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!"