Trauma, Tedium and Tautology in the Study of Ritual
Knight, C. (2002). Language and revolutionary consciousness. In A. Wray (ed.), The Transition to Language. Oxford : Oxford University Press.
This ambitious volume is the sequel to an earlier work (Lawson & McCauley 1990) in which the authors 'launched the cognitive science of religion' (McCauley & Lawson 2002, ix). Adopting a linguistics-inspired 'competence' approach and assimilating ritual to the Agent-Action-Patient structure of propositional speech, they make a series of scientific predictions. Where it is the Agent who is 'Special' in the sense of 'closest to God', it is predicted that the Patient will participate just once in a vivid, memorable event. By contrast, where only the Action, Instrument or Patient is special - that is, where God himself is not responsible for what happens - we may expect performances to be impermanent in their effects and correspondingly repeatable. It is predicted, further, that the consequences of a Special Agent ritual will be reversible under certain conditions (as when a non-consummated marriage must be annulled). Reversibility is not predicted in the case of Special Instrument or Special Patient rituals. In the case of Special Agent rituals, finally, it will not be permissible to allow substitutions - only the agency of God can guarantee efficacy. By contrast, it should be allowable to make personally convenient substitutions of things, actions or persons in the case of Special Instrument or Special Patient rituals. To test these predictions, McCauley and Lawson turn to Whitehouse's (1995) work among the Mali Baining of New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea. The local Pomio Kivung is a millennarian cargo cult whose followers devote themselves to placating deified ancestors. Once sufficient ritual purification has been achieved, the gods will arrive in the guise of white-skinned western scientists and industrialists. They will inaugurate 'the Period of Companies' - a period of affluence based on a western-style industrial infrastructure - before ushering in the 'Period of Government', whereupon the faithful will be freed from conflict, suffering, labour, death and reproduction.
When Whitehouse and his wife arrived to do anthropological research, it occurred to a young man named Tanotka that they must be the ancestors in question. When the couple commented innocently that the Cemetery Temple perhaps needed repairs, the alerted villagers immediately built a new temple. Breaking with the Christian-influenced mainstream cargo-cult - with its tedious focus on verbal indoctrination and ritual routine - they decided to celebrate by reviving songs, feasts and masked dances from traditional initiation rites. Confident that the world would now end, Tanotka's splinter-group ceased all labour in the gardens and killed every pig in the village. Following a feast, they constructed a roundhouse in which the sexes were collectively paired off. During the ensuing climactic nights it was expected that the ancestors would arrive within minutes. When this failed to happen, it was clearly because of everyone's half-hearted performance. To avoid upsetting the ancestors yet again, the faithful were prevented from stepping outdoors - even to relieve themselves. Following months of squalor and hunger as supplies ran low, a government health inspector finally arrived. He ordered demolition of the stinking roundhouse and commanded everyone to return to work. By now disillusioned, the cult members obeyed - and resumed participation in the mainstream religion they had earlier left.