As with all of his work, Barth was seeking tofind a way to understand the
meanings in Baktaman rituals that would avoid the pitfalls of two widely
followed but diametrically opposite theoretical standpoints. One was the
structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, which Barth viewed as abstract and too far
from lived experience. The other was Clifford Geertz’s method of thick
description or the layering of multiple details in the search for patterns.
Instead of these approaches Barth wanted to employ his long-standing
method of study with everyday experiences of people and how they them-
selves gave meanings to their rituals, and then moving on to the organiza-
tional ways in which these experiences were codified and transmitted. The
first thing he found was that in circumstances of this kind, where thefield
worker starts almost from scratch, there has to be someone who particularly
helps with the work. Barth found this person in Nulapeng, a young man
who was himself both an insider and an outsider among the Baktaman.
Particularly, he spoke Tok Pisin, or New Melanesian Pidgin, a bridge
between local vernaculars and English. Barth also focused his topic down
by looking at the stages of male initiations–much as he had looked at the
actions of male leaders in Swat. These initiations were staged over many
years of an individual’s life, but Barth was able to‘construct’a picture of the
various stages during the one year he had in thefield. He was, in effect,
making a mental reconstruction of Baktaman experience. Although he
emphasized direct observations and non-invasive methods of enquiry, he
was doing what he had also done in his Pathan study. There, he was actually
building an account of a system that hadflourished prior to the emergence
of a central state ruled by the Wali of Swat from 1914 onwards. In other
words, he had to dig back from a structure in which the two large factions
had been absorbed into one dominant coalition.
It was the sixth degree initiator Kimebnok who secretly told him about
the seventh degree of initiation. The question of who knew, or did not
know, what turns out to have been central, and Barth himself shifts the
question of meaning around by examining it from the viewpoint of how
knowledge was communicated–or not. The initiations were repeated only
about every ten years, and the experts who presided over them had to be
creative in introducing performative variations rather than simply memor-
izing and sticking to exact details. This in turn would mean that much
variation could enter into rituals over time, and systematic codifications of
meanings would not occur. Barth was then able to link this feature to the
almost entire lack of exegesis about meanings of ritual actions, a lack which
went in turn with a stress on secrecy and a fear of telling anything that was
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