The ritual institution of society 9781786303141, 1786303140

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The Ritual Institution of Society

Traces Set coordinated by Sylvie Leleu-Merviel

Volume 2

The Ritual Institution of Society

Pascal Lardellier

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: ISTE Ltd 27-37 St George’s Road London SW19 4EU UK

John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA

www.iste.co.uk

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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 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78630-314-1

Contents

Epigraph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxi Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxiii Chapter 1. A Plurality of Anthropology, a Permanence of Symbolic Mediations . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1. Anthropologies… . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2. Anthropology and communication . . . . . . . . . 1.3. Political anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3.1. Intangible and omnipresent, the mystical nature of power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3.2. Complexity and ambiguities of “power on stage” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3.3. Rituals, power, and symbolic effectiveness 1.3.4. The dark side of power... . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 2. The Ritual, a “Total Scientific Object”. . . . .

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2.1. The eternal question of the purpose of the ritual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2.1.1. From ritual order to the central importance of the king . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2. The ritual as a “cultural form” . . . . . . 2.2.1. Form in the social sciences . . . . . . . 2.2.2. Return to the ritual as a material, theoretical, and symbolic “form” . . . . . . . 2.3. The ritual device . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4. The symbolic effectiveness of the ritual, between context and performance . . . . . . . . 2.4.1. From the system to the context . . . . 2.4.2. From “primary framework” to “transformed framework” . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.3. The “ritual body”... . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.4. ...to the “ritual performance” . . . . . 2.5. Opening up to the myth... . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 3. Rituals and the Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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3.1. Communication objects: anthropological issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1. The long genealogy of ritual media . . . 3.2. Rituals and media: cross interests, coupled effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1. Are media events really events? . . . . . 3.2.2. The symbolic power of media rituals . . 3.2.3. The emergence and particularities of a fully fledged media genre . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3. The social functions of ritual media . . . . . 3.3.1. A singular inversion, from current events to history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4. From media to new media: toward disintermediation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5. The underlying issue of disintermediation . 3.6. Toward new “digital liturgies”? . . . . . . .

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Chapter 4. The Ritual Institution of Society. . . . . . . . .

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4.1. The double-ideal ritual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.1. From the “communicative facade” to the “principle of magnificence” . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.2. Theatrical, spectacular and specular ritual . 4.1.3. The ritual fascination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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73 81 89

Contents

4.1.4. “Spect-actors” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.5. From “presentation of self” to “representing the collective Body” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.6. The community ritual, an expression of a social doctrine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.7. The “double ritual constraint” . . . . . . . . . 4.1.8. From another West... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2. “Ritual regimes” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1. Community and social rituals . . . . . . . . . .

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101 108 112 116 118

Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 From the Same Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

 

Epigraph

“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

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shut up shop immediately and stop bothering the world with their stories”. Alain Caillé, Anthropologie du don, Desclée de Brouwer, 2000, p. 82.

Foreword

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.

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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,

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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.

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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

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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

 

Preface In Relation to the Ritual

An editorial and theoretical journey, a life journey... 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                                         1 Receiving official accreditation from 1997, I was able to see the Festival “from the inside” for four years, with access to reserved spaces, interviewing the ritual actors, observing and photographing at ease this wonderful “ceremonial machinery”. I have drawn from this analysis a series of articles, chapters of books (including one in the “Livre d’or des 50 ans”, celebrating the half-century of the Cannes Film Festival), and interviews in the media (e.g. a long interview in a report devoted to the Cannes red carpet on the French channel Canal+ in May 2017).

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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                                         2 The Ancien Régime, which is mentioned throughout the book, refers to a political regime that took place in France during the two centuries that preceded the French Revolution (1789, or 1792 if we consider the abolition of the monarchy). Rituals linked to the French monarchy in this period of history were reclaimed, adapted, and perpetuated by regimes that followed the monarchy of this period. 3 Les Entrées royales, d’un événement à son discours, Thesis published in 2002 by Honoré Champion under the title Les Miroirs du paon: Rites et rhétoriques dans la France de l’Ancien Régime (Mirrors of the Peacock: Rites and Rhetoric in France during the Ancien Régime). 4 Emmanuel Macron “re-presidentialized” the supreme function in France with mixed success, following a “solar” function, slip-ups and clumsiness (arrogant words, inappropriate attitudes, inappropriate selfies...). All of this quickly made him fall from his pedestal, while considerably damaging his image. One of the hypotheses presented is that the French Republic is the continuation of the monarchy, especially when we consider the sacrality surrounding the President. We can even speak in France of a “Republican Monarchy”. Presidentializing the role means embodying it from a distance, and demonstrating the authority

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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.

                                        and gravity of a king (see François Mitterrand or Charles de Gaulle). De-presidentializing means acting like Nicolas Sarkozy, with his Americanizing behaviors, or François Hollande, who instead wished to make things “normal”. Our judgement is not of a moral nature: it is simply a matter of considering French political tradition. 5 Pascal Lardellier, “The two bodies of the President. A semioanthropological analysis of the two personnalities of Nicolas Sarkozy”, Journal of Ritual Studies, Pittsburgh University, USA, no. 32—1, 2018, pp. 17—25. 6 Lucien Scubla, introduction to Au commencement était le rite by Arthur Maurice Hocart, Paris, La Découverte, 2005, p. 20.

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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                                         7 Lucien Scubla, op. cit., p. 12.

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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. The ritual, at the same time, a form, a trace, and a link 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                                         8 Lucien Scubla, op. cit., pp. 25—26.

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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

                                        9 https://www.meshs.fr/page/traces.

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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

                                        10 http://archimede.unistra.fr/programmes-de-recherche/programmestransversaux/les-gestes-rituels-traces-materielles-et-interpretations/. 11 Arthur Maurice Hocart, Au commencement était le rite, Paris, La Découverte, 2005, p. 73.

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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.

                                        12 Yves Jeanneret, “La fabrique de la trace, une entreprise hermeneutique”, in Quand les traces, p. 51. 13 De près et de loin, discussion with Didier Eribon, p. 192.

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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... A research journey, a researcher’s journey 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                                         14 Sybille Krämer, “Qu’est-ce que donc qu’une trace, et quelle est sa fonction épistémologique ? Etat des lieux”, Trivium, October 2012, p. 1. 15 “ESCP” stands for “Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris” (Paris Business School). Thanks to the friendly mediation of Professor Olivier Badot.

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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                                         16 Lucien Scubla, op. cit., p. 22. 17 Pascal Lardellier, “Un anthropologue à l’Apple Store. Notes de terrain sur la millénarisme d’Apple”, Questions de communication, “Figures du sacré”, vol. 23, 2013, pp. 121—144. 18 Claude Rivière, Les rites profanes, Paris, PUF, 1995, p. 10.

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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                                         19 Michael Houseman and Carlo Severi, Naven ou le donner à voir. Essai d’interprétation de l’action rituelle, Paris, CNRS, 1994, p. 8.

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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                                         20 With the same publisher, ISTE, and in the same “Traces” series. I would like to point out that in these pages, I have only quoted my work (articles, books, chapters) that are in direct line with what I am talking about, in order to not overload the critical apparatus, and to not give the impression of engaging in a self-promotion enterprise. 21 See “Les nouveaux rites sont-ils vraiment nouveaux?”, Rites et ritualisations, D. Jeffrey and M. Roberge, Quebec, Presses Universitaires de Laval, 2018, pp. 243—259. 22 See Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, Flammarion, Paris, 1989.

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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

                                        23 Kenneth Burke, cited by Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoff, Secular Ritual, Amsterdam, Van Gorcum, 1977, p. 16. 24 The play has been adapted into an English film by Roman Polanski, called Carnage. 25 Paris, Albin Michel, 2008.

 

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of a long theoretical journey, and a pleasant intellectual and human adventure. As we reach our final point, I have thoughts full of gratitude for those whose friendship has never been denied over the years, and with whom research is generous and there is joyful sharing: Sylvie Alemanno, Alexandre Eyriès, David Le Breton, Michel Melot, and Max Poulain. Can we be prophets in our own country? In any case, I have long found within Groupe IGS at ESCP-Europe and the Doctoral School “Environment and Society” of the PasqualePaoli University of Corsica three institutional spaces where I have been entrusted with intense seminars, and a rare intellectual and scientific freedom. For this, I would like to reiterate to Richard Delaye and Yves Enrègle, Olivier Badot, and Françoise Albertini my immense gratitude for their trust. I would like to thank the journal directors, seminar and conference organizers, publishers, and collection directors who welcomed my articles, chapters, and books on rituality, and also my doctoral students who became doctors and the colleagues and friends who allowed me to support their

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HDRs (Daniel Moatti, Claudine Batazzi, Fabien Liénard, etc.). I address Françoise Bernard, Jacques Walter, and Yves Winkin who are, I consider, scientific and institutional role models. I express my friendship, gratitude, and admiration. Some institutions have rituals that are much richer than those of a University. I therefore warmly thank Frédéric Gallois and Jean-Dominique Caseau, officials, role models, and friends who are flying the flag for the subject. My research theses, all devoted to rituals (Diploma of Advanced Studies, 1990; Doctorate, 1993; and HDR, 1999) have had the chance to be supervised by professors who have been models of what it means to transmit information: Roland Antonioli, Bernard Lamizet, and Jean Davallon. I would like to thank Sylvie Leleu-Merviel for the confidence she has shown in me by welcoming this book into her collection. I dedicate this research to my dear friend Professor Sung do Kim, my “intellectual brother”, whose immense culture is only equaled by probity. The ritual is a way of life that structures, guides, and brings together memories and stories. If I am the guarantor and custodian of something of this kind, my last thought goes to my daughter Clara, as always...

Introduction Bright Eclipses of the Ritual...

I.1. Ritual and postmodernity: chronicle of a persistent misunderstanding Our contemporary world is incredibly full of rituals1, rustling from a rituality that is fertile with myths and symbols. However, to evoke the rituals and question their meaning is sometimes suspicious today. This is because the West has a paradoxical relationship with them: omnipresent, they are rarely assumed as such. Often, dominant thought thinks it is done with what is no longer named. However, the ritual constitutes an anthropological foundation in the absence of which entire sections of society would no longer make sense. If the foundations are not the most visible part of the structure, they do carry it. This book places this thwarted relationship at the heart of its purpose: it will be a question of bringing to light the foundations of Western rituality, and proving that its political, institutional, and social resonances are immense. It will, therefore, be a question of an archaeological quest, to                                         1 Inaugural tribute to Roland Barthes’s incipit, which recalled “that the world is incredibly full of old rhetoric”. L’aventure sémiologique, “L’ancienne rhétorique. Aide-mémoire”, Paris, Le Seuil, 1985, p. 85.

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return to Foucault’s quotation. For “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”2. Can we seriously affirm the permanence of rituals that common sense considers to be disinherited? It must be recognized that all institutions, the great State bodies, and all communities gathered under the name of organizations live their important hours and their historical moments under the auspices of the ritual. More than a pleasure that flatters institutional actors, solemnity is a necessity for institutions. Without this principle of order and organization, they, whether political, religious, judicial, military, academic, or esoteric, would be orphans of an irreplaceable symbolic body, which underpins their identity and anchors them in history. “To remove a certain ritualistic form, it reappears in another form, with all the more vigor as social interaction is intense. Without letters of condolence or congratulation, without occasional postcards, a distant friend’s relationship has no social reality. There is no friendship”3. More than a symbolic instance, the ritual becomes the framework that gives meaning and even reality to something that would otherwise remain abstract. On another level, Antoine Garapon considers that the staging of the judicial institution constitutes an essential ceremonial framework for it, without which there is no possible trial. The exercise of justice would depend on the ritual, which alone makes the act of judging plausible and credible, and legitimizes the decisions and sentences                                         2 Michael Houseman, Carlo Severi, Naven ou le donner à voir. Essai d’interprétation de l’action rituelle, Paris, Éditions du CNRS, 1994, p. 8. 3 Mary Douglas, De la souillure, Paris, Maspero, 1971, p. 81.

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resulting from it4. For the ritual strengthens the bonds that unite communities, produces the forms of collective belonging, regulates passages and changes, and legitimizes the institutions that use its symbolic effectiveness. The ritual is not everything, and not everything is ritual. However, it marks with its symbolic imprint the spheres constituting society, to make its structuring action felt, and to produce, always, order from disorder. But the prevailing discourse, sometimes, is not in line with social practices. For modernity, the ritual has a bad press (even if things are changing). The eradication of rituals, if it had been possible, would even have marked, after 1968, the definitive disappearance of “truant thoughts”, and the paradoxical advent of a sacred rationality, and a “spontaneity” presented as an ideology. “Inheritance, undoubtedly, of this primacy given to rationality, for nearly three centuries, by the civilization of the West: it is only within the framework of the confrontation of doctrines... and systems of thought that the destiny of the Cities should be contained”5, that the plural forms of social life should be expressed. It then seems to be in the nature of things that the hyperactivity and utilitarianism characterizing our societies correspond to a demonetization of ritual practices, which are part of a slow temporality that is not very appropriate in our time. Thus, the average person on the street hastily considers these rituals as practices marked by superstition or even fetishism. By virtue of the imperative of spontaneity (I will come back to this) and in the name of the “natural” that should govern social relations by introducing a sincerity that                                         4 Antoine Garapon, Bien juger. Essai sur le rituel judiciaire, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1997. 5 Raoul Girardet, Mythes et mythologies politiques, Paris, Le Seuil, 1986, p. 9.

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ritual solemnity would contradict, they want to oust it, sweetening this principle of major structuring. However, this norm of spontaneity is specific to the West, as Roland Barthes pointed out, analyzing in L’Empire des signes the offering of a gift in Japan. Whatever the nature and value of the gift, the most important thing is the ceremony surrounding this gift, and the relationship created by the ritual6. And for children, what would Christmas presents be without the enchanting packaging, and the ribbons that give them their status as gifts, surrounding them with magic and mystery? And this is a trace of the sacredness present in ordinary interactions, this sacredness so finely analyzed by Erving Goffman in his general theory of interaction rituals. For him, “it is therefore important to clearly see that the self is in part a ceremonial and sacred object, that it is necessary to treat it with the necessary ritual care and that it must be presented to others in a suitable light”7. This is what the pages of this book affirm: our daily life, our actions, our relationships, and our representations are still full of sacredness, and the rituals express this by offering this sacredness a framework, a setting, so to speak. And yet, rituals are generally assimilated with historical forms of constraint, which compelled the individual to belong to classes, to the burden of customs and traditions of another age. The civilities themselves are challenged in the name of “spontaneity”. “Why, in the West, is politeness viewed with suspicion? Why does courtesy seem to be a form of distance (if not a flight action) or hypocrisy? Why is an ‘informal’                                         6 Roland Barthes, L’Empire des signes, Paris, Flammarion, pp. 83—88. 7 Erving Goffman, 1974, p. 81, in Yves Winkin, Dictionnaire critique de la communication, edited by Lucien Sfez, Paris, PUF, 1993, p. 467.

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report (as we say with greed) more desirable than a coded report”8? And the defenders of this “relational spontaneity” (steeped in “youthism and egalitarianism”) deplore the incivilities when they touch them, these small hurtful insults to their face and more broadly to that of society, if we agree to see it as the structure of the thousand interactions that produce social cohesion. For there is also something sacred in all this9. More broadly, religions (and the Catholic Church in particular) have also been victims of this conflation linking rituals and religious cults, and pronounced their disavowal and rejection. And they were not the last, under the guise of modernism, to develop thousand-year-old ritual traditions. Thus, the concessions made by the Second Vatican Council were essentially in the direction of greater simplicity and spontaneity in the accomplishment of the liturgy. More broadly, the leitmotif of many institutions was, at the turn of the 1970s, to oust the trappings of tradition, in a curious and furious witch hunt. The University was thus stripped bare of its gowns and student caps. In addition, graduation ceremonies were still held recently with diplomas being sent in the post, and the return to education after the school holidays was more administrative than solemn. Not lost for everyone, business schools quickly seized these abandoned traditions, by Americanizing their solemn moments in the form of scripted shows, which drew ritual chestnuts from the symbolic fire, to legitimize themselves at a good cost and in times of certainty. However, we feel a return to an academic ritualization that we thought had been spent with weapons and credentials in the private sphere. It can be said that the                                         8 Roland Barthes, op. cit., p. 83. 9 See on this point the fascinating interpretation of the ritual of civility proposed by Denis Jeffrey in Rites et ritualisations, Quebec, Presses Universitaires de Laval, 2018, pp. 1—21.

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recent revival of university solemnity has somehow restored “the church in the center of the village”... In fact, the apparent backward surge of the great community rituals would be a symptom of a loss of social cohesion. And this at a time when observers deplore an individualism (now connected) that was yesterday synonymous with fulfillment, ensuring the primacy of the individual over groups that seemed to force him/her before. Ironically, it is when it becomes scarce that the ritual proves its roles and effectiveness, its erosion being the flagrant manifestation of a loss of social consciousness and community substance; this at a time when Western society is going through identity crises, as well as the expression of picky particularisms. And at the same time the “disenchantment of the world” would correspond to its deritualization. This is where the title of this book, “the ritual institution of society”, takes on its full meaning: a melting pot and vector, the ritual constitutes a social binder that gives all its substance to the whole being, when it responds to its symbolic etymology, referring to “that which brings people together”. Basically, it allows individuals to belong: to communities, institutions, and societies operating on elective affinities. And this form of belonging is based on a powerfully symbolic instance. The ritual is a transhistorical and transcultural “total social fact”: wherever people live in communities, they sacrifice themselves to ritual practices, remarkable for their stability. From traditional societies to our Western modernity, rituals are also present. It is certainly true that they have fulfilled roles, and have played a role for the communities and institutions that have perpetuated them. The ritual is the infallible indicator of social health, from

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community memberships to a shared founding past, to a memory, and to a culture. One could mention the possibility of a human appetite for rituality: it has inhabited humanity since its origin, which is confirmed by anthropologists, paleontologists, and religious historians. We go back to the basics though with Au commencement était le rite by Hocart. Thus, burying the dead, the first ritual which is already a quintessence of rituals (relationship with the body, with others, with the community, with the afterlife), can be considered as a primordial symbolic experience, differentiating the human from the animal10. Indeed, humanity has a propensity to symbolize relationships with the surrounding world. As a “ritual animal” (Mary Douglas), humanity stabilizes the relationship with the environment through the principle of rituality. Historical attempts to eradicate rituals were in principle immediately followed by the return of ritualized forms, and a re-sacralization of politics. The revolutionary celebrations in France in 1789, such as the great “political liturgies” (Claude Rivière) of the former USSR, bear witness to this. Despite the desacralization of power, despite its evolution from a divine essence to a conception that expresses a general will, despite the denigration of splendor and the very denial of solemnity, political rituals remain, drawing their legitimacy from this permanence. This is because by trying to simplify or reduce them, we refocus them on what they possess that is essential to us. As such, the ritual questions all societies, whether present in excess or by default. Because eventually, its erosion affects some major forms of ritual, and in more ways than                                         10 Ethologists refer to so-called ritual practices in animals. The sticking point in animal rituality seems to be the unintentionality of these practices, with intentionality implying the use of symbolism.

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one! Claude Rivière states that “the deritualization that we believe we are currently observing refers only to the loss of certain historically dated religious practices, correlated to a decline in beliefs”11. In fact, the Western world is full of forms of ritualism which, if they do not explicitly claim to be such, take on its aspects, endorse its structure, and seek its effects. To celebrate new values in an equally ritual and religious way, communicating with equal eagerness in now lay liturgies. Just a simple return of things. Our “extreme individualism... is carried by the crisis of meaning, but it also carries it within itself; that is why it is so religious, or more precisely so fascinated by new epiphanies of the sacred, which develop it and generate it”12. Thus, all the major festivals recreated by popular initiatives (often orchestrated politically or commercially) mark the great return of rituals or ritualized festivals. Let us then recognize that institutions have a relationship with the ritual that is paradoxical, hypocritical, and almost paradoxical and hypocritical! One zealously sacrifices the plural forms of one’s worship only at a time when it is in good taste to criticize one’s formal and official character. Rituals persist and are renewed, despite attacks from their detractors. Politics, religion, and also seemingly lighter fields, such as sport or cinema, constitute inexhaustible mythical and ritual matrices, objects of study for any researcher questioning symbolic thought, and the mysteries of social cohesion. In this sense, being interested here in the ritual will be similar to a rehabilitation enterprise. Because in order to                                         11 Claude Rivière, Les Rites profanes, Paris, PUF, 1995, p. 7. 12 Gabriel Gosselin, “L’anthropologie actuelle de Georges Balandier”, in Les Nouveaux enjeux de l’anthropologie. Autour de Georges Balandier, edited by Gabriel Gosselin, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1993, p. 22.

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understand it, we must first get rid of the prejudices that make it a practice marked by superstition. But make no mistake about it: if the social scientist considers ritual practices with sustained attention, it is because he or she is aware that it is a shortcut to access the “essence” of a community or institution. If we agree that by examining the rituals of a culture, we observe its values, its imagination, and, above all, its framework for representing the world. I.2. Gift and counter-gift in the ritual... In fact, the ritual is a gift. Because organizing a ritual, setting up a ceremony, is like spending, and implementing resources. In other words, in the ritual, we especially give time, money (indirectly), special care, recognition, our attention, and a presence — this is incredibly symbolic, and can even be seen as unction. What do institutions do in their rituals, if not legitimize, and institute? However, this is given, granted, and sometimes even offered... Yves Winkin, exhuming the ancient munus, demonstrated that, etymologically, communication has powerful anthropological origins and that the importance of the gift/counter-gift in the analysis of this communication has been greatly reduced13. It is in this sense that by studying rituals, I wish to bring to light here the terms of a symbolic theory of social cohesion, which has its origin in the gift paradigm as stated by Marcel Mauss. If we agree with Claude Lévi-Strauss, again, to admit that “symbols are more real than they represent”, then rituals have an anthropological function that goes beyond the utilitarian obnubilation that characterizes our economies. They are in disinheritance of these symbols that make the gift the crucible of archaic                                         13 Yves Winkin, “Munus. De l’étymologie comme heuristique”, MEI, “Histoire et communication”, edited by Pascal Lardellier, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1999, pp. 43—52.

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forms of social matters. For in this exchange, “the link is more important than the good” (Alain Caillé). “However, the idea that has gradually been imposed on us is that the gift is as modern and contemporary as it is characteristic of archaic societies; that it does not only concern isolated and discontinuous moments of social existence, but its very totality”14. Undermined by the individualism of the time, and cooled by the “icy waters of selfish calculation”, this gift/counter-gift nevertheless resonates like an echo, distant, and nostalgic; it is a “social unconscious”, and the backwash that no foam can hide... Reading Marcel Mauss, Mark R. Anspach engages us in “a reflection on the circular mechanisms of interaction”, while proposing to think about the self-transcendence of relationships under the sign of a gift. And the main actor in these relationships, he says, is the relationship itself. Mauss, precisely, indicated in The Gift that the given object is never inert but that it wants to return (by virtue of the size that animates it), thus producing the relationship by virtue of a beautiful circularity15. Give, but what!? This gift, while often symbolic, can in no way be abstract. Let us return to this point, to the original The Gift. In it, the author stated, with regard to the archaic societies studied: “Moreover, what they exchange is not solely property and wealth, movable and immovable goods, and economically useful things. In particular, such exchanges are acts of politeness: banquets, rituals, military services, women, children, dances, festivals, and fairs, in which                                         14 Jacques T. Godbout (in collaboration with Alain Caillé), L’Esprit du don, Paris, La Découverte, 2000 (1992), p. 20. 15 Marc R. Anspach, A charge de revanche. Figures élémentaires de la réciprocité, Paris, Le Seuil, 2002.

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economic transaction is only one element, and in which the passing on of wealth is only one feature of a much more general and enduring contract”16. If the terms of exchange can hardly be the same hic et nunc, the principle of reciprocity, the circularity of the symbolic, and this cycle of giving, receiving, and giving again are set in stone as the primary and primordial framework of all forms of sociality. And to abuse this principle of reciprocity that the structural anthropology outlines, Lévi-Strauss also placed at the foundation of his analysis of symbolic exchanges, the homo occidentalus. It has been emptied of its substance which founds the heart of social relations. Have we not forgotten the difference between “the market system, where things only have value between them, and the gift system, where things are worth what the relationship is worth?”17. Unless there is confusion in our minds and in our exchanges about the border that distinguishes them... And unless the system of “secondary sociality” does not take precedence over primary social wealth, impoverishing social relationships reduced to their utilitarian dimension. The gift paradigm, whose obvious appearance is equaled only by its unfathomable complexity, must be given a central place in the analysis of interpersonal relationships. According to Yves Winkin, “the gift/counter-gift lies at the heart of communication, which he redefines as an archaic economy of daily life”18. This primacy of the gift and the                                         16 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, London and New York, Routledge, 1990, p. 6. 17 Jacques T. Godbout, ibid., p. 18. 18 Yves Winkin, “Munus ou la communication. L’étymologie comme heuristique”, MEI — Médiation et Information, no. 10: “Histoire et communication”, edited by Pascal Lardellier, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1999, p. 43.

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symbolic brings our analyses back to their anthropological focus, and to the initial questions that question our epistemology: how does social cohesion arise? And how does it originate? The moral bond often mentioned by Durkheim undoubtedly lies in this obligation “to challenge oneself or to trust completely, giving everything”, as Marcel Mauss pointed out in The Gift. By choosing trust (having “faith in”), and by giving, we accept to initiate the dynamics of circularity. Let us not forget that communities are based on the circle that reciprocity generates. In the era of triumphant individualism, the disintegration of this principle of reciprocity leads to a dilution of social ties, which are weakened and distended. They are then reinvested by the thousands of mediation functions invented by the State, prostheses that institutionalize this symbolic function, which is very difficult to put into texts and devices. In this respect, the “yellow vest” crisis, which continues in France in 2019, essentially reminds us that citizens who feel neglected or even despised need links (human and institutional) of recognition, of consideration, and above all, links that are “symbolic”. All the reports and documentaries on “France des ronds-points” explain that what those who protest find is a “social bond”, a “community”... Moreover, this “yellow vest” crisis has also opened up an incredible symbolic war, seeing the “Obelix”, “Marianne”, French flags and the “Marseillaise” (French national anthem) being used to express more than words, through the media... Establishing this link between a current crisis and older things makes it possible to consider that by “relying on apparently insignificant considerations about certain Polynesian customs... we would finally reach practical

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guidelines concerning the development of contemporary so-called civilized societies, insofar as the analysis... leads to a constitutive dimension of social matters as such”19. I.3. The always defined ritual To paraphrase Marcel Mauss and his “total social fact”, I affirm that the ritual is a “total scientific object”, because all disciplines have something to say. Classical authors in the human and social sciences have at one point grappled with the question of rituals, sometimes making them the cornerstone of their thinking. The ritual spectrum is immense, ranging from the individual (and even the intrapersonal) to the broadest community. A panoramic tour of the various works published on this question of rituals reveals that it is characterized by plasticity, modernity, and a transcultural character that guarantees its durability. It should also be noted that questioning rituals always raises three questions: first, an ontological question, on what the ritual is, precisely. Then, a morphological question: what are the forms (ceremonial, symbolic, festive, institutional...) used by rituals? Finally, a pragmatic question, as to their function and usefulness. These pages will not escape this observation. We have so far referred to rituality in a generic way. However, a semantic problem arises, which needs to be resolved: what meaning will the word “ritual” have in these pages? Because it has a terminological flexibility depending on the discipline, which is detrimental to a clear understanding of the nature of the research devoted to it. The conceptual inflation of the word “ritual” has contributed to a devaluation of the notion, which is reflected in the vagueness of meanings. “Between the classical habit of                                         19 Bruno Karsanti, Marcel Mauss. Le fait social total, Paris, PUF, 1994, p. 5.

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restricting the rite to the sacred and the temptation to call all routine behaviors rituals, the spectrum of identifying and explaining the ritual remains vast”20. The encyclopedias of the humanities all take note of this semantic and conceptual blur, whereas almost everything has become ritual in everyday language. Are rite and ritual even synonymous? The ritual (used as a noun) is the set of texts from “Tradition”, which prescribe the rules of organization of the rite (the rituals of masses, for example, determine their ceremonial arrangement). This ritual is authentic, prescribing what the conduct of the rite should be. This is the ritual in action. It is this space—time that characterizes the achievement of something of the symbolic order for its participants and for the communities that use it. As for rituality, it is the abstract principle characterizing the ritual thing, considered as a political and social authority. Importantly, studies on rituals divide their objects into two main categories: on the one hand, “Goffmanian”21 microrituals, and on the other hand, the major community rituals that could be called “Durkheimian”. Gérard Althabe poses this dichotomy between interpersonal and community rituals as the foundation of any approach to rituals: “in the sense of social anthropology, the ritual is a particular form of social activity. In the sense of interactionists and Goffman, any

                                        20 Claude Rivière, Les Rites profanes, Paris, PUF, 1995, p. 10. 21 According to Goffman, “the ritual is a formal and conventionalized act by which an individual expresses respect and consideration for an object of absolute value or for its representation”, translated into English from the French version of his book La mise en scène de la vie quotidienne. 2. Les relations en public, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1973, p. 73.

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social practice organized according to certain conventions is considered ritualized, and called a ritual”22. Let us compare some definitions: in my opinion, the ritual can be defined as a particular social context, established within a spectacular system, mobilizing bodies, and characterized by a codified set of normative practices, by a strong symbolic value for its actors and spectators. In a similar register, “the ritual is a set of formalized, expressive acts, carrying a symbolic dimension. It is characterized by a specific spatio-temporal configuration, by the use of a series of objects, by systems of specific behaviors and languages, by emblematic signs whose coded meaning is one of the common goods of a group”23. There is no need to add any more to be able to quickly identify a few features, including the formal and symbolic dimension of ritual sequences, as well as their spectacular and narrative character. Undeniably, the ritual tells a story. It is precisely one of the functions of the ritual to enchant the origins, by dramatizing common effects in a theatrical way for a given time. And it is always a question of ritual theatricality: a scene, a script, roles, a distribution, a scenario, actors, and spectators. A show, but more than that, the ritual is a “performance” (see the Glossary at the end of the book), symbolically effective from a social and institutional point of view. Thus, for Marcel Mauss, the ritual is characterized by its symbolic effectiveness, or that which we attribute to it: if we believe that dance can affect heaven and earth, then “thanks to rituals, the plants grow”.                                         22 Terrain, no. 8, “Les rites contemporains”, Paris, Mission du Patrimoine, April 1987. 23 Martine Segalen, Rites et rituels contemporains, Paris, Nathan, p. 20.

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This category can include public events that define themselves as rituals: political and religious rituals, public ceremonies involving a significant part of society, festive gatherings, and other media events with a solemn dimension. These community rituals are based on a context that dramatizes and makes social relationships theatrical, characterized by a powerful idealization of the system and participants, by strict standards of conduct to be respected, all of which must guarantee the effectiveness of the process. If the ritual paragon remains as this major political ceremony that constitutes the official visit of men and women of States, many social situations can also be catalogued in the great family of ritual contexts: solemn returns and farewells, speeches, awards, diplomas and decorations, transfers of power and support, banquets of brotherhoods and official inaugurations... All these celebrations dramatize daily life, chanting year after year these passages spotted by the famous folk artist Arnold Van Gennep, and which mark the cycle of seasons and the round of functions, printing their symbolic seal on the lives of individuals and institutions. In fact, rituals “accompany changes in place, state, occupation, social situation, and age. They punctuate the course of human life from cradle to grave”24. I.3.1. The wide range of the ritual scepter There is much talk of rituals in the work of the interactionist current as well as in Goffman’s. Part of his work presents a general theory of sociability, in which the appearance and the concern of “looking good”, not attacking the image of others, are fundamental, dictating most social                                         24 Nicole Belmont, “La notion de rite de passage”, in Les Rites de passage aujourd’hui, edited by Pierre Centlivres and Jacques Hainard, Neufchâtel, L’Age d’homme, 1986, p. 9.

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behaviors. Indeed, therefore, “alongside the constituent entities of sociology that are the collective (groups, classes, populations) and the individual (actors, agents, subjects), microsociology thus introduces a new object, the situation of interaction”25. Indeed, this discipline is concerned with observing, describing, and interpreting this permanent procession that works to “lubricate” social relationships. These symmetrical displays, small integrated protocols, and other implicit conveniences allow each of the actors in the interaction to adapt their “territory of the self” to that of others. They usually adopt a symmetrical structure, with the interpersonal situation constituting the ideal corpus of observation for Goffmanian small behaviors. And these happen by chance when their protagonists meet. Incorporated in each person and constituting their social being, inherent in culture and individuals, these rules form the basis of relationships, even beyond individuals, so unconscious are they, yet unanimously shared. For Norbert Élias, we can superimpose the different levels of rituality, which complement each other more than they contradict each other. Historian of the rise of absolutism in Europe, Elias sketches a path that leads from the individual to institutions. And it shows that from integrated rituals (such as politeness) to the solemn ceremonies of the State, it is in fact a vast social control that is put in place through the slow “civilization of morals” through the “domestication of bodies” and the “curialization” of institutions (integration of the codes in force at court).

                                        25 Isaac Joseph, Goffman et la microsociologie, Paris, PUF, 1998, p. 10.

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Thus, the label is an “instrument of domination. For the king, it is not a simple ceremony but a means of dominating his subjects. The people do not believe in power, even if it is real, unless it is also manifested in the monarch’s external approach. To believe, he must see. The more distant a prince is, the greater the respect that the people show him”26. As Elias states in his reference works, between the 16th and 17th Centuries, the state sought to acquire a monopoly on legitimate violence, at the same time as individuals internalized the control of impulses linked to the tensions of collective life. Thus, politeness, arising from the Court, was spread by the institutions through its relays, the Nobility, and the bourgeoisie, eventually leading to the “civilized” man repressing his passions and impulses, in favor of the pacification of antagonisms. However, this path of domestication of the body has passed through two types of mediation: one is interpersonal, and it is the advent of politeness (from which many interaction rituals derive). The other is communitarian and institutional, expressing itself in the great state ceremonies that put individual bodies in order. Etiquette and protocol, politeness and civility, and state ceremonies and manners constitute a patchwork that is less disparate than it seems. All work is to perpetuate the social order, to legitimize interpersonal and institutional relationships. Because, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday life, Erving Goffman demonstrates that in the codes of sociability analyzed by microsociology, two levels of rituality meet,                                         26 Norbert Elias, La Société de cour, Paris, Flammarion, 1985, p. 116.

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linking private and public, the intimate and the social. There is a difference in scale but no difference in nature between a great ritual ceremony and a microbehavioral interaction. According to Goffman, the ritual, whatever its form, serves to confirm the social order, and to conform individuals to it. Therefore, any micro-ceremony has a powerful normative dimension. We remember that for Saussure and Benveniste, stating a simple sentence summons the whole order of language. Well, formalized situations (language and rituals) impose precise modes of behavior on their actors, guaranteeing the perpetuation of social order. The ritual works in tandem with the order, and etymologically, rita means “order” in Sanskrit, and ritus “prescribed order”27. This term is associated with Greek forms, such as artus, “prescription”; ararisko, “adaptation”; and arthmos, which refers to “the link”, “the junction”. As for the ar root, which derives from Vedic Indo-European, its etymology refers to the order of the cosmos, the relationships between gods and humanity, and the order of humans between them... A fertile etymological journey, in which these roots, which have been in existence for several thousand years, contain all the anthropological principles of the ritual: order, connection, and relationship with the cosmos and with society. “Social order”? This raises an important question, in the form of a flaw that tempers a so-called “ritual almighty power”: that of perception, and of the very use of rituals according to social classes: “there exists a bourgeois rituality, different from the popular rituality that conditions the many forms of sociability specific to each social class. It is therefore important to link the analysis of rituals to the social configurations in which they take place, as the arrangements                                         27 Martine Segalen, Rites et rituels contemporains, Paris, Nathan, 1998, p. 8.

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vary significantly”28. In other words, not all rituals are the same according to social classes, and they do not make unequivocal use of them; there are differences in the mobilization of the symbolic arsenal contained in ritual devices, which can be considered as superstructures (I have been repeating this since the beginning of this book) or even as ideologies, in the sense that Althusser gave to this term in On the Reproduction of Capitalism. Did he not see this ideology as a set of practical rituals? Aware of these distinctions, it is important to work toward the re-emergence of their common theoretical heritage. I.4. From theories to situations29 This book will provide an analysis of institutional rituals in the broadest sense. It will be a question of probing their theoretical depth, their cultural sustainability, and the unity that their apparent diversity actually covers. It should be recalled that we will be talking here about major political ceremonies such as official receptions which welcome personalities, but also about “lay liturgies” (Claude Rivière) that modernity and the media have invented. These pagan “great masses” extend ancient ceremonial structures, reinvested by new actors, in the service of contemporary mythologies. And yet, these rituals have a historical dimension. These are “sublimation rituals” (Glossary), “semiurgies” (Glossary), and dramatized sequences of social dramatization. And always, communities celebrate values for which these rituals intercede.                                         28 Stéphane Olivesi, Questions de communication, “Interculturalités”, April 2003, p. 3. 29 I would like to repeat here that another book will soon follow the publication of this one. It will put into perspective the “situations” I have studied at the GIGN, Clos Vougeot, Apple stores, and the Fête des Lumières in Lyon, by proposing more broadly a reflection on “new rituals”.

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What will be the coherence of objects that seem distant from each other? They are all based on ritual devices (Glossary) involving social actors, and the creation of a context (Glossary), while requiring both a change of “framework” (Glossary), via a change in perception of the situation, and the achievement of a “performance” (Glossary) that requires “playing” something physically. A symbolic transformation will depend on this game: very often, a change in social or institutional30 status. A common ceremonial structure and particular purposes link rituals that seemed disparate a priori, as long as they are considered as a social form with a similar structure and effects, behind a diversity that is only apparent. I.5. A communicational ritual theory31 The interpretation of the ritual fact presented here was communicational in nature because these pages wish to work toward a disciplinary comparison between an academically established discipline, anthropology, and the young information and communication sciences (now abbreviated as ICSs). However, these are too often reduced to the word “communication”, and they are much more than a “scientific ideology”32. The project is not to annex objects and concepts anchored in historically established disciplines                                         30 This interpretation of ritual theories seems to respond to the project led by Barbara Myerhoff and Sally Moore, affirmed in Secular Ritual: “this book is assembled to address the question of what happens to theories of ritual if analogous formal procedures are inspected in secular contexts”, Secular Ritual, Assen/ Amsterdam, Van Gorcum, 1977, p. 4. 31 This adjective refers to the study of the facts and effects of communications as envisaged by the information and communication sciences. Communicational concerns analyses that focus on interpersonal and social situations. 32 Georges Canguilhem, Idéologie et Rationalité, Paris, Vrin, 1988, p. 39.

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but rather to indicate new interdisciplinarity of ICS itself 33.

directions

for

the

It is right to deplore the crisis in the humanities and social sciences. In Ici et là, Clifford Geertz referred to an “epistemological hypochondria”34 that would affect our “soft or flexible sciences” (Bruno Latour) as a whole. This depression consists of a loss of confidence in our disciplines, the disappearance of great historical figures, a crisis in scientific literature, and a major digital migration. This would upset the authorities of legitimization, by narrowing the ground, by rebuilding borders, to weaken the theoretical and disciplinary foundations. The contribution of information and communication sciences, in this disturbed landscape, is precisely to attempt theoretical cross-fertilization, to dare to match disciplines, to look at traditional objects from a different angle. And it is in the capacity of disciplines (as well as in the real willingness of researchers) to believe in this renewal that the human and social sciences would emerge from the crisis. Moreover, these information and communication sciences constitute a model of what Clifford Geertz calls “blurred genres”, when he refers to the loans that some sciences take to define new genres and produce emerging analyses. Communication researchers work under the aegis of what I define as “the palimpsest paradigm”: they assign themselves the task of patiently scratching social reality, the                                         33 “Interdisciplinary research involves confrontation, an exchange of methods, concepts and points of view”. Jean Piaget (in Madeleine Grawitz, Méthodes des sciences sociales, Paris, Dalloz, republished in 1996, pp. 305—306). In this sense, ICS is quite interdisciplinary, since it often borrows its methods and concepts from other social sciences and humanities, while engaging in discussion with them. 34 Clifford Geertz, Ici et là-bas. L’anthropologue comme auteur, Paris, Métailié, 1996, p. 76.

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proliferation of relationships, and the nebula of techniques and discourses in order to detect a new meaning, which emerges because we bring a different light to it. A necessary declaration of interdisciplinarity was the courageous belief of the “founding fathers” of the communicative field35. This reaffirmation borders on the exercise of style carried out with more or less conviction in the preface of all general works in ICS. This plural dimension is the basis of any research in ICS, a disciplinary field which, around a few objects and concepts, borrows from the human sciences as a whole. As long as these borrowings do not amount to indisciplinarity, the important thing is not so much to justify oneself as to try to give back to these disciplines what we borrow from them, enriching ourselves with our differences, and finding a fair balance in this undertaking of “disciplinary import-export”. However, the ritual can also be studied from the perspective of this disciplinary field constituted by ICS. Indeed, the study of social rituals, naturally anthropological objects, has a prominent place in the field of communication studies. Because “the question of communication is present in the anthropological approach of the ritual”36. In addition, ritual practices as a whole can be considered as primary instances of mediation, constituting rich and complex contexts of communication. As such, they are indeed “communication systems. In exchange networks comprising                                         35 Thus, Robert Escarpit, a pioneer of ICS in France and author of the Théorie générale de l’information et de la communication, questioned the validity of “nexology”. This word, borrowed from science fiction, was intended to designate a discipline studying disciplinary and methodological crossovers. 36 The author himself emphasizing the word “communication”. Marc Abélès, Anthropologie de l’Etat, Paris, Armand Colin, 1990, p. 119.

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emitters, transmitters, and receivers, messages circulate, which are part of signaling systems based on culturally defined codes”37. I.5.1. Ritual as a principle of mediation Liminality38 is one of the constituent features of the ritual, considered as an intercession practice. And it is presented as a space—time of communication at several levels: members of the ritual between them, and from them toward abstract otherness (the past, founding values, etc.) or idealized mythical representations. This confirms the ritual as a principle of mediation. This is because it brings us into contact with other kinds of powers, guaranteeing microcosm/macrocosm harmony. This function is no longer assumed as such in the Western sphere, except in religious rituals. And yet, in terms of the spirit, “the ritual is conjunctive, because it establishes a union (we can say here a communion), or, in any case, an organic relationship between two groups (which merge at the limit, one with the character of the officiant, the other with the faithful community) which were dissociated at first”39. Social rituals are, therefore, imposed as vectors of mediation that shape the aspirations of the social body to transcendence, expressing a quest for ideality, and even a regressive impulse toward Durkheim’s “collective effervescence”. We can rightly refer to the notion of “social communion” in the face of certain ritual manifestations and traditions.                                         37 Claude Rivière, Les Rites profanes, Paris, PUF, 1995, p. 50. 38 Being at the threshold (limen), at the edge between two situations. 39 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, Paris, Plon, 1962, pp. 46—47.

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For all these reasons, rituals are research objects in their own right for social communication studies. Because micro-rituals of interactions and great ritual ceremonies complement each other more than they oppose each other. All of them work to perpetuate social cohesion by consolidating and legitimizing interpersonal and institutional relationships. Similarly, looking at social matters with this communicational prism means thinking about mediation and praising the “instituted third party”, a third party that is sometimes an institutional person (see the figure of the “mediator”, who intertwines in each social conflict) and sometimes a person who is invisible and transcendent. In this respect, in her research on “electoral incommunication”, Isabelle Mathieu makes fine use of Legba, an African god embodying both the function of mediation and of translation and also a form of mischief, where power can be found. “Legba was not entrusted with the task of any sector of the universe: all that remained to be assigned to him was the ability to master languages. A figure of ambivalence par excellence, his weakness made his strength; and his power was finally immense since he became the interpreter of the gods among them. God of communication, he is therefore the equivalent of Hermes for the Greeks, Mercury for the Romans. But if he is of particular interest to us, it is because he establishes a link between the order of communication and that of political power. Endowed with ubiquity, Legba is everywhere, in every person and in every home”40.                                         40 Isabelle Mathieu, “Les facéties de Lebga. Fragments pour une analyse communicationnelle du vote”, ESSACHESS, Journal for Communication Studies, vol. 11, no. 1(21), 2018, p. 168.

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He is indeed a god — or a demiurge — of communication, in his multiple roles of intercession. He symbolizes more broadly the communicational view of social and political issues. It is this desire for enlargement and enrichment, consisting of the communicative reinterpretation of an anthropological object, the ritual, that constitutes the main ambition of these pages; it is understood that these contributions are intended as a contribution to communication studies as well as to sciences interested in the question of rituals.

1 A Plurality of Anthropology, a Permanence of Symbolic Mediations

1.1. Anthropologies... Anthropology, in its original project, tended toward an ideal: to recognize the humanity in what is universal and to grasp its unity despite the infinite diversity of cultural forms that characterize it. Let us recall Claude Lévi-Strauss’s astonishing confession when seeking a society reduced to its simplest expression, he found... only men and women among the Nambikwara! However, and despite the globalizing declarations of intent, this discipline is plural by nature. The CNRS academic section of anthropology (38th section) is explicitly titled “Unity of Man, Diversity of Cultures”. It is even to this plurality, substantial to cultures and particular situations, that anthropology must constantly renew itself. Whether thematic or perspectivist1, anthropologies contribute, according to the times and traditions of research,                                         1 Thematic anthropologies focus on the study of a particular section of the societies studied: work, family, leisure; the so-called perspectivist currents focus on a human activity as a whole: thus with communication.

The Ritual Institution of Society, First Edition. Pascal Lardellier. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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to completing an initial totalizing purpose which aims to offer a global understanding of the human fact. Epistemological evolutions, the renewal of situations, the questioning of concepts, do not, however, constitute its privilege, but a destiny shared by all the human and social sciences. The problem is that sometimes this discipline is offered unnatural alliances. Indeed, it is an intellectual guarantee and almost a moral guarantee in the vast sphere of the human sciences. Thus, from the very first pages of Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains, Marc Augé is engaged in an uncompromising indictment of the risky discussions, the accommodations, to which some invite anthropology. “This one, the queen discipline, the traditional discipline, is a moral and scientific guarantee. It has the respectability of seniority, the honors of a long tradition. It is also a trendy refuge value, and there is no study or research project that does not invite an anthropological approach. This calls for a little caution, in the absence of mistrust”2. Already fragmented into a nebula of sub-disciplines, currents, and perspectives, anthropology can encounter a threat, the danger of fragmentation. It can be proud to represent a providential ally and a “safe haven” for disciplines undergoing an eclipse. But anthropologists may also be concerned, fearing the separation and fragmentation, or even the eventual dissolution, of their discipline3. However, this fear is a prerogative that they derive from its nobility.                                         2 Marc Augé, Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains, Paris, Aubier, 1994, p. 9. 3 At a time when books are titled L’anthropologie, à quoi bon? (Anthropology, What is the Point?) and when seminars are wondering: Anthropologie, suite et fin? (Anthropology, a Continuation and an End?)

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The very term anthropology is the subject of semantic inflation that jeopardizes the “original purity”4 of its quest: the discovery of others, whose otherness conceals the constituent traits of the great human family, mother of the sign, and daughter of the symbol. From the legendary situations encountered by the founding fathers, anthropology has come to share ground with exoticism and fascinating otherness because they are radically different. The “passion of the gaze” (P. Dibie) has been part of the discipline since the first “trips to Polynesia”5. But as geographical and cultural boundaries faded during the 20th Century, these almost mythical, and sometimes myth-like6, lands, isolated and ideally circumscribed by seas, mountains, and forests, withered away. This was the price to pay for the Western model that extended its empire and influence over the decades. Almost definitively deprived of these distant ethnic groups and these lost small islands on which it was finally easy to isolate oneself physically with “one’s tribe”, the anthropologist must now look around them to find new clans emerging from territories less perceptible than those of the

                                        4 Inverted commas! 5 In Le Voyage en Polynésie. Anthologie des voyageurs occidentaux de Cook à Segalen (Robert Laffont, 1994), Jean-Jo Scemla composes a favorable compilation of poetic tales from the great European navigators, who, from the 17th Century, “built a land of the imagination and at the same time founded ethnography”, discovering the fauna, flora, and especially the customs and traditions of the antipodes. 6 On the relativity of ethnological interpretations, making situations more in line with the desires of anthropologists, see Jean-Louis Siran’s corrosive L’Illusion mythique, Paris, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1998.

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highlands, deep, non-material, and sometimes even virtual7 forests. The outline of the “Maison Anthropologie” became uncertain as the terrain became fleeting and the objects escaped. Out of necessity, it is important to comprehend, between wisdom and disillusionment, that anthropology can no longer be forced “to the mirages of flight, exile or exoticism” (M. Augé). It is necessary to reaffirm the possibility, and also the epistemological necessity, of an “anthropology of contemporary worlds”, certainly, but also of contemporary modes of social representation, of new forms of linking, in the midst of postmodern uncertainties. As early as the mid-1980s, Georges Balandier had shown the way to a renewal of the fields and the problems of the discipline in Le Détour (1985). Other renowned anthropologists (including Maurice Godelier) have recently contributed to this reflection on the outline of what their discipline could contribute to the globalization era. While it was short-sighted to think that standardization would win, identities crystallized and vehement community demands made themselves heard. The existential crisis that Europe and its institutions have been going through in the years 2018—2019 cannot be resolved by the expression “bad populist winds”. We can also see a “return of the repressed” in terms of national identities, the opposition to technocratic normalization and standardization carried out by what is known as “the Europe of Brussels”. In any case, it is important to alleviate the interpretations of the European crisis and to “re-anthropologize” it, thus to restore identity, community, history, and symbolism. Beyond the ruralist workcamps, together with the conversion of its lands and objects to intimacy and beyond                                         7 The Internet and virtual universes are a... concrete object for anthropology. In Le grand Système (Paris, Fayard, 2001), Georges Balandier stated that “the Internet is more than a metaphor for the New Worlds of the 18th Century”.

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the precious analyses of an exotic world now located at our doorstep, it is the study of a new symbolic and relational economy that is proposed to the anthropologist; and this in order to help to think, thanks to the hindsight of this discipline, of social organizations which are a priori recent, unexpected, but which reproduce old models behind their apparent modernity8. Therein lies the new challenge of anthropology: a broad interpretation of the human condition, which starts from the neurophysiological foundations of humanity and draws an asymptote across the whole of the human and social sciences; also, to look at contemporary advances in culture and technology, as well as urban communities, post-modern “tribal” practices, great lay rituals, new “political liturgies”, and also digital worlds, which require an anthropological view. These developments must carefully consider the complex technical and symbolic systems of the media, which are prisms that create new relationships with society and history. These media convey representations and produce belonging by crystallizing collective identities and exercising a social function that is superimposed on that of traditional institutions. By considering these new objects as natural terrain, anthropology will see its horizons recede as society                                         8 “Is there any basis for bringing anthropology and psychoanalysis closer together? There is their common affirmation of an unconscious active instance, and of the primacy of the symbolic. But in the same way, the anthropological viewpoint seeks to detect the forms of the “collective unconscious”. Both are the science of deep structures, individual on the one hand, and community structures on the other. According to Maurice Godelier, Claude Lévi-Strauss “offers us an overall explanation of social facts that made the social a combination of forms of exchange whose profound origin was to be sought in the unconscious structures of the mind, in its ability to symbolize” (L’Enigme du don, Paris, Fayard, 1996, p. 14).

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develops, as identities embrace new outlines, including technological ones. 1.2. Anthropology and communication Anthropology and communication, whatever their apparent dissimilarities, are in fact close to each other, when you take the time to look closely at them. They both study, in different fields, the human being in front of their fellow kind, the nature of social cohesion, the systems of symbols, and interactions that constitute relationships, communities, and organizations. Since its origin, anthropology has had as its mission the “study of humans in society”. And these humans, in society, communicate not only through their words but also through their gestures, their gazes and facial expressions, their general posture, and even their silences. We can rightly consider that all these are “culturally coded”. More broadly, communication is about mobilizing a set of codes, representations, and symbolic ways of doing things that weave a theoretical link, from anthropology to communication. And “communication is first and foremost a fundamental anthropological experience”. Intuitively, communication consists of exchanging with others. There is simply no individual or collective life without communication9. Bringing definitions together is striking: for Marc Augé, “anthropology deals with the meaning that humans in a community give to their existence. Meaning is the relationship, and in this case, the essential part of the symbolic and effective relationships between humans                                         9 Dominique Wolton, Penser la communication, Paris, Flammarion, 1997, p. 15. “Anthropological experience” is italicized by the author.

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belonging to a particular community”10. And for Pierre Lévy, “the purpose of information and communication sciences is to study the web of relationships between beings, signs, and things that constitute the human universe”11. It is clear that both are concerned with analyzing the symbolic economy that constitutes humans in society. There is indeed a common basis allowing passages and allowing exchanges. By extension, anthropology and communication sciences share common objects. Indeed, rituals, festivals, different forms of language, and the symbolic economy that serves as a basis for social cohesion are all naturally anthropological objects, studied by generations of ethnologists before communication researchers took to them in accordance with the “palimpsest paradigm” mentioned earlier, which consists of reading through the communicative prism studies carried out on other objects previously. Gérard Althabe goes further, by affirming an almost organic solidarity between these two disciplines, anthropology and communication, as to objects and method: “it is an artifact to isolate symbolic languages and ritual scenarios from the places where they are implemented, i.e. social relationships, communication and the logic of which they are the framework”12. But the current in anthropology has precisely made “communication” (in the sense of interpersonal relationships) its preferred object. This is so-called “communication                                         10 Marc Augé, Le Sens des autres. Actualité de l’anthropologie, Paris, Fayard, 1994, p. 49. 11 Pierre Lévy, “La place de la médiologie dans le trivium”, Les Cahiers de médiologie, no. 6, “Pourquoi des médiologues?”, Paris, Gallimard, 1998, p. 47. 12 Gérard Althabe, “Vers une ethnologie du présent”, in Les Nouveaux enjeux de l’anthropologie. Autour de Georges Balandier, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1993, p. 98.

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anthropology”, which focuses on the contexts of communication, with methods specific to the anthropological approach (in situ observation, among others). The authorship of the expression “anthropology of communication” belongs to the American anthropologist and linguist Dell Hymes. “In 1967, he proposed to ethnographically invest the behaviors, situations, and objects that are perceived within a given community as having a communicative value”13. Based on the premise that social actors are constantly involved in communication, communication anthropologists focus on forms of social interaction that are a priori harmless and, in fact, extremely rich from a semantic, cultural, and communicative point of view. “The challenge of anthropology of communication is precisely this: to learn to see communication in the words, gestures, and gazes of daily life, in order to gradually reconstruct the ‘secret and complicated code, written nowhere, known to no one, heard by all’ of which Edward Sapir spoke”14. 1.3. Political anthropology An interest in institutional rituals and ceremonies leads to the integration of concepts and problems related to political anthropology into one’s thinking. This is historically linked to the study of power structures in traditional societies. However, this discipline has evolved toward other objects, such as modern and contemporary institutions. And referring to the manifestations of the transcendence of politics leads to opening up the approach to what is universal about this power. It is curious to note that questions related to political rituality, state ceremonies and protocol are traditionally                                         13 Yves Winkin, Anthropologie de la communication, Brussels, De Boeck, 1996, p. 8. 14 Yves Winkin, ibidem, blurb.

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ignored by political science. A revealing example of this defection is: almost none of the encyclopedias of political science have a thematic article on these themes. Are these objects marginal? Ritual, ceremony, and protocol are in any case unthought, a “vacuum” located at the very heart of the political reflection on its nature. More broadly, when we talk about the social and community aspects of rituals, we can talk about potlatch, gift and counter-gift, displays, and sacrificial economy. Above all, we can affirm the numinous15 nature of power, of which there are implicit traces in rituals, protocol, and in all the attention surrounding power and its institutions16. This “supernatural” dimension is, therefore, one of the major elements of a theoretical reflection on power, provided that we take into account the magical substance that suits its anthropological essence, and not just its constitutional and legal aspects. For one of the dangers facing the researcher would be that they would remove this mystical origin from their analysis due to the rationalism that dominates our ways of perceiving the world. The combined historical action of positivism to the enlightenment and the retreat of monarchies of divine right have contributed to the desacralization of power and institutions. Certainly, but not completely: gold and protocol are like distant nostalgia for a certain appeal, a numinousness that power seeks, even if it apparently defies                                         15 Numinous is an adjective derived from the noun numen, a word designating a diffuse force, a supernatural power carried by extraordinary individuals — priests, sorcerers, shamans.... as well as, often, representatives of power. 16 On these themes, let us refer to Denis Fleurdorge’s excellent book Les rituels et les représentations du Pouvoir, published by Paris, Zargos, 2005. He shows that politicians essentially spend their lives going from ceremony to ceremony, with little personal room for manoeuvre.

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it, as soon as political ceremonies are considered as precautions. “More simplicity, less pomp”, some leaders ask. But they will only be truly respected and considered after having passed through this protocol channel, which alone manages to transform them into statesmen and women, giving them a place to be feared and admired. For these are the two functions of the political ritual, beyond its function of legitimization: did not R. Otto remind us as an anthropologist that power must always be perceived as fascinans and tremendum, “fascinating and terrible”? The memoirs of the heads of cabinets and other Verbatim of Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand’s close collaborators prove how much they were attached to protocol, ceremonies, and the distance they imposed between the sphere of power and that of the ordinary people. Recently, we have measured the limits of the Americanization of the role carried out by Nicolas Sarkozy, or of François Hollande’s “normal presidency”. Both carried out a “symbolic disfiguration” of the role. Emmanuel Macron, I will come back to this point, has taken the exact opposite of these postures of complicity and proximity, by spectacularly “represidentifying” himself. First of all, he succeeded, considering the nickname given to him by the media and observers of “Jupiter”! But some mistakes and clumsiness led him to come down from Olympus, to tread the realities of the earth’s ground, paved with fierce turning points. And his presidency has gone from solar yellow to the most popular vest of the same color... Beware of soothing images of clichés. The ritual deployment of politics is by nature serious, rarely a “good child”. It would be necessary to forget this primarily political dimension in order to understand these rituals in a more romantic way. Studying political rituals is not a pleasantly historiographical approach. On the contrary, it consists of reintegrating politics into its original sphere, offering it the

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broad perspective that this diffuse but omnipresent mystical nature requires. The study of this dimension even makes it possible to reveal aspirations for the ideal political model that can be found in the watermarks of the ritual. From a political anthropological perspective, this central question is raised concerning the sacredness of power — even if it is secularized — and whose preferred channel this ritual is which takes on the appearance and always endorses the forms of a cult. How can the permanence of political ceremonies be explained, if not by the affirmation of this numinous essence of power? From Kantorowitz to Otto, and from Bloch to Gluckman, there is a long list of authors who consider that those who hold power are always filled with a mystical, terrifying, and fascinating power. The nature of the regimes and the disparity of cultures and eras actually relativize this affirmation of power, which will require precautions, precisely ceremonial. Ultimately, it is the essence of power that is perceived in this ceremonial and ceremonial imperative, honoring and containing at the same time its mystical aura. Institutions sometimes pretend to ignore this, or worse, as ungrateful legatees, they forget it. Even if they are desecrated and apparently disillusioned, institutions need to be guided by the “political liturgy” (C. Rivière), the only guarantee of their integrity and wholeness. To affirm this is not pure convention: political rituals proceed to put the social body in order, whose utopian completeness they replay, via the deployment of ranks, the formal alignment of the emissaries of the constituted bodies. Thus, in the 17th Century, the representatives of the various corporations came close to the king to be ritually touched by him, and symbolically aggregated as different parts of the great Mystical Body of the State. A direct parallel can be drawn with the President’s current wishes to the “constituted bodies” and

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other “living forces of the Nation”. “The fact that the entanglement of theology and politics that prevailed in monarchies of divine right is now abolished in no way implies a separation of politics and religion. Rather, we observe a phenomenon of sacralization of the Republic and the representations it carries with it”17. 1.3.1. Intangible and omnipresent, the mystical nature of power In the background of political ceremonies, their symbolic devices and ritual structures, the question of the mystical nature of power appears. Affirming the principle of the sacredness of power may seem suspicious, in a media and social context where power and those who hold it are accessible and even similar to the common person. According to evolutionist theories, power has evolved from a supernatural origin to democratic regimes, and from magical thinking to reason-based governments. These theories are questioned by the religiosity of political rituals. Except, we consider that dregs can remain, fragmentary traces of power universes, of which we must take a full measure. It is worth mentioning a Durkheimian hypothesis, because “Durkheim attributes a religious character to a public authority, especially since power will be absolute. Indeed, the power concentrated in the same hands gives its holder an extraordinary stature, places him at a great distance from other men and thus absolute power has the same character of transcendence as the divine”18. But the essence of politics is in fact far beyond the legal and juridical conventions that organize it, give it a social                                         17 M. Abélès, Anthropologie de l’Etat, Paris, Armand Colin, 1990, p. 169. 18 Philippe Steiner, La sociologie de Durkheim, Paris, La Découverte, 1998, p. 24.

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foundation, by offering it the conditions for its institutional sustainability. It finds its full meaning in relational alchemy in which the members of a community subscribe to the principle of a common destiny, a powerful representation, necessarily superior to the sum of individuals (the current crisis in politics is also due to the loss of this collective consciousness). However, this “being together” (which overlaps with the idea of the Nation) is of a mystical essence19. Of course, this statement defies rationality, and “it is therefore in vain that a realistic analysis would claim, without any reference to irrational factors, to account for the political relationship, i.e. the relationship between authority and obedience”20. The great authors who have studied this mystical nature of power, from Ernst Kantorowitz to Marc Bloch, affirm the evidence of this transcendent dimension, which enshrouds the political body and underlies the principle of sovereignty. To accept the reality of this transcendence of power is to put it back into a long, precisely anthropological perspective. And this insight could explain some of the problems faced by modern institutions and contemporary political staff, precisely because of a lack of strong concepts (or rather, a lack of mobilization of these on cases from the news). There still remains, imperceptible but omnipresent, a “republican mysticism”, to borrow Maurice Agulhon’s expression. To affirm that power is of sacred essence is to state a postulate. In fact, it is necessary to demonstrate how this sacredness is                                         19 Let us refer to the baptism of Clovis and the Holy Chrism brought by the Holy Spirit according to legend, or to the tradition of the “thaumaturgic kings”, who had the capacity to “heal” by placing their hands accompanied by the ritual formula “The king touches you, God heals you”... 20 Raoul Girardet, Les Mythologies politiques, Paris, Le Seuil, 1995, p. 8.

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expressed, to designate its historical manifestations, and to describe the contexts in which it is expressed. And to the attentive observer, political representatives reveal that they are dedicated (explicit polysemy) to the perpetuation of the political body through a set of personal or public rituals, all of which are staged, but in which the spectacular dimension is crucial, and not only entertaining: it fulfills an imperative of authentication. “The whole game of politics and the entire issue of rituals are to identify this transcendence with the person and politics with those who embody it at the moment, and that this staging (which inevitably forms part of a broader system) necessarily (and consciously) borrows the form and means of the ritual itself”21. In the social and political crisis that France has been going through since the end of 2018 (the so-called “yellow vest movement”), well, we are calling for a “sacred union” to escape it. And — sacrilege! — when the interior of the Arc de Triomphe was damaged, there was a talk of “desecration”, nothing less. This tends to confirm that, indeed, there is something sacred and mystical in the very nature of Power... 1.3.2. Complexity and ambiguities of “power on stage” In view of what has just been said, make-believe strategies, such as those implemented by institutions during ritual ceremonies, should not be viewed too lightly. The power that occurs “on stage” has sacred origins, and it responds to profound determinisms, which go beyond its a priori spectacular character. Already established, the political personality exists largely through ceremonial apparitions that bring it into contact with citizens, magnifying its image, historicizing its word. It is necessary                                         21 Marc Augé, Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains, Paris, Aubier, 1994, p. 103.

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to take into account the permanence of this state of affairs. Beyond cultures and times, power exists in the eyes of its witnesses; in front of them, it must show itself, and if possible to its advantage. Why are all important moments in political life protected and magnified by both protocol and ceremony? Because power, as soon as it is instituted, is neither absent nor anonymous. “Political actors must pay a daily tribute to theatricality, to the point of ensuring the primacy of ‘theatrocracy’”22. Its manifestations, then, are ritualized, according to esthetic and symbolic modalities precisely established by protocol. This does not in any way undermine the essentially political function of state ceremonies. For “certainty animates those who are concerned about protocol: the conviction that good protocol manners are important because they hide behind their superficiality, their apparent insignificance, the secret of obedience and political consent and the true relationships between the rulers and the governed”23. If communities and institutions carry out this ritual detour, it is because they perceive that higher benefits (and secondary benefits, as psychoanalysts would say) will result in legitimizing the institution, but also perpetuating the community, by bringing it into contact with other dimensions of politics. The political ritual, if it is an aggregate of symbols, is, even more so, a dynamic phenomenon during which something happens, from which the institutions benefit first and foremost.                                         22 Georges Balandier, Le Pouvoir sur scènes, Paris, Balland, 1992, p. 13. 23 Yves Déloye, “Le protocole ou l’ombre du pouvoir politique. Sociologie historique de l’obéissance politique en France”, in Le Protocole ou la mise en forme de l’ordre politique, edited by Yves Déloye, Claudine Haroche and Olivier Ihl, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1996, p. 62.

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And anthropology reminds us that, in other cultural spheres, it was absolutely crucial for the sovereign not only to appear publicly, but above all to be strong and vigorous: many African monarchies sacrificed kings long before they became cacochymists. In Polynesia, leaders who were no longer physically able to “shake the coconut tree” (this is the surprising origin of this expression) were also shamelessly killed. Much less than what is asked of our presidents who, etymologically, “are those who remain seated in front of the assembly” (from the Latin sedere); as for the senators, they are not far from senility! And at the beginning, it is always a question of producing the reality or media conditions of an incarnation, which will tend to reduce an incredulity, that of the sudden present power, no longer absent and abstract, but alive. Here again, political anthropology can be integrated into communication studies. If there is no question of annexing previous problems, it can be seen that from the celebration to the ritual, and from monarchical rhetoric to the expected effects of the symbolic range deployed by institutions, at all times, everything is a matter of mediation and, by extension, of mediatization and, therefore, of communication, between power and the social body. Hence, the need for this theoretical and communicative viewpoint arises. Because “political activity is always a symbolic activity”24, political symbols are shown and exhibited and, from this exhibition, social action is expected, knowing that power, which must be present or represented, must also, symmetrically, see everything and be seen by all. In practice, this covers an aporia, hence the subterfuges and conventions of political representation. Moreover, the word representation is characterized by a fertile polysemy: it can be both                                         24 Marc Abélès, Anthropologie de l’Etat, Paris, Armand Colin, 1991, p. 117.

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diplomatic and esthetic: power will then be represented, and sometimes even — as is the case with rituals — presented. At this level, the obligation to display the portraits of the presidents in each town hall is less incidental than it seems to be. It is crucial and even vital for institutions to communicate, to seem, and to appear on the ritual scene. The desire of the Heads of State to publicize their solemn gatherings and rituals, in order to make them visible to as many people as possible, confirms this state of affairs, even if part of the sacredness has evaporated. Thus, it is worth recalling the television broadcast of François Mitterrand’s solitary and solemn stroll through the Pantheon in 1981, with a rose in his hand, the day after his first election. “The episode of the Pantheon highlights the dual nature of the President: an individual caught up in the presence of management and action, and simultaneously, the incarnation of the political body and of permanence, that of France. The double body of the President is concretized from the first day in the ritual of the Pantheon”25. Let us return, however, to the recent totally failed inauguration of Nicolas Sarkozy (“the night of the Fouquets!”), François Hollande (a few steps dancing along to a little accordion tune in Tulle, on the arm of a future former First Lady), and the brilliantly successful Emmanuel Macron (the courtyard of the Louvre crossed with slow steps against a background of Ode to Joy) before a tide of tricolor flags. On the other hand, in L’homme de cour, Baltasar Gracian states that to govern well, it is better to keep a part of one’s being and action away from the eyes of others. We would only govern well through secrecy. But this is accompanied by a theatricalization, sometimes with its own silences and absences. General de Gaulle, then François Mitterrand,                                         25 Marc Abélès, Anthropologie du politique, Paris, Armand Colin, 1997, p. 265.

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retained models of this pragmatic management of their public image, made up of true and false departures and “retreats of reflection”, calculated silence, Irish escapades, or ritualized annual ascents, all invested in strong symbols, and always abundantly commented on by the media and opinion. And was not that the desired effect? Let us discuss a circular return to mask strategy and the necessity of the ritual scene. For this power — if it can be exercised in secrecy and darkness — is almost always manifested in a ritual context that legitimizes it, gives it its solemn character and its historical dimension. “The protocol order changes, but the protocol... in social life, does not change. Respect for the form is undoubtedly the most profound aspect of political existence; it therefore resists all changes in regime, latitude, and appellation”26. Thus, to wonder about, “power in terms of actions and in action”, according to the project stated by Michel Foucault, consists of thinking about politics within the framework of this formal setting that serves as gala attire, and without which institutions would be seen naked. It also means thinking of the superb staging of political bodies, exhibitions claiming that institutions alone have historically been able to appropriate these bodies to punish, sublimate, or torture them, lock them up, exhibit them, or drive them into seclusion, at their discretion. But always subjugating them, in both senses of the word: by forcing or magnifying them. In any case, making them political signs that express the strength and truth that characterize the State requires individuals to incorporate during the ritual the social norm, order, and discipline that should govern the society. Louis Marin and Jean-Marie Apostolidès, among others, focused on uncovering the symbolic and ritual architecture supporting the political system of the Ancien Régime in                                         26 Régis Debray, Transmettre, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1997, p. 64.

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France. An essentially pragmatic conscience has worked on this construction. The apparent slowness of this tidying up cannot absolve it of the determination expressed by its instigators. Reading the memoirs of great statesmen of the Ancien Régime in France, from Richelieu to Louis XIV, leaves no doubt about the avowed desire for a “civilization of morals” (N. Elias) and the subjection of society, at a time when these companies went hand in hand with the establishment of absolutism. “These people are heavily deceiving themselves and think that these are only ceremonial matters. The people over whom we rule are unable to penetrate the depths of things, usually regulate their judgments on what they see outside, and it is most often by precedence and rank that they measure their respect and obedience”. This eloquent confession is taken from the memoirs of Louis XIV. A few centuries later, Charles de Gaulle had equally pragmatic features in Le Fil de l’épée: “A leader is distant, because authority does not go without prestige nor prestige without distance. The greats are careful in their interventions”27. A historical perspective of political rituality does not erode the differences between eras, but, on the contrary, it allows the permanent structures, the invariant elements invisible in short-sighted analyses, to stand out. This is what Georges Balandier endeavored to show in Le Pouvoir sur scènes: from Antiquity to France of the Ancien Régime, and from the latter to our modern democracies, institutions have experienced a slow desacralization. Rituals are no longer quite the same. But from this monarchy of divine right to a democratic state that produces the paradoxical signs of a monarchization of the Republic, some ceremonial practices have remained the same, changing too little over the centuries for this stability to make sense.                                         27 Quoted by Roger-Gérard Schwartzenberg, mensonge, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1998.

La

Politique-

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1.3.3. Rituals, power, and symbolic effectiveness And the political ritual, which is more than just entertainment, must above all be considered as a performative context (J.-L. Austin). To question power and rituals is to question the power of the ritual. Ceremonials and protocol have a symbolic force as well as an emotional charge, which can affect individuals and institutions. We have just mentioned the deviations to which this has sometimes given rise. Ritual gestures are nowadays less emphatic than they were at the Court of the Sun King and in France in the classical age. But contemporary politicians seem to be overtaken by this dimension, although they are initially suspicious of it. And for good reason: it allows them to access another state of political being in which they experience the breath of History, a form of hybris, a form of institutional excess that borders on the intoxicating feeling of omnipotence. From far and wide, the question of the “hyper-presidency” of the French system has been raised in debates in France. And it is a physical inscription in the ceremonial that will give them room to play and feel the fear and respect of those who are different, and who are kept at a distance by the precautions expressed in the ritual, knowing that it is to this ritual performance that part of the symbolic28 and political effectiveness of power is delegated. And just as in the theater, the actor becomes a character through a symbolic rise that owes nothing to change; well, in                                         28 “Symbolic effectiveness”? In his Anthropologie structurale (Paris, Plon, 1958), Claude Lévi-Strauss explained that symbolic practices can produce transformations without direct intervention on reality. Ritual action is in this sense a form of “magical thought” which therefore acts on reality.

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another register, the politician must go through ceremonial stages that will make them more than a party leader, a real statesperson. Only the ritual channel will carry out this transformation. And it is to the ritual that the mission of the institution always falls. To the Shakespearean question: “who made you king?”, what simpler and more obvious answer than: “the coronation”? Studying the sphere of rituals, ceremonies, and civilities does not mean that the problems of domination, as stated by Marx and Weber, are ignored. This dimension is even constitutive for them. If politics is the set of means by which a group imposes its hegemony on a society, ritual and protocol can be considered as two of the most effective weapons, as devices and contexts designed to generate belonging, consent, and “voluntary submission”. From the military, the violence lurking in the folds of the ritual then becomes symbolic. It influences and inferences the “spect-actors” (glossary) of the ritual all the more effectively as they take an active part through their participation and their perspective, in this process, a political process first and foremost. State rituals and ceremonies play an important role, and this is affirmed by political anthropologists. However, there is no deformation of reality: it would be simplistic to reduce the entire political decision-making process to this ritual gesture, solely to the order of protocol. However, it is worth noting the scrupulous attention paid by many prominent politicians to this protocol. This proves that it is important within the decision-making process, and at the very heart of strategies to legitimize their decisions. For “if the ritual is obviously not the only key to success in the conduct of a policy, ritual incapacity can be a sign of more general impotence and ritual failure, the failure of a policy”29.                                         29 Marc Abélès, Henri-Pierre Jeudy, Anthropologie du politique, Paris, Armand Colin, 1997, p. 103.

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Marc Abélès shows how both dimensions are simultaneously present in the consciousness of the French politician, who distinguishes politics as an art of playing in the short term and politics as a means of ensuring the longevity of a social order. This downside implies a circular return to the nature of this reflection, which, starting from the analysis of the make-believe of institutions (which they give themselves), leads to a kind of meditation on the very essence of politics. Can we go so far as to postulate that in this political field, the essence would bend to make-believe, the substance would join the forms it must take to materialize and, finally, be seen and believed? 1.3.4. The dark side of power... The political ritual works to perpetuate power and legitimize it at regular intervals. The necessary consideration of the effects produced by these rituals can also open up the understanding of the conditions of its regression toward demagogy; when it is not the will to use these rituals cynically that gives birth, if “the belly is fertile”, to their monstrous anamorphosis, to the fanatical crowd. History is paved with examples of these diversions from state ceremoniality to worship megalomaniac dictators. Rituals unfold their finery on unstable scenes, and their balance is fragile. And power, which uses rituals in a pragmatic way, knows that they imply a triple regression: “toward the warm forms of belief with its mobilizing slogans; toward the image, which simplifies thought and polarizes desire; and toward the unconscious of the collective and the hypnosis of participation”30. The temptation is often great for weakened institutions to nestle in a grand ceremonial sequence that is the gentle slope to tyranny, at the risk and peril of ridicule or demagogy.                                         30 Daniel Bougnoux, Le Pouvoir, Paris, Ellipses, 1994, p. 132.

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In these specific cases, there is little to ensure that the political ritual, which is of an “erotic” and Apollonian essence, does not lean toward Thanatos. Let us clarify our thinking: the political ritual is “erotic” because it carries a vital charge. Seminal, the coming of power regenerates the social body, invigorates institutions. “The act of creation is constantly described as a sexual act, insemination in the womb and embryo growth. The act of conceiving is thus the prototype of creation. The integral ritual is a rebirth”31. However, there is also a bacchanal aspect of major social ceremonies. But the ritual is Apollonian in the mind because the power is revealed as “solar”. And it is turned toward Thanatos when, kneaded with demagogy and fascinated by evil, it serves the forces of shadows and death32. For “there are forces that cannot be silenced. When they are no longer satisfied within the framework of official temples, the demands of the sacred find their expression in the most aberrant forms of religiosity. Eliminated from the norms of collective organization, ignored, suspicious, or reproved, the powers of the dream reappear in an uncontrolled explosion”33. In this regard, it is worth recalling Marcel Mauss’s astonishment at the Nazi ceremonies of 1936: “that great modern societies... can be suggested as Australians are by their dances and set in motion like a round dance of children, it is something that we had not really foreseen. This return to the primitive had not been the subject of our reflections.

                                        31 Arthur Hocart, op. cit. p. 71, ibid. 32 See, for example, Hitler. Du charisme, by Ian Kershaw, Paris, Gallimard, 1987. 33 Raoul Girardet, Mythes et mythologies politiques, Paris, Le Seuil, 1986, p. 190.

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We were content with a few allusions to the state of the crowds when it was something else” 34. Mirabeau wanted to introduce concrete celebrations to create the right emotional conditions to “create new men”. In 1791, he declared that it was necessary to act on the senses of men because he believed in the virtue of these celebrations. According to him, “man, being sensitive is driven by striking images and deep emotions”, which should be used precisely in these celebrations35. Fascism had not yet appeared. Nevertheless, it was already to transform man in the crucible of the feast and the ritual in question. The human and social sciences can offer valuable help in understanding and preventing the “perversions of social matters” and the dark abysses of politics. Because, by explaining, we can perhaps prevent the misuse of politics. In the heat of a controversy with Tarde, did Durkheim not essentially claim that our research would not deserve an hour’s pain if it were only to have a speculative interest? Science would then only be an intellectual amusement if it had no practical use — to understand humanity and society, and even a moral purpose: to try to improve them36, through the stubborn work of conscience and intelligence. A vast project, which more than ever requires the converging effort of all lucid researchers, and goodwill.

                                        34 Cited by Michel Maffesoli, La Transfiguration du politique, Paris, Grasset, 1992, p. 173. 35 Cited by Martine Segalen, Rites et rituels contemporains, Paris, Nathan, 1998, p. 72. 36 See La sociologie de Durkheim, by Philippe Steiner, Paris, La Découverte, 1998, p. 64.

2 The Ritual, a “Total Scientific Object”1

2.1. The eternal question of the purpose of the ritual2 After these peripheral approaches having delimited the theoretical framework of the reflection proposed in these pages, let us return to the ritual itself. A few questions deserve to be asked at first glance: why the ritual? Why do people feel the need to sacrifice restrictive practices, without apparent utility for the uncultured? What if it is a celebration, which is at the center of the ceremony? Is a hero welcomed or commemorated? The social body, hypostasizing itself into sublimated representations, into founding myths? In the beginning, it seems that ritual practice allows the expression of something that would pass from the psyche to the social, through the detour of this mediation. The ritual would be a symbolic bridge between archetypal fears and                                         1 The ritual is a “total scientific object”, to paraphrase Marcel Mauss, because all the human and social sciences can approach it as an object of study, by producing original analyses, with their specific methods and concepts. 2 Our position could be called functionalist, because functions are assigned to the principle of rituality, which societies would “activate” to produce effects.

The Ritual Institution of Society, First Edition. Pascal Lardellier. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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their objective social representations through staged and thus symbolized practices. If we agree with Georges Balandier that the ritual “works essentially for order”3, we can refer to entropy to support this assertion. It is a strange reference at first glance! Entropy is a concept derived from thermodynamics. It defines the degree of potential disorder associated with an energy producing source. It was from the steam engine that Boltzmann refined the concept at the end of the 19th Century. But this entropy can also be social. In this case, it refers to the chaotic disorder that can affect a society. This is where sociology has its say with the notion of anomie, developed by Emile Durkheim. He made extensive use of it at the end of the 19th Century, in particular, to analyze suicide and the social division of labor. This anomie is a kind of social entropy, expressed as a form of erosion affecting institutions. It is linked not only to the disorder introduced into a society by a dilution of communities due to major economic, political, and social changes (such as revolutions) but also to a dissolution of individual and collective aspirations and demoralization. This anomie has implications for social mobility, marriage, fertility, mortality, and even morality rates (if this is measurable). Against this social entropy, against this anomie, the ritual would tend to introduce order. And we remember that, etymologically, the rite refers to order. This would then be a principle of structuring and harmonization, which can be described as homeostasis4.                                         3 Georges Balandier, Le Désordre. Eloge du mouvement, Paris, Fayard, 1988. 4 Homeostasis being the principle of self-regulation of the steam engine characterized by a high degree of entropy, and which is

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Each change of state, of status, is characterized by turbulence and uncertainties; the so-called “rites of passage” or “institution” responds to this disorder by allowing a change in relative serenity. And it is not an incident that most of the anxiogenic moments of individual or community life (known as life crises) are framed by rituals, intended to contain this stress5. The precautions for boarding and taking off at airports, which are always highly procedural6, are exemplary in this respect. This hypothesis of rituals that would induce social situations of anxiety is shared by researchers ranging from Arnold Van Gennep to Pierre Bourdieu. The principle of rituality also aims to control the “interstitial turbulence”7 that the community encounters during its development. The ritual is a channel containing through its mediation, symbolic, normative, and all forms of the disorder. “Failing to control the forces of nature, the ritual, through the organization it implies, allows people to control themselves and present a united front against the blows of fate”8.

                                        brought back (by a thermostat for example) to its equilibrium point. 5 This function of rituals is obvious, and OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and other compulsive manias designed to control anxiety are commonly referred to as “rituals” in individuals affected by these pathologies. 6 See Julian Pitt-Rivers: “Un rite de passage de la société moderne : le voyage aérien”, pp. 115—130, in Les Rites de passage aujourd’hui, edited by Pierre Centlivres and Jacques Hainard, Lausanne, L’Age d’homme, 1986. 7 Jean Cazeneuve and Nicole Sindzinge, “Rite”, in Encyclopaedia Universalis, vol. 19, Paris, 1990, pp. 64—71. 8 Lucien Scubla, introduction to Au commencement était le rite, Arthur Maurice Hoccart, Paris, La Découverte, 2005, p. 23.

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This does not detract from its other purpose, intercession, which it shapes in the direction of otherness. The ritual process, characterized by a primacy of order and measure, thus brings individuals and by extension communities back to stability and balance, by “organizational exacerbation”. In this sense, the slow and symmetrical gestures, the formal and harmonious organization of most community rituals is by no means random: in a tangible way, it is this entropy that it tends to control, by exacerbating control gestures. However, let us avoid being Manichean: “The order and disorder of a society are like the obverse and the reverse of a currency, inseparable, two linked aspects, one of which, in light of common sense, appears as the inverted figure of the other. But the inversion of order is not its reversal. It is part of it; it can be used to strengthen it. It makes order with disorder, just as sacrifice makes life with death9”. Rituals, whatever their nature (religious, secular, political, etc.), aim to introduce meaning while providing prehension and understanding — therefore, “taking” and “understanding” — in the face of the hazards and dangers of life, and the arbitrariness that is inherent in it. If they constrain, it is to order, redefine, tighten the disorder, and to reverse it. It goes without saying that the symbolic charges they instill are beneficial to institutions and society: it is a process of regeneration, a necessary restructuring at regular intervals, in order to reintegrate individuals and the community into the melting pot of their history, their memory, and their founding ideals.                                         9 Georges Balandier, Le Pouvoir sur scènes, Paris, Balland, 1992, p. 71.

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2.1.1. From ritual order to the central importance of the king The king (perhaps even the President), and with whom so much protocolary attention surrounds, can be considered as the living emblem of all these precautions. Without it — which exercises a function and occupies a central place, literally and figuratively — the social body would disintegrate in the absence of a structuring point. Because the ritual — we often come back to it — strives to master what is powerful and numinous. The king, like the president, is charismatic in the sense that he is invested with the numen inherent in power, even in regimes based on the primacy of rationality. And the rituals constitute a system in itself, sufficiently well organized to show this charism, to let it be seen by staging it, and to contain it, by demonstrating that it is mastered in this precise context: the ritual contains violence, at all levels. This obsession over the “emptiness of the center” is at the origin of many monarchical theories representing royalty in terms of centrality. All the civilizations that have given themselves kings have endeavored to symbolically represent them as a central point, carrying organizing virtues. This is not incidental. The path here is open to heliocentric symbolism, from Jupiter to Louis XIV and from Mikado to the great African kings. Thus, during the great ritual parades, the king constituted the principle and center of the triumphal Entries. Center here can be synonymous with an axis from which structuring is possible. And just as the ritual compensates for anomie, a social disorder, the royal function helps to compensate for this disturbance feared by institutions. The sovereign embodies this center, which is essential to social order, as it is the vector and guarantor of the organization. It introduces order and meaning, it constrains to structure, proposing historical coherence and social cohesion.

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2.2. The ritual as a “cultural form” The ritual, as a symbolic device, can be considered as a kind of channel. This social form transmits a culturally embedded knowledge, which individuals are aware of, during the ritual, to share with the generations that preceded them, or with those who experience it at the same time, but elsewhere. We remember the formula borrowed from Saint Augustine, who defined the ritual as the “present of the past”. Japanese culture ostensibly ritualizes relationships which take place within the kata framework. This word, which is not specific to martial arts, refers precisely to shape, etymologically. It is a formal structure inherited from tradition, and in which the individual passes and inserts themself, in order to be transmitted knowledge; as well as a mode of relationships stabilized by this kata, which promotes integration into a community perpetuated by this ritual framework. 2.2.1. Form in the social sciences10 If psychology, with its famous Gestalt, if esthetics, which Paul Valéry defined as the “science of form”, and if linguistics and semiotics pay great attention to form, by making it a preferred object or concept, this notion remains very much undervalued in the communication register. And more broadly, the form remains neglected by many social sciences. To be interested in social forms is to respond to Simmel’s invitation, whose “formal sociology” project explained that “it                                         10 This section contains elements published in the introduction to the book published and edited by myself and titled Formes en devenir: Approches communicationnelles, organisationnelles et symboliques, ISTE Editions, London, 2014.

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is necessary to uncover the forms, which in limited numbers, govern and organize social life”. This was a hypothesis taken up and supported by Goffman, for whom social life is entirely human interaction. However, this is determined by social forms. And for Simmel, the sociologist’s objective is to uncover these formal structures of social relations, regardless of their content. The form would be a mental, social, or material structure, which contains and delimits by imposing its outlines and rules, more or less fixed and rigid, on the senses (and, in particular, on sight) or on the mind. Above all, the form allows expression, giving it a semiotic, artistic, and social destination. But the communication form remains difficult to understand. In the museum, things are simple: as Louis Marin said, “the frame utters the painting as a speech”. This framework, which for him has the comfort of materiality, delimits, constrains, and contains meaning. In real life, things are often a little more complex. And yet, we spend our lives going through different forms, wearing them and “performing” them. The form can be mental, urban, architectural, linguistic, and semiotic. And of course, the form is also anthropological, which these pages try to demonstrate. However, a dichotomy can be established between material or technical forms (which are of the order of device, but also artistic expression), social and symbolic forms (intangible but tangible, such as social interactions, rituals), and, finally, linguistic and mental forms. There is indeed a difference of degrees, but not of nature, between these different categories of forms. Because to come back to my definition, it is always a question of structures that impose their outlines on social actors, on the modalities of social action and expression.

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2.2.2. Return to the ritual as a material, theoretical, and symbolic “form” The ritual can be considered, therefore, as a social and cultural matrix that pre-exists to individuals and conceals a capacity for social transformation, a force for symbolic effectiveness. I have often defined the ritual as a superstructure of social matters. The ritual awaits communities to come and seek order and meaning. Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoff state: “Ritual is in part a form, and a form which gives certain meanings to its contents. The work of ritual, then, is partly attributable to its morphological characteristics”11. But this form is not given sui generi. It requires being constructed as an object, and as a scientific object: because “the term ‘trace’ (which in this case deserves quotation marks, because its metaphorical value is strong and in many respects misleading) refers to an act of active mediation, in the political sense of this notion, which itself requires, to take place, a whole range of technical, social and semiotic mediations, in the socio-semitic sense of the term”12. We see here how many traces and forms can resonate and make sense. We have also seen that similarities exist, from the community forms of rituals to their interpersonal variations. We can then agree with what Yves Winkin is saying about interaction, which is also considered a cultural form. “The interaction seen by a sociologist will never be reduced, for him, to the interaction envisaged by the (social) psychologist. The second considers                                         11 Sally Moore, Barbara Myerhoff, Secular Ritual, Amsterdam, Van Gorcum, 1977, p. 8. 12 Yves Jeanneret, “La fabrique de la trace : une entreprise herméneutique”, Quand les traces communiquent... Culture, patrimoine, médiatisation de la mémoire, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2014, pp. 55—56.

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interaction as the result of the meeting of two or more people; the first proceeds in the opposite way: interactions expect people to go to them. This attitude remains deeply sociological. Primum movens is social and not individual. The aim is to identify a set of collective rules, as in linguistics, not to articulate a set of motivations, attitudes, and reason in the heart of the subject13”. And ritual forms guarantee a community memory14, in that they are stable structures for social integration, group reproduction (from generation to generation), and the transmission of symbolic legacies. Culture is what you need to know in order to belong15. Because “the ritual experience does not directly transmit messages, it first and tacitly establishes a relational context in which certain messages that contrast with the daily experience can be formulated. These messages may seem incomprehensible, obscure, or even absurd to the participants of the ceremony, but they remain a crucial element of it”16.                                         13 Yves Winkin, Anthropologie de la communication, Brussels, De Bœck, 1996, p. 190. 14 Edmund Leach and Victor Turner point out the fundamental role of rituals as vectors of transmission and information, their symbols being able to be processed as “storage units” that contain a maximum amount of information. See Marc Abélès, in Anthropologie de l’État, chapter “L’État en représentation”, Paris, Armand Colin, 1990, p. 117, et seq. 15 Quotation from Ward Goodenough, taken from Yves Winkin’s Anthropologie de la communication, Brussels, De Bœck, 1996, p. 9. The exact wording, less aphoristic than mine, is: “culture is made up of everything you need to know or believe to behave in a way that is acceptable to the members of this society”. 16 Michael Houseman, Carlo Severi, Naven ou le donner à voir. Essai d’interprétation de l’action rituelle, Paris, CNRS, 1994, pp. 49—50.

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The ritual provides a form and substance, which are those of culture. It is this form in which one must accept blending in to belong. Pierre Bourdieu, studying institutional rituals, affirmed that this ritual always marks the boundary between those who are still outside and those who are already inside. The institutional ritual implicitly states: “this man is a man” — implying, which is not self-evident, a real man. It tends to make the smallest, weakest, most effeminate man a fully male being, separated by a difference in nature from the most masculine, tallest, strongest woman, etc. “To institute, in this case, is to consecrate, that is, to sanction and sanctify a state of affairs, an established order, as precisely a constitution does in the legal-political sense of the term”17. What has just been said about the ritual as a form raises a question with philosophical resonances: that of the degree of freedom, and the free will that the individual keeps, in the face of those cultural systems that would enable selfdetermination. Certainly, we are all carriers of socio-cultural constructions (habitus), which are at the articulation between what we receive from the outside, and the filters through which we see and perceive the world. The codes and norms imposed by rituals could a priori be considered as instances of alienation, which would predispose the individual to interact in a certain way. This must be minimized by reaffirming the role of culture: belonging to it is a predisposition, but it is not because they share something of the order of cultural heritage that social actors are fully determined, and therefore as “dispossessed of themselves”. This debate is in line with another, recurrent debate on the role of the unconscious.                                         17 Pierre Bourdieu, “Les rites comme actes d’institution”, in Les Rites de passage aujourd’hui, edited by Pierre Centlivres and Jacques Hainart, Lausanne, L’Age d’Homme, 1986, pp. 207—208.

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Of course, rituals can in some respect be considered as forms of “symbolic violence” (P. Bourdieu), because they constrain the time of the “passage”. “Academic support is an eloquent example of this”. In the end, rituals (interpersonal and community) do not alienate, but they allow us to integrate into the “dance of life” (E. T. Hall), to participate equally with others, with whom social and cultural rules are shared because they are contained and transmitted in the same structures. As vectors of integration, they make it possible above all to free the individual from their social being (many rituals endorse the symbolic theme of rebirth), thus offering a place, through the mastery of codes of participation stabilized by tradition, and which constitute an invaluable door opener of community belonging. 2.3. The ritual device The device, or dispositive, is a concept that is widely accepted in the social sciences, according to the authors, from Lyotard to Foucault, and from Marin to Agamben: mental, social, technical, and symbolic devices. Here, it refers to the material and spatial character of the organization of rituals. However, this materiality covers political, social, and symbolic issues from an anthropological perspective. When we are interested in rituals, we must pay the most scrupulous attention to our material device, as well as to the way in which space is delimited, in which the decorum is established, in which gestures are regulated. The advice is from Emile Durkheim, who posed in Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse to be sensitive to “the primordial

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importance attached by almost all religions to the material part of ceremonies”18. The expression “ritual device”, on the other hand, was proposed by Marc Augé, who thus refers to the materiality of the ceremonial process. “It is such a device — the one whose absence makes the need even more obvious — that we propose to call ritual. The ritual will thus be defined as the implementation of a symbolic device that builds relative identities through mediating otherness”19. According to this author, the materiality of the device is inseparable from its ceremonial purpose, such as the communication with “symbolic systems”, as Claude LéviStrauss understands it in his Introduction à l’œuvre de Marcel Mauss. This device ensures the passage from one language to another; it ratifies another way of perceiving reality. Indeed, it is required from the participants in the ritual that they change their register of consciousness, in an intuitive but radical way. However, shifters are precisely these tangible elements of the system. Because ritual decorum is more than just a decoration: from its perceptible materiality, from its spatial organization, the establishment of a context, which produces symbolism and brings about social and institutional transformations, will follow. Above all, this ritual device is made up of carpets (the protocol red carpets), barriers, and hedges, which delimit spaces. But in the same way, this horizontal constituency system is complemented by other elements, relating to exhibition techniques: indeed, scenes, platforms, stands, grandstands, and ceremonial stairs (like in Cannes) have the function of allowing an appearance, an incarnation. All these                                         18 Emile Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Paris, PUF, 1979, p. 48. 19 Marc Augé, Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains, Paris, Aubier, 1994, p. 89.

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elements will offer optimal visibility, favoring the view on, at the same time as this “assumption” of the actors. The physical elevation and the spatial ascent, so frequent in rituals, are ascensions that go beyond their theatrical dimension, to become powerfully symbolic. Signifying the material difference between the outside world and the ritual world, the ritual device grants a new status to beings, gestures, and objects. It also arises like the materialization of the link that unites the ritual actors, in this space and this precise moment. This ritual device, therefore, constitutes a synthetic space20. Built to become a sign, it semiotizes space. And this device, behind its a priori contingent character, proceeds to a delimitation, which is a horizontal closure, and a vertical opening on another dimension. The whole system aims to make an intercession tangible: stairs and red carpet, platform, podium, and showcases offer maximum visibility, while they are placed between; between an outside and an inside, and especially between a “downstairs” and an “upstairs”. It is indeed the sacralization of space that is at stake during these great community rituals, which seek to mobilize processes of symbolic effectiveness, to bring about access to other states. Everything is then done to signify this demarcation between the lay space (etymologically in front of the temple) and the sacred perimeter. And the success of the ritual as a symbolic operator lies in the fact that it adorns those who come to it (kings, presidents, the pope, stars...) with a                                         20 Expression proposed by Jean Davallon, in L’Exposition à l’œuvre. Médiation symbolique et stratégies de communication, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2000. He draws a striking parallel between the museum space and the ritual spaces, both of which are based on a device that semiotizes the space and induces certain behaviors in relation to it.

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charism halo21. However, they need the splendor of decorum to appear and show themselves. This gold serves as their showcase, and perhaps also as a screen. Such credit is given to the ritual device, the scene of an “incarnation” that can trigger disproportionate reactions in its witnesses: fascination, shock, and even amazement. The ritual device inscribes its participants in a temporality that abstracts them from ordinary time. Often, the entry into this other time is characterized by ceremonial stages marking the passage from an ordinary temporal register to another historical and even mythical one. In fact, it is significant that the material arrangement of the ritual device is systematically based on the principle of balance and centrality, which opens up symmetry and harmony, all governed by a rigorous rhythmic sense. Balance and harmony, introduced materially by the ritual into the social group, are one of the great themes of Confucianism. Le livre des rites explains how the practice of li (the ritual) is the cornerstone of social construction, as the supreme mark of education, separating the “wild” from the civilized22. According to Georges Balandier, rereading Durkheim in his Anthropologie politique, “every society associates its own order with an order that exceeds it, expanding to the cosmos for traditional societies. Power is sacred because every society affirms its will for eternity and fears the return to chaos as the realization of its own death”23. However, this                                         21 In our opinion, the ritual device also tends to control the charism, whose magical and anthropological origins refer to numen and mana. And in the etymology of the “charism”, again, we find both grace and “service rendered”. 22 See on this point the Entretiens de Confucius, Paris, Le Seuil, 1981. 23 Georges Balandier, Anthropologie politique, Paris, PUF, 1967,

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order is found in ritual devices in its most accomplished form. It is then represented in its material, spatial, and symbolic dimensions. It will not be surprising to then consider how much most ritual devices are, explicitly or implicitly, forms of cosmogonic representations, which favor the symbolic phasing of a microcosm with a macrocosm that encompasses and regenerates it, whether the traditional bond is alive or broken. They are traces of something superior, whose device expresses the sacred nature, in the efforts of this device to contain and celebrate. Let us recall that the triumphs and Royal Entrances of the Renaissance saw the cities closed, hunting out everything that was “entropic”, to reconstitute an insularity of an eschatological nature. We went so far as to proclaim the ceremonial skies in the streets where the official royal procession passed. Abundance was decreed, fountains spat wine, food was distributed in abundance... These resurgences of the ancient Saturnalia and the triumphs of the Roman generals symbolically instituted the mythological golden age, the heavenly Jerusalem, in a quest for this Utopia24 whose program Thomas More had just outlined. 2.4. The symbolic effectiveness of the ritual, between context and performance 2.4.1. From the system to the context An elementary semiotic principle enjoins us to consider that meaning is rarely separable from the conditions of its production. This rule remains entirely valid regarding the                                         republished 1995, p. 119. 24 Similarly, and in another equally cosmogonic register, the carousels of the classical age represented the wheel of the sun, as well as etymologically (caro sol).

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ritualistic context, a symbolic matrix that requires equal consideration of all that occurs, and all that is produced within it. Thus, the ritual device is only worth as long as it generates a context, and it is a context in power before it is in performance. This means that by virtue of a double mediation, of a technical and symbolic nature, this device, in order to achieve efficiency, must go beyond its status as a simple spectacular environment (as a theater scene can be), to reach the level that will transform it into a context. According to Ray Birdwhistell25, this context constitutes the framework of the social cord: this beautiful image of the fibers that come together to make rope joins the idea of this social binding represented by the ritual matrix. It brings individuals together, becomes a tessitura, closed to itself, within the representation system that endorses it, and remains nevertheless open to mediation and all the interactions that constitute it. Martin Buber (quoted by Victor Turner) states that “the community is there, where it appears, where it emerges”26: it then exists, in an intangible and powerful way, in a passing current, it is part of something dynamic, which makes us closer to others, but also with them. The two authors state that, under certain conditions, a communitas may emerge. Opposing societas, it is characterized by its high symbolic density and its revitalizing social functions. The context is, in fact, a mental disposition produced collectively, then harmoniously shared by ritual actors. It will distill a form of relational energy, a binder capable of                                         25 Yves Winkin, La Nouvelle Communication, Paris, Le Seuil, 1981, p. 293. 26 Martin Buber, in Le phénomène rituel. Structure et contrestructure, Victor Turner (ed.), Paris, PUF, 1990, p. 124.

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establishing a tacit rule of conduct, of erecting a temporary modus vivendi, powerful enough to create mimicry, conformation, and naturally rejecting what is denoted outside. The symbolic effectiveness of this ritual context depends as much on a decorum deliberately intended to produce the emergence of “being-together” as on factors such as the general conviction of the situation and the legitimacy it will be given. The essential thing is “to believe in it”, to accept as true the reality proposed by the ritual spectacle. The ritual context is not suitable for skeptics: it requires unconditional acceptance. Its strength lies there: that it gains credibility in bodies and minds by imposing itself naturally. Without even mentioning the great political rituals, as with places of worship and most museums: they require from those who enter them an attitude of restraint, reverence, and silence. Attitudes that, directly ritual, are sought by all ceremonial architecture. And this context is powerful enough for all those who subscribe to it to call to order and decorum (because ultimately, it is a question of morality) the very few offenders. This is not written anywhere; however, it is natural that people do not smoke in churches, and that people do not run or shout in museums. Bodies and objects change their status during ritual sequences, densifying dramatically. By the grace of what action? It is the nature of this particular context that instills this almost sacred dimension in them, by defunctionalizing them in order to proceed to a secondary resymbolization, where a mysticism emerges as the focus of the “ritual performance”; this is the case of political rituals, which express an obstinate quest for the transcendence inherent in

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power27. Sacredness, moreover, is above all a mental operation, and its own theatrical effects. Did Durkheim not claim that objects are sacred when they are considered as such, and when they are offered the treatment that would be given to relics? Thus, the exhibition system of many museums recreates the finery of the context of religious celebration. This is because the museum cannot disappear behind the objects exhibits; and in many ways, this place is similar to a ritual scene. A representation space devoted to art and memory, it even comes close in some cases to a sacred space. The reverential and collected attitude observed among most visitors is indicative of the religious as well as of a cultural status conferred on the museum. However, it is the museum context that induces almost religious respect for places and works. An archetypal object (as Mauss and Godelier understand it), the muséalia (i.e. the museum piece) is a “semiophore” (Krystof Pomian), a “transcendent” object whose meaning is understood by all and shared by all. Introduced into the museum, what is on display is almost sacred. Precisely thanks to everything that is at stake in the field of scenography — exhibition techniques — and the context it will create, certain effects will be induced. The ritual context is, therefore, an operation produced and shared mentally by its protagonists. Based on staging techniques designed to magnify and impress, it will produce a confirmation with an established order, both legitimized and regenerated by this ritual sequence.

                                        27 Let us not forget that, in many ancient civilizations, the king was also the high priest. The two sacred functions were mixed. And the word hierarchy, which usually characterizes power, etymologically contains sacred (hieros).

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2.4.2. From framework”

“primary

framework”

to

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“transformed

Everything that is received is always received according to the receiver mode28. In order for the perception of the ritual context to not be aberrant — in view of its extreme theatricalization — a change of mental framework is necessary for the actors. During the ritual process, people rub shoulders who do not perceive the ceremony in the same way and do not expect the same effects. Thus, during political ceremonies, or during the great ritual moments of the Cannes Film Festival, one can meet, in the middle of the ceremonial device, employees assigned to security or cleaning, or even official photographers. They are discreet, and not at all involved in the process, because they are not there for that, and because they are not obliged to “play the game” and believe in it. And ritual actors do not see these people, simply because they are not there to be seen. This example approaches the notion of a framework, as stated by Erving Goffman. He also uses a relatively similar example, in the case of Japanese puppet theater, where technicians in work clothes walk “on stage, without unduly disturbing the spectators; and for good reason, their nontheatrical clothes make them irrelevant”29. In fact, the way in which ritual sequences are understood is not the responsibility of a “primary framework”, but of a “transformed framework”, and more precisely of a “modeled framework”. It is this change in a mental register that will                                         28 This sentence, taken from Thomas Aquinas’ Somme théologique (quidquid recipitur ad modum reciptoris), consecrates this Father of the Church as a very ancient theoretician of communication! 29 Erving Goffman, Les cadres de l’expérience, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1991, p. 207. Moreover, among the five fundamental modes of “transformed frameworks” as defined by Goffman, they are precisely ceremonies.

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give the ritual its credibility and, what’s more, its effectiveness. This transformation makes it possible to seriously enter into another regime of perception and belief, opening up the possibility of symbolic effectiveness. And the ritual context as a whole will go so far as to generate modified states of consciousness, reality becoming symbolic, and symbolism becoming performative, as it is capable of transforming this reality. This confirms that, in fact, it is by virtue of a certain gaze that everything is played out during the ritual: just as in the allegory of the Naked King30, the subjects persist in (wanting) to see the sovereign dressed in a magnificent way; the ritual device and context mentally produce the conditions of appeal, admiration, and awareness of a historical moment experienced and shared by the community. 2.4.3. The “ritual body”... The ritual is a special experience for the bodies of those who come to experience it. The ritual sequences sublimate and subjugate these bodies at the same time to make them political signs. Thus, religion is a corpus of values that contains a doctrine, but it is first and foremost a set of practices. The spiritual experience is above all a physical and sensitive experience. The body is powerfully mobilized by religion and by the ritual: one gets up, sits down, kneels down, goes to bed, remains silent, recites, fasts, and suspends one’s desires or sexual impulses. One is constantly caught up in an experience that wants to be spiritual, but which “subjugates” the body, that is to say, it puts it, etymologically, “under the yoke”. It is precisely the ritual that says what to do and what not to do; it is its “strict observance” that brings believers                                         30 See Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale, originally titled “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.

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into the community. Blaise Pascal was right when he said: “make the gestures of faith, and you will believe”. Finally, what is the difference between someone who is “culturally religious” and someone who “practices religion”? These are rituals. For the second will go to Mass, respect the calendar and the great festivals, while the first will have a cultural adherence, but will not sacrifice themself to the ritual practice. Taking into consideration the specific nature of the ritual body amounts to subscribing to the wish expressed by Marcel Mauss: “the inventory and description of all the uses that people, throughout history and especially throughout the world, have made and continue to make of their bodies”; it is being understood that it is people, who “always and everywhere, have known how to make their body a product of their techniques and their representations”31. Particularities of the ritual body, we were saying? In a nutshell, our bodies, on a daily basis, divide their mobility into a few broad categories of activities, taken into account and analyzed by sociologists, anthropologists, semioticians, among others: first of all, the “elementary motions”, which define the basic movement sequences. Then, production activities, first and foremost work, for all those who use this body to ensure their subsistence. Finally, leisure and other entertainment: sports, tourist activities, etc... But the moments during which the bodies are inserted in strong symbolic contexts, which will dramatize, script and stage gestures, words, and objects, until they are granted another status are rare. This is the case for the ritual context.                                         31 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction à l’œuvre de Marcel Mauss”, in Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris, PUF, 1950, 1999, pp. XII and XIV. On this point, refer to Marcel Mauss’s inalterable and founding “Principe de classification des techniques du corps”.

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The ritual always requires a physical demonstration, a “creation of presence” (E. Scheffelin). Since it cannot be experienced in an abstract way, it imposes an incarnation without which no symbolic action can be achieved. For to be credible, this ritual must be experienced from within, in two ways: within the ritual, through active participation and integration in the ritual form, which contains, encloses, as much as within the participants, by being played, and above all is internalized. Also, ceremonial gestures will produce profound effects on their actors. Emile Durkheim devotes sequences from the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life to ritual gestures, which go so far as to “invigorate consciences”. He explains that it is through the acceptance of the rituals imposed on him that the natural body of people becomes a social body. These gestures appear publicly in relationships no longer subjected to force — the demonstration is all the more powerful — but molded in this ritual channel, expressing an absoluteness of social order, staged in a hyperbolic way. Each of the actors physically demonstrates their status, function, and social position in relation to that of the others. For example, the reverence of individuals means deference to constituted bodies. The functions are redefined physically. Symbols are truly lived, values are embodied, take shape, and demonstrate social consistency. It is necessary to understand the meaning of the permanent control of bodies in rituals through its codified gestures, which leave no room for spontaneity. There are relationships of domination, hypostasized by this procession that defines functions, expresses allegiances, and confirms ranks and statutes. The more modest you are on the social scale, the more you have to stoop, kneel, and even bow to appear reverent. On the other hand, the more important we are, institutionally, the more central and elevated we are in

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the system. As such, kings in ceremonial representations are always alone in front of everyone, in the middle of decorum and in terms of size; like the French President today. 2.4.4. ...to the “ritual performance” In fact, the actors of the ritual must submit to a “performance”. Based on a mediation of mobilizing bodies, this performance means playing something, which has the function of making something visible, credible, and legitimate. Claude Lévi-Strauss stated in L’Homme nu that “the gestures that make up the ceremonial activities take place in loco verbi, replacing words”. According to him, the ritual condenses into concrete and unitary form procedures which would otherwise have been discursive. This notion of performance is borrowed from the theories of theater and performance32. First of all, performance is an artistic action, which finds its raison d’être in its event dimension, its public, and the media character (see Jackson Pollock’s Happenings). By extension, theater actors must enter “into a role”, and this implies that the actor will integrate the psychological “character” of the character they play33. Psychological preparation work must sometimes be carried out so that the actor manages to move from the individual to the character                                         32 Bringing the world of theater and the sphere of rituals closer together helps us grasp what is common to them: the sense of dramaturgy, staging, and performance, that is, the fact that bodies are invested with a role to play, to make them see and believe in “spectactors”. The title of Victor Turner’s book, From Ritual to Theatre, takes on its full dimension. 33 And the costume we put on is not least to act. The actors’ confidence levels on the induced transformations are explicit on this subject. Hence, the important role of uniforms and symbolic attributes in most ceremonial rituals and contexts.

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without damage being caused. To each one corresponds a particular personality, and one does not pass from one to the other without consideration. We understand the crucial nature of “ritual performance”. “Playing” seriously the role of king, president, star, public figure, judge, and academic during an official term is of paramount importance. Because status awareness, experienced from within, will flow precisely from the achievement of this performance. We play, certainly, but this ritual game goes beyond the simple playful function: we join Geertz’s “deep play”, acting “as if”, knowing that this true simulation will exert a symbolic action. Of course, we can adopt what Goffman called “role distance”, and make the public understand “that we know well” that we are playing a role during a ritual. Nevertheless, this is to make people smile, certainly, but not to cause a scandal! Ritual performance, therefore, consists of the inscription of a symbolic and dramaturgical function in the body, assigned to a social and institutional posture, to emerge transformed. Deprived of its will, this body becomes the instrument of symbols. Indeed, the gestures, “the appearance of the participants, the decorum (i.e. the device) are conceived as values that we intend to celebrate, or messages of a political, scientific, artistic nature... that we wish to transmit”34. Ritual performance leads the posture, the gesture, and the words to the point where they become symbols, institutionally effective. In the academic field, let us recall the fundamental role played by materials, rituals in their own right. Before defense (or without defense), the thesis is a scientific                                         34 Christian Bromberger, Terrain no. 15, “Paraître en public”, October 1990, Paris, Mission du patrimoine, p. 7.

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document that follows an obligatory administrative path (pre-reports, registration by the competent authorities...). It is the defense that will institute the imperialist, legitimize and consecrate their work and status, making their “creators” peers above all. After the defense, all the doctors! This defense, in its formal course, will also bring its actors (jury and candidates) into contact with the academic tradition, within Alma Mater. This ritual is a “form” that has been perpetuated for centuries, and encloses its participants during this space—time while putting them in symbolic contact with all those who have passed through it before them. The historical analysis of the body, and even of social bodies that are in fact political bodies, must be given new relevance. A “double”35 or a simple body, constellating, radiant or historically artful, torn apart, bodies radiating gold or horrors, bodies on stages, on trestles or scaffolding, bodies magnified, tortured, exhibited to see and be seen, always... This raises a set of powerful anthropological issues that the apparent desacralization of institutions has not exhausted. Their study remains open. 2.5. Opening up to the myth... A device, a context, an action on the body, the requirement of a performance... We need to understand the esthetic and symbolic perimeters of the ritual. However, it is                                         35 Reference to the “king’s two bodies”, or royal “double bodies”, taken from the title of Ernst Kantorowitz’s work, and the theory according to which the sovereigns of medieval and reborn France and England saw a mystical part (the corpus mysticum) survive and pass from king to king, “leaving the dead to seize the living”, and thus ensure the permanence of the nation and the perpetuation of royalty, of sacred origin. See The King’s Two Bodies, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1981.

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essential to not forget the discourses on which the ritual is based, and the narratives that articulate it. This is where the myth comes into play, or on the scene... Rituals and myths have a dialectical relationship. Both are living traces of something older. “If people today perform creative rituals, they must have done so in the past; it seems reasonable to give them credit and consequently to treat the myths they recite in the rituals as a description of those that were performed in the past. A myth of creation is therefore not a speculation on the origin of the world, but a historical narrative36”. Rituals and myths activate another state of reality; they superimpose on ordinary space—time an enchanted, theatricalized reality, with a sometimes psychodramatic dimension. It is at this price that they will allow their actors to enter into the collective illusion that they carry and serve. Thus, we often portray an original murder, a primordial sacrifice, a painful separation. For this myth “treats what is at the origin, in the beginning; it refers, by its narrative quality, to temporality, not of a succession of historical events, but of a founding time during which an order is generated; it binds itself to memory as a revelation allowing access to hidden realities”37. Politics is full of legends that nestle it in mystery and grandeur. And these original myths regenerate the social body, confirming the belief in common roots, and, ideally, in a shared destiny. July 14 is an example in France of this, of the articulation between founding narratives (the great revolutionary gesture) and a set of ceremonies (including                                         36 Arthur Hocart, op. cit., p. 72. 37 Georges Balandier, Le Désordre. Éloge du mouvement, Paris, Fayard, 1988, pp. 24—25.

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parades...) celebrating the Republic, and national cohesion. Indeed, “from this myth, the political ritual is obviously nourished to a large extent. It is, in the opposite sense, natural that ritual discourse aspires to create myth”38 — as it was with the “double body” and the divine origins for royalty. In the context of the French “republican monarchy”, Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand clearly understood the profound meaning of this better than their successors, playing on distance with a consummate art of staging. Of course, the symbolic effectiveness of the ritual and the affirmation of a community consciousness depend on the group’s adherence to these founding myths. “A narrative of an explanatory nature should not be forgotten, however, that myth is also a mobilizing power. The mental restructuring function of the political imagination therefore corresponds to another one, which is social restructuring”39. The powerful poetic dimension of mythological narratives does not exclude their conformist and moral character. It is getting closer to the ritual now. The mythical word organizes the world, it hierarchizes it, by introducing a meaning and an order, like the ritual. Fatalist by design, the myth explains, but also enacts, in order to make things acceptable. Myth and ritual tend toward the same goal: they proceed to a structuring idealization for the communities that perform them, in order to recover — and to replay — their wholeness and their original integrity.

                                        38 Marc Augé, Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains, Paris, Aubier, 1994, p. 102. 39 Raoul Girardet, Mythes et mythologies politiques, Paris, Le Seuil, 1986, p. 181.

 

3 Rituals and the Media

3.1. Communication objects: anthropological issues Let us now focus on the anthropological dimension of “ritual media”1. Indeed, rituals and the media maintain a pragmatic relationship, combining their symbolic, political, and institutional effects. It is in the tradition of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz that we will question the sustainability of “ritual media”2. Moreover, it is not only audiovisual media that are pertinent here. Giving a historical resonance to my subject, we will see that more than four centuries ago, in the Ancien Régime in France, political rituals already maintained a very close relationship with the ceremonial publications that                                         1 Of course, a medium cannot be of a ritual nature, since it is technical. The expression “ritual media” implies ritual programs, which become a media genre in their own right. 2 The book by Dayan and Katz, Media Events. The Live Broadcasting of History, Harvard, 1992, is based on the analysis of a corpus of media events that have received a strong political response, such as Pope John Paul II’s first trips to Poland. My analysis was also based on other texts by the same authors, including “Télévision d’intervention et spectacle politique. Agir par le rituel”, and “Le Pape en voyageur”, published in Hermès and Terrain (see References).

The Ritual Institution of Society, First Edition. Pascal Lardellier. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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extended them, by granting them a form of “textual and iconographic eternity”3. And we will note the fundamental role attributed to the gaze as an authority of legitimization and a vector of belonging during these ritual programs. For ceremonial media “produce the communities they address” (D. Dayan); they produce them through a common vision and shared emotions, through this intuition of history that captures their “spect-actors” (Glossary). And the ritual media bring their “diasporic communities” (E. Katz, D. Dayan) into contact with this emerging history. 3.1.1. The long genealogy of ritual media Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz’s book had the merit, in the mid-1990s, of highlighting the profound anthropological dimension of television programs when they broadcast rituals of a political or religious nature. These media rituals have grown in power since the end of the Second World War4 to acquire visibility and social power that give them the increased effects of classical ceremonies. However, the emergence of “ritual media” does not date back to the emergence of television in the middle of the 20th Century: their history is several hundred years old, and they had been able to borrow, well before the emergence of audiovisual and then digital media, other media, pursuing the same aims, for example, praising the great ones, legitimizing the institutions in place, and creating the emotional conditions for popular support for the celebration while working to “produce the official history”.                                         3 Pascal Lardellier, Les Miroirs du Paon, Les Entrées royales, rites et rétorique politiques dans la France de l’Ancien Régime, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2002. 4 Historians usually date the birth of television as a mass medium from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on June 2, 1953.

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Even before the 15th Century, “very rich times”, chronicles and other official relations (from the verb to relate), published as soon as possible, accompanied all the major political and religious events: weddings, coronations and investitures, solemn entrances and the taking up of office, visits, burials, and oaths... They already fulfilled this function of memorialization, as much as of commemoration and tribute. Ritual media intend to bear witness to the inevitably historical dimension of the event of which they take note, at the same time as they report on it, and this at all times. 3.2. Rituals and media: cross interests, coupled effects The great institutional rituals naturally find a media extension, these ritual retransmissions being of an “unavoidable”5 character, as journalistic jargon would say. Indeed, almost all major political and social events (visits by heads of state, investitures, royal weddings, funerals of personalities, etc.) are broadcast on television and now on social networks. The arrival of continuous news channels has been a godsend for the ritualization of information. And in a paradoxical movement, information is demonetized, trivialized, “flowing” constantly from the “informational tap”; but, on the other hand, everything that can be a somewhat solemn event — speeches, debates, ceremonies, meetings, commemorations — is transmitted live, with the power of media ritualization. Moreover, major events are sometimes                                         5 Rituals and media do not have a conscience in themselves. Behind each are institutions. However, a consensus has always been reached on the broadcasting of major events — weddings, funerals, receptions of heads of state, investitures... Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz reflect in their book on the discussions preceding the broadcasting of ritual ceremonies and the conditions for their historicalization. In France, the question arose of a state funeral (or not) for the singer Charles Aznavour (October 2018), who finally received his national and televised tribute.

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scheduled on several channels at once, thus demonstrating their blinding historical visibility; it would seem that something crucial is at stake here for the media, which are partners and even co-producers of History. And the first virtue of these media retransmissions, compared to the rituals of the past, lies in the fact that they multiply the audience of the great rituals. This is crucial when we regain awareness of the membership and belonging functions fulfilled by rituals, linked to the potential for dramatization hidden in the audiovisual media. To the falsely candid question asked by Daniel Dayan: “Can you become a pilgrim without leaving your living room?” the answer is certainly yes. More than inert partners in the event, the media are in fact obligated passages, guarantors of the existence of the ritual, and stakeholders in the social and historical construction of the event. For “it is clear that television does not play the role of an undifferentiated pipe, a simple organ of transmission of the event, but that its technical nature is coupled with rhetoric aimed at shaping the audience’s response, imposing on them, if not precise content, at least a certain register of experience, and proposing roles which, even if they negotiate them, are part of the construction or definition of the situation presented”6. This is the originality of this anthropological approach to the media, represented by E. Katz, D. Dayan, B. Myerhoff, and J. McAloon. It opens up the study of the media from approaches that attach too little importance to the cultural                                         6 Daniel Dayan, “Présentation du Pape en voyageur. Télévision, expérience rituelle, dramaturgie politique”, Terrain, no. 15, “Paraître en public”, Mission du Patrimoine, Paris, 1990, p. 20.

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context of reception and to the modes of collective appropriation of ritual content. It relativizes socioeconomic analyses that neglect the anthropological basis for the programming of certain types of TV shows. On this point, these quantitative approaches are forgetting the profound aspirations of the communities and institutions to come to the ritual, to live a “theatricalized social dramaturgy” (according to V. Turner), whose sublime character goes far beyond the usually audiometric and semio-linguistic questions specific to media questions. Above all, this anthropological perspective reintegrates the study of the media into a broad perspective, restoring all their symbolic dimensions to these programs. Do not they contribute to creating social cohesion by “producing” audiences especially, who, looking together, know that they belong to the same community? And they are always a digression experienced collectively by millions of people, in the case of royal marriages, funerals of heads of state, or even the opening of the Olympic Games. In this sense, anthropological studies applied to the media renew not only anthropology, by opening it to contemporary objects, but also the study of the media, by revealing the adhesion strength of certain types of programs, which place their influence far beyond that of everyday television programs. “Ritual media” therefore cultivate a particularity, linked both to their content and their social effects. If institutions organizing major ritual ceremonies attach so much importance to their media coverage, if it is sufficiently serious to allow them to disrupt the schedules of usual programs, it is also, as Daniel Dayan points out, because these retransmissions are assigned a purpose: nothing less than an inscription in history.

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The mediated ritual is not a subritual or a ritual substitute, an avatar that technical power of attorney would sweeten: on the contrary, it is a multiplied ritual, made potentially universal and “eternal”7, and which finds in the modes of participation and “consumption” that it creates the conditions for symbolic action specific to the ritual in general. From one to the other, there is a difference in degree, but not a difference in nature. D. Dayan and E. Katz explain that virtual communities of ritual media tend to take shape when people gather to watch these ceremonial events. Viewers reconstitute themselves into spontaneous communities, these programs calling for “collective viewing” and “communion”. And even at a time when everyone can follow any event from their tablet or smartphone, large events still gather crowds in public places where they are broadcast, and these crowds also come to follow these moments to experience together. Look at the recent way in which “fan zones” have developed to give an element of “living together” to communities of strangers gathered in the urban squares of major sporting events. The Church soon understood the fundamental role that could help it to play audiovisual media in its ecumenical mission. Thus, since the early 1950s, canonical texts have followed one another, enacted by the Vatican, to affirm that the blessings received by the faithful in prayer in front of their television sets were valid, from a symbolic point of view. And in fact, almost similar functions are granted to major political and religious ceremonies and their media retransmissions: legitimacy, allegiance, belonging and a “hegemonic aim” via the effects of “seeing with”. Because we must not forget the essentially normative character of the                                         7 Published or recorded, the mediated ritual will indeed be kept and watched; this is one of its functions: memorization extending the production of the story.

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ritual, which “works for order” (G. Balandier) and in favor of institutions that it always contributes to legitimizing. 3.2.1. Are media events really events? Event theories usually construe the event as a carrier of unexpected discontinuity and disruption. It is about “the emergence of the future in a stable environment”8. The event is considered as an acceleration of everyday life and history, disrupting a state of the world by introducing some novelty, the unexpected, a turbulence. A revolution, in its sudden brutality, or the murder of a personality, is generally considered to be a historical event. The attacks that have regularly struck Europe in recent years are indeed “monster events”, with “unpredictable predictability”. But in the case of the live broadcast of major political and religious rituals on television, what remains of the event, when the circumstances of its hold and conduct are fully prepared and controlled? In the official reception of a king or a president, one might ask, what is the part of the unexpected? Indeed, almost everything is known in advance9. The social and institutional relations generated by the ritual deliberately take precedence over its intrinsic content. Media rituals would in fact be more like “pseudo-events”, in the sense that Daniel Boorstin meant it. According to him,                                         8 Jean-Paul Aron, “Audiographie de l’événement”, Communications, no. XVIII, “L’événement”, Paris, Le Seuil, 1972, p. 156. 9 My 3-year research in ancient archives and municipal archives allowed me to “discover” that the works relating to the Royal Entrances were sometimes entirely written in advance, on the basis of the program of festivities created by learned humanists who were also the authors of these works: only a few blank spaces were reserved for the King’s responses to municipal orations, hastily completed so that they would be available for sale as close as possible to the event’s end.

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the pseudo-event is not spontaneous but occurs because it was predicted or triggered. It is essentially provoked with the objective of being told or recorded10. Political rituals have obvious similarities with this “pseudo-event”. And yet, the ritual often finds itself at the very heart of this facade conforming with the production conditions for “live history”. Event, non-event, pseudo-event... We must not overlook the historical significance of these official visits, ceremonial receptions and funerals, which are broadcast with pomp and emphasis. Despite this facade of conformity, their performative character makes it possible to regenerate diplomatic and political relations. 3.2.2. The symbolic power of media rituals Moreover, media rituals are emancipating themselves from the political and religious sphere in order to find new places, new actors, and new practices. The world of sport and cultural industries are their new fields of predilection, with media ritualization having the ability to script and dramatize these events. They appropriate the ritual codes, seeking to summon their symbolic effectiveness, at the risk and peril of its sweetening, trivialized in these “lay liturgies” (C. Rivière). But when their subjects are not overused, the ritual media play the role of symbolic operators who enter the process of legitimizing the actors and institutions that mobilize them. Authors of ceremonial television are formal: the important thing seems to be, for a community or institution, to have access to the airwaves, to have the right to retransmission. Thus, several contemporary revolutions, violent or “velvet”,

                                        10 Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, USA, Peter Smith Publishers, 1984.

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were played and won on the air11, and were in fact already accomplished when their retransmission was authorized, as with the convening of the General States, then the drafting of the grievance books allowing the French revolutionary momentum to express itself, and to find its dynamics. Because these ritual programs mediatize at the same time as they authorize the conditions for change. These “ritual media” show a scene that becomes historical through the emotional force that is collectively invested in it. If the technical nature of the media is important, it is then overtaken by the modalities of collective appropriation to which it will give rise, with, always, social, political, and institutional consequences. 3.2.3. The emergence and particularities of a fully fledged media genre What are the characteristics that underlie “ritual media” as a specific genre? All are rituals in the Durkheimian sense of the term, as well as “total social facts”, in the sense given by Marcel Mauss: they are social moments of passage, in which communities meet to celebrate a transition in joy or sorrow, around values, of a hero. Whether “positive” or “piacular” rituals (“which serves to appease divine anger”, “to atone”), they are always an escape from ordinary time, and establish another space—time, precisely ritual.

                                        11 Let us look, for example, at the changes in the former communist bloc, which began with John Paul II’s televised visit to Poland (June 1979) and the Romanian revolution, broadcast live, culminating in the takeover and power of the opponents, and then with the public execution of President Ceaucescu and his wife in December 1989.

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These programs are also characterized by the fact that they are not regular. Usually, this regularity is a constant in the media genre: from news on TV to games broadcast every night, and even weekly varieties, programs must also return regularly for them to be considered as media genres. However, this does not concern “ritual media”, which have the capacity to disrupt the schedules of established programs. Breaking away from the regulated periodicity of everyday television, they establish a historical temporality. Similarly, these “ritual media” are consensual in nature, willingly conformist in tone and form. Indeed, all the media actors open on this occasion a social digression, they decree a truce. The usually controversial and playful tone of media discourses will no longer be appropriate. The celebration outweighs the criticism. “Ritual media” are moments of reconciliation, already induced by this respectful tone. Finally, these programs benefit from a particular technical process: no sponsors or “advertising breaks”, a slow montage that contrasts with the syncopated media rhythm, an alternation of wide shots on the decorum and the crowd, and close-ups on the serious and moved faces... All the signs of ritualization are visible. 3.3. The social functions of ritual media Five functions can be assigned to ritual media. They are exercised on the institutions organizing the ritual, as well as on its actors and audiences. — The first of these functions is testimonial. Essentially, the discourse, the images of the ritual media, bears witness to something that has happened, by showing it, to ensure its veracity and its authenticity. This memory can be approached from the dual perspective of remembrance and commemoration, each referring to different modalities of

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enunciation. Basically, ritual media are instances of testimonies, as well as institutions of memory. But the media also allows the shaping of the emotion, joy, and sorrow of the people who make up the community of “spect-actors” of the ceremonial event being broadcast. — Similarly, the ritual media “monumentalize” the event12, producing the official image that the collective memory will keep of it; restoring it, above all, through the magnifying and idealized prism that, by nature, underlies and governs the ritual principle. We can consider that the ritual is sui generi “the monument of politics”, corresponding to the “aestheticization” of power that Walter Benjamin mentioned. Moreover, in the case of engravings representing the Royal Entrances of the Renaissance, it is in the very strong interaction linking architecture to books that this function takes its full dimension. It is indeed a rare and even unique case in which a book prolongs an exceptionally ephemeral architecture, and which, etymologically, effectively lasted “only one day”. This work was “monumentalized” in the literal sense of the word. Stone and marble have always been the materials of eternal memory, of fossilized memory. There, the opposite was emerging: it was the book that kept, retained, and extended. “Thanks to its epigraphy, does the book present                                         12 Dayan and Katz refer to this “monumentalization” of the event in la télévision cérémonielle (p. 106). I also mentioned this function, in connection to the collections relating resurgent triumphs in Les Nouvelles de l’estampe, no. 135, “Sur deux gravures d’entrées royales...”, May 1994. Or in “Monuments éphémères: les Entrées royales”, published in Les Cahiers de médiologie, no. 10, “La confusion des monuments”, Paris, Gallimard, edited by Michel Melot, May 1999.

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itself as the last monument of the entrance? The one who would contain them all and be the only one able to give a real end to the celebration?”13 — Second, ritual media tend to legitimize the events they broadcast, through an obvious legitimizing function. Accessing ritual media coverage is de facto, for a personality or an institution, being recognized as legitimate, respectable. Several institutions grant this legitimization, which becomes effective with the retransmission or media narrative. It is the authorities who receive and the media protagonists who agree to interrupt or modify the usual programs to broadcast a historical event, and who become historical through this retransmission. — Ritual media also convey ritual events. They offer them an indefinite, sometimes global, audience. As such, the papal blessings given urbi et orbi from St. Peter’s Square are eloquent examples of the nature of “ritual media”: earlier, only the pilgrims present in Rome attended. But since the appearance of television, millions of people can participate, then joining the vast community of Catholics, through the gaze, emotion, and prayer shared virtually, by the grace of television technology. And the urbi et orbi formula has only found its full meaning since television allows the “world” (orbi) to participate in the media, while in St. Peter’s Square, it is to the city (urbi, Rome) that the blessing is given. This is what television has accomplished, achieved, which was just a metaphor, and/or a mystical operation. — Finally, the ritual media dramatize the events they broadcast. A playful tone usually characterizes television discourses, operating according to established codes and within devices that highlight cues of privacy and good relaxation. On the other hand, the ritual media dramatize                                         13 Christian Jouhaud, “Imprimer l’événement”, Usages de l’imprimé aux XIVe-XVIIe siècles, edited by Roger Chartier, Paris, Fayard, p. 414.

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their retransmissions. Is this not a rather rare media context, during which we will experience an event in its integral continuity, with a unity of action in time and space specific to the ancient tragedy? It is at this price that their “spect-actors” will become aware of the historical dimension of what they are witnessing, and will give it a form of credibility. This dramatization creates a particular context of reception, partly guaranteeing the historicization of the event. 3.3.1. A singular inversion, from current events to history Many criticize the media for transforming history into a continuous flow, seeing every day the tide of images from the previous day erased by the tide of the day. The rise of continuous news channels has further accentuated this trend. Taken as a whole, the ritual media radically reverse these fears of historical dilution and silence criticism of the information system. Because if the broadcast event has sufficient audience and legitimacy, let us repeat, it will put viewers in direct contact with “History in the Making”. And the social, political, and institutional changes also come from the fact that the charismatic guest received ritually — a sovereign, president, the pope, star — arrives to give meaning and produce transformations of a symbolic order, acting through the ceremony. It especially introduces meaning in a period of turbulence. We can refer to two famous American speeches: Martin Luther King’s, titled I Had a Dream, and J. F. Kennedy’s, known as The New Frontier. But we can also think of the historical evocations of General De Gaulle, Vive le Québec libre!, or Je vous ai compris, about French Algeria. These performative discourses have transformed social and political

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realities, changing the consciousness of their “spect-actors”. Closer to home, the strength of Obama’s Yes We Can helped to unite behind him and his agenda millions of voters, united by the power of this inclusive “we”. “The interpretation proposed by actors is powerfully directive. Like the Levi-Strauss shaman, the ceremonial actor rephrases, using culturally accepted paradigms, the situation in which they act. This situation then acquires intelligibility, but within a dynamic oriented toward a precise outcome. It aims to ‘make it happen,’ and is based on a ‘mythical elaboration’”14. Filled with political mythologies, the symbolic program proposed by the ritual guest will sediment the social body with its mobilizing power of evocation. It will create a link, a dependence, by playing on powerful anthropological resources. The ritual community, regenerated by the historical moment experienced together, will keep the trace, the memory. “To have been there”, “to have seen it”, “to have lived it”, and to be able to share these experiences, which are inscribed in the consciousness and body of each person, constitute a history shared by all. A reference must still be made to Victor Turner’s communitas once we understand the density of these media rituals. Because they transgress established social strata, going beyond the usual barriers, these retransmissions “produce their audiences” which are taken on “body and soul”, become a community in their own right. A form of communication and even powerful communion is instituted. Ceremonial politics and major political ceremonies would                                         14 Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, “Télévision d’intervention et spectacle politique. Agir par le rituel”, Hermès, nos 17—18, 1995, p. 171.

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express a “desire for fusion”, manifested in situ, and also by extension, through collective participation in media broadcasts. Thus, they “strive to create continuity between the crowds filmed and the groups of viewers. It arouses in the latter an oceanic feeling, a euphoric loss of the limits of the self, an imaginary incorporation into a congregation in a state of communitas”15. And it is on a nationwide scale, sometimes, that the “ritual media” raise their “diaspora communities” to a common emotion, memory, and outlook. For example, on November 22, 1963, the day of John F. Kennedy’s murder in Dallas, the whole of America stopped in the middle of the afternoon. Millions of people turned on their radios or TV sets and began to cry together. A few days later, during the President’s funeral, a large part of the planet communed together on the altar of emotion and history. Miracle and vertigo of the ritual media... 3.4. From media to new media: toward disintermediation Let us not end up with a discussion that is too dramatic or too dated. History has remembered the world’s tears over the death of “JFK”, and also, more recently, Barak Obama’s “4 more years” tweet, announcing his re-election, or, more “hysterical than historical”, Donald Trump’s “Twittomania”. All this leads to a simple question: what remains of the hierarchies, so well-staged by the great “political liturgies” and television, at a time when the impression is given that social networks “horizontalize” the relationships between politicians (as individuals) and citizens? In fact, everything is in opposition. Thus, while it is significant that (political) rituals slow down the flow of daily life, Twitter and ICTs, on the other hand, proceed from a formidable acceleration, both                                         15 Daniel Dayan, “Le Pape en voyageur”, Terrain, no. 5, “Paraître en public”, 1990, p. 20.

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of reactions (called “hot” or “epidermal”), and of their diffusion on the “twittosphere”. Most politicians have made Twitter the reference device that allows them to come into direct contact with their followers and voters, without filters or intermediaries. During the political ritual, the citizen is passive, a spectator or “spect-actor”. On the other hand, Twitter has become the tool of an “ electronic democracy that seeks to involve cybercitizens in the political process”16. While this somewhat utopian vision of “e-democracy” is well represented in the media, it is contested by most scientific observers, because interactions between politicians and citizens remain an exception. However, it is first of all in announcements, declarations, and “feelings” (“love at first sight” and “ranting and raving”) that people “following” a political personality on Twitter are given information “just-in-time”, because these are the most common uses of the majority of policies on this social network. At the opposite of the dramatized approach to power, which is that of ritualized speech (statements are called “official”), on social networks, politicians essentially make announcements, publish information, post comments, and react to announcements and “network”, that is, they will try to aggregate followers. Louise Merzeau recalled that “the attentional regime of Twitter makes it above all a vector of informational authority”17. According to her, many politicians see Twitter as a simple “press release machine”. Sacrificing the ideals of a direct and participatory democracy, politicians have seized Twitter to adorn it with a thousand virtues. They make it the ultimate mechanism for their “interactions” with their voters. Information, action,                                         16 Tamara Small, “La politique canadienne en 140 caractères: la vie des partis politiques dans l’univers Twitter”, Revue Parlementaire Canadienne, Fall 2010, p. 41. 17 Louise Merzeau, “Twitter: une machine à fabriquer de l’autorité”, in Nicolas Pélissier and Gabriel Gallezot (eds), Twitter. Un monde en tout petit? Paris, L’Harmattan, 2013, p. 43.

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reaction, and communication strategies are the keywords for the use of the “blue bird”. On Twitter, the political voice is free of the weight of conventions, ceremonies, and roles to be played. Political rituals have a theatrical and tragic dimension that is evacuated, in favor of spontaneity and an increasingly assertive emotional character18. In fact, on social networks, political communication is unpredictable and unexpected (to the extent that the commentary “arises”), concise, conniving, and often emotional. Comments about the migrant crisis confirm this. On Twitter, the formal dimension of political rituality is avoided in favor of friendliness, spontaneity, and connivance that are supposed to govern digital expressions. On the other hand, a new space has also opened up for violence (daily verbal aggression against many public figures), embezzlement, parody, and desacralization. It is in this respect that, in order to be closer, more accessible, and more responsive, politicians are exposed to a loss of credibility of their words and actions. According to Jean Véronis, “Twitter does not free political speech, it spreads it”19. We come back to this: Twitter participates in the deritualization of politics because there is no longer a filter between public and private space, between official speech and expressions of feelings, of comments. Political communication on Twitter no longer consecrates, it can legitimize, but it takes note more than it institutes; it is a witness. For example, the famous “4 more years” of Barack                                         18 See Sophie Coignard, an attentive observer of French political life: “Valls ou le gouvernement par l’émotion. Gouverner n’est pas tweeter. Le Premier ministre semble l’oublier en commentant la mort d’un enfant migrant comme s’il était un simple observateur”, Le Point.fr, September 4, 2015. 19 February 5, 2013, on BFMTV.com http://www.bfmtv.com/ politique/jean-veronis-twitter-ne-libere-pas-parole-politique-repand441028.html.

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Obama, following his re-election. In fact, “in this new digital forum, the relationship between elected officials and candidates and their audiences has been profoundly disrupted by Twitter: it has been part of a vast process of disintermediated communication and the desacralization of political speech and staff”20. 3.5. The underlying issue of disintermediation Of course, the parallel between traditional political rituals and this “new digital ethos” leads to the question of mediation, or rather disintermediation, as a global process. If this is clearly perceptible in the “mediamorphoses” experienced by political rituals (with this ideal of direct links, freed from the burdens of ceremoniality), more broadly speaking, it can be found in many fields. For example, François Hollande, addressing live and “eager” the young Leonarda expelled from France in October 2013, had not considered that she could “convene” the French continuous news channel BFM TV in her Kosovar village and vehemently contradict his words, while rejecting his proposals! So what about these hilarious selfies featuring Emmanuel Macron, sweaty, surrounded by two young men with their shirts off, making obscene and provocative gestures? In early autumn 2018, broadcast and commented on endlessly on social networks and continuous news channels, this sequence considerably damaged the image of the President, ruining the presidentialization efforts he had been working on since the beginning of his mandate. In conclusion, we are witnessing a deritualization of politics, or rather a “trivialization”, as historian Jean Garrigues put it. Technologies, by what they allow (technically) and authorize (relationally), play a role in this.                                         20 Alexandre Eyries, La communication poli-tweet. La politique gagnée par les TIC, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2015, p. 122.

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But television (with continuous news channels in particular) and the evolution of the French presidential function toward its “Americanization” are also responsible for this loss of symbolic density. Media and technologies, therefore, only accelerate an older movement, which must be considered in all its sociohistorical complexity. And indeed, according to Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Erwan Dianteill, and Isabelle Saint-Martin, “what is disinherited today is the great political ritual that reaffirmed the community of citizens and its permanence over time”21. 3.6. Toward new “digital liturgies”? The deritualization that characterizes our time is part of a broader and older process, to which digitization only partially contributes. Moreover, new rituals can emerge from ICTs22. On the other hand, we recall that a “ritual produces collective mental states evoked by the fact that the group is assembled”23. We return to the “effervescences” and the “dynamogesic” character of the ritual evoked by Durkheim. However, social networks are part of this economy of shared and propagated emotions. We can therefore see a link with communities now forming “through ritualized actions referring to each other, carried out in various places on the planet [...] within the globalizing network society, such as                                         21 Erwan Dianteill, Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Isabelle Saint-Martin, La modernité rituelle. Rites politiques et religieux des sociétés modernes, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2004, p. 75. 22 See “Ritualités numériques”, Les Cahiers du numérique, vol. 9, nos 3—4, Pascal Lardellier (ed.), Hermès-Lavoisier, 2013. 23 Emile Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Paris, PUF, pp. 13—14.

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Twitter, Facebook, or flash mob, blogs, bulletin boards and wikis, [promoting] the establishment of a transnational ritual culture within multinationals”24. And there is indeed a parallel to be drawn between the most traditional rituals and these very recent contemporary and digital variations. In some respects, this also reflects the notion of “diaspora communities”, as they aggregate around major historical events broadcast on television. However, in an era of digitization of political discourse and action, it should be recalled that the ritual is the most reliable channel to legitimacy, while the quantitative saturation of “channels” does not mean better communication, far from it. And the impression is sometimes given of exhaustion of the word in its perpetual dissemination. As such, the “ups and downs” which Emmanuel Macron experienced are full of meaning: while his hyper-ritualized appearances at the beginning of his term of office had led all observers to naturally nickname him Jupiter, it is the digital slippages (including disastrous selfies) that have also permanently altered his image. It comes back to the ritual that institutes while inscribing in another temporality. Above all, it legitimizes, where the media (non-ritual) trivialize terribly. A symbolic lesson by default, which many personalities learn again at their own expense.

                                        24 Yannic Aurélien (ed.), Le Rituel, Paris, CNRS, 2009, p. 18.

4 The Ritual Institution of Society

The theory1 presented here will focus on the analysis of social and formal communication contexts, in this case, large ritual and festive gatherings of a political and religious nature, but also in media and sport. 4.1. The double-ideal ritual 4.1.1. From the “communicative facade” to the “principle of magnificence” One of the prerequisites for any communication situation is that each interlocutor (or group of interlocutors) should usually look “good”, striving to present a correct overall appearance, and if possible one that is pleasant, from the physical, the clothing, and the verbal points of view. Interaction actors know that this general impression always has an almost moral connotation. This rule applies to most social contexts.                                         1 We will use here, in an interdisciplinary approach, concepts from anthropology and communication sciences. Several original theoretical proposals are set out, such as the notions of “spectactors”, the “representation of the Collective Body”, and “double ritual constraint”.

The Ritual Institution of Society, First Edition. Pascal Lardellier. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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An important part of Erving Goffman’s work has focused on demonstrating this: paying attention to others, respecting them (thereby showing that they respect themselves), offering them a decent, fair, and measured image of themselves; it is also and above all giving them the opportunity to “not lose face”. We also know that according to Brown and Levinson, the principles of virtual offense and worst interpretation are as follows: “always consider that there is a worse interpretation of your actions than you could imagine”2. This a priori is in line with the consideration given to others, in any even slightly involving interaction. By virtue of this, it can be considered that a dual requirement of coherence and responsibility prevails in most social relations. The relational economy that allows people to live in society is based on this respect and consideration. Giving great importance to the primacy of selfappearance, Goffman states from the very first pages of the Interaction Ritual3 that this presentation is complemented by an “idiom”. And this model of consensual communication — which implies a tacit pact accepted and respected by all — is so culturally integrated that those who depart from this “line of conduct”, this modus vivendi, are considered to be deviant. We will not be able to “communicate” with them, at least not under the conditions normally recognized and instituted. They play wrong “in the orchestra”. This negative perception will then be moralized by defining these asocial interlocutors as rude, disrespectful, even “abnormal”, by affirming that they look poor or even “bad” (E. Goffman). Someone who is                                         2 See Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, Politeness, Cambridge, CUP, 1987. 3 Or, “The individual generally has an immediate emotional response on their face when in contact with others: the individual raises it, and grows attached to it”. Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual, Pantheon Books Inc., 1982.

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“not frequentable” is often someone who does not play the social score in the same register as others, and who refuses, consciously or not, to display the external signs of convenience and respect. However, this is not specific to interpersonal communication contexts. This requirement of appearance, and this body of social rules, can also be elevated to a social and community level on a larger scale. They will then become all the more crucial as each individual engages with the group they represent, by general appearance and attitude, all of them having to answer for each other4. Education and society teach social actors early to “work” on this appearance, trying to match it with a form of virtue: thus, cleanliness, “dress”, and presence are socially coalescing with dignity. The Western tradition maintains a paradoxical relationship with this relationship between identity, appearance, and respectability: it is wary of it. Established social codes require that we subscribe to it and that we accept this obligation, except to derogate from it, and to be marginal. The etymology of dignity teaches us that this term, which appeared in French in the 12th Century, first referred to merit. A gradual shift took place, to make this dignity an honorability linked to appearance, opening up to the respect due to beings and things. Etiquette manuals, widely distributed in classical Europe, taught generations of nobles and then the bourgeois to build a virtuous social image, and to adopt, physically and morally, attitudes of honor that represented the name and                                         4 E. Goffman, who has focused his attention on interaction rituals, admits that they are open to broader ritual contexts, bringing together more people in exceptional circumstances, referring to the official visits of heads of state. It is this openness that we intend to work toward here.

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the lineage. It was appropriate for the honest man to display “splendor”, including in his clothing, and gravity of attitude and behavior that had become synonymous with values. But even further back, we recall that according to Aristotelian ethics, the behavior and appearance of the virtuous man saw in him the good and also the beautiful coinciding. A close relationship, therefore, links the interiority of each person to the image he or she gives of himself or herself, to the appearance he or she offers, to the risks and dangers of the abuses that this form of collusion may have generated. This dignity, which is a descendant of the ancient and reborn dignitas, is of great importance in the process of building and representing individuals in ritual contexts. In line with this tradition, we could also mention the “principle of magnificence”, communicated by Thomas Aquinas as early as the 13th Century. He considered this magnificence as a virtue that the prince had to acquire. This imperative of appearance establishes a relationship between magnificence and goodness. And just as cleanliness has become a socially recognized value, even more so than a simple health standard5, magnificence became an essential political quality. In the 16th Century, the humanists in charge of the rebirth celebrations made reference to St. Thomas. Through a game of syllogisms, it was affirmed that greatness, which is one of the royal virtues, could be expressed through magnificence. Pomp became a moral and political principle. Sumptuousness suits princes, who must live and show themselves, a fortiori, in luxury. The major political celebrations were eventually called “magnificences”. This rule of ostentation could not be derogated from, despite the                                         5 The ritual will to remove all forms of ugliness and dirt, synonymous with defects and potentially carrying impurities, confirms this.

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substantial amount it costs, which forced royal courts into often difficult financial positions. But let us return to “sublimation rituals”. We propose this expression because the ritual devices in question here — state ceremonies, “layepeople liturgies”, papal journeys — are characterized by the particular importance they attach to the appearance of their actors, which must be sumptuous, luxurious, precisely “sublime”6. This primacy given to appearance is all the more notable because it takes place in a spectacular context by nature. The magnified appearance of ritual actors, beyond the anthropological issues it covers, is also part of the show, as a central element of the staging. This “appearance requirement”, common to the vast majority of “positive” ritual practices, is particularly noticeable in political rituals. We recall that we are witnessing a real metamorphosis of ordinary space—time, on which a perfect double “superimposes” itself, actualizing the myth of the ideal Society, and opening a historical and even mythical temporal sequence. This systematic idealization of the ritual space covers in every respect what could be defined as the “Potemkin syndrome”: in the 19th Century, Catherine II of Russia wanted to discover the daily life of her kingdom. On a great journey through her vast country, she passed through many villages, which through the care of her Minister Potemkin, were hastily embellished and adorned. They found themselves, during the queen’s passage, clean, opulent, and smiling, far from the terrible reality of a starving, bloodless Russia.                                         6 Sublime is used here to mean the “beauty” that everyone must display during the ritual, as well as the fact that the ritual context leads each of its members to toward an ideal, whereas by a reverse movement, this ideal comes to incarnate, and to appear.

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The “Potemkin syndrome” resides in this: to subscribe to this “ostentatious imperative”, to impose appearance not as a means, but as a ceremonial end. What is behind the facade does not matter. The priority is what we see, what we perceive. Whatever the cost, what is imposed on the view must be beautiful, revealing the appearances of order, perfection, and above all, purity. Whether they were “screens” was of little importance, only their magnificent appearance was important. Moreover, and in the same logic, the architectures manufactured for the re-emerging Royal Entrances were called “feigned” or “ephemeral”, almost all these architectural elements being made of wood and plaster or even hessian. They lasted only one day, the time of the ritual. During these royal triumphs, clean sand was thrown on the ground, the city walls were covered with a white cloth; it even happened that “skies” of starry blue cloth were stretched in the streets, above the royal route. Ephemeral triumphal arches, temporary theaters, sumptuous decorations appeared for the occasion. A new city thus emerged, truly covering the ordinary and banal city of everyday life. Above all, beggars and bandits were hunted extra muros during the ritual, in order not to disturb the ideal of perfection. Were they not, without their knowledge, the bearers of defects that could have altered the outcome of the ritual process, that is, the aim to bring the community into contact with their ideal representations and the mythical imaginaries staged? The cities organizing the Olympic Games, every four years, reason on the basis of this principle: clean, purify, and idealize urban space at all costs. This is constancy, beyond the centuries and the diversity of civilizations, of this obligation to appear clean, pure, and perfect, on the scale of a city and even a country, the time of the ritual.

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At first sight, this ideal appearance seems to be important on two levels: first, in relation to the values toward which the ritual intercedes, of which these actors are the mediators and which they honor by imposing this magnificence7 on themselves, and, second, in relation to the view that the actors of the ritual will bring to it. We know the costumes, uniforms, and all the official attributes displayed during this ritual by the people representing the institutions must appear magnificent8. Uniform can also be brought closer to the ritual, because both allow the individual to rise to the level of their social function, by entering into these “unique forms” that re-shape them in a melting pot of traditions. Integrated with uniform into the ritual process, one truly leaves one’s identity behind to take on another, institutional one. The rules establishing appearance, cleanliness, and measurement as principles are recorded in the books of protocols or rituals. Often inherited from an ancient tradition that gives them their legitimacy (since “custom has the force of law”), this protocol is an operating code from which it is impossible to derogate, except to be punished and to be excluded from the ritual process. It is also in this respect that the ritual context is imposed on its actors. We have repeatedly mentioned the symbolic violence inherent in the ritual. Even before it becomes a “thought trap” (P. Smith), it constitutes a structure that encloses the bodies of its actors, who will no longer be able to do “anything”. It                                         7 This theme is very present in the Old and New Testaments, fertile in passages highlighting this symbolic magnificence, considered as a gift made to God. It also often encounters the sacrificial function, confirming the almost universal nature of the potlatch as an overbid. 8 Ethology has also identified animal parades of seduction and intimidation, which consist precisely of “showing strength and beauty”.

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requires constraint and rules, with which we must comply. Disrupting it leads to punishment by the authorities who worked to manage and organize it. But on a larger scale, it is to attract the wrath of the numinous powers who express themselves there and toward whom this ritual intercedes. The ritual involves “being aware of the movement that moves the lines” (Charles Baudelaire), of any “displaced” expression... The role must be played perfectly. Over the centuries and throughout cultures, this rule is not subject to any exception, and it reaffirms an obvious fact, assumed or not: ritual mediation celebrates values, at the same time as it puts people in contact with powers of another order: no one, under any pretext, should disturb the ceremonial process. Thus, in 1600, at the official reception of Marie de Médicis in Lyon (where she came to marry Henri IV), a decree of the governor prohibited anyone presenting a weapon during the parade to fire near the Queen, under penalty of death. Shooting, even inadvertently, was prohibited, because it would have introduced disorder, by “refunctionalizing” the weapons, frightening the horses, which would have destroyed the balance, order, and harmony of the ritual. The extent of the sanction only confirms the fear of any turbulence that may interfere with the process of the ritual, fearing that things will not go as they should. To a lesser extent, the “errors” that marked July 14, 2018 (two motorcyclists collided and fell heavily during the parade, a concern for color (too much red!) during the passage of the Patrouille de France) were the subject of ridicule as much as comments criticizing the amateurism of all this, and the symbolic force of these harmful mistakes. Nowadays, official visits by presidents to French cities are sometimes the occasion for hostile demonstrations by citizens who are dissatisfied with a political decision. These

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demonstrations are always kept well away from the official procession, and all coercive means are used to ensure that there is no “misbehavior”; no visible misbehavior, in any case. 4.1.2. Theatrical, spectacular and specular ritual 4.1.2.1. Ritual, power, gaze: the powers of the ritual gaze Let us return to the analysis of the gaze in ritual processes, and the fundamental role it plays as a vector of belonging and legitimization. The gaze games during the ritual exert an action at a dual level: on individuals, and also on a larger scale, on the entire social body. Power exists first in the eye of its witness. “Giving to power to see seems to be a substantial dimension of the political order. The latter operates in the sphere of representation”9. Napoleon stated that “to command, you must first of all speak to the eyes”. He probably mentioned this spectacular and theatrical dimension inherent in the exercise of power. Until this century, no institution more than royal power had such an appetite for rituals, ceremonies, and self-certification. Since then, regimes of a non-royal nature have equaled it, in the taste of political liturgy, and to the point of excess. This living and uniquely represented spectacle that is the ritual (and whose actors happen to be the highest representatives of the State) is not exhausted in an entertainment purpose. It is more than a spectacle. The political ritual is in fact a moment of power in performance, an authentic achievement of institutional life. During these rituals, power is shown to society, and in this way has an active political dimension.                                         9 Marc Abélès, Anthropologie du politique, Paris, Armand Colin, 1997, p. 247.

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But these strategies of representation of the institutions that are the great state ceremonies are complemented by another logic, which consists of them in looking, too. Because the ideal of all power seems to be able to see everything. These institutions, whatever their nature, dream of being “panoptic”. At the heart of monarchical hegemony, as much as in the spirit of bureaucratic centralization, lies a panoptic project, “that of being able to embrace at a glance all the cogs of the machine, follow all its springs, precipitate the action of some, slow down that of others, ensure in one word that all the parts of the whole are constantly in harmony with each other”10. To be able to see everything? Faced with this aporia, it is necessary to find subterfuges, the safest of which is proposed by the ritual scene, which is less dangerous and more flattering than military theater. In this space of representation, the powers affirm their strength, contemplating themselves before those whose gaze makes them exist11. “Sublimation rituals” are organized according to this principle: the eye of the king (or the president, the pope...) sees everything, through a “piercing panoptism”, which redefines their subjects, their witnesses. Just like the royal eye that already appropriated everything that crossed its optical beam. It is really about the “eye of the master” (as the instructive fable of La Fontaine, “The Master’s Eye”, tells                                         10 Fleurigeon, Administrative Code, vol. 1, p. 7, quoted by Olivier Ihl, “Les rangs du pouvoir. Régimes de préséances et bureaucratie d’Etat dans la France du XIX et XX siècles”, in Le Protocole ou la mise en forme de l’ordre politique, edited by Yves Déloye, Claude Haroche, and Olivier Ihl, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1996, p. 238. 11 Clifford Geertz proposes a fine analysis of charismatic powers and their protocolary treatment: “Centre, rois, et charisme : réflexions sur les symboliques du pouvoir”, in Savoir local, savoir global. Les Lieux du savoir, Paris, PUF, 1990, pp. 153—182.

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us), putting the Nation in perspective, according to the absolute of a point of view, and from an absolute point of view. “Rituals would not be as effective if they did not include the satisfaction of a powerful desire as a secondary benefit for the subjects (both for those who participate in the protocol order and those who are its spectators): that of seeing and that of being seen, that of settling into a regulated illusion. It expresses a disguise of life, i.e. a taste for theatricality, dramatization, or a dedramatization of social life”12. Ritual and gaze are, therefore, in their own right, instances of structuring power. From the eviction of any form of entropy to the superposition of a double ideal on the institutions in representation, we always find the same will and the same logic at work: to be admired, feared, and obeyed by all. This power, once instituted, in return uses the ritual and the gaze to introduce order, harmony, and recognition into the social body. The community ritual, which dramatizes and creates a theatrical performance of social and institutional relationships, is first and foremost a vast spectacle that society offers itself, and offers society. In fact, sublimation rituals proceed to ostentation of bodies and objects, which constitutes an “ostentation”, in other words, the “act of showing”, truly. The ritual need gazes, it feeds on them and finds its fulfillment in them. However, this specifically ritual look, more than just esthetic, will be a truly active look.

                                        12 Eugène Enriquez, in Le Protocole ou la mise en forme de l’ordre politique, edited by Yves Déloye, Claudine Haroche, and Olivier Ihl, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1996, pp. 43—44.

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For there is in the ritual the thought construction of a device conducive to evoking certain spectatorial reactions (seeking to produce effects exerted on the gaze). We must draw all the consequences from this statement. “Sublimation rituals” give great importance to this exposure device, which is the very basis of them. The ritual context offers another status to the body — which reaches a new state — or to objects, which have become archetypal, sacred13. “Sublimation rites” are designed and organized according to the action exerted on the spectators’ eyes. These great community rituals are characterized by a particular scopic dimension, since they institute a type of gaze that goes beyond the traditional categories of seeing. How could this ritual gaze be defined? It acts on individuals — those who look, and those who are looked at — regenerating them, working to produce transformations at the individual and collective level. In any case, the whole ritual system aims to offer exceptional visibility on power and the person who embodies it. Everything is done, in this logic of exhibition, so that one can fully admire the main actor of the ritual (king, president, pope, and by extension star). Admire, because this device always intends to arouse the effects of gazes, in the absence of which the ritual would “pass by” its social and political purpose.

                                        13 For Durkheim, an object is sacred if it is considered and treated as such. However, ritual devices create the conditions for this sacred perception and treatment, “defunctionalizing” to “resymbolize”.

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4.1.2.2. The “panopticon look” 14 of the charismatic guest The sight of those who represent power must be rare, if it is to have any effect; in a word, it must remain historical, like the images of emperors, then those of the first saints, who were only exceptionally visible in antiquity, drawing from this rarity their emotional value and symbolic legitimacy. All the great mystical, mythical, or esoteric texts contain passages that bring the power of a totalizing gaze closer together, with an all-seeing eye (the luminous Masonic Delta, borrowed from Christian as much as Hindu iconography...). Power is consubstantial with a total and mythical view, it would even dissolve in this “panoptic eye”. Moreover, this view of power is vested with such powers that there were traditions and civilizations where, on the contrary, one should never see the king, or meet his gaze. Here again, reference must be made to the Asian tradition, and to what Barthes said in L’Empire des signes about the imperial palace, “the visible form of invisibility”. The terms “Panopticon” and “panoptism” are borrowed from Jeremy Bentham, an 18th Century English forensic scientist and architect. And there are many traditions and legends about the magical powers, beneficial or evil, of animal and human eyes. They have been passed on from antiquity via the middle ages to the present day, in popular tales. Seeing power, having seen the president, or even better, the king, the queen, and so on — this thrill can capture intellectuals, researchers, and writers alike. Thus, Roland                                         14 See, in particular, the chapter on this topic in Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison, Paris, Gallimard, 1989, or Carl Havelange’s, De l’œil et du monde. Une histoire du regard en Occident, Paris, Fayard, 1996.

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Barthes, on the first page of Chambre claire, was thrilled to contemplate a saturated photo depicting Napoleon’s last brother: “I see the eyes that saw the Emperor”... Or Claude Lévi-Strauss, confident that as a child he lived in “the memory of the Second Empire. It wasn’t long before: as a child, I still saw — with my own eyes — the Empress Eugenie”15. The ritual will offer social actors bright conditions for the visibility of power. It is the true performance of the great political spectacle, finding its full accomplishment in this specular exhibition, which will both legitimize and regenerate its participants, and more particularly the one in whose honor the ritual device was built. According to Daniel Dayan, the sanctuary welcoming the pope “is the place of a meeting, of a double fascination, of an intersubjective exchange between the pope and the crowd. Each of the partners came to recognize in the other their own faith”16. In the political sphere, both the king (or queen) and the president pay full attention to these ranks marching before them, they give equal attention to the representatives of the constituted bodies. Thus, in France, during the traditional July 14 parade, the military forces march, and the President, the “chief of the armies”, watches over them. It is in this symmetrical exchange that the political ritual will truly be fulfilled. The ritual device imposes symmetry of gazes, to subscribe to these conditions of operativity. A double qualification is established: the ritual crowd wants to see the illustrious host, and this host will not withdraw until they have seen the whole community marching, parading, in their honor. By a panoptic effect, this eye appropriates what its optical beam intersects, symbolically putting the Nation                                         15 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Didier Eribon, De près et de loin, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1988, 2001, p. 11. 16 Daniel Dayan, “Le Pape en voyageur”, Terrain, no. 15, “Paraître en public”, Paris, Mission du Patrimoine, 1990, p. 17.

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or community in perspective. It is, therefore, crucial that they see all those representing the social body. The urban paintings created for the resurgent triumphs, conceived according to the eye and the path of the sovereign on an official visit, were explicit: perspectives leading to a central square, convergence of all the escape points, central or symmetrically distributed “feigned marble arches”, declaiming the glories of this host to the totalizing glance. It was a “perspectivism” that emerged in this case. Moreover, this omnipotence of the king’s gaze also found applications in real architecture. A century later, in Versailles, it is “interesting to note that the room in the middle of the first floor, from whose windows the entire access road, the ‘Marble Court’, the ‘Royal Court’ and the entire area of the forecourt was gazed upon, was the king’s bedroom”17. This qualification through the eyes is essential. A fertile exchange, based on this ocular relationship, emerges during the great political rituals. In our time, this primacy of the political gaze in situ has been trivialized by the media coverage of political figures and the increasing scarcity of major ritual ceremonies, but it was particularly visible in the French Ancien Régime, the era in which these theories were applied: the people wanted to see the sovereign, and he did not withdraw until all the ranks, and therefore the social body (each group, community, corporation, with a delegation represented at these major civil processions) had passed through. During the civil parades, it was the presence of the monarch, his physical appearance, that suddenly made him exist in the eyes of the spectators, for the “good people” gathered in his path, and in return, he gave life and movement through his presence. It was the dynamic and organizational principle of the municipal procession considered as a vast ritual syntagmatic. “Mysteries”, living                                         17 Norbert Elias, La Société de cour, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1975, p. 68.

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paintings, allegories of texts, stones, and images punctuated his passage, his presence bringing to life and animating those who were waiting. However, the two gazes facing each other, that of the invited dignitary, invested with charism, and that of the spectators, are not of the same nature, although they exist within each other. If the public experiences a form of fascination, the king, the president, or the pope contemplates the crowd gathered for them, truly transforming it by the power of their gaze, invested with something magic. This charismatic and panoptic gaze, filled with a thaumaturgic force, first transfixes, then animates and regenerates the social body, capturing two myths in a dazzling stroke via the path that leads from Medusa to Pygmalion. Let us recall that Medusa had the terrifying power of being able to transfix people with the power of her gaze alone. The appearance of the king produces an effect diametrically opposed to that which illustrates the myth of Medusa: he does not reify, and if he is transfixed, then this transitional immobility is then reversed to animate, to give both “soul and movement”. We can speak here of “visual thaumaturgy”, in the sense that the simple gaze of the sovereign produces a miracle: that of the regeneration of the social body. To refer to another myth about the gaze, the pygmalionic king fixes upon people, giving them life and animating them, thanks to his reviving power. His optical beam does not carry a curse, but on the contrary a palingenic force, “which truly reconstitutes”. It is understood that he must be granted power by those who look at him and recognize him as being invested with this power.

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And “thus, in these royal entrances, an essential part of the symbolic and political effectiveness was due to this dialog of two spectacles: the one that the monarchical power gave by itself to the city, the one of the cities to its sovereign, and it is not surprising that, in this alternating exchange, a double awareness takes place through a double reflection of the power and glory of the monarch in the brilliance of his procession, and of the unity and harmony of the city in the diversity of the groups that compose it18”. Nowadays, the reflex consisting for the individual to film or photograph using a smartphone any singer, ephemeral star of the small screen or reality TV they cross in the street or during an event and to then immediately “post” the photo and boast about these few seconds of glory refers to the same logic, even if we are witnessing a symbolic demonetization, due to the uncertain status of the “stars” as well as the generalization of a practice that in fact significantly reduces the aura. 4.1.3. The ritual fascination I come back to this point: the view of the spectators of the ritual is not of the same nature as that of the charismatic dignitary received in a ceremonial manner, although they complement each other. If effects are sought and produced by the ritual device, passing through the gaze, the question arises from the purposes assigned to the ritual by the institutions: did not André Duchesne, theorist of the monarchy, affirm in his Antiquitez des Roys, in the 17th Century, that “the sight of the King in the grandeur of his                                         18 Louis Marin, De la représentation, Paris, Hautes Etudes, Le Seuil, Gallimard, 1994, p. 59.

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State also serves to maintain the subjects in the reverence they owe to his Majesty”? Politicians and great statesmen and women all had an increased awareness of the effects produced by their ritualized apparitions before subjects and citizens, often making very pragmatic use of them. Machiavelli, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and more recently, Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand, have left in their wake explicit texts on the reactions to the “incarnating power”. The public’s view of the ritual in front of these historical incarnations is imbued with fascination, which can go as far as states of amazement. From one appeal to another, let us look at the state of amazement at the appearance of stars of sport, pop music, or cinema that nowadays plunge their transfixed fans into a certain state! If we agree at the height of the relationship, it is hypnosis, and it is not surprising to note that it is the ritual context that generates quasi-hypnotic effects. This raises questions, and all the more so since transport in this extreme state does not only concern the average person: great intellectuals and famous thinkers have also experienced this disturbing or wonderful sensation that passes through the eyes, leaving surprising testimonies. Thus, once the battle was over, Hegel was ecstatic to have seen Napoleon Bonaparte march past him, riding his horse: “I saw the master of the world pass by! I saw the emperor, this soul of the World, leave the city to go in recognition; it is indeed a wonderful feeling to see such an individual who concentrated here on a point, sitting on a horse, extends over the world and dominates it”19. In this exclamation of the philosopher, there is an admission of an aporia, faced with the sudden incarnation of a capital Power. What did it matter on that day that the “master of the world” was only a                                         19 Paul-Laurent Assoun, “De l’allégorie à la tautégorie : le mythe de l’Un”, Corps écrit, “L’Allégorie”, Paris, PUF, 1986, p. 111.

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man of ordinary appearance, overweight, and of small stature? His presence alone was enough to enthuse the philosopher, and to make him experience an exalted fascination, in all conscience. Above all, it left him with the impression that he had experienced a unique, magical, and historical moment. Our time seems to have watered down this magic. Media and technological images endlessly disseminate the public appearances of personalities. One might think that there is wear and tear and trivialization. And yet, the recent vogue for selfies (I will come back to this) taken by whatshisname with personalities (politicians, media, sports, etc.) and the intuition of immortalizing a “historical” moment (by posting proof online) seems to prove that the magic still prevails. 4.1.3.1. From the embodied ideal to the make-believe In fact, if the participants of the ritual attach so much importance to seeing the dignitary during political rituals, it is not so much because of simple curiosity as they seem to want to experience this fascination with Power, suddenly present “here and now”. It must be reawakened that during the ritual, the received dignitary embodies a power the rest of the abstract time, then refers only to an institutional entity. This gives them an unusual appeal, in situ, which explains this emotion. They offer a “Real Presence”, the theological meaning of the phrase is clearly assumed here. But this fascination can also be explained as the residual trace of the impulse of danger that the public of the ritual would come to seek: the central personality of the ritual is endowed with an appeal, as I have often said. Hence there is a potential risk of the unleashing of raw forces lurking in the folds of the ceremony. It is understood that the entire protocol system can be considered as part of precautions, aimed at containing and controlling this power, at least as much as it offers optimal conditions of admiration. To approach central personality, to go and see them, “we take

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risks”, at the same time as we come to experience a “wonderful feeling”. Jean-Pierre Vernant affirms that “by the game of fascination, the voyeur is torn from themself, dispossessed of their own gaze, invested and as if invaded by one of the figures facing them and who, by the terror that their features and their eye mobilize, seizes them and possesses them”20. This is the expression of this terror that ritual admiration barely counterbalances. There is fascination because something is shown and someone considered to be in the realm of the forbidden is incarnated, characterized by an impossibility to be seen, to be looked at, and yet who presents themself before our eyes. In several African and Asian traditions, it was forbidden, under penalty of death, to meet the sovereign’s gaze. This would explain the dangerousness that is expressed in an archaic way during rituals, confirming the power attributed to those in power. There seems to be an inability to take on this defended, yet transgressed gaze. Fascination has powerful erotic origins and determinisms, first etymologically. Pascal Quignard is explicit: “I want to meditate on a difficult Roman word: fascinatio. The Greek word for phallos is said in Latin fascinus. The songs that surround it are called ‘fescinnins’. The fascinated stops the gaze to the point that they cannot detach themself from it”21.

                                        20 Jean-Pierre Vernant, La Mort dans les yeux, Paris, Le Seuil, 1998, p. 80. 21 Le Sexe et l’approi, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 11. Psychoanalysis has theorized the urge to see, “scoptophilia”, a kind of perversion of the gaze. On the eroticization of the gaze, see also Jean-Thierry Maertens and his analysis of the “Gorgô sex mask” in Ritanalyses, Chapter 10, “Le Moi envisage”, pp. 281—306, Jérôme Millon, 1987.

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Then, “we will understand the rituals as attempts to make the invisible visible”22. The public’s ritual gaze is confronted with an impossibility: the impossibility of suddenly seeing a person who has been so imagined that they have become imaginary, a “construction” terribly sublimated as “impressive”23. In the same vein, as early as 1619, Théodore Gaudefroy, deciding on the rules of protocol, stated in his Cérémonial de France that these prescriptions tend to “set by a visible order — that of ritual provisions — the invisible hierarchy of the Order proper to each society”. This appearance could be considered as make-believe, i.e. as the materialization of a being who comes to incarnate in an almost magical way, the result of the prodigious encounter (but the ritual is magical by nature) located between dream and reality, between existence and essence. In this sense, referring to the “Real Presence” is more than pleasantly metaphorical. In situ, the ritual gaze is placed “on the other side” of the appearance, even if it is sumptuous. During the ritual, in fact, conscience seems to contradict what is seen, at the cost of recurrent disbelief. It is this “disturbing strangeness” that provokes fascination, from which will also come the feeling of having experienced a historical moment. From the individual to the collective, these emotional transportations can lead to the fusion of the group gathered in the ritual into a single body, of both regressive (the crowd is                                         22 Christoph Wulf, “Mimesis et ritual”, Hermès, no. 22, “Mimesis. Imiter, représenter, circuler”, Paris, Éditions du CNRS, 1998, p. 158. 23 These hypotheses are based on a Girardian interpretation of politics. See René Girard, La Violence et le sacré, Paris, Grasset, 1972.

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powerfully matrixed) and eschatological nature; into a single body, which shares the same emotions, and the same view, collective by nature. And this fascination bears a distant trace, of religious and mystical essence: it is (all proportions kept) that of Moses in Sinai, that of St. Thomas’ doubt in the face of Jesus’ unimaginable resurrection, in the aftermath of his Passion, and it is still that of the perplexity of the women discovering the rolled stone and the shroud without the body of Christ... Because “the fascination for those who have seen, approached, touched important people, witnessed significant events, does not turn these witnesses into the stars of a free show. Their hearing is never passive, it mobilizes attention with enough intensity to permanently engrave its memory, and it engages those who have listened well beyond a furtive memory”24. In the Ancien Régime, more particularly, when power had not yet lost part of its sacred aura, seeing the king provoked effects of unimaginable fascination25, in the face of the hierophanic manifestation of an absolute and sacred power suddenly embodied. “The King was more than a King, he was an all-powerful father, an all-powerful demiurge and his prestigious images seen during the entrances and the celebrations that accompanied them inspired infantile, resigned and confident spirits”26. This king was the embodiment of a plethora of dreams, myths, and beliefs, maintained around this person, like a halo. And it was this                                         24 Arnaud Dulong, Le témoin oculaire. Les conditions sociales de l’attestation personnelle, Paris, Éditions de l’EHESS, 1998, p. 14. 25 Little imaginable, if the public appearances of the stars of show business did not remind us that, in fact, surrounding these people full of charism, the induced effects remain the same. 26 Françoise Bardon, Le Portrait mythologique à la cour de Henri IV et Louis XIII, Paris, Picard, 1979, p. 284.

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imaginary, mythical, and sacred halo that allowed sovereigns to distance themselves from reality, to present themselves as others and superiors, at each of their public appearances. Even today, through a set of rituals that still exist, the politician dedicates themselves to the perpetuation of the political body, “by expressing the transcendence of power in relation to the adventures of politics. The whole political game and the whole ritual issue identify this transcendence with the person and politics with those who embody it in the moment, and this staging necessarily (and consciously) borrows the form and means of the ritual”27. Concerning the emotional manifestations resulting from amazement caused by the gaze, in the case of “sublimation rituals”, one could speak of “eidetic hallucination”28. An eidetic image is an imaginary representation of an almost hallucinatory veracity. In the case of the effects of fascination specific to the ritual, the actors suddenly see the incarnation (which contains “nation”...) of power, both spiritual and temporal, suddenly emerge, taking form and body before their eyes. An image that has until now been conceptual is materialized, filling the space. We understand the emotion and fascination aroused. The “sublime impossible” of power appears. This apparition shows a historical outline, whose vision will be a milestone, and a historical memory; as Hegel’s exclamation before the enthroned Emperor testified. The notion of aura helps to shed light on certain aspects of this fascination. It was by questioning the status of the work of art that Walter Benjamin proposed this notion. According to him, the powerful and intuitive grasp of this aura is a sensitive experience for the eye. A halo emerging                                         27 Marc Augé, Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains, Paris, Aubier, 1994, p. 103. 28 For Plato, the eidos represented the Essence, the Form, the Idea.

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from a photograph, “a singular framework of space and time, a unique appearance of a distant being as close as it may be”29, the aura is in fact neither in the gaze nor in the object, but in the in-between, in the relationship. During the rituals, it is a form of experience of the sublime, of the impossibility made possible that arouses this fascination, as much as the nature of this relationship, exceptional because it is historical. We could also refer to Bertolt Brecht, and his concept known as the “V-effect”30: the ritual serves to deliberately draw attention to someone, to extract them from their daily context and to offer them to community consciousness and sight. In this sense, the ritual is at the same time a context of densification, a symbolization of social life and distance, too. It points to a person in a context, this polysemic “point” deliberately referring here to both point and punctum of Barthesian La Chambre claire. Make-believe emerges — it points — and it becomes the center of a ceremonial device as much as a symbolic context: it is pointed. 4.1.4. “Spect-actors” The spectacular and spectatorial particularities inherent in the ritual context allow the emergence of a certain type of spectator: the “spect-actors”. These are the audiences gathered in communities during the course of the ritual, in situ or participating by providing a television broadcast. It is around this collective perspective that the system is organized, and it is this that will legitimize the ritual process as a whole. The testimonial function ensures that it confers legitimacy and generates the conditions of belonging.                                         29 Walter Benjamin, “What is epic theater”, Theses on philosophy of history, Esthétique de la communication, Paris, PUF, 1997, pp. 27—31. 30 V-effect, for verfremdungseffekt, i.e. “strangeness effect”.

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The gaze is active, and even an actor. It assists, in the double sense of this verb: first of all, as a witness of a social representation. It also participates equally in the creation of something powerful symbolically, which could not exist without it. During the great ritual parades, the people composing the audience play “a role in the demonstration, those of actors whose role and function would be precisely to watch it pass”31. The people who make up this audience are much more than mere spectators, and in some aspects, they fulfill the function attributed to the ancient choir in Greek tragedies, which chanted dramaturgy, said what should be and what was to be. This is what Louis Marin seems to mean, by evoking the importance of the exchange of public gazes in processions and ritual parades: “Moreover, and this is more particularly true for the parade and the procession, [...] it appears that these types of groups as well as their process of constitution and actualisation imply structures with two extremes [...] of action and passion, of activity and receptivity, of movements and gazes taken by collective or individual figures [...] of actors and spectators; in other words, a general structure of theatricality and spectacularity32”. However, this look is engaging. It is powerfully inductive, rebuilding legitimacy and strengthening belonging. We are faced with a “dramatization of metaphorical appearance, where artifices and ritualized mirror games develop, by which the individual becomes an actor who stages

                                        31 Louis Marin, De la représentation, Paris, Hautes Etudes, Le Seuil, Gallimard, 1994, p. 59. 32 Louis Marin, ibid. pp. 49—50.

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themselves interactively under the gaze of others”33. Here, we find the description of the ritual context as a space that dramatizes a particular moment in social life and is strongly symbolically invested. From one viewpoint to another... In a parallel register, Henri Lévi-Bruhl states in La Preuve judiciaire that these symmetrical sets of views are also mandatory during a trial because they guarantee the legitimacy of the sanction34. This leads to the application of this notion of “spect-actor” to other fields, since, in this case of justice, witnesses are once again more than spectators. Their presence and their view of the trial process guarantee the legitimacy of the proceedings and the verdict. Religious devices operate on the principle of circular visibility, and everyone is also there to see others, and watch them attend the celebrated mystery. Thus, “in the rituals established by the Second Vatican Council, it is no longer just a question of seeing, but also of being seen. It is a crossroads of looks: the presiding priest, the readers in the ambo, the animator of the songs present themselves and gaze. They see the crowd and show themselves to be seen... Moreover, Evry Cathedral is an almost caricatural example of this desire to show35”. Those who attend Mass are therefore all required to be, again, “spect-actors” of the ritual, witnesses of this “invisible made visible”.                                         33 Hugues Hotier, Cirque et Communication, Bordeaux, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1995, p. 15. 34 Arnaud Dulong, Le Témoin oculaire, Paris, Éditions de l’EHESS, 1998, p. 82. 35 Maurice Gruau, L’homme rituel. Anthropologie du rituel catholique français, Paris, Métaillé, 1999, p. 82.

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If we do not want to legitimize the ceremony, if we do not want to give the ritual its ritual effectiveness, we must look elsewhere, not be a witness, declare ourselves, and say that we are physically absent through our eyes. “Other societies are constituted as its public, or ostensibly look elsewhere, refuse to legitimize the project by refraining from serving as its witnesses”36. To a lesser degree, the visitor to the museum is a “spectactor”, who constructs the exhibition through their gaze, legitimizes the object exhibited in the museum, in the way that, according to Durkheim, the gaze on an object has the ability to make a relic of it. We are here in the register of pure symbolic effectiveness. 4.1.5. From “presentation of self” to “representing the collective Body” Reference has often been made in these pages to Goffman’s “presentation of self”. This concept is crucial to grasping the duty of appearance that is appropriate in ritual contexts, at the interpersonal and community level. To open the approach from the individual to the collective, we propose the concept of “representation of the collective body” (see Glossary). This is a global image, a general impression that the community will produce of itself during the ritual. This collective image, characterized by a strong principle of idealization, will be perceived globally but very powerfully in the eyes of the ritual’s guest, the construction of the ritual device being always specular, conceived as a mirror.                                         36 Daniel Dayan and Eliuh Katz, “Présentation du pape en voyageur. Télévision, expérience rituelle, dramaturgie politique”, Terrain, no. 10, “Paraître en public”, Paris, Mission du Patrimoine, p. 13.

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And thanks to these mirror effects, a general perception is possible, providentially offered to the community by the ritual device, which allows it, if not to see itself completely, at least to imagine itself in its original completeness. In this sense, Pierre Bourdieu affirms that “the acts of theatricalization by which groups perform (and first of all to themselves), ceremonies, processions, corteges, parades, and so on, constitute the elementary form of objectification and, at the same time, of becoming aware of the principles of division according to which they organize themselves and through which their self-perception is organized”37. Following the example of the nations, which during the Olympic Games, represent themselves as their “charismatic double” (as McAloon calls it), via the global retransmission of the opening and closing ceremonies. Unique digressions: moreover, these great ritualized celebrations, whether political, religious, or sporting, are the only moments when the social body sees itself and contemplates all the representatives of the institutions. “Through the ordered and hierarchical parade of constituted bodies, it is the one and indivisible Nation that travels through the space of political representation. The protocol thus gives substance to the abstraction that the Nation constitutes. It allows those following the protocol events to imagine the national community”38 and even to visualize it. It is in this sense that the specularity of “sublimation rituals” is regenerating. The eyes of the “spect-actors” allow,                                         37 Pierre Bourdieu, “La recherche politique. Eléments pour une théorie du champ politique”, in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, vols 26—27, February 1981, p. 11. 38 Yves Déloye, “Le protocole ou l’ombre du pouvoir politique. Sociologie historique de l’obéissance politique en France”, in Le Protocole ou la mise en forme de l’ordre politique, edited by Yves Déloye, Claudine Haroche, and Olivier Ihl, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1996, p. 58.

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during the time of the ritual, to complete and make whole this fragmented and conceptual social body the rest of the time. Through the grace of this gaze, the sensation of ceremonial and collective communion is approached: in the ritual context, “an essential relationship is established between the subject and society. The subject becomes selfaware by taking the role of others; they can also grasp the attitude of an entire group, if not the entire community, by conceiving them as a ‘generalized Other’. The generalized Other gives birth to the ‘I’, all the roles internalized by the subject. It is opposed to the ‘I’ that represents the unique Individual, not considered as a social being. These relationships between Me and I, Self and Generalized Others, are made possible by communication39”. 4.1.6. The community ritual, an expression of a social doctrine 4.1.6.1. Communions and ritual incorporations The great social rituals would allow access to a social communion, this opening up the theme of community doctrines. Texts from different traditions echo each other and evoke the “social corporality” that rituals would shape. It remains to be seen what it means to perpetuate these large ritual “gatherings”. Durkheim, and his concept of “collective effervescence”, can be a gateway to understanding this controversial

                                        39 Yves Winkin, Anthropologie de la communication, Brussels, De Boeck, 1996, p. 45.

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subject40. And, politics is indeed the domain of predilection of the “mystical body” and social communion. This physical image of society, the principle of which is the head, was commonplace in ancient and medieval thought; thus, some texts by Jean de Salisbury and Nicolas de Cues expressed social inequality through the various functions of the social body. For example, if the king is the head, the peasants are the feet. The hierarchy is thus legitimized, and the “mystical body” is only the expression of an order willed by God. Late in the 17th Century, this organic vision of politics was still in force. One needs to only quote Thomas Hobbes’ book, Le Corps politique, ou les éléments de la loi morale et civile, dated 1652. However, beyond the bodily metaphors, the political ritual clearly indicates its theological origins through this principle of communion41. The political meanings of the “mystical body”, “social corporality”, and “ritual incorporations” are at the origin of the Catholic tradition’s theological language. Christ is often distinguished between a personal body (corpus personale) and a mystical body (corpus mysticum). Canonically, the nature of Jesus is twofold, containing also the collective and mystical entity that is the Church. This is the collective body aggregating in Christ. St. Paul states (St. Paul I, Corinthians XII): “18. But, in fact, God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be”. “20. As it is, there are many parts, but one body”. This biblical metaphor is also present in many ancient authors’ works, and it was naturally adapted to the State and the                                         40 See Emile Durkheim (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life), but also Sigmund Freud (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego), Max Weber (Economy and Society), and Elias Canetti (Crowds and Power), among others. 41 The political ritual and religion share a semantic destiny: the words celebration, worship, communion, symbolism... are naturally common to them.

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Prince, in a historical context, France of the Ancien Régime, where the principle of the monarchy of sacred law reigned without undividedness. These theories had penetrated the minds of many people to such an extent that one may wonder whether, at one time, the use of these metaphors had not taken on sufficient consistency to impose themselves as truths among contemporaries42. From theoretical principles to their concrete expression, the metaphor of society as a “social body” was realized during the Royal Entrances. It was a ritual of incorporation, since we were witnessing the communion of this political and mystical body, which then found unity through the great ritual parade. It should be recognized that within the ritual unfolding of the Entrance, another ritual was lived, which saw all the corporations being touched in a ceremonial manner by the king, this touching marking the integration into the symbolic body of the Nation. Thus, during the Entrance of Louis XIV in Paris, June 1660, the king saw the various representatives of the trades, cities, and “constituted bodies” come to him for several hours, “integrating” them into his body by touching them ritually. Nowadays, an anthropological interpretation of the official visits can lead to considering the ceremonial presentation of public figures to the President, with handshakes or embraces, as the distant resurgence of this royal touch of mystical essence, since the aim is reintegration and regeneration. “See the president”, shake their hand, and touch them43.                                         42 Jean Bodin also made a major theoretical contribution by affirming that “sovereignty is what happily unites all the members and parties [of the republic] and all households and schools into one body”, J. Bodin, Les Six Livres sur la République, Amsterdam, Scientia Verlag, 1629 republished edition of 1977, p. 122. 43 But with too many contacts, an unexpected coming together

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Moreover, these “ceremonial incorporations” took place within a decorum that recreated the ideal Society. The superposition of this “double ideal” made it possible to perform again the time of the origins, whose harmonious order we imagined. For a cosmogonic and insular symbolism emerges from this idealization of all societies during the political ritual: they close on an idealized representation of themselves, complete to their perfection. All this was valid during these festive and ritual times, which allowed its actors to access a historical and even mythical dimension. This closure of urban space is not specific to political rituals: all the great contemporary rituals also redefine their space. It separates not so much the clean from the dirty, but the pure from the impure, and, finally, the sacred from the layperson. And ritual communions ratify a bond, which allows the “being-together” to aggregate to “become one”, and to proceed to the regeneration of society. 4.1.6.2. Energy rituals... There is a powerful energetic dimension to these ritual “effervescences”. Social regeneration and the revitalization of individuals and communities through trance phenomena are regularly mentioned by anthropologists. These make a distinction between mana, as power descending from heaven, and numen, energy rising from the earth. Ritual communion is above all the sharing of a vibration, the tuning of individual energies into a collective vibration, into a “magnetism” of mystical essence. Emile Durkheim mentioned in this regard the “dynamogenic” influence of religion. For the ritual “carries within it an energy: that of the realization of its ends as well as that of the satisfaction                                         runs the risk of causing a scandal, such as the too casual selfies taken with Emmanuel Macron by young people in less formal clothes, images “attacking his function”, and which were strongly reproached in 2018.

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of unconscious desires, but its dynamic is expressed above all in the convergence of individual energies for the benefit of the community in which it is expressed. In this regard, it is an integrator”44. Through the ritual, individual emotions crystallize into a collective emotion, exacerbating the awareness of belonging to the community, of being integrated, socially incorporated. Nevertheless, the ritual, however symbolically effective we may attribute it to be, does not work “empty”, in a systematic way. The first rule of “ritual effervescence” leads us to consider that we take part in it without being forced to do so. In order for it to regenerate the community, each of its members must participate in the ritual voluntarily. A survey has never been carried out, which would ask the onlookers of major totalitarian demonstrations what degree of credibility and legitimacy they give to “the masquerade”. But the most important thing for the authorities assigning them to be present is that they “play the game”, preserving appearances. After all, participating in the ritual, accepting its rules (even under duress), means submission and belonging. It is here that it reveals the underlying symbolic violence. Dozens of marriages, coronations, and other conversions have been celebrated against the will of their main actor, but have nevertheless been symbolically validated. Thus the union between the young Henry IV and “la Reine Margot”, in 1572, on the eve of Saint Bartholomew’s Day. This proud queen displayed an obvious unwillingness to play the game. It did not matter: having taken place ritually, the marriage took place. Splendor and misery of ritual performance... In any case, the great ritual manifestations perpetuate the “gatherings” and promote the collective effervescence toward the forms of the Great Community. The great social rituals would become increasingly rare if not. But we also                                         44 Claude Rivière, Les Rites profanes, Paris, PUF, 1995, p. 78.

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observe that sport or music (major international competitions, concerts, and recent rave parties) put back on the agenda large ritualized community festivals, whose return Durkheim prophesied: “A day will come when our societies will know again these hours of creative effervescence, in the course of which new ideas arise and new formulae are found which serve for a while as a guide to humanity; and once these hours shall have passed, people will spontaneously feel the need to relive them from time to time in thought, that is to say, to keep alive their memory by means of celebrations which regularly reproduce their fruits45”. As such, the extraordinary enthusiasm generated by the French victories in the 1998 and 2018 FIFA World Cups is less anecdotal than it might seem. Endorsing the classic and millenary forms of ritualized popular jubilation, these victories provoked a wave of euphoria uncommon in a France that was said to be suffering from “doom and gloom”. Above all, they have produced a noticeable strengthening of social ties (transcending the usual divisions of class, age, ethnic origin, and gender) and a reaffirmation of national identity and “patriotic belonging”. All accredited observers, polling institutes, columnists, and sociologists spotted this enthusiasm. All this for football!?! Some sorrowful spirits may have laughed at it. The fact is, however, that all spheres of society received the dividends. However, it is the shaping of popular joy in these gigantic celebrations that can regenerate a country, by bringing together millions of people in the same momentum,                                         45 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., translated from French by Joseph Ward Swain, 1915, p. 428.

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reaffirming their awareness of existing together, of “being with” each other, and of being proud of this. Ritual mediation works produce the conditions of this social range, which constitutes the “I” in “We”, in order to give the community occasional access to this dreamed of communitas46, “a moment in time and yet out of time, in and above any social structure”. Collective exultation, national exaltation... France is a country that found itself, 20 years apart (1998 and 2018) “transported above itself”, brought into contact with historical and even mythical spheres. The country was truly enthusiastic, caught “in the breath of the gods”. And in ancient times, the winners of the Olympics received the same collective tribute as current champions. The Greek heroes returning from the Games would, during a glorious procession, return to their city with breaches opened exceptionally in the walls of the city. More recently, the series of attacks that struck France in 2015 saw in response huge rallies (Place de la République in Paris, but also in many of France’s main squares), imposing demonstrations seeing the nation “join together”, uniting in citizen and republican communions, in order to “stand up” against terrorist barbarity. Less anecdotal than it may seem, French singer Johnny Hallyday’s recent funeral was broadcast live on television and was attended by hundreds of thousands of people, all in sadness and fervor... In any case, “society does not consist only in existing through transmission, through communication, but... continues to exist in transmission, in communication. There is more than a verbal link between the words ‘common’, ‘community’, and ‘communication’.                                         46 See, again, Victor Turner, Le phénomène rituel. Structure et contre-structure, Paris, PUF, 1990. See in particular pages 98 et seq.

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People live in a virtuous community of the things they have in common, and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common”47. One of the invaluable social functions of the ritual, in its optimal course, is precisely to offer the possibility, and to create the conditions for the advent of this “being-together”. 4.1.7. The “double ritual constraint” Several authors have noted that the ritual functions as a “thought trap”, a context capable of anesthetizing critical meaning. And it may come as a surprise to consider that many politicians with significant decision-making power (and very busy schedules) take pleasure in representations in which they themselves are the obligated actors. They require them to conform to the pre-established order of the ceremony, which is not in line with their level of responsibility and their pace of usual activities. The ritual context produces confirmation: it is necessary to comply with its protocol requirements and the temporality it induces, slower than that of daily life. In fact, one observation leads us to consider that the ritual permanently places its participants between two states, or in two states at the same time. We could say in a prosaic way “that the participant sits on two tables”, two registers of perception of reality, without ever being entirely in either one. They carry out a subtly organized psychological and emotional destabilization, the benefits of which are social and institutional. Moreover, “according to Wallace, rituals lead to cognitive and emotional restructuring, characterized by dissociation leading to the rejection of familiar frames of reference, and

                                        47 John Dewey, cited in Park and Burgess (1921, 1970), in Yves Winkin, Anthropologie de la communication, Brussels, De Boeck, 1996, p. 103.

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by various reinforcement operations leading assimilation of newly acquired information”48.

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In fact, from this “transient psychological imbalance”, a feeling of dissociation, and a “disturbing strangeness”, to borrow a Freudian expression, will occur. The ritual context deliberately places its participants in this hybrid state. Acting on two opposing and ultimately complementary perceptions of time, space, and also of the statuses of individuals, it exerts its action by combining, in this context, two modalities of being. It is this ambivalent state that is covered by the expression “double ritual constraint”. “Constraint”, because, as stated by the Batesonian theory, there is a constant opposition between the expression of ambivalent emotions and feelings during the ritual process. Prisoners of the ritual context, its actors operate in a “modified state of consciousness” mode. We recall that in Balinese Characters, Bateson, when observing Balinese mother—child couples, noticed that the mother was establishing an ambivalent relationship with her child, a relationship based on attraction/repulsion. We are, in our ritual context, faced with a Batesonian “double constraint”: the will to express an emotion is restricted, even as it seeks to manifest itself. Here, it is not the Balinese mother who rejects, but mutatis mutandis, the ritual constraint that imposes this restraint, this selfdiscipline, without which the ritual would become a simple celebration, then misses its effects. And there is already an opposition between the personal and the institutional status of the participants in the ritual: the ritual actors are no longer entirely individual persons as                                         48 Daniel Dayan, Eliuh Katz, La Télévision cérémonielle, Paris, PUF, 1996, p. 172.

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they belong to a community, a social body, their belonging and participation reinforced by titles and uniforms. Ritual space and time, likewise, contribute to producing dissociation effects in the actors’ perceptions. Indeed, the ritual is presented as an a-chrony and utopia that is already etymological, by virtue of the fact that ritual time is by nature an event-based time, in opposition to that of everyday life. The ceremonial space is anything but daily, since the principle of idealization and magnificence has cleaned, embellished, and purified it. From the reminiscence of the heavenly Jerusalem as a sacred urban space to a temporal digression always approaching the golden age, the ritual is again ambiguous: its participants no longer know exactly “where they are” in time and space. More than confusion, there is superposition, and even fusion of one daily space to another, dreamed and represented by the device. The perception of the ritual space lends itself to an antagonistic perception. Objectively, we know that the ritual context accelerates the possibilities of encounters and exchanges, the opportunities for interaction. In this sense, it constitutes the standard ideal of the “sociopetal” space as defined by Edward T. Hall. However, things are not so simple once again, since, in this case, they are twofold: the rules governing the ritual, the protocol that arranges it, mean that individuals must also “restrict” the spontaneous expression of their feelings, their emotions. A sociopetal place, the ritual context is, therefore, at the same time, and all at once, a sociofugal49 space.                                         49 Concerning the notions of sociopoetic and sociofugal spaces, see E. T. Hall, The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time, New York, Anchor, 1984. “Sociopetal” places favor human contact, those called “sociofugal” go against easy and natural relationships.

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However, “protocolary memory is part of a specific materiality, space and places where groups in action in society are recognized (honors, rank and precedence, costumes, spatial disposition...) but also ‘emotional techniques’ (the expression is borrowed from Maurice Halbwachs). The latter aim to govern the actions and emotions of individuals, to bring their behavior into line with the collective feelings that the protocol values. The rules of protocol are therefore also codes for expressing emotions and political passions50”. And the ritual actors are caught in this “emotional trap”, in which they cannot express their feelings as they would like. And for good reason, they are sometimes forbidden by protocol standards to speak and even to move outside the sequences regulating exchanges and that codify individual expression. We can again refer to the notion of an “analytical framework” as stated by E. Goffman in 1974. During the ritual, there is a superposition of a “primary framework” presenting the reality “as it is”, and a “transformed framework”, which enjoins us to not take anything at the first level. Hence this (con-)fusion between two modalities of reality, skillfully maintained, and which produce these dissociation effects, manifested by a fascination resulting from radical disbelief in the face of “incarnate aporia”.

                                        50 Yves Déloye, “Le protocole ou l’ombre du pouvoir politique. Sociologie historique de l’obéissance politique en France”, in Le Protocole ou la mise en forme de l’ordre politique, edited by Yves Déloye, Claudine Haroche, and Olivier Ihl, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1994, p. 51.

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4.1.8. From another West... In conclusion, it is important to reconsider the powerful anthropological dimension of the great rituals discussed here. They constitute an exchange, but also a form of oneupmanship, which, under the guise of institutional staging, is indeed a potlatch in the first sense of the term, involving appearance logics and sacrificial expenses. During these great ritual performances, a gift and a counter-gift are played and knotted together, giving rise to admiration and the fear of an image of extreme density; an incarnation. This “incarnation” is not without risks; the ritual context and constraint serve to welcome and contain the numen inherent in power, as much as the excesses that its coming and incarnation could generate. And the wonder, the Hegelian oceanic feeling does not succeed in totally removing fear, that of seeing the brutal unleashing of numinous forces attributed to the one who comes, sees, and lives, under the eyes of the “spect-actors” of the ritual, truly capitalized. There is a diffuse but present, pressing fear. Let us recall that in many cultures and traditions, it was impossible to meet the sovereign’s eyes, and sometimes even to simply look at them. The looks of common men could have stained the sovereign; but above all, the risk was to be amazed by this overpowering look. Specular return to the eyes of the Gorgon, which petrify and kill when they make eye contact. The ritual is the melting pot of these dialectical oppositions, on which society tries to establish a precarious order and to find this unstable balance that protects it from chaos. Does not Lucien Scubla remind us that the ritual contains violence51? As for Jean-Paul Sartre, he affirmed                                         51 Lucien Subla, “Ceci n’est pas un meurtre, ou comment le sacrifice contient la violence”, in De la violence, vol. 2, seminar by Françoise Héritier, Odile Jacob, Paris, 1999, pp. 135—170.

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that “it is necessary to put rituals between people, if not they will massacre each other”... Our Western rituals, however, are imperfect, and, through them, we are the heirs of distant and almost forgotten épistémè, of which they are precisely the witnesses, deafeningly silent. In them resounds the distant echo of another West. Indeed, contemporary rituals have lost their fear, while at the same time escaping the function of the grotesque, whose meaning Jean-Pierre Vernant has shown regarding ancient masks, both a conjurative challenge to the gods and an anamorphosis of their powers. Most importantly, most of our rituals have broken the traditional in and out that made them a sacred form of communication as our societies became desecrated. The nostalgia for this major function of the rituals then remains inscribed in their mechanism, so full of precautions, in the appeal that comes to incarnate, in these communions that are now pagan and yet full, etymologically, of “religion”, that is, of reliance. Our rituals are still full of sacredness; they are the discreet trace of times and societies that assumed this part would be implicit. However, there is no passéism. Let us return to conclude with this gift/counter-gift inscribed as a primitive feature of the relationship with others, an anthropological foundation of the first and ultimate forms of exchange. It embraces and engages, in a broad movement, the a priori harmless contours of interpersonal exchange as well as the large ceremonial gatherings that regenerate the social body. 4.1.8.1. A return to communication We find ourselves at the heart of our symbolic reading of archaic, elementary forms of social connection, whose depth goes beyond our now rational horizons. But “it becomes possible to demonstrate that the societies in which we live, however evolved ‘they may appear’, reveal similar modes of

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relationship [to those of Polynesian tribes], and that the gift regime as we have discovered it in such distant lands and in such a buried past, retains all its effectiveness in our laws and morals”52. And here as well as there, today as then, we do a service, and we visit, again... The ritual and the gift, intertwined, entangled, it is the mediation that always emerges, a glow that no curtain can conceal. And from these encounters, these exchanges, “a transcendent third party emerges each time [which] is nothing more than the relationship itself which imposes itself as a full-fledged actor”53. It is in this sense that the work you have just read is profoundly communicative: the pulsating heart of the ritual is only relationships, mediation, intercession, communion, and so on. And this book has tried to prove it, to support this hypothesis and to structure this unthoughtfulness, to give it body and meaning... For “if we take the word communication in both its narrow and broad sense, we see that when someone is in the presence of others, their activity has all the characteristics of a long-term commitment: others normally give the person credit and offer them while they are in their presence, the counterpart of something whose true value they can establish only after leaving54”. In this gift/counter-gift, anthropology and communication meet, knowing that it is etymologically inscribed in communication. Reference is made to the original meaning                                         52 Bruno Karsanti, Marcel Mauss. Le fait social total, Paris, PUF, 1994, p. 6. 53 Mark R. Anspach, A charge de revanche. Figures élémentaires de la réciprocité, Paris, Le Seuil, 2002, p. 5. 54 La mise en scène de la vie quotidienne. I/La présentation de soi, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1973, p. 12.

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and the symbolic content of the ancient munus, common root, legacy, and heritage of our disciplines, our societies, our very exchanges, which contain and summon in their apparent banality the anthropological and moral terms of what underlies us “to be with”, man before his fellow men, and man among them55. As such, the ritual is a true “societal structure” at the same time as this enigmatic “structure that connects” according to Bateson. “It may well be that the ritual is not only the distant source of institutions that would then be self-sufficient, but that it is and remains the only possible basis for any structurally stable social organization”56. At the end of this book, we will be able to connect the subject to the spirit of the times, to see that we are witnessing the resurgence of rituals in our society. Folklorized and marginalized for a few decades (from the 1970s to the beginning of this century), these rituals are returning in force, through their restructuring, proving once again their invaluable functions. Not only the Republican baptisms, official receptions and graduations, swearing in, the opening of marriage as a symbolic institution, and etiquette competitions but also the revival of traditional festivals, festivals celebrating both a form of artistic expression and values, and a community of sharing, brotherhoods exhuming forgotten local traditions... The list could be a long one, proving the renewal of rituals. These are not just demonstrations organized by institutions seeking legitimacy or popular entertainment for the summer season, but more deeply a fundamental movement that puts the symbolic, a collective memory, and identities that can be                                         55 Yves Winkin, “Munus. L’étymologie comme heuristique”, revue MEI, no. 10, “Histoire et communication”, edited by Pascal Lardellier, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1999, p. 51. 56 Lucien Scubla, “Introduction générale”, in Au commencement était le rite, Arthur M. Hocart, op. cit., p. 17.

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inscribed for a long time, shared and celebrated at the center of the social game. Let us present a circular return to the inaugural Durkheimian question: “What makes it stand?”. The ritual, probably, an indispensable instance of symbolization, scriptwriting, and estheticization of social life, the ritual, as a form that assembles, fighting against dissolving anomie, against chaos. So let us return to the emphasis on the trace, which logically opens on the traced, to conclude. This person, often called a “regulator”, guides, orients, suppresses, refers to order, to measures, and even to “divine proportion”. All this is contiguous to the ritual; this and the trace finally share an authentic semantic destiny. I hope that these pages will have proved this. 4.2. “Ritual regimes” The ritual is a “cultural form”; however, it would be simplistic to want to place all the rituals under a common model, without taking into account the morphological and social specificities characterizing them. The exercise of typology is the prerequisite for most scientific approaches, because classifying is about introducing meaning. I have chosen here to classify the rituals according to the principle of “ritual regimes”, according to an original classification. They propose to integrate community rituals, understood in the broad sense of the term as formal social situations. With this scale, all ritual practices can be prioritized according to a few criteria, knowing that the degree of the general formalism of the context will be considered as the most “safe resource”. Therefore, to classify a ritual situation on this scale, we will proceed by asking the following questions:

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1 — Is the ceremonial delimitation of ritual space—time defined by pre-rituals of passage, such as ritual receptions? Is the ritual context instituted by normative texts (protocol rules, and speeches) or “tradition”? Does a particular device spatially delimit it? 2 — Are the general arrangement and conduct organized according to stated precedence? And is the presence of idealization specific to the “principle of magnificence” affirmed? What kind of protocol-related constraints are exerted on the individual during the ritual process? Does the principle of slowness, which morphologically defines “ritual movement” (according to E. Goffman), apply to the participants and to the general process, by slowing down gestures and the flow of words? 3 — Is there any evidence of implicit or explicit recognition of the mediation function performed by the ritual? What values, virtues, ideals, or institutions (which can be embodied by a personality, uniform, object) does the ritual have in the function (explicit or implicit) of celebrating? 4 — Does the ritual context proceed to a performance, based on a device for exposing bodies or certain archetypal objects? Is the spectacular dimension of the staging important in the general organization and arrangement of the ritual? This principle of “ritual regimes” makes it possible to outline a classification. Rituals are classified here as decrescendo, starting from the most formal community rituals, and moving toward ritual situations that are a priori less rigorous.

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4.2.1. Community and social rituals These rituals are gathered from several tens to several thousand participants, each of them respecting the rules imposed on them by the ritual and the protocol. Based on this rating scale, they include: — In the first place, there are religious rituals, such as “obligation masses” (Easter, Christmas...) and traditional Sunday high masses. There is indeed a delimitation of ritual space—time by appropriate formulas and gestures (signs of the cross...). These are forms of mediation toward sacred entities (God and saints in this case), a great formalization presides over the whole ceremony, books explicitly called “ritual”, containing the precise modalities of development... The “principle of magnificence” is an important instance, through the ostentation of the different costumes, ritual accessories (cross, chalice, ciborium, etc.). Finally, if the purpose does not lie in the staging, the spectacular dimension is important, characterized by a “demonstration” device, a spatial organization favoring the principle of centrality... The participants are “spect-actors”, invited to witness a “mystery” and to see the invisible incarnate. Their gaze, above all, produces collective memory and belonging. Canonical texts, enacted jointly at the time of the rise of the audiovisual media in the 1940s and 1950s, affirm that it is possible to attend Mass and papal blessings in front of one’s television set and receive the sacraments by proxy, valid despite the vicariousness associated with the media. — We then find “political liturgies” (C. Rivière), i.e. great state ceremonies. Here too, rituals and welcoming words mark the entrance into the ritual space—time. Precise

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protocols, inherited from the diplomatic tradition57, regulate the conduct of the ceremony and the order of precedence. Precise spatial markers (rows of people, red carpets, etc.) and an exacerbation of interpersonal distances make the ritual space tangible. “Every ritual of appearance is accompanied by a staging that meticulously regulates positions and distances, a spatial translation of a preexisting or temporary hierarchy”58. Here, mediation is turned toward idealized values and representations, even unconscious ones (the “community of origins”). And all this is emblematized by the personality welcomed, invested with a certain appeal. An imperative of exposure and demonstration places this personality in the center and above the rest, different from the “spect-actors”. The entire ceremony is organized under the aegis of the “principle of magnificence”. These events are generally covered by the media, and these broadcasts contribute to giving them a full historical dimension. — Then the great ritualized social celebrations, such as the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games and major sporting events (the World Cup), and so on. Thousands of people, in situ, and millions via the full broadcasts, are invited to attend these ceremonies, all of whom have become “spect-actors” as a result of this participation. These great representations constitute forms of intercession toward values such as the Republic, Brotherhood between Populations, the Nation, Youth... Festive spontaneity is controlled by the ritualization of the event. Moreover, in order to satisfy both the participants and the requirement of order and magnificence that must preside                                         57 On this point, see Bernard Moreau’s book Protocole et cérémonial parlementaires, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1997. The author analyzes the evolution of diplomatic traditions around the world. 58 Christian Bromberger, “Paraître en public”, Terrain, no. 15, Paris, Mission du Patrimoine, October 1990, p. 8.

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over these ceremonies, the festival is “emitted” at the end of the parades, and still expressed by fireworks, for example, which shape the festive explosion... — Next come “laypeople liturgies” (C. Rivière), of which the Montée des Marches, the famous red carpet of the Cannes Film Festival, is a typical example, but also great concerts or fashion shows. Markers delimit a ritual space— time. A rigorous protocol and the “principle of magnificence” govern the whole ceremony; everything is organized around the coming and then the appearance of “totemized” personalities, stars who are nurtured by charism. The major political meetings before the elections, ritualized excessively in order to confer solemnity on the meeting and legitimacy on political figures, can be linked to these “laypeople liturgies”. The festive dimension, overshadowed by the official character and the values celebrated, is limited to the opening and the end of the demonstration, the beginning and the end coinciding — and this is not incidental — with the appearance and disappearance of the politician for whom everyone is gathered for. But likewise, “televised duels during the presidential elections are one of those great moments. And it seems quite obvious that in the minds of the protagonists, as in those of the authors of the staging, the will to ritualize is explicit, deliberate and meticulous... It is the presence or promise of the myth that is taking shape: the Appel du 18 juin59, in the history of France, is obviously the                                         59 The appeal of June 18 was a famous speech given in 1940 by Charles de Gaulle, the then leader of the Free France forces. It is considered by many to be the origin of the French Resistance to the German occupation of the country.

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archetype of the resistant and effective word, capable of galvanizing national energies60”. — We then find “institutional rituals” as Pierre Bourdieu defined them: theory defenses, formal and public awards of decorations, etc. This time there are fewer participants. Nevertheless, organizational rules are at work. The “facade” (E. Goffman) of individuals and the general system is important; symbolic mediation is oriented toward values (Work, Merit, Knowledge). The ceremonial space—time is marked, the general organization is responsible for the performance of the participants in stages, the respect of public distance, the bowing to which people who are usually familiar with each other are forced to do, and so on. And if the king is nothing without the coronation, what would a doctorate be without the defense that legitimizes the applicant? Then come the ritualized shows: fashion shows, preliminaries to sporting events, media ceremonies (Oscar and Caesar awards), “premiers” at the Opera, and circus performances. Once again, precise rules giving the ceremonial tone are observed. The “facade” of individuals and the system is extremely important; it is toward secondary values (Talent, Style, Beauty, etc.) that mediation plays, although it is sometimes implicit for the participants, and is expressed “in their defending body”. There is still a spectacle, through the arrangement of the device: scenes, the primacy of the principle of centrality, and so on. — Finally, we find the social rituals of commensality: cocktails, drinks parties, welcome or farewell speeches in an institution, etc.                                         60 Marc Augé, Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains, Paris, Aubier, 1994, p. 101.

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A group, a community, and a company gather to celebrate some of their members. Under the a priori festive character, granted by the conviviality of rigor, reigns, in fact, a precise order, under the aegis of which the whole ceremony is organized. The “facade” and the precedence are important, a tacit spectacle is required, mediation highlights codes of conviviality, sharing, and gratitude.

Glossary

The glossary provides definitions of some of the concepts and notions used in this book. Original concepts are enclosed in quotation marks. Charism: charism is a particular quality which emanates in an intangible but powerful way from a person. This form of magnetism induces types of reactions: deference, submission, admiration, seduction, etc. The charismatic person is considered as a “savior”, a prophet, since they carry a supernatural aura. The ritual devices studied in this book are all characterized by a purpose: they are designed to serve the make-believe and then the contemplation of a charismatic person for the community that welcomes them: almost sacred power for kings or presidents at official receptions, talent, beauty, seduction for stars, who all take on heroic forms. Communication: communication is considered here as being resolutely orchestral, i.e. dynamic, global, and multipolarized. For the ritual is constituted in context, within which everything makes sense, by excess or by default. The ritual context is even the nec plus ultra in communication because it is essentially a relationship (to

The Ritual Institution of Society, First Edition. Pascal Lardellier. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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reference Paul Watzlawick, according to whom content is information and relationship is precisely communication). Community: the rituals analyzed here are essentially communitarian. They find their raison d’être and their purpose in the voluntary gathering of a certain number of people. This means that they bring together “individuals who feel they belong to the same group, the totality of which is greater than the sum of the parts” (Tönnies). This definition of the community finds a tangible character in the ritual process because the ritual incorporates individuals to aggregate them into the social body where they are put in ranks and staged. Context: the (ritual) context is a particular space—time, certainly characterized by a material demarcation (see Device), which takes on a strong symbolic and emotional dimension. It is strong enough to change attitudes and behaviors, leading the actors of the ritual to behave in a certain way and to conform with what this context requires of them: solemnity, deference, etc. Device: the device has different meanings according to the authors. In this book, the ritual device defines a material ensemble consisting of platforms, red carpets, stands, fences, stairs, scenes, etc. that will be superimposed on the daily space. These material elements, which form the basis of the device, are not disparate, but homogeneous and active within the ritual process, as they will make it possible to circumscribe a particular space and time, favorable to the achievement of something in the order of symbolic effectiveness, and especially to the arrival, and to the sight of someone. For the ritual device as a whole is a visual device, which exacerbates the miraculous conditions of this — defined as “make-believe”.

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“Double bind ritual”: we recall that, according to Bateson (Balinese Characters), double bind is an emotional and affective “attraction-repulsion”, induced by the Balinese mother, and which seems to have the purpose of desensitizing her child. This notion is here taken up and opened at a collective level; it is understood that the “double bind ritual” is constituted by this ambivalent set of dialectical oppositions (emotion/contention, sociopetal/social space, expectation/ intensity, etc.), which is established by the ritual context, and which ensures its balance and durability. It is this “double bind ritual” that makes it possible to separate the celebration from the ritual, since it is specific to it. Frame: Erving Goffman defined the notion of a framework in Frame Analysis. It is fundamental in any approach to the ritual, to understand the mental changes that are essential for the ritual context to be symbolically effective. Indeed, during the ritual, there is a superposition of a “primary framework”, presenting reality as it is, and a “transformed framework”, which enjoins us not to take anything at face value. Hence this confusion between two modalities of reality, skillfully maintained by the ritual context, which produces these dissociation effects, manifested by a fascination. Moreover, among the five modes of “transformed frameworks” defined by Goffman are the shows and ceremonies as analyzed here, which are also “deep play” (C. Geertz) and “social dramas” (V. Turner). Gift: this book is placed under the auspices of the paradigm of a gift, as stated by Marcel Mauss in his The Gift, “trembling hands, heart pounding, head throbbing” by Claude Lévi-Strauss (dixit).

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For the ritual is a gift/counter-gift that is authentically Maussian, perpetuating this cycle of “giving, receiving, and giving back”. The ritually welcoming community gives (consideration, presents, tributes, etc.) to a received host, who visits, offering their “miraculous presence”. The rituals studied here are part of the gift paradigm, because it is the bonds that prevail, pacifying and perpetuating social, political, and institutional relations. “Magnificence principle”: this notion defines the authority that imposes on ritual actors, devices, and communities, as a whole a requirement of cleanliness, beauty, and dignity. In the ritual context, one must present oneself at one’s best, whatever the cost, and one must even raise one’s bidding by sacrificing to the cult of make-believe. Overbidding, sacrifice, worship, make-believe? Indeed, this “principle of magnificence” has direct anthropological origins, which are related to a potlatch. “Make-believe”1: make-believe characterizes the sudden incarnation of a prestigious and “extraordinary”, personality “incarnation” that takes place during the ritual. This hierophanic apparition is of an almost magical nature, located for its witnesses between the dream world and reality, existence and essence, and entity and identity. For this make-believe is “the offering” of a “real presence”, in the historical context of the ritual. This “make-believe” generates a fascination which goes beyond the usual functions of the gaze, to lead it into a specific and even unique register. During the ritual, the conscience seems to contradict what is seen, with a form of disbelief. This “disturbing strangeness” provokes fascination.                                         1 Make-believe is the English equivalent of the author’s original French term, appar-être, the sense of a magical appearance.

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The emotional manifestations resulting from the dazzling effect of make-believe provoke an “eidetic hallucination”: something of the imaginary order takes shape. This “sudden incarnate image” signifies the presence of History. “Metapolitics”: metapolitics is the entirety of symbolic production (composed of images, a range of objects and codified practices, such as rituals), seeing political power generate meaning about itself, while placing this production in a logic of efficiency. We are, therefore, in a pragmatic communication register. “The function of such a symbolic activity [is to be sought] at the very heart of establishing and maintaining the legitimacy of power — if not within the functioning of power itself”2. “Metapolitics” is aimed above all at the affectivity of the subjects: power must make itself amiable, if it wants to last, because it is the rule of any ideology to make the political reality it imposes sentimentally necessary. Numen: the numen (which gives the adjective numinous) can be defined as a “force” characterizing certain people who perform particular social, political, or religious functions: priests, wizards, kings, magicians, and so on. As a result, they maintain a privileged contact with the spheres of another nature, which enshroud them with this extraordinary force. Those who hold power are often enshrouded with this numen, which makes them, according to anthropologist Otto, fascinans et tremendum, “fascinating and terrible”. Performance: this hybrid concept is borrowed both from theatrical studies and from the pragmatic branch of linguistics (J.-L. Austin). It means that the rituals impose an                                         2 Jean Davallon, “La représentation, des signes au pouvoir”, Procès, Le processus de représentation politique, nos XI—XII, 1983, p. 7.

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incarnation, without which no symbolic action can be achieved. Powerfully invested symbolically, the body and gestures occupy a central place in the ritual process. They go beyond the theatrical and spectacular dimension of these demonstrations to produce effects on their actors. Ritual gestures publicly represent the profound order of social relationships. Each of the ritual actors physically states, in a willingly emphatic way, his or her status, role, and social position in relation to that of others. It is physically, and no longer only legally, that the roles are redefined. Symbols truly live, values are embodied, taking on a social consistency through this powerful performative “ritual performance”. Potlatch: the potlatch is a major anthropological concept. It was originally a sacrificial overbid that characterized the relational and symbolic economy of the tribes of the northwest coast of the United States and Canada (notably the Kwakiutl). It is expressed in the exchange of increasingly expensive and sumptuous gifts that can lead to sacrificial destruction. But the potlatch lies above all in the obligation to appear dignified and beautiful in front of the ritual protagonist, to show prestige. It initially assumes an agonistic dimension (referring to the conflict) that must not be ignored. Rooted in a gift/counter-gift, modern and contemporary political and media rituals “contain potlatch” in the sense that each of the communities of protagonists ostensibly shows wealth and virtues. These rituals, built in a specular (“mirror”) mode, would satisfy an expectation and a desire that essentially pass through the eyes: the president, the king, the pope, the star present themselves, they give a gift of make-believe, a quasi-

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magical public incarnation (“make-believe”), at the same time as their eyes regenerate the community. On the other hand, the audience legitimizes this “make-believe” by participating in the show. A symbolic economy and a gift/counter-gift are, therefore, played out during these great community rituals. “Representation of the collective body”: I propose this concept to complement Goffman’s “self-presentation” and open it up from the individual to the group. The “representation of the Collective Body” is a global image, a general impression that the community will produce of itself during the ritual. This collective image, characterized by a strong principle of idealization (see “principle”), magnificence will be perceived in the eyes of the ritual’s guest, the construction of the ritual device being always specular. Ritual: multiple definitions of the ritual coexist. And traditionally, a founding dichotomy pits micro-rituals or “interaction rituals”, typically Goffmannian, against the great public and solemn ceremonies, known as Durkheimian. The ritual studied in these pages can be defined as a particular social context, established within a framework of spectacular nature, characterized by a codified set of normative practices, and by a strong symbolic value for its actors and spectators. A show, but more than that, the ritual is a “performance” with symbolic effectiveness from a social and institutional point of view. “Ritual mediation”: mediation is a concept that is almost valid only with a qualifying adjective: it will then be called cultural, technical, political, symbolic... and problematized in these perspectives. Strictly speaking, mediation is an intercession operation, of a technical or symbolic nature, characterized by the institution of a third party. “Ritual mediation” is supported by the system, which establishes the ritual by delimiting a particular space—time,

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as well as supported by the context, which refers to the primacy of the symbolic, and its effectiveness by those who participate in it, while sharing emotions. Semiurgy: this neologism (R. Barthes) means a dramatization of the use of symbols and meaning, through their ceremonial staging. The ritual always proceeds to a “semiurgy”, and we understand that this notion is important in this book to characterize the theatrical, solemn, and almost tragic character of the great ritual ceremonies. “Spect-actors”: I propose this notion (which is a neologism) to define the participants of community rites; it is understood that a fundamental role is assigned to their gaze within the ritual process. During the ritual, indeed, no one is only an actor or a spectator. Its spectacular logic, like the specular construction of its device, requires everyone to look at it at the same time “when they play”. The views of the two groups facing each other in the mirror during the ritual are of a different, asymmetrical nature. “Sublimation ritual”: certain rituals, known as “sublimation” rituals, are characterized by the fact that their devices present quasi-magical or sacred objects, or personalities (kings, presidents, the pope, etc.) made superlative and charismatic by this context; it is understood that this display promotes implicit or explicit intercession toward values or ideals. These “sublimation rituals” always concern communities whose ideals they “mediate”, whose values they celebrate, and for whom they intercede. The actors and the ritual device are adorned, preparing themselves, seeming to be veiled by a double ideal, which shows luxury and magnificence. Symbolic efficiency: we know the fortune of this expression, proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his

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Anthropologie structurale. It defines the action exercised by mental representations and/or practices, which have the capacity and strength to transform reality, and, more particularly, social relations and statutes. Pierre Bourdieu completed this definition by stating in La Reproduction that this efficiency makes it possible to obtain something without the use of force, whereas originally, it would have made it possible to achieve it. The ritual is characterized by its symbolic effectiveness, since it establishes, consecrates, legitimizes, and delimits; these are even its essential functions. Trace: literally, this is a “print or series of prints or marks, which indicates the passage of a being or an object”, or “tracking, losing track of a fugitive”. Of course, a theoretical approach cannot be satisfied with a definition of common sense. Trace, taken on by a discipline and tracing itself, studies phenomena of different technical natures, and of first or second source (traces taken or related, guessed, etc.), which allow us to witness the manifestations of things that are absent and/or past, but which express what they are or have been, precisely through their traces. Transdisciplinary borrows disparate methodologies in order to make sense of traces that testify, tell, and attest. The concept of trace carries a strong heuristic dimension. The hypothesis of this book is that the ritual is always based on a testimonial of previous epistemes. As such, it manifests precautions and aspirations that constitute traces referring to the sacredness of social life, taken over by the symbolic architecture underlying relationships and institutions.

 

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From the Same Author

Books Le

journal d'entreprise. Les ficelles d'Organisation, 1998 (out of print).

du

métier,

Éditions

Les Miroirs du Paon. Rites et rhétorique politiques dans la France de l'Ancien Régime, Honoré Champion, with a foreword by MELOT M., 2002. Théorie du lien rituel. Anthropologie et communication, L’Harmattan, with a Postface by CAILLÉ A., 2003. Le cœur Net. Célibat et amours sur le Web, Belin, 2004. Les Nouveaux rites. Du mariage gay aux Oscars, Belin, 2005. Le Pouce et la souris. Enquête sur la culture numérique des ados, Fayard, 2006. 11 septembre 2001. Que faisiez-vous ce jour-là ?, L'Hèbe, 2006. Les Célibataires. Idées reçues, Le Cavalier bleu, 2007. Arrêtez de décoder. Pour en finir avec les gourous de la communication, L’Hèbe, 2008 (out of print). La Guerre des mères. Parcours sensibles de mères célibataires, Fayard, 2009. Opéra bouffe. Une anthropologie gourmande de nos modes alimentaires, EMS, 2011.

The Ritual Institution of Society, First Edition. Pascal Lardellier. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

144

The Ritual Institution of Society

Les Réseaux du cœur. Sexe, amour et séduction sur le Net, François Bourin, Paris, 2012. Les Ados pris dans la Toile. Des cyberaddictions aux technodépendances (with MOATTI D.), Le Manuscrit, 2013. Nos modes, nos mythes, nos rites. Le social, entre sens et sensible, EMS, 2013. Génération 3.0. Enfants et ados à l’ère des cultures numérisées, EMS, 2016. Enquête sur le business de la communication non-verbal, EMS, 2017.

Edited and co-edited books A fleur de peau. Corps, parfums, odeurs, Belin, 2003. Violences médiatiques. Contenus, dispositifs, effets, L’Harmattan, with a Foreword by TISSERON S., 2003. Des cultures et des hommes. Clés anthropologiques pour la mondialisation, L’Harmattan, with a Foreword by AUGÉ M., 2005. Demain, le livre (with MELOT M.), L’Harmattan, 2006. Le Réseau pensant. Pour comprendre la société numérique (RICAUD P.), EUD, 2007. La Métamorphose des cultures. Sociétés et organisations à l’ère de la mondialisation, EUD, with a Foreword by ABÉLÈS M., 2011. Entreprise et Sacré : Regards transdisciplinaires (with DELAYE R.), Hermès-Lavoisier, 2012. L’Engagement, de la société aux organisations (with DELAYE R.), L’Harmattan, 2013. Actualité d’Erving Goffman, de l’interaction à l’institution, L’Harmattan, 2015. La confiance. Relations, organisations, capital humain (with DELAYE R.), EMS, 2016.

From the Same Author

145

Transmissions. La médiation en révolution (with DELAYE R.), EMS, 2016. Oser la laïcité (with DELAYE R. and ENRÈGLE Y.), EMS, 2017. Identités. Métamorphoses identitaires à l’ère d’Internet et de la globalisation (with DELAYE R. and ENRÈGLE Y.), L’Harmattan, 2018. La négociation. Techniques, valeurs et acteurs sociaux de la négociation (with DELAYE R. and ENRÈGLE Y.), L’Harmattan, 2018.

 

Index

A anthropology political, 8, 16 C Cannes Film Festival, 36, 43, 120 charisma, 82, 85, 88, 89, 94, 100, 120 communication, 1, 6, 7, 8, 16, 53, 67, 69, 70, 73 context, 29, 33, 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 49, 51 cultural form, 30, 32 D deritualization, 70, 71, 72 device, 30, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 48, 49 digital liturgies, 72 disintermediation, 68, 70, 71

dispositive, 35 double constraint, 109 E Emmanuel Macron, 10, 17, 71, 73, 104 F fascination, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 112 framework, 25, 30, 31, 40, 43 H History, 53, 56, 66, 68 I information, 55, 65, 69 M mystical nature of power, 12, 13 myth, 25, 38, 39, 49, 50, 51

The Ritual Institution of Society, First Edition. Pascal Lardellier. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

148

The Ritual Institution of Society

P

S

performance, 39, 40, 41, 47, 48, 49 presentation of self, 99

social functions, 63 spect-actor, 73, 96, 98, 99, 101, 112, 118, 119, 120 symbolic effectiveness, 32, 37, 39, 41, 44, 51 symbolic mediation, 1

R ritual body, 44, 45 gaze, 81, 84, 93 media, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67 new, 72 Royal Entrances, 60, 64

T traces, 32, 39, 50 Twitter, 68, 69, 70, 72

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2016 BRONNER Gérald Belief and Misbelief Asymmetry on the Internet EL FALLAH SEGHROUCHNI Amal, ISHIKAWA Fuyuki, HÉRAULT Laurent, TOKUDA Hideyuki Enablers for Smart Cities GIANNI Robert Responsibility and Freedom (Responsible Research and Innovation Set - Volume 2) GRUNWALD Armin The Hermeneutic Side of Responsible Research and Innovation (Responsible Research and Innovation Set - Volume 5) LAGRANA Fernando E-mail and Behavioral Changes – Uses and Misuses of Electronic Communications LENOIR Virgil Cristian Ethical Efficiency – Responsibility and Contingency (Responsible Research and Innovation Set - Volume 1) MAESSCHALCK Marc Reflexive Governance for Research and Innovative Knowledge (Responsible Research and Innovation Set - Volume 6) PELLÉ Sophie, REBER Bernard From Ethical Review to Responsible Research and Innovation (Responsible Research and Innovation Set - Volume 3) REBER Bernard Precautionary Principle, Pluralism and Deliberation – Sciences and Ethics (Responsible Research and Innovation Set - Volume 4) VENTRE Daniel Information Warfare – 2nd edition

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