The many resources for communication in ritual are certainly there in
my experience, Ricardo. We wrote about this a little in *The Cultural
Context of Learning and Thinking* with respect to mystified language
of elders. But it was an absolute and pervasive necessity in the USSR
where jokes are an essential form of communication. It is no accident
that the Russians are experts in the use of aesopian language, which
I take to be a closely related phenomenon to ritual speech of other
kinds.
Of course, this is a domain rich for explorations in terms of discourse
and power. Bakhtin on Rabelai springs to mind, and Kornei Chukovsky whose
book on child language we use widely in our curriculum.
mike
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