ABSTRACT
The cake for the young lady envisaged here, and doubtless for generations of young participants in weddings, meant not just the part it played in the event itself but ‘the promis’d dream’ too.
These are all meanings which are real and important. They are the basics at which historians and anthropologists elucidating unfamiliar cultures always need to work (Charsley 1987a: 101 ff.) Frequently, however, people have the idea that there are or may be in their own and others’ practices further kinds of meaning which a student of the society
has to regard as optional extras. In principle there could be ideas which everybody ‘knows’ and to which everybody subscribes. There are, for instance, meanings in Catholic ritual, in particular the meaning of the bread and wine in the mass, which are taught as a qualification for participation and, as far as this central rite is concerned, constantly reiterated in the ritual text itself. There may also be esoteric meanings which, though ‘known’ only to a few, have a special claim to being ‘real’ since those who possess them control the system. The use of access to such ‘secret’ knowledge as a resource for control occurs only in nooks and crannies in contemporary western societies but is much more familiar to anthropologists of Melanesia and other regions of the world (e.g. Barth 1977:217 ff.; La Fontaine 1977; Keesing 1982:38-9). Popular ritual, however, if it is not part of any organised institution, is bound to be provided much less systematically with extra meanings.
