No topic in cultural anthropology bears more significantly on the relation between the anthropologist's understanding or explanation of a culture, and its own internal relations, than ritual does. Ritual, then, relates-and sometimes confounds-two different sorts of relativity: that of the anthropological analyst and the subject culture, and that of significant parts or categories of the subject culture. The study of ritual amounts to a sort of double relation. It is a communication between the anthropologist and his readership of what he has learned, through fieldwork and analysis, regarding the ritual and its signifi cance. And on another level it is a communication involving its performers and perhaps significant others-persons, groups, spirits, deities,
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R Wagner (1984) studied this question.