Don Handelman

Introduction: Why ritual in its own right? How so?

Calvin, who introduces this collection of essays on ritual in its own right, understands ritual as well as many anthropologists. Calvin is dramatizing the matics that I am trying to avoid. Complaining about the peanut butter, spoiled because his mother did not observe the proper ritual for scooping it out, he is telling us: do the ritual correctly. It exists because it has a function—control. Perform control in your ritual, and you will have control in your life. The rit ual of how to scoop out peanut butter is a representation of life. Living pro duces its own symbols, its own reflections, and these are the ritual, existing to

THE EXTENDED CASE Interactional Foundations and Prospective Dimensions

The extended case is inherently processual, continuously becoming prospective history. Therefore, the dynamics of the extended case are necessarily temporal; there is no separation between the prac- tice of social life and micro history. Here I ground the emerging tempo- rality of the extended case in interpersonal interaction, in the dynamics of the creation and emergence of micro forms that Erving Goffman called encounters. An extended case emerges from a series of encoun- ters as it moves into its own futures. Therefore, the extended case opens time/space to the practice of process, to the foregrounding of practice as intrinsically dynamic. The prospective perspective of the extended case pays close attention to how social life is practiced into existence as emergent phenomena, without assuming or presuming how social order holds together and falls apart. The extended case argues for a dynamic rather than a structural anthropology.

The Ethnographic Praxis of the Theory of Practice

The ethnographic extended-case method, also known as situational analysis, was a diagnostic of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology—and today it remains an ethnographic practice of remarkable relevance and promise. Originated by Max Gluckman, the method was intended to use case material in a highly original way. Instead of citing examples from ethnography in apt illustration of general ethnographic and analytical statements, as was common in the discipline, Gluckman proposed to turn this relationship between case and statement on its head: the idea was to arrive at the general through the dynamic particularity of the case. Rather than a prop, the case became in effect the first step of ethnographic analysis. Underlying this methodological reversal, though, was a theoretical pursuit pertaining to an enveloping, indeed a suffocating, problem endemic to structural functionalism and implicating a social ontology radically different from this dominant paradigm. As a young man in South Africa, Gluckman had studied law in university; he also was known throughout his career to have a certain affinity with psychoanalytical thought. Given the critical centrality of the notion of case in these two fields of study, using cases in a way essential to advancing his own discipline—ethnographic research—might well have had an intuitive appeal to Gluckman. At any rate, he grasped and shaped the case method in relation to the problem of “the on-going process of social life” (1965: 177), a problem with which he and his peers were inescapably confronted. Gluckman’s basic anthropological training was in structural functionalism, via, pre-eminently, Radcliffe-Brown’s rendering of Durkheim. Plainly, the vital thesis of this paradigm—that the explanation of a social phenomenon is a matter of determining its function in reproducing the social structure in its current form—tended to picture society in terms of stability and equilibrium. This thesis recognized social process, yet only insofar as process was reducible to, and so in the service of, social stasis. In turn, the thesis created an undesirable, though virtual, constituent problem of the paradigm—to wit, the problem of