BOB SCRIBNER Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe

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18 Bob Scribnerof power and social consensus. Here the symbolic anthropology of CliffordGeertz was quite influential, although the marxian anthropology ofMaurice Bloch represented an alternative line of thought that found littlewider response among historians 15 .The original interest of historians in ritual undoubtedly emerged becauseit was seen as a way of understanding potent currents of dissentwithin pre-modern societies (exemplified in religious riot, iconoclasm,carnivalesque events, rituals of popular justice, notions of the 'reversibleworld'), but more recently emphasis has shifted to the ways in whichrituals constitute and conserve societies by creating consensus amongtheir members, whether as rites of power or as rites of incorporation 16 .The main thematic lines of argument have concerned the way in whichrituals create symbolic universes and a means of identification with thosewho stage 'rites of power'. However, historical studies in this area haveleft rather too many questions unanswered and there has been a tendencyto accept too uncritically the theoretical stance of the anthropologicalworks cited, as though these were in themselves free from presuppositions.Thus, it, has been too readily assumed that rituals always workand that they are always understood by their audience in the way intendedby those who stage them. The possibility has been overlooked thatsome rites of power are no more than expressive forms of self-displaywhose effect is confined to their performance and which work primarilyon those staging them for their own purposes. Meanwhile, the anthropo-ular Ritual (Assen/Amsterdam, 1977); A. van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London,1960; orig. ed. 1908).15 M. Bloch, Ritual, History and Power (London, 1989), esp. chs. 2, 9; P. Bourdieu,'Rites as Acts of Institution', in: J. G. Peristiany, J. Pitt-Rivers, eds., Honor andGrace in Anthropology (1992), 79 - 89; D. Cannadine, S. Price, eds., Rituals of Royalty. Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1987); C. Geertz,'Centers, Kings and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power', in: Rites ofPower. Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages, ed. S. Wilentz (Philadelphia, 1985), 13 - 38; C. Geertz, Negara. The Theatre State in Nineteenth CenturyBali (Princeton, 1980); S. Wilentz, ed., Rites of Power. Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1985).16 See for example the works by Mervyn James, 'Ritual, Drama and Social Body in thelate-medieval English Town', Past & Present 98 (1983), 3 - 29; Thomas A. Brady,'Rites of Autonomy, Rites of Dependance: South German Civic Culture in the Ageof Renaissance and Reformation', in: Religion and Culture in the Renaissance andReformation, ed. S. Ozment (1989), Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, vol. 11,pp. 9 - 23.
Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe 19logical discussion of ritual has become quite complex in two directions.On the one hand, the question of just what constitutes a ritual and how itworks has been subjected to searching and in some cases devastatingcriticism of the underlying theories by scholars such as Catherine Bell.On the other, studies of ritual have expanded their scope into an interdisciplinaryfield which now encompasses sociology, comparative religion,liturgical studies and even theatre studies 17 . It is thus now harderthan in the past for the historian simply to pick up an anthropologicaltheory of ritual and apply it like a stencil to his or her historical material.A similar set of problems has emerged around the approach probablymost in favour with historians of early modern Europe, the symbolicanthropology of Clifford Geertz, who first began to influence historicalthinking with his sketch of 'religion as a cultural system' and whosenotion of culture as primarily constituted by symbolic action seemed tooffer a viable alternative to the cruder forms of reductionism often embeddedin functionalist and materialist approaches to anthropological analysis.Focussing on how symbols were invested with meaning and constructedinto systems of belief and behaviour seemed to offer a wayforward that retained both the autonomy of ideas and the importance ofthe historical actors who invested the symbols with meaning. Yet as withritual, the interpretation of symbols and symbolic activity turns out to befraught with unforeseen difficulty. The most pertinent issue here has beenthat most symbols are often polysemous and multivalent and it is thusoften difficult to extract an unambiguous meaning from them. Sometimesthe meaning attached to any given form of action is embodied in theperformance, although this need not be repeated if the action is repeated.For some anthropologists, symbolisation is a complex social practice,rather than a matter purely of mentalities, and there are equally complicatedproblems of cultural transmission to be taken into account: whetherthe use and meaning of symbols change over time, why one kind of symbolis favoured at one time rather than another, and indeed whether allsymbols do have evident meaning that can be extracted by the historian.Moreover, the emphasis on symbolising behaviour has certainly swung17 C. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford, 1992); R. L. Grimes, Beginnings inRitual Studies (Washington, D. C., 1982); the sociological direction in D. Kertzer,Ritual, Politics and Power (New Haven, 1988); the interaction with theatre studies inV. Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: the Human Seriousness of Play (New York, 1982).
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