RELIGION

Mother/word, Father/tongue, lovepoem, wordsong, talking drum.
When one is in trouble, one remembers God and Family. (West Africa)

In The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), Kenneth Burke asked us to consider "strategies" and "situations" in considering "critical and imaginative works." When we view proverbs or magic or religion, according to Burke, we should take note of the ways in which "naming" is done because the strategic or stylistic choices "embody attitudes of resignation, solace, vengeance, expectancy etc." Burke spoke of "the magical decree that is explicit in all language" and introduced the idea that this "decree" is common in all verbal action. Using the categories of "dream, prayer and chart," he suggested that we are always choosing "between magics." This idea of choosing between magics seems more forgiving than Frazer's nineteenth century distinctions among science, magic and religion. Burke's description of the symbolic act as the "dancing of an attitude" lends itself to modelling the dynamic interactions among religion, the individual and the society.

One nineteenth century thinker who seemed to intuit the dynamic processes of what he called "social forms" was Georg Simmel, whose principles of form, reciprocity, distance and dualism anticipated other conceptual frameworks that deal with the creation of meaning and the imposition of reality based on experience. For Simmel, there was no fixed or intrinsic meaning in any thing or in any event because all meaning emerges through interaction. In terms of distance, Simmel suggested that "religion offers a point that transcends all of the contrasts of psychic experience and toward which they all converge." Simmel's dynamic approach is best considered in his refusal to see humans as passive beings who are constrained by outside institutions. In terms of the study of religion, it might be interesting to consider Simmel's idea that we each inhabit MANY WORLDS. As he said: " We are constantly circulating over a number of different planes, each of which represents the world - totality according to a different formula; but from each our life takes only a fragment along at a given time." So, as individual ethnographers or students of comparative religion, the different groups to which we belong, the different "interests and expectations" that we bring to the endeavor will continue to shape our perceptions and affect our abilities to name what we see. Won't this be the same among the Africans we come to know?

In his 1985 article "Self: Public, Private. Some African Representations," Godfrey Lienhardt considers the African idea of the "I." He "takes his bearings" he says, from "African forms of self-expression not elicited by questions put by foreign observers in a foreign philosophical and psychological idiom," but from the following West African Folktale:

The king invited the animals to a great feast, and offered a prize to the best dancer.
The animals danced energetically before him, each showing off its own most
striking qualities -- the elephant its grave dignity, the leopard its sinuous coat,
the gazelle its spectacular leaps and so forth. When, at the end of the dance,
they gathered around the king to hear his judgment, to their surprise and
displeasure he awarded the prize to the tortoise. Answering their complaints,
the king asked them who had provided the feast, and who was giving the
prize, to which they could only reply 'It is you, O king!'. 'And so it is that I
award the prize to the tortoise', said the king, 'for it is only I who can see the
dance of the tortoise: his dance is entirely inside him'.

Lienhardt tells the reader that, "in much West African folklore, the tortoise represents resourcefulness, intelligence, trickery and luck." "Thus," he says, "for those who tell this tale, the success of the slow, ungainly tortoise is an extreme example of the deceptiveness of outward appearances, though the moral is not that hidden intellectual agility is preferred, as such, to physical display: both are parts of the dance."

This led me to think about the study of other people, other religions, other cultures, and it helped me to reflect on Burke's "symbolic act" and the "dancing of an attitude" in ethnographic representation, and how "naming" is, in some senses, "becoming" or "being." In some parts of Africa, babies don't become "people" until they get their names in a public ceremony - one that includes singing, dancing and eating. The naming is a "magical decree" and symbolic act; it's art and communication and it is all a part of the dance, the "art" of being human. The ethnographer moves between several worlds as well, and I will close with what Victor Turner, anthropologist/religionist/Africanist, ( From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play) taught of the theatrical potential of social life:

" . . .In the field my family and I lived in no "ivory tower" : we spent nearly three years in African villages ( Ndembu, Lamba, Kosa, Gisu), mostly in grass huts. Something like "drama" was constantly emerging, even erupting, from the otherwise fairly even surfaces of social life. For the scientist in me, such social dramas revealed the "taxonomic" relations among actors (their kinship ties, structural positions, social class, political status, and so forth), and their contemporary bonds and oppositions of interest and friendship, their personal network ties, and informal relationships. For the artist in me, the drama revealed individual character, personal style, rhetorical skill, moral and aesthetic differences, and choices proffered and made. Most importantly, it made me aware of the power of symbols in human communication. This power inheres not only on the shared lexicons and grammars of spoken and written languages, but also in the artful or poetic individual crafting of speech through persuasive tropes: metaphors, metonyms, oxymora, "wise words" (a Western Apache speech-mode), and many more. Nor is communication through symbols limited to words. Each culture, each person within it, uses the entire sensory repertoire to convey messages: manual gesticulation, facial expressions, bodily postures, rapid, heavy, light breathing, tears, at the individual level; stylized gestures, dance patterns, prescribed silences, synchronized movements such as marching, the moves and "plays" of games, sports and rituals, at the cultural level . . ." (1982:9)

Kumasi, Ghana photo: Kathryn Roe,WCC Art Instructor