From one rite to another: the memory in ritual and the ethnologist’s recollection

In his ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’, Wittgenstein (1982:28) writes of the comparative study of rites, The most striking thing seems to me to be, beyond all the similarities, the diversity of all these rites. There is a multiplicity of faces with common features continually reappearing here and there’. I will focus on this question of the multiplicity of reappearances of common features from one rite to another, attempting to structure it by confining myself to two segments of distinct ceremonies that I observed among the Gurmanceba (Gurma, Gourmantché) of Burkina Faso.