Koziol, G. - Review - The Dangers of Polemics. is Ritual Still Interesting Topic...

Review article:The dangers of polemic: Is ritual still an

interesting topic of historical study?Geoffrey Koziol

The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and SocialScientific Theory. By Philippe Buc. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress. 2002. 310 pp. ISBN 0691016046.Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Friedenund Fehde. By Gerd Althoff. Darmstadt: Primus Verlag. 1997. 360 pp.ISBN 3 89678 038 7.Rituals of Power fromLate Antiquity to the EarlyMiddle Ages. Editedby Frans Theuws and Janet L. Nelson. The Transformation of the RomanWorld 8. Leiden: Brill. 2000. 503 pp. ISBN 90 04 10902 1.Medieval and Early Modern Rituals: Formalized Behavior in Europe,China and Japan. Edited by Joelle Rollo-Koster. Leiden: Brill. 2002.310 pp. ISBN 9004117490.

A sure way of knowing that a concept has temporarily outlived itsusefulness is that experts begin to polish it off with encyclopedictreatments whose smooth-cut surfaces leave no traction for the imagina-tion. So it is with the study of ritual. At least within anthropology, forreasons quite relevant to this review, the subject has become more than alittle passe. And at just this moment, Catherine Bell, herself one of thesubject’s leading theorists, published Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions.1

An excellent and absolutely comprehensive survey, the book leaves notheory of ritual unturned – except, glaringly, those involving the MiddleAges. Not only are no historians of early medieval rituals mentioned, nomedievalists of any period or specialty are cited beyond a tiny, wholly

1 Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford, 1997). See also the same author’searlier Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford, 1992). The study of early modern European ritualshas reached the same encyclopedic closure: see Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe(Cambridge, 1997). Of other recent ethnological treatments, one of the most interesting is thelate Roy A. Rappaport’s Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999), adifficult book written with tremendous care and dedication that still ends up soundingremarkably like an updated and more thoughtful version of William Robertson Smith.

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unrepresentative handful. Now medieval historians may not be the mosttheoretically sophisticated of social scientists, but many are sophisticatedenough, and besides, we certainly have written often enough aboutenough different rituals for some of our studies to have penetrated theworld of ethnologists. Yet nothing of this appears either in Bell’sbibliography or in her text. She discusses West African circumcisionrituals (both male and female), Hopi Kachina cult initiations, Moroccanfasting and feasting, Sinhalese healings and exorcisms, ancient Babylonesenew year’s rituals, Brazilian carnivals, Greek firewalking, the Jewish Seder,American football and softball, graduation ceremonies, opera, Emily Post,children’s play, childbirth, drumming _ The list goes on and on, yet theonly mentions in the entire book of anything having to do with medievalrituals are glancing references to the Eucharist and allegorical interpreta-tions of the liturgy, both flawed by residual unexamined Protestantcritiques.2 Medieval historians in Britain and the United States areknown for reading ethnology, but it is an unreciprocated borrowing,for ethnologists are not reading back.

Perhaps there is nothing very good for them to read. That is certainlythe impression an uninformed reader might take from Philippe Buc’sThe Dangers of Ritual, for it is a sweeping criticism of the way historianshave applied ethnological treatments of ritual to early medieval society.Buc argues that an important group of historians, including, quiteprominently, the present author, have applied ethnological models ofritual uncritically and overenthusiastically. Specifically, we have takenover without reflection the (allegedly) functionalist, equilibrationist,communitarian assumptions inherent in this ethnology: the assumptionsthat a society is an organism that always seeks homeostasis and thatrituals ‘function’ to minimize conflict and return the society to equili-brium. We speak of ‘rituals’ as if they had some sort of real existence inthe world that was causally effective and objectively apprehended, andthat can still be objectively described, forgetting that we know about anygiven ‘ritual’ only because it was written about by a contemporary ornear contemporary whose accounts of rituals were inherently polemicaland partisan. Indeed, where the ethnology borrowed by historianspresumes homeostasis and privileges consensus, it is clear that earlymedieval society was highly combative and that the clerics who describedrituals were highly argumentative. We therefore cannot speak of ritualsin the abstract as having been either active agents or passive representa-tions of consensus and community. Community and consensus, and

2 Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, pp. 126, 216–7. For her knowledge of the medievalEucharist, Bell refers only to an article by Josef Jungmann on the pre-Reformation Mass. Theother scholars she cites on medieval ritual are Talal Asad and Norbert Elias. (She does citeCaroline Bynum, but only for her article on Victor Turner.)

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rituals as representations of them, were rhetorical tropes. They wereliterary conventions used by clerical polemicists to support their prota-gonists and their claims.

Believing that historians have been able to apply an artificial model ofritual only by ignoring the authorial intent and artifice of our sources, Bucproves the error of our ways by taking the opposite tack. The first part ofThe Dangers of Ritual substantiates his arguments through close readingsof crucial passages in a selection of sources that describe what historianshave labelled ‘rituals’. Working backwards in time from the tenth centuryto the second, Buc repeatedly shows that the consensus and sacrality heclaims historians attribute to rituals was really a fiction created by writersengaged in partisan polemic. For example, Liutprand of Cremona,apologist for Ottonian rule in Italy, promoted his kings’ sacrality andthe excellence of their rule by consistently depicting their rituals asmoments of order, consensus, and epiphany. Conversely, Liutprandneeded to delegitimize the rule of Italian kings, all the more becausethey, and not the Ottonians, were descendants of the Carolingians.Liutprand therefore consistently depicted Berengarist rituals as travesties,shot through with violence and staged with manipulative duplicity.Historians therefore cannot write about Ottonian rituals as if the ritualsthemselves promoted sacrality. The sacrality and consensus of Ottoniankingship was not an objective state of affairs but a parti pris polemic thatmobilized ritual to make its point. Presumably, had there been aBerengarist chronicler, he would have described Ottonian rituals as shotthrough with violence and cunning, and Berengarist rituals as a repre-sentation of pontifical kingship.3 Similar arguments are adduced in thechapters on Carolingian annals and Gregory of Tours, but the latterbegins to move towards a point even more crucial to Buc. ThoughGregory depicts numerous rituals, he does not treat all the same way. Onlyrituals that occur within or under the aegis of the church and its bishopsdemonstrate true unity and community. Rituals led by or initiated bykings invariably undermine unity and community, or replace transpar-ency (the perfect correspondence of action and truth) with deceptivemanipulation. The obvious example is the trial of Praetextatus, manipu-lated by Chilperic, but failed or incomplete transparency remains true ofall ‘royal’ rituals, even those of the best of Gregory’s kings, Guntram; forGuntram’s ‘rituals’ approach the ideal of community only when he isperforming them under the aegis of and with respect for bishops.4 Heretoo we are dealing not with ‘rituals’ but with a partisan description ofthem. Yet what is even more important to Buc is that Gregory waspromoting a particular ideal of the true, perfect ritual as a transparent

3 Buc, Dangers, Chapter 1.4 Ibid., pp. 100–2, 106–7, 110–8.

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revelation of a true and perfect communitas.5 This ideal, of course, goesback to early Christianity, the subject of Chapter 4, dealing primarily withthe Passio Perpetuae. Here, again, far from being objectively fixed inmeaning, the meaning of rituals is precisely what was fought over, throughtexts, as the Passio ‘hijacks’ a ritual seen by Romans as the execution ofcriminals and transforms it into an imitation of Christ’s suffering.6 Andhere we reach the moment that Buc surely intends to be revelatory, thereason he has chosen his unusual device of working backwards in time tothe age of the martyrs. Almost uniquely in the ancient world (save forJews), Christians desired not to assimilate; they therefore consciously andcompletely underlined their difference with non-Christian society. Thus,the emphasis of early Christian apologists on the idea that Christians werenot a factio, as the Romans thought them, but a mystical corpus, alive withshared understanding (conscientia). Christians formed a coitio, coetus, acongregatio, a community of the elect realized through shared rites, such asprayers, acts of charity and, of course, banquets and eucharistic meals.What Christians did was not ritual; it was sacrament. And their privilegedaccess to truth allowed them to see through the shell to the truth of Romanrituals – to see that these were not sacred embodiments of a community atall but profane and secular, without a shred of the truth but only a blindand false belief that they were true.7

The thrust of Buc’s argument is that this Christian cast of mindcontinues to ‘haunt’ sociological and ethnological treatments of societyand ritual, for ethnologists and the historians who borrow from themcontinue to see ‘good’ rituals – sacred, orderly, and deeply believed – assigns of a community that is in fact sacred, orderly, and deeply believing,rather than seeing these attributes for what they are: a partisan stance. Thesecond part of Dangers of Rituals therefore shows how these ideasdeveloped in and after the Reformation, but transmuted to create themodern, secularist, sociological understanding of ritual and society. First,the Reformation began to criticize Catholic ‘sacraments’ as mere ‘rituals’,undermining their claim to sacramental truth by presenting them as meresocial inventions for reasons of political utility. Thus began what Buc calls‘double religion’: those who understand the truth of rituals know thattheir only real function is to promote order and obedience, while the massof the populace believes in them uncritically, blindly, and thereforewithout true knowledge of their own beliefs and actions. In otherwords, those who practice rituals have no real understanding of theirtruth, which is apprehensible only by outsiders.8 The utilitarian mode of

5 Ibid., pp. 118–22.6 Ibid., pp. 134–40.7 Ibid., pp. 140–7, 156–7.8 Ibid., pp. 164–76, 188–94.

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understanding rituals was furthered by European contact with non-European peoples, which not only made Europeans aware that non-Christian peoples had social activities that looked much like their ownsacred rites, but also led Europeans to treat those activities as merelysecular, so that unbelieving Christian diplomats and missionaries mightparticipate in them. The result was an increased tendency to discuss non-European rituals and religion in terms of the merely secular and utilitarianfunction of maintaining good order – and therefore to presume thatEuropeans understood the true significance of other peoples’ rituals betterthan those people did themselves.9 The French Revolution accentuatedthis secular, functionalist interpretation of social rituals by consciouslypromoting a variety of festivals solely for the purpose of maintainingorder.10 Even more important to creating the modern, sociological modelof ritual and social order was the conservative reaction that followed theRevolution. For the essence of that reaction was a desire to restore tosociety the sense of community that the Revolution’s promotion ofindividualism and modernity had broken; and rituals were seen, increas-ingly, as a sign of the sense of community that had been lost.11 FromComte to Durkheim and from Durkheim to Geertz, sociology has simplyabsorbed, uncritically, the ‘baggage’ of this circular history.12 Religion andthe rituals of religion are primarily important and understandable in termsof their social function. That social function is seen merely as maintainingthe homeostasis of the society, preventing change and promoting order.Being believers, members of the society cannot see this elemental, seculartruth themselves; only Europeans, privileged outside observers, can see it.In effect, the sociologist stands to the societies he or she studies asProtestants stood to Catholics, as Christians stood to Jews and pagans.Thus, when Geertz, in Negara, interprets Balinese rites as promoting anorder rooted in ritual, and even cites Kantorowicz for an historicalanalogy, the cogency of his model is vitiated by the fact that he hasunconsciously borrowed it from Christian society. And when a subse-quent historian applies a Geertzian model to tenth-century West Frankishsociety, he is guilty of the same unconscious ignorance.13

9 Ibid., pp. 176–88, including an interesting discussion of the ‘Chinese Rites Controversy’.10 Ibid., pp. 203–6.11 Ibid., pp. 206–19.12 Ibid., pp. 219–29.13 Buc thus professes amazement that I do not cite Geertz’sNegara: The Theatre State inNineteenth-

Century Bali (Princeton, 1980) in my own Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Orderin EarlyMedieval France (Ithaca, 1992), even though I have so clearly been marked by him (p. 227,n. 119), but this is a misunderstanding of both Geertz and my own work. The reason I do not citeGeertz’s Negara in Begging Pardon is because the problems Buc sees in applying Geertz’s readingof Balinese ceremonial to early medieval European ceremonial are obvious. Indeed, theincompatibility runs deeper than Buc himself is aware. Since the beginning of his career andhis earliest works (for example, Agricultural Involutions: The Process of Ecological Change inIndonesia (Berkeley, 1963)), Geertz has always emphasized the close coordination between



TheDangers of Ritual is a dangerous book. Though a skilled writer, Bucis acerbic and ad hominem in a way that goes beyond respectful profes-sional disagreement.14 In fact, what he has written is itself a polemic, for ashe himself states in his preface,15 he is pushing a point of criticism to theextreme, without providing an alternative, without particularly caring fornuance, in order to raise a point he believes important; and like allpolemicists, his remedy is as extreme as his critique: banish the word‘ritual’ from all historical analyses of early medieval society. But polemicpersuades by reducing its targets to caricatures, even misstating facts ifnecessary, to the point that a reader cannot help but be persuaded, sinceno person of reasonable intelligence could possibly dispute what thepolemicist says.

Of many problems with this book, this is the most serious. Noreasonable person believes or practices what Buc attributes to them –no skilled ethnologist, no historian who has read widely enough inethnology to know anything about the subject. Buc is able to make hiscriticism only by making generalizations that are flatly untrue. It istherefore puzzling and disconcerting that from his preface on, Buc setsup Durkheim as the linchpin of his attack, leads us in detailed textualanalysis backwards from the Ottonians and Carolingians to the Mer-ovingians and martyrs, then forwards through Melanchthon, Navarrete,Warburton, Boulanger, Dupuis, Bonald, de Maistre, de Lammenais,Quinet, Constant and Fustel, and then, in the penultimate chapter,

culture and ecology – that is, the interactions of a given physical terrain and human culture.Given the specificity of such ecologies, cultures are equally specific. This is a constantpresupposition in Geertz. It is fundamental to Negara, with its emphasis on the determinativenature of Bali’s physical terrain on the political values expressed in Balinese ceremonial. Itremains fundamental in one of his later works, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in InterpretiveAnthropology (New York, 1983), and in his autobiography, After the Fact: Two Countries, FourDecades, One Anthropologist (Cambridge, MA, 1995). Since all knowledge is local knowledge –knowledge by the members of a society, but also knowledge of outsiders about them – it isimpossible to take a model developed to interpret one culture and blindly apply it to any othersociety. In other words, if one correctly understands Geertz, one knows that one cannot apply hismodel of the Balinese Negara anywhere else. If there is therefore any borrowing from Geertz inmy work, it lies in an effort to ground early medieval supplication in its own distinctive politicalecology (see especially Chapter 8). Any similarity in interpreting ‘rituals’ simply results from theobvious fact that a certain repertoire of interpretation is common to all ethnographic,historiographical and literary schools. (My own tend to be much more structuralist thanGeertz’s, and more akin to the formalism of the New Criticism.) In any case, far from my use ofthe word ‘iconic’ being borrowed fromNegara, I use the term in a way very different from Geertzand very close to Buc’s own usage (cf. Begging Pardon, pp. 165–73, and Dangers, p. 228).Similarly, Buc’s characterization of my argument as imitating Negara in presenting a simpleunilineal ‘borrowing’ of forms of supplication downwards through the hierarchy of rulership isprecisely what I argue against (pp. 93–103), as, following Foucault, I argue against the existence ofa ‘monistic ‘‘iconic’’ framework’ (seeDangers, pp. 244–5 and Begging Pardon, pp. 109–12, 147–59,258–67, 304–6, 316–8).

14 Beginning with the preface, p. viii: ‘the hubris of Pharoah Francois Mitterand (r. 1981–95)’.15 Dangers, p. viii.

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having finally arrived at Durkheim – says that there is no reason to discussDurkheim’s work in any detail because it is so well known!16

Of course Durkheim’s work is well known. So is the criticism of it andall sociological and ethnological models descended from it or akin to it.17

And those criticisms are known best of all precisely to those historians whoare the objects of Buc’s criticisms, simply because they have read widely,deeply, and thoughtfully in ethnology for decades. Buc makes sweepingcriticisms of the way historians have used ethnology to analyse earlymedieval rituals, but I can think of no historian in either Britain or theUnited States who actually practises the naive functionalism Buc attri-butes to them. Ethnologists themselves have not been able to writeethnography the way Buc claims since 1955, when Levi-Strauss’s TristesTropiques revealed the imbrication of the ‘primitive’ in the Western.18

True, Levi-Strauss was not the darling of British social anthropologists, soperhaps Tristes Tropiques missed them; but they did not miss the volumeTalal Asad edited in 1973 on the colonial underpinnings of earlierethnography.19 Since that time, all important writers in ethnology havemade critiques of their own discipline far more devastating than Buc’s.20

Does Buc really believe that William Miller, Stephen White, BarbaraRosenwein, and Patrick Geary are unfamiliar with these critiques? Howcan that be, when their studies prominently cite the authors of thesecritiques to frame their discussions21 and when the ethnological models

16 See also p. 223 (broadly criticizing Max Gluckman, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner and CliffordGeertz), ‘At the risk of being allusive, I eschew an exhaustive and exhausting presentation, andelect instead to effect a triangular confrontation _’

17 In another undue privileging of Christian elements in his account of sociology, Buc ignores theinfluence of Durkheim’s early experience as a Jew in Lorraine, which Durkheim himselfprivileged. See Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Works (New York, 1972), pp. 39–40;Robert A. Nisbet, Emile Durkheim (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1965), p. 28; W.S.F. Pickering, ‘TheEnigma of Durkheim’s Jewishness’, inDebating Durkheim, ed. W.S.F. Pickering and H. Martins(London, 1994).

18 Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Harmondsworth,1992), first published in French, 1955.

19 Talal Asad (ed.), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London, 1973).20 Among countless works, see George E. Markus and Michael M.J. Fischer, Anthropology as

Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago, 1986); JamesClifford and George E. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography(Berkeley, 1986); Paul Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (Berkeley, 1977); KevinDwyer, Moroccan Dialogues: Anthropology in Question (Baltimore, 1982); Renato Rosaldo,Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston, 1989); Johannes Fabian, Timeand the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983).

21 For example, William Ian Miller, ‘Gift, Sale, Payment, Raid: Case Studies in the Negotiationand Classification of Exchange in Medieval Iceland’, Speculum 61 (1986), pp. 18–50; Stephen D.White, ‘Proposing the Ordeal and Avoiding it: Strategy and Power in Western FrenchLitigation, 1050–1110’, in Thomas N. Bisson (ed.), Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, andProcess in Twelfth-Century Europe (Philadelphia, 1995), pp. 89–123, and the same author’s muchearlier Custom, Kinship, and Gifts to Saints: The ‘Laudatio Parentum’ in Western France, 1050–1150(Chapel Hill, 1988), pp. 8–9 and 238–9, n. 34 (with Durkheim specifically mentioned andcriticism assumed); Barbara Rosenwein, To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning ofCluny’s Property (909–1049) (Ithaca, 1989), pp. 125–43; Patrick Geary, ‘Vivre en conflit dans une



Buc presumes remain orthodoxy had already been supplanted by the mid-1970s?22 As for Buc’s most critical point, that historians who use anthro-pology are unaware that the idea of communitas is overdetermined withinwestern civilization, I find this difficult to believe. Quite apart from thefact that it is impossible to read much of Victor Turner or Mary Douglaswithout becoming acutely aware that their interpretations of non-westernsociety, ritual, and religion are problematic because so very Catholic,23 it isvery hard to be a literate, historically minded intellectual, at least in theUnited States, without knowing that modern discussions of communityhave a long genealogy predisposed to reproducing the same intellectualpatterns, precisely as Buc alleges.24

France sans etat: typologie des mecanismes de reglement des conflits (1050–1200)’, Annales,E.S.C. 41 (1986), pp. 1107–33; also Koziol, Begging Pardon, pp. 93–4 and n. 43, and especiallyChapter 9.

22 For example, in my own graduate seminars on legal anthroplogy at Stanford University in 1975–76, the anthropology Buc holds out as the norm was so far from being the norm that its greatnames (Evans Pritchard, Radcliffe-Brown, Gluckman) were held out as examples of how notto do ethnography, precisely because of their unexamined functionalist, equilibrist, andEurocentric presuppositions and colonial framing (Gluckman being unusually importantbecause, like his student Turner, both a late exemplar and early critic of the approach). Instead,study concentrated on what became known as a ‘process’ approach, identified in particular withthe Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader. (See Law in Culture and Society, ed. Laura Nader(Chicago, 1969); The Disputing Process: Law in Ten Societies, ed. Laura Nader and Harry F.Todd, Jr (New York, 1978).) Central to Nader’s writings were the assumptions that law and legalprocedure were fundamentally imbricated in power relations within society; that they were tools,access to which was unevenly distributed throughout a society; that far from working to restorehomeostasis, they worked to embed existing power relations ever more deeply within a society;that societies were constantly in a state of disequilibrium and dysfunction. In other words, thecritique Buc claims historians are ignorant of was, in fact, basic to the teaching of the discipline inthe mid-1970s at his own university.

23 C. Clifford Flanigan, ‘Liminality, Carnival, and Social Structure: The Case of Late MedievalBiblical Drama’, pp. 42–63, at pp. 57–8, and Ronald L. Grimes, ‘Victor Turner’s Definition,Theory, and Sense of Ritual’, pp. 141–6, at pp. 144–5, both in Kathleen M. Ashley (ed.), VictorTurner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism: Between Literature and Anthropology(Bloomington, IN, 1990). See also Edith Turner’s reminiscences of her and her husband’sconversions to Catholicism in the late 1950s, while still at Manchester, and the importance oftheir Catholicism and his membership in the Communist Party to their ethnographic work:Matthew Engelke, ‘An Interview with Edith Turner’, Current Anthropology 41 (2000), pp. 843–52, at pp. 847–9.

24 We might draw that genealogy a bit differently than Buc does. He disagrees with Jonathan Z.Smith’s suggestion that Zwingli’s and Calvin’s critiques of Catholic sacraments were instru-mental in establishing a secular view of ritual, on the grounds that their movements lacked thereach of Lutheranism and Anglicanism. Buc therefore believes that the latter were the two trulyimportant movements in creating the idea of a false religious community bound by rituals(Dangers, pp. 164–5, n. 3). This, however, is a very parochial – and conservative – narrative ofintellectual history that shows little awareness of British and American history. Though Buc maynot be wrong, Smith was certainly right, for the tension between communities as immanentmoral entities and legally constituted ones and the problematic position of the individual’sfreedom within politico-moral communities does come into the Anglo-American traditionthrough Calvin, via English, Scottish and American Puritanism, as reinvigorated and reinter-preted in the United States by every subsequent Great Awakening and evangelically based call forthe reform of political morality.

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If all this is so well known, how then can Buc present historiographicalwork as so retrograde? In the case of his most prominent target (and theone I am in the best position to know about) as polemicists do, by ratherbreathtaking ellipses in his quotations that transform the original meaningof a sentence out of all recognition.25 Or again as polemicists do, byrelentless, ever shifting attacks that divert attention from the inconsis-tencies inherent in the writer’s own position. And Buc’s own position isdeeply inconsistent. Though he criticizes historians for having invented a‘swollen grab bag’ of rituals,26 he himself discusses exactly the sameswollen grab bag of practices: anointings, pacts, oaths, burial, adventus,occursus, supplications and humiliations, royal acts of charity for the poor,burials ad sanctos, liturgical commemorations for the royal family, tearfulprayer before the Holy Lance, tearful prayer before the relics of saints,pilgrimages to shrines, Christmas and Easter feasts and Lenten fasts,translations of relics, among many others. Not only does he discuss theexact same rituals, he interprets their symbolic meanings in ways that evenVictor Turner would find absolutely unexceptionable. And though hecriticizes us for inventing new rituals, he invents new rituals himself,suggesting that Childeric’s poetry ‘may have been an element in a royalliturgy of thanksgiving’.27 Of course, Buc does not like calling theseactivities ‘rituals’. An arch-philosophical nominalist, he would have usentirely banish the word ‘ritual’ from discussions of religion and society,both because such modern abstract categories do not accurately reflect thespecificity of contemporaries’ actions and because the word brings with itfrom ethnography a host of allegedly unexamined assumptions. But thesame is true of absolutely every abstraction used by historians. ‘Society’,‘culture’, ‘institutions’, ‘religion’, ‘church’, ‘structure’, ‘law’, ‘feud’, ‘king-ship’, ‘court’, ‘family’, ‘class’, ‘status’, ‘nobility’, ‘peasantry’_ ‘the middleages’: no matter the extent to which these words descend from medievalcognates, all are used currently by historians in terms broader and moreabstract than in medieval usage. The struggle to keep such words fresh andflexible, to use them profitably without reifying them, is elementary to thehistorians’ task. The reason it must be a struggle is because we can’t banishthese words. We have to use them.

So it is with the word ‘ritual’. Buc himself repeatedly uses the very wordhe would have others banish. And it is not enough for him to pretend thathe only uses the word as if in quotation marks, as shorthand for ‘apractice twentieth-century historians have identified as ritual’,28 when he

25 Compare, for example, Buc’s quotation (p. 211) from Begging Pardon (p. 59): in the original, it isnot the rituals that are important in maintaining power but prestige, loyalty, friendship, andkinship, rituals being a way these are publicly manifested and tested.

26 Dangers, p. 176.27 Ibid., p. 113.28 Ibid., p. 2.



consistently uses it not as the object of a position he dislikes but preciselyas the historians and ethnologists he criticizes have used it, to defineexactly the same practices which he interprets in exactly the same modes.Nor is one fooled by his use of words like ‘liturgy’, ‘solemnity’, and‘ceremony’: given the way Buc actually uses them, these are nothing butsynonyms for ‘ritual’, as when he speaks of the ‘liveliness of liturgicalidioms’ in discussing Merovingian kingship, or explains the importance ofprocessions in Rome by suggesting that ‘litanies served to measurepower’.29 Does a synonym really offer a profound analytic advance? Dothe quotation marks really make a difference when Buc emphasizes thatthe Carolingians consciously created and elaborated ‘solemnities of allsorts, solemnities that following current historiographic convention weshall provisorily call ‘‘rituals’’’?30 How seriously are we to take his owndemand that we abolish the term ‘ritual’ when he writes that by the ninthcentury the ‘great political rituals _ were well established’, that ‘competi-tion and ritualization fed one another’, that the ninth-century parts ofthe Liber Pontificalis ‘abound in descriptions of ceremonies’, that ‘ritualsare so present in Gregory of Tours’s works that one might almost fail to seethem’?31 Can he really criticize historians’ use of the word ‘ritual’ and thendescribe tristitia and laetitia as ‘public bodily postures intended tomanifest respectively political hostility and friendship’, when a publicbodily posture intended to manifest anything is one of the most elemen-tary definitions of what a ritual is (and a particularly naive definition atthat, since it presumes precisely what all recent ethnologists and historianshave taken as the central problem that requires explanation – that is, how aphysical gesture can intend or manifest meaning at all)?32 Such incon-sistencies riddle the book. Thus, his chapter on martyrs begins by notingthe importance of public spectacles in Rome, including executions, thenadds, ‘It was indeed desirable that everything should take place accordingto a set scenario – hence, patterns, forms, some would say, ritual.’ This isdisingenuous in the extreme, to use the term ‘ritual’ in its ordinarymeaning, apply it to the kinds of activities it ordinarily denotes in waysthat are utterly conventional, yet claim to be doing something novel anddistinctive. When he then continues the sentence by saying that ‘spec-tacles, either of the stage or of the circus, provided the universallyacknowledged litmus test of civic unity and order’, providing this glosswithout any trace of irony whatsoever – this within a book that castigateshistorians who allegedly interpret rituals as litmus tests of civic unity and

29 Ibid., pp. 109, 87.30 Ibid., p. 57.31 Ibid., pp. 58, 62, 93.32 Ibid., p. 66. On the naivety of this implicit definition, problematic because isolating particular

moments and behavioural forms from the cultural and socio-/politico-/economic context thatinforms them, see Koziol, Begging Pardon, 289–307.

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order – he forgoes the right to posture as critic.33 You cannot criticizehistorians, then take over their positions and claim them as your own, leastof all simply by putting the word you criticize in quotation marks.

It is astonishing that a writer so intelligent can have such blind spots.Presuming that he is not as cynically manipulative of texts as he claimshis clerical alter egos were, one can only conclude that Buc really believeshis critique well founded, and that he has therefore somewhere seriouslymisapprehended the work of those he criticizes. I believe that threerecurring contentions in Dangers of Ritual point to three such misap-prehensions. The first is a dismissal of the purposes of social and culturalhistory and a resultant misreading of the ways ethnologically mindedhistorians have used textual sources to write such history. The second is amisconstrual of the reasons historians speak of order and community.The third, and most fundamental, is a misunderstanding of the reasonshistorians define and use rituals in ways that Buc finds vague and allencompassing. Almost any book by almost any well-regarded historianof early medieval ritual could illustrate the misunderstandings. Onemight begin with one of the best known and most influential.

Everyone interested enough in early medieval rituals to be reading thisarticle has probably read Gerd Althoff ’s Spielregeln or the articles the bookgathers together and will recognize his positions in many of Buc’scriticisms. Althoff does rely on the classic ‘functionalism’ of the Britishschool of social anthropology, though in a way that is idiosyncratic ratherthan systematic. He insists on the existence of ‘unwritten rules’ ofbehaviour, where either the rules or the behaviour allows the social‘system’ to ‘function’, in the sense of return to an equilibrium – a statusquo ante.34 Furthermore, one of Buc’s most damning criticisms of currenthistoriographical treatments of ritual is their lack of concern for authorialintent, and though Althoff relies heavily on primary sources, he is notparticularly interested in the social and political context within which hissources were produced or in the authorial intent of the writers whoproduced them. Finally, in very few but also very important passagesAlthoff speaks of ‘representation’ – specifically, of the representationalcapacity of rituals – in ways that are related to the conservative usage ofCarl Schmitt that Buc rightly criticizes.35

Yet one should be not only critical but also generous. It is worthremembering that when Althoff wrote the early articles and papersreprinted in Spielregeln, the terrain of ritual studies in Germany wasquite other than it has been since, that it was, in fact, far closer to the

33 Ibid., p. 128; note also the implicit functionalism of Buc’s own analysis of public prostrations(pp. 104, 106).

34 Spielregeln, pp. 1–17, 283–304 and passim.35 Ibid., pp. 13, 231, 259.



representational inheritance of Tellenbach, Schramm, and Erdmann thatBuc criticizes.36 If it is no longer, that is partly because of what Althoff haswritten. In any case, although Buc’s implicit criticisms of Althoff are insome ways correct, in more important ways they misrepresent hisassumptions, purposes, and sophistication. To begin with, Althoff rarelyspeaks of ‘ritual’ in the abstract or of ‘rituals’ collectively – much less oftenthan Buc, in fact.37 Indeed, precisely like Buc, this most particularistic ofhistorians is far more comfortable speaking of and analysing discreteevents in contextually specific, highly nuanced readings: the election andpre-anointing procession of Conrad II in 1024, Henry IV’s penance atCanossa, the deditio of the Milanese in 1158, the second Milanese deditio of1162.38 To be sure, Althoff rarely discusses the sources he uses, but this ishardly because he does not realize that authorial intent shapes andmisshapes their accounts of rituals. Quite the contrary, he says quiteclearly that the image of Conrad II as the true lord of freemen has more todo with Wipo’s norms than with eleventh-century reality.39 If, therefore,he ignores problems of authorial intent, it is for good reasons, the samereasons that William Miller uses Icelandic sagas as sources for Icelandicbehavioural patterns, or that Stephen White and Barbara Rosenwein usecharters to reconstruct networks of alliance, or that I myself use chartersand histories to isolate distinctive linguistic and gestural patterns ofdeference to high lords: to discover the patterns of behaviour and beliefthat are common to all writers in a society, regardless of their motivationsin writing any specific text.40 The fact that Buc is an intellectual historian isno reason for him to fall back into such a radical nominalism that itdiscredits the efforts of others to try to use clerically produced texts todiscern the behaviour and beliefs of laymen and laywomen in courts,assemblies and halls.

Althoff ’s history simply has different purposes from Buc’s, veryspecifically and explicitly so. Nearly every article in Spielregeln beginswith a statement of the historiography against which it was written. For

36 For example, Gerd Tellenbach, ‘Romischer und christlicher Reichsgedanke in der Liturgie desfruhen Mittelalters’, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philologisch-historische Klasse, 1 (1934–35) (Heidelberg, 1934); P.E. Schramm, Kaiser, Konige, und Papste:Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, 4 vols (Stuttgart, 1968–70); idem,Herrschafts-zeichen und Staatssymbolik, 3 vols (Stuttgart, 1954–56); Carl Erdmann, Forschungen zur politischenIdeenwelt des Fruhmittelalters (Berlin, 1951).

37 Only a little more frequently he will speak of rituals adjectivally (for example, ‘ritualistic’), torefer to actions that exhibit recurrent patterns of formal behaviour (for example, pp. 29, 53, 125,301, 303).

38 Spielregeln, pp. 164–6, 240–3, 103–7.39 Ibid., p. 27.40 William Ian Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland

(Chicago, 1990), Chapter 2; Stephen D. White, ‘Proposing the Ordeal’, and ‘Feuding and Peace-Making in the Touraine around the Year 1100’, Traditio 42 (1986), pp. 195–265; Rosenwein, ToBe the Neighbor of Saint Peter; Koziol, Begging Pardon, Chapters 1, 6, 7, also pp. 147–59 for theway in which Dudo of Saint-Quntin’s authorial intent conditions his accounts of supplications.

378 Geoffrey Koziol


the early ones, that historiography is nineteenth-century German Verfas-sungsgeschichte and its presumption that there was an early medievalStaatlichkeit which, while not that of a modern state was still like enoughto it to bear the ideological weight of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German national aspirations. The focus of these historians wastherefore kings and the courts of kings, laws issued in the name of kings,the fundamental quasi-constitutional principles that governed relationsbetween kings and nobles, and their abiding belief was that the Car-olingian administrative order possessed a ‘rationality’ (Rationalismus) ofpurpose and means perhaps not as fully realized as that of the modern statebut recognizably embryonic to it. Yet even assuming that this visionmatched Carolingian reality (which it did not), following the declineof the Carolingians there are no sources that support anything like thisvision of political order – no written laws, few written judgements, littletrace of formal legal proceedings that look anything like earlier or laterlegal proceedings. Given this caesura, Althoff writes, historians had twoalternative paths. One, the older, was to assume that tenth- and eleventh-century law and administration followed the same principles as theCarolingians’. Since there was no evidence for this and much against,the second, more recent approach was to see the tenth and eleventhcenturies as a time of violence and disorder between the collapse of theCarolingians and the appearance of Frederick Barbarossa’s feudalizingprogramme. Althoff ’s goal is therefore quite simple: to try to understandwhat did the work of ‘law’ in a society that had no formal written laws andno formal legal institutions.41

What makes Althoff ’s work most distinctive and valuable is that ratherthan begin his search with norms extrinsic to tenth- and eleventh-centurysociety, he begins with its most distinctive traits. These are: the lack ofpower of the Ottonians at the beginning of their rule; the dispersal ofrights and powers among the nobility; and most crucial of all, theimportance elites attached to rank, honour and precedence. The unusualcoherence of Althoff ’s model of ‘rituals’ in tenth- and eleventh-centuryGerman society stems from the fact that everything flows from hisunderstanding that the nobility was contending over issues of rank,precedence and honour.42 Thus, one of his more notable arguments isthat absolutely every public action was carefully prepared and scripted,that no public action was ever spontaneous. Simply because rank andorder were so important but maintained in such delicate balance, changesto rank and order threatened to upset everything. The dangers of hastyaction, spontaneous action, inconsiderate action, the dangers of anyaction at all were so momentous that everything was done to make sure

41 Spielregeln, pp. 1–17.42 Ibid., pp. 2, 12, 23, 162–3, 251–2, 279–80.



there were no surprises.43 Thus, the details of the deditiones that accom-panied surrender were, for Althoff, all negotiated beforehand and care-fully scripted, nothing at all being left to chance.44 In terms of thehistoriographical tradition within which Althoff writes, perhaps evenmore important is the distinction this leads to between public and privateconsensus-seeking. German ‘constitutional’ historians had always debatedthe extent to which the nobility had a recognized right to give counsel and/or consent, and the extent to which kings could ignore or act against thatcounsel. Althoff ’s spin on this debate is to point out that the statements ofconsensus we find in chronicles (for example) refer not to a real process ofdecision-making but rather to a formal, public, ‘demonstrative’ enact-ment of counsel, where decisions that had already been reached privately,through the canvassing and mobilizing of opinion (Willensbildung), wereformally and publicly acted out.45 In an interesting reversal of Buc’spriorities, he even argues that literate modes of communication replicatedthis fundamental reflex, insofar as the relationship between letters andStreitschriften corresponds to that between private and public means ofgaining consensus.46

Though shifting his critique fromVerfassungsgeschichte to Norbert Eliasand Jurgen Habermas, the later articles build on the same insights. Thus,Althoff responds to Elias’s view of early medieval nobles as unable tocontrol their emotions and therefore in need of ‘civilizing’ by arguing thatshowing highly pitched emotions like anger was, in fact, a demonstrativeaction, not a ‘ritual’ but a ‘ritualized’ display. A member of the nobility wasnot described as flying into a towering rage because he had been unable tocontrol his emotions. Rather, in a world in which actions counted, theaccompaniments that signified ‘rage’ were intended to demonstrate andcommunicate to potential enemies that they had gone too far, that one waswilling to fight, that the next step in the escalation of a conflict would bebloodshed. In other words, not even emotions were ‘spontaneous’.47 As forHabermas, Althoff argues against his modernist assumption that the earlyMiddle Ages had no sense of public space. The constituent elements ofpublic space were different: not congresses, city streets, or newpapers butrather courts, halls, letters, and stories. Yet the early Middle Ages had a veryhighly developed sense of public space, for in a sense, all demonstrativeaction was geared towards public communication.48

There are difficulties with Althoff ’s analysis, particularly with itstheoretical superstructure. Althoff believes that tenth- and eleventh-

43 Ibid., pp. 66–7, 248–50, 256, 264, 273–4.44 Ibid., pp. 101–3, 125.45 Ibid., pp. 157–84.46 Ibid., pp. 183–4.47 Ibid., pp. 258–81.48 Ibid., pp. 229–57.

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century German society was governed by rules, known by everyone, clearto everyone, unambiguous even though unwritten. He says that thepurpose of these rules was to allow the continued functioning of thesystem, for if there had not been such clear rules, the entire system wouldhave fallen apart.49 At the level of both theory and history, this leads toproblems. In what sense were what he identifies as ‘rules’ really rules?When he actually comes down to stating what the rules were, they do notseem very rule-like at all: disputes must be processed in clear stages ofescalation; mediators are essential to the settlement of disputes; composi-tion and satisfaction are necessary to end disputes.50 I can imagine callingthese ‘principles’, if one wishes to emphasize the normative, or ‘patterns’, ifone wishes to emphasize non-normative praxis, but to call them ‘rules’seems to be bending the word considerably, if only because they are far toobroad. Indeed, the breadth of these ‘rules’ is manifested by the fact thatAlthoff also emphasizes how flexibly they could be applied. Depending oncircumstances, one could make a deditiomore or less harsh, do more or lessto work to get oneself reinstated in grace.51 But where there is so muchflexibility and variation, then it ceases to be useful to think in terms of rulesat all. ‘Code’ and ‘custom’, though far from unproblematic, are perhapssafer terms, because unlike ‘rule’, they convey both norm and flexibility,and do so with an implicit assumption of diffuse social reinforcement inplace of coercive governmental enforcement.

Althoff ’s appeal to ‘function’ is also problematic, in a way thatunderscores why ethnologists, sociologists, and historians have repu-diated the term: where everything in the society works to maintaining orrestoring equilibrium, it becomes difficult to explain change. Interest-ingly, some of Althoff ’s most astute analyses concern just that – dramaticchanges in or violations of the rules. For example, one of his mostimportant arguments is that the tenth-century Ottonian polity wasdifferent from either the Carolingian or the Staufen, because the relativelack of power of the new dynasty and the dispersal of power among thenobility required more consensual interactions between them. So whereCarolingian deditiones, like Ottonian, ended in displays of mercy,Carolingian mercy, unlike Ottonian, lay in commuting a death sentenceto mere blinding.52 And if Staufen legal processes were as demonstrativeas Ottonian, what they demonstrated was the kings’ new attention toasserting their superior power.53 However, in a society in which everyoneknew the rules and no one would break them, how does one explain these

49 Ibid., pp. 3, 125, 187, 253–4, 287–90, 297, 300, 303–4.50 Ibid., p. 53; also p. 294: those of highest rank decide whether to introduce issues into public

discussion, and opinions are presented in public gatherings according to individuals’ rank order.51 Ibid., pp. 108, 111, 122–3; similarly for all rituals, pp. 16, 36–7, 63–5.52 Ibid., pp. 37, 53–6.53 Ibid., pp. 38–9, 52–3, 63 (seeing a growing ‘hardness’ already under the Salians), 71–3.



changes, except by virtue of the fact that someone at some point waswilling to break them?

In the final analysis, this is my real disagreement with Althoff, and withall those recent historians who have applied a semiotic ethnography toemotions in a way that routinizes them, in the same way that olddefinitions of ritual routinized behaviour. Such analyses cannot explaina situation in which honour counts so much to an individual who believeshe has suffered an affront that he is willing to violate all the rules, riskeverything, lay hands on the Lord’s anointed, make a scene in a publicgathering, assassinate a court favourite. For Althoff and many others, thesehave become nothing but signs.54 But where all emotion has becomenothing but a sign that one wishes to renegotiate an ongoing, dyadicrelationship, what has happened to the emotions that people felt, to theideals they valued, the values that gave them their identity?55 If honour andrank were so important to men and women of the tenth century, are we tobelieve that they really didn’t get angry when they suffered affronts to theirhonour and rank? There is a point, in the recent attention not to ritual butto semiotics, in which everything has become a sign of something otherthan it is. And Buc himself is guilty of this ‘double-psychology’, forthough one part of his argument asks us to take the religion of these peopleseriously, another sees rituals (including rituals of religion) as nothing buta set of rhetorical tropes that cover a writer’s partisan political loyalties.Ironically, Buc’s emphasis on the rhetorical nature of our sources hasstripped both actors and writers from real belief in the same way he claimsethnologists have, and he claims the same stance to superior under-standing he discounts in ethnologists.

In any case, even though Spielregeln is the book that most correspondsto the functionalist ethnology Buc criticizes, there is little in it that reallycorresponds to Buc’s criticisms. It is true that Althoff does speak of the‘representation of rulership’. He does so, however, only once. And thephrasing is noteworthy, because elsewhere Althoff criticizes past historiansfor speaking of ‘public communication’ entirely in terms of Herrschafts-reprasentation.56 Althoff ’s public rituals are consciously constructed,

54 Ibid., pp. 11–12, 63, 65–6, 124–5, 228, 232, 245, 252–3, 262 (‘Demonstrationsfunktion, Signal-charakter’). See also Geary, ‘Vivre en conflit’; also Gerd Althoff, ‘Ira Regis: Prolegomena to aHistory of Royal Anger’, pp. 59–74, Richard E. Barton, ‘‘‘Zealous Anger’’ and the Renegotiationof Aristocratic Relationships in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century France’, pp. 153–70, and BarbaraH. Rosenwein, ‘Controlling Paradigms’, pp. 233–47, all in Barbara H. Rosenwein (ed.), Anger’sPast: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1998).

55 Some anthropologists are becoming aware of this dilemma, though there is still no good modelfor how to approach it. See Sandra Bell and Simon Coleman (eds), The Anthropology ofFriendship (Oxford, 1999); Joanna Overing and Alan Passes (eds), The Anthropology of Love andAnger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia (London, 2000).

56 Spielregeln, p. 259: ‘in den Situationen, in denen im Mittelalter Politik gemacht und Herrschaftreprasentiert wurde’; otherwise, p. 13.

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tightly negotiated pieces of choreography, highly scripted theatre (Insze-nierung) – something quite different from those of Carl Schmitt’srepresentational model.57 How could it be otherwise? Althoff ’s analysishas taken the ground out from under all representational modes ofanalysis. Since everything in his society comes down to contendingindividuals, kindred alliances – even the king himself is a contender –he has left us with nothing really to represent, even embryonically orideally. For the same reasons, Althoff does not see tenth-century society asholistic in a Durkheimian sense; far from it, his entire analysis ispredicated on the idea that primary loyalties and experiential commu-nities were found in highly shifting and particularistic friendship andkinship networks. He does not ignore contention. On the contrary, everymember of his society is constantly contending. He does not presume orconstruct a reified social reality, in which society in the abstract is morereal than the individuals who comprise it. Instead, he gives us a societycomprised of contending, ever shifting groups, those groups themselvescomprised of proud, contentious individuals.58 As to the role of ‘ritual’ inthis society, rituals do not provide a sham of consensus in the absence ofthe reality. Quite the contrary, Althoff ’s rituals are the means ofcontending. This is why it is so significant that he rarely speaks of ‘ritual’at all, but speaks instead of ‘demonstrative action’ and ‘communication’.59

Simply because tenth-century nobles were driven by concern for theirrank and honour (in both senses of the word), simply because they werewilling to fight – indeed, had to fight – to enforce respect for their rankand honour and avenge insults to them, changes in rank and honour or anyaction that portended such changes were threatening. Such changes andmicro-changes were therefore marked not by ‘rituals’ in any kind ofartificial sense but by a host of particular, very concrete signs. Where onetook a seat, where one was seated, who spoke to whom first, with whatinflections of familiarity – these were ‘demonstratives’, because theirpurpose was to publicize rank, order and favour, and changes in them.

And what is true of Althoff is true of all those historians whom Buccriticizes. He assumes that we presume community. In fact, we presumethe same contention, rivalry, and manipulation that Buc assumes.Community is not an assumption we begin with, nor is it a simplistic,lazy solution we impose on the society by using contemporary ethno-logical models. Community is the problem. Simply because the societywas so contentious, order, community, and consensus become theproblem, not the explanation.60

57 Ibid., pp. 12–13, 101, 167, and especially 229–57. Cf. Buc, Dangers, pp. 231–7.58 See especially Spielregeln, pp. 21–84.59 Spielregeln, pp. 11–14, 35–7, 108, 113, 123–5, 187, 202–3, and especially 229–57.60 Ibid., pp. 1–3 and 21–84; Koziol, Begging Pardon, pp. xi, 5–7, 59, 110–12, 128–30, 194–8, 254–7;

White, ‘Feuding and Peace-Making’ and ‘Pactum Legem Vincit et Amor Judicium: The



Rituals of Power, a volume in the series on The Transformation of theRoman World sponsored by The European Science Foundation, presentsthirteen articles written by scholars from seven European countriescovering a host of different topics from a variety of methodologicalstances.61 The articles are of very mixed quality. At the very least, thevolume as a whole presents interesting material on a wide array of subjects:Roman funerary rituals; Germanic origin legends; Visigothic and Lom-bard royal rituals and Herrschaftszeichen; Frankish investiture with arms;the circulation of weapons in Anglo-Saxon society; Beowulf and thereproduction of social identity.62 Four articles are particularly noteworthy.Mayke de Jong’s contribution tackles the ‘master narrative’ of publicpenance that sees a decline in a dominant early Christian scheme of publicpenance in the sixth century. De Jong argues that, to the contrary, therehad never been a strongly institutionalized public penance, that in factpublic penance was something of an invented tradition even for the sixthcentury, and that much of the evidence for early Christian public penanceresults from a programmatic Carolingian reading of these sixth-centurysources. It is an important article, with great ramifications not only for thehistory of the sacraments but also for the history of monasticism andChristian piety.63 In an article typical of her craftsmanship, Janet Nelsonprovides a very useful sketch of Carolingian royal funerals, arguing againstAlain Dierkens that, in fact, the Carolingians devoted substantial atten-tion to the public, regalian displays of funerals.64 Christine La Rocca andLuigi Provero present a close and very subtle reading of the will ofEberhard of Friuli and his wife Gisela, daughter of Louis the Pious. Everyearly medievalist interested in books, writing, the nobility, the family,inheritance, and the construction of power should read it – which is to saythat every early medievalist should read it.65 Finally, Frans Theuws and

Settlement of Disputes by Compromise in Eleventh-Century Western France’, AmericanJournal of Legal History 22 (1978), pp. 281–308; Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking. Theagenda was announced in an influential article by Frederic Cheyette, though written within theframework of the older functionalist anthropology of law: ‘Suum Cuique Tribuere’, FrenchHistorical Studies 6 (1970), pp. 287–99.

61 On the project, see Ian Wood, ‘Report: The European Science Foundation’s Programme on theTransformation of the Roman World and Emergence of Early Medieval Europe’, EME 6 (1997),pp. 217–27.

62 Javier Arce, ‘Imperial Funerals in the Later Roman Empire: Change and Continuity’, pp. 115–29;Lotte Hedeager, ‘Migration Period Europe: The Formation of a Political Mentality’, pp. 15–57;Pablo Diaz and Ma. R. Valverde, ‘The Theoretical Strength and Practical Weakness of theVisigothic Monarchy of Toledo’, pp. 59–93; Stephan Gasparri, ‘Kingship Rituals and Ideologyin Lombard Italy’, pp. 95–114; Regine Le Jan, ‘Frankish Giving of Arms and Rituals of Power:Continuity and Change in the Carolingian Period’, pp. 281–309; Heinrich Harke, ‘TheCirculation of Weapons in Anglo-Saxon Society’, pp. 377–99; Jos Bazelmans, ‘BeyondPower: Ceremonial Exchanges in Beowulf ’, pp. 311–75.

63 ‘Transformations of Penance’, pp. 185–224.64 ‘Carolingian Royal Funerals’, pp. 131–84.65 ‘The Dead and their Gifts: The Will of Eberhard, Count of Friuli, and his Wife Gisela, Daughter

of Louis the Pious (863–864)’, pp. 225–80.

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Monica Alkemade’s examination of weapons depositions in northernGaul and Belgica is the most suggestive work I have read not only onweapons depositions, but also on the transformation of the mechanics andsymbolics of power in the sub-Roman period.66

Even such a bare sketch indicates the breadth of subject matter includedin the volume. It may also hint at an important issue. Many of the authorsassume a very broad definition of ritual. In fact, the usage is often sobroad that several articles have very little to do with ‘rituals’ as they arecommonly understood, to the point that one can read an entire seventy-page article and wonder where the rituals are. A superficial conclusionwould be that Buc is correct, that these authors have applied the term‘ritual’ lazily, that the term has been so emptied of meaning that justwriting a will becomes a ‘ritual’. However, that conclusion would itself belazy. In fact, it is precisely the most theoretically advanced articles on ritualin which rituals tend most to disappear into the background.67 Under-standing why their authors’ theory has led to such latitudinarian usage isimportant, because it is this misunderstanding that I suspect accounts forthe most fundamental of Buc’s misapprehensions about recent studies ofritual. The ethnological model most frequently resorted to in Rituals ofPower is the model most commonly used by post-structural ethnologistsand post-processual archaeologists. Its assumptions are now so widespreadthat its precise author is no longer relevant. In this volume, one usuallymeets them in the ‘hierarchy’ of Louis Dumont or the faits sociaux totauxof Maurice Godelier (via Marcel Mauss); Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus oreven Michel Foucault’s ‘discourse’ would do as well.68 Indeed, noauthorizing theorist is required at all; the issue should be apparent toanyone who has studied rituals long enough, or read enough ethnology orliterary criticism, or simply thinks deeply on the problem. A ritual by itselfcannot define its own meanings or its own values. A single action cannotdo that.69 This is why the linguistic turn was so quickly received bystudents of ritual (or, put another way, why Americans in particularturned from British social ethnography to a more hermeneutically

66 ‘A Kind of Mirror for Men: Sword Depositions in Late Antique Northern Gaul’, pp. 401–76.67 Thus Bazelmans (though the article is flawed by the author’s tendency to essentialize Beowulf

even as he asks us not to essentialize social categories like the individual), and Theuws andAlkemade. See also Theuws’s ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–13.

68 Maurice Godelier, L’ideel et le materiel: pensee, economies, societes (Paris, 1984), trans. MartinThom, The Mental and the Material: Thought, Economy and Society (London, 1986) (Godelierreworking the phrase from Marcel Mauss); Louis Dumont, Homo hierarchicus: essai sur le systemedes castes (Paris, 1967), better consulted in the revised translation with the later English preface asHomo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, trans. Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumontand Basia Gulati (Chicago, 1980); Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse d’une theorie de la pratique (Geneva,1972), trans. Michael Nice, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977); Michel Foucault,L’archeologie du savoir (Paris, 1967), trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, The Archaeology of Knowledge(New York, 1972).

69 See Koziol, Begging Pardon, Chapter 9, ‘How Does a Ritual Mean?’.



oriented cultural anthropology): the axiom of semiotics – the study of howmeanings are constituted as networks of signs – is that no single sign hasany inherent meaning. And of all signs, it is particularly impossible tostudy cultural elements constitutive of ‘power’ – including rituals –without returning those elements to the matrix of ideational relationshipsand differentiations that produce and reproduce the categories that makea world whose sites of power seem natural and essential, simply becauseramified so incessantly and thoroughly throughout experience as to beinescapable, to make alternatives unthinkable. One can cite Bourdieu,Foucault, Dumont, or Godelier, it hardly matters. The essential point isthat to understand not what a ritual means but how a ritual can meananything at all, to the point that it matters enough to contemporaries thatthey want and need to contend over its meanings, we have to understandany given ritual and all its component elements in conjunction with allother parts of the culture. Not just the artefacts used, but the logic withwhich they are put together. Not just the words used, but the syntacticstructures and semantic patterns they reproduce. Not just the syntax andartefacts of the individuals actively participating in the ritual, but alsothose who participate on the margins, as audience, and those whoseconspicuous abjection marks the boundaries of the thought-world ofparticipants.70

These are the reasons that ‘ritual’ is no longer a subject of intense studyamong anthropologists as a discrete category of analysis. Past under-standings of rituals as discrete events consistently led to hermeneuticimpasses by turning rituals into a unique category of action and languageincommensurate with other actions and discourses. Older models –especially simple functionalist and structuralist ones – were also increas-ingly seen as politically naive, because unaware of strategic uses of ritual togain power, unaware of the imbrication of ritualized expressions of powerin the relations and distinctions of ordinary actions and language.Realizing this, ethnologists stopped asking what any given ritual meansand began asking instead how the meaning of rituals is constituted, whichis to say, how social values are constructed, selected, framed, mobilized,and changed.71 In other words, ethnologists shifted their attention fromunderstanding discrete rituals to understanding the cultural ‘practice’ ofwhich rituals were a coherent, continuous part. Hence, again, the growingemphasis on practice and strategy (following Bourdieu), on the mutuallyreinforcing interrelationships between elements of a cultural systemconstructive and productive of values (following Dumont), on the

70 An elegant illustration is Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, ‘Medieval Identity: A Sign and a Concept’,American Historical Review 105 (2000), pp. 1489–533.

71 The importance of such constructive matrices for understanding specific rituals was broughthome to medieval historians by Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York,1980).

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imbrication of all given elements of meaningful action and articulablethought in a total discourse that creates and recreates diffuse sites of power(following Foucault), on the impossibility of understanding any singlesocial fact in isolation (following Godelier). These are the models used byrecent historians of medieval ritual. And it is these models – not the naivesocial functionalism Buc alleges – that have led precisely the mosttheoretically sophisticated authors in Rituals of Power to assume such abroad definition of ‘rituals’ that rituals themselves have almost entirelydisappeared. Such an expansive use of the term is not a sign of theoreticalnaivety or a blind borrowing of ethnological models. The definition ofritual has broadened for the same reasons that ethnologists no longer reallycare about rituals per se, and therefore write rarely on rituals as a discretesubject. These authors are not really interested in rituals at all. They areinterested in power, in the construction of collectivities, and in thedynamic between individuals and collectivity. They are interested inmeaning, its production and reproduction. It is the opposite of a lazyborrowing of ethnology. Theuws and Alkemade, for example, begin bycriticizing those who would reduce weapon depositions in bogs to a ritualthat is explainable simply according to ‘some irrational, primitive habit’.They assume that rituals are imbricated in power relations. They writeagainst those who would interpret actions and objects according to ‘someready-made ‘‘symbolism’’’ that comes from outside the society. Criticiz-ing those who see rituals as ‘passive’ and ‘representational’, Theuws andAlkemade see them as active components in the construction of meaningand social roles, not because the ritual itself has agency, but because theindividuals who act are agents in the constitution of meaning for bothactions and objects used in their actions.72 In other words, these authorsare making the same points Buc makes but in a way that is far broader andsubtler, and far more open to more contention than Buc’s narrow,exegetical, clerical perspective allows.

It is true that the theoretical language of many of the articles in Ritualsof Power is overly arcane and abstruse. One wishes one could cast a spelland create the perfect historian of ritual: someone with Althoff ’s instinctfor the political, Nelson’s craftsmanship and empirical common sense,Theuws’s theoretical sophistication, and maybe even Paul Dutton’s orStephen Glosecki’s sense of style.73 But no spell is necessary. Medieval andEarly Modern Ritual is a collection of articles of even wider geographicaland chronological range than Rituals of Power. Again the quality of thearticles is uneven; the finest articles, however, are on early medieval topics:Marguerite Ragnow’s ‘Ritual before the Altar’ and Martha Rampton’s

72 ‘Sword Depositions’, p. 409.73 Paul Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (Lincoln, NE, 1994); Stephen

Glosecki, Shamanism and Old English Poetry (New York, 1989).



‘Burchard of Worms and Female Magical Ritual’. Both are superb.Rampton does the impossible. She fully recognizes the composite natureof Burchard’s Corrector, the classical traditions that underlie its texts, andthe chimaeric projections74 of its depictions of women’s magic; yet shedoes not surrender to historiographical agnosticism. Instead, her aware-ness of the problems and complexity of the text make her conclusionsabout the magical practices of women contemporary to Burchard all themore convincing and courageous. Her theory (like most in this volume,largely Susan Bell’s practice-orientation) is also cogently applied and verysupple. This is also true of Ragnow’s article on donations made uponaltars, which is not only the best article I have read on the subject, but oneof the best articles I have ever read on any medieval ritual. Ragnowmanages to be traditionally rigorous yet say things that are new. Andthough she does not flaunt theory, she is not only fully aware of thetheoretical implications of her argument, she also manages to do some-thing theoretically quite important, in emphasizing the dense concatena-tion of meanings that attaches to altars and thereby essentializes theirmeaningfulness to contemporaries. Quite apart from these virtues,Ragnow’s application of the idea of ‘historical memory’ to the problemof the continuity of Roman law is one of the best models for under-standing the problem I’ve read.

So there is hope. However, it will not be met by polemicists. It will bemet by historians like Ragnow and Rampton who understand theimportance of theory but also understand the distinctive, historicallyshaped and socially reproduced habitus that defines the community ofscholars who work on the early Middle Ages: awareness of sourcecriticism; attention to detail; mistrust of reification and a sense for theintegrity of the concrete and local; and not least, understanding of andrespect for the writing of predecessors and peers.

University of California, Berkeley

74 For this use of ‘chimaeric’, see Gavin I. Langmuir,Toward aDefinition of Antisemitism (Berkeley,1990).

388 Geoffrey Koziol


Koziol, G. - Review - The Dangers of Polemics. is Ritual Still Interesting Topic...

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