Les rites comme actes d'institution

Abstract

The Instituting rites. What does the rite of passage separate ? A before and an after — circumcision, for example — or those the rite concerns and those it does not — men and women. In the crossing of the line, should one consider the crossing, as the expression «rite of passage» implies, or the line itself, the arbitrary limit which the rite of institution — in the active sense of «instituting» — consecrates and legitimates ? The instituting rite, an act of social magic, owes its symbolic efficacy to the fact that it signifies to a man what he is and what he has to be : «become what you are». The work of institution is a process of inculcation which treats the body as a memory so as to induce a second nature : social function.