From: Eric Prestbo <ewp@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Ritual: Advanced Thoughts on The Grateful Dead/Baseball
Reply-To: ewp@u.washington.edu
Organization: The Internet
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1992 18:53:43 GMT

I read an excellent essay in "The Sciences" May/June 1990 issue entitled
"Loading the Bases" by Bradd Shore.  Athough its intention was to describe
the mystic of Baseball, I thought it was an accurate description of the
Grateful Dead phenomenon.  In particular, it may help to explain the
differences between those who just go for the concert/party, and those who
go for the ritual/transcendence.  Below are the concluding paragraphs.
Please read the whole thing before you react to each sentance. 
Thoughtful, constructive criticism and comments welcome.

Reprinted without permission:

For millions of devotees baseball (read Grateful Dead), though obviously a
game to be played (read party/concert) is also a ritual to be observed; and
ritual, by most definitions, is religion in motion, constituted by
activities directed toward the sacred.  In his book "The Savage Mind", the
French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss reflects on the relation between
games and rituals:

	Games thus appear to have a disjunctive effect: they end in the 
	establishment of a difference between individual players or teams
	.... At the end of the game they are distinguished into winners 
	and losers.  Ritual, on the other hand, is the exact inverse; it
	conjoins, for it brings about a union...between two initially
	separate groups.

For Levi-Strauss the crucial difference between games and rituals hinges
on the relation between the fixed rules, or structural forms, and the
unpredictable events to which they give rise.  In games the structure of
play is taken for granted and recedes into the background like the bass
line in a piece of music: a barely perceptible but deeply resonant
grounding on which the melody dances with illusory freedom.  Games use the
rules to create disequilibrium between players (read net-heads,
touch-heads, ticketless hordes) and teams (read east-coast, west coast)
that ostensibly started out as equals.  Rituals, on the other hand, bring
the shared framework of forms and rules forward into consciousness.  A
ritual can serve as a kind of public social memory, an enacted
recollection of shared experience.  It brings us together.

An oft noted characteristic of games is that they are not for real: they
are "just play."  All games take place within an agreed-upon "play frame"
that suspends to some extent the seriousness of ordinary activity.  The
play frame is defined by both time and space, so that the suspension of
workaday reality is understood to be in effect only within the confines of
the park, or game space, and only for as long as the game is in play.

Ritual shares with games this framing of reality.  Often, however, a
ritual is assumed to be MORE important than everyday behavior.  Whereas
games seem to operate on a level just below ordinary busines, rituals rise
transcendently above it, largely because ritual -- particularly religious
ritual -- is frequently believed to be the repetition of sacred primal
events (read Acid Test, Merry Pranksters).  To devout worshipers, the rites of
their faith may fairly be characterized as more real than reality or, at
least, part of a higher reality.  At the same time, ritual draws much of
its power from the interplay of its immutable forms and the possibiity that
a real event may chance upon the scene.  At the edge of performance,
ritual flirts with reality: Rites of passage can come unnervingly close to
bodily experience, whether for novices in New Guinea or fraternity pledges
on college campuses.  Real pain, authentic danger and, not infrequently,
body mutilation figure prominently in such rites, throwing into doubt
their status as a performance.

Baseball (Grateful Dead), it seems, is neither game nor ritual alone but
both at once.  Our experience of the sport as player or spectator
exemplifies what might be called - to use a musical metaphor - the
polyphonic mind.  That is, a thick, complex texture of conscious
experience is made possible by the simultaneous interaction of several
layers of knowledge.  From our box at the ballpark our immediate attention
may be riveted on the flow of the events of the game.  But the total
experience of baseball includes the embodied awareness of the recurrent
forms and traditions of the game, which have a resonance all their own.

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