How 'Content and Form' in Music, Ritual and Language are Related to Meaning/Understanding

I would argue that to view ritual as text is to come up with a precise meaning of what ritual really is. In other words, the meaning(s) of ritual can be directly found in some form of text. In practice as Bell and other scholars have done, to reduce the meaning(s) of ritual to a text is very problematic. In this sense, I believe that ritual and text imply one another but not directly. More precisely, I think that language can not fully engage the ‘meaning’ of a certain experience.

In fact, I will use a pictorial example to illustrate my point. My aunt who is a nurse told me last week that she had too train two co-op students from UfT. While training one of the students expressed that taking the blood pressure of a patient is easy to understand in a theoretical sense but difficult in practice. The students were graded C+ in practice but received A’s throughout there textual studies at UfT. Therefore, the difference between text and actual experience or ritual is vast. One may experience ritual different from another and thus have different takes on what the meaning is.

Sharf describes the alternative of focusing more on the per formative aspect which he illustrates tends to answer the question of how do participants come to do what they do?, instead of What does it mean? (250) I believe that there really is no alternative to understanding what ritual really means, because underlying this question is whose ritual gets discussed? In this sense ritual by different groups of members are practiced differently. Obviously then different meanings are given and thus, to apply one meaning limits it to only one group of individuals. Therefore, text can be considered “form” in which ritual is the ‘content’ as experienced by different groups.

This brings me to the discussion of ‘content’ and ‘form’ in music language and ritual and Sharf’s theory that ritual and music are more alike than language in the sense that one cannot distinguish content from form. (251) If languages’ content and form can be distinguished, then wouldn’t ritual and music be distinguishable because it employs language? More precisely, since music needs language and ritual needs language couldn’t one analyze the language within that context (music or ritual) and come up with meanings, much like Weber did? However, as seen in Masuzawa’s text language used to imply certain meanings in the progression of history was viewed by many as problematic. In this light, language constitutes its own variations and problems. Thus, language as seen in Masuzawa’s text complicates this whole notion of not being able to extract the content from the form. Thus, I argue that music ritual and language are equally alike.

However, what I think Sharf was trying to point out was more the idea that language in form (written) is different from the content (meaning) of the word under discussion. On the other hand what music sounds like or ritual looks like (form), is directly related to what we are suppose to understand (content). In this sense the form implies the content. As seen in my blog I disagree with this assertion because language like experience whether musical or ritualistic can bring about different understandings and meanings. More precisely, one could read a text and have a totally different take of that text compared to another individual, as well as one could have multiple understandings of ritual or musical experiences.