FISCHER, Michael and ZEITLYN, David (University of Kent at Canterbury)
RITUAL, IDEATION ANDPERFORMANCE - CULTURAL MODELS AND THE MAMBILA NGGWUN RITUAL.

The Mambila Nggwun ritual (Cameroon) is partly a war dance in which the domination of the outlying hamlets by the village centre is dramatically enacted. Principally, it is a celebration of the institution of chief, and it includes many rites to strengthen the chief.

Our research strongly suggest that whatever collective or individual representations of Nggwun may be present, these representations are not easily described using present theory regarding cultural representations. Concrete representations of past or future Nggwun rites corresponding to these theories are incomplete, lack structural stability or consistency, and are insufficient to account for enacting Nggwun. These representations are not consistent with interpretive, textual, schema, or existing structural theories of cultural knowledge and practice, all which require more detailed knowledge than that for which we found evidence. We stress this is a problem for anthropological theory - not Mambila actors!

It appears that Mambila actors do not think of the details of an Nggwun performance as a chronologically structured sequence in which b follows a and is in turn followed by c, and that as a group, Mambila do not make judgements relating to the chronological sequence of Nggwun despite being able to produce a summary verbal schema when asked. While performing the ritual they make comments that indicate deontic judgements (the logic of permissions in which a permits b) but stronger, more deterministic models of sequence are refuted by our empirical findings. This has consequences for an anthropological account of meaning and presents a strong challenge to any text-based model of society.