|
|
Research and PublicationsPART III. A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR STUDYING RITUAL AND MYTH
OVERVIEW In the preceding discussions of the role of ritual and myth in working families we have allowed ourselves a certain imprecision in the use of the terms "ritual" and "myth." In part this is possible because these terms are a part of ordinary language and people have an intuitive sense of what these terms mean. Yet the fact that myth and ritual are often used in conversation in imprecise ways poses a problem for anyone wanting to carry out scholarly research on these topics. It is important to develop a more precise set of analytical concepts and distinctions that will comprise a comprehensive theoretical framework for the research program of the Emory/Sloan Center. Ritual is an extremely complex topic, subject to considerable ambiguity of reference.
The term "ritual" is used to describe many things that sometimes do not seem to have a lot in common. Despite these variations, it is possible to understand ritual as a complex family of deeply related behaviors. Marcel Mauss once termed gift exchange "a total social fact" since it served multiple social functions and acted as a kind of ongoing social contract, underwriting much of morality and social life (Mauss 1967). Ritual has something of the same foundational and ubiquitous status in human life. But whereas gift giving might fairly be said to distinguish humans from other animals, ritual connects hu-mans with other complex forms of animal life, and thus appears to be an even more basic process than gift giving. Animal and Human Ritual From an evolutionary perspective, human ritual is significant both in how it links humans to and distinguishes them other animals. Since Tinnbergen's and Lorenz's early ethological work on animal behavior (Tinbergen 1952, 1960; Lorenz 1952) evolutionary biologists have understood ritualization as a process shaped by natural selection by which a functional act performed voluntarily by members of a species is transformed into a hard-wired "signal" whose purpose becomes largely communicative (D'Aquili et al 1982). Neck-craning in ducks is a key example for Lorenz of a complex set of involuntary actions that became fused together in a kind of compromise gesture that signals simultaneously fight and flight. What was originally a set of separate intentional and functional movements became a single hard-wired communicative gesture. Animal ritual is distinct in several ways from most of what is termed ritual in hu-mans. Some anthropologists have gone so far as to declare that the use of the term "ritual" for animal signals and human ceremonial behavior is totally misleading because the two kinds of behavior have nothing significant in common (Leach 1966). But while there are clearly important distinctions to be made between kinds of ritual, the term ritual is a useful umbrella word for bringing together a number of different kinds of behavior. The variants of ritual have an important family resemblance and probably share common evolutionary roots. Recognizing the similarities as well as the differences among these forms of ritual is a key to understanding how ritual evolved in animals with complex nervous systems and eventually came to have distinctive functions and forms for humans. So while we need to acknowledge probable relations among the various genres of ritual, it is also important to clarify their differences. The most ambitious attempt to clas-sify different forms of human ritual is probably that of Ronald Grimes, who distinguishes among six modes of ritual sensibility: decorum, ceremony, liturgy, magic, celebration and ritualization (Grimes 1982). While his classification is useful for clarifying ritual genres in religious and magical practice, I will be using a somewhat different framework for examining the relations among various ritual forms. As with Grimes's typology, this framework uses six distinctions, distinctions that are useful in the context of this pro-posal. The first three focus different ritual processes that generate ritual forms. The sec-ond three focus on the distinctive forms of ritual understood as ritual genres.
This is the evolutionary biologist's notion of the fixing of a complex behavior pattern (often involving conflicting impulses) into a single hard-wired gesture that serves largely a communicative function (Lorenz 1952; Tinbergen 1952). Clearly, we will not be dealing with this kind of primitive form of ritual in our research at the proposed center.
Habituation is the emergence of a stable and relatively automatic behavior pattern in an individual through repetition. In humans the automaticity of habit conveys some of the same characteristics as ritualization, but habituated behaviors are not hard-wired. They may be unlearned or modified with some effort. Therefore habituation might be said to mimic ritualization in its relative stability and automaticity, while retaining the flexibility and mutability of learned behavior. Psychologists have proposed the key role of children_s play in the process of ritualization of behavior, and its central role in so-cialization (Piaget 1962; Leach 1966; Bruner 1972; Erikson 1977; Garvey 1977). They generally use the term "ritualization" for this process, but to avoid confounding it with the biologist's notion of ritualization we can use the term "habituation." Jean Piaget (1962) stressed the role of ritualization in the transition from free play to socially coordinated play with rules. In this process, he saw the psychosocial origins of the social contract, a notion of the moral force of depersonalized rules of conduct, as an emergent property of child's play. In the terms used here, he was describing the relations between habituation and institutionalization.
Institutionalization is the gradual proliferation of habituated forms among a com-munity or group, and their eventual sedimentation into external institutions, understood as a feature of the social world rather than of an individual's behavior (Berger and Luck-mann 1966). Most behavioral institutions in a community (e.g., greeting behavior, dance forms, flirting, characteristic posture, etc.) are recognizable because individuals mimic the habituated behavior patterns of others. Behavior patterns that at one time began as a process of individual habituation gradually become experienced as a feature of the social environment rather than as a feature of an individual_s personal behavioral repertoire. So ritual in this sense underlies the creation and social proliferation of institutional behavior.
RITUAL FORMS
Personal routines are sequences of behavior that become characteristic of an indi-vidual behavioral style. An example would be a pattern of eating where one eats one food at a time on one's plate, not moving to the next food item until the first one is finished. Another common instance is a morning grooming routine where individuals usually wash their faces, brush their teeth, brush their hair in a personally ritualized sequence and manner. Bedtime for children is another time when personalized routines become very important. Each of us shapes our lives through numerous personal routines. Most of these routines are in fact personalized versions of social rituals (see below) (Miner 1956), but some are quite idiosyncratic, limited to an individual or a relationship. In neurotic individuals personal routines can also become the basis of compulsive ritualization. A common example of this kind of compulsive psychopathology of ritual is obsessive hand washing, or other cleaning routines. Such extreme instances of personal routines point to their ordinary functions of personal routines in providing a sense of pre-dictability and familiar order to their lives. This is why personal routines become espe-cially salient for people in times of transition (e.g., waking up, going to sleep, entering a hotel in a strange city) and situations of stress. Social Rituals Social rituals are socially scripted behavior patterns that are constrained by social role and context. Viewing everyday social encounters as "interaction rituals" has been the mainstay of symbolic interactionists and ethnomethodologists in sociology and by some cognitive scientists seeking an idiom for describing and replicating on a computer the "programmed" nature of everyday behavior (Goffman 1959, 1960, 1967; Garfinkle 1967; Watson 1992; Coulon 1995; Schank and Abelson 1977). This use of the term ritual or script to describe everyday social interactions implies a performative theory of everyday life (Burke 1969). The underlying tone of such work is often somewhat ironic since participants do not normally consider their everyday behavior to be scripted, performed or ritualized. Using the language of ritual or theater for everyday life is an effective and provocative way to get people to understand the often invisible but crucial role of ritual-ized behavior in shaping social interactions of everyday life that participants may experi-ence as spontaneous. Sacred Rituals Sacred rituals are self-conscious ceremonial performances of ultimate salience to communities. In the case of civic rituals they serve to reaffirm and establish important ties of individuals to political and social communities, institutions and leaders. In the case of religious ritual, they serve to link participants to transcendent events, beings and realms. In this broad sense, sacred rituals include holidays, festivals, prayer, sacramental rites, rites of passage, state rituals like coronations or state funerals, etc. This use of sa-cred acknowledges Durkheim's fundamental insight that there is a basic similarity be-tween religious congregations and the body politic, both of which recognize the power of a transcendent authority over the individual (Durkheim 1915). In this sense important social and political ceremonies can be seen as sacred ritual. Clearly there is no hard line between social rituals and sacred rituals, since they differ only in degree of self-awareness and salience. An ordinary social ritual can, under certain circumstances, become a sacred ritual. Conversely a formerly sacred ritual can lose its meaning and salience for a community and become little more than a social ritual carried out with little emotional or meaningful resonance to transcendent issues. Dis-rupting either social or sacred rituals tends to produce similar kinds of personal and social stress.
COMMON "DESIGN FEATURES" OF RITUAL A great variety of behaviors fall under the name "ritual." For the sake of clarity, it is important to emphasize that all these kinds of ritual forms share certain common features, but differ in others (D'Aquili et al 1982). Below are listed a number of features common to ritual forms. These may be usefully thought of as the common "design fea-tures" of all ritual. Breaking down ritual into its component features is similar to the very useful approach that Charles Hockett has taken to explicating the shared and variable features of language understood broadly as symbolic communication systems (Hockett 1966). 1. Formalism Ritual draws attention to the significance of its particular forms. Form and con-tent are closely linked in ritual. Rituals cannot be paraphrased. Many behaviors may be viewed either as functional acts (when their pragmatic functions are stressed) or as rituals (when the significance of their particular forms is emphasized). Thus everyday acts like eating, brushing ones teeth, or chatting with neighbors over the fence may be viewed as rituals when we acknowledge the significance of the specific forms by which these actions are framed. To view an act through the lens of ritual is to stress the meaningfulness of its specific forms. 2. Mediation Rituals commonly mediate between opposed or conflicting impulses or statuses. Transitions (entrances, exits, and status changes) are common sites of ritualized behavior. Ambiguous situations or ambivalent feelings are often highly ritualized. And social rituals often reconcile or collapse contraries (love and hate, life and death, single and married states, God and human, internal agency and external agency, etc.) making them particu-larly useful for the expression of religious sentiments and ideas. This affinity of ritual for ambiguity or conflict may well have evolutionary roots. Konrad Lorenz explains the ori-gins of ritualization in animals (e.g. _neck-craning_ in certain ducks) as the fusion of contrary impulses (e.g., fight and flight) into a single ritual embodying a double message (Lorenz 1952). 3. Symbolism Rituals are forms of symbolic action. When a purely functional act (e.g., eating, walking) becomes ritualized, an intent to communicate some symbolic meaning is added to the purely functional or utilitarian dimension of the act. Treating baseball as a ritual rather than a game draws attention to the symbolic significance of its forms (Shore 1991) 4. Automaticity Ritual practices tend to produces automaticity of action and response, a cognitive feature important in the attainment of attention, control and consciousness (Broadbent 1993). 5. Agency Reversal One extreme effect of automaticity of motor action is "agency reversal." In ordi-nary action, a person performs an act, control being with the person. When that act be-comes habituated through repetition, the locus of control can reverse, and the actions may come to be experienced as "performing" the individual. Every skilled performance artist or athlete experiences some form of agency reversal. Extreme examples of the loss of agency through ritual are spirit possession, trance and other ritually induced hypnogogic states. But even less dramatic forms of ritual can produce the experience of an individual's being carried away by the forms. The powerful experience of ritually induced agency reversal accounts in part for the special place of ritual practices in religious traditions. Agency reversal powerfully reinforces the notion of otherworldly control over one's life. 6. Intersubjective Coordination Ritualized interaction between caregivers and infants is a primary basis for the earliest development of intersubjectivity in the developing infant. Intersubjectivity im-plies the reciprocal coordination of perspectives. Before objects serve as the focus of joint attention between caregiver and infant, ritualized interactions assume the status of a coordinating framework and a mutual object of attention. Intersubjective coordination among individuals and groups is an important feature of all social and sacred rituals (Schieffelin 1976). Coordination may entail a functional integration of activities and resource alloca-tion (Rappaport 1984). It also may include a socio-cognitive coordination of perspective, information and meaning. Even rituals carried on privately may be ritually coordinated. A television sitcom or soap opera watched alone can become the basis of important social coordination. When friends or colleagues get together to discuss the latest installment of a soap opera or sitcom, there is an often ritualized exchange and coordination of perspec-tives. Those who do not watch feel left out of the group. The weakening of social and sacred ritual in any community may be taken as an important index of the loss of mutual orientation and coordination. 7. Embodiment Rituals are closely linked with bodily knowledge. Piaget suggests that the most basic form of ritualized behavior is a simple sensory-motor movement pattern (schema) of an infant. The earliest parent-child rituals are simple motor routines, the most written about being peek-a-boo and other fort-da games (Garvey 1977). The automaticity of many ritual forms involves what musicians term "muscle memory" in which the body "knows" its moves in a way not accessible to ordinary con-sciousness. Even complex religious ritual engages embodied knowledge that cannot be easily accessed by ordinary consciousness (Deren 1953; Csordas 1994a, 1994b; Farnell 1995). Embodiment implies a way of knowing that is preconscious and nonanalytic. The notion of embodiment figures centrally in Michael Polanyi's conception of tacit knowl-edge (Polanyi 1966, 1969). Ritual behavior also has important effects on the body. Barbara Lex has pro-posed, for instance, that certain forms of ritual can trigger what she terms "central nerv-ous system tuning," characterized by alternations of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activity (Lex 1982). It is also quite possible that ritual activity and its ab-sence or impairment have measurable effects of physiological and psychological stress, effects that are subject to empirical investigation. 8. Modularity Ritual tends to be modular in structure. Smaller units of ritual (rites, symbols, gestures etc) can be linked together to form higher level ritual units, so that small rites can be sequenced into major rituals. Alternatively ritual units can be disaggregated and recombined in a novel order or with other units. Jerome Bruner has proposed that one of the most important functions of child_s play (a genre closely linked with ritual) is the opportunity to practice recombinant activity, the very mental activity that is the hallmark of language use (Bruner 1972). Many religious rites within a tradition employ a common stock of ritual elements in numerous combinations. In many religious traditions, a nov-ice's understanding is transformed and deepened stepwise by the recombination of fa-miliar ritual elements to reveal new meanings (Levi-Strauss 1963; Barth 1975; Shore 1996, Chaps. 9 and 10). 9. Memory effects Ritual has several important links with memory. Personal or social routines are remembered through what is termed procedural or habit memory, one of several human memory systems (Connerton 1989; Tulving and Schacter 1994 ). Certain kinds of mem-ory such as remembering multiplication tables or counting are closely connected to ritu-alized postural dynamics and physical routines position, the clicking of teeth or the nod-ding of the head. Particular kinesthetic or postural associations may also trigger certain kinds of memory, as when a forgotten dream memory is recovered by reclining in a sleeping posture. Age-grading rituals are often orchestrated to systematically transform memory structures (Levi-Strauss 1963; Munn 1969; Battaglia 1990; Shore 1996). Social and sacred ritual has been interpreted as a form of social memory which itself is subject to being distorted (Connerton 1989; Battaglia 1990, Shore, in press; Sullivan 1995). 10. Authentication through Replication Like all other experiences, ritual is subject to experiential "authentication." Some rituals are felt to be deeper, truer and more authentic or efficacious experiences than others. Ritual is also subject to de-authentication. In a famous essay on value and authen-ticity in an age of industrial production, Walter Benjamin argues that most artifacts and experiences lose their "aura" of authenticity by replication (Benjamin 1969), (Becker 1995). Mechanical replication, as in the "knock-off" of an expensive designer product, or a forgery of a painting or document, has the effect of dispersing or weakening the "aura" or the unique power of the original. This is why museums are full of displays of originals -- paintings, objects, documents etc.--that are displayed to highlight their sacred aura Benjamin's famous example of the loss of authenticity through mechanical reproduction. was the photographic copy. For most things, mechanical replication distances an object increasingly from its original, so that an age of mass-produced commodities and simulated experiences ("simulacra") is an age of compromised authenticity (Baudrillard 1983; Shore 1996, Chaps. 7 and 8; Becker 1995, pp. 633-34). Ritual replication, however, reverses this process and operates by a unique logic of authentication whereby its experiential authen-ticity is generally enhanced by replication and decreases with proximity to the original act. Although ritual practice always has a history, often imperceptibly changing over time, ritual value is intimately tied to faithful reproduction. In both religious and magical traditions sacred words and actions-- prayer, incantation, spells, invocations, rites-- are generally supposed to be performed with exact precision (Reichard 1944, 1963; Tambiah 1968; Murray 1977. In ritual curing, the failure of a patient to respond to the cure is often attributed to errors in ritual performance. These associations with ritual value inform the cultural understandings of the place of ritual practices in many pre-industrial societies. For instance Navajo relig-ious/curing rites involve very complex and elaborate song cycles performed by ritual spe-cialists. Even a small error of replication is believed to not simply make the ritual inef-fective, but harmful as well (Witherspoon 1977; Reichard 1944; Reichard 1963; Murray 1977). Navajo ritual and its associated art form (sand paintings) is a man's domain, asso-ciated with closure and exact replication. By contrast, the women's art of weaving is as-sociated with generative and open-ended potency that is a female domain. And so no Navajo woven rug is supposed to be perfect, but must leave a small section incomplete and imperfect. Navajo understand life to be preserved and protected by the intersection of male ritual perfection and female generative openness.
DIMENSIONS OF SIGNIFICANT VARIATION AMONG RITUAL GENRES While the ten design features discussed in the preceding section define a common core of features shared by most the different genres of ritual, it is important as well to highlight the dimensions along which ritual genres vary. The most important of these dimensions of variability are listed below. 1. Degree of Consciousness Ritual behavior varies significantly in terms of how aware actors are of their ac-tions. Presumably animal ritual is non-conscious, and humans also manifest numerous biologically controlled gestures (e.g., the yawn of nervousness, a social smile) that are normally non-conscious. Personal routines and much social ritual are what might be termed pre-conscious or tacit forms of knowledge. They can become fully conscious when someone points them out or when they fail to work properly, but are normally not part of focal knowledge. Most people do not call such non-conscious or tacit ritual forms ritual. Sacred ritual, on the other hand, is often very consciously known. Unlike other ritual genres, sacred rituals are often labeled with special terms (e.g., a coronation, thanksgiving dinner, a requiem Mass, a pep rally, a political fund-raiser) and participants can often explicate their specific forms and meanings. 2. Degree of Symbolic Elaboration The kind of signal behavior that characterizes biologically controlled gestures are symbolic in that they are vehicles for conveying intention, meaning, and information. The same is true of the purely personal or the neurotic rituals of individuals, which often may be read as indices of an individual's mental state. But strictly speaking, such proto-symbolic behavior is better described as indexical or symptomatic of an individual's situation or state of mind than as truly symbolic in the sense of a highly conventional or arbitrary code (Langer 1957). It is misleading to equate too closely this kind of proto-symbolic behavior with the elaborated conventional symbolism at work in sacred ritual. In this sense we can say that while all rituals convey meaning of some sort, rituals will vary significantly in the degree of elaboration and conventionality of their symbolism. Still, as Gregory Bateson and Roy Rappaport stressed, even the most symbolically elaborated sacred rituals often employ an interesting mix of indexical symbolism and conventional symbolism (Bateson 1972; Rappaport 1979, 1984). 3. Degree of Social Significance The hard-wired ritual displays of social animals shared with human social and sa-cred rituals a high degree of social significance. They have a primary function of coordi-nating the activities and perspectives of different members of a community or distinct social groups. By contrast, personal or neurotic rituals function largely for the benefit of individuals. Personal and neurotic rituals often employ conventional social routines, and they may certainly have unintended social consequences. But personal and neurotic ritu-als are only secondarily social, whereas social and sacred ritual might be thought of as having primary social functions. 4. Scale, Complexity, and Functional Load Obviously there is a major difference in scale and complexity between brushing one's teeth in the same way each morning and a Navajo curing ritual which may involve dozens of songs, myths, sand paintings and a variety of ritual specialists and an elaborate repertoire of carefully sequenced actions. These issues of scale and complexity are ex-tremely important when considering the status of ritual in contemporary American middle class life. This is why it may seem hard at first glance to recognize the importance of ritual in modern life. While the actual number or variety of ritual forms in play in middle class life is very considerable, it is also likely that middle class American rituals may be far less complex and elaborate in scale than the sacred rituals which have been described for pre-industrial societies. Why would ritual have been reduced in scale and complexity in modern life? Many of the functions subject to ritual regulation in pre-industrial societies (like educa-tion, food production and consumption, gender socialization, knowledge transmission, economic exchanges, and regulation of human relations with the biosphere and ecosystem) have been "rationalized" and "bureaucratized" (Weber 1978). These functions have been taken over by specialized institutions like schools and various government bureaucracies, and private corporations whose functioning is not explicitly or primarily ritualistic (though it will always involve some degree of tacit social ritual). In sum, the "functional load" on ritual has been reduced in modern society. Ritual tends to be reduced to its more basic social and psychological functions of coordination. 5. Transcendent Reference Transcendence is an important dimension of religious/sacred experience. In this sense religion might be thought of as a way to provide meaning for the ordinary or secular dimensions of everyday life by linking them in some way to a transcendent or sacred order (Eliade 1961). Sacred rituals thus promote this transcendence by virtue of (a) their highly elaborated symbolisms, (b) their capacity to commemorate and bring to life for participants foundational events and persons through their memory effects, and (c) their capacity to alter human experience by "agency reversal" (see above). The quest for transcendence is still an important aspect of religious ritual for many in modern life, not only for mainstream religious traditions but also and especially for those fundamentalist traditions where the fostering of transcendence a prime focus. Notable examples would be certain "ecstatic" Protestant religious sects like the Holiness Churches of Appalachia which practice snake-handling and drinking poison, or new age groups which practice elaborate ritual and magic to effect connection with divinity (Bur-ton 1993; Leonard 1999; Luhrmann 1989; Bloch 1998). But it is likely that modern life, with its stress on bureaucratic order, technical rationality and consumerism, have signifi-cantly reduced the availability of conventional rituals that stress transcendence. This loss of ritually mediated transcendence may be quite significant for middle class Americans. The loss manifests itself in a vague sense of spiritual deprivation, and in periodic reactions to this perceived loss, particularly by youth,. These reactions take the form of self-conscious tribalism such as body piercing, tattooing, drug-induced experience ands the appeal of rock concerts or dance parties which produce a kind of transcendence, but one devoid of traditional religious cosmology or grounding.
RELATED PERFORMANCE GENRES Five Related Performance Genres Ritual is a kind of "performance genre" which has close ties with a variety of other types of performance. This family of related performance genres might usefully be termed "ludic genres" (Shore 1996, Chap. 2) since they are all closely related to "play." In a classic formulation, Gregory Bateson defined play as a kind of "framed" behavior that involves a basic paradox. Play frames define behavior as both "not real" and also "not not real" (Bateson 1972; see also (Huizinga 1938). The attraction of ritual for "betwixt and between" themes and situations is built into its very character a a form of play. Whereas "pure" play (what Roger Caillois calls ludus) behavior presses against rules and constraints, ritual is an example of what Caillois paidea, foregrounding the rules and constraints of its forms and finds its meanings in the forms themselves (Levi-Strauss 1963; Shore 1996, Chaps. 3 and 4; Caillois 1958). Games and sports are related to ritual in their dependence on shared form and symbols, but share with free play the focus on pushing against their constitutive boundaries and creating focal contingent events (Shore 1996, Chap. 4, Levi-Strauss 1963). Theatrical drama is a performance genre that probably evolved from sacred ritual but which became increasingly secular in character (Nietzsche 1999). True theater, how-ever, gradually transformed itself into a performance genre where author, performers and audience are distinct. Throughout the world dramatic performances still bears important links with theater's ritual roots. Sacred theater often functions less to entertain than to summon sacred powers and to transport, transform and heal the audience (Schechner 1985; Turner 1984; Turner & Schechner 1986; Kapferer 1983, 1984; Obeyesekere 1990). Finally there is spectacle, which is rooted in seeing rather than participating, and where the gap between performer and audience is greatest (MacAloon 1984). The mod-ern Olympics, though originating in sacred ritual, is a good example of a spectacle (Ibid.). In the modern era film and later television have simultaneously brought such "spectacular" performances into the homes of viewers worldwide, and increased the gap between those who view and those who perform.
MYTH: SIGNIFICANT NARRATIVE FORMS What ritual is to action, narrative forms are to language. "Narrative" is not just speaking, but always implies the formulation of a story in some kind of conventional genre, a story-form. This formalization of behavior into meaningful genres is what links ritual and narrative as a significant and distinctive kind of human behavior. Ritual and myth also share common roots in play. Whereas ritual formalizes play into dramatic, en-acted forms, myth represents play in its narrative mode. Play forms are all specially "framed behaviors" that are set off from ordinary life as simultaneously within ordinary life and set apart from ordinary life. Gregory Bateson discussed the special paradoxical message conveyed by all forms of plan and fantasy: "this is not real; but this is also not not real" (Bateson 1972). Myths are narratives that play with reality, presenting life in a way that is at once fact and fiction, real and not real, serious and whimsical. Myths de-rive their paradoxical representation of reality by a number of narrative techniques including:
Through such rhetorical devices, myths stand out from ordinary narrative reality, just as ritual stands out from ordinary action as forms of "play." As specially marked forms of narrative, myths have the function of transforming the representation of reality by rhetorical devices such as distortion, illumination, exaggeration, formalization, etc.. In this way all myths "play" with reality and can serve in many complex ways to model aspects of reality for people.
Kinds of Narrative Forms and Processes It is possible to distinguish several important uses of the term narrative, though actual stories may fall between types. First, as with ritual, it is important in defining nar-rative to distinguish process from product. Myth or narrative as a process of meaning-making is different from narrative as a particular "text" or genre that results from that process. As process, narrative might be thought of as meaning making "on-the-fly." Peo-ple tend to make sense of anomalous events through the active creation of stories that gradually formulate a standard or conventional "tale" on an event (Bruner 1990; Shore 1996). Underscoring the importance of story-telling in meaning-construction, Jerome Bruner has pointed to narrative as the most important way that humans generate meaning out of the events and personalities of their lives. As product, we can distinguish several important genres of narrative that we can expect to figure in different ways in American life. Four Kinds of "Myth"
Some are religious, and others secular (such as fairy tales, or stories from Ameri-can history). Sacred myths underwrite meaning-making about fundamental truths. Many modern myths are conveyed as "history," stories such as the coming of the pilgrims, or the killing of President Kennedy, which are based upon acvtual events but which become remembered and transmitted in stereotyped and canonical ways (Kammen 1991).
Just-so stories that people use to explain everyday happenings. The story of the founding of baseball in Cooperstown is an example of one such folktale for many Ameri-cans
Media myths are of immense importance in modern life. Whether in the form of TV sitcoms, the news, or advertising narratives, many of our beliefs today are strongly media driven.
These are stories that circulate in small communities about themselves, their key personalities and events. Families have such narratives, as do clubs, political groups and all stable organizations. Gossip is a very potent genre of narrative, one that serves both as the breeding ground for community histories and as a form of informal social control. Any community that is dense and vital will also produce a lot of gossip. Like all narrative genres, gossip tends to transform events and personalities into culturally standardized and recognizable types. Like rituals, narrative traditions serve a number of distinct functions in any community.
THE UNDERSIDE OF RITUAL AND MYTH Throughout this proposal, the emphasis on ritual and myth has been largely on their positive roles for individual and communities. We have emphasized their functions in coordinating social life, and for helping to provide a meaningful "shape" to life. We expect that much of our research will focus on these positive associations with ritual and myth and the implications of their weakening or absence in modern life. Yet it is important to note that both ritual and myth are not intrinsically or neces-sarily positive influences in human life. They are simply important and powerful human institutions that can have either positive or negative consequences for people. We have already noted, for example, that ritual can take on pathological forms for neurotic indi-viduals, in the form of compulsive ritualization of behavior. Moreover, the very psycho-logical power of ritual to produce feelings of transcendence and strong solidarity with co-participants often leads to irrational and sometimes violent acts, something seen in relig-ious rites, political ritual and modern sports (Schieffelin 1976; Shore 1996, Chap. 4; Sullivan 1999). Anthropologists have studied in great detail social and religious "rituals of rever-sal" and "rites of rebellion," such as Carnival which simultaneously express and contain social forces which are potentially disruptive of the status quo, and have within them the seeds of revolution (Da Matta 1984; Gluckman 1954; Turner 1968 1969). Though basically conservative in their cathartic function of supporting the status quo, rites of reversal can also trigger genuine revolt by giving legitimate expression to forces of change (Le Roy Ladurie 1979). On the other end of the scale, mass ritual has been an important part of the social disciplinary techniques of totalitarian societies and religious cults like that at Jonestown. This kind of ritually induced conformity to a political ideology or paranoid fantasy is sometimes thought of as "mindless ritual." But there is probably no clear-cut structural difference between social ritual that produces healthy social solidarity and ritual that pro-duces social pathology. The same ambiguities hold for the functions of myth. These ambiguities are built into the very term "myth" which can mean some sort of powerful stories sacred to a community or religion, or in a different context can mean misleading or false beliefs (Robertson 1980; Kammen 1991; Bowden 1992; Schmidt 1995). For example Stephanie Coontz's 1992 book The Way We Never Were debunks numerous "myths" about Ameri-can family which are widely shared among Americans and produce an unrealistic and sometimes dangerous nostalgia for a past that never was. Many of these myths are con-tained in media representations of the family and are exploited by advertisers. So ritual and myth are neither intrinsically good nor bad forces in human life, and it would be a mistake to adopt a nostalgic or romantic view of ritual and myth and ignore their poten-tially dysfunctional roles in modern life. For better or for worse, myth and ritual are powerful social forms. Their status in the lives of American working families is bound to be highly significant.
GO FORWARD TO:
GO BACK TO: |