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Full Text: Anthropos, 102.2007

532 
Christine 
A. Kray 
characterization of Catholicism as promoting rela- 
tionality. However, while historians have focused 
on messages explicitly communicated in church 
doctrine, this work also examines how Catholic rit 
ual obliges people to act as a cooperative commu 
nity. As such, this work asserts a practice approach, 
which considers the ways in which relationships 
are instantiated in ritual practice. In the community 
of Dzitnup, the church stands at the center of both 
the physical and social space. Generally speaking, 
Catholic ritual practices tend to reproduce relations 
that unite villagers into a corporate body. As they 
reproduce Catholic practice, villagers indirectly re 
produce community structures. To be a Catholic in 
rural Yucatán is, in a real way, to act as a member 
of a village community. 
This work describes semantic and pragmatic 
theories about how religions influence social life, 
which focus on signs that are read by practition 
ers and the audience. The article explores a prac 
tice perspective, which reveals how ritual practices 
oblige people to enact (put into practice) “right” so 
cial relationships. By way of illustration, the article 
shows how Catholic rituals in Yucatán semiotically 
project relationality, and further, how they actually 
forge or instantiate social relations through oblig 
ing large groups of people to interact collectively 
and cooperatively, and to do so nearly continuously 
for large portions of the calendar year. While an 
thropologists have become accustomed to think of 
ritual as a clearly demarcated, discrete time “out of 
time” (Turner 1977: 96), this case calls attention to 
other cycles of ritual activity that stretch out over 
long periods of time, overlap, and blend into ev 
eryday activities. In such cases, ritual is the actual 
stage for social life, rather than merely a represen 
tation of it. 
The Power of Religion 
In the anthropological literature, the power of re 
ligion - the effect that it has on people - is typi 
cally attributed either to the creation of a worldview 
through symbols or to the representation of a world 
through indexical signs in the performance of ritual. 
First, in what we might call a semantic approach, 
religion projects a worldview that then shapes how 
people interact in their daily lives. (Tambiah [1979] 
makes the basic semantic/pragmatic distinction.) 
This approach is most often associated with Geertz, 
who considered religion both a “model of” and 
“model for” (1973: 94) the sociocultural order. In 
his view, the supernatural order is also a direct re 
flection of (a model of) the social world, and there- 
as 
ial 
In 
the 
by serves as a model for its reproduction. Religi^f 
rituals may be read as texts to reveal the won 
view which they impart. For Geertz, religion 
a set of symbols, is able to reproduce the soc 
order because of its manipulation of emotion, 
religious ritual, the worldview and the ethos, 
moods and motivations by which people live, & 
united in one set of symbols. In this way, the mo° 
and motivations are more permanently attached ^ 
the established social order: “By inducing a set 
moods and motivations - an ethos - and defining 
image of cosmic order - a world view - by meanS he 
a single set of symbols, the performance makes 
mnHiil f/ir anrl mr>rliri rtf cicnpi'tc nf rfriicrinilS De* 
1973: 
model for and model of aspects of religious 
mere transpositions of one another” (Geertz 
118; emphasis in the original). v 
Turner similarly attends to the social effi ca ^ 
of ritual symbols. In particular, he notes that rfid 
symbols often encode both “physiological phene 
ena” - blood, breast milk, semen, birth, death - aI V 
also “normative values of moral facts” - respect 
elders, matriliny, generosity to kin, etc. The v 
performance of ritual is essential for its effect 1 
ness: the singing, dancing, etc., lead to an alter 
sensitivity, so that the normative becomes inves 
with the physiological, and, therefore, imbued 
deep sentiment: “The drama of ritual action " 
singing, dancing, feasting, wearing of bizarre dr ^ 
body painting, use of alcohol or hallucinogens, 
so on, causes an exchange between these P 
which the biological referents are ennobled and 
normative referents are charged with emotional . 
nificance” (Turner 1974: 55). Ritual achieves s °^ 
effects because through the ritual process ern° 
is attached to the symbols of societal norms. 
In contrast, in what we might call a prag 1 ^ t 
perspective, religion affects the social world ^ 
necessarily through symbols of a worldview, 
more so through indexical signs that signal a j 
lationship between those who wield the sig nS ^ 
others. Crucial is the idea that the actual P ra ^ 
of the ritual - who performs it and how " ^ 
greater effect on social life than does any w ^ 
view embedded in its symbols. The pragma! 1 *' ^ 
proach may be traced back to Durkheim, ^ ^ 
fact begins his discussion of ritual with a se ^ 
tic approach. As such, he asserts that the ^ 
bols of religions (such as totems) are actually 
bols of the society: “the sacred principle is n 
more nor less than society transfigured an 
sonified” (Durkheim 1965: 388). In collectif^ 
ship of these symbols, the participants in 
indirectly worship the society, thereby real 11 
their collective beliefs. Moreover - and th lS ^ 
pragmatic element - through their collective P 
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