Eric Gans has been exploring the concept of the “sacred” in some recent Chronicles. This is obviously a welcome development and one to be followed, as it returns us to the fundamental concerns of GA, the co-constituent origin of language, the human and the sacred. But it also has me thinking of the insufficient minimality of the concept itself—it’s one of those words, like “aesthetics” and “freedom,” that took on a particular shape in the 19th and 20th centuries within the Western world and seemed obviously universally applicable—but has every social order had, not just what “we” would call the “sacred,” but an actual word for it? The same problem holds for “religion,” which seems universally applicable because, after all, it’s a university discipline, but as anyone in religious studies will tell you, if there’s any consensus in that field today it’s that there is no single phenomenon called “religion” that includes all the practices that have been traditionally studied in religion departments (let alone those that have not been studied because they didn’t seem to fit the concept). We can apply the same objection to the word “ritual,” which I’ve also relied on fairly systematically. I think ritual does get closer to something we might be able to locate in every social order, and it’s not as if I’m going to institute a self-imposed ban on its use, but I certainly couldn’t prove its universality and, anyway, we need to be able to move away from any concept that our inquiry comes to suggest might not meet the highest standards of minimality.
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Eric Gans has been exploring the concept of the “sacred” in some recent Chronicles. This is obviously a welcome development and one to be followed, as it returns us to the fundamental concerns of GA, the co-constituent origin of language, the human and the sacred. But it also has me thinking of the insufficient minimality of the concept itself—it’s one of those words, like “aesthetics” and “freedom,” that took on a particular shape in the 19th and 20th centuries within the Western world and seemed obviously universally applicable—but has every social order had, not just what “we” would call the “sacred,” but an actual word for it? The same problem holds for “religion,” which seems universally applicable because, after all, it’s a university discipline, but as anyone in religious studies will tell you, if there’s any consensus in that field today it’s that there is no single phenomenon called “religion” that includes all the practices that have been traditionally studied in religion departments (let alone those that have not been studied because they didn’t seem to fit the concept). We can apply the same objection to the word “ritual,” which I’ve also relied on fairly systematically. I think ritual does get closer to something we might be able to locate in every social order, and it’s not as if I’m going to institute a self-imposed ban on its use, but I certainly couldn’t prove its universality and, anyway, we need to be able to move away from any concept that our inquiry comes to suggest might not meet the highest standards of minimality.