Sacred Order: The Reliance of Ritual on Norms, the Emergence of Norms from Ritual

Conference, 4–6 July 2023

In the tradition of Émile Durkheim, ritualization as the practice which sets apart our mundane reality from what we consider to be sacred is closely connected with the idea of religion. However, as ritual theories have shown over the past decades, ritual practices which create the sacred by differentiating it from the profane are not merely religious but relate to all kinds of social acts. Roy Rappaport therefore once called ritualization “the basic social act” (Ecology, Meaning, and Religion, Richmond, CA, North Atlantic Books, 1979, 176). A close reading of this finding in the light of norm theory suggests that practices of differentiating between the sacred and the profane may in fact be at the core of norm creation. And yet, as this normative practice, ritualization is not merely a creation of order ex nihilo, but seems to be highly reliant on a normative fundament itself. This finding invites us to study the mutual relationship between ritual and order, as both appear to serve as a constitutive factor for the other. Rituals as social practices which distance themselves from everyday actions by doing them differently rely on order to transcend our common experiences in an attempt to engage with the sacred. On the other hand, norms—as the very peculiar social facts which markedly distinguish our everyday life from alternative worlds which might prevail—rely on ritualization to contrast the world we have with “our projections of alternative ‘worlds- that-might-be’” (R Cover, “The Folktales of Justice,” Cap. U. L. Rev. 14 (1985), 181). This understanding of norms as bridges between “the world we have” and “a world we can imagine” (R Cover, “Bringing the Messiah through the Law,” in Pennock & Chapman, eds., Religion, Morality, and the Law, New York, NYU Press, 1988, 201) resonates in many academic fields which have to face the enduring question of how to relate social facts to those atypical facts we call “norms”.