ABSTRACT
For Victor W. Turner, Edmund R. Leach, and Clifford Geertz, ritual is a suggestive language for communicating statements about structural relationships, but each theorist developed this idea in a distinctive way. Turner and Geertz focused more on the interaction of social experience and cultural symbols, while Leach emphasized more purely linguistic features in an attempt to formulate the rules that govern the orchestration of a ritual sequence in the same way that rules of grammar govern a verbal sequence. If concerns syntax dominate linguistic and cognitive theories, concerns both semantics and syntax are prominent in theories of ritual performance that began to gain currency in the 1970s. In addition to performance theory, the 1970s also saw the emergence of several formulations of human action as praxis, or “practice,” a term that has been heralded as a key idea in the last decade of anthropological theory, usurping, the place of “structure” as the dominant image for cultural analysis.
