Repositorium | Buch | Kapitel

In Chapter 3 I made a case against the overly formal approach to ritual, arguing instead for a set of criteria that favored content or purpose over form but ultimately combined the two. Accordingly, I argued that Arnold Van Gennep's three-part schema for understanding rites of passage was not particularly useful for other kinds of ritual activity with different aims. I suggested that theorists needed to relate the formal properties of events to the types of events they are fit to accompany, that different genres may well have different syntagmatic patterns, and ultimately that any formal aspects abstracted must be related to the intentions and understandings of the creators (i.e., the meaningful contents) of the events. In general, the point here is that while the form of an event may be partially distinguished from its content, the two cannot be dissociated—that is, one cannot imagine a pure form without content or vice versa. For Peirce, this is what separated distinction, the weakest form of category division, from the stronger modes of dissociation and precission (CP 1.353).¹

DOI: 10.1057/9781137342386_4

Quellenangabe: