Recovering Durkheim's 'Second Program of Research - Rappaport and Alexander

Recovering Durkheim's 'Second Programof Research'Roy Rappaport and Jeffrey C. Alexander

Massimo Rosati

Abstract: Durkheim's 'second program of research' above all refers to hisproject as developed in Les formes 6l1mentaires de la vie religieuse. Thisessay examines how it has in turn been developed and taken up nowadaysin the work of Roy Rappaport and Jeffrey Alexander. Both of them areconcerned with the centrality of ritual and the sacred as active, constitutiveelements not just of religion but of all social life, not least modern sociallife. However, a key difference between them can be found in the issue ofthe internal dimension of ritual and of the individual's participation inpublic performance of this. Rappaport emphasizes some sort of generalnotion of acceptance, in an effort to open up things and get away from theparticular epistemological as well as theological commitments of the ideaof belief. Alexander still appears to work with the modernist epistemologyand 'Protestant' theology of belief. His project of a new Durkheimian cul-tural sociology has nonetheless itself opened up all kinds of things, and isone of the most creative and dynamic research programs in sociology now-adays.

Keywords: Durkheim; Rappaport; Alexander; ritual; the sacred; belief

Introduction

The field of Durkheimian studies is multicoloured. Even if Durkheim schol-ars are widely spread around the world, it seems to me that one can basicallydistinguish three macro-areas of Durkheimian studies. France, where schol-ars are used to focusing on the Durkheim of the Division of Labour, TheRules of the Sociological Method, and Suicide, and where the Durkheim ofThe Elementary Forms of Religious Life is almost neglected; England, whereon the contrary, the most discussed book is the Elementary Forms of Reli-gious Life, and - more recently - the thought of some Durkheimians suchas Marcel Mauss; and the United States, sharing with England the interest

Durkheimian Studies, Volume 13, 2007: 105-121, © Durkheim Press ISSN 1362-024Xdoi: 10.3167/ds.2007.130105

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in the later Durkheim. However, at least in recent decades, France andEngland share a more historical, contextualist and philological approachto Durkheim's thought, whereas in the United States scholars prefer amore theoretical and presentist reading of the French sociologist.1 Thesesubstantial and methodological differences are quite a mystery to me, andI really feel they should be discussed. However, leaving aside my ownsubstantial and methodological preferences and convictions, what I intendto do is try to discuss, briefly, two contemporary ways of developing Durk-heim's 'second program of research', to borrow the expression of PhilippeSteiner (1994) Both start from the sociological and/or anthropological studyof religion understood as 'the missing key to open all the sociologicaldoors' (Pickering 1984), to state something both supposedly universal aboutsociety in general, and more particular about modern and contemporarysocieties. I am going to sidestep 'classical', American interpretations ofDurkheim, such as offered by Parsons, Coser, Nisbet, and restrain myselfto the works of Roy Rappaport and Jeffrey C. Alexander. More particularly,I will focus on their ways of recovering and expanding Durkheim's thoughtand intuitions, rather than on their reading of Durkheim tout court. I con-sider their works among the most interesting and useful contemporaryways to recover and theoretically develop Durkheim's second program ofresearch. In my view, they have at least another common denominator,namely the emphasis on ritual as the 'basic social act', the infrastructure ofsocial life (Scubla 2003), a brick of the intellectual building of the ElementaryForms highly reconsidered in contemporary interpretations of Durkheim,above all in a culturalist milieu.

Rappaport's Cybernetics of the Sacred

Ritual and Religion in The Making of Humanity, Roy Rappaport's mostsignificant work, was published posthumously in 1999 as a result of morethan three decades of research on the relationships between religion, societyand ecology. It has been judged as a 'milestone in the anthropology ofreligion', comparable in scope to Durkheim, and indeed as the 'first system-atic attempt to address the question which Durkheim left unanswered'(Hart 1999: xiv). This judgment expressed by Keith Hart, a colleague ofRappaport's at the University of Michigan, is shared for example by RobertBellah (1999: 569). As for my own view, Rappaport's Ritual and Religionin the Making of Humanity is one of the most significant books I have readin recent years, if not the most significant. If the later Durkheim was a veryradical thinker, as I believe, given his obsession that religion was the keyto the study of (every) society, Rappaport's investigation of the role ofrituals and religion in the making of humanity seems to me in perfectkeeping with Durkheim's theoretical radicalism. Consequently, I cannotfail to agree with Hart's and Bellah's judgments.'

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Recovering Durkheim's 'Second Program of Research'

Again, according to Hart (1999: xvi), Rappaport 'acknowledges Durkheimas a founder'. I would speculate that he acknowledges Durkheim as apredecessor well beyond the number of pages he dedicates explicitly to theFrench sociologist. In his five hundred page volume, Rappaport deals withDurkheim's thought directly in eight pages, more or less, partly with refer-ence to the 'categories', particularly time, and partly to the idea of thesacred. However, besides complex epistemological problems that mightdifferentiate Rappaport from Durkheim, a Durkheimian approach is, in myunderstanding, the central core of Rappaport's project.

Like The Elementary Forms - and maybe more than The ElementaryForms - Ritual and Religion is a very complex work, with many ways intoit. However, the author himself suggests we read it as 'a treatise on ritual:first on ritual's internal logic, next on the nature of what (i.e. sanctity) itslogic entails, truth, and finally, on the place of ritual and its fruits in theevolution of humanity' (Rappaport 1999: 3). Here we have a slight butimportant difference compared with The Elementary Forms. In my view,The Elementary Forms is first of all a treatise on the sacred, and onlyeventually does it become a treatise on ritual, at the end recognized byDurkheim as the dynamo of religion, its most enduring element. On thecontrary, Rappaport starts with ritual, from the beginning recognized asthe central, basic element of religion, moral obligation and social contract,as I will shortly try to illustrate. Ritual is the dynamo of a hierarchy ofregulative elements of social life. Regulation - the centrality of regulationis another important similarity with Durkheim - and its relationship withritual, can be taken as the most convenient thread to sew together thecomplex fabric of Rappaport's work.

According to Rappaport, social life is regulated by a hierarchy of struc-tures, described as the cybernetics of the Holy, encompassed by ritual. Itis top-down cybernetics. Its towering elements are the so-called UltimateSacred Postulates (USPs), the linguistic and more rational component ofthe Holy, namely the sacred - the other being the numinous. Rappaportprovides a diagram that represents in an oversimplified form the cyberneticsof the Holy, but whose logic can also be expressed as follows:

1. USPs sanctify authorities, institutions, and the various forms of directivesconstituting regulatory hierarchies;

2. The operations of the regulatory hierarchy influence, to say the least, prevail-ing material and social conditions;

3. Material and social conditions determine to a great extent, or even define,the well-being of those subject to the sanctified regulatory hierarchy;

4. Those subordinate to the regulatory hierarchy, the members of the commu-nity, are the congregations themselves participating in the rituals accepting,and thus establishing, the USPs which, in turn, sanctify the regulatory

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hierarchy and, often, explicitly accept the connection of elements of suchhierarchies to the USPs. Thus, the validity of the USP and the connection ofelements of the regulatory hierarchies ... to those postulates, is ultimatelycontingent upon their acceptance by those presumably subject to them... -Prophets not only may challenge the connections of incumbent authoritiesto the sources of sanctity but may also claim sanctified status for their owninjunctions and even may proclaim new USPs.

In sum, if authorities wish to maintain their sanctity, which is to say theirlegitimacy, and to maintain the sanctity of the regulatory structures overwhich they preside, they must be sure that those regulatory structuresremain in reasonable working order and are reasonably responsive to thosesubject to them. (Rappaport 1999: 429-430, original italics)

Here it is worth noting a couple of elements that echo The ElementaryForms. First, politics - the main function of which is the regulation ofsocial life - is only one element of the regulatory system, and it must beencompassed in much broader cybernetics, the key of which is religion.That is why Durkheim at a certain stage stopped writing on politics andshifted to religion, according to Lacroix (1981). Secondly, the sacred andthe USPs that have a towering position in the regulatory hierarchy are inthe end contingent upon the ritual legitimation on the part of the subjects,exactly as in The Elementary Forms. Durkheim recognized and could explain- in contrast with Robertson Smith - God's dependence upon believers,and society's dependence upon individuals.

Ritual, as already noted, is the dynamo of the cybernetics of the Holy.And Rappaport's analysis of the formal and structural logic of ritual isthe most significant contribution he gave, in my opinion, to the depth ofDurkheim's pioneering investigation. To sum up this analysis in a coupleof pages would be almost impossible, so I will simply try to outline a fewessential points.

1. The definition of ritual. Ritual can be taken to denote 'the performanceof more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirelyencoded by the performers' (Rappaport 1999: 24). The crucial elements ofthis very 'terse' definition - all of them analytically analysed by Rappaport- are 'performance' (and the different kinds of performances similar toritual, such as theatre, drama, play, athletic contexts), 'formality', 'invari-ance', 'inclusion of both acts and utterances', and, last but not least, 'en-coded by other than the performers'.

2. Ritual, among other things, is a tool that communicates messages andmeanings. And he distinguishes between three levels of meanings that haveparticular importance in ritual: low-order, middle-order and high-ordermeaning (ibid.: 70-72). Low-order meaning is grounded in distinction, aswhen we say that the meaning of the word 'dog' is dog, dog being distinctfrom cat. Taxonomies are the usual way to structure low-order meanings.

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Middle-order meaning, on the other hand, is when we find similaritieshidden beneath the surface of distinctions, and when we judge these similar-ities more important than distinctions. Metaphor is the paradigmatic caseof middle-order meanings. Finally, high-order meaning is grounded in iden-tity or unity, 'the radical identification or unification of self with other'.High-order meaning:

is not so much, or even at all, intellectual but is, rather, experiential. It maybe experienced through art, or in acts of love, but is, perhaps, most oftenfelt in ritual and other religious devotions. High order meaning seems to beexperienced in intensities ranging from the mere intimation of being emotionallymoved, in for instance, the course of ritual to those deep numinous experiencescalled 'mystical'. (Rappaport 1999: 71)

In other words, even if ritual as a tool communicates the whole complexof meanings, it is particularly connected with high-order meanings, the onesrelated to the less rational component of the Holy, namely the numinous.

3. As with Durkheim and other Durkheimians, ritual is conceived as thedynamo of the cybernetics of the sacred. The sacred is renovated but alsoproduced ex novo by means of ritual, as Durkheim wrote in The ElementaryForms ([1912a] 1995: 32), echoing Bergaigne. Consequently, the survivalof the sacred (or of the USPs) is contingent upon an individual's willingnessto participate in ritual. However, and this is in my understanding a verycrucial - and controversial - point, according to Rappaport participationdoes not imply belief. The genesis and survival of the sacred, contingentupon the performative nature of ritual, implies acceptance, and not belief.Belief is an inward state, 'knowable subjectively if at all', whereas accep-tance is

not a private state, but a public act visible both to witnesses and to the perform-ers themselves. People may accept because they believe, but acceptance notonly is not itself belief; it does not even imply belief. Ritual performance oftenpossesses perlocutionary force, and the private processes of individuals mayoften be persuaded by their ritual participation to come into conformity withtheir public acts, but this is not always the case. Belief is a cogent reason, butfar from the only reason, for acceptance. (Rappaport 1999: 120)

From the point of view of the individual, ritual is important in shapinga performative identity: the subject in ritual is what he or she is doing (cf.Seligman et al., forthcoming). From the social point of view, ritual is essen-tial because it defines boundaries, margins of collective identities: 'participa-tion in ritual demarcates a boundary, so to speak, between private andpublic processes. Liturgical orders, even those performed in solitude, arepublic orders and participation in them constitutes an acceptance of a public

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order regardless of the private state of belief of the performer' (ibid.: 121).Ritual, in other words, is a sort of social compass, but it is also essentialin order to maintain public order because it creates and strengthens moralobligations. Once again, contrary to modernist beliefs, moral obligationdoes not necessarily demand sincerity and belief in moral norms. Moralobligations are the outcome of external actions, publicly performed indepen-dently from the depth of subjective adherence. As we read:

Acceptance in, or through, liturgical performance may reflect an inward stateof conviction; it may also encourage 'the mind', 'the heart', 'the spirit' intoagreement with itself. It does not necessarily do either, however, and thereforeit does not eliminate all of the shenanigans of which the mind, the heart, thespirit, and other 'backstage artistes' may be capable, but my argument, basedon Austin's, proposes that although liturgical performance does not eliminateinsincerity, it renders it publicly impotent. It is the visible, explicit, public actof acceptance, and not the invisible, ambiguous, private sentiment, which issocially and morally binding. (ibid.: 122)

We cannot trust the backstage artistes, society cannot ask for a full liningup of our inner states with social norms, and at the same time societycannot rely upon the 'shenanigans of which the mind, the heart, the spirit,and other "backstage artistes" may be capable'. This is true not only formodern and complex societies, but even for less complex, more primitivesocieties, as anthropological research shows. Even mechanical solidaritycannot rest only upon common beliefs.' But organic solidarity, and complexand pluralistic societies, cannot be grounded on common beliefs4 :

'Common belief' cannot in itself provide a sufficiently firm ground upon whichto establish public orders ... we cannot know if a belief is common, for onething, and whereas belief is vexed by ambivalence and clouded by ambiguity,acceptance is not. Liturgical orders are public, and participation in them consti-tutes a public acceptance of a public order, regardless of the private state ofbelief. Acceptance is not only public but clear ... While ritual participationmay not transform the private state of the performer from one of 'disbelief' to'belief', our argument is that in it the ambiguity, ambivalence and volatility ofthe private processes are subordinated to a simple and unambiguous publicact, sensitive both to the performers themselves and to witnesses. (ibid.: 122)

In other words, there is a performative morality intrinsic to ritual's struc-ture': 'ritual establishes morality as it establishes convention. The establish-ment of a convention and the establishment of its morality are inextricable,if they are not, in fact, one and the same' (ibid.: 132).

The relation between ritual, (sincere) belief and acceptance is crucialbecause it has a deep impact on the reading of modernity and the roleof ritual in modern western societies, namely in a culture factually and

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normatively imbued with the values of sincerity and authenticity (cf. Selig-man et al., forthcoming).

Emphasizing the importance of acceptance as a public, outward basicsocial act necessary to establish conventions, does not imply the denial ofthe 'complementary nature' of beliefs: 'Whereas belief, being volatile, hid-den and unpredictable, is not in itself sufficiently reliable to serve as thefoundation of convention, it is, in the long run, indispensable to the perpetu-ation of liturgical orders in which conventions are accepted' (Rappaport1999: 396). The opposition between belief and acceptance, as other similarterms such as ritual and sincerity, law and love, have to be considered asideal types in tension with one another, more than strict dichotomies (cf.Seligman et al., forthcoming).

I would maintain that in The Elementary Forms Durkheim expressed thesame idea of ritual, as something that does not imply inner belief andsincerity, but simply acceptance. As I have tried to show elsewhere (Rosati2005a), this point in Durkheim has something to do with his later mistrustof the cult of the individual, and so also with an understanding of religionless influenced by Christianity and more by Judaism.

The lesson of The Elementary Forms, in my view, is more or less thefollowing: if modern societies want to survive and deal with contingency,they must be open to self-reassessment and self-revision. They must beready to learn what is valid from 'primitive' societies, something that impliesscepticism about answers given by mainstream modernity, and in a senseevidenced in Durkheim's own previous works - the cult of the individual,loyalty towards democratic political values - understood for sure as thebest available to us, but insufficient to avoid new forms of pathologies. Forexample, just to mention one element, they have to learn to appreciatemore the importance of ritual for social regulation. The lesson of Ritualand Religion doesn't seem to me very different. Both these masterpiecesinvite us to reflect on the role of the sacred and ritual not only 'then', forthe Arunta or the Maring, but also 'now', for us 'moderns'. Both volumes- but I can only touch upon this point now - invite us to reflect in non-reducing terms on the relation between religion and science, faith andreason, thought and praxis.6 The comparison would have to be much moreaccurate, given the proximity of the two projects, but at this point, I wouldlike to consider/examine another way of developing Durkheim's secondprogram of research.

Alexander's Cultural Sociology

Differently from Rappaport, Jeffrey C. Alexander dedicated to Durkheimdeep and reiterated concern. His interpretation of 'Durkheim's intellectualdevelopment' (Alexander 1982, 1988) has been one of the most influential

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in the sociological field in recent decades, for two good reasons. First, asan interpretation of Durkheim's thought in itself; secondly, because hisreading of Durkheim has been the springboard for the development ofAlexander's own project of cultural sociology, one of the most authoritativecurrent paradigms in sociology.7 However, my interest, in this context, isto do neither with Alexander's interpretation of Durkheim's thought initself, nor with Alexander's cultural sociology in itself. Rather, my concernfocuses on Alexander's cultural sociology as a way of developing Durk-heim's second program of research. So I will attempt to indicate a fewpoints that are particularly relevant for me in this respect.

First of all, Alexander's cultural sociology can be understood as the heirof Durkheim's later sociology - particularly of The Elementary Forms -because their nature as intellectual enterprises is the same. The aim ofcultural sociology is that of 'bringing to life those cultural unconsciousstructures that regulate society' (Alexander 2006c: 20). In other words, itis a kind of 'social psychoanalysis' - the task of The Elementary Formsaccording to Robert Bellah (1959) - making visible the invisible, 'revealingto women and men those myths that shape their existence, so that theycan make new myths instead of the old ones' (Alexander 2006c: 21).1

Alexander defends, theoretically and by means of a plethora of empiricalstudies, the Durkheimian intuition according to which ritual and the sacredare the 'infrastructure of social life' (cf. Scubla 2003), and he maintainsthat 'love for the sacred, fear of contamination and need of purificationhave always characterized modern as traditional life', so that 'only byfollowing a cultural sociological path can we discover how and why it islike this' (Alexander 2006c: 26). In the light of this approach, modernlinguistic practices - in politics, but also in every other social sphere - canbe considered as embedded in 'religious' meanings, and their performativenature still depends, notwithstanding important differences, on ritual inter-actions.

Alexander's theoretical aim seems to be the reconciliation between thetwo moieties of the 'cultural Durkheim's camp'. As he and Philip Smithmaintain in the introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Durkheim,the new cultural Durkheim approach splits in two partially different direc-tions. On the one hand, there are approaches that draw on pragmatist andnetwork traditions - and I would add, that maintain some connection withrational choice theories - exemplified by Randall Collins (2001), but also,with a totally different background, by Robert Bellah (2005). On the otherhand, there are approaches that derive from semiotics and hermeneutics:'whereas the former stress how practical action and patterns of humanassociation give rise to group norms, beliefs and solidarities, the latterperspective looks more strongly to cultural systems as motivating and con-straining behaviour' (Alexander and Smith 2005: 16). However, as stressed

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in the introduction to Social Performance, 'pragmatics and semantics areanalytical, not concrete distinctions' (Alexander 2006a: 5). From this theo-retical standpoint, he reflects on modernity and its differences with earlysocieties, characterizing three different positions. There are those who be-lieve that modernization and secularization imply the loss of cultural mean-ings, 'the emergence of free-floating institutions, or the creation of purelyself-referential individual actors' (ibid.: 8). There are those, like Durkheim,who by means of the study of early societies, show the importance of ritualand dramatic performances in and for individual and collective agency.And finally there are those who, jumping from Durkheim's early societiesto complex ones, maintain that differences between the former and thelatter are only residual. It is against a backdrop, on the one hand, of post-modernists, rational choice theorists and disenchanted cynical realists, andon the other, of 'old fashioned Durkheimians' (ibid.: 9), that he wants toplace his sociological theory of performance, drawing first of all on Durk-heim, but also right at the core - and to mention only a few - on Turner,Geertz, Goffman (Alexander 2006a: 9-16; Giesen 2006: 324-328).

According to this sociological theory of performance, social perfor-mances, individual and / or collective, can be analysed on the basis ofthe theatrical model (cf. Alexander 2006b). Social life, material practicesincluded, can be read as a web of social practices. Every social practice -like the structure of social action in Parsons - needs a set of elements: (a)a system of collective representations, namely a background of symbolsand foreground scripts, (b) actors, individual or collective, (c) an audience,(d) standardized expressive equipments (Goffman), namely what Alexan-der calls means of symbolic production, (e) a mise-en-scMne, and, finally,(f) social power, whose distribution affects the social performance. Now,Alexander's central thesis is that what distinguishes early and modernsocieties is not in itself the performative nature of social life, the universalkey role of social performances, but the dynamics of the relationship be-tween the elements of social performances within early and modern socie-ties. In simple social organizations, all these elements are fused together,and ritual is the kind of performance that fuses the components of perfor-mance further. Performances in simple societies frequently become ritualsbecause this kind of fusion is still possible.

On the other hand, it is also the case that 'fused performances creatingritual-like effects remain important in more complex societies' (Alexander2006b: 42). This is true, he argues, in a dual sense. First of all, ritual-like performances are still possible in relatively simple and homogenouscontexts, such as primary groups, i.e., families, inter-generationally stableethnic groups, enclaves of life style. Secondly, fusion remains the goal ofperformances even in more complex environments, but here it is a muchmore difficult goal to reach. But what is in fact characteristic of complex

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organizations is the de-fusion of the elements of performances, and particu-larly: '1) the separation of written foreground texts from background collec-tive representations; 2) the estrangement of means of symbolic productionfrom the mass of social actors; 3) the separation of the elites who carriedout central symbolic actions from their audiences' (Alexander 2006b: 45).Social segmentation, the fragmentation of citizenry, is the main barrier tore-fusing social drama and audience (ibid.: 75).

However, even if the contemporary social milieu seems to be particularlyinauspicious, re-fusion continues to be the aim of social practices. Thepossibility of making sense of our lives, individually and as societies, de-pends on our capability of re-fusing performance (ibid.). Given the abovementioned inauspicious conditions of social performances in complex socie-ties, the success or the failure of performances seem to be related to theaudience's perception of the actors' authenticity. Re-fusion is reached whenthe performance appears authentic, sincere:

the attribution of authenticity, in other words, depends on an actor's ability tosew the disparate elements of performance back into a seamless and convincingwhole. If authenticity marks success, then failure suggests that a performancewill seem insincere and faked: the actor seems out of role, merely to be readingfrom an impersonal script, pushed and pulled by forces of society, acting notfrom sincere motives but just to manipulate the audience. (ibid.: 75)

For example, the inauthentic nature of social performances is the key tounderstanding disaffection for politics in democratic societies (cf. Giesen2006; Apter 2006). If complete authenticity is not possible, the actor, agood actor, should be able to adopt an 'as if' attitude, pretending that thescripted situation is the actor's in real life.

So, the difficulties / pathologies of our modern societies can be read asthe consequence of defective social performances. Re-fusion is a crucialingredient of social life, notwithstanding rational biases. As we read:

from the normative point of view, performative fusion must be unmasked,and rational deliberation provides the means. From a cultural sociologicalperspective, however, embracing rationality as a norm does not mean seeingsocial action as rational in an empirical way. Culture is less toolkit than story-book ... Re-fusion remains critically important to complex societies. One mustinsist that social power be justified and that authority be accountable, butone must also acknowledge that even the most democratic and individuatedsocieties depend on the ability to sustain collective belief. Myths are generatedby ritual-like social performance. (Alexander 2006b: 80)

Accordingly, Alexander's conclusion does not seem to differ so radicallyfrom Rappaport's, and is perfectly coherent with the lesson of The Elemen-

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tary Forms. But there are important differences that I wish to stress, al-beit rapidly.

The main barrier to re-fusing social drama and performance, given con-temporary inauspicious conditions of social performance, seems, accordingto Alexander's viewpoint, to be the inauthentic nature of current perfor-mances. Here a slogan might be apt, 'no authenticity, no success in socialperformances' - that is, no successful social performances (ritual-like prac-tices), no meaningful social and individual life, no collective belief and, atthe end of the story, no social life at all. In my view, the whole story isvery Durkheimian. With a single 'but', that with Rappaport's help shouldbe stressed.

The 'but' has to do with the requirement of sincerity / authenticity - thatAlexander wrongly, in my opinion, conflates.9 From Alexander's analysis itis not completely clear to me if actors must be sincere / authentic or, asGoffman maintained, must appear sincere / authentic to their audience, inorder to make their social performance successful. But more than this, thepoint seems to me that Alexander thinks of ritual within a horizon shapedby Christian categories. From the Christian point of view (here I am referringto Christianity as our more or less common cultural horizon), ritual isacceptable only insofar as it is the expression of inner subjective feelings.In other words, as also for part of the anthropological tradition, ritual isthe external shape of inner feelings. In this context, a discrepancy betweeninner feelings and external behaviours can be understood as 'hypocritical'or something similar. For Alexander, it is not primarily a normative, but asociological matter. Ritual, or ritual-like social performances, do not work inthe absence of sincerity. However, Rappaport's analysis of ritual's structureshows how, contrary to modernist beliefs, moral obligation does not neces-sarily demand sincerity and belief in moral norms. Moral obligations arethe outcome of external actions, publicly performed independently fromthe depth of subjective adherence. Ritual can be performed without beliefand full knowledge, exactly because ritual creates an 'as if'. Meaning is theby-product of ritual performances. In my view, this is a crucial theoreticaljunction. As stated before, it seems to me that the relation between ritual,(sincere) belief and acceptance is crucial because it has a deep impact onthe reading of modernity and the role of ritual in modern Western societies,namely in a culture factually and normatively imbued with the values ofsincerity and authenticity (cf. Seligman et al., forthcoming). Moreover -even if here it can be only a fleeting reference - it also seems to me thatThe Elementary Forms is closer to Rappaport's analysis of ritual than to the'modernist' reading of Alexander. My impression is that Alexander's analy-sis of ritual is biased by a modernist and secularist interpretation. Therelationship between ritual, beliefs, inner feelings, individual and collectiveidentity is not the same, I suspect, for a Liberal Protestant, a Catholic, aJew, a Muslim, an Orthodox, a Confucian, a secularist and so on.

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Alexander's model of ritual and of successful social performance seemsto be modelled on mystical forms of ritualism - characteristic of the so-called new religious movements, the nature of which is basically hyper-modernist. Crucial ideal-typical elements of mystical ritualism are a) theinvented and chosen nature of the community; b) the showy, expressivebut at the same time weak kind of ritualism; and, above all c) the narcissisticaim of ritual itself, more a technique of the Self than a self-transcendingexperience. Fusion with the divinity, rediscovery of the 'Olon', is a waytowards introspective consciousness. Mystical ritualism is a search for fusion,a con-fusion of margins and identities, because it cannot coexist with ambi-guity; it has to make social and individual experience as transparent aspossible. On the other hand, the movements of liturgical ritualism aretowards exteriority more than towards interiority, even if this is not at allinsignificant for individual experience and intimacy. Liturgical ritualismrealizes intimacy as 'being among others', 'in the hand so of others' (orThe Other), more than being with oneself and with an indistinct whole.Intimacy is understood in liturgical ritualism as the outcome of an outward(external, material, visible) movement / effort. Mystical ritualism is a searchfor fusion, and so cannot conceive of ritual except as the external expressionof inner feelings; one must perform even ritual itself in one's own voice.On the other hand, in liturgical ritualism, ritual is not encoded by theperformer (see Rappaport's analysis, above), and it must not be encodedby the performer if it has to connect the performer to canonical orders. Theaim of liturgical ritualism is not individual but collective authenticity, thesense of belonging to a tradition, of being part of something broader (anddeeper) than one's own introspective conscience. Something that can implycurbing one's own feelings, passions, desires; something that can imply anordinary, almost existential form of suffering.1" The performer of liturgicalritual cannot be the hyper-modern authentic self, nor the modern autono-mous self, but a self that recognizes a heteronomous - or indeed a Heterono-mous - legislation.

Considering ritualism and social practices as closer to mystical ritualismthan to liturgical practices is an error caused by our hyper-modernist pointof observation. It is an error, in my opinion, for two reasons. First, becausefrom a factual point of view, not every form of ritualism in contemporaryWestern societies is mystical (post-modern). How can we take pluralismseriously and at the same time misrecognize the liturgical ritualism ofmillions of the faithful?11 Secondly, because mystical ritualism runs in thesame direction as hyper-modernity and only liturgical ritualism runs againstthis current, it is only liturgical ritualism that can represent a resourceagainst pathologies connected with the hypertrophied development of intro-spective consciousness.

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Conclusion

In sum, and notwithstanding particular criticisms, it is the work of bothRappaport and Alexander that in different ways offers the best contempo-rary effort to recover and develop Durkheim's second program of research.This is an urgent task, for many reasons. As already remarked, the lessonto be learned from The Elementary Forms is that of forcing us to rethinkmodernity in a self-critical way. On my own agenda, this task implies:

1. The need to reinterpret the trajectory of modernity as the history of thedevelopment of the introspective conscience or, in Maussian terms, ofthe idea of the person. Introspective conscience, in a Protestant-stylemodernity, becomes the new centre of collective identities, the marginsof which are interiorized and almost dissolved (cf. Seligman 1994).Contemporary strains and reactive collective identities are a consequenceof this process of dissolution of boundaries and margins.

2. The need to rethink public space, and above all the role of collectiveidentities within public space. A good test is rethinking the idea of laicitd,which needs to be taken up differently from its classical French paradigm.

3. The need to rethink in ways that don't just continue to reproduce theindividualization of categories, concepts and experiences, such as eviland responsibility.

4. The need to rethink the role of different kinds of rituals in our contempo-rary public life, including politics. As Mary Douglas remarked manyyears ago, Luther's shadows have lengthened in modern life, and ritualbecame a pejorative word 'signifying empty conformity' (Douglas 1963)- not just in a modern everyday common sense, but also in modernsociological theory (Merton 1957). Rituals seem incompatible with theIexpressive revolution' of the 60s and 70s that gave life to the value ofauthenticity (cf. Taylor 1992; Ferrara 1993, 1998). But at the same timethey seem constitutive of social legacy, so that it is necessary to addressthe conceptual junction of ritual, sincerity and authenticity.

5. The need to rethink the necessity of regulation - the old quintessentialDurkheimian idea - in both social and individual life, and accordingly,re-echoing Durkheim, the role of intermediate groups and traditions as'conditions of collective life and of individual happiness'.

Massimo Rosati teaches and researches at the University of Salerno. Hehas taken a leading role in a modern Italian effervescence of Durkheimianstudies, and is especially interested in the re-working of the Durkheimianproject in modern social theory and philosophy. He has produced the new

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Massimo Rosati

Italian edition of Le forme elementari della vita religiosa (2005), and is theauthor of Solidarietil e sacro (2002), as well as of numerous articles, inEnglish and Italian, on Durkheim. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1. On these methodological differences, see Jones (1977a, 1977b, 1999).2. On Rappaport, see Messer and Lambeck (2001).3. As Mauss understood, vs. Durkheim. See Allen (2000), chapter three.4. Rawls (2004) has claimed that the priority of practices over beliefs is a central

point of The Elementary Forms, but also attempts to show that the emphasison practices over beliefs involves The Division of Labour. So, on the basis ofher practices-over-beliefs argument, she can criticize the thesis of 'the twoDurkheims'. But her book goes beyond an account of The Elementary Forms,since it contains a program for a general sociology, of practices based on asocio-constructivist epistemological approach capable of analysing contempo-rary issues better than rival contemporary sociological approaches, all of thembased at least implicitly on the prominence of concepts, norms, values. Thusher interpretation and application of his work not only challenges philosophicaland culturally dominant tendencies of modern Western thought but contradictsthe consolidated image of Durkheim as the sociologist of order, values andshared norms. See Rosati (2005b); however, for a critique of Rawls, see StedmanJones (2006).

5. Religiously, this kind of morality can be quite easily defended from a Jewishpoint of view, but also - with more difficulty - from a Christian and Catholicpoint of view: 'Even the most devout, indeed especially the most devout,sometimes harbour doubts or even voice scepticism concerning propositionsexpressed in liturgies to which they scrupulously conform, and acceptance inthis deep sense has much in common with certain Christian notions of faith.Fehean O'Doherty, a Catholic priest, writes: "faith is neither subjective convic-tion nor experienced certitude, but may be at its best where doubt exists", andas Paul Tillich has said that faith necessarily includes an element of uncertaintyor doubt. It is also of interest in this regard that Judaism does not require thedevout to believe, for belief is not subject to command. It does, however,demand of them that they accept the law, and this acceptance is signalled by,and is intrinsic to, conformity to the ritual observances that pervade all life'(Rappaport 1999: 120).

6. See Durkheim ([1912a] 1995 429-433); Rappaport (1999: 453-460)7. For a general introduction to cultural sociology, see Smith (2001).8. Other possible examples include the essays on death by Parsons (1978), and

Parsons et al. (1972).9. See for example Trilling (1972), Ferrara (1993, 1998).

10. See Wilkinson (2005), Rosati (2005/tr. forthcoming).

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11. I consider liturgical ritualism proper more of religious (stricto sensu) peoplethan of secularist social performances.

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- 1977b. 'The Other Durkheim: History and Theory in the Treatment ofClassical Sociological Thought', in C. Camic (ed.), Reclaiming theSociological Classics. Oxford: Blackwell.

_ 1999. The Development of Durkheim's Social Realism. Cambridge:

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Reciprocation', Social Research 39: 1-45.Pickering, W.S.F. 1984. Durkheim's Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories.

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