Professional Documents
Culture Documents
2
Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, pp. 126, 2167. For her knowledge of the medieval
Eucharist, Bell refers only to an article by Josef Jungmann on the pre-Reformation Mass. The
other scholars she cites on medieval ritual are Talal Asad and Norbert Elias. (She does cite
Caroline Bynum, but only for her article on Victor Turner.)
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The dangers of polemic 369
5
Ibid., pp. 11822.
6
Ibid., pp. 13440.
7
Ibid., pp. 1407, 1567.
8
Ibid., pp. 16476, 18894.
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The dangers of polemic 371
culture and ecology that is, the interactions of a given physical terrain and human culture.
Given the specificity of such ecologies, cultures are equally specific. This is a constant
presupposition in Geertz. It is fundamental to Negara, with its emphasis on the determinative
nature of Balis physical terrain on the political values expressed in Balinese ceremonial. It
remains fundamental in one of his later works, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive
Anthropology (New York, 1983), and in his autobiography, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four
Decades, One Anthropologist (Cambridge, MA, 1995). Since all knowledge is local knowledge
knowledge by the members of a society, but also knowledge of outsiders about them it is
impossible to take a model developed to interpret one culture and blindly apply it to any other
society. In other words, if one correctly understands Geertz, one knows that one cannot apply his
model of the Balinese Negara anywhere else. If there is therefore any borrowing from Geertz in
my work, it lies in an effort to ground early medieval supplication in its own distinctive political
ecology (see especially Chapter 8). Any similarity in interpreting rituals simply results from the
obvious fact that a certain repertoire of interpretation is common to all ethnographic,
historiographical and literary schools. (My own tend to be much more structuralist than
Geertzs, and more akin to the formalism of the New Criticism.) In any case, far from my use of
the word iconic being borrowed from Negara, I use the term in a way very different from Geertz
and very close to Bucs own usage (cf. Begging Pardon, pp. 16573, and Dangers, p. 228).
Similarly, Bucs characterization of my argument as imitating Negara in presenting a simple
unilineal borrowing of forms of supplication downwards through the hierarchy of rulership is
precisely what I argue against (pp. 93103), as, following Foucault, I argue against the existence of
a monistic iconic framework (see Dangers, pp. 2445 and Begging Pardon, pp. 10912, 14759,
25867, 3046, 3168).
14
Beginning with the preface, p. viii: the hubris of Pharoah Francois Mitterand (r. 198195).
15
Dangers, p. viii.
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The dangers of polemic 373
Buc presumes remain orthodoxy had already been supplanted by the mid-
1970s?22 As for Bucs most critical point, that historians who use anthro-
pology are unaware that the idea of communitas is overdetermined within
western civilization, I find this difficult to believe. Quite apart from the
fact that it is impossible to read much of Victor Turner or Mary Douglas
without becoming acutely aware that their interpretations of non-western
society, ritual, and religion are problematic because so very Catholic,23 it is
very hard to be a literate, historically minded intellectual, at least in the
United States, without knowing that modern discussions of community
have a long genealogy predisposed to reproducing the same intellectual
patterns, precisely as Buc alleges.24
France sans etat: typologie des mecanismes de re`glement des conflits (10501200), Annales,
E.S.C. 41 (1986), pp. 110733; also Koziol, Begging Pardon, pp. 934 and n. 43, and especially
Chapter 9.
22
For example, in my own graduate seminars on legal anthroplogy at Stanford University in 1975
76, the anthropology Buc holds out as the norm was so far from being the norm that its great
names (Evans Pritchard, Radcliffe-Brown, Gluckman) were held out as examples of how not
to do ethnography, precisely because of their unexamined functionalist, equilibrist, and
Eurocentric presuppositions and colonial framing (Gluckman being unusually important
because, like his student Turner, both a late exemplar and early critic of the approach). Instead,
study concentrated on what became known as a process approach, identified in particular with
the Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader. (See Law in Culture and Society, ed. Laura Nader
(Chicago, 1969); The Disputing Process: Law in Ten Societies, ed. Laura Nader and Harry F.
Todd, Jr (New York, 1978).) Central to Naders writings were the assumptions that law and legal
procedure were fundamentally imbricated in power relations within society; that they were tools,
access to which was unevenly distributed throughout a society; that far from working to restore
homeostasis, they worked to embed existing power relations ever more deeply within a society;
that societies were constantly in a state of disequilibrium and dysfunction. In other words, the
critique Buc claims historians are ignorant of was, in fact, basic to the teaching of the discipline in
the mid-1970s at his own university.
23
C. Clifford Flanigan, Liminality, Carnival, and Social Structure: The Case of Late Medieval
Biblical Drama, pp. 4263, at pp. 578, and Ronald L. Grimes, Victor Turners Definition,
Theory, and Sense of Ritual, pp. 1416, at pp. 1445, both in Kathleen M. Ashley (ed.), Victor
Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism: Between Literature and Anthropology
(Bloomington, IN, 1990). See also Edith Turners reminiscences of her and her husbands
conversions to Catholicism in the late 1950s, while still at Manchester, and the importance of
their Catholicism and his membership in the Communist Party to their ethnographic work:
Matthew Engelke, An Interview with Edith Turner, Current Anthropology 41 (2000), pp. 843
52, at pp. 8479.
24
We might draw that genealogy a bit differently than Buc does. He disagrees with Jonathan Z.
Smiths suggestion that Zwinglis and Calvins critiques of Catholic sacraments were instru-
mental in establishing a secular view of ritual, on the grounds that their movements lacked the
reach of Lutheranism and Anglicanism. Buc therefore believes that the latter were the two truly
important movements in creating the idea of a false religious community bound by rituals
(Dangers, pp. 1645, n. 3). This, however, is a very parochial and conservative narrative of
intellectual history that shows little awareness of British and American history. Though Buc may
not be wrong, Smith was certainly right, for the tension between communities as immanent
moral entities and legally constituted ones and the problematic position of the individuals
freedom within politico-moral communities does come into the Anglo-American tradition
through Calvin, via English, Scottish and American Puritanism, as reinvigorated and reinter-
preted in the United States by every subsequent Great Awakening and evangelically based call for
the reform of political morality.
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The dangers of polemic 375
If all this is so well known, how then can Buc present historiographical
work as so retrograde? In the case of his most prominent target (and the
one I am in the best position to know about) as polemicists do, by rather
breathtaking ellipses in his quotations that transform the original meaning
of a sentence out of all recognition.25 Or again as polemicists do, by
relentless, ever shifting attacks that divert attention from the inconsis-
tencies inherent in the writers own position. And Bucs own position is
deeply inconsistent. Though he criticizes historians for having invented a
swollen grab bag of rituals,26 he himself discusses exactly the same
swollen grab bag of practices: anointings, pacts, oaths, burial, adventus,
occursus, supplications and humiliations, royal acts of charity for the poor,
burials ad sanctos, liturgical commemorations for the royal family, tearful
prayer before the Holy Lance, tearful prayer before the relics of saints,
pilgrimages to shrines, Christmas and Easter feasts and Lenten fasts,
translations of relics, among many others. Not only does he discuss the
exact same rituals, he interprets their symbolic meanings in ways that even
Victor Turner would find absolutely unexceptionable. And though he
criticizes us for inventing new rituals, he invents new rituals himself,
suggesting that Childerics poetry may have been an element in a royal
liturgy of thanksgiving.27 Of course, Buc does not like calling these
activities rituals. An arch-philosophical nominalist, he would have us
entirely banish the word ritual from discussions of religion and society,
both because such modern abstract categories do not accurately reflect the
specificity of contemporaries actions and because the word brings with it
from ethnography a host of allegedly unexamined assumptions. But the
same is true of absolutely every abstraction used by historians. Society,
culture, institutions, religion, church, structure, law, feud, king-
ship, court, family, class, status, nobility, peasantry _ the middle
ages: no matter the extent to which these words descend from medieval
cognates, all are used currently by historians in terms broader and more
abstract than in medieval usage. The struggle to keep such words fresh and
flexible, to use them profitably without reifying them, is elementary to the
historians task. The reason it must be a struggle is because we cant banish
these words. We have to use them.
So it is with the word ritual. Buc himself repeatedly uses the very word
he would have others banish. And it is not enough for him to pretend that
he only uses the word as if in quotation marks, as shorthand for a
practice twentieth-century historians have identified as ritual,28 when he
25
Compare, for example, Bucs quotation (p. 211) from Begging Pardon (p. 59): in the original, it is
not the rituals that are important in maintaining power but prestige, loyalty, friendship, and
kinship, rituals being a way these are publicly manifested and tested.
26
Dangers, p. 176.
27
Ibid., p. 113.
28
Ibid., p. 2.
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376 Geoffrey Koziol
33
Ibid., p. 128; note also the implicit functionalism of Bucs own analysis of public prostrations
(pp. 104, 106).
34
Spielregeln, pp. 117, 283304 and passim.
35
Ibid., pp. 13, 231, 259.
# Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2002 Early Medieval Europe 2002 11 (4)
378 Geoffrey Koziol
there were no surprises.43 Thus, the details of the deditiones that accom-
panied surrender were, for Althoff, all negotiated beforehand and care-
fully scripted, nothing at all being left to chance.44 In terms of the
historiographical tradition within which Althoff writes, perhaps even
more important is the distinction this leads to between public and private
consensus-seeking. German constitutional historians had always debated
the extent to which the nobility had a recognized right to give counsel and/
or consent, and the extent to which kings could ignore or act against that
counsel. Althoff s spin on this debate is to point out that the statements of
consensus we find in chronicles (for example) refer not to a real process of
decision-making but rather to a formal, public, demonstrative enact-
ment of counsel, where decisions that had already been reached privately,
through the canvassing and mobilizing of opinion (Willensbildung), were
formally and publicly acted out.45 In an interesting reversal of Bucs
priorities, he even argues that literate modes of communication replicated
this fundamental reflex, insofar as the relationship between letters and
Streitschriften corresponds to that between private and public means of
gaining consensus.46
Though shifting his critique from Verfassungsgeschichte to Norbert Elias
and Jurgen Habermas, the later articles build on the same insights. Thus,
Althoff responds to Eliass view of early medieval nobles as unable to
control their emotions and therefore in need of civilizing by arguing that
showing highly pitched emotions like anger was, in fact, a demonstrative
action, not a ritual but a ritualized display. A member of the nobility was
not described as flying into a towering rage because he had been unable to
control his emotions. Rather, in a world in which actions counted, the
accompaniments that signified rage were intended to demonstrate and
communicate to potential enemies that they had gone too far, that one was
willing to fight, that the next step in the escalation of a conflict would be
bloodshed. In other words, not even emotions were spontaneous.47 As for
Habermas, Althoff argues against his modernist assumption that the early
Middle Ages had no sense of public space. The constituent elements of
public space were different: not congresses, city streets, or newpapers but
rather courts, halls, letters, and stories. Yet the early Middle Ages had a very
highly developed sense of public space, for in a sense, all demonstrative
action was geared towards public communication.48
There are difficulties with Althoff s analysis, particularly with its
theoretical superstructure. Althoff believes that tenth- and eleventh-
43
Ibid., pp. 667, 24850, 256, 264, 2734.
44
Ibid., pp. 1013, 125.
45
Ibid., pp. 15784.
46
Ibid., pp. 1834.
47
Ibid., pp. 25881.
48
Ibid., pp. 22957.
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The dangers of polemic 381
changes, except by virtue of the fact that someone at some point was
willing to break them?
In the final analysis, this is my real disagreement with Althoff, and with
all those recent historians who have applied a semiotic ethnography to
emotions in a way that routinizes them, in the same way that old
definitions of ritual routinized behaviour. Such analyses cannot explain
a situation in which honour counts so much to an individual who believes
he has suffered an affront that he is willing to violate all the rules, risk
everything, lay hands on the Lords anointed, make a scene in a public
gathering, assassinate a court favourite. For Althoff and many others, these
have become nothing but signs.54 But where all emotion has become
nothing but a sign that one wishes to renegotiate an ongoing, dyadic
relationship, what has happened to the emotions that people felt, to the
ideals they valued, the values that gave them their identity?55 If honour and
rank were so important to men and women of the tenth century, are we to
believe that they really didnt get angry when they suffered affronts to their
honour and rank? There is a point, in the recent attention not to ritual but
to semiotics, in which everything has become a sign of something other
than it is. And Buc himself is guilty of this double-psychology, for
though one part of his argument asks us to take the religion of these people
seriously, another sees rituals (including rituals of religion) as nothing but
a set of rhetorical tropes that cover a writers partisan political loyalties.
Ironically, Bucs emphasis on the rhetorical nature of our sources has
stripped both actors and writers from real belief in the same way he claims
ethnologists have, and he claims the same stance to superior under-
standing he discounts in ethnologists.
In any case, even though Spielregeln is the book that most corresponds
to the functionalist ethnology Buc criticizes, there is little in it that really
corresponds to Bucs criticisms. It is true that Althoff does speak of the
representation of rulership. He does so, however, only once. And the
phrasing is noteworthy, because elsewhere Althoff criticizes past historians
for speaking of public communication entirely in terms of Herrschafts-
reprasentation.56 Althoff s public rituals are consciously constructed,
54
Ibid., pp. 1112, 63, 656, 1245, 228, 232, 245, 2523, 262 (Demonstrationsfunktion, Signal-
charakter). See also Geary, Vivre en conflit; also Gerd Althoff, Ira Regis: Prolegomena to a
History of Royal Anger, pp. 5974, Richard E. Barton, Zealous Anger and the Renegotiation
of Aristocratic Relationships in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century France, pp. 15370, and Barbara
H. Rosenwein, Controlling Paradigms, pp. 23347, all in Barbara H. Rosenwein (ed.), Angers
Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1998).
55
Some anthropologists are becoming aware of this dilemma, though there is still no good model
for how to approach it. See Sandra Bell and Simon Coleman (eds), The Anthropology of
Friendship (Oxford, 1999); Joanna Overing and Alan Passes (eds), The Anthropology of Love and
Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia (London, 2000).
56
Spielregeln, p. 259: in den Situationen, in denen im Mittelalter Politik gemacht und Herrschaft
reprasentiert wurde; otherwise, p. 13.
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The dangers of polemic 383
74
For this use of chimaeric, see Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley,
1990).
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