ABSTRACT
The combination of community, identity, and ritual determine meaning. That is, by understanding the various communities involved, the design of their rituals, and the relevant identities of the participants, we can begin to understand the meanings that events, and the symbols they incorporate, have for participants. This works because, as Peacock (1986) reminded, us: “Culture is shared meaning. To comprehend meaning, one must see the world as others see it, to comprehend experience in terms of the others’ frames of reference” (p. 99).1 Members learn meanings slowly, over all the years they spend in a community, gradually increasing their understanding. Nonmembers (including analysts) need to focus deliberately on meaning, playing a fast game of catch-up, if they are not willing to spend a lifetime with each community, letting meanings gradually accumulate. Essentially the process of understanding begins by focusing on one particular behavior at a time, and placing it into context. “Rituals are inherently ambiguous in their function and meaning. They speak with many voices” (Muir, 1997, p. 5). Thus they lend themselves to multiple interpretations. Meaning is a shared cultural production: It does not lie in the event waiting for us to discover it, and is not produced by a single individual, rather it is the result of combined numerous interpretations of the event by multiple partici-pants, and so “it is constantly changing with our every act of participation” (Penman, 2000, p. 71). Fiske (1987) in his study of television
culture emphasized that “Meanings are determined socially: that is, they are constructed out of the conjuncture of the text with the socially situated reader” (p. 80). Although here he was speaking of television, the point is no less true for rituals: The meanings of any ritual are determined socially in the interpretation of the ritual performance by participants. It is this interpretation that the late-coming analyst must work hard to discover, through a combination of observation and explicit questioning of participants about their understanding of what has occurred.
