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Swazi Royal Ritual1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2012

T. O. Beidelman
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Extract

In his Frazer Lecture of 1952, Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa (1954), Professor Max Gluckman considers certain types of ritual behaviour as institutionalized expressions of rebellion against authority. He maintains that this expression is an important function of such ritual. The following quotations present the gist of his interpretation:

I shall therefore consider the social components of ceremonies, analogous to those which concerned Frazer, among the South-Eastern Bantu.…Here there are…performed, as elsewhere in Africa, national and local ceremonies at the break of the rains, sowing, first fruits, and harvest.…But whatever the ostensible purpose of the ceremonies, a most striking feature of their organization is the way in which they openly express social tensions. Women have to assert license and dominance as against their formal subordination to men, princes have to behave to the kings as if they covet the throne, and subjects openly state their resentment of authority. Hence I call them rituals of rebellion. I shall argue that some ritual rebellions proceed within an established distribution of power, and not about the structure of the system itself. This allows for instituted protest, and in complex ways renews the unity of the system (1954, p. 3).

We are here confronted with a cultural mechanism which challenges study by sociologists, psychologists, and biologists, the analysis in detail of the process by which this acting of conflict achieves a blessing—social unity. Clearly we are dealing with the general problem of catharsis set by Aristotle … the purging of emotion through ‘pity, fear and inspiration’. Here I attempt only to analyze the sociological setting of the process (1954, p. 20).

Résumé

LE RITUEL ROYAL DES SWAZI

Cet article propose une interprétation des rites royaux annuels des Swazi, différente de celle de Gluckman exprimée en termes d'agression et de conflit social. Il soutient que ces cérémonies tendent uniquement à séparer le roi des Swazi des groupes sociaux qui forment sa nation, de manière à le libérer et à le rendre disponible pour assumer la charge et les pouvoirs surnaturels de prêtre-roi de la nation entière, embrassant et transcendant l'ensemble des groupes et des catégories. Aussi, bon nombre des actes rituels Swazi, que Gluckman classe comme agressifs et portés au conflit, sont-ils actuellement considérés comme de simples moyens de parachever une telle séparation. Ces cérémonies exaltent le puissant statut, le statut prééminent, et leur mode d'expression allie des attributs de prééminence aussi communs que la nudité à la combinaison de catégories idéologiques et de qualités morales normalement tenues pour distinctes et opposées. Le roi y acquiert une personnalité ambiguë et quasi monstrueuse en vue de se rendre efficace. dans l'ordre surnaturel. Cette interprétation paraît plus en accord avec l'ensemble des croyances swazi et du symbolisme décrits dans ce même article.

Certaines pensées téléologiques semblent inhérentes à la confiance de Gluckman dans son analyse du rituel en termes de fonctions sociales latentes plutôt qu'en cherchant la clef du rituel dans le symbolisme lui-même. Ces symboles sont efficaces par leur relation avec certains états affectifs de l'être humain—états pré-verbaux, pré-rationnels—et, en dernier lieu, représentent un sujet qui ne pourra être valablement approfondi qu'au moyen d'une recherche interdisciplinaire détaillée réunissant des ethnologues, des linguistes et des psychologues.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , October 1966 , pp. 373 - 405
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1966

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