Ritual as Communication: Order, Meaning, and Secrecy in Melanesian Initiation RitesAuthor(s): Roy WagnerSource: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 13 (1984), pp. 143-155Published by: Annual ReviewsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2155665Accessed: 07/12/2009 14:49

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Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 1984. 13:143-55 Copyright ? 1984 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved

RITUAL AS COMMUNICATION: Order, Meaning, and Secrecy in Melanesian Initiation Rites

Roy Wagner

Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903

No topic in cultural anthropology bears more significantly on the relation between the anthropologist's understanding or explanation of a culture, and its own internal relations, than ritual does. Ritual, then, relates-and sometimes confounds-two different sorts of relativity: that of the anthropological analyst and the subject culture, and that of significant parts or categories of the subject culture. The study of ritual amounts to a sort of double relation. It is a communication between the anthropologist and his readership of what he has learned, through fieldwork and analysis, regarding the ritual and its signifi- cance. And on another level it is a communication involving its performers and perhaps significant others-persons, groups, spirits, deities, abstract forces- recognized in their culture.

The first relation is fairly clear-cut; if ritual is, in its usual definition, what Mary Douglas calls a "restricted code" (8, p. 77), then the anthropologist's job is to decipher it. But what is encoded and why? And what is the nature of the code and why is it formulated in that way? These questions bear upon the relational role of ritual within the subject-culture, what it does as communica- tion, regulation, or whatever. Here, too, anthropology has made, since Durk- heim, a fairly explicit assumption. Paraphrasing Gluckman, J. Christopher Crocker distinguishes ritual as against ceremony, the expression of the status quo: "Ritual always involves moral issues, and has a definite outcome, whether positive or negative . .. Above all, ritual has, or seeks to have, a transformative capacity. . . " (6, p. 160). Thus, if we choose to approach ritual as communica- tion, the differential, or relation, across which communication takes place for

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its performers amounts to the kind of difference that, in the words of Bateson, "makes a difference" (3, p. 1 10).

The issue in recent anthropological writing seems to be that of how this difference is made. Is it purely conceptual, involving the relation between knower and known, symbol and symbolizer'? Does it involve, directly or indirectly, relations among groups or categories of people. communicants, subjects, or objects of communication'? Does it further, inclusive or exclusive of these first two possibilities, articulate the relationship of a people to their physical or social environment'? None of these alternatives for how ritual makes its difference is entirely independent of the first relation mentioned above, that of the anthropologist's communication. For the anthropologist, whatever his idea of the efficacy of ritual and its means, must communicate this idea symbolically-he does not affect the sociological or ecological balance of those to whom he communicates.

An anthropological account of ritual is always to this degree "symbolic": it must be conveyed through our symbols. This condition of anthropological analysis has a significant bearing on the way in which ritual is conceived to operate. For if the action of the ritual is considered as wholly symbolic in its effect, then it will be of the same "scale," or phenomenal order, as its translation, which can, if effective enough, amount to an expressive relaying of the communication. But if the ritual communication is freighted with sociolog- ical or ecological implications as well, then as mere translation, however sensitive it may be, it cannot possibly bring across all of its implications and effects. In this case, the "message" has a pragmatic significance all out of proportion to its mode of conveyence; it is not merely enacted meaning but enacted regulation, a "meaning" on several levels at once.

The difference between ritual as conveyed meaning and ritual as conveyed regulation-message as against metamessage-marks a significant watershed in modern cultural anthropology. In a recent collection of essays on Ndembu ritual, Victor Turner summarizes the development of his views:

At one time I employed a method of analysis derived essentially from Durkheim via A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. I considered the social function of Chihamba with reference to the structural form of Ndembu society The ritual symbol, I found, had its own formal principle. It could be no more reduced to, or explained by any particular category of secular behavior, or regarded as the resultant of many kinds of secular behavior, than an amino-acid molecular chain could be explained by the properties of the atoms interlinked by it (19, p. 186).

Yet the significance of Chihamba, for Turner, has to do with communica- tion, though in an elusive and transcendental sense: ". . . we have, in Chihamba the local expression of a universal human problem, that of expressing what cannot be thought of, in view of thought's subjugation to essences" (19, p. 187). Because ritual has "its own formal principle," it is not primarily a form of

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Durkheimian social glue, nor is it necessarily any sort of social or mechanical regulatory mechanism. Its address to moral issues, its definite outcome, its transformative capability, is realized in an altogether different direction. Ritual, in Turner's later works, has the "performative" function of transcending thought's verbal and categorical boundaries by enacting meanings that are interstitial to them. It completes the conceptual world of a culture by allowing man to experience what thought cannot frame.

This Turnerian view, it might be said, makes religion more real than society, because of society's categorical limitations. It forms a sharp contrast, at this point, with the approach of another leading modern authority on ritual, Mary Douglas.

The tendency of Douglas's work, especially from Puirity ain1 Daniger (7) to Natural Svmbols (8), has been to develop a framework around the parameters of categorization and social grouping, within which the significance of ritual in various, differentially situated societies can be compared. Thus, having begun with the same subject as Turner, and from a similar orientation, Douglas proceeds in the opposite direction, making the significance and effect of ritual a function of category (classification, boundaries) and social solidarity ("secular behavior"), precisely those elements which ritual, in Turner's analysis, tran- scends and eschews. But Douglas's "group and grid" model is neither simple functionalism nor simply social determinism, but a supple, generative system correlating the stuff of Durkheimian sociality with cognitive categorization. As Douglas puts it, "The restricted code is used economically to convey informa- tion and to sustain a particular social form. It is a system of control as well as a system of communication" (8, p. 79).

Ritual as control, as a socially effective regulator, manifests the anthropolo- gist's description or communication of the phenomenon as a kind of absolute presence within the culture itself. It becomes, as a reification of the heuristic, something more than a description, for it reveals what the natural sciences call an "order" in the subject. Order in the social sciences may be manifested as meaning (more often "coding" or "classification") or as behavior (as in the "rituals" of animal-behavior studies); what is important is that it is not limited to either.

A classic example is Gregory Bateson's concept of schismogenesis (2, p. 58), in which social norms and behavior interact dialectically to bring about cultural change. Bateson, who first introduced the idea in the 1936 edition of Naven, was only able to resolve the runaway dynamic of schismogenetic change into a model for stability through the introduction of the cybernetic concept of "feedback" in his 1958 epilogue to the book. A recent generalization of this solution, Roy A. Rappaport's Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (I8), expands "order" into cybernetic homeostasis and the "restricted code" of ritual into a general model of culture. The collection of essays represents a meta-

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morphosis of the ecological homeostasis model of Rappaport's earlier mono- graph, Pigsfor the Ancestors (1 7, p. 67), into a broader cybernetic homeostasis in which "Wholeness, holiness, and adaptiveness are closely related . . ." (18, p. 234). The significant innovation, then, is that the meaningful elements in ritual, and therefore in culture, assume a central place in Rappaport's homeo- stasis, they ". . . define the teleology of such systems . . ." (18, p. 125).

Like Douglas's and Bateson's models, Rappaport's cybernetic homeostasis makes ritual meaning integral to the cultural dynamic; more than that, for Rappaport it is the raison d'etre of the system. But for that very reason, meaning is not and cannot be separated from the regulatory system as it is in Turner's later work.

The critical point at issue here is not one that has often been raised in connection with ritual, nor necessarily is it one that most writers on ritual consciously address. Anthropology's liaison between the interpretive and the natural sciences tends to blur over sharp distinctions between the significance or purport of a semiotic expression on one hand, and the regulatory functions of actions, images, and ritual orderings on the other. Granting that the fusion of these two considerations was a remarkable achievement of Bateson's schis- mogenesis model, it does not follow that they can be automatically or thought- lessly synthesized. More to the point, however, it is by no means established that such a synthesis is in any sense crucial to the understanding and explana- tion of ritual. Commitment to one position or the other is very much a matter of theoretical assumption and expectation.

The point was raised, however, because it is central to an exchange that took place in the journal Man in 1980 and 198 1, following an article by Ron Brunton on "Misconstrued Order in Melanesian Religion" (4, p. 80). Brunton focuses on two recent studies of ritual, Alfred Gell's Metamorphosis of the Cassowar- ies (9, p. 75), and Fredrik Barth's Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea (1, p. 75), in developing a critique of what he construes as the "oversystematizing" of Melanesian religions. In the most succinct terms, he argues in effect that factors such as ambiguity and innovation, "antisystematic" tendencies if you will, constitute evidence for certain socially correlated determinates of religion. Brunton criticizes academic traditions for putting a high premium on intellectual order (4, pp. 112-13), although Brunton's own expectations of "order" are fairly rigid and problematic and make of it some- thing of a "straw man." Before rejoining his strategy, then, it might be helpful to consider more closely the prime target of his attack, Gell's monograph.

Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries may well be, as Brunton claims, ". . . the most sophisticated and detailed attempt to date to uncover an internally coher- ent pattern in the religion of a Melanesian people" (4, p. 120). Certainly, however one might feel about the significance of inherent patterns, it is the most detailed. Perhaps no other account of a Melanesian people makes the

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immediacy of sociological, lexical, and ritual detail as available to the reader as Gell's does, and the sense of familiarity is heightened by the author's dry and often brilliantly witty asides. On the other hand, for all of the masterly craftsmanship and skill with which Gell has handled his data, the analysis of the ida ritual is striking for its lack of theoretical coherence and conclusiveness. Applications of the ideas of Victor Turner, Levi-Strauss, and the linguist Stephen Ullman abound, as well as germinal insights into indigenous cosmolo- gy. The most original theoretical innovation involves a "breaking" of the accepted rules for semiotic analysis. Gell extends the notion of lexical motiva- tion to include much broader ranges of verbal relationship, based primarily on sound-similarity, than are conventionally admitted, and achieves a remarkable "core" cosmological metaphor as a result. This is what he calls the "triple analogy" (9, p. 148) of social role, body part, and part of a tree, a principle that serves to orient Umeda social and anatomical space. The metaphor is salient in the ida ritual and Gell often returns to it. But it is not conclusive. As Brunton remarks, Gell's interpretive method is "centripetal," and ". . . using any of a number of procedures of widely differing status, he isolates an aspect, which may be only one out of many possibilities, and incorporates it into the gradually unfolding model of the ida's meaning." (9, p. 118).

All of this, in Brunton's view, would be justified if we had some good evidence of the unity and consistency of the Umeda world view. If, in other words, Gell can explain Umeda ritual to Westerners better than Umeda can, then Gell's "meaning" for the ritual is not likely to exist among the Umeda, and he will be guilty of "oversystematizing" their religion. But what if Gell had used the ambiguities in Umeda ritual in such a way as to give a more coherent account of it? Should he then be praised for "undersystematizing" Umeda religion, or should he be criticized for yielding to pernicious academic tempta- tion and transmuting an honest indigenous confusion into a self-seeking clarity'? If oversystematizing is one sort of misconstruing of order, then equating the anthropologist's explanation with a described, intrinsic entity may be another.

This also raises the issue of coherence in symbolism generally. Is a "loosely structured" symbology possible? What would be the reaction of linguists if Gell had reported an indigenous grammar full of major ambiguities and gaping irregularities? It is part of anthropology's conventional wisdom that there are no primitive languages; what, then, of primitive symbologies? Granting, of course, that languages and general symbologies are rather different things, have we the right to assume that the patterning of public utterance is somehow less subject to the "pushes" and "pulls" of socioenergetics than the patterning of public conceptualization?

It is also part of anthropology's received wisdom that all grammars "leak," and the play of ambiguity (and often ambivalence), innovation, and nescience in Melanesian cultures generally is established ethnographic fact. Like other

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antipodal empiricists, Brunton (he cites McArthur's Kunimaipa work approv- ingly) has capitalized heavily on this fact in advancing the case for sociological determinism. But what if ambiguity, innovation, and nescience are part of the meaningful process (rather than the sociological undertow, so to speak) of Melanesian religion? This is the implication of much of the Telefolmin-area data, presently to be considered, and, as we shall see, it is also significant in Gell's area of research. Ambiguity and innovation, as much as anything, test the resourcefulness, flexibility, and imaginative range of theoretical concep- tion of "order." A very brittle or frangible order (like the "dogmas" of the Hogbin era in Australian anthropology), introduced as straightforward model or as argumentive foil for another model, is certain to succumb.

This brings us back to the argument that underlies Brunton's critique. Assuming that ". . . we are probably not justified in assuming that there is a basic human need to develop comprehensive and consistent responses to what we might see as fundamental existential questions" (4, p. 123), he states his major thesis: "It is particular forms of social organization, or more specifically, cleavages of a certain type between categories or classes of people, which cause the supernatural to be 'colonised ...'" (4, p. 123). "Sociology" for Brunton (and also, apparently, for Gell) involves, as its major "players," the indige- nously generated categories within the population (e.g. age-sets, senior mar- ried men, young unmarried women, etc). These categories (they are certainly not self-sufficient and corporate like the "groups" of traditional social anthro- pology) may vie with one another in terms of their particular interests, and express this competition in attempts to control religious "order." Thus we can expect to find a high degree of order in those parts of a religious system being used to advance a group's (sic!) political interests . . ." (4, p. 125). Brunton speaks of a "continuum," rather reminiscent of Douglas's "group and grid," across which religion is more or less affected by competition of this sort.

There are serious problems here, even at the level of definition. Brunton's sociological argument is reminiscent of the functionalists' attempt to explain segmentary societies in terms of the organic solidarity that Durkheim posited for hierarchical societies-having no evidence of an institutional division of labor, they proceeded to cut one out of whole cloth, then stitch it together with "functions." Brunton adduces the major competitive dynamic of a society among categories defined in a complementary relationship to one another. What, then, of the complementary interests, implied by definition, that serve to unite them against any divisive "political" interests they may conceive? And what of the cross-cutting "symmetrical" competition among opposed lineages or villages? The most damaging flaw, however, involves an assumption about priorities. Why, if competition is engendered through the categorization of people in a certain way, should the competition affect religious "order" more than, or rather than the equally conceptual order through which the social

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categorization was made? Is not social categorization as much of a problem as ritual categorization?

The next contribution to the exchange is that of Bernard Juillerat, who worked with the Yafar, immediate neighbors of Gell's Waina-Sowanda (Ume- da). Juillerat's comment suggests a much more immediate reason for Gell's difficulties in resolving an interpretation of the ida, and raises the issue of ritual secrecy, which has widespread theoretical ramifications elsewhere in Melanesia. The Yafar have, according to Juillerat ( 16, p. 732), adopted the ida from the Umeda "some time ago," and so Juillerat is able to offer the closest thing to comparative testimony. According to Juillerat,

Gell's mistake is not, as Brunton declares, that he "exaggerated" the unity and consistency of the Umeda world picture (p. 124). It is rather that he wishes to reconstitute this coherent picture by his own intellectual means, having already decided, as an established fact, that there was no exegesis (16, p. 733).

The claim that a ritual tradition has no exegesis was made also by Barth, in the Baktaman study that Juillerat declines to discuss. It is interesting, however, that the two major monographs to which Brunton addresses his critique both support their analyses on this claim. I shall consider Barth's study and its ethnographic context presently. The substance of Juillerat's criticism of Brun- ton as well as Gell is that the ida ritual does indeed have an exegesis, and he proceeds to list a number of significant events of the ida in which secret interpretations revealed by his informants controvert Gell's conjectures. Juil- lerat argues, on the basis of his own field experience, that exegetical material concerning the ida is consciously withheld, or released to the "foreign investi- gator" only in small and unconnected details. The core of the exegesis is mythic, and, according to Juillerat, "I subsequently established that the small- est ritual details (before and during the public ceremony), the briefest of spells, and the nature and the mineral or botanical identity of the materials used, all referred systematically to certain details of chronological narrative expressed in the myth" (14, p. 732).

It might be supposed that the ethographic fact of secrecy-interpretation itself regarded as a scarce and precious commodity-would subsume the substance of Brunton's ethnosociology at a single stroke. Why graph continua of organizational complexity in relation to the competitive dynamic of com- plementarity when the subjects of study themselves manipulate "order" con- sciously in the neatly packaged form of exegetical secrets'? And if this puts the ball of religious order and sociological competition squarely in the "natives" court, the ball, by this time, is an invisible one-for what is more secret than the traffic in secret knowledge'? Barth's monograph is very much a treatise on the sociological and epistemological implications of this sort of invisible tennis.

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Brunton, in his response to Juillerat, remarks that this sort of secret exegesis is just exactly the sort of thing that his sociological interpretation of the Umeda/Yafar would lead us to expect-do they not belong to the "highly ordered" side of the continuum? He accuses Juillerat of implicitly denying that there are substantial variations among Melanesian societies in "the extent to which secrecy is stressed and maintained" (5, p. 734). He credits Juillerat, however, with correctly relating secrecy to complementary male/female com- petition. It is clear, at this point, that the differences between Brunton and Juillerat are those of sociology as against symbolic interpretation. For Brunton, this comes down to why religious material is controlled, and he traces the crux of their differences to Juillerat's subscription to the assumption that there is "a basic human need to develop comprehensive and consistent responses to what we might see as fundamental existential questions" (5, p. 735). Brunton's remarks indicate that Juillerat is ignoring empirical evidence that this is not the case-the evidence being the sociological readings Brunton is able to make of ostensible intersocietal variation in Melanesia. (However, a judicious observer might wish to point out that it was Juillerat who provided the empirical evidence-both the fact of a secret exegesis and some specific details-here, and that this was evidence of which Brunton was ignorant when he formulated his initial position.)

Before I follow up on this most significant matter of secrecy, it might be helpful to consider Gell's rejoinder to both Brunton and Juillerat, which follows Brunton's comments (10, p. 736-37). Gell castigates Brunton for making "broken-backed" argument to the effect that he (Gell) is guilty of oversystematizing the Umeda symbolic system, but that the system is itself extremely systematic and ordered. He takes Juillerat's part, essentially, as against Brunton, but he also seems to favor a sociological as opposed to a strictly symbolic approach. Gell uses the extreme secrecy of Juillerat's reported exegesis, in fact, against Juillerat's position, in a comment that bears signifi- cantly on the issue at hand:

It would be Juillerat's account, not mine. which would be parochial or mystical" if. as he proposes, the "explanation's ida is to be found in local mythological lore. Such an approach makes of every culture a windowlcss monad, and begs every conceivable interesting analytical question (10. p. 736).

Gell defends his lack of awareness of, or rapport with, the native exegetical tradition by appealing to received theory-the "applications" of L6vi-Strauss, Turner, and Ullman that enter into his involved effort to make sense of the ida. Data, no matter how significant or revealing, are not theory. The point is important enough to compel an immediate rejoinder: what are the theoretical implications of a secret, mythological exegetical tradition'? Gell suggests that they are sociological and political, and that "With this recognition there also

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follows . . . a general devaluation of the explanatory value of such secret knowledge, for it is patently obvious that what is most important is not what is secret, but that it is secret" (10, p. 737).

Separation of content from status, and perhaps therefore of symbolics from politics, is perhaps less useful than Gell's remarks suggest: how can there be a secret without a content, something to be secret? And it is Gell himself who draws our attention to Barth's monograph on this issue, so let me consider it now.

The actual length of Barth's field research among the Baktaman, a small and isolated community of Faiwol speakers in New Guinea, has the status of professional rumor (though it is an unknown that both Brunton and Juillerat comment upon). Barth's preface speaks of "fieldwork during January- November 1968" (1, pp. 6-7), though it is clear that Barth spent a considerable amount of time traveling. He was at the time a highly experienced fieldworker, however.

Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea, whatever else might be said of it, provided the first monographic treatment, and the first serious anthropological assessment, of the remarkable secret initiatory com- plex of the "Mountain Ok" peoples in its full implication. Even though the work is addressed to what its author calls "The Epistemology of Secrecy" (1, p. 217) and addresses itself at the outset to culture as ". . . an ongoing system of communication . . ." (1, p. 15), Barth differentiates himself methodologically and theoretically from what is usually called "symbolic anthropology." Addressing himself to "spontaneous, unelicited word and act" and to the conversations of Baktaman with one another, he seeks to free his study from the contamination of the "feedback" engendered when an anthropologist structures informant interviews (1, pp. 224-25).

If it is possible at all, such a search for the pure, uncontaminated "emic" presumes very much on the linguistic and kinesthetic "fluency" a fieldworker is apt to achieve in the eleven-month range Barth allows for his fieldwork. (And if a good bit of fluency were not present by the second or third month, it is questionable how much objective eavesdropping could have accompanied the author's participation in the entire initiatory series.) Barth finds, not surprising- ly, that Baktaman ritual has no exegesis, and that it is primarily based on nonverbal communication: "in such a world, only 'real objects' persist while communication is by definition ephemeral" (1, p. 229). Granting the ethnog- rapher both points (the force and effect of nonverbal communication has been seriously underestimated and undervalued in much Melanesian research) only serves to make his methodology the more questionable. What is to be con- taminated in such a world? Unless the nonverbal meanings are to be directly or telepathically intuited, their understanding would seem to require much more care, background, and communication in areas where verbal articulation is

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possible, than verbal meanings. The alternative, which Barth seems to advo- cate, is a kind of "dumb barter" of quizzical tokens.

A self-imposed taboo on verbal proliferation makes the verbal messages one is able to overhear very precious. This also seems to be the way the Baktaman epistemology operates: the scarce good (which Barth provides, very sparingly, in Appendix III) is just precisely verbal and mythical knowledge. So are the "secrets" that seem to be focal in Baktaman magic, power, and ritual under- standing-names, myths, and mythic details-all of them in words.

Thus it is not the undervaluing of verbal communication that animates Baktaman ritual, but a cult of secrecy that assures that words and the shared, conventional understandings that they convey will retain their centrality and significance. When Barth tells us that Baktaman collectivities are "poorly constituted and conceptualized," that patrilineal exogamous clans "emerge more as a by-product of certain cult activities" that manifest membership and solidarity obliquely through ritual (1, p. 25), and that "the striking fact . . . is the absence of ... common premises and shared knowledge between persons in intimate interaction" (1, pp. 264-65), he is documenting the operation of a powerful indigenous praxis for controlling and compelling the collective. His account, however, emphasizes the outward and experiential effects of this control rather than providing insights or explanations regarding its manipula- tion.

Barth's theoretical and methodological stance is interesting, from the general standpoint of communication, in that it seems to have reversed the order of contamination. Instead of inadvertantly communicating the overstructurings and biases of the anthropologist to his informants, he appears to have internal- ized their communicative constraints. It is practically inevitable then that however eloquent his evocation of thefact of secrecy, its content will remain uncommunicated in the same way, and for the same reasons, that the Faiwol themselves curtail communication.

A parallel with Gell's work suggests itself here, for Juillerat's comments on Umeda secrecy might be extended to the Baktaman as well. Is there a vital core of exegesis in Baktaman or Faiwol culture, protected as a vital secret against all comers? Or are the Baktaman, as Barth insists (and as Gell asserts for the Umeda) without exegesis? Fortunately, some comparative evidence exists for the "Mountain Ok" area, as a considerable amount of field research has occurred there since Barth's visit. With very few exceptions, however, most of the findings are as yet unpublished and remain in dissertation form.

At least two dissertations address the issue of communication centrally. Barbara Jones spent two years with a larger and somewhat more acculturated group of Faiwol speakers than the Baktaman, at Imigabip (13). Her account is no less emphatic than Barth's on the subject of secrecy, and its delineation of an integral ambivalence in Faiwol culture is also reminiscent of Barth's descrip-

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tion. But whereas the Baktaman seem largely to be missing a sense of shared convention, the Imigabip have, in their insidious biis witchcraft, wrought the collective into what Jones calls ". . . a powerful negative image of society as society with no higher motivating principle" (13, p. 8). Jones's informants among the elder cult-house guardians told her that they were "cowboys," drawing a conscious parallel between the dangerous life of a Western gunman in films they had seen and the dangers they incurred in protecting cult-house relics. These are absolutely essential to the growth of taro, and hence to the well-being of the community, but they exert a debilitating or lethal effect on those who keep them (12). Taken altogether, Jones's evidence, although acquired among a larger and more nearly "acculturated" community, represents a greater degree of ambivalence and uncertainty than Barth's! If there is a Faiwol exegesis at all, it must be a well-kept secret indeed.

Dan Jorgensen's dissertation, based on extensive research with elders of the acknowledged "mother house" of the initiatory (bani) system for the entire Star Mountains region, at Telefolip, gives a good indication of just exactly where the exegetical tradition may be. Somewhat after the conclusion of his initial fieldwork in 1979, Jorgensen was requested by the elders to return to Telefolip and prepare a permanent record of the relics, mythological corpus, and exeget- ical doctrine of the mother house. Fundamentalist Christian elements had set in motion an effort to destroy the "pagan" complex (they did not, in fact, succeed), and a number of Telefol, including government officials, were concerned to preserve their heritage. Jorgensen was able to accomplish this. He received permission to publish the material, and it is incorporated in his dissertation, which appeared in 1981 (14). The exegesis, comprising a series of revelations, encompasses the serial negation of the symbolic premises of Telefol culture, and is impressive by any philosophical standard.

Insofar as the Faiwol, as well as most other peoples in the "Mountain Ok" region, recognize the primacy of the Telefolip mother house and send youths to its initiations, the case can be made that the ritual exegesis for a number of discreet ethnic units has been maintained as an exclusive secret at Telefolip. This possibility bears significant implications for our assumptions regarding the autonomy of cultural meanings, and it would also tend to confirm Juillerat's commentary on Gell's material. The initiatory ritual is concerned with the moral, is transformative, and is exclusively male. It is, above all, communica- tive, and the communication takes the form of a revelation of exegetical interpretation concerning central cultural meanings by elders to ritual novices. It represents, in other words, the same "scale" of communication-that of the exposition and analytical penetration of cultural meaning-as the anthropolo- gist's account of it.

In this context, Jorgensen adds a commentary on Brunton's position to the Man exchange: ". . . Brunton seems to think that we can 'explain' the symbolic

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realm with reference to the political (never clearly defined)-presumably because political relations are in some sense prior to or more 'real' than religious understandings of the world" ( 15, p. 471). "The only sense in which differentials in cult lore are political is simply by definition, by equating esoteric knowledge with secular power" (15, p. 471). He criticizes Gell for retreating into ". . . a stylised affirmation of sociological faith," and suggests that Gell's work will be remembered more for its exegesis of the idaI than for any contribution it might make to general sociology (15, p. 471).

A final word in the exchange is Ragnar Johnson's review of the discussion, in which he criticizes Gell in particular for adherence to a rigid structural model. Johnson stresses the importance and effect of analytical models, and notes that "The problem of 'order' in Melanesian ceremonial institutions is one that derives almost entirely from the models used by anthropologists to present their research findings" (1 1, p. 474). A tight, logically integrated model, in other words, is apt to project academic standards onto ritual, and obscure the dynamic, "becoming" aspects of its enactment.

Johnson's point is a cogent one, whether or not the anthropologist intends his meanings to replicate the indigenous sense of a ritual. For whether the anthro- pologist's communication is presented as sociology or epistemology, and whether it presents the natives' understanding of a ritual or some order or scheme presumed to explain or determine that understanding, it deals with the representation of human creativity. The anthropologist may represent the creativity of the ritual as the static artifact of his own creativity; he may attribute that artifact to the native culture itself, as an inherent or determinative "order"; or he may use his creativity to communicate something of the creativity of the ritual. If ritual is understood to be transformative-the production of a social status or a cosmological state-then only the last of these three alternatives does justice to that fact. For otherwise, however incisive or insightful it may be, the production (and the creativity) is that of the anthropologist alone. Jorgen- sen's criticism also strikes to the core of the exchange; when it comes down to secrecy (and the Waina-Sowanda/Yafar and Mountain Ok converge at this point), it scarcely matters whether one refers to "religion," "sociology," or "politics." Secrecy is, perhaps, the politics of meaning. The "sociology" that Gell and Brunton invoke is an epiphenomenon of cultural categorization, a matter of categories in confutation rather than groups in competition.

It would seem, then, that "order" can be misconstrued in as many ways as it can be construed in Melanesian religion. For Melanesian religion, if we are to understand Barth, Jorgensen, and Johnson correctly, is itself the process of construing order, and disorder.

RITUAL AS COMMUNICATION IN MELANESIA 155

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