Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology Editorial Board John Davis Luc De Heusch Caroline Humphrey Emily Martin Peter Rivière Marilyn Strathern THE ARCHETYPAL ACTIONS OF RITUAL OXFORD STUDIES IN SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology represents the work of authors, new and established, which will set the criteria of excellence in ethno­ graphic description and innovation in analysis. The series serves as an essential source of information about the world and the discipline. OTHER TITLES IN THIS SERIES Organizing Jainism in India and England Marcus Banks Society and Exchange in Nias Andrew Beatty The Culture of Coincidence: Accident and Absolute Liability in Huli Laurence Goldman The Female Bridegroom: A Comparative Study of Life-Crisis Rituals in South India and Sri Lanka Anthony Good Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia Peter Gow Exchange in Oceania: A Graph Theoretic Analysis Per Hage and Frank Harary The Interpretation of Caste Declan Quigley The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey Martin Stokes THE ARCHETYPAL ACTIONS OF RITUAL A THEORY OF RITUAL ILLUSTRATED BY THE JAIN RITE OF WORSHIP CAROLINE HUMPHREY and JAMES LAIDLAW CLARENDON PRESS OXFORD 1994 Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0X2 6dp Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Ine., New York © Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw 1994 First published 1994 All rights reserved. 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Laidlaw, James Alexander. II. Title. III. Series. BL1376.H86 1994 294.4'38—dc20 94-1005 ISBN 0-19-827788-1 ISBN 0-19-827947-7 (Pbk.) 13579 10 8642 Typeset by Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., Guildford and King's Lynn PREFACE One day we went to see our Jain friend Ravindra Golecha in his villa in the suburbs of Jaipur. We had both worked before, at different times, among Jains in Jaipur. This visit was to start a new project together, one which we confidently expected to be manageable in a short time, on the symbolism of the puja, the ritual of morning worship performed in Jain temples. Golecha had offered to tell us all about it. When we arrived, a man dozing in the shadow of the verandah rose to show us through to a ground-floor room, which was tightly shuttered against the sun. Here we found Golecha, and some other dignified old men, comfortably reclined on a huge mattress, playing cards. Several younger men lounged at the sides watching and a little girl lay sprawled asleep in the centre of the group. Slightly taken aback at our arrival, Golecha nevertheless jumped to his feet, and brushing aside our apologies for disturbing him, took us inside the house to a more suitable place for our conversation. This was his bedroom, which was on an upper floor, reached by passing through the dining room and skirting round the kitchen where some of the women of the house were preparing food. Here in the bedroom we found Golecha’s wife fast asleep on a capacious bed. To our embarrassment she was unceremoniously dismissed and sent to bring tea and biscuits. We were all seated on the bed: Ravindra himself, James, Caroline, and Anju Dhaddha, our assistant, who comes from another of Jaipur’s prominent Jain families. ‘Now’, said Golecha, with a beaming smile, ‘ask me your questions. It is my duty to tell you about Jainism, it is a religious duty.’ He proceeded to tell us about some of the minutely detailed ‘rules which must be followed’ to be a good Jain. This encounter was not exceptional, just one of many conversations we had with Jain people in their homes. But it hints at some of the things we came to find so difficult to understand and which transformed our limited project into something unmanageable (and to which this book is only a partial and imperfect answer). What was this combination of languid informality with the exacting and multifarious ‘rules which must be fol­ lowed’? What was this ‘religious duty’ which so firmly and generously displaced everything else going on in the household? Though we knew Golecha quite well, it was apparent that it was because of our religious purpose that we were invited into the sanctum of his bedroom. It was because he thought of us as seekers after the truth about Jainism that he said, ‘You are my family.’ There was nothing set apart about his religion, no hint that it only really applied to particular places (the temple) or with particular people (other Jains). In fact, the rules and precepts of Jainism are fastidiously, even relentlessly applied to every aspect of life. The very biscuits which were brought to us had to conform, and were used as an occasion to explain how the central Jain doctrine of non-harming (ahimsa) is applied. Each of their ingredients is classified and rigorously inspected for the presence of tiny life-forms, and they must be produced by non­ violent means; the heat of the stove, for example, should not harm insects. Could we possibly describe how ‘Jain sentiments’ arise from an infinite number of such occasions? Most of our work was conducted in the Dadabari temple, where we knew many of the congregation from our previous visits. Just after dawn, in the comparative cool of the early morning, the bicycle repair shops and dried-dung makers were already busy in the streets outside, and a steady stream of immaculately clad Jains was arriving at the temple: making their way on foot, or alighting from cars and rickshaws, bearing their offerings to the Jinas, the founding teachers of the Jain religion. The temple is a clean-swept, quiet enclave, with its own garden and dwelling-hall for the occasional passing ascetics, Jain monks or nuns, who spend their time wandering from town to town, preaching Jain doctrines to their followers. We used to station ourselves in a shaded alcove in the garden, between the entrance and the temple itself. Here, we would talk with lay Jain worship­ pers as they came by. We spent many hours watching people perform the puja, and then discussing with them what they had just done. In time, we too learnt to perform the puja. After morning worship people used to drift home for a meal before the day’s work, but no one was in a rush, and as with Golecha, we felt that people were genuinely happy to talk about their religion. Little groups would form in the shade of our alcove. A temple servant brought tea and listened genially to our conversations. Occasion­ ally he would rouse himself to chase away a monkey or a peacock. A single bell would clang as a worshipper entered the temple; every so often the birds in the garden would screech or chatter. The puja, we discovered, is a ‘forest of symbols’; but these symbolic meanings were different from the religious meaning of objects in everyday life. In puja, each item brought as an offering is likely to be given one or more propositional meanings. For example, sweets might be given the meaning, ‘these are for the attainment of spiritual contentment’. In the everyday world things such as biscuits must be made and used in accord­ ance with Jain principles, and they can become the subject of a lengthy religious discourse, but the biscuits remain just biscuits, items of food. They have ‘significance’ in the widest sense, but they do not refer to or express propositions. With puja offerings, on the other hand, people were happy to declare multifarious, but in each case specific ‘meanings’. Some­ times these seemed to have been plucked from the air in response to our questioning, and no one was perturbed that different individuals prof­ fered quite different such definite ‘meanings’ for the same object or act. As the days passed we grew increasingly puzzled: what were these ‘mean­ ings’ which seemed so weighty in import, and yet so lightly and variously applied? Why did they not, as we had expected, add up to a system? Our Jain respondents were invariably and unfailingly polite, but it was not long before we were being given the idea—particularly by some of the older men—that we had chosen the wrong subject. Why were we so interested in this mere ‘empty ritual’? Some tried to guide us away from our topic, the kind of secondary and ‘external’ thing that foreigners would latch on to. We knew, of course, that other Jain orders had renounced temples and worship of statues of the Jinas. It was disconcerting to find nevertheless that some adherents of these orders came regularly to the Dadabari to perform puja. And it was not only these people who expressed restrained disapproval of our research. The basic idea was universal: anything of any religious value that can by done through puja can be done better in other ways. Part of the reason we had chosen this subject was that even casual observation reveals that this form of worship is performed with sincerity and piety, and is a central part of people’s religious lives. But our Jain friends’ opinion was to change the direction of our own ideas completely. It became clear to us that to develop an adequate account of Jain religious practice we had to raise some difficult questions about the problematic status of ritual in general. We had to make sense of the variety of meanings that we were told the puja has, and yet to take seriously the fact, insep­ arable ethnographically from this feast of ‘meanings’, that the ritual is declared by those who practise it to be meaningless. To do this, we had to raise fundamental questions about the understanding of ritual in general, and abandon many of the assumptions behind current anthropologi­ cal thinking about ritual. In the end we had to develop a new theory of ritual action. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We are very grateful to all the people in Jaipur, Ahmedabad, and other parts of western India, who helped us with our enquiries about Jainism and the puja. The following people were especially kind and generous with their time and knowledge: the late Pravartini Sajjan Shri ji Maharaj Saheb, Gani Shri Mani Prabh Sagar ji Maharaj Saheb, Sadhvi Priyadarshana Shri ji Maharaj Saheb, Dr N. K. Baz, Dr Narendra Bhanavat, Dr Hukamchand Bharilla, Mr and Mrs P. L. Dagga, Mr Kamal Kant Dagga, Mr and Mrs H. Dhaddha, Mr S. L. Gandhi, Mr Prem Chand Jain, Mr and Mrs S. C. Jain, Shri Jyoti Kumar Kothari, Mrs Sunita Meharchandani, Mrs Anju Dhaddha Mishra, Shri Dhanroopmal Nagori, the late Mrs Phophalia, Mr Rajendra Kumar Shrimal, the late Shri Rajroop-ji Tank, Mrs Saceti, Dr K. C. Sogani, Kavita Srivastava, Meenu Srivastava, and Dr (Mrs) Pawan Surana. All through our research, but especially in 1985, we were given encour­ agement, academic advice, and most generous practical help by the then Vice-Chancellor of the University of Rajasthan, Professor T. K. N. Unnithan, and by Mrs Unnithan. We are grateful also to Professor N. K. Singhi, of the Department of Sociology in the University of Rajasthan, for his valuable insights into Jain society. The original intention of our 1985 fieldwork was to make a video film together with a paper about the Jain puja, so we were accompanied by our colleague Marcus Banks, who shot the film. We joined Marcus in editing the film, ‘The Jains: a religious community of India’, which was produced in the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, in 1985. We benefited much from Marcus’s knowledge of Jainism. This work started life as a longish paper which we read to an informal seminar in King’s College, Cambridge. It was the interest of Pascal Boyer, Keith Hart, Tanya Luhrmann, and Nicholas Thomas that encouraged us to turn the paper into a book. All along, Pascal’s friendly typed missives from across the court have pointed us in the direction of new ideas, and he has commented in detail on successive versions of the work. The follow­ ing people have read all or parts of earlier drafts of the book, and we are extremely grateful for their comments: Peter Allen, Alan Babb, Stephen Cherry, John Cort, Paul Dundas, Alan Fiske, Chris Fuller, Alfred Gell, Tanya Luhrmann, Gananath Obeyesekere, David Owens, Fitz Poole, Quentin Skinner, Tony Tanner, Giles Tillotson, and Harvey Whitehouse. An anonymous reviewer for Oxford University Press made particularly detailed and helpful comments and for this too we are grate­ ful. Other people with whom we have discussed our ideas or who have suggested examples or arguments to us include Bill Brewer, John Drury, Naomi Eilan, Ernest Gellner, Stephen Hugh-Jones, Nick Humphrey, and Julian Pears. In April 1991 we read a paper, based on this work, at the Collège de France and we profited much from long discussions of the material with Michael Houseman and Carlo Severi. We should like to acknowledge the generous financial support given by the Nuffield Foundation and King’s College, Cambridge, which enabled us to undertake fieldwork together. More generally, James Laidlaw is grateful for research funding to the Economic and Social Research Coun­ cil and for a research fellowship to King’s College, Cambridge. During the final period of writing the book, 1990-2, Caroline Humphrey was supported by a British Academy Research Readership.