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Culture, Thought,and Social Action

An Anthropological Perspective

Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 1985



166 Ritual as Thought and Action

the esoteric lore of doctrine and rite is taught with punctilious care to

disciples. And the ambitious aim—so solemnly cultivated by the Quak-

ers—is pursued to breathe meaning and fervor into each article of

faith and each act of communal worship. But these enthusiasms of re-vivalism can be relatively short-lived. For the most part between mes-

sianic hope and indolent routine, the rituals of ordinary times carry

both symbolic or iconic and indexical meanings in different mixes,

and the participants too understand these meanings in varying mea-

sure, according to their lights, interests, and commitment.

One task, then, is to specify the conditions under which rituals—

which ordinarily convey both symbolic or iconic and indexical, refer-

ential and pragmatic meanings—take opposite turnings: to the right

when they begin to lose their semantic component and come to serve

mainly the pragmatic interests of authority, privilege, and sheer con-

servatism; and to the left when committed believers, faced with a de-

cline of referential meaning but with a surfeit of manipulated

“implicatures,” strive to infuse purified meaning into traditional

forms, as often happens during the effervescence of religious revival

and reform. Such a dynamic view might make it possible to transcend

the seeming dissonance between two perspectives: the approach

which sees redundancy as contributing to pattern emergence, and the

use of multiple media as resulting in message intensification; and the

other approach, which, wearing the garb of realism, sees in formalismand redundancy a decline of semantic meaning, and the sovereign

presence of power buttressing itself with ritual speech, and the ex-

ploitative strategies of priestly castes building castles out of esoteric

knowledge. The concepts of indexical symbolism and indexical ico-

nicity might serve as a bridge for studying the dynamic interrelation

between these two kinds of meaning.

IICosmologies and

Classificationsas Thought and Action

2 aaer tambiah unidad 2

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