The founding of English ritual dance studies before the first World War: human sacrifice in India … and in Oxfordshire?

Folklore, Dec, 2004 by Stephen D. Corrsin

Ronald Hutton argues for a very wide range of explanatory factors in British intellectual life, in two recent books: Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (1996), and, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (1999). He asks:

   Why did folklorists not focus upon images of a green and ordered
   land centred upon the manor house, the parish church, the common
   fields, and the village feast, as the proponents of Merrie England
   had done? Why did they turn instead to evocations of pagan deities
   and archaic rites? (Hutton 1996, 435).

Hutton points to the decline of Christianity in British intellectual life, plus the continuing "infatuation of the Victorian British with the classical pagan world" (1999, 12). He also suggests that a fascination with savagery and unexpressed sexuality played a key role: "Frazer and the English folklorists of the early twentieth century were working with images which were alien not just to the contemporary religion of their time but to the conventional morality. In that lay their attraction, and power" (Hutton 1996, 425).

Theresa Buckland, in her 2001/02 article, "'Th'Owd Pagan Dance': Ritual, Enchantment, and an Enduring Intellectual Paradigm," discusses the topic in the light of the application of the specific idea of ritual origins to a unique north-western English tradition, that of the Britannia Coco-Nut Dancers of Bacup. One of the key aspects of her approach, at least from the viewpoint of intellectual history, is her elucidation of, "the enduring influence of nineteenth-century social evolutionism" in modern folk performance (Buckland 2001/02, 441).

Another recent book, this one on literature and social theory at the turn of the century, Susan Mizruchi's The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory (1998), is particularly suggestive about reasons behind the emphasis on specifically sacrificial rituality in Western intellectual culture. Mizruchi's exciting study deserves the attention of folklorists.

Mizruchi cites "a common preoccupation with religion and sacrifice," among both literary writers and social theorists of the day. She states that "sacrificial thinking in the late nineteenth century is social scientific thinking. When realist writers and sociologists undertook to conceptualise the basis of collective life, they discovered sacrifice" (Mizruchi 1998, 5, 6). She continues: "sacrifice was a far-reaching, one might even say overworked, metaphor in this period. In social science, in literary realism and naturalism, in a renovated theology, in any analysis that took seriously the idea of society, sacrifice (as form or content) was likely to be invoked" (Mizruchi 1998, 26). Mizruchi finds an explanation in the intellectuals' reaction to the intense and rapid development of Western society from an agrarian one based on extreme and rigid class stratification, into a more fluid and mobile industrial-capitalist society. This led to threatening changes in, or even the dissolution of, long-established social boundaries.