“Yup’ik cosmology is a perpetual cycling between birth and rebirth, humans and animals, the living and the dead.” (355) “Instead of a static opposition between life and death, men and women, land and sea, … metaphors of interaction and encompassment defined their relationships.” .. “To follow a circular path had the power either to create and maintain the boundaries between persons or states of being, or to initiate movement and travel across the distance between them, depending on the context and direction in which people performed it.” (358)
In these statements particularly we see the circular understanding of time:
“The spirits of both human and animal dead, which had disappeared during preceding seasons, were drawn back into view to be feasted and hosted and sent away again supplied for the coming year.” (266)
Circulation opens the passage.
And in this we see the important role of man as mediator between oppositions and consequentially the one who renews time:
“Both private and public ceremonies revolved around the appearance and disappearance of animals and the power of humans to control their periodicity” … “The Yup’ik effected this control through a series of dramatic reversals of the culturally constituted relations of the daily life. The ceremonies turned inside out the established oppositions and hierarchical relations. Ritual acts made fluid the boundaries between human and the spirit worlds and realized dramatic passages between them.” (266)
In the three rituals “members of the spirit world were invited into the human community, formally hosted and finally returned to their own domains. This ritual movement effectively recreated the relationships between the human and spirit worlds and placed each in their proper position to begin the year again.”
THE BLADDER FESTIVAL
Inversion: the seals that have been hunted and killed are royally hosted and returned to the sea.
- ACTIONS: especially significant is the ritual act of circling:
- circling of the bladders (from men to women, from women to men)
- leading village boys sunlike around the village, entering each woman’s house circling the room (also notice the strong correlation of inversion – walking in backwards, naked men in women’s houses, etc.)
- gatherers of wild celery circled the village (following the universe)
- THOUGHT: the overall meaning of the ceremony:
- “The 19.th century Yup’ik did not believe that the new year followed the old one automatically. Rather human and nonhuman persons actively participated in the annual regeneration of the seasons.”
- “The many reversals enacted during the bladder festival were part of this elaborate attempt to remake the world.”
- “The primary focus of the bladder festival was the renewal of life. The ceremony focused not only on the return of the seals but also on maintaining continutity in the relationships between the living humans…”
-
The image of the cosmic cycle dominated at numerous points throughout this ritual renewal. People likely performed them as part of a common effort to produce or control the cosmological cycle on which they were modeled.
THE FEAST FOR THE DEAD (ELRIQ)
Inversion: the human dead returned to the land of the living
- ACTIONS: here F-R gives no account for the act of circling and fairly little material acts that would display a circular emphasis – yet it is true that the whole concept of the feast somehow requires a circular view of time.
- THOUGHT: They supplied the dead for the next year, yet another element is important the dead are seen as in a way incarnate in the namesakes showing that death is not the end but a rebirth.
THE KELEK
Performed to assure future game.
Inversion: unseen spirits become visible
- ACTIONS: symbolic death of shaman
- Displayed his paradoxical postion as a person who had experienced death but could not die (yet Y. cosmology did not present the contrast between birth and death as an opposition, rather the Y. clothed death in images of birth, thereby transforming it into a new beginning.)
- The shaman thus transcended the apparent opposition between life and death, which was reconceptualized as a cyclical movement between birth and rebirth.
- THOUGHT: The shaman secures the supernatural regeneration – he is the man of all men (in the sense that he has a privileged position in the human task of regenerating the world).
COMMENTS
- F-R is in an open way using L-S categories and is in fact maintaining the importance of oppositions in the Yup’ik way of life. What is striking is that she is simultaneously tying to deny the existence between the oppositions (and thus negate L-S) in her emphasis on their circular worldview – which is not simply limited to their perception of time. Yet I think she is constantly triping over these categories often contradicting herself (a good example is the role of the shaman as the mediator between opposites – life and death – yet F-R tells us these are not really opposites in the Y. worldview. However we have little proof of that in her actual description of rituals)
- It is thus not clear where the meeting points of past present and future are situated as she ambiguously does not display the in the actual descriptions of rituals but rather asserts them.
- Also problematic is the concept of circulation which seems to be extremely important to the way the Yupik understand their universe yet F-R does not extensively explain the function of this element in the other two rituals.
- Another example of her relying on the existence of opposites is in her insistence that all ceremonies are an inversion of opposites (men take the role of women, etc) yet as it would seem temporality has no opposites (there is no opposite between birth and death). It is not clear whether she is trying to say that rituals try to explain that these apparent oppositions do not really exist.
- The relationship between myth (story) and ritual is no very clear. She is obviously inverting the relationship L-S proscribed. She is denying the role of myth (to which she never actually refers to) and ascribing all power for the resolution of binary opposites to the rituals. She ascribes all power to ritual. For L-S myth is the schematic dividing up the continuum of reality in order to create a signifying system based on the opposition of elements, the operations of ritual are a desperate attempt to re-establish the continuity of lived experience. Yet she still admits that all rituals have a background in an origin story.
