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Ballet

We will make use of some interrelated ways of looking at and talking about Bhaktapur. The book will illustrate the value these "fanciful and ingenious conceptions" or "conceits," as they once could have aptly been called, may or may not have. Our collage of conceits is more fanciful, literary, and metaphorical than precise, but "marked symbolism," "ancient" and "archaic" types of cities, "axial transformations," "epistemological crises," and the like are ways of adumbrating what seem to us the important tendencies and relations that may well be lost in the mass of details that are to follow.

We may start with an assertion that in comparison with certain kinds of simple traditional communities such as Tahitian villages[1] on the one hand, and with complex modern urban communities on the other, Bhaktapur is to a very large degree characterized by the presence of a great deal of a certain kind of symbolism. We may defer for a while the questions as to what kind of symbolism and what that symbolism might do, what purposes it may serve. For now we may characterize it as "extraordinary," and of compelling local intellectual and emotional interest. That symbolism is, in large part, derived from the vast resources of South Asian "religious"[2] ideas and images, locally transformed, ordered, and put to use for Bhaktapur's civic purposes.

In the following chapters after first considering the contexts of Bhaktapur's "symbolic world," we will distinguish and discuss various aspects and elements of that world. For those who live in or are familiar with other kinds of cities, whose experience of urban symbols is of a different kind, it may be useful to think, at the start, of the civic life of Bhaktapur as something like a choreographed ballet. The city space is the carefully marked stage. Beyond the city is another sort of space, another kind of world, the wings of the civic stage. Both the civic stage and its wings are symbolically represented, the dance moves off center stage at times, but the symbols, conceptions, and emotions proper to the city stage and to its wings are quite different, although interdependent. The civic stage is separated from the "outside" by clear boundaries and is elaborately differentiated and marked out through the symbolic divisions imposed on the physical space of the city, which we will present in chapter 7. These spaces contribute their own meanings to the


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performances that take place on them and, in turn, take further meaning from these performances.

Distributed through this differentiated space are images of deities, shrines, and temples, many of which are semantically appropriate to the spaces they characterize. Like all our analytically separated out aspects and elements, specific deities give meaning to and take meaning from the other aspects—space, actors, time, form of enactments, and so on. We can think of the gods and shrines as the distributed, differentiated, and, above all, meaningful decor of the ballet, setting the mood and context against which the human actors dance. "Decor" is too weak for the deities' roles, however; they strain our metaphor, and their contribution is more like that of the Commandatore in Mozart's Don Giovanni , part decor, part singer. We introduce them in chapter 8.

Largely through descent, roles in this ballet are assigned to the city's inhabitants. There are more than 300 clan-like units (thars ) that in large part determine what ritual and occupational roles their members will play in the city. These are ranked in some twenty or so "macrostatus levels," in a hierarchy of statuses from king and Brahman to untouchable. Civic roles, the civic social structure, is the subject of chapters 5 and 6.

Actors, decor, and space are set into motion by the city's conventional arrangements of time, the music of the ballet, signaling various beginnings and endings, rhythms and tempos, entrances and exits, movements, and phases of performances. There are some eighty annual events[3] determined by the lunar and solar calendars. There are other times and tempos in the city. The time of the life cycle—birth, maturation, menstruation, and so on—brings on stage a dozen events during life, and a large number on dying and after death (app. 6). Another kind of time, making use of the planets and, for some purposes, the moment of birth, is associated with its own deities, the astral deities (chap. 8) and is used in attempts to bring the city dance into relation with what seems from the perspective of the order of the dance to be choice, accident, chance, and luck.

If one knows what a person's surname is (the designator of his or her thar ), his or her age and sex, what day of the lunar (for some purposes the solar) year it is, and where the person lives in Bhaktapur, one can make a plausible guess at where he or she is, what he or she is doing, and even something of what he or she is experiencing. One has come to understand "the work." This is, in part, simply to claim that there is considerable social and cultural order in Bhaktapur. This in itself is


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banal, but when that order is placed in comparative perspective, when the details of the ballet are worked out, when the relations between actor and role, between person and symbol are considered—then the question shifts from order to a special order, and, in part, a particular kind of order. Our approaches to "kind," our typological conceits include "the archaic city" and "climax Hinduism."


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Chapter Two Orientations
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