Memory, reflexivity and belief. Reflections on the ritual use of language

Abstract

Anthropologists have objected in various ways to this conception, still well alive among historians and other social scientists. Shamanistic recitations, as any other ritual performance, cannot be seen as entirely dependent on the arbitrary will of an individual because they are oriented by a special context of interaction and communication, which is seen as radically different from ordinary social life. Many anthropologists have remarked that rituals have a paradoxical relationship to belief. On one side, as sequences of symbolic actions, rites have been often defined as attempts to generate a mental state of belief in a fictive, or supernatural dimension of reality. Ritual action may not only aim to confirm the existence of supernatural beings. In the anthropological study of ritual symbolism, great attention has been devoted to the various ways in which language, as it is used in ritual performances, transforms the usual representation of the world, and constructs its own truth-universe.