previous sub-section
Chapter Two Orientations
next sub-section

Organizational Conceits: The Civic Function of Symbolism in Bhaktapur and, Presumably, in Other Such Archaic Cities

Shortly after arriving in Bhaktapur, I (the senior author) was standing with a Newar inhabitant of that city in a public square when a nearby man began to shout angrily at a boy. "Who are those people," I asked, "and why is the man shouting?" My friend was unable to answer either question. In Piri, the Tahitian village, the understanding of, response to, and staging of such episodes was the predominant way in which village order was known, taught, learned, rehearsed, experimentally violated, and repeatedly brought under control. Conversely, worry that one's behavior would inevitably be seen and known to others—who would always know exactly who you were and what you were doing—underlay the moral anxieties central to villagers' discourse about and attempts at self-control. In its intimacy, in the constant interplay of being watched by the whole village and watching it, through its close agreement on moral definitions and proper responses, and above all in its construction of people's sense of a "normal" reality, the village of Piri operated as what Erving Goffman (1956) once called a "total institution" with consequent implications for the "mind and experience" of its inhabitants (Levy 1973). In Bhaktapur the kind of communally shared learning from patterned, contextualized, "ordinary" events which was pervasive in Piri was limited to only certain sectors of people's experience of the community—to the bounded and isolated household unit and, sometimes, to the larger kin group or the household's immediate neighborhood. Thus, how did the inhabitants of Bhaktapur understand, learn from, and adjust themselves to the larger city, most of which was out of sight and hearing, and whose complexity, whose quantities and


26

varieties of people and events seemed beyond any direct and intimate grasp? How did citizens understand and how were they affected by a city that, like Redfield's "cities of orthogenetic transformation," seemed to embody a cultural tradition in urban rather than village form? In large part, we propose, by making use of a resource for communication, instruction, understanding, and control that is not much used in Polynesian communities where culturally shaped common sense used to interpret culturally shaped face-to-face interactions and observations provides the core of community integration. Bhaktapur, in contrast, makes elaborate use of particular sorts of symbols—"marked symbols"—to solve the problems of communication induced by magnification of scale. How it does it, the extent and limits of the resource, is one of the concerns of this book.


previous sub-section
Chapter Two Orientations
next sub-section