20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

The Sviṣṭakṛt: formal structure and self-reference in Vedic ritual 605tradition continues till today. “Vedic ritual [is] known to us as a closed,unchanging, and meaningless structure, a separate realm cut off from thelived-in world” (1993: 227). HOUSEMAN & SEVERI discuss STAAL’sposition, together with the theory of LAWSON & MCCAULEY (1990), asa major representative of “Syntactic schemes” in the study of rituals (1998:183-192).HUMPHREY & LAIDLAW (1994), arrive on the basis of Indian butnon-Vedic material (Jain ritual worship) at a position remarkably similarto the one of STAAL: ritual is basically meaningless. HUMPHREY’s &LAIDLAW’s 1994 observations on the shift of intentionality between theact in daily life and the ritualized act in Jain ritual indicate that a simplepragmatic relationship between act and function, and hence betweenintention and act, is often conspicuously absent in ritual. The remarks ofVERPOORTEN (1991: 169) on Sāyaṇa-Mādhava's understanding of thecontrast daily life versus ritual point in the same direction from again adifferent ritual background. All this would be entirely in line with STAAL’sposition of meaningless ritual.After the 1990s, STAAL’s theory has acquired the status of a positionthat is both widely known (among anthropologists, scholars in textual andreligious studies, India and Asia specialists) and clear and unmistakablein its extreme form, but which no-one accepts in its entirety. An overviewof arguments regarding the meaninglessness or meaningfulness of ritualsappears in Axel MICHAELS’ “Ritual and Meaning” (2006), in which theauthor argues thatthe meaninglessness of rituals only concerns the invariability ofprescribed actions and the polysemy of ritual s (that is, the multiplicityof meanings). Apart from that, rituals have a great variety of meaningsand functions. The tradition of commentaries demonstrates the historyof the meaning that was attached to rituals (MICHAELS 2006: 261).What is clear, even from this very cursory overview, is, first of all, that notonly ritual, but also ritual theory is a field that deserves detailed study of itsdynamics. Second, over a time space of little more than a century we seethe attention of scholars shift to and fro between the foundational level offormal structure of ritual and various dimensions of meanings, beliefs andfunctions associated with or attributed to rituals. Third, since the argumentsadvanced by STAAL in favour of it mainly in the 1980s and 1990s, theimportance of the establishment of an autonomous Science of Ritual inwhich the study of the structure of ritual occupies a central place seemsnow generally accepted by most scholars directly or indirectly involved inthe study of ritual.