GENESIS A N D STRUCTURE STRUCTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS FIELD
Pierre Bourdieu
“Man,” said Wilhelm von Humbolt, “grasps objects principally—in fact, one could say, exclusively, since his feelings and his actions depend on his percep per ceptio tions—as ns—as language langu age presents presen ts them the m to him. In the same way th at he reels reels off language outside of his own being, he entangles himself in it; and each language draws a magic circle around the people to whom it belongs, a circle one can leave leave only by by leaping into anot an othe her.”1T r.”1This his theory of language as a mode of knowledge—a theory that Cassirer extended to all “symbolic forms” and, in particular, to symbols of ritual and myth, that is to say to religion conceived as language—applies also to theories, and in particular to theories of religion as instruments for the construction of scientific facts. This occurs, in effect, as if the exclusion of questions and principles that makes other constructions of religious facts possible were part of the conditions of possibility implicit in each of the great theories of religion (which, as we will see, could all be situated in relation to the three positions symbolized by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim). In order to leave one of these magic circles without simply falling into another or without condemning oneself to jumping indefinitely from one to anot a nothe her—in r—in brief, brief, in order to be able able to integrate the contributions contributio ns of various Comparative Social Research, Volume 13, pages 1-44. Copyright ©1991 by JAI Press Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 1-55938-238-4 1
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partia par tiall and mutually mutu ally exclusive theories theori es into a coheren coh erentt system (contrib (con tributio utions ns as limiting, in their current state, as the antinomies that oppose them)—one must endeavor to situate onself at the geometric vantage point in the various perspectives from which one can see, see, at the same time, both bo th what can and what cannot be perceived from each of these separate points of view. Considering religion as a language, that is as both an instrument of communication and an instrument of knowledge or, more precisely, as a symbolic symbolic medium m edium at once structured (therefore receptive receptive to structural struc tural analysis) analysis) and structuring, as a condition of possibility of the primordial form of consensus that is the agreement on the meaning of signs and on the meaning of the world that they permit one to construct, the first theoretical tradition proceeds from the objective or conscious intenti int ention on to give give a scientific scientific answer to the Kantian problem of knowledge posed in its most general form. This is the form Cassirer gave the problem in his attempt to establish the function fulfilled by language, myth (or religion), art, and science in the construction of various “domains of objectivity.”2 objectivity.”2 This theoretical theoretical intention int ention is altogether altoge ther explicit in the work of Durkheim. Durkheim, who considers the sociology of religion as a dimension of the sociology of knowledge, finds the opposition between aprior apr iority ity and empiricism in a “sociological theory the ory of knowledg know ledge,”3 e,”3 which is none other than a sociology of symbolic forms, the “positive” or “empirical” foundation of Kantian apriority.4 The debt of structural anthropology to Durkheimianism, however many times it is declared, often goes unnoticed. Philosophers may even be struck with admiration for their own acumen when they discover the survival of a Kantian problematic in works (such as the chapter of The Savage Mind consecrated to “the logic of totemic classifications”)5that are still a response, no doubt incomparably more elaborate, to the Durkheimian and therefore Kantian Kant ian problem, pr oblem, of “primitive forms of classification.”6 classification.”6 If this is so, it is is not only that the fundamental contributions of the Durkheimian school are so strongly repressed by the joint censorship of spiritualist propriety and the bon ton intellectuel that they can only appear in distinguished discussion in the more becoming disguis disguisee of Saussurian linguistics; linguistics;7 7 it is also that th at the most decisive contribution of structuralist science consists of providing the theoretical and methodological instruments permitting, practically speaking, the realization of the intention to discover the immanent logic of myth and ritual. Even though it already expresses itself in Schelling’s Philosophy of Myt M ytho holo logy gy , a defense of a “tautegorical” (as opposed to an “allegorical”) interpretation of myth, this intention would have remained only a pious vow if, if, thanks to the model of structural structur al linguistic linguistics, s, the interest in myth as structured structure had not been swept away by interest in the myth as structuring structure, that is to say as princip prin ciple le o f structu stru cturat ration ion o f the world wo rld (or (or “symbolic “symbolic form for m ,” “primitive “primitive form of classification,” “mentality” “mentali ty”)).
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But if one is always justified in leaving aside, at least provisionally, the question of the economic and social functions of mythical, ritual, or religious systems submitted to analysis, to the extent that by calling an interpretation “allegorical” it becomes an obstacle to the application of the structural method, this methodological resolution remains more and more sterile and dangerous in proportion to the distancing of one’s self from the symbolic productions of the least differentiated societies or the least differentiated symbolic produ pro ducti ction onss (like language, this produ pro duct ct of the anonymous and collective labor of succ succes essiv sivee generations) of class-di class-divided vided societies.8 societies.8 Becaus Becausee it opens an unlimited field to a method that found its most fertile and rigorous applications in phonology and “mythology,” without asking about the social conditions of possibility of this method met hodolog ological ical privilege, privilege, semiology implicitly deals with all symbolic systems as simple instruments of communication and knowledge (a postula pos tulate te that, th at, strictly speaking, speakin g, is legitimate only for the phonol pho nologic ogical al leve levell of language). language). Semiology also risks risks importing import ing into in to all analytic objects objects the theory of consensus implicit in the primacy granted to the question of meaning and that Durkheim states explicitly in the form of a theory of the function of the logical logical and social integration of “collective representations” and, in particular, of religious religious “forms of classification.”9 classification.”9 Because Because symbolic systems derive their struc s tructure ture,, as the case case of religion shows, from the systematic application of one and the same principle of division, and because they can organize organiz e the natu na tural ral and social world only by carving out antagonistic classes (owing to the fact that they give birth to meaning and consensus on meaning by the logic of inclusion and exclusion), they are predisposed predispo sed by their the ir very structu stru cture re simultane sim ultaneously ously to serve serve the functio fun ctions ns of inclusion and exclusion, of association and dissociation, of integration and distinction. These “social functions” (in the Durkheimian or “structuralfunctionalist” sense of the term) always tend to be transformed into political functions as the logical function of ordering the world (which myth fulfilled in a socially undifferentiated way by effecting a diacrisis, at once arbitrary and systematic, in the universe of things) is subordinated to the socially differentiated functions fun ctions of social social differentiation differentiatio n and legitimation of differe differences nces;; that is, as the divisions that religious ideology operates come to re-cover (in the double meaning m eaning of the term) term) social divisions divisions into competing com peting or antagonistic antagoni stic groups or classes. The idea that symbolic systems (religion, art, or even language) can speak of power and of politics—that politics—tha t is, is, once again, of order, but in a totally different sense—is no less foreign to those who make the sociology of symbolic facts a dimension of the sociology of knowledge than the interest in the structure that of which they speak— of these systems (in their manner of speaking, o f that f o r that of which they speak—their thematic) is to their syntax—rather than fo those who make it a dimension of the sociology of power.
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And it could not be otherwise, because each of the theories can seize the aspect that it seizes only by surmounting the epistemological obstacle that constitutes for it the equivalent, in the order of spontaneous sociology, of the aspect that structures the complementary and contrasting theory. Thus, the appearance of intelligibility that all the “allegorical” (or external) interpretations of myth procured so cheaply—whether astronomical, meteorological, psychological, psychoanalytical, or even sociological (as the explanation by universal but empty functions, as in Malinowski, or even by social functions)—has no doubt contributed at least as much to obstructing the “tautego “tautegorical” rical” or structural stru ctural interpretation interpre tation as the impression impression of o f incohere incoherence nce and absurdity contributed to reinforcing reinforcing the the propensity to see in this apparently arbitrary discourse discourse only a manifestation of Urdummheit , “primitive stupidity,” or, at best, an elementary form of philosophical speculation, a “country science,” as Plato would say. This happens as if Levi-Strauss had not been the first to penetrate the mirror of explanations that were “all too simple,” because naively naively projective. He did this at the price of a radical radi cal doub do ubt, t, hyperb h yperbolic olic in regard to all outside readings, which brings him to reject the very principle of the relationship between the structures of symbolic systems and social structures: “On the other hand, psychoanalysts and many anthropologists have shifted the problems away from the natural or cosmological toward the sociological and psychological fields. But then the interpretation becomes too easy: If a given mythology confers prominence on a certain figure, let us say an evil grandmother, it will be claimed that in such a society grandmothers are actually evil and that mythology reflects the social structure and the social relat rel atio ions ns.”1 .”10 By stating that magical or religious actions are worldly (diesseitig) in principle and must mu st be done don e “in order ord er to live live a long life,”11 Max Ma x Weber keeps himself from grasping the religious message as does Levi-Strauss (that is as the product of “intellectual operations” as opposed to “affective” or practical) and from raising the question of strictly logical and noseological functions of what he considers a quasi-systematic ensemble of responses to existential questions. But, at the same time, he gives himself a way of linking the contents of mythical discourse (and even its syntax) to the religious interests of those who produce it, diffuse it, and receive it, and more profoundly, of constructing a system of religious beliefs and practices as the more or less transfigured expression of the strategies of different categories of specialists competing for monopoly over the administration adm inistration of the goods of salvation salvation and of the the different different classes interested in their services. It is here that Max Weber—who concurs with Marx that religion conserves the social order by contributing, in his own words, to the “legitimation” of the power of “the dominant” and to the “domestication of the dominated”—provides the means of escaping the simplistic alternative of which his most uncertain analyses are the product, that is the opposition between the illusion of the absolute autonomy of mythical
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or religious discourse and the reductionist theory that makes it the direct reflection of social structures. This brings up what the two opposing and complementary positions both forget: namely the religious labor carried out by specialized speci alized prod pr oduc ucer erss and an d spok sp okesp espeo eople ple investe inv ested d with the power, pow er, institutional or not, to respond to a particular category of needs belonging to certain social groups with a definite type of practice or discourse. Weber finds in the historical origin of a body of specialized agents the basis for the relative autonomy that the Marxist tradition grants, without deriving all the consequences, consequences, to religion.1 religio n.12This simultaneously simultan eously leads to the heart h eart of the system system of produc pro ductio tion n of o f religiou religiouss ideology, ideology, th at is to the most specifi specificc (but not n ot ultimate) ul timate) principle of ideological the transfig tran sfigurat uration ion of social social relations ideological alchemy alchem y by which the into supernatural relations operates and is therefore inscribed in the nature of things and thereby justified. At this point, we can see the common root of the two partially and mutually exclusive traditions in the sociology of religion. The Durkheimian question of the “social functions” that religion fulfills for the “social body” as a whole can polit ical func fu nctio tions ns that religion be reformulated in the form of the question o f the political fulfills for various social classes in a given social formation by virtue of its strictly symbolic symbolic eff effic icac acy. y. If one takes seriously seriously both b oth the Durkheimi Durk heimian an hypothesis of the social origin of schemes of thought, perception, appreciation, and action and the fact of class divisions, one is necessarily driven to the hypothesis that a correspondence exists between social structures (strictly speaking, power structures) and mental structures. This correspondence obtains through the structure of symbolic systems, language, religion, art, and so forth; or, more prec precise isely, ly, religion religion contributes contribut es to the (hidden) imposition of the principle principless of structuration of the perception and thinking of the world, and of the social world in particular, insofar as it imposes imposes a system of practices practices and representations whose whose structure, objectively founded on a principle of political division, presents itself as the natural-supernatural structure of the cosmos. 1. THE PROGRESS OF THE DIVISIO DIV ISION N OF RELIGIOU RELIG IOUS S LABOR AND THE PROCESS OF THE MORALIZATION AND SYSTEMATIZATION OF RELIGIOUS PRACTICES AND BELIEFS
1.1. .1. The technological, economic, and social social transfo tran sforma rmation tionss that th at are correlated with the birth and development of towns, and in particular advances in the division of labor and the appearance of the separation of intellectual and physica physicall labor, constitute the common com mon condition co ndition of two two processe processess that tha t can only unfold in a relationship of interdependence and reciprocal reinforcement, namely the constitution of a relatively autonomous religious field and the development of a need need for the “moral “m oralizati ization” on” and “systematizat “system atization” ion” of religio religious us belief beliefss and practices.
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The emergence and development of world religions are associated with the emergence and development of the city. The opposition between the city and the country marks a fundamental break in the history of religion, just as it marks one of the most significant religious divisions in all of society affected by this morpho mo rpholog logical ical oppositi oppo sition. on. Having observed “the deep division divisio n of intellectual intellectual labor labo r and physical labor, that th at is the separation separati on of o f city and and coun co untry try,” ,” Marx wrote in The German Ideology: “Division of labor only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labor appears. From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other ot her than th an consciousness of existing practice, practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on, consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formatio form ation n of o f ‘pure pu re’’ theory, theory , theology, philosophy ph ilosophy,, morality, etc.”1 etc .”13 There is hardly any need to mention the characteristics of the peasant condition that stand in the way of the “rational “ratio naliza izatio tion” n” of religious religious practices practices and belie beliefs, fs, such as subordi sub ordinati nation on to the natur n atural al world that th at encourages “the “the idolatry of o f natu na ture re””;14 the temporal nature of agricultural work and seasonal activity, which intrinsically intrinsically resis resists ts calculation and rationa rati onaliza lization tion;1 ;15 and the spatial s patial dispersion of the rural population, which makes economic and symbolic exchanges difficult and hampers the awakening of collective interests. Conversely, the economic and social transformations that are related to urbanization—the development of commerce and above all of craftsmanship; occupational activities relatively independent of natural risks and, at the same time, relatively rationalized or rationalizable; or the development of intellectual and spiritual individualism favored by the assembling of individuals snatched from the enveloping traditions of ancient social structures—promote the “rationalization” and the “moralization” of religious needs. Weber observes: “The bourgeoisie depends depend s economically economical ly on work which is conti c ontinuo nuous us and ratio rat ional nal (or at least empirically rationalized); such work contrasts with the seasonal character of agricultural agricultural work th at is exposed exposed to unusual and unknown natural forces; it makes the connection between means and ends, success and failure relative relatively ly transp tran spare arent nt.” .” As “the immediate relationship to the palpable and an d vital vital realities of nature” disappears, these forces “become an intellectual problem as soon as they are no longer part of the immediate environment” and “the rationalist quest for the transcendental meaning of existence” begins to pose itself, while the religious experience purges itself and direct relations with the client client introduce introdu ce moral values values into in to the religiosity religiosity of the arti a rtisan san.1 .16 The greatest merit of Max Weber, however, is to have shown that urbanization (with its correlative transformations) contributes to the “rationalization” and “moralization” of religion only insofar as it favors the development of a body of specialists in the administration of religious goods. The processes of the “internalization and rationalization of religiosity usually develop parallel to a certain degree of handicraft production, most of the time
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to that of the urban trades. This involves the projection of ethical criteria and commandments and the transfiguration of gods into ethical powers which will reward good and punish evil; now the gods themselves must conform to moral expectations and the individual’s sense of sinfulness and his desire for redemption can emerge. It is impossible to reduce this parallel development to an unambiguous relation of cause and effect: Religious rationalization has its own dynamics, which economic conditions merely channel; above all, it is linked to the th e emergence of priestly educ ed ucat atio ion. n.”1 ”17 If the religion of Jehovah underwent an “ethico-rational” evolution in a Palestine which, in spite of its great cultural centers, never knew an urban and industrial development comparable to that of Egypt and Mesopotamia, it is because—unlike because—unlik e the Medit Me diterra erranea nean n polls po lls that never produced rationalized religion, given the influence of Homer and above all the absence of a body of priests, organized hierocratically and specially prepared for its function— ancient Palestine ordained a citizen clergy. But, more precisely, if the worship of Jehovah triumphed over the tendencies toward syncretism, it is because of the conjunction between the interests of the citizen priests and the new type of religio religious us interests to which urbaniz urb anizatio ation n gave rise rise in the laity. This overcame the obstacles commonly opposed to the progress towards monotheism: on the one hand, hand , “the pressure of o f the powerful material and ideological ideological interests interests vested in the priests, who resided in the cultic centers and regulated the cults of the partic par ticula ularr gods go ds,” ,” and were therefor th ereforee hostile to the process of “con “c once cent ntrat ratio ion” n” that tha t makes makes the small small enterprises enterprises of salvation salvation disappear and, on the other hand han d “the religious need of the laity for an accessible and tangible familiar religious object . . . which would wou ld above abo ve all be accessible to magical influe in fluences nces.” .”1 18 As political cond c onditio itions ns became more and more difficult, d ifficult, the Jews, Jews , who could only wait for a future improvement in their fate through their conformity to the divine commandments, came to judge as unsatisfying the various traditional forms of worship and, particularly, the oracles with their ambiguous and enigmatic responses. They felt a need for more rational methods of knowing the divine will and for priests capable of practicing them. In this case, the conflicts between this collective demand—which, in fact, coincided with the objective interest of the Levites, since it tended to exclude all rival cults—and the particular interests of the priests of numerous private sanctuaries found, in the centralized and hierarchical organization of the priesthood, a solution that would preserve the rights of all priests without contradicting the establishment of a monopoly on the worship of Jehovah in Jerusalem. 1.2. .2. The process process that th at leads leads to the constitu con stitution tion of claims1 claims 19 specifi specificall cally y developed in view of the production, reproduction, or diffusion of religious goods, and the evolution (relatively autonomous from economic conditions) of the system of these claims towards a more differentiated and more complex structure, that is, towards a relatively autonomous religious field, is
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accompanied by a process of systematization systematization and moralization moralization o f reli religi giou ouss m yth as an objectively systematic practices and an d representations. This leads from myth (quasi) system to religious ideology as a (quasi) system expressly systematized and, in parallel, from taboo and magical contamination to sin, or from mana, the “numinous” and the punishing, arbitrary, unpredictable God to the just and good God, preserver and protector of nature and society. Extremely rare in primitive societies, the development of true monotheism (as opposed to “monolatry,” which is but a form of polytheism), according to Paul Radin, is linked to the emergence of a strongly organized body of priests. That Th at is to say that th at monoth mo notheism eism,, totally tot ally ignored igno red by societies societies whose economies relied on crops, fishing, and/or hunting, is encountered only in the dominant classes of societies already based on a developed agriculture and a division into classe classess (some (some West African societie societies, s, the Polynesians, the D akot ak otaa and Winnebago Indians) in which the advances of the division of labor are accompanie accom panied d by a correlative correlativ e division of religious work wo rk.2 .20 0 To attem at tempt pt to to understand this process of systematization and moralization as the direct and immediate effect of economic and social transformations would be to ignore that tha t the real effica efficacy cy of these transform transfo rmatio ations ns is restricted to making possible— po ssible— by a sort of double dou ble negatio neg ation, n, that th at is, is, by the suppress supp ression ion of the negative economic conditions for the development of myths—the progressive constitution of a relatively autonomous religious field. This then facilitates the convergent action (in spite of the competition between them) of the priestly body (with its materi m aterial al and symbolic interests) and “extraprie “extra priestly stly forces,” forc es,” that th at is, is, the religious religious demands dema nds of certain categories categories of o f the laity and an d the metaphysical or ethical revelations revelations of a prop p rophet het.2 .21 Thus the process process of moralization moraliza tion of notions notion s such as ate, time, aidos, phtonos , and so forth—which are marked fundamentally by “the transfer of the notion of purity from the magical order to the moral order,” that is, by the transformation of the fault as blemish {miasma) into “sin”—is completely intelligible only if one takes into account (outside of the concomitant transformations of the economic and social structures) the transformations of the structure of the relations of symbolic production, which led to the constitution of a veritable intellectual field in the Athens of the fifth century. The priesthood partially colluded in the rationalization of religion: it found the principle of its legitimacy in a theology erected in dogma from which, in return, it secured validity and perpetuation. The exegetical work imposed on the priesthood by the confrontation or apposition of different mythico-ritual traditions (until then juxtaposed in the same urban space) or by the necessity to confer on obscure rituals or myths a meaning more in agreement with the ethical norms and world view of the recipients of their preaching and also the values and self-interests of the cultured group tends to substitute for the objective systematization of mythologies the intentional coherence of theologies, even of philosophies. This prepares the transformation of the
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syncretic analogy that is the basis of magico-mythical thought into a rational and consciou co nsciouss analogy anal ogy of o f its principles or o r even even into syllogism.2 syllog ism.22 The auto a utono nomy my of the religious field asserts itself in the tendenc te ndency y of o f specialists specialists to lock themselves up in autarchic reference to already accumulated religious knowledge and in the esotericism of a quasi-cumulative production, destined first of all for its produc pro ducers: ers:2 23 hence, the typical typica l priestly taste for trans tra nsfig figura urator tory y imitat im itation ion and disconcerting infidelity, deliberate polyonymy and practiced ambiguity, equivocal or methodical obscurity and systematic metaphor—in brief, all the word games rediscovered in all the scholarly traditions and whose source we can find, with Jean Bollack, in allegory, understood as the art of thinking something else with the same words, of saying something else with the same words, or saying the same things differently differently (“to (“to give a purer pure r meaning m eaning to words of the same trib t ribe” e”).2 ).24 1.3. .3. Inasmuch Inasm uch as it is the result of the monopo mon opolizati lization on of the adminis adm inistratio tration n of the goods of salvation by a body of religious specialists, socially recognized as the the exclusive exclusive holders of the specif specific ic competence necessary necessary for the product pro duction ion or reproduction o f a deliberately organized corpus of secret secret (and therefore th erefore rare) knowledge, the constitution of a religious field goes hand in hand with the objective dispossession of those who are excluded from it and who thereby pr ofan anee, in the double meaning find themselves constituted as the laity (or the prof of the word) dispossessed of religious capital (as accumulated symbolic labor) and recognizing the legitimacy of that dispossession from the mere fact that they misrecognize it as such. Objective dispossession means nothing other than the objective relationship produced prod uced when groups gro ups or classes classes occupying occupyin g an inferior inferio r position posit ion in the stru s tructu cture re of the distribution of religious goods confront the new type of goods of salvation born of the dissociation of physical labor and symbolic labor. This structure is superimposed on the structure of the distribution of the the instruments of religious production, that is, competence, or, as Max Weber would say, religious “qualification.” Objective dispossession does not necessarily imply religious “pauperization,” that is, a process aimed at accumulating and concentrating in the hands of a particular group a religious capital previously more equally distribute dis tributed d among amo ng all members of o f society.2 society.25 Neverthele Nevertheless, ss, if it is true that this capital can perpetuate itself unaltered, as much in its content as in its distribution, while finding itself objectively devalued in and by the relation that unites it to new forms of capital, then this devaluation will continue, more or less rapidly, the wasting away of traditional capital and, thus, religious “pauperization” and symbolic separation, which expresses and reinforces the secrecy of sacred knowledge and secular ignorance. 1.3.1 .3.1.. Different social formation form ationss can be arrang arra nged ed—according —according to the degree degree of development development and differentiation of their religio religious us apparatus, ap paratus, that tha t is,
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the objective solicitations mandated to assure the production, reproduction, conservation, and diffusion of religious goods—according to their distance from two extremes: religious self-sufficiency, on one hand and, on the other, complete complete monopolization mono polization of religious production by the specialist. 1.3. 1.3.1. 1.1. 1. One of the two extreme kinds of structure structu re of the distribut distr ibution ion of religious capital corresponds to opposed types of objective (and actual) relations to religious goods and, in particular, to religious competence. This pra ctical al mastery ma stery of a body of schemes of thinking and includes, on one side, practic objectively systematic action, acquired in the implicit state by simple familiarization, therefore common to all members of the group, and put to work in the prereflexive mode; and, on the other, knowledgeable mastery of a corpus of norms and explicit knowledges, explicitly and deliberately systematized by specialists belonging to an institution socially mandated to reproduce reprodu ce religious religious capital by an expressly expressly pedagogic action. The other extreme ex treme of organization of religious capital corresponds to clearly distinct types of symbolic systems, myths (or mythico-ritual systems) and religious ideologies (theogonies, cosmogonies, theologies), which are the product of a scholarly reinterpretation operated by reference to new functions—internal functions, correlated to the existence of the field of religious agents, and external functions, such as those born of the constitution of states and the development of class antagonisms and which give their raison d’etre to the great world religions with their universal pretentions. The ethical rejection of evolutionism and racist ideologies that are socially interdependent without being the least bit logically inseparable drives certain anthropologists to the reverse ethnocentrism of imputing to all societies, even the most “primitive,” forms of cultural capital that can be constituted only by a determined leve levell of development in the division of o f labor. Peasant Peas ant classe classess call this form of primitivist error the populist error: confounding disposession with pauper pau perizat ization ion leads to treatin trea ting g the decontextua deconte xtualize lized d and reinterp rein terpreted reted odds and ends of a scholarly culture of the past as the precious relics of an original culture.2 cult ure.26 6 In order ord er to escape these errors, as the analyses of Weber (which seem seem little known to anthropologists) suggest, it suffices to relate the structure of the system of religious practices and beliefs to the division of religious labor. This is what Durkheim does (without deriving from it any consequence, because that th at is not no t his objective), when he separates separat es “complex religions,” religio ns,” characterized by “the clash of theologies, variations of rituals, multiplicity of groupings, diversity of individuals,” from “primitive religions”: “Suppose the religion considered is like that of Egypt, India or the classical antiquity. It is a confused mass of many cults, varying according to the locality, the temples, are there the generations, the dynasties, the invasions, invasions, etc. etc. Popular superstitions are confused with the purest pur est dogmas. Neither Neither the thought thoug ht nor the activity o f the religion is evenly distributed among the believers; according to the men, the
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environment , and an d the circumstance circumstancess, the beliefs as well as the rites are thought of in different ways. Here they are priests, there they are monks, elsewhere laymen; laymen; there are mystics mystics and rationalists, rationalists , theologians th eologians and prophets, proph ets, etc.”2 etc.”27 Actually, it is extremely rare for anthropologists to provide systematic information about the complete universe of religious agents, about their recruitment and training, their position and function in the social structure. They only occasionally raise the question of the distribution of religious competence according to sex, age, social rank, technical specialization, or this or that social variable; at the same time, they never question the relation between the practical pract ical mastery mast ery of the mythical system, which natives have in differing degrees of proficiency, and the knowledgeable mastery that the anthropologist acquires at the end of an analysis based on systematic information gathered by observation and the survey of different informants f o r their particu par ticular lar competence. comp etence. Besides, if we know that today, in the chosen fo name of a naively antifunctionalist ideology, they tend to dismiss the question of the relation between the social structure and the structure of mythical or religious religious representations, representati ons, we see see that th at they canno can nott raise the question ques tion (which only comparative studies can answer) of the relationship between the degree of development of the religious apparatus and the structure or thematic of the message. In brief, the intellectual tradition of the discipline, the relatively undifferentiated structure (even from the religious point of view) of societies studied, and the idiographical method used tend to impose on the anthropologist the theory of religion that summarizes the Durkheimian definition of the church, diametrically opposed to that of Max Weber: “Now the magician is for magic what the priest is for religion, but a colle college ge o f priests pries ts is not a Church, any more than a religious congregation which should devote itself to some particular saint in the shadow of a cloister, would be a particular cult. A Church is not n ot a frat fr ater ern n ity it y o f pries pr iests ts; it is a moral community formed by all the believers believers in a single single faith, faith , laymen as well as the priests. prie sts.””28 It follo follows ws that, contrary to the fundam ental aim of Durkheim ,29 who hoped to find the truth of “complex religions” in “elementary religions,” the limits o f validi validity ty of the Durkheimian analysis of religion, and of any method that makes the sociology of religion a simple dimension of the “sociology of knowledge,” stem from begging the question that separates the variations in form and degree of differentiation of productive activity and, more directly, the form and degree degree of the the differentiation of o f the the labor lab or of symbo symbolic lic production produ ction from the correlative variations of the function and structure of the religious message.30 As Weber Webe r remarks rema rks correctly, the worldview propos pro posed ed by the great world religions is the product of well-defined groups (Puritanical theologians, Confucian scholars, Hindu Brahmins, Jewish Levites, etc.), indeed even of individuals (like prophets) speaking for defined groups. Therefore, analysis of the internal structure of the religious message cannot ignore with impunity the sociologically constructed functions that it fulfills first for the groups that
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produce prod uce it and then th en for the groups gro ups that th at consume cons ume it. The trans tra nsfo form rmat atio ion n of the message, in the sense of moralization and rationalization, for example, can account for at least part of the fact that the relative weights of the functions that one might call internal grow in proportion to the autonomy of the field. 1.3. 1.3.1. 1.2. 2. The opposition oppos ition between the holders of the monopoly monop oly on the management of the priests and the laity—objectively defined as profane (in the double meaning of religious ignorants and strangers to the sacred and to the body of administrators of the sacred)—is at the heart of the opposition between the sacred and the prof pr ofan anee and, correctively, between legitimate manipulation (religion) and profane and profanatory manipulation (magic or sorcery) of the sacred, whether it is a question of objective profanation (i.e., intentional profanation profanatio n (i.e., of magic magic or sorcery sorcery as a dominate dom inated d religion) religion) or of o f intentional of magic as an antireligion or an inverted religion). Because Because religion, like all symbolic systems, systems, is predisposed to fulfill a function functi on of association and dissociation or, better, of distinction, a system of practices and belief beliefss is made to appe ap pear ar as magic or sorcery, an inferior religion, whenever it occupies occupies a dominate dom inated d position positio n in the structure structu re of relations of symbolic symbolic power, power, that is, in the system of relations between the systems of practices and beliefs belonging to a determin deter mined ed social formatio form ation. n. Thus Thu s it is commo com mon n to designate desig nate pr imit itiv ivee, or a as magic an ancient and inferior religion, one therefore prim pr ofan anee (here equivalent to contemporary and inferior religion, one therefore prof vulgar) and profana pro fanatory tory.. Thus, the appear a ppearance ance of a religi religious ous ideology ideology relegates relegates ancient myths to the state of magic or sorcery. As Weber notes, it is the suppression of one religion, under the influence of a political or ecclesiastical power, to the advanta adv antage ge of anot an othe herr religion, reducing reduc ing the ancient ancie nt gods to the rank of demons, that usually gave birth to the opposition between religion and magi ma gic. c.3 31 When anthropological tradition calls on the opposition between magic and religion to distinguish social formations endowed with an unequally developed religious apparatus from systems of unequally moralized and systematized religious representations, one has the right to ask if it really has broken with this first and primitive meaning. On the other hand, at the heart of the same social formation, the opposition between religion and magic, between the sacred and the secular, between a legitimate or profane manipulation of the sacred conceals the opposition between differences of religious competence tied to the structure of the distribution of cultural capital. This is best seen in the relation between between the religio religiosity sity of the Chinese Chinese working workin g classe classess and Confucianism, which was rejected as magic out of the spite and suspicion of the well-educated who elaborated the refined ritual of state religion and who imposed the domination and the legitimacy of their doctrines and social theories, despite some local and provisional victories victories of Taoist and Buddhist priests priests whose whose doctrines and practices were were closer to the religious interests of the masses.32
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Given, on one side, the relation that links the degree of systematization and moralization of religi religion on to the degree degree of development of o f the religi religious ous app aratus and, on the other, the relation that links progress in the division of religious labor to progress in the division of labor and urbanization, most authors tend to accord to magic the characteristics of systems of practices and representations belonging to the least economically developed social formations or to the most disadvantaged social classes of class-divided societies.3 societies.33 Most autho au thors rs might m ight agree agree that tha t magical practices practices aim at concrete and specific goals, both particular and immediate (in opposition to the more abstract, more general, and more distant ends that would be those of religion); that they are inspired by an intention to coerce or manipulate supernatural powers (in oppo op posit sitio ion n to the propi pro pitia tiato tory ry and contem con templat plative ive dispositi disp ositions ons of “prayer” “praye r” for example); or th at they live live enclosed enclosed in the formalism and ritualism of do ut des.34 This is because all these trai tr aits ts—which —which originate orig inate in i n conditio cond itions ns of existence existence dominat dom inated ed by an economic urgency prohibiting prohibiti ng all distancing from present prese nt and immediate immed iate needs and an d unfavo unf avorab rable le to the develop dev elopmen mentt of compet com petent ent scholars in the field of religion—are, obviously, more often found in societies or social classes more impoverished from an economic point of view and thus predisposed predis posed to occupying occupy ing a domi do mina nated ted positio pos ition n in the relations relati ons of materia mat eriall and an d symbolic power. But there is more: every dominated practice or belief is pr ofan anat ator oryy, inasmuch as, by its very existence and in doomed to appear as prof the absence of any intention of profanation, it constitutes an objective contestation of the monopoly over the administration of the sacred, and therefore of the legitimacy of o f the holders hold ers of this monopoly. mo nopoly. In fact, its surviv survivalalis always a resistance, that is, the expression of a refusal to allow oneself to be deprived depriv ed of the instru ins trumen ments ts of religious produ pro ducti ction on.. This is why magic inspired by an intention to profane is only the limiting case or, more precisely, the truth of magic as objective profanation: “Magic,” says Durkheim, “takes a sort of professional pleasure in profaning holy things: in its rites it perforns the contrary con trary of the religious ceremony.”35 The sorcerer takes the logic of contesting the monopoly to its logical conclusion when he redoubles the sacrilege that results from putting a secular agent with a sacred object by inverting or caricaturizing the delicate and complex operations to which the prisone pris oners rs of the mono mo nopo poly ly on m anipu an ipulat lation ion of religious goods good s must mu st submit sub mit themselves in order to legitimate such juxtaposition. 2.
STRICTLY RELIGIO RELI GIOUS US INTERE INTEREST ST
2.1. 2.1. A structure struc tured d symbolic system functioning funct ioning as as a principle of structu stru cturati ration on constructs experience (at the same time as it expresses it) in the name of logic in the state o f practice, the unthought condition of all thought, and of the implicit problematic —that —th at is, is, a system of undiscussed undiscu ssed questio que stions ns setting settin g the
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bounda bou ndaries ries of the field of o f what merits discussion discus sion as oppos op posed ed to what wha t is outside outsi de of discussion, therefore admitted admi tted without withou t discussion. discussion. The effect effect of consecration (or legitimation) exercised by explanation also causes causes the system of dispositions toward the natural world and the social world inculcated by conditions of changee o f nature nature, in particular transmuting the ethos existence to undergo a chang as a system of implicit schemes of action and appreciation into ethics as a systematized and rationalized ensemble of explicit norms. Thus, religion is ideologicalfunction, a practical and an d political pol iticalfunc function tion predisposed predis posed to assume assum e an ideologicalfunction, o f absolutizati absolutization on o f the the relativ relativee and an d legitimat legitimation ion o f the arbitrar arbitraryy. It can fulfill this function only by fulfilling a logical and noseological function, which consists of reinforcing the material or symbolic strength that can be mobilized by a group gro up or class to legitimate all that th at which socially defines this group gro up or class, that is, all the characteristic properties of one way of life among many, therefore arbitrarinesses, which are objectively attached to it inasmuch as it occupie occupiess a determined position pos ition in the social structure (the effect o f conse consecrati cration on as sacralization by “naturalization” and eternalization). 2.1.1. 2.1.1. Religion exercises an effect effect of consecr con secratio ation n in two ways: ways: (1) (1) It consecrates by converting into limits of law, through its sanctifying sanctions, the economic and political limits and barriers of fa c t and, in particular, by manipulation o f aspirati aspirations ons, which tends to ensure contributing to the symbolic manipulation the adjustment of actual hopes to objective possibilities. (2) It inculcates a system of consecrated practices and representations whose structure (structured) reproduces, in a transfigured and therefore misrecognizable form, the structure of economic and social relations in force in a determinate social formation. Religion can produce the objectivity that it produces (in structuring structure) only by producing the misrecognition misrecognition o f the limits of the knowledge that it makes possible. Religion therefore adds the symbolic reinforcement of its sanctions to the limits and the logical and noseological barriers imposed by a determi dete rminate nate type of material mate rial conditio con ditions ns of existence (the effect effect of recognition-misrecognition). The effect of consecration, which any system of religious practices and representations tends to exercise (in a direct or immediate way, in the case of the religiosity of the dominant classes; in an indirect way, in the case of the religiosity of the dominated classes), must not be confused with the effect of recognition-misrecognition, which any system of religious practices and representations necessarily exercises through the imposition of a problematic, which is undoubtedly the most hidden mediation by which the effect of consecration exerts itself. The ways of thinking and perception that constitute the religious problematic can only produce the objectivity they produce by produci prod ucing ng misrecogni misre cognition tion of the limits of the knowledge knowledg e that th at they make possible (i.e., the immediat imm ediatee adhesion adhe sion,, in the mode of belief itself, itself, to t o the world of tradition tradi tion lived lived as as a “natural “natu ral world” worl d”)) and the arbitrariness arbitrarines s of the the problematic, problem atic,
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a system of questions th at is not questioned. questio ned. Thus, Thu s, one cannot cann ot assign to popul po pular ar religiosity a mystifying function of displacement of political conflicts while seeing in certain types of religious movements, such as medieval heresies, a disguised form of class struggle, without taking into account, as Engels does not, the effect of recognition-misrecognition, that is, everything that follows from the fact that class struggle can only realize itself, at a given point in time, by takin tak ing g the form for m and borrow bo rrowing ing the language languag e (and not no t the “disguise”) “disguise”) of religious war. In brief, religious wars are neither the “violent theological quarrels” that they are most often taken to be nor the conflicts of “material class interests” that Engels discovers in them; they are both things at once because the th e categories of theolo th eological gical think th inking ing make it impossible to think th ink and conduct the class struggle as such insofar as they permit thinking it and conducting it as a religious war* In the same way that religious alchemy makes “a virtue of necessity” in the practical realm, or according to William James, “makes “makes that tha t which which is inevitable easy and pleasant,” likewise, in the noseological domain, it makes “a reason of necessity” by transforming the social barriers that define the “unthinkable” into logical, eternal, necessary limits. Thus, for example, it would be easy to show, as Paul Radin suggests, that the representation of the relation between man and the supernatural powers proposed by different religions can exceed the limits imposed by the logic logic governing the exchange of o f goods in the group gro up or class class being considered consi dered.3 .36 This occurs o ccurs as if the “eucharistic” “eucharist ic” represen rep resentati tation on of o f the sacrifice— almost totally unknown in primitive societies, where exchanges follow the law of the gift and countergift, and even in peasant classes that, as Weber observes, tend to follow, in their relations with God and the priest, “a strictly formalist moral of do ut des”—could only develop when the structures of economic exchange were were transformed, transform ed, in particul p articular ar with the development of commerce commerce and the urban artisanate. In establishing their relationships with customers, the artisans make possible a calculating conception of moral relations between man and divinity. And one knows the effect of consecration that could be exercised in return, not only in the practical domain but also in the theoretical domain. The religious transfiguration turned the ascetic ethos of the nascent bourgeois class into a religious ethic of worldly asceticism. 2.2. 2.2. The aspect of religious interest that that is pertinent for sociology, that is, the interest that a group or a class finds in a determinate type of religious practice or belief beli ef and, and , in parti pa rticul cular, ar, in the produ pro ducti ction on,, reprod rep roduc uctio tion, n, diffusion, diffusio n, and consumption of a determinate type of goods of salvation (including the religious message itself), is a function of the reinforcement that the considered religion, by its power to legitimate arbitrariness, can bring to the material and symbolic force that can be mobilized by this group or class in legitimating the material or symbolic properties attached to a definite position in the social structure. The generic function of legitimation cannot by definition be
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accomplished without specifying itself in terms of the religious interests attached to various positions in the social structure. If there are social functions of religion and, consequently, if religion is amenable to sociological sociological analysis, analysis, it is becau because se laypeople do n o t—or not n ot only— expect from it justifications for existence capable of freeing them from the existential anguish of contingency and dereliction or even biological misery, sickness, suffering, or death, but also and above all justifications for existing in a determinate social position and existing as they exist, that is, with all the propert pro perties ies that th at are socially attache atta ched d to them. The questio que stion n of the origin of evil (unde malum et quare) which, as Weber recalls, becomes a questioning of the meaning of human existence only in the privileged classes—always in search of a “theodicy of their good fortune”—is fundamentally a social interrogation of the causes and reasons for social injustices or privileges: theodicies are always sociadicies. To those who would judge this theory of the functions of religion to be reductive, it suffices to indicate that the variations of the functions objectively conferred on religion by the various social classes in various societies and in various eras designate as an expression of ethnocentrism those theories theories that put the psycho perso nal) fun psy cholog logical ical (or personal) fu n ctio ct ion ns of religion foremost. It is only with the development of the urban bourgeoisie, given to interpret history and human existence more as the result of merit or lack of merit merit of o f the person p erson tha t han n as the effect effect of fortune fortu ne or destiny, that th at religiosi religiosity ty assumes the intensely personal character that is too often considered as belonging belongin g to the essence essence of all religious experience. Therefore, one may construct the religious fact in a strictly sociological manner, that is, as the legitimate expression of a social position, in order to perceive perceive the social condit con dition ionss of possibility, po ssibility, and therefor ther eforee the limits, of othe ot herr kinds of construction, and in particular of the one we might call phenomen pheno menolo ologica gicall and which, in its effort to submit sub mit itself to the lived trut tr uth h of religious experience as personal experience, irreducible to its external functions, leaves out the performance of an ultimate “reduction,” that of the social conditions that must be fulfilled for this lived experience to be possible. As with virtue according to t o Aristotle, personal person al religiosity religiosity (and, more m ore generally, generally, any form of “interio “interiorr life”) life”) “requires a certain ease.” e ase.” The questions qu estions of personal salvation or the existence of evil, of the agony of death or the meaning of suffering, and all the questions situated in secularized form at the border between “psychology “psyc hology”” and metaphysics, metaphysic s, which are produc pro duced ed and treated trea ted by various methods and with different successes by confessors and preachers, psychologists and psychoana psy choanalysts lysts,, novelists and marita mar itall counselors, couns elors, not no t to mention women’s weeklies—all these have for their social condition of possibility possibili ty a develop dev elopmen mentt of interest inte rest in the problem pro blemss of conscience and an increase increase in the sensibility sensibility to the miserie miseriess of o f the human hum an condition, conditio n, which is itself possible only in a defined type of materia mat eriall condit con dition ionss of existence. The representation of Paradise as a place of individual happiness is in keeping with
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the millenarian hope of an overthrow of the social order that haunts popular faith. This expresses the same opposition as the “metaphysical” revolt against the absurdity of human existence and against universal “alienations”—those that th at the position positio n of o f privi privilege lege never abolishes abolishes totally and th at it can even increase increase by developing develop ing the ability to express them, them , to analyze them th em and, and , thereby, thereb y, to feel them—and the resignation of the disinherited before the common destiny of suffering, separation, and solitude, all these parallel oppositions that originate in the opposition between the material conditions of existence and social positions where these two opposed types of transfigured representations of the social order and its future are born. If the representation of Paradise as a place of individual happiness corresponds better today t oday to t o the religious religious demands of the petty bourgeoisie bourgeoisie than to those of o f dom do m inant ina nt fractions fraction s of o f the bourgeoisie, as welcoming welcoming to the scientif scientific ic eschatology of a Teilhard de Chardin as to the futurology of prospectivist plan pl anne ners rs,, it is becaus bec ause, e, as Rein Re inho hold ld N iebu ie buhr hr rem arks, ark s, “evol “ev olut utio iona nary ry millenialism is always the hope of comfortable and privileged classes who imagine themselves too rational to accept the idea of the sudden emergence of the absolute in history. For them the ideal is in history, working its way to ultimate triumph. They identify God and nature, the real and the ideal, not because the more dualistic dua listic concept con ception ionss of classic classic religion religio n are a re too t oo irrat irr atio iona nall for fo r them (though they are irrational); but because they do not suffer as much as the disinherited from the brutalities of contemporary society and therefore do not take ta ke as catastrop catas trophic hic a view view of contem con tempo porary rary history. hist ory.””37 2.2.1. 2.2.1. Given that th at religious religious interest has its basis in the need need for legitimation of the properties attached to a determinate condition of existen existence ce and position p osition in the social structure, the social functions that religion fulfills for a group or a class of people necessarily are differentiated in terms of the position that this group or class occupies (a) in the structure of class relations and (b) in the division of religious labor. 2.2.1.1. The exchange relations established between specialists and laypersons on the basis of different interests, and the relations of competition , which oppose various specialists to each other inside the religious field, constitute the principle of the dynamic of the religious field and therefore of the transformations of religious ideology. 2.2.2. 2.2.2. Religious interest is based on the need to legitimate the material or symbolic properties attached to a determinate type of conditions of existence and position in the social structure and, consequently, it depends directly on this position. Thus, the religious message most capable of satisfying the religious religious interest of a determinate deter minate group grou p of o f laypeople, and therefore t herefore of exerting upon them the strictly symbolic mobilization that results from the power of
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absolutization of the relative and legitimation of the arbitrary, is that which carries a (quasi) system of justification of the properties that are objectively attached to it as it occupies a determinate position in the social structure. This proposition, deduced directly from a strictly sociological definition of the function of religion, finds its empirical validation in the quasi-miraculous harmony harm ony observed between between the form that th at religious religious practices and belie beliefs fs assume assume in a given society at a given moment in time and the strictly religious interests of its privileged clientele at that moment. Thus, as Weber observes, “As a rule, the warrior nobles, and indeed feudal powers generally, have not readily __ Concepts like sin, salvation, become the carriers carrie rs of o f a rational ratio nal religious ethic ethi c __ and religious humility have not only seemed remote from all ruling strata, particul part icularly arly the warri wa rrior or nobles, but bu t have indeed appeare app eared d reprehensible reprehen sible to its sense sense of hono ho no r.”38 This harmo ha rmony ny is the result o f a selective selective reception necessarily involving a reinterpretation whose principle is none other than the position occupied occupied in the social structure; structure ; the schemes schemes of perception and thinking, th inking, which are the conditions of reception and also define its limits, are the product of the conditions of existence attached to this position (class or group habitus). That is to say that the circulation of the religious message necessarily involves a reinterpretation that can be consciously performed by specialists (e.g., religious vulgarization with a view toward evangelization) or unconsciously effected by the laws of cultural diffusion alone (e.g., the “vulgarization” resulting from their divulging) and which is all the greater when economic, social, and cultural distance increases between the group of producers, the group of diffusers, and the group of consumers. It follows follows that tha t the form fo rm taken t aken by the structure structu re of systems systems of religi religious ous practices and beliefs at a given moment in time (historical religion) can be quite different from the original content of the message and it can be completely understood only in reference to the complete structure of the relations of production, reproduction, circulation, circulation, and approp a ppropriation riation of the messa message ge and to the history of this structur stru cture.3 e.39 Thus, at the end of his monume mon umental ntal history hist ory of o f the social teachings of Christian churches, Ernst Troeltch concludes that it is extremely difficult to “find an invariable and absolute point in the Christian ethic” because, in each social form fo rmati ation on and in each era, the entire worldview and all Christian dogma depend on social conditions characteristic of various groups or class classes es to the extent th at they must adapt ada pt to these these conditions in order orde r to master mast er them. the m.4 40 Belie Beliefs fs and practices collectively designated desig nated as Christi Chr istian an (and (an d which may have nothing more m ore in common commo n than th an this name) owe owe their persistence persistence over time to the fact that they change as the functions they fulfill change in the constantly renewed groups that welcome them. In the same way, in synchrony, religious representations and behaviors that refer to one and the same original message owe their diffusion in social space to the fact that they receive radically different meanings and functions in various groups or classes. Thus, the facade of unity of the Catholic Church in the thirteenth century must
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not hide the existence of real schisms or internal heresies that permitted the church to give an apparently uniform response to radically different interests and exigenc exigencies ies (thereby contrib co ntributin uting g by to the dissimulation dissimul ation of the differe difference nces). s). 2.2.2.1. 2.2.2.1. In a society divided into classes, classes, the structure of the systems of religious representations and practices belonging to the various groups or classes contributes to the perpetuation and reproduction of the social order (understood as the established structure of relations between groups and classes) by contributing to its consecration, that is, to sanctioning and sanctifying it. As soon as it presents itself as officially one and indivisible, it organizes itself in relation to two polar positions: (1) the systems of practices and representations (dom inant religi religios osity ity)) that th at tend to justify the existenc existencee of the dominant classes as dominant and (2) the systems of practices and representations (dominated religiosity) that tend to impose on the dominated a recognition of the legitimacy of the domination founded on misrecognition of the arbitrariness of the domin do mination ation and of the symbolic symbolic modes of o f expression expression of this domination (that is, the lifestyle and the religiosity of the dominant classes). This contributes to the symbolic reinforcement of the dominated representation of the political world and of the ethos of resignation and renouncement directly inculcated by conditions of existence, that is, the tendency to limit one’s hopes to the possibilities inscribed in these conditions by means of techniqu techn iques es of symbolic mani ma nipu pulat lation ion of aspir as piratio ations ns as different differen t (however convergent) as the displacement of aspirations and conflicts by compensation and symbolic transfiguration (promise of salvation) or the transmu trans mutatio tation n of destiny destiny into choice choice (exaltation of ascet ascetic icism ism). ). The structure of systems of representations and practices can find a reinforcement of its mystifying efficacy in the fact that it gives the appearance of unity by concealing, under a minimum of dogmas and common rituals, radically opposed interpretations of traditional responses to the most fundame fund amental ntal questions qu estions of existence. existence. There is not one of the great world religions religions that does not present such a plurality of meaning and functions. This is so whether one looks at Judaism Juda ism,, which, as as Louis Finklestein has shown, preserves preserves in the opposition between the Pharisaic and prophetic traditions traces of the tensions and economic and cultural conflicts between seminomadic shepherds and settled farmers, between groups without land and large landowners, and between artisans arti sans and urba ur ban n nobility;4 nobili ty;41 or Hindui Hin duism, sm, variously variou sly interpr inte rpreted eted at different levels of the social hierarchy; or Japanese Buddhism, with its numerous sects; or finally Christianity, a hybrid made of elements borrowed from the Judaic tradition, Greek humanism, and various cults of initiates that were first transported, as Weber observes, by itinerant artisans to become, at its height, the religion of the monk and the warrior, the serf and the nobleman, the artisan and the merchant. The Th e apparen ap parentt unity of these these profoundly profoun dly different different systems is easier to maintain the more the same concepts and practices tend
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to have contrary meanings when they serve to express radically opposed opp osed social social experiences experiences.. Fo r example, examp le, for some, “resignation” “resign ation” is is the first lesson of existence existence while, for others, it must be won through laborious struggle against the tendency to rebel rebel before universal forms of the inevitable. inevitable. The The effect effect o f double meaning, which is ineluctably produced and without which it would be necessary explicitly to investigate all the instances when a unique message is interpreted by reference to opposing conditions of existence, is without doubt only one of the mediations through which is realized the effect of logical imposition that all religion accomplishes. 2.3. 2.3. A religious religious practice or ideology ideology can can by definition exert the strictly strictly religious effect of mobilization correlative to the effect of consecration, only to the extent that th at the political political interest interest that determines and supports su pports it remains dissimulated both to those who produce it and to those who receive it. Therefore, the belief in the symbolic efficacy of religious practices and representations constitutes part of the conditions of the symbolic efficacy of religious practices and representations. Withou Wit houtt claiming claiming to provide a complete explanat expl anation ion of the relations between belief and the symbolic efficacy of religious practices or ideologies—which would require one to take into account the psychological or even psychosom psyc hosomatic atic functio fun ctions ns and effects effects of belief4 belief42 2—one may suggest that th at the explanation of religious practices and beliefs by the religious interest of the producers prod ucers or the consumers consu mers takes take s into account acco unt the belief itself. itself. Since the th e very basis of the effect effect of consecr con secratio ation n resides resides in the fact that th at religious ideology and practice fulfill a function of recognition-misrecognition, religious specialists must necessarily conceal that their struggles have political interests at stake. This is because the symbolic efficacy that they can wield in these struggles depends on it and therefore they have a political interest to conceal and have to hide from themselves their political interests (or “worldly” [temporal] [temporal] interests, in “in “indig digeno enous” us” idiom).4 idio m).43 One should perhaps reserve the label charisma to designate the symbolic propertie prop ertiess (symbolic efficacy efficacy first firs t of all) all) that th at accrue to religious agents to the extent th at they adhere to the ideology ideology of charisma, charisma, th at is, the symbolic power that confers on them the ability to believe in their own symbolic power. If one must deny charisma the status of a sociological theory of prophecy, then any pr ofessi ssion onal al ideology ideolo gy theory of prophecy must make room for charisma as a profe of the prophet which is the condition of the specific efficacy of prophecy, to the extent that it supports the faith of the prophet in his own mission at the same time time as it provides him with the principles of o f his his professional ethic, namely the proclaimed denial of all tempor tem poral al interests. interests. And the ideology of revelation, revelation, inspiration, or mission is the form par excellence of charismatic ideology only because the convic co nviction tion of the pro p roph phet et contri con tribu butes tes to the opera op eratio tion n of inversion and transfiguration that prophetic discourse accomplishes by imposing a
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representation of its own origin; prophetic discourse makes descend from heaven that which it projects there from earth. But this means not only that he who demands to be believed on his word must seem to believe in his word or that he who professes to impose faith by his discourses must manifest in his discourse or his conduct the faith that he has in his discourse, or even that the power to express or to impose by discourse or oratorical action faith in the truth of the discourse makes an essential contribution to the persuasive power pow er of discourse. With Wi thou outt doub do ubt, t, the basis of the relation rela tion among amo ng interest, interes t, belief belief,, and symbolic power powe r must mus t be found fou nd in what wh at Levi-Strauss Levi-S trauss calls “the shamanic complex,” that is, in the dialectic of inner experience and social image, a quasi-magical circulation of powers in the course of which the group produces prod uces and projects projec ts the symbolic power powe r that th at will be exercised upon up on itself and in the terms of which is constituted, for the prophet as for his followers, the experience of prophetic power that produces the whole reality of this power.4 powe r.44 4 But, more mo re profou pro foundl ndly, y, how can one not no t see that th at the dialectic of inner in ner experience and social image is only the visible aspect of the dialectic of faith and bad faith (in the sense of a lie to oneself, individual or collective), which is the basis of the game of masks, the game of mirrors, and the game of masks in front of mirrors, and which aims to provide individuals and groups constrained to the interested repression of worldy interests (economic but also sexual) with circuitous routes to an irreproachable spiritual satisfaction? The force of represssion is never as great nor the work of transfiguration as important as in realms where the proferred function and lived experience purely and simply contr co ntrad adict ict the objective tru tr u th of practice. And the success success of the enterprise, that is, the strength of belief, is a function of the degree to which the group colludes in the individual enterprise of occultation, and thus a function of the interest it has in keeping the contradiction hidden. This is to say that the self-deceit implicit in all faith (and more generally all ideology), can succeed only insofar as individual bad faith is maintained and supported by collective bad faith. faith . Mauss said that th at society always pays itself in the counterfeit money of its dream: society and it alone, because it alone can organize the false false circulation circu lation of o f counterfeit counte rfeit money that, th at, by granting gran ting the illusion of objectivity, distinguishes between madness as private belief and faith as recognized belief, that is, as orthodoxy, right opinion and belief (doxa) and, if you will, belief in the right; apprehending the natural world and the social world as they ask to be apprehended, that is, as externally given [literally, selfmoving — allant de soi —Trans.]. It is in this logic that th at one must mu st questio que stion n the conditions conditio ns of the pro p roph phet’ et’ss succe success, ss, which lie liess precisely precisely at the uncertain un certain borde bo rderr between the abno ab norm rmal al and the extra ex traord ordin inary ary,, and an d whose eccentric and strange strang e behaviors behavi ors can be admir a dmired ed as ext e xtra raor ordi dina nary ry or scorned as not n ot having havin g commo com mon n 45 sense.
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3.
THE THE SPECIFIC SPECIF IC FUNCTION FUNCT ION OF THE RELIGIOUS FIELD FIELD AND ITS FUNCTIONING
As a result of their position in the structure of the distribution of capital of strictly religious authority, the various religious claimants, individual or institutional, institu tional, can mobilize mobilize religiou religiouss capital in the competition for fo r the monopoly monopo ly over the administration of the goods of salvation and over the legitimate exerci exercise se of religious religious power as power durably dur ably to modify the representations represen tations and religious habitus. hab itus. This religious practices of o f laypersons layper sons by inculcating incul cating in them a religious capital is the generative basis of all thoughts, perceptions, and actions conforming with the norms of a religious representation of the natural and supernatural world. It is objectively adjusted to the principles of a political vision vision of the social social world—and worl d—and to t o them only. only. On the one hand, ha nd, religious religious capital depends, at a given moment in time, on the state of the structure of objective relations between religious demand (i.e., the religious interests of various religious us supp su pply ly (i.e., religious services, whether groups or classes of laity) and religio orthodox or heretical) that the various claimants are brought to produce and to offer by virtue of o f their position pos ition in the structure of relations of religious religious power, that is, as a function of their religious capital. On the other hand, it governs the nature, the form, and the force of the strategies that these claimants can put pu t in i n the service service of o f the satisfacti satis faction on of their the ir religious interests in the same way as the functions they fulfill in the division of religious labor and thus in the division of o f political labor lab or.4 .46 Thus, the capital of strictly religious authority of which a religious claimant can dispose depends on the material and symbolic force of the groups and classes the claimants can mobilize by offering them goods and services that satisfy satisfy their religious religious interests. The Th e nature n ature of these these goods and servic services es depends, in turn, on the mediation of the position of the productive claimant in the structure of the religious field, the religiously authorized capital of which he disposes. This circular relation or, better (since the authoritative capital that the various claimants can commit to their competition is the product of past relations of competition), this dialectic is the basis of the harmony observed between the religious produc pro ducts ts offered by the field field and the demand dem andss of laypeople and, at the same time, of the homology between the positions of the producers in the structure of the field and the positions of the consumers of their products in the structure of class relations. 3.1 3.1. Since the position pos ition of religious religious claimants, institutions institu tions or individuals, in the structure struc ture of the the distrib dis tributio ution n of o f religious religious capital dictates all their strategies, strategies, the struggle for the monopoly over the legitimate exercise of religious power over the laity laity and over the adminis adm inistrati tration on of the goods of salvation is necessaril necessarily y proph et. In order organized around the opposition between the church and the prophet. to perpetuate itself, to the extent that it manages to impose the recognition
Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field
23
of its its monopoly mon opoly {extra ecclesiam nulla salus ), the church tends to pro hibit more or less completely the entry into the market of new enterprises of salvation, such as sects sects or any form of o f independe inde pendent nt religious community, or the individual search for salvation (e.g., by asceticism, contemplation, or orgy). It thus gains or protects a more or less total monopoly over an instructional or sacramental capital capital o f grace grace (of which it is the trustee and which constitutes an object of exchange with the laity and an instrument of power over them) by controlling access to the means of production, reproduction, and division of the goods of salvation (i.e., by ensuring the maintenance of order in the body of specia specialists lists). ). It also delegates delegates to the body bod y of o f priests, the functionaries functio naries of worship who are interchangeable interchangeable from the standpoin stan dpointt of o f reli religio gious us capital, capital, the monopoly on instructional or sacramental distribution, and simultaneously an authority (or a grace) of office (or of institution) of a sort which save savess them from having continually to win and confirm their authority and shelters them from the pr ophe het t (or the consequences of the failures of their religious actions. The prop heresiarch) and his sect contest the very existence of the church by their very existence, and, more precisely, by their ambition to satisfy their own religious needs without the intermediation and the intercession of the church. They call into question the monopoly over the instruments of salvation and who must accomplish the initial initial accumulation o f reli religio gious us capital by endlessly gaining and regaining an authority subject to the fluctuations and intermittencies of the conjunctural relation between the supply of religious service and the religious demand of a particular category of laypeople. Because of the relative autonomy of the religious field as a market for the goods of salvation, one can see the various historically realized configurations of the structure of relations among the various claimants competing for religious legitimacy as so many moments mom ents in a system o f transformations . One can also attempt to discern the structure of the invariant relations among the properties prop erties attached atta ched to the groups gro ups of specialists occupying occupyin g homo ho molog logous ous positions posi tions in different differe nt fields, witho wi thout ut ignoring igno ring that th at the relations relati ons among am ong the different claimants could be characterized in an exhaustive and precise manner only within each historical configuration. 3.1.1. 3.1.1. The managem man agement ent of the fund of religious (or sacred) capital, which is the product of accumulated religious labor and the religious labor necessary to ensure the perpetuation of this capital by ensuring the o r restoration of the symbolic m arket arke t on which it is is legal legal tender, conservation or can only only be be guaranteed by a bureaucratic bureaucrat ic appara ap paratus, tus, capable, like like the church, of enduringly carrying on continuous action, that is, the custom or ordinary routine necessary to guarantee its own reproduction by reproducing the prod pr oduc ucers ers of the th e good go odss of salv sa lvat atio ion n and religio reli gious us services (i.e., the th e body bo dy of priests) priest s) and the th e m arke ar kett offered for fo r these thes e good go ods, s, that th at is, the th e laity (as oppo op pose sed d to the unfaithful and the heretics) as consumers endowed with the minimum
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religious competence (religious habitus) necessary to demonstrate the specific need for its products. 3.1. 3.1.2. 2. A product prod uct of the institutionalization and bureaucratization bureaucratizat ion of the propheti prop heticc sect sect (with all the correlative effect effectss of “bana “ba naliz lizati ation on””), the church chu rch shows a number of bureaucratic characteristics: explicit delimitation of areas of competence and regulated hierarchization of functions, with the correlative rationalization of rewards, “appointments,” “promotions,” and “careers”; codification of the rules regulating professional activity and extraprofessional life; rationalization of the tools of labor, such as dogma and liturgy, and of professional profess ional training train ing,, and so forth. forth . The church chu rch is objectively objectively opposed oppo sed to the sect as the ordinary organization (banal and banalizing) is to the extraordinary action of contesting contesting the ordinary order. order. Any sect that succeeds tends to become a church, trustee and guardian of an orthodoxy, identified by its hierarchies and by its dogmas, and committed by this fact to giving rise to new reform. refor m. 3.2. .2. The force wielded wielded by the prophet pro phet,, as as a petty indepe independent ndent entrepreneur entrepren eur of salvation claiming to produce and to distribute goods of salvation of a type that is new and fit to devalue the old ones, in the absence of any initial capital and of any security security or guarantee guarante e other oth er than his his “pers “person on,” ,” depends on o n the ability of his discourse and his practice to mobilize the virtually heretical religious interests of determinate groups or classes of laypersons through the effect of consecration. This consecration performs the feat of symbolization and explanation expla nation,, and contribute contr ibutess to the subversion of o f the established symbolic symbolic (i.e (i.e., ., priestly) order ord er and to the symbolic putti pu tting ng to rights of the subversion subve rsion of that th at order—that is, the desacralization of the sacred (i.e., of “naturalized” arbitrariness) and the sacralization of sacrilege (i.e., of revolutionary transgression). 3.2.1 3.2.1.. The prophe pro phett and the sorcerer both bot h oppose themselves themselves to the body of priests as independent entrepreneurs exercising their office outside of any institution, and thus without institutional protection or security. They are conspicuous for the different positions they occupy in the division of religious labor and from which they express the very different ambitions they owe to their very different social origins and training. The prophet asserts his claim to the legitimate legitimate exercise exercise of religious religious power pow er by devoting himself to the activitie activitiess by which the priestly body bod y asserts the specificity specificity of its practice practic e and the irreducibility of its competence, therefore the legitimacy of its its monop m onopoly oly (e.g., (e.g., systematization); th at is, by producin prod ucing g and professing an explicitly explicitly systematized systematized doctrine, able to give a unitary meaning to life and the world and to provide thereby the means to realize the systematic integration of everyday behavior around ethical principles, that is, practices. The sorcerer responds on the spot
Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field
25
to partial and immediate demands, using discourse as one kind of cure (of the body) among amo ng others oth ers and not no t as an instr in strum umen entt of symbolic power, that th at is, is, of preaching preach ing or of a “cure for souls.” sou ls.” The prophet renounces profit (or, Weber would say, refuses “the economic exploita exp loitation tion of the gifts gifts of grace grace as a source of o f income”)4 income”)47 and the ambition ambi tion to exercise true religious power (i.e., to impose and inculcate a scholarly doctrine, expressed in a scholarly language, and inserted in an esoteric tradition, with the corresponding, but strictly reversed, characteristics that define the sorcerer) and submits material interest and obedience to order (correlative to renouncing the exercise of spiritual domination). Thus, he must in some way legitimize his ambition for strictly religious power by a more absolute refusal of temporal interest—that is, political from the very first— of which asceticism and all other physical ordeals are another manifestation. The sorcerer, however, can openly lend his services in exchange for material reward, tha t hatt is, explicitly explicitly establish himself in the relationship relation ship of selle sellerr to buyer, which is the objective truth of any relationship between religious specialists and laypeople. And one can therefore ask oneself if disinterest does not have an interested function as a component of the initial investment required by any prophetic enterprise. The sorcerer is linked to the peasant, the man of fid fi d es implicita, who is little predisposed, as Weber observes, to welcome the systematizations of the prophet, but who does not exclude recourse to the sorcerer as the only one to utilize, without intention of proselytism and without mental reserve, the sermo rusticus and thus to provide an expression for that which has no name in any scholarly language. 3.3. .3. Conservat Con servation ion of the monopo mon opoly ly over symbolic power, such as religious religious authority, depends on the ability of the institution that possesses it to make known to those who are excluded from it the legitimacy of their exclusion, that is, to make them misrecognize the arbitrariness of the monopolization of a power and a competence in principle accessible to anyone. The prophetic (or heretical) contestation of the church threatens the very existence of the ecclesiastical institution when it questions not only the ability of the priestly body to fulfill fulfill its proclaime procl aimed d functio fun ction n (in the name of the refusal of “institutional grace”) but also the raison d’etre of the priesthood (in the name of the principle of “universal priesthood”). When the relations of force are in favor of the church, prophetic contestations can end only in the suppression of the prophet (or the sect), by physical or symbolic violence (excommunication), unless the submission of the prophet (or of the reformer)—that is, recognition of the legitimacy of the ecclesiastical monopoly (and of the hierarchy that guarantees it)—authorizes annexation by canonization (e.g., Saint Francis of Assisi).
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3.3.1 3.3.1.. A particul part icular ar form of struggle struggle for monopoly mon opoly is seen seen when the church holds a total monopoly over the instruments of salvation. This opposition between ortho ort hodo doxy xy and heresy (homol (ho mologo ogous us to the oppos opp ositi ition on between the church and the prophet) unfolds according to an almost invariant process: conflict for strictly religious authority between the specialists (theological conflict) and/or conflict for power within the church leads to contesting the ecclesiastical hierarchy. This takes the form of a heresy when, in a crisis situation, situatio n, contes co ntestatio tation n of o f the ecclesia ecclesiastica sticall monopoly mono poly by a fraction of the clergy clergy encounters the anticlerical interests of a fraction of the laity and leads to contestation of ecclesiastical monopoly as such. The concentration of religious capital was never more complete than in Medieval Europe. The Church, organized according to a complex hierarchy, utilized a language almost unknown to the people and held a monopoly over access to the tools of worship, sacred texts, and, above all, sacraments. It relegated the monk to second place in the hierarchy of ordinands, made the duly mandated priest the indispensable instrument of salvation, and confered upon the hierarchy the power of sanctification. Making salvation depend more on the receipt of the sacraments and on the profession of faith than on obedience to moral codes, it encouraged the form of popular ritualism that was the quest for indulgences: “the crowds of the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries had faith in the the priest’s blessing for the remission of sins, whether it was absolution in the sacramental sense of the term or the absolution given to the deceased, indulgences accorded under certain conditions and which put off punishment, pilgrimages undertaken to obtain ‘great indulgences,’ Roman jubilees, or confessionalia that granted to certain of the faithful spiritual favors in the use of o f the con c onfes fessio sion.”4 n.”48 In such a situation, the religious field is coextensive with the field of the relations of o f competition compe tition at the very center center of the church. Rivalries Rivalries for spiritual authority, which establish themselves in the relatively autonomous subfield of scholars (theologians) producin g f o r other scho scholar larss and brought by the search for strictly intellectual distinction to schismatic position-takings [prises de domai n of doctrine doctrin e and dogma, do gma, are by by their nature na ture fated to posi po siti tion on ] in the domain remain limited to the “university” world. The transformation of what we will call call cleri clerical cal schis schisms ms into popu p opular lar heresies heresies is is perhaps always more apparen app arentt than th an real.49 real.49 Even in the cases cases most favorable favor able to the th e thesis of diffusion (e.g., Jo h n Wyclif Wycliffe fe and the Lollards, Jo J o hn Huss and the Hussites, Hussites, etc.), etc.), one must in reality deal with a mix of simultaneous invention and deforming reinterpretation accompanied by a search for scholarly authorities and guarantees. All this inclines one to suppose that it is to the extent and only to the extent that the structure of relations of competition for power within the church offers the schismatic schismatic the possibility of articulatin arti culating g with a “liturgical” “liturgic al” and “ecclesia “ecclesiastical” stical” conflict (i.e., a conflict for the power over the instruments of salvation) that the clerical clerical schism has any possibility possibilit y of becoming a popu po pular lar heresy.5 h eresy.50 0
Genesis and S tru cture o f the Religious Field
27
Religious (and even secularized) ideologists who, in very different states of the ideological field, designate themselves as heretics (in the sense that they tend to contest the religious order that the ecclesiastical “hierarchy” aims to maintain), offer as many invariant themes: refusal of institutional grace, preaching preach ing by laypeople laypeop le and universal priesth prie sthoo ood, d, self-adm self -adminis inistrati tration on of the work of salvation, “permanent” eccliastics considered as simple “servants” of the community, “freedom of conscience,” that is, the right of each individual to religious self-administration, in the name of the equality of religious qualifications, qualification s, and so forth. forth . That Th at is because because they always always have have as their generating principle a more or less less radic ra dical al conte co ntesta statio tion n of the th e priestly hierarchy hiera rchy that th at can be exacer exa cerbat bated ed by denoun den ouncin cing g the arbitra arb itrarine riness ss of a religious auth au thor ority ity not no t founded on the saintliness of its holders and even by a radical condemnation of the ecclesiastical monopoly, such as it is. It is also that, initially producedreproduced reprodu ced for the needs of internal intern al struggle against the ecclesiastic ecclesiastical al hierarchy (contrary to most of the purely “theological” ideologies, obeying other functions and therefore belonging to the world of the clergy), they were predisposed predis posed to express-inspire, express-i nspire, at the cost of radicali radi calizatio zation, n, the religious interests of the categories of laypeople most inclined to contest the legitimacy of the ecclesiastical monopoly over the instruments of salvation. In this case, as elsewhere, the question of origins or, if you prefer, of the heresiarch and the sectarians, is almost devoid of meaning and there is no end to the errors engendered by this false problem. In fact, the theological subfield itself itself is a ffiel ield d of competitio compe tition n and one can hypothesize that th at ideologies ideologies produced produce d for purposes of this competition are more or less predisposed to be taken up again and utilized in other struggles (e.g., the struggles for power within the church) according to the social function that they fulfill for the producers occupying different positions in this field. Besides, any ideology invested with an historical efficacy is the prod pr oduc uctt o f the collective labor of all those whom it expresses, inspires, legitimizes, and mobilizes, and all the various moments in the process of circulation-reinvention are equally origins. Such a model permits us to grasp the role given to groups gro ups situated situ ated at the Archimed Arch imedean ean point po int where the the conflict between religious religious speciali specialists sts at opposin o pposing g ends (dominan (dom inantt and a nd dominated) of the structure of the religious apparatus is articulated with its external counterpart, that between clergy and laity. Such groups include members of the lower clergy, whether ordained or defrocked, occupying a dominated position in the system of symbolic domination. The role allocated in heretical movements to the lower clergy (and, more generally, to the prole pr oletar taroid oid intelligentsia) intelligent sia) could be explained expla ined by the fact that th at they occupy a dominated position in the hierarchy of the ecclesiastical apparatus of symbolic domination, presenting definite analogies, by reason of the homology of position, posit ion, with the domi do mina nated ted classes. classes. Thus Thu s placed in a con c ontra tradic dicto tory ry positio pos ition n in the social structure, structu re, they wield wield a critical critical power powe r that tha t allows them to give give their
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revolt a (quasi) systematic formulation and thereby to serve as spokespersons for the dominated classes. It is an easy step from denouncing the worldly church and the corrupted ways of the clergy and above allhe high dignitaries of the church to contestation of the priest as appointed dispenser of sacramental grace and to extremist claims for a total democracy of the “gift of grape” suppression of intermediaries, with the substitution of voluntary voluntary expiation for confession confession and and the compensations compensations that t hat the church alone, holder of the monopoly on the sacrament of penitence, had the right to impose on the sinner; suppression of intermediaries, moreover, with the denial of the commentators and the commentaries, of the “obligatory ecclesiastic ecclesiastical al symbols, understo unde rstood od as sources sources of inter in terpre pretat tation ion,” ,”5 51 and the th e will will to come back to the very letter of the sacred source and to recognize no other pre ceptu tum m evangelicum evangelicum;; denunciation of the priestly authority than the precep monopoly and denial of the institution’s grace in the name of the equal distribution distribut ion of the gift gift of grace that th at asserts asserts itself itself as much in the quest for fo r a direct experience of God as in the exaltation of the divine inspiration capable of permitting innocence, innocence, indeed the stultitia of the humble and of the “poor Christians,” Christi ans,” to profess profess the secret secretss of the faith better tha t han n the corr c orrupt upt ecclesi ecclesiast astics ics.5 .52 3.4. .4. The logic logic of the functioning functi oning of the church, priestly practice, and, at the same time, the form and content of the message that it imposes and inculcates are the consequence of the joint action of internal constraints and external forces. Internal contraints are inherent in the functioning of a bureauc bur eaucracy racy insisting, with more or less less total tot al success, success, on o n a mono m onopoly poly over the th e legitimate exercise of religious power over laypeople and the administration of the goods of salvation as the imperati imperative ve o f the the economy o f charisma charisma, entrusting entrus ting the exercise exercise of the priesthood, priesth ood, a necessari necessarily ly “vulg “vulgar” ar” activity activity because it is quotidian and repetitive, to interchangeable officials of worship endowed with a homogenous professional qualification acquired by a specific apprenticeship, and homogeneous instruments, appropriate to support a homogeneous and homogenizing action. External forces assume unequal weight depending on the historic conjuncture, be it (I) the religious interests of different groups or classes of laypersons capable of imposing on the church more or less important concessions and compromises according to the relative weight (a) of the force that they can put at the service of heretical virtualities enclosed in their deviations in relation to traditional norms (and that the priestly body confron con fronts ts directly directl y in the cure of souls) and (b) of the power pow er of coercion implied in the monopoly on the goods of salvation, or (II) the competition of the prophet (or sect) and the sorcerer who, in mobilizing these heretical virtualities, weakens the church’s power of coercion all the more. This means that there is no adequate interpretation of the message in one or another of its historical forms other than that which relates the system of constitutive relations of this message to the system of relations between the
Genesis an d St ru cture o f t he Religious Fie ld
29
material and symbolic forces that constitute the corresponding religious field. The explanatory exp lanatory power of various factors varies varies with each each historical situation, and the oppositions that obtain between supernatural powers (e.g., the opposition between gods and demons) reproduce in a strictly religious logic the opposition between various types of religious action, that is, the relations of force that establish themselves in the religious field between various categories of specialists (e.g., the opposition between dominant specialists and dominated specialists). The interests of the priestly body can also express themselves in the religious ideology that they produce and reproduce: “Just as the Brahmin priests have monopolized the power of effective prayer, i.e., of the effective magical coercion over the gods, so did a god in turn now monopolize the disposition of this capacity, thereby controlling what is of primary prim ary impo im porta rtanc ncee in all religious beha be havio vior.”5 r.”53 The logic of the marke ma rkett of religious goods is such that all reinforcement of the monopoly of the church, that is, any extension or any increase of the temporal and spiritual power of the priestly body over the laity (e.g., evangelization), must be paid by a redoubling of the concessions granted in the order of both dogma and liturgy to the religious representations of the laypersons thus conquered. In accounting account ing for the properties of religious religious goods (or, today, cu ltural ltura l goods) offered on the market, the explanatory value of the factors linked to the field of produc pro duction tion,, strictly speaking, tends to decrease the profit pro fit of the the factors linked to consumers in proportion to the increase in the area of diffusion and circulation of its products, that is, as a class-divided society diversifies socially. It follows that when the church holds an almost perfect monopoly, as in Medieval Medieval Europe, Euro pe, the appeara ap pearance nce of o f unity given given by the invariance of the liturgy dissimulates the express diversification of techniques of preaching and of curing of souls and the extreme diversity of religious experiences, running the gamut from mystical fideism to magical ritualism. Thus, the game of reinterpretations and transactions has made of North African Islam a complex totality where one would would not n ot know, except excep t arbitrarily, arbitraril y, how to distinguish distinguis h that tha t which is is strictly Islamic from that which is of local origin. The religiosity of bourgeois citizens (“traditionalists” or “Westernized”), conscious of belonging to a universal religion, is opposed on all points to the ritualism of peasants, ignorant of the subtleties of dogma and theology, and Islam presents itself as a hierarchized totality in which analysis can isolate various “levels” (animist devotion and agrarian rituals, worship of the saints and Maraboutism, a practice regulated by religion, law, dogm do gma, a, and mystical esotericism). Differential Diffe rential analysis would wou ld religious profiles profile s (by analogy with no doubt reveal extremely different types of religious the Bachelardian notion of an “epistemological profile”), that is, means of hierarchical integration very different from these various levels whose relative importance in each type of experience and practice varies with the conditions of existence and the level of education characteristic of the group or class consid con sidere ered.5 d.54 4
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3.4.1 3.4.1.. Competit Com petition ion from the sorcerer, a petty independent indepen dent entrepreneu entrep reneur, r, hired on the spot by the people and exercising his office part-time and without remuneration, without having been specifically prepared for it and without institutional protection (and, most often, in a clandestine manner), converges with the demand of the inferior groups or classes (in particular, peasants) who provide provid e the sorce so rcerer’ rer’ss clientele, clientele, so as as to impose on the th e church churc h the “ritua “rit ualiz lizati ation on”” of religious practice and the canonization of popular beliefs. Ma nuel el de Folklore Fol klore frangai fran gaiss contem con tempora porain in by Arnold Van Gennep is The Manu teeming with examples of these exchanges between peasant culture and ecclesiastical culture—“folklorized liturgical feast days,” like “rogations,” pagan pag an rituals integrated inte grated into the commo com mon n liturgy, saints invested with magical propertie prop ertiess and a nd function fu nctions, s, and so fort fo rth—which h—which are the mark ma rk of concessions that th at clergymen must grant to secular demands, if only to tear away clients from the competing solicitations of sorcery to which an “aggiornamento” would aband aba ndon on them t hem.5 .55 Likew Likewise, ise, Islam keeps keeps its its strength and its form, in the North Nor th African countryside, by accommodatin accomm odating g itself to the aspiration aspir ationss of the peasants at the same time that it assimilates them at the cost of incessant transactions. Whereas agrarian religion constantly reinterprets itself in the language of universal religion, the precepts precep ts of o f universal unive rsal religion redefine themselves in terms of local local customs. customs. The tendency of orthodox orth odoxy y to consider vernacular rights rights and customs (Berbers for example) or agrarian religions as reversions and deviations is always counterbalanced by the more or less methodical effort to absorb abs orb these t hese forms of religiosity or law without witho ut recognizing them t hem.5 .56 3.4.2 3.4.2.. Inversel Inversely, y, competitio n from the prophe pro phett (or sect) sect) is joined join ed with the intellectual criticism of certain categories of laypersons to reinforce the tendency of the priestly bureaucracy to submit both liturgy and dogma to a “casuistic-rational systematization” and a “vulgarization,” destined to turn them into instruments of symbolic struggle: homogeneous (“vulgarized”), coherent, distinctive, and fi f i x e d (“canonized”), and thereby susceptible to be acquired and utilized by anyone but only after a specific apprenticeship, and thus not accessible to just anyone (in terms of the legitimation of the religious monopoly allowed to education). Pro of that the need need to defend against the competition comp etition of prophecy proph ecy (or heresy heresy)) and against lay intellectualism contributes to promoting production of “vulgarized” instruments “ of religious practice can be found in the fact that the production of canonical writings accelerates when the content of the traditio trad ition n is itself itself threat thr eaten ened. ed.5 57There 7T here is also also the worry of defining defining the originality of the the community in relation to competing doctrines th at led to the valorization of distinctive signs and discriminating doctrines, both in order to struggle against indifferentism and to make the “transference of membership” to a rival religion religion more difficult.58 Elsewhere Elsewhere,, “casuistico-rational “casuistic o-rational systematiza syste matization” tion” and and “vulgarization” are fundamental fundamen tal conditions of the the functioning of a bureaucracy
Genesis Genesis and and Structure Structur e o f the Religious Field
31
that administers the goods of salvation in that they permit any agents (i.e., interchangeable) to exercise priestly activity in a continuous manner by providin prov iding g them with the practical pract ical instru ins trumen ments ts indispensable indisp ensable to them the m to fulfill fulfill their function at the least cost (to themselves) and with the least risk (for the institution), above all when it is necessary for them “to take an attitude [in preaching preac hing or the curing curin g of souls] souls] toward tow ard the numerou num erouss problems prob lems which had not no t been settled in the revelation rev elation itself.”5 its elf.”59 The breviary, brevi ary, the sermonnaire (book pen se-bete bete (memory jogger) of sermons), or the catechism play both the role of penseand garde-fou (guardrail), (guardrail), intended intended to guarantee the economy of improvisation at the same time that they prohibit it. Finally, by the refinements and complications it brings to primary cultural foundations, priestly systematization holds the laity at a distance (this is one of the functions of any esoteric theology ),60 ),60 and convinces convinc es them th em th t h at this th is activity acti vity require req uiress a special “qualification,” “a gift of grace*” inaccessible to the common people. It persuades persu ades them the m to aban ab ando don n the admi ad minis nistra tratio tion n of their th eir religious affairs to the ruling caste, only proportionately to their acquisition of the necessary competence compe tence to become religious theoreti theor etician cians.6 s.61 4.
POLITICAL POLITI CAL POWER POWER AND RELIGIO RELI GIOUS US POWER POWER
The strictly religious authority and the temporal force that various religious claimants can enlist in their struggle for religious legitimacy is never independent of the weight that laypersons mobilize in the structure of the relations of force between classes. It follows that the structure of objective relations between claimants occupying different positions in the relations of produ pro ducti ction on,, repro rep rodu ducti ction on,, and distr di stribu ibutio tion n of religious goods tends to reproduce the structure of relations of force between groups or classes, but o f a field field of relations relatio ns of o f force between under the transfigured and disguisedfor disgu isedform m of claimants struggling for the conservation or subversion of the symbolic order. Thus, in ever every y conjuncture conju ncture,, the structure struct ure of relations between between the religious religious fiel field d and the field of power controls the configuration of the structure of relations constitutive of the religious religious field. field. This configuration config uration fulfill fulfillss an external exter nal function fun ction of legitimizing the established order inasmuch as the maintenance of symbolic order contributes directly to the maintenance of political order. The symbolic subversion of symbolic order can affect the political order only when it accompanies a political subversion of that order. 4.1. 4.1. The church contribute con tributess to the maintenance main tenance of political order, that th at is, is, to the symbolic reinforcement of the divisions of this this order, ord er, in and an d by fulfi fulfilling lling its proper function, which is to contribute to the maintenance of the symbolic order. It does this this by imposing and inculcating schemes schemes of perception, thou t hought ght,, and action objectively agreeing with political structures and grants these
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structures the supreme legitimation of “naturalization.” It establishes and restores the agreement on putting the world to rights by the imposition and inculcation of common wavs of thinking and by the solemn affirmation or reaffirmation of this agreement in the feast or religious ceremony, a symbolic action of the second order that utilizes the symbolic efficacy of religious symbols to reinforce their symbolic efficacy by reinforcing the collective belief in their efficacy. The church also enlists the strictly religious authority that it has at its disposal to fight off in strictly symbolic symbolic terms the prophetic pro phetic or heretical attempts at subversion of the symbolic order. It is not by chance chance that, in an ideal-typ ideal-typical ical manner, two of the most important imp ortant sources sources of scholastic philosophy express in their very very titles titles the homology hom ology amon a mong g the political, cosmological, and ecclesiastical structures that the church serves to inculcate. The two works attributed to Denys the Areopagite, On Celestial Hiera Hi erarch rchyy and On Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, contain an emanationist philosophy philo sophy that th at establishes a strict correspon corres pondenc dencee between the hierarchy hiera rchy of values values and the hierarchy of beings beings that tha t makes the universe universe the result of o f a process of degradation from the One, the Absolute, down to matter, passing through the archangels, the angels, the seraphim, and the cherubim, man and organic nature. In this symbolic system, Aristotelian cosmology is smoothly integrated with its “prime mover,” who transmits his movement to the heavenly spheres, from which it descends, by successive degrees, to the sublunar world of becoming and corru co rrupt ption ion,, seeming predisposed predis posed by some preestablishe preestab lished d harmony to express the “emanative” structure of the ecclesiastic and the political world. Being Being a faithful faith ful image of all all the others, oth ers, each of o f the hierarchi hie rarchies— es— pope, cardinals, cardin als, archbis arch bishop hops, s, bishops, bishop s, low clergy; clergy; emper em peror, or, princes, dukes d ukes and other vassals—is in the final analysis only an aspect of the cosmic order established by God, and thus eternal and immutable. By establishing such a perfect corres co rrespon pondenc dencee between the various vari ous order or ders—in s—in the mann ma nner er of a myth that reduces the diversity of the world to a series of simple and hierarchical oppositions themselves reducible each to the others, high and low, right and left left,, masculine and feminine, feminine, dry and humid—religi hum id—religious ous ideology ideology produces this elementary form of experience of the logical necessity that analogical thought engenders by unifying separate universes. The most specif specific ic contri co ntribut bution ion of the church (and (an d more m ore generally generally of o f religion) religion) to the conservation of the symbolic order consists less in the transmutation logic c into order order.. It makes of mysticism into orde or der6 r62tha 2t han n in the transmutation o f logi the political order submit to this by the mere fact of the unification of the different orders. The effect of the absolutization of the relative and the legitimation of the arbitrary is produced not only by establishing a correspondence between the cosmological hierarchy and the social or ecclesiastical hierarchy but also and above all by imposing a hierarchical way of thinking that “naturalizes” (Aristotle does not speak of “natural places”) the relations of order ord er by recognizing the existence existence of privilege privileged d points in cosmic
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space space just ju st as in political space. space. Durkhe Dur kheim im said that th at “logical “logical discipline discipline is a special special aspect of o f social discipline.”6 discip line.”63 To inculcate, by implicit and explicit educa e ducation tion,, respect for “logical” disciplines such as those that support the mythico-ritual system or the religious ideology and liturgy, and, more precisely, to impose ritual observances which, which, lived lived as the condition condit ion of the safeguard of cosmic cosmic order and of the subsistence of the group (natural cataclysm playing in certain contexts the role that political revolution plays in others), tends in fact to perpetu perp etuate ate the fund fu ndam amen ental tal relations relati ons of the th e social order. One of the principle principl e functions of ritual here is to make possible the reunion of mytho-logically separated principles, such as the masculine and the feminine, water and fire, and so forth. This is to transmute the transgression of social barriers into sacrilege containing its own sanction, if not to render unthinkable the very idea of the transgression of borders so perfectly “naturalized” (because internalized as principles of structuration of the world) that they can be abolished only at the cost of a symbolic revolution (e.g., Copernican or Galilean revolution on one side, Machiavellian on the other) correlative of a profound political transformation (e.g., the progressive dissolving of feudal order). Cosmological topologies are always “natura “na turalized lized”” political topologies, and, as testified testified by the place that th at all aristocra aristo cratic tic educat ed ucation ionss give to the th e study stud y of o f etiquett etiq uettee and an d manners, mann ers, respect pect fo r fo rm s (even and above all under the species the inculcation of the res of formalism and magical ritualism), an arbitrary imposition of an arbitrary order, constitutes one of the most efficacious means of obtaining the recognition-misrecogniti recognition-misrecognition on of o f the the prohibitions prohibitio ns and norms th at safeguard safeguard socia sociall order. Thus, an institution like the church, which finds itself invested with the function of maintaining the symbolic order by virtue of its position in the structure of the religious field, always contributes in addition to the maintenance of political order. 4.1.1. 4.1.1. The relationship relatio nship of homology homo logy obtainin obta ining g between between the position positio n of the church in the structure of the religious field and the position of the dominant fractions of the dominant classes in the field of power and in the structure of class relations and which makes the church contribute to the conservation of political order by contributing to the conservation of religious order does not exclude tensions and conflicts between political and religious power. Despite the partial complementarity of their functions in the division of the labor of o f domination dom ination,, they can enter into competition. In the course course of history, history, they have indeed (at the cost of tacit compromises or explicit concordats founded in all cases on the exchange of temporal force against spiritual authority) autho rity) found foun d various variou s types types of equilibrium equilibri um between the two poles poles constituted constitute d by hierocracy hieroc racy (or (o r tempo tem poral ral governm gov ernment ent of priests) and an d Cesaro Ces aropap papism ism (total (to tal subordination of priestly power to secular power). All this inclines us to hypothesize that the structure of relations between the field of power and the religious field governs the configuration of the
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structure of relations relations constitutive of the religious religious field field.. Thus, Th us, Max Weber shows shows An cient nt Judais Jud aism m that depending on the type of political power or the type in Ancie of relations between religious claimants and political claimants, various solutions may be given to the antagonistic relation between priesthood and prophecy. prophe cy. In the great bure b ureauc aucratic ratic empires such as Egypt and Rome, Rom e, prophec pro phecy y is simply excluded from a religious field controlled strictly by the religious police of a state religion. Conversely, in Israel, the priesth pri esthoo ood, d, which had behind it a long tradi tra ditio tion, n, could not no t coun co untt on the monarc mo narchy, hy, which was too weak to suppress prophecy definitively, and found support among people of influence. In Greece, one finds an intermediate solution: the fact that freedom was given to exercise prophecy, but only in a well-circumscribed place (the temple of Delphi), shows the necessity to compromise “democratically” with the demands of certain groups of laity. Moreover, differences in the form of prophecy prop hecy corres co rrespon pond d to these various vari ous types of structur stru cturee of the relatio rel ationsh nship ip between the claimants claim ants for the religious field. field. 4.2. 4.2. The ability to formulate form ulate and name that th at which symbolic symbolic systems systems vigorously reject in the unformulated or unnameable, and thus to displace the boun bo unda dary ry between the thou th ough ghtt and the unth un thou ough ght, t, the possible and the impossible, the thinkable and the unthinkable (an ability that correlates with the high birth associated with a contradictory position in the structure of the religious field and in the structure of class relations) constitutes the initial capital that enables the prophet to mobilize a sufficiently powerful fraction of laypersons by symbolizing in his extraordinary discourse and behavior that which ordinary symbolic systems are structurally incapable of expressing. The success of the prophet remains incomprehensible as long as one stays within the limits of the religious field, unless one invokes a miraculous power, nihil o creation creation o f religiou religiouss capital, as Max Weber does in some that is, an ex nihilo of his formulation formu lationss of the theory of charisma. In fact, just ju st as the priest priest is linked linked with the ordinary order, the prophet is the man of crisis situations, in which' the established order see-saws and the whole future is suspended. Prophetic discourse has more chance of appearing in overt or masked periods of crisis affecting either entire societies or certain classes, that is, in periods where the economic or morphological transformations of such or such a part of society determine the collape, weakening, or o r obsolescence obsolescence of traditio trad itions ns or of symbolic symbolic systems that provided the principles of their worldview and way of life. Thus, as Max Weber observed, charisma may be “produced artificially in an object or person thro t hrough ugh some extraor extr aordin dinary ary means.” mean s.”6 64 Likewi Likewise, se, Marcel Mauss noted: “scarcities “scarcities,, wars, arouse aro use proph p rophets, ets, heresie heresies; s; violent contacts broach broac h even even the distribution of the population, popul ation, the nature na ture of o f the population, populatio n, crossbreeding crossbreedingss of entire societies (as is the case with colonization) necessarily and precisely cause new ideas and new traditions to rise. . . . One must not confuse these collecti collective ve,, organic causes causes with the action of individuals who are the interpreters interp reters more than the masters of them. Constancy and routine can be the making of
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individuals, innovation and revolution can be the work of groups, subgroups, sects sects,, individuals acting by and fo r grou ps.” ps. ”65 Wilson D. Wallis Wallis observes observes that th at messiahs arise in periods of crisis, in relation to a profound aspiration for political change, c hange, and that th at “when nati n ation onal al prospe pro sperity rity blossoms again, messianic hope disap di sappe pears ars.”6 .”66 Likewise, finally, Evans P ritch rit chard ard notes that th at,, as with most Hebrew prophets, the prophet is linked with war: “the principal social function of principal prophets of the past was to lead raids on the cattle of the Dinka and actions against various variou s foreign groups in the nor n orth th.” .”6 67 To do away once once and for fo r all with the representation of charisma charisma as a property attached to the nature of a single individual, in each particular case one must again determine the sociologically pertinent characteristics that allow an individual to find himself socially predisposed to test and express, with partic par ticul ular ar force and coherence, coheren ce, ethical ethic al or political politi cal arrangem arran gements ents already present presen t implicitly among amo ng all members memb ers of the class or grou gr oup p of its recipients. One must have analyzed in particular the factors that predispose structurally ambiguous categories and groups, cripples or bastards (words chosen for their evocative virtue), occupying places of great structural tension, contradictory or anomalous positions, and Archimedean points (e.g., blacksmiths in numerous primitive societies, the proletaroid intelligentsia in the millenarian movements or, on a more psychosociological level, individuals with strongly decrystalized status) to fulfill the function incumbent on them in the normal state of the functioning of societies (manipulation of dangerous and uncontrolled forces) as well as in crisis situations (formulation of the unformulated). In sum, the prophet is less the “extraordinary” man of whom Weber spoke than the man of extraordinary situations, about whom guardians of ordinary ordi nary order ord er have nothing noth ing to say, and with reason, since since the only language which they have at their disposal is that of exorcism. It is because he realizes, in his person and in his discourse, the meeting of a signifying and a signified that predated him, but only in the potential and implicit state, that he can mobilize groups or classes that recognize his language because they recognize themselves in him—aristocratic and princely births, for example, in the case of Zarathu Zara thustra, stra, Mohammed, Moha mmed, and Indian prophets; the middle cla classe sses, s, citiz citizen ens, s, or countrymen, in the case of the prophets of Israel. The fact that scholarly analysis reveals that prophetic discourse contains almost nothing that t hat is not part of prior tradition, trad ition, whether priestl priestly y or sectarian, sectarian, in no way excludes that it could have produced the illusion of radical novelty, for example by vulgarizing an esoteric message to new publics. The crisis of ordinary language calls for, or authorizes, the language of crisis and the criticism of ordinary language. Revelation, that is, to state that which is going to be or to state that which was unthinkable because inexpressible, requires those moments where anything can be said because anything can happen. It is such a conjuncture that C. Vasoli evokes to explain the appearance of a heretical Florentine sect at the end of the fifteenth century: “Especially after
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1480, one encounters numerous and frequent traces of a strong eschatological sensibility, diffuse expectations of mystical happenings, terrifying prodigies, presaging signs, signs, and mysterious mysterio us appari app aritio tions ns that th at annou ann ounc ncee great gre at upheavals uphe avals in things human and divine, in ecclesiastical life, and in the fate of all Christendom. Christen dom. The invocation inv ocation of a great reformer is not rare rar e and it is even more and more lively and insistent that he come to purify and renew the church, to purge it of all its sins, and lead it back to its divine origins, to the purity without blemish of the evangelical experience. . . . We are not amazed that, in this atmosph atmo sphere, ere, clearly prophet prop hetic ic theses also reap re appe pear ar.” .”6 68 The successful proph pro phet et is the th e one who manages to state what has to be said, in one of those situations that seems at once to summon and to reject language, because they impose the discovery of the inadequacy of all available deciphering tools. But more profoundly, the very exercise of the prophetic function is conceivable only in societies that, escaping from mere reproduction, have, so to speak, entered into history. As one moves away from the most undifferentiated societies and those most capable of mastering their own development by ritualizing it (via agrarian rituals and rites rites of passage), passage), the prophets, prophet s, inventors in ventors of o f the eschatological future and, therefore, of history as movement towards the future, who are themselves the products of history, that is, of the rupture with cyclical time that crisis introduces, come to fill the place heretofore granted to social mechanisms of crisis ritualization, that is. to the controlled exercise of the crisis, which presuppose presup posess a division divisio n of religious work wo rk conferring confer ring complementary roles on those responsible responsible for ordinary order (Brahmins in India or Flamines Flamines in Rome) and to the abettors of sacred disorder (Luperci and Gandharvas). We may note in passing that the stylization that the myth effects exemplifies the opposition between the two antagon anta gonisti isticc powers, between celeritas and gravitas. This opposition is the basis of any series of secondary oppositions, such as that between the discont disc ontinu inuous ous and the continu cont inuou ous, s, creation creat ion and conservat cons ervation ion,, mysticism and religion: “The Brahmins, like the Flamines and the priestly pe rman anen entt and an d consta con stantly ntly pub p ublic lic religion hierarchy they head, represent that perm within which—except on one lone day of the year— the the whole life life o f society society is set set.. The Luperci, as with the group of men men the Gand Ga ndhar harva va and all its members is seem to represent in mythic transposition, constitute precisely that one exception. Both of these groups belong to a religion that is neither public nor accessible except during that one fleeting appearance. . . . Flamines and Brahmins are the guardians of sacred order , Luperci and Gandharvas are the agents of a no less sacred disorder . Of the two religions they represent, one is static, regulated, calm; the other is dynamic, free, violent. And it is precisely because of its inherently inhe rently explosive natur na turee that th at the latter lat ter canno can nott remain f o r anyth an ything ing more mo re than tha n a very b rief ri ef peri pe rio o d o f time tim e, the time it takes dominant fo to purify and also to revivify, to ‘recr re crea eate te’’ the th e former in a single tumultuous o f energy.” energ y.”6 69 It suffices suffices to add tha t hatt the Flamines Flami nes are drink dr inkers ers and irruption of
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musicians while the Brahmins abstain from inebriating liquour and ignore song, dance, and music: “/tor anything original or in any way related to inspiration inspiration or f a n c y ”10 “Speed (extreme rapidity, sudden appearance and disappearance, lightning raids, etc.) is that behavior, that ‘rhythm,’ most suited to the activity of violent , improvisatorial, creative societies,” while public religion “demands a majestic gait and solemn rh y th m ”11 The Luperci and the ju nior orss and seniors, as light and heavy; Flamines oppose themselves also as juni the Flamines ensure “a continuous fecundity against interruption and accident”; but although they can “prolong life and fecundity through [their] sacrifices, sacrifices, [they [they]] can c anno nott “revive them th em ”; the miracles of the Luperci Lu perci “[m “ [make ake]] good goo d an accident accid ent and an d [ reestablish] an inter in terrup rupted ted fecund fec undity. ity.””72 Finally, Finally , “It is precisely because they are ‘excessive’ that th at the Gand Ga ndha harva rvass and the Luperci Luperc i can create; whereas the Flamines and the Brahmins, because they are merely ‘correct,’ can only main m aintai tain. n.””73 4.2.1. 4.2.1. The relation relatio n that th at obtains obtai ns between political revolution revolu tion and symbolic symbolic revolution is not symmetrical. If there is doubtless no symbolic revolution that does not presuppose a political revolution, political revolution does not in itself suffice to produce the symbolic revolution necessary to give it an adequate language, a condition of a complete accomplishment: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something th at has never yet yet existed, existed, precisely precisely in such such periods of revolutionary revolutiona ry crisis crisis they anxiously anxious ly conjure up the spirits o f the past to t o their thei r servic servicee and borrow bor row from them names, battle cries and costumes, in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored time-ho nored disguise disguise and this borrow b orrowed ed language.”7 lang uage.”74 So long as the crisis has not found its prophet, the schemes with which one thinks the world overturned are still the product of the world to be overturned. The prophet is the one who can contribute to realizing the coincidence of the revolution revolut ion with itself by operating operatin g the symbolic revolution revolutio n that th at is called called political revolution. revolu tion. But if it* is true that th at political politica l revolu rev olutio tion n finds its fulfillment ful fillment only in the symbolic revolution that makes it exist fully, in giving it the means to think itself in its its truth, that tha t is, is, as unprecedented, unprecedented, unthinkable, unthinkab le, and unnameable unnameab le according to all the previous grids of classification or interpretation, instead of taking itself for one or the other of the revolutions of the past, and if it is true, therefore, that any political revolution calls on this revolution of symbolic systems that the metaphysical tradition designates by the name of metanoia, it remains remains that tha t the conversion of the minds as revolution revolution in thought thou ght is only a revolution in the minds m inds of those converted beforehand beforeha nd by the religious religious prophe pro phets ts who, for want wan t of the power pow er to think th ink the limits of their the ir power, that th at is, is, of their thinking about abo ut power, supply the means of thinking this unthink able (i.e., the crisis), without imposing at the same time this un-thought, which is
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the political meaning of the crisis. With neither the knowledge nor the will, fl ig h t o f thoug tho ught ht which they thereby fall prey to the flig which is given them. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper was translated by Jenny B. Burnside, Craig Calhoun, and Leah Florence. It was originally published as “Genese et structure du champ religieux,” R e v u e fr a n q a i s d e S o c i o l o g i e , XII (1971): 295-334. The translation appears by permission of Polity Press, and will appear in L. Wacquant (Ed.), P r a c ti c e , C la ss , & C u lt u r e .
NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. W. von Humboldt, Humb oldt, Einleitung Einle itung zum zu m K aw i-W erk er k (VI. 60) as quoted by E. Cassirer in Stu dien n der de r Bibli Bi blioth othek ek Warburg Warbu rg (Leipzig. “Sprache und Mythos f Studie (Leipzig. VI, 1925), 1925), reproduced in Wessen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965, p. 80). 2. E. Cassirer, Cassi rer, Philos Phi losoph ophie ie des sym bolis bo lische che n Formen For men (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1923-1929). (U.S. ed. R. Manheim, trans. Ph iloso ilo soph phyy o f Sym S ym bolic bo lic Forms For ms (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955). E. Cassirer, “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,” Word 1(1945): 99-120. Cassirer, who had written an essay titled “Die Begriffsform in mythischen Denken” ( Studen des Bibliothek Warburg, Warburg , Leipzig [1(1992)], takes up in his account the fundamental theses of the Durkheiman school (“the fundamentally social character of the myth is incontestable”; An A n Essay Ess ay on Man [New York: Doubleday, 1956; 1st ed., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944, p. 107]) and employs the very concept of “form of classification” as an equivalent of his notion of “symbolic form” {The Myth o f the State State [New York: Doubleday, 1955; 1st ed., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946, p. 16]). Life, trans. J.W. Swain (New York: 3. E. Durkheim, Durk heim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, EF RL.. Free Press, 1965), 1965), p. 31. Hereafter Hereaf ter cited as EFRL 4. “Thus renovated, the the theory of knowledge know ledge seems destined to unite the opposin opp osing g advantages of the two rival theories, without incurring their inconveniences. It keeps all the essential principles of apriorists; but at the same time it is inspired by that positive spirit which the empiricists have ., p. 32). striven to satisfy” (Durkheim, EF RL ., sau vagee (Paris: Plon, 1962), pp. 48-99 {The Savage Mind 5. C. Levi-Straus Levi- Strauss, s, La Pensee sauvag [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966]); E. Durkheim and M. Mauss, “De quelques formes primitives de classification. Contribution a l’etude des representations collectives,” in M. Mauss, Oeuvres. Economie Economie //(Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1969), pp. 13-195. (U.S. ed., R. Needham, trans., Pri mit ive Classificati Class ification on [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963].) 6. “I am also particularly particularly grateful to Mr. Ricoeur to have underscored the the kinship that could exist between my enterprise and that of Kantianism. It concerns, in summary, a transposition of the Kantian research to the ethnological domain. Instead of using introspection or reflexion on the state of science in the particular society in which the philosopher is placed, one moves beyond these limits by research into what can be common between the humanity which appears to us most distant, and the manner in which our own minds work; by trying, therefore, to disengage fundamental and constraining properties for all minds, whatever they may be” (C. Levi-Strauss, Espr it 1l[Nov. 1963]: 628-653). “Responses a quelques questions,” Esprit 7. On the relation bewteen Durkheim Durkhe im and and Saussure, the two unequally renowned founding found ing fathers of astructuralism, see W. Doroszewski, “Quelques remarques sur les rapports de la sociologie al de Psychologie Psycho logie (January/April 1933); et de la linguistique: E. Durkheim et F. de Saussure,” Journ Saussure,” Journal republished in Cassirer et al., Essais sur le langage (Paris: Ed. de Miniut, 1969), pp. 99-109.
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8. That is to say, one has reason to suspect a priori all attempts to apply methods meth ods that are only the more or less mechanical transposition of linguistic analysis to the products of the culture industry or to the works of scholarly art. Such attempts ignore the position of the producers in the field of production and the functions that these symbolic objects fulfill for the producers and for the various categories of consumers. 9. “If men did not agree agree upon these essential ideas at at every moment, momen t, if they did not have the same conception of time, space, cause, number, etc., all contact between their minds would be impossible, and with that, all life together. Thus society could not abandon the categories to the free choice of the individual without abandoning itself. If it is to live there is not merely need of a satisfactory mor m or al co nfor nf or m ity ; there is also a minimum of logical logical confo rmity that it cannot safely do without” (Durkheim, EF R L., p. 30; Bourdieu’s emphasis). 10. C. Levi-St Levi -Straus rauss, s, Structural Anthropology, trans., C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf (New York: York: Basic Books, Bo oks, 1963), 1963), p. p. 207. The admirable texts that Levi-Strauss Levi-S trauss consecrated consecrate d to the problem of symbolic symboli c efficacy (ibid., ch. IX and X, pp. 183-226) 183-226) remain isolated isolated in his work, the most significant for our purpose being the chapter of Tristes Tropique titled “The Writing Lesson”: “Writing is a strange thing. It would seem as if its appearance could not fail to wreak profound changes in the living conditions of our race and that these transformations must have been above all intellectual intellectual in character. character. . . . If my hypothesis is is correct, the p rim ri m a ry fu n ctio ct io n o f writing, as a mean s o f commu com munic nicatio ation, n, is to fac f ac ilita ili tate te the enslav ens laveme ement nt o f oth er human hum an beings. The use of writing for disinterested ends, and with a view to satisfactions of the mind in the fields either of science or the arts, is a secondary result of its invention—and may even be no more than a way of reinforcing, reinforcing, justifying, or dissimulating its primary functi on” (C. Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tristes Tropique s, trans. J. Russell (New York: A'theneum, 1964), pp. 291-293; Bourdieu’s emphasis). 11. “That it it may go well with thee .. . . . and that thou mayest prolong thy days upon the earth” [Deut. 4:40] (according to the terms of the promise made to those who honor their parents). M. Weber, Econ Ec onom omyy an d So ciet ci etyy , ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 1978). Hereafter Her eafter cited as Econo Ec ono my. 12. Though Thoug h one can evidently transpose to the body of religious specialists what Engels writes writes of professional jurists in his letter to Conrad Schmidt (27 October 1890): “It is the same, to be straightforward: as soon as the new division of labor becomes necessary and created by prof pr ofes essio sio na l ju ris ri s ts , in its turn a new domain opens up, autonomous, which, while being dependent on production and commerce in a general way, possesses no less, it as well, a particular capacity of reaction to these domains. In a modern state, it is not only necessary that the law correspond to the general economic situation and be an expression of it, but that it as well be a syste sy ste ma tic expression that does not inflict upon itself its own denial by its internal contradictions. And in order to succeed there, it reflects less and less faithfully the economic contradictions.” And Engels then describes the effect of apriorization which results from the illusion of absolute autonomy: “the jurist imagines that he operates by a priori proposition whereas there are however only economic reflections”; speaking of philosophy, he notes one of the consequences of professionalization that reinforces, by a circular effect, the illusion of absolute autonomy: “For a determined domain of the division of labor, the philosophy of each epoch supposes a defined intellectual documentation transmitted to it by its predecessors and for which it serves as point of departure.” 13. 13. K. Marx, Mar x, and F. Engels, Collected Works: The German Idology , vol. 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), pp. 44-45. 14. 14. K. Marx, Mar x, Principes Principe s d u n e critique criti que de Te co no m iep olitiq ol itiq ue in Oeuvres Oeuvres.. Econom ie f l (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 1968), p. p. 260 (U.S. (U.S . ed.: Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Collected Works, vols. 30-34 (New York: International, 1989). 15. 15. Cf. Weber, Web er, Ec onom 1:468: 8: “The lot o f peasants is so strongly stro ngly tied to nature, on om y, 2:1178 and 1:46 so dependent on organic processes and natural events, and economically so little oriented to rational systematization”; K. Marx, Le Capita Ca pita l , II, 2nd section, ch. VIII, in K. Marx, Oeuvres.
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Econo Ec onomie mie //(Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 655, (“temporal structure of the productive activity and impossibility of prediction”); ibid., Ill, 5th section, ch. XIX, ibid., p. 1273 (uncertainty and contingencies). E co no m y , 2:1178. 16. Weber, Eco 17. 17. Ibid., Ibi d., 2:1179. 18. 18. Ibid., Ibi d., 1:419. 1:419. instances—literally, entreaties, pleas, solicitations. Bourdieu uses the 19. 19. The French Fren ch here is instances—literally, term (with its legal resonances) throughout this essay to refer to contending organizations of religious practice as they seek (e.g.) primacy and capital. We have usually rendered instances as claims or claimants. Bourdieu often seems to refer to both simultaneously; they are always understood to be in competition, like claimants to a throne. Pr imiti itive ve Religion, Relig ion, Its Nature Natu re and a nd Origin (New Origin (New York: 20. P. Radin, Radi n, Prim York: Dover Publications, 1957 1957); ); 1st ed. 1937. 21. Cf. A. W. H. Adkins, Adki ns, M Mer erit it an d Respo Re sponsi nsibil bility ity,, A Stud St ud y in Greek G reek Values (Oxford, Values (Oxford, Claredon Press, 1960) (particularly chap. V), and above all E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957); lsted., 1951. E cono nom m y , 1:409-410. 22. Cf. Weber, Eco 23. 23. As marked as the break break between the specialist and the layperson can be, the religious field field distinguishes itself from the intellecltual field, strictly speaking, in that it can never devote itself totally and exclusively to an esoteric production, that is, destined for its sole producers, and that it should always sacrifice to the exigencies of the laypersons. “The aede [priest] also knows the language of the gods ‘who are forever,’ he reveals several terms of it, but he is obliged to translate for the men who listen to him and to conform himself to custom” (J. Bollack, Em pedo pe do cle cl e , I. Introdu Intr oductio ctio n a I’ancienne ancien ne phys ph ys ique iq ue [Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1965], p. 286). 24. One must read read the the entire entire chapter chapter titled “The transpo tran spositio sitio n” (ibid., pp. 277-310), where Jean Bollack uncovers the principles of interpretation and reinterpretation to which Empedocles submits Homeric texts and that no doubt could characterize the relation that every scholarly tradition brings with its heritage: “It is in the variation variation that the power one had over language manifested itself best and most visibly” (p. 284). “From the game of letters [jeu de lettres] to the complex re-deployment of entire groups [of letters or words], verbal creation rests first on the elements of memory. . . . Variation is all the greater as knowledge is inferior and as it allows the imitated text to appear” (p. 285). On the function of “sacred etymology” and “play on words” and on the search for a “polyphonic” means of expression among Egyptian scribes, one can also Pret res de Vancienne Vancienne Eg ypte ypt e (Paris: Seuil, 1957), pp. consult the work of Serge Sauneron, Les Pretres 123-133. 25. 25. Durkheim defines defines social categories categories of thought as “pricele “priceless ss instrum instruments ents of thought thought which the human groups have laboriously forged through the centuries and where they have accumulated the best of their intellectual capital.” And he comments in a footnote: “That is how it is legitimate ma terial ial accu ac cumu mu lated lat ed capital. capit al. There to compare the categories to tools; for a tool, on its side, is mater is a close relationship between the three ideas of tool, category, and institution” (Durkheim, EF E F R L ., p. 32 and note 24; Bourdieu’s emphasis). Pri me educati edu cati on et moral mo ralee de d e classe (Paris: 26. For a critique of this illusion, see L. Boltanski, Prime Mouton, 1969). E F R L , p. 17; 27. Durkheim, EF 17; Bourd Bou rdie ieu’ u’ss emphas emp hasis is.. 28. Durkheim, EF R L , pp. 61, 62. However, Durkheim noted earlier that one encounters the division of religious labor everywhere (albeit in a rudimentary form); “Undoubtedly it is rare that a ceremony does not have some director at the moment when it is celebrated; even in the most crudely organized societies, there are generally certain men whom the importance of their position points out to exercise a directing influence over the religious life (for example the chiefs of the local groups of certain Australian societies). But this attribution of functions is still very uncertain” (EFRL, (EFRL, p. 59, note 58).
Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field
41
29. And no doubt, doubt , more or less confusedly, of all ethnologists ethnolog ists who have have a professional intere interest st in rejecting Marx’s thesis according to which the most complex forms of social life contain the principle of the comprehension of the most rudimentary forms (“The anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape”). 30. One may consult cons ult on this point the the report of the debate between Claude Levi-Strauss and Paul Ricoeur {Esprit, {Esprit, Nov. N ov. 1963, 1963, pp. pp. 628-653), where the the question o f the the specificity of the productions of the priesthood is pilfered away as much by the philosopher, anxious to save the irreducibility of the Bibilical tradition (A), as by the ethnologist who, in recognizing explicitly the religious work of specialists (B), eliminates it from his analysis. (A) “For may part, I am stunned that all the examples come from the geographic area which was that of so-called totemism, and never never from from Semitic, pre-Hellen pre-Hellenic, ic, or Indo-European Indo-European thought. thought. . . . I wonder if the myth mythical ical background to which we are connected—Semitic backgrounds (Egyptian, Babylonian, Aramaic, Hebrew), Proto-Hellenic backgrounds, Indo-European backgrounds—lend themselves as easily to the same operation or more so, . . . they lend themselves surely, but do they lend themselves without reservation?” (p. 607). (B) “The Old Testament, which certainly puts mythical materials to work, takes them up again with another end in mind than was originally theirs. Editors have, without doubt, deformed them by interpreting them; these myths have therefore been subjected, as Mr. Ricoeur says very well, to an intellectual operation. One would have to begin with preliminary work, aimed at recovering the mythological and archaic residue beneath the Biblical literature, which can evidently only be the work of a specialist” (p. 631). “From historicized myths we understand much about the world; it is altogether stunning, for example, that the mythology of the the Zuni Indians Indians of the the southwestern southwestern United United States States had been been ‘‘historic historicized’ ized’ . . . by indigenous indigenous theologians in a manner comparable to that of other theologians beginning with the myths of Israels’s ancestors” (p. 636). Ec onom om y 1:432-433. 31. Weber, Econ 32. M. Weber, Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 19201921), vol. I, pp. 276-536. 33. 33. Undoubtedly, Undoubtedl y, there there is no social formation that, weak weak as as the developm ent of the religious religious apparatus may be, ignores the opposition that Durkheim established after Robertson Smith, between institutionally established religion, the patent and legitimate expression of beliefs and common values of the group, and magic as the ensemble of beliefs and practices characteristic of groups or of dominated categories (as women) or occupying struc str uctur turall allyy am big uous uo us soc ial ia l po siti si tion on s (as the blacksmith or the old woman in Berber societies). on om y 1:423-424. 34. Weber, Ec onom 35. Durkheim, EF E F R L , p. 58. 36. Radin, Prim Pr imiti itive ve Relig Re ligion ion , pp. 182-183. 37. R. Niebuhr, Niebuh r, M oral or al Man Ma n a nd Im m oral or al Soci So ciety ety (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), p. 62. on om y 1:472. 38. Weber, Ec onom 39. That is why M ax Weber’ Webe r’ss attempt to characterize the great world religions by the professional groups of classes that have played a determining role in their propagation has above all a suggestive value in that it indicates the principal style belonging to each of the original great messages: “If one wishes to characterize succinctly, succinctl y, in a formula so to speak, the types representative of the various strata that were the primary carriers or propagators of the so-called world religions, they would be the following: In Confucianism, the world-organizing bureaucrat; in Hinduism, the world-ordering magician; in Buddhism, the mendicant monk wandering through the world; in Islam, the warrior seeking to conquer the world; in Judaism, the wandering trader; and in Christianity, the itinerant journeyman. To be sure, all these types must not be taken as exponents of their own occupatinal occupa tinal or material ‘class ‘class interests, in terests,” ” but rather as as ideological carriers carriers ( (ideologische ideologische Trager) Trager) of the kind of ethical or salvation doctrine which rather readily conformed to their social po p o si ti o n ” (Weber, Eco E co no m y , 2:512; Bourdieu’s emphasis).
42
40.
PIERRE BOURDIEU
E. Troeltsch, Die Sozialleh Soz iallehren ren der christlichen christ lichen Kir chert chert un d Gruppen Grup pen (Tubingen: Mohr,
1912), vol. I, in Gesammelte Gesa mmelte Schriften von E. E. Troeltsch (1922), repub. (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1961). 41. L. Finkelstein, The The Pharisees: Pharisees: The Sociolo gical gica l Bac kgrou nd o f Their Their Faith (New York: Harper and Bros., 1949), 2 vols. 42.
Cf. C. Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology , ch. IX and X, pp. 183-226. 43. It will suffice to mention here the prayer that a Punjab religious community comm unity,, reputed for its piety, addresses to its patron saint:
A famished man cannot perform your worship, Take up your rosary again. I ask only the dust from the feet of the Saint. Make it that I not be indebted. I ask of you two se s e e r of flour, s e e r of butter and salt. A quarter of a se I ask of you half of a s e e r of dal, Which will nourish me two times a day. I ask of you a fourfooted bed, A pillow and a mattress. I ask of you a loincloth for me And then your slave will serve you with devotion. I have never been greedy. I love nothing other than your name (Radin, P r i m i t iv e
R e lig io n ,
pp. 305-306).
44. “Quesalid did not not become beco me a great sorcerer because he healed the sick, he healed the sick because he had become a great sorcerer” ( Levi-Strauss, Structu Structural ral A nthropology , p. 198). To get a better picture of this dialectic, it would be necessary to analyze the objective relations and interactions that unite the painter to his public, gro sso m o d o , since Duchamp, and which find their archetypal form today among defenders of Tart Tart pauv re or conceptual art, led to “sell” their convict con viction ion or their sincer sin cerity ity as the unique and ultimate proof of their claim that any sort of object belongs to the class of works of art or, which amounts to the same thing, to assert their claim to a monopoly over artistic production by the mere fact of producing themselves as artis ar tists ts , that is, by thinking think ing themse the mselves lves as artists art ists an d calling art an object obj ect deliber deli berate ately ly undistin und istin guishe gui shed d that
anyon any onee coul co uld d prod pr od uce. uc e. 45. 45. Think of one of these these prophets prophets about whom Evans-Pritchard Evans-Pritchard speaks, speaks, who lived in the bush, eating human and animal excrement, and who ran from the floor of his stable to its summit, or of another, who spent all day crying from the top of the pyramid of earth and debris that he himself had built (E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Nue r Religion Religi on (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1962, 1st ed., 1956], pp. 305-307). Likewise in An cient describes how the biblical prophets cie nt Judaism , Max Weber describes descended into the street to shower the high dignitaries of Judaism with personal invectives, threats, and injuries and manifested all the signs of the most furious passion. Diverse pathological states preceded these moments of high inspiration: Ezekiel beat his kidneys and stomped the ground; following one of his visions, he remained paralyzed for seven days; he felt himself floating in the air. Jeremiah was like a drunk man. Many prophets had visual and auditory hallucinations: they fell into states of hypnosis and launched into uncontrollable discourses. 46.
On the distinction distin ction between the level of interaction (where the Weberian analysis of relations
between specialists is situated) and the level of the structure of objective relations, see P. Bourdieu, “Une interpretation de la theorie de la religion selon Max Weber,” Archi Ar chives ves europe eur ope enes ene s de
Sociologie 12(1971):3-21; and “Legitimation and Structural Interests in Weber’s Sociology of
Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field
43
Religion,” in S. Whimster and S. Lash, eds. M ax Weber, R atio at iona na lit y & Mod M od erni er nity ty (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), pp. 119-136. E cono nom m y 1:244. 47. Weber, Eco 48.
Heresie s E. Delaruelle, “Devo tion populaire et heresie heresie au Moyen Moye n Age ,” in J. Le Goff, ed., ed., Heresies
et societes dans VEurope VEurope pre-industrielle, Xl e-X VI IIe siecles siecles (Paris-La Haye: Mouton, 1968), p. 152. 49.
Cf. H. Grundmann, “Heresies savantes e heresies heresies po pu late la tess au Moyen Age ,” in J. Le Le
so cie tes , pp. 209-210, 218. Goff, Heresies et socie 50. Greenslade discerned well the determining weight assumed by the “liturgical “liturgical disputes” dispute s” in the schisms of the primitive church (Cf. S.L. Greenslade, Schism in the Early Church [New Church [New York: Harper and Bros., 1953 19531, 1, pp. pp. 37-124). Am ong on g the explana exp lanatory tory factors for the appearance of heresies, the structural properties of the priestly bureaucracy, and in particular its greater or lesser aptitude for reforming itself or for welcoming and tolerating in its own midst groups of reformers must be taken into account. Thus, one can distinguish in the history of the Christian church in the Middle Ages periods during which “heretical” tendencies could develop at the same time that they were annihilated in the creation of new religious orders (i.e., roughly up until the beginning of the thirteenth century) and periods during which these tendencies could only take the form of explicit refusal of the ecclesiastical order by reason of the prohibition of founding of new orders Her esies et so ciet ci etes es,, pp. 103 and 220-221). One may, following a (Cf. G. Leff, in J. Le Goff, Heresies suggestion o f Jacques Jacques Le Goff (ibid., p. 144), 144), wonder whether the variations variations in the frequency frequency of o f heresy did not maintain a relationship with morphological phenomena, such as fluctuations in the volume of the body of clerics and the correlative ability of the church to digest heresies by offering them a mystical escape in its very bosom. eglise, la conscience religieuse et le lien confe ssionel au X V ile 51. 51. L. Kolakovs Kola kovski, ki, Chretiens sans eglise, siecle siecle (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 306. 52. The contestation o f the established hierarc hierarchy hy which, with Montanism, goes as far as refusal refusal of the very principle of order and of authority, led the heresies of the primitive church to ideological themes fully akin to those of the medieval heresies (cf. S.L. Greenslade, Schism). Ec onom omy, y, 1:411. 53. Weber, Econ VAlgerie (Paris: 54. Cf. P. Bourdieu, Bourd ieu, Sociologie de VAlgerie (Paris: Presses Universitaires Universitair es de France, 1st ed. 1970), pp. 101-103. 55. Cf. J. Le Goff, Goff , “Culture “Culture clericale et traditions traditio ns folkloriq folk loriq ues dans la vicilsation vicils ation Ni vea ux de d e culture cu lture e t group gro upes es soci so ciau aux x (Paris: Mouton, 1967), merovingienne,”in L. Bergeron, ed., Nivea pp. 21-32. 56. Cf. P. Bourdieu, Bourd ieu, Sociologie de VAlgerie. 57.
Weber, Econ Ec onom om y 1:459-460.
58. 59. 60.
Ibid., Ibi d., 1:461. 1:461. Ibid., Ibi d., 1:465. 1:465. P. Radin, Prim Pr imiti itive ve R eligio eli gio n , p. p. 19.
61. 62.
Ibid., p. 37. “The social soc ial system sys tem is, as it were, removed remove d to a mystical mysti cal plane, where wher e it Figu Figure ress as a system syste m Afr ican of sacred values beyond all criticism or revision” (M. Fortes and E. Evans-Pritchard, African Politi Pol itical cal Sy stem st em s (Oxford University Press, 1940], p. 16). 64.
Durkheim, EF RL ., ., p. 30, note 19. E co nom no m y , 1:400. Weber, Eco
65.
Oeuvres, III Cohesion sociale et divisions de la sociologie (Paris: Ed. de Minuit, M. Mauss, Mauss , Oeuvres,
63.
1969), pp. 333-334. 66. W.D . Wallis, Wallis, Messiahs, Their Ro le in Civil Ci viliza izatio tion n (Washington, DC: American Council on Public Affairs, 1943), p. 182. 67.
Ibid., p. 45.
44
PIERRE BOURDIEU
68. C. Vasoli, Vasol i, “Une secte heretique florentine a la fin du du XVe siecle, les ‘oints’,” oin ts’,” in J. Le Goff, Heresies Heresie s et soci so ciet etes es , p. 259. Mit ra-Varu aruna, na, An Essay on Two Indo-E Ind o-E uropea uro pean n Re prese pr ese nta tions tio ns o f 69. 69. G. Dumezil, Dumez il, Mitra-V Sovereignty Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 33-34; Bourdieu’s emphasis. 70. Ibid., p. 38. 71. Ibid., Ibid. , p. 40. 72. Ibid., pp. 44-45. 73. Ibid., Ibid. , p. 45. Works , vol. 74. K. Marx, Marx , “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonapa Bon aparte rte,” ,” Collected Works, vol . 11 (New (Ne w York: International, 1977), pp. 99-197; quote pp. 103-104.
