Language, Physicality, and Mantra

Chapter 2 examines the nature of mantra. It first explores ideas of mantras as magic utterances and examines ritual language. This leads to a theoretical discussion that argues against Staal’s assertion that mantras are not speech acts. While Staal’s work is useful for understanding mantras, the chapter claims that the Netra and Svacchanda Tantras anticipate his argument and offer a counterexplanation. The perspective they offer is unique to these two texts, and the Netra Tantra’s twenty-first chapter provides a philosophically rigorous examination into the composition, characteristics, power, and productiveness of mantras. The Netra Tantra offers a tripartite explanation of mantras as formless, disembodied, and embodied or unmanifest potential, potential, and limited potential. This discussion presents the most important feature of mantras: that no matter their form (or lack thereof), the mantra and the deity are inseparable. This too helps explain the importance of encoding the mantra within the text. The chapter ends with a brief section on the practicalities of mantric recitation, namely, in the eleven types of sequences that protect the mantra from impurities such as mispronunciation or incorrect usage. Further, it presents a type of semantic analysis called nirvacana that uses the roots of words to demonstrate the eternal nature of the text itself.

RITUAL LANGUAGE IN BURIAL PROCESSION OF MOSALAKI OF LIO-ETHNIC

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menelaah bentuk, makna dan fungsi dari bahasa ritual yang digunakan pada saat prosesi pemakaman Mosalaki (sebagai tetua adat) dari etnik Lio, di kampung Nanganio, kecamatan Maurole. Dalam penelitian ini ditemukan tiga bahasa ritual yang digunakan pada saat prosesi pemakaman Mosalaki yakni Nangi Na’u, Woge dan Oro Woko. Metode penelitian yang digunakan adalah deskriptif kualitatif dalam menganalisis ujaran-ujaran dalam teks lisan Nangi Na’u, Woge dan Oro Woko pada prosesi pemakaman Mosalaki di Kecamatan Maurole. Teori-teori yang digunakan untuk menganalisa ketiga bahasa ritual ini yakni teori oleh Foley (1997) tentang bentuk bahasa ritual, teori Palmer (1996) tentang makna bahasa ritual dan teori Jakobson (2017) tentang fungsi bahasa ritual. Hasil dari penelitian ini yakni ditemukan dua bentuk bahasa ritual (kesetaraan dan metafor), empat makna bahasa ritual (makna kebersamaan, makna harapan untuk kesehatan, makna harapan untuk kesuksesan dan makna religi) dan empat fungsi bahasa ritual (fungsi ekspresif atau emotif, fungsi konatif, fungsi puitis dan fungsi phatic). Keunikan dari penelitian ini yakni ditemukannya beberapa ungkapan dalam ketiga teks lisan bahasa ritual tersebut yang memiliki pengulangan kata, bunyi dan memiliki makna kiasan serta memiliki makna dan fungsi bagi keselamatan jiwa dan ketabahan bagi anggota keluarga yang ditinggalkan.

BECOMING ΚΛΕΙΝΟΣ IN CRETE AND MAGNA GRAECIA: DIONYSIAC MYSTERIES AND MATURATION RITUALS REVISITED

This article reconsiders the historical and typological relation between Greek maturation rituals and Greek mystery religion. Particular attention is given to the word κλεινός (‘illustrious’) and its ritual uses in two roughly contemporary Late Classical sources: an Orphic-Bacchic funerary gold leaf from Hipponion in Magna Graecia and Ephorus’ account of a Cretan pederastic age-transition rite. In both contexts, κλεινός marks an elevated status conferred by initiation. (This usage finds antecedents in Alcman's Partheneia.) Without positing direct development between puberty rites and mysteries, the article argues on the basis of shared vocabulary and other ritual elements that age-transitions influenced the ideology of mystery cults. It is further claimed that puberty rites and mysteries performed similar functions in their respective social contexts, despite obvious differences of prestige and visibility. Age-transition rites have been analysed in Bourdieu's terms as ‘rites of institution’, in which young elites were publicly affirmed in civic roles: private mysteries can be described in analogous but opposed terms as rites of ‘counter-institution’, in which familiar ritual language and symbols of elite status were used to construct an alternative ‘imagined community’ of mystery initiates.

Retórica y organización del discurso en El ritual de los Bacabes

The aim of this paper is to study the rhetorical structure of the Ritual of the Bacabs, a colonial document of great importance in the context of Yucatec Maya literature. After a philological analysis, I will focus especially on the study of textual rhetoric and the marks of orality of this ritual document. I will also study the textual symbolism and networks of paronomasias, used to link diseases, body parts, animals and medicinal plants in the same healing action. The analysis of its rhetorical organization and the textual mechanisms of meaning production allows us to understand the functions of ritual language and the presence of a codified system of discourse. The basis of my theoretical approach is the convergence between rhetoric and semiotic study of discourse.

Michel Leiris and the Secret Language of Song

Best known for his reminiscences of artistic and intellectual life in midcentury Paris and for his chronicle of the 1931 Dakar-Djibouti mission, L’Afrique fantôme (1934), Michel Leiris also wrote obsessively about music, turning to imperfectly recalled fragments of song and opera to evoke key moments of early childhood and to explore affective relationships. This article focuses on two episodes from Leiris’s writings to demonstrate that his highly emotional and anecdotal mode of writing about music anticipates, and quite possibly influenced, the more systematic theories of voice, sound, and language of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Derrida engaged directly with Leiris in his essay “Tympan” (in The Margins of Philosophy), which quotes at length a text by Leiris on the cognitive and relational dimensions of hearing and writing. Leiris’s experience in the 1930s and 40s developing a lexicon and grammar for the ritual language of the Dogon people of Mali, I argue, fundamentally shaped his conviction that both music and language are most communicative when they permeate and destabilize each other.

Language as Cultural Expression: The Case of Limbu Mundhum and Ritual* Ramesh Kumar Limbu

An anthropological study of „religious /ritual language‟ concerns the relationship between the study of language and the study of culture. This article, using ethnolinguistics and ethnographies of communication as tools of study, examines how the Mundhum language distinctively maintains ethnographic communication by use of the ritual language, and communicates the social worldviews and cultural cognition of Limbu community. The Limbu, known also by endonym "Yakthung", are one of historically notable indigenous communities of Nepal. They have their own distinctive culture based on traditional ritual performances guided by Mundhum. The Mundhum is narrated and recited by Limbu ritual/religious actants/officiants in cultural/ritual observations, that is, rituals from pre-birth to after death. The study focuses on the issue how the Mundhum language, also known as Ritual Language (RL), is distinctive to the everyday language or Ordinary Language (OL) and helps express their cultural perceptions, behaviours and way of life. In doing so, it also shows the way this ritual/liturgical language influences not merely the kinds of speech but also the aspects of tradition, culture and way of life.

Eating and Being Eaten: Interspecies Vulnerability as Eucharist

Living in a time of urgent ecological crisis, Christians need outdoor ritual experience of their faith: of what is wild, of the living Earth, stranger faces of the divine: taking eco-alienated people out of the building and into the streets, the river, the forest. Moving liturgy outdoors makes possible an opening to both human and more-than-human strangeness on their own terms, in actual, present, sensory experience. It also opens worshipers’ experience of the Christian sacraments into the disconcerting realm of our bodies’ physical edibility to other creatures: the possibility of our own flesh becoming food. Using the work of Val Plumwood, David Abram, and Eric Meyer, this paper examines Eucharistic ritual language and theologies of resurrection as these contribute to a worldview that maintains a human versus food dualism incommensurate with biological processes. Ultimately, the paper calls for Eucharistic practices that allow participants to pray being prey.

Doukhobor Russian (South East Slavic), Salish (Sinixt, SENĆOŦEN [Snčán, Sénčqn]), Standard Russian, Ritual Language, [kharthuli εna, Kartvelian], and Altaic (Turco-Tataric ‐ татарлар) : The Language(s) of the Doukhobors of Canada

Due to the 250-year status of their language as an oral language (but see below the reference to Georg Brandes [1888]) the only hard evidence we have just what the Doukhobors’ language was like, are the interviews conducted with Doukhobor elders in the 1960’s, i.e., those speakers who had brought the language with them in their mass migration to Canada in 1899. Some glimpses can also be gained by the study of their ritual texts (psalms, prayers, and hymns) that fortunately had been collected and written down in the early 20th century by the Bolshevik Russian land surveyor in a book called Životnaja Kniga duxoborcev (Bonč-Bruevič, Vladimir. 1909 [1954].) There is a debate as to how the title of this book is best translated into English, The Book of Life or The Living Book. I believe that The Living Book currently has the edge. Before being collected and written down, this book was also oral, and much of the language reflected the spoken practice (Schaarschmidt 1995). At all times, the illiterate Doukhobors had access to members of their community that performed the written tasks for them, such as dealing with the bureaucracy of the Russian Empire. And because of their forced move from the Crimea to Transcaucasia, the Doukhobors’ previous exclusive contacts with South Russian now faced Russian-Turco-Tataric bilingualism. The latter can still be traced rather easily: of the ever decreasing number of elders in their seventies and up, many remember bits and pieces of Turco-Tartaric words and expressions that are published in a series of articles in the Doukhobor monthly Iskra by a former and now retired Russian-language teacher in the Doukhobor area of British Columbia (see, for example, Popoff 2013). In addition, many Doukhobor surnames show Turco-Tataric influence. What is often not so clear is whether the Turco-Tartaric words came into Standard Russian before the contact of Doukhobor Russian with Turco-Tartaric, and it is our role as etymologists to determine that on the basis of multi-volume dialect dictionaries or field work in the still extant Doukhobor oral language area within Georgia. For any moribund language that in the past had multiple functions there arises the question of the relationship between language death and the preservation of culture, a largely unresolved issue in sociolinguistics. On the one hand, there are cases of large-scale language loss with the retention of at least some elements of culture (to wit, Ukrainian in Canada, Sorbian in Germany, many First Nations in North America, and, as will be demonstrated in the present research article, Doukhobor Russian in Canada and Georgia). The present paper will deal with a small subtopic in this large field, i.e., the loss of “special” languages, such as the “ritual language” as used by the Doukhobors as well as their oral language that they brought with them to Canada in 1899 and that was partially recorded by linguists, such as Harshenin (1961; 1964; 1967).

Kekuatan dan Kekuasaan (dalam) Bahasa: Potret Tradisi Ritual Etnik Rongga, di Manggarai Timur

Kekuatan dan Kekuasaan (dalam) Bahasa:Potret Tradisi Ritual EtnikRongga, di ManggaraiTimur Ni Wayan SumitriFPBS IKIP PGRI BaliJalanSeroja, Tonja, Denpasar Utara, Telepon [email protected] Wayan ArkaAustralian National University/ FIB Universitas UdayanaJalanNias No 13, Denpasar [email protected] AbstrakPenelitian ini mengkaji kekuatan dan kekuasaan dalam bahasa pada etnikRongga dalam konteks kehidupan kontemporer di Manggarai Timur. Fokus kajiannya pada aspek sosio-etnolinguistik terkait dengan bentuk-bentuk linguistik dan non linguistik, sistem nilai budaya yang terkait dengan nilai-nilai kekuasaan, proses pemerolehan, pewarisan, pemertahanannya di masa lampau dan kini, serta prospeknya di masa mendatang. Penelitian deskriptif-kualitatif ini menggunakan pendekatan etnografi, ditopang data wawancara, studi dokumentasi, rekam dan catat, memaparkan inovasi kajian kapital lingusitik sebagai bagian dari kapital lainnya (sisiokultural dan ekonomis).Hasil temuan menunjukkan bahwa secara linguistik, terdapat kekhasan satuan bentuk ujaran bahasa ritual bersifat puitis arkais dalam pola-pola bersajak dengan tingkat kesulitan bentuk dan irama yang tinggi. Secara etnolinguistik, ada pesan/makna yang sarat nilai sosial budaya dan pengetahuan etnik Rongga terutama terkait dengan kekuasaan. Relasi kekuasaan dan bahasa ritual terbangun secara alamiah melalui sejumlah kualitas persona dengan mendapatkan pengakuan/ligitimasi atas posisi hirarki sosial seperti kemampuan, keterampilan, dan kepekaan dalam penguasaan pengetahuan adat. Semua itu, sebagai bentuk kapital linguistik dan kultural bagi seseorang, dan juga otoritas rohaniah yang bersifat genealogis menjadi sumber daya potensial pada pengaruh dan kekuasaan menggerakkan kepatuhan dan penghormatan warga lain.Walaupun mengalami penyusutan, danl egitimasinya tergerus karena kehadiran sistem kekuasaan pemerintahan/birokrasi modern Indonesia, namun sistem pewarisan kekuasaan tradisional masih mengikuti garis kekuasaan kepada orang yang memiliki kapital linguistik-budaya, umumnya tokoh adat yang berpengaruh, yang mampu menguasai bahasa ritual dan memanfaatkan pengetahuan adat dan energi lembaga adat untuk berbagai kepentingan, baik ritual/tradisi maupun kontemporer. Kata kunci: kekuatan, kekuasaan,bahasa, tradisi ritual, capital linguistic/budaya AbsractThis study examines power within and behind language with reference to the Rongga people in the contemporary East Manggarai context. The focus is on socio-ethnolinguistic aspects as seen in linguistic and non-linguistic forms and cultural value systems reflecting power, the process of acquiring and preserving it in the past and present, and its prospect in the future. This is a qualitative-descriptive study, using an ethnographic approach, supported with data collected by means of interview and documentation. It provides a description and offers a fresh analysis of linguistic capital as part of other kinds of capital (cultural and economic). The findings show that ritual language linguistically has peculiarities with a high degree of difficulty in terms of poetic and archaic expressions and patterns of rhyme and rhythm.Ethnolinguistically, the ritual language carries messages reflecting socio-cultural values and knowledge, especially in relation to traditional power. Power within and behind ritual language is acquired and developed naturally through personal qualities (such as ability, skill, and sensitivity in mastering indigenousand linguistic knowledge), with legitimation and recognition of the authority gained by inhereted positions in the traditional social hierarchies. All these form a socio-cultural capital by which one can earn power and respect, driving influence and compliance by fellow members of the community. While shrinking with eroding legitimacy due to modern Indonesian bureaucratic system, the acquisition of traditional power still relies on heredity, combined with ability in mastering ritual language and indigenous knowledge as part of linguistic-cultural capital for various purposes in both traditional and contemporary contexts.Keywords: power, language, ritual tradition, linguistic/cultural capital