Symbolic types, mediation and the transformation of ritual context: Sinhalese demons and Tewa clowns

Ritual as process, and as transformation of context and of its participants, is of increasing concern to anthropologists. Most anthropologists have been content, however, to describe the processual form of rites without sufficient attention to their dynamic properties, or to the agents and agencies through which they effect their transformational work. Turner (1967, 1969), following Van Gennep, has contributed the most to our understanding of the transformational process and has located the critical moment of transformation, specifically in relation to rites de passage, as occurring in the liminal period: that point 'betwixt and between' one context of meaning and action and another. Characteristic of this liminal period is the appearance of marked ambiguity and inconsistency in meaning, and the emergence of liminal demonic and monstrous figures who represent within themselves ambiguities and inconsistencies. As ambiguous figures, they mediate between alternative or opposing contexts, and thus are important in bringing about their transformation. We are concerned with examining this aspect here as one part of a general interest in the analysis of the transformational moments of ritual. The argument is limited to an analysis of the transformational function of what we term 'symbolic types' (see also Klapp 1949; Grathoff 1970; Burns 1972; Handelman 1979, in press; Kapferer 1977b), or what others in some contexts might recognize as liminal figures, and of the way these are mediated into a ritual context. Our general thesis is that the key dynamic in the transformational process is related to the mode and nature of mediation of symbolic types into context. Symbolic types, as we will explain more fully in the analysis, are internally consistent forms which are reified above context but at the same time are determinate of it, in the sense that where they appear they tend to mold context to their own internal consistency. By contrast with the symbolic type, the role-type is a construct of mundane reality. In