The British Functionalists such as Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown
took from Durkheim’s theory the inference that a people’s religion will
both ‘reflect’ the structure of their social system and function to maintain that system in its present state. Variations between myths told by
neighbouring peoples would be expected to reflect differences between
their social systems. Centralised political systems will be associated
with beliefs in a high God, who has lesser beings to mediate between
himself and ordinary people. Uncentralised political systems will be
associated with religions in which there are a number of deities of equal
status. In particular, lineage-based societies such as the Nuer and
Tallensi will be associated with ancestor cults.
In continental Europe, anthropologists more closely linked with
Durkheim took up the proposition that a culture’s belief system had an
internal logic which gave meaning to ritual actions. Like the British
school, they were reacting against earlier writers who had interpreted
customs as survivals from what were supposed to be earlier stages in
human social evolution. The British argued that the presence of each
custom should be explained in terms of its contemporary effect on the
social system. Writers such as Hertz (1960 [1909]) and van Gennep
(1960 [1905] ) argued that the meaning of each custom had to be
deduced from its place in a cognitive structure. In his essay ‘The Preeminence of the Right Hand’ (originally published in 1909, and
reprinted in Hertz 1960) Hertz documented a general tendency among
many cultures to associate the right hand with strength and order, the
left with chaos and weakness. He concluded that thestructural opposition between right and left stood for a more general opposition
between right and wrong. He regarded this as one case of a general
tendency for ‘primitive man’ to think in terms of dual oppositions.
What is, in biological terms, a statistical tendencyfor more people to be
right- rather than left-handed is transformed by culture into an
absolute opposition filled with meaning. ‘The vague disposition to
right-handedness, which is spread throughout the human species,’ he
wrote, ‘would not be enough to bring about the absolute preponderance of the right hand were this not reinforced and fixed by influences
extraneous to the organism’ (Hertz 1960:91).
In The Rites of Passage (originally published in 1905), van Gennep
argued for the widespread occurrence of three-part, rather than binary
cultural structures. He contended that there is a general tendency
among human societies to conceive of a change in status on the model
of a journey from one town or country to another or, as he put it, a
‘territorial passage’ (van Gennep 1960: 18). Territorial passage had
three aspects:separation from the place of origin, transition and incorporation into the destination. Just as the opposition between right and
left hands could stand for more general, moral oppositions, so territorial passage could stand for any change of status in society.‘Marriage
by capture’, where the groom and his brothers ride to the bride’s house,
snatch her and carry her back to the wedding is not a survival from
some fancied early epoch in human evolution when cave men clubbed
women and dragged them home, but a symbolic enactment of the
separation of the bride from her status as an unmarried girl in her parents’house,and her incorporation into the groom’s household. Rituals
of birth, entry into adulthood and death may all have the same structure. As van Gennep emphasised,‘The primary purpose of this book is
precisely to react against the procedure which consists of extracting
various rites from a set of ceremonies and considering them in isolation,
thus removing them from a context which gives them meaning and
reveals their position in a dynamic whole’ (van Gennep 1960: 89).
Although van Gennep’s case of territorial passage is not the only image
round which passage rites are constructed, many others have thesame
tripartite structure, as set out in Table 3.4.
| 70 | I N T R O D U C T I O N T O T H E O R Y I N A N T H R O P O L O G Y | |
| Table 3.4 Tripartite structures in the symbolism of rites of passage | ||
| Separation | Transition | Incorporation |
| (a) | leave home |
| (b) eaten by monster | |
| (c) | immoral order |
travel through wasteland
lie in belly
destroyed by flood
arrive at destination
reborn
replaced by new order