英文摘要 |
Devised by anthropologists to look at non-Western societies, this paper uses anthropological ideas about rituals to analyze elections in United States culture, the self-professed exemplar for the world. The argument is that elections are a ritual structure deeply imbedded in the history and structure of the United States, and its place in the world-system. And, therefore, this is not a ritual practice that can be or should be considered necessarily appropriate for other places. In addition to its ethnographic and theoretical interests, then, the paper is a contribution to applied anthropology. Using data from the earliest years of the country’s existence to the present, and focusing on presidential elections, it outlines four different but interrelated schemes that organize the practices. The first follows from the way a Nature/Culture contrast operates. The second employs standard ideas about rites of passage. An analysis of African joking relationships is used to delineate relationships internal to the rites of passage structure. The final model outlines how the entire ritual edifice accomplishes a temporary shift in United States consciousness into an image of mechanical solidarity. Through its ritual process, elections invert transformations effected by United States educational structures, which serve to produce organic differences. |