PART THREE
METAPHOR AND PERFORMANCE

6
Ritual Language Speaking the Kingdom

If charisma is a rhetorical process that transforms self and habitus, and if the locus of charisma is in the language and performance of religious ritual,^[1]   a central hermeneutic task must be to determine the way language and performance achieve their transformative effect. Can the characteristic persuasiveness, the metaphorical vividness, and the evocation of the sacred in ritual language justifiably be said to be creative, orienting the self toward new patterns of engagement and experience? Or, on the contrary, is such language primarily the servant of a linguistic and cultural status quo, lacking the creative potential inherent in the language of poetry or even in everyday speech? In the remainder of this book I choose to argue for the creativity of ritual language as a self process. To do so effectively, however, my argument must meet two criteria: (1) to demonstrate precisely how that creation is achieved by identifying the conditions under which creativity is possible and the processes through which it works; and (2) to demonstrate that something in particular is created, whether it be a new meaning, a new state of mind, a new way of understanding the world, a new community, or a new social order.

Within the repertoire of Charismatic ritual elements, let us first clearly distinguish among ritual objects, gestures, somatic manifestations, and language. Ritual objects are limited to traditional Catholic sacramentals (blessed oil, salt, or water), the occasional use of candles, the decoration of homes with pictures or banners, and the rare use of ritual clothing.

Ritual gestures are limited to the customary prayer posture and the laying on of hands, and more rarely to the hopping, kneeling, and prostration found in the calisthenic spirituality of The Word of God. Somatic manifestations include resting in the Spirit and other signs and wonders as well as physical sensations or images taken as instances of revelation, or "words of knowledge." Ritual language includes a system of genres and a specialized vocabulary.

Catholic Charismatic ritual performance is characterized by a marked linguisticality, in that most of what goes on is verbal. In this sense it is a religion of "the word." Catholic Charismatic ritual is not based on the recitation of written texts (except when a passage from the Bible is read during a gathering) or a preestablished liturgy (except when a prayer meeting is integrated into a "Charismatic mass") but is predominantly oral. Bound by the mortar of oral performance, ritual events become the building blocks of Charismatic life. However, this occurs in a manner distinct from that found in societies typically treated in the anthropological literature. Anthropological accounts of traditional societies customarily treat ritual as a window on the nature of society, as events that throw light on underlying cultural and structural patterns: society creates ritual as a self-affirmation . In a movement like Catholic Pentecostalism, this relation between society and ritual is inverted. Ritual events like prayer meetings are both historically and structurally prior to the generation of distinctive patterns of thought, behavior, and social organization. The events provide the earliest models for the organization of aspects of community life that subsequently transcend the boundaries of the events: ritual creates society as a self-affirmation . We must accordingly undertake a hermeneutic of the rhetorical conditions that define the creativity of oral performance in Catholic Charismatic ritual.

A Synthetic Theory of Performance

There are three relevant schools of thought on performance in anthropology, each of which approaches the problem from a slightly different angle, and which taken together constitute an adequate theory of performance. These are the cultural performance approach of interpretive anthropology (Singer 1958, 1972; Peacock 1968; Geertz 1973; Grimes 1976; Kapferer 1979a, 1983; Laderman 1991; Schieffelin 1985; Fernandez 1986; Manning 1983; Roseman 1991; Csordas

1994; Laderman and Roseman 1996); the performance-centered approach from sociolinguistics and folklore (Abrahams 1968, 1972; Gossen 1972, 1974; Hymes 1975; Bauman 1975; Jansen 1975; Fabian 1974, 1979b; Goldstein and Ben-Amos 1975; Samarin 1976; Csordas 1987; Bauman and Briggs 1990), and the performative utterance approach borrowed from the philosophy of language (Austin 1975; Searle 1969, 1979; Finnegan 1969; Bloch 1974, 1986; Tambiah 1985; Rappaport 1979; Ray 1973; Gill 1977). All share a hermeneutic sense of the importance of context but complement one another in that the first formulates performance as event, the second as genre, and the third as act. I shall briefly elaborate each of these approaches.

In Milton Singer's formulation, cultural performances as events are elements of tradition on the "cultural level of analysis" and ways in which

content is organized and transmitted on specific occasions through specific media. . . . [A performance] has a definitely limited time span, a beginning, and an end, an organized program of activity, a set of performers, an audience, and a place and occasion of performance. (1958: 194)

Analysis of cultural performances runs in terms of constituent factors such as cultural institutions, cultural specialists, and cultural media, which in part, at least, are amenable to the direct observation of the field worker. (1972: 78)

For Singer, performances are "the most concrete observable units" of culture, from which progressive analytic abstraction can lead to the structure of kinds of performances and thence through examination of linkages among these structures to constructs of cultural structure or value system (1972: 64).

Whereas classical anthropological theories typically limited the scope of ritual efficacy to its exemplary or legitimating functions, in this view performance has a creative dimension aptly summarized by Geertz.

[Performance, by] ordering [important themes of social life] into an encompassing structure, presents them in such a way as to throw into relief a particular view of their essential nature. It puts a construction on them, makes them, to those historically positioned to appreciate the construction, meaningful—visible, tangible, graspable—real in an ideational sense. (1973: 443–444)

My argument is that performance makes key psychocultural themes real not only in an ideational sense but also in a phenomenological sense. This is consistent with the notion that cultural performance has a power to transform both experience and social relations. Singer

recognizes that it is not through evocation of emotion that performance acts, but by creation of a specific mood the constancy and intensity of which become a religious devotee's primary concern (1972: 201). This matches Geertz's general formulation that religion "acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations" (1973: 90), where moods are kinds of disposition "which lend a chronic character to the flow of . . . activity and the quality of . . . experience" (1973: 95). Thus cultural performances are primary arenas not only for representation but also for the active constitution of religious forms of life.

In contrast to performances as events, the sociolinguistic approach formulates performance as a specific kind of action carried out within a distinct genre.

There is behavior , as simply anything and everything that happens; there is conduct , behavior under the aegis of social norms, cultural rules, shared principles of interpretability; there is performance , when one or more persons assumes responsibility for presentation. (Hymes 1975: 18)

It is necessary to assess the "degree of performance" in each instance, since texts from the same genre may in different situations take on greater or lesser degrees of performance (Hymes 1975). For example, the full performance of a myth cycle entails a greater degree of performance than the recitation out of context of a single myth from that cycle. William Hugh Jansen (1975) notes that different genres customarily involve different degrees of performance, as for example the difference in force between uttering a maxim like "Rain before seven, clear by eleven" on a morning stroll and uttering a sermon in a church. For Jansen, the degree of performance is contingent on the function of a text in a particular situation, on whether the form or content of the text necessarily implies performance, and on whether the performer is recognized as such by the audience.

The concept of genre in this approach is a modification of the concept as used in literary criticism. In particular, Northrop Frye argues that any analysis of the rhetorical functions of language is contingent on a theory of genres.

The basis of generic distinctions in literature appears to be the radical of presentation. Words may be acted in front of a spectator; they may be spoken in front of a listener; they may be sung or chanted; or they may be written for a reader. . . . The purpose of criticism by genres is not so much to classify as to clarify . . . traditions and affinities, thereby bringing out a large number of lit-

erary relationships that would not be noticed as long as there were no context established for them. (1957: 246–248)

This approach may be even more essential to the cross-cultural study of oral performance than it is to comparative literature, for whereas literature typically deals with a limited number of more or less well-defined genres (epic, drama, lyric, novel), anthropologists have encountered a multiplicity of specialized speech varieties and oral performance forms. In these instances the "radical of presentation" looms large, and clarification of "traditions and affinities" is contingent on careful ethnographic analysis. Richard Bauman suggests that "performance sets up, or represents, an interpretive frame within which messages being communicated are to be understood, and that this frame contrasts with at least one other frame, the literal" (1975: 292). The frame defines a genre by use of special codes or formulas, figurative language and formal stylistic devices, distinct prosodic or paralinguistic patterns, and appeals to tradition or disclaimers of performance.

The critical aspect of performance for our argument is its emergent quality that "resides in the interplay between communicative resources, individual competence, and the goals of participants, within the context of particular situations" (Bauman 1975: 302; see also Abrahams 1968: 148–149). The act of performance can create new forms of social relations.

It is part of the essence of performance that it offers to the participants a special enhancement of experience, bringing with it a heightened intensity of communicative interaction which binds the audience to the performer in a way that is specific to performance as a mode of communication. Through his performance, the performer elicits the participative attention and energy of his audience, and to the extent that they value his performance, they will allow themselves to be caught up in it. When this happens, the performer gains a measure of prestige and control over the audience—prestige because of the demonstrated competence he had displayed, control because the flow of interaction is in his hands. When the performer gains control in this way, the potential for transformation in the social structure may become available to him as well. (Bauman 1975: 305)

In this formulation what is created by performance, understood as a marked form of communicative behavior, is "social structure," understood by Bauman as the structure of relations between performer and audience. However, if our theory of ritual performance is not to revert to the idea of the individual performer as "charismatic leader," performance must also be understood to structure relations among members

of the audience, some of whom may also at times have performative access to ritual genres. In other words, the conditions and processes of creativity must be identified in performance understood as a form of charismatic interaction among participants.

The third component of our theory of performance shifts analytic focus from the more general domains of event and genre to the specificity of the performative act. This approach originates with John L. Austin's (1975) and John Searle's (1969, 1979) notion of performative utterance. For Austin, not all utterances are "constative," or descriptive of states of affairs. Some are actually ways of doing things, so that in certain cases "saying something is doing something," and there is no simple distinction between spoken word and physical act. Austin also distinguishes the force of an utterance from its meaning. "I will come to the party" has a clear sense and reference but may have either the force of a promise or only that of a vague intention. In Austin's formulation, illocutionary force is effected in the act of saying itself, as in "I promise." In contrast, perlocutionary acts "produce certain consequential effects on the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons" (Austin 1975: 101). For example, saying something can perform the perlocutionary act of "persuading" someone of something, but one cannot say, as with illocutionary acts, "I persuade you that . . ."

Anthropologists have applied the concept of performative acts cross-culturally to conventional forms of ordinary speech as well as to forms of ritual language, and have reinforced the theory's implicit blurring of the line between word and deed by including nonlinguistic ritual acts in their analyses. Tambiah (1979/1985) has proposed for the analysis of ritual language a distinction between the illocutionary frame, roughly that which establishes the force of an utterance, and the predicative frame, that in which qualities are attributed and transferred among persons and entities. This distinction can serve us as long as we recognize that the illocutionary act bears an aura of predication and that the performance of metaphors carries illocutionary force. It expands the notion of performative act to explicitly include the performance of metaphor. The power of metaphor to create form and movement in expressive culture has been decisively shown in the work of Fernandez (1986). Our adaptation of the notion of performative act incorporates both the Austinian emphasis on illocution and perlocution and a concern with the predicative force of metaphor.

In the subsequent discussion I will examine the structure of event,

genre, and act in the performance of Catholic Charismatic ritual language.^[2]   I will adopt neither the functionalist perspective that performance acts primarily to reinforce behavioral patterns and belief systems nor the materialist perspective that religion mystifies language to create an illusion of its efficacy. Instead, I will adopt a hermeneutic approach to utterances and the way they make sense within a religious movement, such that a distinctive sacred reality is constituted in performance.

Events of Charismatic Ritual Performance

The prayer meeting is the central collective event for Catholic Charismatics, and as I have noted the organization of prayer groups and communities evolved directly from the organization of prayer meetings. You can best get a sense of a typical prayer meeting in a moderate-size group by imagining yourself one evening in the gymnasium of the parochial school in a suburban Catholic parish. About one hundred folding chairs are arranged in concentric circles with a small open space in the center, a physical representation of community in contrast to the typical arrangement of church pews in straight rows oriented toward an altar above and in front of the congregation (this physical arrangement on a larger scale appears in pl. 1). Against one wall is a long table that several women are filling with books, pamphlets, and cassette tapes. The people trickling into the room know one another and embrace in greeting. A young man greets you, the newcomer, with a handshake and a smile, asking if you have ever attended a Charismatic prayer meeting and if you know what to expect. He is a "greeter," a ritual office within the group, and is concerned that you are prepared for the potentially unsettling experience of hearing collective speaking (and eventually singing) in tongues for the first time. Someone at the center of the circle begins to play a guitar, and people drift toward the chairs, where they stand and join in singing "Alleluia, give thanks to the risen Lord." You are handed a book of Charismatic songs to help you participate.

After the song everyone sits, except for the head of the group's pastoral team, a man dressed in jacket and tie who stands at the center. He says, "The Lord be with you," and the assembly responds enthusiastically, "And with you too!" This is a greeting borrowed from the Catholic Mass, but endowed with an informal tone in the prayer meeting.

The man welcomes everyone, especially newcomers, reminding participants that they are gathered for the sole purpose of "giving praise and glory to God." He urges everyone to "worship the Lord" in a relaxed way and to "be open to what the Lord might have to say to the group in prophecy." He announces another song title, and the guitarist leads the singing. Afterward, participants sit quietly murmuring prayers to themselves, some with closed eyes. Some of these prayers are short phrases such as "Praise you, Jesus" or "Thank you for your love, Lord," while others utter a stream of glossolalic nonsense syllables, praying in tongues. The leader rises again, suggesting that everyone stand and praise God. Everyone does so, many raising their hands in front of themselves, palms open. The room is filled with a hubbub of voices and clapping, in the midst of which a voice begins intoning in tongues. Other voices join in, weaving a fabric of harmony around the original note, vaguely reminiscent of a Gregorian chant. Some contribute short melodic phrases that emerge from and then subside again into the collective chant. The singing in tongues swells and crests, subsiding after a minute or two back into a murmuring of voices. Everyone sits down.

Once again the leader stands, this time to introduce another member of the pastoral team who will deliver a "teaching" on the topic of "God's love." The man next to him stands and speaks for about ten minutes, quoting from the Bible and providing illustrations of how he has experienced divine love in his own life. The leader requests participants to "thank the Lord" for this teaching and to "be open to any word the Lord might have for them." The room is silent with anticipation, many sitting in the characteristic palms-open prayer posture. The silence is broken by a woman's voice speaking in an authoritative tone: "My children, I love you. I love you, for I am your God. Follow me and I will show you the glory of my love." No one watches her as she speaks; everyone looks ahead or sits with closed eyes. At the conclusion of the "prophecy," understood as the direct utterance of God through an inspired speaker, there are scattered, reverential murmurs of" Thank you, Jesus." Someone in the assembly begins a slow chant of "Alleluia, Alleluia," and the group joins in the simple, familiar melody.

When the chant subsides, a man rises and "shares" an incident from the past week in which he had an opportunity to show God's love to a fellow worker in his office. The theme of divine love is now well established as the focus of the prayer meeting, as a woman stands to narrate how the assurance of this love was helping her to deal with her husband, who was opposed to her participation in the prayer group.

Another woman announces that because of the group's love and concern—divine love incarnated in human caring—the sick relative for whom she had previously requested the group's prayers was now improved. A priest stands to publicly thank God for the love he has experienced since his ordination. The leader then asks if anyone has a prayer of petition for the group to collectively "lift up to the Lord." Several people speak up, following which all once again join in collective prayer, some speaking in English and others in tongues.

The leader now makes several announcements as the meeting comes to an end: the single people in the group are planning a weekend canoe trip, a men's prayer breakfast is planned for the next week, a couple is moving across town and needs help loading their furniture, a Life in the Spirit Seminar for the initiation of new members will begin in two weeks, an introductory talk for newcomers and a session of prayer for divine healing will be held in separate rooms immediately following tonight's prayer meeting. The group sings a final song, and people move from their seats, smiling and embracing one another. Some browse at the book table, others talk in groups, drinking coffee and nibbling cookies. The young man who greeted you earlier appears again, pointing out where the introductory talk is to be given. There with half a dozen others you listen to a group member describe the "Four Spiritual Laws," give some background about the history and organization of the prayer group, and narrate how his life has changed since joining the prayer group and being baptized in the Spirit. He answers questions about the group and about speaking in tongues, prophecy, and faith healing. The evening's activities have lasted a total of two to three hours.

Variations on the basic prayer meeting correspond to the features, described in earlier chapters, that distinguish types of charismatic groups and geographic regions within the movement. A small, casual prayer group is likely to gather around a lighted candle in the living room of a private home; a large group may meet in a gymnasium, with several instrumentalists to accompany group singing, a public address system for the speakers, and control by leaders over who may prophesy or share. In such a large group a second weekly prayer meeting may be held for more intimate communal prayer among core group members. Where groups have included communal households, there are small prayer meetings for the residents, and some covenant communities have adopted a weekly Sabbath ceremony. Where there is a more Catholic, as opposed to an ecumenical, orientation, the prayer meeting is often incorporated into a Charismatic mass, with segments of the liturgy

expanded to include elements of the prayer meeting. Periodic conferences that last several days include multiple prayer meetings, along with workshops on various spiritual and pastoral topics. Finally, committed Catholic Charismatics typically spend a certain period every day in individual prayer, which may take the form of a prayer meeting for one.

The Pentecostal experience of Baptism in the Holy Spirit is understood as an infusion or release of divine, life-transforming power in a person. Initiation to this experience is closely tied to initiation into the Charismatic group (see also Harrison 1975). One need not have experienced the baptism to attend weekly prayer meetings, but even if one has undergone it in another setting or group, participation in the initiation rite is usually prerequisite to attendance at the more private core group meeting. Initiation typically occurs in a series of weekly seminars that meet for seven weeks. The first four sessions explain the "basic Christian message of salvation" and the meaning of Baptism in the Holy Spirit. The fifth week is devoted to prayer with laying on of hands for neophytes to receive the Baptism in the Holy Spirit. The final two weeks are "oriented toward further growth in the life of the Spirit." These Life in the Spirit Seminars are led by experienced group members following the format of a published manual.^[3]

Each session consists of a carefully prepared talk, following which participants break into small "discussion groups" segregated by sex. The discussion group leader gives his or her own "testimony" of personal religious experience and encourages the participants to speak openly about, or share, their own spiritual background and personal lives. During the week preceding the special session of prayer for Baptism in the Holy Spirit, the discussion group leader has a private interview with each of his or her charges. The critical fifth session is a rite within a rite. Following an introductory explanation, participants make a formal "commitment to Christ," pray collectively for "deliverance" from evil spirits in a reiteration of Catholic vows made at sacramental baptism, receive individualized prayer with laying on of hands for Baptism in the Holy Spirit, pray collectively as a group in praise of God, and listen to a closing exhortation. Additional prayer group members are often enlisted to help the team members with laying on of hands, so that in the individualized prayer there are two men with each male initiate and two women with each female. At this point the neophytes are distributed about the room awaiting personal attention by the teams of two. The seminar leaders' manual advises the team to encourage a background noise of soft vocal prayer to create a sense of privacy for each initiate.

A good deal of excitement is generated on the seventh and final week of a Life in the Spirit Seminar, when the new members are introduced to the rest of the group at the weekly prayer meeting. They have assimilated a basic message that the world is in a state of sin and requires salvation, which can ultimately be obtained only by commitment to Christ. Thereupon the deity bestows the Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts on the faithful, initiating their spiritual growth into a life that can be most ideally and fully lived within a Christian community. The expected effects of the Holy Spirit are the desires to pray, to read the Bible, and to frequent mass and the sacraments; experience of gifts of the Spirit such as speaking in tongues and prophecy and fruits of the Spirit such as feelings of love, peace, and joy; and experience of the "presence of God" in daily life as well as in ritual settings.

The seminars expose neophytes to the repertoire of Charismatic ritual practices, to a specialized vocabulary and genres of ritual language, and to a mode of thinking about divine action in life that are expected to lead to transformation of personal consciousness and adoption of a distinctly "Christian" way of life.^[4]   As we have seen, the initiation process is considerably expanded in some covenant communities, where as many as two years of seminars may be required for full membership. In addition, in some groups rites of passage marking changes in state of life are used to mark new phases of commitment to the group. Charismatic weddings emphasize the new couple's place in the community, and some communities recognize a parallel state of celibacy called being single for the Lord. Finally, the initiation of new group leaders is typically marked with some degree of ritual observance. In all cases, the crucial gesture of confirmation of new status is the traditional Pentecostal laying on of hands.

Charismatic healers tend to specialize in one of several types of healing prayer (healing from physical illness, inner or emotional healing, and deliverance from evil spirits), and ritual healing may take place in four relatively distinct types of events: large public services with multiple patients, small services following prayer meetings, private services for the benefit of a single patient, and solitary healing prayer for oneself or absent others.^[5]   In large public healing services the principal healing minister, unless he or she is traveling as a guest in an unfamiliar region or country, is typically assisted by a staff. Members of this staff serve as ushers for those coming forward to receive prayer, "catchers" for those who may be overwhelmed by divine power and fall in a sacred swoon, musicians, and members of small prayer teams. Each patient receives

at least a few moments of personal attention from either the principal healer or one of the prayer teams. Staff members of several well-organized "ministries" may be identified during services by a sash or jacket worn over their clothing, or by regular street clothing with a common color scheme.^[6]   In a typical scenario, the service begins with the leader walking up and down the aisles of the church, using a liturgical instrument called an aspergillum to sprinkle holy water on the assembly, and pausing periodically to lay hands on a person's head or shoulder. Returning to the front of the assembly, the leader delivers a sermon on divine healing, and a music emsemble composed of members of the staff leads the group in Charismatic songs. Several participants are solicited to share or "witness to" previous healings they have experienced. The body of the service consists in each participant coming forward for a minute or two of private prayer, much as they come forward for the Eucharist in a mass. Each is anointed with sacramental oil and "prayed over" with laying on of hands.

In prayer groups, healing prayers for self or others may occur in a segment of the weekly prayer meeting. Better-organized groups may have a selected team of "healing ministers" who, following the meeting, conduct prayer for individual supplicants in a separate prayer room or "healing room." Several pairs of team members dispersed through the room each see one patient at a time. They listen, talk, lay on hands, and pray for healing. Other patients wait outside the prayer room and are admitted one by one by another healing team member who acts as gatekeeper. The post-prayer meeting healing room session stands in contrast to the large service in its relative privacy, in the increased amount of time spent with each patient (10 to 20 minutes instead of 2 to 3), and in the greater likelihood of healers and supplicants having an ongoing relationship within the group.

Based on the recommendation of the healing room prayer team, on the recommendation of another prayer group member who senses that a person is troubled, or on one's own initiative, a person may arrange a private session with a more experienced healer or healing team, within or outside the group.^[7]   Private healing sessions typically take place in a home or counseling center but sometimes occur over the telephone or in hospital visits. Private sessions may last an hour or more and may be conducted by healers within the group or by those with broader reputations. Healers either stand over the seated supplicant with hands laid on head, shoulder, back, or chest; or they sit facing the supplicant, sometimes holding hands. Private sessions are infor-

mally structured into alternating segments of talk or "counseling" and of actual "healing prayer," though some healers regard the entire session as prayer. Multiple sessions over time on the model of psychotherapy are performed by more "psychological" healers who hold that healing can be a divine augmentation of gradual, natural processes, although more "fundamentalist" healers object that God's power or willingness to heal is slighted if lengthy, multiple sessions are held. Finally, healing prayer for oneself or others may be practiced in the solitude of private devotion. To my knowledge there is no formal procedure to such prayer, and it can obviously not be observed directly.

Along with prophecy and speaking in tongues, healing is regarded by Charismatics as one of the spiritual gifts, or charisms. However, the structure of healing events as cultural performances is essentially different from that of the prayer meeting and its variants. This is because the gift of healing is understood as the mediation of divine power through specific individuals, rather than as collective access to the divinity through worship and inspiration. Even though prophecy is also a mediation of divine power by an individual, and even though its message may be uniquely interpreted by each listener, anyone in a prayer meeting may be inspired with prophecy, and everyone hears the same prophetic utterance. The asymmetrical relationship among participants in healing, constituted by one person "ministering to" others, persists even when there is a group of healers working in teams. Only rarely is divine power given a collective locus, with the leader instructing all participants to lay hands on each other.^[8]   Thus, although movement leaders exhort participants to "focus on the gift, not the man," there is nevertheless a perception that some healing ministers are more gifted than others, and those in attendance at public healing services often show a preference to be "prayed over" by the service leader instead of by one of the teams of assistants.

The System of Ritual Genres

The major genres of Charismatic ritual language are named, formalized speech varieties used with regularity in ritual settings and frequently regarded as verbal manifestations of the sacred. There are four such major genres, including prophecy, teaching, prayer, and sharing. Several minor genres occur only in informal settings and

are not formally named. These include maxims and slogans, jokes, and slang. Other minor genres integrate language with various forms of bodily movement and include liturgical dance, liturgical drama, and religious games. As language , these genres can be placed on a continuum defined by formality, sacredness, and distinctness from speech genres typical of the mainstream or background culture.^[9]   As forms of social interaction they are characterized by specific relations between performer and audience and relations among members of the audience. I will describe the genres of Catholic Pentecostal ritual language with respect to the place of each along the linguistic continuum, and with respect to the way they conventionalize social interaction. We begin with the major genres.

Major Genres of Ritual Language

Prophecy . Prophecy is a first-person pronouncement in which the "I" is God; the human speaker is merely the divinity's mouthpiece. For Catholic Charismatics, prophecy is a kind of divine revelation, a means of access to the mind of God. In spite of this, prophecy is very rarely used to foretell the future. Instead, its primary functions are usually listed as exhortation, encouragement, conviction, admonition, inspiration, correction, guidance, consolation, and revelation. Prophecy can occur in a variety of settings and for a variety of audiences. One may be prophetically inspired while alone, while praying with another person, or in a prayer meeting. The prophecy may be intended for oneself, may be a "personal prophecy" for another individual, or may be intended for the group as a whole. The content of a prophecy may be standard and repetitive or innovative and unique and may be directive or nondirective in its implicit consequences for action. Acceptable or authentic prophecy may also be communicated in several modes: (1) a prophetic vision may be narrated in ordinary language; (2) a prophecy may in special cases be written down and read aloud later (even though it is a predominantly oral genre); (3) oral prophecy may be sung or spoken, either in the vernacular or in glossolalia.

Glossolalic prophecy must be "interpreted" into the vernacular, either by the original speaker or by another participant. In a prayer meeting, glossolalic oration will be followed by silent anticipation of its interpretation. The risk of exercising a charismatic gift in a group other than one's own, where one is initiated into the tacit local code of appropriateness, is illustrated by an incident in which a woman proph-

esied in tongues while visiting Charismatics in another city. The anxious silence was never broken by a vernacular interpretation, and the prophet's chagrin was relieved only when a group leader approached her after the prayer meeting with the reassurance that someone had "received" the inspiration to speak but either from timidity or for some other reason had not done so. The leader was in this case conforming to the precept that it is the responsibility of listeners to encourage or admonish the speaker according to the impact of the words.

Precisely because it lacks semantically intelligible meaning, prophecy in tongues is a compelling manifestation of the absolute other that constitutes the ultimate object of religion (van der Leeuw 1938). Its specialness is enhanced by its relative rarity in Charismatic ritual discourse. Nevertheless, a certain pragmatic attitude toward ritual language is illustrated in one prayer group leader who frequently prophesied in tongues. He regarded it not so much as a prophecy in itself but as a "prophecy facilitator." That is, since participants knew the ritual rule that a vernacular interpretation must be forthcoming following such an utterance, those who were hesitant, shy, or inexperienced would be encouraged to voice an inspiration of which they might be unsure.

As the literal word of God, vernacular prophecy is the most overtly sacred genre of Catholic Pentecostal ritual language. This status is highlighted in performance by distinctive features of prosody, and by the imposition of formal constraints on diction:

1) Prophecies are typically uttered in a strong, clear voice and a tone that can be declamatory, authoritative, imperative, or stern. Seldom will the tone be one of beseeching or imploring. Prophecy in guttural, harsh, strident, or whining tones is of questionable validity, for such tones are thought not to be adopted by the deity when speaking to his "people" and are often attributed to demonic inspiration.

2) Prophecies are usually prefaced by an opening formula, most often "My children, . . ." With increasing development and self-perceived maturity in a group, this formula tends to be replaced by "My people, . . . " In groups with extensive familiarity with prophecy, whose participants can recognize it by intonation and other conventional features, an opening formula is sometimes dispensed with altogether.^[10]

3) There is a characteristic intonation pattern within each line of

prophecy, such that the voice rises in the middle and falls again at the end of the line, producing a kind of singsong effect. Several authors have suggested that such intonation patterns are typical of ritual language across cultural traditions (Goodman 1981; DuBois 1986).

4) Prophecy is usually recited in couplets such as the following taken from two separate utterances:

This gathering is a great hope
This meeting is both a hope and a promise

I am doing a new kind of work of unity
I am stirring you up to new dedication and new zeal in my service

This latter technique is common among varieties of oral poetry, such as the biblical Psalms and the Mayan Popol Vuh (Tedlock 1986), among Yugoslavian bards (Lord 1960), among the Rotinese (Fox 1974), and among the Weyewa (Kuipers 1990, 1993). For Charismatics, in juxtaposition to the less formalized genres of ritual language, the measured cadences of parallel structure add to the solemnity and sacrality of prophetic utterance.

Prophesying is not primarily a form of ecstatic speaking. What the prophet says is subject to an elaborate procedure of evaluation by himself and others, called "discernment." It is held that discernment is necessary because prophecy can be inspired not only by God but by the Devil (in which case it is "false prophecy"), or by the speaker's own human wants and needs (in which case it is "nonprophecy"). Prophetic words must be judged to agree with Christian teaching and Scripture, must be edifying, and must have a tone that is not frightening or condemning. The prophet's personal life must be "in order" if his words are to be trusted, and the prophecy must "bear fruit" in the lives of others. If the prophecy contains predictions, they must "come to pass."

An additional criterion of discernment is the degree of certainty a person feels regarding a particular inspiration. A continuum of certainty ranges from absolute conviction and powerful "anointing" to a weaker "sense of what the Lord might be saying" and finally to personal insight and opinion. Only when someone is fairly certain that an idea is "from the Lord" should it be cast in the verbal form of prophecy; otherwise it should be communicated in the more conversational genre of sharing, or not at all. Valid inspirations with didactic content should be communicated as "teachings." In some quarters of the move-

ment, the "teaching prophecy" is regarded as an invalid and inappropriate mixture of genres. In all cases it is the responsibility of the listeners to admonish or encourage the speaker of prophecy according to the impact of his words.

The prophet must also discern or decide whether a particular divine message is appropriate to a particular setting: whether it is meant for a group or solely for his own inspiration, and whether it should be uttered immediately or at a later time. For example, given that the proceedings of a prayer meeting often coalesce around a distinct theme, an unrelated prophecy that is otherwise well formed may be regarded as inappropriate, or even disruptive. In one group a young woman was forbidden to prophesy for this reason; one of her last prophecies was an eloquent discourse on God's tears of sorrow at those who did not hear his word, but it was uttered during a meeting at which all the other prophecies had to do with "God's love." In this instance the group leadership was already convinced on other grounds that the person was "emotionally unstable," and the overt impropriety of her attempt at ritual discourse both confirmed that opinion and marked her as a potential threat to the order and continuity of the ritual event.

Teaching . Like prophecy, teaching is often performed by a class of cultural specialists. The chief requirement for teaching is "spiritual maturity," but at the same time the ability to teach is regarded as a spiritual gift from God and thus not entirely dependent on a person's native talents. Group leaders often deliver teachings, and in addition they recruit others whom they feel have attained the appropriate level of maturity. Teachers may be assigned topics or may be allowed to develop their own. The usual setting for teaching is the prayer meeting, where for many groups a prepared teaching is a regular weekly feature. Teaching is also given in initiation seminars, workshops, and conferences. Dozens of prerecorded cassette tapes are also available, with teachings by widely known and well-respected movement figures.

The principal generic criterion of teaching is that it clarify some spiritual truth and thus enable its hearers to lead better Christian lives. The teachings are often detailed elaborations of key terms and concepts that recur in less elaborated form in the other ritual genres. Teaching is distinguished from public "sharing" by the skill and rhetorical resources of the performer. The speaker draws on incidents from personal experience, standard anecdotes, and moral tales to illustrate his points and substantiates these points with citations from the Bible.

Teaching is expected to be relevant to actual situations and to be

integrated by its hearers into their everyday lives. It is not just useful advice, but an articulation of the basic motives around which group life is supposed to coalesce. At the same time, the teaching itself is shaped in the context of collective experience and is enacted in a distinctive relationship between performer and audience. Teachers often ask listeners to pray with them before beginning, thus establishing a collaborative setting: the teacher becomes inspired, and the audience becomes prepared to receive and accept the message. The listeners are taught to evaluate the teaching not only on the speaker's clarity of expression and rhetorical skills but also insofar as they "can feel that the Holy Spirit is at work in it."

Teachers take their responsibility quite seriously, as is evident in the account of how a man, who had recently delivered a teaching accepted by his group as "inspired," had formulated his talk during the preceding week. It had evolved out of two thoughts shared by his wife and a Scripture passage shared by another woman. He was simultaneously influenced by a trip his sons were making to a conference for Catholic Charismatic youth and by news of a man in Atlanta who had quit his job and become a schoolteacher so as to have more time for religious activities. In addition, he knew that his teaching was to be given at the prayer meeting during the crucial fifth week of the Life in the Spirit Seminar, where neophytes would be present who had within hours received the Baptism in the Holy Spirit. As he prayed that week, the deity assured him that the teaching was in His hands. However, he became "upset with the Lord" because the synthesis of ideas, which for him usually comes early in the week before a teaching, was not occurring. He suffered the entire week with a "teaching bondage," which he described as "an urge to please people rather than to speak God's truth." The reason for this bondage was clear to him: Satan did not want the talk to be given. This example illustrates that the meaning of an utterance cannot be fully apprehended if performance is viewed solely in terms of interactions within the boundaries of isolated ritual events (see Bourdieu 1977).^[11]   For this informant, the total experience of teaching was interwoven in a universe of discourse. Emerging from the experience of everyday life, its message in performance became a normative commentary on that life and was experienced as "inspired" by its hearers.

Prayer . Prayer may be performed by an individual or a group, silently or audibly, in speech or in song, in glossolalia or in the

vernacular, in a normal state of consciousness or "in the Spirit" (a mild ecstasy). As an everyday life activity, prayer need not be restricted to a particular setting, and indeed people may pray at any time or while engaged in any other activity. There are, however, specific settings, notably the prayer meeting, the main purpose of which is prayer. There are four basic types of Charismatic prayer: worship, which includes adoration, praise, and thanksgiving; petition or intercession on behalf of another for a special purpose such as healing; "seeking the Lord," or prayer for divine guidance; and "taking authority," or praying in the form of a command for evil to depart from a person or situation. Spontaneous expression is highly valued in Charismatic prayer, which very rarely requires the repetition of fixed texts. The notable exceptions are several formulaic invocations of the name "Jesus" (either in praise or in the casting out of evil spirits) and the texts of religious songs.

In prayer humans both speak and listen to the deity. The "Lord" should be "present" within a group or with an individual in prayer. Divine presence is experienced concretely in performance. One informant reported that sometimes it is "like He is right in the room." This is an "immediate thing," not a physical presence but yet more than "something in your head." She described a subtler instance of this experience as a moment in which, while reading a religious book, her apperception of the noise of trucks in the street contained God's presence. She felt that "God did it"—that he had the idea of that sound in his mind and she was perceiving the idea. The same informant also reported experience of the divine presence through mental images that arose during prayer. Typical for her were Christ's full body (as opposed to face alone), robed in white, wearing a gentle, peaceful expression, with arms opening in a gesture of welcome, and standing against a background of light. For Catholic Charismatics, some of these images appear spontaneously, and others are consciously invoked more or less as internal icons. Their importance varies with the individual; another informant reported "stumbling on them by accident" in the course of prayer and not experiencing them often or as very significant. When they do appear, their role is that of an internalized icon, an aid to prayer that is generated within the performance itself.^[12]   Such experiences in prayer of divine presence, vivid imagery, and shared subjectivity culturally thematized in terms of spontaneity have also been reported for Catholic Pentecostals by Neitz (1987).

Song is a highly elaborated form of prayer (worship) among Catholic Charismatics. Although participants sometimes sing spontaneously and

sing in tongues, composed song is an aspect of nearly every gathering, and the song texts explicitly celebrate the themes of group life. As new themes emerge, new songs become popular, and where there is talent among members, new songs are written to express and celebrate "what the Lord has been saying to us" in the evolution of group life. Some groups have their own compilation of songs for use at prayer meetings, while centers of movement activity produce printed songbooks and albums of recorded songs.

By far the greatest amount of prayer is praise. Praise of the deity is the sole semantic load of that barrage of random vocalization called praying in tongues (glossolalia). Tongues are a divine spiritual gift (charism) that allow their user to praise him in a manner for which "mere man-made language" is regarded as inadequate. The most impressive public displays of glossolalic prayer are in the periodic conferences, during which the voices of thousands of people swell to a melodic crescendo as they collectively sing in tongues. At the same time, tongues can be used quietly and even subvocally while a person is engaged in other activities.

I will postpone discussion of the phenomenology of glossolalia and the semiotic contribution of unintelligibility to the structure of the sacred until the next chapter. For now, I will comment only on the generic criteria that allow speakers and hearers of Charismatic ritual language to distinguish between prophecy in tongues and prayer in tongues. With reference to the kinds of episodes that make up a prayer meeting, glossolalic prophecy is more likely to occur during periods when participants are called to "listen to the Lord" whereas glossolalic prayer tends to occur in periods of "worship and praise." Tonal qualifies also distinguish these two forms of glossolalic utterance: prayer in tongues has a conversational or supplicative tone whereas prophecy in tongues has an authoritative or declamatory tone. Glossolalic prophecy must be "interpreted" into the vernacular for the edification of the participants; glossolalic prayer remains a mode of intimate communication between an individual and the deity that need not be intelligible to others. These features highlight the importance of Frye's radical of presentation in the differentiation of genres, even to the point of rendering the unintelligible utterance of tongues into meaningful generic performance.

Sharing . The formal criterion that distinguishes sharing from ordinary conversation is that its contents must have some

spiritual value or edifying effect. These contents may be experiences, events, problems, or thoughts. To describe "how work went yesterday" is sharing if it has some religious significance. One might share about "what the Lord taught me this week" in the course of everyday life or through a crisis. The settings for sharing are various. People may arrange to get together to share in the process of becoming acquainted, or may have intimates with whom they share regularly. Sharing should be an aspect of a person's regular meeting with his head, or spiritual adviser. When sharing occurs publicly in a prayer meeting, it is referred to as "witnessing" or "testimony" (cf. Harding 1987 on Fundamental Baptist Witnessing). Nearly every person has a standardized account of "how I came to the Lord" and of the personal transformation undergone since Baptism in the Holy Spirit (cf. Stromberg 1993 on Evangelical Christian conversion narratives). Finally, as noted above, sharing occurs in the process of initiation, particularly in the "discussion groups" in which individuals reveal the spiritual state of their lives.

The manner in which Catholic Charismatics learn this genre in the initiatory discussion groups has been described by McGuire (1975) as a process in which the discussion leader "reframes" each member's contribution by translating it into the terms of the movement's ritual discourse. The leader adds comments that indicate the deity's action in the unfolding of everyday events, or alters the intended significance of a neophyte's statement. He or she subsequently reinforces appropriately formed utterances with a knowing look and a smile, or by sharing similar personal experiences (McGuire 1975: 8). The following exchange between a neophyte (N) and a discussion leader (L), recorded by me, supports McGuire's conclusion:

N: I want to change my mind.

L: Only God can change your mind. He will show you, you don't need to worry.

In expressing a desire for personal transformation, N's statement is already incorporated within Catholic Pentecostal discourse. The way L reframes the statement relieves N of personal responsibility for this transformation and directs her toward the project of discovering "the will of God" for her life. From this point on, she will learn to "seek the Lord in prayer" and to expect "leadings from the Lord." In this way, reframing restructures the neophyte's perceptions so that she will see the hand of the deity active in the world and will look to divinely inspired,

rather than to personal, intuition as a source of knowledge about what to do and how to feel.^[13]

The transformation of language and consciousness in sharing is complemented by a transformation of self and affect. An example is that of sharing in a headship relationship, as described by an unmarried covenant community man in his twenties and his married adviser, also in his twenties. The young man reported that when first baptized in the Spirit, he was "thrilled" by spiritual gifts, prayer meetings, and external elements of Charismatic life. Only through sharing with his head, he said, did he become aware of "internal deficiencies" in himself. When his head asked if he had ever been in love, he initially recoiled from the issue. Eventually, however, this exchange opened the way for sharing about the superficiality of his interpersonal relationships. Through sharing, the two linked his inability to open up to others with details of his relationship to his father and with the competitiveness that characterizes relationships among American men. He also reported being able to share about a "problem with masturbation" and about the "dating relationship" he was in with a woman in his covenant community; this woman also shared regularly with her head about the relationship. Performance of the genre of sharing within the headship relation in this way is thought to guide a person's life decisions and facilitate spiritual and personal growth.

Charismatics themselves would likely recognize each of these genres from the above description. However, also critical to our understanding of Charismatic ritual language as a performative apparatus for the creative transformation of self and habitus is analysis of the systematic cultural relations among the four major genres. Anthropologists studying language use in cultural context have described not only single genres but systems of genres (Gossen 1972, 1974; Fabian 1974; Stross 1974; Csordas 1987; Briggs 1988; Kuipers 1990; Bourdieu 1991; Leitch 1991). Synthesizing the descriptions presented above, such a systematic relation among the major genres of Charismatic ritual language can be outlined both in terms of structural features of the genres and in terms of performance.

There are two ways in which the four genres are structurally interrelated. First, they can be distributed along a hierarchical continuum such that, in comparison to what would be recognized as everyday conversation by middle-class speakers of North American English, proph-

Fig. 1.
Genres of Ritual Language among Catholic Charismatics

ecy is the most formalized, sacred, and specialized, while sharing is the least formalized, sacred, and specialized. This is depicted in figure 1, which also shows the minor genres (to be discussed below), the performance of which shades into everyday speech. At the same time, variation of these three features occurs within each genre as a function of variation in relationships between performer and audience across different settings. In a public setting, for example, sharing becomes testimony and may even have a semistable narrative text if it is a person's account of "how I came to the Lord." Likewise, prayer can acquire a degree of formalization in public, collective worship or in songs with fixed texts. Prophecy, the genre that is most formalized and distinct from everyday conversation, loses some of these characteristics when it takes the form of a "personal prophecy," in which one individual delivers a message from God to another outside a ritual event. Finally, teaching can be uttered only in some kind of ritual setting, but it can either be a fixed part of the event or a spontaneous contribution, and its content can be more or less sacred depending on whether the speaker is perceived to be truly "inspired."

The relative places of the four major genres along the formal-specialized-sacred continuum corresponds to an even more compelling feature of their systematic relation, that is, their complementarity in outlining a paradigm or template for ideal communicative relationships among the participants in ritual performance. These are of two types: relationships among humans, and the relationship between humans and the divine Lord. Charismatic ritual language establishes each of these

Fig. 2.
Relations among the Major Genres of Catholic Charismatic Ritual Language

relationships in two modes: that of dialogic intimacy or reciprocity between performer and audience and that of monologic authority or hierarchy between performer and audience. These relationships (fig. 2) are structured as follows:

1) Sharing is that form of ritual communication among humans that is most reciprocal and personal. In dialogue one shares one's inmost thoughts and feelings; one bares one's soul. Sharing constitutes a relation of intimacy between performer and audience, who ideally alternate roles, and gives that intimacy a specific religious meaning.

2) Teaching articulates human relations hierarchically. In the form of a monologue, the flow of information is unidirectional, from the spiritually mature teacher to the less mature participants or neophytes. Utterance constitutes a relationship of authority between performer and audience, although when the teacher asks his listeners to pray with him beforehand to assure the success of the teaching, it is emphasized that the authority is ultimately God's. The teacher is thus identified simultaneously with the audience and with the divine source of his authority.

3) Prayer is the reciprocal form of communication between the deity and humans. One can converse with the "Lord" as a friend, "go to the Lord" with a problem, or "give something to the Lord" in prayer, and he will respond with comfort, guidance, or inspiration. In the dialogue of prayer there emerges a relationship of intimacy between performer and (divine) audience that

emphasizes the deity's presence as an active participant in the speech event—someone who speaks back. Prayer is like sharing, but with a divine co-performer.

4) Prophecy is the hierarchical form of divine communication to humans. It is a pronouncement by the deity on his own initiative, and when uttered authentically it is his indisputable Word. As an authoritative monologue prophecy constitutes the relationship of authority between God and humans in a more immediate way than does teaching, and with an emphasis on the divine power immediately manifest in such an utterance. Because of this the role of performer (prophet) is ambiguous: in the abstract it is unimportant because the performer is but a mouthpiece; in practice it is very important because the prophet is responsible for discerning the validity and appropriateness of his inspiration and because his words bear powerful consequences for future action.

Within this system, the qualitative difference between relations among humans and relations with God is marked by another formal characteristic: the two genres in which God is a participant (prayer and prophecy) are sometimes performed in the specialized modes of song and glossolalia whereas the two others (sharing and teaching) are not (fig. 2). The option of expressing prayer and prophecy in these modes enriches their performance and enhances their sacredness vis-à-vis the genres of interhuman ritual communication. Song is regarded as an apt and edifying vehicle for prophecy or prayer, but would serve no purpose in sharing or teaching. Glossolalia in prayer is the highest form of praise to the deity, and in prophecy it is the sign of a specially charged message that must be "interpreted" into the vernacular, whereas sharing or teaching in glossolalia would contravene their essential purpose. In this way the most formal-specialized-sacred genres are precisely those that entextualize (Bauman and Briggs 1990) the relationship between human and divine rather than among humans. Thus if performance offers a "special enhancement of experience" (Bauman 1975), including experience of the sacred, the present case documents the existence of formal means through which the enhancement of experience can be systematically greater for some genres than for others.

Attention to relations among genres also has methodological consequences for the analysis of performance and its creative/transformative effects. Peter Stromberg (1993) presents a compelling analysis of

Evangelical Christian conversion narratives, a genre that corresponds to one form of what we have identified among Charismatics as sharing. Stromberg's analysis demonstrates how performance of such narratives effects self-transformation through an interplay between two types of what he calls constitutive language, namely, canonical and metaphoric language. In this formulation self is, reminiscent of Hallowell, "the ability of the human organism to be reflexively aware" (Stromberg 1993: 27), and self-transformation is, reminiscent of psychodynamic psychotherapy, "the result of changing embodied aims into articulable intentions" (Stromberg 1993: 29). These definitions are nicely suited to the genre of conversion narrative, for while it may be embedded in a dialogue (with an interviewer or with another believer or potential convert), such a narrative is at base a person talking about and generating insights about himself or herself, and therefore it is reflexive by genre convention. There are analytical implications, however. Since self is characterized by reflexivity, what would be the nature of self-transformation effected by less reflexive genres? Since in this view embodied aims are by definition outside the self, must we exclude the possibility that they could be ritually transformed precisely as bodily aims without being linguistically objectified? Are these definitions adequate to analytically deal with transformation of habitus as well as self-transformation? In sum, while Stromberg's concepts of self and self-transformation are well matched to the analysis of a particular genre, they might not be generalizable to the entire life-world of Evangelical Christians or Charismatics, and hence not generalizable to other cultural settings.

When we turn to the relation among genres in performance, rather than the hierarchical structure of performance or how it outlines a paradigm of ideal social relations, our analysis becomes one of multiple ways in which the speaking subject (Benveniste 1971) is constituted in relation to the apparatus of enunciation. Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman (1992) have called for studies of generic intertextuality, referring to the meaningful consequences of gaps and continuities between different utterances within the same genre. Such genre intertextuality is evident in Charismatic ritual language, and in the next chapter we will examine a particularly important instance in the genre of prophecy. Beyond intertextuality within genres, however, recognizing a system of genres requires attention to inter genre intertextuality. The importance of intergenre intertextuality is evident in the questionable mixed genre of the "teaching prophecy," questionable perhaps because it conflates a genre based on divine authority and one based on human intelligence,

or perhaps because it confuses the prophetic function of "forthtelling" with that of exegesis. Again, the tendency of utterances in different genres within a prayer meeting to coalesce around a theme bespeaks the importance of intergenre intertextuality, as does the possibility of both prayer and prophecy to be performed in tongues. We have yet two steps to take to fully appreciate the scope of intertextuality and to complete our analysis of the system of Charismatic ritual performance. In the next section I will describe the minor genres of ritual language and then take up the act/motive complex that constitutes the formal means by which intergenre intertextuality is guaranteed in performance.

Minor Genres of Ritual Language

The existence of what we are calling minor genres of Charismatic ritual language demonstrates the permeation of ritual form through everyday life and discourse. In some ways even more than our discussions of community life, ritual events, and major genres, the texts I will present offer an ethnographic window on the ethos of everyday Charismatic life. In the following order, I will treat maxims and slogans, pastoral slang, jokes, games, drama, and dance.

Maxims and Slogans . The genre of maxims and slogans is composed of texts at the sentence level of linguistic patterning, the content of which is widely shared among neo-Pentecostals and Charismatics. There are no specified settings for performance, and anyone may utter them as a commentary on a situation or for special emphasis. In the guise of practical advice or insight into the divine "plan," such maxims and slogans frequently encode either imperatives for action or inarguable statements of essential truths, what Rappaport (1979) has called "ultimate sacred postulates."

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Pastoral Slang . What I call pastoral slang includes informal terms coined by movement leaders to denote practices or attitudes they regard as inappropriate or excessive. The terms indicate behavioral dispositions of rank-and-file Charismatics that persist despite the advisement of movement elite.

Cultural baggage —Styles of worship and ritual practice adopted from Protestant Pentecostalism but perceived as inappropriate to or incompatible with middle-class, Catholic styles.

Spiritual battery —Prayer meeting participants sometimes regard exhilarating and "uplifting" events as opportunities to "recharge their spiritual battery," which has become depleted by a week's activity in the mundane world. As opposed to this kind of spiritual materialism or utilitarianism, the appropriate attitude toward prayer meetings is that they are occasions to worship God.

Charismania —Overextensive use or attention to Charismatic gifts, to the detriment of serious worship and community building; a kind of enthusiastic sensationalism.

Hothouse spirituality —Overintensive cultivation of charismatic gifts, with the danger of being carried to potentially destructive excess by lack of "discernment" in using them. There is spiritual danger in becoming involved in situations where one is "over one's head" and beyond one's competence, or where one is exposed to more "spiritual power" than one can handle.

Superspirituality —Although the deity is thought to provide direction and concrete "leadings" for people in their lives, one can carry surrender/submission to the divine will to the extent that one becomes reduced to inactivity by waiting for inspiration in the most routine tasks and decisions.

Charismatic tourism —The practice of going from one prayer group to another without making a commitment to any, a practice felt to retard a person's "spiritual growth" as well as to hinder the process of building stable communities.

Charismatic density —Large, centralized groups are felt to be more likely to have all the charisms necessary for building community represented among their members; the expression bears the connotation of a "critical mass" necessary to generate a fully Charismatic environment.

Dry spells —Periods in which one's spiritual life or "prayer life" seems flat, uninspired, or distant from intimate contact with God.

Jokes . Charismatic jokes illustrate the "esoteric-exoteric" factor that affects oral genres when a group is relatively isolated, possesses a really or apparently peculiar knowledge or training, or is considered by others as particularly admirable or awesome (Jansen 1975: 49–50). The Charismatic Renewal has all three characteristics to some degree. Therefore, I will offer more explanatory comment on these texts than I did for the preceding two genres. First, a sanction against going through life with a "negative spirit" is typically extended to disapproval of "negative humor," a style of joking observable in varying degrees across regions and ethnic categories in North America. Negative humor generally includes sarcasm and any joke at the expense of another. This sanction, in conjunction with a degree of seriousness about pursuing a divinely bequeathed mission, at times lends an almost humorless cast to the demeanor of some Charismatics. One group leader commented that though he thought Charismatic jokes funny, others "did not fully approve." Thus as a genre they tend not to be widespread. One example is the following:

A man bought a horse, but when he tried to ride it, it wouldn't budge. "Giddy-up," he shouted again and again, but the horse stood stock still. In a rage the man returned to the horse's seller. The latter apologized, saying, "I forgot to tell you that this is a Charismatic horse. To get it to go you say 'Praise the Lord' and to stop say 'Amen' [or "Alleluia" as a variant]." The purchaser was nonplussed, but consented to give it a try. He said "Praise the Lord," and the horse took off at a canter. He said "Praise the Lord" again and the horse broke into a gallop. He was having a great time when he realized he was heading straight for a cliff. "Whoa," he cried, but in vain. Then, just at the edge of the abyss, he remembered his instructions and shouted "Amen!" The horse stopped dead, inches from the edge. Leaning back in the saddle and wiping the sweat from his brow, the man sighed, "Praise the Lord."

An element of self-commentary is evident in the premise of the joke, namely, that the clearest behavioral marker identifying a Charismatic is punctuation of everyday speech with frequent exclamations of "Praise the Lord," "Amen," or "Alleluia." The power of praise to mobilize divine power is coded in the efficacy of repeated exclamations of praise to increase the velocity of the horse. The presumption of a generalized human tendency to abandon one's faith in moments of crisis, just when it is most needed, is vivid in the horseman's predicament. Finally, the danger of practice without thought, or of allowing religious practice to become mere habit, is brought home in the story's tragicomic ending.

Here is another example:

A young boy was riding his bicycle past the church when one of its wheels fell off. "Son of a bitch," he said. The Charismatic parish priest, on the church steps, overheard and reprimanded the boy, saying, "You should praise the Lord in all things." Shrugging his shoulders, the little boy obliged, praising and thanking Jesus. Suddenly the wheel reattached itself to the bicycle and the little boy rode off smiling. The priest looked up at the sky and said, "Son of a bitch."

This story also emphasizes the efficacy of praise in mobilizing divine power. It capitalizes on a perceived tendency of spiritual maxims such as "Praise the Lord in all things" to become matters more of habitual utterance than of experience, and gives a specifically Charismatic slant to a fairly common folkloric theme of the clergyman who does not fully believe what he preaches.

The following jokes, mostly in the form of riddles, are based on puns between conventional and Charismatic meanings of common words.

Q: What do you call a haircut by a barber who's been baptized in the Holy Spirit?

A: A hairismatic removal.

The pun is on Charismatic Renewal.

Q: What would you call a group that prohibits Charismatic gifts at their assemblies?

A: A nonprophet organization.

This pun is triple, referring first to prophecy, the most prominent charism, second to the understanding that prayer groups benefit or profit from the exercise of spiritual gifts, and third to the fact that many Charismatic groups are in fact incorporated as nonprofit organizations.

Q: What would you call a program to train preschool children in the exercise of pastoral authority in committed relationships of submission?

A: A Headstart program.

A degree of self-commentary on the evolution of an elaborate, esoteric jargon that hardly conforms to a Christian ideal of "childlike simplicity" is evident in the premise of the joke. The pun is between the popular U.S. government educational program for underprivileged children and the covenant community institution of personal headship. The implication is that children are underprivileged because they have not yet had the opportunity to enter a relationship of submission to a head, a relationship understood as a vehicle for achieving spiritual maturity.

Q: What did Lewis and Clark get when they prayed for guidance?

A: The Northwest Passage.

This pun is between the new route to the Pacific sought by the explorers Lewis and Clark and the Charismatic practice of exploring or "seeking" the divine will by opening the Bible at random. In this practice, frowned on as "magical" in some quarters of the movement, one expects spontaneously to receive or "get" a scriptural "passage" relevant to a current problem or situation.

Those who do not pay their exorcism fee within thirty days after deliverance will be repossessed.

The pun here is between commercial activities in which goods are delivered and can be repossessed if not paid for in time and the Charismatic practice of deliverance from the influence of evil spirits that can "repossess" a person who fails to lead a Christian life supported by a Christian community. An element of the ridiculous is added by the notion of a "deliverance fee," for Charismatics do not typically charge for a service that is understood to be a voluntary ministration of a spiritual gift originating with the deity.

Games, Drama, and Dance . Passing to genres that add a bodily dimension to that of language, I will briefly discuss games, drama, and dance. The game of "Bible charades" resembles secular charades, except that the subject must be a scriptural character or incident. Thorough familiarity with the sacred text is requisite for success in this pastime, which is engaged in by both adults and children. In the game of "Instant Theater" teams take turns pantomiming episodes from the Bible, while their opponents attempt to identify the scene. I took part in one such game during which a partner and I were required to climb beneath the cushions of a sofa and roll out, being born as the twins Jacob and Esau. Such games keep participants focused on religious topics even in settings in which pleasure and relaxation are in order. I am not aware how widespread this form of play is among Charismatics, though I would expect it to be observable among a variety of born-again Christians.

Drama and dance require a degree of participation and resources typically available only in covenant communities. In the late 1970s The Word of God had a troupe that performed original material such

as the following skit presented as part of the community anniversary celebration.

A little girl asks her grandfather to read her a story. He looks on the shelf for Winnie the Pooh and sees some Charismatic books. The little girl asks for a Bible story instead. (Grandfather is a comic character; he takes a very long time to settle into his chair and repeatedly dozes off.) Grandfather asks the girl to use her imagination during the story.

"What's imagination?" she asks.

"Pictures in your head," he replies.

"I'm doing it!" she says excitedly.

"I haven't started reading yet," says Grandfather.

The old man reads a parable from the Book of Matthew about a tree that bears good fruit and one that bears bad fruit. The girl's mental image is portrayed onstage by actors garbed as trees. The bad tree is covered with streamers—"spinach" in the little girl's imagination—and the good one with lollipops. The actor and actress portraying the good tree speak with sugary sweet and blended voices. Their counterparts are gruff and shrill, and their comment to the good tree is "Yuck!" A woodsman enters, tastes the fruit of both trees, and chops down the bad one.

The girl asks Grandfather to interpret the parable. He replies that one is a good person and the other a bad one. She can fall asleep more easily now. Grandfather dozes again, and as the girl awakens him he is startled, thinking his deceased wife was there.

"Oh, she's in heaven, Grandpa," the girl reminds him.

"I know ," he says, gulping with a bit of fear.

The little girl falls asleep under the Christmas tree and dreams. Angels are deciding to announce the birth of Jesus with a lullaby, which is rendered as a jazzy "Noel." Grandpa enters and reads her the story of baby Jesus.

"Remember to use your imagination when I read you a story. Remember what it is?" says the old man.

"Pictures in my head," she responds.

This time she sees shepherds frightened by the angels. The shepherds depart for Bethlehem, and the little girl goes off to bed.

"That little gift sure has quite an imagination," comments Grandfather, and he exits the stage humming "Noel" to himself.

Cultivation of the imagination as a medium through which the deity communicates with humans in ritual healing prayer, worship, and prophetic inspiration is a distinctive feature of the Charismatic world (see Csordas 1994). It is the theme of imagination that makes the skit explicitly Charismatic and not simply a generalized Christian setting for the enactment of Bible stories. The audience, many of whom were children, was expected to take away an understanding of imagination as

"pictures in your head," along with concrete examples of how imaginative scenes might unfold for them. Performance is thus an aid to inculcating a disposition for guided spontaneity and regulated improvisation in imaginative practice.

The embodied concreteness of ritual performance might be expected to be most fully elaborated in the genre of dance as a self-conscious aesthetic fulfillment of habitus in a locale where habitus has been subject to the greatest degree of cultivated transformation. This appeared to be the case at The Word of God during the late 1970s, when the community had its own chief choreographer, a woman then in her twenties. Thus, though dance is in fact a rare genre of Charismatic performance, it is worth some time to examine the rhetorical principles that guided its practice in that locale at that historical moment. The community choreographer stated that the discourse of the body in dance guides the mind into a pattern of thought, whereas mere words allow thoughts to wander. This is true, she said, because the form of abstract modern dance captures essences, not ideas, so that, for example, the message of an image such as "streams of living water" is more aptly conveyed by dance. In comparison to Charismatic modern dance, however, secular modern dance "has little joy." It "works out of anxiety" and regards the incorporation of joy into choreography as frivolous. Secular dance also celebrates movement for movement's sake, whereas Charismatic dance is intended to be communicative and spiritually edifying. The "non-Christian" would choreograph "what she felt like," cutting it up and putting it together any way, and her audience would watch it as "art." In the Charismatic view, this fails to give life to the dance, whereas by contrast community dancers attempt to produce works that "share" and "speak." As the choreographer said, the "value systems" of the two forms are opposed. "It is not useful to fill your mind too much with those ideas if you are trying to grow in another direction."

The community choreographer saw the development of dance in the group toward expression of the "deeper aspects of experience." She noted that her troupe formerly did a collective improvisation on "joy," with the sole preparation of a session of "sharing" among the dancers. They subsequently discovered, she said, that emotions are the "shallow version of an experience" and that joy is in fact a "deep experientially founded affirmation." In recognizing this the troupe began "dancing our convictions, not our emotions." Performing became a reverential, "absolutely ground-level experience under God," and a "praise-oriented activity." At the same time, the artist's personal relation to her art was

transformed in a double movement. First, creativity within the ritual attitude surpassed the boundaries of the performance event. Thus she had recently begun to dance spontaneously in the streets of town. Second, she began to perceive the practice of art as less closely bound to her own ego. Whereas before her conversion she had a compulsion to constant expressive activity (dancing, drawing, and writing), she reported having attained the comfortable feeling that "you can do it when you want."

The phenomenological integration of body and language, essence and word, representation and being-in-the-world, is evident in the orientation of dance toward major genres and key terms that repeatedly appear in all the genres as well as toward ritualized practices of everyday life. Sharing, prayer, "listening to the Lord" (for divine guidance), "giving something to the Lord" (surrendering a decision or situation to the divine will), or headship could receive choreographic treatment. "Fruits of the Spirit" such as "love, peace, and joy" may serve as themes for dance. The latter are key terms but also "essences," and the Charismatic choreographer trying to dance them "does not need to think much since you're experiencing them already." The group would also choreograph key terms such as "darkness," "growth," "freedom," "praise," "renewal," and "covenant." "Order" and "authority" would be portrayed literally by "nice-looking patterns" that would metamorphose as the dancers moved. "Power" is difficult to portray because it is difficult to "overwhelm an audience," and you immediately "sense your own weakness." The terministic pair "heart" and "head" (as in the maxim "Ours is a religion of the heart not the head") is also difficult in that the terms are "too conceptual" and would require more talented and trained dancers. The significance of these key terms as themes enacted in dance is that they motivate Charismatic discourse and through it, all of Charismatic life. We have encountered these motives in a variety of contexts, and we are now prepared more formally to examine their role as a structured component of ritual language.

Ritual Acts and the Vocabulary of Motives

Thus far I have fleshed out my threefold theory of performance by describing types of Charismatic ritual events and a system of Charismatic ritual genres. In turning to discussion of discrete ritual acts, several distinctions are necessary for the sake of clarity. First is a

distinction between acts describable as named practices or techniques and any enactment of or utterance in one of the genres. In my study of Charismatic healing, I identified a series of named practices under the headings of empowerment, spiritual protection, revelation, deliverance, sacramental grace, and emotional release (Csordas 1994a: 45–49). These acts are often performed within one of the ritual genres. For example, the act of deliverance from evil spirits is achieved in a "prayer of command" to those spirits to depart, and the act of giving or lifting something up to the Lord (commending it to divine Providence) is done "in prayer." However, not all acts of performance in a genre include one of these practices. Second, we must distinguish between acts of utterance and gestures or bodily movements. Acts such as anointing with oil, laying on of hands, resting in the Spirit, or taking the Eucharist may be but are not necessarily accompanied by utterance in verbal genres. Blurring the verbal/nonverbal distinction, dance can be almost literally a form of "body language" when it is choreographed as the nonverbal enactment of verbal concepts. Third, it is necessary to distinguish between the formal performative of speech act theory and the illocutionary or predicative effect of discreet ritual acts. Thus while the illocutionary act must have a particular linguistic form, analysis of an utterance in the illocutionary frame has to do with the nature of its force and authority (the importance of this distinction will be evident in analysis of specific prophetic utterances in the next chapter).

In general, I am less concerned with the form of any of these acts than with their performative (illocutionary or predicative) effects. The goal is to understand ritual acts as part of the rhetorical apparatus by means of which participants are oriented and reoriented in the sense I have described as essential to a definition of self. To this end a final distinction is critical, that between act and motive, where motive has a precise cultural sense distinct from the psychological sense of motive or intention. Specifically, every utterance or gesture is oriented by a "motive," which is a term that defines its illocutionary or predicative effect. A principal component of the Charismatic system of ritual performance, then, is the movement's specialized vocabulary of motives , a phrase introduced in the work of C. Wright Mills (1940).^[14]

Mills's concept of motive stems from Weber, in whose formulation "a motive is a complex of subjective meaning [Sinnzusammenhang ] which seems to the actor himself or to the observer an adequate ground for the conduct in question" (1947: 98). The relationship between act and motive is reciprocal: motive orients act, and act articulates motive.

This notion of a motive as a complex of meaning that orients action is explicated by Mills.

Motives are words. Generally, to what do they refer? They do not denote elements "in" individuals. They stand for anticipated situational consequences of questioned conduct. Intention or purpose (stated as a "program") is awareness of anticipated consequences; motives are names for consequential situations, and surrogates for actions leading to them. (1940: 905)

Just as we have found the locus of charisma to be not in individuals but among them, so in Mills's conception the locus of motives is not within people.^[15]   The utterance of a motive is the declaration that a situation is consequential, and its rhetorical impact may be the impulse to charismatic action.

In this respect, a vocabulary of motives is not a random list but a self-referencing system of terms. In the dramatistic theory of Kenneth Burke (1966), what Mills calls motives are identified as terms (words) situated with respect to an act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. In Burke's theory, a vocabulary of motives constitutes a "terministic screen" through which experience is filtered and organized. Terministic screens are essential aspects of human affairs.

We must use terministic screens, since we can't say anything without the use of terms; whatever terms we use, they necessarily constitute a corresponding kind of screen; and any such screen necessarily redirects the attention to one field rather than another. Within that field there can be different screens, each with its way of directing the attention and shaping the range of observations implicit in the given terminology. (Burke 1966: 50)

Burke's argument suggests that a vocabulary of motives is a basis for orientational process in that it directs the attention and shapes the range of observations in a cognitive sense. Returning to Mills, we can understand a second dimension of orientational process in that the deployment of motives in social life can direct action in a strategic sense.

When they appeal to others involved in one's act, motives are strategies for action. In many social actions, others must agree, either tacitly or explicitly. Thus, acts must often be abandoned if no reason can be found that others will accept. Diplomacy in choice of motive often controls the diplomat. Diplomatic choice of motive is part of the attempt to motivate acts for others in a situation. Such pronounced motives undo snarls and integrate social actions. Such diplomacy does not necessarily imply intentional lies. It merely indicates that an appropriate vocabulary of motives will be utilized—that they are conditions for certain lines of conduct. (Mills 1940: 907)

In this passage Mills refers not to affairs of state, for as terministic screens are essential to human affairs, so vocabularies of motives are fundamental to the diplomacy of everyday life. That "diplomacy controls the diplomat" suggests that there is a continuity between the motivation of everyday life and what the theorists we encountered in the preceding chapter referred to as the terror of the text, the terror of play, fatal logic, or swallowing of the charismatic figure by the mythdream. The "charisma" of everyday life differs from that of a Charismatic movement primarily in the tightness of articulation between the vocabulary of motives and the system of performance in which those motives are circulated, such that motives are more easily not only strategies for action but also instigations to action.

The following definitions of terms that comprise the Charismatic vocabulary of motives are based on their use in the performance of ritual genres.^[16]   The categories I have imposed on them for purposes of analysis reflect the manner in which the motives shape and give content to the ideal relationships embedded in the system of genres, and thus how they orient action among participants. These categories include (1) forms of relationship among individuals or between individuals and God; (2) forms of collectivity or collective identity; (3) qualities or properties of individuals or relationships; (4) activities or forms of action essential to life within the movement; and (5) negativities or countermotives that refer to threats to the ideal constituted by the totality of positive motives.

Forms of Relation

Authority —Stems from God's absolute authority. Group leaders have authority over members, and all Christians can invoke God's authority over Satan.

Word —Divine message, power, the Savior: "In the beginning was the Word." The Word is manifest especially in Scripture and in the utterances of prophecy.

Covenant —Solemn agreement between God and humans and among humans themselves in the founding of a community. "Covenant" also refers to the written document stating the terms of such an agreement among humans.

Gift —Charism or ability given by God for service to the community of believers. The "gifts of the Spirit" are enumerated in Saint Paul's epistles.

Promise —God promises salvation and healing to his followers.

Presence —God is in the world and can be concretely experienced as present. The term has a connotation of the Incarnation of God as man.

Sonship/brotherhood —God is a father god. All humans are his sons, as Jesus is his son. Therefore, all humans must treat one another as brothers. (In some quarters of the movement, women are explicitly included as "brothers" in this sense.)

Forms of Collectivity

Community —Ideal form of Christian collectivity, based on the intimacy of a life in common, guided by Christian principles; the term has connotations of the Mystical Body in Christ.

People —Christians, or a Christian community, conceived as a nation in analogy to biblical Israel.

Army —Christians engaged in struggle against the Devil and the world, in an effort to save and protect the Church, form an army of Christ.

Kingdom —The reign of God is destined to become universal. Christians are already living in his Kingdom.

Qualities

Lordship —Possessed by God in his attribute of Supreme Being with dominion over all creation.

Light —Enables one to see the truth clearly and follow without faltering.

Heart —Capacity for feeling, and for experiencing spiritual truth.

Head —Capacity for rational and analytic thought, sometimes interfering with the spiritual purpose of Heart.

Power —Efficacy of the Holy Spirit that can be felt either physically, in the utterance of ritual language, or in the events of everyday life.

Expectant faith —Belief that things will go according to God's plan and that God's power will manifest itself in Charismatic gifts (especially healing).

God's plan —An attribute to the mind of God that represents the destiny of the world and humanity. It is progressively revealed to believers, and they must participate in bringing it to fruition.

Love/peace/joy —Affective states that are essential "fruits of the Spirit" as listed in Saint Paul's epistles. Love can also be understood as an activity, bearing the connotation of "charity."

Maturity —Closeness to God as a result of "spiritual growth." Maturity is characterized by prayer, discernment, and sound relationships.

Freedom —From the Devil, for service to the community of believers, and to love others and praise God.

Order —The discipline necessary to promote growth, build the Kingdom, and protect against Satan's chaos.

Activities

Service —Every Christian must take an active part in building the Christian community.

Praise —The ultimate form of prayer to an all-worthy God, and a natural response to the experience of Baptism in the Holy Spirit.

Spiritual warfare —Christians must ceaselessly combat the work of Satan until his ultimate and inevitable defeat.

Growth —The process of becoming closer to God, initiated for many at the moment of being baptized in the Holy Spirit.

Healing —The intervention by God in human affairs to correct illness, whether its cause is physical, spiritual, emotional, or demonic.

Renewal —The process of change and revitalization brought about by Catholic Pentecostalism, both in individuals and in the Church as a whole.

Commitment —The act by which one affirms one's status as a Christian, or one's membership in a Christian community.

Submission —The proper attitude to authority, also a synonym for "yielding" in that one submits or yields to gifts (i.e., accepts gifts) given by God.

Obedience —The proper response to the commands of God and those he places in authority.

Negativities

World —Primary source of distraction from God's work. The materialism of the world is opposed to the spirituality of the Kingdom. Everyday cares and pleasures, as well as sinful pleasures, can be said to be "of the world."

Flesh —Primary source of sexual temptation and sin.

Devil —Evil spirit who is the primary source of subversion and active opposition to God's plan.

Darkness —Negative quality including blindness to truth, corruption, and loss of direction in life or in spiritual growth.

Motives play a distinctive role in Catholic Charismatic ritual performance. Across ritual events, discrete acts of utterance constantly circulate motives through the genres, whether as the topic for a teaching, as the theme of a prayer meeting, as constituent elements in a prophecy, or even as the subject of dance. In this way the vocabulary of motives constitutes the concrete basis for a specific kind of intertextuality within and across genres. We can best understand this by invoking Rappaport's (1979) observation that ritual performance communicates two kinds of messages to participants. The first are messages invariantly encoded in the ritual canon that correspond to enduring aspects of the social and cosmological order. The second are messages carried by variations in the performance that index current states of participants in relation to the invariant order encoded by the canon. Although Rappaport is concerned primarily with fixed, invariant rituals of a liturgical order, the distinction is quite relevant to Charismatic ritual communication and has its locus precisely in the vocabulary of motives.

To be precise, the Charismatic motives are terms common in many other Christian forms of religious discourse, derived directly from and referring directly to the Scriptures (see Burke 1970). Thus, on the one hand, the vocabulary of motives constitutes the Charismatic canonical language. On the other hand, as the motives are circulated in performance each genre endows them with a characteristic rhetorical function, indexical in that it addresses and reflects the immediate state of participants. Specifically, in prophecy motives are promulgated; for example, "My people, you are part of my plan ." In prayer they are invoked; for example, "Lord, help me serve your purpose and your plan ." In teaching they are expounded; for example, "It is part of God's plan that we should build strong Christian communities." In sharing they are negotiated; for example, "When I did that, I felt I was helping to bring about a small part of God's plan ." Thus not only does performance circulate motives by formulating them into generically recognizable utterances. The key terms literally motivate the genres, giving them the specificity to redirect attention and instigate to action. Furthermore, through performance the motives are metaphorically predicated onto selves (Fernandez 1974). We have seen this process in the naming of communities, and it also occurs in deliverance from evil spirits, the names of which are derived from the vocabulary of motives (cf. Csordas 1987, 1994a).

Thus participants are persuaded to orient their attention to the

world, and action in the world, in the direction indicated by the motives. Performance keeps the motives constantly in the purview of participants, so that they eventually come to be taken for granted as the standard vocabulary in terms of which people should interact. Moreover, the circulation of motives helps prevent them from becoming semantically static. As ideal forms of relation, collectivity, and so on, they undergo a shift and specialization in meaning as they are circulated by performance in the changing context of group life.^[17]   In this way, circulation of motives is the rhetorical condition for the radicalization of charisma and ritualization of practice we found in the evolving notions of covenant and commitment in The Word of God/Sword of the Spirit. In the next chapter we will see how, given the fight conditions, the circulation accelerates into the processes of rhetorical involution.

Conclusion

In an important chapter on religious speaking and hearing among Catholic Charismatics, McGuire (1982) observes that insofar as ritual language is regarded as having a divine source (as an inspiration or spiritual gift), its performance alters the relationship of the speaker to his utterance by altering the sense of responsibility for what is said, the sense of freedom/spontaneity with which it is said, and the sense of its authoritativeness and expected consequences for others. Ritual performance also alters the hearing of language, both insofar as "hearers focus on the expressive intent of the speech, and actively impose metaphorical, allusory, and poetic expectations on the content" (McGuire 1982: 123) and insofar as ritual performance invites its own confirmation and validation by asserting its divine origin. These observations are not unlike those made by anthropologists studying ritual language across a wide range of cultural settings (see references in note 1 of this chapter). For our purposes the changed relationship to language on the part of both speakers and hearers can be conceptualized as an interpretive gap or rhetorical space among participants, and it is precisely on this interactive space that I would identify the locus of charisma. However, McGuire's discussion is restricted to the social setting of the prayer meeting, where she sees religious language as creating a Schutzian "alternate reality" distinct from that of everyday life. Essential to the present argument is that the performance of ritual genres

and its transformative effects transcend the boundaries of ritual events like the prayer meeting, bleeding over into the sphere of everyday life and contributing to the transformation of habitus described in earlier chapters.

The discussion of religious experience among Catholic Charismatics by Neitz (1987) captures this everyday transformative dimension of ritual language. She describes rich imagery experiences in prayer, special signs in the form of visions, transformative moments, and talking with God as part of the "personal relationship with the Lord" that is a trademark of Charismatic and born-again spirituality. Focusing not so much on the relationship between speakers and hearers as on the relationship between the individual and the deity, she observes, "Rather than one leader having the religious experience and then offering a tradition to followers, each person has the separate-in-space-and-time experience of the sacred, and then uses that to create a new way of being in the world" (1987:118). Here again we are outside the Weberian conceptualization of charisma, but once again a rhetorical space opens up, this time between the human speaker and an interlocutor who is none other than the sacred other.

Charismatics are people whose daily thoughts about their world become framed in terms of a conversation with the Lord. Nearly all conscious thought seems to be considered a form of prayer. . . . In terms of everyday language the phrase "I thought about this" becomes "I prayed about this" or, even more likely, "I talked to the Lord about this." Prayer, as conversation with God, is the framework within which reflection in general takes place. Again these conversations, like the image of God who is seen as participating in them, are highly personalized. They clearly reflect the problems, the language and the general style of the individual involved. (Neitz 1987: 119–120)

Both in the ritual performance of prayer as a form of everyday conversation and in a quotidian readiness for prophetic inspiration, the divine interlocutor can communicate not only in the words of a "still, small voice" but also in vivid multisensory imagery, and in a way that invests incidental features of everyday events and surroundings with personal meaning. All these ways "the Lord speaks to me" are profoundly implicated in the Charismatic transformation of habitus because communication with the deity provides answers to concrete questions of everyday life. The answers to such questions are everywhere, and as people come to inhabit the Charismatic habitus, "eventually, almost any experience can be interpreted as bearing a message from the Lord" (Neitz 1987: 120).

The systematic relationship among genres and the consequent crisscrossing, weblike structure of ritual language as motives are circulated through everyday life and ritual events bring about a transformation of linguistic habitus continuous with and thoroughly integrated into the transformations of habitus with respect to space and time that were described in chapter 2. As William Hanks has observed in a study of traditional Maya discourse, "genres become part of the organization of habitus. They are the relatively lasting, transposable resources according to which linguistic practice is constituted. At the same time, they are produced in the course of linguistic practice and subject to innovation, manipulation, and change" (1987: 677). However, this statement can be taken to preserve a distinction between everyday speech and more or less formal genres of performance. We must also consider the issue raised earlier regarding degree of performance, recognizing that there is a gradual shading between everyday speech and speech marked as performance. Certainly the genre of sharing shades off into everyday conversation, and it can be said that the more it does so, the greater is the transformation of linguistic habitus. Minor genres such as pastoral slang and maxims can be characterized by minimal degrees of performance insofar as they are incorporated into everyday speech in a taken-forgranted way. In this same light we must recall the rules introduced to regulate informal speech itself, such as those prohibiting "speaking against" others discussed in chapter 4 as part of the ritualization of personal conduct in The Word of God. Again, we must acknowledge those subtle subgeneric speech habits or characteristic turns of phrase sifted from ethnographic observation. An example is reference to "what usually happens" in contrast to "what we usually do" as a subtle celebration of spontaneity over agency or intention (see the anecdote about Martin and Clark in chapter 5). Another is the expression "to speak into" or to intervene by means of speech, as in the following remark regarding adult imposition of community authority on children: "Look, if you're not gonna get to know these kids, we've got no right to speak into their life the way we do." Finally with respect to transformation of linguistic habitus are hard-to-document sublinguistic speech dispositions such as what often appeared to me as a certain style of clearing one's throat characteristic of covenant community members.

Viewed across the entire performative apparatus, this transformative process can be summarized as a kind of triple dialectic. Corresponding to the understanding of performance as event, genre, and act, each component of this dialectic is embedded in one more comprehensive in

scope. At the most general level, we can understand the organization of the movement and its distinctive habitus to have evolved in a dialectic with the system of ritual performance. The result of this dialectic between performance events and nonritual interaction is the progressive blending of the two that I have described as the ritualization of practice. The performative "transformation of context" (Kapferer 1979a) in this case transforms the very boundary between ritual event and everyday life. Within the system of ritual language, a second dialectic takes place between genres and motives. It guarantees the circulation of motives in performance such that they do not remain static, but remain attuned to the exigencies of daily life. As we have seen, the potentialities of the sacred self are immanent in the structure of this dialectic: the system of major genres constitutes an ideal template for social relations, while the vocabulary of motives orients and shapes social action. Finally, on the level of discrete acts, a third dialectic can be identified, this time between motives and the metaphors generated from them. In the following chapter, we will examine how this dialectic is played out in the performance of Charismatic prophecy.

7
Prophetic Utterance and Sacred Reality

I think a lot of times people would voice their opinions through prophecy, and it was their own beliefs and they were just saying it was prophecy and that was their way of . . . see, the thing was, I remember sitting at the prayer meetings and watching the people go down to the microphone if they wanted to speak, and they would tell the people sitting down front what they wanted to say, and those people would tell them if it was relevant or not. And if it wasn't, they'd be sent back to their seats, and that also struck me as kinda strange. Maybe these people have an opinion to voice, and it's a very strong opinion, and they're doing that through calling it a prophecy, and since it's not an opinion that these people wanted to hear, they basically rejected it and said go away because we don't want these people to hear this viewpoint.
—Man, age 22

Often prophecy is not foretelling the future as much as speaking about the person's identity in Christ, now. Which is kind of an immediate entering of the kingdom of God to the person. It's a sort of immediacy of God speaking to the person. It's not like an actor on the stage where an actor speaks in God's name. There's usually a spiritual sense about it. When you hear a prophecy you're really hearing something of God addressing you. It's not just this person. An example might be, you're listening to a sermon or a talk and you think, wow, that was a little deeper than usual, that really touched me, somehow you connected with God. Prophecy does that if it's real prophecy.
—Man, late forties

The Old Testament prophecy that's recorded in the Scripture is of a different nature or . . . not nature, but a different weight, or something, than what we experience or what we see among Christians today. On a couple of counts. One is, those that were preserved over time were those that had the stamp of God's spirit clearly enough on them, registered strongly enough with God's people, to be preserved through the ages, that Christians would say, "Yeah, those are true, we can be confident that that's really God's word." And also they have something of a universal application. Often they're predictive. The prophecy that we get now doesn't carry that same weight. That is, I wouldn't make a claim for any of it that it's 100 percent true, that we got it just right. It hasn't stood the test of hundreds of years, or thousands of years of confirmation by God's people. So instead what God is giving is encouragement, direction, that's much more temporal, much more immediate, and which, because we're pretty fallible human beings, is mixed.
—Man, late thirties

I know girls who made up prophecies. I know girls who made up prayers that they would pray out loud. Girls who would stand up and fake praying in tongues. And this one girl—this is really funny—she stood up and prayed in -tongues and this other girl stood up and translated it, and the first girl was speaking jargon and the second girl was just making it up! It's just like, it was totally . . . we look back on that and go, I can't believe I did that, but that was what was expected, so we came through. And it got to the point where now, today, if God hit me with a sledgehammer I would wonder who dropped it. You really don't know when God's speaking to you and when he's not. Bolts of lightning, please! A roll of thunder! [laughs]
—Girl, age 16

Prophecy occupies a pivotal position in Charismatic ritual language, and to more fully understand performance as a collective self process we must deepen our analysis of this mode of inspired speech.^[1]   So far I have defined its formal properties and rules of use and determined its place in the system of ritual genres. In this chapter I will carry out two parallel analyses of prophecy's effect on self and habitus. First,

at the level of act and motive in performance, I will examine a series of prophetic utterances to demonstrate the rhetorical conditions under which it is performed and recognized as authoritative, transformative discourse. This will include analysis of formal features of utterance, including reported speech, verb use, and pronoun use, as well as of the particular role of the vocabulary of motives and the manner in which motives are transformed and elaborated through metaphorical extension in performance. Second, we will examine Charismatics' experience of prophetic inspiration as well as that of being "spoken to" by prophecy. The discussion will include the manner in which prophecy emerges into consciousness as speech or sensory imagery, issues of responsibility, intentionality, and control of prophetic utterance, experience of the sacred, and the consequence for understanding prophecy of the manner in which speech is grounded in bodily experience and the habitus. This dual approach resumes the theoretical project of my earlier book (Csordas 1994a; see also Csordas 1994b) to reconcile semiotic and phenomenological understandings of culture, juxtaposing rhetorical analysis in terms of textuality with existential analysis in terms of embodiment.

Before entering these analyses, however, I want to outline what is at stake in prophecy from the standpoint of participants by commenting on the four epigraphs that begin this chapter. All are from members of The Word of God/Sword of the Spirit shortly after the community schism in the early 1990s. Together they offer a perspective on prophecy with respect to a series of closely interrelated issues: social control in the group as a whole, the listener's experience of the sacred, the divine authority of prophetic utterance, and the authenticity of the speaker's inspiration.

The first quote must be understood in light of the development of specialized word gifts groups the members of which were not only recognized as regularly gifted with the charisma of prophecy but who along with community coordinators also came to serve as gatekeepers who screened the occasional prophecies of the rank and file in large gatherings. Word gifts groups are not unique to covenant communities; some of the larger prayer groups have prophecy ministries, and in the late 1980s there was a transparochial word gifts group in the archdiocese of Boston. Such groups are based not only on an implicit distinction between people with occasional and enduring gifts of prophecy but also on the inclusive notion that prophetic inspiration will be more accurate and comprehensive if people "listen together to what the Lord is saying to us." The result in a community such as The Word of God

was that those with occasional gifts of individual inspiration became subject to discipline by those with enduring gifts supported by group consensus. Although prophetic themes that guided the course of collective life continued to be experienced as spontaneous within the elite, within the rank and file they came to be experienced as dogmatically predetermined. The issue embedded in the young man's commentary is that of how strong an opinion or conviction must be before it can legitimately be cast as an authoritative utterance in the genre or prophecy. In sociological terms, this is the issue of how "delegated power" (Bourdieu 1991) to speak in authorized language is guaranteed; in linguistic terms it is the issue of whether the first-person pronoun, the "I of discourse" (Urban 1989), is the human or the deity. Critically at stake is the way the social control of prophecy went hand in hand with prophecy as social control.

Prophecy is also the linchpin between social authority and immediate experiential access to the deity. The second epigraph emphasizes immediacy of divine presence (the kingdom of God within) and connectedness with the deity from the perspective of a person listening to prophecy. Reference to the "person's identity in Christ" highlights the importance of prophecy as an orientational self process, albeit one in which the self cannot be understood in isolation from the collectivity. This stance notably introduces an element of intimacy with the deity that is not a conversational intimacy as in prayer but an experience of the sacred the vitality of which maximizes the authoritativeness of the utterance. At the same time it minimizes the agency of the prophet (who is only a mouthpiece and not "an actor who speaks out in God's name") and thereby preserves the listener's experience as the criterion for validating what counts as "real" prophecy.

The third quote emphasizes the connection between prophecy and scripture while taking care to avoid a potentially heretical equation of the two. Indeed, one of the consequences of experiencing prophecy as sacred in a scripturally based religion such as the Charismatic Renewal is that in some places it has come to occupy a pivotal position between oral and written genres. The logic would appear to be that prophecy is a direct experience of God insofar as god is his Word; and if prophecy is the holy word of God it should be preserved. Thus in some communities prophecies are tape recorded and transcribed. They may be archived and studied by coordinators to get a sense of the pattern of the divine plan over time, or the most recent prophecies may be circulated by inclusion in a group newsletter. Thus it would be inaccurate to hear

prophecy merely as the authoritative reiteration of canonical language. Its indexical features—as communication about the current state of participants in ritual life—are evident in the process of both entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990) into generic form in oral performance and inscription into canonical form as written texts. Transcription de-contextualizes only in the limited sense of abstracting the utterance from the circumscribed ritual event, for both in its performance and in its inscription prophecy is grafted onto the roots of sacred scripture, and ramifies like running sap through the branches constituted by the multiple events and situations of collective life.

The fourth quote is the bemused but sincere reflection of an adolescent on the implications of intentionally inauthentic ritual speech. She describes her classmates at the community school faking the complex dyadic interaction of prophecy in tongues and its interpretation, which in theory requires independent but coordinated inspirations in two separate individuals. One does not get the impression, however, that the girls were trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes, but simply trying to "perform" to the expectations of their teachers. The error, to use a more phenomenological language, was their enactment of an intention to speak without the intentionality of taking up or engaging a divine project, and with a phenomenological horizon defined externally by expectation rather than internally by inspiration. The adolescent girl laments the weight of responsibility for discerning the authenticity of an inspiration perhaps as powerful as the blow of a sledgehammer but not as definitive as a bolt of lightning, precisely at an age when North American culture problematizes her own authenticity as an autonomous self. Her dilemma: there is a god, and god speaks, but how do I know if he's speaking to me?

The Bulwark Prophecies

We are due at this point for an extended examination of actual prophetic utterance, using examples recognized as authoritative and consequential. Much of Charismatic prophecy is highly redundant, literally a circulation of motives as guides for action and indexes of the current state of participants. Less common are prophecies in which motives or metaphorical extensions of motives lead to innovative courses of action; and prophecies that are named, recognized, and alluded to

in subsequent discourse are relatively unique. Earlier I discussed the importance of the Rome prophecies and their warning of hard times for God's people. The texts of those prophecies were widely circulated through New Covenant magazine, but in their wake came a less widely known series of prophecies that were critical to subsequent relations within and among covenant communities. Informally referred to as the "bulwark prophecies," the first two texts were uttered by experienced prophets at the 1975 conference convened to establish a federation of Charismatic communities. The third was spoken a little over a year later at the anniversary gathering of The Word of God. Having transcribed them in the late 1970s, and faced with a tendency to downplay the importance of the divine mouthpiece in prophecy, I was unable to determine the identities of the prophets. However, it is probably safe to assume that they were leading members of the word gifts group of The Word of God.

These prophecies constitute an exhortation and a call for unity in service to a collective goal of protecting the Church against the onslaught of evil in the world. They emphasize the difficulty of achieving this goal and enumerate a variety of possible pitfalls along the way. Adherents saw in them the articulation of a vision and a mission in which the alliance of covenant communities would serve as a protective bulwark for the endangered Church. As ritual performance that is at the same time a manifestation of the sacred, however, I suggest that the utterance of these prophecies achieved more than this. In an experientially real sense, it created the bulwark as an enduring objectification of the collective self. In examining the process of this creation in the bulwark prophecies, we will find ourselves at the performative locus of charisma as a rhetorical self process.^[2]

SUMMER 1975: PROPHECY  1

This gathering is a great hope                                        1
This meeting is both a hope and a promise.
I am raising up courageous, strong, gifted men and women who
     will join themselves to you.
As you hold fast to one another others will come and be
     joined to you.
Together you will labor with me to stem the tide of evil
     that is sweeping the earth.                                        5
I have brought you together for this purpose; go on with
     confidence, courage, and determination.

I will be with you, and in the days to come I will raise up
     men in communities
Who will bind themselves fast to you in my service.
Let yourselves be joined together;
Hold on to one another in faith and hope and see what I will
     do.                                                       10

SUMMER 1975: PROPHECY 2

I am doing a new work of unity;
I am stirring you up to new dedication and new zeal in my
     service.
Those of you who have never seen one another will be drawn
into unity
As you recognize your common bond of commitment to me and to
     my purpose.
I will stir you up;                                                  15
I will rally you to new effectiveness in my service:
For I am forming a people to proclaim my Word anew.
The day is at hand when my Word will be proclaimed with
     new power.
When those who have never heard it before,
Whose ears have been closed, will begin to hear.                              20
I have brought you here to the beginning of something very
     important in my Church;
I have brought you together here to join you together
And to give you a vision of what is to come:
I will make you a bulwark to defend against the onslaught
     of the Enemy.
Those of you who are not prepared,                                   25
Those of you who are not ready,
I will not have them swept away because they are not
     ready;
But I will protect them behind the bulwark that I form out
     of you.
I want you to be ready to join yourselves with others
And to stand together with them in the battle against the
     onslaught that's coming:                                        30
To defend the weak
And to defend those who are confused;
To protect those who are not prepared
Until I am able to fulfil my entire plan.
I tell you, you are a part and not the whole;                              35
You are a part and not the whole.
There are many other things I am doing in this world today
And there are many other ways that I am at work to raise
     up my people in strength and in glory.

I want you, though, to take your part seriously,
And to lay your lives down for it.                                        40
But I want you to understand that only I see the entire
     plan;
Only I see every front of the battle.
I will raise you up with others,
And bind you together to make a bulwark.
But that is not all there is to be, because when you have                         45
     stemmed the onslaught of the Enemy
Then I will reveal to you greater things.
In the unity you have with one another there is a
     prefigurement and foreshadowing of something much
     greater that I intend to do;
Something greater, much more vast, much more glorious
     I will unveil at that time.
You are a foreshadowing and a prefigurement
You are a bulwark I have set up to stem the onslaught of the Enemy.               50
You are a part and not the whole;
You are my servants and my people.
Lay down your lives now for the things I have revealed to
     you;
Commit yourselves to them, so that in the day of battle you can
     stand fast and prove victorious with me.

November 21, 1976: Prophecy 3

I have spoken to you of a bulwark;                                   55
I have told you that I am raising a bulwark against the
     coming tide of darkness,
A bulwark to protect my people
And protect my Church.
And because your mind of man cannot comprehend the mind of
     God,
I've spoken to you in figures.                                        60
You might envision the bulwark as a wall of rock:
I speak to you now of that bulwark in the figure of an
     impenetrable hedge.
Yes, I have scattered my seed of truth widely across the
     surface of the earth;
And some of that seed has sprouted and begun to grow into
     the impenetrable hedge that will be my bulwark.
Yes, see how just four seeds have landed in your midst and sprung up;               65
And other seeds have been carried by the wind of my Spirit,
Other seeds have been windbroke at that first sprouting of
     the hedge,

And there they too have germinated and taken root and grown
     up,
And the hedge has grown,
And more seeds have been brought to it by the wind of my                    70
     Spirit.
It continues to flourish, to rise in strength;
And I prune it vigorously.
Yet look about and see that other seeds have germinated away
     from the hedge;
They stand by themselves—they grow unpruned.
I say to you, you are the bulwark                                        75
You are the hedge,
And you are to see that the bulwark grows in strength:
You are to go to those outlying sprouts and call them in.
It is for you to see that they receive my Word, that they
     are gently uprooted and transplanted,
That they too may flourish and add strength to my bulwark                    80
     that I am raising up.
And you are to be open to sending parts of that hedge out,
To seeing it transplanted to extend the bulwark across the
     face of the earth.
But are you ready;
Are you ready to believe in your hearts that you are that
     bulwark?
Do you have the conviction                                        85
Do you have the courage
To say to the world
To say to others,
"We are that bulwark,
We are God's work: Come stand with us"?                              90
I tell you this,
That unless you have come to me
And become utterly destitute,
You will not have the courage to speak that truth.
If you say, "I am God's plan, we are God's bulwark"                         95
And you cling to anything from the world,
You will not speak the truth, you cannot be believed.
You cannot be believed unless you are utterly destitute.
If you say to me,
"I have received your truth,"                                        100
And yet you have protected a corner of your heart to cling
     to the things of the world,
I cannot believe you.
If you say to yourself,
"I believe God's Word,"
And yet you treasure things of the world,                                   105

You cannot believe yourselves.
If you say to the world,
"We are God's bulwark, we know God's truth, we are God's
     plan for man,"
And the world sees that you treasure things that belong to
     them,
They will not believe you.                                        110
Only if you are utterly destitute,
Only if you give up all that you have
And come to me with empty hands,
Can you be believed.
The truth is too great, the truth is too profound                              115
To be compromised by any attachment to things of this world.
Yes, you are free to receive from me a great abundance,
But you are not free to take it for your own purposes;
You can receive from me riches and power, lands and cities,
But you cannot use them for your own pleasure.                              120
All that you have must be turned to my service,
And when you speak my word of truth
The world will be convicted,
And the world will believe.
Know this,                                                       125
That no one who has given all to me,
No one who has entrusted himself completely to me,
Has ever perished.
Those who give themselves to me
Are they who endure and taste everlasting victory.                         130

The best place to begin to understand the performance of prophecy as a rhetorical self process in a semiotic/linguistic sense is with pronouns. Pronouns are simultaneously rhetorical and indexical, asserting both a claim about relationships and demonstrating those relationships in speech. Thus they may also belong to both the illocutionary and predicative frames. The classic paper by Roger Brown and A. Gilman (1960) showed how the use of formal and familiar pronouns of address determines relations of "power and solidarity." More recently, Singer (1984, 1989) has elaborated Peirce's the pronominal "I-It-Thou" triad in a semiotics of self. In the present instance, the "I" of Charismatic prophecy must be considered both in its pragmatic relation to the person who utters the prophecy (an I-I relation) and in its discourse-internal relation to the audience addressed by the prophecy (an I-you relation).

What is at stake in the I-I relation is the authoritativeness of the

speech and its self-evidence, as well as the nature of responsibility and control over that speech by the speaker. Two authors have recently proposed schemes by means of which linguistic analysis can identify a continuum of possible relations of speaker to speech in this sense. The continuum outlined by Greg Urban (1989: 43) refers specifically to the first-person pronoun and runs from everyday speech in which the "I" indexes an everyday self to speech characteristic of trance in which the I "projects" a nonordinary self. The continuum outlined by John Du Bois (1986: 328) refers to degree of speaker control and runs from sovereign speech ultimately controlled by the ego to speech in trance and beyond ego control. Both emphasize increasing reliance on formal features and contextual metapragmatic cues to distinguish stages of distance from everyday self or sovereign ego. The linchpin of both systems, however, is the role of indirect speech, or "reported speech" in the sense derived from Valentin Voloshinov (1986) and taken up in much current linguistic anthropology (Lucy 1993; Hill and Irvine 1993). In addition, Urban develops his analysis as an elaboration of Emile Benveniste (1971) and Milton Singer (1984) on personal pronouns. Thus the "I" of everyday speech is "indexical referential" in that its reference is not fixed but indexes or points to whoever the speaker might be in a particular situation. The "I" of direct quotation actually refers to a third person, but as speech moves along the continuum toward mimicry or the role-playing of theater the speaking first person (in Du Bois's terms the proximate speaker who produces the utterance) disappears, leaving an "I" in the form of an alter ego (the prime speaker to whom the speech is attributed) that can ultimately, in trance behavior, take on the autonomous character of an ancestor or a deity.^[3]

The critical difference between the two accounts is that for Du Bois the end of the continuum with the least ego control suggests the possibility of apersonal, intentionless speech, while for Urban the continuum is folded back on itself in a way that suggests the possibility of a dual "I." We will take up this issue in greater detail both with respect to its theoretical implications and to its efficacy as a rhetorical self process when we treat the subjective conditions under which prophecy is produced and heard. For the present it is enough to emphasize that the "I" of prophecy is subjectively and formally distinguished from the indexical referential self of the proximate speaker but that within the text it functions as an indexical referential self in its own right, that is, as God.

Thus, to begin with, Charismatic prophecy is typically not reported

speech. Whereas reported speech is quoted or paraphrased from what has previously been said, by definition prophecy is the deity speaking directly through the prophet in the present moment. Certainly in some instances the formal and archaic (and more typically Protestant) opening is "Thus saith the Lord . . . ," but in use this appears more to signal a change in present speaker than a report of another's (the deity's) previous speech. In addition, the formula is a form of emphasis, with a performative force equivalent to "I tell you . . ." (line 35), "I say to you . . ." (line 75), "I tell you this . . ." (line 91), and "Know this . . ." (line 125). We should note that in informal and more intimate settings the divine speaker may be paraphrased colloquially as in "I really feel the Lord wants you to know that . . . ," but here too it is also common for the deity to speak directly in the first person rather than through reported speech. Much more typical as an opening in group settings is a term of direct address, such as "My children," or "My people." In the bulwark prophecies even this formality is dispensed with, and God begins to speak straightaway in his own voice.

Furthermore, given the strength of the performative convention that the deity may speak continuously regardless of his mouthpiece, there is no opening formula in the second bulwark prophecy. Indeed the convention is so powerful that the first word of the second utterance is the pronoun "I," with no apparent need to preface this with any specification that the "I" is God and not the proximate human speaker. This tightly articulated transition merges the predicative and illocutionary frames, predicating intimacy between speakers insofar as they are participating in the same inspiration and bearing the force of authority insofar as it is recognized that the deity can choose his mouthpieces at will. Moreover, it is a concrete embodiment of the point (made explicitly in the third prophecy) that the divine plan is larger than any individual or even any community—"you are a part and not the whole" (lines 36, 51). The performative result is the virtual absence of an "intertextual gap" (Briggs and Bauman 1992) between the first and second utterance.

The only significant reported speech in these texts occurs in lines 55–60, and quite remarkably this passage consists of the deity reporting his own previous speech ("I have spoken to you . . . ," "I have told you . . . ," "I've spoken to you . . . "). Much more than a simple reminder, this is once again a rhetorical strategy for reducing the intertextual gap between utterances separated in time by more than a year. Thus following these prefatory remarks the very next line shifts into the

present with "I speak to you now . . ." (line 62). These strategies of intertextuality that render prophecy independent of individual speakers and continuous across time are critical contributions to its authority. Taken together with the circulation of motives identified in the last chapter as another strategy of intertextuality (and that I will illustrate as our analysis of the bulwark prophecies continues) and the strategy of inscription in which prophecies are transcribed and kept as a community archive, these oral performative strategies implicitly seek to minimize the intertextual gaps between prophecy and sacred scripture. If scripture is the word of God, prophecy is its direct extension in the present—the living word of God among his people.

Another strategy of pronoun use occurs in the form of what we can call hypothetical reported speech in lines 89–90, 95, 100, 104, and 108 (e.g., line 95, "If you say, 'I am God's plan, we are God's bulwark'"). In these instances the divine speaker formulates possible articulations of collective identity that might be made by those listening to the prophecy. In a curiously hyperreflexive way, the "I" in these lines could be the indexical referential "I" of the prophet as well as that of any other participant, here as it were twice removed by being embedded as a hypothetical in divine speech, which is in turn embedded in the utterance of the prophet. What is particularly striking is that these hypotheticals are the only places in which the first-person plural "we" occurs—only four times in 130 lines, and only within quotes to instruct community members how they should articulate the relationships among themselves (lines 89, 90, 95, 108). Thus the "we"—the pronoun of intimacy—indexes participants' collective identity but not the relation between the divine speaker and the assembled audience. That this usage is not only indexical but also bears rhetorical force is brought home by the avoidance of "we" even where its use might be presumed obvious: in line 5, when God says "Together you will labor with me" instead of "Together we will labor." In sharp contrast, a relation of authority is asserted by the occurrence in twenty-two lines of the sequence I/you and in eleven lines of the inverse sequence you/I-me-my. The former sequence typically frames a statement of what God will do with or for his followers, while the latter frames a statement of reciprocal commitment and obligation to the divinity and his plan. The separation of divinity and humanity is further emphasized by the occurrence of pronouns of address (you-your-yourselves) alone in thirty-six lines and of pronouns of self-reference (I-me-my) alone in sixteen lines. The survey of pronoun use is rounded out by noting the occurrence in ten lines

of them-they and in nine lines of who-whose-those who. The third-person pronouns refer either to people in the "world" opposed to the divine plan or to Christians outside the community who are threatened by the "world" and therefore must be protected from it. Their rhetorical function is therefore to serve as foils or coordinates against which the intimate "we" of the community can define its own identity.

Although there remains the possibility in other contexts of an intimate I-Thou "personal relationship with the Lord," this analysis shows the force of pronominal usage in constituting prophecy as an utterance affirming the authoritative dimension of an "I-you" human relation with the divine. There are several ways in which the absence of the pronoun of intimacy contributes to this end. Intimacy characterizes the "we" of the human community, and reciprocity among humans may be oriented by the egalitarian motive of "brotherhood," but in prophecy the relation between human and divine is oriented by the hierarchical motive of "Lordship." Thus in a rhetorical sense the pronominal separation between human and divine circumscribes the kind of self that ultimately gives and entrusts itself entirely to the deity (lines 126–130). That self does not in the process "merge" with the deity and thereby lose itself but "commits" a discrete self that thereby becomes a sacred one. In a pragmatic sense, to use the pronoun "we" is to speak on behalf of a group, and in so doing would compromise the sovereign nature and authority of the utterance (see also Duranti 1993a: 38). Finally, in a metapragmatic sense, too liberal use of"we" could compromise the carefully crafted separation of subjectivities between the proximate human speaker and the prime divine speaker, potentially leading to attributions of authorship to the prophet and God or the prophet with God's endorsement (i.e., we = God and I; see the first epigraph to this chapter).

I turn now to the role played by the vocabulary of motives in structuring ritual discourse in these texts. The repeated use of these motives and repeated judgments about the appropriateness of their use ensure that prophetic utterance expresses a consistent attitude toward the social world. Their prominence in the texts is evident, and I will only briefly list them in order of the frequency of their occurrence: world (9), word (5), service (5), people (4), plan (4), enemy (3), darkness/evil (2), commitment (2), power (2), battle (2), promise (1), freedom (1). Once again, this terminological domain contributes to both the illocutionary and predicative frames of ritual language. First, motives reinforce the illocutionary effect by serving as aids in composition. Such elementary constituents of verbal formulas are, as Albert Lord (1960)

has shown, an essential part of the linguistic repertoire of individuals fluent in spontaneous oral composition. Command of the vocabulary of motives and the ability to generate poetic formulas from them not only help a speaker utter prophecies that are likely to be "discerned" as appropriate. They also abet the spontaneity of composition, experienced by speakers and hearers as inspiration from a source outside the individual and as a manifestation of divine power. Second, motives guide the predication of qualities both in the manner in which they are elaborated and in that they suggest or "motivate" appropriate metaphors. Describing this process will lead us to the heart of the problem of creativity in ritual language.^[4]

I have identified the divine "promise" as one of the key motives of Charismatic discourse, and although it appears only once at the beginning of the bulwark prophecies it will be valuable to trace its elaboration in the texts. It is also of interest because for speech act theory (Austin 1975; Searle 1969, 1979), in which illocutionary force typically is found to inhere in "performative verbs" (i.e., those verbs by use of which "to say something is to do something" [Austin 1975:12]), promising is the prototypical "commissive" illocution. I suggest that the use of "promise" (line 2) as a motive in its noun form in fact fuses the predicative and illocutionary frames. First, both hope and promise are predicated onto the meeting, lending a particular quality to what otherwise would be a typical case of a Charismatic ritual gathering. Second, I would argue that, while in formal linguistic terms the illocutionary act of promising is not performed ("I promise that . . ."), to consider the utterance in the illocutionary frame suggests that it does indeed have the force of a promise ("This meeting is a promise"), especially since the speaking subject is God.

We must pay close attention to the subsequent use of verb tense to define the force of what we might call this "commissive predication." Lines 3 through 8 specify the contents of the promise as what the divinity "will" do in the indeterminate future. Yet a sense of immediacy for fulfillment of the promise is added by use of the present progressive tense in line 3. Lines 9 and 10 use verbs in the imperative mode—let, hold on, see—to define the requirements of reciprocity and openended anticipation that count as adequate responses to the promise. In prophecy 2, lines 11 through 28 continue to elaborate the divine promise, again seasoning future tense articulations (lines 13, 15, 16, 18, 20, 24, 27, 28) with those in the present progressive (lines 11–12, 17) and

present perfect (lines 21–22) tenses. Line 35 marks a shift from the commissive predication to a declaration, with a corresponding shift in lines 35 through 52 to a preponderance of present tense over future tense verbs and a shift in reference from God's promise to God's intention (line 47). This shift is accompanied by the same call to open-ended commitment that we heard in the prophecy giving The Word of God its name (chap. 4). Thus the command to "lay your lives down" (line 40) for a plan that only God sees in its entirety (lines 41–42) is accompanied by a further promise to "reveal to you even greater things" (lines 46–48). Line 49 can be read as a climactic transformation of line 2 in which the earlier predicated qualities of hope and promise become foreshadowing and prefigurement and in which the entity onto which they are predicated shifts from the "meeting" to the more personal and immediate "you" of collective identity. Finally, as in the first prophecy, the pattern is completed in lines 53 and 54 with a return to the imperative verbs "lay down" and "commit."

The same pattern is repeated in the third prophecy, only this time the contents of the promise are reiterated in the present perfect (lines 55–74), indicating that its fulfillment is already under way. The break comes with another performative in line 75—"I say to you . . ." It is critical once again to observe the subsequent verb usage (lines 75–79), which shows that this act combines the force of two kinds of illocution identified by Searle (1979): declaration ("you are . . .") and directive ("you are to . . ." ). Completion of the form is initiated by another performative in line 91 with "I tell you this . . ." Lines 91 through 116 are not simple imperatives but introduce a series of if/then propositions that elaborate the conditions of reciprocity under which the divine promise will be fulfilled. Reciprocity—the promise and the response to that promise—remains constrained by hierarchy, however. This is shown in lines 117 through 124, where the limits of freedom to receive and use the divine gifts are spelled out. Yet freedom there is, for in the end the divine plan requires consent. The final illocutionary act of line 125, "Know this," combines the force of a directive and a declaration and is followed by a capsule statement specifying that to give and entrust the self to the deity corresponds to an ultimate promise of imperishability and everlasting victory.

That these prophecies conclude with such an emphasis should remind us of Rosaldo's analysis of the cultural implications of the promise as a prominent and even privileged speech act in Euro-American society.

To think of promising is, I would claim, to focus on the sincerity and integrity of the one who speaks. . . . It is a public testimony to commitments we sincerely undertake, born of a genuine human need to "contract" social bonds, an altruism that makes us want to publicize our plans. Thus the promise leads us to think of meaning as a thing derived from inner life. A world of promises appears as one where privacy, not community, is what gives rise to talk. (1982: 211)

For Rosaldo the possibility, and perhaps even the necessity, of the promise presumes a prior lack of connection among discrete, private selves that have inner lives characterized by capacities for orientation to the world such as sincerity and commitment. In contrast she posed the example of the Ilongots. For them the self is not at all an "inner" one, continuous through time, such that its actions can be judged in terms of sincerity, integrity, and commitment. "Because Ilongots do not see their inmost 'hearts' as constant causes, independent of their acts, they have no reason to 'commit' themselves to future deeds" (Rosaldo 1982: 218). Rosaldo is here distinguishing a self culturally constituted as constant and interiorized from one constituted in the consequences of acts for relationships in a community. We will shortly have occasion to warn against drawing such a distinction too sharply. Nevertheless, Rosaldo's observation helps refine our understanding of the rhetorical conditions under which the sacred self struggles to come into being. That is, as the condition of possibility for promise and commitment, the individuated self characteristic of both the deity and his followers is at the same time that which makes community problematic. We thus begin to understand the internal connection among motives such as promise, commitment, and community.

Having demonstrated the elaboration of a key motive in prophetic utterance, let us now consider the transformation of motive into metaphor. Recall that the setting for the first two prophecies was a conference convened to form an alliance among covenant communities. The perceived need for this alliance evolved through the elaboration of motives including community, commitment, and the negativities of world, flesh, and devil. Given its pivotal role in group life, and culminating with the words spoken at the Rome conference, prophecy was a principal medium for articulating these motives. In the utterances recorded here, the alliance was taken up into this body of discourse not in terms of motives as a "community of communities" but as a metaphorical "bulwark," the purpose of which is to stem the onslaught of evil and

protect the Church. The establishment of the alliance as a sacred reality is achieved by the creation of the bulwark through performance of a complex illocution/predication by God, the ultimate speaker in prophetic utterance. We will examine the bulwark image in the illocutionary frame by returning to the use of verb tense, and in the predicative frame in its relation to motives, "inchoate pronouns" (Fernandez 1974), and to itself as it is transformed in discourse.

In line 24 the divine speaker first says, "I will make you a bulwark," and continues to describe the function of the bulwark in his plan. Again in lines 43–46 the deity states this promise/intention, adding that there will be more to come afterward. The critical act occurs in line 50: the tense changes to simple present, and God says, "You are a bulwark that I have set up." In Searle's (1979) terminology, the "commissive" act marked by the future tense is replaced by a "declaration" in the present tense. In the act of utterance the bulwark has been created, and this creation is rhetorically effected by a simple change in verb tense from future to present. There is yet more, however, for the tense immediately changes again to the present perfect "have set up." This enhances illocutionary force by, in Austin's (1975) terms, referring to the bulwark in a constative or simply descriptive mode, thus marking the creation of the bulwark as already a fait accompli.^[5]

Cultural reality is not created once and for all, however; to be sustained, it must be continually re-created. Thus we find that more than a year later, in prophecy 3, the creative act is repeated. In line 56 it is stated "I have told you that I am raising a bulwark," but by line 75 this has become "I say to you, you are the bulwark." The temporal continuity between the prophecies is evident not only in the affirmation by repetition of the performative act but also in the difference in choice of verb tenses. The later prophecy acknowledges the prior creation of the bulwark by initiating the performative sequence with the present perfect (I am raising) rather than the future (I will raise). The illocutionary force of the act is emphasized by inclusion of the formula "I say to you . . . ," leaving no doubt that the utterance is declarative and not constative. Again, however, the temporal continuity of prophetic discourse suggests that the declaration is not only a recreation of the bulwark. It maintains a locutionary or constative element insofar as it is a reminder of an act already performed, a description of an already extant state of affairs. It can also be construed to have the force of an assertive insofar as it can be read as taking for granted

that God is in fact creating the bulwark and then asserting that the listeners "are that bulwark." In either case, once more the bulwark appears as a fait accompli.

From this analysis we can see that the efficacy of the bulwark metaphor is dependent on Frye's radical of presentation (see chap. 6) within conventions of prophecy as a genre. This radical of presentation is constituted by the use of performative speech acts, the force of which derives from their combination in performative sequences within each utterance and across a temporally continuous body of utterances. This sequence can be summarized as progressing from commissive to declarative to constative (assertive) speech acts. To the extent that prophetic utterance is heard as the definitive word of the deity and to the extent that the deity is omnipotent, the conditions for their effect on the audience are self-contained in the utterance: prophecy encodes what we might call a "presumptive perlocution" and therefore carries its own "guarantee" of performative felicity and predicative success.^[6]

Let us be more precise regarding this claim about presumptive perlocution. Searle points out that in both cornmissive and directire utterances, which form the bulk of these texts, the relation of "world" and "word" is that the world "fits" the words: I promise things will be a certain way, and that state of affairs is expected to come to pass. On the other hand, the assertive/constative presupposes the inverse, that the words fit the world: such and such is the case, and I am saying so. As the middle term, a declarative act achieves its mediation by means of what Searle understands as a "very peculiar relation" between world and words that "the performance of a declaration brings about by its very successful performance" (1979: 18). To explain how this is possible he appeals to the necessity of an "extra-linguistic institution" that determines constitutive rules in addition to those of language, and within which the speaker and hearer must occupy specific places. Among Charismatics these conditions are met, respectively, in the constitutive rules that define prophecy as a genre and in the organization of the covenant community.

Searle carries us even further, however, in observing that the only two exceptions to the requirement that an extralinguistic institution underlie every declaration are declarations that concern language itself and "supernatural declarations. When, e.g., God says 'Let there be light' that is a declaration" (1979: 18). The remarkable state of affairs is that in this instance the constitution of the extralinguistic institution erases the requirement of its own existence as assurance of a declaration's ef-

ficacy. In our case, insofar as the declaration must be understood to be made by God even to count as prophecy, we can say there is a presumptive perlocution already embedded in the utterance.

Scholars such as Michelle Rosaldo (1975) and James Fernandez (1986, 1991) have observed that the performance of metaphors effects a qualitative transformation in participants, a movement either from one state to another or from formlessness and lack of identity to definiteness and specificity. I will take this argument a step further and show how metaphors can then themselves be cycled back into performance with fresh implications for the understanding of basic motives, creating the possibility for generations of still other metaphors. The circulation of motives is thus a self-sustaining dialectical process: motives generate metaphors, metaphors move people, people are reoriented by motives, motives generate new metaphors, and so on.

I would argue that this process has a transformative effect in part because metaphors such as that of the bulwark constitute a critical link between prophecy as an arbiter of social practice (intersubjectivity) and as an ongoing body of discourse (intertextuality). In the first instance, the metaphor supplies a concrete identity to an inchoate "we" that is in search of a new pattern of relationships motivated by religiously prescribed goals (see Fernandez 1974). Indeed, as we have seen, the texts give explicit instructions on how to use the pronoun "we." Second, the metaphor contributes to the temporal continuity and coherence of discourse as it is repeated in successive utterances and applied in new situations. This pivotal role of metaphor goes beyond the possibility for repetition of the constitutive act documented above, in which the bulwark is created and re-created in prophetic utterance. Once it has entered into ritual discourse, the metaphor can be transformed or amplified, as occurs in the third prophecy. In line 60 the deity specifically acknowledges speaking in figures, and the figure introduced to transform the bulwark is that of a hedge, as opposed to a wall of solid rock. The semantic transformation is from inorganic to organic, and from monolithic unity to the plural unity of intertwining shoots. This allows an amplification of meaning through the incorporation of aspects of group life into the web of sacred discourse. Thus, the "four seeds" from which the hedge has grown is simultaneously an allusion to the "good seed" of Matthew's gospel and to the four founders of the community, a doubling that not incidentally contributes to the mythologization of their role. The image of separate shoots intertwining to form the hedge is an idealization of interpersonal relationships among

members of the community. The notion of "pruning" the hedge refers both to the loss of members who cannot maintain their commitment to the group and to the complex of self-discipline and group authority by means of which individuals are disburdened of their "worldly" attachments. Incorporating wayward shoots into the hedge refers to the necessity of recruiting new members, and transplanting parts of the hedge refers to the community's plan to send out small groups of members who would establish outposts in other localities.

This dialectic of motive and metaphor in performance is a locus for the radicalization of charisma and ritualization of practice documented above in Part Two. Let us make one final pass through the bulwark texts with an eye to how this dialectic in the performance of prophecy contributes to the dual processes of involution in Charismatic ritual life. Recall that I have already identified, in the earlier brief consideration of the prophecy by which The Word of God was named, a rhetoric of open-ended commitment that called listeners toward a phenomenological horizon where plans and actions that once seemed "crazy" became accepted and incorporated into collective life. Returning to the bulwark prophecies, we find a similar dynamic at work. The "hold on and see" at the end of the first prophecy (line 10) is not the deity teasing his people, or a sign that people do not know what to do next, but discourse awaiting inspiration and leaving its hearers expectantly on the edges of their seats. It is a formulaic elaboration of the ritual motive of the promise. The second prophecy begins (line 11) with the statement that something new is being done, describes that something, and promises that once it is accomplished something much more grand and glorious will be revealed (lines 46–48). Here is an elaboration of the ritual motive of a plan that invites hearers of the prophecy to "seek the will of the Lord" for ever-deeper, profound, and open-ended meanings and goals. The call to "lay down one's life for the Lord" (lines 40, 53) is a frequently occurring formula of Charismatic oral composition based on the motive of commitment. In the radicalization of charisma the formula's ambiguity has allowed it to remain unchanged—but not stable (see Bloch 1986)—as its meaning has expanded from the horizon of "commit your life" to that of "give up your life," and finally to the possibility of physical martyrdom promulgated in the Sword of the Spirit Training Course.

In this light, the statement "You are a part and not the whole," redoubled in lines 35 and 36 and stated a third time following the promise of greater things to come (line 51), takes on a dual rhetorical function. On one level it is an exhortation to resist an inflated sense of

self-importance over being called to play a role in the divine plan. On another level it emphasizes the immensity of the plan that will be revealed gradually as each stage is completed. It thus keeps listeners on the hither side of the phenomenological horizon of divine revelation. Finally, the entire second half of the third prophecy (lines 83–130) is an open-ended statement of what is required of listeners in order that they be effective participants in fulfillment of the divine plan. It is, in effect, an extended elaboration of the ritual motive of commitment.

If ambiguity and open-endedness are textual conditions for the rhetoric of radicalization, so also is the source domain from which metaphors are drawn (Sapir and Crocker 1977). It is critical to observe that the dialectic between motive and metaphor is not hermetic. Motives "motivate" and therefore constrain metaphors, and metaphors amplify the meaning of motives, but motives do not definitively determine which metaphors from the available repertoire will be applied in particular situations. The Word of God has consistently drawn on the military as its preferred self-predicative domain, cultivating images of battle against the forces of evil. In contrast, the transformation of bulwark into hedge can be compared with a parallel transformation from tree into house in the prophecies of its former sister community, the People of Praise. Their prophecy described a tree full of life being cut down and sawed into lumber, and the wood being built into a house. At the time, members were unable to interpret its meaning. However, several years later a reorganization of the community was initiated, and those charged with planning recalled the earlier prophecy. The planners had the "sense" that their reorganization was "what was in God's mind when that prophecy was uttered." They interpreted this "sense" as "God [re]calling it to mind," and thus as a "confirmation that we were in [i.e., within the scope of] God's will."

The People of Praise prophecy began with the same motive of "community," and as in the bulwark prophecies, this motive was transformed by performance of a metaphor whose salience persisted over time. Note that the transformation in both cases is predicated on a structural opposition between an inanimate cultural edifice (bulwark, house) and an animate natural entity (hedge, tree). The vector of transformation across this opposition does not appear particularly salient, for in the first case it is from culture to nature and in the second, from nature to culture. However, both imply a process of development, advance, internal elaboration, and sophistication, and both create images of shelter and protection.

It is also of little consequence that the two metaphors draw on the

different technical domains of horticulture and construction. The critical difference is that the metaphorical source domain for the tree/house is that of domesticity, whereas for the bulwark/hedge it is that of defense. The salience of this difference was aptly summarized by a People of Praise coordinator who, following the split with The Word of God, had observed ritual discourse in his community gradually shift away from the rhetoric of conflict.

The rhetoric of war, siege is very effective at eliciting commitment and dedication from your followers. We against them, they against us, the hostile forces of evil surrounding us, survival is at stake—these are very powerful rhetorical terms and images that get people to dedicate everything they have and put up with all sorts of hardships. They pump up the adrenaline. In fact, we found that after the separation, to the degree that we had talked like The Word of God talked, and to the degree to which that began disappearing, our members could tell, and for a while there was a lack of rhetorical effect. So we could see the advantage to using that kind of language. I don't mean to imply anything cynical that they use that language only to pump up, but just from the sociological or linguistic point of view, you can see that certain languages have certain effects on mass movements, because when that language ceases to be used, the effect, in the corresponding fashion, disappears.

People in the community "felt their energy level going down" and found themselves in search of vision and direction. Eventually they "felt the energy and focus come back," as the vocabulary of motives continued to circulate and orient collective life, but with different emphases and enriched by different metaphors.

These considerations lead to a critical series of questions about the performance of ritual language. To what extent is the calling into play of different metaphoric domains a function of intentionality? Does a vocabulary of motives allow for conscious choice in performance, or for partial choice among a restricted set of domains? To what extent does it demand thematic consistency across successive utterances? Does it generate its own rhetorical dynamic that, once activated, drives it toward ever more radical and symbolically charged formulations? Does the choice of militaristic rhetoric initiate the dynamic, or does the dynamic invite expression in military images?

I would argue that the Charismatic vocabulary of motives is indeed structured in such a way that it invites radicalization, and this in two senses. First is an unresolvable tension created by two cosmological oppositions embedded in the vocabulary: one between the world and the Kingdom of God and the other between God and Satan (the Enemy). Both sources of tension are evident in the texts examined above

and readily lead to preoccupation with the topics of "getting free from the world," "building the Kingdom of God," and "spiritual warfare" between the forces of God and those aligned with Satan. The second element is suggested by the work of Burke (1970) on the relations of key terms in the writings of Saint Augustine and in the Book of Genesis. Burke shows that the rhetorical power of these texts is grounded in the way that each key term implies the next so as to form a neatly closed system—a tautological cycle of terms. That is, discourse constitutes a circular argument on a grand scale. The cycle is seamless, absolute, incontrovertible, and eternal; in short, it is sacred (cf. Rappaport 1979). Not coincidentally, Burke's focus is precisely those key motives of covenant and order from which the radicalization of charisma in the communitarian ideal took its departure. While in the preceding chapter I organized the contents of the vocabulary of motives into topical domains, what I am now suggesting is that in performance, the vocabulary is structured as a tautological cycle of terms. To recapitulate the tautological cycle within the Charismatic vocabulary of motives, the notion of commitment to a community can lead to the adoption of a written document, or covenant , that specifics forms of order , instituting structures of group authority that command obedience , and so on. We could expand this discourse to include the entire vocabulary, ending where we started.

The vocabulary of motives is thus a closed system in which the terms imply one another and require one another to complete their meaning. Burke's analysis adds to the idea that speech circulates motives throughout ritual and social life the further suggestion that in speech the entire tautological cycle in a sense "revolves" in a systematic way. Although this would likely also be the case if we were to extend Burke's analysis through the written texts of biblical scholars, under the social conditions of ritual speech we can expect a lively interplay between creativity and constraint in the elaboration and transformation of motives critical to entextualization and intertextuality. As motives are inserted into discourse at ever new moments of implication, the structure of the tautology remains, but the canonical terms no longer refer solely to one another within fixed texts. Concretely experienced as sacred words, they become indexical to social relations and motivate those who speak and hear them. Motivated actions instantiate sacred discourse in social life, and thus social life becomes a sacred reality.

This leads us to postulate a final rhetorical condition for the radicalization of charisma. Where, as in covenant communities, motives are structured as a tautological cycle of terms, those terms may be driven

around that cycle at increasing velocity as performance amplifies oppositional tensions (e.g., world/kingdom, God/Satan) embedded in the vocabulary. As the cycle revolves it spins off new metaphors and compositional formulas with a kind of centrifugal force. Closed upon itself, the velocity of the cycle results in a rhetorical spiral as the meaning of motives such as covenant and formulas such as "to lay down one's life for the Lord" become amplified in the direction of traditional authority or apocalypsis. Like Blake's depiction of Jacob's Ladder, the straight and narrow path is a spiral staircase of charisma upon which the sacred self ascends toward a destiny perceived as glory.

In this way the dialectic between ritual and social life may be endowed with a directionality that is to some extent independent of events external to discourse. However, there is nothing internal to discourse that renders such a result necessary or inevitable. We have observed that Charismatics outside covenant communities are not typically involved in the radicalization process. Neither are all covenant communities, and as I have shown, it is quite possible, as in the case of the People of Praise, to become extricated from the rhetorical dynamic. In summary, we can suggest several social conditions that may facilitate the processes of rhetorical involution:

(1) the degree to which life situation permits experimentation with lifestyle among the people who become involved in a particular locale, such as young married couples, the unmarried, or college students;

(2) the degree of radical religious vision and rhetorical skill possessed by individual leaders, given the reservations already expressed about the "charismatic figure" in Weber's sense;

(3) the degree to which relief from boredom is needed in a settled religious life, as, for example, when Charismatics motivated by the desire for "spiritual growth" undergo periods of stagnation or "dry spells";

(4) the degree to which it is necessary to intensify commitment in order to maintain it, requiring the mission of a movement to become ever more urgent, its correctness ever more certain, its scope ever wider.

It is unlikely that any particular combination of these factors or others—whether they be personality characteristics of participants or preoccupation with psychocultural themes such as intimacy, spontaneity, and control—can predict the initiation of a rhetorical spiral based on a

tautological cycle of terms. It might be suggested, however, that such a process, with an incremental change in what ceases to "seem crazy" and what begins to "make sense," can be identified in retrospect in those movements in which the radicalization process is carried to extreme or even fatal lengths. Such a process likely occurred in the case of the unfortunate Savonarola, as well as in the contemporary aberrations of David Koresh, Jeffrey Lundgren, Charles Manson, Jim Jones's People's Temple, the Solar Temple, and Aum Shinrikyo^[7] —all of which lacked the constraints on radicalization that moderate even the most radical among Catholic Charismatics.

With this analysis of the elaboration and transformation of motives, I have completed the description of the triple dialectic of ritual performance on the levels of event, genre, and act. In sum, the dialectic between motive and metaphor appears when motives like community, commitment, and world generate metaphors such as that of the bulwark, which in turn reorients the motives themselves such that in subsequent utterances the bulwark itself becomes transformed into the impenetrable hedge. This textual, illocutionary-predicative process is embedded in the pragmatic, action-behavior process that characterizes the dialectic between the system of genres and the vocabulary of motives. The global rhetorical apparatus for "speaking the Kingdom" keeps motives in circulation as the verbal lubricant of ritual life. This dialectic is in turn embedded in the habitus-based, event-situation process that characterizes the dialectic between ritual and social life, where we have observed the ritualization of practice and radicalization of charisma.

Prophecy and the Cultural Phenomenology of Revelation

We have one task yet ahead, for the semiotic/symbolic analysis of prophetic texts does not complete an understanding of prophecy as a self process. The "extrinsic theory" of thought and meaning (Geertz 1973) takes us a considerable distance in showing how rhetorical processes circumscribe the boundaries of the sacred self, outline the motivational space of everyday social interaction, and shape the contours of collective identity. If we are serious about defining self as a capacity for orientation in the world that is integrated into a habitus, the

necessary complement of a semiotics of performance is a cultural phenomenology of performance. When we make the methodological move from representation to being-in-the-world (see Csordas 1994b), it becomes evident that the phenomenology of prophecy is about the experience of revelation. This is the phenomenon that can allow us to understand how prophecy "works" and thereby approach a conclusion about the problem of creativity in ritual language. The ground here is largely uncharted, perhaps because of the difficulty of obtaining data about revelatory experience in languages in which the anthropologist may be not entirely fluent and in cultures in which the appropriate questions are difficult to pose or respond to. We must therefore take advantage of a ritual system and ritual practitioners that operate in English to describe ritual language not only as utterance but also as experience.

Prophecy is regarded as a spiritual gift, in the use of which one can "grow" or become increasingly experienced. More precisely, it is one among a class of "word gifts," all of which are understood to be forms of divine revelation.^[8]   The capacity to experience revelation is an orientational capacity of the culturally constituted self in the sense we have defined it. Its phenomenological criterion is spontaneous insight or inspiration, often in the form of sensory imagery. We have already witnessed the cultivation of imagination as a self process in the children's drama described in the preceding chapter and alluded to its central role in ritual healing (see Csordas 1994a). For the present, we will note that a prophecy emerges into consciousness in one of several ways. A person may simply feel impelled or "anointed" to speak without a clear sense of what should be said. Even though there are implicit guides to utterance (in the themes of ongoing group life, in a theme implied by previous speakers or stated by leaders of the assembly, or in the vocabulary of motives), the prophet in this ambiguous circumstance feels that to speak is a test of faith and responsiveness to the divine call. There is a collective acknowledgment that such faithfulness can be rewarded by a special message. One experienced covenant community prophet stated that the most frightening inspiration is one that just says "Speak." When he goes to the front of the assembly and the leaders who screen prophecies ask what it's about and he says "I don't know," they say "Oh, one of those ," implicitly acknowledging their own experience of inspiration as a test of nerve.

The prophet may also have a "sense" of the entire message, leaving to "faith" only its articulate utterance. Again, the prophet may "receive" a verbatim text of the initial line or two of the prophecy, leaving

to "faith" only its spontaneous elaboration once she or he begins to speak. Such a text may suggest itself in a way that is not only spontaneous but immediate as well—much, I imagine, as a statement one might make during a group conversation suggests itself prior to one's saying it. In such a case there are several criteria by means of which the inspiration can be distinguished from "one's own" thoughts. These are, if it is directly addressed to the themes at hand, if it is obviously of "spiritual" content, if it occurs precast in the vocabulary of motives and formulas of ritual composition, or if it feels like it is not one's own thought or is something one "wouldn't have thought of on one's own." Prophecy may also be presented—not represented—in consciousness as the audition of an internal voice, as the visualization of a written text, or as a visualization either already accompanied by words or which must be described/expressed in words by the prophet. These experiences appear to have nothing of the character of hallucination and require instead an understanding of the cultural elaboration of imagination. Through these variations, we begin to see the central issue of a phenomenology of revelation when revelation is culturally supposed to occur in a completely wide-awake state: it is much less fruitful to invoke dissociation or trance as explanatory concepts than to outline a capacity of self constituted as the "recognition" of revelation.

Let us make our analysis more concrete with a brief portrait of what Singer (1958, 1972) would call a "cultural specialist" in prophecy at The Word of God. In his mid-thirties, during a difficult period in his marriage, G received the Baptism in the Holy Spirit and the gift of tongues at a religious conference after reading an inspirational book. Shortly thereafter, while driving on an errand, he "felt thoughts" in his mind that were "different from prayer, like someone else thinking in my mind telling me 'I've loved you, I've been waiting for you a long time.'" He spoke the words aloud in the first person, though he had never yet heard of prophecy. Attending his first prayer meeting at The Word of God several days later, he heard prophecy for the first time. His wife was baptized in the Holy Spirit at home during the following week, and he began experiencing prophecy nearly every night. At the summer's end he prophesied publicly for the first time, and continued to do so at every community prayer meeting afterward. In two years he was asked to join the community's word gifts group.

The new prophet faces a dilemma in observing that the content of an utterance is an outgrowth of personal experience. The concern arises that he or she is speaking to everyone a message intended only for his

or her own edification, or that he or she is not being truly inspired but is "making it up." With experience one learns to focus and "listen" according to context. G explained that he makes himself ready and available for inspiration at times when it is clear that "the Lord wants a general word [to be spoken in prophecy], while other times it just pops into my head." As in the formulation of a "teaching" described in the preceding chapter, a prophecy may also evolve over a period of time. G recounted his experience of formulating a prophecy that elaborated his revelatory image of a "multitude clothed in white receiving the mark of God." The prophecy came at a critical moment, when the community was in the process of its controversial recommitment and adoption of ritual clothing. The core visual image is of an already mantle-and-veilclad membership amplified into a multitude and marked or chosen by the deity. G's experience of inspiration begins in the week preceding the prayer meeting, during which he "had trouble coming before the Lord" (i.e., praying with a sense of divine presence) and felt "unacceptable about his own attitudes to the community, life, etc." He came to the meeting still feeling that the "Lord was inaccessible" to him, though he later realized that the divinity "was preparing him for that word" (of prophecy). God "began talking" to him during the preparatory meeting of community prophets (the word gifts group) that precedes every prayer meeting. At that time, G said,

I saw God on a throne in a white/yellow burst of light, almost silhouetted. I felt something is wrong with me, I shouldn't be here Lord, but He touched my lips with two fingers to stop the protest, then made a mark on my forehead like they do in [the Catholic sacrament of] Confirmation. I asked myself was I supposed to be home, am I being harassed by Satan. Then as I was praying I got [i.e., was inspired to open the Bible to] a passage from Revelations about sealing of the multitude, which was exactly what was going on [at the time in the community]. I received the actual prophecy in the carly praise period of the meeting [the opening period of collective prayer in tongues], and at first thought it was [a message meant] just for me. Then [a head coordinator] gave a [teaching] talk using the same imagery—"before the Lamb we will, etc.," and as I sat down I got the feeling I should share it, the strongest anointing [i.e., experience of divine inspiration and empowerment] I've had in a while. As I was deciding whether to share it, testing it, the confirmation [from God] was "I want you to share and also speak" [indicating that part of his utterance should be in the genre of sharing and part "spoken" as prophecy]. Under the usual procedure I shared it with [two coordinators who were screening prophecies], and as I walked up and was waiting to speak I got the words [to the prophecy], adding later. Sometimes there's an air of unreality, but this time I didn't even have to get back to my seat and ask my wife if it was right—I knew it this time. Since

then a lot of people have felt a change of heart to the community, accepting themselves in their attitude toward being there. Like the prophecy said, "The seal can never be erased, face the future with less fear."

This text shows that the phenomenology of revelation is constituted as a gestalt of spontaneity and reflection, self-questioning and confirmation, multisensory imagery, mixed genres of ritual language, coordinated sequences of motives and metaphors, personal circumstance, and collective concern. Insofar as this gestalt describes his orientation to the world and to others, we can understand the sense in which the performance of prophecy is a linguistic and imaginal self process for the prophet. In the context of what we know about Charismatic life, we can say that the ability to prophesy is a spontaneous disposition of the habitus grounded in a configuration of capacities for orientation in the world.

If there is a distinct cultural phenomenology of revelation for the prophet, no less is there one for the hearer of prophecy. As with its utterance, then, we must understand the hearing of prophecy in a manner that is experience based and not simply rule based. To be sure, there are no explicit "teachings" on how to listen to prophecy, since one is expected to have a distinct "personal response" to each utterance. It is generally said that it is easier to "receive" a prophecy from another than it is to be confident in one you utter yourself. This is doubtless in part because the speaker is more preoccupied with the speaking and with doubts about the inspiration's validity than with incorporating its meaning. It is said that most people "try to make a conscious effort to decide it is the Lord speaking," and that this gets easier with time as one "sees them fulfilled." The language in which the incorporation of prophecy is described includes an "emotional feeling" or a "physiological quickening" similar and parallel to the "anointing" that indicates one should utter a prophecy. People may say "It felt right," "It spoke to my needs," "I felt the Lord was in it," "It answered a question I was having," "I was really convicted by that prophecy" (i.e., I was grasped by its truth and aptness), or "That prophecy really spoke to my heart" (i.e., I heard it and was moved by it). For some, "the words make more sense and [one] hears them more clearly than talking plainly, and [one's] understanding seems sharpened."

The obvious but critical observation that experience transcends the text is only a truism if it is assumed that experience does not matter. Hints at what really constitutes the efficacy of ritual language are given

in the response of two people present during the prophecy in which the bulwark was transformed into the hedge. From a man who recalled that he pictured the big square hedge along with other hedges and got the feeling of runners going out to attach them together, we learn that imagery may accompany the hearing of prophecy as well as its utterance. The "big square" shape of the hedge is probably a formal feature retained from its precursor the bulwark, suggesting that we are accurate in describing the phenomenological process as a transformation instead of a substitution of metaphors. Whereas the text describes transplanting sprouts that germinate from separate seeds into the bulwark, and transplanting parts of the hedge to extend the bulwark, the hearer's image elaborates, specifies, and interprets by evoking a scene that includes multiple hedges linked by runners. Another hearer stated that the image of the bulwark in prophecy brought to mind "all the other things the Lord has told us about our mission as a community," a datum that is a tribute to Victor Turner's (1967) insight that key symbols are multivocal and polysemic. This woman described her original notion of the bulwark as a kind of seawall. The seawall represented "an idea she could understand," but the transformed hedge made it much clearer for her, "since the hedge is both penetrable and impenetrable." I do not believe that there is anything necessarily "feminine" about her valuation of this particular enhancement of the metaphor. Instead, it appears to reconcile a felt contradiction between the broader understandings of the community as an inclusive space of intimacy and as an exclusive barrier to aggression. Here we are at the phenomenological core of ritual language as self process.

I have shown that thematic consistency and intertextuality in Charismatic ritual language are grounded in the circulation of motives through genres in performance, but a few more words are in order about how that consistency is experienced as divine power. Charismatics observe that when everyone is "open to the movement of the Spirit" there is a kind of prophetic "fallout." Participants, especially members of the word gifts group, claim at times to be aware of precisely when the deity is "giving" prophecy, and even of who is "getting" it. The deity might say to one, "X is distracted, tell her I want to speak through her." Everyone is "picking up the general sense of what the Lord is saying," and no one can be sure he or she is the one receiving the "word" that is actually to be uttered. It is not uncommon for prayer meeting participants to report with awe that they "received" exactly the same message moments before it was uttered by another. In this situation the person

who did not speak can "confirm" the validity of the prophecy, verifying the speaker's accurate rendering of the inspiration on the ground that both were, so to speak, tuned into the same divine transmission. Major prophecies are also "confirmed" by minor prophecies that follow, or synthesize minor prophecies that come before. As with the first two bulwark prophecies, it sometimes happens that a single speaker "receives" only part of a prophecy and its continuation is "received" by someone else. In "discerning" whether or not to speak, the inexperienced prophet may hesitate because his inspiration seems incomplete. The experienced prophet may in contrast "step out in faith" and speak, on the assumption that the sense of his utterance will be completed by a subsequent speaker—again as in the bulwark prophecies, where the second prophecy (beginning at line 11) is a nearly seamless continuation of the first. Finally, when the prophet has discerned that he (or she) should speak, he may begin the utterance with only a vague sense of the content or with a clear idea of only the first line or two of the prophecy. As in the above example from the cultural specialist, spontaneous oral composition is then experienced as a manifestation of divine power.

Those who listen attentively often report that prophecy moves them in ways they would not expect from utterance that had a "human source." It is not expected that every prophecy will have such a profound effect on every hearer, but the miraculous nature of sacred discourse is confirmed for listeners by the experience that the same lines of prophecy may carry different messages for different individuals. But precisely the opposite is also the case: apparently unrelated prophecies may be interpreted as bearing the same message or addressing the same issue. During the late 1970s it was said that the head prophet of The Word of God received about a hundred prophecies per week. In addition, he was sent a steady flow of prophecy mail from the general membership. Whenever over a period of time he was "praying about" a particular topic, the contents of prophecy mail were said to skew toward that topic, even tough "people do not necessarily know that the coordinators are discussing that topic." This experience of spontaneous, apparently unprompted thematic consistency is an experience of the sacred produced and sustained by the dialectic between ritual and social life. That is, given the intense cultivation of habitus, it is not surprising that the membership and the administrative staff express similar concerns at any one time. Given the tightly articulated system of genres and motives, neither is it surprising that the body of prophetic discourse can at

any one time be searched and interpreted for messages relevant to a given theme—certainly no more surprising than that the Bible can be used in this manner.

Given these elements of experience it is also the case that, just as the prophet must discern when and whether to speak, those who hear prophecy must discern or test its validity and relevance. A woman in her early forties put it as follows:

Predictive prophecy, or directive prophecy, is always treated with a certain amount of caution. You're not supposed to do anything solely based on a prophetic word unless it's something so innocuous you would do it anyway. A prophetic word that says "little children love one another," there's no problem with something like that. But if the prophetic words says, "Behold hard times are coming, you must sell your house and live together in clusters"—and we had prophetic words that said more or less that (they didn't get quite that explicit)—that sort of thing needs to be judged and tested. The category of things that's tested most extensively is personal prophecy—" Behold, John, you should marry Mary."

Here the hearer's interpretive intentions are as much at issue as are the communicative intentions of the human/divine speaker. At least for the ideally "mature" hearer, being experientially moved and spiritually tuned in to a divine wavelength are not the sole sources of validation. The relative need for external validation is determined based on criteria distinguishing innocuousness/momentousness, generality/specificity, and collective/personal target of the divine message.

These observations are directly relevant to theoretical discussions of creativity in ritual language. Despite attestations of the importance of the audience in performance, such discussions typically overprivilege the flexibility or constraint allowed by rules for the production of utterances, to the neglect of conventions for the interpretation of those utterances and their incorporation into practice (see Duranti and Brenneis 1986 for a major exception). I will address the problem of creativity directly in the concluding chapter. For now, my point is that the phenomenology of language allows us to grasp both how the validity of utterances is confirmed and, insofar as discourse is concretely experienced as originating outside its speakers and as conveying a special message to each listener, how it creates a sense of sacred otherness. The kind of account I have provided suggests that we not conceive the efficacy of ritual language as a function only of its texts, or conceive of performance as merely the generation of texts. In the extrinsic analysis of textuality

and representation, prophecies are metaphorical extensions of the linked motives of community-people-covenant. We must now take another step toward embodiment and being-in-the-world, picking up with respect to prophecy in particular the thread of analysis of the transformation of habitus woven into the argument in chapters 2 and 6.

We can describe how prophecy extends into the habitus in several directions through a metaphorical social space. First, it diffuses "downward" from ritual event into everyday domestic life. As authoritative utterance invades the space of intimacy and through the ritualization of practice becomes an additional tool of patriarchal social control, it also adapts to that space by losing the prosodic features that characterize it as a formal genre. One covenant community man noted that for several years, when uttering prophecy in the domestic context to his wife and children, he maintained genre conventions such as prefacing his words with an opening such as "Thus saith the Lord." Eventually he came to feel that formal speech was somewhat stilted and distance creating and that the divine message could be conveyed just as effectively with an opening such as "N, I really feel the Lord wants you to know that . . ." followed by a message framed in colloquial speech. The problem of how one recognizes such an utterance as a prophecy in the absence of prosodic conventions disappears when we realize that this change accompanies the incorporation of prophecy into a habitus. That is, one has an ongoing relationship of intimacy with the speaker, knows whether that speaker is endowed with the gift of prophecy, recognizes the kinds of things that are customarily said in prophecy, knows how seriously one should weigh words heard in prophecy especially if they are directed unequivocally at oneself, and recognizes the kind of response that an apt prophecy typically evokes in oneself.

The linguistic self process also diffuses "upward" insofar as covenant community coordinators appropriate increasing authority to both utter and interpret ritual language. In The Word of God this was marked by a relative shift in the locus of efficacy away from the genre of prophecy, customarily accessible to all, to the genre of teaching, based on the authoritative "discernment" of the coordinators. Some of those who objected to the teachings of the Training Course in the mid-1980s also perceived that community prophecies were no longer the source of direction for the group, but appeared increasingly to mirror "preconceived" ideas promulgated by the community elite. From the coordinators' point of view, utterance delivered as teaching was no less a

product of divine inspiration than that delivered as prophecy. This ambiguity about the social role of prophecy is predicated on its dual property, observed above, wherein the same utterance may have different meaning for different hearers (preserving elements of intimacy with the divine even in the most authoritative of utterances and reciprocity among participants who search for an egalitarian consensus of interpretation) while separate utterances can have the same meaning for all (reflecting unequivocal authority in the divine word and hierarchical separation between the rank and file and the gatekeepers of divine will). Once again the tension was between intimacy and authority, reciprocity and hierarchy.

We have already examined how the force of ritual utterance diffuses "inward" as one makes the "decision" that it constitutes the divine word and experientially incorporates its meaning. Finally, it diffuses "outward" beyond the bounds of the verbal genre into the body. In certain instances it comes to be performed as prophetic gesture, transforming the motives of ritual life in what Laurence Kirmayer (1992) has called "enactive metaphor." An example comes from a meeting between The Word of God leaders Martin and Clark, accompanied by their chief prophet, and Cardinal Suenens, accompanied by his prophet. The Word of God prophet was divinely prompted to "get a rope" and bring it to the meeting, where he was to bind together the hands of Martin and Suenens. In this instance not only did the prophet perform or enact a metaphor indicating the divine ordination of the alliance, he also enacted a wordless performative act (see Tambiah 1973/1985: 80) of binding, and thus establishing, that alliance. A second example from the same prophet is a gesture that accompanied a verbal prophecy at one of the community's anniversary celebrations. While the deity described how he had "lifted up" the community and given it broad influence within the Charismatic movement, the prophet lifted his white mantle above his head. Suddenly he announced that this influence and respect would be sorely tested in the future, flinging the mantle to the floor and trampling on it. The reported effect was to bring about a profound transformation in the mood of the assembly from that of jubilant celebration to sober apprehension.^[9]   A final example comes from a lesser prophet in the same community who once, while meeting privately with a group of district heads, felt inspired to perform the prophetic gesture of laying on of hands while prophesying verbally. The gesture's prophetic meaning was to encourage and exhort the leaders not to be overwhelmed by the pastoral responsibility they bore. That such em-

bodied performances of prophecy are relatively rare, apparently elaborated only in the covenant community setting, reinforces my earlier conclusion that the radicalization of charisma is accompanied by its progressive embodiment.

Let us pursue the significance of the observation that the performance of ritual language exceeds the bounds of textuality and overflows into embodiment. My discussion suggests that the experience of divine power in Charismatic discourse is more than a function of attributing utterances to the deity by the rhetorical use of the first-person pronoun. Instead, power is grounded in the phenomenology of prophetic inspiration, composition, speaking, and hearing. What, then, is the relation between the phenomenology of religious experience and the phenomenology of discourse, between divine power and the power of language? What is the relation between the "I" of prophecy and the "I" that is a sacred self? Tambiah offers a provocative suggestion.

There is a sense in which it is true to say that language is outside of us and given to us as a part of our cultural and historical heritage; at the same time language is within us, it moves us and we generate it as active agents. Since words exist and are in a sense agents in themselves which establish connections and relations between both man and man, and man and the world, and are capable of "acting" upon them, they are one of the most realistic representations we have of the concept of force which is either not directly observable or is a metaphysical notion which we find it necessary to use. (1968: 184)

The two critical features of language that Tambiah's argument highlights are its "inwardly otherness" and its realistic "representation of force." These features, however, are not distinctive of language per se, but of language insofar as it participates in the generality of our embodied existence. And it is the error of an overly textualized approach that leads Tambiah to write that the aspect of language he is tapping is a representation , rather than an instance , of force.

Merleau-Ponty (1962) captures this embodied nature of language by suggesting that at its root speech is not a representation of thought but a verbal gesture with immanent meaning. For Merleau-Ponty, speech is coterminous with thought, and we possess words in terms of their articulatory and acoustic style as one of the possible uses of our bodies. Strictly speaking, speech cannot be said to express or represent thought, since thought is for the most part inchoate until it is spoken (or written). Instead, speech is an act or phonetic gesture in which one takes up an existential position in the world. The clearest example I can think of to illustrate this position is that of Charismatic glossolalia.^[10]   The two

relevant facts about Charismatic glossolalia are that it takes the form of nonsense or gibberish and that its speakers regard vernacular language as inadequate for communication with the divine.^[11]   It thus seems to challenge taken for granted canons of vernacular expressivity and intelligibility, and in so doing calls into question conventions of truth, logic, and authority.

A semiotic account might accordingly hold that glossolalia ruptures the world of human meaning, like a wedge forcing an opening in discourse and creating the possibility of creative cultural change, dissolving structures to facilitate the emergence of new ones. This interpretation is not incorrect, but a different light is thrown on the problem when glossolalia is viewed as a phenomenon of embodiment. Note that I am not saying that glossolalia is only a gesture, for we must grant its phenomenological reality as language for its users. What I would argue, along with Merleau-Ponty, is that all language has this gestural or existential meaning. Glossolalia, by its formal characteristic of eliminating the semantic level of linguistic structure, highlights precisely the existential reality of intelligent bodies inhabiting a meaningful world. In playing on the gestural characteristic of linguisticality, speaking in tongues is a ritual statement that the speakers inhabit a sacred world, since the gift of ritual language is defined as a gift from the deity. The stripping away of the semantic dimension in glossolalia is not an absence but the drawing back of a discursive curtain to reveal the grounding of language in natural life, as a bodily act. At the same time, "speech is the surplus of our existence over natural being" (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 197), that is to say, of our existence as persons over mere being as things or objects. Glossolalia thus reveals language as incarnate, and this existential fact is homologous with the religious significance of the "Word made Flesh," the unity of human and divine.

Once we acknowledge the embodied nature of language, we have a new basis for understanding the significance of Tambiah's observation that it is both outside and within us, both other and self. In the words of the phenomenological philosopher Richard M. Zaner, our bodies are alien presences to us at the same time as they are compellingly ours, both "intimately alien" and "strangely mine," such that "the otherness of my own body thus suffuses its sense of intimacy" (1981: 55). To the extent that our experience of language is also an experience of our bodies, it partakes of this ambiguous embodied otherness. It thus contributes to the conditions for our senses of the uncanny and of the sacred. My argument, then, is that the existential otherness of language

is not grounded in the abstract otherness that allows us to consider it as langue instead of as parole but in the concrete otherness it shares as a feature of embodiment.

The second feature of language singled out by Tambiah is its realistic representation of the abstract notion of force. In later writing Tambiah (1973/1985), taking up Austin's theory of performative speech acts, observes, as did Bronislaw Malinowski, that speech can be considered "part of action." Also like Malinowski, however, he does not take the next step to an embodied theory of language. Hence while in the later work he makes the shift from language as a representation of force to language as an instance of force, and never forgets the importance of "actions other than speech," his analysis remains within the mode of textuality and with philosophers of language (1968/1985: 32–34; 1973/1985: 78–80). More recent work from philosophers of the body suggest a somatic origin for the experience of force. These arguments are all the more persuasive in that they are formulated from the divergent standpoints of cognitive science and phenomenology.

Consider first the argument of the cognitive philosopher Mark Johnson:

The meaning of "physical force" depends on publicly shared meaning structures that emerge from our bodily experience of force. We begin to grasp the meaning of physical force from the day we are born (or even before). We have bodies that are acted upon by "external" and "internal" forces such as gravity, light, heat, wind, bodily processes, and the obtrusion of other physical objects. Such interactions constitute our first encounters with forces, and they reveal patterned recurring relations between ourselves and our environment. Such patterns develop as meaning structures through which our world begins to exhibit a measure of coherence, regularity, and intelligibility. . . . These patterns are embodied and give coherent, meaningful structure to our physical experience at a preconceptual level, though we are eventually taught names for at least some of these patterns, and can discuss them in the abstract. (1987: 13)

For Johnson, these developmentally primordial experiences of force are the nonpropositional basis of fundamental metaphors and image schemas. Thus it makes sense that the force we experience in language, insofar as we agree that language is a form of action and is embodied, is not an abstraction from the primordial sense of force but an example of it.

From a more explicitly phenomenological standpoint, Zaner, drawing on the work of Hans Jonas, carries us further in this direction by observing that causality itself is not an a priori of experience but an

extrapolation from "propriobodily prime experience" that constitutes the ground of our very "idea of force and action in the world" (1981: 36). Every execution of a movement involves the feeling of kinesthetic "flow" that "most fundamentally constitutes this body as my embodiment," concretely enacting rudimentary strivings or efforts and doing so in such a way that it is strictly correlated with whatever appears to our senses. The important point for the genesis of a sense of force is that the kinesthetic feelings exhibit an if/then pattern:

"If" I move my arm in specific ways, "then" the glass is knocked off the table. Thus bodily experience at its roots, and not only in relation to resistant or impacting objects, has this "causal" style . Indeed, the experience of force and effort Jonas describes turns out to be far more basic and complex than even he indicates. This "force" is first and foremost an enacting by kinaesthetic patterns of elemental strivings—whether they are initiated by the organism towards the world, or whether they are reactions by it to impacting things. (Zaner 1981: 42; emphasis in original)

Causality is not first a logical relation, but an embodied one. Likewise, force is not first invisible or metaphysical, but a concrete experience of effort. Once again, to the extent that utterance partakes of embodiment and effort, speech is a real instance of force.

Including phenomenology alongside semiotic/symbolic interpretation thus gives us additional purchase on the ritual consequences of the inherent "otherness" and "force" of language. More precisely, it gives us a way to grasp the possibility that discourse, insofar as it can be understood to be "outside us," can be experienced as continuing independently of us—as "speaking itself." If the presumed unobservable and metaphysical force is in fact an embodied property of discourse, we can grasp the religious experience of that force—perceived principally in terms of its essential otherness—as a manifestation of divine power.

How this feature of language, this "embodied otherness," participates in the phenomenology of a sacred reality can be no more aptly summarized than by the following passage from Foucault:

I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible beginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon me. There would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path—a slender gap—the point of its possible disappearance. . . . A good many people, I imagine, harbour a similar desire to be freed from the obligation to begin, a similar desire to find themselves, fight from the out-

side,[^[*] ] on the other side of discourse, without having to stand outside it, pondering its particular, fearsome, and even devilish features. To this all too common feeling, institutions have an ironic reply, for they solemnize beginnings, surrounding them with a circle of silent attention; in order that they can be distinguished from far off, they impose ritual forms upon them. (1972: 215)

Foucault here taps the embodied otherness of language. The mystification of this otherness is the final rhetorical condition for the efficacy of Charismatic prophecy,^[12]   the source of both its spiritual meaning and its persuasive power. It is a paradoxical situation in which the speaker is at the moment of speaking enmeshed in a voice long preceding itself, in which the speaker stands in the path of the speech that proceeds from him, and in which because the speaking "I" is not the self, one is already on the other side of discourse—its charismatic side—safe from its fearsome, devilish, or uncanny features.

The institution of Charismatic prophecy ritualizes this paradox, precisely, I would suggest, because of its salience to the critical psychocultural themes of control, intimacy, and spontaneity. The beginning that it distinguishes "from far off" is a beginning of the self, the circumstance that the prophet is not "really" speaking but yet bears responsibility for what he says. It thus constitutes the compromise of the culturally constituted North American self that strives for control but incessantly feels it slipping away. Moreover, all utterances are attributed to the same "real" divine speaker, while anyone can serve as a font of discourse. The shared participation in the mind of God, the mutual tuning in to the divine will, is thus a concrete experience of intimacy as well as of authority. Finally, this decentering of intentionality exposes the semiautonomy of language from its speakers. This is, once again, not because langue is independent from parole, but because the body has an "autonomous" existence, and speaking is a feature of embodiment. The ritual act raises the possibility of a speakerless discourse, of language "speaking itself," and in this embodied otherness manifests the presence of the sacred as spontaneity.

This discussion suggests that we pursue the issue of intentionality, and by extension that of subjectivity, as a preliminary to our concluding discussion of creativity in the next chapter. The kind of embodied otherness we have uncovered in language is related to the understanding of intentionality as a general structure of embodied existence in phenomenological philosophy (Merleau-Ponty 1962; Kelkel 1988). Intentionality has also been analyzed as a specific characteristic of utterances

Foucault clearly means "outset," not "outside."

in the philosophy of language (Searle 1983; Lepore and Van Gulick 1991). For the most part, anthropologists have taken up the problem of intentionality in the domain of sociolinguistics, particularly with respect to the relations among intention, responsibility, and control in speech and to the critique of the role ascribed to intentions in speech act theory (Rosaldo 1982; Duranti 1993a, 1993b; Du Bois 1986, 1993; Kuipers 1993).

The critique mounted by these authors has been an important corrective to accounts that place the intention of individual speakers universally at the center of the meaning-making process in language. Thus Alessandro Duranti (1993a: 26, 42, 44) gives ethnographic examples of how the audience rather than a speaker's intent determines the force of an utterance.^[13]   Kuipers (1993: 101) highlights examples of when responsibility is not a personality trait but an act of exchange between persons. Du Bois (1986: 328; 1993) points to examples of speech characterized by the absence of ego control instead of sovereign ego control. Despite its powerful contribution, however, in its strongest version this "antipersonalist critique" of meaning (Duranti 1993a) and the elaboration of "intentionless meaning" (Du Bois 1993) could easily be interpreted to draw an irreconcilable distinction between the Western speaker characterized by subjective intention and the non-Western speaker characterized by collective determination. Indeed, the linguistic argument closely parallels the distinction drawn in psychological anthropology between an entitled Western egocentric self and a permeable non-Western sociocentric self, an implicitly orientalist distinction that has recently come increasingly to be modified and attenuated (see the literature cited in Csordas 1994c: 336–337).

To their credit some of these authors grant speech act theory and the speaker's intention a degree of value, rejecting only its universal claims (Duranti 1993a: 44; Du Bois 1993: 69). Duranti in particular calls for a balanced approach, not denying that there may be occasions in Samoa where individual intention can be invoked in understanding meaning, while Du Bois acknowledges the advances made by speech act theory even in pointing to the occurrence of intentionless meaning in Euro-American societies. Charismatic prophecy, and Charismatic ritual language in general, adds a vivid ethnographic example of the intersubjective constitution of meaning in a Euro-American setting, but one that at the same time remains permeated with intention. As in Samoa, there is a much more obvious concern on the part of hearers of prophecy with the "public, displayed, performative aspect of language" than

with the "actors' alleged subjective states" (Duranti 1993a: 44). Yet prophecy is far from the intentionless meaning in the version of the critique formulated by Du Bois using the example of divination, for it displays control, responsibility, and intention at the same time as spontaneity, collectivity, and intersubjectivity.

Our corrective to the antipersonalist corrective requires recognition of two points: the kind of genre typically presented as an example and the kind of assumption typically made about subjective states of the speakers. The kind of genre is often one characterized by substantial structure and rigidity allowing for diminished spontaneity in the enactment of more or less fixed texts. Duranti's (1993a) example of Samoan political oratory perhaps offers the most flexibility in allowing the speaker to strategically switch between adopting a dramatis persona representing a group and a personal identity, but his version of the critique is based more on the co-construction of meaning by performer and audience. Du Bois, however, argues that the need in ritual language for self-evidence and authority not subject to critical scrutiny dictates a fixed source of meaning "which stands outside the chain of human fallibility" ( 1986: 333), and he makes the strongest case for this position with respect to the extreme example of the highly overdetermined language of divination (1993). Even in traditional narrative genres such as the Shokleng origin myth (Urban 1989) or the Weyewa words of the ancestors (Kuipers 1993) the vector of intentionality is in the direction of approximating a timeless and fixed mythic account. By contrast, in prophecy the vector of intentionality is reversed, and utterance is an elaboration rather than an approximation of the timeless word of God fixed in scripture. This is the case for both the proximate and prime speakers: the intentionality in prophecy is toward the mind of God, ultimately toward the revelation of the divine plan. The intentional horizon is defined by the extent to which that plan is perceived already to have been revealed; the intentionality of the prophet becomes concordant with divine intentionality as an act of "forthtelling" in the way a surfer catches a wave.

The subjective state that corresponds in an ideal typical way to the speech of intentionless meaning is trance, which as we observed above is placed at the opposite end of a continuum with the wide-awake awareness of everyday speech (Du Bois 1986; Urban 1989). Once again, I would argue, implicit in such continua is that the everyday self is modeled on the sovereign, egocentric Western self while the nonordinary self is modeled on the trance-prone sociocentric non-Western self. I

think Urban becomes snared in this distinction while at the same time offering a way out. He offers the intriguing suggestion that the far fight of the continuum is connected back up with the left, such that projective "I" merges with the indexical referential "I" of everyday speech (Urban 1989: 42, 47). This analysis leads him to a conception of "embodied iconic otherness" (1989: 47–48) that from a semiotic standpoint parallels the phenomenological account elaborated above. In Urban's account the projective "I" operates just like an everyday "I" and constitutes an alternate self. If there is truly a merging, however, then the alternate self does not supplant the everyday self but is superimposed on it. This appears to create the paradox that there must be both an ordinary and a nonordinary self present, both sovereign speech and trance at the same time. Moreover, if the projective "I" is really behaving like the referential indexical "I" of everyday speech, then it won't be speaking in a fixed or rigid text as the model of trance speech would predict. Indeed, this is where Urban becomes entangled, stating at one point that the projective "I" tells an emergent story with no script or story accessible to the audience apart from its manifestation in present speech (1989: 42) and later that where the projective "I" is involved, texts display an extreme rigidity (1989: 47).

The ethnographic example of Charismatic prophecy offers a way to get beyond this theoretical impasse, while at the same time Urban's analysis offers additional insight into how prophecy contributes to the creation of a sacred self. Urban suggests that it is the interplay between the imaginary "I" and the everyday "I" in discourse that makes possible a truly cultural self. More important, he suggests that metapragmatic awareness of this interplay is the "motor of cultural change in the discourse constitution of self" insofar as it creates the ground for apprehension of possible discrepancy between superego and id, self and ideal, cultural constraint and creativity, and "consequently for representable internal affective processes that might otherwise never exist" (Urban 1989: 50). Charismatic prophecy is neither a fixed-text genre like the origin myth narrative nor a genre that presupposes an everyday self supplanted in trance by a nonordinary self, but one characterized by a remarkable degree of metapragmatic awareness. In prophecy, the "I" of discourse is intentionally and subjectively doubled insofar as the speaker is aware that "I am speaking responsibly, but the I of my speech is not me." There is in addition a second doubling for the hearers of prophecy because "God is speaking to us but may have a special mes-

Fig. 3.
Structure of Intentionality and Subjectivity in Charismatic Prophecy

sage for me." Finally, these doubled subjectivities carry out the constitution of meaning in the intersubjective dialogue of ritual performance.

These relationships result in the metapragmatic structure of intentionality and subjectivity presented in figure 3. The double doubling of embodied otherness is the condition for the coexistence of intentional and intentionless meaning in the sense adopted by the antipersonalist critics (note that the term "apersonal" could easily be replaced by "transpersonal"). At the same time, in another sense each pole is riddled with intention: the speaker's conscious act of prophecy that includes not just the intention to speak but the recognition of inspiration and frequently its pragmatic content (compare Du Bois 1993: 67), the deity's authoritative expression of intention often in the form of performative speech acts, and the hearers' decision to understand the utterance as prophecy that yet remains subject to a further act of judgment and testing. Furthermore, this structure not only characterizes the social relation among participants but is also incorporated within each participant: every hearer is in theory inculcated with the disposition to assume the prophetic role and continue the open-ended discourse of the divine word, and every prophet could in fact say "Insofar as God is speaking to the group of which I am a part, he is speaking to me through me."

Charismatic prophecy thus offers an ethnographic example that allows us to decenter the authority of the sovereign intentional ego in precisely the way insisted on by the anthropological critics. It also allows us to connect the issues of intention and control with those of

creativity and constraint in language use. To the extent that the speaker is absorbed in the utterance, language speaks itself and the rhetorical dynamic of discourse reigns autonomous; to the extent that the speaker retains metapragmatic awareness of the dual "I" of discourse, there is a self process defined by the possibility for internal dialogical creativity. Likewise, to the extent that the utterance is granted ultimate authority as sacred discourse by the audience, it is the unassailable voice of divine will; to the extent that it is dialogically constituted by the way it "speaks to" or is taken up by every hearer, there is necessarily space for multiplicity and creativity in meaning. Here the argument rejoins our earlier observations on the implicit paradox of a premodern patriarchal movement in a postmodern condition of culture. We can now understand that the centering of authority in the divine voice takes place from the standpoint of discourse whereas a postmodern fragmentation of intentionality takes place from the standpoint of subjectivities. Finally, it completes our account of the dual subjectivity of individual humans as speaking and hearing agents in performance and of charisma as an autonomous discursive force with its locus not in the person but in the self-sustaining rhetoric of performance grounded in the social conditions of its production and reception. Such speech "concentrates within it the accumulated symbolic capital of the group" (Bourdieu 1991: 109) and thereby "provides words with 'connotations' that are tied to a particular context, introducing into discourse that surplus of meaning that gives it its 'illocutionary force'" (Bourdieu 1991: 107).

If it is true, as Foucault suggests in the remark quoted above, that a good many people harbor the desire for submergence in discourse, then it is true that in comparison to most others Catholic Charismatics have gone quite a distance toward realizing this desire. If prophecy, as we might extrapolate from Foucault, can be seen as a model or miniature of discourse in general, one can consider the possibility that all discourse has a sacred substrate—that it is essentially a religious form of action and structure—or at least that discourse can be approached via its metaphysical implications. This in turn opens the category of communication a bit further, with implications for the relation of language to culture, reality, and the sacred. The "I" of prophecy is authentically "other" at the same time as it is authentically the self precisely because language is an embodied otherness, that is, because it is existentially grounded in the body.