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Recovering Durkheim's Recovering Durkheim’s ‘Second Program of Research’ Roy Rappaport and Jeffrey C. Alexander Massimo Rosati Abstract: Durkheim’s ‘second program of research’ above all refers to his project as developed in Les formes e´le´mentaires de la vie religieuse. This essay examines how it has in turn been developed and taken up nowadays in the work of Roy Rappaport and Jeffrey Alexander. Both of them are concerned with the centrality of ritual and the sacred as active, constitutive elements not just of religion but of all social life, not least modern social life. However, a key difference between them can be found in the issue of the internal dimension of ritual and of the individual’s participation in public performance of this. Rappaport emphasizes some sort of general notion of acceptance, in an effort to open up things and get away from the particular epistemological as well as theological commitments of the idea of belief. Alexander still appears to work with the modernist epistemology and ‘Protestant’ theology of belief. His project of a new Durkheimian cul- tural sociology has nonetheless itself opened up all kinds of things, and is one of the most creative and dynamic research programs in sociology now- adays. Keywords: Durkheim; Rappaport; Alexander; ritual; the sacred; belief Introduction The field of Durkheimian studies is multicoloured. Even if Durkheim schol- ars are widely spread around the world, it seems to me that one can basically distinguish three macro-areas of Durkheimian studies. France, where schol- ars are used to focusing on the Durkheim of the Division of Labour, The Rules of the Sociological Method, and Suicide, and where the Durkheim of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is almost neglected; England, where on the contrary, the most discussed book is the Elementary Forms of Reli- gious Life, and – more recently – the thought of some Durkheimians such as Marcel Mauss; and the United States, sharing with England the interest Durkheimian Studies, Volume 13, 2007: 105–121, © Durkheim Press ISSN 1362-024X doi: 10.3167/ds.2007.130105 Massimo Rosati in the later Durkheim. However, at least in recent decades, France and England share a more historical, contextualist and philological approach to Durkheim’s thought, whereas in the United States scholars prefer a more theoretical and presentist reading of the French sociologist.1 These substantial and methodological differences are quite a mystery to me, and I really feel they should be discussed. However, leaving aside my own substantial and methodological preferences and convictions, what I intend to do is try to discuss, briefly, two contemporary ways of developing Durk- heim’s ‘second program of research’, to borrow the expression of Philippe Steiner (1994) Both start from the sociological and/or anthropological study of religion understood as ‘the missing key to open all the sociological doors’ (Pickering 1984), to state something both supposedly universal about society in general, and more particular about modern and contemporary societies. I am going to sidestep ‘classical’, American interpretations of Durkheim, such as offered by Parsons, Coser, Nisbet, and restrain myself to the works of Roy Rappaport and Jeffrey C. Alexander. More particularly, I will focus on their ways of recovering and expanding Durkheim’s thought and intuitions, rather than on their reading of Durkheim tout court. I con- sider their works among the most interesting and useful contemporary ways to recover and theoretically develop Durkheim’s second program of research. In my view, they have at least another common denominator, namely the emphasis on ritual as the ‘basic social act’, the infrastructure of social life (Scubla 2003), a brick of the intellectual building of the Elementary Forms highly reconsidered in contemporary interpretations of Durkheim, above all in a culturalist milieu. Rappaport’s Cybernetics of the Sacred Ritual and Religion in The Making of Humanity, Roy Rappaport’s most significant work, was published posthumously in 1999 as a result of more than three decades of research on the relationships between religion, society and ecology. It has been judged as a ‘milestone in the anthropology of religion’, comparable in scope to Durkheim, and indeed as the ‘first system- atic attempt to address the question which Durkheim left unanswered’ (Hart 1999: xiv). This judgment expressed by Keith Hart, a colleague of Rappaport’s at the University of Michigan, is shared for example by Robert Bellah (1999: 569). As for my own view, Rappaport’s Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity is one of the most significant books I have read in recent years, if not the most significant. If the later Durkheim was a very radical thinker, as I believe, given his obsession that religion was the key to the study of (every) society, Rappaport’s investigation of the role of rituals and religion in the making of humanity seems to me in perfect keeping with Durkheim’s theoretical radicalism. Consequently, I cannot fail to agree with Hart’s and Bellah’s judgments.2 106 Recovering Durkheim’s ‘Second Program of Research’ Again, according to Hart (1999: xvi), Rappaport ‘acknowledges Durkheim as a founder’. I would speculate that he acknowledges Durkheim as a predecessor well beyond the number of pages he dedicates explicitly to the French sociologist. In his five hundred page volume, Rappaport deals with Durkheim’s thought directly in eight pages, more or less, partly with refer- ence to the ‘categories’, particularly time, and partly to the idea of the sacred. However, besides complex epistemological problems that might differentiate Rappaport from Durkheim, a Durkheimian approach is, in my understanding, the central core of Rappaport’s project. Like The Elementary Forms – and maybe more than The Elementary Forms – Ritual and Religion is a very complex work, with many ways into it. However, the author himself suggests we read it as ‘a treatise on ritual: first on ritual’s internal logic, next on the nature of what (i.e. sanctity) its logic entails, truth, and finally, on the place of ritual and its fruits in the evolution of humanity’ (Rappaport 1999: 3). Here we have a slight but important difference compared with The Elementary Forms. In my view, The Elementary Forms is first of all a treatise on the sacred, and only eventually does it become a treatise on ritual, at the end recognized by Durkheim as the dynamo of religion, its most enduring element. On the contrary, Rappaport starts with ritual, from the beginning recognized as the central, basic element of religion, moral obligation and social contract, as I will shortly try to illustrate. Ritual is the dynamo of a hierarchy of regulative elements of social life. Regulation – the centrality of regulation is another important similarity with Durkheim – and its relationship with ritual, can be taken as the most convenient thread to sew together the complex fabric of Rappaport’s work. According to Rappaport, social life is regulated by a hierarchy of struc- tures, described as the cybernetics of the Holy, encompassed by ritual. It is top-down cybernetics. Its towering elements are the so-called Ultimate Sacred Postulates (USPs), the linguistic and more rational component of the Holy, namely the sacred – the other being the numinous. Rappaport provides a diagram that represents in an oversimplified form the cybernetics of the Holy, but whose logic can also be expressed as follows: 1. USPs sanctify authorities, institutions, and the various forms of directives constituting regulatory hierarchies; 2. The operations of the regulatory hierarchy influence, to say the least, prevail- ing material and social conditions; 3. Material and social conditions determine to a great extent, or even define, the well-being of those subject to the sanctified regulatory hierarchy; 4. Those subordinate to the regulatory hierarchy, the members of the commu- nity, are the congregations themselves participating in the rituals accepting, and thus establishing, the USPs which, in turn, sanctify the regulatory 107 Massimo Rosati hierarchy and, often, explicitly accept the connection of elements of such hierarchies to the USPs. Thus, the validity of the USP and the connection of elements of the regulatory hierarchies...tothose postulates, is ultimately contingent upon their acceptance by those presumably subject to them ...- Prophets not only may challenge the connections of incumbent authorities to the sources of sanctity but may also claim sanctified status for their own injunctions and even may proclaim new USPs. In sum, if authorities wish to maintain their sanctity, which is to say their legitimacy, and to maintain the sanctity of the regulatory structures over which they preside, they must be sure that those regulatory structures remain in reasonable working order and are reasonably responsive to those subject to them. (Rappaport 1999: 429–430, original italics) Here it is worth noting a couple of elements that echo The Elementary Forms. First, politics – the main function of which is the regulation of social life – is only one element of the regulatory system, and it must be encompassed in much broader cybernetics, the key of which is religion. That is why Durkheim at a certain stage stopped writing on politics and shifted to religion, according to Lacroix (1981). Secondly, the sacred and the USPs that have a towering position in the regulatory hierarchy are in the end contingent upon the ritual legitimation on the part of the subjects, exactly as in The Elementary Forms. Durkheim recognized and could explain – in contrast with Robertson Smith – God’s dependence upon believers, and society’s dependence upon individuals. Ritual, as already noted, is the dynamo of the cybernetics of the Holy. And Rappaport’s analysis of the formal and structural logic of ritual is the most significant contribution he gave, in my opinion, to the depth of Durkheim’s pioneering investigation.
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