The structure of ritual and the epistemological approach to ritual study

Abstract

With cases collected from long-term fieldwork on two ethnic groups of China, the Flora-belt Dai and the Ao Yao, this paper analyzes predominant definitions of “ritual.” It discusses such issues as ritual’s technique versus the supernatural, the sacred versus the profane, symbol and metaphor, the non-Aristotelian definition and the operational definition in order to examine their generalities. The paper then presents a new point of view on ritual’s structure and function through the angle of epistemology: as a human activity, ritual contains certain progressive meanings based on an ethnic group’s exclusive cultural facts. Ritual functions as visualization and activation of these cultural facts. Presuming an intercommunity between informants and anthropologists, the paper offers the possibility of further study in anthropological ritual research.