4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

must be cautious when assuming an area that has left little visual
evidence of high art is necessarily artistically impoverished.
The functions of the ceremonies – the performances – at the ceremonial
centers, and the exact procedures, cannot be known precisely.
Heel-marks left in the clay in at least one of the caves indicate dancing;
authorities generally agree that performances of some kind took place. 2
But more often than not the reconstructions suit the tastes of the
reconstructor: fertility rites, initiations, shamanist-curing, and so on.
My own tastes run toward “ecological rituals” such as outlined by Roy
A. Rappaport: performances which regulate economic, political, and
religious interaction among neighboring groups whose relation with
each other is ambivalently collaborative and hostile. In fact, Rappaport
(1968) discusses war as part of a total ecological system. My own
views are close to Rappaport’s:
ritual, particularly in the context of a ritual cycle, operates as a regulating
mechanism in a system, or set of interlocking systems, in which
such variables as the area of available land, necessary lengths of fallow
periods, size and composition of both human and pig populations,
trophic requirements of pigs and people, energy expended in various
activities, and the frequency of misfortunes are included. . . . Underlying
these hypotheses is the belief that much is to be gained by
regarding culture, in some of its aspects, as part of the means
by which animals of the human species maintain themselves in
their environments.
(Rappaport 1968: 4–5)
Rappaport is writing about a contemporary New Guinea people; I am
trying to reconstruct performances of Paleolithic hunters – I think both
bear on patterns within modern and postmodern societies. Extrapolating
from Rappaport, from the pictorial and other evidence within the
caves, and from patterns within contemporary theater I say that the
performances at the ceremonial centers occurring where hunting
bands met functioned in at least the following ways:
1. To maintain friendly relations.
2. To exchange goods, mates, trophies, techniques.
toward a poetics of performance 175