Итог полностью

points to the crisis tn the mechanisms which ensured the production of legitimate senders and receivers. The outraged faithful are not wrong when they associate the anarchic diversification of ritual with a crisis in the religious institution: Every parish priest has become a little pope or a little bishop, and the faithful are in disarray. Some worshippers, faced with this torrent of changes, no longer believe that the church is solid and that it posseses the truth.’⁵ The diversification of the liturgy, which is the most obvious manifestation of the redefinition of the contract of delegation uniting the priest and the Church and, through it. the priest and the faithful, is experienced in such a dramatic way by a large body of worshippers and priests only because they reveal the transformation of the relations of power within the Church (in particular, between the high and the common clergy), which is linked to a transformation of the social conditions for the reproduction of the priesthood (a crisis of priestly 'calling') and of the lay public ('dcchristianization’).

The crisis over the liturgy points to the crisis in the priesthood (and the whole clerical field), which itself points to a general crisis of religious belief. It reveals, through a kind of quasi-experimcntal dismantling, the 'conditions of felicity’ which allow a set of agents engaged in a rite to accomplish il felicitously; it also shows retrospectively that this objective and subjective felicity is based on a total lack of awareness of these conditions, a lack of awareness which, in so far as it defines the doxic relation to social rituals, constitutes the most indispensable condition for their effective accomplishment. The performative magic of ritual functions fully only as long as the religious official who is responsible for carrying it out in the name of the group acts as a kind of medium between the group and itself: it is the group which, through its intermediary, exercises on itself the magical efficacy contained in the performative utterance.

The symbolic efficacy of words is exercised only in so far as the person subjected to it recognizes the person who exercises it as authorized to do so, or, what amounts to the same thing, only in so far as he fails to realize that, in submitting to it. he himself has contributed, through his recognition, to its establishment. It rests entirely on the belief which is the foundation of the social fiction called ministry, and which goes much deeper than the beliefs and the mysteries which the ministry preaches and guarantees? That is why the crisis of religious language and its performative efficacy is not limited, as is often believed, to the collapse of a world of representations: it is part of the disintegration of an entire universe of social relations of which it was constitutive.

With the notion of rites of passage. Arnold Van Gennep named. indeed described a social phenomenon of great importance. I do not believe that he did much more and neither did those who, like Victor Turner, have taken up his theory and offered a more explicit and more systematic description of the phases of ritual. In fact, it seems to me that in order to develop the theory of rites of passage any further, one has to ask the questions that this theory does not raise, and in particular those regarding the social function of ritual and the social significance of the boundaries or limits which the ritual allows one to pass over or transgress in a lawful way. One can ask oneself whether, by stressing the temporal transition - e.g. from childhood to adulthood - this theory does not conceal one of the essential effects of rites, namely that of separating those who have undergone it, not from those who have not yet undergone it, but from those who will not undergo it in any sense, and thereby instituting a lasting difference between those to whom the rite pertains and those to whom it does not pertain. That is why. rather than describing them as rites of passage, I would prefer to cal) them rites of consecration, or rites of legitimation, or. quite simply, rites of institution - giving this word the active sense it has. for example, in expressions like 'institution d'un heritier' ('appointing an heir'). Why substitute one word for another in this way? I would quote Poincare, who defined mathematical generalization as ‘the art of giving the same name to different things’, and who insisted on the decisive importance of the choice of words: as he used to say, when the language has been well chosen, then what has been shown with regard to a known object can be applied to all sorts of new objects. The analyses which I shall put forward are produced by generalizing from the results of an analysis