Analysis of ritual: metaphoric correspondences as the elementary forms.

Turner's suggestive analysis of African ritual symbolism (1) enhances one's appreciation of the complexity of expressive phenomena. There are, however, methodological and theoretical cautions to be raised. First, the approach he advocates attacks the problem of representations at the most difficult point of analysis. Symbols of the kind singled out by this method are repositories of many, highly condensed meanings, and this polysemy, or multivocality, can rarely be explained by local peoples. Interpretation, therefore, is hindered by this great complexity of meaning and little confirmation in local culture. Second, there is a more direct approach to expressive phenomena, of which ritual is but one kind. While exegesis of anything and everything is the order of the day in university culture, it is much rarer in traditional cultures. Empirical research, in fact, shows that it is usually quite difficult to obtain the significata of symbols. In studies of eight different African religious movements (2), exegesis was easy to obtain in only two, and in only one did it approach the completeness and clarity necessary to support empirically a complex theory of symbolism such as Turner's. This is not to deny the theory, but only to suggest that it is very difficult to tie down to local awareness and motivation. This difficulty applies even more to the ideological pole of symbolic meaning than to the sensory, or orectic, pole of meaning. The ideological components of the moral and social order to which ritual symbolism is said to refer-"the principle of matriliny," "the unity and perdurance of society," "the structural and communal importance of femaleness"are all manifestly of much greater salience in anthropology than in the particular local culture. In most cases, in short, the explication of symbols rests upon an interpretation of observed usages rather than upon local exegesis. One may find rare informants who will confirm the significata, but there is always the question of whether they are learning our culture or we are learning theirs (3). As a case in point, Turner holds that most African languages have a term for ritual symbol. Although his informants have agreed that this is what the terms ififwanii (likeness) and chijikijilu (a landmark, or blaze) really mean. I suspect that the ethnographer is here more the teacher than the taught. My own experience with the widespread African term "likeness" is that it means just what it says -a likeness, a resemblance, a correspondence of one thing to something else (4). One may extend that concept to cover the complex notion of ritual symbol, but that extension conforms more to analytic necessity than to local lexicon. There is a more direct approach to expressive phenomena. This approach rests upon the recognition that a symbol is simply an abstract and autonomous metaphor (5) and that the ritual system is, in essence, a system of enacted correspondences. A metaphor (and related tropes) is the statement, explicit or implied, of a correspondence between some subject of thought in need of clarification and an object that brings some clarity to it. Metaphor, not symbol, should be considered the basic analytic unit of ritual because ritual and ritual symbols spring from metaphors. Ritual symbols may be complex repositories of correspondence, and doubtless they are important entities of orientation in ritual episodes; however, the effective cause of behavior lies in the metaphoric statements (the subject-object correspondences) contained in ritual symbols. A metaphor is an image predicated upon a subject by virtue of some sense of apt correspondence perceived in the culture, and it is this image which is efficacious in the subject's experience and in planning his performance in the ritual process (6). When metaphor is employed, one is directed to the subject upon which the image is predicated and to the motivation for selecting the likeness. This is true whether the metaphor is "the king is a lion" or "breast milk is the latex of the mudyi tree." But a symbol, because it is abstract and because its meaning varies with its context, loses its clear relation to specific subjects. One loses hold of what means what to whom and ends up speaking of a symbol as referring to "the principle of matriliny." Consider the lion as the symbol of the British Empire. Upon what subject or set of subjects is it predicated? What is the motivation of the predication? Answers may be provided by careful analysis of observed usage in specific contexts (7), but in the end that analysis will come down to statements of correspondence.