1991 No. 1 CONTENTS - Institute of Social and Cultural ...

JASO 22/2 (1991): 101-117
SPACE, TIME AND BODILINESS IN DOGON FUNERALS:
A PRAXIOLOGICAL VIEW
DIRK VERBOVEN
Introduction
THROUGHOUT this essay, space, time, and bodiliness are considered as the main
vehicles for constructing ritual meaning. Tracing back praxiology to one of its
main roots, the French Annee school, I fIrst discuss bodily and spatial ritual
behaviours and how they relate to meaning construction. Secondly, I discuss
temporal aspects of ritual praxis, both syntactically (the notion of a processual
development of rituals) and semantically (the notion of context, Le. the ritual as
a historically situated performance). In a third section-also to a large degree
indebted to the Annee school-I show how the general patteming of funerary ritual
affects the meaning of its constituent parts, and how this allows for the structural
meaning of the Dogon funeral. The ultimate aim, however, is to proceed to an
alternative praxiological interpretation of the Dogon funeral, which I confront with
the socio-structural interpretation of Barbara DeMott (1982).
1. The Human Body, Spatial Thresholds and Boundary-Transgression in a
Ritual Context
The notion of the body is commonplace in anthropology today (e.g. Blacking
1977), but already in 1936 Mauss had published an interesting essay on bodily