ANTH245 2007-09-10

Go back to main page

ANTH 245: Lecture for SEPT 10 2007

SESSION 1: Rappaport on the Ritual Cycle of the Tsembaga and What it Does

Business

1. Readings to be posted on Blackboard
2. Blogging can take place after the class

Review of Bateson

The Social Context

1. Relationships exist at a "wider" level
2. The social context of a message is part of the code
   • e.g. Who is saying this? Can they be trusted?
3. Confers validity to the message

"Purposive Mind" and "Greater Mind"

1. The unconscious mind is the location of "codes"
   • Purposive Mind perceives messages
2. The unconscious mind connects the "purposive mind" to the Greater Mind
   • The purposeive mind normally perceives "arcs" within wider circuits

Communication and Schismogenesis

1. Complementary vs Symmetrical interaction
2. The difference is in the code
   1. Complementary entails mutual understanding
   2. Put another way, synchronized codes with a shared social map

Overview of Cybernetic Theory

Feedback and Control

• Communication dyads are often control dyads
• Classic example is the feedback loop
• Positive and negative feedback
• Examples of negative feedback
  • Steam engine, "Watt's Governor" (See Bateson's diagram)
  • Thermostat
  • Negative feedback with glucose
• Examples of positive feedback
  • Obesity and insulin: carbs -> insulin -> cravings (caused by raised levels of insulin) -> more carbs ... Obesity and diabetes as by-product.
  • Arms race (in theory)

Implications

1. All communication involves control
   1. Decoding
   2. Learning
   3. Evolution
2. Blurred distinction between between meaning and causality
3. The code is in the message
   • This is how control happens -- message program recievers, and influence their behavior
4. Complex, layered systems are built out of feedback loops

Rappaport

Introduction

• Review of "Ritual Regulation of Environmental Relations among a New Guinea People" (1967)
• Implicitly, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (1968)

Background: the Anthropology of Religion

1. Functionalism -- explaining irrationality
   • Given that the beliefs are not true, and the the actions are not practical, what is going on?
   • Marxist, Freudian, Nietzschian, etc. responses
   • Weber and "verstehen"
   • Durkheim and the superorganic
2. Rappaport's "cultural materialism"
   • Religion is both practical and rational, even though intellectually, from the point of view of "cognitive models" alone, it is non-sensical
   • Ecology is the broadest horizon of interpretation (Rappaport's religion, by his own admission)
3. Definition of religious ritual: " ... the prescribed performance of conventionalized acts manifestly directed toward the involvement of nonempirical or supernatural agencies in the affairs of the actors. ... part of the behavioral repertoire employed by an aggregate of organisms in adjusting to its environment." (p. 18)

The Tsembaga of New Guinea

1. Geographic context
   1. New Guinea
   2. Simbai and Jimi Valleys
   3. Heavily forested area
   4. Occupy a space of 3.2 sq mi
   5. 2000 ft -- 7,200 ft above sea level
2. Social and cultural facts
   1. Maring speaking
   2. 1 of 20 groups in the area
   3. ~200 in 1963
   4. unmissionized
   5. 5 patrilineal clans
   6. acephalic
3. Subsistence
   1. "bush-fallowing horticulturalists"
      • A type of subsistence agriculture in which land is cultivated for a period of time and then left uncultivated for several years so that its fertility will be restored.
   2. Energy ratios
   3. Nutrition
   4. Carrying capacity
   5. Pigs

When there are too many pigs

1. Pigs = humans in taro consumption
2. People must work to support pigs when their numbers grow to a certain level
3. Produces sanitation problems as well
4. Produces conflicts among neighbors

Pigs, stress and sacrifice

1. Pigs are only killed in ritual contexts, i.e. as sacrifices
2. Ritual contexts are triggered by stress
3. We know that medically, protein helps fight stress
4. Consumers of pigs are the most stressed
5. Stress, however, is not part of the cognitive model
   • The cognitive model focuses on sacrifice and the ancestors

The ritual cycle

1. Warfare
   • May last several weeks
   • Certain taboos observed
2. Planting of the rumbim
   • Declaration of truce
   • Still time of "bamp ku" (fighting stones)
   • Begins with wholesale slaughter of pigs (all but young)
   • Some taboos lifted; others added
   • Period of debt to allies
   • Pigs and poeple are complementary
   • May last 5-10 years
3. The kaiko
   • Unplanting of the rumbim
   • Triggered when pigs and people become symmetrical and competitive
     • pigs/wives > 5
   • Planting of territory stakes
   • Lasts 1 year
4. Concluding Sacrifice
   • The kaiko concludes with "major pig sacrifices"

• Simple image of the cycle
• Detailed image, from Rappaport's book
• [Create a version of the diagram as a cybernetic system, complete with homeostat and transducer]

Rappaport's Rules

1. If one of a pair of antagonistic groups is able to uproot its rumbim before its opponents can plant their rumbim, [then] it may occupy the latter's territory
2. A man becomes a member of a territorial group by participating with it in the planting of rumbuim [may want to phrase as an if/then]
3. If pair of antagonistic groups proceeds through two ritual cycles without resumption of hostilities, [then] their enmity may be terminated

Some observed functions of the Kaiko

1. Epideictic display, e.g. if dancing = fighting, then the ritual provides all with accurate numbers of who will fight
2. Trade
3. Earlier functions described:
   1. Redistribution of population
   2. Maintenance of biota
   3. Redistribution of surplus
   4. Limitation of fighting

Conclusions

1. Ritual regulates two subsystems
   • The Local Subsystem (subsistence, biota)
   • The Regional Subsystem (social relations with other groups)
2. Ritual acts both transducer and homeostat
   • Transducer: converting messages
   • Homeostat: responding to messages
3. Ritual governs -- discuss root of cybernetics

SESSION 2

Introduction

• Discussion of "Ritual, Sanctity, and Cybernetics" (1971)
• This article focuses how ritual communicates

Regulation and values

1. Regulation
2. Control
3. Goal ranges
4. Adaptation

Review of thesis

1. Ritual articulates two subsystems
2. Ritual is both homeostat and transducer
3. Ritual sends "metamessages"

Transduction

1. See Wikipedia
2. Energy always carries or imparts information
   1. E.g. temperature varies, wind has direction, footprints have a shape and depth, etc.
3. A Transducer is sensitive to such information and converts it into a signal
4. Examples:
   1. Record player needle --> bumps into electrical impulses
   2. Temperature sensor --> heat into pressure into mercury rising
   3. Governor (also a corrector) --> velocity into rotation into centrifugal force
5. Examples of ritual transduction:
   1. Transduction of local system (pigs) into regional system (warfare)
   2. Transduction of individual biology (puberty) into social classification (initiation)

Ritual defined (again)

1. Conventional, Regular, Emotional
2. "conventional acts of display through which one or more participants transmit information converning their physiological, psychological, or sociological states either to themselves or to one or more other participants"
   • Compare to Bateson's view of art

Content and occurrence

1. The "content" of ritual = e.g. ritual as "public counting devices"
2. The "occurrence" of ritual = e.g. that the ritual occurs at all
   1. Conveys binary information
   2. Converts continuous and complex information about states into a simple message
   3. Fool-proof

Regulator functions related to Content and Occurrence

1. Regulation: (1) detect, (2) compare, and (3) correct [e.g. sense, respond, adapt ...]

SESSION 3

Introduction

• Discussion of latter sections of "Ritual, Sanctity and Cybernetics" (1971) and "The Sacred in Human Evolution" (1971).
• The argument moves from how to why -- Why Ritual? Why Religion?

Statement of the Problem

1. On the one hand, meaning does not match "purpose" in ritual
   1. Meaning = cognitive models = ancestor worship
   2. Purpose = operational models = cultural materialism
      • Note that operational models = our models
2. On the other hand, it seems obvious that beliefs validate functions
   • So, how does this work?

Signs, symbols and lies

1. The problem: rituals messages and effects are distinct
2. This gap is produced by symbolic communication

Back to Bateson

1. Symmetry and complementarity in pig/human relations
2. Control hierarchies are levels of "Greater Mind"
3. The sacred as a context of trust
4. Purposive mind and cognitive models