The Archetypal Actions of Ritual: A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship.

• Author: Smith, Frederick M.

Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw, two Cambridge anthropologists, have written a carefully argued, challenging, and highly recommended book on ritual theory. The Jain daily temple puja, which they observed at length at the Dadabari Jain temple in Jaipur, is explicated, according to the subtitle, only in order to illustrate their theory. However, it quickly becomes apparent that the authors, both known for their work on Jain-ism, have shed a great deal of light on the Jain daily puja that stands independent of its application to ritual theory. Nevertheless, their principal work here is theorizing, and it is important to note that their data preceded their theory. The authors make it clear early and often that they conceived their theory in response to their data, that "through the lenses provided by people's attitudes and reactions to their ritualized actions" (p. 4), they were forced to reconsider the very nature of ritual. Just as pressing for the authors, and wholly connected to the project of constructing ritual theory, is their questioning of the rationale that historically has propelled anthropology towards study of ritual. In order to clarify the connection between anthropological study of ritual and the authors' theorizing on the nature of ritual, I must briefly summarize at least some of the theory, with the hope that a few readers might pick up the book themselves.

The authors' fundamental premise is that "ritualization works by means of a single crucial transformation" (p. 3), which they call the "ritual commitment" or "ritual stance." The pivot of this multifaceted transformation is the manner in which "intentional meaning," that agreed or obvious meaning which characterizes our actions in non-ritualized situations, becomes "non-intentional meaning." In ritualized action ordinary intentionality disintegrates, only to reintegrate in new and different ways. "[W]hen we attempt to understand what another's action is, to succeed in this we must grasp his or her intention in acting. It is one of our central claims in this book that when an action is ritualized, this is not the case" (p. 94, italics theirs). In other words, the normal relation between intention and act is broken. In a ritualized act, the relation between intention and act is defined by the adoption of the ritual stance. In ritual the intention bears little or no resemblance to the intention which the identical act would bear in ordinary circumstances.

Ritualized actions and their identities are stipulated, for example, as "puja," or more specifically as "placing of sandal-paste on the forehead of the deity," or "constructing designs out of rice grains," etc. But the authors discovered that these descriptions or designations that people give to their ritual actions are wholly divorced from their inner intentionalities, which are so idiosyncratic and diverse that attempts to catalogue them can...