ABSTRACT
It is illuminating to consider ritual as a restricted code. But more problems arise in applying this insight than I am ready to handle. Bernstein argues that the restricted code has many forms; any structured group that is a group to the extent that its members know one another very weIl, for example in ~ricket, science or local government, will develop its special form of restricted code which shortens the process of communication by condensing units into pre-arranged coded forms. The code enables a given pattern of values to be enforced and allows members to internalise the structure of the group and its norms in the very process of interaction. Much of the writings and conference proceedings of anthropologists, or of every other body of scholars, would have to be classed as ritualistic or restricted code in so far as the citing of fieldwork, the reference to (often impossible) procedures, the footnotes etc., are given as pre-coded items of sodal interaction. Allegiances, patronage, clientship, challenge of hierarchy, assertion of hierarchy and so on, these are being obliquely and silently expressed along the explicit verbal channels. If this is so, then Bernstein, by working within the broad framework of a dichotomy of restricted and elaborated codes, is at the stage of Durkheim when he distinguished mechanical and organic solidarity, or of Maine, distinguishing sodeties governed by contract or by status. As he himself says, the distinction between restricted and elaborated codes must be relative within a given culture or within the speech forms of a given group. Thus the question of whether there are primitive cultmes in which all speech is in the restricted code is meaningless, since it ascribes absolute value to the definition. Bernstein would suppose that in any sodal group there are some areas of sodal life more responsible for policy dedsions and more exposed to the need to communicate with outsiders. Therefore in any tribai system he would expect to find some people who had been forced to develop
55 a more elaborated code in which universal principles can be made explicit and meanings detached from a purely local context. I am not convinced of this myself. If the situations requiring policy dedsions were only part of a repetitive cyde it would be possible to discuss them fully in terms of pre-organised units of speech. Only the need for innovation in policy would caIl forth the effort to use an elaborated speech code. This question poses intriguing problems of method for the ethno-linguists. But it is not central to my theme. More pertinent is how to use the idea of the restricted code to interpret different degrees of ritualisation.
