Abstract
Abstract This paper is focused on the anthropological concept of ritual, starting from Emile Durkheim's approach in Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912). We discuss three different aspects of the Durkheimian perspective on religion and rituals: a) the sacred/profane dichotomy; b) the concept of collective representations - which establishes a substantial continuity between religious and scientific thought; c) a ‟practical” and performative interpretation of rites as the basis of social bond. During the twentieth century, these aspects have influenced different and sometimes opposing theoretical approaches (including ‟symbolist” and ‟neo-intellectualist” theories and Victor Turner's ‟anthropology of experience”). We briefly review each of them, arguing for the importance of reconsidering them into a unitary perspective, centred on religious phenomena as basically moral experiences and as the language of social relations. In the conclusions, we will show how such unitary approach helps us understand the transformations as well as the continuities of rituality in the individualized and secularized societies of what we call nowadays the Western world.
Highlights
This paper is focused on the anthropological concept of ritual, starting from Émile Durkheim's approach in Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912)
Our analysis will involve three different aspects of the Durkheimian perspective on religion and rites: a) the sacred/profane dichotomy; b) the concept of collective representations, which establishes a substantial continuity between religious and scientific thought, and; c) the “practical” and performative interpretation of rites understood as the basis for social bond
Dei of the history of anthropological studies, a task that lies outside of the target of this interdisciplinary Special Issue. We argue for their reconsideration within a unitary framework, centred on religious phenomena intended as, essentially, moral experiences that serve as the glue of social relations
Summary
The sacred/profane dichotomy is a basic tenet of Durkheim’s approach to religion In his view, the sacred is a feature of experience that lies outside of the sphere of the profane, in the same way the social sphere is separated from the individual one: “The division of the world into two domains, one containing all that is sacred and the other all that is profane—such is the distinctive trait of religious thought” (Durkheim1995 [1912], 34). In a Durkheimian perspective, the task of religious rites is that of reinforcing this separation, averting the collapse of the sacred into the profane—this is the function of religious prescriptions and taboos, as well as of predicaments like “purity” and “pollution”, as shown by Mary Douglas (1966) Durkheim emphasizes this dichotomy as part of his criticism of nineteenth century British anthropology, which supported intellectualist and cognitive interpretations of religion and magic (cf Stocking 1995). The limit of this debate is that both the opposing positions frame magical-religious rites mainly in intellectual terms, disregarding a crucial aspect of Durkheim’s work that we will analyse in the paragraph
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