Trobriand Islanders' Forms of Ritual Communication

Many discussions of ritual and ritualization, such as Goffman's (1967) essays on face-to-face behavior, emphasize functional criteria and point out that one of the most important functions of rituals is to create and stabilize social relations. Social rites that serve the functions of bonding and aggression-blocking are central to the interaction of living beings. Humans, however, do not have to rely on nonverbal signals to develop rituals; they can also use verbal means to reach this aim. Thus, with humans we observe not only ritualized patterns and forms of nonverbal behavior that are used as signals in acts of communication but also, and especially, ritualized patterns and forms of verbal communication. In what follows, the term "ritual communication" (RC) subsumes verbal as well as nonverbal patterns and forms of behavior that function as signals that originate and have been generated in processes of ritualization (see Senft 1991: 43). It is a trivial insight that anyone who wants successfully to research the role of language, culture, and cognition in social interaction must know how the researched society constructs its reality. It is a prerequisite that researchers must be on "common ground" with the researched community. However, as Goffman pointed out, this essential precondition is a rather general one: Every speaker of a natural language must learn the rules of nonverbal and verbal communicative behavior that are valid for her or his speech community. In the course of this learning, one of the most important objectives is to understand and duplicate the construction of the speech community's common social reality. Verbal