Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society

Preface

Dramas, passages, action, processes—these are the key words in the tides of the essays in this book. Alongside them are such terms as metaphors and paradigms. The book attempts in fact to probe and describe the ways in which social actions of various kinds acquire form through the metaphors and paradigms in their actors’ heads (put there by explicit teaching and implicit generalization from social experience), and, in certain intensive circumstances, generate unprecedented forms that bequeath history new metaphors and paradigms. In other words, I do not see social dynamics as a set of performances produced by a program, as certain of my colleagues, notably the New Anthropologists, believe to be the case. Living action, for the human species, can never be the logical consequence of any grand design. This is not because of the inveterate tendency of man’s free will to resist manifest good and manifest reasonableness, as Dostoevsky, Berdyaev, Shestov, and other alienated Russians would have it, but because of the processual structure of social action itself. Van Gennep made a striking discovery when he demonstrated, in his comparative work on rites of passage, that human culture had become cognizant of a tripartite movement in space-time. His focus was restricted to ritual, but his paradigm covers many extraritual processes. He insisted that in all ritualized movement there was at least a moment when those being moved in accordance with a cultural script were liberated from normative demands, when they were, indeed, betwixt and between successive lodgments in jural political systems. In this gap between ordered worlds almost anything may happen.

In this interim of liminality, the possibility exists of standing aside not only from one’s own social position but from all social positions and of formulating a potentially unlimited series of alternative social arrangements. That this danger is recognized in all tolerably orderly societies is made evident by the proliferation of taboos that hedge in and constrain those on whom the normative structure loses its grip during such potent transitions as extended initiation rites in tribal societies and by legislation against those who in industrial societies utilize such liminoid genres as literature, the film, and the higher journalism to subvert the axioms and standards of the ancien régime—both in general and in particular cases.

Without liminality, program might indeed determine performance. But, given liminality, prestigious programs can be undermined and multiple alternative programs may be generated. The result of confrontations between monolithic, power-supported programs and their many subversive alternatives is a sociocultural field in which many options are provided, not only between programmatic gestalten but also between the parts of different programs. As my colleague Harold Rosenberg, the art critic, has often argued, the culture of any society at any moment is more like the debris, or fall-out, of past ideological systems, than it is itself a system, a coherent whole. Coherent wholes may exist (but these tend to be lodged in individual heads, sometimes in those of obsessionals or paranoiacs), but human social groups tend to find their openness to the future in the variety of their metaphors for what may be the good life and in the contest of their paradigms. If there is order, it is seldom preordained (though transiently bayonets may underpin some political schema); it is achieved—the result of conflicting or concurring wills and intelligences, each relying on some convincing paradigm.

When one surveys large spans of social processes, one sees an almost endless variety of limited and provisional outcomes, Some seem to fall on the programmatic side of the scale, others eschew precise structural articulation. But the besetting quality of human society, seen processually, is the capacity of individuals to stand at times aside from the models, patterns, and paradigms for behavior and thinking, which as children they are conditioned into accepting, and, in rare cases, to innovate new patterns themselves or to assent to innovation. There is nothing mysterious about these capacities if we are to accept the testimony of evolutionary biology. Evolving species are adaptive and labile; they escape the constraints of that form of genetic programming which dooms a species to extinction under conditions of radical environmental change. In the evolution of man’s symbolic cultural action, we must seek those processes which correspond to openendedness in biological evolution. I think we have found them in those liminal, or liminoid (postindustrial-revolution), forms of symbolic action, those genres of free-time activity, in which all previous standards and models are subjected to criticism, and fresh new ways of describing and interpreting sociocultural experience are formulated. The first of these forms are expressed in philosophy and science, the second in art and religion.

This book is concerned both with the strength and vitality of certain root paradigms, such as the acceptance of martyrdom for the sake of an altruistic cause—as in the somewhat contrasting cases of Becket and Hidalgo—and with the social dramas where conflicting groups and personages attempt to assert their own and deplete their opponents’ paradigms—as in the confrontations between Henry II and Becket and between Hidalgo and his former friends, who for various reasons supported Spanish hegemony over Mexico. I have also considered the processes through which religious paradigms are continually reinvested with Vitality, such as pilgrimages, which commit individuals unreservedly to the values of a particular faith in order to make not merely acceptable but glowing the hardships and unforeseen disasters of long journeys across several national frontiers. Religious paradigms are also maintained by the periodic emergence of counterparadigms which under certain conditions become reabsorbed in the initial and central paradigm. The essay Metaphors of Antistructure in Religious Culture exemplifies this process in the context of Indian culture. I believe that it has a still wider application and has something to say about developmental cycles in European and Chinese religion. Yesterday’s liminal becomes today’s stabilized, today’s peripheral becomes tomorrow’s centered. I am not here advocating a cyclical repetitive view of the human historical process. Rather I am suggesting that the cyclical repetitive view is itself only one among a number of possible processual alternatives. At the other extreme we may find history regarded as a succession of unique, unrepeated phases in which all forward movement is the result of inspirations owing nothing to the past. Between these poles many degrees of mutual accommodation are possible. I would suggest that what have been regarded as the serious genres of symbolic action—ritual, myth, tragedy, and comedy (at their birth)—are deeply implicated in the cyclical repetitive views of social process, while those genres which have flourished since the Industrial Revolution (the modern arts and sciences), though less serious in the eyes of the commonality (pure research, entertainment, interests of the elite), have had greater potential for changing the ways men relate to one another and the content of their relationships. Their influence has been more insidious. Because they are outside the arenas of direct industrial production, because they constitute the liminoid analogues of liminal processes and phenomena in tribal and early agrarian societies, their very outsiderhood disengages them from direct functional action on the minds and behavior of a society’s members. To be either their agents or their audience is an optional activity—the absence of obligation or constraint from external norms imparts to them a pleasurable quality which enables them all the more readily to be absorbed by individual consciousnesses. Pleasure thus becomes a serious matter in the context of innovative change. In this book I have not taken up this point, but my concern with complex societies in change (twelfth-century England, nineteenth-century Mexico, medieval India, medieval and modem Europe and Asia as settings for pilgrimage processes) points toward this formulation.

In the present context, fields are the abstract cultural domains where paradigms are formulated, established, and come into conflict. Such paradigms consist of sets of rules from which many kinds of sequences of social action may be generated but which further specify what sequences must be excluded. Paradigm conflict arises over exclusion rules. Arenas are the concrete settings in which paradigms become transformed into metaphors and symbols with reference to which political power is mobilized and in which there is a trial of strength between influential paradigmbearers. Social dramas represent the phased process of their contestation. These abstract formulations underlie the essays that make up the book. I have ranged widely through geography and history, over India, Africa, Europe, China, and Meso-America, from ancient society through the medieval period to modern revolutionary times. I know that I have trespassed beyond the limits of my disciplinary competence on several occasions. My excuse is that I regard mankind as one in essence though manifold in expression, creative and not merely adaptive in his manifoldness. Any serious study of man must follow him wherever he goes and take into serious account what Florian Znaniecki called the humanistic coefficient, whereby sociocultural systems depend not only for their meaning but also for their existence upon the participation of conscious human agents and upon men’s relations with one another. It is this factor of consciousness which should lead anthropologists into extended study of complex literate cultures where the most articulate conscious voices of values are the liminoid poets, philosophers, dramatists, novelists, painters, and the like.

This book is programmatic perforce because it strays beyond disciplinary frontiers. Its main imperfections derive from such incursive nomadism. But I would plead with my colleagues to acquire the humanistic skills that would enable them to live more comfortably in those territories where the masters of human thought and art have long been dwelling. This must be done if a unified science of man, an authentic anthropology, is ever to become possible. I am an advocate not of abandoning the methods of behavioral science but of applying them to the behavior of an innovative, liminal creature, to a species whose individual members have included Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, as well as Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.

Acknowledgments

Four of these essays have been published previously. The author is grateful to John Wiley & Son (Metaphors of Antistructure in Religious Culture), first written for Allan Eister, ed., Changing Perspectives in the Scientific Study of Religion, 1974; to Worship 46 (August-September 1972):390–412; 46 (October 1972):482–494 (Passages, Margins, and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas); to History of Religions 12, no. 3 (1973): 191–230 (The Study of Pilgrimages as Social Processes) by permission of the University of Chicago Press, Copyright © 1973 by the University of Chicago; and to Social Science Information 7, no. 6 (1968):55–61 (The Word of the Dogon).

The opportunity to write The Study of Pilgrimages as Social Processes was afforded me by the Lichstern Fund of the Department of Anthropology and by a grant from the Division of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. I am most grateful to both these sources of assistance.

My thanks are due to Father Jorge Serrano-Moreno, S.J., who patiently acted as my research assistant in the collection of Mexican data. His research was financed by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, to whose generous support we are both indebted.

I am particularly thankful to have had the constant advice and stimulus of my colleagues and students of the Committee on Social Thought and of the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago. I would also like to thank Jerald Brown, who, when he was a graduate student at Cornell University, gave me much valuable information about the then incipient counterculture. The staff of Cornell University Press have contributed their skills to the making of this book, and, indeed, of this whole series. My thanks are due to them. Finally, I would like once more to acknowledge my debt to my wife, Edie, for her incomparable help with this book as with all my other publications.

V.T.

CHAPTER 1

Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors

¹

In this chapter I shall trace some of the influences that led to the formulation of concepts I developed in the course of my anthropological field work and to consider how they may be used in the analysis of ritual symbols. In moving from experience of social life to conceptualization and intellectual history, I follow the path of anthropologists almost everywhere. Although we take theories into the field with us, these become relevant only if and when they illuminate social reality. Moreover, we tend to find very frequently that it is not a theorist’s whole system which so illuminates, but his scattered ideas, his flashes of insight taken out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. Such ideas have a virtue of their own and may generate new hypotheses. They even show how scattered facts may be systematically connected! Randomly distributed through some monstrous logical system, they resemble nourishing raisins in a cellular mass of inedible dough. The intuitions, not the tissue of logic connecting them, are what tend to survive in the field experience. I will try later to locate the sources of some insights that helped me to make sense of my own field data.

The concepts I would like to mention are: social drama, the processual view of society, social anti-structure, multivocality, and polarization of ritual symbols. I mention these in the order of their formulation. All are pervaded by the idea that human social life is the producer and product of time, which becomes its measure—an ancient idea that has had resonances in the very different work of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Henri Bergson. Following Znaniecki, the renowned Polish sociologist, I had already come, before doing field work, to insist on the dynamic quality of social relations and to regard Comte’s distinction between social statics and social dynamics—later to be elaborated by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and other positivists—as essentially misleading. The social world is a world in becoming, not a world in being (except insofar as being is a description of the static, atemporal models men have in their heads), and for this reason studies of social structure as such are irrelevant. They are erroneous in basic premise because there is no such thing as static action. That is why I am a little chary of the terms community or society, too, though I do use them, for they are often thought of as static concepts. Such a view violates the actual flux and changefulness of the human social scene. Here I would look, for example, to Bergson rather than, say, to Descartes, for philosophical guidance.

However, I am alive to the virtues of Robert A. Nisbet’s warning in Social Change and History (1969: 3–4) about the use of becoming and similar notions, such as growth and development, which rest fundamentally on organic metaphors. Nisbet has drawn our attention to a whole metaphorical family of sociological and sociophilosophical terms such as genesis, growth, unfolding, development, on the one hand, and death, decadence, degeneration, pathology, sickness, and so on, which take off originally from the Greek idea of physis. This term literally means growth, from ϕύ-ειτ, to produce, Indo-European root BHU. It is the key concept of Greek science, ϕνσική meant natural science, as in physiology, physiognomy, and so on. This family also derives from the Roman and Latinized European basic concept of nature, the Latin translation or rather mistranslation of physis. Nature is from natus meaning born, with overtones of innate, inherent, immanent, from the Indo-European root GAN. The nature family is cognate with the gen family, generate, genital, general, gender, genus, generic, and with the Germanic kind, kin, kindred. All these terms have immediate and unchallengeable reference to the organic world, to the life-cycles of plants and organisms (pp. 3–4), where they are literal and empirical in meaning. But "applied to social and cultural phenomena these words are not literal. They are metaphoric" (p. 4, my italics). Hence they may be misleading; even though they draw our attention to some important properties of social existence, they may and do block our perception of others. The metaphor of social and cultural systems as machines, popular since Descartes, is just as misleading.

I am not opposed to metaphor here. Rather, I am saying that one must pick one’s root metaphors carefully, for appropriateness and potential fruitfulness. Not only Nisbet but Max Black, the Cornell philosopher, and others have pointed out how perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with algebra; and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have been any algebra (Black, 1962:242). And, as Nisbet says:

Metaphor is, at its simplest, a way of proceeding from the known to the unknown. [This corresponds, curiously, with the Ndembu definition of a symbol in ritual.] It is a way of cognition in which the identifying qualities of one thing are transferred in an instanstaneous, almost unconscious, flash of insight to some other thing that is, by remoteness or complexity, unknown to us. The test of essential metaphor, Philip Wheelwright has written, is not any rule of grammatical form, but rather the quality of semantic transformation that is brought about [1969:4].

Metaphor is, in fact, metamorphic, transformative. Metaphor is our means of effecting instantaneous fusion of two separated realms of experience into one illuminating, iconic, encapsulating image (p. 4). It is likely that scientists and artists both think primordially in such images; metaphor may be the form of what M. Polanyi calls tacit knowledge.

The idea of society as being like a big animal or a big machine, as James Peacock has pithily put the matter (1969: 173), would be what Stephen C. Pepper has called a root metaphor (1942:38–39). This is how he explains the term:

The method in principle seems to be this: A man desiring to understand the world looks about for a clue to its comprehension. He pitches upon some area of common-sense fact and tries to see if he cannot understand other areas in terms of this one. The original area then becomes his basic analogy or root metaphor. He describes as best he can the characteristics of this area, or if you will, discriminates its structure. A list of its structural characteristics becomes his basic concepts of explanation and description. [E.g., the gen-words, the kin words, the nature words.] We call them a set of categories [a possibly exhaustive set of classes among which all things might be distributed]. . . . In terms of these categories he proceeds to study all other areas of fact whether uncriticized or previously criticized. He undertakes to interpret all facts in terms of these categories. As a result of the impact of these other facts upon his categories, he may qualify and readjust the categories so that a set of categories commonly changes and develops. Since the basic analogy or root metaphor normally (and probably at least in part necessarily) arises out of common sense [which is the normal understanding or general feeling of mankind, but for anthropologists this operates in a specific culture], a great deal of development and refinement of a set of categories is required if they are to prove adequate for a hypothesis of unlimited scope. Some root metaphors prove more fertile than others, have greater power of expansion and adjustment. These survive in comparison with the others and generate the relatively adequate world theories [1942:91–92].

Black prefers the term conceptual archetype to root metaphor, and defines it as a "systematic repertoire of ideas by means of which a given thinker describes, by analogical extension, some domain to which those ideas do not immediately and literally apply" (1962:241). He suggests that if we want a detailed account of a particular archetype, we require a list of key words and expressions, with statements of their interconnections and their paradigmatic meanings in the field from which they were originally drawn. This should then be supplemented by analysis of the ways in which the original meanings become extended in their analogical use.

The illustration Black offers of the influence of an archetype on a theorist’s work is of exceptional interest to me, for this very case had a profound effect on my own early attempts to characterize a social field. Black examines the writings of the psychologist Kurt Lewin whose field theory has been fruitful in generating hypotheses and stimulating empirical research. Black finds it ironical that Lewin

formally disclaims any intention of using models. We have tried, he says, to avoid developing elaborate models; instead we have tried to represent the dynamic relations between the psychological facts by mathematical constructs at a sufficient level of generality. Well [Black goes on], there may be no specific models envisaged; yet any reader of Lewin’s papers must be impressed by the degree to which he employs a vocabulary indigenous to physical theory. We repeatedly encounter such words as field, vector, phase-space, tension, force, valence, boundary, fluidity—visible symptoms of a massive archetype awaiting to be reconstructed by a sufficiently patient critic" [p. 241].

Black is not upset about all this on the ground of general principles of sound method. He feels that if an archetype, confused though it may be in details, is sufficiently rich in implicative power it may become a useful speculative instrument. If the archetype is sufficiently fruitful, logicians and mathematicians will eventually reduce the harvest to order. There will always be competent technicians who, in Lewin’s words, can be trusted to build the highways ‘over which the streamlined vehicles of a highly mechanized logic, fast and efficient, can reach every important point on fixed tracks’ (p. 242). There, of course, we have another uninhibited flood of metaphors.

Nisbet, too, as well as Black and Pepper, holds that complex philosophical systems can proceed from metaphorical premises. For example, Freudianism, he says, would have little substance left once stripped of its metaphors (p. 5)—Oedipus complex, topographical and economic models, defense mechanisms, Eros and Thanatos, and so on. Marxism, too, sees social orders as forming embryonically in the wombs of preceding orders, with each transition akin to birth, and requiring the assistance of the midwife, force.

Both Black and Nisbet admit the tenacity as well as the potency of metaphors. Nisbet argues that what we usually call revolutions in thought are

quite often no more than the mutational replacement, at certain critical points in history, of one foundation-metaphor by another in man’s contemplation of universe, society, and self. Metaphoric likening of the universe to an organism in its structure will yield one set of derivations; derivations which become propositions in complex systems of philosophy. But when, as happened in the 17th Century, the universe is likened instead to a machine, not merely physical science but whole areas of moral philosophy and human psychology are affected [p. 6].

I believe it would be an interesting exercise to study the key words and expressions of major conceptual archetypes or foundation metaphors, both in the periods during which they first appeared in their full social and cultural settings and in their subsequent expansion and modification in changing fields of social relations. I would expect these to appear in the work of exceptionally liminal thinkers—poets, writers, religious prophets, the unacknowledged legislators of mankind—just before outstanding limina of history, major crises of societal change, since such shamanistic figures are possessed by spirits of change before changes become visible in public arenas. The first formulations will be in multivocal symbols and metaphors—each susceptible of many meanings, but with the core meanings linked analogically to the basic human problems of the epoch which may be pictured in biological, or mechanistic, or some other terms—these multivocals will yield to the action of the thought technicians who clear intellectual jungles, and organized systems of univocal concepts and signs will replace them. The change will begin, prophetically, with metaphor, and end, instrumentally, with algebra. The danger is, of course, that the more persuasive the root metaphor or archetype, the more chance it has of becoming a self-certifying myth, sealed off from empirical disproof. It remains as a fascinating metaphysics. Here, root metaphor is opposed to what Thomas Kuhn has called scientific paradigm, which stimulates and legitimates empirical research, of which it is indeed the product as well as the producer. For Kuhn, paradigms are accepted examples of actual scientific practice—which includes law, theory, application and instrumentation together—which provide models from which spring coherent traditions of scientific research (1962:10)—Copernican astronomy, Aristotelian or Newtonian dynamics, wave optics, and others. My own view of the structure of metaphor is similar to I. A. Richards’ interaction view; that is, in metaphor "we have two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction" (1936:93). This view emphasizes the dynamics inherent in the metaphor, rather than limply comparing the two thoughts in it, or regarding one as substituting for the other. The two thoughts are active together, they engender thought in their coactivity.

Black develops the interaction view into a set of claims:

1. A metaphorical statement has two distinct subjects—a principal subject and a subsidiary one. Thus if one says—as Chamfort does in an example cited by Max Black—that the poor are the negroes of Europe, the poor is the principal subject and the negroes the subsidiary one.

2. These subjects are best regarded as systems of things, rather than things as elements. Thus, both poor and negroes in this metaphorical relation are themselves multivocal symbols, whole semantic systems, which bring into relation a number of ideas, images, sentiments, values, and stereotypes. Components of one system enter into dynamic relations with components of the other.

3. The metaphor works by applying to the principal subject a system of associated implications characteristic of the subsidiary subject. In the metaphor cited, for instance, the poor of Europe could be regarded not only as an oppressed class, but also as sharing in the inherited and indelible qualities of natural poverty attributed to black Americans by white racists. The whole metaphor is thereby charged with irony and provokes a rethinking of the roles both of the (European) poor and the (American) blacks.

4. These implications usually consist of commonplaces about the subsidiary subject, but may, in suitable cases, consist of deviant implications established ad hoc by the author. You need have only proverbial knowledge, as it were, to have your metaphor understood, not technical or special knowledge. A scientific model is rather a different kind of metaphor. Here the maker must have prior control of a well-knit theory, says Black, if he is to do more than hang an attractive picture on an algebraic formula. Systematic complexity of the source of the model and capacity for analogical development are of the essence (1962:239).

5. The metaphor selects, emphasizes, suppresses, and organizes features of the principal subject by implying statements about it that normally apply to the subsidiary subject.

I have mentioned all this merely to point out that there are certain dangers inherent in regarding the social world as a world in becoming, if by invoking the idea becoming one is unconsciously influenced by the ancient metaphor of organic growth and decay. Becoming suggests genetic continuity, telic growth, cumulative development, progress, etc. But many social events do not have this directional character. Here the metaphor may well select, emphasize, suppress, or organize features of social relations in accordance with plant or animal growth processes, and in so doing, mislead us about the nature of the human social world, sui generis. There is nothing wrong with metaphors or, mutatis mutandis, with models, provided that one is aware of the perils lurking behind their misuse. If one regards them, however, as a species of liminal monster, such as I described in The Forest of Symbols (1967), whose combination of familiar and unfamiliar features or unfamiliar combination of familiar features provokes us into thought, provides us with new perspectives, one can be excited by them; the implications, suggestions, and supporting values entwined with their literal use enable us to see a new subject matter in a new way.

The becoming metaphor fits fairly well, despite the apparent quarrel between functionalists and cultural evolutionists, with the structural-functionalist orthodoxy or paradigm, that gave rise to what Kuhn would have called the normal science of British social anthropology when I went into the field. For functionalism, as Nisbet has argued, following Wilbert Moore, from Durkheim through Radcliffe-Brown to Talcott Parsons, tried to present a unified theory of order and change based on a biological metaphor—it tries to draw the motivational mechanisms of change from the same conditions from which are drawn the concepts of social order. In other words,