VEDIC HINDUISM by S. W. Jamison and M. Witzel - people.fas ...

Jamison & Witzel VEDIC HINDUISM 42
at face value. He has simply redefined, without telling us, the term "meaning."
He does not characterize all ritual or a particular ritual, such as the Agnihotra, as
having no meaning or as never having had any meaning (but does not say so
expressly). He rather points out the lack of meaning of the various small
constituent parts of a particular ritual, just like the various small melodic
phrases that make up a particular song of a bird. But he overlooks the point that
both ritual and bird song are a system of signs with a function outside this
system. A nightingale has a song which differs somewhat from that of a crow. If
some birds can vary their songs (as do whales), then such insertions have a
function: they serve (at least) to identify the individual bird and its territory,
not unlike the way we use personal names, which often do not have a meaning
any more. In short, we cannot accept Staal's private redefinition of the term
"meaning" - especially without his telling us so.
Just as the "meaning" of ritual has shaped recent discussion of the
synchronic questions, diachronic questions have been shaped in response to
Heesterman's equally provocative but over-simple theories48 (see esp. the essays
of various dates collected in Heesterman 1985) about the bloodily agonistic
background of "Classical" Vedic ritual and its transformation into the (as he sees
it) non-competitive machinery described in the Śrauta texts, neglecting, e.g. the
social aspects of the increasingly difficult "ritual career" a sacrificer undertakes by
becoming a dīk�ita. This approach views the development of the ritual too
much in terms of a sudden revolutionary break-up of the old ritual rather than
in terms of observable ritual development. Heesterman specifically does not
identify his older ritual stage with that of the �g Veda.
A general problem with his approach is the great stress put on a purely
"deductive", but anecdotal method: Once the pre-classical ritual has been
defined as agonistic and violent, every hint in the classical ritual is used to
support the pre-conceived theory, -- instead of carefully if not tediously
investigating the various strands and stages in the development of a particular
ritual and, especially, the evidence we actually have for these stages: in extremely
lucky cases from the pre-Vedic (Indo-Iranian) period, from the �gveda, the
Mantra texts, the YV prose and the Bråhma�as, and finally, the Sūtras (for this
approach, see Witzel 1981/2, 1992, forthc. d). Surprisingly, a discussion of
�gvedic ritual is strikingly absent in all the recent discussions of the forerunners
of "classical" Vedic ritual, as present in that of the Bråhma�a and Śrauta Sūtras,
even though it is in the RV and in the Avestan texts that we have evidence for
48 For a (partial) critique, see e.g. B.K. Smith, 1989, p. 40-45.