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SCHEFFLER, H.W., 1964. Descent Concepts and Descent Groups: the Maori Case. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 72(2): 126-33.

SCHREMPP, Gregory, 1985. Tuu Alone was Brave: Notes on Maori Cosmogony, in A. Hooper and J. Huntsman (eds), Transformations of Polynesian Culture. Auckland, Polynesian Society.

SCHWIMMER, Eric, 1978. Levi-Strauss and Maori Social Structure. Anthropologica NS, 20(l-2):201-22.-----------, 1988. The Maori Hapu: a Generative Model. MS, University of Auckland.SHARP, Andrew, 1971. Duperry’s Visit to New Zealand in 1824. Wellington, Alexander Turnbull Library.SHORTLAND, Edward, 1851. The Southern Districts of New Zealand. London, Longman, Brown, Green and

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Avery for the Polynesian Society.TAYLOR, Richard, 1855. Te Ika a Maui, or New Zealand and its Inhabitants. London, Wertheim and Macintosh.THORNTON, Agathe, 1987. Maori Oral Literature: as Seen by a Classicist. Dunedin, University of Otago Press.VALERI, Valerio, 1985. Kingship and Sacrifice.Chicago, University of Chicago Press.WAKEFIELD, Edward J., 1845. Adventure in New Zealand from 1839 to 1844, vols I and II. London, John Murray.WEBSTER, Steven, 1975. Cognatic Descent Groups and the Contemporary Maori: a Preliminary Reassessment.

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THE CEREMONIAL SELF

Eric Schwimmer Universite Laval

One of the achievements for which Ralph Bulmer will be remembered is that he showed a way of relating ethnoscience to the traditional holistic orientation of social anthropology. The ethnoscience of the early 1960’s was an appropriate reaction against that holistic approach which had often erred by ignoring the informants’ conceptual framework. Ethnoscience introduced methodological rigour in our fieldwork procedure but in the initial applications of the method the holistic perspective of the discipline of social anthropology was often lost.

Ralph Bulmer was one of the very first to show the way out of this dilemma, by a series of studies whose method was based partly on Lêvi-Straussian structuralism but also, and largely, on British anthropological approaches to studying social process. He took from the former a definition of “species” permitting him to link biological with social and philosophical domains while he always relied on the latter for his basic fieldwork analysis (Bulmer 1967, 1968, 1970).

Both these approaches aimed at analysing society as a totality in which a number of levels of indigenous conceptualisation should be distinguished. In this sense, the present essay is intended as homage to Ralph Bulmer. In its own way, it seeks to present the Papua New Guinea kind of ritual process as a totality while relying for our understanding of each conceptual level on ideas derived directly from the members of the society studied.

INTRODUCTIONThis paper1 summarises researches I have made into “the ceremonial self’, especially as it is revealed in the

ceremonials of the Orokaiva of Papua New Guinea. The term is quite evidently not Orokaiva; it is derived

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from Goffman who suggested that “the self is in part a ceremonial thing, a sacred object which must be treated with proper ritual care” (1967:91). This ceremonial self is manifested in “ritual games” played in the course of any social interaction (1983:9-10). Such ritual games are interpretable as reenacting a “condensed and idealised version of the events of mythic history” (1979). Gofftnan’s analyses of the forms in which the ceremonial self expresses itself are conducted by means of “frames” that are full of social content. Many other analysts of ritual such as Turner (1986) and Tambiah (1985) follow the same basic procedure. They do not, however, go in the same “direction” as Goffman in that their objective is to get at the “meaning” of the ritual whereas Goffman is concerned “to collect all of the rituals that are performed to a given recipient” (1967:57).

My own emphasis is slightly different again as my text will be constituted by the sum of the rituals performed by any particular emitter of the signs. From a pragmatic viewpoint, Orokaiva initiators aim at conferring adult status on novices, establishing harmonious and prestigious relations between age groups, between participant villages and between male/female, and perhaps also at strengthening the group’s consciousness of Orokaiva identity. From an indexical viewpoint, all these ends depend on a prior, postulated social relation, namely that between the persons participating and the ancestors put on stage (Williams 1930), for it is only by this postulated relation that all the others are validated. From the esthetic viewpoint, the credibility of the ancestral presence can be established only by an effective staged performance. Such performance requires of the ceremonial self social competence, historical competence, theatrical competence.

With regard to social competence, I would summarise Orokaiva thought in the proposition that making gifts of both goods and services is the most effective mode of acquiring greater security and power, and of expanding, ennobling and beautifying the Self. I was even told, in Hobbesian style, that the life of a man who made no gifts would be nasty, brutish and short. Such a position is close to Mauss’, except that there was no question here of the three obligations. My informants’ moral observations, supported by maxims and moral tales, were not obligations. Nobody ever said that if you make no gifts your hair will fall out, etc. Competence consisted in knowledge of an elaborate code of giving: what, where, perhaps why - but most importantly, how.

We need specify some modalities of this image of man the donor. It was extended to man the initiator and man the healer, but also - negatively - to man the warrior and sorcerer. When seeking detail about these moral fundamentals, it was invariably given to me in the form of myths. When I tried to understand these myths (Schwimmer 1974, 1979, 1984, etc.), I was given somewhat improvised interpretations valuable for their leaps of logic and the presuppositions revealed by those leaps.

The question that concerns us here, in relation to all such ritual prestations, is the self-construct by which they are organised. It was F.E. Williams who first saw the key to this subtle question when he proposed his model of “the magic of impersonation” ([1932 in] 1976:68-70). Here, the actor impersonates a mythical character or identifies some feature of his undertaking with a corresponding feature of a mythical undertaking, helped out by details of costume, action and the use of paraphernalia.

The Orokaiva Self as donor thus operates on two levels at once. On the transactional level, he gives food (taro, pigs) at feasts and receives in return amity, suspension of sorcery, promise of return presentations. On a postulated, imaginal level, his ancestral spirit brought him pigs, hunted in the forest; the donor impersonates that spirit, performs successfully, donates the pig, causing the recipients to grow strong and multiply greatly. Thus, Orokaiva gifts contain spirit, but only if the donor impersonates that spirit.

Because of this ancestral identification, the boundaries of the ceremonial self are necessarily fluid, for he ritually impersonates a particular ancestor, in his own style to his own end, yet he is joined on stage by many others, part of a larger whole that gives the event its only meaning. Orokaiva initiation, Australian corroboree, masked ball or costume party - all assign this same fluidity to the ceremonial self.

Every ideology contains some scheme of classification of components of the self. Iteanu has suggested that the Orokaiva self is composed of ahihi (“spirit”, but with a physical content also), hamo (body-skin, but with a mental content also),;'*? (physically : internal organs, but also : the hidden self). Like concepts such as ego, superego, id, these are functional relational notions. The ceremonial self, which is purely expressive and “imaginal” (Tedlock), cannot be put into such a scheme, in as much as a man impersonating an ahihi is not an ahihi. Similarly, after the seclusion period novices can impersonate spirits not because their hamo has become greater but because they received information and leave to perform. My point is not that the analyst needs to demystify such Orokaiva notions but that the initiate is culturally defined as a person who has “seen the spirits”, i.e. who knows about the staging. As both sexes are initiated, this knowledge is shared by all adults. Those who stage the ahihi deeply believe in their existence. They believe that staging them is the gravest religious responsibility.

In functional analysis, a distinction is often made between exchange and reproduction but the ceremonial self attends to both in performance. For in the “imaginal” system, all gifts are at least part of the ceremonial self: taro is a mother, an ancestress and while wild pigs are ancestors also, domesticated pigs are children.

358 Eric Schwimmer

There is thus always an intimate bond between giver and gifts. But according to myth and to popular belief, the feast giver dies shortly after the feast is over. For the Orokaiva imagination, then, making a feast is an absolute gift in the sense that it includes life itself. There are other absolute gifts, made only once in a lifetime such as status-conferring emblems and finally, the kind of suicide signifying desire for vengeance. All these are kinds of gifts to posterity.

The ceremonial self is as fluid in space as in time. Its outer boundary is probably the confederacy - a loose alliance of local groups roughly corresponding to a connubium of intermarrying villages and to the boundary within which scope of warfare was restrained and cannibalism proscribed - Williams (1930) refers to this as the “sympathy group”. Initiations are occasions when the signs of amity and commensality are expanded from the village community to the confederacy.

I shall not survey the ritual itself in any detail as this has been competently done by Iteanu recently (1983). In the first phase, the spirits, mostly representing animals but also plants, attack not only the novices who are finally allowed to flee to a platform, but also tear down trees, “bite” coco palms, domestic pigs, etc., damage houses and make the village look a mess. They come not just from the village itself but from other confederacy villages as well. The second phase of the ceremony is the seclusion of novices in an enclosure called the sama which they may leave only if completely wrapped in a cape. They are separated from their parents and looked after by the mother’s lineage and father’s sisters. They do very little, eat excessively and grow fat. They finally emerge from this regime as new children (ehamei), decorated as spirits. In the third phase, novices put on their own performance, climb the platform where the gift pork is displayed and leave their elders to engage in their own dramas which concern neither the relations between age groups nor those of local groups but of the sexes and which progress from the theatrical exchange of insults to a sexual orgy.

THE THEATRICAL PROJECTION OF GIFT-BEARING SPIRITSFeasts of the type of Orokaiva initiation are called by Mauss “systems of total prestations” (1950:151). The

word “total” is to be understood as comprising the whole set of sociological perspectives appearing in Mauss’ manual of ethnography (1967) - thus: a number of discrete levels of conceptualisation such as religious; moral-juridical, including political and familial; economic “without counting the esthetic phenomena” (1950:147). Studies over the last 60 years have faithfully followed this blueprint and respected Mauss’ exclusion of the esthetic while recognising its existence.

In this paper, we offer no general justification for dealing with the esthetics of ceremonies, but point only to an unresolved problem both in the ethnography of Williams and of Iteanu. Williams puts the question very clearly if somewhat crudely when he writes:

I feel that the ceremony admits of two constructions, that it may be viewed (not only by ourselves, but by those who actually practise it) as alternatively solemn and frivolous, at one moment as if the initiates were being brought into the sacred danger of contact with the embahi, the next as if the initiated were having a great deal of fun at the expense of the frightened and bewildered initiates (1930:197).

In what sense, then, can we say that the bullroarer and the flutes, revealed at initiation, are sacred instruments? Williams does not attempt to answer the question, but it is evident that the same problem of the “two constructions” applies to most esthetic phenomena which may be viewed alternatively as deeply serious statements about life and as artful productions dealing ludically with that same content. The only adequate answer to Williams’ question would, then, be esthetic analysis.

More recently, Iteanu encountered such a trap but came closer to actually falling into it. Referring to the cry one hears in the first phase of initiation “do not kill my child”, he beards several authors who explained this phrase, supposedly, as intended just to frighten the children. He points out the phrase is used also when no children are present and continues solemnly:

We, on the other hand, start from the idea that this ceremony is an event where parents as well as children are concerned with the menace of the spirits (1983:55).

Here, we are apt to forget that though both categories are obviously concerned, they are not concerned in the same way, for the parents are impersonating spirits whereas the children, at this stage, have never seen them and one of the purposes of the performance is undoubtedly to show them the spirits, i.e. initiate them. Iteanu opens himself up to technical objections: first, he does not distinguish between the actors and the public and, secondly, he forgets Diderot’s witty demonstration that actors do not always totally feel what they express superbly and that deep feelings badly expressed do not even appear genuine to the public. At the same time, he raises a major problem in the esthetic analysis of Papua New Guinea initiation performances, namely

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that the parents are not only actors but are sometimes also their own public, and that the children are not always just the public but are sometimes also on-stage actors.

Let us now consider how we can make progress with the questions just raised, keeping in mind our concern with the experiencing subject as well as with the production of theatrical meaning. No existing anthropological methods are completely adequate, though the contributions of Victor Turner as well as Claude Lêvi-Strauss have both been crucial. Turner has laid solid groundwork for treating ritual as theatre (1962, 1974, 1986) while Lêvi-Strauss’ analysis of the logic of myths (1964-1971) has led the way in the rigorous derivation of meaning from mythic texts. If we wish to go beyond this, we probably need input from the literary sciences even though these still tend to be deeply western oriented. A systematic and useful descriptive scheme may be obtained from Erika Fischer-Lichte’s Semiotik des Theaters (1983) which helps us to establish, first, what characteristics of these ceremonies fulfil the minimal conditions of theatre, secondly, what the current “norms” of the Orokaiva theatrical system are, thirdly, by what steps we may analyse an actual performance. She brings together phenomenological attitudes to theatre analysis ultimately derived from Lessing and Lotman’s method of studying chains of structures, transcoding and the relation between literature and social forms.

(a) What is theatrical in initiation ceremonies?Let us briefly consider the four conditions proposed by Fischer-Lichte (1983, I) in her Einleitung

(Introduction) as distinguishing theatre from other esthetic objects. The first condition relates to its mode of existence: the material artefact of theatre has no enduring existence independently of its producer. It is non- transferable and not repeatable. This is obviously true for Orokaiva initiation which has no existence outside the performance of the initiators.

The second condition has to do with production and reception: theatrical signs can be read only at the very moment they are produced. There can be no performance unless there is also an audience. It is an exclusively public art form. Though this condition seems to me to apply to Orokaiva initiation, we cannot ignore the difficulty raised by Iteanu. A phrase like “Do not kill my child” is used during episodes when children are present and are obviously the public of the performance. During those episodes the children are prevented from seeing anything, but they are made to hear words and various sounds, discussed below, that cannot help but create strong impressions on their minds and are obviously intended to do so. But then, the same words and some of the same sounds are produced when the children are absent. Who is the public at that moment? Here, Iteanu is referring to a sacralisation rite to which initiates are subjected to restore their contact with spirits and to prepare them for reenacting them. One might call this a magical rite within a guild of actors, preparing them to play their roles. We have seen also that in the third phase of initiation, the novices themselves perform a dance and climb the platform where the pork is displayed. Here again, there is no confusion of actor and public but rather a structured development of the novice from non-actor (public) to the status of actor. It is to be noted that when the novices perform, they do so without participation by their elders who thus become their public. To a certain extent, however, the actors are their own public.

Theatre may thirdly be distinguished from other art forms by certain prerequisites. It must have actors. An actor is distinguishable from any ordinary person A, B, C, only in as far as he represents a character other than himself (say X, Y, Z), i.e. in as far as he plays a role. The minimal requirement for theatre is therefore a person A, representing X, while S is watching (1983 I, 16). Some Melanesian performances clearly meet this criterion, e.g. those of experienced mediums in Kaluli spirit seances (Schieffelin 1985) who may reenact 20 or more distinct spirit characters. Among the Orokaiva it appears, however, that each actor A stays with a single role X that rarely changes. For Orokaiva, then, as in many oriental traditions, the only prerequisite is distanciation between the everyday self and the impersonated spirit self. This rule is expressed by certain taboos: it is forbidden among the Orokaiva to signify that one recognises the everyday self of the actor hidden beneath the disguise he wears when impersonating the spirit.

Fourthly, a prerequisite for theatre is that there should be a space set aside in which A is acting when representing X. Nothing can take place within that space without becoming an integral part of the performance. This rule holds for Orokaiva initiation, but all New Guinean performances make a great deal of allowance for audience participation, to the extent that it is not always easy to distinguish what constitutes the “stage”. Descriptions by Fortune (1935), Pouwer (1956, 1984) and Schieffelin show members of the “public” freely conversing with members of the public within the theatrical space and such exchanges are an integral part of performances. In Orokaiva initiation, during the first phase, the novices are definable as the public, but they are harassed by the spirits, lifted by them onto a platform, dragged from the platform, carried around, and thus maintain a very precarious hold on any “audience space”. The platform, quite ambiguously, is set aside as a refuge from theatrical space. For those who reach the top, it does constitute a refuge, but it is a precarious one. Nor is the youthful audience wholly taken in by the performance. It is not really unknown

360 Eric Schwimmer

to them that these spirits are impersonations. They also know, however, that it is their “role” to show unquestioning belief. More importantly, they do not know how really dangerous these disguised people can be when they are impersonating spirits. For the novices, something very important is happening that has not happened before. In other words, the problem of defining theatrical space is part of the initiatory process itself. To the initiated, the platform is an integral part of it and the ferocious attacks on it signify the spirits’ claim on it. The novices, however, have not learnt to view the performance theatrically. This is in fact what initiation is supposed to teach them. Marking their progress, the third phase of initiation no longer has a refuge platform, as the novices dance on the ground, but it has a pig distribution platform that is part of the theatrical space occupied not only by the feast giver but also by the novices. At this point, the pork receiving visitors constitute the public but again they become part of the act as they have the meat, dripping with blood, thrown at them.

This summary shows that a universal definition of theatre such as Fischer-Lichte’s may well turn out to be useful to the analysis of Orokaiva initiation. As for the discrepancies mentioned above, let us recall that many recent western experimental theatre groups and hippie happenings (Schechter 1985) have sought to reestablish the kind of personal commitment, cosmic reference and audience participation traditional in Orokaiva ceremonies.

(b) Orokaiva theatrical normsEven if we may have doubts about such universal definitions, Fischer-Lichte’s concept of a theatrical norm

appears to be entirely in the tradition of anthropological analysis. A theatrical norm is a system of rules operating within a particular culture, period, social stratum and artistic genre. These rules are recognised by the producers but an outside investigator ought also to be able to establish that they apply to a sufficient number of actual performances. Such rules prescribe what material representations should be counted as meaningful units, i.e. theatrical signs. These signs may be of several kinds: linguistic, paralinguistic, kinesic, gestural and so on. There are very many coded non-verbal acoustic signs, visual signs, tactual signs and even olfactory ones.

Theatrical norms are an integral part of culture; they change when culture changes, and they are intimately tied to overall ideology. A great deal of what happens at initiation is conveyed to the audience simply by conforming to a theatrical norm. A general norm would be that spirits are taken to be the hidden but real causative agent in the world. At initiation, any event is taken as theatrically significant if a spirit has a part in it, and thus becomes manifest in it. A tree may crash somewhere or a spirit may bite a pig which begins to squeal. The novices cannot see this but they know what it “means” as it is part of the theatrical norm for spirits to act thus. Or spirits may be somersaulting on the horizontal bars of the platform on which the novices found refuge. All these signs have meaning in the particular syntagms of initiation, though their meaning might be obscured in other circumstances.

There are, however, particular impersonations: actors who wear decorations and costumes coded as belonging to particular animals or particular ancestors. A spirit of a man killed in war may be impersonated by a “sideways jerk of the head” (Williams 1928:70), “to clear away the blood which is clogging his ears”. An impersonation is a particular combination of theatrical signs forming a coherent pattern or character.

Secondly, there are theatrical norms prescribing how the performance as a whole should proceed, set out by Williams for Orokaiva initiation. Such norms lay down the sytem of representations observable by the senses. But thirdly, as Fischer-Lichte suggests, there are norms (1983 II, 88) prescribing “an invisible order” that must be represented in the performance. In the case of Orokaiva initiation, this would be the reconstitution of the universe made up of the dead as well as the living members of the entire confederacy. Ultimately, then, the theatrical norms have to be understood as intimately related to the overall problematics of contemporary Orokaiva culture.

(c) Analysis o f an actual performanceHow, in practice, do Orokaiva initiators go about reconstituting a world order made up of dead and living?

How is such a theatrical illusion produced, how is it experienced? We shall answer this question in three steps. As a first step, we briefly discuss a process entering into general esthetic analysis, known as transcoding.

Lotman suggests that in an esthetic analysis at least two different chains of structures are often available. In transcoding, correspondences are set up between certain pairs of these chains such that an element in one system can always be perceived as equivalent to an element in the other. If one chain is within the text analysed and the other outside it, we speak of external transcoding, but if both chains are of the same system, that could be called internal transcoding. For example, in Chinnery and Beaver’s 1915 account of initiation, a sacralisation rite of initiates is described containing a chain of structures: two officiants raising the man to be

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sacralised high up in the air, passing him on the next pair of officiants and so on along an entire double column. Iteanu (1983) rightly supposes that this action of raising something high up in the air is a way of bringing it into contact with spirits. But we might obtain such a result by the method of external transcoding if we compare the man thus raised to the food that is lifted onto a small platform (outside the initiation context), in order to feed spirits present in a taro garden. The two actions are, in respect to one element, equivalent to one another. Both may be called “chains of structures” in the sense that any offering to the spirits activates a system of relations and may be broken down into a sequence of particular successive acts.

We might apply the method of internal transcoding to the same episode of sacralisation ritual by comparing it to a later event within the initiation system itself. Thus, when the novices have been chased around for a while on the ground, initiates pick them up, and put them on the platform. Later they pick them up from the platform and carry them around raised above their heads. Williams compared this action (by external transcoding) to “ragging” of newcomers in public schools in England or Australia. On the other hand, internal transcoding (using the sacralisation episode of the first phase of initiation) would lead us to the conclusion that what seems to be “ragging” may in fact be sacralisation. If we carry the internal transcoding further, by including a third chain of structures - the confinement of the novices ita (on high) in the seclusion hut - this second internal transcoding provides us with a further equivalence.

The most common kind of external transcoding connects chains of structures in the text with what Lotman calls primary modelling systems, i.e. the primary realia of culture somewhat like an infrastructure. My own analysis linking initiation to basic contradictions in Orokaiva community life falls into that category. But in the following discussion we shall be much concerned with a more complex kind of transcoding, not admitted in Durkheimian analyses, where the meaning of the text is understood only with reference to secondary modelling systems such as religious representations, myth and various art forms.

The actor, by his personal imagination, applies such transcodings to the constitution of his performance text. This, the second step in one argument, is what Fischer-Lichte calls “the praxis of the individual production of meaning” (1983 III, 26). Though the codes and norms discussed above enter into this, she suggests that there is also always an hermeneutic process. Even if the performance is not based on a literary text, there are certainly underlying myths introduced, as well as family traditions without which there could be no impersonation of spirits. I am not sure whether an Orokaiva would, as Fischer-Lichte puts it, “reflect upon the meaning” of such background information, but a good deal of practising occurs before performances so that there are many hours spent on perfecting one’s role as dancer.

Even if those hours do not lend themselves ideally to “reflection”, there is no doubt that the actor can, and does, develop during those practices what Fischer-Lichte calls his or her corporeal text. For in the act of role creation, the actor’s chief material medium is his own existence and particularly his own body in which his individuality, his life history, his clan history, his cultural environment, are already inscribed. Now the body, by nature, is a non-signifier but, in culture, it can progress step by step to become a signifier (1983 111:28-9). Among the Orokaiva, this training begins in earliest childhood. Dancing and spirit impersonation are occasions when the body must act as signifier, and be raised to the level of the symbolic order. Certainly, the attraction of sexual partners depends greatly on this ability, and initiation is a key occasion for finding these.

We can now, as the third step in our argument, consider how an invisible world order can be evoked with the kind of theatrical materials described here. This clearly depends not only on the individual myths of each impersonator but also and even more on the representation of the collective myths underlying the performance as a whole, such as the Totoima and Tiambu Peambu myths. For the sake of brevity, I shall limit myself to these here, though there are many others.

Under what conditions is it possible to transcode from such verbal material to a valid theatrical-ritual text? Fischer-Lichte’s answer to this is: “We must entirely agree with Lessing (1765, 1769) and Diderot (1769- 1778) that verbal signs can be translated into theatrical only if each if useable as interpretant for the other” (1983 III, 39).

This suggests, then, the need for two “hermeneutic” operations. First, with reference to the Totoima myth, when the novices are on the platform, the initiators need to seize them and eat their innards. Later, when the meat is distributed (not of the novices but of the immolated Totoima), this must be done in a gory manner and suggest the savage era to which the sacrifice belongs as well as its powerful magic in bringing about the multiplication of the tribes. During the episode in the sama, it must be kept in mind that the novices have to grow a new heart and new innards as their original ones were eaten by Totoima.

But secondly, and most importantly, the existence of the ritual and the interpretation given to it confers new and profound meaning on the myth itself. The point is not that ritual is prior to myth or that myth is prior to ritual, but that individual actors cannot perform the ritual without making each of them the interpretant of the other.

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How is such a translation process accomplished? Fischer-Lichte (1983 III, 42) distinguishes three basic modes of transcoding: linear, structural and totalising. In the first mode, translation proceeds phrase by phrase. Thus, the ritual of pork distribution is a linear transcoding of the Totoima myth where the meat was Totoima’s. In the second mode, the transcoding involves the kind of transformations to which we have become accustomed in Lêvi-Straussian structural analysis. Thus the sama is like the platform on which Totoima’s son was first killed, then revived by the Managalase sorcerer, and the novice’s mother’s brother fulfils the role of magician. Such a transformation of the text is justified by several logical operators: the opposition low/high, where the high modality belongs to the patient and the low one to the sorcerer, secondly by the homology between the mother’s brother in the ritual and the Managalase sorcerer’s position as sister’s husband. The sister’s role in the myth is played by the father’s sister in the ritual. The sealing off of the sama, the need to wear a cape when leaving the sama and various ritual prohibitions are transformations of aspects of the Tiambu Peambu cure.

In the third and most complex mode of transcoding we do not necessarily find correspondence between any particular part of the literary text (or myth) and any part of the theatrical text but the latter acts as interpretant of the former. Ritual actors characteristically create corporal texts to be condensations of symbolism. Thus, there is correspondence between Totoima’s (Schwimmer 1973, 1974) total lifestyle and the lifestyle of the spirit attackers in the first phase of initiation. Likewise, there is correspondence between the lifestyle of Tiambu Peambu (Schwimmer 1984) and the second phase of initiation. As for the last part of the Tiambu Peambu myth, i.e. the feast where the hero meets again with the parents who abandoned him, this causes problems of interpretation as it is absent from all the versions collected except for Johnstonwick’s. Moreover, it lacks the extraordinary richness and complexity of the earlier part as it moves purely on a social level. On the other hand, it acquires new levels of meaning as soon as we intrapolate from the third phase of the ritual (the post-seclusion feast) to the last part of the myth. The parents of the novices now appear as parallels of the parents of Tiambu Peambu. This is in part just another structural transformation linking myth and ritual, but it is likely that historically the ritual was, in this case, prior to that part of the myth. For there is no evidence that the myth was traditionally so closely linked to Orokaiva initiation. This may not have happened until the 1970’s. Once the connection became important from an ideological viewpoint, for the reasons set out above, the myth was elaborated to fit. This would explain why, in earlier versions, the last part is missing.

However this may be, the totalising mode of transcoding is of the highest importance in explaining the many bizarre acts of the spirits that have nothing to do with any of the mythic texts as such. There is no mythic charter for somersaulting or biting pigs, houses and coco palms. Here we depend wholly on hermeneutic explanation: the spirits of the dead are angry and envious: they wish to communicate their feelings to the living world from which they are excluded. The somersaulting shows them as unsocialised and irresponsible, like the children before they were initiated.

This brings us to the third question: how can we judge whether the transcoding from the mythic to the performance text has been adequate? In view of what we have said of the transcoding process, it must remain dubious whether the performance text is truly “equivalent” to the mythic one. The latter is indeterminate in many physical features whereas the latter is indeterminate in many discursive features. Fischer-Lichte therefore suggests we should distinguish between the signification (Bezeignung) of the performance text and the meaning (Bedeutung) of the literary text of myth (1983 III, 42). We may then say that transcoding into the performance text will be deficient if it is confined to rendering the signification of the original (i.e. the applying of theatrical conventions to the original); it has to refer also to the level of the meaning (Bedeutung).

On the level of theatrical illusion, the cardinal condition of adequate performance is that the audience (the novices) must be tricked by the spirits, whom they must believe to be real spirits and not living people at all. This is a theatrical norm, constraining upon the performers. At the same time, the performers must bring out that, at a cosmological level, the ceremony brings together the living and the dead as a total and ideal world order, a model of what life should be.

CONCLUSIONOn one level, this paper analyses Orokaiva feasting. It shows that the resources it absorbs are investments

in the inter-village alliance system for politico-military ends. Feasts are, moreover, instruments in the stabilisation of local authority structures, symbolising both their freedoms and their constraints. In spite of their cyclical repetitive nature, they have been dynamos of Orokaiva history. Finally, on the religious level, they bear witness of hidden realities in the universe for which they rely on elaborate and sophisticated artistic codes. The paper offers some suggestions on the method of study of these codes.

At the same time, it addresses the question of Orokaiva self-concepts. We have shown that the Orokaiva identifies, in his myths and rituals, as a warrior/donor and a sorcerer/healer. These are self-concepts appropriate to a social system depending for its survival on inter-village alliances. During the great festivals,

The Ceremonial Self 363

the experience of selfhood is one of expansion from the material individual in space to embrace the entire alliance system as object of identification and in time to embrace all remembered ancestors of the alliance. Self-liberation is experienced in this self-expansion.

In as far as this paper is a contribution to esthetic anthropology, it focuses on the “magic of impersonation” as genesis of an esthetic. By showing theatrically the process of self-expansion and self-liberation, performances succeed in making the “invisible order” manifest as a totality. The genesis of esthetics, then, does not lie in the development of particular esthetic objects but rather in the integration of all these particular objects into a “total prestation”. As Michel Leiris put it (1958:96): “c’est la vie collective elle-même qui prend forme de thêâtre”.

NOTE

1. I express my gratitude to the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago where I spent several months and wrote this piece, after which several scholars of that department spent a great deal of time writing comments on it. In particular, I appropriated several of Michael Silverstein’s comments in the present manuscript - for which I thank him. The paper was presented at the Phoenix meeting of AAA in November 1988. I gave an earlier version to Ralph Bulmer shortly before he passed away. The financial aid of the CRHSS of Canada and of Universite Laval (leave fellowship) is also acknowledged with gratitude.

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