BRIAN R. CLACK
Wittgenstein’s views concerning anthropology emerge predominantly from his notes on Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and have as their focus the interpretation of ritual phenomena and the nature of anthropological explanation. His words on this subject are fragmentary and were not intended for publication – they were published posthumously as “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough.” But the philosophical community has not ignored them. By contrast, they have had little impact on those working in the field of social anthropology. The anthropologist Rodney Needham, indeed, while lauding Wittgenstein’s notes as one of the two “most radically instructive sources for the critical comprehension of ritual” (Needham, 1985, p.8), laments that Wittgenstein has had “scarcely any effect on the practice of the great majority of social anthropologists” (Needham, 1985, p.149). There are signs, however, that this may be changing (see James, 2005; Tambiah, 1990, pp.54–64). I shall begin by describing the theories and explanatory methods of Frazer before turning to Wittgenstein’s critique of The Golden Bough and making an assessment of the significance of his contribution to anthropological discussions.
The nominal purpose of The Golden Bough is to explain a peculiar ritual of classical antiquity, namely the rule regulating the succession to the priesthood at Nemi, Italy. But it extends well beyond this one task, and a complete theory of magic and religion is articulated within its copious pages. This theory is of the kind known as intellectualism and consists of two central contentions: that magic and religion emerged as explanatory theories of the natural world and its workings; and that these theoretical systems gave rise to rituals, conceived as instrumental actions, attempts to influence the course of natural events. According to the intellectualist approach, therefore, the foundation of religion (as well as of magic) is theoretical and speculative, with ritual actions being practical applications of that underlying intellectual theory. Magic (regarded by Frazer as the earliest of humanity’s philosophies of life) arose when primitive human beings attempted to understand the world around them. The result of this primitive philosophizing was the production of what Frazer terms “theoretical magic,” a system of belief based upon the positing of two laws: the law of homoeopathy and the law of contiguity, laws which can be manipulated to produce desired results. The first of these laws states that “like produces like,” while the contention of the second is that “things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed” (Frazer, 1922, p.11). When applied, these laws yield practical magic, a technique employed by primitives in their attempts to bend the will of nature to their own advantage. The practical form of the first law is homoeopathic magic, examples of which are numerous. To take the classic cases, the death of an enemy may be brought about by damaging or destroying a small likeness of the intended victim, while sprinkling a small amount of water on the ground is believed to produce rain. Such is the character of homoeopathic magic as Frazer presents it: desired events are to be produced by acts of imitation. Though such desires are perfectly reasonable, the methods used to achieve them suffer from one fatal flaw: they are completely futile. An imitation of a desired outcome cannot by itself produce that outcome. And it is important to emphasize this point: magic is, for Frazer, in essence an error.
Despite the presence of what John Skorupski (1976, p.5) calls “blocks to falsifiability” within the magical system (the inevitable appearance some day of the desired event, for instance), the flaws in magic are ultimately discovered, leading to its abandonment and the formulation in its place of a rival philosophy of life: religion. Instead of the impersonal manipulable laws hypothesized by magic, religion posits the existence of powerful supernatural beings – gods – who are responsible for the way the world operates, and to whom believers may appeal for assistance in their struggle with life’s vicissitudes. The dawn of religion, therefore, brings not just a new theoretical structure (gods replacing impersonal laws) but also a new practical technique (supplications replacing spells). As with magic, however, flaws in the religious system are inevitably detected – prayer, for example, fails to yield concrete results – and it is replaced by a far more effective theory of life, namely, science. Frazer thus puts forward a vision of the progressive development of human beings in society, one in which the human mind moves from magic through religion to science, the history of civilization being a story of humankind’s scientific liberation from superstitious ignorance.
There is much that Wittgenstein objects to in Frazer’s presentation of the ritual life of humankind. A principal objection is that it is wrong to conceive of magical acts as being in the nature of errors. Frazer had contended that magic was something operating, as it were, in lieu of science and in the absence of adequate technology: it was “the bastard sister of science” (Frazer, 1922, p.50). Wittgenstein, contrariwise, warns us against presuming that primitives engage in magic because they lack adequate technological expertise: “The same savage, who stabs the picture of his enemy apparently in order to kill him, really builds his hut out of wood and carves his arrow skillfully and not in effigy” (GB 125). The remark is incisive, indicating the co‐presence of magic and technology within a primitive society. Magic need not, then, be regarded as a (poor) substitute for technical proficiency, but rather as something that exists alongside it. Hence:
One could begin a book on anthropology by saying: When one examines the life and behavior of mankind throughout the world, one sees that, except for what might be called animal activities, such as ingestion, etc., etc., etc., men also perform actions which bear a characteristic peculiar to themselves, and these could be called ritualistic actions.
(GB 129)
Frazer, according to Wittgenstein, had not paid sufficient attention to this “peculiar characteristic,” presenting all actions as being fundamentally instrumental in nature, and this failure to recognize the distinctive character of ceremonial actions is what Wittgenstein seeks to correct.
It is commonly thought that Wittgenstein wishes to replace Frazer’s instrumental account of ritual with an expressive alternative, this expressive quality constituting precisely ritual’s “peculiar characteristic.” Many accounts of the “Remarks on Frazer” advance such a view (for representative examples, see Bell, 1984; Cook, 1983; Rudich and Stassen, 1971). An expressivist account of magic will deny that ceremonial actions are intended to effect some desired change in the natural world, and will instead envisage them as expressive of desires, feelings, and values. One of Wittgenstein’s critical comments regarding Frazer’s presentation of homeopathic magic seems to admit of just such an expressive interpretation:
Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one’s beloved. That is obviously not based on the belief that it will have some specific effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at satisfaction and achieves it. Or rather: it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.
(GB 123)
It is easy enough to read this passage in an expressivist fashion. Destroying ceremonially the image of an enemy need no more be an attempt to influence the course of events than the analogous act of kissing a photograph of one’s beloved. In this latter case, the action is best seen simply as an expression of love, and may thus provide the key to understanding the primitive ritual action, namely as an expression both of hatred and of the desire that the enemy really should pass away. Armed with this insight, an investigator may come to see the entirety of ceremonial behavior as expressive rather than instrumental: a rain dance is the expression of hope that rain may soon arrive; a planting ritual is the expression of the desire that the subsequent harvest be plentiful; and so on. In this light, ceremonial actions can be regarded as constituting a kind of language, a way of saying and expressing ideas and states of mind. Nowhere is this stated more succinctly than in Wittgenstein’s declaration that “magic brings a wish to representation; it expresses a wish” (GB 125).
I have argued elsewhere (see Clack, 1996) that the expressivist interpretation flows from a view of the nature and function of language that is roundly rejected by Wittgenstein, and, accordingly, that he cannot straightforwardly be advancing such an account of ceremonial behavior and belief. The contention of that argument is that Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy undermines the descriptive–nondescriptive, cognitive–noncognitive, and belief–attitude distinctions upon which expressivism rests. But even if we restrict ourselves to a consideration of his explicit engagement with Frazer, we find much that does not sit easily with expressivism. It is true that Wittgenstein often seems to seek to replace an instrumental reading of some ritual with one stressing expressive significance (for example, “toward morning, when the sun is about to rise, rites of daybreak are celebrated by the people, but not during the night, when they simply burn lamps” (GB 137)), but any neatly uniform expressivist view is compromised by comments such as the following:
People at one time thought it useful to kill a man, sacrifice him to the god of fertility, in order to produce good crops.
(AWL 33)
There are dangers connected with eating and drinking, not only for savages, but also for us; nothing is more natural than the desire to protect oneself from these.
(GB 127)
When a man laughs too much in our company (or at least in mine), I half‐involuntarily compress my lips, as if I believed I could thereby keep his closed.
(GB 141)
In each of these cases, Wittgenstein lays an emphasis on goals sought, human sacrifice, for instance, being explained in terms of what people once thought regarding its usefulness in securing success at harvest time. But evidently an account of that kind does not run counter to the explanations advanced by Frazer, and we thus appear to be left with a puzzle: how can we resolve the apparent co‐presence of expressivism and instrumentalism within Wittgenstein’s critique of The Golden Bough?
There are several ways in which this tension might be removed. Firstly (and this, of course, would be entirely in keeping with the spirit of his philosophical enterprise), Wittgenstein may be eschewing any kind of generalized account of magic, either instrumental or expressive, in favor of focusing instead on the motley and varied character of ceremonial acts. Hence, the same judgment might be offered in respect of ritual actions as that given regarding language: “These phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all” (PI §65). Frazer’s confusion, on this view, would not be that he explained some particular rite in instrumental terms, but rather that he supplied instrumental explanations in all cases. Frazer’s fault, therefore, would lie in his essentialism, in the “craving for generality” (BB 17) leading him to seek to isolate the distinctively common element in all ceremonial actions. Wittgenstein would not then be replacing an instrumentalist account with an expressivist one, but simply recommending that an interpreter look and see what is going on in a specific rite, preserving the uniqueness and particularity of that instance. For, the field of ritual practices is highly diverse, some rites seeking changes in the natural world, others cementing social ties, still others evincing anxious hopes, and so on.
A second way of removing the aforementioned tension would be to stress that Wittgenstein is not setting out to correct an instrumental conception of ritual at all, but instead has his sights set on a rather different matter: the role of ratiocination in the production of rituals. According to the intellectualist tradition, ceremonial actions are practical applications of an earlier‐established theory of the workings of nature, and hence are products of a process of reasoning. This is a contention consistently opposed by Wittgenstein:
When, for example, [Frazer] explains to us that the king must be killed in his prime, because the savages believe that otherwise his soul would not be kept fresh, all one can say is: where that practice and these views occur together, the practice does not spring from the view, but they are both just there.
(GB 119)
I believe that the characteristic feature of primitive man is that he does not act from opinions (contrary to Frazer).
(GB 137)
It would be wrong to think that Wittgenstein in this latter remark is drawing a distinction between the “savage” and the “civilized” mind. Rather, he should, firstly, be thought of as making a judgment about the basis of ritual action (it does not spring from any opinion); and, secondly, his consideration of the non‐opinionated nature of ritual should be seen in the context of his later desire to “regard man […] as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination” (OC §475). It is, of course, characteristic of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy that he seeks to undermine an overly rationalistic conception of human agency and behavior (something seen clearly in his work both on “primitive reactions” (see Z §§540–5) and on our “intuitive awareness” of cause and effect (see CE)), and it may be that his consideration of the nature of ritual behavior helped to form this anti‐rationalistic perspective.
Approached in such a manner, one begins to see each of Wittgenstein’s reflections on specific rituals as doing something other than advancing either an expressive or an instrumental case. Hence, the remark considered earlier, comparing effigy‐burning with picture‐kissing, has as its purpose, not the substitution of an expressive rationale for an instrumental one, but rather an attack upon the intellectualist notion that such acts are rooted in a theory concerning causal connections. Kissing a picture, Wittgenstein claims, is “obviously not based on a belief that it will have a definite effect” (emphasis added), and it springs from no reasoning about the connection between the picture and the person pictured. Likewise, the emphasis of the lip‐compressing example, as cited earlier, should fall on the “half‐involuntary” nature of the act. These thoughts are evidently to the fore in one of Wittgenstein’s most dramatic suggestions concerning ritual actions:
When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly do not believe that the ground is to blame or that my beating can help anything. “I am venting my anger”. And all rites are of this kind. Such actions may be called Instinct‐actions.
(GB 137)
Frank Cioffi is correct in regarding this remark as “dismally opinionated” and “profoundly un‐Wittgensteinian” (Cioffi, 1990, p.43), for it appears to violate the nonessentialist requirements demanded both by Wittgenstein’s philosophizing in general and by his thoughts about ritual in particular. Its exaggerated character does, however, have the virtue of bringing into clear light what remains somewhat shrouded in the “Remarks,” namely that Wittgenstein wishes to emphasize, against the intellectualism of Frazer, the spontaneous, non‐ratiocinated nature of (at least a great many) ceremonial actions. The suggestion that rituals are somehow spontaneous would seem to be refuted by the fact that their forms are meticulously prescribed, as well as by the fact that they have to be learned. Rather than denying this, Wittgenstein’s claim would appear to be that, however rule‐governed and carefully constructed a ritual may be, its form “would only be a later extension of instinct” (GB 151). The bedrock of ritual activity is held to be located in instinctual, spontaneous actions, rather than in ratiocination, as the intellectualist thinks.
A third tension‐removing strategy would be controversial and might yet prove to be fruitful. Wittgenstein, recall, contends that magic “expresses a wish.” Held captive by the pervasive instrumental–expressive dichotomy, a reader of that particular remark will tend to emphasize the word “expresses” and thereby arrive at the familiar judgment that Wittgenstein is advancing an expressivist conception of ritual. If, however, the word “wish” is emphasized, something rather different happens. Wittgenstein would now appear to be suggesting that the vital component of magical rites is that they are representations of wishes. This, interestingly, allows us to draw a connection between Wittgenstein’s account of magic and that advanced by Freud in Totem and Taboo.
Freud’s account of the nature of magic and religion is multifaceted, but at the heart of his analysis lies the wish: “It is easy to perceive the motives which lead men to practise magic: they are human wishes” (Freud, [1913] 1955, p.83). Ritual beliefs and practices, for Freud, give representation to wishes that have been left unsatisfied by reality. This, coupled with the primitive’s sense of the omnipotence of his wishful thoughts, leads to the peculiar character of homoeopathic magic: the linking of an imitation of a desired state of affairs with the attainment of that state of affairs. Contrary to intellectualism, the Freudian view does not see magic as the product of ratiocination, but as the natural outpouring of “primary process” thought, governed by wishes and hallucinatory fulfillment (see Freud, [1911] 1958).
Much in Wittgenstein’s account coheres with this Freudian view: the non‐ratiocinative basis of ritual belief and practice; the claim that satisfaction ensues from merely imitative acts (such as kissing a photograph); the unearthing of the wishful basis of magic; and even the detection that the magician views his thoughts as having immense power: “With the magical healing of an illness, one directs the illness to leave the patient” (GB 129). The contribution this connection with Freud makes to the resolving of the instrumental–expressive tension is clear: an action can be expressive of a wish and yet simultaneously be felt to effect some change in the external world. Hence the expressive and the instrumental are here nonexclusive. Exploration of the connections between Wittgenstein and Freud on this matter would be worthwhile. It would further deepen our dawning realization of the influence on Wittgenstein of psychoanalytic thought (see Baker, 2004, pp.143–222; BT 644; and Chapter 43, WITTGENSTEIN AND PSYCHOANALYSIS), and help to clarify Wittgenstein’s striking characterization of himself as “a disciple of Freud” (LC 41).
In addition to criticizing Frazer’s interpretation of ritual phenomena, Wittgenstein also appears to make a number of corrective suggestions regarding the methodology appropriate for anthropological investigations. Curiously, he suggests that Frazer is wrong, not just regarding the particularities of the intellectualist explanations he offers for the existence of ritual practices, but in offering any explanation at all. What he seems to think preferable to explanation is an entirely descriptive approach, revolving around the notion of “perspicuous representation” (übersichtliche Darstellung), itself a key element of Wittgenstein’s later philosophical methodology (see Chapter 16, SURVEYABILITY).
The eschewal of explanation and the corresponding recommendation of description can be seen in the following selection of remarks:
The very idea of wanting to explain a practice – for example, the killing of the priest‐king – seems wrong to me.
(GB 119)
I believe that the attempt to find an explanation is already therefore wrong, because one must only correctly piece together what one knows, without adding anything, and the satisfaction being sought through the explanation follows of itself.
(GB 121)
Here one can only describe and say: this is what human life is like.
(GB 121)
“And so the chorus points to a secret law” one feels like saying to Frazer’s collection of facts. I can represent this law, this idea, by means of an evolutionary hypothesis, or also, analogously to the schema of a plant, by means of the schema of a religious ceremony, but also by means of the arrangement of its factual content alone, in a “perspicuous” representation.
(GB 133)
This perspicuous representation brings about the understanding which consists precisely in the fact that we “see the connections”.
(GB 133)
These ideas clearly foreshadow the sections of Philosophical Investigations in which Wittgenstein dismisses explanation from his enterprise (“We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place” (PI §109)), and advances the notion of “perspicuous representation” as the means whereby one might “command a clear view of the use of our words” (PI §122), such a clear view of linguistic usage allowing one to avoid the bewitching “traps” and “false paths” that threaten to lead us into philosophical confusions (see BT 422–6).
Despite its importance for Wittgenstein’s later philosophical project, the concept of perspicuous representation is itself contested and somewhat unclear. There are two competing interpretations, which we shall here briefly note. The commonly accepted view is that a perspicuous representation is something like a “bird’s‐eye view” of grammar (PR 52), meaning that the philosopher should aspire to a perspective in which she is, as Baker and Hacker once put it,
able to ‘take in at a glance’ a segment of grammar, so that one will not be misled by surface grammar, false analogies, or pictures embedded in language which, considered independently of their application, mislead us.
(Baker and Hacker, 1980/84, p.306)
The construction of a perspicuous representation would here be the positive aim of philosophy, contrasting with the negative or therapeutic side of Wittgenstein’s method, which highlights pieces of philosophical nonsense with the aim of removing them. These two sides are, however, intimately connected, since the removal of these problems is effected by the construction of an overview (Übersicht) of all uses of language.
Troubled in part by the ambitious aspects of such a global interpretation of perspicuity, Gordon Baker in his later work presented a more modest model, stressing that a representation is a perspicuous one simply if it introduces a degree of clarity into a confusing philosophical matter. He links the ideal of perspicuity to Wittgenstein’s discussion of “seeing an aspect,” suggesting that a perspicuous representation functions to remedy aspect blindness by bringing “hitherto unnoticed aspects of things to a person’s awareness, i.e. to get him to see things differently” (Baker, 2004, p.35). Hence, we are blind to certain aspects of the grammar of our language due to their familiarity and we need to remind ourselves of the ordinary uses to which such troubling segments are put. A representation is perspicuous when it succeeds in bringing us to such a clearer understanding. On Baker’s view, therefore, the term “perspicuous representation” does not designate a systematic overview of our linguistic system, but rather the family of tools and methods employed so as to yield clarity and dissolve philosophical confusions.
Elements of these rival interpretations can be detected in the “Remarks on Frazer.” There are certainly suggestions here that Wittgenstein wants, in the place of Frazer’s explanatory schema, to construct a highly detailed description of religious practices, one in which similarities and differences between rituals could easily be seen. A “bird’s‐eye view” of ritual would appear to take the form of a comprehensive description of magical and religious phenomena, stripped of any explanatory or historical content. In such a fashion, one would be able “to see the data in their relation to one another and to embrace them in a general picture without putting it in the form of an hypothesis about temporal development” (GB 131).
Among those writers struck by the promise of such a technique is Avishai Margalit, who says that an account of ritual should take the form of “a sort of stamp album” (Margalit, 1992, p.308), in which the ceremonies of one’s own tradition can be compared and contrasted with those of other cultures. Richard Eldridge (1987), likewise, proposes perspicuous representation as the proper way to bring out the expressive significance of ritual: arranged by likenesses, the material would provide a detailed picture of the attitudes and concerns expressed in religious ceremonies. One might, however, question both the justification for an exclusion of historical and explanatory considerations and the extent to which the project of perspicuous representation really does differ markedly from Frazer’s approach. After all, once stripped of its theories, which Frazer (1936, p.xi) said he held only “very lightly,” The Golden Bough is itself akin to a “stamp album” of rituals, grouping ceremonies thematically and enabling readers to survey similarities and differences.
The same concerns, moreover, which led Baker to reject the bird’s‐eye view model of perspicuity and to advance his smaller, more piecemeal interpretation, might also apply to these anthropological matters. Certain aspects of rituals are neglected in Frazer’s accounts of them, and this leads to the confused judgment that magical and religious ceremonies are in the nature of erroneous proto‐scientific actions. That confusion is dispelled by bringing a ritual phenomenon into connection with an act evidently not of such a mistaken character. The remark about effigy‐burning can be read in this light. Once placed alongside the act of kissing a picture, the intellectualist picture begins to lose its hold on us and perspicuity is attained. Hence, the reminders Wittgenstein offers are not to be contrasted with the more systematic project of producing a complete description of ritual phenomena. Rather, each specific reminder employed, if successful in its clarification, may legitimately be termed a “perspicuous representation” of a segment of ritual life, the aim being to dismantle the misconceptions of a confused account of ceremonial life, allowing us thereby to see clearly the true nature of magical and religious actions.
The limitations of such a technique should not be ignored. Wittgenstein and his followers frequently deny the necessity for fieldwork and empirical inquiry when considering ritual. Witness Rush Rhees:
We need not go in search of new facts, nor conjecture them, to understand how there came to be such forms of magic and of ritual. All that we need for this is with us […] in our ways of thought and feeling.
(Rhees, 1971, p.21)
But without such fieldwork the possibility of misunderstanding is surely great. For example, it may be that I do not expect any concrete result to follow from kissing a photograph of my beloved (I know she will not feel at a distance the touch of my lips), and my act does not express or even depend on any opinion about its likely effects. But this in itself tells me very little about the motivations and expectations of the primitive ritualist engaged in effigy‐destruction. Linking magical rites with our own quasi‐ceremonial acts may help to expand the range of possible motivations informing rituals, but the only way to establish what a ritualist actually expects or believes when he engages in ceremonial activity is through observation of his (and not my) behavior. The anthropological relevance of Wittgenstein’s critique of Frazer seems therefore compromised by his stubborn rejection of the importance of empirical investigation. Although, of course, his primary interest in anthropological questions might well be said to have been one of a philosopher, not one of an anthropologist as such.
Wittgenstein’s antipathy toward explanation has been noted above, but his reasons for denying the legitimacy of an explanatory project such as Frazer’s are of a somewhat peculiar nature. Following his reflections on beating the ground as an exercise in anger‐venting, he says that “an historical explanation, say, that I or my ancestors previously believed that beating the ground does help is shadow‐boxing, for it is a superfluous assumption that explains nothing” (GB 137–9). This rather bald statement is subsequently tempered by a more measured one emphasizing only the differences between two kinds of inquiry: one which brings a ritual phenomenon “into connection with an instinct which I myself possess” and “a further investigation about the history of my instinct,” which “moves on another track” (GB 139). This does not suggest that explanatory accounts of ritual are illicit, but simply that Wittgenstein has no interest in them.
Recognition of this point has led some writers to suggest that Wittgenstein’s purpose in writing on ritual is very unlike Frazer’s, for while Frazer is trying to understand why primitive peoples engage in magical practices, Wittgenstein’s aims lie elsewhere. Thus, Cioffi argues that Wittgenstein’s remarks on ritual should be read not for “their contribution to the explanatory tasks of anthropology or pre‐history but for the light they shed on our relation to exotic practices” (Cioffi, 1990, p.69). The pattern that Cioffi discerns in the “Remarks” is as follows. We experience wonderment and perplexity when we read the tales of extraordinary customs chronicled within the pages of The Golden Bough; such perplexity leads us to reflect on those eccentric personal‐ceremonial acts each of us performs; this reflection, however, does not – and nor is it intended to – illuminate the rationales of the exotic rites; rather, we reflect on our own ritualistic practices for their own sake.
This account of Wittgenstein’s project certainly protects it from the charge that he is advancing a faulty method for reconstructing the motives of exotic ritualists, though in doing so it perhaps trivializes it, for as Cioffi notes, when one takes up Wittgenstein’s methods (rather than those of, say, Frazer) it may legitimately be felt that “we have abandoned thinking for brooding” (Cioffi, 1984, p.172). A response to that criticism might be to suggest that with regard to certain phenomena – unhappy love, for example, or bereavement, or human wickedness – one requires, not an explanation, but something akin to consolation: “an hypothetical explanation will be of little help to someone, say, who is upset because of love. – It will not calm him,” Wittgenstein writes (GB 123). The relevant question here, however, concerns why ritual behavior (the slaying of the priest at Nemi, for instance) should fall into that particular category, why such a practice does not call for empirical inquiry. And it is hard to see why Wittgenstein’s rejection of empirical inquiry is not merely temperamental; harder still, perhaps, to detect, on this view, what value Wittgenstein’s notes on The Golden Bough might have for anthropology as a scientific or at least academic discipline.
One must concede that Wittgenstein has not advanced the outlines of a coherent anthropological methodology. This is not, however, to say that he has nothing to offer researchers investigating the nature of ritual. First, a Wittgensteinian account of human agency, which, as seen earlier, de‐emphasizes the role of ratiocination, may prove to be fruitful in an investigation into the wellsprings of ritual belief and practice. Secondly, one dramatically nonempirical feature of Wittgenstein’s technique does in fact possess value for the project of understanding ritual. This concerns the consideration of merely possible ritual practices as a means of articulating general patterns of religious action:
One sees how misleading Frazer’s explanations are – I believe – by noting that one could very easily invent primitive practices oneself, and it would be pure luck if they were not actually found somewhere. That is, the principle according to which these practices are arranged is a much more general one than in Frazer’s explanation and it is present in our own minds, so that we could think up all the possibilities.
(GB 127)
Wittgenstein illustrates this insight by means of two examples: a king who must be kept hidden from everyone or must, contrariwise, be shown to everyone; and the case of Schubert’s brother, cutting some of the composer’s scores into pieces and distributing the pieces to his favorite pupils. As a sign of piety, the brother’s act is perfectly understandable, as would alternative acts, such as burning the scores or leaving them untouched. Using the scores as scrap paper, on the other hand, would lack this mark of piety. Wittgenstein’s conclusion: “The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) characterizes piety” (GB 127). Such thoughts indicate, not simply our own “inwardness” with rituality, but also the principles according to which ritual is structured (the hot and the cold, for instance), principles that provide the researcher with some “conceptual evidence” regarding ritual, by which is meant here some broad understanding of general patterns of ritual activity (see Byrne, 1989, p.236). The conceptual evidence assembled by Wittgenstein may throw considerable light on the nature of ritual.
Finally, against Frazer’s view that rituals serve a purely utilitarian function, Wittgenstein alerts our attention instead to conspicuous features of the world around which ceremonial activity revolves:
It goes without saying that a man’s shadow, which looks like him, or his mirror‐image, the rain, thunderstorms, the phases of the moon, the changing of the seasons, the way in which animals are similar to and different from one another and in relation to man, the phenomena of death, birth, and sexual life, in short, everything we observe around us year in and year out, interconnected in so many different ways, will play a part in his thinking (his philosophy) and in his practices, or is precisely what we really know and find interesting.
(GB 127–9)
Peter Winch (1967, p.38) refers to such features of the world and of human life as “limiting notions” (the principal ones would appear to be those isolated by T.S. Eliot as birth, copulation, and death), and we need only to think of examples of ritual in order to recognize how these notions form the backbone of such acts. In the ritual life of our own culture, for instance, it is possible that a person might attend a church ceremony for three types of events only – christenings, weddings, and funerals – each marking and dramatizing one such limit. The anthropological value of spelling out these limiting notions is that “they are inescapably involved in the life of all known human societies in a way which gives us a clue where to look, if we are puzzled about the point of an alien system of institutions” (Winch, 1967, p.38). This is a helpful recommendation. When confronted with a puzzling exotic ritual, one might try to make sense of it (as Frazer does) by thinking of it predominantly as a form of (attempted) technological activity. In this way the rite ceases to be mysterious, but the lifting of mystery is attained at the cost of turning the ritualists into simpletons (and of distorting the nature of ritual in the process). When, on the other hand, limiting notions are utilized to dispel mystery, a different outcome ensues. The idea of technological action will play no role in this elucidation (any more than it should play a role in the explication of a wedding or a funeral), but instead the rite would be contextualized and understood in terms of one or other perennial feature of the world impacting on the mind and activity of a being envisaged as “a ceremonial animal” (GB 129).
The characterization of the human animal as a ceremonial creature might indeed be regarded as the guiding principle of the “Remarks on Frazer.” Whether he is reflecting on effigy‐destruction, rain dances, or human sacrifice, Wittgenstein’s concern is not to discern the motive (either “instrumental” or “expressive”) informing a ritual act, but to emphasize the naturalness of ceremonial behavior. Rather than a peculiarity rendered redundant by the progress of scientific understanding, and as something to be understood in terms of the practical application of curious beliefs concerning supernatural realities, ritual is to be approached as “part of our natural history” (PI §25), and therefore as a manifestation of aspects of our shared being. This is presumably why his reflections on ritual action return to thoughts concerning “man and his past” and “all the strange things I see, and have seen and heard about, in myself and others” (GB 151). Though his thoughts on these matters remain tantalizingly undeveloped, the contents of the “Remarks on Frazer” probe deeply into the nature and bedrock of human ritual activity, and anthropological research might thus benefit markedly from Wittgenstein’s pregnant insights into the ceremonial life of other cultures.