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CHAPTER THREE: THE RENDERING OF MEANING: RITUAL. MAGIC, MYTH AND HUMOR

 

Reality, as history and anthropology inform us, can take many different forms.  There are a multitude of metaphors used by people in different societies and epochs to assign meaning to experience.  Yet whosever reality it is, it is, for them, the correct one; for each the meanings generated by the belief machine are, for the most part, taken for granted.  But where does this taken-for-grantedness come from?  How does the user of the belief machine arrive at the conclusion that the metaphors through which he or she interprets experience are correctly portraying that experience? 

In a metaphoric theory of belief this is a crucial question because metaphors are not, nor can they be in themselves accurate renditions of reality, but working approximations only.  For that reason the meaning generated by the belief machine is full of anomalies and contradictions; yet, somehow the belief machine manages to convince the user that the contradictions and anomalies do not exist.  How can it do that?

One answer lies in the nature of ritual.  By ritual I include not only what we generally think of as ritual and ritual behavior, but also the accouterments of ritual, things such as myth, magic and humor.  Ritual is a dramatic rendering, a performance and social display of metaphors.  But this dramatic rendering is a very special one; ritual affirms the truth of metaphors through a process of social notarization.  Ritual is a social display of metaphors that demonstrate conclusively that the metaphors rendered in the ritual are accurate renditions of meaning. 

In this chapter I want to show why ritual, myth, humor and magic form an important part of the belief machine, how they work to give our interpretations of experience their taken-for-grantedness quality, and how they filter out some of the possible contradictions and ambiguities inherent in the process of converting experience to meaning.  Let me begin to illustrate what I mean with Clifford Geertz's classic description and analysis of the Balinese cockfight.

The cockfight, says Geertz, is to the Balinese what football is to Americans, or soccer to Europeans and Latin Americans;

As much of America surfaces in a ball park, on a golf links, at a race track, or around a poker table, much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring.  For it is only apparently cocks that are fighting there.  Actually it is men (Geertz 1973:417).

Cocks in Bali, says Geertz, are explicitly metaphors for men:

To anyone who has been in Bali any length of time, the deep psychological identification of Balinese men with their cocks is unmistakable.  The double entendre here is deliberate.  It works in exactly the same way in Balinese as it does in English, even to producing the same tired jokes, strained puns, and uninventive obscenities.  Bateson and Mead have even suggested that, in line with the Balinese conception of the body as a set of separately animated parts, cocks are viewed as detachable, self-operating penises, ambiant genitals with a life of their own.  And while I do not have the kind of unconscious material either to confirm or disconfirm this intriguing notion, the fact that they are masculine symbols par excellence is about as indubitable, and to the Balinese as evident, as the fact that water runs downhill (Geertz 1973 417-418). 

Sabung, the word for cock, has numerous meanings and is used metaphorically to mean "hero," "warrior," "champion," "man of parts," "political candidate," "bachelor," "dandy," "lady-killer," or "tough guy."  Court trials, wars, political contests, inheritance disputes, and street arguments are compared with cock fights.  Even the island of Bali is thought of as cock-shaped. But the relationship between man and cocks is more than metaphorical.  Men give cocks inordinate attention; they spend most of their time grooming their cocks, and even feed them a special diet; as one of Geertz's Balinese informants put it, "We're all cock crazy." 

Cockfights are public events.  Held in arenas about fifty feet square, they begin in late afternoon and run till after sundown.  Handlers, expert in the task, attach sharp spurs to the legs of the cocks adjusting the spurs at a slightly disadvantageous position for a cock thought to be superior to his opponent. The cocks are released in the center of the ring, and fly at each other with a fury so absolute, says Geertz, as to represent an almost Platonic concept of hate. 

Elaborate rules  handed down from generation to generation govern the cockfight, and each is managed by an umpire whose judgement is never questioned.  The fight continues until one of the cocks is dead. 

Cockfighting, according to Geertz, represents an enactment of features of Javanese ideology; it is a ritual, the dramatic rendering of a metaphor, a performance of certain themes in Javanese culture having to do with manhood, status and hierarchy. 

Javanese are status conscious.  Cocks represent men, or, more specifically, their owners; the fate of the cock in the ring is linked, if only temporarily, to the social fate of its owner, in the same way the status of the followers of winning (or losing) football teams is effected by the the fate of the team.  Each cock has a following consisting of the owner, the owner's family, and members of the owner's village, or temple congregation.  And these followers "risk" their status by betting on the cockfight.  The cockfight takes on the aura of a "status bloodbath" (Geertz 1973:436). 

It is little wonder that when, as is the invariable rule, the owner of the winning cock take the carcass of the loser -- often torn limb from limb by its enraged owner -- home to eat, he does so with a mixture of social embarrassment, moral satisfaction, aesthetic disgust and cannibal joy.  Or that a man who has lost an important fight is sometimes driven to wreck his family shrines and curse the gods, an act of metaphysical (and social) suicide.  Or that in seeking earthly analogues for heaven and hell the Balinese compare the former to the mood of a man whose cock has just won, the latter to that of a man whose cock has just lost (Geertz 1973:420-421). 

The cockfight is a performance about status in Bali; but it portrays status in a way that makes it comprehensible and acceptable to the Balinese. In real life status is often vague, uncertain.  Moreover it is highly abstract.  In the cockfight status is well defined and unambiguous; someone wins and someone loses, and the loss is symbolized with the most powerful metaphoric contrast possible--life and death.  Here is how Geertz expresses it:

Like any art form -- for that, finally, is what we are dealing with -- the cockfight renders ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible by presenting it in terms of acts and objects which have had their practical consequences removed and been reduced (or, if you prefer, raised) to the level of sheer appearances, where their meaning can be more powerfully articulated and more exactly perceived.  The cockfight is "really real" only to the cocks -- it does not kill anyone, castrate anyone, reduce anyone to animal status, alter the hierarchical relations among people, or refashion the hierarchy; it does not even redistribute income in any significant way.  What it does is what, for other peoples with other temperaments and other conventions, Lear and Crime and Punishment do; it catches up these themes -- death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, beneficence, chance -- and, ordering them into an encompassing structure, presents them in such a way as to throw into relief a particular view of their essential nature.  It puts a construction on them, makes them, to those historically positioned to appreciate the construction, meaningful -- visible, tangible, graspable -- "real" in an ideational sense. 
An image, fiction, a model, a metaphor, the cockfight is a means of expression; its function is neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten them, but, in a medium of feathers, blood, crowds and money, to display them (Geertz 1973:443-444). 

Ritual, then, is a rendition of a metaphor, its dramatic representation, its display; but, and this is important, it is not only a dramatic rendition of a metaphor, it is a very special kind of rendition, for the ritual does not represent what is, but, instead, what should be.  The ritual convinces us that the metaphors we use to interpret experience are correct versions of the experience.  The cockfight does not reflect Javanese temper, ethos or values; rather it portrays the world as the Javanese think it should be.  That is the crux of ritual.  It is a man-made world without the vagaries and ambiguity of the real world.  It represents the world as it would be if men or women were gods.  Oscar Wilde's Miss Prism says of her own novel that the good end well and the bad end badly: "That is why it is called fiction." Ritual is fiction.  In the arena of the ritual, life is as it is supposed to be in a man made world.  The fact that a man made world must, by the nature of its creator, be imperfect, is submerged in a set of rules in which the outcome is predetermined. 

Let me illustrate further with the game of chess.  Chess originated in India or China as a favorite pastime of the aristocracy.  While its original meanings are unknown, the game is often portrayed as a metaphor for war.  But it is a strange war.  Each side has exactly the same number and kind of pieces, and each side alternates its move.  If it is a metaphor for war, it is a highly stylized and carefully regulated war, and unlike any that has ever been fought. 

But chess, like the cockfight, is more than a game; it is a statement about hierarchy and the social order. Pieces are ranked in terms of importance, and are given a freedom of movement corresponding to their ranking.  Each game demonstrates the preeminence of the hierarchy, and reinforces the validity of a social system based on rank order. Each time the game is played, the authenticity of this social system is proven true; the side with the highest ranking pieces remaining is almost always the winner.  And most importantly the game validates the importance of the General, the Commander over the other pieces on the board.  It is the strategist, the thinker who wins the war (game), not the soldiers.  Even the king is dependent upon the General and the military.  Since in every chess game each person starts out with the same number and kind of pieces it must be the strategist, the head of the hierarchy who determines the outcome of the game and by extension, the well-being of the society.  It demonstrates the truth, as it were, of the hierarchical metaphor.  The game is the playing out of a metaphor to its predetermined conclusion; a pawn, as itself, can never defeat a queen anymore than a peasant can threaten a king.  There are winners and losers, but, regardless of which side wins, the match in a crude way represents the superiority of the aristocracy over the peasants. 

The game has a ritual outcome independent of who wins or loses; for ritual purposes who wins and loses is unimportant. What are important are the rules, how they are applied and the meaning of the actions generated by following the rules.  Rules are as important in ritual as they are in games, for the rules determine the proper outcome.  We have all seen or participated in laboratory experiments in high school or college.  They also are surrounded by rules, and they too have a predetermined outcome.  That's why they were chosen in the first place; they are dramatic renditions of certain metaphors or scientific paradigms performed in such as way as to demonstrate the validity of the metaphor.  Even when the lab experiment doesn't come out right, we assume the reason is that the rules weren't followed. We rarely, if ever, doubt the truth the experiment was chosen to prove. 

Let me further illustrate this relationship between ritual, metaphor and rules with an example from American society.  A variation of the hierarchy dilemma in our society revolves around the idea of success.  How do we define it, how do we attain it, and, if we follow all the rules, why don't we have it? 

Certain ideas of success are central to the American success ethos; "all men are created equal," all men have equal opportunities, we all compete in a free society.  There are certain metaphors that are central to our ideas of success.  There is the metaphor of altruistic self-sacrifice.  Success comes from hard work, sacrifice and self-denial.  It is sort of an up-to-date version of the Protestant Ethic.  Some of the metaphors of success consist of persons or scenarios which, if followed, should bring success.  However, how do we know they bring success, and aren't there instances where they don't?  What about women and minorities?  What about those people who follow the proper rules for success, but don't achieve it?  And why do some people achieve more success than others?  It is, in fact, impossible to prove directly the correctness of this American success model.  Faith in these values must be generated in other ways. Consequently there are rituals, dramatic renditions of metaphors, which demonstrate the metaphors are true and that the activities which are supposed to bring success, do in fact bring it.  American football is one of these rituals. 

Football, like the Balinese cockfight, is a dramatic rendering of a metaphor, and, like the cockfight, it is carefully controlled by fixed rules so there is only one outcome: there is a winner and there is a loser.  In its ritual aspect who wins is unimportant; it is only important that someone wins (a tie, as one wag once put it, is like kissing your sister).  But more than that, football tells us what it takes to win or lose.  Football is a dramatic reenactment of values and ideas about success that are important in American culture; football encapsulates the value Americans place on such things as technological complexity, coordination, and specialization.  While, as William Arens points out, violence is part of the ritual, it takes place in the context of teamwork, specialization, mechanization and variation (Arens 1976:8). In fact, as Susan P. Montague and Robert Morais note, the football team looks very much like an American corporation, compartmentalized, highly sophisticated in the coordinated application of a differentiated, specialized technology, turning out a winning product in a competitive market (Montague and Morais 1976:39). 

The identity between football and American corporate life is often explicit.  The late Vince Lombardi used to deliver inspirational lectures to corporate groups on "winning," while drawing analogies between football and corporate life, and some football coaches portray football as a means of preparing for life in the business world.  When Americans watch football, they are, in effect, watching a representation of their corporate work world. 

But why, after working in the corporate world all week, should Americans want to watch the corporate world in action on Sundays?  For two reasons, say Montague and Morais.  First of all, football, like the Balinese cockfight, is a small-scale rendering of a system too complex to be directly comprehended.  It is difficult even for economists to picture the workings of the corporate world, let alone anyone else.  But the football viewer can easily follow the progress of his teams, and easily understand the entire system in which the team operates; he or she can observe the team as a coherent entity, and by being visible and comprehensible it makes the things we associate it with visible and comprehensible (Montague and Morais 1976:40).  Every element in the game of football--the layout of the field, the role and behavior of the coach, the cheerleaders, the plays, the formations--items, rules and behaviors have meanings attached to them portraying an important part of the spectator's world in a manner both dramatic and comprehensible.  Second, football is compelling because it is a vivid demonstration of the validity of the metaphors of success and hierarchical structuring.  If the metaphors that govern the world of football are equated with the business world, then the principles that govern success on the football field must also apply in the world of work (Montague and Morais 1976:40). 

The values and, more importantly, the rules by which one succeeds in football are, in the ritual, the same that apply to success in the real world.  The great football coaches are not those with the best talent, they are those who get the most out of their men; success comes, not from raw talent (which, the television commentators tell us endlessly is not enough), but from hard work, dedication and sacrifice.  Mental and physical toughness is emphasized in training camp, and throughout the season.  Self-denial is glorified as players abstain from sex before games, and are prohibited from drinking, smoking and gambling.  All these self-denying behaviors indicate devotion to duty and the team.  Winning teams deserve to win, and win because they are dedicated and hard-working. 

Football validates the success model by staging a real event in which the principles of success are shown to work as promised by society.  The contest actually happens before's the viewer's eyes.  The reality of the event is then transferred to the ideology of the success model, which is presented as accounting for the winning team's superior performance.  Of course, there is a slight of hand going on here, because "the best team always wins." The team that wins is not necessarily best; it is best because it wins (Montague and Morais 1976:42). 

Moreover the ritual works because the rules are designed to make sure it works.  Football is to the corporate world what chess is to hierarchical societies; it is a carefully orchestrated presentation that makes it seem the metaphor works.  Corporations in America are supposed to compete equally, and one is not supposed to be more powerful than the other nor have an unfair competitive advantage.  There is even a branch of the Federal Government to enforce anti-trust laws.  In football the equivalent is the player draft where teams with the worst season records get first choice of graduating college seniors.  Equalization rules probably work better in football than in American corporate life; if they work as they are supposed to work, then any team, if they follow the rules of success, can go from losing to winning, as any corporation could.  And we root for the underdog who, winning occasionally, reaffirms our faith in fair competition. 

We forget that the rules of the game insure the occasional victory of the underdog, and that schedules are arranged so weaker teams play other weak teams.  The fact that we place odds on teams (as the Balinese do on cocks) insures, by definition, an occasional victory of the underdog.  In fact, if the odds system works the way it is supposed to work, teams should "beat the odds" at least half the time.  Consequently, while IBM rarely loses, the Dallas Cowboys might, and therefore the system must work.  And, seeing it work in football, where competitive balance is glorified, we think it works in the corporate world. 

The compelling nature of football ritual is a result of a successful demonstration of the success model.  But football not only provides a working demonstration of the traditional success model, it also provides the viewer with ways of monitoring the model.  In the real world of the corporation, the actor, who cannot comprehend the structure of the business world, or even the company where he competes for success, cannot directly verify how the system works.  In fact he is probably not as successful as he thinks he ought to be, and is confronted with experiences to suggest the system doesn't work.  Football, on the other hand, resolves those doubts, and perhaps suggests to those not as successful as they think they should be, that they are not as dedicated, and hardworking as they ought to be.  However in football, the accomplishments of individuals are carefully monitored and expressed in the statistics popular with newspaper writers and television commentators:

Players' accomplishments are compared and contrasted with those of fellow team members and competitors.  Rewards in the form of salary and recognition are then extended as a result of evaluation.  Again, insofar as the equation is drawn between football and business, the viewer is reassured that the system really works, for he sees the actors being dispassionately and accurately monitored and rewarded according to the merits of their performance.  He can also appreciate that the monitor-reward system is standardized and thus equitable (Montague and Morais 1976:43). 

Football, like chess, laboratory experiments, and the Balinese cockfight, is a dramatic rendition of a metaphor or set of metaphors that represent one way Americans (or at least some Americans) give meaning to portions of their lives.  And the ritual validates the truth of that meaning.

There is another aspect of ritual that is not as clear to us in our rituals as it may be when we look at rituals that appear strange to us.  Rituals have results that confirm to the participants that the world of ritual and the "real" world are one.  That is the rituals "work"; the rituals have real effects.  As a final illustration of how ritual helps create and validate peoples views of their worlds, I want to examine a ritual of the Ndembu of Northwestern Zambia.  There are among the Ndembu a category of rituals, called Isoma,  for women who have not been able to have children.  Isoma rituals are performed because a woman has forgotten her obligation to ancestral shades or ghosts, and has been "caught" by a ghost. In normal times the Ndembu believe a woman who is living at peace with her fellows and is married should have living children.  But a woman who is quarrelsome, who has forgotten her ancestral spirits, is in danger of having her procreative powers "tied up" by the offended shade.  What we will see in the Isoma ritual is the dramatic rendering of the metaphors of matriliny, in the same way as American football is a dramatic rendering of metaphors of capitalistic success.  And, like football, the performance of the metaphor makes the metaphor come true, so to speak. 

The Ndembu trace descent matrilineally, but are virilocal in residence.  From a women's point of view this means her children belong to her descent group, but that she resides with her husband's relatives.  Consequently, every marriage is a struggle between a woman's husband and her brothers for residential affiliation of her children.  If a woman's children do as they should, and move to the village of their matrikin, she is faced with the choice of following them and losing her husband, or staying with her husband and losing her children.  As you might guess, the divorce rate among the Ndembu is very high. 

Since a woman conceives only through the grace of the spirits of her maternal ancestors, the Ndembu say that her failure to conceive is a result of her making the wrong choice of family affiliation, or damaging the balance she must maintain between her husband and his relations on the one hand, and her matrikin on the other.  A woman may be afflicted with barrenness because she neglects her obligations to her matrikin by too strongly affiliating with her husband.  From the perspective of the belief machine, we can say that the Ndembu try to make relations among people meaningful by applying metaphors of matrilineality.  But, because of the rule of virilocal residence, whereby a woman resides with her husband's family, ambiguity and conflict is created in certain relationships.  The metaphors of descent create personal conflict in the same way metaphors of hierarchy create problems.  The question is how can they be resolved?

When a woman is suffering a reproductive disorder -- a failure to conceive or repeated miscarriages -- her husband or her matrikin seek out a diviner who names the cause of the affliction.  Then a doctor is summoned.  He gathers wives and husbands who have themselves undergone the ritual, creating what Victor Turner refers to as a "community of sufferers."

As in football, every article used in the curing ritual, every gesture employed, each prayer, and the organization of space and time are symbolically significant.  A metaphorical world is being created for and by the participants.  Isoma, for example, means "to slip out of place," "to leave one's group," and is a fitting metaphor for the patient afflicted by offended ancestral spirits.  The shade makes itself known, not only by obstructing the reproductive process, but by appearing to the patient in dreams as makishi, a masked figure prominent in the initiation ceremonies of boys.  The makishi is taboo to women.  It is a supreme symbol of maleness, and, if it appears in her dreams,  signifies that the woman has been contaminated by the powers of manhood.  As Turner puts it:

It is because the woman has come too closely in touch with the "man's side" in her marriage that her dead matrikin have impaired her fertility.  The right relation that should exist between descent and affinity has been upset; the marriage has come to outweigh the matrilineage.  The woman has been scorched by the dangerous fires of male sacredness.  I use this metaphor because Ndembu themselves do: if women see the flames of the boys' seclusion lodge when it is burned down after the circumcision ritual, it is believed that they will be striped as with flames, or, like the zebra..., with leprosy, or, alternatively, will run mad or become simpletons (Turner 1969:18).

Like chess, football, or the cockfight, there are fixed rules in the Isoma ritual. The site for the ritual is located at the hole or burrow of a giant rat or ant-bear because each of these animals block up their burrow after excavating it, as the barren woman is "blocked up."  In the ritual the doctor will open the blocked entrance of the hole and magically restore the victims fertility.  From this hole a tunnel will be dug to connect to another hole especially prepared for the ceremony.  The animal hole is consided the hole of death or witchcraft, while the man-made hole is thought of as the hole of life.  Male and female adepts will stand on either side of the tunnel during the ceremony, males on the right, females on the left.  Next to each hole a fire is kindled. 

Special medicines are collected for the rite.  Bark and leaves from certain trees are collected, each with a metaphorical significance.  The bark of the mulendi tree is used since it has a slippery surface, as the patient's children are "slipping out" prematurely.  Then there is the musong'asong'a tree, a hardwood tree which symbolizes health and strength, and whose name implies "to come to fruit or develop fruit," a term metaphorically applied to bearing children.  Other items collected for the ritual include a white pullet contributed by the patient's matrikin, and a red cock from the husband's kin. 

At the beginning of the ceremony the patient and her husband descend into the hole of life or health.  The patient holds the white pullet, signifying fertility, to her left breast where normally a child is held, while the red cock, a symbol for masculinity, remains trussed up next to the hole of death or witchcraft.  From the medicines the doctor prepares two potions, one hot and the other cold.  The ceremony proceeds by having the patient and her husband move back and forth from the hole of life to the hole of death and back again, and at each hole medicines are poured on both the patient and her husband, hot medicine at the hole of death, cool medicine at the hole of life.  The couple is splashed twenty times, seven times with hot medicine, thirteen times with cool medicine. While this is happening, the adepts are singing songs of the great life-crisis and initiation rites. 

The symbolic richness of the ceremony is obvious, even in this abbreviated account.  All the metaphors rendered in the ceremony emphasize the distinction between male and female.  They convey the message that a female should honor her matrikin and that getting too close to her husband is dangerous and risks offending matrikin, both living and dead.  Consequently, since matrikin allow profundity, a woman who affiliates too closely with her husband, risks barrenness. 

Thus thorough the dramatic rendering of the metaphors of maleness and femaleness, a world is created in which all works as the metaphors say it will work.  In the ritual a woman honors her matrikin, as she should in real life,  and is symbolically blessed with children in the symbolic form of the white pullet.  And since the ritual in the Ndembu's scheme of things is a rendition of real life, real children should result.  But is the ritual really supposed to work?  Do the participants really expect the ritual performance to have results, or do they recognize it simply as a performance? 

A chess match, football game or reproductive ritual is the dramatic rendering and social notarization of metaphor.  But, because of the nature of the rules and the consensual agreement of the participants, the metaphor in a fashion, must work; the winners of the cockfight do gain status (if only momentarily), the supporters of the winning football team do feel victorious and superior to the supporters of the losing team, and the woman conceives, if only in the context of the ritual performance itself.  Cockfights represent status (they are not status in themselves), but the representation does become real.  Thus winning sports personalities become political leaders because we magically connect the attributes of a good football player with the attributes of a good political leader.  And the attributes may, in fact, be the same because we have created both systems, and the fact they mirror each other is no accident.  Life becomes a football game because we all think it is a football game. 

MYTH

If ritual is the dramatic rendering of a metaphor, then myth is the verbal counterpart of ritual. The purpose of myth is the same as that of ritual, to portray our metaphors in a story, to make it seem they are true representations of our world.  Like ritual, myth is a medium of communication, a code, that gives meaning to experience, dramatizes our metaphors and helps us believe the world is as we would have it. 

Myth, like ritual, overcomes potential contradictions; in the words of Claude Levi-Strauss, myth orders experience by providing logical models capable of overcoming contradictions.  The contradictions may be between life and death, nature and culture, male and female.  Or the myths may, as football or cockfights, deal with issues of status, success, and authority.  Myth, like ritual, is highly redundant, repeating over and over the same story or developing variations on a theme.  In our culture one thinks of stories such as Red Riding Hood, or the Three Bears, or the Three Pigs, or more recently, the Bugs Bunny stories or Road Runner and Coyote, each repeating the same plot again and again with only some variation.  Myth, in the last analysis, is a rendition of a metaphor in the form of a story, and the story precedes in such as way as to eliminate or resolve contradictions or ambiguities resulting in the attempt to fit the metaphor to experience.  Like ritual the myth portrays the world as if the metaphor were the proper expression of it. 

Let me illustrate with the analysis of a myth by R.G. Willis.  The myth comes from the Fipa, a Bantu-speaking people living on a plateau near the southern end of Lake Tanganyika.  In the middle of the plateau there is a mountain called Itweelele.  It is the center of a small kingdom called Milansi which is supposed to be the original source of authority in the land of the Fipa.  Ufipa (the land of the Fipa) is further divided into another kingdom called Twa.  There is a myth among the Fipa which explains the origins of Twa power and its relation to Milansi.  The myth is a working out of some of the Fipa ideas about political sovereignty and the relation of politics to kinship.  One version of the myth goes as follows:

There were once three sisters who came from a far country in search of somewhere to settle.  They reached Ufipa from the East and went around the Western part of the country.  After walking for a long time they at length reached a hillock and they said to themselves, "Let us rest here." One of the woman sat down on a rock, another sat on the ground and a third was holding a red fruit called isuku.  The one who was holding the fruit isuku became known as the Child of Isuku, the one who was sitting on the ground was called Earth-Person and the one who sat on the rock as the Child of the Stone. 

Meanwhile the king of Milansi said one day to his wife: "Something is going to happen to us before long.  If certain strange people come here be sure not to give them my royal stool, even if they say, `Give it to us'.  If you do they will take away our kingdom." Soon afterwards he went into the wilderness to hunt, spending the night out there.  The three women meanwhile had arrived at the place called Kanda, where even today you can see their footprints.  Not long afterwards they arrived at Itweelele mountain, the home of the king of Fipa.  There they were met by the queen, his wife, and they said to her, "Give us stools so that we may sit down."

The Queen took out one stool and the leader of the women passed it on to her younger sister; she then produced another and the leader passed it on to her elder sister, saying, "I don't want that one but the king's own stool: bring it to me." The queen refused.  Then the strange woman entered the hut herself and finally overbore the queen so that she was obliged to surrender the royal stool.  Taking it, the stranger said, "This country is mine: may the people live long." Then the three sisters sat down.  Meanwhile the king, where he was in the wilderness, heard a buzzing in his ears and he knew it meant that the long-awaited strangers had arrived.  Straight away he returned to the royal village, and when he reached it he met the three sisters.  They greeted one another with all courtesy, then the king went inside the hut with his wife. 

"O wife, what did I tell you?" he said.  "Did I not warn you against giving my stool to the strangers? Now they have taken the kingdom from us." Next morning the three regal sisters said to the king, "Let us go to the top of the mountain, so you may show us the limits of your domain." Now it happened that the king had allowed his under-arm hair to grow very long and, when they reached the summit, he felt ashamed of exhibiting it to the three women.  So he kept his arm low, and said, "My country ends just there."

"Why, his country extends only as far as the mountain!" the three women said, and their leader stood erect and pointed saying "My rule extends from Lake Tanganyika in the west to Lake Rukwa in the east; and from Unyamwanga in the south to Lyamfipa [an escarpment at the northern end of the Fipa plateau] in the north!" So it was that the rule of the Twa began in Ufipa; and the king of Milansi remained as priest of Itweelele, the sacred mountain (Willis 1972:315).

The myth is a story, an initial situation unfolding in stages of crisis, partial resolution, renewed crisis and final reformulation.  It is also an entertaining story, which is why the Fipa tell it; it has elements of both tragedy -- the losing of a kingdom-- and humor -- the overgrown under-arm hair.  It is also the story of two political groups -- Milansi and Twa -- and expresses the relations between them.  But, as Willis points out, it is more than that. 

The metaphors of the myth tell how the Fipa think political sovereignty should work.  It shows Milansi is ritually superior to Twa.  The king of Milansi is the priest, the holy figure.  It shows Twa is politically superior to Milansi; Twa is larger and politically more powerful.  However Milansi is older than Twa. 

Willis diagrams these relations as follows:

MILANSI	TWA
Ritual Authority (+)	Ritual Dependency (-)
Political Dependency (-)	Political Supremacy (+)
Seniority (+)	Juniority (-)
Lack of Power (-)	Possession of Power (+)

So certain ideas are expressed.  But what contradictions does the myth resolve in the belief system of the Fipa? How can the metaphors be manipulated for them to believe the world is as it should be?

There is, according to Willis, a related system of ideas present among the Fipa concerning descent.  The Fipa use the metaphors "head" and "loins" to signify descent; they are key metaphors.  "Head" is associated with "maleness," "intellect," "authority" and "seniority." The "head" for example is a metaphor for one's paternal relatives; if you want to know who a Fipa's relatives are on his father's side you ask for his "head" relatives. 

"Loins," on the other hand, are associated with "femaleness," "sexuality," "reproduction," and "juniority." A person's "loin" relatives are his maternal kin.  As with so many other metaphors, head and loins also have other associations.  "Head" is "lightness," "fewness," "weakness" and "constraint."  "Loins" is "heaviness," "numbers," "strength," and "fellowship.  We can summarize these relations as follows:

 

HEAD                                                         LOINS

Maleness                                              Femaleness

Intellect                                                 Sexuality

Authority                                               Reproduction

Seniority                                               Juniority

Lightness                                              Heaviness

Fewness                                               Numbers

Weakness                                             Strength

Constraint                                             Fellowship

 

Some of the cultural patterns encapsulated in this metaphoric contrast include the fact that a man can expect food and friendship in the huts of his mother and her siblings (good fellowship) while the father and his siblings are supposed to be less forthcoming.  There is also explicit sexual symbolism in the contrast of "head" and "loins; while the loins do not include the sexual organs, the loins are nevertheless associated with sexuality since muscular control of this region is considered the mark of sexual maturity. 

But what has this to do with the myth, and what contradictions does the myth try to resolve? Willis sees a high correlation between the areas of descent and sovereignty; metaphors of descent are used to give meaning to political relations.  For example, the head and loins are mirrored in the sovereignty myth since Milansi was founded by a male and Twa by a female.  The "head" is high on the body as the kingdom of Milansi is located on a mountain, while Twa is below, as are the loins.  Another contrast is between fixed and moving.  The kingdom of Milansi is fixed, it never moves.  Twa royal villages, on the other hand, traditionally would be moved around from one site to another.  This is mirrored further in the descent system by the fact of virilocal residence; the men stay where they are and the women move to their husband's villages. 

There are other symbolic equivalences between the sovereignty myth and descent.  Red, for example, the color of the fruit associated with the sisters, is the color Twa rulers were buried in.  It is also the color of blood and was associated with war and violence, both brought to the Fipa by the sisters.  White, on the other hand, is the color of spiritual power.  We can sum up these metaphorical equivalences as follows:

The myth is a rendition of metaphors of descent and sovereignty.  But the metaphors are presented in such a way as to smooth over some rough spots in the world portrayed in the metaphors.  The myth is an elaborate way of conceptualizing notions of descent and political sovereignty, using one metaphoric contrast to encapsulate a whole range of meanings.  Willis concludes that the contrasts drawn by the Fipa have to do with a basic notion that has concerned theologians and philosophers through the ages, ideas centering around "being and becoming," transcendent and contingent," and "continuity and change."  It is the question of how can thing change and yet remain the same; how can a society remain when all its members die? How can institutions remain viable when its members no longer remain? How can a kin group maintain its identity when half its membership must leave it?

The myth of the founding of Milansi and Twa states the opposition in dramatic form; it is a dramatic rendering of the metaphors of head and loins in the symbolic form of the king and the sisters, and it dramatizes the conflict in the form of a stool.  It resolves the conflict peaceably, as the king accepts the rules of the game, so to speak, and gives up his kingdom by giving up the stool, and maintains his dignity by refusing to expose his underarm hair, even at the cost of the greater part of the kingdom.  And so in the myth everything is resolved, as in most "just-so" stories.  The myth is a man-made picture of the world as it should be, as it is in football where the winning team is always the one that works hardest, exhibits the most teamwork, and "wants it the most." As Willis says,

In their most basic thought categories Fipa thus unite in complementary opposition the ideas of society as a continuing entity, and therefore in some sense unchanging, and as the subject of historical mutation (1972:319). 

HUMOR

Humor, I think, deserves a special place in the discussion of ritual and myth.  Social scientists, however,  have had little success explaining humor.  It seems to resist analysis, as if explanation would deprive it of meaning, much the same way a joke loses its meaning when we try to explain it.  But there are good reasons for including humor in a discussion of ritual, myth, anomaly and contradiction.  First, humor is often an intrinsic part of ritual performance all over the world.  For the Hopi the clown was an important part of all ritual performance, and the masked clown was featured in Iroquois rituals.  In Java, the clown has traditionally been a major figure in drama.

Second, humor, like ritual, has therapeutic qualities. Norman Cousins made the connection between humor and therapy in his essay The Anatomy of an Illness; but the role of humor and the clown is recognized in other societies where humor often plays a significant role in healing ceremonies.     

Finally, in addition to being associated with ritual, and being recognized for its therapeutic properties, humor, like ritual and myth, has to do with contradiction and ambiguity. The humor in the pun, for example, rests on a basic ambiguity in language, the fact that a word can mean two things at the same time; "Tell me Mr. Fields," a reporter once asked W.C.  Fields, "do you approve of clubs for children?" "Only," said Fields, "when kindness fails." Here the humor focuses on the ambiguity of the term club--an association, like the Boy Scouts, or a large stick. 

A pun occurs when we make a joke by confusing two apparently different meanings of the same phonemic pattern.  The pun seems funny or shocking because it challenges a taboo which ordinarily forbids us to recognize that the sound pattern is ambiguous (Leach 1972:207). 

Or the contradiction may hinge on the sudden switching of context.  An Irishman driving through Texas comes upon a rancher leaning against his fence; "I'm a farmer too," says the Irishman.  "How big is your farm?" asks the Texan; "Well from here is goes up to those trees up there," says the Irishman, "How big is your farm?" "Well," says the Texan, "if I got into my car at sunup, and drove till sundown, I still wouldn't reach the end of my ranch."  "I know just what you mean," says the Irishman, "I got a car just like that myself." 

Humor makes fun of the distinctions we make between the literal and the figurative: "When I came to this country," said Groucho Marx, "I hadn't a nickel in my pocket....  Now I have a nickel in my pocket." John Allan Paulos in his ingenious book Mathematics and Humor, has this to say about humor and contradiction;

Running through [my] account of the logic of humor has been the idea of an abrupt switch or reversal of interpretation resulting in the sudden perception of some situation, statement, or person in a different and incongruous way.  This interpretation switch may be accompanied by the overcoming of a mild fear or anxiety, as one realizes what seemed threatening is really not so (Paulos 1980:75).

As Paulos points out, the contradictions in beliefs addressed in humor are the same that philosophers struggle with in earnest.  George Pitcher, for example,  contends that the philosophical issues regarding ambiguity and nonsense addressed by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein are the same as those treated with humor by Lewis Carroll, although it is instructive that Wittgenstein once remarked that a serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

 Wittgenstein sought to reveal nonsense disguised as sense in philosophy.  His major concern was with the absurdities of our language.  If we keep in mind the absurdity of metaphor, we will be able to see the parallels between Wittgenstein and Carroll.  The central principle of the belief machine is that knowing and learning requires interpreting the new according to the known, taking something we are familiar with and using it to comprehend something we don't understand.  But this, as Wittgenstein showed, can be fraught with danger, since in the process of teaching someone something, it is difficult to control the known through which they are interpreting the new.  This applies especially to the act of ostensive definition, that is pointing out something to someone.  For example, if I want to teach my son the meaning of the concept "two" I can point to "two nuts," and say that is what two means.  But the act can easily be misinterpreted, and "two" can be interpreted as meaning those particular nuts, that kind of nut, the color of nuts, the size of nuts, etc.  It is similar to the story of the first European explorers in Australia pointing to a jumping animal and asking the native "what is it?"  The native replied "kangaroo," which meant in the native language, "I don't know."  We celebrate the problem of ostensive definition every time we think of the kangaroo.

One implication of this difficulty with language is that if a person knows what W means in one context, it does not necessarily mean that they know what it means in another context.  Yet this is one of the major assumptions in the use of metaphor; if I know what one thing means, I can use it to interpret something entirely different.  Wittgenstein gives as an example of the problem the fact that knowing what "measuring" means as a way to measure length or distance, doesn't mean you know how to measure time. 

In Lewis Carroll there are passages where the ambiguity of interpreting the new according to the known plays a crucial role, as in the trial of the Knave of Hearts:

one of the guinea-pigs cheered, and was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court.  (As that is rather a hard word, I will explain to you how it was done.  They had a large canvas bag, which tied up at the mouth with strings: into this they slipped the guinea pig, head first, and then sat upon it.) "I'm glad I've seen that done," thought Alice.  "I've so often read in the newspapers, at the end of trials, `there was some attempt at applause, which was immediately suppressed by the officers of the court', and I never understood what it meant until now." (Alice in Wonderland, Chapter 11, quoted in Pitcher 1965:598).

Alice, in effect, misunderstood an implied ostensive definition (this is what it means to "suppress" applause) and interprets the metaphor "suppress" wrongly.  Knowing what suppressing a guinea pig means, did not imply she knew what suppressing applause meant.  Yet our entire mode of knowing is based on the assumption we are able to do just what Alice did. 

Wittgenstein shows also that one cannot always with sense make the transition from some to all.  Thus it  certainly makes sense to say people sometimes make false moves in some games; it does not make sense to suggest everyone might make false moves in every game.  Here is how Carroll deals with this problem. The caterpillar is critical of Alice after she recites "Father William":

"That is not quite right," said the Caterpillar. "Not quite right, I'm afraid," said Alice, timidly: "some of the words have got altered." "It is wrong from beginning to end," said the caterpillar; and there was silence for some minutes. (AW, Chap 5, quoted in Pitcher 1965:599).

Obviously the caterpillar's charge is too extreme, for while you can recite a poem and get some words wrong, you cannot get all the words wrong because then you are not reciting that poem at all.  The same thing applies when the Dodo says everyone won the Caucus-race; this is nonsense since while everyone can get a prize, or even win a prize, not everybody can win a race since to win you must come in ahead of everyone else. Wittgenstein also points out that our forms of expression make us think of time as a "queer thing": 

...We say that `the present event passes by' (a log passes by), `the future event is to come' (a log is to come').  We talk about the flow of events; but also about the flow of time--the river on which the logs travel. Here is one of the most fertile sources of philosophic puzzlement: we talk of the future event of something coming into my room, and also of the future coming of this event (BB, 107f. in Pitcher 1965:609).

Wittgenstein is, of course, pointing out the absurdity of confusing a metaphor with the thing it represents. Carroll also works on this source of confusion:

Alice sighed wearily. "I think you might do something better with the time," she said, "than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers." "If you knew time as well as I do," said the Hatter, "you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's a him. "I don't know what you mean," said Alice. "Of course you don't!" the Hatter said tossing his head contemptuously. "I dare say you never even spoke to Time!" "Perhaps not," Alice cautiously replied; "but I know I have to beat time when I learn music." "Ah! That accounts for it," said the Hatter.  "He won't stand beating...." (AW ch. 7, in Pitcher 1965:609).

A central doctrine in Wittgenstein's philosophy is that similarities in our grammar cause confusion in our use of language. For example the sentence "Nobody is here" is grammatically similar to the sentence "John is here," implying "Nobody" can be interpreted as a name.  Here is what Wittgenstein says about this:

Imagine a language in which, instead of "I found nobody in the room," one said "I found Mr. Nobody in the room." Imagine the philosophical problems which would arise out of such a convention. (B.B., p 69 quoted in Pitcher 1965:610)

In Carroll it comes out like this:

"Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them." "
I see nobody on the road," says Alice.
"I only wish I had such eyes," the king remarked in a fretful tone.  "To be able to see Nobody!  And at that distance too!  Why it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!.."... "Who did you pass on the road?" the king went on, holding out his hand to the Messenger for some hay.
"Nobody," said the messenger.
"Quite right," said the king: "this young lady saw him too.  So of course Nobody walks slower than you."
"I do my best," the messenger said in a sullen tone.  "I'm sure nobody walks much faster than I do!"
"He can't do that," said the king, "or else he'd have been here first." (TLG, ch 7 Quoted in Pitcher 1965:610).

Lewis Carroll's routine is, of course, an early version of the classic vaudeville routine made famous by Lou Abbott and Bud Costello that has "Who" on first, "What" on second, "I don't know" at shortstop, and so forth.

The ambiguities and contradictions that Wittgenstein and Carroll write and joke about are functions of our language.  They are, in effect, culture bound problems, and not likely to be the same ambiguities and contradictions found in other cultures.  This is why humor is the most difficult thing to translate across cultural boundaries.  But there do seem to be contradictions that are near universal, and which come into humor in many societies.  John Allan Paulos puts it as follows;

Of course some incongruities are less culture-bound than others, and there does seem to be an almost-universal class of such incongruities.  By this I mean that some ways of ordering the world are so basic--perhaps the elementary laws of logic and arithmetic or perhaps Piaget's basic cognitive skills of conservation, seriation and so on--that to violate them is incongruous in any culture....  (Wife to husband: Should I cut your meat loaf into four or eight pieces?  Husband: Four; I'm trying to lose weight) (Paulos 1980:106-107). 

Paulos even draws an analogy between Kuhn's idea of scientific revolution and the joke; both build up with the accumulation of anomalies and contradictions; the climax in one comes with the punch line, the other with the scientific revolution. 

Thus there is a link between humor and ritual.  The question is why?  What does humor--the joke, the clown-- have to do with the meaning we assign experience?  The answer, I think, is humor also has to do with making the meaning imposed on our experience by our metaphors seem correct.  Like ritual it smoothes out the rough edges of the meaning encapsulated in our metaphors; and it does this by laughing the contradictions, ambiguities and anomalies away.  But there is a problem with this interpretation of humor, and that is that in almost every way humor is the antithesis of ritual; most ritual masks contradiction and anomaly; the football game makes it seem the work world works as it should, when it doesn't; the cockfight makes people winners and losers when they may not be.  Humor, on the other hand, thrives on contradiction and anomaly.  The clown, instead of hiding imperfections in people, revels in them and points them out for all to see.  The servant-clown in Javanese drama, instead of hiding the flaws in his master, and thereby reinforcing the Javanese hierarchy, mocks his master. Satire, after all, knocks the system, it doesn't try to preserve it.  Puns, instead of hiding the flaws in our language, accents them.  In a sense humor is anti-ritual.  Humor is intellectual, ritual is emotional; "The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel," as Horace Waldpole put it.  Humor is relativistic, it points out there is often more than one way of looking at something; ritual, on the other hand, is absolute and dogmatic, it convinces us to look at the world in a specific way.  Humor mocks our beliefs, it does not glorify them.  Humor breaks down distinctions that our rituals try so hard to build up.  Contrast the grim football coach (who, the television commentators are forever reminding us, is really a pleasant and humorous fellow) prowling the sidelines, with the clowns in the stands, dressed in absurd costumes or masks.  Or contrast the priest with the clown.  So what ritual purpose can humor serve?

The answer must lie, I believe, in how we treat the contradictions encountered in humor.  The clown is a good figure to start with.  The clown may point out the pitfalls in our beliefs, but he or she receives little support for it.  The clown in Javanese proletariat drama mocks the upper class; but instead of being rewarded by his (or her) lower class audience, he or she is derided and jeered at.  The clown (and the joke) is our guide to the incongruities and absurdities in our beliefs.  Why the clown or joke chooses to highlight some absurdities over others is another point.  But the clown does show them to us, and figuratively (and sometimes literally) defecates or urinates on them.  It is as if portraying them in the joke, or having them pointed out to us by the clown, the incongruities and absurdities, by association, lose their credibility.  The clown is inevitably an asocial figure, often asexual.  The clown exists on the fringes of society.  It is no accident I think that most American comedians are Jewish or Black, and most British comedians are Irish.  The clown, the comedian is the butt of our aggressions.  He or she is, in the end, a pathetic figure.  Psychoanalysts see in the clown a cathartic figure who encapsulates all our fears and anxieties.  I think this is basically correct, except that I would include along with the fears and anxieties the contradictions, ambiguities and anomalies that threaten to break through and reveal the absurdities of our beliefs.  The clown and the joke are, in effect, receptacles in which we store our fears and anxieties about threatened disorder,  receptacles we conveniently trash by our laughter.  The clown is a symbol of the joke, and the joke is the symbol of what threatens order and coherence in the universe.  The joke, as many satirists have demonstrated, is a revolutionary vehicle par excellence.  And, I think, all humor serves much the same purpose. 

There is also in humor, as John Allan Paulos points out, a sense of the mathematical proof of the form "if we want to prove A, then show not-A is nonsense." Humor, by making jokes about the very real contradictions and anomalies in our beliefs, makes them seem nonsensical, and, consequently less threatening. 

MAGIC

Rituals, myths, humor are expressive forms that help convince us that the metaphors we use to assign meaning to our experiences are correct, concise and true representations of reality.  However it takes cooperation on our part to accept the existence of an inherent connection between the metaphors of the ritual, myth and humor and the experience they represent.  Football would mean little to us if we were unwilling to accept, at least implicitly, the connection between it and the corporate life it represents.  The cock would mean little to the Balinese if it didn't, for them, encapsulate manhood and honor.  This is the essence of magic, and it is as much a part of our lives as it is the Azande's, Ndembu's or Dogon's. 

Discussing the problems associated with the use of metaphor, many writers, notably Douglas Berrigan and Colin Turbayne, warn of metaphor becoming myth; the person begins to think of the metaphor as the thing it represents.  This is, of course, the essence of magic; by manipulating the representation of something (e.g.  a voodoo doll) a person can effect the thing or person represented.  It is the crux of James Frazer's definition of magic as a misapplication of the law of similarity: two things effect each other because they are similar or because they have been in contact with each other.  Magic says that to heal a knife wound, apply a salve to the knife, or to insure the rapid growth of a child, spit the juice of the berry from the rapid growing salmon-berry bush on her. Or by uttering a word, the person can conjure up the thing, event or person represented by the word.  This mytho-magical world is the one represented in the Eskimo narrative at the beginning of this chapter.

The Azande explicitly recognize the basis of their magic in the seeking of connections between similar things:

They [the Azande] say, `We use such-and-such a plant because it is like such-and-such a thing', naming the object towards which the rite is directed.  Likewise they say, `We do so-and-so in order that so-and-so may happen', naming the action which they wish to follow.  Often the similarity between medicine and desired happening is indicated in the spell (Quoted in Tambiah 1973:204). 

Examples of magic abound in descriptions of other cultures. In fact it has been widely assumed that magical thinking separates primitive from so-called scientific thinking.  Rarely do we think of ourselves as magical. Yet persons in all societies make connections between things based on the similarities they perceive between them.  George Gmelch tells how baseball players assume magical connections between things they do, say or eat on a given day, and their athletic performance.  One player during a successful batting streak made sure he stepped on third base on the way to the dugout after the third, sixth and ninth innings.  Another made sure to reach into his back pocket and touch a crucifix, straighten his cap, and clutch his genitals before throwing a pitch.  As one baseball player put it,

Everything you do is important to winning.  I never forget what I eat the day of a game or what I wear.  If I pitch well and win I'll do it all exactly the same the day I pitch.  You'd be crazy not to.  You just can't ever tell what's going to make the difference between winning and losing (Gmelch 1974:348)

Richard Shweder uses personality traits to illustrate his contention that all persons seek similarities between things and events and connect the things based upon the perceived resemblance.  If someone is loud, we assume they are aggressive, if we see a child organizing games in the park, we assume they have leadership qualities.  There is, says Shweder, a universal inclination to seek similarities among our experiences, and assume the experiences are connected; the linking of things by similarity dominate our understanding of the real world.  As he puts it,

Magical thinking seems to be no more a feature of Zande beliefs that ringworm and fowl excrement go together than our own beliefs that self-esteem and leadership do (Shweder 1976:638). 

Shweder maintains that people think magically when they seek empirical relationships among or between objects or events they affiliate conceptually.  For example, we affiliate intelligence with mind, which we locate physically in the brain. Stephen Jay Gould, in his fascinating book on the history of our attempts to measure such things as intelligence, relates how the search for measurable intelligence led psychologists to attribute intelligence to an entity (e.g.  IQ, Spearman g, "mental energy," etc.).  They measured something (ability to make analogies, to count, to identify missing parts of pictures), and measuring something assumed it varied in persons because of the presence or absence of some genetically inherited entity or other.  In other words, the IQ (a metaphor for intellectual ability), led to psychologists believing the metaphor was real.  Gould's book, The Mismeasure of Man, is a wonderful account of attempts of psychologists (Spearman, Burt, etc.) to justify their beliefs by making magical connections between metaphors (e.g. I.Q.) and something "real."

Shweder demonstrates how we do the same with personality traits.  We observe something (a certain kind of walk, a way of speaking or dressing), and, since these activities or objects have meaning, we infer that what they mean--self-confidence say--exists as an entity.  We infer that the entity exists, or we make connections between entities, based on conceptual similarities (e.g.  a swaggering walk and self-confidence), and assume if one is present, so is the other.  Shweder puts it well:

It is very difficult for us to accept the idea that everyday personality traits are not there to be discovered in behavior, just as it is difficult for the Azande to accept the notion that fowl excrement doesn't cure ringworm.  What our resistance reveals is the pervasiveness of magical thinking and its power to influence our perceptions of reality.  Everyday personality traits (e.g.  dependent, aggressive, friendly) are not correlational patterns to be found in conduct.  Personality traits are symbols of interpretive categories that link together items of behavior and are linked to each other by conceptual relationships that have little to do with frequency and co-occurrence likelihoods.  These conceptual affiliations (e.g.  connections based on resemblance) dominate our understandings of what goes with what in the world of experience (Shweder 1977:640). 

If the belief machine contains a component that functions to filter out the ambiguity and contradiction inherent in the metaphors through which the machine creates meaning, then magical thinking must be a necessary attribute of the machine.  If there did not exist a magical connection between metaphors and the reality they render, ritual and myth would be meaningless.  In fact if some connection did not exist it is difficult to think how we could operate.  If we could not act on the assumption of the truth of a metaphor, we would have no basis on which to act.  This is the dilemma of knowing through metaphor.  On the one hand we must be able to believe a connection exists between the metaphor and the thing it represents, or why represent it that way; on the other hand, the greater the connection, the greater the danger of confusing the two.  Magical thinking gives an absoluteness to our world, and, for that reason is crucial to the effectiveness of ritual and myth.  The metaphor and the thing must merge into each other if the ritual is to convince us the metaphor is an adequate representation of the experience.  If football did not merge into corporate life, how could it be capable of proving to us corporate values work?  If the Ndembu did not believe in the connection between the metaphors representing matriliny and matriliny itself, how could they believe the ritual effective, and, consequently, how could they have confidence in their representations of experience. 

To illustrate a bit further, let me return to the theme of the opening Eskimo narrative and the world of the magical word.  S.J.  Tambiah, in a paper on the magical efficacy of words, says that a common characteristic of belief systems is the idea of the creative primacy of the word.  The Sumerians held the world to be created by the word of god; the Greek doctrine of logos holds that the essence of things resides in their names; in the Bible, God created things by assigning them names.  The Bible illustrates a trinity of ideas about the power of words: 1.  God created the world by assigning names; 2.  he gave man speech, and man named the things brought to him, 3.  the word is given an objective existence.  These three notions come together in Buddhism as well.  Buddha was the source of sacred words, the Dhamma, the doctrine preached by Buddha is sacred and inscribed in texts which themselves are holy, and special people, the monks, are those most qualified to recite the sacred words. 

These same ideas are present among the Trobriand Islanders who say that magic appeared with the first ancestors, and that it is essentially a human possession; magic, once voiced, acts on things. 

Thus it is clear that we are dealing with three notions which form an interrelated set: deities or first ancestors or their equivalents instituted speech and the classifying activity: man himself is the creator and user of this propensity; finally language as such has an independent existence and has the power to influence reality.... I would suggest that it is the perception of these characteristics of language that has perhaps brought about the elevation of the word as supremely endowed with mystical power.  Let me explain.  There is a sense in which it is true to say that language is outside us and given to us as part of our cultural and historical heritage; at the same time language is within us, it moves us and we generate it as active agents.  Since words exist and are in a sense agents in themselves which establish connections and relations between both man and man and man and the world, and are capable of `acting' upon them, they are one of the most realistic representations we have of the concept of force which is either not directly observable or is a metaphysical notion which we find necessary to use (Tambiah 1968:184). 

Tambiah is, I think, seeing the connection between words and reality as the connection between metaphor and reality; the force of the connection between the metaphor (word) and the thing it represents, determines the degree of power of the metaphor (word), in itself, to influence and control reality.  It is this connection between metaphor and reality we find in ritual. Tambiah also notes the importance of metaphor in ritual, and how ritual action is designed to convey the attributes of one thing to another by metynomic transfer.  Malinowski, he says, noted a type of Trobriand magic where objects and substances are used as agents and vehicles of transfer through contagious action. The spell was the most important constituent of Trobriand magic. The object of the spell was thus to transfer a quality or attribute from one thing to another.  It consisted of three parts: the u'ula, the tapwanga, and the dogina.  Each stands for a range of things; u'ula means "foundation", "beginning", "reason"; tapwanga means "middle part", "surface", "skin", "trunk", and dogina means "tip", "end", "tail". 

All spells are constructed along these lines.  The tapwanga is the longest part and consists largely of a series of repetitive utterances, in which an object is linked to a whole series of things.  For example, one bit of garden magic aims to ensure good growth.  The spell goes as follows:

 

`The belly of my garden................leavens

rises

reclines

grows to the size of a bush hen's nest

grows like an anthill

rises like the ironwood

palm

lies down

swells

swells as with child

 

Or another example; a part of the garden is named

`soil'.............................shall be anchored

`magical prism'

`yam pole' `branching pole'

`stem saved from cutting'

`training stick'

`uncharmed prism'

`light yam pole'

etc. 

 

The idea of transfer is further evident in the substances used, each of which has a key association for the rite.  Thus the substances used in the first cutting ceremony have metaphoric associations crucial to the ritual. 

 

A.  Leaves

1.  yoyu: coconut leaves.  `they are of dark green

color which the

[small yam] leaves should have if they are to be strong

and healthy'

2.  ubwara: wild plant with long tubers which are white

and beautiful; used so that the [small yam] in the

garden will also produce beautiful white tubers' (The

white color is also associated with fertility and

purity in the pregnancy ritual). 

3.  Kaybwibwi: white petals of the fragrant pandanus;

used so that `the [small yams] in the garden should

have a pleasant smell....'

4.  Sasoka: tree with big round bulky fruit; used to

influence the size of the yams
            5.  Wakaya: largest

variety of banana; it has a massive trunk swelling out

at the ground.  Same association as 4. 

etc. 

What then is the garden magician up to when he scrapes some soil from a bush hen's nest, brings it into contact with an adze, and recites `the belly of my garden grows to the size of a bush hen's nest'? Is this a case of mystical contagion between bush hen mound and the size of the yam, or is it simply a metaphorical equivalence set up verbally between the property of size portrayed by the bush hen's nest with the desired property in the yam, and lending the mental comparison an air of operational reality by using the soil of the bush hen's nest as a medium of transfer? The rite of transfer portrays a metaphorical use of language (verbal substitution) whereby an attribute is transferred to the recipient via a material symbol which is used metonymically as a transformer (Tambiah 1968:194). 

Trobriand garden magic is an attempt to transfer the properties of one thing to another through words and rituals.  It is the same type of process attempted by the Ndembu when they attempt to transfer the properties of matriliny from a white pullet to a woman, or by Americans when they attempt to transfer the qualities of a football player to a businessman or politician. This transfer principle is clearly represented in Trobriand pregnancy ritual.  The ritual is performed and directed by women of the matrilineage of the girl's father when the girl first conceives.  The women begin by preparing two white fiber skirts and mantles. One set is worn for the pregnancy ritual, the second after childbirth. 

The u'ula of the spell associated with the pregnancy ritual refers to the bwaytuva, a bird of white plumage, and the tapwanga of the spell names the white bird which makes resplendent each part of the robe, and then each part of the woman.  The dogina of the spell says how the woman has been whitened by the ceremony.  The spell and ritual have as their goal the transferring of `whiteness' to the woman.  After five months of pregnancy the woman is carried on a chair and put on a small platform, and is fed by the women of her father's matrilineage.  She washes frequently and keeps out of the sun to become as white as possible.  The whiteness stands for elevation and sexual purity (by whitening she will not think of adultery), and the beauty of motherhood.  The frequent bathing, in addition to whitening, is supposed to loosen the child in the womb. 

While pregnant, the woman is supposed to observe certain taboos.  She must avoid delicacies such as fruit, since if she eats fruit the child will have a big belly, fill with excrement, and die.  She cannot eat fish that live in holes or that have sharp-pointed and poisonous fins;

The logic of these taboos is a metaphorical similarity and difference principle which is the first rule of Trobriand food taboos: e.g.  normally edible things that suggest an analogy to the condition of the mother in some respect (fruit of the tree, and fish in holes are like the child in the womb) but are also antagonistic in certain other respects (fruit rot, and fish in submarine holes do not easily emerge, but a child must be delivered easily and whole) are tabooed (Tambiah 1968:196). 

The pregnancy ritual also makes explicit the contrast between whiteness and blackness in Trobriand thought.  Black stands for black magic, and the power of a witch to make the skin of a woman black.  If a woman's skin is black, say the Trobrianders, she has men on her mind.  Black is also associated with death in the same way white is with pregnancy and birth.  At funerals, a widow wear black, her hair is shaved, she wears soiled clothes, her body is smeared with grease that she will not wash off.  All this symbolizes ugliness (the opposite of beauty) and the witchcraft her family must publicly