This book shows how rituals allow us to live in a perennially imperfect world. The book, building on anthropological theories, draws examples of ritual attitudes from a variety of cultural settings, including original comparisons of Chinese and Jewish discussions of ritual and its importance. The book utilizes psychoanalytic and anthropological perspectives on how ritual, like play, creates “as if” worlds, drawing upon the imaginative capacity of the human mind to create a subjunctive universe. This ability to cross between imagined worlds is central to the human capacity for empathy. The limits of this capacity mark the boundaries of empathy. The chapters juxtapose this ritual orientation to a “sincere” search for unity and wholeness. The sincere world sees fragmentation and incoherence as signs of inauthenticity that must be overcome. Our modern world has accepted the sincere viewpoint, at the expense of ritual, to a degree rarely seen in other times. It has often dismissed ritual as mere convention. The chapters point to the modern disavowal of ritual in the creation of fundamentalist movements as well as other extremist positions. Portions of the book take up questions of music, architecture, and literature, which also show the tensions between ritual and sincerity. The book shows that ritual, at least in its relationship to the rest of experience, is never totally coherent and never complete. Ritual is work, endless work. But it is among the most important things that we humans do.
This chapter turns directly to the tension between sincerity and ritual. Sincerity often appears as a reaction against the perceived hypocrisy of ritual; these reactions in turn tend to ritualize over time. Sincerity offers the world “as is” instead of ritual's “as if”, a world of discursive meanings and unique selves instead of repeated acts and fragmented worlds. Modernity has brought an especially powerful turn toward sincerity. One crucial implication has been a utopian search for wholeness as part of a general dissolution of social boundaries in principle, even as people constantly reassert them in fact. It is suggested that phenomena like “fundamentalism” are more usefully understood in relation to this dynamic than the more usual claim that they are returns to tradition.
Three states have controlled Taiwan over the last century: the Qing Dynasty, a Japanese colonial government, and the current Nationalist government. Each has attempted to manipulate popular ritual, and each has largely failed in the attempt. This paper will analyze the Universal Salvation (Pudu), a major annual ritual t o appease the ghosts of the improperly dead.' The state's successive failures t o manipulate this ritual result from the nature of popular interpretation of ghosts. People produce their interpretations out of their material circumstances, including both past ideas and current experiences. Ghosts are thus open to flexible reinterpretation within a very general symbolic framework as material conditions change. The state found neither an established ideology nor an effective institution through which to impose an interpretation. The only effective counters to popular reinterpretation were too difficult to carry out: the state could ban popular religious performance, or it could change the political economy.Most anthropologists interpret Taiwanese ghosts as metaphors for the socially marginal: for bandits and beggars, for gamblers and prostitutes. They support their interpretations partly with informant statements, and partly by comparing the ritual offerings for ghosts with offerings presented to the other major figures in the Taiwanese cosmology, gods and ancestors (Feuchtwang 1974, Jordan 1972, Wolf 1974b. The structure of these ritual offerings has not changed over the last century, and this helps to explain why the state failed to impose its own ritual interpretation. The state did not want people worshiping socially and politically marginal beings whose very existence was a challenge t o its authority and legitimacy. Yet the state could not offer an alternative interpretation of ghosts without Throughout the last century, local temples in Taiwan propitiated socially marginal ghosts in the Pudu (Universal Salvation Festival). The traditional state manipulated the ghost cult in an attempt to enhance its control; the current state is making similar, but less systematic efforts. These efforts largely failed, however, because of the nature of popular interpretation. Popular interpretations of the ceremony experienced several transformations within a basic symbolic framework that defined ghosts as socially marginal beings: ghosts were dangerous outsiders in the commercializing frontier of the 7880s, but they have become the powerless o l d with the changing family structure of modern Taiwan. Official and elite attempts at ideological control were unsuccessful because the state had n o institution that could challenge the symbolic definition of ghostly marginality, or that could channel people's flexible reinterpretations of ghosts. 46 american ethnologist changing the entire symbolic structure of offerings that defines ghosts in contrast to gods bandits, beggars, and ghosts 47 bandits, beggars, and ghosts
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