Intangible Culture ISSN:2799-3868(Print) 무형문화연구

In the late 1970s, F. Staal proposed ‘Ritual Syntax’ as a theoretical framework for the new understanding of ritual in general, which is the claim that rituals have the same structure or syntax as human natural languages. According to him, the focus of the ritual study should be shifted to the observable structure of the rituals from the searching for the meanings that have been supposed to be underlying in it. Rather than going for the philosophical or anthropological interpretation of the ritual meaning, he suggests focusing on the formal procedures or the formal structure that rituals inevitably have, which makes naturally an objective description possible. By doing this, he insists that the scientific framework for ritual research could be obtained, and the result conducted by the framework could be referred to as ritual science. His methodological inspiration came from linguistics. Staal argues that, like human natural language, the ritual shows a certain formal structure that could be named ritual syntax in the context of linguistics. The ritual, according to him, can be said to be a course of serial actions that can be articulated by certain units, just like a sentence structure that humans use in their daily lives. Thus, the ritual procedures show the same modification of the unit of the ritual actions, just as if the words, the units of a sentence, are put together to form phrases or clauses, which in turn go through some degree of transformation when the phrases or clauses change their place in a sentence or are placed in a different context. Likewise, it is said to have the syntactic characteristics of these languages. He explains these linguistic characteristics of rituals as ‘inheritance’ or ‘transformation’. The new ideas about ritual studies by Staal are based on his field research experience of Vedic rituals and Chomsky language studies.