6 - Ritual and political authorities

Summary

Recently, a number of people interested in the relationship between religion and politics have arrived at the same conclusion: that religion and ritual help those in power exercise authority over others. Maurice Bloch makes the stimulating suggestion that restricted codes of the sort discussed in Chapter 4 are apt tools in the hands of political leaders because they severely limit and predictably control the responses of political subordinates. He suggests further that it is common for those codes to occur in religious ritual because religion embodies traditional authority. Similarly, Rappaport suggests that ‘sacred’ rituals (those that refer to entities whose existence cannot be verified or falsified), make arbitrary control mechanisms seem necessary. Their arbitrariness is hidden in a ‘cloak of seeming necessity’ (1971: 35–6). This encourages authorities to use the sacred as a tool to achieve compliance (p. 41). Thus both Bloch and Rappaport suggest that leaders can use ritual to increase their legitimacy.

A related and complementary notion is that leaders can use religion and ritual to enhance their power because religion and ritual hide the true source of power from those over whom it is exercised. Maurice Godelier develops this idea with force, using data from the Inca Empire and present-day New Guinea (1977). In terms of Chinese society Albert Feuerwerker describes the function of ‘ideology’ in traditional China as ‘a kind of cultural integument which protects the actual distribution of power and wealth from both direct apprehension by those who are ruled and from frontal attack’ (1975: 57).