RITUAL OF REBELLION
Hilaire, George P St
RITUAL OF REBELLION GEORGE P. ST. HILAIRE Does it enhance the social order rather than weaken it? Max Gluckman, a South African social anthropologist, has written extensively on what he calls...
...We may topple more presidents by this means, arid certainly we'll send more dishonest politicians to jail amid a flurry of cluck-clucks and sound recommendations for reform...
...But they have to admit, either by their words or by their actions, that they did something that is never done...
...Yet the demonstration appears to be a preliminary necessity...
...And a few of these are recognized to state conflicts...
...Why, too, should the Senate Watergate hearings recess in June of 1973 because Brezhnev was visiting our shores...
...In Swaziland, if the king was still a boy, the rites of rebellion were not practised...
...AMERICANA AT NEWPORTMERICANA AT NEWPORT...
...Consequently, if these young men do nothing more than say "I'm sorry," we will be purged of this social sin...
...But, of course, we have many ceremonials expressing unity...
...Why do so many Americans (and not just the V.F.W.s) get terribly emotional when the question of unconditional amnesty is raised for those who resisted the draft and/or refused to go to Vietnam...
...But this is not entirely useless...
...and the Russian Revolution turned its back violently on an even more venerable system which for most had become too burdensome...
...The public now is aware of these tensions and some small reform may result or a given crooked individual will be thrown out of office...
...Wayne Hays of Ohio, chairman of the House Administration Committee, held up a campaign reform bill for months...
...The answer, it seems to me, is contained in the lengthy quotation from Gluckman...
...Are we to believe that that many millions are partisans of the immoral slogan "My country right or wrong...
...the French Revolution was an effort to abolish an elaborate power structure which left most people powerless...
...The problem in these cases, of course, is that these dissident groups were refusing to play the game according to the rules, and the law and order people were crying foul...
...Congress and our leaders in general are nearly always made the scapegoats...
...Consequently, the Roman Catholic mystic Margaret Mary Alacoque and other would-be religious reformers were quite wide of the mark when they inveighed against the sexual license indulged in at Mardi Gras in 17th-century France...
...Since we are not at present willing to pay the price of revolution, we will have to be satisfied with periodic rituals' of rebellion...
...As Gluckman points out, by legitimizing otherwise forbidden actions, they relieve and express tensions...
...The intuition these two latter groups had was that many sympathizers of the dissidents, at least, and doubtless some of the active participants were really playing at a game called revolution when in fact they were claiming to be playing at rebellion...
...That is why, even though the country was almost unanimously sick of the Vietnam war by 1970 when Nixon ordered the U.S...
...The great revolutions of the modern era are, of course, good examples pointing up Gluckman's distinctions between revolution and rebellion...
...Sam Ervin's prestigious committee has recommended a spate of strong measures for government reform, not much that will really shake the establishment will be enacted...
...Revolution, on the other hand, seeks to overthrow GEORGE P. ST...
...What about the Blacks rampaging through the streets of Watts, Washington, Detroit, or Newark, looting and killing...
...There is a healthy dialectic between custom and conflict or order and rebellion in many of the African societies studied by anthropologists...
...He therefore calls them "cold" societies, since "their internal environment neighbours on the zero of historical temperature" and since it is their object "to make it the case that the order of temporal succession should have as little influence as possible on their content...
...In fact, Gluckman contends, it is only when that existing order is firmly established and generally accepted that a society can afford the luxury of rituals of rebellion...
...this was not found where the rabbinate was weak...
...and when he finally let it 'through, it did not call for public financing of congressional campaigns because, as an incumbent, he would have no advantage over his challenger...
...We were saying that we still approve of our political system, that despite its wrinkles and warts, it is overall a pretty good order...
...Hot" societies, in contrast, of which we are representative, are those "with history," "resolutely internalizing the historical process and making it the moving power of their development...
...Margaret Mary failed to understand the process unfolding: by engaging in this kind of rebellion the people were acknowledging the wisdom of the Church's marriage and purity rules...
...On the other hand, in the midst of this general outcry for reform, Rep...
...If the foundations of the institution are weak, then rituals of rebellion are out of the question...
...But why should that be...
...For instance, "in the Polish ghettos, where the rabbis were powerful, once a year a sermon attacking them was preached in the synagogue by a wastrel...
...There are other straws in the wind as well: the papers report that though Sen...
...The American colonists in 1776 were determined to throw off the shackles of royalty-and not just George III-as well as an unjust tax system...
...or Richard Nixon...
...Therefore, people are opposed to unconditional amnesty because the evaders and the deserters were playing at war and our society was being threatened...
...We were saying, and Congress was saying that "Once there is questioning of the social order, ritual of protest is inappropriate" (Custom and Conflict, 134...
...Even some strikes appear to be ceremonials of rebellion in the national industrial system...
...It is his contention-and he demonstrates it quite conclusively-that ritualized rebellion paradoxically enhances the social order instead of weakening it...
...But there is something else that must be examined at this juncture...
...Such are New Year's Eve and Mardi Gras, when sexual mores are lampooned, and, for the children, Hallowe'en, when honesty and fair play are set aside and limited destruction of property is legitimized...
...hilaire is assistant professor of anthropology at Gonzaga University...
...In the former, people are demonstrating the tensions that obtain between ruler and subjects or between various classes of the population...
...They realized intuitively what anthropologists have analyzed with great care and over a long period of time: working within the system can at most precipitate rebellion, and rebellion can at most turn out a specific ruler like L.B.J...
...They also perform that paradoxical service Gluckman mentions: they reaffirm, by reason of the fact that they are rebellion and not revolution, confidence in and approval of existing institutions...
...Periodic scandals, say, about the actions of the Civil Service, may lead to the affirmation of general principles about how the country should be run, as if there were not posed impossible reconciliations of different interests...
...There is no question of trying to overthrow the existing order...
...What about the scared look on Nixon's face as he carefully avoided college campus appearances...
...That is why the radicals of the '60s were right (and more "level heads" were wrong) when they refused to work within the system...
...After Gluckman, other anthropologists began to notice a whole series of rituals of rebellion in our society...
...Rebellion, Gluckman points out, is different from revolution...
...Intriguing for me, however, in light of recent events in our society, are some observations Gluckman makes in Custom and Conflict about Western culture: "We don't have rituals in the sense that we believe that the acting of social roles will in some supernatural manner affect our prosperity and unity in this way...
...Yet I am also sometimes tempted to regard as 'ceremonies' other squabbling actions in our social life, which are usually assumed to be realistic...
...For some of them end, and apparently for a time happily, without changing conditions...
...Whenever there is a foreign war, the foundations of a society are always threatened...
...But if what Gluckman says is true, then we can believe that we have just passed through another ritual of rebellion...
...It breaks out much less frequently in tribal societies than in our own because the former are much more conservative and traditional-in fact, like to think that their order has remained crystallized since time immemorial and that they are, to use Claude Levi-Strauss's phrase, "peoples without history...
...incursion" into the Parrot's Beak of Cambodia and again when two years later he mined the harbors of Hanoi and Haiphong, the vast majority of Americans approved of his actions...
...If we view the entire matter of the war under the rubric of ritual of rebellion, I believe we can come up with a more satisfying explanation...
...These inquiries may not alter what actually happens, but they affirm an ideal condition of unity and justice...
...Again, harking back to Gluckman, we recall what he said about the weak and the strong rabbinate in ghetto Poland...
...I don't think so...
...otherwise rituals of rebellion would have no purpose...
...Parliamentary debates and election campaigns are full of dispute: I wonder how realistic much of this is, and what relation it bears to the actual taking of political decisions...
...Is it merely because they can't admit that they themselves or "we" were wrong while the kooks were right...
...How much can we hope for political reform, for honesty in government...
...And he points to various cases where, because rebellion would be no laughing matter, it is not allowed...
...So were a lot of Mid-Americans, as we learned in 1968 and again in 1972...
...With the Watergate scandals and the strong recommendations for reform coming out of the Senate Watergate hearings, most of us are expectant of more honesty in political campaigns, some radical changes in campaign financing, and a higher level of morality in our public servants...
...Ironically, the participants were not demonstrating their immorality but precisely their morality...
...their acts were in no way revolutionary, for on Ash Wednesday they went back to their normal observance of the law...
...and others lead to a change which might have been achieved without the demonstration...
...Political analysts told us at the time that people get behind the President on matters of foreign policy...
...especially Custom and Conflict in Africa, Order and Rebellion in Tribal Society, and Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society...
...the existing order...
...While I'm on the subject of the war-resisters, I'd like 'to examine the case of those young men who refused to serve in Vietnam...
...One might legitimately ask, "Yes, what about the rebellious '60s, when John Mitchell herded thousands of anti-war demonstrators into corrals like' cattle...
...Max Gluckman, a South African social anthropologist, has written extensively on what he calls "rituals of rebellion" (cf...
Vol. 102 • September 1975 • No. 13
