Walsham, A. - Review of the Dangers of Ritual

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Review: The Dangers of Ritual Author(s): Alexandra Walsham Review by: Alexandra Walsham Source: Past & Present, No. 180 (Aug., 2003), pp. 277-287Published by: on behalf of Oxford University Press Past and Present SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600745Accessed: 25-10-2015 17:27 UTC

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REVIEW ARTICLE THE DANGERS OF RITUAL*

Over the last generation the discipline of anthropology has played a critical part in transforming and revitalizing medieval and early modem history. Approaching the past as if it were a foreign country, historians have enthusiastically embraced social science models in their efforts to illuminate and interpret the nature and significance of the overlapping religious and political cultures of European society. Building on the foundations laid by Emile Durkheim' in the early twentieth century and subsequently developed in the work of Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Max Gluckman and others, they have subscribed to and systematically applied the insight that religion and society are integrally related and that close study of individual actions and practices can thus provide access to the values, assumptions and structures of a culture in its entirety. In this context the concept of 'ritual' as an expression and/or agent of social cohesion and consciousness has proved to be a particularly powerful heuristic tool. The fruits of this process of scholarly cross-pollination have been a wealth of immensely stimulating studies of coronations, ceremonial entrances, and processions; royal baptisms and noble funerals; judicial ordeals and acclamations; civic celebrations, banquets, and games; relic translations, public penances, and a wide range of other liturgical and secular rites. Among medievalists and early modernists, the influence of this mode of analysis shows no sign of waning.

The purpose of Philippe Buc's bold and thought-provoking book is to release historians from the insidious spell that he believes social-scientific theory has cast over our profession. The product of more than a decade of thought and reflection, it aims to expose the methodological dangers of employing uni- versalizing anthropological models of ritual in the service of medieval historiography and to undermine their seductive allure

* Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social

Scientific Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), xi, 272 pp. 1 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward

Swain (London, 1915).

C The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2003



278 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 180

and subliminal force. Describing itself as an 'essay' on 'the conditions of possibility and validity of historical inquiry' (pp. 1, 248), it joins other voices which have warned against the risk of reduc- tionism implicit in these approaches and categories, notably those of the theologian John Milbank and the philosopher Catherine Bell.2 For Buc, ritual is a construct which 'carries within itself too much baggage to be conducive to clear thinking' (p. 248) and one which he insists we must renounce if we are to comprehend the Middle Ages in all their complexity. Throughout the book, the word itself is surrounded by visible or invisible quotation marks.

The polemical tone of The Dangers of Ritual is unmistakable. Buc's wholesale epistemological assault is aggressive and impas- sioned. It is also intellectually demanding. Clarity and accessibility are regrettable casualties of the author's tightly compressed argumentation and stubborn refusal to make concessions to those less deeply immersed in the scholarly debates embedded in the specialist secondary literature than he is himself. Comprising many intricate threads, his book is allusive and dense. Reading it is at times comparable to wading through wet concrete. This is a work for the cognoscenti and not the weaker brethren; con- sequently it may be vulnerable to a degree of misapprehension. The comments which follow are prefaced with the caveat that they inevitably oversimplify the labyrinthine arguments which characterize Buc's analysis, as well as with the remark that they reflect the horizons of an early modernist outsider.

In pursuing his thesis that social anthropology profoundly distorts the specificities of medieval culture, Philippe Buc sets himself an ambitious double agenda. The first half of his book seeks to explicate what he calls the 'implicit or native anthropology' (p. 3) of late antique and early medieval writers: to unravel how such authors understood events which more recent scholars have labelled 'rituals' and to discern the role which these rites played in the economy of their narratives. In the second half, Buc attempts to trace the intellectual genealogy of the social sciences, to identify the original theological roots of modem theories and to follow their evolution from the Reformation, through the era of the French Revolution, down to the 1970s. At the core of his critique is the claim that ritual's status as 'the multilayered

2John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford, 1990); Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford, 1992). See Buc's comments on pp. 2, 237-8, 248.



THE DANGERS OF RITUAL 279

product of a longue-durce diachronic stratification' (p. 2) invali- dates its essentialist use.

Part I consists of a series of four discerning case studies of key medieval texts arranged (for somewhat obscure reasons) in reverse chronological order, beginning in post-Carolingian Germany and ending in early Christian Rome. Individually and collect- ively, these chapters underscore the highly crafted nature of the documents upon which they focus and contest the impartiality and transparency of narratives which purport to recount actual performances. Repeatedly, Buc emphasizes the generic conven- tions and sophisticated literary strategies which conditioned, shaped and distorted contemporary descriptions of political ritual and which thus render positivist analyses of them deeply proble- matical. In chapter 1 he shows how Liudprand of Cremona's Antapodosis constructed a dichotomy between the 'good' rituals of the tenth-century Ottonian dynasty for which he worked as an apologist and the 'bad' rituals of their Lombard rivals whom he sought to besmirch - between the sacred, seamless and consensual ceremonies of the Saxon emperor and the deceitful, manipulative and frequently dysfunctional practices engaged in by illegitimate Italian princes. Turning back the clock by a century, he then demonstrates how the tensions and conflicts between popes, bishops and lay rulers which fractured the Carolingian world were played out in competing partisan accounts of episodes like Louis II's Roman adventus of 864. The representation of ritual was at the heart of 'a political culture of maneuvers and countermaneuvers' (p. 64). Depicted either as the liturgical sublimation of an institution's link with the divine or as a crude, even diabolical, ideological tool, it was a weapon regularly deployed by the propagandists of the period. Chapter 3 explores a further permutation of this theme in the sixth-century writings of Gregory of Tours, revealing how he too created a typology of 'true' and 'counterfeit' rites, equating Christian king- ship with a willingness to imitate episcopal forms and impious rule with a refusal to follow the advice and mimic the conduct of bishops. Finally, Buc investigates the manner in which Christians hijacked the pagan ritual of execution and reco- nstituted it as an act and instrument of martyrdom. Through the hagiographical texts they wrote about the victims of judicial violence, they appropriated and subverted the ambiguous prestige enjoyed by Roman gladiators and reinvested it with fresh




significance. A by-product of this process was the evolution of a narrative polarity between secular heathen spectacula and the transcendental rites of the early Christian Church, which would later be recycled and applied by Augustine of Hippo and other ecclesiastical spokesmen to discredit the liturgical practices of dis- senters and heretics. All these writers also drew implicitly on the biblical trope that Jewish ceremonial observances had been abro- gated and emptied of meaning by the coming of Christ.

Buc's underlying point is that a recognition that 'ritual' was above all a rhetorical confection and polemical tactic casts doubt on uncritical readings of medieval texts which assume it is possible to reconstruct from them the social function or efficacy of such practices - and here, as close scrutiny of his footnotes reveals, he is particularly targeting tendencies within the work of Geoffrey Koziol and Gerd Althoff.3 In other words, reiterating a commonplace of postmodernism, he stresses that an opaque and irreducible veil of language and text always divides us from the historical 'realities' which lie behind them. Historians should therefore abandon the attempt to reconstruct ritual events and concentrate instead upon the significance of the hermeneutical struggles that accumulated around them. In medieval culture, Buc proceeds to assert, authority and legitimacy lay not in the actual performance of rituals but rather in controlling interpretation of them: texts themselves, not the solemnities they described, were the crucial 'forces in the practice of power' in the medieval context (p. 259). It is tempting to object that if we cannot penetrate beneath the surface of textual artefacts about ceremonies how can we presume to judge which of these was more critical as an instrument of political hegemony? Here, as elsewhere, Buc may be in danger of contradicting the logical implications of his own relativist principles. More than once it is possible to detect a lingering empiricism, a residual conviction that it is indeed possible to break through the filter of discourse and pinpoint the 'facts': thus he writes of 'the gap between Gregory [of Tours's] constructions and sixth-century practices' (p. 107), of the 'fragmentary evidence [which] suggests that the

3 See esp. Gerd Althoff, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt, 1997); Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favour: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, 1992); Geoffrey Koziol, 'England, France and the Problem of Sacrality in Twelfth-Century Ritual', in Thomas N. Bisson (ed.), Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status and Process in Twelfth- Century Europe (Philadelphia, 1995).




Merovingian reality differed from what competitors, contemporary or posterior, depicted' (p. 108). As revealed in the 'tentative' con- clusions (p. 255) proffered in the final pages of the Epilogue, in the end Buc retreats from the premise that ritual has no existence outside the texts in which it is embedded and concedes that the very 'centrality of certain ceremonial practices to narratives suggests that they were extremely important in reality' (p. 256). Ultimately he stops short of reducing ritual to a mere optical (or rather linguistic) illusion or fiction.

Throughout Part I, Buc is at pains to underline the curious affinities and resonances between medieval descriptions of ritual and the models employed by modem social theorists. This is integral to his wider thesis that 'the roots of our contemporary concept reach down, with complicated subterranean trajectories, into the humus of the Middle Ages' (p. 2) - in short that sociology and anthropology are the intellectual offspring of theology. Thus he discerns in Liudprand of Cremona's Antapodosis both 'a vulgar Marxist or conflict-theory grid avant la lettre' and a 'proto-Durkheimian' tendency to read ritual as consensual and stabilizing (p. 22), and highlights moments in which Gregory of Tours likewise appears in the guise of a 'functionalist' theologian. Meanwhile, in Augustine's doctrine that the beliefs of pagan elites differ from the precepts they preach and teach to the masses he finds a foreshadowing of Karl Marx's notion of religion as the opium of the people. At times, Buc's resort to glib and deliberate anachronism to point up these parallels sticks in the throat. To say that 'Gallo-Roman hagiographers had read their Max Gluckman and Victor Turner' (p. 120) may be to push the tech- nique of historical self-reflexiveness beyond the limits of what it can usefully yield.

Nevertheless such remarks serve to signal the preoccupations of the second section of this monograph, where Buc follows the concept of 'ritual' on its complicated journey from the theological texts of the Middle Ages into modem academic theory. The Protestant Reformation was the first landmark in this process of geological evolution: one side effect of denying five of the seven primitive sacraments status as scripturally endorsed rites was the crystallization of political ceremonial as a distinct analytical category. Displaced out of the domain of the mystical and sacred, some rejected rituals came to be conceived by Lutheran writers like Philip Melanchthon as legitimate and positive




mechanisms for fostering social order and harmony. Such practices fell into the realm of adiaphora or 'things indifferent', though it may be noted that discussion of this critical concept (and of the Erastian context in which it developed in the early modem era) is surprisingly absent from Buc's analysis. Confes- sionally motivated historians like the Magdeburg Centuriators also played their part by tracing how true doctrine and practice had become submerged in a sea of 'popish' traditions invented to keep the populace in awe and obedience, as did humanists intent upon tracking the historical conformities between Christian culture and classical antiquity. The tendency to conflate 'Romish superstition' with heathen idolatry and to identify many pre- Reformation practices as vestiges of pagan culture also, of course, pervaded many moralistic sixteenth- and seventeenth- century diatribes against popular customs and pastimes, yet this too is a wisp of discourse to which little reference is made in the main body of this monograph. Catholic writers involved in the Chinese Rites Controversy (c.1635-1742) do, however, occupy a key place in Buc's survey: in defending their participation in the Confucian ceremonies of their oriental hosts, Jesuits like Louis Le Comte further developed the notion of religion as an ethic or system which stabilized society and ensured ease of governance, an argument influenced by the casuistical justifica- tions which had evolved in early modern Europe for attending heretical services in accordance with the orders of a Protestant ruler or state. Over time the axiom that ritual was a utilitarian tool of social cohesion or unity was systematized in works like Johann Christian Liinig's Theatrum Ceremoniale Historico-Politi- cum (1719-20) and Bishop William Warburton's Divine Lega- tion of Moses (1738-41), which, in striking anticipation of Marx, spoke of man-made religion as a 'sovereign remedy' or 'drug' (p. 189 n.).

Buc's fascinating genealogy of the precursors of functionalist sociology continues into the era of the French Revolution and from thence into the twentieth century. In chapter 6 he pursues the notion of religion (in the guise of ritual) as a social glue or cement through the works of Rousseau, Montesquieu, Louis de Bonald, Fustel de Coulanges (the direct forerunner of Durkheim himself), and forward into the more recent writings of conservative and neo-Catholic theorists such as Carl Schmitt and Percy Ernest Schramm, culminating with a discussion of Clifford




Geertz's classic study of the Balinese 'theatre state', Negara, in which ceremony is presented as a continuum with the practice of power.4 The purpose of this extended analysis is to demon- strate the manner in which a 'dualistic' world view in which religion and society were conceptualized as separate and auton- omous entities was eventually marginalized by the now dominant 'monistic' model in which the former is seen simply as an avatar of the latter. What changed between 1500 and the birth of the social sciences c.1900, Buc concludes, was the 'reality' which interpreters sought to access behind the rituals they discussed: in both cases rite was conceived of as an 'envelope' for some deeper truth - first spiritual and later social/political.

It cannot be said that this historiographical synthesis is entirely original,5 but it is hard to deny its persuasiveness. Nev- ertheless, although Buc lays no claim to comprehensiveness, his omission of some significant strands in post-Reformation thinking about ritual is conspicuous. In particular, he plays down the influence of radical Protestants who, in reconceptualizing the sacraments themselves as mere symbols and signs, precipitated a paradigm shift in understanding ritual in general: at the heart of the Eucharistic theology of Huldrych Zwingli (and, with more qualifications, Jean Calvin) was the revolutionary notion that external rites were simply representations or, as it were, figures of speech. This insight, which divided Reformed Protestantism not merely from Roman Catholicism but also from Lutheranism, hinged on a dramatic reinterpretation of the crucial line in Matthew 26, hoc est corpus meum ('This is my body'), which denied Christ's words any physical or literal significance and understood them instead as metaphorical in character.6 Buc dismisses this revolution in metaphysics as a 'minority' view and

4 Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, 1980).

5For partial anticipations, see Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York, 1966); John Bossy, 'Some Elementary Forms of Durkheim', Past and Present, no. 95 (May 1982); Peter Burke, 'The Repudiation of Ritual', in his The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1987).

6 See Bernard Cottret, 'Pour une semiotique de la reforme', Annales ESC, xxxix (1984); Carlos M. N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, 1986); Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 5; Christopher Elwood, The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth-Century France (New York, 1999).




chooses to focus his discussion instead on moderate Lutheran, Anglican and neo-Catholic writers (p. 165 n.). As I shall suggest below, this bias has potentially serious consequences for his analysis.

But first it is necessary to examine Buc's contentious claim that the hidden debt which social scientific theories owe to medieval Christian theology fundamentally undermines their validity as instruments of historical analysis. Part of his quarrel with these models is that they often unearth meaning at the expense of effacing or displacing the structures of contemporary belief, and with this one is bound to agree. His thesis that 'one should master a culture's grammar, but not think thoughts none of its members ever thought' (pp. 226-7) is akin to John Bossy's memorable (yet not uncontested) remark that to use words to describe a past culture in senses unknown to it is 'an invitation to misdescription', and to Hildred Geertz's earlier pointed warnings about the pitfalls inherent in employing historical labels like 'religion' and 'magic' whose incidence and use are part of the very problem under investigation itself7 - though here, of course, Buc is operating at the level of concepts rather than terms. It is also reminiscent of Stuart Clark's com- pelling critique of approaches to popular culture and witchcraft which utilize criteria of intelligibility at odds with those held in the period in question, and of Susan Reynolds's challenging assault upon the tyranny of the post-medieval construct of feudalism.8

However, Buc's insistence upon the evils of employing cultural terminologies alien to the context under discussion sits more than a little uneasily with other aspects of his analysis. In this regard it is important to note that his objection to the functionalist anthropology which is the chief target of his project of deconstruction is not that it is, strictly speaking, anachronistic. His problem with such approaches is not that they do not dovetail with the mentality of those who produced medieval sources but rather that, in complex and subtle ways, they do. Both the seductive attractiveness and the hidden perils of anthropological models which equate religion and culture, Buc asserts, lie in their

7Bossy, 'Some Elementary Forms of Durkheim', 18; Hildred Geertz, 'An Anthropology of Religion and Magic', Jl Interdisciplinary Hist., vi (1975).

8 Stuart Clark, 'Inversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft', Past and Present, no. 87 (May 1980); Stuart Clark, 'French Historians and Early Modem Popular Culture', Past and Present, no. 100 (Aug. 1983); Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford, 1994).




remarkable coherence with and indebtedness to contemporary assumptions about the incamational character of liturgy and political ceremonial. It is not the differences between theology and social science, but the superficial similarities and 'concealed affinities', 'the twisted continuities and half-ruptures' (p. 238), which, he insists, should give us pause for thought. In other words, it is the dangerous circularity of modem academic discourse that unsettles and disturbs him.9 How can we employ categories whose very origins can be located in the sources which are the subject of our scrutiny without falling into the trap of tautological reasoning? 'Is the social-scientific reading of texts generated by a culture from which sciences themselves descend eo ipso invalid?' (p. 237). Buc's monograph seeks to persuade us that it is. And in this regard, the methodological challenge at the heart of the Dangers of Ritual is perhaps not so much constructively critical as it is nihilistic. If we may not utilize any model which is rooted in the discourses upon which we necessarily rely to recover the past then surely we are left without any heuristic tools at all? Sensitivity to our own intellectual ancestry is undeniably vital, but does this mean that we must throw away the ladders that link us with our intellectual forebears? In the end we cannot escape the fact that we all stand on the shoulders of giants, or at least past generations. Such difficulties are utterly intrinsic to this and all other academic disciplines.

Moreover, Buc can no more transcend the process of 'longue- duree diachronic stratification' which has produced the concept of 'ritual' than can the medieval historians whose work he so aggressively calls into question. He insists that his objective is to destroy an existing model but not to replace it with a new one. Yet, mutatis mutandis, this is precisely what he does. What else is Part I of Buc's monograph but an attempt to erect a new framework for the analysis of the political culture of medieval Europe? The very functionalism he eschews in regard to assess- ments of social practice is unwittingly transferred to the realm of text. To adapt Peter Burke's observation about Protestantism's repudiation of ritual itself: expelled at the door, social science theories creep back in through the window.10 In seeking to analyse the narrative and rhetorical functions of 'ritual' within the works of Carolingian, Merovingian and early Christian commentators

9 In this regard, see especially his comments on p. 224 n. 10 Burke, 'Repudiation of Ritual', 230.




and theologians is he not guilty of reproducing the same reduc- tionist flaws that he alleges have so distorted the interpretations of his professional rivals?1"

Furthermore, it cannot pass without notice that the main focus of Buc's critical attention is a style of historical anthropology which, at least in the world of early modem studies, has long since receded. In concentrating his deconstructive energy on the tendency to see ritual as 'a microcosm, in which a macrocosm, namely, a culture's essence, values or structures, stand condensed' (p. 253), a tendency he detects in Clifford Geertz's Negara no less than Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Buc is setting himself against an interpretative model which now seems somewhat old-fashioned. Since the 1970s the most prevalent and influential strand of anthropological analysis has in fact been post-structuralist, semiotic, and sociolinguistic in character - a trend initiated by Geertz himself in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), in conscious reaction against crude forms of functionalism, and applied to past societies by Natalie Zemon Davis, Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, Jacques Le Goff and many others. Ironically Buc's own insistence upon the textuality of 'ritual' owes much to the influence of a model in which culture and its constituent practices are seen as an 'acted document', 'a web of signifiers', and 'a forest of symbols'.12 And, returning full circle, this model, too, has complex polemical, rhetorical and historical roots. In introducing the trope of metonymy into discussions of the meaning of the baptism and holy communion, the Reformed Protestantism of Zwingli and Calvin arguably anticipated important components of postmodemism. In its emphasis upon the sacraments as merely figurative it assisted in sowing the seeds of ideas at the core of the current 'linguistic turn'. In turn, this Protestant semiotics drew on certain strands of logical analysis within medieval scholastic philosophy, notably those engendered by the nominalist/realist debate on universals, which were themselves erected on foundations laid by Aristotle and Plato. It is perhaps, then, no coincidence that these reformed

11 This is particularly explicit on p. 77. 12 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 10; see also ch. 1 passim; Robert Darnton, 'The Symbolic Element in History', fl Mod. Hist., lviii (1986), 220. This school of thought has, of course, been fractured by its own internal conflicts: see, for example, Roger Chartier, 'Texts, Symbols, and Frenchness', Jl Mod. Hist., Ivii (1985); Dominick LaCapra, 'Chartier, Darnton, and the Great Symbol Massacre', Jl Mod. Hist., Ix (1988).




'sign-readers' are marginalized from Buc's investigation of the transmutation of medieval theology into the modem social sciences in Part II. Nor can it be accidental that his discussion dwells so heavily on Catholic and conservative Protestant writers whose theology preconditioned them to think of the relationship between ritual and society in terms evocative of the doctrine of the real presence, to conceive of religion as the organic and incor- porating essence or soul of society.'3 If the Eucharistic theory of transubstantiation is the precursor of Durkheimian sociology, reformed notions of ritual as representation may be counted among the forerunners of our present preoccupation with historical events as epiphenomena of texts. To this extent, Buc's brave enterprise founders on the very rocks from which it is launched.

Even so, we must thank Philippe Buc for making us sit up and think, for shaking us out of the methodological complacency into which we are often prone to slump. The Dangers of Ritual is an iconoclastic and controversial book and one with which many medievalists and early modernists will vociferously disagree. It is also a book which is fraught with an unresolved tension between an impulse to discard the concept of 'ritual' and the awkward intellectual cargo which it carries with it and a subliminal recognition of the heuristic difficulty, not to say undesirability, of doing so. Yet, despite its contradictions and inconsistencies, Buc's monograph remains a timely and salu- tary reminder of the intractable conceptual and epistemological problems that surround our scholarly endeavours. It seeks to instil in its readers a 'secure sense of [the] limits' of historical analysis (p. 261) and it succeeds in doing so. If nothing else it casts a fresh shaft of light on the shape of the barriers and obstacles which stand between us and an understanding of the distant - and not so distant - past.

University of Exeter Alexandra Walsham

13 See his comments on pp. 213-14, 229.



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Walsham, A. - Review of the Dangers of Ritual