INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

interpretation of activities defined and categorized as rituals. 712 Typical of scholars
operating within the first two traditions was a search for different levels of meanings
of ritual practices, that is, what shared values and notions are expressed in symbols
and symbolic acts and how do these meanings correspond to patterns in the larger
society and even conduce a persistence of social order. Functionalists, on the other
hand, have been more inclined towards studies of the social utility of rituals, that is,
the ways by which rituals affect social groups and societies at large, even civilizations,
and contribute to the functioning of social systems. In the anthropological
search for meanings religious practices have frequently been defined and interpreted
from the social and psychological functions they might accomplish, or the ideas,
concepts, and values the practices are believed to communicate.
During the last decades, anthropologists and ritual theorists have come to question
the assumption that all individuals share a blueprint of meanings regarding
actions termed as ritual. Do people have common understandings of ritual enactments?
Since people often fail to express clear-cut ideas, functions, and purposes of
ritual action and provide alternative explanations, are meanings and religious beliefs
intrinsic to the identity of ritual? Based on a study of Brahmin rituals in India, Staal
(1979) proposed his much debated theory about the “meaninglessness” of ritual acts.
Staal observed that verses derived from the Vedas were subjected to formal rules and
turned into highly stylized mantras or sounds which the religious specialists would
carefully and faultlessly recite quite ignorant of their meanings. 713 Unlike everyday
language, utterances of religious language turned into pure acts that were essentially
rule-governed and devoid of referential content. From this observation Staal argued
that symbolists and functionalists were wrong in their premise that rituals are expressions
of beliefs and values, since rituals are not meant to communicate anything. His
theory was still a product of the semantic-directed approach to rituals which he questioned:
it was only when Staal found Vedic rituals to be self-referential and not involving
references to some other external reality that he proposed that rituals are
“meaningless”.
In their attempt to define the qualities which identify ritualized acts, Humphrey
& Laidlaw (1994) strongly argue that the paradigm of rituals is not the expression of a
single culture model or symbolic codes. People may unite in the performance of ritual
acts even if their beliefs and ideas for the conduct are incomplete or even contradictory.
The link between purposes and the enactment of rituals becomes more or less
arbitrary, simply because ritualized acts have assumed a stipulated quality and are
thereby open for the assimilation of a variety of interpretations and meanings. As
Humphrey & Laidlaw purport, no theory or meaning is in fact necessary for conducting
ritual acts and people continue to do so with a variety of purposes, meanings and
interpretations (or none at all) in mind. The advantage of Humphrey & Laidlaw’s
theory is their analytical distinction between the different elements which constitute
712
For an overview, see Bell 1997.
713
Staal 1979.
451
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008