[FULL TEXT]

[in the press of the time]

Thus it would be too easy to explain the development of the celebration of Christmas in France simply in terms of· influence from the USA. ... Consider briefly the obvious explanations ...: there are more Americans in France celebrating Christmas according to their own customs; the cinema, ..., articles in the national press have all introduced American customs that are backed up with American economic and military power. ... But none of that is enough to explain the phenomenon. Customs imported from the USA influence strata of the population that do not realize their origin. Thousands of workers for whom communist influence would discredit anything marked made in USA, are adopting them as readily as others. In addition to simple diffusion we need to [what] Kroeber called stimulus diffusion, whereby an imported practice is not assimilated but acts as a catalyst. ([1952] 1993: 41)

Father Christmas thus first of all expresses the difference in status between little children on the one hand, and adolescents and adults on the other. In this sense he is linked to a vast array of beliefs and
practices which anthropologists have studied in many societies to try and understand rites of passage and initiation. (p 43)

Now, there is a very important aspect of initiation rituals which has not always been given adequate attention but which clarifies their nature far better than the utilitarian models discussed above. Consider
the example of the katchina ritual of the Pueblo Indians mentioned earlier. If children are kept in the dark about the human nature of the people incarnating the katchina, is this simply to get them to fear, respect, and behave well? (p. 45)

Explanations in terms of survivals are always inadequate. Customs neither disappear nor survive without a reason. When they do survive, the reason is less likely to be found in the vagaries of history than in the permanence of a function which analysing the present allows us to discover. The reason for giving so much prominence in this discussion to the Pueblo Indians is precisely because there is a lack of any conceivable historical link between their institutions and ours (with the exception of some late Spanish influence in the seventeenth century). This demonstrates that with the Christmas rituals we are witness not just to historical relics but to forms of thought and behaviour which illustrate the most general conditions of social life. (p. 46-47)

One final remark: it is a long way from the King of the Saturnalia to Father Christmas. Along the way an essential trait-maybe the most aneient-of the first seems to have been definitely lost. For, as Frazer showed, the King of the Saturnalia was himself the heir of an ancient prototype who, having enjoyed a month of unbridled excess, was solemnly sacrificed on the altar of God. Thanks to the auto-da-fe of Dijon we have the reconstructed hero in full. The paradox of this unusual episode is that in wanting to put an end to Father Christmas, the clergymen of Dijon have only restored in all his glory, after an eclipse of several thousand years, a ritual figure they had intended to destroy. (p. 51)

 

Thursday, November 9, 2006