1

AWAY FROM RITUAL

One of the gravest problems of our day is the lack of commitment to common symbols. If this were all, there would be little to say. If it were merely a matter of our fragmentation into small groups, each committed to its proper symbolic forms, the case would be simple to understand. But more mysterious is a wide-spread, explicit rejection of rituals as such. Ritual has become a bad word signifying empty conformity. We are witnessing a revolt against formalism, even against form. ‘The vast majority of my classmates just sat through four years.’ So wrote Newfield of what he called the ungeneration of his college year: ‘They didn't challenge any authority, take any risks or ask any questions. They just memorized “the given”, not even complaining when instructions turned them into mindless tape-recorders, demanding they recite rather than reason’ (Newfield, 1966: 41). Shades of Luther! Shades of the Reformation and its complaint against meaningless rituals, mechanical religion, Latin as the language of cult, mindless recitation of litanies. We find ourselves, here and now, reliving a worldwide revolt against ritualism. To understand it, Marx and Freud have been invoked, but Durkheim also foretold it and it behoves the social anthropologist to interpret alienation. Some of the tribes we observe are more ritualist than others. Some are more discontented than others with their traditional forms. From tribal studies there is something to say about a dimension which is usually ignored – the band or area of personal relations in which an individual moves. But in trying to say it, we are handicapped by terminology.

Many sociologists, following Merton (1957: 131ff.), use the term ritualist for one who performs external gestures without inner commitment to the ideas and values being expressed. Thus these apathetic students would be ritualists. There is some analogy in this to the usage of zoologists. For example, when an animal is said to make a ritual attack the zoologist means that a sequence of movements is initiated which, if completed normally, would end in aggression; the function of the animal ritual is communication, for when the other animal receives the signal, it changes its behaviour into ritual submission, thus inhibiting and checking the sequence of aggressive actions. This seems to be a perfectly legitimate way of distinguishing between symbolic and other behaviour in animals. A form of communication is identified; no judgement is implied about the value of the ritual as compared with other forms of communication. However, when this usage is transferred to human behaviour, ritual, defined as a routinized act diverted from its normal function, subtly becomes a despised form of communication. Other symbolic acts accurately convey information about the intentions and commitments of the actor: ritual does not. The ritualist becomes one who performs external gestures which imply commitment to a particular set of values, but he is inwardly withdrawn, dried out and uncommitted. This is a distractingly partisan use of the term. For it derives from the assumptions of the anti-ritualists in the long history of religious revivalism. The sociologist may maintain that the emotional legacy does not disturb his cool objectivity. He cannot deny however that it leaves him without convenient terminology for describing the other kind of symbolic action which correctly expresses the actor's internal state. It would be decidedly cumbrous to use anti-ritualism for the positively committed use of symbolic forms in order to keep ritualism in its pejorative, sectarian sense. There is another reason for using ritual in a neutral sense. Anthropologists need to communicate with sociologists as well as with zoologists. They are in the habit of using ritual to mean action and beliefs in the symbolic order without reference to the commitment or non-commitment of the actors. They have a practical reason for this usage. For in small-scale, face-to-face society the gulf between personal meanings and public meanings cannot develop; rituals are not fixed; discrepancy between the situation being enacted and the form of expression is immediately reduced by change in the latter. Primitive jurisprudence sees no gap between law and morality, because there are no written precedents and because small changes in the law can be constantly made to express new moral situations and because such changes, being unrecorded, are unperceived. The idea of an immutable God-given law is in practice compatible with a changing legal situation. If this is so in the formal situation of specialized tribal law courts, how much more so in the public use of religious symbols in primitive society. However earnestly the anthropologist is assured that the worship of the gods follows an immutable pattern from the beginning of tribal history, there is no justification whatever for believing what the performers themselves believe. Primitive religions are fortunate in that they cannot carry a dead weight of ‘ritualized’ ritual (to adopt the sociologist's usage). Therefore anthropologists have not needed so far to consider the difference between external symbolic forms and internal states. It is fair enough that ‘ritualized’ ritual should fall into contempt. But it is illogical to despise all ritual, all symbolic action as such. To use the word ritual to mean empty symbols of conformity, leaving us with no word to stand for symbols of genuine conformity, is seriously disabling to the sociology of religion. For the problem of empty symbols is still a problem about the relation of symbols to social life, and one which needs an unprejudiced vocabulary.

The anthropological usage relates the discussion more honestly to the historical controversies in religion. Ritual in the positive sense corresponds to ritualism in Church history, and allows us to identify ritualists and anti-ritualists in terms which they themselves would use. We are thus able to reflect upon ourselves and consider the causes of anti-ritualism today.

An instructive example is the recent concern of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England with Friday abstinence. This is a rule which, on the one hand, is dear to large sections of the Catholic population. They adhere to it, confess its breach with contrition, generally take it seriously. On the other hand it is not highly regarded by the clergy. In their eyes the avoidance of meat on Fridays has become an empty ritual, irrelevant to true religion. In this argument the anti-ritualists are the clergy and the ritualists a type known patronizingly as the Bog Irishmen. Bog Irishism seems to be a highly magical, irrational, non-verbal culture. Paradoxically the Bog Irish are found, not so much in Ireland, as in London parishes. Friday abstinence is the core rule of their religion: it is a taboo whose breach will bring automatic misfortune. It is the only sin they think worth mentioning in confession and they evidently believe that it will count against them more heavily on the day of judgement than breach of any of the ten commandments. To bring them nearer to the true doctrines, the rule of Friday abstinence has now been abolished in England and an active movement of new catechetics attempts to wean their offspring from magicality and bring them to a superior form of worship.

When I ask my clerical friends why the new forms are held superior, I am answered by a Teilhardist evolutionism which assumes that a rational, verbally explicit, personal commitment to God is self-evidently more evolved and better than its alleged contrary, formal, ritualistic conformity. Questioning this, I am told that ritual conformity is not a valid form of personal commitment and is not compatible with the full development of the personality; also that the replacement of ritual conformity with rational commitment will give greater meaning to the lives of Christians. Furthermore if Christianity is to be saved for future generations, ritualism must be rooted out, as if it were a weed choking the life of the spirit. We find in all this a mood which closely parallels the anti-ritualism which has inspired so many evangelical sects. There is no need to go back to the Reformation to recognize the wave on which these modern Catholics are rather incongruously riding.

Today, as much amongst us as the immigrant Irish, are the thriving, numerous Protestant sects which each arose in turn by rejecting ecclesiology, and by seeking to return to the primitive purity of the Gospel message, speaking straight to the heart of the worshipper without intervening ritual forms.

Is this move against ritual to be seen as a matter of swings of the pendulum? Such an approach implies that any strong impulse towards ritual must eventually be countered by an impulse in the other sense. One of the usual explanations of the regular renewal of anti-ritualism is that revolts against established hierarchical systems of religion come from the disinherited. A popular combination of Freud and Weber, it assumes that the principal religious function is to cope with psychological maladjustment and that as this function becomes more or less established, so the social forms become more or less routinized. A movement which begins as a sect expressing the religious needs of the poor gradually moves up the social scale. It becomes respectable. Its rituals increase, its rigorous fundamentalism in devotion to the Word becomes as weighted with magic as the sacramental edifice it started by denying. With respectability comes ritualism. With loss of good fortune comes anti-ritualism and the new sect. This is the assumption underlying many of the contributions to Patterns of Sectarianism (ed. Wilson, 1967). Wilson expresses it very clearly himself when he offers a maladjustment theory for the development of anti-ritualist sects. Mal-adjustment is bound to follow from social change. Hence the impulse to new sects grows with the speed of change.

The specific factors of stimulus of sect emergence are usually found in the stresses and tensions differentially experienced within the total society. Change in the economic position of a particular group (which may be a change only in relative position); disturbance of normal social relations, for instance in the circumstances of industrialization and urbanization; the failure of the social system to accommodate particular age, sex and status groups – all of these are possible stimuli in the emergence of sects. These are the needs to which the sects, to some extent, respond. Particular groups are rendered marginal by some process of social change; there is a sudden need for a new interpretation of their social position, or for a transvaluation of their experience. Insecurity, differential status anxiety, cultural neglect, prompt a need for readjustment which sects may, for some, provide.

(ibid.: 31)

And so on.

The argument which seeks to explain behaviour by reference to maladjustment, compensation, deprival is always fair game. When it rears its head among empirical sociologists it is a particularly pleasant duty to give chase. The psychoanalysts, who popularized this equilibrium model of human nature, based their case on its therapeutic value. The question of forming scientifically verifiable propositions was not their primary concern. But for a sociologist to seek the origins of a class of religious movement in terms of maladjustment and readjustment is to abdicate his role. Either he must use the proposition to prove its own premise, or he must admit it is valueless for explaining negative instances. What about the Bog Irish? Are they not dispossessed, deprived, suffering disturbance of normal social relations? When they find themselves labouring in London, or, rather, queuing outside labour exchanges, do they not feel a sudden need for a new interpretation of their social experience? For what status could be more insecure, more marginal and anxiety-prone than that of the immigrant unskilled worker in London? Yet there they are, clinging tenaciously to their ancient ecclesiastical organization and elaborate ritualism from which far less obviously marginal and socially insecure preachers strive to dislodge them. We can be dissatisfied, therefore, with this as an explanation of anti-ritualism.

The deprivation hypothesis has its roots deep in our cultural heritage. Perhaps Rousseau gave the first and most emphatic vision of the individual enchained by society and liable to revolt after a certain pitch of humiliation and despair has been reached. The assumption that has bedevilled sociology ever since is that deprival and strain can be measured cross-culturally. In my Chapter 3 below I attempt to establish methodological limits within which these notions can be applied. Anyone who uses the idea of strain or stress in a general explanatory model is guilty, at the very least, of leaving his analysis long before it is complete, at worst, of circularity. Smelser, for example, puts the factor of strain into his explanation of mass movements, panics, crazes and religious movements. Strain, for him, results from discontinuity between roles and performance (Smelser, 1962: 54), but as this discontinuity cannot be assessed he proceeds to postulate its emergence as a result of social change. He detects structural strain when large classes of unattached persons flood into towns, or equally in what he calls ‘pinched’ groups (ibid.: 199 and 338). So we are little further in locating causes of mass movements of different kinds. The emotional content of a word like ‘strain’ inhibits analysis as much as maladjustment, deprivation, frustration and the rest. A further difficulty lies in concentrating on change and movement, for these can always be presumed to start in a state of disequilibrium. It is more revealing to identify in certain kinds of collective action both the distinctive social structure and the correlated symbolism which are found in the steady state in some small-scale primitive societies.

Even amongst ourselves, there is a long-term tendency to be reckoned with. A trend towards unritualistic forms of worship is found not merely among the dispossessed and disoriented. Contemporary Catholicism in America displays an

individual emphasis, found also in Protestant spirituality, focuses on a personal type of religious experience in which the individual considers himself and God to the relative exclusion of his neighbour.

For those who get their spirituality in the form of reading, the sociologist of religion goes on to say,

the bulk of spiritual reading recommended to Catholics for two centuries has emphasized this private spirituality.... In Gospel language, this means that the role of Mary took . . . precedence over that of Martha.

(Neal, 1965: 26–7)

Let me use this excerpt to signpost three phases in the move away from ritualism. First, there is the contempt of external ritual forms; second, there is the private internalizing of religious experience; third, there is the move to humanist philanthropy. When the third stage is under way, the symbolic life of the spirit is finished. For each of these stages social determinants can be identified. Loyalty to my Bog Irish ancestors would not in itself lead me to defend ritualism. Without being Irish, any anthropologist knows that public forms of symbolic expression are not to be despised. The reformers who set low value on the external and symbolic aspects of Friday abstinence and who exhort the faithful to prefer eleemosynary deeds are not making an intellectually free assessment of forms of worship. They are moving with the secular tide along with other sections of the middle classes who seek to be justified in their lives only by saving others from hunger and injustice. There are personal experiences which drive people in our society towards justification by good works. But at this point notice also that the Irishism which clings to ritual forms is itself also socially determined. The Friday abstainers are not free to follow their pastors in their wide-ranging philanthropy. For each person's religion has to do with himself and his own autonomous needs. There is a sad disjunction between the recognized needs of clergy, teachers, writers and the needs of those they preach, teach and write for.

I hope to disclose these social determinants by considering small-scale, primitive cultures. The problem in hand is the central problem of religious history and it amazes me that anthropological insights have not yet been systematically used to resolve it. So little has been done to extend the analysis across modern and primitive cultures that there is still no common vocabulary. Sacraments are one thing, magic another; taboos one thing, sin another. The first thing is to break through the spiky, verbal hedges that arbitrarily insulate one set of human experiences (ours) from another set (theirs). To make a start I shall take ritualism to signify heightened appreciation of symbolic action. This will be manifested in two ways: belief in the efficacy of instituted signs, sensitivity to condensed symbols. The first is the sacramental, and equally the magical, theology. I see no advantage for this discussion in making any distinction between magical and sacramental. I could be talking about an historic shift in Europe from an emphasis on ritual efficacy before the Reformation to an emphasis on spontaneous, commemorative rites. Or I could be referring to the variation in tribal religions from strong to weak beliefs in magical efficacy. Let it make no difference to the argument whether I use the word magic or sacrament.

Ritualism is most highly developed where symbolic action is held to be most certainly efficacious. Between Catholic and Anglican celebrations of the Eucharist there is a shift from the emphasis on ritual efficacy in the first, to the emphasis on a commemorative rite in the second. This is a fine difference in the series (ranging from magical to unmagical ritual) whose social origins we are considering. The difference is perhaps most easily identified in attitudes to wrong-doing. Where symbols are highly valued and ritualism strong, then the idea of sin involves specific, formal acts of wrong-doing; where ritualism is weak, the idea of sin does not focus on specific external actions, but on internal states of mind: rituals of purification will not be so much in evidence.

Before I launch into a comparison of primitive religions, I must recall the delicacy of the line on which a sacramental religion rests. Sacraments, as I understand, are signs specially instituted to be channels of grace. The whole material world is held to be sacramental in the sense that material signs and channels of grace are everywhere, always available; but the sacraments are specially instituted. The Christian who approaches a sacrament must fulfil stipulated ritual conditions. If these, for one reason or another, cannot be met, he can have recourse to the more diffuse sources of grace. Instead of actually going through the instituted form of confession and absolution, he can make an inward ‘act of contrition’; instead of Eucharistic communion he can make an ‘act of spiritual communion’. The devotion to the sacraments, then, depends on a frame of mind which values external forms and is ready to credit them with special efficacy. It is such a general attitude which commits the ritualist to sacramental forms of worship. And vice versa, a lack of interest in external symbols would not be compatible with a cult of instituted sacraments. Many of the current attempts to reform the Christian liturgy suppose that, as the old symbols have lost their meaning, the problem is to find new symbols or to revivify the meaning of the old ones. This could be a total waste of effort if, as I argue, people at different historic periods are more or less sensitive to signs as such. Some people are deaf or blind to non-verbal signals. I argue that the perception of symbols in general, as well as their interpretation, is socially determined. If I can establish this, it will be important for the criticism of maladjustment or strain theories of religious behaviour.

First, to dispose of the popular idea that all primitive religions are magical and taboo-ridden. Robertson Smith (1894) voiced this impression that there has been, through the centuries, a progressive decline of magic accompanying the growth of civilization. He was not altogether wrong. But the great secular movement he describes, if it is not an optical illusion, at least has been frequently interrupted. Among primitive cultures far removed from industrial progress we find non-ritualists.

Ritualism is taken to be a concern that efficacious symbols be correctly manipulated and that the right words be pronounced in the right order. When we compare the sacraments to magic there are two kinds of view to take into account: on the one hand the official doctrine, on the other the popular forms it takes. On the first view the Christian theologian may limit the efficacy of sacraments to the internal working of grace in the soul. But by this agency external events may be changed, since decisions taken by a person in a state of grace will presumably differ from those of others. Sacramental efficacy works internally: magical efficacy works externally. But this difference, even at the theological level, is less great than it seems. For if the theologian remembers to take account of the doctrine of the Incarnation, magical enough in itself, and the even more magical doctrine of the Resurrection and of how its power is channelled through the sacraments, he cannot make such a tidy distinction between sacramental and magical efficacy. Then there is the popular magicality in Christianity. A candle lit to St Anthony for finding a lost object is magical, as also a St Christopher medal used to prevent accidents or the expectation that meat eaten on a Friday would bring one out in spots. Both sacramental and magical behaviour are expressions of ritualism. What we learn about the conditions in which magic thrives or declines in primitive cultures should apply to sacramentalism among ourselves and should apply equally to the turning away from magic and ritual which was expressed in the Protestant Reformation.

The advantage of taking belief in efficacious signs as the focus of the comparison is that other aspects of religious behaviour largely coincide with variations on this score. I have mentioned how ideas of sin tend to vary with ideas of magicality. The concept of formal transgression can take on a very magical aspect indeed, and again, the more magicality, the more sensitive the perception of condensed symbols. All communication depends on use of symbols, and they can be classified in numerous ways, from the most precise to the most vague, from single reference signs to multi-reference symbols. I ask you here to be interested in a variation, within the class of multi-reference symbols, which runs from the most diffuse to the most condensed. For examples of highly condensed symbols, read Turner's interpretation of Ndembu rituals. This people in Zambia experiences human society as a complex structure of descent groups and local groups stratified by age and cult associations. To symbolize this they fasten on the colours of the juices in the human body and in the earth and trees. The active principles in humans are black bile, red blood and white milk; in the world of living nature there are trees with milky saps and red, sticky resins and charred black wood; likewise, minerals include black earth, white and red clay. From these colours they work out a complex representation of male and female spheres, and destructive and nourishing powers, interlocking at more and more abstract and inclusive levels of interpretation. So economical and highly articulated is this system of signs that it is enough to strike one chord to recognize that the orchestration is on a cosmic scale (Turner, 1968). For Christian examples of condensed symbols, consider the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist and the Chrisms. They condense an immensely wide range of reference summarized in a series of statements loosely articulated to one another. By contrast, for diffuse symbols, take as an example the Mbuti pygmies’ word for ‘joy’, described by Turnbull as the focusing element of their system of values, or the words ‘human values’ in contemporary BBC culture. The ideas are comprehensive enough in reference; they produce a standard emotional response. But it is difficult to analyse their connotation precisely. I am suggesting that the rule of Friday abstinence is a minor condensed symbol for the exiled Irish in London, as abstinence from pork has become a symbol of the Law for Jews everywhere. Some English Catholics and Jews feel no response to these condensed symbols and are more moved by general ethical principles. My hypothesis is that these responses are respectively aspects of particular kinds of social experience. Implicitly I find myself returning to Robertson Smith's idea that rites are prior and myths are secondary in the study of religion. For it would seem that the recent shifts in Christian doctrine which are taking place in the long theological debate since the Reformation are attempts to bring intellectual positions into line with deeply imprinted, personal attitudes to ritualism. A full development of this argument should enable us to assess the social context of anti-ritualist movements and of their periodic defeat by ritualism.

At the present stage of ethnographic reporting it is not reliable enough a basis for comparison to look for the presence or absence of condensed symbols. For there is the nagging possibility that if a field-worker of the calibre of Victor Turner or Raymond Firth went to the pygmies and carried out his customarily intensive investigation, he would discover as condensed a set of symbols as any on the seven hills of Rome. Some symbolic scheme of orientations may be necessary for people to relate to one another in time and space. This would not in itself necessarily mean that their beliefs take on a sacramental form. Since I am developing a sociological approach to the problem, let me concentrate, not on the other characteristics of the belief system, but only on the kind of use to which people put their symbols in everyday life, as regulators or as channels of power. That is, we should attend more to their ideas about ritual efficacy, and less to the structure of their orientations.

Take first the case of a tribe whose traditional religion was magical, and where a sizable minority switched to a Protestant-like reform of ritual and conscience. David Aberle writes:

The traditional Navaho fears error in his rituals and particularly error in the fixed prayers which chanter and patient must repeat in the course of a ceremony. Error may not only render the ceremony ineffectual but may cause illness to the patient years later.... Navaho supernatural power is likely to harm man when man breaches various taboos, but these taboos have almost nothing to do with the moral order. If a man were to commit murder, he might have ghost trouble – but so might he if he worked in a hospital or happened to burn wood from a hogan where someone had died. His ghost trouble stems from ritual contamination, not from God's curse or the ghost's vengeance. Theft, adultery, deceit, assault and rape have no supernatural sanctions.... True, ceremonies are impaired if the singer becomes angry or if there is quarrelling at the ceremony. In this sense there are supernatural sanctions against misbehaviour – but only while the ceremony continues. On the other hand, the Navaho must fear the consequences of many accidental breaches of taboos.

(Aberle, 1966)

From this position of extreme ritualism a large minority of Navaho have adopted a religion centred on the ritual eating of peyote. The religion of the peyotists differs utterly from the traditional one, in their ritual, their ideas of sin and of God. The peyotists value spontaneity in their prayers and insist there is no fixed pattern in them. As Aberle puts it, the traditional Navaho tries to bind power by formulae while the peyotist tries to sway God by his fervour. The peyotists’ God is interested in morality. Confession of sin is necessary to gain God's blessing and aid.

Full details of this religious change are given in David Aberle's remarkable book. Here I need only indicate the change in social conditions which accompanied the change of religious worship. Navaho life was based on sheepherding in very arid, difficult conditions, mainly in Arizona and New Mexico. A man with many sheep used to gather round him other families who managed portions of his herd for him and in return were given part of the yield. These units must have been extremely cohesive, the basis for economic aid in crises and for revenge and moral control.

The largest organized unit of Navaho kinship was a group of local matrilineal kinsmen who actually co-operated and assisted one another on a day to day and year to year basis.... A man might lose his accumulated wealth through a bad winter or a dry summer. Hence an ethic of sharing was general, with primary dependency on matrilineal kin but secondary dependence on many other kinsmen as well, including affines. The wealthy were supposed to be generous, the poor unremitting in their pressures for generosity. Mutuality among kinsmen was reinforced by . . . the process of regulating disputes: here self help and compensation were the rule. A headman could only arbitrate, and kinsmen were needed for support in case of feud, pressure for compensation or need to pay compensation.

(ibid.: 44)

How tight this community life was and what strong controls to conform were exerted by the sanctions of reciprocity in hardship may be seen from the attitude to moral rules. European inquirers were apparently surprised to find that Navaho ethical standards were supported not by love of virtue but by fear of reprisals, fear of withdrawal of support and fear of shame. Aberle's book is a documented study of the gradual breakdown of the basis of community moral control. American law and order substituted for vengeance groups.

Clan cohesion was impaired as the possibility of mutual aid was reduced. Fear of loss of support in the community also became a lesser threat. And fear of loss of face or shame depends on the degree of involvement in the face-to-face community. Not only was intra-community interdependence lessened and enforcement of morality impaired, but extra-community dependence on wage work, and familial economic autonomy, was increased.

(ibid.: 200–1)

This one example suggests that when the social group grips its members in tight communal bonds, the religion is ritualist; when this grip is relaxed, ritualism declines. And with this shift of forms, a shift in doctrines appears. The social experience of the traditional Navaho man conditioned him to automatic response to his community's demands. Abstract right or wrong, internal motives, these were much less important to him than knowing to which vengeance group he belonged and to whom he was bound in a web of reciprocities. But the new Navaho, impoverished by enforced de-stocking, inadequately involved in the American wage and cash economy, had to learn to discriminate between the obligatory claims of his family and optional claims of charity. Private judgement controlled his behaviour, not blind loyalty. He could not count on his kinsmen, nor should they on him. He was alone. Eating peyote gave him a sense of greatly enhanced personal worth and a sense of direct communion with the supernatural. Notice that his God has become like himself, no more coerced by powerful symbols of reciprocity and allegiance. He judges intentions and capacities. He does not apply fixed rules automatically but pierces behind the symbolic façade to judge the inner heart of man. God has turned against ritual. Here is a fascinating small-scale model of the Protestant Reformation, well worth exploring further. I shall return to the Navaho peyotist again. But as their anti-ritualism is a response to modern conditions, it does not satisfy my need for primitive models.

For these I turn to an African study, Colin Turnbull's on the pygmies of the Ituri forest. From this I derive my initial thesis that the most important determinant of ritualism is the experience of closed social groups.

The pygmies represent the extreme case. So little ritual do they perform that their first ethnographers assumed that they had, to all intents and purposes, no religion, no culture even, of their own. All that they had was borrowed from the Bantu. Turnbull's work is inspired by the need to assert that their very lack of ritual is an aspect of an independent culture of their own. He draws a picture of pygmies, irreverently mocking solemn Bantu rites into which they have been drawn, uncomprehending the magic for hunting and fertility which their Bantu neighbours offer them, overcome with giggling during Bantu attempts to divine for sorcerers, quite unconcerned about incurring pollution of death. They perform no cult for the dead, they reject the Bantu idea of sin. The whole paraphernalia of Bantu religion is alien to them. Seen from the Bantu point of view they are ignorant, and irreligious. But they do not have any alternative set of paraphernalia, equally elaborate and imposing, but different. Their religion is one of internal feeling, not of external sign. The moods of the forest manifest the moods of the deity, and the forest can be humoured by the same means as the pygmies, by song and dance. Their religion is not concerned with their correct orientation within elaborate cosmic categories nor with acts of transgression, nor rules of purity; it is concerned with joy (1965: 289). It is a religion of faith, not works, to use an ancient slogan.

As to their social groupings – so fluid and so fluctuating is the band that a given territory witnesses ‘a continual flux of individuals’ (ibid.: 109). Bantu farmers consider that certain pygmies are attached to their villages by hereditary right and would very much like to know their whereabouts. But, Turnbull says:

So with every lineage, as with every individual, there is an infinity of territories to which he may move if it pleases him, and the system such as it is, encourages such movement to the point that no (Bantu) villager can ever be sure of what Mbuti lineages are hunting in ‘his’ territory.

(ibid.: 109)

A camp of net hunters moves its site roughly every month. During that time newcomers are arriving and original members moving out, so that the composition is not the same throughout the month. Seven men are needed for the hunting season, and a camp of over twenty huts is counted as a large one. In the honey season such camps fragment into much smaller units.

The pygmies seem bound by few set rules. There was a general pattern of behaviour to which everyone more or less conformed, but with great latitude given and taken.

(Turnbull, 1961: 80)

In such a society a man can hardly need to be preoccupied with the formalities of social intercourse. If a quarrel arises, he can easily move away. Loyalties are for the short term. Techniques of conciliation need not be elaborate or publicly instituted. I am not merely saying that the people's behaviour to their god corresponds to their behaviour to each other, though the truism could well be underlined. I am saying that religious forms as well as social forms are generated by experiences in the same dimension. Pygmies move freely in an uncharted, unsystematized, unbounded social world. I maintain that it would be impossible for them to develop a sacramental religion, as it would be impossible for the neighbouring Bantu farmers, living in their confined villages in forest clearings, to give up magic.

We can have confidence in the pygmy example because of the obviously high quality of the ethnography. If Turnbull had been careless, left gaps, seemed not to be aware of the implications of what he has observed, if he had not followed up his statements with such a wealth of secondary material, pygmy religion would be of no interest. The same value attaches to studies of Nuer and Dinka, pastoralists in the Sudan. I shall say more in Chapter 6 about these peoples. As far as religious behaviour goes, neither tribe seems to be as Low Church as the pygmies. Yet their ethnographers have both had trouble, when asserting the non-ritualist quality of their worship, in convincing their colleagues that a tendency to idealize has not distorted their reporting. This is the fate of every ethnographer who tries to describe an unritualist, primitive religion. I have never known what to reply to anthropologists who have suggested that his own religious affiliations may have coloured Professor Evans-Pritchard's (1956) interpretation of Nuer religion. I have heard them question Nuer disregard of fetishism, alleged to be a foreign new importation (ibid.: 99). As for the Nuer God, his intimacy with his worshippers, his refusal to be coerced by sacrifice, his aptness for being described in Christian theological forms, how far he seemed from the traditional gods of primitive religions. Similarly for the God of the Dinka (Lienhardt, 1961: 54, 73). I have even wondered whether Robin Horton was perhaps justified in chiding Godfrey Lienhardt for playing down the magical content of Dinka ritual behaviour.

There is an occasional failure to call a spade a spade. For instance, though it seems clear from the material offered that the Dinka think certain actions symbolizing desired ends really do help in themselves to achieve those ends, the author seems at times to want to rationalize this magical element away.

(Horton, 1962: 78)

The book thus reviewed draws a very subtle, delicate line between the expressive and efficacious functions of Dinka ritual. In my view, Lienhardt offers a brilliant insight into the way in which symbolic action controls experience. But is he guilty at the same time of over-playing the expressive and underplaying the magical element? Robin Horton read the Dinka book from his perspective in the steamy man-grove swamps of the Niger Delta where local communities are closed in and where magic is indubitably magic. But magic may be less important in open savannah lands.

My considered view now is that magical rites are not the same the world over and that interest in magical efficacy varies with the strength of the social ties. Those who doubt the existence in their own right of primitive, unritualist religions are in the position of old Father Schebesta (1950). He assumed that if pygmies had no ritual elaborations as magical and complex as those of the Bantu, it must be proof that a former pygmy cultural heritage had been lost. So the sceptics suggest that something of magicality has been lost in the reporting of Dinka and Nuer religions. They betray the assumption that all primitive religions are equally magical. The case of the pygmies and of the old and new Navaho provide a basis for asserting that there are unritualist primitive religions. The difficulties of the ethnographers of the Nuer and the Dinka in convincing colleagues that their rituals are not very magical suggest that there is a real dimension to be investigated along a series from high to low ritualism in primitive cultures.

Secularization is often treated as a modern trend, attributable to the growth of cities or to the prestige of science, or just to the breakdown of social forms. But we shall see that it is an age-old cosmological type, a product of a definable social experience, which need have nothing to do with urban life or modern science. Here it would seem that anthropology has failed to hold up the right reflecting mirror to contemporary man. The contrast of secular with religious has nothing whatever to do with the contrast of modern with traditional or primitive. The idea that primitive man is by nature deeply religious is nonsense. The truth is that all the varieties of scepticism, materialism and spiritual fervour are to be found in the range of tribal societies. They vary as much from one another on these lines as any chosen segments of London life. The illusion that all primitives are pious, credulous and subject to the teaching of priests or magicians has probably done even more to impede our understanding of our own civilization than it has confused the interpretations of archaeologists dealing with the dead past. Very differently, for example, would Harvey Cox surely have described the secular trends of today if he had realized how closely the following words parallel accounts of some New Guinea tribal beliefs.

In the age of the secular city, the questions with which we concern ourselves tend to be mostly functional and operational. We wonder how power can be controlled and used responsibly. We ask how a reasonable international order can be fashioned out of the technological community into which we have been hurried. We worry about how the wizardry of medical science can be applied to the full without creating a world population constantly hovering on the brink of famine. These are pragmatic questions, and we are pragmatic men whose interest in religion is at best peripheral.

(Cox, 1968: 93)

Secularism is not essentially a product of the city. Secular in the sense of this-worldly, secular in the sense of failing to transcend the meanings of everyday, secular in the sense of paying no heed to specialized religious institutions, there are secular tribal cultures. Until he grasps this fact, the anthropologist himself is at a loss to interpret his own material. When he comes across an irreligious tribe, he redoubles the vigour and subtlety of his inquiries. He tries to squeeze his information harder to make it yield that overall superstructure of symbolism which his analysis can relate all through the book to the social substructure, or he dredges for at very least something to put in a final chapter on religion. So thwarted in this exercise was Fredrik Barth when he studied a group of Persian nomads that he was finally driven to write a special appendix to clear himself of the possible charges of insensibility to religious behaviour or of superficiality in his research.

The Basseri show a poverty of ritual activities which is quite striking in the field situation; what they have of ceremonies, avoidance customs and beliefs seem to influence or be expressed in very few of their actions. What is more, the different elements of ritual do not seem closely connected or interrelated in a wider system of meanings; they give the impression of occurring without reference to each other or to important features of the social structure....

(Barth, 1964, Appendix: 135)

The Basseri would apparently endorse this view, as they see themselves as slack Moslems, ‘generally uninterested in religion as preached by Persian mullahs, and indifferent to metaphysical problems’. Good marks to Barth for so frankly recording his own surprise and professional frustration. He tries to solve the problem which still remains (because of his assumption that tribal society must have a straight Durkheimian religious expression) by trying to refine the conceptual tools of analysis: he has been led to look for expressive action specialized and apart from instrumental action; can it be possible that the distinction is not always valuable? Perhaps the symbolic meanings are implicit in the instrumental action, and that for the Basseri the meanings and values which make up their life are fully expressed in the richly dramatic sequence of their migrations: ‘. . . this value is not in fact expressed by means of technically unnecessary symbolic acts and exotic paraphernalia . . . the migration cycle is used as a primary scheme for the conceptualization of time and space’. He suggests rather weakly after this that meanings can be implicit in the sequence of activities because of the ‘picturesque and dramatic character of these activities, which makes of their migrations an engrossing and satisfying experience’ (ibid.: 153). The criterion of picturesqueness, however, would be difficult to apply to similar phenomena in urban America, even were it to fit pig-feasting in New Guinea. The meanings of the migration may well be expressed implicitly in the migration itself, but this says nothing about the meanings of society. Should not one suppose that a society which does not need to make explicit its representation of itself to itself is a special type of society? This would lead straight to what Barth says of the independence and self-sufficiency of the Basseri nomadic household which, enabling it to survive ‘in economic relation with an external market but in complete isolation from all fellow nomads, is a very striking and fundamental feature of Basseri organization’ (ibid.: 21). These features will become more prominent as an explanation of secularity as my approach to the question is developed in this book. For one of the most obvious forms of religious behaviour, which Barth was looking for and failed to find, is the use of bodily symbols to express the notion of an organic social system. But it would seem that unless the form of personal relations corresponds in some obvious way to the form or functions of the body, a range of metaphysical questions of passionate interest to some people becomes entirely irrelevant.