ABSTRACT
This essay challenges a common anthropological assumption that we can demarcate a domain of ‘the symbolic’, that this domain is self-evident, located ‘out there’, its paradigm being given by ritual. This assumption itself rests on the conventional anthropological distinction between sign and symbol, where the sign is propositional or simply referential and the symbol is evocative of meaning beyond itself, and thus on the notion that the sign too is obvious. Here I argue that we should cease to make an a priori distinction between sign and symbol and that we should give up the lingering notion that to understand ritual is to analyse its meaning as a relation between metaphors. At best, such an analysis can be only the first step towards understanding the peculiar power of ritual.
