ABSTRACT
Understanding ritual practice is not a question of decoding the internal logic of a symbolism but of restoring its practical necessity by relating it to the real conditions of its genesis, that is, to the conditions in which its functions, and the means it uses to attain them, are defined. Like the acts of jurisprudence, ritual cowes its practical coherence to the fact that it is the product of a single system of conceptual schemes immanent in practice, organizing not only the perception of objects but also the production of practices. The language of the body, whether articulated in gestures or, a fortiori, is incomparably more ambiguous and more overdetermined than the most overdeter-mined uses of ordinary language. This is why ritual “roots” are always broader and vaguer than linguistic roots, and why the gymnastics of ritual, like dreams, always seems richer than the verbal translations, at once unilateral and arbitrary, that may be given of it.
