Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (review)

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, the 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 field-work on Maring ritual as well as from other Melanesian and Pacific Island cultures, Australia, Native North America, Ancient Egypt, and the Judeo-Christian 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 the lie and the means to ameliorate its socially disruptive effects: religion. He clarifies that his argument is not functional but rather "formal causal, or structural" (p. 28). Religion establishes the canonical True Word by combining it with irrefutably true, self-referential-often indexical-performative messages about the current state of its participants. Thus social and religious truth is forged in ritual. Chapter Two elaborates on ritual form, which Rappaport claims constitutes the "holy" (total religious phenomenon) by combining the "sacred" (discursive), "numinous" (non-discursive, affective), "occult" (efficacious) and "divine" (pertaining to spirit concepts). Beginning with the definition of ritual as "the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers" (p. 24), Rappaport uses the chapter to enumerate and explicate the 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 the current state of their transmitters and invariant canonical truths depend upon one another.

In the third chapter Rappaport analyzes an extended Maring 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 the private ambivalence and equivocalness of individual participants through digital statements of public acceptance. In the following consideration of ritual's canonical content, Rappaport argues that ritual simultaneously creates and communicates states of performers and publicly indicates acceptance of the existing liturgical order, yielding convention, obligation, social contract, and morality. Chapter Five deals with how the use of objects and substances and the unification of form and substance in paradigms of creation merge conventional cultural orders and natural laws.

In the following chapter, "Time and Liturgical Order," he argues that ritual "'time out of time' really is out of time" (p. 181) in that it articulates the ever-changing mundane in terms of the never-changing recurrence and repetition of the liturgical order, whether recurrence is time-dependent and calendrical or variable-dependent and critical. Here Rappaport also considers the relation between variations in the length and frequency of rituals and types and complexity of social formations. The following chapter develops this theme in arguing that altered states achieved in ritual bring together in experience eternity as innumerable endless repetition marked by intervals and eternity as invariable absolute changelessness. Chapter Eight, "Simultaneity and Hierarchy," elaborates this argument by showing that ritual experience also brings together, via many sensory channels, multiple disparate significata which are hierarchically arranged from variable and contextually sensitive meanings to invariable unconditional Ultimate Sacred Postulates.

The next two...