20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

606 Jan E.M. Houben2.6 However, in the actual study of the formal structure of ritualsvery little advance has been made beyond programmatic suggestions foranalyses in terms of sequential diagrams and tree diagrams, frames andboxes, interrituality apparently as methodically parallel to intertextuality(GLADIGOW 2004), etc. The importance of the analysis of the innerstructure of rituals has become increasingly clear. What has also becomeclear is that a minimal meaningfulness is required in this analysis. Unclearremains, however, whether this inner structure of ritual is best analysedagainst the background of linguistics – something that the term “ritualgrammar” would definitely suggest – or biology – the discipline where“morphology” was first developed and next transferred to linguistics. Or,taking into account the problems discussed in HOUBEN forthc. b, in termsof mathematical logic and formal semantics. In any of these cases, a ritualepisode is to be studied taking into account the distinction establishedby RAPPAPORT: that between (1) the canonical dimension and (2) theperformance dimension, and, moreover, (3) within the canonical dimension,the distinction of different organizational levels, which are to some extentcomparable to the levels of (a) phoneme-sequences, (b) morphemes, (c)words and (d) sentences in language; or even to the levels to the levels of(a) genes, (b) cells, (c) organs and (d) organisms in biology.3.1 The Nihnava-rite, which Frits STAAL used as a major example toillustrate a supposed fundamental meaninglessness of ritual, turned out to besolidly meaningful when we properly distinguished different organizationallevels in ritual (HOUBEN forthc. a): in this episode the ritual agent deniesor disavows (ni-hnu) some undesirable but apparently necessary act, andaccording to two different Brāhmaṇa-interpretations it refers either forwardto an undesirable act that is still to follow (the ritual “killing” of “king”Soma) or back to an undesirable act already done (going to the Southwhich is an unfavorable direction). A so far neglected but neverthelessremarkable feature of several episodes in Vedic ritual becomes here visible:as an episode within Vedic ritual it refers not primarily to any "external"aim such as worldly success or the birth of a son, nor is it they primarilydirected to a deity external to the ritual; instead, it refers to other episodeswithin the same ritual, to itself as ritual episode, or even to the ritual as awhole (HOUBEN forthc. b). Their status is thus like that of the word “this”in “this sentence is correct/false”. As is well known, the reference by “this”to the sentence in which it occurs makes the whole sentence self-referential.From a logical point of view, such self-reference has been regarded as mostproblematic since the time of Bertrand RUSSELL and Saul KRIPKE; in