Ritual Syntax Revisited

IF 0.7 2区哲学 Q1 HISTORY

NUMEN-INTERNATIONAL REVIEW FOR THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS Pub Date : 2022-05-23 DOI:10.1163/15685276-12341664

Richard K. Payne

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Abstract

The syntactic analysis of ritual initiated by Frits Staal (1979) provides an effective means for the study of differences between rituals within a particular ritual culture, of changes to a ritual over time, and of changes as rituals are transmitted from one ritual culture to another. The utility of a syntactic approach continues to be obscured by Hans Penner’s critique (1985), which when examined in the first section of this article, “Clearing the Ground,” proves to be faulty. Despite Penner’s critique, some scholars have employed syntactic analyses, and the work of five of them is discussed in the second section, “Existing Constructive Projects.” The following section, “Foundations,” examines the methodological bases of ritual syntax – formalism and abstraction, the difference between production and analysis – and distinguishes three levels of syntactic analysis that parallel linguistic analyses of sentences and sentence structures. The final section, “Extending the Construction,” further develops the technical aspects of a syntactic analysis of ritual into new areas, including alternative diagramming of syntactic structures.

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仪式语法重审

Frits Staal(1979)发起的仪式句法分析为研究特定仪式文化中仪式之间的差异、仪式随时间的变化以及仪式从一种仪式文化传播到另一种仪式文化时的变化提供了一种有效手段。汉斯·彭纳(Hans Penner)的批评(1985)继续掩盖了句法方法的效用，在本文的第一部分“清理地面”中对其进行检查时，证明其是错误的。尽管Penner提出了批评，一些学者还是采用了句法分析，在第二部分“现有的建设性项目”中讨论了其中五位学者的工作。下面的“基础”部分考察了仪式句法的方法论基础——形式主义和抽象，生成和分析之间的区别——并区分了三个层次的句法分析，它们与句子和句子结构的语言分析平行。最后一部分，“扩展结构”，进一步将仪式的句法分析的技术方面发展到新的领域，包括句法结构的替代图表。

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来源期刊

NUMEN-INTERNATIONAL REVIEW FOR THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS Multiple-

CiteScore

2.20

自引率

9.10%

发文量

期刊介绍： Numen publishes papers representing the most recent scholarship in all areas of the history of religions. It covers a diversity of geographical regions and religions of the past as well as of the present. The approach of the journal to the study of religion is strictly non-confessional. While the emphasis lies on empirical, source-based research, typical contributions also address issues that have a wider historical or comparative significance for the advancement of the discipline. Numen also publishes papers that discuss important theoretical innovations in the study of religion and reflective studies on the history of the discipline.