Genre, Motive, and Metaphor: Conditions for Creativity in Ritual Language

Abstract

Although much anthropological discussion of ritual has focused on symbolic objects and actions, specific concern with the linguistic dimension of ritual can be traced back at least as far as Malinowski's (1935) Coral Gardens and Their Magic. Lienhardt's (1961) work on Dinka religion encouraged this concern by offering, in addition to a chapter on ritual action, a separate chapter on religious language. Since then, a variety of analyses has appeared. These studies can be summarized under the following general headings: specialized religious vocabularies (Fabian 1971, Wheelock 1981, Zaretsky 1972); genres of religious language (Bauman 1974, Fabian 1974, Gossen 1974, McDowell 1983); religious speaking as illocutionary act (Ahern 1979, 1982, Austin 1962, Finnegan 1969, Gardner 1983, Gill 1977, Ray 1973, Tambiah 1968, 1973, 1979, Wheelock 1982); religious language as discourse (Fabian 1979, Jules-Rosette 1978, Samarin 1976); religious language as power or authority (Andelson 1980, Bloch 1974, Fields 1982, McGuire 1983); ecstatic language and glossalalia (Eliade 1964, Goodman 1972, Jennings 1968, May 1956, Motley 1981, Pattison 1968, Samarin 1972). The area defined by these studies lies adjacent to the fields of rhetoric, poetics, and the cross-cultural phenomenology of the sacred. A single hermeneutic issue that links these concerns is whether the property of creativity can be attributed to the language of religious ritual. That is, can the characteristic persuasiveness, the metaphorical vividness, and the evocation of the sacred in ritual language justifiably be said to be creative? Or, on the contrary, is such language primarily the servant of a linguistic and cultural status quo, lacking the creative potential inherent in the language of poetry or even in everyday speech? An attempt to resolve this problem bears directly on our understanding of both the nature of language and the nature of religious experience. If it is to be argued, as does the present article, that ritual language can be creative, then two criteria must be met: (1) It must be demonstrated how that creation is achieved, identifying the conditions under which creativity is possible and the processes through which it works; (2) It must be demonstrated that something in particular is created, whether it be a new meaning, new state of mind, new way of understanding the world,