Rituals in Religion

Émile Durkheim acknowledged the influence of Robertson Smith in his magnum opus, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). However, unlike his evolutionist predecessors, his goals were not to uncover the original form of religion (which he rightly considered an impossible task) but rather the very essence of religion, its universal features. He accepted key evolutionary assumptions, notably that he could rank human societies unambiguously from simpler to more complex, and that the simplest society would have the simplest religion. Scholarly consensus at the time identified native Australian societies as the simplest in existence. Durkheim was able to rely on the work of pioneer Australian ethnographers Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, whose description of the Arunta in The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) contained a wealth of detail on religion and especially ritual. Durkheim intended his analysis of this "elementary" case to demonstrate the centrality of religion to human society in all of its forms, including modern Europe. For Durkheim, religion incarnated society's conscience collective, a term that can be translated either as "collective consciousness" or as "collective conscience." If religious beliefs were expressions of this consciousness, then ritual imparted the conscience causing believers to internalize the deep-seated sentiments that made religious and moral ideas compelling. Rituals were, for Durkheim, sites of collective effervescence, moments when the very fact of congregating to perform set actions imparted special energy to the participants. These emotions generated by ritual gave credence to religious beliefs and moral dispositions. For example, mourning rituals were not simply expressions of an individual sense of loss; on the contrary, the rituals conditioned, if they did not create, the very sentiments they expressed. Last but not least, ritual was essential in maintaining the separation between the domains of the "sacred" and the "profane" that, for Durkheim, constituted the defining essence of religion.

Van Gennep.

Arnold Van Gennep's The Rites of Passage (1909) considered rituals from an entirely different vantage point, neither in terms of the ideas they expressed nor the sentiments they instilled, but rather in terms of shared formal properties of ritual process. Specifically, he argued that a wide variety of rituals from very different types of society effected "passages" in a literal or metaphorical sense from one state to another. Literal passages included leaving or entering a specific territory or passing a threshold when entering or exiting a dwelling. Metaphorically, they denoted the passage from one social state to another, specifically rituals of pregnancy and childbirth, of initiation, of marriage and betrothal, and of death. Such ceremonies, he suggested, all involved the same sequence of phases—rites of separation, of transition, and of incorporation—so that the person or group could be separated from one initial state in order to pass into another. Van Gennep categorized the transitional phase in terms of the metaphor of the threshold (limen in Latin), as "liminal." His was undoubtedly the most fully "instrumental" of the early approaches to the study of ritual, an attempt to understand ritual in terms of what it accomplished instead of what it expressed.