Doing Rituals: An Enactivist Reading of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms

Ritual theory has undergone a significant revision over the last few decades. Whereas ritual was once discussed mainly in terms of symbolism, now the importance of ritual action is foregrounded. Many theorists consider doing rituals, rather than inferring theological subtleties supposedly implied by them, to be paramount. However, this school of thought should not be interpreted as marginalizing meaning as a fundamental category, though a basic reorientation is required: meaning comes predominantly from ritual enaction rather than from ideas or beliefs thought to be encoded and expressed in ritual. In this article, ritual action and enaction are juxtaposed in order to arrive at a set of productive comparisons between the two frameworks. As in the paradigm of enaction, it is here suggested that ritual is an important means of “bringing forth a world.”