Ritual, society, and culture among the Yami

The first part of this study--chapters 2, 3, and 4--is devoted to introducing basic ethnographic facts about Yami life: how they earn their living, how they organize their society, and how they understand their cosmos. The following three chapters are given over to accounts of three categories of Yami rites. Chapter 5 focuses on calendric rites, flying fish season ceremonies, and several other production-related rituals. I propose to convey not only the ritual scenarios in these chapters, but also to depict real life ritual events. Chapter 6 and chapter 7 address Yami rites of passage and feasting ceremonies respectively. The latter chapter includes new boat and new house inauguration ceremonies, as well as other informal feasts. I try to portray actual events in these two chapters, too. These various rites of production and of passage, as well as other ceremonial feasts, are regarded as culturally designated occasions for actors to communicate with significant others. Overall, the two parts of my analysis hope to reveal what symbols the Yami use in their daily rituals and the various ways they use them. The final chapter draws upon the ethnographic descriptions of Chapters 1 through 7 to discuss the theoretical issue with which I am most concerned--how agents strive to maintain, through utterances and actions, their standing, "habitualized" social ties. To achieve this goal, they must send their consociates specific messages, often through the use of ritual symbols, that all remains well with their relationships--that all normal expectations and obligations continue to be in force. The symbols used by agents must be accepted (in the sense of understood and approved of) by others or they will lose their support. In using traditional symbols and in obtaining approval from others, of course, an individual is thereby reproducing his culture. Under the impact of external forces which challenge the integrity of their culture, a condition that the Yami now must cope with, people are strongly tempted to employ symbols that are imported from the environing hegemonic system. Such symbols and their meanings, should they eventually find a niche in the local culture, if not come to dominate it altogether, will surely cause it to transform.