Revitalization or Continuity in European Ritual? The Case of San Bessu

Abstract

This article argues against Boissevain's thesis that many European rituals have recently undergone revitalization after a post-war period of deritualization. We analyse, as a counter-example to Boissevain's thesis, a ritual which has displayed a remarkable degree of continuity over the last eighty years. We suggest that this counter-example is not an isolated one, and that Boissevain's position only appears convincing because it relies on excessively limiting notions, ultimately derived from Durkheim, of ritual and deritualization. It is often assumed that European cultures have become the most deritualized in the world. Modern ways of living, with their challenge to community life, are supposed to have made rituals difficult to maintain, while modern modes of thought are said to have made them irrelevant, if not absurd. Factors responsible for this change usually include individualism, the predominance of a scientific and rationalist outlook, general secularization, and the mobility of Europeans. In everyday English, and in media sociology, 'ritual' has come to denote action carried out merely 'for form's sake', or even 'bogus' actions (such as the 'ritual' denunciations of which politicians occasionally accuse one another), and it comes close in meaning sometimes to 'habitual' (for instance, the 'ritual' washing of the car on Sunday mornings). The earliest example given by the Oxford English Dictionary of the term in an 'extended and trivial' use comes from Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson: 'He cared for his wardrobe and toilet table ... merely as ... a ritual in which to express and realise, his own idolatry'. The most obvious early intellectual proponent of the thesis of the deritualization of European culture was Durkheim (1964). He portrayed the evolution of society as a process whereby religion became an increasingly specialized institution and ritual ever less important. Weber developed the point and gave it a more specific history by integrating it within his account of the rise of Protestantism. For example, referring to the nature of the Protestant shift in the performance of funerals, he wrote: 'The genuine Puritan even rejected all signs of religious ceremony at the grave and buried his nearest and dearest without song or ritual' (1976: 105). A more recent proponent of a similar thesis is B. Wilson (1982: 148-79), who argues that secularization involves deritualization, the expansion of state control and functions, and shifts from religious to ra