VIRTUALITY

Bruce Kapferer

In this discussion I wish to pursue the proposition that much ritualcan be understood primarily as a dynamic in and of itself with no 'necessary immediate relation to external realities. Moreover, I amconcerned with how some rites may come to influence experienceand affect the structuring of relations outside the domain of ritualperformance through processes that are not directed to the repre-sentation of such realities, hitherto a dominant aspect of much analy-sis of ritual. Rituals in many respects are totalizations, or whatSusanne K. Langer refers to as significan! formatioris, in which allor most of that which is included within them is intentionally inter-related internally.1 But to grasp them as totalized symbolic forma- ¡tions of the world around them, albeit highly selected ones, may incertain instances lead to misunderstandings of their import and dynam-ics, and, indeed, of how some rituals come to have interventionalforcé in ongoing personal and social realities.

There has been considerable work on how rituals change or are(re)invented. But a key assumption is that it is by changing that ritessustain their relevance to socio-historical realities. There is no doubtthat this is so. But it is also possible that it is their relative lack of-,change—or even their irrelevance to contemporary socio-historicalrealities—that may hold a clue to the way some rites maintain theirimport. Moreover, for some rites, at least, there is a built-in imper-viousness, or obliviousness, to history and to change. If they change ..in the structuring of their action, which they almost certainly must,it may not be the way in which they change that is crucial to com-prehending their appeal and forcé. Clearly, in numerous contempo-rary realities there are political and social pressures (for example,nationalism, ethnic communalism) for the (re)invention of rituals asrepresentational of dominant valúes. As such, ritual is often given a

1 S.K. Langer, Feeling and Porm. A Theo-iy qf Art Deeebped Jrom Philosophy in a .NeivKiy (New York, 1953).

672 BRUCE KAPFERER

primordialist and foundationalist import of a historical nature, i.e.,its current represeiitations are continuous with the valúes of the past.Rather than pursue this line of thought, I wish to reconsider an ear-lier orientation to ritual as a technological dynamic for the (re)cre-ation, (re)generation, (re)production, redirection, or intervention withinthe circumstances and continuity of personal realities and social andpolitical forms of human life. While this may have primordialist andfoundationalist aspects, they are not of a historicist character.

The view of ritual as a technology (techné) for bringing-forth, orpoeisis, is at least a potential of earlier anthropological orientationsfrom James G. Frazer up to Bronislaw Malinowski and Claude Lévi-Strauss. The former two draw a strong equation between the tech-nology of science and the technology of rite. From the perspectiveof Frazer's and Malinowski's rationalism, scientific technology andrite stand alongside each other as different methods of doing thesame thing. Thus in their modernist thinking, they contend that rit-ual and magic must give vvay to science and technology. For Lévi-Strauss they are not so replaceable or transposable or located alongsuch a linear line of evolutionary development.2 Ritual practice (andespecially myth) manifests the general (universal) scientific curiosityof human beings with their realities and their (technological) con-cern to control or harness the forces of nature and transmute theminto distinct formations of a humanly constituted existence. Here Iam in agreement with Lévi-Strauss. Ritual, or at least some eventsdefined as rituals, can be grasped as technological apparatuses, notnecessarily for the transmutación of nature into culture in Lévi-Strauss's sense, but as artífices or technologies designed to workvvithin the elements and fabric of human constructive existence (phys-ical, mental, material, relational, etc.) so as to (re)generate their per-sonal, social, and cultural continuities and possibilities.

What is stressed in the present argument is ritual as a technicalpractice rather than a representational formation. This is not to denythe representative function (the constitutive potency of representa-tion) of ritual but to suggest that in certain ritual practices the rep-resentational process of rite is a secondary process organized in thetechnical interest of ritual to créate, constitute, and, to a degree,control the realities that are through and through those of human

2 C. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Aíind (London, 1966).

VIRTUALITY 673

construction and circumstance. The concept of the virtual developedhere is an attempt to expand the notion of the technological, orwhat might be referred to as the machinic, dimensión of ritual.

The concept of virtuality used here draws predominandy on thework of Gilíes Deleuze and Félix Guattari,3 but is also influencedby Langer's notion of the virtual.4 They develop the term in a waythat parts with views that maintain that the virtual is somehow lessthan real or in one way or another a model of reality or else anideality. Such conventional approaches cling to representational/reflectionist forms of argument and therefore drive analysts to dis-cover the meaning of ritual action either in subterranean psycholo-gies or in extra-political and social existences. The virtual is no lessa reality, a fully lived existential reality, than are ordinary realitiesof life. Yet it is substantially different. Let us consider two aspects.

First, I stress the virtuality of rite as a kind of phantasmagoricspace.5 That is, as a dynamic that allows for all kinds of potential-ities of human experience to take shape. It is, in effect, a self-con-tained imaginal space—at once a construction, but a constructionthat enables participants to break free from the constraints or deter-minations of everyday life, and even from the determinations of theconstructed ritual virtual space itself. In this sense, the virtuality ofritual may be described as a form that is anti-determinant but para-doxically enables new kinds or forms of determinations to emerge.That is, it overcomes those determinations that may inhibit or pre-vent the capacity of human beings to act and to constitute their real-ities. The phantasmagoric space of ritual virtuality may be conceived

3 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, WTiat Is Philosophy? Trans. H. Tomlinson andG. Burchell (London, 1994).

4 Langer's usage of the concept of virtual appears to be distinct from that ofDeleuze and Guattari; this is especially so because of her emphasis on symbolisraand symbolic meaning. But, as with Deleuze and Guattan, she tries to avoid meta-physics and draws explicidy on physics and esp. optics. The virtual, for her, is adimensión of the real, or the actual, insofar as it describes the dynamics, lines offorcé, etc., on which human perceptions and meaningful constructions of realitydepend. Aestheüc forms achieve their specific potency in their organization of aparticular dynamic perceptual field. My own development of the notion of the vir-tual elsewhere is along the lines of Langer's analysis (Kapferer 1997; B. Kapferer,"Introducción. Outside all Reason—Magic, Socery and Epistemology in Anüiropology",B. Kapferer (ed.), Beyond Ralwnahsm. Retlnnking ¿\-fagic, IVikhcraj'l, and Sorceiy [Oxford,2003], 1-30, here 22-25).

5 See Kapferer, "Introduction", 22—25.

674 BRUCE KAPFERER

as a space (or a space opened by means of the virtual) whose dynamicnot only interrupts prior determining processes but also is a spacein which participants can reimagine (and redirect or reorient) them-selves in the everyday circumstances of life.6 As a phantasmagoricspace, the virtual is a plañe of immanence and emergence.

The virtuality of such ritual spaces, and the kinds of dynamicsthat can be produced in them, might be seen as similar to the vir-tualities of contemporary technologically produced cyberrealities.These are by and large mimetic attempts to reproduce the experi-ence, for example, of flying, falling, fighting, dancing, and to matchreality in many other ways. This is not what I conceive as virtual-ity, and especially ritual virtuality. It is not a mimetic process (although,of course, mimesis is likely to be part of many ritual processes). WhatI refer to as ritual virtuality is a reality space sui generis, in and ofitself. Insofar as it can be described as involving copies or simulacraof other events or objects, they are for all intents and purposes thesame (as technological artefacts—sewing machines, cars, etc.); heneemy use of the concept 'machiiiic'. The elements of ritual virtualitiesare what they represent.

But the crucial aspect of ritual virtuality is that it is simultaneousíyits own reality (not reducible to any other reality that is independen!of the one it represents to itself), and an opening up witlnn ongoing exis-tential realities. Ritual is frequently described in terms of a dramaticperformance, and indeed, much that is described as being ritual hassuch qualities. Thus ritual operates dynamics of framing, staging,what some describe as the 'suspensión of disbelief', a movement outof paramount or quotidian realities. However, my usage of virtual-ity implies something other than this. I stress virtuality as a directand immediate entrance into the processes of reality and their for-mation. Reality is not set apart, as it were, or re-presented so thatit might be reflexively explored. Rather, the virtuality of ritual, andritual as a technology of the virtual, descends into the very realityit appears to represent, the very representations it engages being atechnology for doing so.

The virtual and what is defined here as ritual virtuality can begrasped in relation to what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as actual-ity. In effect, actuality is what is available to representation but is in

See also Williams and Bovcl 1993.

VIRTUALITY 675

excess of any attempt to represent it. Actuality is chaotic, but notin the sense of chaos/order, as this is conceived culturally or in manytheoretical ideologies of the social sciences. It is not something fixedor stable, but is always in process, subject to forces that are alwaysextending beyond any human knowledge of them. The actual is thecomplex mass of singularities (of diverse structuring and interpene-trating, though not necessarily logically interconnected aspects of exis-tence) of which human being and its own manifold processes offormation are at once part of and continually emergent within. The

• actual, or aspects of it, is what science attempts to enter and cometo know directly. This is what scientific practice and technology aredesigned to do, and one of the ways it does this is through virtual-izing actuality.

Scientific technology créales a virtual opening in actuality. Thisenables a descent into actuality within which certain dimensions ofthe chaotic flux of actuality are suspended or slowed down—the vir-tualizing process—so as to facilítate the examination and manipula-tion of aspects of actuality. My central point here is that the virtualis a dimensión of the actual in its process with some of its formationalflux suspended or radically slowed down. The technologies of sci-ence aim to break into dimensions of reality (be it an atom, light,a rock, a human body), but also to slow down or suspend aspectsof its motion, its speed, so that it can be explored and, perhaps,reconfigured or restructured. Virtuality, then, is a dimensión of actu-ality, both an intrusión into it (a direct confrontation with it) andan alteration of critical dimensions within it. Virtuality, or the estab-lishment oí a virtuality, is an unmediated engagement with actual-ity. This is so in the sense that it is not at a distance from the actual,such as is created by modeling actuality or other ways of imaginingor representing it (all of which, of course, are part of scientific, tech-nological, and humanistic inquiries into the nature of existence).

Insofar as ritual can be conceived as a technological virtualizingpractice, a virtual reality machine, it is a device for entering intohuman actualities and is an opening and slicing into actuality. Humanactuality is a chaosmos of extraordinary complexity and flux thatengages as no less integral to its actuality the perceptions, senses,constructions, representations, shifting orientations, structurations ofhuman beings. In constant motion, such an actuality, such a com-plex of continua! differentiation, folding, and interpenetrating struc-turating and rhizomatic spread, of manifold singularities, is ultimately

676 BRUCE KAPFERER

beyond any totalization of it. In other words, actuality is always ínexcess of any attempt to represent it.

Ritual as a virtual reality machine can be envisaged as a kind ofscaffolding erected at particular moments and sites within the chaos-mic flow of human actualities, the motioning of quotidian sensory,relational, shifting, forming and reforming, constructional life. Ritualerected upon and within this flow and operating in the actual, facil-ítales a descent into it (a penetration into the working depth of thesurface). It does so by interrupting the flow of human actualities,slowing down its flux and speed. Much that has been written on rit-ual time as circular or repetitive7 might be reconceived as methodsfor both slowing the flux that time is and enabling an entry into thecompositional dynamics of processes within which a temporality isintegral. The music and dance of many rituals are virtualizing, thesound and music of rite often announcing8 and developing a move-ment into the temporality of living actuality (a visceral consciousnessof it) and also frequently engaging such temporality or timing withthat of the body in dance, the dynamic generative flow, motioningand spatializing of time.9 The virtualizing machine of ritual holdscertain dimensions of actuality in abeyance while exposing the for-mational processes of other aspects of actuality, while in the midst ofit, to exploration, manipulation and, perhaps, to reconfiguration.

An aspect of the virtualizing is the totalization of rite. This is oneof its machinic qualities of abeyance, not a modelling of reality somuch as a framework for direct engagement with particular aspectsof it. Ritual as machinic, as a virtualizing technology, is shapedaccording to the type of interruption and intervention into humanactuality that it intends. Thus it is organized to stem certain aspectsof its flow and concéntrate on what is particularly vital or critical.Ritual descending into the actual focuses on its central constructsand experiences (entering within them, as in masking or in trance).It opens up the core valúes of everyday existence and social for-mation and plays with the very processes of the construction ofhuman actuality while living them, working, for example, with lan-guage and exchange (with their dynamics of composition) and a host

1 E.g. Leach 1976; Lévi-Strauss 1981; A. Gell, Tile Anlhmpology of Time. CulturalConstmctions of Temporal Aiaps and Images (Oxford, 1992).

8 See Needham 1967.9 See Kapíerer 1983, 178-206.

VIRTUALITY 677

of elements of actuality generation (for example, elements and essencesof the body, sex and reproduction, food).

The ethnographic record is full of examples to which this recog-nition of ritual as virtual might apply, meaning that it can be stronglyconceived as a working within human actuality and not simply amodeling or play upon it. I have in mind, for example, the widearray of material on initiation rites whose constitutive forcé to changestatus, or as Audrey I. Richards noted long ago,10 to grow the girlinto a woman, has to do with the virtuality of ritual not to repre-sent (or to opérate as a performative, a more up-to-date versión ofthe potency of representation)" but to engage the initiands (bringthem into immediate manipulative and operational contact) with theforces and processes of their positioning in actuality formation andto embody such processes in them.'2

The Virtuality of Ritual: A Sinhala Buddhist Example

My own analysis of anti-sorcery Sinhala healing rites among BuddhistSinhalese13 explicitly engages the notion of ritual as virtuality in thetwofold sense of an imaginal space and as a technical site for descend-ing within the dynamics of the reality formation of actuality. Theparticular rite I discuss, the Suniyama, is performed over a twenty-four hour period; it addresses a variety of illnesses and misfortunesattributed to sorcery (huniyam, kodivina, vina). Broadly speaking, sor-cery is a consequence of both of the conscious or unconscious actionof others to cause harm and/or when different life trajectories acci-dentally or purposefully cross so that the sepárate life paths areeffectively blocked. In the latter instance, the result is understood assorcerous for the continuation of personal projects and capacities to.act in the world are prevented or in some way upset. Thus sorceryis an effect of the ordinary lived compléxities of actuality. Furthermore,sorcery is, in Deleuze's terms, a singularity of potentially cosmic

" A.I. Richards, Chisungu. A Gtrl's Initiation Ceremonf among the Bemba of Cambia(London, 1956; 2d ed., 1982).

1 1 See Rappaport 1999; Kapíerer 2004.12 See P. ¿lastres, Sociely Againsl the State. Esstys in Política/ Anthropology, trans.

R. Hurley and A. Stein (New York, 1987).13 Kapíerer 1997.

678 BRUCE KAPFERER

proportion. Sorcery manifests itself in experience as a particularanguish within which forces in the overall scherne of things havecome to have a specific malevolent focus. The victim of sorcery ina Suniyama rite is conceived of as being particularly vulnerable inan astrological sense. That is, the exposure of the victim (and, byextensión, of household and extended kin) to recurrent misfortune isconnected to the victim's birth-time and location at a specific inter-section of planetary effects. The Suniyama is therefore a major inter-vention, and one of its principal objectives is to adjust the victim'scoordínales in space/time. In effect, the project of the rite is to re-birth and to reorient the victim within the actuality flows of ongo-ing existence.

The ritual action as a whole focusses on a ritual building knownas the Mahasamatta Palace. This is the main reference point of thewhole rite, and in the terms of this discussion it may be conceivedas a virtual reality machine. It is the instrument through which thevictim descends into virtuality, wherein the vital readjustments inspace/time and a critical reorientation are effected. The victim inthe action centred upon the Palace is also instructed in those prac-tices at the heart of self constitution and the construction of humanrealities within actuality.

The song, poetry, dance, and the Palace (in fact the aesthetics ofthe rite as a whole) are presented as exact repetitions (copies) of theoriginal performance of the Suniyama. Songs repeated throughoutthe rite, for example, declare that the palace measurements and dec-orations accord with the way it was built as an artífice of rite at thevery first performance.

The entire ritual scene is referentially self-enclosed (it is a total-ization in and of itself) and united in theme through its foundationalmyth. This myth specifically asserts that the realities of human life—their orderings—were imaginad into existence. The palace itself is arepresentation of this imaginative act (in fact, one of human self-re-creation), which was built by the ritualist/sacrificer who inventedthe Suniyama to heal the first victim of sorcery: Queen Manikpala, thewife of King Mahasammata, who instituted the orders of humanreality within existential actuality. The palace in the conception ofthe ritualista is a technical artefact, a machine, which is the meansby which sorcery victims can repeat the act of self- and reality con-stitution (as an imaginal act) and exercise those practices that enablethe emergence of human realiües that are subject to their control.

VIRTUALITY 679

The palace endoses a space, the axial and cosmic center of exis-tence, which is figuratively represented as the world mándala. It isthe chthonic site of existential and human emergence, of the for-mation of self-consciousness, and of the transcendence of self, whichin the Buddhist context of the rite is the conditionality for the order-ings of human realities and the overcoming of suffering. The ritethroughout focuses on the progress of the victim towards the palaceand his ultímate entry into it. Here the victim is seated upon theworld mándala to be cosmically recentered (reborn), reoriented towardsexistential realities, and finally completed as a world-maker (afterMahasmmata) capable of self-actualization and able to act freely andindepeiidently, as any other human being, in the realities of humanconstruction.

The ritual progress of the victim into the palace may be conceivedas a descent into the virtual space of the rite, a space, incidentally,that is in the midst of actuality in much of its chaotic possibility andtensión. The audience or ritual gathering, for example, at ritualevents like the Suniyama is engaged in a great diversity of activi-ties—some are watching, others are playing cards, some are prepar-ing food for visitors, others are stopping by on their way to or fromwork. The world of everyday life is bustling constantly around thespace of the rite.

The descent into virtuality within actuality (a descent to the coreor site of emergence) is effected by a series of practices based inwhat is the perfect gift, selfless giving with no expectation of return—the Buddha ideal. This practice within the teleology of the rite as awhole conditions all other interested gifts, which give rise to thedifferentiated and hierarchialized relations of existence.14 These andother ritual acts that are part of the progress (indeed, that impel thevictim's journey according to ritualist understanding) involve prac-tices of breakin°' down forms of matter into their essences and recom-

O

posing them. They are life-forming and sustaining exercises integralto human existence in the flux of actuality. These are part oí anextended sequence of acts (the hat adiya, or seven lights or steps) thatsimultaneously retrace the life-course resulting in the ensorcelmentand erasing this life course and its effects, so that life can beginanew.

11 See Kapferer 1997.

680 BRUCE KAPFERER

Sígnificantly, the events are an entry within time. They are a goingback upon and a slowing down of time (the events are performedpainstakingly over a four-hour period in normal time, that is, timeas a human construction), a moving into temporality itself, both theduration of that flash of an instant and the eon of the cosmos. AsI have said, here the victim, seated on the axial world mándala, isrealized as a singularity within the cosmic immensity. The victim isunderstood to be in the womb (garbhd) space, here to be turnedaround and reorientecl back into the life-world, and prepared toascend into the chaotic actuality of the everyday.

In a vital sense, acting from within the virtuality of the palace,the victim brings forth the constructed realities of everyday life and,most importantly, an active capacity and positionality within them.The victim does so by taking over the work of ritualist or sacrificer.Engaging in sacrificial acts, the victim who is now invested with thepotency of the re-originating sacrificer constitutes, acts ('sacrifice' asthe total act in Hubert and Mauss's terms), and does so for the firsttime. The victim effects a self-ascent out of virtual space back intothe world. (Until the victim's entrance within the palace, the victimis in a condition of non-active determination, but in passing throughthe palace the victim is freed of sorcery's constraints and becomesactive and self-determining.)

As the victim starts to act (begins the ascent out of the virtual),the everyday world bursts into life through a series of comedieepisodes (the vadiga patuna and chedana vidijia)15 during which the palace,the technical apparatus for entering into the virtual, is torn down.The ritual ends, and the quotidian chaotic world might be said tocióse over the virtual space created through the machinery of the rite.

There are two related observations that I would like to make inrelation to this very abbreviated description. First, the Suniyama, likeso many rites, is a totalization but in virtuality. It does not refer toexternal realities, but rather is directed to the critical dynamicsthrough which human beings construct their realities both withinthemselves and around them. It is outside historical time but thor-oughly engaged in temporality and with the underlying plañe of exis-tential formation. Any attempt to interpret the actions by referringto events in historical time would seriously misunderstand this rite,at least in terms of its own logic.

15 See Kaplercr 1997; Kapferer 2004.

VIRTUALITY 681

Yet, and this is the second observation, the rite is intended tohave effect on outside realities. This it does, but not through a dis-course of representing or re-representing quondian realities or insome way or another modelmg them as much anthropological analy-sis might have it.16 It is concerned to act on the way victims (andtheir households, for the victim often stands for the collective) areoriented towards their realities and to give them the capacity to actwithin them. There is no attempt in the virtuality of the rite tochange the world around it. This the ritualists themselves wouldregard as an absurdity and, indeed, a hopeless totalizing and essen-tializing project. The ritual works on a singularity, on a particularindividual positioning, restoring potency and the capacity to insiston a trajectory in the chaotic complexity of life. Thus this ritual,and perhaps many rituals, are able to sustain their relevance for thechanging historical contexts of existence without necessarily alteringor changing their organization and content of practice. As a virtualreality machine, the Suniyama does not impose a conformity ofthought and practice upon the world within which it has effect.Moreover, it is always already relevant to continually changing his-torical reality.

Some Implications of Approaching Ritual as Virtuahty

The approach to rite just outlined as a process in virtuality obvi-ously does not apply to all events that may be defined or recognizedto be ritual. Furthermore, it does not obvíate already well-establishedapproaches although it does suggest a limit to their applicability.Thus representational and symbolic analyses that concéntrate on rit-ual as a reflection on the political and social realities in which rit-ual is founded may not be always relevant and may be radicallymisleading about how the ritual establishes its effects.

The Suniyama, for example, is distinctly out of historical time. Itis likely that the Suniyama was invented in the precolonial world ofSinhalese medieval society, for it incorporales symbolic events thatare relevant to the annual rites of the renewal of kingship.17 But

16 See, e.g., Geertz 1966; Handelman 1990.17 See H.L. Seneviratne, Rituals of the Kandyan State (Cambridge Studies in Social

Anthropology 22; Cambridge, 1978).

682 BRUCE KAPFERER

even then such rites (of cosmic kingship, of sorcery, of healing) oper-ated by means of a virtualizing, a dynamic that was (re)generativelywithin, behind, or underneath the dynamics oí' a potent singularitythat is self- and world-constitutive. Given prcsent fashions, it wouldbe easy to grasp the Suniyama (or the regenerative rites of cosmickingship to which the rite is related) as an apparatus in the hege-mony of power (and this is undoubtedly an aspect in the past andin the present). However, the translatability of the kinds of practicesthat the rite incorporales (for example, the use of rites of purifyingthe king for healing or overcoming everyday problematics) is con-nected to its totalizing virtuality: it does not reflect a particular actu-ality but rather processes relevant to a great many problematicsrelevant to distinct singularities (persons and positionings) and theirpotency for the construction of realities within an always changingand shifting actuality. Kingship is the dominant metaphor of therite—indeed, a totalizing metaphor that indicates the virtuality ofthe rite as the inner reality of a great variety of contexts that areotherwise irreducible to one another. Paradoxically, the historicity ofthe Suniyama is in its ahistorical virtuality. This is not primordial-ist, at least in the sense that the rite reduces the present to a par-ticular point of origin at some moment in a lived past. The virtualityof the rite is one through which a myriad of lived pasts and a diver-sity of futures can be produced. Ritual virtuality exists, as it were,in the pluperfect tense.

Much of vvhat I have said is clearly related to other well-knownperspectives, such as Hubert and Mauss's discussion of sacrifice (withrespect to the Suniyama example) and especially with Víctor W.Turner's analyses of the liminal dimensions of rite and its triadic orquadratic structure (after Arnold van Gennep).

The idea of the sacred in Hubert and Mauss (building on Durkheim)can be interpreted in my terms as being the virtual. In other words,a space which is quintessentially a dynamic locus for the productionof action and the construction of realities within the actual (the pro-fane). The difference, perhaps, is that the sacred/virtual is not thesocial (Hubert and Mauss and Durkheim are committed to a dis-course of representations, to ritual as a symbolic process) but thetechnology (ritual as a technical dynamic) for personal and socialcreation, generation, and production. Hubert and Mauss's perspec-tive on sacrifice (where sacrifice is the general form of rite in theirunderstanding and also the total generative act) presented an approach

VIRTUALITY 683

to rite as a technology but were diverted towards a focus on repre-sentation and valué. It floundered in Durheimian sacred/profane dis-tinctions that forced separations that the concepts of the virtual andthe actual overeóme. Thus the sacred is not society sacralized, madetranscendent, and held apart from the quotidian. Instead, some rit-ual processes, at least, can be conceived as a descent into the dynamiccrux of reality formation. The reality of rite is a reality within actu-ality and distinct only in that it constitutes a suspensión or slowingdown of some of its processes so as to enter within, and thus to con-céntrate upon or manipúlate the generative forces engaged in thecreation of human realities.

My outline of the virtuality of ritual processes bears a relation toTurner's discussion of liminality and the structure of life crisis rites.18

He is strongly critical of arguments that treat ritual as necessarilyconformist and reproductive of the world around it. Ritual is aboutchange and concerned with changing and not about repeating thesame. Turner's analysis of the liminal periods of rites as reoriginat-ing chaotic moments (a period outside of structure and antagonisticto it) stresses them as generative of new schemes and visions of real-ity. The liminal is a dynamic of disjunction and new creation oper-ating subjunctively and transitively. That is, it is both a field ofimaginal possibilities (as is the virtual) and a conjunctive space thateffects the movement from one aspect or structuring of existence (forexample, status) to another. But Turner's approach is directed tochange in and of the forms of representation and valué that exist inthe outside world as they pass through the representational andreflexive process of ritual acts.19 As with the liminal, the virtual opér-ales as a switching, reorienting point, but it does not mediate betweenone structure and another. It is not a moment within a linear processof transition and transformation in historical realities. Rather, it is aperiod of intense (re)structuration within such realities, these realitiesnot being open to totalization since they are chaotic.

On Turner's understanding, the chaos of the liminal is a momentout of which order emerges which is very much consistent withJudaic and Christian cosmologies. My approach to the virtual in

13 See Kapferer 2004.19 Herc his positrón does not deviatc from Geertz's far more static understand-

ing according to which ritual is a model of and for reality (see Geertz 1966).

684 BRUCE KAPFERER

ritual conceives of it as a totalizing process, but not of external real-ities. The totalization of ritual is part of a virtualizing wherein thechaotic formations of actuality are slowed down, certain aspects ofactuality put on hold, as it were, so that ritual can opérate machini-cally on the dynamics of person- and world-formation insofar asthese are relevant to ritual participants. Through the virtuality of rit-ual, the world is not changed in some totalizing sense; rather, whatchanges is the way persons are re-oriented and re-positioned withinthe ongoing flux of actuality so that they can particípate in its con-tinuing change and transformation.

The stress I place on ritual as a virtuality is directed to the dynamictechnology of ritual. It is intended as a corrective to mimetic andperformance perspectives towards ritual. While such perspectives areextremely importan! (as Turner's own rich studies testify), there isan over-use of dramatic and theatrical metaphors in the discussionof much ritual and there is often a reduction to the terms of a semi-otic of textual analysis and interpretation (to which Turner himselfwas particularly prone as, too, is Geertz) as vvell. Ritual seen fromsuch perspectives continúes the importance of the phenomenon forthose anthropologists who engage the events they cali 'ritual' as ameans for gaining access to realities that are not usually their own.But these orientations may reduce an understanding of how ritualsopérate on those who routinely have recourse to them. Thus anapproach to ritual as a virtuality which concéntrales not merely onthe surface as a play of representations but on the dynamics of rit-ual, on the rules and procedures (what Goffman in his use of thedramatic metaphor calis the backstage)20 whereby rituals penétratebeneath the surface to intervene in the very process of personal andreality construction.

PART V

EPILOGUE

20 Gofiman 1967.