Traces Set
coordinated by
Sylvie Leleu-Merviel
Volume 2
First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
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© ISTE Ltd 2019
The rights of Pascal Lardellier to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019940676
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ISBN 978-1-78630-314-1
“If the ritual is not obviously the only key to success in terms of conducting a policy, ritual incapacity can be a sign of more general powerlessness and ritual failure, the failure of a policy”.
Marc Abélès, Henri-Pierre Jeudy,
Anthropologie du politique,
Armand Colin, 1997, p. 103.
“To understand the strength of rituals, it is not people that we must follow, but rituals like socialization and figuration devices”.
Isaac Joseph,
Erving Goffman et la microsociologie,
Presses Universitaires de France, 2000, pp. 38—39.
“If the humanities and social sciences did not try to establish the existence of anthropological invariants, even those that are sociological or cultural, they would do well to shut up shop immediately and stop bothering the world with their stories”.
Alain Caillé,
Anthropologie du don,
Desclée de Brouwer, 2000, p. 82.
The question of rituals is at the heart of Pascal Lardellier’s work: it runs like a common theme from one book to another, with, in particular, the highlights of his reflection on digital rituals among adolescents (Le Pouce et la souris, then Génération 3.0), in the quest for love (Le cœur Net or Les Réseaux du cœur), or around food (Opéra bouffe). Behind these seemingly disparate subjects, the link is the question of the ritual, the ritualization of relationships and social life more broadly.
His first book on rituals, Théorie du lien rituel (2003), was a kind of conceptual toolbox that he then deployed in a series of other research projects in many fields, including Les nouveaux rites. Du mariage gay aux Oscars (2005) and more, including Nos modes, nos mythes, nos rites (2015), in the tradition of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies.
Pascal Lardellier is on the lookout for ritual emergences that our contemporary societies are constantly inventing. In Les nouveaux rites, he discussed, for example, gay marriage (long before it was politically debated), defending degrees or awarding them to recipients, court sessions, Bastille Day, urban events, the Cannes Festival from the inside, beauty pageants or Oscar ceremonies, the “Beaujolais nouveau”, Halloween, hazing, or cremation and new funeral rituals.
Pascal Lardellier is a formidable observer of these incessant movements of reinvention of the social world, which crystallize dynamically in new rituals, organizing social cohesion and promoting transmission in this sense. This is because rituals are forms that transmit cultural content, as well as the trace of older things. This evidence is well recalled in these pages.
Social cohesion is a tangle of rituals that guide individual behavior and social interactions, as well as provide instructions for use during larger ceremonies, and Pascal Lardellier also reminds us of this in an illustrated and argued way. The ritual is a guide to acting with others; it indicates a course of action to follow in a given situation, by linking it to an original myth, or simply to usage. In this sense, Pascal Lardellier tells us that every ritual is a trace of history. An infinite web of rituals permeates daily life, from common interactions to rarer events such as mourning or religious ceremonies. It is nourished by the need to socially reproduce a common model by taking into account all the variations of individual and collective existence.
Religious or secular, often personalized and tinkered with, rituals contribute to the maintenance of collective or individual identity. They reconcile the “us-others” and the “me-I”, the materiality of interactions and the instruments that support it at the same time as the meanings exchanged. They immerse the individual in the incessant movement of social matters without producing disorder or disruption, and without being in conflict with the world. They integrate and substitute the individual differences by which a whole is held together and feed the predictability of behaviors. For example, the Highway Code, among others, which allows for tremendous collective regulation at a lower cost. Everyone enters it with their own style. Anyone who does not play the game is exposed to disapproval or accident. Well, likewise, in everyday life, it puts others in danger, without respect for rituals, to lose face or to be disoriented. Without rituality, any interaction would be difficult. Frameworks are needed to nurture and “normalize” any relationship with the world and others. In this respect, no one is unaware of the misunderstandings that arise for travelers in a society whose contact with the other is unknown. Even at the most elementary level, misunderstanding sometimes prevails, and the need to decipher rituals that are still unknown emerges. Learning others’ language also implies the need to engage with the rituals of those others.
Rituals are facilitators of sociability; they suggest ways of acting. These are codes to access and interact with others. The individualism of our societies (i.e. the pre-eminence of the individual over the collective) does not in any way eliminate rituals, even if they are sometimes reformulated, personalized and readjusted. Rituals are instances of reciprocity; they express a movement of gift-counter-gift in the fundamentals of daily life or in ceremonies with a broader social density. They endlessly mediatize the link with the other; they transmit the norms and knowledge necessary for any relationship with others.
Rituals are, therefore, a kind of protective envelope that makes each other’s behavior predictable, provides alternatives when an actor no longer meets common expectations, and guides relations with the environment as a whole. They are the oxygen of collective life, without which no communication would be possible except in an endless trial and error to adjust without damage. Through many examples, Pascal Lardellier shows us that they are the executives where social cohesion comes to pass, in their minimal or major versions; they always embody a “total social fact”. All human societies are matrices of rituals. They permanently nourish social cohesion in their materiality and symbolism.
A bird’s imprints on the sand are more or less durable on the ground. They are sometimes inscribed over time, like those of the Bès valley, near Digne, France, printed in gray molasse, still clearly marked by birds that walked the wet sand twenty million years ago, or they are immediately erased by rain. The same is true of rituals: some come from afar, shaped by history, shaped by time; others arose yesterday and their origin is still fresh; some of them sometimes demonstrate metamorphosis and never stop being updated. And then others disappear. They are part of social creativity; they are never fixed, but they are both social forms and recent or ancient memories. They propose a route, an orientation for the actors.
Another originality of Pascal Lardellier’s work lies in his assertion that rituals are forms of social communication, both in the way they are linked and in the exchanges of meaning they produce.
Of course, rituals are adapted to social contexts. Political rituals, for example, are often crossed by the “numinous”; they express a form of transcendence of power. They often involve splendor, distance, the enhancement of a single person in relation to the protocol environment, or the spectators. The archetype in this matter is the solemn march of François Mitterrand to the Pantheon, with a rose in his hand. It is indeed a matter of “communicating” in its most memorable or most innocuous forms, even if often a democratic and good-natured semblance accompanies them. But more often than not, the dignitary becomes the time of the ritual, what Pascal Lardellier fittingly calls “makebelieve”, which instill the emotion of those he rightly calls “spect-actors”, because, without their presence, the political ritual would deflate like a balloon.
With this new work, Pascal Lardellier pursues his path with coherence; he digs his furrow and follows a personal and original trace. Above all, the book offers its readers a precious theorization of the “ritual institution of society”, which opens many avenues.
David LE BRETON
Member of the Institut Universitaire de France and the Institut des Etudes Avancées at the
University of Strasbourg
Let us indicate from the outset the perspective proposed by these pages: they will retrace a theoretical journey around the ritual, and recount an intellectual journey that spans three decades. A work is created when it matures and follows thoughts that emerge at lightning speed. Reading and writing have concretized over the years, increasing in amplitude, depth, and density. It is for all these reasons that this book is being published today.
Let us begin with introductory confession, which will shed light on the interpretation of these pages: I experienced a real epistemic revelation during the first Cannes Film Festival, which I attended as an anthropologist in 19961. I became aware that the ceremonial arrangements put in place to glorify film stars were essentially identical to those used to welcome monarchs during the Royal Entrances to France during the Ancien Régime2. And I had approached these political rituals during a long archival work carried out as part of a Doctorate in Lyon at the end of the last century3.
From Royal Entrances to the Cannes Film Festival, times and people change, but the structure remains the same. And when we know that these reborn political rituals exhumed a Roman ceremony, with the rise of the victorious general incarnating Jupiter on the Capitol, we understand that the rituals come from afar.
Jupiter? Precisely the nickname of the well-known Emmanuel (“God with us”) Macron, who will have assigned himself the first mission of “re-presidentializing”4 a function symbolically devalued by his two predecessors, having Americanized it, then “normalized” and trivialized it5.
Ancient Rome, Renaissance Europe, the Cannes city of stars… Diverse eras, but in fact, a real ritual link unites them, beyond the apparent dissimilarities of the celebrations that took place there, or still take place there. And we can rightly refer to a matrix that has spread, to disseminate the traces and expressions of something that, at the base level, is similar. For “the customs of the royal rituals, and these royal rituals themselves, by moving away from their roots, they may well have taken on very different aspects, but the invariant structure that has remained shows that they are related and have the same origin. In both cases, a common structure is the mark of a common origin”6.
The “morality of history”, if we can call it this, is that the ritual is to be considered as a symbolic and cultural form (in the sense of Simmel), which is perpetuated, adapted, and sometimes exhumed to reappear as a “symbolic phoenix”. And it is on the basis of this observation on the durability of symbolic forms that we can use the ritual reading grid as a particularly effective heuristic tool, by detecting rituals of yesterday in those of today.
Encountering Au commencement était le rite by Arthur Hocart played an important role in the evolution of my reflection, and in the clarification of it. For it can be argued that a common matrix would be at the origin of all the rituals, and would underpin the “ritual institution of society”. The ritual as a matrix and base, the ritual as a trace, too — these are the profound structural lines of these pages, extending Hocart’s intuition. In its foreword, Lucien Scubla, states: “Could it be that everything we call civilization, and all the institutions characteristic of human societies, come from the development and transformation of ritual activities that have gradually spread throughout the world?”. The statement is radical. Indeed, what I am arguing here is that societies have powerful symbolic foundations that materialize in forms constituted by rituals. And society is a tangle of rituals, which from micro-rituality to political and religious “high masses”, intertwine contexts and relationships in a huge set of “symbolic Russian dolls”. Finally, “the common objective of rituals […] is to promote life, in other words, the stability and prosperity of societies and their members, and all are organized according to the same scenario and composed of the same features, variously developed, combined or hierarchical”7. Hierarchical, that is, etymologically-speaking, organized around “sacred power”.
However, let us make no mistake about it. There can be no question in these pages of succumbing to a romantic reading of the ritual fact, which would consist of seeing it only in a form of mystical essence pre-organizing human life in society. There may be some of this in the ritual, in a nutshell. But in this entanglement, we can also see, symbolic forms of the authorities that constitute us as social beings belonging to society and to institutions, via the rituals to which we submit; in this sense, the rituals make us subjects in certain respects, subject to… To integrate (into a community, an institution) is to ostensibly prove that we have understood and integrated the symbolic codes that are constituent of these groups, and that we accept to “play the game”. This story is ultimately that of all rituals of passage and institutions, and in the academic field, doctoral students will know something about this.
The institution will be understood here in a twofold sense: the ritual, substantive is indeed an institution, but more broadly, in a more active sense, it is a governing body: “in other words, and to borrow Marxist vocabulary, the ritual does not constitute an ideological or symbolic superstructure, but the very infrastructure of human societies. It is the matrix of social cohesion and the institutional and material means that make it possible to consolidate it”8.
It is more than a stylistic effect to affirm that forms and traces are the two conceptual elements of the ritual. We will walk through these pages with the concept of a trace. And we have already understood that the ritual has somehow spread from an original matrix (this is Hocart’s hypothesis), to constitute a trace of something older, in the societies where it is found. And a trace on a dual level: a ritual trace, precisely, which around a flexible pattern, adapts to the times and cultures. Thus, the model of the Roman triumph, which persists throughout history in its processional form to provide the re-emerging Royal Entrances, up to modern official visits and other media celebrations. What links these events? A unique formal scheme, an invariable script, a spectacular device…
The ritual, is it a trace? The purpose of my demonstration will be to lead us to consider how rituals constitute forms and traces, both cultural and historical. The trace carries, as a concept, a very strong heuristic dimension. A transdisciplinary, flexible concept, it allows one to adopt different theoretical and methodological perspectives on the objects studied. It is this flexible and encompassing character that allows for these different postures.
“Recent publications explicitly aim to structure and consolidate research fields based on the notion of the trace. Information and communication sciences seem to be the HSS discipline that takes hold of it in the most visible way, in connection with the development of digital tools”9. Well before the emergence of digital technology, which offers a great analytical potential for tracing, we will discuss here historical and anthropological forms that prove the plasticity and robustness of the concept.
Louise Merzeau also saw the theoretical coupling between ritual and trace as obvious:
“the theme [of traces] thus crosses that of rituals, understood in a broad, anthropological sense… Rituals as collective and codified practices, repetitive according to regular rhythms (daily, annual, etc.) or occasional occurrences: funeral rituals, rites of passage, war rituals, foundation rituals, etc.). It is divided into two stages: establishing the materiality of the gesture before clarifying its meaning. It is therefore a question of starting from the immediate or direct material traces of the ritual… from which it is possible to induce a ritual behavior. The confrontation with other documentary sources… but also with an ethnological and anthropological reference frame, must help restore as precisely as possible the materiality of the gestures accomplished before trying to identify their meaning10”.
Let us continue to furrow our brow over the ritual considered as a trace. If every conscious is conscious of something, likewise, every trace is a trace of something. From something that has been, and is absent; however, the trace, phenomenological by nature, expresses, like the Saussurian sign, “something else”, which in our case is not arbitrary, is absent, and especially concerns the past. But in the content, the watermark, the form, this “past” is still being expressed. St. Augustine, with a luminous formula, affirmed that “the ritual is the present of the past”, that the idea of the ritual could not be better summarized as a trace.
And it is worth mentioning Hocart, the pillar that carries our central hypothesis:
“Why recall what was done before, we don’t know. The fact is that humans consider it necessary to recite what happened in the past. We do not do otherwise: all our ceremonial behaviour is governed by what precedes. Both in parliament and in the church, the practice is based on a previous practice, the reminder of which may occupy entire registers11”.
Of course “nothing is in itself a trace, but some phenomena can be named as such by an interpretation based on very complex hypotheses. In other words, if the trace creates a memory, it creates it to the extent that social memory constitutes it as such, and specific mediations accompany and publicize the trace of objects”12.
Claude Lévi-Strauss stated that “we could erase ten or twenty centuries from the history of humanity without our knowledge of humanity being too affected. On the other hand, only the preservation of the works of art of these centuries would make it possible to bear witness to what these disappeared and forgotten societies really were”13. In essence, in works of art, as in rituals, there are sedimented invariants that bear witness to the history of these societies. And here we find the problem of the trace.
In this sense, the ritual is a form that bears the trace of a past, an era, a culture, which is expressed in it, of which it is the bearer and guarantor, the morphological expression and the testimonial pledge. But it is also a trace of a mentality, which ritual precautions express clearly. In our case, the ritual staged and shaped a relationship with the sacred, which individuals and communities maintain, confusedly or in their conscience.
And this sacredness is now implicitly expressed in many areas of modernity: politics, sport, consumption, the media… The ritual is a theatricalized action by which individuals address others, and not necessarily gods. Via the ritual, societies seek from the outside something that the group lacks, or they celebrate the group itself and its mystical part, according to the Durkheimian hypothesis. This refers to transcendence, to a missing part located outside, above the group. According to Durkheim, it is that the social body sacralizes itself by sacralizing representations.
However,
“is it possible that the reading of traces is not only the archaic remnant of a ‘wild knowledge’, the beginnings of metaphysics, the stage of a hermeneutic without text? Is it possible that this interpretation is not only a first and instinctive form of symbolic grammars but that it is found in all practices where signs, knowledge and interpretation come into play?14”.
And how can we guard ourselves against a theoretical and methodological impressionism, which would consist of guessing more than discerning? By engaging ethnologists and anthropologists in dialog, in their descriptions as well as in their analyses. If so many great minds have discerned a movement toward the sacred in the precautions expressed by ritual mediation, there must be something sacred in “all this”, or at least something sacred as a principle. Or else, the immense collective illusion is devilishly effective…
The ethno-marketing seminar that I have been holding for a long time at ESCP-Europe15 (“Rituals and sacredness of consumption”) have allowed me to further discuss the sacred density nestled at the heart of consumer facts that could be considered as contingent. Here too, we are dealing with authentic “total social facts”. In regards to simple “consuming” to “consuming” (in a sacrificial way), there is an obvious semantic link. The English language takes this anthropological dazzlement literally, with its well-named consumer, who etymologically is the one “who destroys by fire for the gods”.
Durkheim believed that “religious phenomena were the seed from which almost all others were derived”16. And so, in my ethno-marketing seminar, I explain to the students that from a temple or a church to the very Apple store design, there is a difference in degree but no difference in nature. Apple has appropriated the most classical cultural codes (architectural, esthetic…) to give itself to religious celebration in these “Our Lady of Apple” churches17. And for Durkheim, finally, that which is sacred is where it happens to land; that which is already considered as sacred.
In other words, this book has a theoretical framework: the information and communication sciences, opening a disciplinary dialog between them and anthropology. In this sense, these pages respond to Claude Rivière’s wish: the ritual “as an autonomous scientific object, which must be explored in new dimensions”18.
The watermark of work is the concept of trace, particularly relevant when applied to the ritual considered from a historical perspective. And it should not be forgotten that the ritual constitutes a social and symbolic form, and that the sociology of Simmel’s forms will also constitute a “sure resource” for the reflection proposed here.
A theoretical model means “concepts”. At the end of the book, a Glossary gathers and defines the main concepts, known or original, used in these pages. As the discussion progresses, their first use is followed by a reference to this Glossary.
We must dare to demonstrate a theoretical exercise and to assume the ambition it carries (which is to propose a global explanatory model) with rigor, humility, and responsibility. Concerning the subject of interest to us here, “in the understanding of rituals, anthropology, despite very brilliant exceptions, still lacks its purpose, which is to identify, on the basis of the study of precisely described local situations, general characteristics that are specific, if not to human nature, at least to life in society”19. Well, that is precisely the aim of these pages. Of course, by maintaining distance or size — you lose the detail of things, but you discover perspectives and an overview of the “mosaic”.
Before getting to the heart of the matter, let us specify that the theoretical model and the examples mentioned in these pages are limited to the cultural sphere of our contemporary Western world. Necessarily, evoking rituals leads to comparison, and to generalization. And I can hardly place this work in the distant lineage of Hocart by ignoring the exotic and historical dimension of rituals themselves. In fact, I announced from the very first lines that the rituals of our modernity recognize ancient matrices. We would like to wager that these pages will allow the reader to regain awareness of the pre-eminence of the ritual, and more broadly of the symbolic representation in our lives.
Moreover, what is the position of the researcher and the author (i.e. me) who present here a theoretical model of the “ritual institution of society”? It is necessary to answer the famous question “Where are taking this discussion?!” before getting to the heart of the matter. What I will analyze here, I can say that I have verified the matter’s validity by following a “human ritual” journey, having experienced from within the many experiences reported here, having walked through many of the ritual devices that are described in this book. I have never participated in a thesis jury without a clear awareness of the symbolic processes and protocol procedures at work. I was very impressed to see the make-believe and embodiment of authentic stars at the Cannes Film Festival and Pope John Paul II at the Vatican when I did not expect it. More broadly, I have taken my fair share in ceremonies fixed by tradition, always with the researcher’s perspective, too, on what is then to be experienced.
A book containing numerous field studies will soon follow20 this first theoretical delivery. Evoking the investigations I have been conducting for several decades around the “new rituals”21 and the new fields of anthropology, this book will be completed “by giving substance” to the analyses, and by proving the robustness of the concept of trace.
During his thesis defense, Michel Foucault affirmed with a luminous formula that he did not “make the history of discourses, but lead the archaeology of silences”22. Well, studying the rituals with the long focal point of history and the prism of the trace is likewise giving oneself the task of bringing about the profound, structuring things, and thus working to reveal a foundation that supports and contains society, to preserve it from chaos. Because “cultures are built on the edge of the abyss. Ceremony is a declaration against indeterminacy”23.
Alan Cowan, one of the protagonists in a formidable piece of theater called Le Dieu du carnage24,25, by Yasmina Reza, explains to his fellow protagonists about a claustrophic atmosphere: “I believe in the God of carnage. He is the only one who governs, without sharing, since the dawn of time. In my opinion, the ritual retains ‘the God of carnage’”. Because in his finery, behind his pageantry, he has impulses, anxieties, the will for power and violence which constitute the DNA of this ruthless god. The ritual civilizes them, makes them socially acceptable and even rewarding.
In the same vein, Sartre was right when he affirmed: “it is necessary to put rituals between people, if not they will massacre each other”. Rituals drawn up against the “God of Carnage”? These pages will demonstrate the anthropological meaning of this allegory.
Pascal LARDELLIER
May 2019