Lawson and Robert McCauley. Roy Rappaport’s early studies are both ethnog-
raphies and theoretical contributions, whereas his final statement, Ritual and
Religion in the Making of Humanity(1999), is a theoretical or, perhaps better,
a philosophical or valedictorian reflection on this central component of social
life. From his early essays, collected in Ecology, Meaning, and Religion(1979),
to Pigs for the Ancestors(1968/1984, to be read in its second edition, in order
to have access to the ‘Epilogue, 1984’), to his final book, Rappaport’s central
concerns have been the understanding of sacredness and ritual. His essay, ‘The
Obvious Aspects of Ritual’ (1974), is one of the most lucid texts on this
phenomenon. In his early work, based on research among the Tsembaga of
New Guinea, Rappaport was concerned with the role played by ritual in
ecological regulation, paying attention to the interaction between ‘cognized
models’—systems of meaning generated by human actors—and ‘operational
models’—the actual organization of nature. Such a distinction is, however,
absent in his late work, which, without ceasing to pay attention to adaptive
processes, is more concerned with sacredness and order (on Rappaport see
American Anthropologist101, 1999; and Ecology and the Sacred, edited by
Ellen Messer and Michael Lambek, 2001).
Frits Staal’s Rules without Meaning(1989) deals with Vedic ritual as well
as with the theory of ritual. Staal stresses the parallels between the structure
of ritual and that of music, paying attention to the issue of the origins of ritual—
attention that is most welcome, as speculation on the ‘origins’ of anything has
been declared anathema in the contemporary humanities. Smith’s To Take Place
(1987) focuses on the connection between ritual and space, more specifically,
place (although, as Grimes has pointed out, it would be more justified to build
a theory of ritual around the mastery of time). In Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice
(1992) Catherine Bell seeks to dereify ‘ritual’; she in fact recoils from ‘the notion
of a fundamental force or conflict’ that could function ‘suspiciously like some
key to understanding’ (p. 37). Even more apophatic is the conclusion of Bell’s
‘Ritual [Further considerations]’, published in the second edition of the
Encyclopedia of Religion(2005: 7855); there she writes that the contribution
of ritual studies ‘is less likely to be a special position or method as a stubborn
refusal to reduce—in analysis or significance—so-called religious phenomenon
into fully other (that is, non-religious, unholy) components or conclusions’.
This is perplexing, not least because she appears to equate ‘non-religious’ and
‘unholy’, an equation that is unjustified, insofar as ‘unholy’ makes sense only
in a religious context, whereas ‘non-religious’ can be used in a purely descrip-
tive manner. No less puzzling is Bell’s reaction to the cognitive approach to
ritual proposed by Lawson and McCauley in Rethinking Religion(1990) and
Bringing Ritual to Mind(2002). She writes that ‘the primary assumptions, as
well as the terminology and style’ of Lawson and McCauley ‘are difficult for
people in religious studies and cultural anthropology’ (p. 7851). That may be
so, although one may ask whether there is a terminology and style proper to
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