as this, primitive man himself might have challenged the elements”.10 This comment underscores the perceptions of Goodall and other primate researchers that some of the behaviours typically associated with religiosity were already present in our pre-human ancestors. These kinds of displays occur in a variety of contexts, indicating that chimpanzees have a disposition to engage in a similar pattern of behaviours in different circumstances, since the core features of these hominid displays are also at the core of an ancient and cross-cultural form of human ritual known as shamanism. Group vocalisations such as singing and chanting, as well as drumming and dancing, are aspects of religious rituals found in human cultures throughout the world, because they have deep evolutionary roots in homologous behaviours also found in other primates. Parsimony suggests that we seek the origins of human ritual and religiosity in these emotive expressive systems. 7 8 9 10

Dunbar 2004. See Winkelman 2000; Winkelman & Baker 2008. Lawick-Goodall 1968. Lawick-Goodall 1971: 53.

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Group and Intergroup Ritual Processes in the Great Apes: Baselines for Hominid Ritual Commonalities in great apes’ displays indicate the presence of similar behaviours in their common ancestors with the humans, the hominids. There are commonalities among the great apes in these locomotor displays, involving kicking, stomping, shaking branches, beating on the chest, ground or vegetation, and jumping and running.11 The vocalisations of gibbons and chimpanzees share functional commonalities as affective displays, made during conditions of high arousal, that are used for social contact and interpersonal spacing. The great apes’ call episodes fulfill similar functions: interindividual and intergroup communication, related particularly to location, spacing, food sources, and danger; this expressive system of communicating emotional states motivates other members of the species and enhances group cohesion and unity.12 Their structural and behavioural similarities indicate that primate calls are the communicative precursors of human singing and musical abilities.13 The primates have been selected for the abilities to use verbal aggression, exemplified in screaming and shouting as part of intimidation displays, used both within the group, and to other species, particularly predators. In these vocalisations we see the precursor to singing and other forms of musicality that eventually allowed for the more nuanced expression of human emotions. Williams characterises this as the pathogenic side of music, the cries of rage and anger, the passionate outburst in both vocalisation and behaviour which exhibits the tension of the individual;14 a capability for passionate and emotional outburst is characteristic of all the apes, as well as most monkeys.15 Primate calls are emotive vocalisations that communicate to other members of the species, and have motivational effects upon them. Aggressive displays, such as bipedal charges and the shaking of branches, are widespread primate behaviours, including the great apes.16 Gorilla calls often incorporate chest-beating, running through the foliage, and breaking branches. Among chimpanzees, the pant-hooting peak phase is generally followed with bipedal charging displays. These are typified in chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) behaviours described below; Pan paniscus (bonobos) also engage in vocalisations, drumming, and charging displays when defending their territory against other groups.17 The power derived from these “noisy displays” is illustrated in the case of 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Geissmann 2000. See Geissmann 2000; Hauser 2000; Marler 2000; Merker 2000. Wallin & Merker & Brown 2000; Molino 2000. Williams 1980. Ibid. 73. Lawick-Goodall 1968; Geissmann 2000. De Waal 1997.

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the chimpanzee called Mike. Mike was a low-ranking male when he began using empty kerosene cans which he bounced and hit in front of him while making aggressive charges. These displays quickly catapulted him to alpha male status, without his ever having to attack the other males.18 Vocalisations (and drumming patterns) are so unique as to permit identification of individuals, both by other chimpanzees and human listeners, based on characteristics of pant hoots, such as the frequency of the calls, the length of the build-up phase, and the rate of hoots.19 Arcadi (1996) suggests that the members of a single community modify their pant hoots to resemble more closely the patterns of their alpha male. This imitation leads to the development of a unique community pattern or “accent” that facilitates recognition of in-group members and avoidance of outgroup members. Wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) often incorporate a variety of acoustic signals into their aggressive charging displays, including drumming, which is typically performed by males.20 Drumming is a widespread mammalian adaptation with many features as a conspicuous display, with self- and other adaptive functions.21 Among chimpanzees, drumming is produced mostly by striking the hands and feet against the ground and trees, although sticks will also be used to flail against objects. This hand and foot drumming of chimpanzees provides a system of long distance communication in the low frequency sounds that they generate; these are audible to humans at a distance of up to one kilometer. While these acoustic exchanges serve a practical purpose, there is also a great deal of spontaneity and evident satisfaction in these displays. These drumming sessions are usually accompanied by choruses of pant-hoots, providing a variety of contextual information. These drumming activities are carried out during travel and in communicative exchanges between individuals who are outside visual contact, providing an auditory signal that allows dispersed members of a group to remain in contact with one another as they forage in separate areas. Individuals can be identified by their own distinctive patterns of drumming (rate of drumming, length of episodes, the number of distinctive beats, and their volume). An outburst of drumming may take place when a travelling party encounters a particular tree, and females and youngsters may also take part. Chimps (Pan paniscus) may use drumming to protect their territory against other groups, engaging in group shouting, vocalisations, and aggressive displays with fast and loud “drumming” that they produce by beating and jumping up and down on tree buttresses.22 These acoustic signals provide mechan-

18 19 20 21 22

See Goodall 1986: 426–427. Reynolds 2005. Goodall 1986; Lawick-Goodall 1968. See Randall 2001. De Waal 1997.

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isms to call on the support of other members of the groups, who can assist in confrontations with chimpanzees from other communities.23

Summary: Adaptive Features of Chimpanzee Threat Displays The varieties of contexts of threat displays illustrate that they are general behaviours with multiple adaptive functions. These displays occur: in greetings, when separated individuals fuse back together in the larger group; at copious food trees; at waterfalls; as “rain dances;” during all-night displays; in intergroup confrontations; and for release of tension.24 The loud vocalisations and the dramatic charging displays provide an auditory beacon for those still distant from the gathering site. The aggressive displays, which can continue as darkness settles, also serve to intimidate “others” in the darkness. These dramatic ritual expressions are an important tool for reintegrating the dispersed society into a single group, and are manifested in dramatic chimpanzee chorus, concerts, and similar group displays. The threat displays of chimpanzees provide a variety of functional adaptations: – Establishing and maintaining status and order in society; – Protecting the group and individual, including reduction of physical harm; – Establishing and maintaining boundaries between groups; – Producing emotional synchrony within the group and releasing frustration and tension; – Protecting the group members from predators, exemplified in drumming and striking with branches; – Providing a group identity, exemplified in the shaping of vocalisations to mimic dominant group males; and – Creating an auditory beacon for group fusion, facilitating the individual re-integration with the protective community. These calls, hoots, and aggressive bipedal displays, that the great apes use for a variety of social purposes, indicate that they are hominid universals and establish that our ancient hominid ancestors also engaged in group activities involving synchronous singing, drumming, and dancing among members of the group. This hominid ritual dynamic involved communal activities that both united the group and set them in contrast with other groups. The many functional effects of chimpanzee ritual indicate the adaptive functions that similar rituals provided for our ancient hominin ancestors. 23 Arcadi & Robert & Boesch 1998. 24 Lawick-Goodall 1968; Reynolds 2005.

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Homologies of Chimpanzee Displays and Shamanic Ritual A number of aspects of chimpanzee rituals – such as charging displays, stomping and drumming, shaking branches, beating on the chest, ground, or vegetation, and jumping up and down – reflect prior hominid adaptations that were incorporated into shamanic ritual activities. Notably, chimpanzees often direct these activities not only towards the nearby members of one’s own group, but also to “no one,” and towards unseen others (i.e., other groups). These displays, and group vocalisations in particular, provide an emotional communication system that promotes social well-being, empathy, and social and cognitive integration, by enhancing group cohesion and unity. Primate call and vocalisation systems are pre-adaptations that underlie the human capacities of song, music, and chanting.25 The use of music and song in shamanic activities expands on these expressive modalities, that further evolved as mechanisms for communicating an animal’s internal state, and for enhancing group synchronisation and cooperation. Ritualised synchronous group vocalisations are at the core of shamanic rituals, and as in non-human primates, provide an expressive system for communicating emotional states, motivating other members of the species, and managing social contact and mate attraction. Drumming and dancing, which are universally associated with shamanism, have deep evolutionary roots as mammalian signalling mechanisms. Such vigorous activity that signals one’s location to others – both allies and potential enemies – is seen as an indicator of vigilance, excessive fitness, and a readiness to act. “An amazing variety of mammals produce seismic vibrations by drumming a part of their body on a substrate. The drumming can communicate multiple messages to conspecifics about territorial ownership, competitive superiority, submission, readiness to mate, or presence of predators. Drumming also functions in interspecies communication when prey animals drum to communicate to predators that they are too alert for a successful ambush”.26 Drumming is a widespread mammalian communication mechanism used to convey information, a so-called “costly signalling mechanism” that displays fitness, enhances the survival opportunities for kin and conspecifics, and reduces the individual’s need for more costly action. The related display and vocalisation activities that have been observed among the great apes, and the chimpanzees in particular, establish that our common hominid ancestors also had social adaptations involving excited synchronous singing and dancing. The singing, chanting, and dancing characteristic of human rituals have a biological basis and deep evolutionary roots in the ritual calls, hoots, and group displays that animals use for a variety of social purposes. These emotive vocalisations, exhibited in loud calls and pant hoots, have structural and behavioural similarities with human vocalisations that indicate that they are the com25 See Wallin & Merker & Brown 2000. 26 Randall 2001: 1.

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municative precursors of human singing and musical abilities, vocalisations that provide information about internal emotional states and external referents. These activities eventually united and integrated the group in the evenings, providing protection by their intimidating sound. Vocalisations that were the precursors of singing and chanting were part of affective displays made during conditions of high arousal, that helped to maintain social contact through an emotive communication system that signalled one’s presence and emotional state to other members of the group.27 This illustrates basic adaptive mechanisms of ritual. The role of ritual as a form of intimidation of both the immediately present “other” and the unseen “other” is illustrated in the use of dominance displays in many contexts. These threat displays, used to intimidate other members of their group, other groups, and even predators, illustrate how these ritualised behaviours played adaptive roles that were expanded in hominin evolution to provide the basis for human ritual and eventually religion.

Shamanic Homologies with Chimpanzee Displays The similarities with chimpanzee rituals include a number of features that indicate their evolutionary continuity. These similarities include: – the most dramatic ritual activity of the community; – displays involving an upright posture and charge; – aggressive display by a charismatic alpha male to manifest dominance; – emotional vocalisations that provide information about individual states; – drumming, including the use of hands and sticks; and – activities that unite and protect the entire group, often oriented to a tree, and sometimes occurring at night. Shamanism expanded these ancient phylogenetic bases, manifested in primate and hominid ritual capacities, into much more prolonged display activities, involving extensive drumming, dancing, and music, extending them throughout the night. I propose that the nocturnal timing of the rituals provided a zone for further development. Night-time ritual allowed for an integration of the cognitive processes involved in dreaming. The ordinary dream experiences were enhanced by prior drumming, singing and other factors that contributed to production of altered states of consciousness. These ASC became central features of the new forms of ritual experience that were at the focus of shamanism and its healing practices. What were the factors that led to the evolution of hominid capacities into the religious rituals of shamanism? The most relevant focus must be on the differences 27 Brown 2000; also see Oubré 1997.

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or gap between maximal chimpanzee ritual and shamanic rituals. Winkelman and Baker (2008) argue that there were various factors involved in the evolution of ritual and religious capacities, including the capacity for mimesis, a by-product of bipedalism,28 which provided an expanded capacity for symbolism through enactment. There was also an evolution of the human healing capacity,29 derived from the capacity for suggestibility (hypnosis) and the healing effects from the capacity for music.30 The most notable of the chimpanzee-human ritual differences, however, involves the effects of altered states of consciousness and the associated experiences of the soul and spirit world. The factors on which selective influences could have acted to produce shamanism, which are addressed below, include: extensions of opioid bonding mechanisms; psychoactive plants that selected for enhanced use of exogenous neurotransmitter sources; and bipedalism and long-distance running, which induced mystical experiences by unusual manipulations of the autonomic nervous system.31

Altered States of Consciousness and Human Ritual Evolution A variety of natural processes induce altered states of consciousness (ASC) and mystical experiences, including drumming, singing and music, trauma, long distance running, near-starvation, sensory deprivation or overload, nutritional imbalances, extreme fatigue, and natural plant substances such as hallucinogens. Consequently, these ASC capacities of humans must be understood in relation to our biological capacities, especially those related to endogenous neurotransmitter substances which also have external analogues in the environment, such as opioids/opiates and the serotonin-like analogues found in mushrooms containing psilocybin and psilocin. There is evidence of an enhanced human capacity for using exogenous neurotransmitter-like substances, reflecting the effects of both natural opioids and the serotonin-mimicking psilocybin and psilocin. Uniquely human religious features also derived from specific genetic changes that enhanced the capacity for ritual effects from enhanced community bonding from extended opioid systems. Significant effects were derived from the expansion of the effects of ritual on social bonding, through an enhanced capacity for eliciting the opioid-attachment processes.32 These opioid related effects are also seen in the effects of bipedalism and long-distance running in producing mystical experiences.

28 29 30 31 32

See Donald 1991; 2001. See Bulbulia 2006; McClenon 2002; 2006. See Crowe 2004. See Winkelman & Baker 2008. See Frecska & Kulcsár 1989; Freeman 2000.

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Belonging and the Opioid System In her book Evolving God: A Provocative View of the Origins of Religion, Barbara King (2007) suggests that the evolutionary origins of religion are found in the primate desire for belonging, a craving and need for emotional connection with others. This belonging needs to be understood in relationship to our enhanced endogenous opioid system. Studies comparing human and chimpanzee genome sequences found significant differences which indicate that there was a rapid evolutionary divergence in the human line, involving xenobiotic metabolising genes that reflect adaptations to frequently encountered plant toxins.33 Since the divergence of hominins from our hominid ancestors, there has been an accelerated evolution of, and a positive selection for, other polypeptide precursors and genes involved in opioid regulation.34 Wang et al. report that the uniquely human pituitary cyclase-activating polypeptide precursor (PACAP) emerged during human origins, and that the precursor gene for PACAP has undergone accelerated evolution in the human lineage since the time of separation from our common ancestor with chimpanzees. The significance of the selection for PACAP involves the neuropeptides’ roles in the central nervous system as both a neurohormone and a neurotransmitter. Rockman et al. (2005) note that there have been waves of selective effects in the hominin line for genes associated with opioid cis-regulation. Natural selection resulted in an alteration of human prodynorphin, a significant precursor molecule for a range of endogenous opioids and neuropeptides. Human specific characteristics acquired during evolution resulted in changes in the ability of the brain’s natural opioid systems, resulting in expression of the prodynorphin gene to a far greater extent in humans than in chimpanzees. So while Kirkpatrick’s (2005) arguments about the opioid system and religiosity suggest that there are exaptations involved, it is clear that humans also underwent some independent evolution in their opoid systems. Religious experiences appear as a by-product, rather than the focus, of these subsequent adaptations.35

Adaptive Advantages of Opioid Systems Why we have enhanced opioid receptors must be contextualised in broad evolutionary terms of mammalian adaptations, as well as uniquely human characteristics. Oldham, Horvath, and Geschwind (2006) characterise these chimp-human differences as involving an increased connectivity in the gene co-expression networks in frontal brain networks of humans. Humans have an intensification of expression of genes associated with the CNS and the frontal cortex innervations, particularly cir33 Sullivan & Hagen & Hammerstein 2008. 34 See Wang et al. 2005; Rockman et al. 2005. 35 Winkelman & Baker 2008.

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cuitry underlying higher cognitive processes. Opioids may also play a central role in another ritual behaviour, dancing, discussed below. Opioids undoubtedly played a role in the factors that Hayden (2003) analyses in relation to the evolution of shamanism. Hayden suggests that linkages among resource stress, community relations, and intercommunity alliances enabled shamanism to contribute to human survival. Severe droughts several million years ago exerted important selective influences on hominin populations that gave rise to modern humans’ shamanistic practices. Among the changes were abilities to forge close emotional bonds that helped survival in inhospitable environments. Emotional bonds with other groups provided resources to cope with crises through assurance of assistance for food and physical protection; Hayden attributes this enhanced emotional bonding, that produced more secure alliances and helped assure survival, to the effects of ASC and their ability to create a sense of a common group bond and identity. Hayden proposes that shamanic rituals induced ASC that helped forge a sense of commonality. Our enhanced opioid capacity would have also contributed to this sense of connectedness and belonging, as is widely manifested in the sense of unity and panhuman identity associated with ASC experiences and opioids. These ASC helped to overcome the natural tendency to xenophobia and violence towards outside groups, a tendency so well-noted in the chimpanzee.

Psilocybin-Containing Mushrooms as Sources of Spiritual Experiences Species containing psilocybin have been found around the world, providing an exposure to humans for millions of years. Since the features of psilocybin-induced experiences are also central to shamanism, it seems likely that exposure to these substances was responsible for the emergence of religiosity. This would have been possible because these psychotropic plants are objectively capable of producing a variety of mystical experiences.36 These kinds of effects illustrate that something intrinsic to the biological properties of psilocybin and its effects on the human brain induced mystical experiences. That hominins evolved to benefit from these kinds of exogenous substance is indicated by several lines of evidence reviewed below.

Human-Chimpanzee Divergences in Serotonergic Binding Raghanti et al. (2008) point to the wide range of evidence that indicates that the role of serotonin (5HT) in support of higher cognitive functions was modified in 36 Griffiths et al. 2006.

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the course of human evolution, and contributed to our cognitive specialisations. The central effects of LSD and hallucinogenic drugs on 5-HT receptors indicate that these should be prime candidates for evolution of our capacity for the spiritual experiences produced by these substances. While humans do not have quantitative increases in serotonin innervations in comparison to chimpanzees, there are species differences in innervations patterns37, and differences in the 5-HT1D receptor amino acid sequences. While chimpanzees and human serotonergic ligands (including several indoles and ergots) have comparable, low nanomolar binding affinities38, and a remarkable degree of similarity in their binding profiles with other ligands (agents that will bind to receptor sites), there are chemical template differences that indicate molecular divergences among the 5-HT1D receptors of humans and chimpanzees.39 Pregenzer et al. (1997) examined the similarity of humans, chimpanzees, and other primates and mammals in the displacement of serotonin by various drugs. While their findings indicate that humans and chimpanzees do not significantly differ in serotonin dissociation (0.31 vs. 0.35), humans do have significantly greater displacement (2.5 to 4 times greater), as compared to chimpanzees, on the binding of LSD (2.3 versus 0.84) and other ergots (naturally occurring LSD substances: metergoline,0.96 vs. 0.22; dihydroergotamine, 0.66 vs. 0.19). This provides the direct evidence that humans evolved to more efficiently process psychedelic drugs.40

Bipedalism and Mystical Experience: The Runner’s High Another influence contributing to the human capacity for spirituality emerged as a by-product of one of the human line’s most unique features, long-distance running. While humans are not considered to be as effective runners as many other mammals, “No primates other than humans are capable of ER [endurance running]”41. In Homo erectus, these capacities led to the emergence of a new set of potentials that produced human spiritual experiences. A natural basis for inducing ASC and mystical experiences derives from endurance running, long-distance running, and ultrarunning.42 Commonly known as the “runner’s high”, this is also associated with features typical of mystical experiences, such as:

37 38 39 40 41 42

Raghanti et al. 2008. Pregenzer et al. 1997. Ibid. Also see Sullivan & Hagen 2002; Sullivan & Hagen & Hammerstein 2008. Bramble & Lieberman 2004: 345. Bramble & Lieberman 2004; also see Jones 2005; Noakes 1991.

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positive emotions such as happiness, joy, and elation; a sense of inner peacefulness and harmony; a sense of timelessness and cosmic unity; and a connection of oneself with nature and the Universe.43

The processes by which mystical experiences are induced by running begin with the saturation of the sympathetic-ergotropic system. In addition to the activation produced in many body systems by the running, the prolonged activity forces a kind of meditative breathing in the regular methodic inhalation and exhalation. Physical stress activated by long-distance running provokes the release of the opioid adrenaline, and noradrenaline neurotransmitters, and elevated body temperatures, oxygen depletion, and chemical and neuronal imbalances that can create unusual states of awareness. Jones places ultrarunning high in the context of the extreme activation of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Extensive running leads to a saturation of the sympathetic nervous system division of the ASN and associated structures of the hypothalamus and amygdala (particularly the left hemisphere of the human brain), a “spillover” effect that leads to the simultaneous activation of the parasympathetic nervous system and the amygdala and hippocampus areas of the right hemisphere. This results in the simultaneous activation of what are usually separate functions and areas of the brain, saturating both sides of the brain responsible for general orientation and attention, visual integration, emotional processing, and expression of verbal-conceptual phenomena.44 This produces a general overload of both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and associated structures (hypothalamus, amygdala, and hippocampus), leading to a cessation of the normal attention, emotional processing, and comprehension. This produces a sense of ineffability and a disintegration of the self, which is generally experienced as a condition of profound peacefulness.45 It is the shut-down of the normal processes of the mind that leads to these special experiences.

Bipedalism and Dance Bipedalism also provided the capacity for another uniquely human capability – dance – which is associated with spiritual practices in cultures around the world. The dramatic chimpanzee charging displays is a limited capacity, compared to the capabilities for running and dance that evolved in humans. Bachner-Melman et al. (2005) found specific gene polymorphisms associated with people who are engaged intensively with creative dance performance. While there are common genetic features of humans that give us all a uniquely human capacity for mimesis 43 Dietrich 2003. 44 Jones 2005: 44. 45 Ibid.

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and dance, there are also variable genes and gene interactions that are significantly associated with the engagement with professional dance. Bachner-Melman et al.’s study identified a genotype associated with serotonin transporters (SLC6A4) and an arginine vasopressin receptor (AVPR1a), which is an opioid. In comparison with normal controls and professional athletes, dancers had higher levels of both of these gene frequencies, which were significantly associated with a measure of spirituality and altered states of consciousness (the Tellegen Absorption Scale). “We therefore hypothesize that the association between AVPR1a and SLC6A4 reflects the social communication, courtship, and spiritual facets of the dancing phenotype rather than other aspects of this complex phenotype, such as sensorimotor integration”.46 The SLC6A4 allele is a more efficient serotonin transporter and is considered to be more effective in the removal of serotonin from the synapses. The AVPR1a gene is widely associated with social communication and affiliative behaviour in primates. They propose that the association between dance and the AVPR1a gene reflects the central role of communication and social relations in the functions of dance. They propose a solid evolutionary basis for the linkages of the AVPR1a gene and dance, reflected in the role of a vasopressin in vertebrates’ courtship behaviour. Vasopressin is well recognised for its role in human bonding, both maternal behaviour and romantic attachment. Thus, they propose that the interaction of these genes and human dance involves an engagement with the emotionality of dance experiences involving courtship and social communication behaviours, that have a conservative evolutionary history among the vertebrates, involving common neurochemical and genetic mechanisms underlying both mating displays and other affiliative behaviours. There is an interaction between vasopressin and serotonin in the hypothalamus, playing a key role in the control of communicative behaviour. The association of serotonin and the opioid system (vasopressin) with ASC and mystical experiences, as well as enhanced dance propensities, suggest that these capacities of dance and ASC coevolved. Clearly dance has that capacity to induce ASC through a variety of mechanisms, such as stimulating the release of opioids, producing rhythmic stimulation of the brain, and inducing exhaustion and collapse.

Conclusions The human capacity for religiosity far exceeds the ritualised behaviours of even our closest primate relatives. Nonetheless, there are substantial homologies between chimpanzee displays and humans’ shamanic rituals. These homologies help to establish the evolutionary origins of human religiosity. Among other features that have contributed to humans’ evolved capacity for religiosity are the effects of en46 Bachner-Melman et al. 2005: 3.

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hanced opioid mediated bonding; the environmental influences of psilocybin-containing mushrooms; and the side-effects of bipedalism, specifically ultra-running. Notably, none of these features were selected for because of their religious capacity or influences. Consequently, we can see how these aspects of our religious capacities evolved as side-effects of other adaptive processes.

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References Arcadi, Adam Clark 1996. “Phrase Structure of Wild Chimpanzee Pant Hoots: Patterns of Production and Interpopulation Variability”. American Journal of Primatology 39/3: 159–178. — & Daniel Robert & Christophe Boesch 1998. “Buttress Drumming by Wild Chimpanzees: Temporal Patterning, Phrase Integration into Loud Calls, and Preliminary Evidence for Individual Distinctiveness”. Primates 39/4: 505–518. Bachner-Melman, Rachel et al. 2005. “AVPR1a and SLC6A4 Gene Polymorphisms are Associated with Creative Dance Performance”. PLoS Genetics 1/3: e42. Bramble, Dennis M. & Daniel E. Lieberman 2004. “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo”. Nature 432: 345–352. Brereton, Derek P. 2000. “Dreaming, Adaptation, and Consciousness: The Social Mapping Hypothesis”. Ethos 28/3: 379–409. Brown, Steven 2000. “The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Music”. In: Nils Lennart Wallin & Björn Merker & Steven Brown (eds.). The origins of music. Cambridge: MIT Press: 271–300. Bulbulia, Joseph 2006. “Nature’s Medicine: Religiosity as an Adaptation for Help and Cooperation”. In: Patrick McNamara (ed.). Where God and Science Meet: How Brain and Evolutionary Studies Alter our Understanding of Religion. Vol. 1. Westport: Praeger: 87–121. Crowe, Barbara J. 2004. Music and Soulmaking: Toward a New Theory of Music Therapy. Lanham: Scarecrow Press. d’Aquili, Eugene et al. (eds.) 1979. The Spectrum of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structural Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press. De Waal, Frans 1997. Bonobo the Forgotten Ape. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dietrich, Arne 2003. “Functional Neuroanatomy of Altered States of Consciousness: The Transient Hypofrontality Hypothesis”. Consciousness and Cognition 12: 231– 256. Donald, Merlin 1991. Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. — 2001. A Mind so Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Dunbar, Robin 2004. “Language, Music, and Laughter in Evolutionary Perspective”. In: D. Kimbrough Oller & Ulrike Griebel (eds.). Evolution of Communication Systems. Cambridge: MIT Press: 257–273. Eliade, Mircea 1964. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. New York: Pantheon Books. Frecska, Ede & Zsuzsanna Kulcsár 1989. “Social bonding in the modulation of the physiology of ritual trance”. Ethos 17/1: 70–87.

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Freeman, Walter J. 2000. “A Neurobiological Role of Music in Social Bonding”. In: Nils Lennart Wallin & Björn Merker & Steven Brown (eds.). The Origins of Music. Cambridge: MIT Press: 411–24. Geissmann, Thomas 2000. “Gibbon Songs and Human Music from an Evolutionary Perspective”. In: Nils Lennart Wallin & Björn Merker & Steven Brown (eds.). The Origins of Music. Cambridge: MIT Press: 103–23. Goodall, Jane 1986. The Chimpanzees of the Gombe: Patterns of Behavior. Cambridge, London: Bellknap Press of Harvard University. Griffiths, Roland R. et al. 2006. “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial, Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance”. Psychopharmacology 187/3: 268–283. Hauser, Marc D. 2000. “The Sound and the Fury: Primate Vocalizations as Reflections of Emotions and Thought. In: Nils Lennart Wallin & Björn Merker & Steven Brown (eds.). The Origins of Music. Cambridge: MIT Press: 77–102. Hayden, Brian 2003. Shamans, Sorcerers, and Saints: A Prehistory of Religion. Washington: Smithsonian Books. Jones, Peter 2005. “Ultrarunners and Chance Encounters with ‘Absolute Unitary Being’”. Anthropology of Consciousness 15/2: 39–50. King, Barbara J. 2007. Evolving God: A Provocative View of the Origins of Religion. New York: Doubleday. Kirkpatrick, Lee A. 2005. Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion. New York: Guilford Press. Laughlin, C. & E. d’Aquili 1974. Biogenetic Structuralism. New York: Columbia University Press. Lawick-Goodall, Jane van 1968. “The Behaviour of Free-Living Chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Reserve”. Animal Behavior Monographs 1/3: 161–311. — 1971. In the Shadow of Man. New York: Delta Publishing. McClenon, James 2002. Wondrous Healing: Shamanism, Human Evolution and the Origin of Religion. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. — 2006. “The Ritual Healing Theory: Therapeutic Suggestion and the Origin Religion”. In: Patrick McNamara (ed.). Where God and Science Meet: How Brain and Evolutionary Studies Alter our Understanding of Religion. Vol. 1. Westport: Praeger: 135–158. Marler, Peter 2000. “Origins of Music and Speech: Insights from Animals”. In: Nils Lennart Wallin & Björn Merker & Steven Brown (eds.). The Origins of Music. Cambridge: MIT Press: 31–48. Merker, Björn 2000. “Synchronous Chorusing and Human Origins”. In: Nils Lennart Wallin & Björn Merker & Steven Brown (eds.). The Origins of Music. Cambridge: MIT Press, 315–27. Molino, Jean 2000. “Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Music”. In: Nils Lennart Wallin & Björn Merker & Steven Brown (eds.) The Origins of Music. Cambridge: MIT Press: 165–76.

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Noakes, Tim 1991. Lore of Running: Discover the Science and Spirit of Running. Champaign: Leisure Press. Oldham, Michael C. & Steve Horvath & Daniel H. Geschwind 2006. “Conservation and Evolution of Gene Coexpression Networks in Human and Chimpanzee Brains”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 103/47: 17973–17978. Oubré, Alondra Yvette 1997. Instinct and Revelation Reflections on the Origins of Numinous Perception. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach. Pregenzer, Jeffrey F. et al. 1997. “Characterization of Ligand Binding Properties of the 5-HT1D Receptors Cloned from Chimpanzee, Gorilla and Rhesus Monkey in Comparison with those from the Human and Guinea Pig Receptors”. Neuroscience Letters 3/17: 117–120. Raghanti, Mary Ann et al. 2008. “Differences in Cortical Serotonergic Innervation among Humans, Chimpanzees, and Macaque Monkeys: A Comparative Study”. Cerebral Cortex 18: 584–597. Randall, Jan A. 2001. “Evolution and Function of Drumming as Communication in Mammals”. American Zoologist 41/5: 1143–1156. Reynolds, Vernon 2005. The Chimpanzees of the Budongo Forest. New York: Oxford University Press. Rockman, Matthew V. et al. 2005. “Ancient and Recent Positive Selection Transformed Opioid Cis-Regulation in Humans” PLOS Biology 3/12: 2208–2219. Sullivan, Roger J. & Edward E. Hagen 2002. “Psychotrophic Substance-Seeking: Evolutionary Pathology or Adaptation?” Addiction 97: 389–400. Sullivan, Roger J. & Edward E. Hagen & Peter Hammerstein 2008. “Revealing the Paradox of Drug Reward in Human Evolution”. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 27: 1231–1241. The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium 2005. “Initial Sequence of the Chimpanzee Genome and Comparison with the Human Genome”. Nature 437: 69– 87. Wallin, Nils Lennart & Björn Merker & Steven Brown (eds.). 2000. The Origins of Music. Cambridge: MIT Press. Wang, Yin-Qiu et al. 2005. “Accelerated Evolution of the Pituitary Adenylate CyclaseActivating Polypeptide Precursor Gene During Human Origin”. Genetics 170: 801– 806. Williams, Leonard 1980. The Dancing Chimpanzee. London, New York: Allison and Busby. Winkelman, Michael 1992. Shamans, Priests and Witches: A Cross-Cultural Study of Magico-Religious Practitioners. Tempe: Arizona State University (Anthropological Research Papers 44). — 2000. Shamanism, the Neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing. Westport: Bergin and Garvey. — 2002. “Shamanism and Cognitive Evolution”. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 12/1: 71–101.

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— 2003. “The Shamanic Paradigm: A Biogenetic Structuralist Approach”. Journal of Ritual Studies Book Review Forum 18/1: 119–128. — 2004. “Shamanism as the Original Neurotheology”. Zygon Journal of Religion and Science 39/1: 193–217. — & John R. Baker 2008. Supernatural as Natural: A Biocultural Theory of Religion. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Jay Johnston

Physiognomy of the Invisible: Ritual, Subtle Anatomy, and Ethics The belief that an individual has energetic, spiritual components – an energetic anatomy – is found in many religious and spiritual traditions. As a form of energetic physiognomy, this aspect of the self is often termed a “spiritual” or “subtle” body. This paper will explore the role and conceptualisation of this invisible anatomy from a popular and philosophical perspective: central concerns will be the form of subjectivity (or self) such beliefs propose, and the way in which subtle anatomy is positioned as enabling a relation with alterity (in this case the divine). In particular, the paper will consider the links that are made between ritual action and the cultivation of subtle bodies in contemporary “Wellbeing Spirituality”, exemplified by Anodea Judith’s publications. The analysis will therefore move between popular and philosophical forms of discourse, the first exemplifying the way in which the “subtle bodies” idea (esoteric anatomy) is taken up in contemporary Western culture, and the latter offering a consideration of the often under-recognised ethical aspects of these ritual practices. The limits of the self are vastly extended in religious traditions that attribute an invisible, “spiritual” body to the individual. This “subtle body” extends unseen beyond corporeal flesh into the greater environment, while, at the same time, it is also thought to exist inside the physical body. This spiritual anatomy attributes an invisible energetic physiognomy to the individual, although this physiognomy is variously conceptualised in diverse religious and spiritual traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, indigenous traditions, and contemporary “New Age” spirituality (where it is often referred to as the “aura”). This energetic anatomy is, by and large, understood as a bridge, or medium, existing between physical corporeality and spiritual matter and agency (again variously configured). The form of “subtle body” developed by the Theosophical Society (founded by Blavatsky and Olcott in 1875), adapted primarily from Hindu schemata, has furnished contemporary Western “Wellbeing” culture with its seven-sheath model of the subtle body. From an ontological perspective, the type of “material” that comprises subtle bodies in these schemata is seen neither as purely “spiritual” nor purely “material”. It is described often as energy or subtle matter, and is attributed

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the ontological status of a co-constitutive matter–consciousness (that is, both matter and consciousness). It can be understood as a type of “substance” (for want of a better term) that is simultaneously material and spiritual. Therefore, as constituted by such ontological material, subtle bodies can be understood not only as existing between two ontological “states”, more usually considered separate states of being – the material and the spiritual – but can also, themselves, be considered as embodied sites of the between. That is, these subtle aspects of the individual actually inhabit spaces between phenomena (between, for example, an individual and an object) that are more usually perceived as empty; as vacant space. In acknowledging the existence of subtle bodies and “working with” subtle anatomy, the spiritual practitioner consciously develops a capacity to not only recognise their own subjectivity as a lived between (as physical and spiritual), but also a realisation that such a type of extensive energetic body necessarily – because of the very intersubjective nature of subtle matter – places the individual in subtle matter relations with broader communal, social, and environmental phenomena. This paper is concerned with the way in which subtle physiognomy is understood to be developed by ritual practices, specifically the inner apprehension and direction of subtle energies. It highlights that such practices, although performed with a focus on a specific individual – for the development and utilisation of their specific subtle anatomy – are, none the less, undertaken in relation to an intersubjective field. This highlights that any “work” on the self has the potential for intimate affect far beyond the individual.

1. The Subtle Dynamics of I-Other Relations The very nature of subtle bodies, as expansive, nebulous, and invisible to the range of perception usually accorded the five senses (especially vision), necessarily challenges the fixed boundaries attributed to self in Western modernity (the skin). Rather, a subjectivity taking account of subtle bodies posits the individual self as inherently interrelated with other “external” phenomena – other subjects, objects, environment etc. – that is, that the self is intersubjective. Subtle body models of the self profoundly challenge the understanding that human individuals are radically separated from other individuals. In fact, this concept of the self can be understood to place the individual in constant negotiation with a radical form of otherness – a subjectivity not their own (an Other) – including the divine (however that may be configured). Debates about the negotiation of radical difference have been a core concern of much contemporary philosophical speculation, not least, how to “think” and engage with an Other radically different from the self. At the most basic level, such debates challenge any assumption that another individual is a version of the same subject (the universal “one”) that one assumes oneself to “be”. This is what

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Emmanuel Levinas (1974) calls the discourse of the Same (the multiple as a repetition of the universal “one”). Such a perspective recognises not only the ethical need for a respect for radical difference, but raises questions such as how an interrelationship with an Other can be undertaken (without, for example, the type of subsumption that characterises IOther relations in G.W.F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit 1807). That is, how do we speak, act, even conceptualise an Other subject – entirely different from ourselves (our self) – without reducing it to a version of ourselves, or defining it in relationship to ourselves, or both? To acknowledge such relations requires admitting that the Other will always be beyond full conceptualisation. Moving these questions into the realm of subjects attributed with subtle bodies – bodies which are understood to intimately interlinked with Others (other subjects or the divine) – positions the individual as enacting, in the very fabric of their being, I-Other relations, even if such relations are not part of the individual’s conscious perception. The following discussion of Wellbeing culture examines the “activation” of subtle anatomy via ritual in such a context of Self-Divine relations. To exemplify the way in which subtle anatomy is conceptualised and manipulated, Wellbeing culture will be discussed with reference to the work of Anodea Judith, an American somatic therapist and yoga teacher, who has sold hundreds of thousands of copies of her books on chakras and energetic anatomy. These texts advocate the development of a capacity to apprehend and control subtle bodies, enabling the individual to recognise his or herr interrelation with divinity. This is not an all-consuming relation understood to annihilate the individual self (in which all I-Other difference is collapsed), but rather a relation where the individual self perceives an equally intimate relationship with the divine, but it does not erase a sense of the individual self. Further, this relationship is understood to be cultivated through physical-spiritual processes and practice: it is therefore a much more “everyday” form of mystical relation. These activities bring to conscious awareness the interrelationship of I-Other; Self-Divine. As such, the inner apprehension and movement of subtle energies are understood as effective beyond the personal concerns of a singular individual. Self-cultivation of subtle matterconsciousness carries ethical ramifications.

2. Subtle Anatomy in Well-Being Culture Anodea Judith exemplifies the genre of subtle anatomy “workbooks” in a contemporary Western context. Her books, which include Eastern Body, Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System as a Path to the Self (1996) and Wheels of Life. A User’s Guide to the Chakra System (1987), have sold in the hundreds of thousands.

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Regarding Wheels of Life, she writes: “This book is a practical guide to a subject that is normally considered very spiritual. As “spiritual subjects” are so often considered impractical or inaccessible, this book attempts to re-examine the spiritual realms, showing how deeply they are embedded in each and every aspect of our daily lives.”1 A highly syncretic text, Judith’s “work book” runs through various conceptualisations of energetic anatomy and traces corollaries of chakras (energy centres in Hindu and Buddhist traditions) with the sefiroth of the Kabbalah (mystical form of Judaism). Complex lists of correspondences are given; such sympathetic correspondances informed by various traditions are a core feature of the Western Esoteric Tradition, which, in its turn, directly informs many of the theories, beliefs, and practices that are placed under the umbrella term of New Age religion.2 Judith’s presentation of the chakras is also inclusive of a Western psychologisation of these schemata, with each chakra also associated with a dominant emotion or psychological dysfunction (this theme is more fully elaborated in Eastern Body, Western Mind). Chakras are considered as intense centres of matter–spirit within the subtle body. Their exact constitution and role varies depending upon the tradition; for Judith, chakras have a clear intermediary role: “Chakras are organizing centers for the reception, assimilation, and transmission of life energies. […] As seven vibratory modalities, the chakras form a mythical Rainbow Bridge, a connecting channel linking Heaven and Earth, mind and body, spirit and matter, past and future.”3 Wheels of Life focuses squarely on the physical body, with Judith directly stating: “I believe that the chakras generate the shape and behaviour of the physical body […]”.4 Here, the dynamics of the energetic subtle body are understood to directly influence the “gross” physical body of flesh and blood, not only its external “shape”, but also its capacity to function. The capacity to apprehend and direct this subtle anatomy is directly linked to physical health and spiritual wellbeing. The technologies of manipulation of subtle anatomy outlined by Judith are presented as chakra-specific, and include: guided meditations (visualisation); dietary guidelines; yoga postures (for Judith this refers to “a system of philosophy and practice designed to yoke the mortal self to its divine nature of pure consciousness”);5 movement and dance exercises; breathing exercises and mantras, “sacred

1 2 3 4 5

Judith 1987: xxi.

See Hanegraaff 1998.

Judith 1996: 4, author’s emphasis. Ibid. 1987: 20. Ibid. 1996: 9.

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sounds used in meditation”.6 The employment of these techniques is also directly linked to developing extrasensory skills, such as clairvoyance, which is understood to make the apprehension of subtle anatomy more conscious to the individual. A multiple-choice “self quiz” is provided, so that the individual can measure the current state of his or her chakra activity apprehension. The text is designed to assist the individual in ascertaining how capable he or she is of sensing spiritual anatomy (chakras), and provides exercises to help the individual to develop perceptive skills. The self-employment of these techniques enact rituals of self-cultivation. The exercises are proposed as enabling a change in the individual’s perceptive capacities; a development that allows the individual to more clearly apprehend the workings of his or her own subtle anatomy, and, by extension, its effects and interrelationships with other phenomena. However, there is a further relation between ritual and the chakras proposed by Judith, which involves yet another syncretic turn: the adaptation and linking of the chakra system to what she terms Neo-Pagan ritual practices (although this is a contested term, and often viewed as derogatory by practitioners of contemporary pagan faiths), and she elaborates aspects of the link as follows: “Conceptually magic is a ‘round art’ because it is based on the patterns of nature, which are cyclic or circular. The space created for a magical working is thought of as a circle, so that what occurs within the sacred space can then radiate outward in all directions when the working is finished, and the ‘circle’ is taken down. One meaning for the word ‘chakra’ is a circle of worshippers, alternating men and women with a Priest and Priestess in the center.”7 Emerging in the twentieth century in Britain (from the 1940s onward) – although claiming a much longer direct historical lineage – Wicca was largely the creation of Englishman Gerald Gardner, who had interests in folkloric studies and the Western esoteric fraternities of his day (ritual initiation being a strong feature of these fraternities). Gardner combined the ritual orientation of the esoteric groups with Egyptologist Margaret Murray’s proposition of a continuous tradition of witchcraft to develop Wiccan rites.8 Within the Wiccan rites that he developed, the ritual invocation of divinity (God and Goddess) takes place within a consecrated circle which operates as a “space between two worlds”. Similarly, for Judith the ritual circle is also a “space between”, yet there are other “Wiccan” heritages informing her conceptualisation of Wicca and ritual. Witchcraft in America included a specifically feminist adaptation of British Gardnerian and Alexandrian witchcraft, 6 Ibid.: 255. 7 Ibid.: 438. 8 See Gardner 2004; Hutton 1999. For a discussion on the central role of ritual in Wicca, in terms of both its practice and appeal in 20th century see Pearson 2007.

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for example Starhawk’s Reclaiming group,9 or Dianic Wicca. In tandem with the development of these groups was the Goddess Movement which intersected with Wicca in a number of ways, and specifically, as Pearson notes, by “using its ritual expression for inspiration”.10 Such influence is clearly evident in Judith’s Wheels of Life. “Ritual, like chakra, is a multidimensional vortex of activity. From the physical space in which it occurs to the thoughts it triggers in the participants, ritual has aspects that coordinate to each of the seven planes we’ve been working with.”11 For Anodea Judith, these Wiccan rites also influence an individual’s subtle physiognomy and link the individual with “planes of existence” an idea prominent in Theosophical concepts of subtle physiognomy. Wheels of Life includes a discussion of, what she terms, “chakric aspects to ritual” in an appendix entitled “Chakras and Magic”. Concerning the operations of ritual more generally, she proposes: “The underlying purpose of ritual is to change our consciousness. If you end a ritual in the same frame of mind in which you began it, chances are it wasn’t a very successful ritual. Ritual is a tool of transformation, and our consciousness, as the master program running our lives, is the main target of transformation. Once that is affected, other kinds of changes fall into place naturally. When planning a ritual, ask yourself what you want people to be thinking before, during and after, and what aspects of their thinking you would like to change. Knowing this makes all the other planning fall into place.”12 This understanding of ritual is very “mind” or “thinking” focused, as evidenced by Anodea Judith’s repetition of the theme that changes in thinking affect the self and others. However, a more embodied relation is elucidated by Judith when she proposes that the link between chakras and this ritual practice is held in place by the extensive nature of subtle anatomy.13 In particular, she proposes a “micro-macro” relation between the Wiccan ritual circle and the energetic “wheel” of the chakra. She writes: “Our bodies are also a kind of sacred space. At the core of our bodies lie the chakras, each of them separate alters to their respective elements. Sacred space allows us a safe place to open and explore new realms. The circle 9 10 11 12 13

See Starhawk 1989. Pearson 2002: 36. Judith 1996: 449. Ibid. 1987: 457. Discussions of subtle anatomy also found in modern British Wiccan discourse, for example Crowley 2003: 82–85.

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around us allows the circles within us to expand and merge with the energies in our ritual, thus charging them with our personal energy. This allows the magic to work its transformation at the inner core of our being. The circle then becomes a chakra itself, alive with the energy of magic, turning on the wheel of life.”14 The inner and outer mutually enfold in this relation. The sacred internal network of subtle physiognomy that the individual has learnt to apprehend and direct is “integrated” with the external sacred space created in the casting of a Wiccan circle. The sacred space and the subtle body are understood as intimately interrelated and reciprocally affected. Haunting the consideration of this relationship is the question of what happens to this dynamic, energetic relation when the “circle” is closed and the “external” ritual is finished. To what degree does the knowledge of this intersubjective dimension of chakra “development” influence intersubjective relations between people, objects, and the broader environment on a daily basis? If such self-cultivation rituals are undertaken with an understanding that they are inherently intersubjective and cosmological, how is that knowledge negotiated in a communal, everyday, setting? That is, to inquire to what degree the ethical dimension of individual selfcultivation of subtle bodies is acknowledged, beyond its use in a willed and directed form of magical action (which takes place in a specially designated sacred space). Are subtle bodies only to be acknowledged in ritual spaces and then to be forgotten when “returning” to the everyday world? As nebulous and fluctuating physiognomy, subtle anatomy renders the individual’s boundaries porous. Where the individual self ends becomes a tricky question. How is the sacred space of self negotiated and controlled in such an expansive environment? One of the most obvious responses to such a question involves the development of particular perceptive states with which to perceive subtle bodies. Further, such a proposition could be considered as an ethical imperative, because such apprehension is understood to allow one to discern the dynamics of subtle matter, and therefore to increase an individual’s capacity to identify the activity of his or her own subtle bodies. Such a perspective would lead to the view that there is a spectrum of subtle energy that requires an interpersonal and environmental ethic of cultivation. As an intersubjective medium, subtle matter conscious – the subtle body – necessarily raises questions regarding the scope of individual control and agency.

14 Judith 1987: 460.

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3. An Ethic of Spiritual Anatomy? There is no doubt that the cultivation of energetic anatomy and its perception can have ritual dimensions and be central to both individual and collective ritual practice. It is also hopefully apparent from this brief discussion that such individual cultivation is intersubjective: simultaneously personal and collective. In considering the efficacy of a ritual practice focused on self-development, it becomes apparent that these operations are intertwined in a broader field of energetic interrelation. That is, from the perspective of practitioners “working” in ritual contexts with their subtle bodies, they are necessarily interrelated with the subtle bodies of other people, the environment, and the cosmos. Such an intersubjective relation is also a feature of philosophical speculation regarding subtle matter, where the I and Other are viewed as intimately interrelated because of the ontological nature of subtle bodies. Conceptualisations like those proposed in Anodea Judith’s Wheels of Life raise many questions about the intersubjective ethics of energetic (or “spiritual”) concepts of anatomy. These include questions about the cross-cultural configuration of subtle anatomy. There are also questions to be asked about the ontological status of subtle physiognomy. That is, are subtle physiognomy schemes considered essential? In which case ritual self or group cultivation takes place within a prescribed area of possible effect, as each individual is thought to contain the same type of subtle anatomy with the same capacities. Or, is subtle anatomy subject to the same social constructivist forces that deeply contextualise the lived corporeal body? To what degree do subtle bodies intersect with the nature/ nurture debate that has been a core consideration of embodiment studies over the past decade? As the above sketch has sought to demonstrate, the individual cultivation of subtle anatomy that one’s ritual practice affords is metaphysically figured as a relation of mutual imbrication: the I and the Other intimately interconnected, even though the social ethics of this relation – often discussed in New Age discourse in terms of the “we are all one” relation – often erases the maintenance of difference essential to retaining relations of responsibility to another, altogether other, subjectivity (that is, acknowledging ontological difference as discussed in section one of this paper). Paradoxically, energetic anatomy simultaneously extends the individual beyond his or her corporeal body into the “between” spaces separating self and other, while remaining subject to a specific individuality. From such a perspective we are not simply all “one”, but rather placed in intimate relations of mutual reciprocity with a myriad of Others (subjects, objects, the divine). In the realm of subtle anatomy relations, the personal is communal.

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References Bowker, John 1997. The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Crowley, Vivianne 2003. Wicca: A Comprehensive Guide to the Old Religion in the Modern World. London: Element. Gardner, Gerald 2004 [1954]. Witchcraft Today. New York: Citadel Press. Grossinger, Richard 1995. Planet Medicine. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Hanegraaff, Wouter 1998. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1979 [1807]. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press. Hutton, Ronald 1999. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Judith, Anodea 1987. Wheels of Life. A User’s Guide to the Chakra System. St Paul: Llewellyn. — 1996. Eastern Body, Western Mind. Psychology and the Charkra System as a Path to the Self. Berkeley: Celestial Arts. Levinas, Emmanuel 1974. Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijoff. Pearson, Joanne 2002. “The History and Development of Wicca and Paganism”. In: Joanne Pearson (ed.). Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age. Aldershot & Milton Keynes: Ashgate & Open University: 15–54. — 2007. Wicca and the Christian Heritage: Ritual, Sex and Magic. Oxford: Routledge. Starhawk 1989. The Spiral Dance. A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco et al.: Harper & Row.

Daniel Böttger

Empirical Test of the Effect of Facial Feedback on the Subjective Experience of Ritual Introduction For all human beings, facial expression can cause the subjective experience of emotion. Although there is some uncertainty concerning the underlying mechanism for this, the empirical results are unequivocal.1 This so-called facial feedback effect influences even how vowel sounds are perceived as likeable or not, depending on how much their pronunciation resembles a smile. For example, saying “ah” [a] or “e” [e, i] has been found to cause a more positive emotional response than saying “uh” [ǝ], particularly if repeated a number of times.2 Since facial feedback theories claim universal applicability, they predict that any and all speech acts should be affected by this, including those performed during religious ritual. Almost all religions incorporate ritual speech acts, and very frequently song. This simple fact has not prompted much study; the psychological specifics of what makes ritual song attractive are sketchy. It goes without saying that many cognitive aspects of ritual, such as symbolic content, framing cosmology, or participants’ theories, play complex roles. More specifically, mantras are expected by believers to have beneficial effects they can look forward to.3 The positive keywords they frequently contain may cause a priming effect (i.e. an activation of associated contents of implicit memory) with emotional consequences.4 Certain melodies can transmit semantic content including feelings, apparently universally.5 Certain intonations can transmit semantic content, again including feelings.6 Several findings also predict that collective ritual mantra singing can cause positive affect. Singing itself can regulate affect, and doing it in a group can increase this.7 Ritual acts may have therapeutic and particularly affect-regulating effects.8 Other factors, such as 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Izard 1985. Zajonc & Murphy & Inglehart 1989. Beck 1995. Bargh & Chartrand 2000. Fritz 2009; Koelsch 2006. Kehrein 2002. Stadler Elmer 2002: 162–166. Hood et al. 1996.

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deepened breathing while singing, may play a role as well. Altogether, a host of psychological mechanisms are predicted to influence the emotional effects of ritual song in various ways, for a complex overall emotional response. One of these mechanisms is facial feedback. Facial feedback theory predicts that the choice of vowel sounds in ritual song should cause a tendency for singers to smile or frown, and hence influence the emotional effect of ritual song. This theory also predicts that the influence should be most profound in cases where the same songlines are repeated over and over, such as in mantra singing. This study aims to test empirically whether facial feedback influences the subjective experience of ritual. This question is simplified and operationalised into whether the choice of vowel sounds that resemble smiles (“ah” [a], “e” [e, i]) in a mantra causes participants to rate the ritual as more relaxing and pleasant than the choice of vowel sounds that do not (“oh” [o], “oo” [u]). A further question is whether the choice of vowel sounds influences the mood of participants as measured by the Zerssen Befindlichkeitsskala (“Zerssen affective state (or mood) scale”, abbreviated Bf-S).9 The third question is whether the choice of vowel sounds influences participants’ motivation to repeat the ritual. This third question implies a mechanism that may explain the apparent popularity of “smiling vowel sounds” in many popular mantras.

Method The ritual experiment was performed by 55 volunteers. Of these, 51 data sets could be evaluated. The data sets were produced by the following groups of participants: 18 students (9 male, 9 female) of the University of Leipzig that were members of the international student organization AIESEC, nine participants (1 male, 8 female) in a Tai Chi and Qi Gong course at the Yin Yang Zentrum in Leipzig, ten participants in an all-female Tai Chi and Qi Gong course at the same Yin Yang Zentrum, seven shamanic practitioners (3 male, 4 female) at a meeting in Bürserberg, and seven devotees of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (6 male, 1 female) at their Leipzig temple. Each of these groups performed the experiment in sets of two locations that were separate, but close to each other for easy supervision. All participants spoke German as a first language. The study design was approved by the Ethics Commission of the University of Leipzig. In each participant category, participants were randomly assigned to one of two ritual groups for the duration of the experiment. Participants first signed consent forms. They then filled out a form that included their age, gender, and a simple rating on a scale of 0 to 100 of how experienced participants judged themselves in the performance of ritual. They were also assessed on the Bf-S depression scale. 9 Zerssen 1976.

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This asks respondents to fill in a list of 22 pairs of self-assessments (e.g. along the lines of “Do I feel more: happy or sad”) which best describes their current mood. Participants then listened to ritual instructions given by an audio recording10. Each audio recording was identical, except for the word participants were instructed to repeat aloud. Every effort was made to render the two words, “Pahtehkah” and “Puhtühkuh”, as similar as possible in tone, volume, and length. The use of a recording served to preclude the possibility of experimenter effects. The ritual was a simple exercise that involved sitting together with closed eyes and visualising various landscape features in a manner analogous to Autogenous Training (AT), while repeating a word aloud. One group repeated “Pahtehkah”, the other repeated “Puhtühkuh”. Apart from this word, the ritual was identical for both groups. Participants were informed that the rituals would differ in one regard, but not in which. Since there is no universally accepted definition of ritual, and it seems unlikely there will ever be one,11 ritual design required choosing one. The five components of the ritual model by Michaels were chosen.12 This model does not require a claim to a supernatural or counterintuitive component. Its requirement of a transcendent component expressly allows for non-metaphysical ones, and may be fulfilled by as minor a component as respect for old age.13 However, it is also specific and detailed enough to not just declare anything a ritual. The five components are as follows: 1. A motivating impulse: in this case, the quest to solve an open question for the advancement of science. 2. A formal decision: represented by the signing of the declarations of consent. 3. Formal criteria of ritual acts: rituals have to be formal, public, and irreversible. They may also be liminal in the Turnerian sense. The ritual used in this experiment is formal, because it includes detailed instructions up to and including, for example, the opening and closing of the eyes. It also has a clearly defined beginning and end, between which conversation is expressly prohibited. It is obviously public and irreversible. Its liminality is arguable but not required. 4. Modal criteria of ritual acts: rituals have to be social and transcendence-related. They may also be impressive from the participant’s point of view. The ritual in question is performed in a group. It is transcendence-related in the aforementioned wide sense because participants are asked to visualise, among other land-

10 11 12 13

Copies of the recordings are available from the author upon request. Streck 1998. Michaels 1999. Streck 1998: 37.

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scape features, whatever seems to them a “holy” place. An impression should be left on participants at least by the AT elements. 5. A transformation of participants through the ritual: participants are told to expect a relaxing effect, and that completion of the ritual qualifies them to learn the difference between the two groups, as well as the hypotheses tested. The ritual lasted for approximately eleven minutes. Afterwards, participants filled out a second form that asked them to rate how relaxing they found it, how pleasant they found it14, and how much they were inclined to repeat the ritual. Each rating was given on a scale from 0 to 100. The second form also included the Bf-Sʹ scale, which measures mood (affective state) using a different set of 22 pairs of words with self-assessment. Participants were asked to guess which hypothesis was being tested. Any participant who guessed correctly would have been excluded from analysis, but no one did. The artificial ritual situation presented is designed to isolate facial feedback from the many aspects mentioned in the introduction that come together in a ritual. Some (such as intonation) were tightly controlled so as to be identical between groups. Others (such as the pre-ritual mood of participants) were evened out through the random assignment of participants to the groups. Factors too complex and unpredictable to be evened out via randomisation (such as the claim to metaphysical meaning) were eliminated. These steps reduce the number of possible explanations for any differences found between groups, until the only apparent explanation remaining is the different choice of vowel sounds, i.e. facial feedback. Statistical analysis was conducted using the statistical software package SPSS. Of the 55 data sets collected, 51 could be analysed. Ratings of the ritual, including the inclination to repeat it, as well as the differences between mood assessments before and after the ritual, were compared between groups using one-tailed t-tests. This test compares the average values between groups and assesses the significance of differences. Correlations between these measures were calculated using the Pearson correlation index. This test calculates the degree to which one measurement predicts the other, from 0 (no correlation) to 1 (complete identity).

Results The following table summarises the measurements taken (except gender), as well as the difference between pre-ritual and post-ritual Bf-S measurements.15

14 The item asked to what degree participants found the ritual “schön”, a German word that cannot be translated precisely and may mean “beautiful” or “pleasant” depending on context. 15 This excerpt from the dataset shows only its most essential features. All data is available from the author upon request.

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The “Pahtehkah” and “Puhtühkuh” groups did not differ significantly in age, gender, or self-rated ritual experience; this indicates successful randomisation. The difference between pre-ritual moods as measured on the Bf-S scale, while not significant, is greater than one standard deviation. This difference appears to be a random side-effect of the fairly small N. The first question was whether the “Pahtehkah” group rated the ritual as more relaxing and more pleasant than the “Puhtühkuh” group on a scale of 0 to 100. For relaxation, the average ratings were 61.38 versus 46.00, a significant difference. The “Pahtehkah” group experienced significantly more relaxation during the ritual, confirming the hypothesis and the prediction of facial feedback theory. The rating of the ritual as pleasant differs significantly as well. Average ratings here were 60.88 versus 37.68. The choice of vowel sounds exhibits a fairly large (23.2% difference) and significant influence on how pleasant the participants find the ritual. The second question was whether the choice of vowel sounds caused the ritual to influence mood differently. This was answered by comparing the average difference in Bf-S values before and after the ritual between groups. There is indeed a significant difference that confirms the hypothesis. While the “Pahtehkah” group reports an average improvement in mood with a difference of -2.0 points, the “Puhtühkuh” group reports an average worsening by 2.0 points. This shows that the choice of vowel sounds does not just affect perception of the ritual as an outside event. Rather, it can actually influence mood in a way predicted by facial feedback theory. The third question concerns whether the choice of vowel sounds influences the attractiveness of the ritual. This is assessed by ratings of how much participants are inclined to repeat the ritual, on a scale of 0 to 100. Results confirm there is an effect. Average ratings were 51.50 for the “Pahtehkah” group versus 33.56 for the “Puhtühkuh” group. Evidently, the choice of vowel sounds has significant predictive power concerning the inclinations of participants to repeat the ritual. The measures are correlated with each other. Each of the three ratings correlates to a high degree with the other two, with correlation indexes above 0.5. This indicates a robust interrelationship between the three ratings. Post-ritual mood, measured by the Bf-Sʹ scale, seems related with correlation indexes below -0.3. These correlations are negative, because on the Bf-S scale high values indicate a more depressed mood. A positive (high-rated) experience would be expected to decrease, not increase, the Bf-S measurement. However, the difference in mood before and after the ritual almost fails to meet the significance threshold of -0.3 that is commonly accepted as an indicator of a notable (“medium-sized”) correlation. This indicates that the difference in post-ritual mood was influenced by the slight difference in pre-ritual mood seen in table 2.

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Discussion The experiment has shown that facial feedback does influence the subjective experience of ritual on several levels. The choice of vowel sounds that resemble smiles causes participants to rate the ritual as more relaxing and pleasant than the choice of vowel sounds that do not. The results of our Bf-S measures confirm that the choice of vowel sounds also influences the moods of participants. The choice of vowel sounds also influences participants’ motivation to repeat the ritual. Given the facial feedback hypothesis, none of the results seem particularly surprising. That smiling induces a good mood, and that things that elicit a good mood will tend to be repeated, could be anticipated using common sense. However, these effects have apparently not yet been a topic in the empirical psychological study of ritual. They would be difficult to test for empirical relevance using methods of ritual study which do not collect and quantify detailed data from all participants in a ritual conducted for the express purpose of psychological study. The randomised, controlled, experimental design of this study has brought an interesting alternative approach to the study of ritual which complements more traditional methods. Although various results of qualitative studies, such as Rue’s characterisation of Vaishnava ritualism,16 are highly compatible with the results, no studies directly comparable with this one, and which might be critically compared, appear to have been conducted. However, the findings are wholly in line with facial feedback theory. The value of this study is diminished by its relatively small number of participants. On the other hand, the result of several significant findings, despite the small number of participants, indicates a fairly strong influence of facial feedback on the subjective experience of ritual. Although the Bf-S scale has so far only been validated for participants between 20 and 64 years of age,17 several participants in this study were aged 19 and one was aged 66. The three ratings of the ritual are newly designed items of uncertain validity – for example, it is unclear whether the similarity of form of these items may have caused a bias towards similar answers to those three questions. This uncertainty was probably inevitable, given the pioneering nature of this study, and any further study in this regard should address this issue. The facial feedback effect has been measured across several cultures and appears to be based on certain features of the human vascular system,18 which are universal to humans as a species. This implies that the facial feedback effect should influence religious practice across all cultures, and during all written history, comparable to how the human need for sleep limits the length of ritual participations 16 Rue 2005. 17 Zerssen 1976. 18 Zajonc et al. 1989.

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everywhere. Since the evidence shows rituals with positive facial feedback properties to be more willingly repeated than those with negative ones, it implies a universal advantage in the competition of mantras for those with the “right” kind of vowel sounds. If there is such an advantage, it would logically have to have played a role in the propagation of mantras. This may be part of the reason why there are so many popular mantras that include many “ah” [a] and “e” [e, i] sounds rather than, say, many “oo” [u] sounds. The study highlights the role of positive affect not only as a result, but also as a motivator for ritual practice. There clearly are many motivators for ritual practice (as for any behaviour), including habit, social coercion, and expected rewards. Seeing the very high correlation of 0.788 between the rating of the ritual as pleasant and the self-reported willingness to repeat it shows clearly that affect regulation (or “how it felt”) can play a very major role. The role of affect has rarely been a topic for theorists of religion, and never as the highly complex phenomenon that motivational psychology knows it to be, shaped by, and shaping in turn, a multitude of factors. McCauley and Lawson are a rare exception when they give emotion a central role in their ritual form hypothesis, but they describe it as originating from the belief in culturally postulated supernatural agents.19 Ilkka Pyysiäinen adds to the ritual form hypothesis that “certain autosuggestive or meditative techniques” can activate emotion.20 But affect is influenced by countless factors, ranging from architecture to food. The further study of these factors, experimental or not, may yield a rich new field of knowledge about ritual.

19 McCauley & Lawson 2002. 20 Pyysiäinen 2001: 96–97.

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References Bargh, John & Tanya L. Chartrand 2000. “The Mind in the Middle: A Practical Guide to Priming and Automaticity Research”. In: Harry T. Reis & Charles M. Judd (eds.). Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology. New York: Cambridge University Press: 253–285. Beck, Guy L. 1995. Sonic Theology. New Delhi: Shri Jainendra Press. Fritz, Thomas et al. 2009. “Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music”. Current Biology 19/7: 573–576. Hood, Ralph W. Jr. et al. 19962. The Psychology of Religion. An Empirical Approach. New York: Guilford. Izard, Carroll E. 1985. “Emotion and Facial Expression”. Science 230: 608–687. Kehrein, Roland 2002. Prosodie und Emotionen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Koelsch, Stefan 2006. “Broca’s Area and Ventral Premotor Cortex for Music-syntactic Processing”. Cortex 42/4: 518–520. McCauley, Robert N. & Ernest Thomas Lawson 2002. Bringing Ritual to Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press. Michaels, Axel 1999. „‛Le rituel pour le rituel’ oder wie sinnlos sind Rituale?“. In: Caduff, Corina & Pfaff-Czarnecka, Joanna: Rituale heute: Theorien – Kontroversen – Entwürfe. Berlin: Reimer: 23–47. Pyysiäinen, Ilkka 2001. How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion. Leiden: Brill. Rue, Loyal D. 2005. Religion is not about God: How Spiritual Traditions Nurture our Biological Nature and What to Expect when They Fail. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press. Stadler Elmer, Stefanie 2002. Kinder singen Lieder: über den Prozess der Kultivierung des vokalen Ausdrucks. Münster: Waxmann Verlag. Streck, Bernhard 1998. „Ritual und Fremdverstehen“. In: Alfred Schäfer & Michael Wimmer (eds.). Rituale und Ritualisierungen. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Zajonc, Robert Bolesław & Sheila T. Murphy & Marita Inglehart 1989. “Feeling and Facial Efference: Implications of the Vascular Theory of Emotion”. In: Psychological Review 96/3: 395–416. Zerssen, Detlev von 1976. Die Befindlichkeitsskala: Parallelformen Bf-S und Bf-S‘; Manual. Weinheim: Beltz Test.

Magnus Echtler

A Real Mass Worship They Will Never Forget: Rituals and Cognition in the Nazareth Baptist Church, South Africa In 1958 Johannes Galilee Shembe, the leader of the Nazareth Baptist Church in South Africa, told Bengt Sundkler, a visiting theologian who witnessed the first performance of a new ritual: “You see, Dr Sundkler, we have our preaching and teaching. That is alright. But give these people a real mass worship – and they will never forget it”.1 The link between rituals and memory is at the centre of Whitehouse’s cognitive theory of religion, in which he proposes two modes of religiosity, the doctrinal mode, based on semantic (and implicit) memories of frequently repeated rituals and teachings, and the imagistic mode, based on episodic memories of infrequent, but emotionally arousing rituals.2 This paper tests the analytical value of Whitehouse’s theory.3 At first sight, the Nazareth Baptist Church, with Saturday preaching contrasting with Sunday dances, and a leader who distinguishes between preaching and teaching on the one, and “real mass worship” on the other hand, seems to be perfectly suited to look into the specific combination or interactions of the two modes of religiosity. But there is, at the same time, the leader who knows about the memory effect of the rituals, and is fully capable of using that effect to further his goals, be it to strengthen his position or to further the moral benefit of his followers, thus opening areas of deliberate social action that might be beyond the analytical focus of the “modes theory”. With this in mind, I will have a look at the cognitive effect of the sacred dance in the Nazareth Baptist Church, at the variable role of narratives of healing which link doctrine to life histories and produce legitimacy, and at the power plays of the succession conflict which threatened the continuity of the church in the 1970s.

1 Sundkler 1976: 181. 2 Whitehouse 2002a; 2004a. 3 The research for this article was made possible by funding from the DFG (German Research Council). Whitehouse’s theory, as well as other cognitive theories, has received a lot of attention recently. See e.g. Alles 2004; Koch 2006; Laidlaw 2007; Whitehouse & Laidlaw 2004; 2007; Whitehouse & Martin 2004; Whitehouse & McCauley 2005; Yelle 2006.

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History of the Church Isaiah Shembe (c. 1870–1935), an illiterate lay preacher and healer, founded the Nazareth Baptist Church (iBandla lamaNazaretha) in 1910 near Durban, just as the British colony of Natal became part of the Union of South Africa. He did so at the behest of God, Jehovah, who had made his will known to his servant through visions and afflictions. In his new church, Shembe emphasised the biblical strictures that define the people dedicated to God, the Nazarites, especially the keeping of the Sabbath, but did away with the less biblical rules of the mission churches, e.g. he did not require his followers to wear western clothing.4 Legitimised by the Holy Spirit, Shembe established rituals that included elements from both mission Christianity and traditional Zulu religion, but also served to distinguish the new church from both strands of pre-existing religious tradition.5 Guided by voices, he created an extensive corpus of hymns, which served as the backbone of the church’s liturgy. These hymns, outstanding examples of Zulu poetry, matched the Old Testament feel of Babylonian loss and suffering with the fate of the Zulu people, and combined it with the hope of the New Jerusalem, a New Jerusalem Shembe built here on this earth in the form of the holy city of eKuphakameni. As well as making use of the Bible, the hymns built upon Zulu clan hymns and drew from the well of Zulu oral traditions, reclaiming the disempowered Zulu kingship within the spiritual realm at a time when the British colonial state had dispelled any remnant of autonomous traditional authority by brutally extinguishing the Bambatha rebellion in Natal. In this time of rapid social change, white settlers regarded Black Christians, and especially those who broke away from the mission churches, as a threat to their supremacy. Consequently the missionaries, who were losing members of their congregations to the new church, were quick to attack their opponent as defying white control and seducing native women.6 But Shembe weathered these allegations and managed to avoid open conflict with state power, because he fiercely opposed overt political involvement. His church became regarded as a sta4 Before the founding of the Nazareth Baptist Church, Shembe sent people he healed to other churches for baptism. According to one oral tradition it was the rejection of people dressed in traditional attire by the American Zulu Mission that led to the foundation of the NBC (Becken 1966: 103). 5 The clearest break with the mission churches was the observance of the Sabbath. With regard to traditional religion, there seem to have been a shift in attitude. Up to the mid 1920s, Shembe was fiercely opposed to the traditional religion in the form of the “cattle cult”, and he took great care that his rituals differed from traditional ones, as e.g. the puberty rites (Roberts 1936: 62, 123). Later his opposition relaxed, and especially under his successor Johannes Galilee Shembe there was a move to embrace selected Zulu traditions, as e.g. with the growing importance of dance in neo-traditional outfits (Papini 2004: 52–54). 6 Natal governor McCallum held in 1906 “that Ethiopianism, which has for its cry ‘Africa for the Blacks,’ is the mainspring of the movement” that stirred rebellion (Guy 2005: 248). For the charges against Shembe see Gunner 1988: 214–218; Papini 1999: 248f.

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bilising influence in the face of newer, politically radical forms of Black organisation.7 The new church was successful in acquiring members, and it was also successful in generating money, which Isaiah Shembe used to acquire land. By the time of his death in 1935, the Nazareth Baptist Church had a membership of several thousand and owned sizeable plots of land.8 While the church was well established, its religious practices were still in flux, their legitimacy being based on the charismatic standing of Isaiah Shembe. His son and successor, Johannes Galilee Shembe (1904–1976), initially felt unsure whether he could follow in his father’s footsteps, especially with regard to healing, and maybe as a consequence it was he who codified the beliefs and practices, most notably in the publication of the church hymnal, which includes the liturgy for morning, evening, and Sabbath prayers, in 1940.9 It was during his reign that most of the church’s rituals, including the different dance groups with their uniforms, were fixed in the way they are performed today.10 But despite the increasing institutionalisation, the structure of the church remained centred on the charismatic leader. This became clear after the death of Johannes Galilee Shembe, when both his brother, Amos Shembe (1906–1995), and his son, Londa Shembe (1945–1989), claimed leadership of the church. This conflict led to the split of the church, and the majority section, led by Amos Shembe, left eKuphakameni and founded a new holy city, eBuhleni, nearby. The eBuhleni branch, led by Amos Shembe’s son, Vimbeni Shembe (b. 1933), since 1995, has grown continuously. In 2008, one minister of the church estimated the membership to number between 2 and 4 million, and close to 50 000 people attended the July festival of the same year.11 The smaller eKuphakameni branch underwent difficult times after Londa Shembe was shot in 1989, but has undergone something of a renaissance since 1998, when Vukile Shembe (b. 1980), Londa’s son, ended the leaderless period.12

7 See Papini 1997: 17; 1999: 249–251; 2004: 54. 8 According to Roberts (1936: 102), ten thousand people went on the pilgrimage to the holy mountain. She lists the church holdings at the time of Isaiah Shembe’s death, and estimates their worth at ₤ 25 000 (ibid.: 71). 9 J.G. Shembe was anxious about his abilities, but proved to be successful in the charismatic qualities of healing and dealing with witches (Roberts 1936: 80, 111). 10 There have been minor changes after that. For a detailed history of the church’s dances and dance uniforms, see Papini 2002; 2004, for changes in the eKuphakameni branch, see Heuser 2008: 43f. 11 Interview with Sipho, 06-07-2008. 50.000 is my estimate. 12 See Heuser 2008: 42f. The church’s spokesperson estimated membership at 300 000 in 2003, Heuser’s “guesstimate” was 10 000 (ibid.: 50, n. 19).

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Powerful Dancing Since the 1920s, the NBC “has observed a ‘holy dance’ as well as a temple service, respectively the ‘African’ and ‘biblical’ streams whose confluence here makes the church so iconic an instance of the indigenization or enculturation of Christianity by charismatic African bricoleurs”.13 Since I am primarily interested in the analysis of the cognitive features of these ritual practices, I will not focus on their cultural meaning and history, but rather on their correspondences with Whitehouse’s modes of religiosity, as characterised by frequency, emotional arousal, and memory type. The religious practices in the Nazareth Baptist Church can be ordered along a gradient of frequency. Least frequent are the life cycle rituals, most notably baptism, and the rituals of healing, that are more or less once-in-a-lifetime experiences, at least from the point of view of the ritual patient. Much more frequent are the practices of praying and preaching, singing und dancing. These ritual practices produce different rhythms, they mark daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly cycles that structure the lives of the church’s members. There are two to four daily prayers, the most important being the morning and evening prayer, both of which have a fixed liturgy. The daily prayers can be performed individually, or within the family or the homestead. Once a week, local congregations meet for the Sabbath services, which take place at the church’s temples at 9 a.m. and at 1 p.m. They consist of the recitation of the Sabbath liturgy, and the hour-long preaching delivered by a male religious expert. Both daily prayers and weekly services include the singing of the church hymns, composed by Isaiah and Johannes Galilee Shembe and published, together with the liturgies, in the church’s hymnal. Once a month, the three main age- and gender-based divisions of the church, the virgin women, the married women, and the men, meet separately to receive religious instruction from the experts of the church. Together, these daily, weekly, and monthly practices make up the ordinary, everyday life of the church. With high frequency, habitually performed body movements, and verbally transmitted teachings, these practices conform to Whitehouse’s doctrinal mode of religiosity, the tedium effect being countered by skilful preaching and the emotional effect of the singing of the church hymns.14 The everyday rhythms can be contrasted with the extraordinary rhythm, the yearly cycle of rituals centred on the leader of the church, the prophet Shembe. The 13 Papini 2004: 49. In the early years of his new church, Shembe seems to have opposed dancing, and introduced it in the late 1910s, early 1920s only (Becken 1966: 105; Heuser 2008: 37; Papini 2004: 50f.). At around that time he also moved the day of worship from Sunday to Saturday. Both these innovations imply a shift in strategy, emphasising difference to Christian groups, rather than to traditional religion. 14 See e.g. Whitehouse 2002a: 296–303; 2004a: 87–104. Part of the skill of the preachers is the strategic use of hymns, which serve as a – sometimes literal – wake-up call for the congregation. On the emotional effects of music see the discussion of dance below.

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most important festivals of the church are the pilgrimage to the holy mountain in January, and the July meeting in the holy city eBuhleni/eKuphakameni, but the prophet visits numerous temples throughout the year, and wherever the prophet stays, smaller versions of the main festivals take place. Unlike the practices of the local congregations, these events address the whole membership of the church and draw crowds ranging from several thousand to several ten-thousand. Extraordinary religious practices include the transposed ordinary ones – e.g. the daily prayers of the whole congregation in the temple, or the Sabbath service led by the prophet – but the typical extraordinary practice, performed only in the presence of the prophet, is the religious dance. At the festivals, dancing takes place usually on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. The yearly cycle consists of eight to ten festivals, which last from two to four weeks each. Just like Johannes Galilee Shembe, who contrasts the dancing of a “real mass worship” with the church’s “preaching and teaching”,15 many scholars have identified the religious dance (umgidi, ukusina) as a second important form of worship in the Nazareth Baptist Church, if not outright as its “most characteristic feature”.16 At the big congregations there are four groups of dancers. The groups of virgins, married women, and older men each wear their own neo-traditional attire, while most of the younger men dance in “Scottish” outfit. Following the tradition of interpretive anthropology, scholars have searched for hidden meanings inscribed in the cultural text, and as the text in question is the religious dance, they have concentrated on the symbolic meaning of the dance attires. The attires, especially the ones of the young women, embody “the historical encounter in the 1930s between European and African, between colonizer and colonized, between (from the European perspective) civilized and uncivilized,” designed to be imbued with “the material power of the European colonizer on the one hand, and the moral power of Nguni tradition on the other”.17 The Scottish uniform of the young men “embodies a critique of African history and a critique of imperial expansion at the same time”,18 and the neo-traditional ones of the older men reclaim “the broader social memory of dance’s image from the amnesia of an exclusive association with courtship eroticism or parade of arms”.19 These interpretations employ concepts of embodied, implicit, and counter-hegemonic cultural memory, concepts that Whitehouse criticised for their ignorance or lumping together of the various cognitive states that constitute implicit and explicit memory types.20 While these interpretations certainly offer valuable insights into the historical development in the pro15 16 17 18 19 20

Sundkler 1976: 181. Vilakazi & Mthethwa & Mpanza 1986: 86. Muller 1999: 75. Heuser 2008: 47. Papini 2004: 55. Whitehouse 2002b: 148.

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duction of cultural meaning, they are little concerned with what the dancers are actually doing, no matter what attire they wear: their dancing as rhythmic movement of the body. “When all we do is read and write, everything looks like a text, including dance,” as Lamothe21 observes in her recent attempt to develop “a theory of religion as practice and performance”.22 In the following brief analysis of the religious dance in the Nazareth Baptist Church, I try to link concepts of “practice” and “embodiment” with cognitive theories, because I think that cognitive theories are most fruitfully employed when looking at the effectiveness of rituals as concrete bodily practices, and because dance as a recurrent religious practice points to some shortcomings of Whitehouse’s bipolar modes of religiosity theory. While the performance of the dances, along with the wearing of the spectacular attires that caught the eyes of the scholars as well as other spectators, is restricted to the festivals of the church, the actual ability to dance is acquired through frequent rehearsal in more mundane circumstances. This is one of the points where ordinary and extraordinary rhythms interlock. Dance rehearsals – without the attires – take place after the Saturday services and during the monthly meetings of the groups of virgins, married women, and men, and those who want to excel, especially the young men who dance in the isikoshi groups, meet up to twice per week for training. During these training sessions, in which instruction is by showing rather than by verbal explanations, the participants practice until they are able to dance without thinking about how to dance, or rather, the skilled dancers dance without having to think about the next step, being free to lose themselves in the rhythm or to concentrate on subtleties of stylistic expression.23 Thus, the dancers acquire a practical skill, a bodily knowledge that is hard, if not impossible, to verbalise, they undergo “procedural rehearsal” that leads them to “behavioral mastery” of dancing, a skill processed largely by the implicit memory.24 The meaning of the religious dance is established through doctrine conflicting with the “spontaneous exegetical reflection” of the individual dancers. According to church teachings, dancing is worship and not entertainment, performed for the benefit of one’s soul and not for the spectators. It is actually the highest form of worship, as explained by a popular story, according to which dancing is the only religious activity the devil is unable to subvert, because when attempting to dance he always steps on his tail and falls down. But frequently the church doctrine is at odds with the experience of the dancers. According to the official rules, the dance follows the moves exactly as established by the prophet, and the most important aesthetic feature is the synchrony of the line of dancers. But in practice, especially 21 Lamothe 2005: 115. 22 Ibid.: 101. 23 I participated in a couple of dance rehearsals, and talked about dancing, and learning how to dance, with numerous people, mostly young men. 24 See Whitehouse 2004a: 88–94.

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the young men spent most of their time to develop their individual style beyond the uniformity, and constantly bend the rules of proper dancing. When Papini25 argues that the invention of Shembe reclaims a tradition of religious dance beyond the competition of Shaka’s military dances and the “courtship eroticism” of colonial dances for entertainment, and that the dancers thus perform “neither clan-praise bombastic nor crowd pleasing antics, but rather a choreography of contemplation and glorification”, he is right with regard to the orthodoxy, but misses the entertainment factor of regional competitions, and the courtship function within the endogamous church, where the big congregations are the main occasion to meet prospective partners.26 But while participants acknowledge competition and courtship as contributing to the attractiveness of dancing, they agree with church doctrine about the religious character of the experience of dancing. On the one hand, the religious character is produced through the framing of the dance. Before and after the dance, the participants meet in the temple to pray, and the dancing ends only when signalled by the prophet or his messenger. Dancing is a religious obligation, the frame has to be respected, and it is impossible to quit in the middle, as a leader of a Scottish group pointed out: “So it’s a prayer, you don’t just do it like you wish, and even when a guy wants to leave, no, he can’t just take his shield and go, he will have to come to me and say: ‘I’m leaving now, can you give me a blessing’, so that I will finish the whole cycle [for him]; if he just take[s] his shield and go[es], then he hasn’t done anything”.27 On the other hand, the religious character is based on the experience of the dancing itself. Dancing lasts from 10 a.m. until 3 p.m. approximately, with a short lunch break, and takes place in all kinds of weather, from scorching midsummer sun to cold rain, atop the windswept holy mountain. While the dancing is basically the same, based on the church’s hymns, the slow, serene moves of the women contrast with the more energetic dancing of the men, but with regard to bodily exertion, this difference is probably offset by the heavyweight beadwork of the 25 Papini 2004: 55. 26 See Papini 2004: 58f. for examples of how the prophets had to counteract “courtship eroticism” with regard to women’s dance attires. In 2008/2009 elders criticised the Scottish dancers for their inventions, a practice driven by the fierce competition between the dance groups of different regional origin – just like the clan-based competition in Shaka’s time. These innovations – making the style of a particular group – certainly drew positive reactions from the audiences. Several people I talked to regarded skilled Scottish as potential womanisers. The last Sunday of the congregations is a day for dancing, but also the day when men propose to unmarried women. The virgins’ dancing forms part of the church’s marriage practices, and as a consequence was not completely beyond “courtship eroticism”. 27 Interview with Mduduzi, 27-07-2008. I have changed the names of all my informants.

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women’s attire. Following the rhythm of the music, the drums and the horns played by the members of the dance group not dancing, the repetitive dance moves for hours on end, the dancing seems to have certain effects on the dancers. They claim to be driven beyond fatigue and pain, beyond the feeling of the heat, although sunburned afterwards.28 And, if one is a skilled dancer and does not have to look at the others in order not to fall out of step, one can reach a state of mind that one dancer compared to the Zulu warriors of old, who did not feel fear when a spirit came over them (-vuka usinga).29 Two of these skilled dancers described their experience as follows: “Like I am saying when you dance you don’t control yourself, it is more like we are in a trance. Someone will look at you and see you smiling, maybe you are feeling some other sounds from the outer world, maybe you are seeing some other things, it happens to me, I do not control myself when I am dancing […] I do crazy things, I can even do a somersault, that is how it feels, it is just the spur of the moment, you can just slip into your stomach flat, that is how you feel, they can’t control you, they can’t touch you, it is not allowed because they don’t know how you are feeling at that moment”.30 “In fact it is the biggest prayer we have here, it is the biggest prayer. What Shembe said, he said when you are kneeling and praying, Satan can come to you and say: Ok, you are praying with this mouth, yesterday you [were] telling a lie with this mouth, yesterday you were insulting somebody with your mouth, and now you are praying and you are doing everything wrong. But when you are doing this dance, you forget about everything that you have done. Your mind is there, you don’t think of anything, and he said, then you are in the situation, where you can’t think of anything, then it’s your time to pray, when you pray God will hear you, because it is more like a meditation, when you have done it up to a particular state, then you feel that ‘I can’t even feel the stone under my feet’ then you are doing it, then you can pray, God will hear you”.31 So, at least for some of the participants, dancing leads to an altered state of consciousness, a state one of them explicitly contrasts with the practice of verbal prayer. Another dancer said that while the preachers tell about Shembe, dancing allows you to participate, “to feel the church, to feel to be a member”.32 And yet another group leader pointed out that the emotion generated by dancing – being 28 29 30 31 32

Interview with Sibongile, 27-03-2009. Interview with Vusumuzi, 25-01-2009. Interview with Nkosinathi, 25-01-2009. Interview with Mduduzi, 27-07-2008. Interview with Sibusiso, 25-01-2009.

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moved to tears was the example he gave – was not restricted to the dancers, but extended to the audience, even when performed outside the religious frame, in the context of a “cultural” performance in the US.33 These attempts to verbalise experiences of dancing, when emotions or unusual states of mind break into everyday consciousness, remind one of van der Leeuw’s notion that “man is danced”34, or, in Lamothe’s words, the dancer’s ability “to represent his individual body as a medium for the generation of kinetic images of (his dissolution in) a rhythmic unity of life”.35 However, speaking of (in this sense) “embodied” experiences and skills proves to be rather difficult, precisely because they ordinarily need not or even cannot be verbalised.36 But here, cognitive approaches prove to be analytically powerful, because they rely on experimental methods that do not depend on verbal communication, and it seems clear that the bodily techniques of dancing are processed in the implicit memory, and that the meaning of the dancing is produced through doctrinal teaching clashing with spontaneous exegetical reflection.37 But the dancing does not really fit with Whitehouse’s dichotomy of imagistic vs. doctrinal mode, in which emotional “arousal varies inversely with frequency of ritual repetition”.38 While dancing is part of the extraordinary yearly cycle, it still happens fairly frequently, and while arousal levels do not reach the terror of once-in-a-lifetime initiation rituals, the dancers are still visibly emotionally involved.39 I suggest that the dancing represents an additional type of ritual unaccounted for in Whitehouse’s model. This type of ritual might not form the basis of an additional mode of religiosity, but it could be especially suited to counter the tedium effect in the doctrinal mode, as it combines fairly frequent repetition with emotional arousal. This emotional effect is arguably linked with music and altered states of consciousness, induced through repetitive body movements.40 If multiple 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40

Interview with Bonginkosi, 13-03-2009. “Der Mensch wird getanzt” (Leeuw 1957: 36). Lamothe 2005: 120, italics hers. On the “difficulty of rendering into analytical discourse those bodily practices consultants do not express verbally” see Samudra 2008: 665; for the kinaesthesia of dance see Potter 2008. Interestingly, when church members talk about dancing, they use the metaphor of “prayer”, while at the same time emphasising that dancing is anything but verbal prayer. Likewise, Isadora Duncan called her dancing “prayer” or “revelation”, and Lamothe, in turn, refers to Duncan’s dancing as “soul language” (Lamothe 2005: 119f.). It seems hard to avoid metaphors of language when talking or writing about bodily practices. See e.g. Whitehouse 2004a: 87–99. Ibid.: 99. Church members interested in dancing dance at least once per month in full attire at some church function, and dance at social functions such as weddings, and practice twice per week. The level of emotional involvement is my (unscientific) estimate. The anthropological approach to altered states of consciousness is traditionally close to psychology and medicine, and seems well suited to link with newer cognitive approaches.

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emotions are based on diverse brain systems, quite different types of ritual practice might induce different emotions.41 The study of the emotional effectiveness of ritual acts seems to be an especially rewarding area for cognitive science, and promises to add to the analytical quality of the “modes of religiosity” theory. Judging by Sundkler’s account of the ritual cited at the beginning of this paper, what impressed him, what inscribed itself into his memory, was the music, the rhythm, the dance. The designer of the ritual, Johannes Galilee Shembe, emphasised the mass aspect that stays in the memory, and a large number of people might well lead to rising emotions. What Sundkler emphasises in his description is the synchronised mass, the bodies moving in unison following the rhythm of the music: “In 1958 we attended the birth of a new rite […] Between five and six thousand men and women together went through a most intense religious mass experience. As I was standing on the verandah of the Church looking at the crowd in the moon-light, Shembe told me: ‘You see, Dr Sundkler, we have our preaching and teaching. That is alright. But give these people a real mass worship – and they will never forget it’. The service began about 9 p.m. and went on until 12.30 a.m. It was full moon and surprisingly bright. People came into the temple, carrying their candles. They entered, and left, each group through their special door: for chiefs, for ordinary men, for the older women, and for the younger women and girls. There were priests burning incense and huge candles in the middle of the Temple. Everybody kindled his or her candle. Then, in a long row, they solemnly danced out, catching now the incessant rising mighty rhythm See e.g. Neher 1962; Bateson 1975; Goodman 1986; Csordas 1987; Castillo 1995; Jankowsky 2007; Cohen & Barrett 2008. For music and emotion see e.g. Juslin & Västfjäll 2008; Thompson 2009. For dancing as therapy in the NBC see Mthethwa 1989; for the Zulu background of a ritual trance state produced by “intentional induction of dissociation by fasting, drumming, dancing” see Gussler 1973: 105. 41 According to Mendoza & Ruys (2001: 55) four systems are involved in the generation and expression of emotion: 2 valence systems (aversion/apprehension vs. pleasure/anticipation) and 2 response probability systems (action/arousal/focus vs. considered/confident/equable); LeDoux (1999: 127) put forward the hypothesis “that different classes of emotional behavior represent different kinds of functions that take care of different kinds of problems for the animal and have different brain systems devoted to them. If this is true, then different emotions should be studied as separate functional units”; and James (1958: 40) argued “[a]s there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, so there might conceivably also prove to be no one specific and essential religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of religious act.” I suggest there might be a variety of emotionally arousing rituals besides Whitehouse’s prototype of imagistic ritual, which seems to be largely based on the evocation of fear or even terror (Whitehouse 1995: 150–154; 2000: 30–33).

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of the drums. Eighteen big drums, four of them played by women drummers. Their rhythm carried and punctuated the whole performance, endlessly, relentlessly, eternally. Eighteen enormous drums, one beat per second. The men in their long rows, and the women and the girls all fill in with that slow and solemn beat. I counted some two thousand men and perhaps four thousand women, all in white garments, all in long rows, each right hand holding the lit candle, and the feet following the incessant rhythm: left foot touching; left foot stamping; right foot touching; right foot stamping; touching and stamping the good African soil – for hours and hours on end, without let or leisure”.42

Dreams and Healing, Charismatic Leaders and Life Histories Looking for imagistic rituals in the Nazareth Baptist Church, circumcision of the men would be a prime candidate, a once-in-a-lifetime, painful, and emotionally arousing ritual experience. Baptism would be another, also a singular ritual, at least for the recipient, the marker for full, adult church membership for the people born into the church, and the culmination of the conversion process for the others. Beyond these life-cycle rituals in the strict sense, healing is the most obvious imagistic ritual in the Nazareth Baptist Church. It does not happen often, once or a few times during an individual’s life, and it is emotionally charged by the suffering, and the release from this suffering for the patient. But often this process of healing does not involve rituals, or the actual ritual, the “God bless you” of Shembe, only plays a minor role in the story of the healing. For the central practice with regard to the healing processes is people telling emotional stories about how Shembe appeared to them in visions or dreams, often in times of distress, and how he healed them or helped them in other ways. And the central element of these stories is a vision or a dream of Shembe, rather than the healing ritual. These stories are told in the ritualised setting of the Sabbath preaching, but more often they are told in non-ritualised, everyday circumstances by ordinary people. A woman in her early 50s told me a typical example of these stories in the streets of Ebuhleni during the July congregation in 2008. We had greeted each other, and she told me that she was not Zulu but Tswana, living in Soweto, and I asked her how she became involved with the Nazareth Baptist Church. This is her story: She had been sick for many years, had tried all kinds of remedies, even tried to become an isangoma [traditional healer], but nothing had worked. She stayed home all the time, alone in her big house, even her children were 42 Sundkler 1976: 181.

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Magnus Echtler afraid of her. She withered away, became paralysed, and hardly slept. If she slept at all, something pressed her in the neck, and she had nightmares. One day, she saw the wall to her children’s room disappear – she was not asleep – and a man appeared. It was Amos Shembe (iNkosi iNyanga yeZulu), but she did not recognise him then. He spoke Zulu and was wearing a twopiece suit and a black hat. He told her he was sent by her ancestors, and that her problems would be over if she got baptised at his church, and that she would be baptised at 150. She didn’t know what that meant and what to do, but not half an hour later, her brother, who hadn’t visited her for years, knocked at her door. She told him what had happened, and that she needed to find that church; he looked for the church and came back after he found church members. He had to carry her, for she was too weak to walk. He drove her to a temple on Saturday at nine when the service was on, and she was asked to tell the congregation her story, and she did, and the pastor showed her four pictures of the prophets, and she identified the man from her vision as Amos Shembe. The people saw that she was an urgent case and might die at any time, and told her they were going to have her baptised at Gibisile Temple, and that the trip was 150 South African Rand. She recognized the 150 from her vision and told her brother that she would be going with these people the next day. Once she was baptised, she could walk like a young girl right away and up to the present day. Her brother is still “hiding”, although he brought her here several times – every one has his time, she was told at the temple; her relationship with her four children is fine now, although one son was shot – but to be in the church does not mean that there is no death. She was saved by Shembe and stays with that church, although the people at home ask her why she is running with the Zulu; but she tells them that they have been making fun of her, saying she has the three words (HIV), and nobody helped her but Shembe.

This story is a fairly typical one of the genre, Shembe is the powerful spiritual actor, the storyteller is the patient. In a situation of need, Shembe appears in a vision or a dream, advising a course of action, the patient overcomes difficulties in reaching Shembe, who then heals or otherwise intervenes and dissolves an affliction. Prototypes of these narratives are the stories about Isaiah Shembe’s visions, which mark the turning points in his life history, and which are at the heart of the store of oral traditions of the church.43 Among the oral traditions, stories of the various Shembes healing or performing other miraculous deeds form an important type,44 and through the practice of telling these stories, ordinary church members recreate one central doctrine of the church – the charisma of Shembe, while at the 43 See Hexham & Oosthuizen 1996: 17–19, 21; Papini 1999: 267–273. 44 See Hexham & Oosthuizen 2001: 19–25.

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same time charging the dedication to the doctrine with lived-through emotional experiences. From a cognitive angle, the success of the stories can be linked with the counter-intuitiveness of the miraculous elements.45 But what makes them especially interesting for the modes of religiosity theory is their management of the inter-linkage between episodic and semantic memory. The storytellers draw on their episodic memory to recall an emotional episode of their lives. The performance of the story is emotional as well, but unless it is very good and remembered episodically, the listeners will remember the story in their semantic memory as one of “Shembe’s miracles”. Alongside the Bible and the hymns, the oral traditions form the third tier of church doctrine. They have to accord to church orthodoxy, and heterodox narratives – usurping spiritual agency from Shembe – are strongly discouraged. But besides reproducing doctrine, and charging doctrine emotionally through lived-through episodes, the storytellers are, at the same time, using doctrine to re-shape the episodic memory of past ailments and miraculous recovery, to re-work their life history and identity according to church orthodoxy.46 Thus, the more or less ritualised practice of telling stories seems to draw upon both episodic and semantic memories, and as a fairly frequent, emotional, and, owing to the counter-intuitive miracles, highly entertaining practice, serve to counter the tedium effect of the transmission of church doctrine. The telling and re-telling of miracle stories engages the members with the church at a personal level, but it also reproduces the social structure of the church in another way. If charisma is conceived of as a form of symbolic capital that is produced through acknowledgement by others, then the storytelling produces Shembe’s charisma, his status as Lord, as almighty healer, and wielder of spiritual

45 For the memorability of minimally counterintuitive concepts see Barrett 2000; Boyer 2003. In March 2009 I witnessed a discussion among members of the church’s association of university students (NaTeSA) about whether they believed, or how far they believed, in these stories. The animated discussion lasted for over an hour, and during its course many such stories were told. All of them were counterintuitive, e.g. Shembe gently putting down a crashing airplane, a child being born by a buried corpse as predicted by the prophet who did not allow abortion, the white stones surrounding a Nazarite homestead turning into people armed with sticks driving off armed robbers, Shembe waking up a woman in coma seconds before the life support systems were to be turned off, etc. 46 For an overview of theoretical approaches for the interpretation of narratives, see Koven 2002: 170–177, for the construction of self and culture through narratives, Ochs & Capps 1996; Miller & Fung & Koven 2007.

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power.47 There might be other spiritual actors, but Shembe can work miracles better than any Christian pastor, he is stronger than diviners, healers, and witches, and he can heal even the cases where biomedicine has failed. This is what the stories tell, and this is the charisma of the leader, his status, his symbolic capital as acknowledged by others. The stories, or rather the practices of telling the stories, produce legitimate power, and that is the reason why their orthodoxy has to be checked, why deviant stories have to be suppressed. What would happen if there were several prophets claiming spiritual power, and they were acknowledged as such by others? It would lead to schism, and that is exactly what happened in the Nazareth Baptist Church in the 1970s.

Strategic Moves in Times of Schism Following the death of Johannes Galilee Shembe in 1976, a succession conflict broke out within the church between Amos Shembe, a brother of Johannes Galilee, and Londa Shembe, one of Johannes Galilee’s sons. By 1980, the church had split into two branches, the majority branch, located in the newly founded holy city of eBuhleni and led by Amos, and the much smaller minority branch, led by Londa and still residing in eKuphakameni. This schism is still considered a stain on church history by most of its members, and relations between the branches continue to be strained today. As one of the prominent events in church history, it has received its share of scholarly attention.48 What I argue for here, is that this conflict over symbolic capital was fought on several levels and through a variety of practices, but that it was not a competition between doctrinal and imagistic rituals or modes. If one wants to understand why Amos was able to gather greater support than Londa, then the “modes of religiosity” theory is of limited use, and has to be combined with theories that focus on social structure. The two men who competed for leadership of the church in the late 1970s seemed to have been both rather unlikely choices. Amos (born 1906) was an elder, but following his attempt to found his own church in the early 1940s and his subsequent excommunication, had been outside the church, and returned only shortly before Johannes Galilee’s death. Londa (born 1945) had been in the church, but not 47 For the concept of symbolic capital, see Bourdieu 1990: 122–134; for acknowledgement as the basis of charismatic leadership, Weber 1972: 140. Shembe’s title is inkosi – king, lord, chief, also inkosi yamakhosi – chief of the chiefs of Zulu nobility present at church services, but also, possibly, Lord of Lords in the biblical sense. The status of Shembe as prophet or Messiah has been the focus of most theological analyses of the church, as well as of everyday conflicts with Christian groups. The leadership of the church stays ambivalent in this regard, while large parts of the lay membership regard him as the black messiah. 48 Becken 1978; Oosthuizen 1981a; 1981b; Masondo 2004; Tishken 2006.

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for long and not in any prominent position, and his main drawback was his young age. According to Oosthuizen, who provided the most detailed account of the struggle, the core of the problem was “to be found in the dissatisfaction with the charismatic abilities of the two persons who contest this leadership”.49 But how could they muster acknowledgement? And why did not Johannes Galilee appoint a successor in the first place, which would have certainly simplified matters? The answers to these questions, I believe, can be found in Zulu social structure, and in the organisational structure of the church. In not appointing a successor, Johannes Galilee followed Zulu tradition, with the fierce competition among the several strands of a polygamous household, where an early appointment of a successor could mean his early death, because the killing of potential opponents was likewise part of the tradition. And this seemed to have happened in the Nazareth Baptist Church as well, at least in the interpretation of some church members, whom Oosthuizen questioned at the time: “The eldest son should have been the ‘natural’ successor under normal circumstances but he was killed ‘mysteriously’ at Ekuphakameni a few years ago. There is a rumour that his brothers were involved and that Galilee knew about this. He tried by all means to hide his feelings about this tragedy but it ‘haunted him for the rest of his life’. This could most probably account for him not naming a successor. This eldest son who was groomed to be his successor was sent to university and eventually took up a teaching post in Swaziland. When on vacation at home he met his ‘mysterious’ death. This son was actually the only one interested in the church and none of the others – they are accused of having been interested only in luxury”.50 This provides a first frame for the interpretation of the succession conflict: family politics in a dynasty of prophets modelled after the Zulu royal house. With the most obvious candidate out of the way, other contenders could position themselves, and there is some evidence that both Amos and Londa became much more interested in church affairs after the death of the “groomed successor”.51 Within this framework, Amos held a dominant position as the eldest male in the descent group, and as such was appointed temporary head of the church, supposed to oversee the search for a successor. On the other hand, Londa, as a son of the deceased prophet, was just such a successor, according to Zulu inheritance customs, and he was supported by Johannes Galilee’s senior wife, who claimed that Johannes Galilee had appointed Londa as successor in secret, again in accordance with customary practice.52 According to the rules, Amos should have led the church through the diffi49 50 51 52

Oosthuizen 1981a: 69. Oosthuizen 1981a: 52f. Ibid.: 51, 53f. Ibid.: 20.

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cult time, and than handed it over to Londa. But inheritance according to the rules is quite different from inheritance in practice, as the history of the Zulu royal house shows.53 And, of course, Amos was charged with being after the money only, and with planning to move the line of leadership from Johannes Galilee’s line to his own – which is exactly what he did, just as Londa was accused of being an opportunist, and of buying support with promises of future gain.54 So both contenders positioned themselves and tried to win followers, but to do so they had to move beyond family politics and convince the church membership. Within church theology, the spiritual aspect of Shembe is one and eternal, only his human embodiment changes.55 So both contenders had to convince people that they were indeed the reincarnation of the spiritual Shembe. In the end, the proof for legitimate leadership lies in the ability to work miracles or other superhuman interventions. As Nonhlanhla, one of the maidens’ leaders, explained: “We see the miracles he does and see if something has changed. We just recognize by the actions of saving and knowing it all that the Holy Spirit dwells in this person. Even when other people say it is not him, it is another one of their choice, we do not consider that and follow the actions of healing and saving etc. What was done before by the previous leader, we see it happening even in the current situation”.56 This was the main arena where the charismatic leader had to prove himself: he had to heal, to perform the miracles people would talk about. But even when using his spiritual power, the prophet needed the people to acknowledge him doing so, as becomes clear in Nonhlanhla’s account of how Vimbeni followed his father Amos in 1996: “We just heard the praising (uyingcwele – he is holy), and later on we heard that a blind person had been saved, that his eyes had been opened. And secondly another person, who was in his wheelchair and could not walk, stood up and left his wheelchair and walked. The same thing happened during iLanga’s [the sun: Johannes Galilee Shembe] and uMqaliwendlela’s [the founder: Isaiah Shembe] era”.57

53 See e.g. Guy 1994: 12–14. 54 Oosthuizen 1981a: 54. 55 As expressed in hymn 220, verse 8: My flesh is tired – it is going to rest in the grave – my spirit will get up – and be clothed in new flesh – from eternity I was born – forever I shall be living (Heuser & Hexham 2005: 152). The hymn was composed by Johannes Galilee Shembe in 1938, two years into his church leadership. 56 Interview with Nonhlanhla, 23-07-2008. 57 Interview with Nonhlanhla, 23-07-2008.

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This is the narrative of the perfect succession: the new prophet is healing the people, just like his illustrious predecessors, and that is the proof that the spiritual Shembe resides in him. The narrative also points to the decisive mechanism in the production of symbolic capital: if enough people shout “he is holy” at the mass rituals of the church, the contender has established his charisma in practice. But for the conflict between Amos and Londa, there is no data regarding their success as healers during the first years into the struggle, although Amos is certainly established as one of the incarnations of Shembe, with full spiritual powers, in the eBuhleni branch. While the role of healing in the succession conflict remains unclear, there was another skill in which the contenders excel: the ability to receive prophetic dreams and visions, which, like the ability to heal, characterised the church’s founder, Isaiah Shembe. Londa claimed to have had a series of five dreams in which his father appointed him as his successor, but his problem was that he failed to convince a sizeable number of church members that these dreams made him the legitimate leader.58 Amos used a prophecy made by Isaiah Shembe, that the moon would follow the sun, which made him (called iNyanga yeZulu – the moon of heaven) the legitimate successor of Johannes Galilee (iLanga – the sun). This formed a very strong claim, as the prophecy came from the church’s founder, but there is evidence that the story was invented at the time of the succession conflict only, which would have seriously lessened its ability to convince church members of Amos’ legitimacy.59 Amos also claimed that he had received the spiritual Shembe by eating a flower, thus referring to the story of the conception of Isaiah Shembe.60 Tishken argues that the difference in prophetic strategy, with Amos referring to Isaiah, and Londa referring to Johannes Galilee only, was the primary variable in the early stages of their struggle over leadership, and therefore central to Amos’ success, although he does allow for his “political acumen” as well.61 I would rather side with the second option, and argue that Amos’ success was based on his ability to build and use social networks, rather than on his prophetic skills. Symbolic capital, charisma, or the status as legitimate leader are based on public acknowledgement, and in the case of the Nazareth Baptist Church, this acknowledgement takes place primarily at the two main festivals in January and July. On these occasions, economic capital, e.g. the big car and the elaborate gown of the prophet, cultural capital, e.g. his ability to heal or to deliver a rousing sermon, and his knowledge of the Bible and of church lore, as well as social capital, e.g. his

58 59 60 61

Becken 1978: 168f.; Tiskhen 2006: 86–88. Tishken 2006: 88f.; Brown 1995: 63. Tishken 2006: 89; Hexham & Oosthuizen 1996: 5–7. Tishken 2006: 89, 91.

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skill in social networking, can be converted into symbolic capital, the charisma of the prophetic leader of the church.62 My argument is that Amos was successful, not because he was the better prophet, but because he was able to control the mass rituals of the church. In January 1977, in the month following Johannes Galilee’s death, Amos became acting head of the church.63 It is not exactly clear how this happened, but Tishken suggests that he was elected by leading ministers of the church “because he was the most senior member of the Shembe family”, and that he was elected to oversee the search for a new leader.64 It seems not unlikely that Amos used his social capital, his leading position within the patriarchal and gerontocratic Zulu social structure, or maybe his cultural capital, his skill as an orator, to convince the head officials of the church to install him as the – at least temporary – leader of the church. In January, the members of the church congregated at Nhlangakazi, the holy mountain, and it seems likely that the negotiations took place there, and that their result was announced publicly. If that was the case, then Amos’ symbolic capital would have been boosted considerably. With the hierarchical structure of the church, the support of a majority of high-ranking officials would also carry many of the lay members. That would also explain why he could claim “that he has been officially appointed Titular head of the Church on the 24th July 1977 by an ‘overwhelming majority’ of members present at a meeting and that a vast majority of the Church have accepted and recognized him, Amos Kula Shembe, as the leader of the Church”.65 In my opinion, the conflict was basically decided at this point. Half a year after his brother’s death, Amos had succeeded in pulling the majority of the church’s title holders onto his side, and he had used two of the major festivals to be acknowledged as church leader. Londa was fighting a losing battle. The support of Johannes Shembe’s senior wife did not take him far, and while he could dream of sitting in his father’s chair in his prophetic visions, at the congregations’ rituals only one person could sit in the leaders’ chair, and that was Amos. Not being able to challenge Amos in the mass rituals, Londa pursued another strategy. In October 1977 he went to court, claiming that the July election of Amos had been rigged, and that the church was not a democratic institution in any case, but rather a “chief and tribe kind of church”.66 At that time, there was high tension between the two factions, and in December 1977, when church members congregated at eKuphakameni, violence broke out and several people were killed. After this incident, both sides asked the Zulu King Goodwill Zwelethini Zulu for media62 For the different forms of capital see Bourdieu 1986; my notion of how rituals produce this public acknowledgement is based on Rappaport 1979. 63 Becken 1978: 164; Oosthuizen 1981a: 10f. 64 Tishken 2006: 98f. 65 Oosthuizen 1981a: 11. 66 Ibid.: 12.

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tion, and the king suggested that an assembly of the Shembe descent group should decide who among Johannes Galilee’s sons should become leader of the church. This suggestion was never acted upon; it certainly was not in the interest of Amos to do so. How far the two contenders developed in different directions becomes clear in the account of a joint visit at eKuphakameni by Becken and Oosthuizen in June 1978. They met Londa “sitting in his father’s chair, and before him a queue of women for whom he interceded by laying on of hands”, i.e. working on his cultural capital on the local level. Amos was not in eKuphakameni, but “in his accepted capacity as the regent of the church, he was visiting the congregations in Zululand as his late brother used to do”, i.e. he was working his social capital on the national level.67 In July, the apartheid state prohibited the festival because of the January violence, and Amos moved his group to an alternative setting. In August, the court reached its verdict, and ordered the election of a church council, which should in turn elect the church leader. The council elected Amos, and Londa went to court again. But that strategy did not generate popular support. Oosthuizen quotes a church member as saying that “he is inviting the wrath of his ancestors. Comparatively spoken, he has no following, and each time this simple truth is demonstrated to him, he runs to the white man’s court, which as far as we are concerned is not competent to decide on the Shembe issue”.68 In 1980, Amos established the new holy city called eBuhleni. This shows the strength of his leadership, as he could leave behind the established “New Jerusalem”, including the important graves of the former leaders, and still pull the vast majority of church members with him.69 With this move, the schism of the Nazareth Baptist Church was completed. In my analysis of the succession conflict, I emphasise two competing actors, who employ strategic moves on different levels. They claim prophetic abilities, and try to connect with the oral histories of the church; they draw upon state institutions and traditional political authority. In my interpretation, the main factor in Amos’ success was not his skill as a prophet, but rather his ability to mobilise social networks, although this ability was probably enhanced by his cultural capital, by his skill as a speaker; at least that was the view of one of Londa’s followers, who argued that “he knows fully well that he has no claim to the leadership. The larger following can be attributed to his age and oratory abilities”.70 Londa’s youth, on the other hand, was frequently seen as a limiting factor for his ambitions. Thus, the social capital of the two contenders at the beginning of the conflict seems to have a lot to do with the outcome. I developed this analysis of the succession struggle in the Nazareth Baptist Church, because it is an example of a type of social conflict that cannot be inter67 68 69 70

Becken 1978: 166f. Oosthuizen 1981a: 54f. Tishken 2006: 92. Oosthuizen 1981a: 54.

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preted within the framework of the “modes of religiosity” theory. One can argue, with Whitehouse, that the kinds of strategies employed by Londa and Amos were possible only because the church operates pretty much in the doctrinal mode, which enables the development of an hierarchy, and of the centralised leadership which was the bone of contention to start with. But that is a rather large framework, and it does not explain why Amos was more successful than Londa. That is a principal shortcoming of Whitehouse’s theory. If one wants to understand what is happening in the intermediate range of society, above the cognitive workings of rituals, and below the wide evolutionary framework of the two modes of religiosity with their sociological consequences, one needs another kind of social theory, a theory that engages social structure beyond cognitive constraints, a theory that uses institutional restrictions and power relations in its arguments. I do not think that this will lead to a deification of society, as claimed in Whitehouse’s argument against social science of the Durkheimian flavour.71 The challenge is to combine cognitive with social theories, because cognitive structure does not lead straight to social structure, where there are agents embedded in relationships, with skills and abilities to act, who follow strategies, and employ rituals because of their cognitive effects. This combination will eventually lead us to better understand an actor like Johannes Galilee Shembe, who knew perfectly well that you need to “give these people a real mass worship – and they will never forget it”,72 and who used this knowledge in a strategic fashion.

Conclusion The “modes of religiosity” theory provides enlightening new perspectives on established problems in social sciences, and its main analytical attraction lies in the clear-cut dichotomy of episodic vs. semantic memory, and imagistic vs. doctrinal mode, which can then be applied to intricate concrete cases. The theory focuses on the cognitive effects of ritual practices, or on the cognitive constraints on rituals as part of a transmitted religious tradition, with the decisive variables being frequency and emotional arousal. Applied to the field data, this focus immediately leads into the grey area between the imagistic and doctrinal “attractor positions”.73 How frequent is high frequency, and what constitutes high emotional arousal, leaving aside the question of how to measure it? I argued that the sacred dance in the Nazareth Baptist Church is of intermediate to high frequency, with, on average, monthly performances before an audience, and up to three a week if one is staying at one of the church’s congregations. And I hold that the emotional arousal of the dancers is 71 Whitehouse 2004b: 67f. 72 Sundkler 1976: 181. 73 Whitehouse 2005: 213.

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rather high, although that is my estimate, not backed by any kind of scientific measurement. Whitehouse allows for the frequent rituals of the doctrinal mode to be enhanced by certain techniques, e.g. oratory skill or singing, and holds that the link between frequency and emotional arousal has to be established empirically, but concludes that his “own hunch is that arousal varies inversely with frequency of ritual repetition”.74 I think that the sacred dance is a type of ritual that does not really fit into the “imagistic vs. doctrinal mode” dichotomy. Dancing is a bodily technique that has to be learned, that has to be frequently repeated in order to gain the performance skills that enable the emotional high. The motor skills are processed in implicit memory, the memory type that Whitehouse links with the rituals of the doctrinal mode.75 And yet dancing is the most important religious practice for many church members, the practice that enables them to find emotional catharsis or satisfaction, and the practice that binds them to the church on the emotional level, beyond the preaching of the church’s doctrine. It is my hunch that the sacred dance is an example of a type of ritualised body technique that combines high frequency with rather high levels of emotional arousal or other altered states of consciousness, i.e. a type of ritual that combines rehearsal with arousal.76 There might be quite different types of rituals that are emotionally effective in quite different ways, beyond the evocation of fear or terror in the initiation rituals that served as the template for Whitehouse’s imagistic mode.77 The second practice discussed here, the narration of stories of healing and other miracles, likewise does not really fit into the imagistic – doctrinal dichotomy. These narratives reproduce church doctrine, and they comply with the convention of the genre, i.e. they are processed in semantic memory. There are also orthodoxy checks on the content of these stories, another feature of the doctrinal mode.78 But the special character of the miracle stories seems to be based on the unique blending of semantic and episodic memory. On the one hand, church doctrine is used to re-interpret more or less traumatic episodes of the narrator’s life history, i.e. semantic memory is used to construct a self in relation to the church and the prophet by restructuring episodic memory.79 On the other hand, the life episodes, typically tales of sickness and healing, charge the doctrine of the church with emotion. The stories are told in more or less ritualised settings, ranging from their use in the preaching of the Sabbath services, where they serve to explicate church doctrine, to everyday situations of face-to-face interaction, where they are used to make sense of one’s personal life history. Especially in the second framework, the narratives 74 75 76 77 78 79

Ibid. 2004a: 99. Ibid. 2004a: 87–94, 103. Ibid. 2005: 211. Ibid. 2000: 30–33. Ibid. 2002a: 296–302. Miller & Fung & Koven 2007: 609f.

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are emotionally highly charged, and form one important religious practice for the reproduction of identities as church members. But in both frameworks, the ritual and the everyday, these stories also carry entertainment value, an aspect that can be linked with the cognitive effectiveness of minimally counterintuitive concepts.80 Besides the role the narratives play for the recreation of church doctrine and personal identities, they are among the religious practices that produce social structure and power relationships. It can be argued that the hierarchy of the church is mis-recognised in the form of spiritual power, in the charisma of the prophetic leader. The power relations of a tightly centralised organisational structure are hidden behind, and legalised through, healing and miracles. And it is practices like the narratives of miracles that produce this kind of symbolic capital. However, the production of symbolic capital becomes problematic, becomes a scarce resource, once people compete over it, as was the case in the succession conflict that split the Nazareth Baptist Church in the late 1970s. Here, I argued that the two competing actors pursued various tactics in different areas, but that the conflict was probably decided by their ability to mobilise social capital, both within the descent group of Shembe and within the church officials, corresponding with the control over the mass rituals of the church, as the occasions where public acknowledgement was practically established. For the analysis of social conflicts like this, the “modes of religiosity” theory is of limited value, because it is not concerned with the realm of social structure, where interested actors employ strategic moves to establish relations of power. For this kind of analysis, actor-centred social theories are more useful.81 Generally Whitehouse’s theory is not concerned with cultural meaning and social structures, the two classic fields of cultural and social anthropology, and Whitehouse has attacked both these approaches as being not scientific, which is a valid strategy to establish a position within the scientific field, but maybe not the most constructive way to move ahead analytically.82 More recently, he called for the integration of cognitive approaches with historical and ethnographic approaches, and suggested how cognitive concepts like “violence inhibition mechanism”, “second order theory of mind mechanisms”, or “cross-domain analogical thinking” can be employed to search for explanations on the level of face-to-face interaction, or with

80 See e.g. Barrett 2000: 90f. 81 E.g. Bourdieu 1990. 82 For the “faulty ontology” of social and cultural/interpretative anthropology, see Whitehouse 2004b: 65–70. In the same article, he criticises the anti-scientific prejudices in what he terms the “hermeneutic vortex” (Whitehouse 2004b: 75–84). But this moral argument can also be read as a penetrating description of the scientific field, where newcomers (cognitive scientists) compete with established position-holders (interpretative anthropologists) over the capitalia of the field (see e.g. Bourdieu 1971).

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regard to cultural knowledge or meaning.83 In my view, the most challenging, but also fruitful, endeavour is the investigation of the interrelations between cognitive and social structures, without reducing one to the other.

83 Whitehouse 2007: 257, 259, 264.

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References Alles, Gregory D. 2004. “Speculating on the Eschaton: Comments on Harvey Whitehouse’s Inside the Cult and the two Modes of Religiosity Theory”. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 16/3: 226–291. Barrett, Justin L. 2000. “Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion”. Trends in Cognitive Science 4/1: 29–34. Bateson, Gregory 1975. “Some Components of Socialization for Trance”. Ethos 3/2: 143–155. Becken, Hans-Jürgen 1966. “The Nazareth Baptist Church of Shembe”. In: HansJürgen Becken (ed.). Our Approach to the Independent Church Movement in South Africa. Mapumulo: Missiological Institute: 101–114. — 1978. “Ekuphakameni Revisited. Recent Developments within the Nazareth Church in South Africa”. Journal of Religion in Africa 9/3: 161–172. Bourdieu, Pierre 1971. “Genèse et structure du champ religieux”. Revue Française de Sociologie 12/3: 295–334. — 1986. “The Forms of Capital”. In: John Richardson (ed.). Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood Press: 241–258. — 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Boyer, Pascal 2003. “Evolution of the Modern Mind and the Origins of Culture: Religious Concepts as a Limiting Case”. In: Peter Carruthers & Andrew Chamberlain (eds.). Evolution and the Human Brain. Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 93–112. Brown, Karen Hull 1995. The Function of Dress and Ritual in the Nazareth Baptist Church of Isaiah Shembe (South Africa). (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Indiana University, Ann Arbor). Castillo, Richard J. 1995. “Culture, Trance and the Mind-brain”. Anthropology of Consciousness 6/1: 17–32. Cohen, Emma & Justin L. Barrett 2008. “Conceptualizing Spirit Possession: Ethnographic and Experimental Evidence”. Ethos 36/2: 246–267. Csordas, Thomas J. 1987. “Health and the Holy in African and Afro-American Spirit Possession”. Social Science and Medicine 24: 1–11. Goodman, Felicitas D. 1986. “Body Posture and the Religious Altered State of Consciousness: An Experimental Investigation”. Journal of Humanistic Psychology 26/3: 81–118. Gunner, Elizabeth 1988. “Power House, Prison House – An Oral Genre and Its Use in Isaiah Shembe’s Nazareth Baptist Church”. Journal of Southern African Studies 14/2: 204–227. Gussler, Judith D. 1973. “Social Change, Ecology, and Spirit Possession among the South African Nguni”. In: Erika Bourguignon (ed). Religion, Altered States of Consciousness, and Social Change. Columbus: Ohio State University Press: 88–126. Guy, Jeff 1994. The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom, 1879–1884. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press.

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— 2005. The Maphumulo Uprising. War, Law and Ritual in the Zulu Rebellion. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Heuser, Andreas & Irving Hexham (eds.) 2005. The Story of Isaiah Shembe. Vol. 5: The Hymns and Sabbath Liturgy for Morning and Evening Prayer of Isaiah Shembe’s amaNazaretha. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Heuser, Andreas 2008. “‘He Dances like Isaiah Shembe!’ Ritual Aesthetics as a Marker of Church Difference”. Studies in World Christianity 14/1: 35–54. Hexham, Irving & Gerhardus C. Oosthuizen (eds.) 1996. The Story of Isaiah Shembe. Vol. 1: History and Traditions Centered on Ekuphakameni and Mount Nhlangakazi. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. — 2001. The Story of Isaiah Shembe. Vol. 3: The Continuing Story of the Sun and the Moon. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. James, William 1958. The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature. New York: Mentor Books. Jankowsky, Richard 2007. “Music, spirit-possession and the in-between: Ethnomusicological inquiry and the challenge of trance”. Ethnomusicology Forum 16/2: 185– 208. Juslin, Patrik N. & Daniel Västfjäll 2008. “Emotional Responses to Music: The Need to Consider Underlying Mechanisms”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (5): 559– 575. Koch, Anne 2006. “The Study of Religion as Theorienschmiede for Cultural Studies: A Test of Cognitive Science and Religious-Economic Modes of Access”. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 18: 254–272. Koven, Michèle 2002. “An Analysis of Speaker Role Inhabitance in Narratives of Personal Experience”. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 167–217. Laidlaw, James 2007. “A Well-Disposed Social Anthropologist’s Problems with the ‘Cognitive Science of Religion’”. In: Harvey Whitehouse & James Laidlaw (eds.). Religion, Anthropology, and Cognitive Science. Durnham: Carolina Academic Press: 211–246. Lamothe, Kimerer L. 2005. “Why Dance? Towards a Theory of Religion as Practice and Performance”. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 17/2: 101–133. Leeuw, Gerad van der 1957. Vom Heiligen in der Kunst. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann. LeDoux, Joseph 1999. The Emotional Brain. The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. London: Phoenix. Masondo, Sibusiso 2004. “Three Generations of Shembe: Leadership Contests within the Nazareth Baptist Church (1935–1989)”. Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 118: 69–79. Mendoza, Sally P. & John D. Ruys 2001. “The Beginning of an Alternative View of the Neurobiology of Emotion”. Social Science Information 40/1: 39–60. Miller, Peggy J. & Heidi Fung & Michele Koven 2007. “Narrative Reverberations: How Participation in Narrative Practices Co-Creates Persons and Cultures”. In: Shinobu Kitayama & Dov Cohen (eds.). Handbook of Cultural Psychology. New York: Guilford: 595–614.

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Mthethwa, Bongani 1989. “Music and Dance as Therapy in African Traditional Societies with Special Reference to the iBandla lamaNazaretha”. In: Gerhardus C. Oosthuizen et al. (eds.). Afro-Christian Religion and Healing in Southern Africa. Lewiston: Mellen: 241–256. Muller, Carol Ann 1999. Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire. Nazarite Women’s Performance in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Neher, Andrew 1962. “A Physiological Explanation of Unusual Behavior in Ceremonies Involving Drums”. Human Biology 34/2: 151–160. Ochs, Elinor & Lisa Capps 1996. “Narrating the Self”. Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 19–43. Oosthuizen, Gerhardus C. 1981a. Succession Conflict within the Church of the Nazarites: iBandla zamaNazaretha. Durban: Institute for Social and Economic Research. — 1981b. “Leadership Struggle within the Church of the Nzarites – iBandla lamaNazaretha”. Religion in Southern Africa 2/2: 12–24. Papini, Robert 1997. A Sourcebook for the Study of the Church of Nazareth: A Bilingual Publication Project for the Shembe “protoscriptures”. (Unpublished Typescript, History and African Studies Seminar Series 24, University of Natal). — 1999. “Carl Faye’s Transcript of Isaiah Shembe’s Testimony of His Early Life and Calling”. Journal of Religion in Africa 29/3: 243–284. — 2002. “The Nazareth Scotch: Dance Uniform as Admonitory Infrapolitics for an Eikonic Zion City in Early Union Natal”. South African Humanities 14: 79–106. — 2004. “The Move to Tradition. Dance Uniform History in the Church of Nazareth Baptists”. African Arts 37/3: 48–61, 91–93. Potter, Caroline 2008. “Sense of Motion, Senses of Self: Becoming a Dancer”. Ethnos 73/4: 444–465. Rappaport, Roy 1979. “The Obvious Aspects of Ritual”. In: Roy Rappaport. Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books: 173–221. Roberts, Esther 1936. Shembe: The Man and His Work. (Unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of South Africa). Samudra, Jaida Kim 2008. “Memory in Your Body: Thick Participation and the Translation of Kinesthetic Experience”. American Ethnologist 35/4: 665–681. Sundkler, Bengt 1976. Zulu Zion and Some Swazi Zionists. London: Oxford University Press. Thishken, Joel 2006. “Whose Nazareth Baptist Church? Prophecy, Power, and Schism in South Africa”. Novo Religio 9/4: 79–97. Thompson, William Forde 2009. Music, Thought, and Feeling. Understanding the Psychology of Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Vilakazi, Absolom & Bongani Mthethwa & Mthembeni Mpanza 1986. Shembe. The Revitalization of African Society. Johannesburg: Skotaville Publishers. Weber, Max 1972. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Mohr. Whitehouse, Harvey 1995. Inside the Cult. Religious Innovation and Transmission in Papua New Guinea. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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— 2000. Arguments and Icons. Divergent Modes of Religiosity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — 2002a. “Modes of Religiosity: Towards a Cognitive Explanation of the Socio-Political Dynamics of Religion”. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 14: 293– 315. — 2002b. “Implicit and Explicit Knowledge in the Domain of Ritual”. In: Ilkka Pyysiäinen & Veikko Anttonen (eds.). Current Approaches in the Cognitive Science of Religion. London: Continuum: 133–152. — 2004a. Modes of Religiosity. A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Walnut Creek: Altamira. — 2004b. “Why Do We Need Cognitive Theories of Religion?” In: Timothy Light & Brian Wilson (eds.). Religion as a Human Capacity. Leiden: Brill: 65–88. — 2005. “The Cognitive Foundations of Religiosity”. In: Harvey Whitehouse & Robert N. McCauley (eds.). Mind and Religion: Psychological and Cognitive Foundations of Religiosity. Walnut Creek: Altamira: 207–232. — 2007. “Towards an Integration of Ethnography, History, and the Cognitive Science of Religion”. In: Harvey Whitehouse & James Laidlaw (eds.). Religion, Anthropology, and Cognitive Science. Durnham: Carolina Academic Press: 247–280. — & James Laidlaw (eds.) 2004. Ritual and Memory: Towards a Comparative Anthropology of Religion. Walnut Creek: Altamira. — & Luther H Martin (eds.) 2004. Theorizing Religions Past: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives. Walnut Creek: Altamira. — & Robert N. McCauley (eds.) 2005. Mind and Religion: Psychological and Cognitive Foundations of Religiosity. Walnut Creek: Altamira. — & James Laidlaw (eds.) 2007. Religion, Anthropology, and Cognitive Science. Durnham: Carolina Academic Press Yelle, Robert A. 2006. “To Perform, or not to Perform? A Theory of Ritual Performance versus Cognitive Theories of Religious Transmission”. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 18: 372–391.

Interviews:84 Bonginkosi, Scottish dancer, 13-03-2009 Mduduzi, Scottish dance group leader, 27-07-2008 Nkosinathi, Scottish dance group leader, 25-01-2009 Nonhlanhla, maiden leader, 23-07-2008 Sibongile, maiden dancer, 27-03-2009 Sibusiso, Scottish dancer, 25-01-2009 Sipho, minister of the church, 06-07-2008 Vusumuzi, Scottish dancer, 25-01-2009

84 I have changed the names of all my informants.

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Ritual, Emotion, and the Navigation of the Self It is early in the summer of 2008. In a field not far from Stockholm, a large tent has been raised. It is a classic circus tent, circular with a pointy roof and anchored to the green meadow with thick ropes and huge iron pegs. The walls are striped in blue and yellow. The tent belongs to a congregation of Pentecostal Roma and on this day they have begun their summer tour. The meeting has been going on for a full day and now, as the sun sets behind the suburban tower blocks that border the field, the tent is packed with people and the emotional intensity is high. A young preacher is standing on the podium. Behind him a keyboard player plays soft chords in accompaniment to a sermon that is being delivered to the ever more exultant crowd. The preacher has to shout his last words at the top of his voice in order to make himself heard above the ecstatic turmoil that by this time is growing in the tent: “If you give your life to Jesus, and if you do it with all of your heart, I promise you that you will change. You will transform completely. You will be an entirely different person. Because you are giving yourself up to a living God and if you do so your life will change. All the curses that have followed you, all that the Devil has brought upon you, all that he has ruined will be rebuilt, all that has been dark will be filled with light. God will come into your life. He will anoint you!” Having heard this promise of change, people now leave their seats and go up to the podium to be prayed for individually, as the choir’s background music grows to a powerful hymn of praise. Many people go up there this night. Men and women, with dignified expressions on their faces, step forward to be prayed for. Other preachers and senior male members of the congregation assist the young preacher now. Together they lay their hands on the people who have come to surrender their lives to Jesus. They speak in tongues and pray loudly for Jesus to come, for him to bring change and anointment into the lives of people. The reactions from the people prayed for are diverse. Some just stand there and cry silently with downcast eyes. Others start to tremble violently. A few collapse completely and are caught and dragged away by men who have been placed behind them in anticipation of this. The exultant mood lasts for the rest of the evening.

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This meeting is an example of an emotionally-charged ritual. Such rituals are common in Charismatic Christianity. A strong emphasis on emotion is a main characteristic of Pentecostalism, both in teachings and ritual practice. Indeed, the whole set-up of many meetings seems arranged with the intention of drawing people into an elated emotional state. What, then, is it all about? How can people be moved to such strong emotional expressions? Why do they seek this so explicitly? What does it do to them, as individuals and as members of a community? And how can we interpret and analyse this kind of ritual as scholars of religion? In this article I will discuss the emotional aspect of Christian revivalism among the Kaale Roma in Sweden. My main hypothesis is that the rituals provide means for social and personal change by conjuring up a specific emotional mood that encourages certain actions and thoughts, whilst keeping others away.

The Experience of Anointment First of all, then, we need to look a bit more closely at the emotions people are expressing in these rituals. The emic term that lies at the core of these emotional rituals is anointment (Finnish: voitelu, Swedish: smörjelse). This word is used in a metaphorical sense to denote an elated emotional state that is believed to be caused by the Holy Spirit. Most of my informants claim that they have experienced this feeling in connection with an open revivalist meeting or in a private prayer gathering. Some experienced it for the first time alone while praying in their homes. When I ask them to describe their experiences, many lack the words to explain more concretely what it is they have gone through. Instead, the religious vocabulary is used, as if the precise meanings of concepts such as “being saved”, “taking Jesus into one’s heart”, “being anointed with the Holy Spirit”, or “feeling the grace of God” were self-evident. Those who find words to describe more elaborately, often speak of calmness, peace, freedom, and, most frequently, forgiveness and love. The anointment is described as an overwhelming and incredible feeling of being loved and forgiven. The anointment, then, is, in a way, the emotional acceptance of theoretical knowledge that one has. Some of the informants also clearly speak of it in terms of a bodily experience. “I could feel it in my whole body”, one of them tells me, and continues, “I grasped the meaning of what we were doing, what it was all about. That Jesus has died for us to save us”. The informants also describe their experiences particularly often in terms of sensations of warm water or oil. A boy in his late teens describes his experience using the metaphor of oil: “When I sat there and prayed I suddenly felt great warmth in my body. I felt like, you know, as if oil flowed from my forehead and downwards. You

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know, completely unbelievable, a very strange feeling. And I started feeling so glad and, you know, lovable and everything. Then I knew that I was Spirit baptised and I started to speak with tongues.” The overwhelming experience of anointment at meetings is, however, not the only emotional state that the informants describe. In addition to this they also describe how other, less dramatic, ritualised activities, such as Bible readings, prayer, singing hymns or attending Pentecostal chat groups on the internet, put them in a certain frame of mind, a pious mood. “I have always liked the word of Jesus Christ, when I read the Bible I always feel that warmth”, one informant tells me, to give just one example. The pious mood is spoken of as a similar but less intense version of the emotional state described as the anointment. It is a feeling of doing something that God favours, of “having done the right thing”, as one informant puts it. It is described as a feeling of purity, lovability, righteousness, divine presence, and mild bliss. How, then, as scholars of religion, should we interpret and analyse these statements about emotion? Needless to say, there are a number of possible perspectives that one can apply to this phenomenon. In the following I will approach the emotional rituals while focusing on the individual level. I will consider what effect the emotional rituals may have on the life and inner emotional state of the individual participants. In order to do this, I will employ two concepts that pinpoint what may be called two specific methods of self-change. The concepts are emotive speech and emotional association.

The Kaale Roma First of all, a necessary prerequisite for this analysis to be meaningful is, of course, that the people who attend these rituals are looking for some kind of personal or social change in their lives. Before presenting the key concepts of my analysis, I shall therefore briefly say something about the situation of the Kaale Roma in Sweden. The Roma are not a homogeneous group. On the contrary the term refers to a number of different communities loosely connected through their language, history, and societal position. Kaale, meaning literally “black”, is a name used for a group of Romani peoples who have been living in Western Europe since the Middle Ages. The specific community focused on here is usually referred to as Finnish Roma. All in all, it consists of between 13,000 and 15,000 Finnish-speaking Kaale. About 3,000 of these live in Sweden and the rest, with a few exceptions, live in Finland. Many travel regularly between the two countries. Nowadays, most of them live as more or less stable residents in suburbs in and around the bigger cities in the south of Finland and in Sweden.

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The social situation of the Kaale Roma, like that of the other Romani communities, is difficult. All studies and reports on their situation in Sweden bear witness to a very prominent experience of exclusion. Because of their distinguishable clothing (they only wear dark clothes of a particular fashion) the Kaale group seems to be among the most discriminated against. According to the DO, the Romani community is largely locked out from democratic processes, and they are exposed to mistreatment in almost all sections of society, including the housingand job-markets, healthcare, and in school.1 The discrimination against Roma is interconnected with the social problems that are found among many members of the group. The relations between the Roma communities and the majority society seem to be caught in a vicious circle of mistrust: discrimination causes an outsidership, which in its turn leads to social problems, which in their turn create mistrust among authorities and in doing so upholds the exclusion. Family violence, alcoholism, and also, for some years now, heavier drug-abuse is over-represented among the members of the group. And despite an improved legal status and stronger laws against discrimination, the situation appears to be getting worse. Needless to say, this situation creates feelings of insufficiency, anger, guilt, and anxiety among many Roma. This is not the place to discuss this very complex situation in depth. Suffice it to say that the Kaale Roma have many problems, and that many who come to the Pentecostal meetings are dealing with harsh difficulties, for which they need to find a solution that works in their everyday lives.

Emotive Speech In an essay written in 1992, American anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano notes that there is something special about first-person present tense utterances about feelings. Expressions like “I love you” or “I am very angry” are similar to performative speech, in so far as they bring about a change of the context in which they have been uttered. Yet they stand out by having a strangely looped self-referentiality that differs from other performatives.2 The American historian William Reddy has further developed and conceptualised Crapanzano’s observation. Taking his departure from John L. Austin’s Speech Act theory,3 he has chosen the word emotives to pinpoint the specific characteristic of these “first-person present tense emotion claims”. Emotives, Reddy suggests, constitute a category of speech that falls in between performative and affirmative speech. 1 Diskriminering av romer 2003: 12. 2 Crapanzano 1992: 234–235. 3 Austin 1962.

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The most important characteristic of emotives, then, is that they are self-exploring or self-changing. This means that they change the emotional state of the speaker who utters them. Hence, when a person says “I love you” to his or her lover, this utterance is seen as the expression of the speaker’s emotional state. But, at the same time, it also contributes to creating that very emotional state. Now, since emotives have this special characteristic, they can be used as tools to change, build, hide, or intensify emotions. Individuals can thus make use of emotive speech in order to control their motivations, or to steer their engagement in different directions. Reddy labels the endeavour to do this “emotional navigation”.4 First-person present tense utterances about feelings are commonplace at Pentecostal meetings. That people sing or loudly declare, for instance, their love for Jesus is quite expected. To become really interesting and relevant for the study of ritual, however, Reddy’s concept needs to be widened. It seems a bit incomplete to restrict the category of emotives to spoken first-person present tense utterances only. It is not only by actually saying that one loves Jesus that one can have the emotive self-changing effects that Reddy describes. The same is also possible by expressing this love through physical gestures, song, body movements, facial expressions, or even through inner visualisations. Indeed, if the emotional expressions of Pentecostalism at large are seen as emotives, then all religious activity by Pentecostal adherents can be approached as an example of the emotional navigation that Reddy speaks of. As humans, we constantly need to negotiate between different levels of experience. In doing so, we may feel that all levels of experience do not combine smoothly. Our intentions and motivations on one level may lead away from what we have decided on another. Most people, I suppose, experience these kinds of internal conflicts of interest quite regularly, for instance, when we have to get up in the morning, or when we fail to behave towards others and ourselves in the ways we want to. In the complicated life-situations that many of my informants bear witness to, a dramatic change of direction has been necessary. Many who suffer the consequences of, for instance, alcoholism have felt the need for such a dramatic change. They have also felt it necessary to somehow find the strength to stick to the choice of direction that they have made. Emotive speech and action, arguably, have provided means to do exactly this. By changing, building, hiding, or intensifying emotions and moods, therefore, emotives can help encourage certain behaviours and reject others.

4 Reddy 2001: 322.

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Emotional Association In order to identify another of the self-changing strategies that the stories of my informants give evidence of, I would like to propose the concept of “emotional association”. In doing so, I would like to pinpoint a self-suggestive method by which ritual participants make themselves experience the ritual as meaningful. The informants’ accounts of their anointments indicate that, in order for a sermon or a prayer to touch the heart of an individual, it has to be intimate. Somehow, it seems, it must connect to heartfelt and private aspects of that individual’s person. Rituals to which a participant has no personal relation will not do the job. On the contrary, an outsider who attends a strongly emotionally-charged religious ritual is most likely to feel alienated, uncomfortable, or even scared or disgusted. At best, the rituals may seem exotic or interesting for such a person. But unless some personal connection is made, they will never really sink in. In order for emotional rituals to work, then, they have to be integrated into the life-world of the individual. They have to become subjectified or, if you will, believed. Clifford Geertz’s classical analysis of religion as a symbolic system that gives plausible answers to existential questions may come in handy here. In Geertz’s view, religious rituals have the capacity to combine people’s rational understanding of the world, their world-view, with their aesthetic and emotional understanding of it, their ethos. If this happens, the world-view is strengthened by the emotional endorsement that it receives at the same time as emotional experiences are legitimised by the world-view.5 To make emotional rituals work, then, participants have to find some kind of connection that makes the rituals become intimate, some kind of link that makes the stories and discussions proclaimed from the podium concern one’s own situation, something with which one can identify. Emotional association, then, is the cognitive process through which the ideas of one set of stories and practices are connected to an intimate and emotionallycharged problem in one’s life. The result of this connection is twofold: firstly, the set of stories and practices is charged with the emotional intensity of the chosen personal problem. Secondly, it becomes possible to express, to vent, the chosen personal problem through the stories and practices. In the Pentecostal rituals that I have studied, it appears as if connections caused by emotional associations of this sort often precede the spectacular sensation of anointment. Let me now give a concrete example of how this happens. One of the informants was not able to connect to the Pentecostal message until his wife became terminally ill:

5 Geertz 1973: 163.

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“When Miranda was pregnant she got very sick and that was the turning point for me. ‘What if she dies?’ I thought. How heartless I have been. If someone is going to die in this house it should be me, me and my sinful life, all the bad things that I did. Then I told God, silently to myself, ‘God, what am I doing? Forgive my rigidity’. That was the turning point.” If we are to trust the memory and narrative of this particular informant, the Pentecostal stories and practices have to be connected to personal, heartfelt experiences in order for the turning point to come. The message of divine love, redemption, and forgiveness has to be connected to personal experiences of failure, insufficiency, or guilt. It is only when an emotional understanding that “this actually concerns me”, as many informants put it, develops, that the person will be moved by the message and the ritual practices become experienced as meaningful.

Conclusions In this article I have discussed the role of emotions in Pentecostal rituals. I have shown how emotions on a social level can be construed as the performance of set repertoires, the success of which is measured in the atmosphere that is created in the group. Focusing on the individual level, I have discussed the emotional rituals as techniques to bring about personal change. I have presented and analysed different means by which preachers and participants can bring themselves and others into emotional states that, they believe, can help bring about such change. In conclusion, it may be said that this brief article has proposed a certain perspective or approach to the scholarly enquiry of emotional rituals. By focusing on the moods and emotions that the rituals can conjure up, rather than their verbalised content or visual execution, a different image of their function and meaning appears. These rituals, then, are not simply the physical expressions of a set of beliefs, but neither are they empty gestures or mere institutions with the purpose of upholding social hierarchies. Instead, the function and meaning that emerge if the rituals are approached from the emotion-oriented perspective is that of social and personal transformation. The rituals constitute a means for change. Now, if this aspect is approached as a central meaning or function of ritual, it may be expanded to other aspects of religiosity as well. Just as performing rituals may be seen as a means of upholding a pious mood and as a way of demonstrating, to oneself and to others, that one is on the right path, then adhering to religious beliefs or ideological positions may also be to make oneself change in one way or another. What happens, for instance, if we, when studying individual adherence to Biblical creationism, Salafist Islam, or liberal Protestantism, focus on the moods and emotions that faithfulness to these particular positions creates, instead of, as is often the case, focusing on their articulated, scriptural, or theological content? Ar-

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guably, individual religious engagement is often motivated and upheld for reasons that are not directly articulated or expressed. An emotion-oriented approach to the narratives of religious people may shed light on meaning, function, and agency, not only in ritual, but in individual religiosity in general.

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References Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon. Crapanzano, Vincent 1992. Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Diskriminering av romer i Sverige – rapport från DO:s projekt åren 2002 och 2003 om åtgärder för att förebygga och motverka etnisk diskriminering av romer. Stockholm: Report from Ombudsmannen mot etnisk diskriminering. Stockholm (The Ombudsman for Ethnic Discrimination). [Retrievable from: http://www.kultur.stockholm.se/ Nationella_Minoriteter/Pdf/roma_rapport.pdf] Geertz, Clifford 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Reddy, William 2001. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Andreas Odenthal

Ritual Experience Theology and Psychoanalysis in Dialogue about the Liturgy of the Catholic Church1 Human beings need ritual. They create rituals and bequeath them through cultural institutions. As such an institution, the Catholic Church has, in the course of its history, amassed a wealth of rituals. Thus, the following considerations will be located within the field of ritual studies in order to understand the immense meaning of the liturgy (Thesis 1). This article engages in an interdisciplinary dialogue between theology and psychoanalysis, and also reflects the general conditions of this dialogue (Thesis 2). The connections between symbolic ritual practices and the fundamental human experiences of life, as these are discerned in ritual, can be demonstrated by means of certain elements of psychoanalytical theory. The aim of this article therefore is to describe a third level of reality, a “potential space”, into which the rituals of the Church fit, and which provides a link between internal experience and external reality. According to Donald W. Winnicott physical objects can become “transitory objects” for infants, thus acquiring a symbolic quality, causing them to represent the enduring bond between mother and child, but also incorporating the child’s repeated experience of separation from its mother.2 In short, they become representations of a relational event (Thesis 3). In a next step, Heribert Wahl’s concept of “symbolic experience” will be introduced. This concept has been generated from elements of psychoanalytical theory (e.g. Heinz Kohut) and emphasises the necessary difference between human experience, condensed into a symbol, and the changing realities of life, which can be interpreted in the context of that symbol. “Symbolic experience” defines the unflagging duty of the Church dynamically to relate the experience of faith to the constantly changing reality of people’s lives (Thesis 4). Wahl’s concept of “symbolic experience” will then be transformed into the concept of “ritual experience”. Applied to the Roman Catholic liturgy, the significance of this concept lies in its simultaneous emphasis on both a subjective and an objective side of ritual action (Thesis 5). Such an ob1 Translation: Thomas Riplinger & Nicki Schaepen. 2 Winnicott 1971.

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jective side is the theological notion of the Paschal mystery, which is celebrated in every liturgical celebration and which can be seen as a link between theology and psychoanalysis. The Christian/Jewish tradition is rich in its experience of the two dimensions of ritual symbols contained in the motifs of the Paschal Meal and the Last Supper experiences: on the one hand, in the assurance of protection expressed in the Jewish and the Christian promise of God’s saving nearness; and, on the other hand, the call to departure, to break out into the new reality of the Exodus and the Death/Resurrection of Jesus (Thesis 6). This understanding of ritual, which builds on symbol theory, locates ritual in the psychic development of human beings, and thus integrates ritual into the historicity of human beings themselves, thereby establishing ritual in the historical dimension of Judeo-Christian religion. In this way, ritual experience can be considered to be psychologically “healthy”.

Thesis 1 In the research field known as ritual studies, a variety of different disciplines enter into the scientific dialogue dealing with the complex phenomenon of human ritualmaking. To this concert with so many disparate voices, I propose here to add a specifically theological approach. The scientific discipline of liturgical studies in its Catholic form can interpret the Church’s tradition of worship as a two-thousandyear-long collection of “ritual experience”, and can attempt to discover the conditions for the functioning of such experiences. Ritualising is a characteristic of human religious behaviour: the repetition of the same forms of worship can be understood as an expression of a primeval attitude of human beings in the face of the divinity they adore. This fundamental notion of the history of religions finds confirmation in the Jewish-Christian tradition. Many approaches to worship, which the history of religion brings to the fore with their diverse cultic motives, can be identified in the Judeo-Christian repertoire of cultic forms as well, though in a transformed and purified manner: “The historical liturgy of Christianity is and remains – inseparably and undilutedly – cosmic, and only in this dimension does it stand in its full reality. Without question, there is something unique about Christianity, but this does not exclude the searching eye of the history of religion; instead Christianity takes up the diverse motifs of the world religions and, in its own unique way, it remains connected with them.”3 Thus, it is possible to find in the liturgy of the Church anthropological constants of ritualising behaviour, which, at the same time, can be seen as expressing the specific Jewish and Christian experience of faith. This means that it is possible to 3 Ratzinger 2000: 29.

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study the liturgy of the Catholic Church in the context of the interdisciplinary field of study called ritual studies. Paul Post has called attention to the manifold dimensions of such an approach, and to their significance for Catholic theology.4 Of all the theological disciplines, it is particularly in liturgical studies that such an approach finds its home, since this is the study of the worship of the Church. The focus in this study is thus the approach of practical theology, namely concerning the living practice of worship and a living tradition of ritual forms. Seen in this light, the Church can be seen as having a two-thousand-year-old experience with rituals and with the deposit of faith which these rituals bring to expression.

Thesis 2 The interdisciplinary contact between theology and non-theological disciplines, in particular the human sciences, finds its realisation after the “model of converging options”. The understanding of the ritual character of human existence can be seen as one such option. Theology will always connect this option with human faith in God and with the way of life which faith engenders. It is part of the theological tradition to enter into an interdisciplinary dialogue with other disciplines. In the past, philosophy was the privileged partner. In recent decades, however, the dialogue with the human sciences has come more and more to the fore.5 For this purpose, Norbert Mette and Hermann Steinkamp have developed what they call the “model of convergent options”. Each discipline participating in the conversation sketches its own perspective. However, the dialogue of the participating disciplines does not end in a consensus, but only in a convergence. Thus, there is no final position in this conversation between the human sciences and the “science of faith”, the discourse remains open and cannot be reduced to a final synthesis. Such a result emerges especially when, as here, the dialogue is pursued between theology and psychoanalysis, a science which is fundamentally critical of religion. This applies especially to Christianity, in which traditional religious motifs are transformed and purified, for instance the motif of blood in the Eucharist. However, refraining from seeking a consensus guarantees the autonomy of the participating disciplines and prevents, for example, theology from being reduced to psychology. On the part of psychoanalysis, the methodological approach to interdisciplinary dialogue is found in the “psychoanalysis of culture”6: going beyond the use of psychoanalysis as a form of therapy, the critical potential of this approach is utilised to achieve a deeper understanding in the dialogue with other 4 Cf. Post 2003; Post et al. 2003; Post 2008; Lukken 2005: 4–6. 5 Mette & Steinkamp 1983: 170–172; Steinkamp 1983; Odenthal 2002: 18–22; Wittrahm 2001: 129–134. 6 Diergarten 1992; 1999.

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sciences. As “a ‘depth-psychology’, a theory of the mental subconscious, psychoanalysis can thus become indispensable to all the sciences which are concerned with the evolution of human civilisation and its major institutions, such as art, religion, and the social order.”7. The potential of such a dialogue would be, for instance, to better understand the phenomenon of the ritualisation of human existence. Theology, in such a dialogue, is concerned with the ritualisation of the human experience of faith, as evidenced by the Judeo-Christian tradition.8 Such experiences are stored up and concentrated in ritual, in the performance of which they are, time and again, renewed. Thus, they constitute a horizon of interpretation, within which men and women repeatedly come to understand their own existence anew .9 In this sense, the specific understanding of time in Christian liturgy becomes manifest: it involves a remembrance (memoria) of earlier experiences of God, which are made present again sacramentally.10

Thesis 3 The dialogue with psychoanalysis calls the genesis of human ritualisation to the fore. Human beings learn the ability to construct rituals in the framework of early interaction with the mother-figure. In this experience, the child must learn to cope with the disappointment that the mother is not always accessible. In the face of such experiences of loss, the child ritualises the presence and the absence of the mother-figure. “Protection”, on the one hand, and “departure into one’s own life”, on the other hand, represent the two constants of such symbolic-ritual actions. These infantile experiences of relationship are brought back to consciousness in symbolic-ritual actions. The development of psychoanalytic theory supports the insight into the depths to which rituals are rooted in the human psyche. Already Sigmund Freud himself had called attention to forms of ritualisation in early childhood, notably in his description of the so-called “Thread Spool Game”11, a fact which, among others, Volney Patrick Gay has called to our attention.12 In his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes how a child would roll away from himself a wooden spool of thread until it disappeared from sight.13 During this phase of the game, the child vocalised a prolonged “Ooo”. Then the child would pull on the thread until the spool reappeared, greeting its reappearance with a satisfied “Da!” The frequent 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Freud 1959c: 248. Schillebeeck 2001. Odenthal 2007a. Cf. Wahle 2006. Cf Grubrich-Simitis 1993: 238–240. Gay 1979: 49–65. Freud 1959b.

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repetition of this game fulfils one general condition of ritualised action. Freud himself provides an explanation of this ritual: “The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement – the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by staging himself the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach.”14 At stake is the child’s ability to develop a ritual, which enables it to take account of its current situation, the absence of its mother, and to deal with this situation actively. This creative solution is part of the difficult process by which the child learns to deal with detachment from the mother, despite the fact that it “never gets over the pain of losing its mother’s breast.”15 In the context of the notion of “scene”, the Frankfurt sociologist and psychoanalyst Alfred Lorenzer has again taken up the Freudian theme of the thread-spool game: “The interaction – the game with the spool – stands for another interaction – the interaction with the mother.”16 The child itself becomes active by staging the disappearance and re-appearance “in a scene”. Lorenzer attributes a special role to the game, namely to “stand for” something, introducing at this point a notion decisive for his theory, namely the “interaction form”, to express the relational character of human action. In the infantile interaction of the child with its mother, the capacity for symbolic-ritual behaviour is called into being. For the child, this represents an achievement, the substitution of one form of interaction for another. “It would be too simple,” warns Lorenzer, “to say that the spool symbolises the mother, for at this stage, naturally, the mother is not perceived as a separate, isolated object.”17 For this reason, one must see the entire scene as a kind of dramatic presentation symbolising the interaction with the mother. Lorenzer’s notion of “scene” is further developed by Donald W. Winnicott, who speaks here of a “potential space” constructed by the interaction.18 As with Freud, so in Winnicott’s concept the starting-point is the experience of the mother’s absence, to which the infant responds creatively by means of ritual-symbolic reaction. It takes “possession” of an external object – the classic example is the teddy-bear – and begins to act with it in a ritualised way to cope with the feeling of abandonment. The resulting experience has two poles: in the first place, the protective dimension of the mother is represented. However, the 14 15 16 17

Ibid.: 15. Freud 1959d: 122. Lorenzer & Görlich 1981: 93; cf. Lorenzer 1981: 158–159. Lorenzer 1981: 159; also Lorenzer 1970: 26–28; Lorenzer & Prokop 2002: 93; Wahl 1994: 206; Bobert-Stützel 2000: 160; Schmid-Noerr 2000: 468 and 472. 18 Cf. Ulanov 2001.

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concrete experience of her absence leads immediately to a second component of the same experience. The ability to cope with the absence of the mother gives birth to the conviction that the child can go its own way, taking steps to form its own life. “Becoming oneself”, on the one hand, and “being protected”, on the other, thus become the two poles of ritual behaviour. At a very early age, the child learns to construct a “symbolic space”, a potential space where both poles have their place.19 This developmental stepping forward lies at the root of every cultural achievement of human beings, and, in fact, makes such achievement possible. For the decisive step, according to Winnicott, is the passage from the transitional phenomena in the development of the child to the cultural sphere of the adult. Winnicott points out that the transitional object “loses meaning, and this is because the transitional phenomena have become diffused, have become spread out over the whole intermediate territory between ‘inner psychic reality’ and ‘the external world as perceived by two persons in common’, that is to say, over the whole cultural field. At this point my subject widens out into that of play, and of artistic creativity and appreciation, and of religious feeling, and of dreaming, and also of fetishism, lying and stealing, the origin and loss of affectionate feeling, drug addiction, the talisman of obsessional rituals, etc.”20 Thus, seen from a psychological point of view, the child’s play becomes one enabling condition for the cultural achievements of humanity.

Thesis 4 Heribert Wahl has proposed the model of “symbolic experience” as the fruit of interdisciplinary dialogue between theology and psychoanalysis.21 What is meant is the relationship which emerges between what he calls the “solidified or congealed experience” represented by the cultural tradition, and the reality of human living as experienced by individuals. Symbolic experience, however, is marked by a “symbolic difference”. In the symbol, it is the “solidified or congealed” experience of other people which is encountered in all its strangeness and otherness. In this process of confrontation with the solidified experience of others, the individual’s experiences of relationship in early childhood come to be reflected. In his notion of symbolic experience, Heribert Wahl has taken up the model of the “self-object”, as developed in the Self Psychology of Heinz Kohut.22 What he has in mind is the ability of the human being, achieved at a very early age, to treat 19 20 21 22

Cf. Winnicott 1971. Ibid.: 5. Wahl 1994. Cf. Kohut 1977; cf. Wahl 1997; 1999; 2000; 2002; 2006; 2008.

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someone or something as a “self-object”, i.e. a counterpart that mirrors, for that person, the warmth and security necessary for healthy living. In Wahl’s development of this notion, he attends less to the sign element (the thing as such) than to the relationship aspect. What interests him is the relation to an object – this can be a natural object, or a piece of art, or another person – that the person enters into. This relationship is never merely to something here and now; on the contrary, on the subconscious level there are always reminiscences of the earliest childhood experiences, concretely, the early experiences of being in a relationship of tension between security and breaking out, which the person has experienced with his earliest partners, in most cases with his mother. What is crucial, however, is that all possible expressions of human culture, in the broadest sense of the term, can be called upon to serve as such a self-object. The whole variety of objectified expressions of culture, i.e. both things and persons expressed in symbol-signs, can serve as expressions of “symbolic experience”. Someone looking at a work of art, for instance, can easily make this a symbolic experience: “Nevertheless, however important such individual creations may be, they do not belong, from a psychological point of view, to the period when the originals were created; only today, in retrospect, do they find in us a deep resonance. It is the modern viewer, listener, or reader who – with the eyes and ears and reflexive thinking of the child from the period of the threatened self – takes up such creations from out of the matrix of individual meaning in which they originated and transforms them into works of modern art.”23 In these words, Kohut has described exactly what it means to use art as a selfobject. The “deep resonance” has its origin in the recollection evoked by the work of art, of the time when the self had been endangered. The work of art evokes the “solution” of the emotional problems by recalling to mind the solution found at that earlier period of life to problems in the relationship with one’s parents. Note, however, that, at this point, Wahl introduces an important change of approach: to make a symbolic experience (via a work of art or another person) means to accept both that the person has his own experience, and also that the work of art has its own semantics, i.e. rules of interpretation that go beyond the “use” to which the symbol is put.24 This realisation constitutes the “difference” necessarily recognised in the symbolic experience. When it is linked up with the remembered life experience of the person, the work of art is experienced fundamentally in its strangeness, and in this way it becomes a horizon of interpretation of one’s own life, with all its vicissitudes. When this model is applied to the life of faith, we have to do with the interpretation of one’s existence against the background of the Jewish/Christian tradition with its experiences of God, which are available as “symbolic expe23 Kohut 19966 [1977]: 282–283. 24 Cf. Wahl 1985: 186.

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rience”. In this model, theology and faith are by no means reduced to psychology, but rather they are preserved in their autonomy precisely as “differing” experiences. Mediated by precisely this difference between faith as objective, i.e. as an alien or foreign counterpart, and as a subjective entity in itself, symbolic experience takes form. It brings about a dynamic relationship between human beings, the tradition of faith, and the subjective side of the person.

Thesis 5 Christian faith can be used to evoke such symbolic experience. This faith is primarily accessible in the Church’s public liturgical celebration of ritual worship. The Church’s accumulated knowledge of life becomes available to human beings in ritual as a horizon for interpreting the individual’s life experience. The notion of ritual experience presented here expresses both connection and abiding difference. The liturgy of the Church creates encounters with God, without denying God’s otherness (transcendence). The celebration is the mystery and as such it defies a purely rational or pragmatic approach. The productive power of the faith lies precisely in the strangeness and otherness of the faith. To make a symbolic experience based on Christian faith means to interpret one’s own life experience in the light of the faith, connecting the manifold experiences collected in the Jewish-Christian tradition with one’s own life history. This kind of faith is made accessible above all in the public worship of the Church. Precisely the ritual richness of the Church plays host to ritualised life knowledge, which is hidden in the manifold individual symbols. In the performance of the liturgy, these remembered experiences are, again and again, made new. The Christian faith can thus call upon the early experiences of human relatedness and can interpret them in the horizon of faith. “Ritual experience” thus takes its place “between” the liturgy in its emergent form, i.e. the ritual tradition, on the one hand, and the “nodes of human existence”, i.e. birth, death, and the like25 on the other, namely the form in which individual human beings deal with this tradition and the meaning it generates. Thereby, the ritual remains multivalent. What individual human beings concretely make of this ritual, what they connect with it, by and large escapes the grasp of the Church. In the ritual experience, the difference between what is objectively present and what makes up the subjective experience can initiate a creative process which yields an “active linguistic competence”26 in dealing with the liturgy on the part of both the individual and the community. In the language of traditional ritual forms, experiences of faith articulate themselves in such

25 Ratzinger 1973: 10. 26 Schaeffler 2004: 198; cf. Odenthal 2007b.

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a way that they can serve as interpretive horizons for understanding and simultaneously giving expression to one’s own life. The model of ritual experience described here can be represented as follows: 27 Fig. 1: model of ritual experience

The significance of this model lies in its simultaneous emphasis on both a subjective and an objective side of ritual action. On the subjective side, personal experience is called for. A mere outward ritual that is not matched by an inner experience sooner or later inevitably loses its meaning. A ritual needs to be experienced, because it refers to previous experiences of human beings with God, which are celebrated, and thus actualised, here and now. On the other hand, this model calls attention, as well, to an objective dimension of ritual distinct from the subjective dimension related to the nodes of human existence. This objective dimension refers to the developed form of the liturgy as the ritualisation of “alien” experiences of human beings, namely the experiences of men and women in the past. Thus, it is only in the “middle” between the objective, “alien” experience and the subjective, “personal” experience that “ritual experience” comes into being.

Thesis 6 The two poles of symbolic experience, “protection” and “outbreak/departure”, manifest themselves in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The ecclesial ritual expresses the experience of the People of Israel in the Paschal Meal, which in turn is a 27 Cf. Odenthal 2008a; 2008b; 2009.

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remembrance of the drama of the Exodus from Egypt (Old Testament), and the experience of Jesus’ disciples with the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth (New Testament). This solidified experience of faith can be melted down into expressions of manifold human life situations and themes, wherever the contrast between the protection needed for life is paired with the breaking-out to new horizons of life. The specifically Christian fulfilment of the abstract and generic notion of ritual can be illuminated with the following consideration. The Liturgy Constitution of the Second Vatican Council characterised the liturgy of the Church as the “celebration of the Paschal Mystery”.28 In this understanding of the liturgy, two facts of salvation history are made present in the celebration of the ritual: on the one hand, there is the Paschal Meal celebrated by the People of Israel in conjunction with the dramatic exodus from Egypt; on the other hand, there is the Last Supper celebrated by Jesus in the shadow of his coming death and resurrection. In this expression of faith one can find manifold themes of human existence, e.g. life and death, becoming a conscious subject, awakening and decampment on the one side, protection and security on the other. Precisely the meal in its ritual dimensions (Paschal Meal/Last Supper) is intimately bound up with the practice of prayer: in the Paschal Meal, the People of Israel reassure themselves of the protective nearness of God, and break out from their Egyptian bondage into the liberty of God’s people; in the Last Supper, Jesus reassures himself of the nearness of his Father and so he is able to break out into his own suffering, death, and resurrection experience as the consequence of his preaching of the Kingdom of God.29 According to the model of convergent options, by no means is this interpretation of the Paschal Mystery theologically exhausted in this way. Nevertheless, this interpretation serves as a fitting connection between the universal human ritual experience and its specifically Christian form in the liturgy. In this way, the mediation is accomplished between the general analytical notion of ritual and the theological content of Christian liturgy without identifying them or reducing them one to another. At the same time, the closeness becomes evident, between the subconsciously resonating relationship experiences at the nodes of human existence and the recorded experiences of God in the context of Christianity. When it is the human being and his or her history that is at stake, and when this is ritualised in the liturgy, then the healthful significance of Christian worship becomes manifest.30

28 Cf. Kaczynski 2004: 62–65. 29 Cf. Funke 1986: 99–105. 30 Cf. Reuter 2004.

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References Bobert-Stützel, Sabine 2000. Frömmigkeit und Symbolspiel. Ein Pastoralpsychologischer Beitrag zu einer evangelischen Frömmigkeitstheorie. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht. Diergarten, Friedrich 1992. „Kulturpsychoanalyse. Möglichkeiten der Vermittlung zwischen Psychoanalyse und Kulturwissenschaften“. Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Psychotherapie 14: 3–116. — 1999. „Was ist Kulturpsychoanalyse? Versuch über die psychoanalytische Neugier“. Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Psychotherapie 21: 3–9. Freud, Sigmund & James Strachey (transl.) 1959a. The Standard Edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. In Collaboration with Anna Freud. London: Hogarth. — 1959b. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. In: Sigmund Freud & James Strachey (transl.). The Standard Edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. In Collaboration with Anna Freud. Vol. 28. London: Hogarth: 1–64 (originally published in 1920 as Jenseits des Lustprinzips. Leipzig et al.: Internationaler psychoanalytischer Verlag). — 1959c. “The Question of Lay Analysis. Conversations with an Impartial Person”. In: Sigmund Freud & James Strachey (transl.). The Standard Edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. In Collaboration with Anna Freud. Vol. 20. London: Hogarth: 177–258 (originally published in 1926 as Die Frage der Laienanalyse. Unterredungen mit einem Unparteiischen. Wien: Internationaler psychoanalytischer Verlag). — 1959d. “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis”. In: Sigmund Freud & James Strachey (transl.). The Standard Edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. In Collaboration with Anna Freud. Vol 22. London: Hogarth: 1– 182 (originally published in 1933 as Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse. Berlin: Kiepenheuer). Funke, Dieter 1986. Im Glauben erwachsen werden. Psychische Voraussetzungen der religiösen Reifung. Munich: Pfeiffer. Gay, Volney Patrick 1979. Freud on Ritual. Reconstuction and Critique. Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press (AAR. Dissertation Series 26). Grubrich-Simitis, Ilse 1993. Zurück zu Freuds Texten. Stumme Dokumente sprechen machen. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Kaczynski, Reiner 2004. „Theologischer Kommentar zur Konstitution über die heilige Liturgie Sacrosanctum Concilium“. In: Peter Hünermann & Bernd Jochen Hilberath (eds.). Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil. Vol. 2. Freiburg et al.: Herder: 1–227.

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Kohut, Heinz 19966 [1977]. Die Heilung des Selbst. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lorenzer, Alfred 1970. Kritik des psychoanalytischen Symbolbegriffs. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. — 1981. Das Konzil der Buchhalter. Die Zerstörung der Sinnlichkeit. Eine Religionskritik. Frankfurt: Fischer. — & Bernard Görlich 1981. „Lebensgeschichte und Persönlichkeitsentwicklung im Spannungsfeld von Sinnlichkeit und Bewusstsein“. In: Friedemann Maurer (ed.). Lebensgeschichte und Identität. Beiträge zu einer biographischen Anthropologie. Frankfurt: Fischer: 84–104. Lorenzer, Alfred & Ulrike Prokop (ed.) 2002. Die Sprache, der Sinn und das Unbewußte. Psychoanalytisches Grundverständnis und Neurowissenschaften. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Lukken, Gerard 2005. Rituals in Abundance. Critical Reflections on the Place, Form and Identity of Christian Ritual in our Culture. Leuven: Peeters (Liturgia Condenda 17). Mette, Norbert & Hermann Steinkamp 1983. Sozialwissenschaften und Praktische Theologie. Düsseldorf: Patmos (Leitfaden Theologie 11). Odenthal, Andreas 2002. Liturgie als Ritual. Theologische und psychoanalytische Überlegungen zu einer praktisch-theologischen Theorie des Gottesdienstes als Symbolgeschehen. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer (Praktische Theologie Heute 60). — 2007a. „‘Kritische Interrelation’ von Lebens-Erfahrung und Glaubens-Tradition. Überlegungen zu einem Diktum von Edward Schillebeeck im Hinblick auf einen symboltheoretischen Ansatz als integratives Paradigma der Liturgiewissenschaft“. Theologische Quartalsschrift 187: 183–203. — 2007b. „‘Der Kultus als Weltauslegung’. Elemente einer Theorie des Gottesdienstes im religionsphilosophischen Ansatz von Richard Schaeffler“. Theologie und Philosophie 82: 351–367. — 2008a. „Rituelle Erfahrung. Thesen zu einer Praktisch-theologischen Liturgiewissenschaft“. Theologische Quartalschrift 188: 31–49. — 2008b. „Rituelle Erfahrung – rituelle Praxis. Psychoanalytische und theologische Überlegungen zur Feier des christlichen Gottesdienstes“. Psyche – Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 62: 1204–1229. — 2009. „Gebrochene Gegenwart: Ein Gespräch von Theologie und Psychoanalyse im Hinblick auf einen symboltheoretischen Ansatz der Liturgiewissenschaft“. In: Benedikt Kranemann & Paul Post (eds.). Die modernen ritual studies als Herausforderung für die Liturgiewissenschaft = Modern Ritual Studies as a Challenge for Liturgical Studies Leuven: Peeters: 159–195 (Liturgia Condenda 20). Post, Paul 2003. „Ritual Studies. Einführung und Ortsbestimmung im Hinblick auf die Liturgiewissenschaft“. Archiv für Liturgiewissenschaft 45: 21–45. — et al. 2003. Disaster Ritual. Explorations of an emerging ritual repertoire. Leuven: Peeters (Liturgia condenda 15). Post, Paul 2008. „Ritualtransfer als ‘re-inventing ritual’. Rituelle ‘Bewegungen’ und rituell-liturgische Referenz“. Liturgisches Jahrbuch 58: 149–164.

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Ratzinger, Joseph 1973. Die sakramentale Begründung christlicher Existenz. Meitingen, Freising: Kyrios (Meitinger Kleinschriften 22). — 2000. Der Geist der Liturgie. Eine Einführung. Freiburg et al.: Herder. Reuter, Wolfgang 2004. Heilsame Seelsorge. Ein psychoanalytisch orientierter Ansatz von Seelsorge mit psychisch Kranken. Münster: Lit (Theologie und Praxis 19). Schaeffler, Richard 2004. Philosophische Einübung in die Theologie 1: Zur Methode und zur theologischen Erkenntnislehre. Freiburg, Munich: Alber (Scientia & Religio 1,1). Schillebeeck, Edward 2001. „Hin zu einer Wiederentdeckung der christlichen Sakramente. Ritualisierung religiöser Momente im alltäglichen Leben“. In: Adrian Holderegger & Jean-Pierre Wils (eds.). Interdisziplinäre Ethik. Grundlagen, Methoden, Bereiche. Festgabe für Dietmar Mieth zum sechzigsten Geburtstag. Fribourg: Universitätsverlag: 309–339 (Studien zur theologischen Ethik 89). Schmid Noerr, Gunzelin 2000. „Symbolik des latenten Sinns. Zur psychoanalytischen Symboltheorie nach Lorenzer“. Psyche – Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 54: 454– 482. Steinkamp, Hermann 1983. „Zum Verhältnis von Praktischer Theologie und Humanwissenschaft“. Diakonia 14: 378–387. Ulanov, Ann Belford 2001. Finding Space. Winnicott, God, and Psychic Reality. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Wahl, Heribert 1985. Narzißmus? Von Freuds Narzißmustheorie zur Selbstpsychologie. Stuttgart et al.: Kohlhammer. — 1994. Glaube und symbolische Erfahrung. Eine praktisch-theologische Symboltheorie. Freiburg: Herder. — 1997. „Symbolic Experience: Transforming the Selfobject Relation. A new Symbol Theory Based on Modern Psychoanalysis”. In: Jacob A. Belzen (ed.). Hermeneutical Approches in Psychology of Religion. Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi: 241–261 (International Series in the Psychology of Religion 6). — 1999. „Symbolische Erfahrung: umgestaltete Beziehungserfahrung. Skizze einer psychoanalytisch fundierten Symboltheorie“. Wege zum Menschen 51: 447–462. — 2000. „Selbst- und objektbeziehungstheoretische Überlegungen zur Religions- und Pastoralpsychologie“. In: Markus Bassler (ed.). Psychoanalyse und Religion. Versuch einer Vermittlung. Stuttgart et al.: Kohlhammer: 67–91. — 2002. „Kunst der Seelsorge. Symbolische Erfahrung als Selbstobjekt-Praxis im Geist Jesu“. In: Walter Fürst (ed.). Pastoralästethik. Die Kunst der Wahrnehmung und Gestaltung in Glaube und Kirche. Freiburg: Herder: 201–212 (Quaestio Disputata 199). — 2006. „Vom Symbol zur symbolischen Erfahrung. Eine psychoanalytisch fundierte Symboltheorie im Gespräch mit Paul Tillich“. Internationales Jahrbuch für die Tillich-Forschung 2: 153–180. — 2008. LebensZeichen von Gott – für uns. Analysen und Impulse für eine zeitgemäße Sakramentenpastoral. Berlin: Lit (Kommunikative Theologie Interdisziplinär 9).

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Wahle, Stephan 2006. Gottes-Gedenken. Untersuchungen zum anamnetischen Gehalt christlicher und jüdischer Liturgie. Innsbruck, Vienna: Tyrolia (Innsbrucker Theologische Studien 73). Winnicott, Donald W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications. Wittrahm, Andreas 2001. Seelsorge, Pastoralpsychologie und Postmoderne. Eine pastoralpsychologische Grundlegung lebensfördernder Begegnungen angesichts radikaler postmoderner Pluralität. Stuttgart et al.: Kohlhammer (Praktische Theologie Heute 53).

Barbara Gerke

The Multivocality of Ritual Experience: Long-Life Empowerments among Tibetan Communities in the Darjeeling Hills, India 1. Introduction The conference panel “The Varieties of Ritual Experience” emphasised the experiences of different ritual agents and participants. The rich variety of the papers presented on this panel showed the immense diversity of rituals that can be studied from the perspective of participants and ritual agents in terms of their ritual experiences. This paper takes the example of one specific ritual – a Tibetan Buddhist long-life empowerment – and analyses how ritual structure in itself influences the variety of ritual experience of the different participants taking part in one and the same ritual. This paper focuses on what matters to the lay people attending the ritual and argues that being removed from the ritual’s text and its content, Tibetan lay people in the Darjeeling Hills in India reinterpret long-life rituals in their own terms, which are quite different from the textual Buddhist ideas the Buddhist teacher, or lama, is applying in his ritual performance. Consequently, people’s inner experiences of the ritual do not necessarily correspond to the “inner work” prescribed and performed by the lama conducting the ritual. This paper is based on my participation in eight long-life rituals in the Darjeeling Hills and Sikkim during my doctoral research (2004–2006).

2. Background: The Field Site Kalimpong and Darjeeling are fast-growing urban centres situated in the foothills of the Himalayas in the Indian state of West Bengal. Tibetans migrated to the Darjeeling region, locally called “the Hills”, long before the beginning of the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1951, as traders from the later part of the nineteenth century, and from the 1950s onwards as refugees. The area of Kalimpong known as Tenth Mile, once part of the Lhasa trade route, remains predominantly Tibetan. Darjeeling has a Tibetan Refugee Self-Help Centre with 650 refugee residents, but

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most Tibetans – there are several thousand in total1 – live elsewhere in the town and are not distinguishable as such. Most of the affluent Tibetan families living in town run large businesses and depend heavily on tourism. Most Tibetans in the Darjeeling Hills do not consider themselves “refugees” and do not use the Tibetan term for refugee in relation to themselves. Most of them apply for Indian citizenship, which is a free choice for the generations of Tibetans born in India, by procuring the Bhutia “scheduled tribe” (ST) status. The ST status also offers them access to various government benefits. In the Darjeeling Hills, Tibetan identity, especially for the India-born Tibetans, has to be established in a multi-lingual, mostly non-Tibetan environment. The increasing Nepalisation of the area through a long-term Nepali nationalist movement involved a period of violent agitation in the mid 1980s and continuing unrest ever since. Overall, the situation has contributed to a separation between “language” and “identity” among Tibetans. Being Tibetan no longer necessarily implies knowing the Tibetan language. Although some effort is made by Tibetan schools to promote studies in Tibetan, most Tibetan families choose a school education in the English medium for their children, since they consider English economically more valuable than an education in the Tibetan language. Consequently, for many local Tibetans in this area, the Tibetan language has become a “ritual language”, which is mostly used in prayers and Buddhist ceremonies, similar to the Latin of the Church in Europe. Moreover, Tibetan Buddhist rituals involve a specialised terminology, which in any case is not easily comprehensible with only a colloquial knowledge of Tibetan. In the monasteries, young monks mostly speak Nepali with each other. Technical “Dharma Tibetan”, is increasingly becoming a monastic language. Young novices at the monastic schools begin by learning the Tibetan alphabet and often recite the ritual texts without understanding their content. The influx of Buddhist lamas from Tibet since 1959 has led to a renewal of Buddhism and the construction of numerous Buddhist monasteries in the region.2 Each monastery has its own annual ritual schedule. Some of the rituals last several days and involve considerable discipline and skills on the part of the monks. The rituals are always open to the public, but rituals lasting for several days usually end with one or two public days of ritual mask dances called ’cham, or with a long-life ritual, known as tshe dbang (pronounces tsewang). 1 According to the 1998 Tibetan demographic survey in India and Nepal, the Indian state of West Bengal has a total Tibetan population of 6455 (Central Tibetan Administration-in-Exile (India). Planning Council 2000). Darjeeling (2455) and Kalimpong (2141) are the urban areas with the largest groups of Tibetans (Ibid.: 36). For various reasons the actual population figures are probably much higher than the 1998 census states (cf. Gerke 2008: 43–44). 2 In 2004, Kalimpong had about nine Buddhist monasteries, of numerous Buddhist schools, and with varying monk populations (no figures available). Darjeeling, including Ghum and Aloobari, had twelve larger monasteries, representing all major Tibetan Buddhist schools.

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3. A Brief Introduction to Tibetan Longevity Rituals There are a variety of longevity rituals in Tibetan Buddhism. They include tshe dbang, as well as longevity sādhana3 or tshe sgrub, which are meditative ritual practices to strengthen the life-force and accomplish the power of long-life. Tshe, the Tibetan term for “life-span”, does not particularly have a durational character; the idea is more that of a reservoir of vital force that will eventually be exhausted, like an oil-lamp running out of fuel. “Empowering tshe” is then not merely an issue of extending life, but also of protecting and strengthening the various life-forces, such as srog (the life-force) and bla (the subtle life-essence; also “soul”).4 Tshe dbang are very popular and draw large crowds, who believe that these empowerments protect them from accidents and untimely death, and also extend their lives by several years. They are attended from early childhood onwards, and I met people who had attended forty or more long-life empowerments during their adult lives. Sometimes, they are consciously avoided by old people who have no desire to live any longer. These longevity rituals generally involve one of the three longevity deities (tshe lha rnam gsum), Amitāyus, White Tārā, and Uṣṇīṣavijayā. Most of the tshe dbang I attended in the Darjeeling Hills were devoted to Buddha Amitāyus5 or White Tārā. The tshe dbang of Uṣṇīṣavijayā were not as popular as the tshe sgrub of this deity. Tibetan Buddhist monasteries provide the space for public gatherings of Tibetans, especially during empowerments. During a popular and well-attended tshe dbang, the monastery becomes a meeting place for families and entire communities of several hundred or thousand people linked by their common faith, even though many of the participants belong to different ethnic Buddhist groups. Many of the participants do not speak Tibetan.

3 Sādhana is a general term for a spiritual practice with the goal of attaining a siddhi (spiritual accomplishment). Sādhana is related etymologically to siddha and involves the visualisation of deities (Gellner 1992: 287–292). 4 For more details on Tibetan life-forces see Gerke 2008. 5 For details on the history and development of the tshe sgrub practices of Buddha Amitāyus see Samuel 2008.

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Image 1: The three long-life deities on a wall painting at the Mani Lhakhang in Kalimpong, 2005. The names were added by the author. Photo by the author

Tshe dbang have been a part of monastic festivals for hundreds of years. Longevity empowerments are of Indian origin and were initially a one-to-one transmission passed on from a master to a disciple. In Tibetan communities one still finds one-to-one tshe dbang transmissions,6 but the empowerment is mostly a public event. Unfortunately, we know very little about the history and origins of tshe dbang and there are only a few published works on this topic. Beyer’s The Cult of Tārā, published in 1973, is the best-known account of a Tārā tshe dbang. He observed a White Tārā tshe dbang7 and a White Tārā empowerment or “permission ritual” (rjes gnang)8 while staying in Dalhousie, in Himachal Pradesh, India, with exiled Tibetan communities from Kham belonging to the Kagyu lineage. The study was carried out in the early 1970s and offers a good description of both the rituals, including the translation of ritual texts, the explanation of their meaning, and the methods of visualisation. Not all tshe dbang are the same. There are regional and sectarian variations of tshe dbang texts. There are also many different types of longevity sādhanas, which 6 During fieldwork, I recorded one event where a Tibetan man, after meeting with a car accident, went to a high lama, who gave him a tshe dbang as a “first aid”. 7 This ritual is a Geluk practice performed by Tārā Rinpoche, and was authored by the last regent of Tibet, Tagdrag Ngawang Sungrab Tutob (ngag dbang gsung rab mthu stobs, 1874– 1952; Beyer 1973: 500, n. 15). 8 This ritual text was composed by Kongtrul Rinpoche (kong sprul rin po che; Beyer 1973: 501, n. 45).

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involve the visualisation of deities. Some such sādhanas form a part of a tshe dbang itself, others are recited as a part of individual long-life practices, with vast regional variations, which to date have not been studied in detail. While there are certain variants of tshe dbang within the different schools of Buddhism, ordained monastics and the public freely attend all types of tshe dbang in the Darjeeling region, especially when they are given by a high lama. For the public, it matters if the lama is considered powerful, since the efficacy of the tshe dbang is linked to his spiritual realisation and not his textual tradition. This fact influences the experiential level of lay participants, who most of the time do not have access to or understand the ritual text used in a tshe dbang. In Tibetan Buddhism, tantric empowerments, called dbang (pronounced wang), are constantly performed with the aim of keeping the lineages and practices alive and passing them on to the next generation of practitioners.9 Initiations and empowerments also mark the start of an intimate relation with the practitioner’s “personal” deity, called yi dam, and often include vows. Usually, receiving a dbang involves a series of commitments on the part of the lama as well as the disciple. The tshe dbang can be located at the periphery of this corpus of tantric empowerments for two reasons. First, a tshe dbang is relatively easy to perform and does not require long preparatory retreats on the part of the lama. Second, people, at least in the Darjeeling Hills, admit that tshe dbang do not involve a daily commitment of practice. For them tshe dbang is a “blessing without practice”. This perception is so widespread and unchallenged that it is part of “local knowledge”, even though it contradicts the texts. One Tibetan man in his early fifties, who I knew was a serious lay practitioner and also the father of a rinpoche, gave the classic answer, which I received many times to my question of whether the person asked had been to a tshe dbang. He laughed and said: “I have been to so many tshe dbang. We Tibetans like tshe dbang. That is the only dbang where you just go to get the blessing; you do not have to do anything. For other dbang you have to practise; tshe dbang is for free.” On another occasion when we were talking about longevity practices, he admitted, “We practise for selfish reasons, just to extend our own life-span. The lamas do it for others.” Clearly, lay people had their own views on tshe dbang – “free blessing, without practice” – and gave them a different level of importance than the lamas did. The following statement by Lama Kunzang, the head of the the Jangsa Dechen Choling

9 The autobiography of Kongtrul Rinpoche (Jamgön Kongtrul Lodrö Thaye, 1813–1900), for example, gives a vivid and personal example of a lama, who describes his life as a continuous effort of receiving and giving empowerments, teaching and carrying out personal retreats, as well as accomplishing a great deal of writing during the nineteenth century in Tibet (Kongtrul & Barron 2003).

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Monastery, locally called Jangsa Gompa,10 in Kalimpong, offered an explanation that represents the lama’s view: “Tshe dbang belong to the Vajrayāna teachings. Actually, when taking a tshe dbang, you have to practise all the commitments, that is the dam tshig (samaya) of Vajrayāna. In particular, you have to practise the tshe dbang tshe sgrub mantra as often as you can. One of the dam tshig is not to kill. Then you try to save lives. This is written clearly in the longer tshe dbang texts. During the tshe dbang, the teacher has to explain the dam tshig (samaya). But nowadays it has changed, and many lamas think rather of putting the seed into the people for receiving liberation in another lifetime. This happens with a lot of the Vajrayāna teachings these days. People still have pure faith in the Vajrayāna teaching, pure motivation, they want to receive the tshe dbang. That also benefits them. If people practise, it is better, but if they do not know the practice, they still get a blessing.” Tibetan Buddhist rituals can be received on various levels. “Blessing”, or byin rlabs (pronounced jinlab),11 is essential to the ritual experience, but can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Geoffrey Samuel pointed out that the basic idea behind a tshe dbang is that “[t]he lama uses his Tantric powers to confer long-life and health upon those receiving the empowerment. As with any other Tibetan rituals, this process may be interpreted at any of a number of levels, and the participants are free to take the ritual at whichever level they wish.”12 My ethnographic example will show that the personal experience and interpretation of a tshe dbang also depends on how people understand the efficacy of the ritual. According to Beyer’s account (1973), the effectiveness of the initiation depends entirely on the spiritual abilities of the master. Ritual efficacy involves more than reading the texts, reciting the mantras, and performing the gestures using the ritual objects. According to the texts, the ritual objects, like the long-life nectar, tshe chu, the long-life arrow, tshe dar, or longevity pills, tshe ril, are there to make

10 Jangsa Gompa is the oldest monastery in Kalimpong, first consecrated in 1680. Originally Drukpa Kargyud, it, too, now follows the Dudjom Tersar School of the Nyingmapa. I am grateful to Lama Kunzang for offering his time and help to discuss various aspects of tshe dbang with me. 11 The Tibetan concept of byin rlabs, which is often translated as “blessing”, is central to Tibetan Buddhist rituals and an intrinsic aspect of the Tibetan understanding of empowerment. Byin rlabs is quite complex, probably of pre-Buddhist origin, and involves concepts of power. Byin is one of the attributes associated with the old Tibetan kings, and byin rlabs literally means “wave of byin” (Samuel 1993: 450). 12 Ibid.: 262.

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the power of the visualised deity tangible to the lay person and bestow the blessings, byin rlabs. Tshe dbang involve large crowds. Since the crowd physically does not fit into the temple (lha khang) and is often removed from the ritual to the extent that people do not even see the lama or understand what he says (background noise, inadequate sound system, language problems), the blessed substances become the essential means of communication between the crowd and the lama. The meaning lay participants attach to receiving a tshe dbang becomes linked to the very moment of receiving the blessing from the lama. The only time that members of the public come near the presence of the lama is when he touches the crown of their bowed-down heads, bestowing long life through one of the ritual objects, usually a long-life gtor ma, vase, or arrow. While I was participating in a tshe dbang as a part of the crowd, I often asked people when exactly they would receive the dbang (empowerment) and the byin rlabs (blessing). Most of them said they received the dbang and the byin rlabs the very moment when the lama touched their head and when they got the long-life pill and long-life water, which they believed would extend their life-span. For the crowd – and I treat them here as a collective phenomenon, almost institutionalised for the amount of time a tshe dbang lasts – the temporal idea of life-extension, the strengthening of their reservoir of tshe, adding to their life-span, manifests in substances they can feel and touch, as well as eat and drink, that is, ingest into their own bodies and make a part of themselves. The spiritual master, or lama, has a different role in the ritual. His ability to selfgenerate himself as a long-life deity through applying visualisation and meditation techniques is decisive. The people attending a tshe dbang generally do not take part in these visualisations. The bestowing of long life is not thought of as being dependent on their participation. As Beyer puts it, “The initiation into life [i.e. tshe dbang] is an end in itself, a bestowing of the magical attainment of longevity, and the major aim of the recipients is fulfilled by their increase of life; hence we find the use of devices and recipes that function more or less independently of the spiritual state of the disciples.”13 My ethnographic account of a tshe dbang complements his description and shows that what matters to the laity attending the ritual is different from the lama’s role in it. I argue that, being removed from the ritual’s text and its content, lay people in the Darjeeling Hills reinterpret tshe dbang in their own terms. Even though I base my discussion on individual expressions on tshe dbang, the entire ritual event presents a regulated, institutionalised religious expression of popular ideas on longevity.

13 Beyer 1973: 432.

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Image 2: Ritual implements used in longevity rituals (from left to right): long-life gtor ma (tshe gtor), long-life arrow (tshe dar), long-life nectar (tshe chu), and long-life pills (tshe ril). Kalimpong, 2005. Photo by the author

The lama, who gains his visualisation skills during the traditional three-year and other retreats, evokes the long-life deity inside the ritual objects, for example, the long-life gtor ma, on behalf of the attending disciples. The visualisation is done mentally and maintained while the text, which describes the visualisation – interspersed with prayers, praises, and offerings to the deity – is recited. The visualisation engages colours, forms, and movements of mantra syllables and light from different body centres of the deity into the lama’s and the disciples’ bodies. From the point of view of the lama, the aim is to generate the deity in front of themselves, and then visualise themselves, others, and inside the ritual objects. Beyer describes this in detail, also presenting a translation of the ritual text.14 The master first prepares himself alone in contemplation, visualising himself as White Tārā (“self-generation”). He then visualises the deity in front of him and merges her with the long-life gtor ma (“generation in front”). Finally, he enters the main shrine room and bestows the initiation. The disciples who are receiving the empowerment are instructed to visualise the deity in front, and then themselves as well as the lama as White Tārā.15 During the course of the tshe dbang they are in14 Ibid.: 378–398. 15 Ibid.: 388–389.

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structed to visualise the power of long life entering their bodies through the ritual implements (e.g. long-life pills, gtor ma, and water). Even though the lama will explain the visualisation during the ritual, only a very few people – usually those who are sincere practitioners and have been studying the practice earlier – will understand the meaning. Most Tibetan practitioners I spoke with, including young monastics, find it very difficult to visualise, and do not engage in it. Both monks and lamas consider it enough for a ritual to work if one person present does the visualisation. This is mostly a senior monk, the khenpo, or the lama himself. Apart from visualisation, other factors relating to the efficacy of an empowerment also involve ideas of belief and lineage. The late Khen Rinpoche, my previous Tibetan language teacher in Darjeeling, commented on the topic of visualisation, when we met in 2004: “The visualisation will not be successful without a proper initiation and lineage. Even a quick dbang will not give the desired support. It is the combination of a good lineage, a powerful dbang, faith of the student and good visualisation practice that will lead to the desired effect. Faith will link the disciple to the lama’s mind, which is like a ‘spiritual satellite’. Only then byin rlabs can work.” Overall, the ritual and the transmission of byin rlabs seems to work because of several layers of efficacy, for instance that the text was recited accurately, the lama visualised “correctly”, the lama had appropriate levels of realisation and a “good linage”, and the student had “faith”. Clearly, most of these layers of efficacy lie outside contemporary ethnographic research methods. The following ethnographic account takes us through a day of a tshe dbang ritual that took place on 20 March 2005 at the Sakya Guru Gompa in Ghum, ten kilometres south of Darjeeling. It unravels the different layers of the same ritual, specifically of how byin rlabs works for the laity who attend a tshe dbang.

4. A Tshe dbang at the Sakya monastery in Ghum, Darjeeling In March 2005, the young son of Sakya Trinzin and heir to the Sakya throne, Sakya Ghongma Dhungsey Ratna Vajra Rinpoche, born in 1974, visited the Sakya monastery in Ghum. Over the period of one month, Sakya Ghongma Rinpoche gave teachings and a series of initiations to the public in the area. Public initiations were predominantly tshe dbang and a dbang which was translated in the English programme as an “anti-epidemic” empowerment, in Tibetan known as the Lo ma kyong ma dbang. I was travelling from Darjeeling to Ghum with a 68-year old Tibetan from Kham named Konchok, who was excited about the fact that four empowerments

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were given on one day. He clearly considered this a good bargain. This meant more potentially difficult areas of life would be covered through the various blessings and he only had to make one trip to the monastery, which cost about one hundred rupees (a little over one Euro) for the rented taxi. Local transport was expensive that day, since the public jeeps were already overbooked. We shared a taxi with other Tibetans, and during the fifteen minute ride one woman told me she believed that the tshe dbang would extend her life by one or two years. When we arrived in Ghum, we found the place already crowded with people. Everyone was dressed in warm jackets and shawls; the dbang would take many hours and Ghum is notoriously covered in thick fog by early afternoon. The monastery had been decorated with many strings of colourful little flags, hissing in a strong wind. Schoolchildren, dressed in their school uniforms, had occupied all the balconies of the three-storied monk residence building next to the temple. Entire families had come with babies and baskets of food, and sat in the front yard. Mats, cushions, tea flasks, and picnics were spread out. I eventually made my way through to a window from where I could see the rinpoche’s throne and the monks inside the temple, and also talk to passers-by outside. In this way I could observe and record what was happening inside and still communicate with people outside and receive a glimpse of the masses. Inside the temple were mostly young monks, some senior monks, and the abbot. A senior Tibetan man and a few women, apparently the sponsors of the ritual, were the only laity allowed to sit inside. Everyone except the rinpoche, the abbot, and the monks reciting the texts sat on thin carpets on the floor. The translator sat in front of a microphone on a cushion to the right of the rinpoche’s throne, and at the back left side of the temple, two rows of monks were seated at low tables with their ritual instruments and one microphone to guide the prayers, which were all recited by heart.

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Image 3: Tshe dbang in Ghum, March 2005: The public attending the ritual in front of the monastery. Photo by the author

Nobody had a printed text apart from the rinpoche.16 Once he arrived and sat on his throne, his soft voice was transmitted through a microphone system, but the electricity failed several times and the noise level outside was so high that it was impossible to understand him. Only his speech, which he gave in between the initiations, was translated into Nepali; the translator’s voice was louder and easier to hear. People told me that it was not important to understand everything; they would still receive the dbang. If understanding the text were important, no one would receive the dbang. They said tshe dbang was an “easy dbang, without practice”. Outside, I started talking in English to a Tibetan teenager, who was passing by the window where I stood. His name was Pema.

16 During all the tshe dbang I attended, apart from an occasional printed programme in Tibetan and English, no written materials were distributed. Once, during a tshe dbang in Kalimpong a xeroxed copy of a long-life prayer was distributed, but since everyone sat on the floor, there was a problem about where to keep the sheets. Religious texts are not supposed to be placed on the floor since they are considered sacred.

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I continued to be squeezed against the window, audio recording the ritual and taking photos and short video clips. Despite the lack of space, there was quite a movement of people around me. Any long conversation was impossible, as people kept moving and were lost in the crowd again. But the few small conversations that took place at the window were quite enlightening. A 14-year old Tibetan girl, Nyima, born in Darjeeling, stood next to me for a short while. She said her parents were born here, and they spoke Nepali at home. She only knew a little Tibetan; we spoke English. BG (MYSELF): Why did you come here? NYIMA: For the dbang. BG: What is the dbang good for? NYIMA: For AIDS [She referred to the Lo ma kyong ma dbang, which in the English programme read “anti-epidemic” empowerment]. BG: Who told you that? NYIMA: My sister. BG: How old is your sister? NYIMA: Twenty-four. BG: Are there many of your friends attending the dbang for this purpose? NYIMA: My sister’s friends. BG: Do you think a lot of people have AIDS here in the Hills? NYIMA: I don’t know. BG: Do you think this dbang will really protect you? NYIMA: I don’t know. Nyima walked off, too shy to talk more, and left me with a creeping feeling about local health care. I wondered if the rinpoche had any idea about how his dbang were interpreted by the local teenagers. I wanted to find out about when and how people thought they would receive the tshe dbang. As the ritual proceeded in Tibetan, people kept moving around, chatting with friends, drinking tea, and queuing at the few toilets behind the temple. It was chilly and the fog crept up the hills and engulfed the crowd and even moved through the open windows into the temple. The monotony of the hour-long recitations was only interrupted by occasional changes in the rhythm of reciting the prayers.

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The most prominent breaks in the monotony occurred when the offerings were made by the sponsors and senior monks, and when Sakya Ghongma Rinpoche recited the few phrases of the actual promise of the dbang, which people were supposed to recite after him. Whoever could hear what was going on recited the words. It was especially the older people who showed great signs of devotion. Others enjoyed their picnic. For about an hour between the rituals, Sakya Ghongma Rinpoche gave teachings in Tibetan, which were translated into Nepali by the translator. It was clear that many young Tibetans did not understand Tibetan, and those Tibetans who knew Tibetan did not necessarily understand dharma Tibetan, and those who did follow the dharma Tibetan may not have followed Rinpoche’s Sakya dialect. Language was clearly a problem and created many barriers between Sakya Ghongma Rinpoche’s elaborate dharma teachings and the people, who understood only a fraction of what was said. The translator used simple and colloquial words in Nepali to bring the meaning of the dharma teachings across. The content was kept simple. The teachings were about non-violence, compassion, and religious tolerance. Rinpoche promoted vegetarianism, requesting people not to place too much importance on food and materialism. Two Tibetan college girls standing nearby, Tsering and Dolma, gave me their version of what they understood: DOLMA: We have to pray and worship, so many gods are there, we have to learn how to pray. TSERING: We should not say we are Christian or Buddhist. All religions are the same. When we are sick, we all take the same medicine. We are not different. DOLMA: People should not be short-tempered, should have a cool mind, and should not become angry. TSERING: We should think about everybody, not just ourselves. Bodhicitta (i.e. loving-kindness towards all beings) is important. We should worship. Animals and people are living beings. We should not kill animals. Motivation of compassion is important. DOLMA: We have to promise that from today onwards we will not speak lies and will not kill animals. TSERING: Understanding the text is not important to receive the dbang. We have to catch only the important thing, like not lying, not killing, from today onwards. We get the dbang anyhow even if we do not understand all what the rinpoche says.

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Image 4: The scene inside the temple: Senior monks and sponsors make offerings to Sakya Ghongma Rinpoche during a tshe dbang, Ghum, March 2005 Photo by the author

One dbang followed the other, hour after hour. While Rinpoche went through the empowerment rituals inside the temple, packets of crisps were distributed outside to the schoolchildren on the balcony. The noise level increased. Between the different dbang, a popular Padmasambhava prayer17 was recited for about ten minutes at a time. The reception of the prayer and the fact that everyone knew it brought people together into a group with some amount of concentration. It reduced the noise levels and gave a sense of order. The masses could participate in this prayer and the ritual was no longer just “happening inside”. Even inside the temple, I noticed only a few monks who were apparently not distracted by what was happening around them and sat in quiet meditation pose. Three younger monks in their teens, who sat just below the window where I stood, were exchanging playing cards of body-builders and chatting with each other. Most people did not have the discipline and training to concentrate for three and a half 17 Later I was told that the reason for them reciting this prayer during each dbang is that one of Padmasambhava’s disciples started a lineage in the Sakya tradition.

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hours on the dbang. Outside the temple, food was taken at all times; inside, tea and oily rice with nuts and raisins were served only during the breaks, and only eaten once Rinpoche had blessed them with a prayer. Three hours later, the actual tshe dbang ritual finally started. Two monks carried a large bowl of long-life pills to the altar. These had been consecrated by the rinpoche during his early morning meditation. Large plastic containers and metal kettles were filled with long-life nectar, made of water and concentrated orangecoloured juice. A smaller bowl of long-life nectar was placed on the rinpoche’s altar, along with a long-life initiation gtor ma. The initiation gtor ma had an image of Amitāyus attached to it. With such an initiation gtor ma, the rinpoche would later touch the head of each person to bestow byin rlabs. Rinpoche recited the tshe dbang sādhana alone from his ritual text. Whenever he needed any ritual implements, his two monk assistants placed the needed item on his high table, which was at the height of their shoulders. Whenever Rinpoche recited the promise, the monks and some members of the public (whoever could hear and understand) followed. The noise levels outside were still very high, but the rhythmical recitations of repeating the verses after Sakya Ghongma Rinpoche were getting louder and lasted for about ten minutes. Each line read from the ritual text was repeated by the crowd with varying accuracy. The monks concluded the recitation by playing their cymbals and trumpets, after which the next session started; again Sakya Ghongma Rinpoche’s recital, the public reciting after him, and the monks playing their cymbals and trumpets. Towards the end, a wave of abrupt movement went through the crowd outside, and people got to their feet and started pushing towards the main gate of the temple. The translator screamed instructions in Nepali and asked people to keep in line, but nobody listened. Inside, the temple was almost taken by storm and I felt there could be a stampede, something not unheard of during large tshe dbang. Both doors to the temple had iron push doors, which were now closed, held together by an iron chain, and only a small gate was left open. A small group of strong youths and monks functioned as the gate keepers. Through the left gate people entered the temple, and they left through the right gate. The pushing and shouting was tremendous, and, anticipating what was happening, I had moved myself onto a nearby roof to watch the scene. I saw more people streaming in from the village, not only Tibetans, but also many local Nepalis who had come for the blessing. The crowd started moving into the temple at around 1:30 p.m. At 4 p.m. the crowd in the courtyard was finally thinning, and it was actually possible to go near the temple gate without being shoved around. Moving with the last crowd towards the gate, I saw that the gatekeepers were passing around a large metal kettle, filled with longlife nectar. Young teenaged boys were passing it around and all of them poured the yellowish liquid into their mouths and over their heads and faces.

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Image 5: Teenagers pushing through the crowd to receive the long-life water (tshe chu) that is passed around in large kettles. Photo by the author

I approached a few Tibetan women coming out of the temple, asking them about their impressions of the dbang. A middle-aged woman, Passang, said in English: PASSANG: We are doing this to live long. I stood in the crowd for three hours to get in, but I received the dbang. BG (MYSELF): What does the tshe dbang mean to you? PASSANG: I will live longer now. BG: How much longer? PASSANG: I believe I got about fifteen years more.

5. Conclusions In this paper, I have sketched a few ethnographic events that present the different voices of people taking part in a Tibetan Buddhist long-life ritual. I used the term “multivocality” in the title of this paper to emphasise how a wide range of individuals come to relate to the same ritual in a variety of ways and to document the diversity in their ritual involvement. “Multivocality” is not a new concept. It has been used by anthropologists in the past in different contexts, most famously by Victor Turner (1967), who stressed the polysemous meaning one single symbol can

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have in a ritual. “Multivocality” in a ritual, such as a Tibetan Buddhist long life empowerment, can be expected because of the hierarchy involved in people’s different ritual roles. By using this term, I want to stress the point that the hierarchy found in the tshe dbang ritual structure is marked by large gaps between lamas, monks, and laity, which in turn provide spaces for new vocalities, i.e. contemporary interpretations of ritual contents by the laity. My ethnographic examples show that lay people, who are unacquainted with the ritual’s text and its content, reinterpret tshe dbang in their own terms. By highlighting the perspectives of lay Tibetans in ritual, which in the past has been underemphasised in Tibetan Buddhist studies, this paper presents a different perspective to the anthropology of Tibetan Buddhist ritual. The ethnographic account of the Sakya tshe dbang in Ghum demonstrates how Tibetans in the Darjeeling Hills, who often no longer use or study the Tibetan language, project their own health needs onto rigid and hierarchical ritual structures and give them a new meaning, which often lies outside the conventional Buddhist paradigm adhered to by the lamas. I have also shown that the lamas who conduct these rituals have to make concessions to the public, who are rarely trained in Vajrayāna practices. Tibetans in the Darjeeling Hills have utilised the ritual to fulfil their contemporary needs without changing the content of the conservative ritual structure or questioning its hierarchical elements. In fact, the hierarchical elements – which themselves lead to the lack of direct verbal communication between the lamas and the lay Tibetans – make this possible. The people themselves transform a tshe dbang into a meaningful ritual by filling the open spaces within the hierarchical structures with their own beliefs of life-extension, accident prevention, or disease protection. Tshe dbang mostly bring together crowds that, for the duration of the ritual, can be treated as “collective manifestations that have an effect on their component individuals”18. The queuing, pushing, and competing for byin rlabs tend to dominate the external scenes of the event, and make the ritual objects that carry byin rlabs take on more importance than visualisation or internal meditative practice. I argue that the ritual objects here are not only ritual symbols that pertain to textual Buddhist interpretations, but are also active agents in the process of how the various participants of a tshe dbang interpret byin rlabs and link it to their own ideas of life-span extension. Byin rlabs is a central component of the communication between the lamas and lay Tibetans, who, during the event, appear as hierarchicallystructured segregated groups of people. It is part of the process by which lay Tibetans fill ritual spaces that they cannot relate to textually with individual beliefs. Tshe dbang remain popular because the structure of the ritual allows and accom18 Ramble 2008: 8.

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modates people’s contemporary needs, which can vary widely, but are essentially centred on the prevention of an untimely death and the prolongation of the lifespan.

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References Beyer, Stephan V. 1973. The Cult of Tārā: Magic and Ritual in Tibet. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Central Tibetan Administration-in-Exile (India). Planning Council 2000. Tibetan Demographic Survey 1998. Dharamsala: Planning Council, Central Tibetan Administration. Gellner, David N. 1992. Monk, Householder, and Tantric Priest: Newar Buddhism and its Hierarchy of Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gerke, Barbara 2008. Time and Longevity in a Tibetan Context. PhD thesis. Oxford: University of Oxford. Jamgön Kongtrul & Richard Barron 2003. The Autobiography of Jamgön Kongtrul: A Gem of Many Colors. Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications (Tsadra Foundation Series). Ramble, Charles 2008. The Navel of the Demoness: Tibetan Buddhism and Civil Religion in Highland Nepal. New York: Oxford University Press. Samuel, Geoffrey 1993. Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. — 2008. “Amitāyus and the Development of Tantric Practices for Longevity and Health in Tibet”. Unpublished paper presented at the International Conference Transformations and Transfer of Tantra in Asia and Beyond, Freie Universität Berlin, 1–3 December 2008. Turner, Victor Witter 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Angela Sumegi

Being the Deity: The Inner Work of Buddhist and Shamanic Ritual Some years ago, I had the privilege of attending a private tantric initiation ritual bestowed on the Royal family of Bhutan by His Holiness Pema Norbu Rinpoche, then head of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. The intent of the ceremony was to initiate the participants into the Mandala of the Eight Herukas, a grouping of wrathful deities prominent in the Nyingma tradition. It took place before dawn at Kurjey Lhakhang, one of the magnificent temple complexes of Bhutan. When we entered, the lama was already seated on a high throne, butter lamps flickering, rows of monks in front of him; the assembled guests on the periphery. The performance was long and measured in bouts of chanting interspersed with the clamour of horns and drums, bells and cymbals. In this, as in all initiation rituals, the lama prepares himself by engaging in the practice of deity yoga, the practice of identifying oneself totally with the deity. Then, in a state inseparable from the deity, the lama guides the participants through the same process. Although there were moments of drama and excitement marked by the sound of drums and percussion instruments, and a palpable feeling of devotion among the participants, the strongest impression was of orchestration and calm control. The entire ritual took place according to the commands of the lama, who, after a preparatory period of chanting and deep concentration, actively directed the flow of the ritual and the involvement of the participants. There were no unexpected outbursts, erratic behaviours, or other-worldly manifestations. The setting and performance of the ritual was devotional and awe-inspiring, but did not have, in Rudolph Otto’s language, any feeling of “daemonic dread.”1 And this, perhaps, was as it should be, since according to liturgy commonly used in initiation rituals, all capricious, unreliable, or dangerous beings that may interrupt or disturb the participants have been kindly or forcefully dismissed or transformed into forces of protection – an aspect of what Frederick Smith calls the “ritual demarcation of the unpredictable”2. 1 Otto 1950: 14. 2 Smith 2006: 386.

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A few days after this ceremony, I found myself at the house of a Bhutanese farmer known to be a pawo.3 He had offered to perform a séance for me, in which he would embody the spirit of Gesar of Ling, the ancient shamanic culture hero of an epic known widely in Tibet and Mongolia – a figure eventually incorporated into the Buddhist textual tradition, especially of the Nyingma School. After washing head, hands, and feet, he tied a maroon-coloured monk-like robe on one shoulder over his formal Bhutanese dress, and placed on his head the five-lobed crown that adorns many Tibetan images of buddhas and bodhisattvas. His drum was of the same type used in monastic rituals – double-sided and beaten with a curved stick. Myself, an interpreter, the pawo’s assistant, his wife and baby, and a few neighbours assembled in the dark room and he began his performance. He started with a slow invocatory chant to the beat of his drum that eventually culminated in a deafening crescendo, and a wild, wide-eyed, growling dance, that had myself and the Bhutanese interpreter instinctively shrinking into the wall behind us – let us say “daemonic dread” did come to mind. After this, the pawo became calmer, stood beside the altar and as the embodied form of the spirit, asked the reason that he had been summoned. The interchange took place in a language unintelligible to my interpreter; it was translated by the pawo’s assistant into Dzonkha, the dominant dialect of Bhutan, and then translated into English for me, so I am willing to accept that much was lost in translation. Still, the immediate juxtaposition of these two ceremonies inspired me to consider more generally the nature of the interactions taking place – between pawo and spirit, lama and deity. Although the initiation ritual and the séance were worlds apart in the social, economic, and religious status of both officiants and participants, they shared a cosmological context that supports the presence of other-worldly beings and the possibility of communication with them. The success of both rituals also depended on the ability of the officiant to effect a self-transformation in which his presence actualised the presence of the deity, thereby establishing relationship and communication between the deity and the participants in the ritual. Yet, according to Tibetan lamas, the self-transformation that takes place in deity yoga is very different from the self-transformation that takes place in oracular possession. As Frederick Smith makes clear, however, in his extensive study of possession in south Asia, the discourse related to possession that permeates folk traditions, as well as classical Indian and Tibetan texts, is exceedingly complex and wide-ranging.4 Smith’s work emphasises the extreme multi-vocality and multi-dimensionality of possession, whose variations, he concludes, differ more in degree than in kind.5 In this paper, I will discuss the process of engagement between human and non-human in both 3 General Bhutanese and Tibetan term for a spirit-medium (Tib. dpa’ bo). 4 Smith 2006. 5 Ibid.: 590.

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types of ritual and examine how this process relates to the inner activity and internal effects generated or intended to be generated by the ritual – the “inner work” of the ritual, expressed either as reported subjective experience or as explanations in texts and oral teachings. I propose that, although certain aspects of tantric deity identification can be reasonably categorised as possession, broadly-writ, there are other aspects that should be situated outside that category, and in fact, whether or not one categorises deity yoga as possession would depend on the aim of the practitioner – to gain access to power for practical purposes, or to attain realisation of some ultimate mode of existence. In comparing Tibetan spirit-mediumship with deity yoga, I will draw examples primarily from the extensive ethnography of John Bellezza, who reports on the beliefs, practices, and rituals of the spirit-mediums of upper Tibet called lhawa (Tib. lha pa “god man”) or pawo. He notes that the present-day spirit-mediums, whether Bön or Buddhist, trace their tradition back to Guru Padmasambhava, the semi-legendary eighth-century Tantric yogi, who played a prominent role in the dissemination of Vajrayana Buddhism in Tibet.6 Bellezza suggests that this origin story represents the Buddhacization of a pre-Buddhist, indigenous spirit-mediumship tradition. However, as a magician with powers to subdue unruly spirits, Padmasambhava would be a familiar figure to a shamanic culture. The historical reconstruction could simply indicate the appropriation of the greatest shaman in their mythical memory as a forefather. Nevertheless, the origin story represents a religious world-view shared by the spirit-mediums and high lamas of Tibet, one that supports rituals of communication between humans and deities. In the traditional world-view of Tibet, the deities that are the focus of possession rituals can be of higher or lower status. High-level deities are enlightened beings – the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and Dharma Protectors of the Vajrayana tradition. Lower-level deities would be powerful but unenlightened protectors and spirits. A similar hierarchy exists among the spirit-mediums who embody these deities. A few, like the Nechung, the state oracle of Tibet, serve as mediums for higher-status deities; the majority, however, are possessed by powerful but lowerstatus spirits, related especially to the mountains and lakes of Tibet. According to Bellezza’s study, although enlightened beings such as the Buddha, the Tantric yidams (meditational deities), and high protectors are an important presence at the ritual, they do not possess the lower status medium, whose body, it is said, would not be able to withstand their power.7 It is interesting to note that these are precisely the deities that are the focus of deity identification in Tantric practice. Would this imply that the Tantric lama or practitioner is a superior medium, capable of withstanding the energy of more powerful deities, or does it point to a difference in 6 Bellezza 2005. 7 Ibid.: 15.

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the meaning of communication with enlightened deities? Although examples of local mediums who claim to channel the higher deities of Buddhism can be found,8 the general view of the lhawa community raises such questions. In the examples we are considering, possession signifies a set of conditions centred on the conceptualisation of identity as a combination of body – the seat or physical support – and that which is supported, i.e. life-force, consciousness, individual vitality, self-awareness, personality. Although, to be accurate, this system works both ways; the body is equally supported by consciousness or “soul”, since without the enlivening factors, the body falls inert and eventually decays. In both folk and classical Tibetan traditions, many terms are used to distinguish the various nuances of the non-physical aspects of identity. To describe the consciousness principle that comes and goes during possession, the lhawa in Bellezza’s study use both the indigenous Tibetan concept of la (Tib. bla), a mobile, quasi-material “soul” substance that permeates the body, imbuing it with life-force and consciousness, as well as more Buddhistic terminology related to consciousness (rnam-shes) or mind (thugs), and associated with radiance.9 But, whatever the language, the process of consciously separating soul or consciousness from the body is regarded as a dangerous enterprise, because if it does not return, then death or madness is the result. The ritual sequence consists of the departure of consciousness from the medium’s body, entrance of the spirit who communicates with the audience through the physical support of the medium’s body, and finally the departure of the spirit’s consciousness and return of the medium’s consciousness. In their rituals, the lhawa of upper Tibet commonly make use of one or more mirrors, which represent the locus of the gods in the tripartite divisions of the universe: the upper world of benevolent gods, the middle world of deities associated with mountains and rocks, and the lower world of subterranean water spirits. The possessing deity or deities are said to appear in the mirror, which functions as the point of transference between the consciousness of the medium and the consciousness of the deity.10 During the period of the séance, the medium’s consciousness, separated from the body, is thought to be in an extremely vulnerable state and in need of protection. Some mediums say their consciousness is transferred to the upper world, where it is guarded by Guru Padmasambhava,11 others say that their consciousness is transferred to the mirror and is guarded by Palden Lhamo (Tib. Dpal ldan Lha mo), a powerful protectress.12 In general, Tibetan spirit-mediums report no memory of what takes place when they are possessed, some claim not to be aware even of which deity possesses 8 9 10 11 12

Smith 2006: 171–234. Bellezza 2005: 7. Ibid.: 93. Ibid.: 72, 129. Ibid.: 143.

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them, relying on others who have been present to recount what happened. Various external manifestations signify the state of possession to the audience. They include profuse perspiration, contorted or grimacing facial expressions, great strength, foaming at the mouth, seizures, and the disappearance of the irises in the back of the head.13 Scholars have also collected reports of the mediums’ internal subjective experiences immediately before the supposed loss of personal awareness. Among the Tibetan mediums interviewed in Nepal in the 1970s by Per-Arne Berglie, one speaks of seeing a rotating wheel of brilliant rainbow light and the feeling of his body becoming expanded as if filled with air. Another saw multicoloured flames that engulfed him; another saw stars sparkling in the mirrors on the altar, which grew bigger and bigger, while he perceived the people around him with brightly shining eyes becoming smaller and smaller, and their receding voices becoming thinner and thinner.14 These descriptions are similar to those recorded more recently by Bellezza during his research among the lhawa of upper Tibet. For example, according to one, the consciousness of the deity is experienced as radiant light striking the mirror and being reflected onto him, entering his body through the fingertips of his ring fingers.15 In the report of another, the consciousness of the possessing deity envelopes him in rainbow light and enters his body through the top of the head – he becomes immobilised and experiences a tingling sensation while everything in his field of vision recedes into the distance.16 In explaining how they understand the process of possession to take place, Tibetan mediums use the language of the Tantric subtle body system, with its multiple channels, centres of psychic power, and circulating energy currents called “winds”. The medium’s soul or consciousness is understood to exit and re-enter from the crown of the head, where the opening to the all-important central channel is located. The possessing deities’ consciousness enters and permeates the channels of the medium’s body, either through the crown of the head or through the fingertips of the ring fingers, which are said to lead to the right and left major channels of the subtle body.17 Just as possession is the defining characteristic of Tibetan spirit-mediumship, so the practice of deity yoga is the defining characteristic of Vajrayana Buddhism. To outline the process of identifying self with a deity, I will follow the explanation given by the nineteenth century Nyingma-Kagyu master, Jamgön Kongtrul, in a brief text translated by Sarah Harding as “The Essential Points of Creation and Completion That Will Benefit the Beginner Who Has Entered the Path”.18 Creation and completion refer to the two main stages of deity yoga in this system. In the 13 14 15 16 17 18

Ibid.: 7. Berglie 1976: 45. Bellezza 2005: 72. Ibid.: 129. Ibid.: 8. Jamgön Kongtrul & Harding 1996.

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creation stage, the practitioner mentally generates a visual image of him- or herself in the form of the deity, whose iconography would be well-known from prior contemplation of paintings, statues, or written descriptions. In itself, the internal process by which the visualisation is carried out is complex, involving a number of stages and components. It can include visualising the deity as appearing in front of oneself, or over one’s head, or as oneself, and can also include visualising the entire environment, the mandala of the deity, with numerous other figures. To create the image, the practitioner first dissolves all conceptual thought and becomes absorbed in the unreifiable primordial nature of mind, described as “emptiness” (Skt. śūnyatā; Tib. stong pa nyid), a troublesome word indeed, defined by Herbert Guenther as “the absence of permanent structures”19 and perhaps better substituted by his phrase “being nothing”. However, in the Nyingma system, being nothing does not imply ultimate negation or utter absence. The nothingness, spaciousness, or emptiness of the ground of being is simultaneously the radiance or clarity of primordial awareness – the presence of being. From a mental state of absorption in this luminous void, the practitioner imaginatively builds up the visualisation in stages, beginning with concentration on the syllable that is considered to be the seed of the deity’s form. This corresponds to the way in which the human body eventually appears fully formed, arising in stages from the generative seed. It is said that the image should appear vividly, yet insubstantially – favourite similes are like a rainbow or the reflection of the moon in water. This imagined divine self is called in Sanskrit the samayasattva, literally commitment being or pledge being. It is to be distinguished from the actual divine being, the “real” deity called jñānasattva, wisdom being or knowledge being. The deity is ritually invited to come from his or her cosmological place in the universe and merge with the visualised identity of the practitioner. The invocation or invitation stage is often associated with the visualisation of many-coloured light rays emanating from the heart of the practitioner and the heart of the deity, binding them together. This entire process is called the creation stage. And it is here that spirit possession and deity yoga would appear to have the closest parallels, especially at the stage when the real deity enters into the imaginatively constructed self. With regard to the signs that the wisdom being has entered, various texts referenced by the fourteenth Dalai Lama indicate external manifestations similar to states of possession, such as “shaking and tremors,” “elation, fainting, dancing, collapsing, or leaping upward” or “hair standing on end”.20 Just as the lhawa or pawo becomes the possessing spirit, so the entrance of the wisdom being signifies the transformation of tantric practitioner into deity.

19 Guenther 1996: 68. 20 Smith 2006: 392.

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The interweaving of possession and deity yoga is dramatically expressed in a text called The Luminous Web of Precious Visions, composed by the fourteenth century Tibetan master, Longchenpa. It purports to be a record of the events surrounding his initiation of a group of disciples, and describes various states of possession occurring over a period of days. Key passages from this text have been translated into English by David Germano and Janet Gyatso.21 According to Longchenpa’s report, during the ritual at the point of the “descent of blessings,” one of the women suddenly began to perform in the persona of the deity, Ekajati. The group was alarmed, but Longchenpa calmed them and verified that an enlightened being was communicating with them through her. This event seemed to open the floodgates of ecstasy, as the yogis and yoginis are said to have “sung and danced in a state of intense exhilaration all day and night in a visionary state that was neither asleep nor awake”.22 In subsequent days, the possessions continued, with both Tibetan folk deities and enlightened Buddhist tantric deities speaking through the possessed women. Although Longchenpa himself is not portrayed as possessed in the same way that the women were, the yogis and yoginis had visions of ḍākinīs (female deities) dissolving into him, whereupon he sang and danced in a spontaneous and ecstatic manner. This text places the initiation ceremony in an atmosphere of intense ecstasy, trance, visions, and a multitude of overlapping voices and identities. It provides a context for deity yoga practice that blurs the difference between the self-transformation brought about by the descent of the wisdom beings in deity yoga, and self-transformation brought about by the descent of a mountain god into a spirit-medium. In comparison, then, the activity of the spirit-medium and initiating lama are very similar: both invoke the deities to come with all their retinue from their place in the spiritual cosmos; the zoomorphic spirit-helpers of the lhawa are reminiscent of the many zoomorphic figures visualised in the mandalas of Buddhist deities. To be able to see the deities is also important to both. The lhawa sees the spirits in the mirror and the lama perceives them as visions in the mirror of his mind. In both cases, the deity comes to be totally invested in the practitioner. This experience is accompanied by similar ecstatic manifestations and experiences of coloured lights. The result is the exchange of identities between lhawa and spirit, and between lama and deity. The external effect of both is the communication between the deity and the participants in the ritual, and the mediation of the power of the deity through the officiant. Despite such similarities, however, Tibetan lamas deny that the identification of self and deity is tantamount to possession by a spirit. Given that possession is frequently associated with folk traditions and local indigenous spirits, as well as with 21 Germano & Gyatso 2000. 22 Ibid.: 252.

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a range of non-Buddhist practitioners, such denial could be interpreted as the desire of Buddhist authorities to differentiate themselves from other religious ritualists, and uphold the greater spiritual status of Buddhism. However, emic claims provide a perspective that should be taken into account in the study of texts or performances, and taking the Buddhist denial at face value leads me to consider how possession is different from deity yoga, and more significantly, why. Although Tantric texts discuss the signs of union with the deity in terms similar to manifestations of possession – shaking, fainting, dancing etc., in Tibetan initiation rituals the lama generally does not exhibit such ecstatic behaviour. Is this to be interpreted as the ritualisation or civilisation of a spontaneous and unpredictable phenomenon, or does it represent the element of self-control emphasised in Buddhist and Brahmanic traditions? Smith references an interesting observation by William Sax, that the bodies of low-caste people in possession gyrate more wildly than those of higher-caste Brahmins.23 Or does it point to a fundamental difference between possession and deity yoga? I would like to consider this from the perspective of the second stage of deity yoga. Having constructed an entire scenario of imagined divine self, unified with the real deity in the creation stage, the inner work of the initiating lama involves a further step, the completion stage. The intention at this point is to dissolve or deconstruct all conceptualisations – whether of self, deity, ordinary world, or deity mandala, ordinary mind, or enlightened mind – thereby entering into a state that is described in terms of luminosity or radiance, and is understood to be the unmediated self-awareness of mind in its primordial state. Commenting on Jamgön Kongtrul’s text, The Essential Points of Creation and Completion, the contemporary lama, Thrangu Rinpoche, says of this experience, “When the faculty you are experiencing in meditation has no object other than itself, experiences its own nature as light, and has the characteristic of brilliant clarity, like a lamp flame, then that is awareness”.24 From the Nyingma perspective, it is in the cognition of pure awareness, where subject-object duality is not operative, that the non-duality of self and deity is really actualised. The process of the completion stage is also associated with the entrance of the “winds”, or psychic energies, into the central channel of the subtle body. This can occur spontaneously, or it can be induced by means of yogic techniques and practices, such as the six yogas of Naropa, aimed at controlling the energies of the body and gathering them into the central channel.25 This process results in various physical and mental experiences and ecstatic manifestations related to the descent of the wisdom deities, and these yogas are usually carried out under the guidance of a 23 Smith 2006: 604–636. 24 Jamgön Kongtrul 1996: 146. 25 Ibid.: 171.

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qualified teacher, to guard against physical or mental illness resulting from their practice. They are called completion stage practices, because they lead to the completion or perfection of the goal of deity yoga – the transformation of ordinary body, speech, and mind into Buddha body, speech, and mind. According to the explanation of a senior Nyingmapa Khenpo, during the initiation ritual, although the lama is said to engage in the creation and completion stages, the intention is that these are unified and not separate, as they are when a practitioner is learning to perfect them.26 When creation and completion stages are unified, then awareness of any kind, visionary or ordinary, is inseparable from the recognition that its appearance is nothing more or less than the self-reflection of one’s own fundamentally empty nature. Awareness in itself is directly perceived as the natural expression of emptiness, and emptiness is recognised as the fundamental nature of awareness. The non-duality of self and deity is actualised in the nonduality of awareness and emptiness. This aspect of the completion stage relates to Frederick Smith’s discussion of nyāsa in the brahmanical tradition – a practice of mantra recitation and invocation through which the body is divinised part by part as the different deities are established in or on the body. Regarding this practice, he says, “In this ritual exercise, the individual’s body parts, heart, and self are so fully identified with specific deities that it must fall within the range of deity possession, though that possession is ultimately nullified and transcended by a final identification with the absolute brahman”.27 Similarly, the deity yoga process involves full identification with a specific deity, but culminates in the transcendence of identity. To return to Longchenpa’s story, the great lama puts the following question to one of the possessing deities: “How is it that I have actualised you without meditating upon you?” Her answer dissolves the dualistic framework within which possession or deity identification takes place, and in a möbius-like twist28, she reveals the single surface of self and other: “Am I simply a deity who must be meditated upon, a mantra to be recited, an object of offerings? Don’t you understand that I am always present for all yogins and yoginīs with intact commitments and realisation? I have been in seamless union with you in all your rebirths”.29 Possession and Tantric deity yoga employ similar processes of exchanging or merging identities with super-normal beings, in which the practitioner gains access to the knowledge or powers of such beings; they both express, in Smith’s words,

26 Personal Communication from Khenchen Tsewang Gyatso Rinpoche, senior Khenpo of Ngagyur Nyingma Institute, Bylakuppe, India. 27 Smith 2006: 385. 28 The reference is to a Möbius strip which forms a single continuing surface with back and front feeding into each other. It is created by joining the ends of a rectangle after twisting one end through 180º. 29 Germano & Gyatso 2000: 259.

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“human experience marked by the permeability of human identity”.30 However, there is a point at which deity yoga breaks the bounds of the category of possession, no matter how broadly conceived. This breaking point, I suggest, can be related to the contrast that Geoffrey Samuel notes between western possession discourse, based on dualistic conceptualizations of body and soul (conceptualizations that are not limited to western vocabularies but which appear cross-culturally), and Indic vocabulary related to different constructions of the body-mind complex, and oriented towards the transcendence of dualities.31 The western body-soul dichotomy might seem to work well enough in the case of Tibetan spirit-mediums; the self-identity of the lhawa remains distinct from the self-identity of the spirit. If the lhawa does not remember the details of the séance, it is because his self/soul was not present. The intention of the possession ritual is to make present in actuality the self-identity of another. Samuel, however, highlights a subtle difference between western conceptualisations of possession as one personality entering into, taking hold of, or taking over another, and the Indo-Tibetan concept of possession deriving from the multivalent properties of the Sanskrit term āveśa and a range of related words. Āveśa is translated “possession” with familiar meanings of entering into, going towards, obtaining, getting hold of, but the term also encompasses ideas of permeating, pervading, immersion, or absorption in. Samuel proposes the intriguing notion that in the Indic context, possession or becoming another can be understood not merely in terms of identity fusion or exchange, but of patterning or re-patterning the operations of the mindbody complex according to another model.32 This perspective would make it easier to understand the close relationship between spirit-mediumship and Tantric deity yoga, both of which can be understood as methods of re-patterning the body-mind and engaging in alternate modes of being, based on externally conceived models. The model, however, makes all the difference; and even though Samuel notes that the Indic conceptualisation of possession is grounded less in conceptions of a relationship between distinct entities, and more in conceptions of the permeability and intermingling of identities, still, the external model and the intentions of spiritmediumship keep the ritual grounded in dualism, while the intentions of deity yoga can be related either to an external model that represents dualistic notions of transformation and power, or to an external model that represents the transcendence of dualism. There is also a difference to be noted between Buddhist and non-Buddhist conceptualisations of transcendence or non-dualism. In Buddhist tantra, where the practice orientation is towards transcendence, the re-patterning of the self-identity 30 Smith 2006: 590. 31 Samuel 2008. 32 Ibid.

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of the practitioner vis-à-vis the self-identity of the deity is a skilful method that ultimately serves, not to reveal the ground of existence or the truth of the godhead or the truth of union with the deity, but the nature of emptiness and the totally illusory nature of all conceptualisations, whether of self, deity, or union. We can get a glimpse of the inner work of this kind of deity yoga from the words of the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Commenting on the merging of wisdom deities and visualised forms in the creation stage, he says: “As a result of the Wisdom beings entering in that way, the minds of the deities […] actually enter the mindstream of the disciple, or else one visualizes and believes that it has done so. Thereby, the wisdom blessing has entered the disciple.”33 The either/or condition is a crucial aspect of understanding the inner work of deity yoga in two ways. First, utter faith or belief in the result brings about the result, because certainty of mind is the method by which ordinary self-consciousness is transformed into deity self-consciousness. In his work on ritual, Stephan Beyer quotes the great Gelugpa master Tsongkhapa on this point: “It is by contemplating with complete certainty, thinking ‘I am Aksobhya’ or ‘I am Vairocana’ and so on, that one nullifies one’s ‘ordinary ego’ […] In the practice of ‘ego’, one generates an ego which thinks ‘I am that deity’, and one dwells thereon one-pointedly […] at first it will be but an artificial thought; but if, after contemplating it […] the deity’s ego becomes firm, he can abandon his mind therein and be able to exchange the ego of a deity for his own ego of an ordinary being, and do so throughout all of the contemplative periods, and even between them.”34 Second, from the perspective of the Nyingma Ati yoga tradition, certainty in the result is equal to the result, because samayasattva, self-awareness manifesting as the visualised being, and jñānasattva, the real meditational deity (real because it signifies cognition of the ultimately empty nature of appearances), have never been separated, so union is illusion and all that implies it is a skilful means to achieve the realisation voiced by the ḍākinī in Longchenpa’s account, that self and deity, appearance and emptiness, are primordially indivisible. And, although the samayasattva is generated from within the mind of the practitioner as imagination and the jñānasattva invoked from without as the real deity, the reverse is simultaneously the case – the samayasattva appears externally as an object of perception and the jñānasattva is none other than the practitioner’s own ever-present wisdom mind.

33 Smith 2006: 392. 34 Beyer 1978: 77–78.

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For this reason, in either case, whether relying on notions of actuality or relying on faith, “the wisdom blessing has entered the disciple”. Spirit-mediumship and deity yoga operate within the same world view and employ similar conceptualisations of the exchange of identities between ordinary persons and powerful deities. At the physiological level, one can find parallels in the experiences of coloured lights, visions, and other expressions of ecstasy, as well as in the active inducement of such states, either by yogic techniques or shamanic methods like drumming, yet there is a transcendent dimension to deity yoga that nullifies the category of possession. In contradistinction to the shamanic insistence on the reality of self and universe is the Buddhist view that holds appearances of self and universe to be ultimately illusory and unreal. The shaman who embodies a spirit attests to the irreducible reality of shaman and spirit. The lama who identifies with a deity attests to the illusoriness of both lama and deity. In the words of the nineteenth century master, Dudjom Lingpa, “all that appears is the phantasmagoria of a single awareness”.35 In the midst of the display of the possessed yoginis, Longchenpa expresses this understanding, even while he joins them in their ecstatic singing and dancing. “Inspire me with blessings to self-recognise as self-manifestations The abiding reality of the unborn beyond all mental objects![…] Inspire me with blessings to self-recognise as self-manifestations The abiding reality of mentation in its empty radiance devoid of grasping![…] Inspire me with blessings to self-recognise as self-manifestations The sameness of abiding reality evenly pervading everything! Inspire me with blessings to self-recognise as self-manifestations The abiding reality of whatever manifests in its unceasing dynamic flow.” Possession and deity yoga also differ with regard to the ongoing conscious analysis that, in Buddhism, is directed at all mental states. For Longchenpa, ecstatic experience does not override or erase the long-standing Buddhist tradition of analysis, observation, and mindfulness, whether of ordinary or sublime states. In explaining the experience of the ultimately empty luminous nature of mind called “Clear Light”, Tsongkhapa states: “But in fact even if the experience were explained a thousand times, there is nothing else for it but the unremitting mindfulness on what is to be experienced.

35 Dudjom Lingpa & Barron 2002: 129.

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[…] a yogin whose faculties are of the very best forms even his mental constructs themselves as mindfulness. Thus he forms the mindfulness of “recognition”: he gains the freedom that occurs simultaneously with appearance.”36 In contrast to the utter abandonment of self in shamanic possession that allows for the total presence of another, in the Buddhist Tantric context, ordinary self or consciousness is neither displaced nor replaced; it is recognised as being of the nature of primordial being. There is a difference also to be noted in the ontological basis of possession and deity yoga. Lonchenpa sings about the subsiding of all appearances and mental constructs into essenceless ineffable groundlessness.37 In contrast, from a shamanic perspective, the reality of personhood and communication is irreduceable. Spiritmediumship works because the spirit is perceived as real; the intention is to facilitate the communication between spirit and audience. Deity yoga works because the deity is perceived as illusion; the intention is to dissolve the dualistic basis on which personhood and communication stand. The shaman’s external actions are the perceivable aspect of a larger situation, just as the visible world is the perceivable aspect of a total reality that encompasses both visible and invisible worlds. From this perspective, in the context of the ritual, the possessing deity is present as an unseen actuality, a fact of existence, which the shaman encounters and reveals for others. The inner work of shamanic ritual, then, is work that materialises the invisible and brings it into the realm of ordinary perception. In deity yoga, the deity is similarly understood to be real but imperceptible, located in a cosmological context. However, where concepts of self, other, and world are ultimately regarded as obscuring illusions or at best convenient fictions, the deity’s presence ultimately manifests the illusory and unreal nature of appearances. The inner work of the ritual functions first to actualise the deity as a real presence within the framework of the practitioner’s mental and sensory world, but it further functions to dematerialise or de-actualise the deity, not only because its very presence places it in the category of illusion or fiction, but in order to dissolve whatever may be grasped by the mind as fact or reality. In Longchenpa’s words: “Conceptuality in its projections and contractions subsides within the five lights, and the visions of five lights subside into the primordial. Appearances and mind having the identity of the groundless Reality Body [Dharmakāya].”38 In the last analysis, however, I have to admit that my efforts to disentangle deity yoga from the category of possession by appealing to the transcendence of identity 36 Beyer 1978: 142. 37 Germano & Gyatso 2000: 256–257. 38 Germano & Gyatso 2000: 257.

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are rendered groundless by Longchenpa’s reference to one of the most widespread and deep-rooted doctrines in Tibetan Buddhism, the doctrine of the Three Bodies of the Buddha. According to Nyingma Ati-yoga teaching, the ground of being is an irreduceable dynamic of awareness and emptiness, primordially in play. This dynamic is conceptualised in the theory of the Three Bodies of the Buddha: dharmakāya, the ineffable, uncharacterisable, substanceless nature of being – emptiness; inseparable from sambhogakāya, the luminous, self-reflecting, self-cognisant nature of being as pure awareness; inseparable from nirmāṇakāya, awareness emanating in an endless variety of forms, any and all of which can serve as the basis for awakening to selfrecognition – all-pervading compassion. Direct experience and recognition of the luminous empty nature of awareness is said to result in identification with the formless dharmakāya, corresponding to enlightened mind. However, being nothing, enlightened mind alone cannot enter into communication with ordinary beings, cannot fulfill the Bodhisattva vow to lead all beings to enlightenment. Buddha body is as necessary as Buddha mind, hence the need for the completion stage yogas, that are said to lead to identification with sambhogakāya and nirmāṇakāya forms, which communicate the ineffable dharmakāya, on extraordinary and ordinary levels of perception, respectively. On a microcosmic level, the initiation ritual replicates the process by which enlightened mind and body relate to ordinary mind and body. The lama, in identifying with the cosmic sambhogakāya form, cognises the ineffable nature of being, the dharmakāya, and in his ordinary body actualises the compassionate emanation of enlightened mind, the nirmāṇakāya, through whom the participant in the ritual is able to communicate and know the ineffable. Microcosmically and macrocosmically, the theory of the Three Bodies of the Buddha implies that the person who awakes to Buddha nature does not disappear into the void or transcend identity, but awakens in body, speech, and mind as a Buddha person, free from the extremes of existence and non-existence. Therefore, despite the emphasis on emptiness, ineffability, and non-dualism, it would seem that differentiation, communication, and personhood are as embedded in Tantric Buddhist views of ultimate reality as they are in shamanic worldviews. Belief in a reality beyond the realm of sense perception is characteristic of all religions, but what makes religious behaviour religious is the belief in the possibility of communication with, or experiential knowledge of, that reality. In both lama and lhawa that belief is actualised for those who wish to know the unknowable or perceive the imperceptible. The reification of an invisible spirit in a village possession ritual and the reification of the ineffable empty nature of being in the Three Bodies of the Buddha may be based on different intentionalities and give rise to different modes of being in the world, but they express a common, dare I say uni-

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versal, ontological instinct – that the essence of what is, is dynamic, cognisant, and communicative.

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References Bellezza, John Vincent 2005. Spirit-Mediums, Sacred Mountains and Related Bon Textual Traditions in Upper Tibet: Calling Down the Gods. Leiden: Brill. Berglie, Per-Arne 1976. Preliminary Remarks on Some dpa’ bos, Tibetan “Spirit-Mediums” in Exile in Nepal. Cuttack: Institute of Oriental and Orissan Studies. Beyer, Stephan 1978. The Cult of Tara – Magic and Ritual in Tibet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dudjom Lingpa & Richard Barron (transl.) 2002. Buddhahood Without Meditation: A Visionary Account Known as Refining One’s Perception (Nang-jang). Junction City: Padma Publishing. Germano, David & Janet Gyatso 2000. “Longchenpa and the Posession of the Dakinis”. In: David Gordon White (ed.). Tantra in Practice. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass: 239–265. Guenther, Herbert V. 1996. The Teachings of Padmasambhava. Leiden: Brill. Jamgön Kongtrul & Sarah Harding (transl.) 1996. Creation and Completion: Essential Points of Tantric Meditation. Boston: Wisdom Publications. Otto, Rudolf 1950. The Idea of the Holy. London: Oxford University Press. Samuel, Geoffrey 2008. “Possession and Self-Possession: Spirit Healing, Tantric Meditation and āveśa”. Diskus. http://www.basr.ac.uk/diskus/diskus9/samuel.htm (10.05.2010). Smith, Frederick M. 2006. The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press.

Beatrix Hauser

Dramatic Changes? The Experience of a Religious Play in the Mega-City of Delhi1 “... bard and character, bard and audience, bard and actor, actor and character are merged at crucial moments and separated at ordinary times. One goes to the theater/ritual to experience such mergers in different degrees.”2

1. Introduction In many respects, Indian ritual theatre serves as an icon of cultural otherness. Its performance seems to absorb people in non-rational ways, eliminating reflective distance, equating plays with reality, and hence giving proof of its intended transcendent quality. Thus, ethnographic writing on experiences gained during ritual theatre risks either mystifying the “other” reaction or missing its sacred character: personifications of deities either “become real” or are reduced to “representations”. Enthusiastic spectators, however, rationalise the actual simultaneity of these ontological states with reference to līlā (Hindi, Sanskrit). The concept of līlā signifies both the paradigmatic mode of divine action and the embodiment of these actions by human beings.3 Following Hindu theology, deities are not obliged to act in a specific way, inasmuch as they are not driven by desire. Hence, divine behaviour is understood as a kind of free “play” (līlā), last but not least proven by the ironies of life. This divine nature may also manifest itself during the annual “play” (līlā) of well-known incidents ascribed to Hindu deities (mythology). Hence a Ramlila is 1 The objective pursued, and the findings presented, in this article resulted from my previous affiliation with the collaborative research centre for aesthetic experience, located at the Free University of Berlin (Sonderforschungsbereich 626: Ästhetische Erfahrung im Zeichen der Entgrenzung der Künste). I am particularly grateful to the theatre historian Erika FischerLichte who encouraged my ethnographic approach and also offered an extremely stimulating intellectual environment. 2 Ramanujan 1986: 70. 3 The term līlā also means “game”, “pastime”, “dalliance”, “amusement”, “sport”, and, by extension, any form of non-utilitarian action. On the concept of līlā in Hinduism see Sax 1995.

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not only the theatrical re-enactment of Rama’s deeds but at the same time an occasion to feel and realise the presence and greatness of this deity.4 Considering the impact of social change on religious plays complicates the challenge of ethnographic writing on experiential states. What happens once the Ramlila is exposed to modern technology, “Western” style music or global discourses on art? How to write on the potential qualities of experience during Ramlilas in the mega-city of Delhi? At first sight, highly codified ritual performances have turned into excessive multimedia events, alluding to the evolutionistic formula “from ritual to theatre”.5 Giving way to this impression, the liminality associated with the event would be at stake. Yet stylistic innovations are not necessarily an indicator of secularisation. To associate aestheticisation with the growing loss of (religious) meaning says more about “Western” discourse and practices of representation than about the experiences evoked by Ramlila performances in an environment well versed in transnational values and discourses. The objective of this article is to trace these changes in ritual theatre in urban India without being trapped by a simplistic dichotomy of “ritual” versus “theatre”, or assuming religious and secular modes of reception as analytic opposites.6 Focusing on the example of Ramlila performances in Delhi, I wish to explore in what respect dramaturgical strategies and aesthetic features shape the experiences gained during this religious play. I shall consider the conditions that bring about atmosphere, moods and sentiments, and thus stimulate the imaginative capacity as well as the production of meaning. Hence the objective of this paper is to focus on the intersection of the aesthetic and the sacred, rather than providing general statements about “the” audience experience. The main argument is that, regardless of stylistic inventions, Ramlila is conceived of as a divine play that has the capacity to raise devotional feelings. Still, recent Ramlila productions in Delhi do not merely evoke familiar responses in a hitherto unknown way. In the following I shall demonstrate how their potential to create “new” experiences can be attributed to (1) the 4 In this article, names related to Rama mythology are spelt in their commonly known English transcription, i.e. following Sanskrit, yet without diacritics. Thus I write about “Rama” and his defeat of “Ravana” rather than about “Rām” (Hindi) versus “Rabaṇ” (Oriya). Hindi terms are transliterated and given in italics, yet for the convenience of reading, “Ramlila” (Hindi: rāmlīlā) has been rendered without diacritics. 5 With all due respect, in his book of the same name Victor Turner (1982) follows this evolutionist hypothesis uncritically. Considering the recent debate on the category of religion as a culture-specific modern concept (Asad 1993), the underlying theory about the general origin of theatre in religious cult is highly problematic. 6 Although Indian terms only vaguely overlap with the meanings of “ritual” and “theatre” in common English parlance, it is problematic to regard these categories as purely Eurocentric. To distinguish truly religious from secular patterns of behaviour also reflects the tradition of Indian rhetoric. On the problem of defining ritual analytically see, for instance, Goody (1977) and Grimes (2000).

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visualisation of sentiments, (2) the type of stage reality, and (3) the impact of an art discourse. At any rate, to evaluate the variety of Ramlilas, I employ vocabulary commonly associated with drama and performance analysis, such as “stage”, “audience”, and so forth. In my view, these categories can be useful to describe the form of cultural performances (including religious ceremonies), yet it should be kept in mind that their semantic field in English does not allow any interpretation as to the intention and involvement of participants, for instance, whether a Ramlila “actor” regards himself as a devotee, as an artist, or both. The ethnographic data presented here were gathered during the Ramlila period in September and October 2006. In this year, estimates for the projected number of Ramlila stages in Delhi varied between 250 and 800.7 As at many other places, these performances ran simultaneously for about eleven consecutive evenings and culminated on the “day of victory” (Vijaya Dashami8) with the burning of effigies symbolising the defeat of the demon Ravana. In total I attended ten different Ramlilas in central and northern parts of the city.9 To get an overview, each night I visited the play at another location. I had also chosen accommodation that allowed me to follow one particular Ramlila during the complete cycle, partly among the audience, partly from my room.10 Since the beginning and duration of the daily programme varied from stage to stage, I could thus enjoy two (overlapping) performances in one evening.11 Early departure or late arrival at a stage was no problem, as fluctuation among the audience was a common feature anyway. I also conducted narrative interviews with actors, organisers, and members of the audience, and evaluated relevant newspaper articles. My first-hand observations in Delhi were analysed against the background of Ramlila performances in other years and 7 The English newspaper Hindustan Times (23 September 2006) and its Hindi counterpart Navbhārat Ṭāims (11 October 2006) mentioned 800 stages; the Hindi newspaper Hindustān (23 September 2006) gave the lower number. 8 Literally: The Glorious Tenth, in reference to the tenth day of the bright fortnight in the Hindu month of Aśvin. In 2006 this religious holiday fell on 2 October. 9 Most stages are identified with the name of the respective locality. I visited Ramlila at the following places: (1) Ramlila Maidan, Old Delhi; (2) Subhash Maidan, Old Delhi; (3) Lalkila Maidan (“Lavkush Ramlila”), Old Delhi; (4) Ramnagar, Old Delhi; (5) Harinagar, West Delhi; (6) Pitampur, North Delhi; (7) Model Town II, North Delhi; (8) Mukherjee Nagar, North Delhi; (9) Hakikat, North Delhi; and (10) the performance by the Shri Bharatiya Kala Kendra, South Delhi. Photographs of some stages are given in Hauser 2008c. 10 Luckily my room could serve as a loge facing the open-air stage from above. Acoustically, and in some respect atmospherically, there was no way to escape the performance that generally concluded only after midnight — a situation familiar to every neighbourhood that has its own Ramlila. 11 I recorded, as a mnemotechnical device, several sequences of Ramlila performances as well as the audience reactions. At any rate, to engage in research on events that occur only once a year is a challenge, logistically, in terms of method and with regard to the physical constitution of the observer.

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places in India. Previously, I had visited the famous Ramlila of Ramnagar, near Benares. This particular performance tradition has been documented and examined by several scholars (see below). Given the popularity of Ramlila throughout northern India, however, (English) descriptions on performances other than in Ramnagar or Benares are rare.12 Orissa, for instance, has a distinct Ramlila tradition of its own, as I realised during research in April 2005.13 Thus, what we know about Ramlila in translocal and historical perspectives is in fact fairly limited.

2. The Ramlila Tradition In social terms, Ramlila is first of all a community theatre, staged once a year for the duration of about ten, eleven, fifteen, twenty-one or even thirty-one evenings. Performed in the open air it invites any and all to attend. The Ramlila is part of those mimetic religious traditions14 that give shape to important events in the legendary life of the god Rama and hence allow pious Hindus not only to pay obeisance to this favourite deity but also to feel the divine presence in full proximity. To re-enact the wise and heroic deeds of Rama is considered an act of devotion, and indeed a religious duty as much as a social honour. Generally, the drama text is identified with the Rāmcaritmānas, written in verse by Tulsidas towards the end of the sixteenth century. The underlying Rama story (Rām kathā) is much older and influenced the composition of many Ramayana epics in several languages of the subcontinent and beyond.15 Lots of Ramlila troupes refer to dialogues and stage instructions from explicit Ramlila-scripts that have been circulated in print since the early twentieth century.16 In fact, many 12 See Hein (1972) on Ramlila in Mathura, Niehus (1905) on Ramlila in Ghazipur, Swann (1990) on Ramlila in Mathura and Allahabad, Williams (1996: 30–38) on Ramlila in Daspalla. Lutgendorf (1991: 251) briefly summarises a calendar of local Ramlila seasons in different parts of Uttar Pradesh. 13 See Hauser 2006a; 2006b; 2008a; 2008b. At each research site I was accompanied by one or two local field assistants. 14 They consist of a variety of performative genres, ranging from pure recitation via reading supplemented by gestures that visualise the narration, the impersonation of deities in a tableau vivant (Hindi: jhaṅki, literally: glimpse), the ritual re-enactment of Rama’s marriage with Sita, up to a fully dramatised Ramlila (see Lutgendorf 1991). 15 See Richman 1992. 16 In 2006, bookshops in Old Delhi offered a total of six Ramlila scripts, written in Hindi by contemporary and deceased authors, differing in poetic style and language code. Hein (1972: 72) refers to similar text-books with stage instructions, the earliest being published in 1904/05. However, several Ramlila manuscripts were and are not circulated freely, for instance, the dialogues to be used in the Ramnagar Ramlila. Moreover, sometimes the terms “Ramlila” and “Ramayana” are used synonymously, so the title of a book by itself does conclusively indicate its intended use or the formal structure of the text. According to Patnaik (1974: 28) there are more than twenty different “Ramlilas” which were composed in Oriya

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Ramlilas pass down only the most popular couplets of the Rāmcaritmānas. Since the Rama story is commonly known, some actors may also arrange and modify their own dialogues. At any rate, similar to the Ramayana, the plot of the Ramlila focuses on the life of the divine prince Rama and his half-brothers Lakshmana, Bharata and Shatrughna. Following an intrigue in the palace, Rama is denied the throne and has to go into exile. Accompanied by his wife Sita and also by Lakshmana, he makes his abode in the forest. From there Sita is kidnapped by the demon Ravana, the ruler of Lanka. Rama and Laksmana search for Sita extensively. With the help of Hanuman and an army of monkeys, Rama finally manages to locate and defeat Ravana. Upon Sita’s rescue Rama returns to Ayodhya and becomes the rightful king. This basic story is enriched with moral and juridico-political commentaries. They illustrate the greatness of (this) god, and also what had caused the other characters to act the way they did.17 One landmark among the innumerable Ramlila stages in northern India is Ramnagar, a small town facing Benares on the opposite bank of the Ganges. In the middle of the eighteenth century it became the seat of the regional dynasty. Because of continuous royal patronage, the Ramlila of Ramnagar has grown in space, duration, and complexity. In the nineteenth century, for instance, the king had commissioned a manuscript with compulsory dialogues. Several anthropologists, theatre directors, historians of religion, and scholars of Indian languages have done research in Ramnagar, for instance, Linda Hess, Anuradha Kapur, Philip Lutgendorf, William Sax, and Richard Schechner, to name only a few.18 Last, but not least, as a result of this scholarly interest, the Ramlila of Ramnagar has achieved canonical status, and with it, media attention and also pan-Indian recognition among the educated middle class. Still, on a sub-regional level, performers, organisers, and spectators tend to identify with their respective local Ramlila, rather than with this paradigm. Aesthetically, the Ramlila of Ramnagar can be characterised as a mobile, highly codified theatrical form of recitation that, by a strong emphasis on production rules, sacredness, and performance details, shows a strict commitment to tradition. This approach is most explicitly expressed by the rejection of electric amplifiers and lights, although the daily performance may draw between 3,000 and a claimed 100,000 spectators. In Ramnagar, one Ramlila cycle is divided into 31 sequences, starting late in the afternoon, each generally lasting about four hours. The reenactment of Rama’s deeds is performed at different stages distributed over an area

during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but he does not clarify whether these can be considered as drama scripts in a strict sense. 17 There is no space in this article to give a solid synopsis of the plot. However, there is extensive literature on the Ramayana and the complexity of this narrative tradition. 18 See Hess 1983; Kapur 1990; Lutgendorf 1991; Sax 1990; Schechner 1983.

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of approximately six square kilometres.19 Each stage is identified with a specific location in the epic: the palace, the forest hermitage, the realm of demons, and so forth. The town architecture has been shaped in a way which is analogous to the divine reality, combining secular and sacred geography in Ramnagar, literally: Rama’s town. As a consequence, Ramlila actors and spectators have to follow the story in a very practical way, being mentally and physically drawn into divine space. Whereas the lively bazaar area near the royal fort stands for the palace of Ayodhya, scenes that focus on Rama’s exile are performed in an open field bordered by trees and, after sunset, in almost complete darkness. Many elderly Hindu men from Benares come to attend the entire Ramlila circle. Well equipped with a personal copy of the Rāmcaritmānas, a torch and some protection against heavy rains, their regular wanderings through Ramnagar in order to see the gods are – in effort and religious merit – akin to a pilgrimage.20 However, lots of visitors enjoy the Ramlila as an occasional outing with their family, selecting only those performance days that schedule favourite episodes of the Rama story. In Ramnagar, the roles of Rama, his half-brothers, and Sita are given to Brahmin boys aged from nine to thirteen (before their voices break). These boys are made to conceal their human character so as to allow identification with the divine role. They dress in noble materials, and glittering facial decoration hides their personal features. Being costumed, they are regarded as svarūp (literally: own form), i.e. as the appearance of a god. People will address them as the deity they embody. Three months before the Ramlila, the five boys are initiated into their roles. They learn the required dialogues by heart and also how to recite them in the appropriate voice and tone (mood). Ideally, there is not much variation in the manner of delivery. The acting is basically suggestive and symbolic; at times the bearing of the boys is totally static (tableaux vivants). In a similar way, adult Brahmins play most of the other central characters of the Ramlila. Some of them take on their roles for many Ramlilas in succession, and later pass them on to younger family members. There are several conventions defining who is eligible to act in what kind of role. Furthermore, there is a group of twelve Brahmin male singers (rāmāyanī) to chant the verses from the Rāmcaritmānas, usually accompanied by the murmur of spectators who read along. During the play two stage managers (vyās) coordinate the alternating performance of chorus and actors. They also appeal to the discipline of the audience. In Ramnagar the ways to experience Ramlila are clearly conveyed by religious discourse. Consecrated living personifications of deities allow – similar to temple icons – for meeting the divine sight (darśan) and worshipping god, for instance, during the aratī-ceremony. The pleasure of the Ramlila is attributed to the feeling 19 For a map of Ramnagar with its various Ramlila locations see Freitag (1989: 24). 20 See Sax 1990; Schechner 1993.

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of bhakti, the devotional love for god, here: Rama. This love is considered a precondition that determines the effects of the play. Linda Hess has described several ways in which onlookers are indeed swept away by their emotions.21 According to her analysis, these deep reactions are related to the awareness of divine presence as it is communicated by the concept of līlā. Moreover, the “intensely physical quality”22 of attending a Ramlila is attributed to the collective movement from one stage to another and hence the exposure to different kinds of environmental circumstances. I would agree in that this kinetic and sensorial dimension derives from the particular presentational conventions in Ramnagar. However, this does not explain how participants come to recognise the divine presence associated with this play. The Indian theatre director and scholar Anuradha Kapur has argued that a convincing Ramlila relies on “complicity” and “collaboration” between actors and the audience.23 Whereas the actual vision must remain partial – the form of Rama is obviously that of a small-sized boy, the stage manager makes no attempt to hide his directions – spectators actively call upon their imagination to realise and make sense of the ongoing līlā. Thus they complete the vision others seek to portray. As I shall argue later, the character of this process differs from deciphering more realistic enactments of the Rama story. Although the Ramlila of Ramnagar has achieved the status of a paradigm, comparison with other places reveals there are several ways to enact the play. It would be misleading to consider Ramlila performances elsewhere as imperfect copies of the Ramnagar version. Nevertheless, the play in Ramnagar enjoyed more than two hundred years of royal patronage, whereas other stages rely on local funds and actors from all social strata. Performative circumstances and dramaturgical preferences differ already in Benares.24 Evidently, there are various models in northern India of how to deliver a Ramlila: the stage can be made on open ground, of one or several platforms, or a temporarily raised proscenium theatre. The audience gathers all around the stage or only in front of it; one may also watch the play from a nearby rooftop. Some, but not all, Ramlilas have processions of “living deities” through the locality. Several venues attract food stalls, vendors, and other forms of entertainments. Dramaturgically, a Ramlila can be based on recitation, emphasise acting, or, instead, focus on dance. It can have a contemplative character and also comical parts. Some productions are based on dialogues, others favour pantomime actors accompanied by a chorus of narrators. The main roles can be given to adolescent boys, yet this does not have to be so. In some regions, masks are used extensively. However, the essential idea is that people identify the performance as 21 22 23 24

Hess 1983. Ibid.: 175. Kapur 1990: 2–4. See Lutgendorf 1991; Katz 1993; Parkhill 1993. In 2006 I could confirm this view and recognise the difference for myself.

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“true” līlā, and thus as an occasion not merely to watch costumed actors, but to feel the proximity of god. Let me illustrate the variety of performance styles, giving a brief example from Asureshwar, a village in Orissa: one man from a particular Brahmin family recites the complete Ramlila circle (narration and dialogues) by heart, while the actors remain totally mute. They concentrate on their bodies and move in formalised ways that allude to an unseen power behind, most explicitly in energetic marital dances. Still, the ethos of the religious play and its social implications are very similar to those in Ramnagar. Performed near the local Rama-temple, the Ramlila effects an interruption of ordinary time and village routine. Rama’s deeds are here enacted for ten nights, from midnight until dawn. Several families from the village are directly or indirectly involved in the play. The caste of fishermen has to provide the actors playing boatmen, the duty of low-caste men is to play drums (as on other ritual occasions), temple servants have to act as priests. The main roles are given as hereditary among members of higher castes. In addition, several men join the play in order to observe a vow (Oriya: mānasika), and for the entire period of the play they change into the costume of a monkey. In this role they constitute Rama’s army to fight Ravana. Thus they are able to serve god in a double way, as character and also as performer: on the level of drama they support Rama; on the level of social reality they show their devotion to this god, for instance, by carrying his personification on their shoulders. During the daytime, these monkey men roam around the villages and collect alms.25

3. Ramlila Performances in Delhi Ramlila is not only popular at rural sites or in small cities. It is equally attractive in large urban areas, such as the metropolitan region of Delhi. As mentioned above, the estimates of the number of stages vary widely, while they may also correlate with the definition of the municipal area (eleven million inhabitants in 2006, with suburbs: sixteen million). Whether these numbers are exaggerated or not, they certainly show the importance given to this religious play. As far as I can tell, the development and style of Ramlila in Delhi is only sparsely documented. Historians have traced early performances to the middle of the nineteenth century, when the play was staged outside the city gates in a largely rural territory that came to be known as Ramlila Maidan.26 At the turn of the century, some stages had emerged 25 See Hauser 2006a; 2006b; 2008a; 2008b. 26 See Gupta (1981: 10, 55). In the year 2000, the Ramlila association of Delhi published a book on Ramlila in Delhi (Ācārya S. Rāmraṅg: Dilli ki Rāmlīlā). It provides the present-day opinions of Hindu nationalists on the play. Historical data on the history of the Ramlila are blurred with clearly biased (“saffronising”) interpretations. At any rate, this book does not provide much information on twentieth-century performances, least of all references to other

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within Old Delhi (following reports in those years when Ramlila processions caused communal conflicts between Hindus and Muslims – at other times, however, Hindus and Muslims participated in each other’s festivals). Even after Independence, descriptions of Ramlila performances in Delhi are, at best, fragmentary.27 However, newly founded cultural institutions aimed to preserve India’s indigenous traditions. In this spirit, a self-consciously artistic Ramlila was created: a condensed three-hour performance with professionally trained dancers, delivering a pot-pourri of regional performing arts, supported by a polished narrative. This Ramlila-“ballet” started in 1957, and involved a seating arrangement for the audience and an entrance fee. Similar to the common Ramlilas, this “evergreen production”28 is staged every year during the Ramlila period.29 Against this background, the neighbourhood Ramlilas must indeed have appeared amateurish and of little aesthetic value. They attested, however, to dramatic changes.30 Whereas some Delhiites sadly regret that the “authentic” neighbourhood Ramlilas disappeared in the 1950s, further research will be needed to substantiate such decay. At any rate, Darius Swann cites a writer who estimated that, in 1970, there were more than three hundred Ramlila troupes in Delhi alone.31 Following the success of a TV serial based on the Ramayana which was produced at the end of the 1980s, there was (again) an intellectual outcry about such a “crude” endeavour.32 In 2006, Ramlila troupes still appreciated the popularity they had gained because of this programme. Considering the sheer number of Ramlila stages in present-day Delhi, it is difficult to make general statements about their performance character, let alone the variety of experiences at these venues. However, let me firstly group these performances into three categories:

27 28 29 30

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authors/works. It rather reflects the political affiliation of the Ramlila association with Hindu nationalist ideas and organisations. Since the 1980s, Hindu nationalists have employed the Rama story and iconography on a large scale in order to support their political goals (see Kapur 1993; Davis 1996). I am convinced that research in town archives and the evaluation of relevant Hindi sources would reveal more insights into Ramlila in Delhi. Moreover, the older generation still remembers bits and pieces about performances from their childhood. Khokar n.d.: 53 (published probably in 1999). See ibid. for the history of the Shri Bharatiya Kala Kendra that in 2006 celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of this hybrid Ramlila. See, for instance, the memories of Shanta Serbjeet Singh in the Golden Jubilee brochure published by the Shri Bharatiya Kala Kendra in 2006. According to Rohit Arya, Ramlila can be considered “very poor theatre” (http://www.indiayogi.com/content/festivals/ramlila.aspx [21/05/2010]). Swann 1990: 234. See Lutgendorf 1990: 145, 166, 169.

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1) Most Ramlila venues in Delhi are neighbourhood stages, located in between the densely constructed apartment buildings of the metropolis, hardly visible to outsiders. Actors and spectators alike come from the neighbourhood. They vaguely know each other, if only through fund-raising activities among residents ahead of the Ramlila season. The preferred type of stage is a proscenium arch theatre with different curtains, stage props, sufficient lights, amplifiers and a sound system. The performance is organised, directed, rehearsed and enacted by one group of Ramlila enthusiasts. Since many men have come to reject female roles and amateur actresses still carry a stigma, young women from distant quarters are hired to play the female characters. 2) Each district of Delhi has its large, professionally organised Ramlila stage, sponsored by local merchants and companies that advertise their products on the Ramlila ground. These stages can be as wide as a hundred metres, at times divided into different segments and floors, equipped with any technical device possible, such as hydraulic platforms, smoke machines, long-range laser pointers or screens to project close-up views of the gods. A Ramlila committee hires an artistic director and a group of professional actors (at times known TV personalities), secures sponsorship and organises the construction of the venue, occasionally including a food court or a fun-fair. There are different classes of seats available. Admission is organised by means of VIP passes (no entrance fee), distributed among the organisers’ and sponsors’ clients by preference. The Ramlila committee attracts politically and economically influential residents, some of whom may also claim a respectable role in the play or send their sons on stage to join the army of monkeys in support of Rama. 3) Professional Ramlila stages located in Old Delhi have special fame. They attract visitors from both the surrounding area and distant quarters. First of all, some of these Ramlila sites are very old (like the Ramlila Maidan) and convey the authority of tradition, thus bringing back childhood memories for the older spectators. Secondly, some of these Ramlilas are affiliated with political parties that dominate the organising committee and also use the venue for their selfpresentation and publicity. In 2006 for instance, Sonia Gandhi, the president of the Congress Party, attended the Ramlila Maidan performance, whereas the former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee (Bhartiya Janata Party) had been invited as chief guest at the Lal Kila Maidan (“Lav-Kush-Ramlila”). Consequently, these Ramlila venues not only select their audience by means of VIP passes, but also require tremendous security control. (At any time and place, however, public events such as the Ramlila also reveal local politics and power structures.) Regardless of the size and location of the stage, Ramlilas in Delhi compete with each other by means of powerful dialogues, touching melodies, famous lines from

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the Rāmcaritmānas, emotional moments, an atmosphere of decency, and aesthetic extravaganzas. It is difficult to assess whether this comparison of Ramlilas reflects a recent approach towards the play. In my view, this competitive effect is primarily related to the density of stages in Delhi and also the rising mobility of urban residents. Moreover, newspapers and local TV channels regularly broadcast the highlights of the Ramlila season and thus contribute towards a kind of consumer attitude. In 2006 the Hindi newspaper Navbhārat Ṭāims introduced a Ramlila contest and offered a prize for the best performance, based on the quality of costumes and sets, acting skill and the organisation of the event (including facilities provided for spectators). This certainly indicates substantially new priorities. Yet there are also aspects that tie in with the Ramlila tradition in rural and semiurban areas, notably in respect to bhakti and the sacredness of the play. This is clear when considering the commitment of some of the actors – yet by no means all of them – vis-à-vis their divine role. Men who embody Rama or Hanuman quite often regard their participation in the Ramlila as a religious duty or call. For the duration of the play they will eat only vegetarian food, take special care to purify their bodies, or even practise celibacy. Some stages have a back-stage prayer room, or provide a copy of the Rāmcaritmānas for worship. At other venues, a Brahmin cook is hired to serve the actors with “pure” (sattvik) food. However, this catering service and other precautions are rationalised in a double way. For example, from one perspective, after embodying Hanuman on stage, it does not feel appropriate to return to one’s wife, while from another, unless actors sleep on stage, they may risk their equipment and props being stolen. As elsewhere, the notion of līlā is most explicit in the case of ārati, an act of worship directed to the personification of Rama and other deities. This ceremony is performed either by a priest, an honorary guest or a member of the Ramlila troupe. In the latter case, it is again both the actor himself and the character he embodies who pay reverence to Rama (the double reality of līlā). The ārati ceremony also invites pious spectators to worship the god. Occasionally, some of them get on the stage and offer a garland or some sweets. Additional forms of getting the audience to interact with the stage reality are comparatively rare. However, during the “Lavkush”-Ramlila, fifteen married women from the VIP section were invited on stage to join the divine wedding preparations, a scene that lasted for about half an hour. Their behaviour was seen as a service to the god, quite unlike the general disregard of women on stage. Later on, male volunteers took the opportunity to carry the wedding-palanquins bearing Rama and his half-brothers. Another example to illustrate the implications of līlā in the metropolitan context concerns the phenomenon of clapping. Generally, it is not unsual in India for the audience to clap at the end of a programme (although spectators may cheer a virtuoso during the performance). In some middle-class settings in Delhi, though, Ramlila spectators have adopted the foreign custom of clapping hands. However, this

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action indicates neither enthusiasm about the art of the play, nor does it only occur at the end of the programme. Rather, the audience claps for the gods and their powers, for instance, when Rama breaks Shiva’s bow – a scene that requires only a small amount of acting skill, since a giant polystyrene bow is clearly and visibly simple to break. Hence, people react in analogy to the fictitious audience, i.e. on the level of the characters’ reality. They join the divine world by “complicity” and “collaboration”, to use Kapur’s terminology.33 In this respect, the audience dissolves the lines between social and stage reality. Similarly, spectators refrain from any criticism of the skill of the Rama impersonator, no matter whether he suits the divine role or not. As mentioned above, the privilege of being asked to embody Rama can be given to a sponsor as well (at times neither young nor of appropriate build). It is again out of respect and love for the god, as well as the sacredness of the play, that harsh comments about the central actor/character would be deemed a form of blasphemy.

4. Conceptualising Change Apart from gradually shifting priorities and attitudes towards the Ramlila, i.e. tendencies which are difficult to pinpoint and to quantify in numbers, there are specific dramaturgical and aesthetic features that influence the ways in which a Ramlila performance is perceived and experienced. In this section I shall evaluate some of these aspects, concentrating on the example of Delhi. Firstly I shall focus on the display and production of emotions, secondly on the type of stage reality, and thirdly on the impact of an art discourse. However, I assume that these issues of form and interpretative frame are limited neither to the metropolitan area nor essentially to the twenty-first century. Still, I would claim that they reflect patterns of seeing shaped by discourses and conditions familiar in a media-saturated, modern, and transcultural environment, rather than in village India. One common feature of Ramlila performances in Ramnagar, Asureshwar, and probably in several other places concerns the display, or rather non-display, of emotions. An actor is conceived of as a vessel that embodies the divine (Hindi: pātr, literally: utensil, actor). As part of this vessel-like state, the actor is to adopt a dispassionate bearing, no matter whether the actual scene is one of joy or sorrow. To outsiders, this ideal of calmness and self-control may even appear like non-acting; at times the living bodies seem to be frozen into a tableau vivant. Nevertheless, there are dramaturgical strategies for shaping an emotional response. This is done preferably by aural means: the tone of voice (a recitation technique), repetitive tone sequences, and swaying rhythms. The progression of these aural patterns blurs hours and days of the Ramlila into timeless presence, connecting seen and 33 Kapur 1990.

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unseen parts of the play. During performances in Delhi, however, actors self-consciously display facial movements, and thus represent alternating sentiments ascribed to the divine personae. A smiling face conveys Rama’s gentle character; Sita visibly longs for her husband, or panics in fear of Ravana. The gods are humanised. This visualisation of emotions follows conventions established by Hindi movies, so expressions often appear melodramatic (by contemporary Western standards), rather than natural. The audience is invited to feel empathy for the respective deity and his or her emotional state. At some Ramlila venues, this form of response is induced by large screens attached to the stage. Relevant facial movements are projected on a large scale, and are thus visible even from a distance. The display of emotions by an actor also serves to illustrate the narrative, whilst silent miming can even be substituted for the drama text. Furthermore, Delhi Ramlilas raise emotions with the help of natural sounds and popular songs that recall a variety of atmospheres and settings. These audio effects vary substantially between one episode and another. They do not create a continuous and connective soundscape. Rather they induce a fairly quick succession of affective and energetic states. These feelings develop in line with the chronology of the story; they are temporary in character. The visualisation of emotions is part of presentational conventions that fall under the category of aesthetic realism. Unlike the suggestive and symbolic acting prevalent in Ramnagar, Ramlila performances in Delhi seem to favour the idiom of simulation and in this respect, the creation of aesthetic illusion. The mode of play is more or less natural in that make-up, costumes, speech, movements and objects on stage attempt to imitate their equivalent in human life. Whereas in Ramnagar the monkey general Hanuman wears a mask, a red shirt and trousers (see Image 1), the “new” Hanuman in Delhi, by contrast, has a muscular and hairy body or rather, fully painted fur (as at the Pitampur Ramlila, see Image 2) What exactly is conceived of as “realistic” (fur, jewellery etc.) may obviously vary. In line with this aesthetic paradigm, Ramlila performances in Delhi emphasise full acting in that most of the narrative is translated into body movements, for instance, during spectacular wrestling scenes. Similarly, divine deeds that hitherto were left to the imagination of the spectators are acted out with the help of technical devices. Rama’s arrow hits Ravana by means of a huge laser pointer; the legendary bird Jatayu flies above the stage with the help of a rope stretched between two towers; fireworks give shape to the magic circle around Sita.

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Image 1: Hanuman carrying Rama on his shoulders, an assistant holds the mask. Ramnagar, 1.10.2003 Photo courtesy: Heike Moser

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Image 2: Hanuman at Pitampur, North Delhi, 29.9.2006 Photo courtesy: Beatrix Hauser

In recent years, these aesthetic conventions have been influenced by the TV version of the Ramayana (also available on DVD). The 78 episodes of this serial were first screened from 1987 and became the most successful programme ever shown on Indian television. The director Ramanand Sagar in his production had combined Ramlila dramaturgy – such as speaking face-on to the audience – with visual idioms well established by mass-produced religious art (posters, calendar prints) and comic books.34 He also relied on the stylistic conventions and lyrics of Parsi drama, an early form of commercial theatre that had popularised European repre34 On the aesthetics and reception of the Ramayana TV serial see Lutgendorf 1990.

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sentational techniques by the end of the nineteenth century (a genre superseded in the 1930s by film).35 Similarly, the idea of staging Ramlila in a more theatrical, rather than abstract, form goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Following the playwright Jyalaprasad Misra, a Ramlila could be presented both on open ground and also on a curtained proscenium stage.36 Thus the impact of the TV serial on contemporary presentational conventions of Ramlila productions should not be overestimated. Further studies will clarify when exactly and to what extent dramaturgical inventions have come to shape Ramlila. In what ways does the degree of aesthetic realism already influence and possibly change the perception of a Ramlila? My second point is that this dramaturgical device manipulates how people objectify stage reality and hence conceptualise the event. In the case of Ramnagar or Asureshwar, the significance and truth of the play is created primarily by dissolving borders between the divine and the social world. Those born into the caste of fishermen play the role of boatmen, and it is they who will navigate the divine ferry through mythological and, at the same time, local water. The god Rama is worshipped in the name of the character (paradigmatically Hanuman) and also by the person behind it (the actor). Participants can frame their role in the Ramlila in several ways: they may concentrate on the drama plot, the observance of a ritual or consider the event as an occasion to realise the divine sphere. Anybody is invited to get a feeling for how the lived-in world is suggestive of divine presence. This effect is largely the result of the mode of reference: the existing world is employed as a substitute for the sacred sphere; the preferred logic principle is that of analogy. In contrast, the dominant representational code in Delhi emphasises resemblance rather than analogy. This is much less demanding of the audience, as the example of the “new” Hanuman at the Pitampur stage shows. The enthusiastic comment there, “Oh my god, it is real[ly] Hanuman!” refers to a visual paradigm rather than the feeling of divine presence. This view of Hanuman is authenticated by its similarity with previous icons of this deity, popularised by several media (see Image 3). As shown with regard to the display of emotions, this aesthetic naturalisation produces a coherent fictitious world apart from the lived-in reality, rather than transforming onlookers into players within a divine reference system. The illusionist paradigm reduces the imaginative activity associated with a Ramlila. It hardly provokes the collaboration of spectators in considering the unseen indicators of divine presence. The audience is not forced to recall subsidiary information in order to decipher and make sense of the stage action. However,

35 Sagar referred to Ramayana-dialogues from Radheshyam Kathavacak (1890–1963), a Parsi theatre director and playwright. Radheshyam produced several Ramayana episodes in Parsi theatre (notably in 1915). His dialogues are still popular among present-day Ramlila actors in Delhi. For presentational conventions popularised by the Parsi theatre see Kapur 1995. 36 1904/1905, cited in Hein 1972: 77.

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following religious discourse, this prior knowledge and love for god is essential to enjoy the pleasure of a līlā.

Image 3: Hanuman as depicted on a religious poster. Websource

Last but not least, changes in performance style shape the reception of a Ramlila, inasmuch as language conventions permit whether and how their effects can be expressed in words. Experience is, after all, also determined by the ways in which people communicate about Ramlila. Elsewhere, I have evaluated several features that characterise the urban Ramlila discourse as reproduced by the English-medium press.37 Some of these phrases used to assess a Ramlila performance have also entered the respective Hindi communication. In general, the debates on the “correct” performance of a Ramlila (prevalent in Ramnagar and Asureshwar) have been superseded and/or extended by another speech pattern: remarks on the qualities of a “good” performance. Aesthetic innovations and preferences are newly discussed as topics in their own right, i.e. without questioning the sacred character of the play (say, for the lead role of Rama). As mentioned above, in Delhi this has culminated in a city-wide competition for the best Ramlila. Thus changes in dramatic form are not equated with those “dramatic changes” that are perceived as a sign of degeneration. Moreover, some ways of speaking about Ramlila convey reflective distance, rather than commitment. This detachment is only in part effected by the conceptual separation of audience and actors. This perspective rather hints at a social gap, 37 Hauser 2006a.

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perceived by several middle-class intellectuals, art-lovers, and journalists vis-à-vis the vibrant atmosphere at a Ramlila ground. Verbalised in terms of aesthetic distinction, the “crude” performance legitimises staying apart from the crowds at the nearby Ramlila venue. However, this public discourse also influences the expectations among regular visitors of a neighbourhood Ramlila.

5. Conclusion In this article I have considered (ritual) experience as a result of particular aesthetic conditions and dramaturgical strategies. The objective was to evaluate how different styles of enacting a religious play possibly predetermine its reception. These aesthetic effects, I have argued, manipulate the conceptualisation and interpretation of the event, and thus the production of meaning. Owing to lack of comparative data, it turned out to be difficult to locate these differences in a temporal perspective (time of change), and also to reduce them to being due simply to contrasting socio-geographic environments (mega-city versus province). Nevertheless, three points were identified in which present-day Ramlila performances in Delhi stand out and cause, or rather foster, comparatively new ways to experience this religious play. Among the issues raised – the visualisation of emotions, the type of stage reality, the impact of an art discourse – the major force in shaping experience seems to emerge from contrasting patterns of representation. Whereas some traditional Ramlila productions employ highly stylised forms of acting and call on analogies between the social and the divine world, the dominant Ramlila idiom in Delhi draws on aesthetic realism and emphasises the resemblance of actors with a paradigm version. This has consequences. The creation of analogies invites interpretation in both ways: to recognise the mundane condition in divine play (the boy who embodies Rama) and also to trace the divine in social reality (the environment proper, that during the play is occupied by the deities). Thus the lived-in and the imagined world start to oscillate. The permeability of the social and the divine is often understood as a defining feature of religious rituals. As Clifford Geertz puts it, in ritual “the world as lived and the world as imagined ... turn out to be the same world”.38 One may therefore wonder whether the urban Ramlila idiom fails to produce similar feelings or experiential states. As shown above, this is not the case. Aesthetic conditions by themselves promote, but do not enforce, experience. They shape perception on the personal, rather than collective, level. Ramlila has not turned into a secular form of entertainment, because several people respond to it as līlā. Moreover, the transcendent, if not liminal, quality of the play emerges from social negotiation. Regardless 38 Geertz 1973: 112.

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of the commitment of (hired) actors to the play, the līlā-effect is produced interactively, once members of the audience begin to show their religious feelings and thus infect others to sense the divine.39 In this respect, līlā is not so much a genre category “between ritual and theatre”, as one of aesthetic efficacy (Wirkungsästhetik). In other words, the enactment neither anticipates consensus about its meaning (whether it is conceived of as religious ceremony) nor the synchronisation of attitudes to the play. The intentions of actors and onlookers may vary individually. Hence, a devotee from the audience can force a professionally trained artist to accept an offering, and thus, through his own action, allude to divine presence. This ambiguity, or rather plurality, of approaches to a Ramlila performance is specific for līlā in general. In Delhi, however, the options to frame a Ramlila in competing ways have increased, particularly owing to speech patterns and arguments associated with a modern art discourse. At times aesthetic judgement and religious encounter might appear mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, this does not outdate the meaning of līlā, in the same way as a non-convincing piece of art will not question the institution of an art exhibition. Ramlila is changing as are religious forms and visual culture.

39 Even watching Ramayana on TV might have this effect, see Lutgendorf 1990.

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References Asad, Talal 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Davis, Richard H. 1996. “The Iconography of Rama’s Chariot”. In: David Ludden (ed.). Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press: 27–54. Freitag, Sandria B. (ed.). 1989. Culture and Power in Banaras: Community, Performance, and Environment, 1800–1980. Berkeley: University of California Press. Geertz, Clifford 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Grimes, Ronald 2000. “Ritual”. In: Willi Braun & Russell T. McCutchion (eds.). Guide to the Study of Religion. London: Cassell: 259–270. Goody, Jack 1977. “Against ‘Ritual’: Loosely Structured Thoughts on a Loosely Defined Topic”. In: Sally F. Moore & Barbara G. Myerhoff (eds.). Secular Rituals. Assen: Van Gorcum: 25–35. Gupta, Narayani 1981. Delhi Between Two Empires, 1803–1931: Society, Government and Urban Growth. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hauser, Beatrix 2006a. “Ästhetik im Transit: Indische Konzeptionen der Ramlila-Aufführungspraxis”. Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 15/2: 133–148. — 2006b. “Durch den Körper sehen: Zur Präsenz der Götter bei der indischen Ramlila”. In: Erika Fischer-Lichte et al. (eds.). Auf der Schwelle: Kunst, Risiken und Nebenwirkungen. Munich: Fink: 143–159. — 2008a. “Acting Like God? Ways of Embodying the Divine in Religious Play and Deity Possession”. Diskus 9. http://www.basr.ac.uk/diskus/diskus9/hauser.htm (21/05/2010). — 2008b. “Dem Spiel ergeben: Zum Entwurf devotionaler Liebe bei der indischen Ramlila”. In: Anke Henning et al. (eds.). Bewegte Erfahrungen: Zwischen Emotionalität und Ästhetik. Zürich: Diaphanes: 201–214. — 2008c. “Ramlila im Großformat: Zum Ritualtheater im Kontext einer indischen Megastadt”. Journal Ethnologie 6. http://www.journal-ethnologie.de/DeutschSchwer punktthemen/Schwerpunktthemen_2008/Rituale_heute/Ramlila_im_Grossformat/in dex.phtml (21/05/2010). Hein, Norvin 1972. The Miracle Plays of Mathura. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hess, Linda 1983. “Ram Lila: The Audience Experience”. In: Monika Thiel-Horstmann (ed.). Bhakti in Current Research, 1979–1982. Berlin: Reimer: 171–194. Kapur, Anuradha 1990. Actors, Pilgrims, Kings and God: The Ramlila at Ramnagar. Calcutta: Seagull. — 1993. “Deity to Crusader: The Changing Iconography of Ram”. In: Gyanendra Pandey (ed.). Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in India Today. New Delhi: Viking: 74–109.

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— 1995. “The Representation of Gods and Heroes: Parsi Mythological Dramas of the Early Twentieth Century”. In: Vasudha Dalmia & Heinrich von Stietencron (eds.). Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity. New Delhi: Sage: 401–419. Katz, Marc J. 1993. The Children of Assi: The Transference of Religious Traditions and Communal Inclusion in Banaras. Göteborg: University of Göteborg. Khokar, Ashish n.d. (1999?). Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra: A History. Sumitra Charat Ram Remnisces. New Delhi: Roli Books/Lustre Press. Kumar, Nita 1995. “Class and Gender Politics in the Ramlila”. In: William S. Sax (ed.). The Gods at Play: Līlā in South Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 156– 176. Lutgendorf, Philip 1990. “Ramayan: The Video”. The Drama Review 34/2 (T 126): 127–176. — 1991. The Life of a Text: Performing the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsidās. Berkeley: University of California Press. Niehus, H. 1905. “Das Ram-Festspiel Nordindiens”. Globus 87: 58–61. Parkhill, Thomas 1993. “What’s Taking Place: Neighborhood Ramlilas in Banaras”. In: Bradley R. Hertel & Cynthia A. Humes (eds.). Living Banaras: Hindu Religion in Cultural Context. Delhi: Manohar: 103–126. Patnaik, Dhirendra Nath 1974. “Folk Plays of Orissa”. Sangeet Natak 32/4–6: 26–33. Ramanujan, Attipat Krishnaswami 1986 “Two Realms of Kannada Folklore”. In: Stuart Blackburn & A.K. Ramanujan (eds.). Another Harmony: Essays on the Folklore of India. Berkeley: University of California Press: 41–75. Richman, Paula (ed.). 1992. Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sax, William S. 1990. “The Ramnagar Ramlila: Text, Performance, Pilgrimage”. History of Religions 30/2: 129–153. — (ed.). 1995. The Gods at Play: Līlā in South Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schechner, Richard 1983. Performative Circumstances: From the Avant Garde to Ramlila. Calcutta: Seagull. — 1993. “Crossing the Water: Pilgrimage, Movement, and Environmental Scenography of the Ramlila of Ramnagar”. In: Bradley R. Hertel & Cynthia A. Humes (eds.). Living Banaras: Hindu Religion in Cultural Context. Delhi: Manohar: 19– 72. Swann, Darius L. 1990. “Ram Lila”. In: Farley P. Richmond & Darius L. Swann & Phillip B. Zarilli (eds.). Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press: 215–236. Turner, Victor 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications. Williams, Joanna 1996. The Two-Headed Deer: Illustrations of the Ramayana in Orissa. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Yolanda van Ede

Differing Roads to Grace: Spanish and Japanese Sensory Approaches to Dance 1. Introduction I will start my argument with a description of a culture clash I witnessed some 25 years ago, while still a dancer myself. It was a clash between a Spanish flamenco dance instructor in Madrid and her Japanese pupils, which I fortunately noted in a personal diary. Indeed, this incident was brought back to me when, after having become an anthropologist, I found myself involved in the explosion of studies on the senses that followed the works of authors such as David Howes, Constance Classen, and Paul Stoller.1 They reminded me of my own experimenting with didactic methods, when still a ballroom-dance instructor, which turned out to be nothing less than applications of differing sensory models. Only then did I recall the incident in that particular class in Madrid, and wondered whether a sensory approach could offer a tool for making sense of what happened. My diary entry leaves no doubt as to how shocked I was at the time, even without being aware of the enduring stereotypical notions of Japanese people. Emiko Ohnuki-Thierney2 and Hillel Schwartz,3 for instance, show the persistence of an image of the Japanese in the West, which depicts them as mere “copy-cats”. Especially when it comes to cultural modes that differ from familiar, Japanese phenomena, this imagery includes an assumption that Japanese people are totally incapable of expressing themselves, or showing emotions and creativity. Whether it concerns the material or the “spiritual”, Japanese cars may be very reliable, but they are still copies of American and German brands; Japanese classical pianists are envied for their technique and precision, but are thought to lack “character”. It is form they imitate (and know how to improve), but they are said to have nothing to add to meaning, aesthetics, content. Surely such derogatory notions, also held among flamenco aficionados, are ethically unacceptable. In fact, they have long since been proven to be wrong. Not 1 Howes 1991; 2006 Classen 1993; Stoller 1989. 2 Ohnuki-Thierney 1987a; 1987b. 3 Schwartz 1995.

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only in technology and classical music, but also in flamenco, Japanese artists have been receiving recognition of their achievements at contests and festivals, even on flamenco’s home ground, Andalusia. If we are willing to break through cultural misconceptions, and want to make a real effort to understand the dynamics of, for instance, music and dance in a globalising world, it is my conviction that we have to shift our focus from what towards how. We have to move away from a preoccupation with cultural forms and entities – which, in fact, fosters a rather static perception of culture and, in its maelstrom, endless discussions on authenticity and unethical generalisations. I suggest a move towards processes of experience, method and style, in accord with James Ferguson and with Michel de Certeau’s “ways of operating”.4 Cultural dynamics are caught up in the dynamics of learning and adaptation, in everyday life as well as in art, in the process of bodily practice, a learning through the body. The senses offer a way to analyse the process of embodiment, as is also argued by Tomie Hahn, on whose splendid book Sensational Knowledge I rely a great deal.5 Her outline and mine can show a sensory approach to be a valuable tool in understanding how people learn – or have to learn. We learn more about ability and meaning when we take people’s sensorially based method of learning as a point of departure rather than as what they seek to incorporate. Differences in method may point towards different emphases that go beyond valuations of “right” and “wrong”, and can draw our attention to the emergence of other, new styles of what all practitioners still conceive to be the same genre. As such, I hope to contribute to an “anaesthetisation” of misconceptions of the “Other” in the context of cultural adaptations to local phenomena in a globalising world. While I focus primarily on dance, references to sensory analyses applied to religious6 and cultural contexts such as the Japanese tea ceremony7 will make clear that the proposed mode of understanding through the sensing is not restricted to dance alone. As a condensed expression of cultural meaning and symbolism, and a reflection of society and social relations,8 dance is ritual. It is exactly its highly structured nature that makes dance practice and performance a fruitful field for understanding how culture in general, and ritual in particular, is learned, adapted and embodied. This paper presents my research project on Japanese flamenco as proposed after some preliminary fieldwork in Seville and Madrid in 2007. It does not offer empirically grounded statements on flamenco in Japan as such - since the research proper has only been actualised, after the Heidelberg conference, in 2009. My aim here is, firstly, to demonstrate the methodological and theoretical value of a sen4 5 6 7 8

Ferguson 1999; Certeau 1984. Hahn 2007. E.g. Meyer 2004. Kondo 2005a. See also Hahn 2007: 59.

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sory approach; and secondly, that such a sensory comparison has an ethical contribution to make as it may take the edge of stereotypical assumptions concerning Japanese cultural adaptations.

2. Clashing Cultures The release of Carlos Saura’s motion picture Carmen in 1983, from Bizet’s opera in a flamenco arrangement and choreographed by Antonio Gades, definitively launched flamenco as a music and dance genre on the global stage. Dance studios mushroomed all over Europe, in the US, and in Japan as well. Thousands of youngsters flocked to Madrid and Andalusia to discover flamenco sources: local flamenco celebrities singing, playing guitar, and – foremost – dancing. I was one of them. In the Amor de Dios studio in Madrid, I stood among other foreigners and Spanish people, mainly girls like me in their early twenties, shedding sweat and tears while trying to capture flamenco’s complex rhythms. The instructor we had signed on with was a passionate gypsy woman, an amazing dancer herself – the very reason why we all wanted to take her class. She was a tough teacher, too, as we were soon to find out, for all of us payos (non-gypsies), foreigners and Spanish alike. But when it came to the three Japanese girls, she acted in a suspiciously different manner. Most of the time she simply ignored them, passing them by during her round along the rows to make a corrective remark here and there. One day, however, she suddenly stopped in front of the Japanese – who were always in a group together – and started to yell, ordering them to start a particular set of steps over and over again, and to listen to the compás. The guitarist was not playing for his own pleasure and their entertainment, she cried, meanwhile clapping and stamping furiously to indicate the right timing. Only after some fifteen minutes and endless attempts by the Japanese girls, tears running down their cheeks, and with the rest of us watching the scene awkwardly, did she give up and throw her hands to heaven with a loud sigh as a gesture of frustration and despair. At the time, I did not understand this. We all had a hard time in learning the compás, especially since she wanted us to start right after the beat. Why pick on the Japanese? Why did she seem more patient with the rest of us, Dutch, Germans, French, Americans, and Spanish? One night I met her at a party and decided to ask her what she held against the Japanese. Her face turned angry instantly, and again her hands went up as she exclaimed, “Ah, these Japanese! They copy everything! Posture, gesture, face, everything. They are their teachers’ dummies! I can see by the mere turn of their little finger who they took classes from! I have no intention of dealing with [a colleague]’s little finger. That’s not flamenco! That’s stealing!” Other guests at the party, many of them flamenco dancers, singers, and guitarists, overheard our conversation and joined in. All seemed to agree with her, and came

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up with their own experiences and stories, wondering why the Japanese wanted to learn flamenco in the first place. The Japanese would never understand, they would never learn, so they stated. A few years ago I decided to leave the field in which I wrote my doctoral dissertation, to return to my initial passion: dance. I came across this entry in my diary and went to search the internet for Japanese and flamenco. That is how I learned about Yoko Komatsubara, whose qualities as a flamenco dancer had already been acknowledged at a festival in Mairena in 1975. She had also received the Insignia de Oro of the city of Cordoba in 1977 for bringing flamenco to Japan, years before Saura’s Carmen gave its popularity a spurt in the Land of the Rising Sun. The flamencos in Madrid in 1985 may not have known about her, although this is hard to imagine. Probably they took her as an extraordinarily talented and unique individual, not to be compared with the Japanese apprentices they encountered in their studios. They evidently did not foresee the many other Japanese who would follow in Komatsubara’s footsteps: Shoji Kojima, Keiko Sato, Yuko Sato (“La Gitana Japonesa”), Mika Kato, Yasushi Yamazaki, Eiko, Atsuko Kamata (“Ami”), to name but a few. They were not only famous in Japan’s explosively growing flamenco scene, as their biographies reveal, but also danced with highly reputed Spanish flamenco ensembles, performed as main acts at festivals all around Andalusia, won competitions like the Concurso Nacional de Arte Flamenco in Cordoba, and so on. The Japanese did not understand flamenco? They would never learn? On the contrary, they could compete with Andalusian flamenco heroes and heroines, according to local juries, reviewers, and audiences. What is striking about this growing Japanese involvement in the Spanish professional flamenco scene is the recognition of their ability to perform with gracia or duende. The latter term became widely popular after Federico Garcia Lorca’s publication of 1933 on this so-called essence of flamenco.9 Its popularity, however, also fuelled vehement debates on meaning and ownership. Duende stood for flamenco’s authenticity and origin, both in relation to the performer’s workmanship and soul, and to his ethnic and local background. It also signified that “divine spark” – not to be mistaken for some external muse – that emanates from the performer’s soul or, rather, guts, showing his or her true quality and talent for expressing the depths and richness of flamenco cante. An initiated audience will recognise the emergence of duende instantaneously, instinctively responding with a confirming “oleee!”. It is particularly this shared experience of performer and audience that turned duende into an essentialising marker of identity, referring to an authentic “ownership”. It has been held that only those who have flamenco “in their blood” possess the capacity to evoke and to recognise its emanation. This led to discussions about the ethnic nature of this flamenco blood, whether Gypsy or 9 Lorca 2007.

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Andalusian. At least until the 1970s, payos were definitely excluded from being able to evoke duende. The interest they took in flamenco was benevolently appreciated, if only for the huge amounts of pesetas they were willing to spend on getting a feel for this passionate and extraordinary genre. At times, they received acknowledgement for their technical skills, but never for duende. And certainly not the Japanese! However, if duende was to be a local, ethnically-bound essence, what about a Komatsubaru or Kojima, or all those other foreigners that are not mentioned here? Might there be a Japanese equivalent of duende, might there even be a general human capacity to evoke a “divine spirit”, which would have to be recognised indiscriminately, against all odds, even by the most die-hard flamencos who sternly and proudly seek to protect “their” cultural and ethnic heritage? I will not go into the debates on ethnic authenticity here, and its manifold historical, social, and political dimensions. Others have done so with much more knowledge and expertise.10 The comparative approach that underlies my current anthropological research project will take up the issue from a Japanese angle later on. It will support my argument that duende – or grace, which many flamencos prefer nowadays – has been but a local indicator of a universal human concept. As mentioned before, the image of Japanese being mere copy-cats already has a long history in European and American descriptions of Japanese learning and adaptation of Western science and cultural phenomena. This discourse is grounded in an opposition between a so-called Japanese “flawless superficiality” and a takenfor-granted Western originality and its associated superiority. More recently, discussions on cultural adaptation follow Michael Taussig’s ground-breaking work on mimesis as the core of all play, all learning, and all change, in an ongoing process of imitating form, adjusting content to a new, specific context, and transforming not only meaning, but the initial form in the process as well.11 The shift is to be lauded from a static view of cultures that cherishes the “authentic” versus “imitation”, “meaning” versus “form”, and the unavoidable unethical “true” versus “wrong” distinctions, towards a more dynamic perception of culture. However, it is my modest opinion that it is the very process itself, how these dynamics come about, that still receives too little attention. In descriptions of mimetic processes, we are too often served with what has changed, like pictures in a slide show. It is left to the viewer to deduce how the process of transformation took place. Most studies on “world music”, for instance, are sociological analyses of ethnic, transnational, socio-economic, and politico-historical features in its globalising process.12 However, in order to come to terms with the emergence of “cultural variety and heterogeneity” – to speak with Wulf – I propose that a phenomenological, anthro10 E.g. Washabaugh 1996; Steingress 2002a; 2002b; 2006. 11 Taussig 1993. 12 E.g. Steingress 2002a; 2002b; 2006; Stokes 2004; Feld & Keil 2005.

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pological approach focused on the body is necessary. Only by returning to the learning body and its senses are we able to accomplish the “transdisciplinary and transcultural orientation as well as a reflexive self-criticism” needed to reject a “eurocentrism” which still seems to dominate “a big part of the humanities and aesthetica”13 of which flamenco offers a fascinating case.

3. Sensory Portals to Dance In order to accomplish such a transdisciplinary and transcultural orientation as suggested by Wulf,14 I propose to move away from what flamenco is, or should be according to some, towards how its cultural dynamics may be grasped. Michel de Certeau coined the term “ways of operating” that emphasises the importance and developments of processional experience in everyday practice.15 James Ferguson took this one step further when outlining his view on the emergence of styles based on differing methods.16 His work makes it evident: what can only be understood by investigating how. Common-sense understanding of style relates merely to form. However, the physical, material outside, as with style of dress, manner of body movement, or life-style, is not detached from content, meaning and the spiritual, as also Birgit Meyer argues, in reference to Ferguson.17 “[I]n the study of style, the how is all-important, and the old idea of culture as the ideational content of expressive behavior is inadequate. For although style always involves knowledge, it is a practical kind of knowledge: more ‘knowing how’ than ‘knowing that’”.18 Style, then, should be understood as a “‘performative competence’, a ‘form of practical signifying activity’, mediating between content and form”.19 In bringing this mediation to light, Meyer pleads for a prominent role for the senses in our investigations of cultural developments. The interest in the senses, since the late 1980s, has basically been directed against a Western ocularcentrism, and its political, epistemological, and methodological consequences. In refuting the Western model of the five senses – sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, ranked according to their epistemological value – studies have shown innumerable social and cultural differences and nuances of sensory 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Wulf 2007: 129–130. Wulf 2007. De Certeau 1984. Ferguson 1999. Ibid.: 98. Meyer 2004: 94. Ibid.: 95; Ferguson 1999: 96.

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perception within Western cultures, as well as in other parts of the world.20 They reveal how a sensory approach can contribute to a deeper understanding of the workings of, for instance, social relationships and gender, commodity and reciprocity, perception of environmental worlds, cosmologies and cosmogonies.21 In particular, the sense of touch has received serious attention, and been granted more significance than Western philosophers and theologians had been willing to accord it in the past. No longer restricted to haptics – that is, touching with hands or other body parts – alone, the sense of touch became extended to cutaneous feeling (of air, water, fluids), as well as kinaesthesia, bodily movement.22 In relation to the topic of this paper, kinaesthesia deserves special attention. For instance, Kathryn Geurts’s work outlines extensively how, for the Ewe of Ghana, the body is the locus of knowledge par excellence. All social and cultural knowledge is expressed through bodily movement, for how a person carries his body, sits, stands, walks, gives and receives, mirrors his embodied knowledge of righteous behaviour. The Ewe exemplify kinaesthesia, including touch, as the encompassing sense of all senses in an almost synaesthetic way.23 However, in studies on the senses in Western cultural contexts, touch has also increasingly been taken as all-encompassing, that is, including sight, hearing, smell, and taste.24 This argument for kinaesthesia as the all-important sense also turns up in dance studies, as in Hannah Järvinen’s writing.25 Writing on Western modern dance, Järvinen defends the conventional visual perspective on stage dance, since it is in consensus with the way modern dance is taught. However, she does admit that the visual may “not be quite this crucial to learning all forms of dancing, particularly those outside of the Western theatrical convention”.26 She continues by stating that there is “a point in stressing the selective quality of kinesthesia, its choice of only some bodily sensations as relevant to the movement sense”.27 In other words, dance as a kinaesthetic practice entails all the senses, but cannot be internalised and learned in its entirety, as a conceptual whole. Its learning process has to follow a particular road, structured along a particular, socially and culturally accepted, sensory model. This also reflects Tomie Hahn’s argument in her book on nihon buyo (2007), but allow me to describe first some of my personal experiments with sensory learning.

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

See Jütte 2004; Howes 2005. See also Howes 2006. Heller 1991; Classen 2005. Geurts 2002. E.g. Verrips 2006. Järvinen 2006. Ibid.: 75. Ibid.

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4. Two Modes of Learning As a ballroom-dance instructor, I had to deal with various pupils in various settings. Some of them were sent to “dansschool” by their parents as part of their education and upbringing, as was the custom in the Netherlands until the 1980s. Many of them stumbled their way through what most felt was an obligatory class. As an instructor at one of these schools, I simply took it as a matter of fact that some would never learn, and the young kids could not care less. However, on other occasions my pupils really wanted, or needed, to learn at least one dance properly. Apart from the Amsterdam Theatre Academy, which included ballroom dancing in its programme for some years, I was also regularly hired by couples who had to prepare themselves for the opening dance at their wedding party. In such cases I felt obliged to do whatever I could to get them dancing. I began to experiment, for, among theatre directors-to-be and wedding couples, particularly the men tended to feel very insecure about their dance abilities – which too often turned out to be understandable when seeing them at their first class. Most of them were indeed unable to pick up the movements by the usual teaching method, that is, me standing in front of them showing the steps for them to imitate. Somehow they were not capable of translating what they saw, the visual, into bodily movement (see trajectory A in Fig. 1). Unwilling to give up on them, I tried different approaches. I was not an anthropologist yet, and the senses not even an anthropological issue at the time, but it was clear to me that dance as danced involved more than watching and moving, and teaching could also follow other lines. The first alternative I came up with was listening to the music. Dancing is, after all, moving to music, to rhythm. So when method A failed, I moved to method B, drawing my class’s attention to the beat. I asked them to listen to, for instance, a Viennese waltz with their eyes closed first. Then, after a while, I would rock their shoulders softly to the beat, before slowly pushing them into steps. It worked for several of them. Through sound, banning sight at first, they were able to embody a dance (see trajectory B in Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1: Four sensory trajectories towards ballroom dancing A = usual * Visual * Body movement * Oral and Aural * Movement in Space * Tactile

B * Aural/oral * Tactile * Body movement * Movement in Space

C * Tactile * Movement in space * Aural

D * Media/Dance notation * Oral * Movement in space * Aural

For others, however, sound/beat did not serve as a portal. For whatever reason, they became nervous from listening on its own, although they clearly had a sense for music. With them, I skipped the listening and rocking part, and started immediately to dance with them. In practice, this approach came down to dragging them across the dance floor, with the record on loud, pushing and pulling them, until they made the right steps, in the right direction, and in time (trajectory C, Fig. 1). These pupils hardly knew, rationally, what they were doing. But their bodies understood how to move in space, and to let the music fit in. Not sight nor sound, nor even haptic touch and movement of the body as such in relation to sound, but movement through space, made them embody the dance. If this method too would not work, there was one final option. The person at hand, I concluded at the time, had, obviously, little body consciousness, since the sensory trajectories I could think of were ineffective. I had to take the “mind road”. As the most distant from my own sense of dancing, it was my last option, but it worked, particularly for elderly men (if I remember well). What they needed was a rationalised display of steps to music. I had to sit with them at a table and draw them a dance notation by which I explained each step mathematically. For instance, to stick to the Viennese waltz: 1. step forward with your right foot at a 90º angle, and put your weight on it; 2. step backward with your left foot at a 90º angle and put your weight on it; 3. pull your right foot aside and put your weight on it; start again at 1. One, two, three! One, two, three! Each set consists of a 180º turn, making two a full circle. Simple. These men would go to the dance floor and walk their way through a Viennese waltz, until the music started to make sense to them as well. They experienced no

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difficulty whatsoever in translating a text into moving in space, while a translation of a visually perceived demonstration seemed impossible (trajectory D, Fig. 1). When pondering on how to put this experiential knowledge into an anthropological research project, I suddenly remembered the clash between the Spanish flamenco instructor and her Japanese apprentices I had witnessed. I wondered whether this clash could be explained along the lines of differing methods, of differing sensory trajectories. Certain sensory scholars working in Japanese contexts, such as Dorinne Kondo, offered me some clues on the possible sensory distinctions.28 It was, however, Tomie Hahn’s Sensational Knowledge. Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance (2007) that helped me elaborate a hypothetical comparison of two distinct sensory models, as applied by the Spanish instructor and the Japanese young women. Hahn’s main questions consider “how a culture’s transmission processes prioritize practitioners’ attendance to certain sensorial (even particular qualities of sensory experience), and how the transmission of sensory knowledge can shape dancers’ experiential orientation”.29 She justifies her sensory approach by three propositions. Firstly, dance is embodied knowledge, which is, to a large extent, not conscious. Secondly, there are definite limits as to the amount of information a body can process at any given time.30 An instructor has to follow particular methods and use pedagogical devices in order for the apprentice to select the right information at a proper stage.31 Thirdly, this “selection of information in a process of transmission is culturally incentive”.32 The information is structured according to certain sensory emphases that reveal a sensory cultural structure, or model. It offers a “path to comprehending cultural aesthetics, social structures, and interactions [that] lies in the process of embodiment, or the methods of transmission. It is a cycle, however, as cultural aesthetics and interactions are also the key to understanding transmission.”33 In other words, a certain mode of transmission represents aesthetic conceptions current in a particular culture, and vice versa. Hahn’s points resonate with Järvinen’s (2006) premise, as well as with my own experiential findings, particularly with regard to apprentices’ inability to take on a dance in its entirety of movement-sound-space. Her proposition of a transmissionculture interrelation obviously asks for a better-informed classification than the 28 29 30 31 32 33

Kondo 1997; 2005a; 2005b. Hahn 2007: 5. See Csikszentmihalyi 1991: 28–29. Hahn 2007: 95. Ibid. Hahn 2007: 59.

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rather mono-cultural comparison I suggest here, that is, between an undifferentiated, presumed hegemonic Spanish sensory model and a ditto Japanese model. I will return to this issue in my concluding remarks. For now, a simplification is needed in order to start a comparison between the two culturally diverging flamenco worlds. Now, what happens if aesthetics and social structures, and their related modes of transmission, are not shared? What if the process of learning and embodiment of a particular cultural phenomenon diverges from what an apprentice has grown used to in her own culture? The pupils in Japanese dance, nihon buyo, who figure in Hahn’s study are all Japanese. What would happen if these Japanese women were to go to Spain to learn flamenco? To achieve a first, tentative understanding of the Spanish instructor’s outburst, I will project Hahn’s sensory structure on to those three Japanese girls in Madrid and hope it will also open the way towards learning about flamenco in Japan.

5. Two Dances, two Cultures In nihon buyo, Hahn describes the learning paths unfolding like a fan, each part of which represents one of the senses. Imitation of the teacher, the iemoto’s movements, designates the very first phase of learning the dance. Only at an advanced stage will the iemoto correct a pupil’s hand, alter body posture with a gentle touch, thereby explaining the significance of the body movement. Once all steps and moves are remembered and can be acceptably performed, the apprentice will be invited to dance to recorded music. Only then do the emotional components of the dance, that mimes a story, often consisting of several personae, receive in-depth attention. When a student is preparing for a public performance, a musician will be present to accompany her. Other media, such as photographs and video footage, have played a minor role in the educational process until now, but are becoming more commonplace. Put into a scheme, nihon buyo instruction starts with sight, to be followed by touch, then sound. Use of media, a rather recent phenomenon, may involve all the senses, but sidelines actual dance practice (see Fig. 2). Fig. 2: Nihon Buyo and Flamenco sensory trajectories Nihon Buyo Flamenco * Aural/Oral * Visual * Visual * Tactile * Oral/Aural * Media * Tactile * Media

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Compared to nihon buyo, flamenco presents us with an entirely different scheme. First of all, the most important feature of flamenco is cante, song. The lyrics, the melody, and, above all, its particular rhythm, its compás, are what determines the kind of cante, the palo. Each palo – and, for those who are accomplished flamencos, even each cante – is characterised by its particular music and dance, with its own compás. Without the embodied knowledge of the right compás one cannot pretend to dance flamenco. Not only the dancer’s feet but the entire body must move in compás. The visual aspects as related to movements of arms, hands, the upper body, and head are of secondary importance. They may qualify a dancer aesthetically, but a sense of compás is primary. This ability, however, is not simply a technique limited to musical chords and rhythm. In close connection to the cante, a dancer has to express the meaning and emotion of the cante – or at least of the palo – through the management of the compás. Students may scrutinise video footage to gain a better sense of particular moves in relation to the music, although instructors prefer their apprentices to see live performances or, even better, to partake in as many social events as possible in which they can put their dance skill into practice. However, as in the case of nihon buyo, media are becoming ever more part of the transmission process. The sense of haptic touch by the instructor plays virtually no part in flamenco, because there is no inclination to correct the angle of arms or hips with such precision. Nor can an instructor pull or push a student into compás. Flamenco is not ballroom dancing. As divergent as the sensory mode of flamenco here outlined is from the one Hahn explains for nihon buyo, are flamenco’s “cultural aesthetics, social structures and interactions”.34 Firstly, nihon buyo is a dance genre related to pantomime. As such, it depends greatly on visual accuracy. The teacher is more than just a dance instructor. She also offers a social role model as the head of a particular style-lineage representing particular interpretations and expressions of the stories danced. Not surprisingly, it is this iemoto who decides on her student’s progress through a series of initiations, of which the most important is when she gives her student a new name. This name is more than a mere stage-name. It marks the student’s accomplishment by including her in the iemoto’s lineage. The iemoto has become her “dance mother”, her tradition the student’s “dance family”. With this initiation, the iemoto determines the student’s command of the dance “vocabulary”, that is, all moves and steps necessary to dance nihon buyo stories. After this a more personal learning may begin, in a one-to-one relationship between iemoto and student. Only now will the iemoto encourage the student to introduce her own human spirit, her personality.35 As Hahn recalls:

34 Hahn 2007: 59. 35 Ibid.: 67–70.

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“I was imitating Iemoto imitating komori [i.e. ‘the babysitter’] imitating a sea slug. Iemoto said to me, ‘do not just imitate me. That’s boring. Learn to dance and then dance with Samie’s [i.e. Tomie Hahn’s] heart’.”36 In fact, it is only at this stage that the real dancing starts to become a mode of personal expression. Once this expression evolves and the student can prepare herself for performance, musicians are invited to accompany her dancing. Until then, the sound mode consists of the iemoto’s oral instructions on beat and pitch, her usage of a mnemonic sound system, and her singing music and vocal lines. Occasionally she will put on a recording.37 Fig. 3: Cultural aesthetics and social structures compared Nihon Buyo Flamenco * Stage dance: pantomime * Social & stage dance: musical interaction * Dance vocabulary * Rhythm vocabulary: compás * Iemoto – master-pupil * Expression of emotional modality * Initiation * Reputation and expertise * Expression of emotional modality * Initiation at social/religious events In flamenco, there is no such social structure of schools, lineages, and initiation rites. Apprentices choose an instructor based on his or her reputation as a dancer, or his or her expertise and reputation related to a specific palo, and his or her availability. They may feel inclined to show respect for a particular instructor they consider to be their major teacher in the art, and their love for his or her interpretation and style, but this would be strictly personal. Amor de Dios, the studio in Madrid for example, offers a timetable of instructors that changes by the week. After each name, one or two palos are mentioned to designate that week’s classes by that specific instructor, as well as the level of accomplishment expected from pupils. There is no formal assessment; students are to determine themselves whether they are beginners, advanced, or semi-professional. An instructor keeps an eye on newcomers, on whether they indeed answer to the level indication, but in practice hardly anyone is ever excluded from partaking. Depending on the apprentices’ understanding and embodiment of the compás, and the time an instructor stays on, the students may end up with a complete choreography. In general, however, students learn only bits and pieces of various series of steps and moves, which – in comparison to nihon buyo’s dance “vocabulary” – could be called a “sound vocabulary”.

36 Ibid.: 49. 37 Ibid.: 123.

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Whether partial or complete, such choreographies become the basis of improvisations at fiestas and tablãos, and ad hoc performances at parties. Although flamenco classes are always accompanied by a guitarist, and some dancers may be part of a (semi-)professional dance company, such fiestas and spontaneous occasions are considered to be the most valuable learning events. In the company of singers, guitarists, and other musicians, the dancer can improve his or her skills, not only in dancing a palo in compás, but to different cantes and melodic styles of the guitar accompaniment as well. Flamenco studios like Amor de Dios are, however, only a recent phenomenon. In Andalusia, schools run by an instructor are a more common phenomenon. Nevertheless, these schools, too, do not represent a particular flamenco tradition, other than an expertise in a palo historically related to its locality, for example sevillanas, tangos de Malaga, or fandangos de Huelva. These flamenco schools are, in a sense, comparable to ballroom-dance schools in Europe, where the young were given instructions in how to dance at festive events. The process of transmission in these schools showed no substantial difference from the one I propose in relation to my observation of several instructors’ classes at Amor de Dios. Only a few Andalusian schools would offer a programme leading towards a professional career as a dancer, a career that would take off with auditioning for, or being invited to, a professional flamenco ensemble. As such, flamenco still has social ties to everyday life, which in nihon buyo – a stage dance par excellence – is lacking (see Fig. 3). Now, suppose we take at face value Hahn’s suggestion that “techniques of the body in motion are culturally and historically situated”,38 and we project her nihon buyo sensory trajectory and social structures on to the Japanese flamenco apprentices of my case. We may now come to understand a little why the Spanish instructor became so upset with them, and why flamencos in Madrid held that Japanese would never be able to learn flamenco. The importance of imitation at an early stage of Japanese learning, and the postponement of including and displaying their own personalities and emotions – until the teacher gave his or her approval to do so – could be at the heart of this cultural misunderstanding. Both parties may not have been aware of their differing methods as applied in both teaching and learning flamenco. Consequently they probably were also not aware of the differing cultural aesthetics and social expectations of the other. As Hahn implies with her vicious circle of cultural transmission,39 and as my ballroom-dancing students made clear, not being culturally familiar with particular sensory modes of transmission often leads both instructors and students to conclude that “they will never learn.” This evaluation, however, equals what has to be learned to how it should be

38 Hahn 2007: 159. 39 Hahn 2007: 5.

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learned. My ballroom-dancing students, as well as Japanese flamenco dancers, have proven this conclusion to be wrong. I will elaborate this comparison further in the concluding paragraph. First there is duende to be addressed.

6. Artistic Essence The sense of the term duende is, in fact, disputed. This is not the place to explore its history and the discussions of its meanings. Suffice it to say that it seems to have lost much of its weight as a signifier of authenticity, and its historical and “political correctness” among flamencos and flamencologists.40 Moreover, in the course of flamenco’s growing popularity around the globe, duende also became highly popularised. Employed by newcomers on the flamenco scene, it was used to index those who had turned flamenco into their “life-style” – judging themselves to be the “real flamencos” – against the “wannabes” who practised flamenco today, but might opt for Argentinean tango or Hawaiian hula tomorrow. Consequently, many Spanish aficionados began to avoid its usage altogether, preferring gracia instead. Nevertheless, whether duende or gracia, both terms are used to indicate a state of being, a moment during a performance in which the art’s essence or spirit is evoked in the interaction between all performers, and between performers and audience. As the word gracia, in particular, implies, its meaning entails an aesthetic valuation (grace, elegance), as well as surrender to mercy – the mercy of God (hence Amor de Dios, “love of God”). Although this religious connotation suggests the grace of an external entity – God, in Roman Catholic Andalusia – it predominantly refers to sympathy, a pathos shared by all participants simultaneously aroused from within. In other words, it is a collective, embodied experience of artists and audience, which can only be achieved by a surrender of each individual, knowing body, a surrender to the here and now of the artistic passion. This state of being, however, is not restricted to flamenco, nor to gypsies or Andalusians, as many Spanish aficionados tend to believe. George R.S. Mead, for instance, holds that “the physical body of man is as it were the exteriorization of the invisible subtle embodiment of the life of the mind”, that is the “subtle body”.41 This “subtle body”, he wrote in 1919, is part of a “very ancient belief” that has been lost in “the sceptical rationalism of the present day [which] dismiss[es] summarily all such beliefs of antiquity as the baseless dreams of a pre-scientific age, and dump[s] them all indiscriminately into the midden of exploded superstitions”.42 40 Steingress 2002a; 2002b; see also van de Port 2002 on authentification. 41 Mead 2001: 1. 42 Ibid.: 2.

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This Modernist rejection, according to Mead, might serve conservative aficionados in their claims that flamenco has its origins in ancient times, with its duende therefore being a unique phenomenon in today’s modern world. However, Mihály Csikszentmihályi’s description of his concept of “flow” seems to refer to a similar surrender as flamencos’ grace, by defining “flow” as a “complete absorption by what one does”.43 It is an all-encompassing awareness created by concentration and focus that leaves no space for any distracting thought or emotion.44 Furthermore, this “flow” signifies a dynamic relation between the performer and the here-andnow, as a state of consciousness in which the artist is challenged at his highest manageable level of skill to seek optimal experience.45 As such, “flow” includes the aesthetic meaning of gracia and its recognition by those present. In fact, a quotation of La Argentina’s, painted on the entrance wall of the newly-founded Museo del Baile in Seville – dedicated to the late Antonio Gades, Carmen’s choreographer – seems to render the source of aesthetic experience in a similar “flowing” phrase. It reads “The technique, invisible to the spectator, at those instances to be forgotten by the dancer, runs at the bottom of her art like an undercurrent with all its richness and triggers the expression, the geometry of the dance.”46 Flamenco requests a surrender to an undercurrent (“una veta de agua”), in which the dancer is not distracted by thinking about technique (“la técnica”), in order to make optimal expression possible. This undercurrent, evoking an association with gut (in Spanish gola), suggests its source to be located in the abdomen. In general speech and practice, however, most flamencos refer to the heart, corazón. As the museum’s device, this citation may perhaps have been chosen as a warning to its visitors – many of them Japanese – not to become blind to the outer form of the art, but to focus on its emotional, passionate drive, from within. Being largely paid for in Japanese yen, such a warning could only have been supported by its Japanese co-founders. Why should they not? Mead’s “subtle body” as well as Csikszentmihályi’s “flow” refer to a universal, human capacity. Why should the Japanese be an exception? In the case of nihon buyo, Hahn refers to “a concept of energy, or power, known as ki (in Chinese, chi or qi)”.47 In referring to the writings of the Japanese philosopher Yuasa Yasuo, she explains ki to lie “beyond what words can supply”.48 Much as in Csikszentmihályi’s state of consciousness: 43 44 45 46 47 48

Nakamura & Csikszentmihályi 2002: 89. Csikszentmihályi 1991: 29; Hahn 2007: 165. Csikszentmihályi 1991: 30–33. Antonia Mercé, La Argentina; translation and emphasis by the author. Hahn 2007: 59. Ibid.: 60.

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“Awareness and control of ki through the body fosters the flow of movement, enabling dancers to move with spirited energy that radiates from the body through dance.”49 Ki, Hahn continues, resides in the body’s core which is located in the abdomen (hara). Only an experienced dancer has learned how to make ki flow outward, for they are trained in haragei, “the art of using the energy and strength of one’s personality”,50 allowing her to perform flexibly the various identities of her dance. As such, this energy, or spirit, is closely related to shugyo (self-cultivation), and to keiko (practice) as “the body’s endeavours to reach a level of technical mastery so that the mind does not hamper the expressive body, which then can move fluidly – without thought.”51 At a stage performance of nihon buyo, the audience will recognise “a dancer’s heightened awareness”, “embodied sensibilities and ki energy” in a similar vein to an audience of flamencos observing duende or gracia.52 Fig. 4: Flow of essence Nihon Buyo * ki, haragei – energy, spirit, flow source location: * hara – abdomen

Flamenco * duende, gracia – surrender, undercurrent source location: * veta, gola, corazón – gut, abdomen, heart

The comparison of nihon buyo and flamenco notions of artistic essence and mastery may entail cultural differences in philosophical and religious references, but their basic concepts, however, show a striking similarity (see Fig. 4). They offer hardly any suggestion as to why Japanese flamencos would not be able to evoke gracia, unless one holds to the conviction that form dictates method, “what” dictates “how”.

7. Concluding Remarks As I have tried to show with my ballroom-dancing experiments, many roads lead to Rome. Whatever sensory method was needed, in the end all the students were waltzing. Dancing, as movement-in-space, can be denoted as a kind of synthetic 49 50 51 52

Ibid. Ibid.: 67. Ibid. Ibid.: 164.

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practice involving all the senses simultaneously. As in the process of learning, only limited amounts of information can be handled, following Csikszentmihályi (1991), didactics in dance involving a careful proportioning following a particular sensory trajectory. This trajectory, as a sensory process of transmission, as Hahn (2007) argues, is culturally incentive in its prioritising and sequencing of sensorial information. However, the interaction of method and culture – that is, modes of transmission being grounded in a particular culture, while simultaneously (re)creating culture – should not distract us from the cultural dynamics involved. One might state that, as long as form and method are inextricably related – as in the case of nihon buyo – we can speak of a tradition in the literal sense (in Latin, tradere) of an art form handed down from one generation to another, in which changes occur gradually along a lineage of masters. When, however, an art form is adapted by people from a notably different culture, such as flamenco by the Japanese, it is very likely that these people will apply their own, embodied “ways of operating”,53 their method or style.54 What can be expected, then, is a change in style, that is, the emergence of a differing style of the same genre, inspired by another cultural and sensory approach. Although Spanish aficionados, to my knowledge, do not distinguish a Japanese flamenco style yet, some Japanese practitioners do refer (half-jokingly) to furamenko (the Japanese pronunciation of “flamenco”)55 or japamenko. Based on the hypothesis that Japanese flamenco has been developing along nihon buyo lines of transmission, what specific features might we discern? What research questions may arise from this comparison? First of all, it would imply that Japanese flamenco dance is more visually than aurally oriented in its process of transmission. For its eventual staged performance, this may suggest flamenco dance in Japan to be more of a spectacle – very much in line with Antonio Gades’ choreographed pieces – than a joined music performance of singers, musicians, and dancers. Consequently, the cultural aesthetic structuring of the genre would shift the key role of the singer to the dancer. If this is the case, Japanese flamenco only contributes to a global development many Spanish flamenco purists regret. Flamenco performances are turning by and large into spectacles, or “flamenco-operas”,56 particularly when dance is involved. Even music recitals, however, have to include a larger variety of music instruments than guitar alone to attract and satisfy ever larger audiences. Secondly, a visual emphasis in the process of transmission, with a similar postponement of interaction between dancer and live music accompaniment as in nihon buyo, might lead to a creation of dance vocabularies and fixed choreographies that 53 54 55 56

De Certeau 1984. Ferguson 1999. Otani-Martin 2004; 2005. Steingress 2002a: 181.

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have to structure early stages in the learning process. In addition, it would cast the Japanese flamenco dance instructor in a supreme role, much like an iemoto, thereby developing particular Japanese flamenco lineages. This makes one wonder how flamenco instruction is organised in Japan. What social relationships do instructors and pupils engage in? What are the reputations Japanese flamenco studios are built upon, and how do they interrelate? And, in relation to the first point, to what extent do Japanese flamenco dancers, and singers and musicians cooperate? Thirdly, the comparison also raises questions about the structure of, and progress in, the process of teaching and learning itself. What levels of achievement are determined, based on what technical mastery? What is the timing of shugyo (self-cultivation) in Japanese flamenco; when are apprentices considered to be ready for expression of their personality? What are the consequences for flamenco’s improvisation quality and so-called passion in performance, when only admitted at such a delayed stage? Finally, a sensory approach can also serve as a framework for analysing Japanese answers to why they feel attracted to such a foreign phenomenon as flamenco. What are flamenco’s specific features that they find appealing? What is it they come to look for in Andalusia and Madrid? In relation to another genre, salsa, Shuhei Hosokawa (1999) detects a Japanese tendency to go for the “original” and “pure” in lyrics and music. This has led local salsaieros, in the midst of salsa being with many other popular music genres and an ongoing eroticisation of its lyrics, to point at Japanese salsa as the most “authentic”. This makes me wonder what Japanese consider to be “authentic” flamenco, and whether they would be able to gain a similar reputation among flamencos as Japanese salsaieros in the Caribbean and New York. From a sensory, style-oriented approach and the emphasis on dance, this seems highly unlikely. It does, however, ask for investigation of whether flamenco in Japan is divided into flamenco puro, and flamenco fusion.57 To what extent is this fusion part of flamenco’s global development, to what extent a local phenomenon that includes Japanese art forms such as nihon buyo, taiko (Japanese drum), and butoh (modern Japanese dance)? Many more questions could be formulated, and most certainly will pop up in the process of anthropological fieldwork in Japan, but I hope to have shown sufficiently herein the inspiring and analytical potential a sensory approach offers. Last but definitely not least, it offers a methodology to “anaesthetise” stereotypes and clichés that result from ongoing, rather pointless discussions on ethics-aesthetics in relation to cultural adaptation. In processes of localisation and globalisation, we tend to forget that imitation is at the heart of all play and learning,58 whether based on sight, sound or touch. Let us first investigate how it is done, before we start 57 Steingress 2002a. 58 Taussig 1993.

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accusing any particular nationality of being mere copy-cats, and telling them that “they’ll never learn”. Acknowledgements I thank the organisers of the conference “Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual”, Heidelberg University, for offering a forum for an earlier draft of this paper, and also the Amsterdam School for Social Research for their financial support. I am indebted to Huib Wilkes (El Payo Humberto) and the BAHAR research group for their interest and insightful comments.

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W. Gerard Poole

Emotional Cultivation and the Chaotic Emotion: Towards a Theory of Ritual, Musical, and Emotional Parallel Morphology, as Encountered in Andalusian Ritual Practices The purpose of this paper is to present an opening argument for the possibility that the varieties of religious experience might be closely linked to the cultivation of emotional modalities, especially through communal musical rituals. I will propose a theoretical relationship between three key ritual elements: ritual structure, emotional mode, and musical form. Although this paper does suggest historical and evolutionary implications, the scope of the paper is limited to the presentation, in outline, of a theoretical model of ritual systems followed by an example of music and ritual morphology.

Myth, Ritual, and the Religious Experience Before I introduce the elements of Andalusian ritual that I will be examining, I need to make some very basic preliminary remarks about where this article is situated theoretically with regard to ritual studies. I will begin by noting that although William James, through his pioneering work, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), did bring the study of the emotions into academic prominence,1 the real focus of his work was, as the title implied, the religious experience itself. James, always ahead of his time, saw possible relationships between the emotions, the religious experience, and the qualities of conscious states.2 But it was not until Nils Wallin’s much later pioneering work, Biomusicology: Neurophysiological, Neuropsychological, and Evolutionary Perspectives on the Origins and Purpose of Music (1991), that we have a theory that proposes a critical role for music in the expansion of emotional categories and an emergent consciousness among early humans, a role that is framed within a neurobiological and evolutionary context. Furthermore, we have witnessed over the past 20 years the rise of a substantial body of neurobiological and clinical literature that also directly links human con1 James 1982: 168, 217, 287, 307. 2 Ibid.: 162, 369, 403, 546, 552–555.

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sciousness to the emotions,3 and that theoretically links the evolution of music with certain evolutionary adaptive advantages.4 What I explored in my dissertation5 was how the deliberate cultivation of the emotions through music and sacred ritual systems might have played a powerful role in human cultural evolution. However, my work also consistently suggested to me that the religious experience had to be given a central, not peripheral, place within sacred ritual systems, if the relationships between the emotions, music, and ritual were to make sense - which brought me back to William James. Furthermore, as I began to formulate my theory, I realised that I had inadvertently re-encountered the myth and ritual debate that had raged in the early twentieth century. It seemed to me that the issue was still relevant if we are to understand the role of ritual in human culture. “The study of ritual began with a prolonged and influential debate on the origins of religion that gave rise to several important styles of interpretation – evolutionary, sociological, and psychological – from which new fields of scholarship emerged. The simple question at the heart of this productive controversy was whether religion and culture were originally rooted in myth or in ritual.”6 My studies suggested to me that while the ritual enactment of myth might in fact be the case in many rituals, it was certainly not the case in others. I began to see that if a ritual was enacting a myth, then it did function symbolically; like a language. In that case, the ritual activity pointed outside itself in the same way that language refers to something outside itself. In these kinds of rituals there could be some efficacy, if very limited, in the application of discourse theories. However, if the ritual has as its objective a significant attempt towards a possible inducement of a religious experience, then the ritual activity pointed into itself; it became a selfreferential process and the mythological content played a very secondary role, if any, depending upon the experiential degree of the ritual. Why do I claim that myth recedes as the ritual experience advances? First of all, because myth is inherently the product of language, and the breaching of the language process is just one preliminary step towards the religious experience.7 But in a broader sense, symbolic communication, by its very nature, is intended to convey indirect knowledge of an absent object. There would be no need to symbolise, or conduct a discursive exegesis about, the religious experience if it was in fact occur3 I.e.: Juslin & Sloboda 2001; LeDoux 1996; Damasio 1999; Wallin 1991: 481–485, etc. 4 I.e.: Mithen 2006: 106–107, 163, 165–166; Levitin 2008: 4, 54–55; Jourdain 2002: 55–57, 112, 205–218. 5 Poole 2007. 6 Bell 1997: 3. 7 D’Aquili & Newberg 1999: 21–45.

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ring. Language only comes to bear after the fact, in an attempt to recapture or communicate what was revealed in the experience. Immediately the recounter of the experience, or the religious teacher, is confounded by the limits of language as exemplified, for example, by two well known Zen koans8: “When your mind is not dwelling on the dualism of good and evil, what is your original face before you were born?” “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” For the people of Andalusia, when describing their rituals, language also quickly lapses into paradox: “What do you think of all this?” a man along the way to El Rocio asked me. “It’s Controlled Chaos” he said, answering his own question. “Sublime Savagery” is how the citizens of the town of Priego refer to their Holy Thursday procession.9 Myths are enacted precisely because the myth is going to tell them something about an object that is not present. From the very onset, a myth divides the ritual practitioners between actors and audience- just as any sign must consist of a symbol (the actor), its object (the absent experience), and an interpreter (an audience). Furthermore, the symbol requires “meaning”, or interpretation, in order for it to even be processed as a symbol.

Brief Description of Ritual System Model However, the mythological enactment ritual, its interpretation and exegesis, does serve to preserve knowledge of, and about, the religious experience, and integrate that knowledge into the cultural field of the community. And this, I suggest, is the great power and function of the symbolic, or myth-driven, ritual; it is not what it achieves inside the ritual, so much as what it causes to occur outside the ritual. The Catholic Mass, for example, is a ritual within which the experience of Divine Communion and the teachings of the Church are presented, but the actual work of experiencing this communion, or of reaching a deeper understanding of it, is an endeavour that spills beyond the ritual confines to engender further activities and rituals: what is symbolised in the Mass exceeds the ritual structures of the Mass, to provide this experience.10

8 koans are teaching tools to train the mind for enlightenment, or satori, the mystical experience in the Zen Buddhism tradition of Japan. Going beyond the limits of language and its logic is considered to be an essential step towards the achievement of that goal. See Suzuki 1994. 9 Briones Gómez 1999: 99–101. 10 Poole 2007: 321–327.

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In the presentation of my theoretical model, I cited the fact that the original, more experiential Mass became increasingly condensed and symbolic over the centuries,11 as it grew in social prominence to become the most important ritual of the emerging culture of Christendom. As the new religion emerged, the central ritual that was the Mass became increasingly important as a site wherein the codified teachings of the clergy could be proclaimed and the mysteries at the core of the religion could be represented. As a consequence of the process of symbolisation, I proposed that new rituals came into being through what I called “ritual proliferation”, in which the displaced experiential dimensions of the Mass could be reintegrated outside it.12 In Andalusia, this process took the form of large processions spilling out into the streets in emotional manifestations of the three official interpretations of the Mass, the mystery, the penitence, and the glorification (New Advent “Liturgy of the Mass”). The Corpus Cristi processions celebrate the mystery, The Holy Week processions manifest the penitential emotional mode, and the processional pilgrimages, or romerías such as El Rocio, are devotional rituals of glorification. The last two, as I discovered, are carried out by highly organised brotherhoods composed of laypeople.13 Through the simultaneous currents of symbolisation, on the one hand, and reintegration of experience, on the other, I suggested that sacred ritual systems can be best understood as a moving, living spiral of formal human behaviours that manifest varying degrees of symbolic to experiential ratios in relation to the sacred.14 The driving force bringing the system into being is the semiotic dynamic of experience and representation,15 a relationship that finds its analogy in the ritual/myth dynamic, and that is itself, I propose, rooted in the religious experience (again, in the context of sacred ritual). I found that at one end of the spiral the more symbolic, or myth driven, rituals tended to be highly, even minutely, scripted, to have a prominent social profile, and they inevitably reflected the social order.16 However, at the other end of the spectrum, the more experiential rituals tended to be performed “in the woods”, so to speak, in marginal spaces on the social edges, loosely scripted (ibid.), and characterised by what Victor Turner called communitas.17

11 12 13 14 15

Coleman 1995; Taylor 1976. Poole 2007: 299–302. Ibid.: 334. Ibid.: 522. See Whitehead 1959 for discussion on symbol and experience; on limits of language see Whitehead 1985: 12; Laughlin & McManus & d’Aquili 1990 on symbol and neurophenomenology. 16 Poole 2007: 297–300, 557–559. 17 Turner 1997: 131–133

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A critical aspect of this model is that the only way to understand the myth and ritual phenomenon, and its relation to culture, is to delve deeply and “intra-culturally” into a single ritual system in order to establish the general tone and relative myth/ritual values that comprise the full spectrum of rituals within that ritual system, from the deeply experiential to the highly symbolic. The ritual system I encountered in Catholic Andalusian culture, for example, can then be understood as fundamentally a semiotic process driven by a community’s own experience and representation of itself; a way in which a people come to know themselves and their place in the world, rooted in the religious experience.

Enter Music and Ritual, and Music as Ritual While exploring the ritual and myth relationship, I also began to see a parallel between that relationship and the music and music language relationship. I arrived at a simple, but I think useful, basic formula:18

These ratios are simply analogues of the basic semiotic processes of experience and representation. However, once we understand that by the power of ritual we mean the power of experience, in particular the religious experience, then the parallel with the musical function becomes very interesting. Studies on the neurobiology of music are revealing that music has the capacity to fully activate or “light up” (as some neurobiologists like to put it) the entire brain in ways that language simply cannot do.19 Curiously, the only other phenomenon that is comparable is the religious experience.20 This suggests, tentatively, that musical experiences and religious ritual experiences might share a number of basic evolutionary commonalities. If we look at this possible relationship in the light of the relationship just discussed with regard to religious experience and ritual, then we come to the consideration of another relationship, that is actually very common among ritual practices crossculturally: the actual identity of music and ritual in what could be called the musical ritual. 18 In my dissertation I present a more detailed list of characteristics that would distinguish these two ritual types (Poole 2007: 545). However, it must be kept in mind that the religious experience can occur spontaneously anywhere, or never, no matter how long and by what methods a person seeks it. What we look for in a ritual system has more to do with magnitudes of probability, and with intentional sites, than with predictable outcomes. 19 Interview with Robert Zatorre in The Washington Post, “Science” Section, 1/22/2007. 20 Private correspondence with C. Laughlin; D’Aquili & Newberg 1999: 26.

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There are many examples of human rituals among many diverse cultures, in which the musical performance is the ritual.21 Steven Friedson in his Remains of Ritual. Northern Gods in a Southern Land (2009) presents a particularly thorough ethnographic example of ritual and music identity within a specific African culture. Furthermore, the sacred musical ritual is particularly common.22 But by the purely “musical experience” I emphatically do not mean the musical concert. The musical concert requires a social division of labour that differentiates between the music makers and the audience. In the concert setting, we have the most quintessential division of the sign/object relationship, or self/other dichotomy, within a musical ritual. What I mean by a musical ritual is, firstly, when the performance of the music is carried out by all the participants in the ritual, and secondly, when the performance itself constitutes the ritual. Margaret J. Kartomi described what she observed in trance rituals in Central Java as ritual and musical “isomorphism”.23 It is this isomorphism between ritual and music that I am referring to. But I would also suggest, based on the work of Nils Wallin mentioned earlier, that this isomorphism is rooted in what for Wallin is “a phenomenology of emotion as neurophysiological process […] as behavioral display of sound gesture and music”:24 “The finest emotional gradations; the morphodynamic power regulating emotional process and emotional expression was used to develop and establish, starting from primordial genetic forms, a sort of ‘catalogue’ of patterns of emotion […]. Such an encoded semiotic catalogue is a necessary prerequisite for ceremonial activities such as rite and music, where each epoch of human history and each region of human culture has used archaic fragments to build ever new and varying forms”.25 Certainly, in a musical ritual we would not expect that there would be no symbolic artifacts whatsoever and no mythological context at all. My point is that these elements would occupy a very secondary role in the ritual process, and that, furthermore, once the ritual was fully underway (or the energy is “boiling” according to Katz 1982; or the “life force” is being raised, according to Edith Turner 1992), 21 The literature is simply too extensive to even begin citations. What is curious is that the subject of the purely musical ritual has not been addressed by scholarship as a ritual type, despite its being widespread. Note, for example, the extensive family of Islamic Sufi rituals, called generically zikr, that would fall into this category, as would many of the healing rituals of sub-Saharan Africa, the Sacred Harp rituals in the U.S., the devotional rituals of the Bhakti tradition in India, to name just a few basic ones. Their sheer abundance attests to how ancient the musical ritual might be. 22 Nettl 1983: 165–166. 23 Kartomi 1973: 200. 24 Wallin 1991: 483. 25 Ibid.: 484.

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the symbolic or mythological elements then begin to recede into the background until they cease to significantly function within the ritual at all. In the case of healing rituals, the “musical ritual technology”,26 takes over, and the emotional states that are being sought after become the single most important focus of the ritual. The ritual musical experience, in these cases, is isomorphic to the ritual experience. The music in these rituals has little, or no, symbolic reference - the music refers to itself. The “script” of the ritual is contained within the structures of the music. What I am proposing here is that both ritual and music can function along a spectrum that ranges from the self-referential (the more experiential rituals) to the referential (the more symbolic rituals). The “purely” musical ritual is simply when there is a near-isomorphic identity between the two, and they afford anthropologists with examples with which to study the potential relationships between music, ritual, and the emotions (or potential phenomenological states), in a situation where they are intimately intertwined. Music and ritual seem to be a critical link between human emotions, consciousness, and the religious experience.

Introduction to the Andalusian Musical Form First of all we must be clear that the Andalusian form, called palos, literally “sticks” or “staffs”, is not what we might think of as a composed song. Also, no Andalusian palo is an isolated phenomenon; there are many palos, all interrelated in what we might call a “tree”, or family, of musical forms. I have provided a series of interpretations of a single form in order to demonstrate the fact that for many listeners each example will seem to have little in common with the other.27 It will be difficult to hear what it is, structurally, that the sequence of songs is supposed to have in common. However, the commonality in emotional “mode” (or mood) will be obvious. This brings out a critical distinction between a song and an Andalusian palo. A song can be sung in many different ways that can change the emotional tone of the song. But an Andalusian palo has the emotional content inherent within its performative structures; an essential aspect of learning to perform the palo is to learn the emotional content of the particular palo, especially as it contrasts with the other palos of its “tree”. But we must be clear here: the musical form is not attempting to stimulate, or mimic, a particular emotional abstraction such as “sad” or “happy”; which are just words, words that refer to something after the fact. The internalised structures of the palo and their emotional mode are inseparable. The performance of the solear is the solear emotional mode; I am suggesting that they have a parallel relationship as a musical/emotional neurophysiological process, if not an isomorphic one. 26 Friedson 1996. 27 www.musicandritual.org/Forms/1.

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As we will see in the case of the Sevillanas, this does not mean that the palo cannot change, or that its emotional content cannot change, but what it does mean is that if the emotional content changes, the musical structure of the palo will change as well, and if the process continues, a new form will emerge out of the old form to become a new palo, and I argue, a new emotional “mode”. This may seem controversial, but I am suggesting that with a new musical form emerges a new emotional nuance, however subtle, which is to say, a concomitant phenomenological corollary, one that adds a new nuance to the cultural emotional spectrum.

The Sevillanas: A Specific Example of Music, Ritual, and Emotional Parallel Morphology The history of the Sevillanas (“a song, or woman, from Sevilla”) can be explored through any number of works, and to them I have nothing new to add.28 What is important for this paper is to reiterate that the Sevillanas Rocieras emerged directly from within the ritual practices of the processional pilgrimage of El Rocio, and, beginning in the early 1970s, dominated popular music in Andalusia for nearly 25 years.29 Each Sevillanas is divided into four sections, or coplas. The Andalusian copla however, differs from the common understanding of a poetic verse in one essential aspect. Each Andalusian copla is traditionally an isolated comment on its subject matter, and so the Andalusian coplas within a single Sevillanas rarely tell a story, and are usually completely unrelated to each other. Each of the four Sevillanas coplas that traditionally constitutes a complete particular Sevillanas is exactly the same length – a total of 40 measures of 3/8. There is an introductory section wherein the melodic motif is introduced (see below), followed by three tercios, or “thirds”. The traditional Sevillanas are up-tempo and lively. Introduction First Tercio Second Tercio Third Tercio

6 (measures) 12 12 10 (last two beats of 10th measure are silent)

The tenth measure is not actually completed in the third tercio. The dramatic cerre, or “closure”, on the first beat of this final measure leaves a two-beat silence. In terms of rhythmic structure there is also the question of the compás. The compás is neither the metre nor the count, but rather the rhythmic accents that give 28 See Buiza & Manuel 1991. 29 Ibid.: vol. 4 devoted exclusively to the Sevillanas Rocieras.

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the form its special character. This is especially important when delineating between forms that share the same metre. Here is the basic Sevillanas accent pattern:

The accents are provided by the palmas (hand clapping) or the tambor (large field drum common at the Rocio), if one is available. The above is the basic accent of the introductory segments and the transitions between tercios and between coplas. As to the melodic structure, unlike nearly every other palo in the Andalusian musical tradition, there is none. The only requirement of the Sevillanas is that the melody fit the strict rhythmic structure. Furthermore, the melody must have a signature introduction that fits within 2 measures of 6 counts and is characteristic of the melody itself. In the non-danced version of the Sevillanas Rocieras, there is no regard to the 4 copla groupings, and the singers may go on indefinitely and stop whenever they wish. Examples might be when a pilgrim dedicates a copla to another person in passing along the camino (“way”, “route”), or when singing to the Virgin at night, or any poignant ritual moment. In its present form, the Sevillana Rociera maintains the rhythmic and melodic structure of the Sevillanas, but it can be slowed down to a near-“libre” (arrhythmic) potential, depending on the singer and the particular circumstance of the song’s performance. But it should be noted that these options for the stand-alone verse are only characteristics of the Sevillanas Rocieras, and this new variation of the Sevillanas form was developed within the pilgrimage. What is significant about this transformation process is how it came about.

Deforming the Musical Form Within the Sub-Rituals The devotional emotional mode that is cultivated all along the pilgrimage route through prolonged singing and dancing is intensified at the unofficial sites within the pilgrimage, what I am calling the sub-rituals. These sub-rituals could never have been ascertained by looking through the itineraries printed by the brotherhood. They are not officially rituals. The pilgrims in the processions are singing much of the time along the camino (path) of the Rocio, especially when they pass through a town or make one of the river crossings. Their singing is characterised by choral singing and handclapping. Also along the way, especially within the forests, individuals will suddenly sing a Sevillanas Rocieras to someone else along the way. Often they can be complete strangers. This happened to me several times, and in each case it was very moving. Furthermore, at family gatherings and parties people will get very close to each other and sing songs directly to one another.

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But the pilgrims also do the same thing to the Virgin. Late at night, a single person or a small group will gather around the cart that carries the banner of the Virgin. This cart is a very sacred object to each brotherhood, and often serves as a kind of altar for the outdoor Masses. The person, or persons, will then sing a very slow, very devotional Sevillanas Rocieras, one copla at a time, while looking straight at the symbol of the Virgin. The singing may be relatively short, fifteen minutes or so, or go on for an hour. It is like a prayer but delivered with open eyes, standing, and looking directly at the Virgin’s representation. Also, when the pilgrims finally arrive at the town of El Rocio, many of them will go to the Hermitage where her image is kept, and again sing personal songs of devotion, standing and looking straight at Her. After having observed these practices over and over again while participating in El Rocio, I am convinced that it was in these marginal rituals that the parent musical form, the Sevillanas de Feria initially sung in procession, was transformed into the Sevillanas Rocieras. Once sufficient deformation occurred at the marginal and informal ritual sites, the Sevillanas Rocieras eventually emerged as a new subcategory within the general Sevillanas form. Another indicator that supports this hypothesis is that when recording studios attempt to make an “authentic” Sevillanas Rocieras CD, one that “captures” the “real” Rocio, they make recordings that attempt to simulate the late-night singing around the campfires to one another, or the late-night singing to the Virgin.30 They attempt, through liner notes and photos, to suggest to the listener the “authentic” context of the Sevillanas Rocieras. At El Rocio, the Sevillanas form has morphed from a strictly dance form with occasional personal imprint31 into a devotional chorus form with an emotional modality specifically of the Rocio (Form2/B), and finally into an intensely intimate personal devotional form, in which the range of emotional nuances, as much as the structure, identify the song as a Sevillanas Rocieras (Forms2/C) The Andalusian musical form can operate as a primary vehicle for change through its ability to deform as the ritual behaviour changes, and with those deformations we can at least propose that there is a concomitant change in emotional content. Furthermore, we can also make this argument because, as was pointed out above, the emotional ritual act itself is what brought about the musical behaviour in the first place: singing to the Virgin late at night, and singing to each other along the pilgrimage way. There is no doubt that the Sevillanas Rocieras were deformed from the Sevillanas de Féria by the pilgrims of El Rocio.32 The objective here is to shed light on how that process came about. These slower, single, free-standing 30 There are countless such recordings. One example is “Una Noche en el Camiono” (2007), by the Flamenco Sevilla Ensemble. 31 www.musicandritual.com/Form2/A. 32 Buiza & Manuel 1991: vol. 4.

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verses, without dancing or guitar, are simply not performed anywhere else, except in the circumstances I have been describing: singing to the Virgin and singing to each other. We can propose, then, that in an almost purely musical ritual setting, where the ritual and the music are virtually the same phenomenon, such as singing to the Virgin late at night, the relationship between the emotional state and the musical form must have certain isomorphic parallels. How the singer or singers exteriorise the internalised form, to include how they deliberately deform it in the moment, and stretch its structural boundaries, is an integral part of a conscious, willed, emotional act. The musical expression and the emotional devotional act of singing to the deity, or to one another, again, must be seen as closely isomorphic. I say that because, although the singer has in a sense “memorised” a specific melodic version of the Sevillanas genre when a specific instance of the form is being sung, there is still the internalised general “sevillanas” form that acts a musical/emotional template underlying the particular moment of expression. The fact that the form is internalised is what allows it to morph over time, without requiring any deliberate conscious compositional act (although deliberate composition can be the case as well). In that light, the more fixed Sevillanas versions can be used as what we would call a “song” within very structured ritual settings like the Mass, or by a chorus in procession. But the same specific Sevillanas can also serve as a vehicle within the less structured ritual settings, such as the sub-ritual devotional practices I described above. In those settings, the form can change over time in conformity with the changing behavioral form (ritual practice) and the emotional content, the deliberate willed intention motivating the ritual behaviour. The Andalusian tree of musical forms is an excellent example of a tradition of interrelated musical structures that can be internalised and externalised for the purpose of emotional cultivation and internal emotional structuring, while constantly maintaining a potential, none the less, for further deformation according to changing behavioral practices.

Performing the Tree of Musical Forms as a Performing Ritual System The systems of musical forms in themselves constitute a spectrum of flexible templates for structuring emotional content. One can argue that, by the process of internalisation and externalisation of these forms, the differences between the musical forms and the emotional modes they bring into manifestation through their performance become negligible; emotional mode and musical form (or structure) will inevitably display isomorphic relationships to each other. The reason is that, as already stated, the Andalusian form is not an abstraction; the emotional content is a central feature of the internalised form, and is learned as part of the form itself. The act of externalising the musical form, and the externalisation of the emotional content, are both manifested simultaneously by the same act of will, by the same per-

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formative behaviour. Note that if one reinterprets a fixed song through a different emotional mode, it will still be recognised as being the same song – the abstraction of melodic contour is what defines the song (and this is reflected in our copyright laws – it is the melody that we copyright). But if one re-interprets an Andalusian form through a different emotional mode, there will inevitably be changes in the musical structures. It is simply not possible to change the emotional mode – the deliberate willful intention of the performance – and not change the musical structures. When this happens, the result is no longer recognised by the Andalusian tradition as being the same musical form. None the less, such changes do happen, the Sevillanas Rocieras being just one example. If the practice continues, and in a sense becomes “ritualised” into popular culture as a performed embodied aesthetic, the resultant musical product becomes a new musical form. This is because the emotional content of an Andalusian palo, however subtle the difference might seem, is a central, defining feature of the form. And so the Andalusian tree of forms is also an example of a system of potentially purely musical rituals. The Andalusian tree of forms functions as a parallel, intersecting system to the Andalusian system of Catholic rituals. Although the two systems are clearly distinct, both systems continue to deform, morph, and overlap with each other through time. Furthermore, the performance of the Andalusian forms can also function along the same symbolic/experiential spectrum as the rituals within a ritual system – because, in fact, the forms can also constitute the basis of a ritual system in and of themselves. In this sense, the proliferation of musical forms, the proliferation of emotional modes, and the proliferation of rituals (as the performance of the musical forms) can be seen as potentially one and the same phenomenon. The Sevillanas Rocieras is a relatively new musical form, among the traditional Andalusian palos. I would argue that this new form also constitutes a new emotional nuance, one that was generated from within a ritual that itself functioned as an experiential derivative of the symbolically evolving Mass: the experiential processional ritual of El Rocio. But as the cultural ritual cycle continues through time, this new musical form generated at the Rocio has now come back full circle to influence the Mass itself. We have today the Misa Rociera, or “Rocio Mass”, which features the Sevillanas Rocieras (among other forms as well). El Rocio has created a new nuance in the emotional expression of Catholic devotional glorification, and by doing so, I suggest it has also created a new nuance in the emotional spectrum of the Andalusian population. Although the Sevillanas Rocieras is the only example I presented here, it is in no way an isolated case. Nearly all the Andalusian forms evolved out of previous

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forms, rather than being deliberately composed.33 However, no one, to my knowledge, has traced these morphologies to ritual practices (with the exception of the Holy Week Saeta which is a specifically ritual musical form).

The Phenomenon of “Controlled Chaos”: Emotional Paradox “What is the feeling of controlled chaos?” – an Andalusian koan? Before we can talk about the chaotic emotion, I must first give another brief introduction. The culmination of the pilgrimage of El Rocio is a procession called the Salida, or “coming out”; the going forth of the Virgin out into the streets among Her people. Here is a succinct picture of what happens, based on my experiences as a participant observer: The Salta la Reja (“The scaling over the rails”): The brotherhood of Almonte arrives in an elaborate procession at the doors of the hermitage some time after midnight in the early hours of Lunes de Pentacostes (Monday of Pentecost). Suddenly they break all semblance of order, charge into the church, and swarm over the high rails that surround the Virgin, in order to seize what they adamantly insist is theirs, and by that act proceed to take into their own hands a direct and unmediated control of their relationship to Her. They breach the symbolic and physical boundaries between themselves and the Virgin, and take Her out from within the Church’s hierarchical control into the streets among the people.34 But as impressive as the Salta la Reja is, it does not really prepare one for what follows: The first recurring events are the attempts by the throngs of people to touch the Virgin or hold on to the palanquin. The Almonteños (members of the brotherhood) strive to block them or push them away. Needless to say, the pushing, shoving, and cursing is greatly aggravated by the fact that the image is “floating” above the churning sea of humanity. There are currents of people surging back and forth and all around the Virgin, while at the same time she is being forced through the streets on the shoulders of the Almonteños. Another group of Almonteños surrounds the Virgin to protect her from, and guide Her through, the mass of people.35 The second recurring events are what I call the “crunches.” These are moments when the Virgin turns into a portion of the crowd that has also surged towards her. The people directly in front of her have to move back and out of the way. Often, however, the float is approaching too quickly for them to get out of the way in time, or the mass of people behind them is too dense to back up any further. At 33 For Fandangos see Merchante 1999; for the Saeta, see Arrebola 1995; Steingress 1994; for general overview see Pohren 1990; Infante 1929; Molina 1963. 34 Poole 2007: 375. 35 Ibid: 381.

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these moments, people begin stumbling forcefully into each other, and several times I witnessed some of them being knocked down before the float changed direction and relieved the pressure. These are definitely moments of near-pandemonium.36 The third recurring event is the “scare” event. It looks like the Virgin is about to be toppled over. Sometimes she comes close to capsizing on one side or the other, and at other times she starts to sink within the sea of people. These events are usually related to the “crunches”, and they happen when there are too many people pulling and pushing against the palanquin. It can also happen when one group of Almonteños comes to relieve the group that had been carrying the Virgin. Either way, once she is suddenly pushed up and righted, there is great cheering and applause. Needles to say, she never sinks completely and never quite capsizes.37 What is equally extraordinary is that, in the midst of this emotional pandemonium, men can be seen in tears embracing each other, while others shout and praise Her. Although there are occasionally claims of miracle cures,38 for the most part the experience seems to be more about a direct emotional encounter with the Virgin. The adoration among the people is palpable as she moves through the turmoil in the streets. As the Virgin approaches the houses of specific brotherhoods, there are individual priests waiting for Her in a state of near hysteria, seated on the shoulders of a brotherhood member; gesticulating wildly and yelling out praises. Often there are groups of people singing to her as she approaches. It is pandemonium, and it continues throughout the night and well into the next day. The first essential characteristic I would bring to the reader’s attention is that both music and language are driven to their structural limits. The praises being shouted to the Virgin by the priests and by the throngs of people in the streets resemble more a form of glossolalia than poetry, and the singing of the small groups along the route is completely drowned out by the overwhelming noise of the event. Furthermore, the singers often break down into tears, and have to stop singing for a few moments while they compose themselves. The Salida is neither a musical nor a poetic event: but it is an emotional event. But what emotional category can we ascribe to this ritual of chaos? Are the pilgrims still in the basic joyful glorification mode that characterised the pilgrimage up until then? What I experienced was a flurry of emotions ranging from anxiety, to fear, to elation. The emotions I witnessed among the people in the streets seemed to have extended from the ecstatic to the near hysterical. It would seem that the emotional mode of joyful glorification, that had been cultivated and intensified throughout the pilgrimage in the devotional sub-rituals, had itself been breached. 36 Ibid: 380. 37 Ibid.: 381. 38 Báñez Aragón 1999.

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It is tempting to relate the event to the many ecstatic practices found around the world. However, despite what might seem to be superficial commonalities between devotional ecstatic rituals cross-culturally, we cannot be certain these emotions are actually similar.39 But I feel that, at the core of the Salida, there is not any single categorical emotional mode at all, but rather a sudden convergence of emotions that manifests as a physical/emotional state of paradox. I would suggest that what I witnessed, and to a degree experienced, was an experience of unity comprised of seemingly contradictory emotions. However, while the ritual cultivation of the musical form/emotional mode/ritual structure relationship forms the basis of the ritual process I have been describing throughout this article, I would suggest that the Salida experience of “controlled chaos” is the actual driving force behind the pilgrimage. I am suggesting this possibility, because the Salida breaks with the general cultivated emotion of Andalusian Catholic glorification that had served up until then to generate a culminating emotional state for the entire pilgrimage. The Salida seems to create a space wherein the potential for the boundaries of the emotional self (and, I would also argue, of the conscious self) can be potentially breached; not just stressed and distorted into new emotional nuances, that can then be expressed as new musical/emotional forms, but breached in their totality. There are no musical forms for the Salida. Whatever music is performed, just as whatever praises are shouted, the music becomes structurally incoherent, and as chaotic as the emotional chaos in which it is performed. For, although the emotional chaos of the Salida is rooted in a ritual system that cultivates specific emotional modes, the Salida gives evidence that the ritual system not only cultivates the morphology and even rupturing of those modes, but it also drives the practitioners towards the limits of music and language in general. Once we consider the possibility that there may be deeply rooted relationships between musical structures, ritual behaviours, emotional modes, and conscious states, and that these relationships may have potentially parallel, if not isomorphic, corollaries within the human nervous system, then the innate genius of the Andalusian Catholic ritual system begins, I believe, to reveal itself. Nevertheless, I do not claim to completely understand the mystery that is the Salida, but I would argue, based upon what I have presented in all the above, that this culminating procession and its potential experiences is the driving force behind the cycle of metamorphosis and cultural production that is the pilgrimage of El Rocio. The Salida seems to be one manifestation, among many within the Andalusian Catholic ritual system, of the potency of the myth/ritual dynamic that has functioned for centuries like a perennial seed within the profound symbolism of the Catholic Mass. But I would also 39 See James 1982: 552; Eliade 1974: xi–xxi; Lewis 1971: ix–xx, for three different approaches to this question.

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suggest that the Salida is just as much a manifestation of something that is perhaps universal and distinctly human; a mysterious behavioral impulse that preceded Christianity or any other specific religion. Perhaps the chaotic emotion is just another step towards that state wherein one feels oneself to be “reborn in the spirit”, a state from which one can then answer the Zen koan and “see the original face before you were born”. I believe that we can call the experience of the Salida, at least provisionally, one of the “varieties of religious experience”, or in the metaphor of Friedrich Nietzsche; an impulse that compels the “Procession of Satyrs” to go into the forest and experience the “paradox that lies at the heart of the world”.40

40 Nietzsche 1967: 58.

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References Arrebola, Alfredo 1995. La Saeta: El cante hecho oración. Málaga: Algazara. Baest, Arjan van & Hans van Driel 1995. The Semiotics of C.S. Peirce Applied to Music: A Matter of Belief. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press. Báñez Aragón, Antonio 1999. Eres mi Fe y mi Verdad. Almonte: Mira Doñana. Becker, Judith 2005. Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bell, Catherine 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — 1997. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Briones Gómez, Rafael 1999. Prieguenses y nazarenos: Ritual e indentidad social y cultural. Córdoba: Ayuntamiento de Priego de Córdoba. Brooks, Lynn M. 1988. The Dances of the Processions of Seville in Spain’s Golden Age. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger. Buiza, Gil & José Manuel (eds.) 1991. Historia de las Sevillanas. 4 vols. Seville: Ediciones Tartessos. Clark, Mary & Clement Crisp 1981. The History of Dance. New York: Crown. Coleman, Lucinda 1995. “Worship God in Dance”. Renewal Journal 6/:2: 35–44 [available from http://www.pastornet.net.au/renewal/journal6/coleman.html] Damasio, Antonio 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. D’Aquili, Eugene G. & Andrew B. Newberg 1999. The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Damasio, Antonio 1999. The Feeling of What Happens. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. Daniélou, Alain 1992 [1984]. Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus. Rochester: Inner Traditions. — 1995 [1943]. Music and the Power of Sound: The Influence of Tuning and Interval on Consciousness. Rochester: Inner Traditions. Eliade, Mircea 1974 [1964]. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Freeman, Walter 2000. “A Neurological Role of Music in Social Bonding”. In: Nils L. Wallin & Björn Merker & Steven Brown (eds.). The Origins of Music. Cambridge: MIT Press: 411–424. Friedson, Steven M. 1996. Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. — 2009. Remains of Ritual. Northern Gods in a Southern Land. Chicago et al.: The University of Chicago Press. Gennep, Arnold van 1960 [1909]. The Rites of Passage: A Classic Study of Cultural Celebrations. Translated by Monika B. Vizedom & Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Gómez, Agustín 1982. La Saeta Viva. Edited by Virgilio Márquez. Córdoba [Privately Printed]. — 1983. Presencia de cántico en el flamenco. Córdoba: Ateneo de Córdoba. — 1999. El flamenco a la luz de García Lorca. Córdoba: Ateneo de Córdoba. Infante, Blas [1929] 1980. Origenes de lo flamenco y secreto del cante jondo. Seville: Consejería de Cultura. James, William 1982 [1902]. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin Books. Jerison, Harry 2000. “Paleoneurology and the Biology of Music”. In: Nils L. Wallin & Björn Merker & Steven Brown (eds.). The Origins of Music. Cambridge: MIT Press: 177–196. Josephs, Allen 1983. White Walls of Spain: The Mysteries of Andalusian Culture. Ames: Iowa State University Press. Jourdain, Robert 2002. Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy. New York: Harper. Juslin, N. and Sloboda, John A. (eds.) 2001. Music and Emotion: Theory and Research. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press Kartomi, Margaret J. 1973. “Music and Trance in Central Java”. Ethnomusicology 17: 163–208. Katz, Richard 1982. Boiling Energy: Community Healing Among the Kalahari Kung. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Laughlin, Charles D. Jr. & Eugene G. d’Aquili 1974. Biogenetic Structuralism. New York: Columbia University Press. Laughlin, Charles D. Jr. 1978. Extinction and Survival in Human Populations. New York: Columbia University Press. — 1979. Ethnography of the So of Northeastern Uganda. New Haven: HRAF Press. — (n.d.). Self-guided Tutorial in Biogenetic Structuralism. [Available from http:// www.biogeneticstructuralism.com/tutindex.htm]. — & John McManus & Eugene G. d’Aquili 1979. The Spectrum of Ritual. New York: Columbia University Press. — & John McManus & Eugene G. d’Aquili 1990. Brain, Symbol & Experience: Toward a Neurophenomenology of Human Consciousness. Boston: Shambhala. Leal, Alberto Jambrina & Carlos Antonio Porro 1997. “Pasado presente y futuro de la flauta y el tamboril en Castilla y León”. Txistulari 172 [Available from http:// www.Tamborileros.com/pdf/fyt-cyl.pdf]. LeDoux, Joseph E. 1996. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lèvi-Strauss, Claude 1963 [1958]. Structural Anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson & Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books. — 1995 [1978]. Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture. New York: Schocken Books. Levitin, Daniel J. 2008. The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. New York: Penguin Group.

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Lewis, I.M. 1971. Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession. Hammondsworth: Penguin. McDaniel, June 1989. The Madness of Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merchante, Antonio González 1999. Historia Antológica del Fandango de Huelva. Huelva: Artes Gráficas Girón. Mithen, Steven 2006. The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Molina, Ricardo & Antonio Mairena 1963. Mundo y formas del cante flamenco. Madrid: Revista de Occidente. Moreno Navarro, Isidoro 1974. Las Hermandades Andaluzas: una aproximación desde la antropología. Seville: Universidad de Sevilla. Morinis, E. Alan (ed.) 1992. Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage. Westport, New York: Greenwood Press. Nettl, Bruno 1983. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-nine Issues and Concepts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. New Advent (n.d.). The Catholic Encyclopedia. [Available from http://www. newadvent.org/cathen/index.html]. Nietzsche, Friedrich 1967 [1886]. Friedrich Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy and the Case Against Wagner. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House. Pohren, Donn 1990 [1962]. The Art of Flamenco. Madrid: Society for Spanish Studies. Poole, W. Gerard 2007. El Rocío: A Case Study of Music and Ritual in Andalucía. (PhD Dissertation, University of Maryland). Rouget, Gilbert 1985. Music and Trance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Staal, Frits 1989. Rules without Meaning: Rituals, Mantras, and the Human Sciences. New York: Peter Lang. Steingress, Gerhard 1994. “De ciegos, saeteros, y flamencos: una reflexión sobre el origen y evolución del jondo en cante flamenco”. Demófilo 12: 93–107. Suzuki, Daisetz T. 1994 [1927]. Essays in Zen Buddhism. First Series. New York: Grove Press. Taylor, M. F. 1976. A Time to Dance. Austin: Sharing. Turner, Edith 1992. Experiencing Ritual: A New Interpretation of African Healing. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Turner, Victor & Edith Turner 1995 [1978]. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Turner, Victor [1969] 1997. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Reprint. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Wallin, Nils L. 1991. Biomusicology: Neurophysiological, Neuropsychological, and Evolutionary Perspectives on the Origins and Purpose of Music. Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press. — & Björn Merker & Steven Brown (eds.) 2000. The Origins of Music. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Whitehead, Alfred N. 1985 [1978]. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Edited by David R. Griffin & Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press. — 1959 [1927]. Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. New York: Capricorn Books.

Website www.musicandritual.org/

Sarah M. Pike

Performing Grief in Formal and Informal Rituals at the Burning Man Festival Introduction Black Rock City, 30 August 2008. It’s my first evening at this year’s Burning Man festival1 and I cycle out on the “playa”, a flat desert-like prehistoric lakebed set aside for large works of art. I’m on my way to see Basura Sagrada, the “Temple of Sacred Trash”.2 The dusty playa sand has blown into small dunes, making it impossible to ride, so I dismount and walk my bicycle towards the temple. Bicycles lit with electroluminescent designs and decorated buses with disco music blaring from the dance floors on their top decks careen by. A car morphed into a dragonfly with white silk drapes and an artist’s vision has its wings lit up for night driving. We’re all heading for the Temple, which stands near the horizon at the end of a boulevard created by lanterns on posts. The Temple is also lit for night with lanterns and colored neon. Trash metal, driftwood, bottle caps, beer cans, and other discarded objects have been shaped by many workers into this year’s large temple space and its satellite shrines. A box of wood and markers for writing messages sits in front of the Temple. Benches and rockers created from scrap wood and other recycled materials are interspersed with whimsical sculptures, large framed photographs of the dead, poster collages, flowers, beads, and written notes. Letters and brief messages are on every surface and in every crevice. As I walk carefully up the narrow spiral staircase I can see that messages cover the railing and the sides of the steps. It is almost midnight, but the Temple is full of people praying, writing, meditating, talking quietly with friends and lovers, or waiting in line to ascend the spiral staircase to the top tier. And everyone is reading everyone else’s messages: “My mother died 21 years ago today. I miss her. She would have liked to be here.” “I love you Mom and Dad. Blessings on your journey. I know you did your best.”

1 http://www.burningman.com. 2 http://basurasagrada.org, [accessed 3 August2008].

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Thousands of similar messages about loss and love and hope adorn the Temple and its satellite shrines. Over the course of the week-long Burning Man festival, the Temple became a site at which the private was made public. Participants recorded confessions, grief, remembrances, desires, and promises on every surface of the temple structure and placed tokens of remembrance on makeshift altars. After the Temple was burned to the ground on the final night of the gathering and Burning Man participants had returned home, they remembered it as a site where their losses and grief were expressed, transformed and released. Since 2001, the Temple has become one of the major attractions for the thousands of participants that attend Burning Man every year. Over the years, I have watched the altars, shrines, messages, and mementos become more numerous and more elaborate, and the Temple increasingly become a focus of contention over the meaning of mourning and “proper” ritual experience. During the week before it is burned, there is no formal structure to Temple ritualising, but rather twenty-four hours, day and night, of experiencing the space in each person’s own way. As one of Basura Sagrada’s creators, Tuk-Tuk, told me, “what ‘I wanted it to do’ for people didn't really matter, as visiting the temple is a singular and personal experience that each person gets a chance to lay claim to in some way, both spiritually and physically” (2008). Mist, who worked on constructing the temple, suggests that “our fellow burners […] have come to find whatever it is they need, to let go of whatever it is they have locked up inside” (2008). In contrast, the formal ritual burning of the Temple is structured and controlled, with a procession of torchbearers and solemn music, over 25,000 people

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sitting quietly in circles around the Temple, and a perimeter set off from the crowd and guarded while the fire is lit and the Temple burns. As most participants describe it, the formal ritual burning of the Temple is experienced as the release of pent-up or suppressed grief, but the informal ritualising at the Temple throughout the week of the festival involves more diverse and contradictory meanings. Informal ritual activities over the week and the formal burning of the Temple seem to represent two different registers of mourning. If the final ritual represents (as it is said to) the release of emotion and what psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and others have seen as the resolution of grieving,3 then informal ritual activity is more in line with the views of philosopher Jacques Derrida and those who critique Freud and say the work of mourning is to keep talking to the dead: “hearing their voices, reading their books, and seeing their faces.”4 Informal ritual experience at the temple exemplifies this ongoing conversation between the living and the dead. But participants’ experiences are dynamic and often contradictory: for instance, they both hold on to the dead and let them go. These two modes of mourning exist in tension with each other at the Temple for the week of the festival. Like the sacred trash that composed Basura Sagrada, participants’ experiences have been weathered by a multiplicity of factors, and it is these factors that I want to bring our attention to. Given the lack of structure and of instructions, how do people know what to do at the temples? What are the sources of their informal ritualising? What shapes their ritual experiences at the temples? In particular, how are memory and emotion expressed and experienced? This example of contemporary ritual invention is shaped by multiple factors that bear on participants’ experiences, including cultural and personal memory, imitation of others, the festival context of Burning Man as a place set apart from ordinary life, the physical space of the Temple, and current trends in memorialisation in the United States.

Background & Context for Different Ways of Grieving Burning Man is an annual arts festival that takes place for a week around Labor Day weekend in the middle of a prehistoric lakebed in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. In 2008 (my ninth year at the festival), the event was attended by over 48,000 people from North America and abroad. Every year, a “Public Works” crew creates “streets” that mark out the semi-circular city – “Black Rock City” – that comes to life as festival-goers arrive with camping gear, pavilions, art installations, costumes, and a range of temporary desert homes. The city borders an open area called the “playa”, where large sculptures like the Temple are erected, just as a real 3 Jacobus 2007. 4 Ibid.: 398.

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city might develop along a lakefront. Musical and theatrical performances, tea parties, meditation and yoga sessions, and many other kinds of events are scheduled every day and night of Burning Man, but most Burners spend their days and nights wandering: visiting new and old friends and neighbours in “theme camps”, which are a blend of campsite and interactive art installation, and looking at art throughout the city. “Burners”, as scholar Lee Gilmore5 dubs participants, tend to see the festival as more real than life outside, giving it the heightened opposition to the ordinary world that is typical of festivals.6 Burning Man has two oft-repeated mottoes: “Leave No Trace” and “No Spectators”, both of which have direct bearing on experiences at the Temple. What sociologist Rob Shields7 calls “place myths”, composites of rumours, images, memories, and experiences that make particular places fascinating,8 have developed around Burning Man and shape participants’ expectations of the Temple. These include memories of past festivals or stories from friends’ experiences in previous years, media accounts of Burning Man, and the tendency to see the site itself as a blank canvas.” Greeters at the festival entrance say “welcome home” to new arrivals, and Burners count down the days until the next Burning Man and begin planning for the subsequent year almost as soon as they return home. For instance, one Burner reminisces a month and a half after the festival: “I’ve felt misplaced ever since i got back, brc [Black Rock City] is my home and the citizens are my people.” And another promises: “In the dust I found my family, In the dust I found my clan, In the dust I found hope for us all. Until we burn again I will hold my screams inside, I will keep the ashes burning until again I join my tribe”.9 Expectations of returning home, memories of past “Burns”, and advance preparations for future gatherings are all factors that shape the expectations and memories of participants in Temple ritualising. Since 2001, the Temple has been one of the major art attractions, and hundreds of people visit it every day of the festival. Burners’ memories of their time spent at the Temple stay with them outside of the festival as well. As Hummingbird Bob puts it, “I love the temple and it guides and leads me during the rest of my living experience very vividly outside the playa.” Liz told me that for her, “There is no other place that I think about as much outside of Burning Man”. Madelyn, another participant, wrote to a discussion group, “I’m coming out from Boston for my third burn […] I’m so excited – the temple is like my little home within a home.” Len wrote to me that “Everyone I speak with talks about the power of the temple, yet all it is a wooden structure with no religious symbols. [...] But entering the Temple 5 6 7 8 9

Gilmore 2005. Pike 2005. Shields 1991. Pike 2001. Ibid.

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area brings a feeling that, while difficult to explain, does not match any real world experience.” Although Burning Man is not a religious site and Burners are as likely to be atheists as Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or Pagans, the Temple is often described as a place that offers transcendance, transformation, or contact with a spirit realm.

Image 1: “Basura Sagrada: the Temple of Sacred Trash” at Burning Man 2008 Photo by the author

The origins of the temples were spontaneous and participatory. David Best, artist and creator of most of the temples before 2008, started the Temple tradition on a small scale in 2000. Best and a good friend had planned to set up a chapel (“The Temple of the Mind”), but the friend committed suicide right before Burning Man. Best came anyway and turned the Temple of the Mind into a memorial. Hundreds of people spontaneously visited the temple and wrote messages on it before it was burned. Because of the obvious community interest in this kind of participatory art, the Burning Man organisation approached Best and asked him to construct something larger for Burning Man 2001. Best erected similar temple structures in 2002– 2004, then took a break when Mark Grieve built the Temple of Dreams and Tem-

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ple of Hope in 2005 and 2006. Best returned in 2007 and built the Temple of Forgiveness and then a collective of artists, headed by Tuk Tuk and Shrine, took over in 2008 to create Basura Sagrada, “The Temple of Sacred Trash”. They described the project on their website: “meticulously detailed, the temple will be a precious space created from non-precious materials. By replacing the gold and marble surfaces of traditional temples with aluminum can adornments and cardboard spires, we hope to inspire others to see everyday trash as beautiful, to save everyday trash and use it – not because it is responsible or right or necessary to recycle (although that is certainly important), but because people are excited about the materials and medium”.10 What is familiar or different in each year’s temple also shapes participants’ experiences. What they recall of past temples has an impact on their expectations each year, and yet each year they must adapt their expectations and desires to the current temple.

Memorialisation in Contemporary America: Private and Public Rites for the Dead On my many visits to the temples, I have been struck by the transformation of private grief and loss into public expression and a kind of memorialising that seems to challenge scholarly accounts of mourning in the contemporary West. Death rites at the temple combine private and public rites of mourning that are generally unavailable to contemporary Americans.11 Many scholars, beginning probably with Philippe Ariès, have argued that industrialised cultures have lost traditional ways of mourning the dead, of “taming” death through collective rituals and public spectacles rather than private rites. In contrast, industrialised, secularised societies have placed “‘the burden of mourning’ on the shoulders of the individual”.12 Mourning practices that were once conducted in communal settings such as churches moved to psychotherapists’ offices and were focused on the individual. For this reason, most Americans experience death as private and invisible. This invisibility is especially a problem for those who are not regular participants in religious communities, which was probably the case for most Burning Man participants, who, according to a study by Lee Gilmore, tend to come from Jewish and Christian backgrounds, but are likely to identify themselves as “spiritual but not religious”.13 Temple participants are aware of the dearth of death rites in the broader culture, but they have also seen in the news spontaneous shrines to the dead of September 11, or have walked along the Vietnam War memorial in Washington D. C. They 10 11 12 13

http://basurasagrada.org, [accessed 3 August 2008]. Pike 2005. Ibid.: 198. Gilmore 2010: 45–67

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are aware of an American tradition of grieving that is expressed through material culture. The building of the temples from 2000–2008 coincides with recent trends in American ways of grieving the dead: Erika Doss (2005) and others have written about the shifting trend towards spontaneous public memorials and other kinds of memorialisation that are on the rise. Examples might include works of art and memory like the AIDS quilt, new rites for pregnancy loss, organ donor memorials, the spread across the U. S. of Latino celebrations around Dias de los Muertos outside Latino/Chicano communities, and increasing numbers of roadside shrines and pet cemeteries. According to Sandra Gilbert’s study of death rites, one million objects were left at the Oklahoma City fence that was designed to protect the crime scene of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.14 In her study of spontaneous memorials, Doss describes a “material culture of grief” derived from “longstanding materialist practices […] [demonstrating] the faith that Americans place in things to negotiate complex moments and events.” Moreover, she argues that contemporary memorials embody “increasingly accepted contemporary understandings of continued, rather than severed bonds between the living and the dead”.15 In these ways, changing social attitudes towards mourning may also shape ritualising at the temples, or at least it is clear that the temples embody these broader social trends. One of the ways the temples at Burning Man parallel the growth of pet memorials and the AIDS quilt is that they are also a place for recognising those who have been traditionally displaced. Suicides have been remembered and honoured in all of the temples, and pets – often excluded from public mourning – are also memorialised with messages and photos. Burners anticipate that they can express themselves in ways at the temple that they cannot elsewhere.

How the Physical Space of the Temple Shapes Experience: While it seems clear that Burners’ experiences at the Temple are very much connected to the material culture of grief that has become increasingly visible in the United States, the presence of the Temple also has a physical impact on those who visit it. Mist e-mailed me in response to an essay I wrote on the temples a few years ago: “how can one say more, then memories came flooding back, i can feel the wood grain of the temple against my finger tips, the tears started streaming down my face and have yet to yield, i can taste the playa at the corners of my mouth, i can feel the sting in my eyes of those first few moments on the 14 Gilbert 2006: 296. 15 Doss 2005: 301.

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The visceral impact of the temples on participants is intended by the builders and artists who work on them. The 2008 Temple artists issued this statement in advance of Burning Man: “We believe that the material itself has an inherent value that can be unlocked in the right hands. We will attempt to unlock unprecedented levels of beauty, and do it on a scale that will blow people’s minds and function as a sufficient vessel for the hopes, dreams, memories, and losses of our community. We welcome intrepid visitors to this space to be a part of this grand experiment in trash alchemy.”16 Beyond the general atmosphere of the temple that is laden with emotion, the physical spaces also shape participants’ experiences. As they sit, meditate, pray, read and write. There are many possible ways of interacting with the temple physically from crouching down in a corner to write a message to sitting twenty feet away on benches designed for looking at the spectacle of the temple laid out before you. Its spaces are all accessible, inviting participation. As they are intended to be, the physical spaces and atmosphere of the Temple are heavily laden with emotion. One of the Burners involved with the Temple in 2008, Tall Tom, who organises a group of volunteers called the “Temple Guardians” every year, described his experience at the temple: he was enjoying the space, reading messages, and looking at photos, and then, while holding the railing of the upper deck, he felt all the energy people had invested there and all their grief. He began weeping and, as his tears subsided, a woman next to him stroked his back, but did not say anything. He explained to me that this was just what he needed, that as “Guardians” we were there not only to protect the temple, but also to witness and support Burners’ emotional responses to the space.

16 See http://basurasagrada.org [accessed 3 August 2008]

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Image 2: Memorial altar in temple interior with photos and messages to the dead. Photo by the author

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Ritual Mirroring & Mimesis At the temples, participants tend to imitate the words and actions of those around them. This mimetic process takes place in several ways, including through ritual empathy and the recognition and imitation of actions and objects. Ritual empathy at the temple occurs when participants identify with and feel each other’s emotions, as was the case in Tall Tom’s story. This identification is a powerful shaping factor in their experiences and provides them with models for how to grieve. While I was wandering through the 2008 temple, a man came up to me with tears in his eyes and said, “I didn’t know it was like this”. Although I had been walking around the temple without feeling any strong emotions, at that point I started to cry too. My experience is a typical example of the kind of ritual empathy described by many Burners. Len, one of the temple Guardians, explained to me, “I don’t consider myself very religious or observant in the real world but I found visiting the Temple last year very meaningful. It was reading the messages left by visitors some of which were very powerful. I remember one in particular ‘Burn my cancer’ which brought tears to my eyes.” In 2008 he “saw a young woman sitting in a corner of the Temple intently writing in the margins of a photograph she brought with her and felt this immediate closeness to her even though there was no contact.” Proximity to the grief of others brings one’s own emotions to the surface. A similar process is described by literary critic Sandra Gilbert, who suggests in Death’s Door that “losses are so much like boomerangs that every effort at inscription returns and revitalises them”.17 These examples make it clear that grief at Burning Man has such a boomerang effect, and that grief can be contagious at the Temple. Other kinds of mimesis include various ways of imitating the actions of others and reading others’ messages, then sitting and writing one’s own. Another common mimetic experience is of recognising one’s own dead in the words and mementos left by other Burners. In 2008 one Burner brought his dead parents’ matchbook collection to the Temple and displayed the matches with a letter that read, “Born in the Great Depression to Jewish immigrant parents […] My parents lived the American Dream. Take a matchbook if you want and the rest will burn.” Someone had tacked another note and photo to the side of the original display: “My father was also born of Jewish immigrants in New York. His collection of matches almost equals your parents […] I hope you don’t mind him joining your parents. They can exchange stories.” In this case, imitation comes about through the process of reading others’ messages, looking at their altars, and recognising in them one’s own beloved dead. Such identification with and imitation of strangers seems to contradict the particularity of memory. For instance, according to philosopher Paul Ricoeur in Memory, History, Forgetting, memory is “radically singular […] the memories of 17 Gilbert 2006: 99.

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one person cannot be transferred into the memories of another”.18 Moreover, Derrida suggests that what we do at Burning Man may be a “betrayal” of the dead: “We cannot mourn for those another has mourned – or at least not in the same way. They could not have touched us in the same way, and so we betray them in reading – though this betrayal will have been made possible, if not inevitable […] by the very publicity, the very readability of mourning’s inscription.”19 But mourning knowledge at Burning Man is accumulated as people return the following year with objects and mementos similar to ones they saw the previous year. This is one of the many ways that Burners share in collective as well as personal mourning. Another mimetic practice that connects personal and public mourning is the recording of others’ words and images at the Temple. Thousands of Burners take photos of all aspects of the temple and its offerings, before it is burned, to freeze the memorials in time, even though they have been designed and intended to burn. In this way I am both different from and similar to other Temple participants. I take photos to document my research and to share with students and colleagues, but other Burners similarly take photos to show their friends and family back home. I may be the only one copying messages as well as images, and I feel a little furtive about this. I wonder if I have gone beyond witnessing the grief of others to somehow stealing their private moments. But I am not alone. I hear there is a BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) film crew making a film about the Temple, and I see a reporter with a large camera and microphone in front of a man playing an acoustic bass at the outskirts of the Temple. At Burning Man with its “No Spectators” motto, scholars and reporters become just another type of participant/observer. Perhaps the kind of ritual voyeurism I am guilty of at Burning Man does not set me apart from other participants, but instead supports Ron Grimes’ challenging of the false split between those who ritualise and those who understand or theorise.20 It might be that these various forms of mirroring and mimesis – both those of other Burners and my own – are all a kind of ritualised voyeurism.

Memory Memory works hard at Burning Man, and its work concerns a set of contradictions: remembering and forgetting, releasing and holding on, the juxtaposition of the 18 Ricoeur 2004: 96. 19 Derrida 2001: 8. 20 Grimes 2006.

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temporary and the permanent, and internalising grief and outwardly expressing it. Remembering by its very nature is fraught with these oppositions. Situating his perspective in the tradition of Plato, in Memory, History, Forgetting, philosopher Paul Ricoeur (2004) separates the object of memories and the act of remembering, explaining that the distance between them is forgetting. Temple rituals (writing and reading messages and letters and looking at photos) involve simultaneously remembering and forgetting, bringing the dead into our presence and letting them go. For instance, the many photographs plastered over the Temple are mnemonic aids that bring the dead into the space of the temple to be in the mourner’s presence once more. And as voyeurs, those of us looking at photographs and reading others’ messages experience that stranger as a loved one, and he or she becomes present to us as well. Burners also know that these acts that continue conversations with the dead are leading up to the Temple burn, which seems meant to end all conversations. Many messages at the Temple are about what was left unsaid, and attempt to provide some closure. As one Burner wrote to a friend, “whatever it was that made you take your life, may your soul find peace with it. May the rising glow of all the love in this temple lift you up with it.” Yet even after the final burning of the Temple, there are movements in both directions, of holding on to the dead and releasing them. Like the bits of melted glass and metal that people take home, replicating the gatherings of sacred trash that went into the temple building, mourners experience an ongoing relationship with the dead: “when it comes to our love objects there is no such thing as memory; our exchanges with them continue as if they were still alive. The work of mourning is always unfinished because we never fully let go of the dead”.21 There is an ambiguity in the thrust of the Temple towards impermanence and a simultaneous desire to hold onto the experience through photos and salvaging pieces of the burnt Temple from the ashes, as I have seen Burners do. Altars, photos, and other mementos left in this space are meant to be temporary and yet by photographing and writing about them, I too am thrusting them into the future.

Interiorisation and Externalisation of the Private Expressing intimate experiences and unique personal identities in a communal, public space on altars for all to see externalises the private experience of loss. At the same time, the dead are kept alive in us, their traces in us: “it is only in us that the dead may speak […] it is only by speaking of or as the dead that we keep them alive”.22 Literary theorist Mary Jacobus calls this kind of work, “the strange after21 Jacobus 2007: 398. 22 Derrida 2001: 9.

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life of mourning […] that continues to honor the dead by talking to them”.23 For instance, a common theme in messages at the temple is to wish the beloved dead could be at Burning Man and to imagine they would have enjoyed being there: “I put my mom’s travel journals in the temple because she would have loved to be at Burning Man, or at least see me and her grandson there.” In this way the dead are kept alive by conjuring up their desired presence at the festival and imagining them as part of the Burning Man community.

Image 3: One of the temple’s satellite shrines with Burners writing messages Photo by the author

On the other hand, a movement in the opposite direction also occurs at the Temple. The opposite of the intimacy of strangers through shared grieving is setting oneself apart from others. Temple visitors often sit and meditate or write intently in a kind of private cocoon, oblivious to the presence of those around them. When Burners’ experiences are private, they bring the outer world of the Temple into a kind of internal communion with the self. As Len puts it, “As soon as I see 23 Jacobus 2007: 393.

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the temple from up close I almost feel like I’m in a trance. I don’t hear the racket or pay attention to the art cars. The Temple literally simply brings tears to my eyes and I feel this need to communicate with my parents in particular. I read the message of complete strangers yet I feel a closeness to them. […] I see people in all manners of dress and non dress. Quietly writing their innermost thoughts or just mesmerized by the spectacle […] there is a serene feeling even with all the cacophony”. Aim had a similar kind of experience: “Hearing laughter, Japanese violin, techno, singing, or even a bluegrass band has helped me put my emotional issues in order and balance the reality that whatever I am feeling, I am still at Burning Man surrounded by these crazy people (yay!)”. Or, from Mist’s perspective, there can be an “odd balance of disruption and serenity only seconds apart making it all part of a wonderful experience […] how much of the old Burning Man do you want to get rid of simply so you can have the “experience” you expect rather than the one that is simply created out of those random events [...].” In a discussion of noisy art cars coming to the Temple, Rose explains, “sometimes my most sacred moments of silence have been jarred by unexpected music that changed my experience in a completely unexpected way. In fact, in some cases that music turned my mourning into celebration”. Through proximity with the dead and with other mourners, Burners may find new ways to relate self to community. At the Temple, contemplation of one’s most intimate and private memories of the dead coexists with collective expressions of grief and memory.

Conclusion Ritual experience at the Temple is marked by a set of contradictions or tensions that make the experience dynamic and powerful for participants: interiorisation/externalisation, remembering/forgetting, the intimacy of strangers/private space within the crowds of people, and impermanence/continuity. These contradictions characterise mourning in the social world outside festival bounds, but are especially heightened in festival space. They allow for grief and memory to shift, to be shared with a community of others, and perhaps to be transformed into something new. In all these ways, the Temple seems to offer unpredictable and contradictory ritual experiences. The Temple’s builders see the driftwood integrated into the Temple as a metaphor: “driftwood speaks to uncertainties and happenstance of multiple elements combining to form something entirely new”.24 Ritualising at the temples is both improvisational and mimetic. One’s own memories blend with ritual empathy towards the grief of others in new material and bodily expressions that both resolve and continue conversations with the dead.

24 http://basurasagrada.org [accessed 3 August 2008].

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References Derrida, Jacques 2001. The Work of Mourning. Edited by Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Doss, Erika 2005. “Spontaneous Memorials and Contemporary Modes of Mourning in America”. Material Religion 2/3: 294–319. Gilbert, Sandra M. 2006. Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve. New York, London: W.W. Norton and Co. Gilmore, Lee 2010. Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califorinia Press. Gilmore, Lee 2005. “Fires of the Heart: Ritual, Pilgrimage, and Transformation at Burning Man”. In: Lee Gilmore & Mark Van Proyen (eds.). AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press: 43–62. Grimes, Ronald 2006. Rite Out of Place: Ritual, Media, and the Arts. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Homans, Peter (ed.) 2000. Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning and Memory at Century's End. Charlottesville, London: University Press of Virginia. Jacobus, Mary 2007. “‘Distressful Gift’: Talking to the Dead”. South Atlantic Quarterly 106/2: 393–418. Pike, Sarah 2001. “Desert Gods, Apocalyptic Art, and the Making of Sacred Space at the Burning Man Festival”. In: Katherine McCarthy & Eric Mazur (eds.). God in the Details: American Religion in Everyday Life. New York: Routledge. — 2005. “No Novenas for the Dead: Ritual Action and Communal Memory at the Temple of Tears”. In: Lee Gilmore & Mark Van Proyen (eds.). AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press: 195–214. Ricoeur, Paul 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey & David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Santino, Jack (ed.) 2006. Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shields, Rob 1991. Places on the Margins: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge.

Websites http://basurasagrada.org, accessed 3 August 2008. http://www.burningman.com.

Jan Weinhold

Navigating the Inner Work: The Experience of Ayahuasca within Santo Daime Rituals 1. Introduction It is a sunny afternoon in June, and we find ourselves in an old church in Amsterdam with about 80 participants dressed in white waiting for a festive ritual of Santo Daime to begin. This church is not used any more for the typical local Catholic services, and it can be rented out for different purposes, including dance parties. Apart from the disco lights on the walls, however, the building looks exactly like a Catholic church with its pulpit, beautifully coloured windows, Jesus on the cross, and a high roof. There are rows of benches on the sides, but there is ample space in the middle of the floor, where a small table is set up. On the walls are the national flags of Brazil and the Netherlands, and a picture of Mestre Irineu, the Brazilian founder of Santo Daime. There is the smell of incense in the air; the atmosphere is quiet, concentrated, and friendly. There is a feeling of tautness and curiosity in the air as we wait for the ritual to begin. Some participants greet each other with hugs and quietly chat with each other, some people are sitting, meditating, and concentrating on their own, and others are still busy with preparations for the ritual. Four members of our research group1 have travelled to Amsterdam to participate in this ritual of Santo Daime, and to collect interview data from church members. Santo Daime is a small religious group that uses the psychoactive substance ayahuasca in its rituals. As researchers, we were invited by our informants to take part in rituals of Santo Daime and to drink ayahuasca ourselves, to obtain some idea of what their rituals and the encounter with the divine are all about. Before this ritual starts, our informant explains the correct behaviour during the ritual, the rules of conduct, the way of dancing, and he gives us some hints about how to manage the state of mind that ayahuasca can induce.

1 The project “Dynamics of Ritual, Salutogenesis and the Use and Abuse of Psychoactive Substances” as part of the Collaborative Research Area SFB 619 “Ritual Dynamics”, Heidelberg University (www.ritualdynamik.de), was funded by the German Research Council (DFG).

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The difficulties and paradoxes of the term “participant observation” in this context would soon become clear. After drinking the daime, as the substance ayahuasca is called within the church, in this particular ritual Portuguese songs are sung for about 10 hours. Every two hours participants queue up to receive another small glass of the substance. Most of the time a special form of dance is conducted, the so called bailado, in which you move three steps to the right and three steps to the left in sync with the other participants. While the effects of daime felt very light at times, and it was pleasurable to enjoy the songs and the music while watching the scene, at other times it was difficult to cope with the substance-induced alterations of one’s mind and body. Breaks were necessary, to sit down, be absorbed within one’s own psychological realms, and to deal with the psychoactive and physical effects of ayahuasca. Being in this double state - experiencing and observing – the following questions came up immediately after the ritual: how do ritual participants manage to maintain the formalised structure of the rituals while coping with the strong psychoactive effects of ayahuasca? Conversely, how does the ritual contribute to shaping the participants’ experience? Finally, how is it possible to change between two aspects of the trabalho (work) – as the rituals are called in Portuguese – the individual “inner work” and the social conduct of the performance? My starting point is the assumption that rituals with psychoactive substances cause a specific extraordinary experience, which, however, cannot be exclusively explained by pharmacological effects. For as soon as external biochemical agents are involved (in this case the psychoactive substance ayahuasca), a biomedical and pharmacological logic suggests itself: it is tempting to conclude that these ritual experiences are simply caused by the general pharmacological effects of the substances used on the nervous system and the brain. In accordance with Zinberg (1984) and his model of “drug, set, and setting”, I will argue that the analysis of substance-induced experiences cannot be primarily based on pharmacological assumptions. Not only would such a perspective be reductionist and ignore participants’ individual agendas, social conditions, and cultural expressions, such as rituals that influence the construction of substance-experiences and their meanings, it would also discount the validity of participants’ explanations. Since the issue of experience is inevitably a matter of analysing “first-person-perspectives”, it needs to take participants’ descriptions and explanations of their experiences with psychoactive substances into account. Hence, a pharmacological view is surely necessary to capture substance-related variables, but on its own it would be of very limited use in analysing ritual experiences. There is a body of research from

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different disciplines such as sociology,2 anthropology,3 medicine,4 and psychotherapeutic medicine,5 which goes beyond a pharmacological view of the effects of psychoactive substances. In the following, I make use of some of this work, while also pointing out its limitations. I will also argue against the presupposition of studying psychoactive substances exclusively within a paradigm of pathology and psychiatric disturbances – as the majority of investigations of this topic in Western medicine and psychology do. Within this academic field, the “patient” is usually reduced to a passive victim of “the drug” and its “effects”, of his or her “drug use”, of familial or social circumstances that enhance drug abuse and addiction. “Losing control” over the “drug”, its “effects”, or of “drug-use patterns” is mostly seen as a linear consequence of any substance use; it is also associated with substance-related mental disturbances.6 To counter this idea, our research project set out to investigate conditions of “controlled” substance use which allow people to take psychoactive substances and stay actively healthy by actively controlling their drug-use. One aspect of “controlled use” is the question of how users themselves control and navigate substanceinduced altered states of consciousness, aiming at desirable effects. Participants who take ayahuasca are not merely passive recipients of the substance’s pharmacological effects, but clearly use and control these effects in their religious rituals. Here, a complementary perspective is necessary, which takes into account that ritual experience is an active construction and the result of an active process of perception and intentional cognitive and embodied activities, rather than merely a “passive” result, or even by-product, of the prescribed ritual performance. In this paper therefore, I will point out how participants make use of “navigational” strategies to control the substances effects and the flow of rituals. But first I will briefly describe the general effects of the psychoactive substance ayahuasca, the Santo Daime church, and its rituals.

2. Ayahuasca The central aspect of Santo Daime rituals is the ingestion of ayahuasca, a psychoactive substance based primarily on two plants that are found in the moist and tropical Amazon basin of South America: the bark of the large forest liana, Banisteriopsis caapi, and the leaves of a bush, Psychotria viridis. Psychotria viridis contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which has structural similarities with 2 3 4 5 6

Becker 1953. E.g. Furst 1972. E.g. Zinberg 1984. E.g. Winkelman & Roberts 2007. APA 2000.

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the human neurotransmitter serotonin, while the liana contains harmin (a reversible monoamine oxidase inhibitor, MAOI) which enables and enhances the effects of DMT. DMT is not psychoactive when taken orally, but in combination with an MAOI will unfold psychoactive hallucinogenic effects for approximately two to four hours.7 For significant psychoactive effects it is therefore necessary to combine both plants.8 Ayahuasca is prepared by boiling the bark of the liana and adding the leaves of the bush, resulting in a dark-coloured, bitter-tasting brew, which is consumed as a beverage. Originally, ayahuasca is a Quechua word that can be loosely translated as “vine of the soul” or “vine of the dead”, derived from aya (soul or dead people) and waska (vine). The word ayahuasca also denotes the vine as the main ingredient of the psychoactive beverage used by several indigenous groups spread along the Amazonian basin. Within Santo Daime, the word daime – a colloquial phrase from the Portugese words dai me (“give me”) – became the name of the church as well as of the psychoactive drink. Both terms, ayahuasca and daime, will be used synonymously in this text. Since ayahuasca – or daime – is not just a symbolic element within the Santo Daime system, but the core concept around which the rituals revolve, it is necessary to summarise its psychoactive effects. Generally, ayahuasca can be understood as inducing an “altered state of consciousness” (ASC), which, from a psychological perspective, can be defined as follows: “An altered state of consciousness for a given individual is one in which he clearly feels a qualitative shift in his pattern of mental functioning, that is, he feels not just a quantitative shift (more or less alert, more or less visual imagery, sharper or duller, etc.), but also that some quality or qualities of his mental processes are different.”9 This now classic definition implies a phenomenological perspective, in that the essence of an ASC is an individual’s pattern of subjective experience, and not the overt behaviour or physiological parameters. Common properties of ASC are summarised by Grob (1999): – alterations in thinking (subjective changes in concentration, attention, memory, possible diminution or expansion of reflective awareness); – altered time sense (subjective feelings of timelessness, accelerating or decelerating of time, infinite or infinitesimal duration of time); – fear or loss of control (fear of losing hold on reality or self-control); – intense emotional reactions, ranging from ecstasy to despair;

7 Riba et al. 2001. 8 For pharmacological details see e.g. Riba et al. 2001; 2003. 9 Tart 1990/1969: 1.

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– changes of body-image (e.g. dissolution of boundaries between self and others, states of depersonalisation or derealisation, where sense of one’s own reality may be temporarily lost); – perceptual alterations (including visual imagery, hallucinations, or synaesthesia); – changing in meaning or significance (e.g. experience of great insight or profound sense of meaning); – sense of ineffability; – feelings of rejuvenation after experiencing the ASC; – hypersuggestibility (enhanced susceptibility for information, statements, perceptual elements or non-specific cues). It should be added that ASC are not merely changes in the contents of consciousness, and that they involve a changed pattern of subjective experiences, not merely a change in one aspect or dimension of consciousness. ASC is a relational term, the states are identified by comparison to the individual’s normal waking state of consciousness. Finally, ASC are (relatively) short-term, reversible conditions.10 Ayahuasca is often classified as a hallucinogenic drug, since the effects partly resemble those of classic hallucinogens such as LSD. Shanon (2002) demonstrates, in his profound phenomenological analysis, that the spectrum of ayahuasca experiences is significantly richer and more complex than merely non-ordinary perceptual effects. It should also be noted that no average or typical ayahuasca experience can be delineated and that particular qualities vary between individuals, and are also different each time an individual is under the influence of the substance. Ayahuasca may change the perception of the general atmosphere and give participants the impression of being in another reality, whose primary characteristics can be beauty, enchantment, deep meaningfulness, and sanctity.11 Shanon introduces the term “otherworldliness” to describe a state in which “things are not as they used to be and one has the sense of entering into another, heretofore unknown, reality”.12 Within this “other world”, sensations of a powerful energy are reported, which is often referred to as a divine force that sustains and permeates all creation. Affective states can range from love, elation, and awe on the positive side, to immense horror, anxiety, and fear. All perceptual modalities are significantly altered; complex visualisations with open or closed eyes are especially common, and may include jungle motifs such as snakes, jaguars, birds, rain forests, or celestial scenes, ancient civilisations, cities, palaces, human and non-human beings, such as deities, 10 Farthing 1992. 11 Shanon 2002. 12 Ibid.: 59.

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angels, and demons. Ideational effects under the influence of ayahuasca can vary from personal reflections and biographical insights to existential religious, philosophical, and epistemological issues. Particularly important are changes in one’s subjective sense of selfhood. Effects range from a dissolution of the border between internal and external reality, to impressions that sensations, cognitions, and actions are not self-controlled (e.g. in the phenomenon of receiving hymns) and even complete transformations of identity.13 In summary, ayahuasca can cause ASC with significant changes in perception, emotion, and cognition about the self, environment, and cosmological questions; it can also cause subjective altered modes of being in the world, states that are interpreted as religious or spiritual experiences by members of Santo Daime. After the introduction of pharmacological and psychological properties of ayahuasca in the next chapters, the sociocultural background of my research is given – the rituals of the Santo Daime church.

3. Santo Daime Santo Daime is a religious institution that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century in the Amazonian state Acre in Brazil. It belongs to a group of three religious systems in Brazil, using ayahuasca, Barquinha and Uniao do Vegetal (UDV) being the other two main religions. However, it should be mentioned that there is a long tradition of ayahuasca use in South American countries such as Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil, within contexts of indigenous shamanism and vegetalismo, a form of specialised healers, who claim that the spirits of plants are their teachers and supernatural agents.14 The development of the Brazilian churches has been strongly influenced by these indigenous Amazonian practices. Labate15 speaks here of a “re-elaboration” and “re-reading” of ancient traditions and local spiritual and healing systems, resulting in syncretic cosmologies and practices, based on indigenous Amazonian systems enriched with elements of Catholicism, elements of Afro-Brazilian traditions, and European Kardecist spiritism and esotericism.16 Santo Daime was founded by Raimundo Irineu Serra (1892–1971), a rubbertapper of Afro-Brazilian origin, who moved to Acre in 1912.17 During the following decades he came into contact with local indigenous healers, who used ayahuasca in ritualised contexts. The foundational myth of Santo Daime has Irineu 13 14 15 16 17

Ibid. Luna 1986. Labate 2008: 201. Dawson 2007. Ibid.

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Serra experience an ayahuasca-induced vision, in which a female figure named Clara sends him on a “mission”: to withdraw into the jungle, drink ayahuasca regularly, and maintain a special diet. The figure told Irineu Serra to call the substance daime and to create a new church – Santo Daime. Ayahuasca – now called daime – would be administered there and play a dominant role as the sacrament. Daime literally means “give me” and is a frequent theme in the doctrine in the form of hymns, e.g. “daime forca, daime amor, daime luz” (transl.: “give me strength, give me love, give me light”). Besides drinking the psychoactive substance, another pivotal part of Santo Daime rituals – called trabalhos (spiritual works) – is the singing of hinos (hymns), which are said to be not composed but rather “received” under the influence of the psychoactive drink. A collection of hymns is called hinário. The hinário of Irineu Serra, called cruzeiro, consists of 132 hymns which were received through the course of his life. Besides the hinário of Irineu Serra as the central core of the doctrine, other hymns, which are received by his followers and contemporary members of Santo Daime, are frequently sung during rituals. In the 1930s Irineu Serra became “Mestre Irineu” (Master Irineu) and practised his rituals in the City of Rio Branco in the state of Acre. Within Santo Daime several branches developed subsequently. CEFLURIS (Centro Eclectico da Fluente Luz Universal Raimundo Irineu Serra), founded by Serra’s follower Sebastiao Mota de Melo in the 1970s, is the largest branch of Santo Daime in Brazil and the most popular branch in Europe. Later, the small church moved further into the Amazonian jungle to establish the settlement Céu do Mapiá, a village which is the main seat of CEFLURIS to the present day. While Santo Daime initially was a rural Amazonian phenomenon, it spread to Brazilian cities in the second half of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1990s, congregations of Santo Daime were also established in several European countries. While DMT has an illegal status under international drug laws, the religious use of ayahuasca is currently permitted in Brazil, and in exceptional cases, and only for religious purposes, also in Canada, the USA, and a few European countries (Netherlands, Italy, and Spain). I would estimate that the number of committed Santo Daime members in Europe is less than 1000, not counting occasional visitors. Santo Daime can be understood as a religion integrating elements from the Catholic Church with indigenous Amazonian concepts and Afro-Brazilian elements.18 Already in Serra’s initial ayahuasca vision, a female figure appeared, possessing a double identity. The woman revealed herself as a plant being, Rainha de Floresta (Queen of the Forest), as well as Nossa Senhora da Conceição (Holy Virgin of Conception).

18 Ibid.: 71.

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Daime is seen as a sacred drink, which both represents and embodies the divine aspect. It refers to an animated force, which resides in the psychoactive substance and is a divine being and the source of life and knowledge. Larsen points out that the founder of CEFLURIS, Sebastião Mota de Melo, regarded daime, as well as nature in general, as a body of knowledge for followers of the church.19 The experiences induced by the substance, called miração, are conceptualised as divine revelations. The substance is seen simultaneously as an intelligible being and a gateway for direct experience with the divine. It is supposed to generate the power for the ritual. This force is conceived of as an energetic and spiritual current that links the participants of the ritual with each other and connects the congregation vertically with the divine.20 Within Santo Daime, illness is seen as a spiritually imbalanced state between individual and environment, while healing occurs when the individual corrects this imbalance. Daime is understood as a universal medicine, offering insight into causes of the particular disease (physical or spiritual), as well as possible cures. Members of Santo Daime see the indivual as responsible for the treatment. Dawson gives two aspects of such a cure.21 First, spiritual cleansing can be obtained by immersion into the spiritual energies of ritual participation and the effects of daime. Secondly, during the daime-induced ASC or spiritual current, the individual should critically investigate his previous and current life to gain insight into potential conditions for the illness. The Santo Daime cosmology is mainly presented through the hinos, which are sung during rituals. The singing of the hymns is supposed to enable the ritual community to engage with the spiritual realm of the “astral force”. For novices, or those participants who are not accustomed to the hymns, textbooks are available and can be used during the rituals. Hymns are sung and partially danced to in the rhythms of a march, waltz, or mazurka. They consist of several repetitive stanzas covering themes such as prayer, ethical and health-related narratives, or references to Christian mythology. For example, the figures of Jesus Christ the Redeemer, the Eternal and divine Father, and the Virgin Mary often appear in the hymns of Irineu Serra. Other common themes are the astral bodies of the elements (sun, moon, stars), and themes of flora and fauna (e.g. flowers and the plants of which the brew is made, hummingbirds, or butterflies). Irineu Serra appears often as a guide who was instructed by the Rainha da Floresta (Queen of the Forest) to convey and transmit the sacred doctrine of Santo Daime. Daime itself is referred to as a supernatural force and the “teacher of all teachers”, and it is believed that its consumption will provide cleansing, strength, and healing.22 19 20 21 22

Larsen 1999: xvi. Dawson 2007. Ibid.: 82. Ibid.: 73.

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4. Rituals of Santo Daime Trabalhos (works), the rituals of Santo Daime, are conducted indoors, usually in brightly illuminated rooms and churches23. In Brazil, polygonally shaped and semiopen churches are built especially for Santo Daime rituals. In Europe, rented churches, or other suitable, large, and illuminated rooms are used. In the centre of the church or room is a large wooden table for the ritual leaders and musicians, the so called mesa. The ritual objects set on the table are: a wooden cross (Cross of Caravaca), around which a rosary is hung, three candles (symbolising sun, moon and stars and the holy trinity), a glass of water (as a symbol to help spirits in need), flowers, and incense sticks. Some groups may also place a bible, some crystals, and pictures of Mestre Irineu on the table. Around the table sit the ritual specialist (the padrinho), his wife (the madrinha), musicians, and a few key members of the community. The mesa is understood as a central focus of Santo Daime rituals, here the spiritual current is said to be generated and directed. The space opposite the church entrance is reserved for dispensing the daime. Often a table is used, upon which the jar with daime and glasses are placed. On average, daime is drunk every two hours. To receive daime, men and women queue up on two sides of a table. Each sex forms a separate line to receive daime, which is dispensed by senior male members of the church. During trabalhos, participants are arranged around the central table according to sex, seniority, marital status, and height, in a precisely structured order. Women and men are separated, and it is a rule not to move to the other side. This spatialsocial structure is said to be important and necessary for conveying the spiritual current. In the rituals, participants are dressed in uniforms: novices and visitors in white, fardados, registered members of the church, according to the particular type of ritual and gender in white or blue-white. Male church members wear classical suits, with the Star of Solomon on the lapel. The female uniform is composed of a pleated skirt, a blouse with the Star of Solomon, and a pleated green shawl. On their heads women wear a small rhinestone crown in silver, symbolising the Queen of the Forest. When hymns are sung as central elements, music is played. In general, guitars are used but other instruments may be played as well, for example flutes or accordion. Several participants play the maraca, a small rattle instrument to keep and support the rhythms of the hymns and dance. Experienced members of Santo Daime work periodically as fiscal. The task of a fiscal is to keep ritual order, as well as to protect and assist participants (e.g. showing which hymn is presently being sung). The fiscal is not supposed to intervene with the participants’ experience, or address visions and unpleasant episodes 23 For details of all Santo Daime rituals see: Cemin 2008; Dawson 2007; MacRae 2009.

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directly. His responsibility is just to secure the basic needs and the safety of the participants, for example to hand participants water or blankets if necessary, or direct them to the bathrooms. This is necessary, since during rituals some participants may go through difficulties in their psycho-physiological process, show signs of unrest or helplessness, or feel nausea and occasionally vomit. Usually there is one female and one male fiscal on the men’s and women’s side of the central table, respectively. There exist different types of ritual, and all rituals are organised according to the calendar. Concentraçãos, meditative rituals, are held on the fifteenth and thirtieth days of each month. Central to these sessions are periods of concentration, lasting between 60 and 90 minutes. During this service, seating for participants is provided, and all Daimistas, as the members are called, sit silently in chairs, focusing on their inner experience. Legs and arms should not be crossed to avoid any interference of the energy flow, a rule which applies to other Santo Daime rituals as well. The aim of the ritual is to quiet the minds of participants, to distance them from worldy concerns and intrusive thoughts and pictures, aiming at a connection with the spiritual realm. At the beginning and the end of a concentração which may last for about 4 hours in total, Catholic prayers are said and Santo Daime hymns are sung. Festive Daime sessions, called hinário or bailado, analogous to the name of the hymns, are held on fixed dates such as Catholic holidays, Christmas, or special days in the biographies of important church members, e.g. the birthday of the founder. These rituals usually start in the evening and last up to 12 hours, until dawn. Sometimes, for practical reasons, festive rituals are conducted during daytime. For festive sessions the church is usually free of furniture. During a hinário, the participants stand and dance aligned in ordered formations, according to height. This alignment means that everybody is able to see the table in the middle of the room. During festive rituals, more than one hundred hymns are sung and the bailado is collectively performed, a synchronised dance with a repeating motion, three steps to the left and three steps to the right. This highly formalised dance has the purpose of establishing harmony within the congregation and enhancing the flow of energy between participants. There are different hinários (collection of single hymns) sung according to the occasion. The official hymns, “received” by main Padrinhos (Mestre Irineu, Padrinho Sebastião, or Padrinho Alfredo), are sung on some of the most important holidays. Additionally, hymns received by other church members may be sung, in Europe, to some extent even in local languages, e.g. Dutch or German. The hinário is danced continually, and only interrupted by the dispensing of daime and occasional salutations (Viva!) adressed to Santo Daime saints, representatives, and local communitiy members. In the middle of the ritual, an appointed break of betweeen 30 and 60 minutes allows some relaxation.

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The missa (mass) is held less often, on the first Sunday of the month. It is determined by anniversaries of the deaths of important church members. Besides other songs, a special set of ten hymns called Santa Missa (holy mass) is sung. Since health and healing within Santo Daime is a rather extensive concept, all Santo Daime rituals are considered to have potential healing power. Nevertheless, there are special healing rituals. Trabalhos de estrela (works of the star) are explicit healing sessions with a small number of participants that are held on special occasions, chosen by the padrinho, the leader of the community. Participants sit on chairs, and there is singing of hymns, but no dancing. Healing rituals are not bound to specific calender dates and can be conducted flexibly. These rituals aim to free the client, who may, but need not, be present during the ritual, from “obsession” and “negative fluids”.24 The work of the star is of relatively short duration and should be repeated on three consecutive days. It should be mentioned here that during healing rituals (as well as other types of rituals) episodes of spirit possession may occur. This element mirrors influences of the Afro-Brasilian cult of Umbanda in which spirit possession is a major feature. In the Daime doctrine, this concept is applied to dissociative episodes that occur especially during healing rituals. Animated individual entities or spirits are considered to enter humans under the influence of daime. Healing of the spirit, as well as of the participant, can occur when these entities are brought together with the positive and curative powers of the divine drink. Since the conceptualisation and ritual practice of spirit possession within Santo Daime is not the central concern of this paper, I will not elaborate on this issue here.25 Feitio is the name of the ritual for the preparation of daime in Brazil. The vine Banisteriopis caapi, which is associated with the masculine attributes of strength and power, is harvested and prepared for cooking the daime by men. After the collection the liana is cut into pieces and pounded to fibers with wooden hammers. The leaves of the bush Psychotria viridis – associated with feminine characteristics such as light and subtlety – are collected, cleaned, and prepared by female church members. The feitio takes place in a preparation house (casa de feitio), it starts usually in the evening and lasts until the next day.

5. Research Background: Sample and Methods In the context of a major research project, an integrative longitudinal study of twenty European members of the European Santo Daime church was conducted which focused on medical and psychological questions as well as ritual-related research. All study participants have academic training and are employed in such 24 MacRae 2009: 87. 25 See Dawson (forthcoming).

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professional fields as education, counselling, the computer-business, and healthcare. The majority are German, with an equal distribution of both genders, spanning an age group between 23 and 67 years. Most of the study participants have been members of Santo Daime for a significant time (10 years on average) and have a rich background of drinking ayahuasca (usually more than 100 times in total). Some are married or related to each other and all participants know each other well, since Santo Daime is a relatively small church with an even smaller percentage of German native speakers. Since at the present time Santo Daime is prohibited in Germany due to drug laws and the illegal status of the psychoactive DMT, some participants have moved to the Netherlands and others travel frequently to participate in Santo Daime rituals conducted in the Netherlands, where Santo Daime holds a legal status as religion. During field research I was able to visit and participate in a variety of different types of Santo Daime rituals in the Netherlands and in Brazil. Since 2003 several semi-structured interviews have been conducted with each of the study participants to illuminate biographical patterns in relation to Santo Daime and to focus on particular aspects of Santo Daime rituals. All interviews were transcribed word by word and quotations were interpreted with a qualitative content analysis system.26 In the following I use direct excerpts from the interviews to exemplify my arguments27.

6. Ritual Experience Beyond Pharmacology: Drug, Set, and Setting In the following I will argue that the psychoactive substance ayahuasca is not the only necessary variable to induce and influence the ritual experience. Even if ayahuasca experiences show some phenomenological commonalities between participants, they are profoundly influenced by extrapharmacological factors. Elaborated as the general model of “drug, set, and setting” by Zinberg (1984), this approach holds the central assumption that substance-related experiences and behaviours are significantly determined by individual and contextual variables. Zinberg, coming from a medical background, defined the terms as follows: “In order to understand what impels someone to use an illicit drug and how that drug affects the user, three determinants must be considered: drug (the pharmacologic action of the substance itself), set (the attitude of the person

26 Mayring 2003. 27 All citations of the transcribed interviews have been translated from German into English by the author.

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at the time of use, including his personality structure) and setting (the influence of the physical and social setting within which the use occurs.”28 Dobkin de Rios (1996) proposes a similar model with several variables that influence the effects of psychoactive substances. Partly based on anthropological field research on ayahuasca in South-America, she proposes a scheme in which socalled “antecedent variables” influence “consequent variables” – that is, the structure and content of ayahuasca experiences. As antecedent variables, she lists e.g. biological variables (e.g. body weight, physical condition, special diets, sexual abstinence), psychological variables (e.g. motivation, mood, past experiences), socialinteractional variables (e.g. nature of the group, ritual performance, presence of a ritual specialist), and cultural variables (e.g. shared symbolic system, expectations of visionary content, values, belief systems, nonverbal adjuncts auch as music). According to this rather comprehensive model, the setting not only denotes the actual physical surroundings of the substance-experience – in this case the spatial and temporal ritual setting – but also the wider cultural context, e.g. particular assumptions about reality and epistemology. Hence, what determines the ritual experience of Santo Daime members can be understood to be the result of several factors: the interplay of the psychoactive substance (drug), the psychological (set), and the contextual variables (setting). Since the comprehensive analysis of “drug, set, and setting” would imply a large number of variables, I will focus in this article only on a few variables, to corroborate my main points. For the “set”, the variable will be the motivational aspect of European Santo Daime members for participating in rituals. For the “setting”, I will point out the actual physical and social ritual scenery, and its relationship to participants’ experiences. I will not consider biographical backgrounds or personality characteristics of my interviewees, which are also essential for the “set”, or cultural and epistemological aspects of the religious system Santo Daime, which are also essential for the “setting”. Motivational Aspects as Part of the “Set” One variable of the “set”, which could be obtained and analysed empirically, consists in the motivational aspects of Santo Daime members for partaking in rituals and drinking daime. According to the “drug, set, and setting” model, it can be assumed that individual intentions (as conscious manifestations of more general motives) for partaking in Santo Daime rituals will influence participants’ ritual experiences. The notion that ayahuasca is a non-specific amplifier of psychological processes finds its reflection in participants’ own views. A 37-year-old woman, who works as a language teacher and has frequently participated in Santo Daime rituals for 12 years, explains: 28 Zinberg 1984: 5.

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Jan Weinhold “You take some [ayahuasca or daime] and you think it does something to you. You take something but what you take is just like a door-opener. That you can see something of yourself or of the world which you haven’t seen before […] And daime is the key to open certain doors and certain parts of your character, of the earth, whatever. You can move where you normally don’t have access.”

Generally, for participants the path of Santo Daime is understood as a process of personal, social, and, most of all, spiritual development. Reasons to engage in rituals can include aesthetic pleasure, the desire to gain knowledge, psychological insight, therapeutic purposes, and, self-evidently, the intention to connect with spiritual realms. A study participant explains the potential variety of reasons for engaging in rituals: “The attitude is simple: that you wish to get to know another area. For, when you approach a thing like this, it is important that you have a wish that you want to realise. For example I can also go to a Daime ritual with the wish for the sweepstakes numbers or for a new relationship or to find a new job. I know people who do this, who take their family problems into the Daime work and ask for a solution.” Other individual reasons can be: “[…] to receive information for certain questions, or to develop understanding for illnesses or for other persons, depending on how you use daime, or to clarify relationships. Ultimately, you can use it for everything.” The relationship between the participants’ reasons and their daime experiences is not necessarily predictable in a linear way, and often the visions are a mystery to them. Shanon points out that what happens during rituals impresses participants “beyond imagination”.29 However, despite the unpredictability of the experience and the subjective mystery of the individual visions, intentions may direct the particular experience in two hypothetical ways: first, the individual may produce a self-fulfilling prophecy by expecting, and to some degree generating, certain information that is relevant for the cognitive scheme which matches the individual intention. When, for example, a question of personal relevance is asked internally before the ritual, this question and related answers may lead through the daimeinduced ASC like a thread in the form of an inner dialogue. When a certain illness is about to be examined within a particular ritual, participants are likely to select information which relates to the illness or the healing process in some way. Consequently, it is these aspects of the abundance of information during the daime-in-

29 Shanon 2002: 308.

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duced ASC which may be selected, focused on, and interpreted according to the relevant individual intention. Secondly, since the content of the daime-induced ASC is often visual and metaphoric, participants may interpret such multivalent information during and after the ritual according to their motivational schemata. As two aspects of ASC Grob (1999) stated the change in meaning or significance, and an enhanced susceptibility for information and non-specific cues. In that sense, unspecific cues and metaphorical images or information may be interpreted in relation to and within concrete and particular individual motivational concerns. Unspecific and metaphoric visions may be viewed and translated in relation to specific and concrete individual concerns. To summarise: motivational aspects and intentions may give subjective patterns for selecting, interpreting, and evaluating the information during the ayahuasca experiences. The Ritual Setting How does the ritual scenery contribute to the shaping of participants’ experiences? The perspective of long-term participants of Santo Daime supports the notion that the whole ritual, as a pivotal part of the “setting”, is paramount, not just the intake of the substance. Most participants would clearly refrain from taking ayahuasca in an unstructured way. Contrary to other and more popular psychoactive substances, e.g. MDMA (“ecstasy”), LSD, or psilocybin, which can be, and have been, used in a variety of settings for a variety of purposes, ranging from recreation to psychotherapy, for members of Santo Daime the use of ayahuasca is rather strictly limited to their religious rituals. One participant explains: “I have never been someone who said: ‘Well, I’ll take a bit of Daime, go into the woods and be on my own and let myself drift away’. For me the structure is important. This is the basis on which I am able to take this, anyway.” Generally, different types of Santo Daime rituals are seen as adequate temporal, physical, and social spaces, which provide conditions for favourable ritual experiences. When asked which factors are pivotal for Santo Daime experiences, one study participant comments in a rather holistic way: “All factors belong together: the day, the personal attitude, the constellation of the planets, God’s energy and what he wants to teach us. Also if the participants are open-minded or not, how the group works together, which level of experience the group has. The big picture depends on many tiny factors.” Some participants emphasise the importance of the structured and prescribed conduct of rituals:

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Jan Weinhold “And structure, structure is essential for me: the planning, when the right persons are at the right places. […] If you don’t have to take care of those things, you have more resources for the subtle qualities of daime. Then you can travel a lot more and be connected to the Astral. You aren’t so occupied with the horizontal level and therefore can go more vertical. For me this is the most important thing.”

Dobkin de Rios & Grob (1994) point out that ayahuasca can induce a hypersuggestible psychological state. Given this feature of the ASC, anything within the ritual setting can become highly meaningful and subjectively significant. Consequently, any variance from what participants know and expect may draw their attention away from the ritual scene or from the inner flow of experiences.30 Unplanned disturbances may change the stream of (an altered) consciousness as an unwanted form of distraction. The prescribed ritual structure and process then not only provides a safe space for the experience, but it also limits the degree of contingency. Since small details and little disturbances may lead to a change in the flow of the ayahuasca experience, how specific elements of the ritual setting become subjectively meaningful during the course of participants’ experiences can also be analysed. In this regard, music and singing as core elements of Santo Daime rituals are highly influential. When asked what is needed to achieve a spiritual experience, a retired pharmacist, who has been taking ayahuasca for more than 10 years, regards singing the songs as crucial to achieve a spiritual state, which he names “the light”: “It needs the drink itself, that it contains enough DMT, and the singing, that’s it. Without singing I don’t get the ‘light’. Tried it without singing, it didn’t work.” Another interviewee mentions the relationship between specific hymns and his experiences: “There are certain hymns, certain passages, which often are very strong. You focus on something specific in this moment and afterwards you realise: ‘Okay, during this hymn that happens more often than during others’.” One interviewee explains that music is not only pivotal for the spiritual experience, but equally important for getting out of difficult psychological states within the ritual: “There are a couple of classic songs [gives examples] which have already gotten me out of phases that were somehow difficult, kind of like, bam! That 30 Weinhold 2007.

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have suddenly made me get up, they sometimes do change the energy from one moment to the next, just like that.” Besides music and singing, symbolic physical elements are important for the ritual experience. An interviewee remembers a particular Santo Daime ritual in Brazil: “Usually there are some crystals or stones on the altar and you concentrate on one of these crystals. […] What I experienced in Brazil: I was feeling pretty bad there and someone came and put a crystal in my hand. And I felt better. Then I put it back on the altar.” After this examination of specific set and setting variables (motivation, symbolic elements, music) and their influence on participants’ experiences, one should finally consider that the entire ritual system is designed and employed to enable participants to experience desired psychoactive effects in a culturally meaningful and safe way. The cosmological system of Santo Daime, the ritual practice, and the ethical values of Santo Daime communities are closely intertwined31 – and they are important variables of the wider sociocultural “setting”. On an individual level, accumulated experiences with ayahuasca and Santo Daime rituals, as well as individual preparations for the rituals and many other factors of everyday life (e.g. nutrition) will influence participants’ “sets”, their personality variables. For empirical and analytical reasons, in this paper the variables and their influence on ritual experiences are described separately. Actually, different aspects of the trilogy “drug, set, and setting” are highly interwoven and dependent upon each other. Nevertheless, so far the discussion has implied a rather passive view of the participants. Within the “drug, set, and setting” approach, experiences are implicitly seen as passively shaped by the psychoactive substance, the personal characteristics of participants, and the ritual setting. Contrary to this perspective, these questions will now be addressed: Which strategies are employed by Santo Daime members actively to influence their “inner works”? How cognitive are “navigational abilities” used to keep the individual from being absorbed in an unwanted manner by his or her experience, and to shape the experience in a desired direction?

7. Participants’ Influence on Their Ritual Experiences Generally, it is rather unpredictable what participants will experience during a specific ritual under the influence of ayahuasca. That, however, does not mean that the daime visions are random. Shanon points out: “As one gains more experience with the brew, one discovers that what happens to one under the intoxication is not 31 See e.g. Cemin 2008; MacRae 2009.

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haphazard – it seems to have an internal logic and order.”32 This echoes what participants emphasise when describing Santo Daime in terms of a “school”, where many lessons are to be learned. Daime itself is referred to as being “the teacher of all teachers”, and the participants are the pupils. In descriptions of ritual experiences, themes of personal relevance often come up repeatedly during subsequent rituals, sometimes for long periods of time, until these “lessons are learned”. The more experienced they are with the ASC, the more participants are also able to actively guide their experiences and actions. A 35-year old language teacher remembers: “In the beginning it was super strong for me and I was really very much blown away. […] As we started, everyone laid on the ground during some periods. I also laid down many times and just felt knocked out. And this has changed quite a lot. The energy doesn’t knock me out. Rather I can link myself to this energy. So I can contribute to the ritual, through singing, playing or whatever. I’m not floored by the energy but I can connect to it instead. I’m realising more and more how I can work with it. That’s why it’s called trabalho or work.” Similarly, a 38-year interviewee, who has been a member of Santo Daime for 10 years, points out that the accumulated practice and experience with the psychoactive substance, but also the knowledge of the hymns, and a daily cultivation of mindfulness, are conditions for achieving desired experiential effects. He explains: “Santo Daime is a strong sacrament, it means working with the body, the body also gets tired and one doesn’t feel that good. But if I manage to concentrate myself – I mean, I know the scenario – if I really concentrate on the hymns and I give myself in, then I often experience a transformation. […] And this is happening through long years of discipline. You can’t learn Santo Daime in one day. You can’t learn everything through one experience. It is a lifelong learning. It is important to study the hymns, to be accustomed to the ritual. It needs training and it needs meditation. Meditation also means to cultivate a quietness [outside the rituals] that you sit for an hour during the day and that you ‘come to yourself’. This will help very much during the rituals to stay calm, because during the works you are very quickly distracted – ‘look there, look there!’ – and this will bring you away from your inner quietness. And if you only look around, all of a sudden you feel unwell and you have to vomit. It is easier to be calm in the rituals if you know this form of concentration from everyday life. Then you can stop for a moment and 32 Shanon 2002: 302.

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feel inside: ‘Where am I, what’s the sacrament doing with me in this very moment?’ And then the thoughts stop and the whole tension will be resolved.” I will now go into a more detailed analysis of the dynamics of participants’ ritual experiences. Before that, I will present a theoretical framework for the analysis.

8. Conceptualising Experiential Dynamics In what follows, I will analyse interview data using the theoretical concept of “representational systems” or “sensory modalities” as found in systemic psychotherapeutic approaches, such as Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) and Hypnotherapy.33 The basic assumption within this model is that human experience is based on cognitive-emotional representations. These are understood as representing sense-specific information. The subjective character of experience is seen as strongly connected with, and influenced by, the way perceptions are processed and represented within sensory systems. The five different representational systems are conceptualised within the so-called VAKOG model, consisting of: a) visual representational system (sight, mental imagery, spatial awareness; e.g. when one experiences certain scenery or remembers or constructs a picture in one’s own mind) b) auditory representational system (sounds, speech, dialogue, linguistic thoughts; e.g. when listening to music, speech, or engaging in an inner dialogue) c) kinaesthetic representational system (including the proprioceptive sense: the somatic aspect of emotions felt in the body, temperature, pressure; e.g. when one describes pain or the bodily aspect of anxiety) d) olfactory representational system (actual experience or memories of smells) e) gustatory representational system (actual experience or memories of tastes) It is assumed that information is processed within these sensory-based representational systems (abbreviated from now on as r.s.). For example, during a conversation in a restaurant the main focus may be on the verbal exchange (the auditory r.s.), but it may also lie on nonverbal information, e.g. the appearance of the conversational partner. If this conversation contains subjectively unpleasant information, the focus may shift onto the bodily awareness of feeling not well (kinaesthetic r.s.), but it may also focus on the smell of the food (olfactory r.s.), or the expectation of a nice meal to come (gustatory r.s.). 33 Dilts et al. 1980; Revenstorf & Peter 2008.

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As the examples for the five representational systems already suggest, experiences can represent external stimuli (that is given visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, or gustatory information), or they may be a representation of intrapsychic information, such as memories or constructions (e.g. making an inner picture). Hence, we can say whether the direction of attention is internal or external, and whether the event is a recollection of an actual (past) event or the construction of an imaginary event34. Even if experiences are usually represented with all senses, some senses may dominate, owing to a limited information processing capacity. Within a given moment, an individual’s focus of attention may lie more on what is seen, or what is heard, or on what is smelled. It may lie more on internal feelings, or pictures, or sounds, than on the external scenery. To sum up: because of a limited cognitive processing ability, the focus of attention during the flow of human experience may be directed towards certain external elements or internal representations, while others are in the background. This model will be used when analysing the reported strategies of Santo Daime participants, by which they dynamically and consciously influence their subjective experiences. In what follows I will give interview examples from my participants, which are reports of how strategies that change the focus of perception by means of intrapsychic or physical activities are applied to navigate the course of the ayahuasca-induced ASC.

9. Strategies of Navigation Generally, the notion that a shift in the focus of attention will change the momentary experience finds resonance within the reported subjective theories of participants. When asked about the possibilities to actively influence the course of the daime experience, a 35 year-old technician answered: “You can close off, you can block off. When you don’t want to see and don’t want to know something specific, when you are not really open, then you can block off the experience, that’s possible. Often during the work [the rituals] you will have a choice: ‘Would you like to go further or would you rather not?’ But sometimes the effect is so strong – then you can’t decide. Then you try to redirect your attention on something else than the experience, to take your thoughts away from there and go somewhere else.” 34 Within models of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), representational systems are described with an elaborated notational system to document mental microstrategies. Further, each experience is assumed to occur with differentiated submodalities, e.g. if an inner picture is distant from, or closer to, the inner eye, is in colour or black and white, is of small or large size, etc. For the purpose of this paper, the differentiation of the five basic sensory modalities is deemed to be sufficient. More details can be found in Dilts 1980.

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This quote mirrors the assumption that, despite the profound effects of ayahuasca, participants do not need to fully and passively surrender to the overwhelming power of their altered states of consciousness. In this case, the internal inner dialogue will actually yield the option of deepening the experience or not, in the shape of a question, or the unwanted experiences can – at least to a certain degree – be faded out by shifting the focus of attention elsewhere. Santo Daime members are also very much aware that there are more and less suitable foci of attention during Santo Daime rituals. An interviewee explains the “right stance” in her illustration of a ritual that took place on the day before the interview: “In these processes you are supposed to follow and to hold the energy. But I was curious about how Paulo Roberto [the ritual leader] is working, you know? That was on the other side of the table, and because I’ve never seen him I watched him now and again, even if this is not according to the rules.” What I described elsewhere in detail echoes the idea that the focus of attention can be actively laid on socially desirable or undesirable objects or processes.35 Santo Daime participants are generally advised to focus on the ritual scenery and action (singing, dancing, or concentrating), and to follow the current of “energy” within the group. According to the doctrine, they are not supposed to look around or to take an otherwise distanced perspective. Frequently, effects of the daime become subjectively and temporarily very strong, and lead to an intention to change the power of the ASC. What is primarily perceived as an unpleasant bodily state (kinaesthetic r.s.), combined with a cognitive appraisal (auditory r.s.), may be resolved by means of actively focusing on autonomous behaviour, predominantly breathing (focusing on another aspect of the internal kinaesthetic r.s.). A 45-year-old translator describes her strategy: “If the effect is really strong, then you stop breathing at first, like this! And when you continue and breathe deeply things pass more quickly than when you are inside of it thinking: ‘Oh God, what is happening now?’ There is often fear involved in this – ‘what is happening to me?’ – because these are bodily experiences you have never had before. … For me this is a process, too, of learning how to deal with the energies. And when the energy comes and maybe it’s unpleasant, if you breathe deeply, then it passes more quickly. So you learn how to deal with the things that happen under daime.” In a similar way, a 25-year-old secretary explains her strategies to cope with undesired daime effects. When asked if and how she can influence her experiences she answered: 35 Weinhold 2007.

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Jan Weinhold “Of course, you can’t influence or control the effects 100%. But yes, through means of breathing, your breathing technique, and that you free you mind the effects get most pleasant. Because if you think too much, which you are not supposed to during the works, then it can get unpleasant. Depending on what in particular you ponder about, either you will feel nausea, or you just don’t want the effects anymore. For example, when I notice that my mind drifts off and I am not focused anymore, then I will try to concentrate my mind on my centre, on my third eye, my solar plexus. Being really in the ‘here and now’, being with my soul within my body, to finally come to another point in the process.”

Shifting attention from her thoughts, which may be perceived as internal voice (auditory r.s.), to her body (kinaesthetic r.s.) will eventually lead the flow of the experience, what she calls the “process”, into a desired direction. She reports that another way to change the inner thought process is to consciously focus on affirmations: “You can also influence your thoughts by saying mantras, for example: ‘I am peaceful, I am relaxed, I am calm, I am fine, I am healthy’. I am also saying this, when I don’t feel well at all. But such positive affirmations help you to relax, because sometimes I had moments where I got really frightened during the works. The daime was so strong and I thought: ‘Man, now you will break down and fall from the chair’.” In this strategy internal thoughts (auditory r.s.) or negative bodily feelings (kinaesthetic r.s.) are countered consciously by engaging in an internal verbal activity in the form of mantras (auditory inner dialogue). It can be assumed that this strategy is effective not only by means of self-suggestion, which in itself may have a positive influence on the body and the experience. It may also be valuable in forcing the mind to focus on either the voices of the negative internal thoughts or on the mantras. If the mantras predominate, the internal thoughts will eventually fade. This basically uses the limited capacity of the mind by establishing a more relevant, and positive, auditory focus. An interesting case-report of “navigational” strategies is given by a retired pharmacist, who has been engaged in Santo Daime for 10 years, and who also follows a Buddhist practice. He reflects on his accumulated Santo Daime experiences: “The first round of the ritual was usually quite hard. A couple of years ago, devilish creatures came. It was like being in a picture by Hieronymus Bosch. They attacked me, they attacked my Buddha statue – it was pure horror. Rats, battle-fields, torture scenes. That stopped a year ago. Nowadays, when I close my eyes, there will be pictures of hell, immediately, in a second. I see devils hanging on crosses and worse things, terrible. [...] Always in the be-

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ginning of the daime ritual, after half an hour, my hands become the hands of the devil, with scales like a crocodile. Sometimes fire and smoke come out of them. It is really, really unpleasant.” Then he explains: “That’s why I can’t just sit there and close my eyes. I always keep my eyes open, even if it demands more discipline. I keep my eyes open and I am concentrating just on the songs. And when I sing the songs then the light comes. And when I notice that I drift away, then I focus even more on the hymns and the singing. Then it happens automatically: After singing for an hour comes the light. And my mind is crystal clear. Much clearer than normal consciousness, it’s really a different state. For that itself it is worth participating in the rituals. If I wouldn’t do that, I’d be in hell for several hours.” By changing the focus of attention from the internal visual r.s. to the external auditory r.s. (listening and singing the songs) and to the external visual r.s. (the ritual scenery), the interviewee managed to subjectively travel from “hell” to a desired state of consciousness. Generally, in those rituals, or periods of particular Santo Daime rituals, where the bailado is danced and songs are sung, the architecture of the ritual process will contribute to influence the experience. The demand for participants to coordinate an upright position, to move in an ordered manner, and to articulate the songs, is accompanied by a focused attention on the external visual r.s. (watching the ordered dancing lines of other participants), the external auditive r.s. (listening to the choir in constant synchronisation with one’s own voice), and the kinaesthetic r.s. (dancing). Though this coordination may be easier and somewhat unconscious and automatic for more experienced participants, it still demands the focus of attention on the ritual scenery, rather than on internal processes. Simply put, there is less capacity for dwelling on inner visions36. Apart from dancing and singing, body-related techniques are mentioned by some interviewees during meditative rituals (concentração), as well. When asked if there are techniques to actively influence the effects of the Daime during the ritual, an experienced Santo Daime members pointed out: “During the meditation, in the concentration work, you need to keep an upright position, combined with a conscious and calm breathing, in and out.”

36 More than this, singing and dancing might directly influence the psychological state of participants in a positive direction by means of body feedback. It is worth noting that within the paradigm of embodiment several experimental studies have shown how certain body postures and gestures can directly cause positive emotions (see e.g. Storch et al. 2006).

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Navigational abilities are also demanded to steer one’s own experience in relation to social interactions during the ritual process. A quote from a 50-year-old female educator illustrates: “I sat in the last row and behind me were all the new people. And next to me was a woman who always made strange movements. During a cura-work [a healing ritual] it is advised to sit still and let the energy do its work. I told her in between but she really couldn’t stop moving. And then I realised that this was about me not directing my attention there. When people threw up, as well, I noticed how my attention went there. But it is important to keep your attention on the singing, completely in contact with God. And then it simply passes through you. And then it isn’t disruptive. And I practiced that yesterday, again and again.” Pointing the focus of attention away from the ritual scenery (external visual r.s.) to the singing of the songs (external and internal auditory r.s.) helped the interviewee to avoid disruptions in experiencing the ritual as prescribed – to be with the songs and the spiritual realm, rather than focusing on mundane social concerns. To sum up: with accumulated experience and knowledge, Santo Daime members have developed several cognitive strategies and actions to actively shape the course of their ritual experiences. I have given examples, which were conceptualised within a scheme that follows the idea of sensory “representational systems”, and the model of a limited attention capacity. By shifting the focus of attention from the internal visions to the external scenery, or vice versa, by focusing on a different representational system, and by engaging in certain activities (dancing, sitting in an upright position, changing the breathing pattern), and thereby shifting the attention to a different focus, Santo Daime participants manage well in avoiding undesirable effects and achieving spiritual experiences.

10. Conclusion In this paper, I have demonstrated that the ritual experiences of Santo Daime members are not exclusively based on the psychoactive effects of the substance ayahuasca itself, but rather on the interplay between “drug, set, and setting”, that is, pharmacological, psychological, and socio-cultural variables. I limited the discussion to just a few variables which influence the experiental qualities of the ayahuasca-induced ASC, and gave empirical examples from interviews conducted with European Santo Daime members. I pointed out that the conceptualisation of “drug, set, and setting” suggests a passive view of participants’ experiences (e.g. in the understanding of Dobkin de Rios, who speaks of antecedent and consequent variables). While the effects of ayahuasca can be indeed very strong and are not easy to control, there are, none the less, several strategies, which I have called “na-

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vigational abilities”, by the use of which one can consciously influence the dynamics of the ritual experience. Research on ayahuasca tends to neglect that, within the ritual process, participants are not merely “passively” following the prescribed rules and “receiving” their visions. Rather, they do have an agency in directing the course of their ritual experiences, even if this might not be apparent from an analysis of the observed performance. It is probably not accidental that rituals of Santo Daime are called trabalho (work): one actively can and needs to do “inner work” to achieve the desired states of consciousness, even if the particular qualities of the ASC are not predictable in a linear way. Ritual experience is thus not a passive psychological by-product of prescribed ritual performances, but an active psychological construction. From a methodological perspective, the use of representational systems as a level of analysis limits the dynamic complexity of the ayahuasca experience. I have shown that certain critical points and particular moments during an ayahuasca-induced ASC can be actively guided and changed by shifting the attention on a different representational system. Taking into consideration that Santo Daime rituals can last all night long, it must be said that this analysis is situated on a micro-structural level, and does not suffice to address the complexity of participants’ overall ritual experiences. Considering that the ASC is of long duration, and also that the constitutive properties of ASC themselves tend to be difficult to conceptualise; capturing the totality of participants’ experiences seems a difficult task, which needs a careful definition of terms and theoretical models.

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References APA 2000. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – DSM-IV-TR. Washington: American Psychiatric Association. Becker, Howard 1953. “Becoming a Marijuana User”. American Journal of Sociology 59/3: 235–242. Callaway, Jace C. 1999. “Phytochemistry and Neuropharmacology of Ayahuasca”. In: Ralph Metzner (ed.). Ayahuasca: Hallucinogen, Consciousness and the Spirit of Nature. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press: 250–275. Cemin, Arneide 2008. “The Rituals of Santo Daime: Systems of Symbolic Constructions”. In: Beatriz C. Labate & Edward MacRae (eds.). The Light from the Forest: The Ritual Use of Ayahuasca in Brazil. London: Equinox Publishing: 256–285. Dawson, Andrew 2007. New Era – New Religions: Religious Transformation in Contemporary Brazil. Aldershot: Ashgate. — (forthcoming). Spirit Possession in a New Religious Context: The Umbandization of Santo Daime. [Special Edition of Nova Religio: New Religions in Latin America] De Rios, Marlene Dobkin & Charles S. Grob 1994. “Hallucinogens, Suggestibility and Adolescence in cross-cultural Perspective”. Yearbook of Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness, 3, 123-132. De Rios, Marlene Dobkin 1996. Hallucinogens: Cross Cultural Perspectives. Long Grove: Waveland Press. Dilts, Robert B. et al. 1980. Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Volume 1: The Study of the Structure of Subjective Experience. Cupertino: Meta Publications. Farthing, G. William 1992. The Psychology of Consciousness. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall. Furst, Peter T. 1972. Flesh of the Gods. The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens. New York: Praeger Publishers. Grob, Charles S. 1999. “The Psychology of Ayahuasca”. In: Ralph Metzner (ed.). Ayahuasca: Hallucinogen, Consciousness and the Spirit of Nature. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press: 214–249. Labate, Beatriz C. (2008). “Brazilian Literature on Ayahuasca Religions”. In: Beatriz C. Labate & Edward MacRae (eds.). The Light from the Forest: The Ritual Use of Ayahuasca in Brazil. London: Equinox Publishing: 200–234. Larsen, Stephen 1999. “Foreword”. In: Alex Polari de Alverga (ed.). Forest of Visions. Ayahuasca, Amazonian Spirituality, and the Santo Daime Tradition. Rochester: Park Street Press: ix–xix. Luna, Luis E. 1986. Vegetalismo. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International. MacRae, Edward 2009 [1992]. Guided by the Moon: Shamanism and the Ritual Use of Ayahuasca in the Santo Daime Religion in Brazil. [English Translation of: Guiado pela lua-xamanismo e o uso ritual da ayahuasca no culto do Santo Daime]. Núcleo de Estudos Interdisciplinares sobre Psicoactivos [online book available under http://www.neip.info/downloads/edward/ebook.htm; last accessed on 1st July 2009]

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Mayring, Philipp 2003. Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse: Grundlagen und Techniken. Weinheim: Beltz. Revenstorf, Dirk & Burkhard Peter (eds.) 2008. Hypnose in der Psychotherapie, Psychosomatik und Medizin: Manual für die Praxis. Berlin: Springer. Riba, Jordi et al. 2001. “Subjective Effects and Tolerability of the South American Psychoactive Beverage Ayahuasca in Healthy Volunteers”. Psychopharmacology 54: 85–95. Riba, Jordi 2003. “Human pharmacology of Ayahuasca: Subjective and cardiovascular Effects, Monoamine Metabolite Excretion, and Pharmacokinetics”. Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics 306/1: 73–83. Shanon, Benny 2002. The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Storch, Maja et al. 2006. Embodiment: Die Wechselwirkung von Körper und Psyche verstehen und nutzen. Bern: Huber. Tart, Charles T. (ed.) 1990/1969. Altered States of Consciousness. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Weinhold, Jan 2007. “Failure and Mistakes in Rituals of the European Santo Daime Church: Experiences and Subjective Theories of Participants”. In: Ute Hüsken (ed.). When Rituals Go wrong: Mistakes, Failure, and the Dynamics of Ritual. Leiden & Boston: Brill: 49–72. Winkelman, Michael J. & Thomas B. Roberts 2007. Psychedelic Medicine: New Evidence for Hallucinogenic Substances as Treatments. Westport: Praeger Publishers Inc. Zinberg, Norman E. 1984. Drug, Set and Setting. The Basis for Controlled Intoxicant Use. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Abstracts Section I: Ritual and Agency Alexis Sanderson Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics, All Souls College and Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford Ritual for Oneself and Ritual for Others During the early medieval period of the Indic world the old ritual order based on the archaic Vedic tradition became progressively complemented and overshadowed by another, developed by devotees of the god Śiva. Around the beginning of this period Śaivism had developed new forms that propagated themselves in the broader society, creating in this process a new repertoire of rituals (Mantramaarga or “Path of Mantras”). By the seventh century the Mantramaarga had emerged into a position of dominance, attracting widespread royal patronage, and exerted a profound influence on other religious systems. What enabled Śaivism to exert its influence was ritual for others as the professional activity of officiants who operated outside the narrow confines of self-cultivation. Śaiva officiants were professional ritualists who while insisting on the superior spiritual character of their religion succeeded in modifying its core rituals to create a repertoire of ritual services that legitimated, empowered, or promoted the key elements of the social, political and economic process that characterises the early medieval period (initiation of kings, service of Gurus as royal perceptors, involvement in the temple cult and in rituals connected with the creation of new urban settlements, initiation of candidates from all four caste-classes). At the same time “Śaivism” took steps to integrate itself with the brahmanical substrate in ways that rendered it accessible and acceptable to a far wider constituency and therefore all the more appealing to rulers in their role as the guardians of the brahmanical social order. Christian Meyer Assistant Professor, Faculty for Sociology, University of Bielefeld Performing Spirits: Shifting Agencies in Brazilian Umbanda Rituals The rituals of Brazilian Umbanda religion are interesting for the question of ritual agency, for on the one hand they demand from their protagonists a high level of perfomative accuracy in order to authentically represent typified spirits in trance. On the other hand, the competitive situation in multi-religious Brazil requires a creative and entertaining individual performance in order to position Umbanda as an attractive religious orientation. Whereas, in general, the incarnation of an alien spirit entails the ostentative transfer of individual agency to an external force, the use of creative and free speech during the ritual performance precisely calls for the prudent agency of the person in trance. For the authenticity of spirit incarnation crucial for Umbanda, this polarity between the public release of

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agency and its individual retention constitutes at the same time a resource and a danger. The tightrope walk between the Scylla of merely repeating liturgical sequences and the Charybdis of too obviously pursuing individual goals in Umbanda ritual performance is the subject of this paper. Claudia Weber Associate lecturer, Department for Religious Studies, University of Muenster, Germany; and Department for Indology and Tamil Studies, University of Cologne, Germany Prescribed Agency – A Contradiction in Terms? Differences between the Tantric adhikāra Concept and the Sociological Term of Agency Empowerment is the most important concept in Hindu Tantra. For this reason, it may be useful to look at power and agency in Tantric ritual. The sociological term of agency is problematic in religious contexts (Sax 2006), since according to sociologists agency entails free will, capability, power etc. exercised by individual persons, whereas religious rituals entail pre-fabricated, prescribed structures which ritual actors have to follow. Furthermore, in the case of Tantric ritual, there are multiple ritual agents (different human actors and different deities) and multiple forms of empowerment which depend on the hierarchy of agents. The Tantric tradition offers an emic term, adhikāra (authority, qualification, competence), which is suggestive of agency. While the common practitioner’s adhikāra is limited to following the script, i.e. to performing the ritual always in the same manner, a guru’s adhikāra includes the authority to construct new ritual elements. The guru indeed has performative agency in the sense of “Gestaltungsmacht”, i.e. an element of free will which fits in with the sociological concept. My discussion of adhikāra will highlight diverse forms of agency. The practitioner’s and the guru’s adhikāra, for instance, are obtained by an administrative act (initiation resp. consecration as a teacher). Here we can speak of institutional agency. Another form of adhikāra pertains to the god Śiva and his free will to manifest himself and the world. Śiva and his goddess may be called “culturally postulated superhuman agents”. Their power is necessary for the empowerment of the practitioner and the efficacy of ritual (ritual agency as “Wirkungsmacht”). The practitioner, the situation, and possibly the socio-religious status are transformed by such empowerment (agency as “the ability to transform the world”). These features reveal ritual agency to be far more complex than the sociologist’s individual agency concept. These issues will be exemplified in my paper by discussing the transmission and negotiation processes in the tradition of an important Śrīvidyā ritual manual (Paraśurāma-Kalpasūtra). My contribution is part of a research project on the PKS at the University of Münster which is funded by the German Research Council (DFG).

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Thomas Widlok Professor, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen What is the Value of Rituals? Effects of Complexity in Australian Rituals and Beyond There is a tendency in current economics to be “imperialist” insofar as it claims to be able to provide a theory of all human behaviour in terms of a bounded rationality geared towards maximization. Ritual in this view could be considered to be “cultural capital” that can be converted into other forms of capital but always within the institutional limitations set by human culture. In other words the “costs“ of doing things ritually are treated as either direct or indirect modes of investment bounded by a substantial amount of uncertainty. In such a framework there is very little room for explaining phenomena of altruism. This paper challenges such an approach on the basis of field research data from Aboriginal Australia where rituals are known to have emerged and to be transacted across the continent in what appears to be an enormously “costly” manner. I argue that these ritual innovations and transactions are not readily explicable in terms of the kind of purposeful behaviour presupposed in the prevalent economic approach. To the contrary, I suggest that ritual innovation and transaction constitutes a complex system whereby numerous individual actions lead to unpredictable results and that this dynamic is in fact also true for many economic processes. I argue that such an altered perspective also allows for new ways of incorporating ideas of altruism.

Section II: Ritual, Performance, and Event Andrea Taddei Ricercatore confermato (Assistant Professor), Dipartimento di Filologia Classica, Università di Pisa Memory, Performance and Pleasure in Greek Rituals There are, at least, two kinds of “memory” in archaic and classical Greece: remembering facts and formulas to produce poetry, and remembering acts and words to build up a ritual. Many scholars have deserved attention to the former, less of them to the latter. I’m going to explore the connections among Memory, Performance and Pleasure starting from a new translation of Hymn.Ap.146–150 where Iones remembers and produces pleasure (terpsis) in the god: is this a goal of a Greek ritual? I’d like, then, to explore three significant cases, chosen from lyric poetry and tragedy. Alcm. fr.125C., where Dionysus is said to take pleasure from the same ritual from which the goddesses take pleasure in Aesch. Eum. (1033– 47). My point is not, obviously, the fact that a ritual aims to make the god happy, in order to obtain what is being asked, but rather the fact that the sequence of words and acts is crucial to generate this specific pleasure, as the sequence in Aesch.Sept.174ff. shows: the Chorus asks the gods to remember the rites to be performed. If these assumptions are true, one can shed a new light on many tragic passages as well as on the identity of the Chorus itself, between poetry and polis, a key-theme in recent classical studies.

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Reinhard Strohm Heather Professor of Music, Oxford University Memories of Ancient Rituals in Early Opera In the 17th century the carnival operas of Venice, just like carnival altogether, were referred to the Roman festivals of saturnalia and lupercalia, combining a legitimising reference to antiquity with the argument of licentiousness and the questioning of social hierarchies. At the same time, early opera generally presented subjects taken from antiquity, in which “ancient” rituals abound. These two phenomena are surely connected. The practice of the carnival operas had to legitimise itself vis-à-vis the traditional rituals of the Church and of the Venetian state. The aspect of licentiousness in the performances covered, among other things, the public presentation of pagan rituals. Such presentations also conveyed a novel character of performativity and narrativity to the ancient heritage. From now on, rituals could be reinvented and expanded at will. The practice implied, however, a sharper distinction between performers and audiences. The foundations were provided for a modern type of public art and festal culture, where the celebration of memoria had been transformed into the institutionalised presentation of human creativity. Angela Bellia Research Fellow at the Department of “Storie e Metodi per la Conservazione dei Beni culturali”, University of Bologna Music and Rite: Representations of Female Figures of Musicians in Greek Sicily (VI-III Century B.C.) In the Sanctuary of the Fontana Calda in Butera (Siciliy) they have brought to light a sacred deposit which is one of the richest of the Island. The discovery revealed hundreds of single statuettes of players of aulos, tympanon, kymbala and harp and groups of players of aulos and tympanon. The statuettes were made of clay by local craftsmen who used moulds. In one group we have statuettes with their heads covered by mantles. They can be dated back to between the end of the VI century B.C. and the beginning of the V century B.C. In the other group we have statuettes of the IV century B.C., with their hair put up on their heads. Many other places in Sicily have discovered this particular kind of coroplastics, especially sanctuaries that were dedicated to “chthonic” divinities. If it is possible to explain the presence in the votive findings in Butera the problem concerning the function of the statuettes of the female musicians remains unsolved. The representations seem to refer to ceremonies where the protagonists were exclusively women. Music was the background in every moment of the sacred ritual of which the female musicians offer a rich and singular repertory. Kathryn Soar Temporary Teacher, Department of Archaeology, University of Nottingham Circular Dance Performances in the Prehistoric Aegean “The Cretans are dancers” was a universal acknowledgement in the works of ancient literature. References to Cretan dancing and its importance have a long history. One of the dances referred to by Sappho was the circle dance, said to be practised by Cretan girls dancing barefoot around altars. Archaeological evidence also attests to the importance of

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the circular dance, not just in Crete but also on the Greek mainland. The duration of this tradition extends from the early Bronze Age, c. 2900 BC on Crete until the Geometric Period on the Greek mainland (c. 900–700 BC). An analysis of these dance rituals suggests an ideological and cognitive theme which unites all manifestations of circular dance in the Prehistoric Aegean. This paper will discuss themes of date, formation and setting of circular dances, to argue that circular dance rituals occur at times of socio-political fluidity and change, that their formation highlights integration and cohesion between community members in such times of growing social turmoil, and their setting is a deliberate territorial indication of these communities. Circular dance ritual and performance is thus an ideological tool, used to create a sense of unity and community identity in the face of growing social disparities. Rachele Dubbini Postdoctoral Associate, ANHIMA (Anthropologie et Histoire des Mondes Antiques), Paris Agones on the Greek Agora between Ritual and Spectacle: Some Examples from the Peloponnese The focus of this contribution is on those ritual competitions (agones) that took place in the spaces reserved for political assemblies in Ancient Greek cities, the so-called Agora. The competitions in question could assume a wide array of characteristics and might include anything from torch runs and horse races to choric and dramatic performances. The Agora was thus a performing space as well as a political one, where the rituals of the city were performed in the form of dramatic events and track competitions.Three Ancient cities, Corinth, Argos, and Sparta, serve as examples for this topic. Ritual complexes are analyzed and the role of these competitions is evaluated using archeological data from these places. The characteristics of performance in these competitions are examined in particular; how did they influence generation, strengthening or transformation of the attitudes of participants and audiences alike? What were the means with which they contributed to both collective and individual identity and self expression? What was the relationship between ritual event and spectacle? Edward Venn Lecturer in Music, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, University of Lancaster Evoking the “Marvellous”: Ritual in Michael Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage Central to the operas of the British composer Michael Tippett (1905–98) are a wide range of ritual and mythical behaviours and models. In his first opera, The Midsummer Marriage 1946–55), Jungian psychology is combined with rites (and depictions of rites) from classical and Indian sources to create an intensely personal theatrical situation. Given Stephen Greenblatt’s famous claim that the theatre “evacuates every-thing that it represents” (1988: 127), and Jerzy Grotowski’s contention that “degenerated ritual is a spectacle” (1988: 36), to what extent can Tippett’s endeavours be said to provide a “collective spiritual experience” analogous to ritual? In what ways might music connect and enrich the assortment of ritual practices, divorced from their original contexts, and infuse them with renewed meaning? This paper will question critically Tippett’s concept of the

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“marvellous” through the examination of the dynamic interaction between his eclectic interritualistic borrowings and their musical presentation in The Midsummer Marriage. Doing so will enable one to understand better operatic treatment of ritual, not just in this specific case, but across the twentieth century as a whole.

Section III: The Body and Food in Ritual Anke Tonnaer Lecturer, Department of Anthropology and Development Studies; Researcher, Department of Comparative Religion, Radboud University Nijmegen Fear and Fascination for a White Maggot: Savouring the “Other” in Tourist Ritual “Are we going to eat witchetty grubs?” The wriggly white caterpillar seems to sum up the ultimate “deviant” menu for tourists that come to experience Aboriginal culture in Australia. The idea of eating such a grub is anticipated by tourists with equal amounts of repugnance as experiential challenge. Not only is the witchetty grub an appealing topos in the tourism context, savouring this little creature also signifies a potential corporal “initiation” into the cultural realm of the “Other”. Feeding the body with these ostensibly inedible substances, of which the witchetty grub is one example, leads to greater commonality while at the same time it serves to solidify the distinctive “otherness” on which the tourism industry pivots. In this paper I discuss the role of foreign foods in the intercultural encounter between tourists and indigenous people, by focusing on one particular example of the Australian context. I argue that the emerging intercultural domain in the interface is characterised by certain ritual conventions. Whereas the anticipation of otherness through food is a structural component of tourist performances; the proffering of “bush tucker” is viewed by Aborigines as essential in the sharing of Aboriginal culture. Hans Stifoss-Hansen and Lars J Danbolt PhD Hans Stifoss-Hansen, KIFO-Centre for Church Research and Diakonhjemmet University College, Oslo, Norway; Lars J Danbolt, Centre for Psychology of Religion, Innlandet Hospital Trust, Hamar and Norwegian School of Theology, Oslo, Norway The Dead and the Numb Body: Disaster and Ritual Memory In this article, we have focused on the bodily aspects of the material in our study of ritualising after disasters and accidents. We find the combination of several bodily perspectives interesting – the concrete dead bodies, the bodily reactions in the ritual participants, and the bodily dimensions of ritualising – and we find it likely that the ritualising contributes to containing and controlling bodily chaos. Our study was specifically aimed at bodily sensations and actions as they were represented by memory, and our main material was interview transcripts related to four instances of disaster ritualising. In our discussion of our findings, we have applied P Connerton’s idea of the memory of communities, and also M MerleauPonty’s phenomenological philosophy of the body. We argue that the dealing with traumatic experience through ritual is a parallel to ritual healing, a contention that is made

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probable by the intention of providing help on the part of the ritual leaders. We suggest that research on the bodily dimension of disaster rituals is continued, since this dimension is so powerful in the rituals, and it has not yet been studied thoroughly. Sophie Bolt and EricVenbrux Centre for Thanatology, Faculty of Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands Funerals Without a Corpse: Awkwardness in Mortuary Rituals for Body Donors Death confronts people with a corpse that unavoidably needs to be subjected to some sort of treatment. Two universal ways to dispose of a human corpse are burial and cremation. Body donation to science is an alternative way of body disposition that entails the donation of a body to an anatomical institute. The bereaved of body donors are left behind without the body of the deceased. This raises the question how they perform mortuary rites while the bodies of the deceased are missing. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Netherlands, we study how people ritualise death when the body, the essential part of the ritual context, is missing. Janneke Peelen Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands Social Birth of Stillborn Children: The Body as Matter, the Body as Person Stillbirth takes place somewhere between two important life passages: the passage to life and the passage to death. This ambiguity leads to uncertainty about what has been lost after prenatal death. Some even consider what has been lost as not fully human. The limited social impact of the life and death of stillborn children resulted in little or no mortuary rituals at their disposal. In the last three decades this has been changing slowly. In the Netherlands, we now have a divers repertoire of funerary rituals and products especially aimed at stillborn children. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Netherlands I analyse how these new rituals and products serve a ritualised farewell of stillborn children. I will show that these products are strongly associated with life and birth and therefore realise a necessary social integration of the stillborn child in the world of the living. Creating this passage to life is necessary to effect fully the passage to, a socially respected and recognised, death. Meike Heessels Centre for Thanatology, Faculty of Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands From Commercial Goods to Cherished Ash Objects: Mediating Contact with the Dead through the Body Until the first half of the twentieth century the loss of a significant was expressed through mourning clothes or jewellery, often adorned with hair, in the Netherlands. But after the First World War these rituals fell into disuse. Recently, a new practice emerged reminding

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of these former traditions, namely ash objects. Human ashes are incorporated in objects to be saved in the home, such as statues or painting, or jewellery to be worn on the body. The human ashes can even be incorporated into the human skin by means of an ash tattoo. This article investigates the meanings of these ash objects for the different actors involved, the producers as well as the consumers of these objects. Analysing the way in which objects are incorporated in the home and on the body shows how transformed human remains can act as mediators between the living and the dead. Joanna Wojtkowiak Centre for Thanatology, Faculty of Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands Living through Ritual in the Face of Death This paper discusses funeral preparations in the face of death as a form of ritualising the own death in the context of secular Dutch society. When people are diagnosed with an incurable disease, facing death becomes part of a person’s reality. Religious rituals traditionally structure the dying process, but in contemporary Dutch society dying has become a private and often unstructured status passage. In the Netherlands, people who are coming closer towards death are preoccupied with their funeral arrangements. The planning of the own funeral ritual is on the one hand a way of gaining control over the situation, but on the other hand also a way of leaving something for after death. The concept of the postself refers to the way people want to be remembered after death. The analysis of contemporary funeral preparations reveals how before actual death, processes of separation and transition are taking place. The person who is going to die is dealing with how to be represented when being dead in the funeral. These ritual preperations are a way of investing in the postself in a ritual context and symbolically transcending death. Thomas Quartier Centre for Thanatology, Faculty of Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands “This Is My Body”: Physical, Spiritual, and Social Dimensions of Embodiment in Roman-Catholic Funerals In Roman-Catholic funerals embodiment is an important category: the physical body of the deceased is present among the bereaved for the last time. Second, the bereaved themselves form a kind of social body around the deceased. And third, a spiritual form of embodiment is enacted in the funeral: the body of Christ present in the Eucharist. The question is, how the liturgical utterance “This is my body” can be understood in this ritual context. This question becomes particularly important, when the exclusive confessional interpretation of embodiment is not evident, anymore. In this paper, the three dimensions of embodiment (physical, social, spiritual) are investigated theoretically and empirically. For the theoretical part, insights from ritual and liturgical studies are used, for the empirical part results from a survey among funeral goers in the Netherlands. The results are interpreted with regard to the concrete case of Roman-Catholic funerals and also with regard to liturgical embodiment in general.

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Section IV: The Varieties of Ritual Experience Geoffrey Samuel Professor of Social Anthropology, School of History, Archaeology and Religion, Cardiff University Inner Work and the Connections between Anthropological and Psychological Analysis Although British social anthropologists have tended to emphasise external and observable aspects of social behaviour, and to stay clear of both psychoanalytic theory and of other modes of analysis developed by psychologists, “inner work” is inescapable in many ritual contexts. Anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson, Victor Turner and Bruce Kapferer have consequently developed their own modes of analysis of internal psychic processes and of the connections between these processes and their social and interpersonal context. Is it possible to work towards unifying psychological and anthropological approaches to the “inner work of ritual”? A starting point would be the body (or rather the psycho-physical complex) and its interactions with its environment, since this constitutes the field that both sets of scholars are working to map. Can we bring their maps into relationship with each other? These questions are explored in relation to a research project Geoffrey Samuel is undertaking with Cathy Cantwell, Rob Mayer and the lama Ogyan P. Tanzin Rinpoche on a set of Tibetan Buddhist practices for health and longevity originating in the early twentieth century and particularly associated with the late Dudjom Rinpoche. Etzel Cardeña and Wendy E. Cousins Etzel Cardeña isThorsen Professor of Psychology, Lund University. Wendy E. Cousins is Course Director, Health and Wellbeing, University of Ulster. From Artifice to Actuality: Ritual, Shamanism, Hypnosis, and Healing Although hypnosis, shamanism, and performance are often thought of as mere fakery, they are all in fact activities that challenge a facile distinction between reality and illusion. Laboratory experiments on hypnosis, field research on shamanism, and participants’ experience in a ritual or a performance, all show that at least for some individuals, “believing so, makes it so” not only in the subjective realm, but in the physiological and socio-cultural domains as well. We review the relevant work on hypnosis and placebo, discuss the embodiment of emotions and cognition, and then move to more social areas. We also make the case that the boundaries between the intra-personal, the inter-personal and the trans-personal are as shifting as those between artifice and actuality. Michael Winkelman Retired, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University Evolutionary Origins of Human Ritual Evolutionary and comparative perspectives illustrate homologies of animal displays with human rituals. Hominin ritual commonalities included group integration through drumming and emotional vocalizations, and provided a baseline for evolutionary changes leading to human religion. Several stages of the evolution of human ritual capacities lead to the emer-

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gence of shamanic practices in the Middle Paleolithic. Shamanism involved exaptations of hominin ritual capacities, illustrated by their similarities with chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) rituals: community integration through aggressive male displays towards “others;” upright charges; night-time group re-unification activities; vocalizations (singing) and drumming; and group protection and reassurance. Evolutionary developments leading to shamanism involved: emergence of mystical experiences as side-effects of ultra-running and trauma; expressive dance and mimetic enactments; and music and singing. Shamanic ritual capacities involved adaptations for enhanced experiences mediated by opioid and serotonergic neurotransmitter systems. Jay Johnston Senior Lecturer, Department of Studies in Religion, University of Sydney and Senior Lecturer, School of Art History and Art Education, COFA, University of New South Wales Physiognomy of the Invisible: Ritual, Subtle Anatomy and Ethics This paper considers the apprehension of the inner “workings” of subtle bodies. Found in a variety of forms in eastern, western and esoteric philosophy/religion, a subtle body form of subjectivity proposes the individual as comprised of energetic networks that interpenetrate the corporeal body and extend out from it. Subtle bodies blur clear boundaries between “matter” and “spirit.” The conscious development of a subtle body, via the cultivation of the senses through ritual activities, proposes a form of self that is simultaneously embodied and disembodied, while being interwoven with the everyday lives of practitioners. The development and apprehension of subtle bodies is therefore a decidedly “everyday” form of mysticism. This paper considers the perception of the “inner” workings of subtle anatomy: how practitioners of various traditions, including Traditional Chinese Medicine and syncretic popular New Age practices, identify and “control” this energetic anatomy through ritual activity. In particular, it will focus on the ethical ramifications for the inner apprehension and movement of subtle energies, and on the extent to which personal ritual practice to direct subtle internal energies, embraces a silent communal agenda. Daniel Böttger Research Associate and Doctoral Candidate, University of Leipzig Empirical Test of the Effect of Facial Feedback on the Subjective Experience of Ritual Looking at common mantras phonetically, open front unrounded vowels like “a” seem much more common than close back rounded vowels like “u”. Speaking open front unrounded vowels is physiologically very similar to smiling. Psychology has established that smiles, even forced ones, increase the potential positive emotional response of individuals. Further, it is well-known that repetitive sounds and motions are prone to induce hypnotic states, which heighten suggestibility and can intensify emotional responses. So might mantras tend to have vowels that make the singer feel better? This paper presents a new empirical study attempting to answer this question, and combines ritual study with unlikely fields like neurology, historical philology, and the experimental psychology of religion.

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Magnus Echtler Research Assistant, Study of Religion, University of Bayreuth A Real Mass Worship they will Never Forget: Rituals and Cognition in the Nazareth Baptist Church, South Africa Isaiah Shembe founded the Nazareth Baptist Church (NBC) in 1911. He invented ritual practices, which included elements from both mission Christianity and traditional Zulu religion. In the following years he codified religious practices and strengthened his central position as the prophetically gifted leader. After his death, his successor continued this endeavor by publishing the “orthodox” proceeding for the daily prayers and weekly services. Regarding the transmission of religious traditions, these processes can be interpreted as a move towards the doctrinal mode of religiosity, but the NBC employed various types of ritual and became best known for the rather imagistic mass gatherings, taking place twice every year. The decentralized imagistic mode is connected with spontaneous exegetical reflection (SER). Within the NBC the most common expression of SER are prophetic dreams and visions, but the centrifugal forces of SER are somewhat confined by the leader’s charisma. However, these forces reign in times of succession, and in 1976 the conflict between two aspirants to leadership led to a schism within the church. This provides an interesting test case for the application of Whitehouse’s modes of religiosity theory. David Thurfjell Associate Professor, Department for the Study of Religions, Södertörn University, Stockholm Ritual, Emotion, and the Navigation of the Self This paper deals with self-suggestion and ritual. It argues that ritualised actions can be approached as means by which individuals manipulate themselves in order to feel in a specific way and thereby strengthen themselves to follow a chosen way of conduct. Drawing on examples from emotional rituals in Pentecostal Christianity, the paper emphasises the way rituals, much like other aesthetic expressions, have the ability to create different moods. Rituals evoke emotional atmospheres, which encourage certain actions and thoughts whilst keeping others away. By focusing these moods rather than the verbalised content of ritual, the paper attempts to sketch a theoretical approach that may shed new light on meaning, function and agency in, not only ritual, but in individual religiosity at large. Andreas Odenthal Professor of Liturgical Studies, Eberhard-Karls-Universität, Tübingen Ritual Experience: Theology and Psychoanalysis in Dialogue about the Liturgy of the Catholic Church Compared with the dictum of “symbolic experience”, the concept of “ritual experience” shall be evolved, applied to the roman-catholic liturgy. “Symbolic experience” defines the unchanging duty of the church dynamically to relate the experience of faith to the constantly changing reality of people’s lives. By an interdisciplinary dialogue between theology and psychoanalysis, certain elements of psychoanalytical theory serve to demonstrate

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the connections of symbolic ritual practices to the fundamental inter-human experiences of life, which are discerned in ritual. The hypothesis describes a third level of reality, “potential space”, in which the rituals of the church belong, and which provides a link between internal experience and external reality. The link between theology and psychoanalysis will be constructed about the theological term of the pashal mystery. The Christian-Jewish tradition is rich in experience of the two dimensions: the search for protection is expressed in the Christian talk of salvation, the search to become oneself and the departure in the Exodus story. This understanding of ritual building on symbol theory integrates ritual into the psychic development of people, and thus into their own historicity. Barbara Gerke Postdoctoral Associate, School of Anthropology, University of Oxford The Multivocality of Ritual Experience: Long-Life Empowerments among Tibetan Communities in the Darjeeling Hills, India A long-life empowerment, in Tibetan called tshe dbang, is a Buddhist tantric ritual that attracts large crowds of people in Tibetan Buddhist communities. Like other Tibetan Buddhist tantric empowerments, a tshe dbang generally involves a series of commitments from the side of the lama as well as the disciple. In practice, long-life empowerments are popular and frequently performed rituals in which these commitments are loosely interpreted by participants. Consequently, people’s inner experiences of the ritual do not necessarily correspond to the “inner work” prescribed and performed by the lama conducting the ritual. This paper is based on my participation in eight long-life rituals in the Darjeeling Hills and Sikkim during my doctoral research (2004–2006). The ethnographic examples show that by being removed from the ritual’s text and its content, lay people reinterpret long-life empowerments in their own terms. By highlighting the perspectives of lay Tibetans in ritual, which in the past has been underemphasised in Tibetan Buddhist studies, this paper presents a different perspective to the anthropology of Tibetan Buddhist ritual. Angela Sumegi Assistant Professor of Religion, College of the Humanities, Carleton University Being the Deity: The Inner Work of Buddhist and Shamanic Ritual In Vajrayana Buddhism, all external components of ritual related to the invocation of deities can be seen as supports or means through which the participant aims to experience certain inner processes and transformations. Further, where the intended spiritual transformation remains unrealized, the ritual represents or symbolizes the actualization of inherent potential. Shamanic ritual actions related to invoking or communicating with spirits are also understood to be methods that produce effects but the intended effect is not the inner realization of a previously unmanifest spiritual potential nor does the ritual represent or symbolize the goal. In this paper, I argue that the methods and expected effects of the invocation of other-worldly personalities in Shamanism and Buddhism relate to ways in which selfhood is conceptualized. Further, I wish to show that the ambiguity and instability inherent in self conceptualizations affect, if not determine, the ways in which such rituals are

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differently experienced and appropriated, from person to person within one tradition, from moment to moment within one person. Beatrix Hauser Visiting Professor, Karl Jaspers Centre of Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University Dramatic Changes? The Experience of Religious Play in the Megacity of Delhi This paper focuses on the intersection of religious and aesthetic experience evoked by ritual theatre in different social settings. Drawing on the example of the Indian Ramlila, the annual enactment of god Ram’s life, I shall contrast different performance styles that at first sight might be branded as “conservative religious recitation” and “urban multimedia event”. It will be shown that – regardless of performance style – Ramlila is conceived of as divine play that brings about intense feelings, above all devotional love. A person can frame the event in terms of ritual, theatre and spectacle, no matter whether other actors, spectators or organisers share this approach. Yet urban Ramlila performances do not merely convey “new wine in old bottles”. This paper seeks to explore categories that may grasp in what ways the experience of these performances differ, looking at (1) the relation of religious and art discourse, (2) the habitus of seeing, and (3) the production of moods and sentiments. I argue that recent metropolitan Ramlila sites are largely determined by the preference for aesthetic realism and the visualization of emotions, apart from factors external to ritual (theatre) and its performance context. Yolanda van Ede Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam Differing Roads to Grace: Spanish and Japanese Sensory Approaches to Dance Spanish flamenco has become immensely popular in Japan over the last three decades, particularly its dance form. Although some Japanese dancers have gained a favourable reputation in Spain as well, Spanish perceive Japanese flamenco as a distinct style, and value it variably from mere strange to “fake imitation.” This paper presents a plea for sensory analysis when investigating bodily practices in processes of cultural appropriation. In order to circumvent uncanny aesthetic/ethic discussions on imitation and (presumed) authenticity, I argue that a sensory approach is both necessary and fruitful. It redirects the focus of research from form and appearance (what) towards method and process (how), and will thereby lay bare cultural differences in learning and teaching that form the base of style differentiation. A first rude comparison between Spanish and Japanese flamenco suggests that the main difference between the two styles rests upon the application of two distinct sensory models. Whereas in Spanish flamenco sound (rhythm) is fundamental to the art, Japanese culture favours sight as its dominant sense in processes of transmission. The result of flamenco adaptation in Japan may be that here flamenco dance, because of favouring the visual, is more spectacleoriented than Spanish flamenco, which has always been more of a concert between musicians, singers and dancers. In the context of flamenco’s current development towards a growing institutionalisation of the art, as happens to many a “world music”, Japanese

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flamenco may turn out to be flamenco’s most globalised style, and Spain’s flamenco of the near future. Taking Japanese flamenco dance as a case study, sensory analysis, then, may offer valuable insights into the intricate complexities of globalisation and localisation, and a way to recognise otherness and sameness from a more dynamic and a more ethical perspective. Gerard Poole Professor of World Music at the Washington Institute of the Arts, Arlington, Virginia, and Executive Director of The Society for The Study of Music, Ritual, and Experience Emotional Cultivation and the Chaotic Emotion: Towards a Theory of Ritual, Musical, and Emotional Parallel Morphology, as Encountered in Andalusian Ritual Practices This paper will suggest that ritual experiences may be intimately related to the cultivation of emotional modalities, especially through musical rituals. I will propose a relationship between three key ritual elements: ritual structure, emotional mode, and musical form. Andalusian musical practices provide examples to demonstrate that the performance of a musical form often constitutes a ritual in and of itself while also serving to generate very specific emotional states. I will analyse a ritual morphological process between these three ritual elements based on my study of the evolution of the Andalusian Sevillanas Rocieras musical form. I will then present what I believe to be a key feature of emotional cultivation in Andalusian ritual, the deliberately generated chaotic emotional state (“controlled chaos”). In conclusion I will suggest that the generation and proliferation of emotional states through musical emotional rituals may have provided early humans with basic categories of thought and classification as a result of the generation of particular emotional modes, or “modes of being.” Sarah M. Pike Professor of Religious Studies, California State University, Chico Performing Grief in Formal and Informal Rituals at the Burning Man Festival On a windy night in the Nevada desert, I am at the end of my shift as a “Temple Guardian” at the Mausoleum, a temple for the dead built annually and burnt at the end of the Burning Man festival. Ritual participants have been coming and going throughout the dark hours of the early morning, writing on temple walls, reading the messages of others, making altars, and weeping for the dead. While the formal burning of the temple is spectacular and most often cited as the penultimate ritual of collective mourning, I argue that it is the informal experience of intimacy with living strangers and dead loved ones in which participants most powerfully experience and express mourning. For a week leading up to the formal burning, the temple offers a space for ongoing conversations between the living and the dead and encourages personalized performances of grief that can take place any time. In contrast to the formal ritual burning of the temple, informal practices are silently communicated by imitating the actions of others. In this paper I explore participants’ experiences of ritual behavior and boundaries through their descriptions of ritual conflict, failure and success, as they engage in altar-building and other memorializing activities.

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Jan Weinhold Research Associate at the Institute of Medical Psychology and at the Collaborative Research Center 619 “Ritual Dynamics”, Heidelberg University Navigating the Inner Work: The Experience of Ayahuasca within Santo Daime Rituals Various psychoactive substances have been used in ritual contexts around the globe for millennia. Substances such as psilocybin, mescaline, ayahuasca, and tobacco have played a part in divination, healing, communicating with spirits, or gaining religious knowledge. Since psychoactive substances can have a profound pharmacological impact on the “bodymind” a biopsychological perspective lends itself to understanding these “Altered States of Consciousness (ASC)”. However, in accordance with Zinberg (1984) and his model of “drug, set, and setting,” I will argue that the analysis of substance-induced ritual experiences cannot be primarily based on pharmacological assumptions. Ritual experience is an active construction and the result of an active process of perception and intentional cognitive and embodied activities, rather than merely a “passive” result or even by-product of the prescribed ritual performance. In this paper therefore, I will point out how participants make use of “navigational” strategies to control the substances effects and the flow of rituals. Empirically this argument will be supported with results from a study on the European Santo Daime church which uses Ayahuasca as the sacrament in their rituals.