The Ritualistic Stage

Ethnology of Possession and Double Consciousness

Abstract

This paper finds his starting point in the constant presence of the theatrical metaphor in the studies of possession rituals conducted by Leiris, Métraux and De Martino. The use of the theatrical metaphor attempts to account for a phenomenon that troubled modernity, through an historically vertiginous trajectory going from Plato to Sartre: the doubling of conscience in ritualistic actors. The paper focuses on the theoretical problems raised by the inescapable overlap between theatrical scene and ritualistic scene. First, I confront the three authors’ approaches and demonstrate the inadequacy of the use of Sartre’s bad faith. I show what this category hides: the production of an individual symbolism capable of answering a specific crisis. I then show the modern roots of the usage of the theatrical metaphor of the actor in order to explain the doubling of reflective self-consciousness, normal and pathological. Finally I identify a possible way out from this model.