of the ways in which elite schools function.1 In a somewhat risky exercise. I will endeavour to bring out the invariant properties of social rituals understood as rites of institution.
To speak of rites of institution is to suggest that all rites tend to consecrate or legitimate an arbitrary boundary, by fostering a misrecognition of the arbitrary nature of the limit and encouraging a recognition of it as legitimate; or, what amounts to the same thing, they tend to involve a solemn transgression, i.e. one conducted in a lawful and extra-ordinary way, of the limits which constitute the social and mental order which rites are designed to safeguard at all costs - like the division between the sexes with regard to the rituals of marriage. By solemnly marking the passage over a line which establishes a fundamental division in the social order, rites draw the attention of the observer to the passage (whence the expression ‘rites of passage’), whereas the important thing is the line. What, in effect, does this line separate? Obviously, it separates a before and an after: the uncircumcised child and the circumcised child: or even the whole set of uncircumcised children and the set of circumcised adults. In fact, the most important division, and one which passes unnoticed, is the division it creates between all those who are subject to circumcision. boys and men. children or adult, and those who are not subject to it. i.e. girls and women. There is thus a hidden set of individuals in relation to which the instituted group is defined. I’he most important effect of the rite is the one which attracts the least attention: by treating men and women differently, the rite consecrates the difference, institutes it, while at the same time instituting man as man. i.e. circumcised, and woman as woman, i.e. not subject to this ritual operation. An analysis of the Kabyle ritual illustrates this clearly: circumcision separates the young boy not so much from his childhood, or from boys still in childhood, but from women and the feminine world, i.e. from the mother and from everything that is associated with her - humidity, greenness, rawness, spring, milk, blandness, etc. One can see in passing that, as the process of institution consists of assigning properties of a social nature in a way that makes them seem like properties of natural nature, the rite of institution tends logically, as Pierre Centilivres and Luc de Heusch have observed, to integrate specifically social oppositions, such as masculine/feminine, into series of cosmological oppositions - with relations like: man is to women as the sun is to the moon - which represents a very effective way of naturalizing (hem. Thus sexually differentiated riles consecrate the difference between the sexes: they constitute a simple difference of fact as a legitimate distinction, as an institution. The separation accomplished in the ritual (which itself
effects a separation) exercises an effect of consecration.
But do we really know what it means to consecrate, and particularly to consecrate a difference? How is what 1 would call the ‘magical’ consecration of a difference achieved, and what are its technical effects? Does the fact of socially instituting, through am act of constitution, a pre-existing difference - like the one separating the sexes - have only symbolic effects, in the sense that we give to this term when we speak of the symbolic gift, in other words, no effects at all? There is a Latin expression that means 'you're leaching fish to swim’. That is exactly what the ritual of institution does, It says: this man is a man - implying that he is a real man. which is not always immediately obvious. It tends to make the smallest, weakest, in short, the most effeminate man into a truly manly man. separated by a difference in nature and essence from the most masculine woman, the tallest, strongest woman, etc. To institute, in this case, is to consecrate, that is. to sanction and sanctify a particular state of things, an established order, in exactly the same way that a constitution does in the legal and political sense of the term. An investiture (of a knight. Deputy. President of the Republic, etc.) consists of sanctioning and sanctifying a difference (pre-existent or not) by making it known and recognized', it consists of making it exist as a social difference, known and recognized as such by the agent invested and everyone else.
