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Criticism dependent upon Cambridge Ritualist assumptions faded with the 1960s, though one still encounters the occasional essay on the dying god as it operates in the work of some [[author]] or movement. But vital criticism implementing ritual as a social phenomenon or organizing [[principle]] of literature soon surfaced: one prominent example is René Girard’s [[Violence]] and the Sacred (1972), which proposes sacrifice as a mediation by which [[humans]] have regulated what is otherwise uncontrollable violence. In general, ritual as an anthropological [[concept]] has remained attractive to the literary critic precisely because it represents, according to Francesco Loriggio, a powerfully primal example of "socially manifested [[behavior]]" (39). The focus upon that behavior by anthropologists, resulting in "a study of ceremonies, of [[acts]] that are at once socialized and archaic in nature" (39), appeals to literary criticism’s inexorable urge toward the social and pragmatic in the broadest sense and certainly has generally influenced literary critical theorizing upon [[concepts]] of collectivity, performance, and the materiality of [[language]].
It is no surprise, then, that there has existed since the inception of [[marxist]] theory and criticism a strong yet complicated series of [[links]] between anthropology, literary criticism, and [[Marxism]]. In The [[German]] Ideologykarl [[marx]] and [[Friedrich Engels|friedrich engels ]] themselves [[state]] that "language is [[practical]] consciousness . . . language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the [[necessity]], of intercourse with other men" (Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2d ed., 1978, 158). This innately anthropological stress on the inherent socialness of language use parallels in fundamental ways early anthropological notions of collectivity, such as in Émile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the [[Religious]] Life (1912), and will reverberate in mikhail bakhtin’s important notion of language as social [[utterance]] and in turn will enable the criticism of theorists as various as kenneth burke and raymond williams.
But perhaps the most [[explicit]] use of anthropological notions of collectivity in Marxist literary criticism can be found in the work of the British critics Christopher Caudwell and George Thomson. Both Caudwell’s [[Illusion]] and [[Reality]] (1937)and Thomson’s Aeschylus and Athens (1941)theorize upon the [[development]] of modern social [[formations]], from the ritualistic to the religious to the secular, in a manner that derives directly from Cambridge Ritualist notions of the evolution of primitive [[society]]. Caudwell argues for the practical and communal [[purpose]] of poetry as both a distillation and a [[projection]] of group [[experience]] in ways that strongly depend upon Durkheim and Jane Harrison. Thomson also borrows from the ritualism of Harrison in the Marxist effort toward cultural critique. Thomson views [[catharsis]], for example, as an effort at aesthetic socialization that can be turned toward social [[formation]]. Drawing from anthropological accounts of collective [[frenzy]], Thomson notes the "subversive" side of the cathartic [[process]], asserting that "the artist leads his fellow men into a world of [[fantasy]] where they find release, thus asserting the [[refusal]] of the human consciousness to acquiesce in its [[environment]], and by this means there is collected a store of [[energy]], which flows back into [[The Real|the real ]] world and transforms fantasy into fact" (360).
At the same [[time]], but on the other side of the channel, the College of [[Sociology]], composed of georges [[bataille]], Roger [[Caillois]], Michel Leiris, and others, was similarly concerned with anthropological accounts of primitive collectivity and their potential for revitalizing modern society. Like the British Marxists, the College relied upon evolutionary conceptions of savage [[solidarity]], explicitly influenced by Marcel [[Mauss]] but, as Michèle Richman has shown, owing a great debt to Durkheim’s important Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Between 1937 and 1939 the College met with the explicit aim of forming a "[[moral]] [[community]]" that would attempt to revive the "sacred" within everyday life through collective energies. The participants, themselves creative artists, critics, and intellectuals, produced an interdisciplinary pool of writings that, though not always explicitly in the realm of literary criticism, had a significant impact upon later critical writings: Bataille’s notion of expenditure within primitive societies (as derived from Marcel Mauss’s [[reflection]] upon potlach in The [[Gift]]) was extended by jean [[baudrillard]] in The [[Mirror]] of Production, and his notion of [[transgression]], in all its complex forms, has a significant connection to later radical critics such as michel [[foucault]], roland [[barthes]], and jacques [[derrida]], as James Clifford has shown (Predicament 127).
Secondary Sources
Ruth Behar, Deborah A. Gordon, Women Writing Culture, (1995); [[Paul]] Benson Anthropology and Literature, (1993); James Boon, From [[Symbolism]] to Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss in a Literary Tradition, (1972); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, (1988); James Clifford, Routes, (1997); James Clifford, George E. Marcus Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, (1986); Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, (1975); Richard Hardin, ‘Ritual’ in Recent Criticism: The Elusive Sense of Community PMLA Volume 98 (1983); Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture, (1999); Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic [[Imagination]] in the Nineteenth Century, (1991); Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Ritual View of Myth and the Mythic, Vickery, Myth, ; Claude Lévi-Strauss, French Sociology Twentieth Century Sociology Georges Gurvitch , Wilbert Moore (1945); Francesco Loriggio, Anthropology, [[Literary theory|Literary Theory]], and the Traditions of Modernism Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text Marc Manganaro (1990); Marc Manganaro, Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept, (2002); Marc Manganaro, Myth, Rhetoric, and the [[Voice]] of Authority: A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye, and Campbell, (1992); George Marcus, Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental [[Moment]] in the Human [[Sciences]], (1986); Michèle H. Richman, Reading [[Georges Bataille]]: Beyond the Gift, (1982); Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and [[Government]], (1994); John Vickery, The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough, (1973); John Vickery Myth and Literature: Contemporary Theory and Practice, (1966)
