Memoria y Civilización (Nov 2000)
From Ritual Practice to Cultural Text
Abstract
This article takes up the distinction between the textual and social practices (that is, actions taken in the social world). In the same way that different literary genres are themselves subject to different interpretative operations, ritual practice and the reading of texts are not strictly analogous. Here Clifford Geertz's famous rendering of the so-called "text analogy" in the social sciences can be misleading. If we believe that it is important to recover historical meanings expressed in ritual form, then we must be careful to differentiate between how social practices work from how texts work. This article considers ritual practices, including those of sociability, in British radical politics in the age of the French revolution, as well as considering rationalist hostility to ritual performance and the privileging of the printed text over ritual and spectacle.
