Resources for Making Meaning Intelligible
We have reviewed here, and throughout this volume, some of the arrangements of forms that contribute to the style of Bhaktapur's symbolic organization and make it seem familiar, coherent, engaging, meaningful, and important to many, most probably to most, of its people. Still more is required, however; that organization must be apprehensible. The mass of symbolic forms must be organized so that people can grasp and remember and understand something about them and find their way about in them. We introduced the problem of intelligibility in our discussion (in chap. 8) of the city's pantheon as an organized "system of signs." The pantheon is sorted into classes of supernaturals distinguished by simple oppositions, oppositions that are not arbitrary but are semantically related to the meaning of the class. Those oppositions distinguish the classes with the same sort of didactic efficiency as the opposition of the dangerous and forbidding, fiery and bloody red to the encouraging living green of traffic signals. The contrasts that distinguished the classes are further arranged in the form of a successively branching tree, leading step by step ultimately to the closest and most familiar class of deities, the benign deities. Within each class of supernaturals members are distinguished by family differences based on a complex variety of differentiated features requiring a concrete familiarity with the class, for some classes a specialist's knowledge, in order to distinguish one member from another.
These particular features of the city pantheon can be thought of as attempted solutions to Bhaktapur's considerable problem of the intelligibility of its hypertrophied symbolic world. Let us recall—and comment further on—some of the resources for intelligibility we have emphasized in our discussions of Bhaktapur's complexity, bearing in mind that these prevalent resources have implications in themselves not only for intelligibility but also for meaning.
1. Levels.
We have repeatedly encountered hierarchical arrangements of classes of forms—for example, among thar s, supernaturals,
spaces, systems of behavioral control, and aspects of "the person," into discontinuous, successively more inclusive, "higher" levels. Bhaktapur uses levels extensively for distinguishing and ordering classes (and, often, subgroupings within classes) of phenomena and ideas. The levels have both formal and semantic implications. Higher levels, by definition more inclusive, are also usually less specialized, have more potential and generative (in contrast to concrete, specialized, and applied) power, are corrective of the errors and problems of the next lower level, and thus are activated when the low level's autonomous self-controls do not work or are insufficient for that lower level's own purposes. But the higher levels have purposes of their own and are thus ambivalently viewed. Sometimes they are helpful and their resources are sought; sometimes they are punitively corrective or simply destructive, and they must be avoided.
In an exemplary contrast that we have repeatedly emphasized, the dangerous deities are related to the benign ones as being more powerful, as being on the outside, as actuated when the powers of the benign deities are insufficient, as being further away than the benign deifies from the concrete, human, and ordinary. We have usually called them "amoral," but they are more precisely "meta-moral," related to but "above" the urban system of morals. They protect it while being alien to it; that is, in a way typical of successive levels, they are intimately related to lower levels without sharing their characteristic qualities.[9]
Within the moral realm the behaviors and categories related to purity and the avoidance of shame and loss of face are similarly discontinuous from those related to power and the avoidance of danger, punishment, sin, guilt, and fear. This latter complex of moral forces is at a different, higher level, insofar as those forces come into operation when the controls of the purity system are not sufficient or are breached. These dangerous forces are closely related to the world of magic and of meta-moral power that lies at the edges of the ordinary world. In a way charactertistic of adjoining levels, the moral world organized through adherence to the dharma and through concerns with purity and proper behavior is a bulwark against these other forces and in the normal run of things prevents them from emerging.
There are hierarchical characteristics differentiating the stories told of deities in their existence in transcendent space and time, "myths," on the one hand from their appearances in the ordinary world, "legends," on the other. We have had many examples of both throughout the book. The myths are for the most part standard and ancient South
Figure 36.
Rites of passage. A young mother, her first son, and the family's Brahman purohita at the child's Maca Ja(n)ko,
the "rice feeding" samskara.
Asian forms. They are often formally told or read at some given point in a traditional formal religious sequence where they relate some ritual action to transcendent time and space. Legends, in contrast, usually have to do with the specific history, space, and social arrangements of Bhaktapur. They are often informally told by professional storytellers in the city's public space or by elders in households. Legends recount encounters between deities and high status humans who are citizens of Bhaktapur or else people of essential importance in its history, and they portray events of great importance not for the cosmos, as in myths, but for Bhaktapur. Legends border on another group of stories, "wonder tales" (the story of the princess and the snakes has qualities of both), that are more purely "recreational," but legends recount events that are supposed to have taken place in real time and real space, a time and space that take their importance from—and that are central to—Bhaktapur's special history, space, and location. Myths, in contrast, are concerned with events equidistant from all times and places. The essential movement in Bhaktapur's legends is the transition from an uncanny encounter with deities on the ground—a marginal and fleeting event belonging to neither the order of the transcendent world nor to the civic world—to a stable new state in which the events of the legend have come under civic control. While people may temporarily participate in a myth (as in Mohani), this is a kind of celebration of a juncture of two orders, civic and cosmic, and that celebration must be cyclically repeated in a continuing renewal. The events of legend produce a once and for all transformation into ordinary time, space, and order. Rarely, notably in the complex story of Taleju's origin and history, a story begins in a mythic mode and then modulates into a legend.
The unstable situations portrayed in legends are resolved by the overcoming of the uncanny transitional state through the actions of high-status figures—Bhaktapur's ambivalently viewed version of the hero—resulting in the transformation and civic "capturing" of the forces portrayed in the legend. The resolution of the legend thus explains and fortifies both city order and traditional high status. The high status justified in legends is always a status of power, a prince, king or Tantric practitioner, and not the high moral status of the Brahman as Brahman. Legends are thus related to the protection of the moral order rather than its internal operation.
There is thus a movement from a most abstract and general level in myth, to a more concrete and local mode in legend, and then a further descent into the present concrete symbolic enactments of the city. In that final move there is a passage from a "mere" recounting of events to
a fuller symbolic enactment in which much more than speech is involved, a participation through complex action as well as through listening and imagining.[10] The deities are transformed as they move from myth to legend to their embodiment in plastic forms and their controlled engagement in the symbolic enactments of the city.[11] Thus myth-legend-symbolic enactment represent, in many aspects, successively descending levels—cosmic, transitional, and civic.
The shared implications of steps in hierarchical classification allow for cross-cutting metaphorical bridges among particular classes in either the same or different hierarchies that can be made to seem to be at the same level. We noted in our discussion of the genealogies of various goddesses that forms considered to have the same level of abstraction, inclusiveness, and, thus., potential power, could be seen as in some sense equivalent, as being "sisters." King and total city and the full goddesses and behavioral controls related to power are all tied together through the shared implications of the equivalent level of each item in its particular hierarchy, and one can find other bridges both at humbler and at still higher levels.[12]
2. Redundancy and filtering.
We have commented, especially in chapter 16, on the redundant portrayal of a limited set of particularly significant statements throughout the myriad forms of symbols and symbolic enactments. Repetition in a sense creates the significant statements that are being repeated by filtering out through comparison and contrast a selected and simplified sample of the very complex cluster of meanings attached to many of the city's symbolic forms.
Siva in himself is, as we discussed in chapter 8, an enormously complex figure, but his position in any particular domain or context of Bhaktapur's gods selects and simplifies, for the purposes of that domain, his impact. The Nine Durgas' pyakha(n) is a very complicated performance, dense with meaning, full of historical and areal residues and of psychological resonances, but its psychosocial significance is much simpler when considered in comparion and contrast with the city's other symbolic enactments. The multitude of other meanings carried by the pyakha(n) contributes to its ability to fascinate and to engage a heterogeneous variety of community members, but this is another aspect of effectiveness of symbolic forms than their specific contribution to the construction of an urban order. In a Western analogy, returning once again to our simplistic traffic light, if we are concerned with the particular integrative relation of such lights to the urban order we are concerned solely or primarly with that particular aspect of the
redness of a light that means generally and powerfully "Stop!" in its contrast to that aspect of greenness that means "Go!"
3. Discrete categories.
Redundancy and filtering produce relatively simple and effective symbolic elements. Those symplified elements are for the most part "discrete" or "digital." For the purposes of the public order a Brahman is or is not a Brahman, a deity is Siva or not Siva. Thus they can be unambiguously recognized and do their work, and be placed in the domains and hierarchies that amplify and transform their meaning. The "more or less" and "sort of" calculations of the private realm are not adequate here.
It is this digital definition of elements in the public realm that is achieved through rites of passage, iconic criteria for icons, rituals of bringing effective life into statues, and by the emphasis on purity in the public realm of humans as social types. A polluted Brahman is not a Brahman in the dynamics of the public social realm whatever he may be known as concretely to family, friends, and neighbors.
4. Membership in a domain.
The discrete units of Bhaktapur's public system are, like all units of meaning, largely meaningful in their relationships and not in themselves. But those relationships are not the limitless shifting contexts of private experience, they are rather a matter of membership in clearly delineated domains and hierarchies whose other members are also discrete units. In Bhaktapur it is taken for granted that meaning accrues from such relationships. There is no attempt to escape from context dependency through doctrines of individuality and essence. Thus when the context changes a unit changes in meaning and may ultimately loose all its public meaning. A great deal of effort in Bhaktapur is devoted to maintaining the contexts of definition, particularly the definition of public social actors who are what they are not so much because of their private history nor of some inherited biological essence, but because of their ongoing contexts.
In those cases where a unit may belong to different domains or levels, its different positions and, thus, meanings are always clearly designated by some "context marker" that signifies whether, for example, killing an animal is murder or a sacrifice.
5. Boundaries.
Bhaktapur's proliferation of discrete categories, domains, and levels in the construction of an intelligible symbolically ordered public world requires the construction and maintenance of var-
ious different kinds of boundaries. We have been much concerned with boundaries throughout this study. The maintenance and breaching of boundaries relates many different ideas—purity, contagion, the carefully encircled realm of sacred power, the power of gods and powerful men to cross boundaries, secrets, initiation, magic, and so on. What is peculiar about Bhaktapur is the sheer quantity of such boundaries, the richness of the conceptions, emotions and operations associated with them and their particualr problematics. For not only are there many of them, not only are they problematically anchored in the more fixed qualities of perceivable nature, not only are objects and events located in shifting classes and hierarchies, but there is, as we have discussed above, a traditional and frequently used emphasis on their openness under certain conditions and on their illusoriness to a higher knowledge. Bhaktapur as a symbolically constituted social order must always strive through action to keep these boundaries and the categories they bound from dissolving, to protect through constant vigilant action an order that is not otherwise guaranteed in seemingly hard reality or in codes of laws.
6. Systematic ordering.
A further way that Bhaktapur's mesocosm responds to the demands of intelligibility is through attempts to fit as many symbolic bits and pieces as possible into larger and larger patterns of coherence, to strive to construct an aesthetic and philosophical unity, a Wagnerian multidimensional artwork. The few disconnected pieces (such as the little drama in the course of the tenth day of Mohani between the king and the merchant from Simraun Gadh[*] discussed in chap. 15) are striking in their very disconnectedness.
Insofar as a community's representations are coherently organized those phenomena that are represented but that do not fit easily into that order stand out against it. It is in such orders that paradoxes and mysteries—rather than just chaos—are able to appear. Such paradoxes and mysteries, any unexpected disconnectedness, motivate further elaborations of ideas and symbolic forms in attempts to save coherence. The striving for coherence in itself necessarily generates rococo elaboration.