Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (review)

Abstract

Ritual and Religion in Making of Humanity. ROY A. RAPPAPORT. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; 535 pp. Reviewed by DOUG DALTON Longwood College His book was first accepted for publication in 1982, but Rappaport decided to delay publishing this volume to revise it to his own liking. He finally returned to it after being diagnosed with incurable carcinoma in 1996 and completed it in 1997. The product of over three decades of study, Roy Rappaport's book can be considered his magnum opus and is certainly a tour de force, well exemplifying his exceptional intellectual prowess and energy. Rappaport's work is nothing short of a fully elaborated theory of religion and humanity. It combines an evolutionary biological perspective with ecological, semiotic, and cybernetic communications theory and draws upon, in addition to very many classical and contemporary anthropological and sociological theorists, works of select philosophers and theologians such as Pierce, Vico, Austin, Russell and Whitehead, St. Augustine, James, Otto, and Buber. It is a lengthy, detailed, sustained close argument. Ethnographic examples are taken from his own fieldwork on Maring ritual as well as from other Melanesian and Pacific Island cultures, Australia, Native North America, Ancient Egypt, and JudeoChristian and Islamic traditions, among others. Rappaport's thesis is well outlined in his introductory chapter. Religion, he supposes, came into being with humanity and language, which requires humans to live in symbolic worlds of their own making and in so doing generates both lie and means to ameliorate its socially disruptive effects: religion. He clarifies that his argument is not functional but rather causal, or structural (p. 28). Religion establishes canonical True Word by combining it with irrefutably true, selfreferential-often indexical-performative messages about current state of its participants. Thus social and religious truth is forged in ritual. Chapter Two elaborates on ritual form, which Rappaport claims constitutes holy (total religious phenomenon) by combining sacred (discursive), numinous (non-discursive, affective), occult (efficacious) and divine (pertaining to spirit concepts). Beginning with definition of ritual as the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by (p. 24), Rappaport uses chapter to enumerate and explicate elements of this definition (facets of encoding, formality, invariance, performance). He concludes that ritual is a complex form in which self-referential indexical messages which verily demonstrate current state of their transmitters and invariant canonical truths depend upon one another. In third chapter Rappaport analyzes an extended Mating example of self-referential message transmission. He discovers that complex, continuous, analogical, social and ecological processes are ritually transformed into digital, yes/no signals of critical states, thus removing interpretive ambiguity and reducing private ambivalence and equivocalness of individual participants through digital statements of public acceptance. In following consideration of ritual's canonical content, Rappaport argues that ritual simultaneously creates and communicates states of performers and publicly indicates acceptance of existing liturgical order, yielding convention, obligation, social contract, and morality. Chapter Five deals with how use of objects and substances and unification of form and substance in paradigms of creation merge conventional cultural orders and natural laws. …