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Ritual Drama and Culture Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

N. Ross Crumrine
N. Ross Crumrine
Affiliation:
University of Victoria, B.C.
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Extract

In this paper we wish to postulate and examine kinds of relationships between ritual dramas, ceremonials, and culture change. A number of individual studies concerned with this question deserve to be seen as focusing upon a unitary phenomenon. By this we have in mind ceremonies or ritual dramas which symbolically mediate structural conflicts or oppositions either within a society or between societies. Max Gluckman (1954) and Hilda Kuper (1947, 1964) among others have pointed out that rituals of rebellion symbolically alleviate conflicts at the level of the social structure of a single society, for example the Swazi of South Africa. In doing so the ritual intensifies identification with the traditional social structure in spite of the conflicts within this structure. C. Geertz (1957) and James L. Peacock (1967, 1968a, b) point out that the traditional Javanese slametan ceremony tends to increase neighborhood, or kampung, social integration. Geertz shows that with urbanization and modernization the neighborhood becomes socially and economically differentiated and that in this situation slametans tend to force interaction between individuals who no longer share specific cultural beliefs and symbols and thus increase rather than reduce hostility and anxiety. Peacock extends this argument to ludruck, an urban proletarian drama. In ludruck, Peacock argues, the individual is led to identify not with his kampung (neighborhood) nor with a traditional village set of values but rather with the urbanite and his urban set of values. Turning to Latin America we may cite the study of Maya Passion Plays by June Nash (1968).

Type
Ritual and Culture
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , October 1970 , pp. 361 - 372
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1970

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References

REFERENCES

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