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extends that concept to wider domains. The approach is Durkheimian: to discover an ele- mentary form, then generalize. Such an ap- proach is followed by Turner in moving out from “social drama” to theater and moder- nity. Rhetorically if not analytically this is a compelling way for the anthropologist to speak with authority to and about the world at large.

The alternative approach is to confront the thing itself. If one wishes to comprehend the nature of ritual and theater or of human play, one confronts the phenomenon itself in its broadest dimension rather than heading to- ward it from some prior experience and local- ized paradigm. This is what Hans-Georg Gadamer attempts in his discussion of “play” in Truth and Method (Crossroads, New York, 1982, pp. 91-119). In fact, Gadamer grasps play only in part, reflecting his own paradigm based on high culture, thus complementing Turner’s vantage point of tribal ritual. The point is that Turner does not accord modern theater or human play the same systematic analysis that he accorded tribal ritual, but in- stead uses the tribal paradigm as a launching platform for insightful but not systematic commentary on modern life. The danger is re- ductionism, the advantages are that one has a clear and honest point of departure; after all, no one can grasp the thing itself, but only from some point of view. Turner has stuck to the viewpoint provided by his most cogent re- search and thinking, yet has been remarkably open to ideas and to the experiences of the world.

It is misleading to depict Turner as reduc- ing modernity to a simple tribalism. Turner may have retained from his early work a par- adigm that is based on tribal ethnography and Durkheimian tradition, but he has always pounded at the walls of that structure and moved to expand if not dismantle it. The con- cept of social drama was itself a major force in transforming social anthropology from Durk- heimian orthodoxy to a more dynamic per- spective. Where Durkheim and the Durk- heimians had seen ritual as preserving soli- darity, Turner shows how the genesis of ritual was conflict. Where Durkheim had seen ritual as fortifying the central values of society, Turner shows how ritual was grounded in the marginal, liminal edges and interstices of so- ciety. Where Durkheimians had emphasized social and cognitive structures, Turner was among the few to grasp the performative and aesthetic dimension. Localized in origin, his ideas need not be localized in application. Dy- namic and rich in content, his works always proved remarkably provocative in implica-

tion. Aside from the stimulation this book may provide for those concerned with perfor- mances, it has great value in stating some- thing of the world view of a major figure who freed anthropology-at least sectors of it- from its more restrictive perspectives and en- couraged us to discover “the total human being. . . at grips with his environment, per- ceiving, thinking, feeling, desiring” (p. 13).

Studies in Symbolism and Cultural Com- munication. F. Allan Hanson, ed. University of Kansas Publications in Anthropology, 14. Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1982. 109 pp. $9.00 (paper).

DAVID HICKS State University of New York, Stony Brook

Max Miiller remains something of a joke in anthropology. His theories purporting to ac- count for solar myths achieved a wide cur- rency and, indeed, credibility for a period after the 1850s, but his confrontations with Andrew Lang not only cast those theories into disfavor, they generated perceptions about his entire work on mythology that Robert Jerome Smith, in the volume under review, has characterized as “to a large extent myths about mythology” (p. 91). Smith’s is one of eight essays in this collection, and he seeks to convince us that these negative perceptions are false. His ar- gument so disarms our prejudices that reading i t will give most readers an entirely new impression of Miiller’s contribution to the study of myth.

The intelligence and sheer readability of this enthralling analysis are matched by vir- tually all the other contributors, affording the reviewer the decidedly unusual pleasure of being able to congratulate an editor on having assembled a cast of such high quality. Just as laudably, Hanson summarizes each essay ac- curately and clearly, integrating each author’s work into a cohesive introduction.

Perhaps the theme that more than any other unifies the articles collected here derives from the work ofVictor Turner, particularly his ad- aptation of Van Gennep’s concept of liminal- ity and his famous processual model of “the social drama.” Dean Braa uses Turner’s model to give us a fresh view ofthe 1916 Easter Uprising in Dublin, a rebellion that soon “be- came a paradigm for. . . action that eventu- ally lead [sic] to independence” (p. 47). He also exploits Turner’s use of symbols as insti- gators of social action. One such local symbol proved to be that of the image of martyrdom,

GENERALITHEORETICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

with the rebel Patrick Pearse envisioning him- self as a perfect imitation of Christ crucified.

Georges Condominas, in his essay, dis- claims any undue bias toward theory and stresses his ethnographic focus. Yet, as Han- son points out in his introduction, Condomi- nas’s article is charged with theoretical impli- cations. Charmingly presented (like every- thing else he writes), Condominas’s analytic description of Mnong Gar ritual succeeds in bridging the factitious gap between art and scholarship. His point of departure is an ex- tract from Baudelaire’s Correspondences (p. 66):

Like dwindling echoes gathered far away Into a deep and thronging unison, Huge as the night or as the light of day, All scents and sounds and colors meet

For Condominas this is the poetic version of Mauss’s “total social phenomena,” his insight that conventional behavior-such as gift ex- change or ritual performance-simultane- ously embodies economic, legal, moral, and religious meanings. From here Condominas takes us through the forest ofrituals created by these Vietnam highlanders, before bringing us to his argument that Mnong Gar ritual must occur at moments and in places marked by a special density to be effective. When the group expresses itself during such periods and in such places, it reinforces its will to survive as a collectivity. This conjecture may come straight out of the pages of Durkheim-al- though the notion of ritual “density” is avowedly Granet’s-but Condominas uses his ethnographic data to propose that we look ,upon ritual as a set of languages talking about collective life. Seen from this angle, alterations in ritual appear as sensitive indicators ofsocial change. He thus concludes that under the in- fluence of Western innovations, ritual may disappear or undergo a “folklorization”: the group no longer expresses itself in “dense” moments of ritual because it is no longer itself; “It is dying” (p. 72). A poignant note indeed when we consider the geographical location of the Mnong Gar.

Literary art is blended with anthropology in Victor Turner’s article, which ingeniously brings together his own special notion of “lim- inality,” the subjunctive mood in grammar, the social drama, a Japanese novel written about 1000 A.D., and a commentary on Jap- anese drama written about 400 years later. No wonder Turner concludes by comparing the anthropologist to the creative artist! Likewise, Gregory Bateson refuses to restrict his think- ing to the straitjacket imposed by the anthro- pological discipline, instead ranging over so-

as one.

cial norms, individual behavior, the explora- tory instinct of rats, the mind-set of a one- legged conquerer of the Matterhorn’s North Face, and his concept of “double description.” Abounding in thought-provoking analogies, Bateson’s essay offers all manner of original suggestions.

If Miguel Le6n-Portilla’s account of Aztec collective thought is more conventional, it is no less interesting, while the analysis of Plains festivals presented by John Janzen reinforces Condominas in concluding that festivals (rit- uals) “are thus assertions against oblivion of their cultural orders; articulations of their sur- vival” (p. 65). The editor’s own essay is an ex- ercise in semiotic analysis, incorporating a (successful) attempt to solve the riddle ofwhy Maori warriors in ancient times used to bite the beam of their local latrine!

Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Dis- course toward an Ethnopoetics. Jerome Roth- enberg and Diane Rothenberg, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. xviii + 503 pp. n.p. (cloth).

STEPHEN TYLER Rice University

Anthropology tells two tales. One, a fantasy told in chorus with all science, tells ofidentity, of the one hidden in the many, of difference as appearance; the other is a dialogue of differ- ence, of the illusion of identity, of the same that is not a same. Symposium of the Whole tells these tales and reveals their strange comple- mentarity .

This important book should be read by all anthropologists, for they are, like it or not, the main inheritors of a subversive subcultural tradition that, ignoring all boundaries of place and time, appropriates differences without de- stroying their difference. Despite its scientific posturing, anthropology is not an imperialistic identity discourse that reduces all differences to the monotone of a dominant culture, and the more it seeks to accomplish such sublating discourse, the more its silences reveal the dif- ferences its words conceal. As Rothenberg says in his “pre-face,” “when the industrial West began to discover-and to plunder- ‘new’ and ‘old’ worlds beyond its boundaries, an extraordinary counter movement came into being in the West itself. . . . It was almost, looking back on it, as if every radical innova- tion in the West were revealing a counter- p a r t - o r series of counterparts in the tradi- tional worlds the West was savaging” (p. xi).