ABSTRACT
Of the various human institutions, the legal and jural order and the formal patterns of government have been competently studied by many anthropologists. But-until the recent work by Barth and others-there had been comparatively few analyses of politics; that is, of the relatively informal patterns and processes for controlling the decisions of a com munity. I n small communities politics-if taken in this sense-largely resolves itself into the techniques and workings of kinship networks and local factions. This interplay between political actors is always signifi cantly tied to the psychology of the leaders and to the economy, particu larly to the use of the soil and other productive resources; yet as centrally political as factional leadership or the control of production, is ideology. By ideology I do not mean a quasi-religion wi th the structure of a lie (Mannheim, 1953, p. 238), although these properties are often apparent; rather, I mean an organized and intelligible set of ideas and beliefs that are related to action, to defending or changing an existing economic, social, and religious order (C. Friedrich, 1963, p. 89). A particularly interesting problem is posed by the politics of revolution, which is de voted to the sudden and complete transformation of the moral and reli gious basis of a community. What follows w i l l explicate the effect-on the communal ritual of a Tarascan pueblo-of an outstanding revolution ary, of revolutionary behavior, and of a distinctive revolutionary ideology. 1
Let us turn to the second variable: ritual. Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, analysis of ritual has ranged (wi th not infrequent brilliance) from Durkheim's theories (1925) to Gough's (1959) tour de force on Nayar cults of the dead. The term itself has been variously
employed: in one generic and extremist usage, ritual is "any expression of cultural form" (Leach, 1954, p. 4 ) ; another definition would limit its ways of performing religious acts (Beals and Hoijer, 1956, p. 496); some psychoanalytically oriented individuals tend to use it for repetitive, invol untary sequences stemming from compulsion; but perhaps most anthro pologists would think of ritual as any prescribed, formal behavior that is not essential to technical or practical affairs. Malinowski, Redfield, and others have demonstrated that an individual often experiences an in timate emotional and conceptual interpenetration of the ritual and nonritual.
