Ritual and Social Change

My sense of the honour conferred upon me by the invitation to deliver this fifth Malinowski Memorial Lecture is equalled only by my strong sense of unworthiness. But, worthy or unworthy, one can but do one's best, and today I shall try to review some recent trends in a field in which, as a student, I have always found Malinowski's contribution especially stimulating and enlightening. This is the field of ritual behaviour, that, broadly, to which anthropologists refer when they speak of myth, magic and religion. Research in these topics, based largely on the vast amount of excellent fieldwork carried out since Malinowski published his essay on 'Magic, science and religion' in I926 (i926a), has moved far beyond where he left it. But after reviewing some recent work in this field I am left with the suspicion that in at least some respects he understood better than some of his modern critics do what ritual is really about. In spite of all that has been said and written about this side of human behaviour (and I am afraid that I must confess to only the slenderest acquaintance with this great corpus of writings), anthropologists still seem to find some difficulty in formulating a working definition of ritual. Thus it has been, and still is, the subject of several different and seemingly incompatible theoretical approaches. With due humility, then, I set out in this lecture to see if it may be possible to state with more clarity than has sometimes been achieved just what it is that we social anthropologists are studying when we investigate what we sometimes call magicoreligious institutions. I shall ask you to bear with me if I ask once again the age-old question: what, if any, is the essential difference between 'ritual' procedures and so-called 'practical' or 'scientific' ones? And, without claiming that I am saying anything that has not been said, and said many times, before, I shall argue that there is a difference, and that it is a crucial one. I shall try to convince you, first, that when we speak of ritual we are speaking of something which is basically expressive, even dramatic, whereas when we speak of science or scientific activity as such, however 'primitive', we are not. I shall argue that this is in fact an essential part of what we mean by ritual. Second, I shall follow a theme of Professor Raymond Firth's (I964: 238. Cf. i95i, passim) in arguing that magical and religious rites are, in consequence, very much more like the arts, like poetry, painting and sculpture, for example, than they are like science as we tmderstand it in this century. Thus comprehending them is very much more like understanding a work of art, such as a play, than it is like understanding science. Third, I shall argue that the instrumental efficacy of ritual procedures (where, as is generally the case, they are thought to have such efficacy) is thought, when and where it is deeply thought about, to lie at bottom in just this very expressiveness. And I shall, finally, suggest that a fresh look at some of the rituals of social change