RELATIONALITY

My aim here is to outline and, in passing, briefly illustrate an approach largely inspired by the work of Gregory Bateson, in which ritual performances are envisaged as experiences afforded by the enactment of special relationships.1 Particular emphasis is thus placed upon the interactions that occur between ritual participants and the relational configurations these interactions imply.2 By concentrating upon the patterns of relationship ritual performances bring into play, my intention is to speak to a fundamental issue which the two dominant approaches in this field of study fail to address: the very nature of ritual behaviour itself.3 Almost everyone agrees to two things about ritual. First, rituals have social and psychological effects: they may be seen as a means of defining or maintaining group boundaries, of bestowing status, of settling conflicts, of bringing about catharsis and so forth. Second, rituals are meaningful, that is, their symbolism can be understood as expressing cultural values and ideas. What has become increasingly evident, however, is the degree to which these complementary perspectives, in spite of their undeniable usefulness, leave important things unsaid. Ritual as an observable phenomenon far exceeds the sociological and/or affect-related functions that may be assigned to it. Conversely, the meanings that may be attached to aspects of ritual performances far exceed the limits of the ritual itself. In other words, only some aspects of the ritual are taken into account by functionalist explanations, whereas in the case of symbolic interpretations, what calls for analysis first and foremost are categories, values and so forth, extraneous to the ritual proper. Thus, even when they are combined, as is often the case, these two approaches, the one concerned with the consequences of ritual, the other with its ideational premises, leave the specific complexity of ritual action itself unaccounted for: what are the distinctive organizational features of ritual as such