GENESIS AND STRUCTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS FIELD Pierre Bourdieu “Man,” said Wilhelm von Humbolt, “grasps objects principally—in fact, one could say, exclusively, since his feelings and his actions depend on his perceptions—as language presents them to him. In the same way that he reels off language outside of his own being, he entangles himself in it; and each language draws a magic circle around the people to whom it belongs, a circle one can leave only by leaping her. ”' This theory of language as a mode of knowledge—a theory that sirer extended to all “symbolic forms” and, in particular, to symbols of ritual andmyth, that is to say to religion conceived as language—applies also to theories, and in particular to theories of religion as instruments for the construction of scientific facts. This occurs, in effect, as if the exclusion of questions and principles that makes other constructions of religious facts possible were part of the conditions of possibility implicit in each of the great theories of religion (which, as we will see, could all be situated in relation to the three positions symbolized by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim). In order to leave one of these magic circles without simply falling into another or without condemning oneself to jumping indefinitely from one to another—in brief, in order to be able to integrate the contributions of various Research, Volume 13, pages 1-44. Copyright ©1991 by JAI Press Ine. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN: 1-55938-238-4Z PIERRE BOURDIEU partial and mutually exclusive theories into a coherent system (contributions as limiting, in their current state, as the antinomies that oppose them)—one must endeavor to situate onself at the geometric vantage point in the various perspectives from which one can see, at the same time, both what can and what cannot be perceived from each of these separate points of view. Considering religion as_a language, that is as both an instrument of communi recisely, as a Synbolc median a once srucned ato ep ahd structuring, as_a_condition of possibility of the primordial form of consensus that is the agreement on the meaning of signs and on the meaning of the world that they permit one to construct, the fir: is i proceeds from the objective or conscious intention to give a scientific answer to the Kantian probk i . This Is the form Cassirer gave the problem in his attempt to establish the function fulfilled by language, myth (or religion), art, and science in the construction of various “domains of ™ This theoretical intention is altogether explicit in the work of(Durkheii urkheim, who considers the sociology of ao" a - eS) on religion as a dimen; i¢ sociology of know! between _apriority and empiricism in a “sociologi which i other than a sociology of symbol s * “empirical” foundati i jor “The debt of structural anthropology to Durkheimianism, however many times it is declared, often goes unnoticed. Philosophers may even be struck with admiration for their own acumen when they discover the survival of a Kantian problematic in works (such as the chapter of The Savage Mind consecrated to “the logic of totemic classifications”) that are still a response, no doubt incomparably more elaborate, to the Durkheimian and therefore Kantian problem, of fgrimtve farms oI casstvemta If this is so, it is not only that the fundamental contributions of the Durkheimian school are so strongly repressed by the joint censorship of spiritualist propriety and the bon ton intellectuel that they can only appear in distinguished discussion in the more becoming disguise of Saussurian linguistics;’ it is also that the most decisive contribution of structuralist science consists of providing the theoretical and methodological instruments permitting, practically speaking, the realization of the intention to discover the immanent logic of myth and ritual. Even though it already expresses itself in Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology, a defense of a “tautegorical” (as opposed to an “allegorical”) interpretation of myth, this intention would have remained only a pious vow if, thanks to the model of structural linguistics, the interest in myth as s/ructured structure had not _been swept away by interest_in the myth as séructuring \ a city 5S gr Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 3 But if one is always justified in leaving aside, at least provisionally, the question of the economic and social functions of mythical, ritual, or religious systems submitted to analysis, to the extent that by calling an interpretation “allegorical” it becomes an obstacle to the application of the structural method, this methodological resolution remains more and more sterile and dangerous in proportion to the distancing of one’s self from the symbolic productions of the least differentiated societies or the least differentiated symbolic productions (like language, this product of the anonymous and collective labor of successive generations) of class-divided societies." Because it opens an unlimited field to a method that found its most fertile and rigorous applications in phonology and “mythology,” without asking about the social conditions of Possibility of this methodological privilege, semiology implicitly deals with all symbolic systems as simple instruments of communication and knowledge (a Postulate that, strictly speaking, is legitimate only for the phonological level of language). Semiology also risks importing into all analytic objects the theory of consensus implicit in the primacy granted to the question of meaning and that Durkheim states explicitly in the form of a theory of the function of the logical and social integration of “collective representations” and, in particular, of religious “forms of classification.” Because symbolic systems derive their structure, as the case of. religion shows, from the systematic application of one and the same principle of division, and Because they can organize the natural and social world only by carving out ‘antagonistic classes (Owing to the fact that they give birth to meaning an consensus _on_ meaning by the logic of inclusion and exclusion), they are predisposed by their very structure simultaneously to serve the functions of inclusion and exclusion, of association and dissocia ‘ation_and cone Tee “social functions” (in the Durkheimian or “structural- unctionalist” sense of the term) always tend to be transformed into political the logical function of ordering the world (which myth fulfilled in a socially undifferentiated way by effecting a diacrisis, at once arbitrary and systematic, in the universe of things) is subordinated to the socially differentiated functions of social differentiation and legitimation of differences; that is, as the divisions that religious ideology operates come to re-cover (in the double meaning of the term) social divisions into competing or antagonistic groups or classes. The idea that symbolic systems (religion, art, or even language) can s of power and of politics—that is, once again, of order, but in a totally different sense—is no less foreign to those who make the sociology of symbolic facts a dimension of the sociology of knowledge than the interest in the structure of these systems (in their manner of speaking, of that of which they speak— their syntax—rather than for that of which they speak—their thematic) is to those who make it a dimension of the sociology of power.PIERRE BOURDIEU And it could not be otherwise, because each of the theories can seize the aspect that it seizes only by surmounting the epistemological obstacle that constitutes for it the equivalent, in the order of spontancous sociology, of she aspect that structures the complementary and contrasting theory. Thus/the, appearance of intelligibili t_all the “allegorical” (or external interpretations of myth procured so cheaply——whether ical, meteorological, psychological, psychoanalytical, or even sociological (as the explanation by universal bi i i i i social functions)—has no doubt contributed at least_as much to obstructing the “tautegorical” or structural interpretation-as the impression-of incoherence and absurdity contributed to reinforcing the propensity t inthi: or, at best, an elementary foym of philosophical speculation, a “country science,” as Plato would sa is happens as if Lévi-Strauss had not been the first to penetrate the miror of explanations that were “all too simple,” aw! because naively projective. He did this at the price of a radical doubt, hyperbolic Led: in regard to all outside readings, which brings him to reject the very principle of the relationship between the structures of symbolic systems and social structures: “On the other hand, psychoanalysts and many anthropologists have shifted the problems away from the natural or cosmological toward the sociological and psychological fields. But then the interpretation becomes too easy: If a given mythology confers prominence on a certain figure, let us say an evil grandmother, it will be claimed that in such a society grandmothers are actually evil and that mythology reflects the social structure and the social relations.” By stating that magical or religious actions are world principle and must be done “in order to live a long life,""" (tax Weber} himself from grasping the religious message as does Lévi the product of “intellectual operations” as opposed to “affective” or practical) and from raising the question of strictly logical and noseological functions of what he considers a quasi-systematic ensemble of responses to existential questions. But, at the same time, he gives himself a way of linking the co 's of mythical discourse (and even its syntax) to the religious interests of those who produce it, diffuse it, and receive it, and more profoundly, of constructi expression of the strategies of different categories ‘ali ing for monopoly over the administrati i vation anc t classes interested in their services. It is here that Max Weber—who concurs with Marx that religion conserves the social order by contributing, in his own words, to the “legitimation” of the power of “the dominant” and to the “domestication of the dominated”—provides the means of escaping the simplistic alternative of which his most uncertain analyses are the product, that is the opposition between the illusion of the absolute autonomy of mythical ve weber Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field Ww 5 or reli ious discourse and the reducinist theory that makes it the direct reflection of social structures. This brings up what the two op posing and complementary positions both forget: carried out by specialized producers and spokespeople invested with the “power, institutional or not, to respond to a particular category of needs belonging to Certain social groups with a definite type of practice or discourse. Weber finds in the historical origin of a body of specialized agents the basis for the relative autonomy that the Marxist tradition grants, without deriving all_the tonsequences, to religion.” This simultaneously leads to the heart of the system principle of ideological alchemy by which the transfiguration of social relations into supernatural relations operates and is therefore inscri i ure oF TRinge ane Ue eteone imseribed in the natur At this point, we can see the common root of the two partially and mutually exclusive traditions in the sociology of rion. fe Durkheimian question of the “social functions” that religion fulfills for the “Social body” as a whole can reformulated in the form of the question of the political functions that religion TUThs Tor Various Social classes in a given social formation by virtue of its strictly symbolic efficacy /If one takes seriously both the Durkhei social origin of schemes of thought, perception, appreciation, and action and jact_of class divisions, one is necessarily driven to the hi i < correspondence exists between social structures (strictly speaking, power structures) and mental structures. his correspondence obtains through the structure of symbolic systems, hi religion, art, and so forth; or, more precisely, religion contributes to the (hidden) imposition of the principles of structuration of the perception and thinking of the world, and of the social world in particular, insofar as it imposes a system of practices and representations whose structure, objectively founded on a principle of political division, presents itself as the natural-supernatural structure of the cosmos. 1. THE PROGRESS OF THE DIVISION OF RELIGIOUS LABOR AND THE PROCESS OF THE MORALIZATION AND SYSTEMATIZATION OF RELIGIOUS PRACTICES AND BELIEFS 1.1. The technological, economic, and social transformations that are correlated with the birth and development of towns, and in particular advances in the division of labor and the appearance of the separation of intellectual and physical labor, constitute the common condition of two processes that can only unfold in a relationship of interdependence and reciprocal reinforcement, 4 namely (the constitution of a relatively a s religious6 PIERRE BOURDIEU The emergence and development of world religions are associated with the emergence and development of the city. The opposition between the city and the country marks a fundamental break in the history of religion, just as it marks one of the most significant religious divisions in all of society affected by this morphological opposition. Having observed “the deep division of intellectual labor and physical labor, that is the separation of city and country,” Marx wrote in The German Ideology: “Division of labor only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labor appears. From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on, consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of ‘pure’ theory, theology, philosophy, morality, etc.”" There is hardly any need to mention the characteristics of the peasant condition that stand in the way of the “rationalization” of religious practices and beliefs, such as subordination to the natural world that encourages “the idolatry of nature”;'* the temporal nature of agricultural work and seasonal activity, which intrinsically resists calculation and rationalization;'* and the spatial dispersion of the rural population, which makes economic and symbolic exchanges difficult and hampers the awakening of collective interests. Conversely, the economic and social transformations that are related to urbanization—the development of commerce and above all of craftsmanship; occupational activities relatively independent of natural risks and, at the same time, relatively rationalized or rationalizable; or the development of intellectual and spiritual individualism favored by the assembling of individuals snatched from the enveloping traditions of ancient social structures—promote the “rationaliza- tion” and the “moralization” of religious needs. Weber observes: “The bourgeoisie depends economically on work which is continuous and rational (or at least empirically rationalized); such work contrasts with the seasonal character of agricultural work that is exposed to unusual and unknown natural forces; it makes the connection between means and ends, success and failure relatively transparent.” As “the i iate relationshi realities of nature” disappears, these forces “become an intellectual problem as soon as they are no Ton; art i i i bs “the rationalist quest for the transcendental meaning of existence” begins to pose itself, while the religious i itself and direct relations wit Client introduce moral values int: igi isan," ‘The greatest merit of Max Weber, however, is to have shown that urbanization (with its correlati sformati: tributes _to_the “rationalization” and “mi 2 insofar _as it favors the development of a body of specialists in the administration of religious goods. The processes of the “internalization and rationalization of religiosity usually develop parallel to a certain degree of handicraft production, most of the time | Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 7 to that of the urban trades. This involves the Projection of ethical criteria and commandments and the transfiguration of gods into ethical powers which will reward good and punish evil; now the gods themselves must conform to moral expectations and the individual’s sense of sinfulness and his desire for redemption can emerge. It is impossible to reduce this parallel development to an unambiguous relation of cause and effect: Religious rationalization has its own dynamics, which economic conditions merely channel; above all, it is linked to the emergence of priestly education.”"” If the religion of Jehovah underwent an “ethico-rational” evolution ina Palestine which, in spite of its great cultural centers, never knew an urban and industrial development comparable to that of Egypt and Mesopotamia, it is because—unlike the Mediterranean polis that never produced rationalized religion, given the influence of Homer and above all the absence of a body of priests, organized hicrocratically and specially prepared for its function — ancient Palestine ordained a citizen clergy. But, more precisely, if the worship of Jehovah triumphed over the tendencies toward syncretism, it is because of the conjunction between the interests of the citizen priests and the new type of religious interests to which urbanization gave rise in the laity. This overcame the obstacles commonly opposed to the progress towards monotheism: on the one hand, “the pressure of the powerful material and ideological interests vested in the priests, who resided in the cultic centers and regulated the cults of the particular gods,” and were therefore hostile to the process of “concentration” that makes the small enterprises of salvation disappear and, on the other hand “the religious need of the laity for an accessible and tangible familiar religious object . . . which would above all be accessible to magical influences.”"* As political conditions became more and more difficult, the Jews, who could only wait for a future improvement in their fate through their conformity to the divine commandments, came to judge as unsatisfying the various traditional forms of worship and, particularly, the oracles with their ambiguous and enigmatic responses. They felt a need for more rational methods of knowing the divine will and for priests capable of practicing them. In this case, the conflicts between this collective demand—which, in fact, coincided with the objective interest of the Levites, since it tended to exclude all rival cults —and the particular interests of the priests of numerous private sanctuaries found, in the centralized and hierarchical organization of the priesthood, a solution that would preserve the rights of all priests without contradicting the establishment of a monopoly on the worship of Jehovah in Jerusalem. 1.2. The process that leads to the constitution of claims'” specifically developed in view of the ccoiea foroduatiog, or Fiffusion| sion Boods| and the evolution (relatively autonomous from economic conditions: eral system of these claims towards a more differentiated and more complex structure, that is, towards a relatively autonomous religious field, is8 PIERRE BOURDIEU accompanied by a process of systematization and moralization of religious practices and representations. This leads from myth as an objectively systematic (quasi) system to religious ideology as a (quasi) system expressly systematized and, in parallel, from taboo and magical contamination to sin, or from mana, and good God, preser ‘ety. Extremely rare in primitive societies, the development of true monotheism (as opposed to “monolatry,” which is but a form of polytheism), according to Paul Radin, is linked to the emergence of a strongly organized body of Priests. That is to say that monotheism, totally ignored by societies whose economies relied on crops, fishing, and/or hunting, is encountered only in the dominant classes of societies already based on a developed agriculture and a division into classes (some West African societies, the Polynesians, the Dakota and Winnebago Indians) in which the advances of the division of labor are accompanied by a correlative division of religious work.” To attempt to understand this process of systematization and moralization as the direct and immediate effect of economic and social transformations would be to ignore that the real efficacy of these transformations is restricted to making possible— by a sort of double negation, that is, by the suppression of the negative economic conditions for the development of myths—the progressive constitution of a relatively autonomous religious field. This then facilitates the convergent action (in spite of the competition between them) of the priestly body (with its material and symbolic interests) and “extrapriestly forces,” that is, the religious demands of certain categories of the laity and the metaphysical or ethical revelations of a prophet.”! Thus the process of moralization of notions such as ate, time, aidos, phtonos, and so forth—which are marked fundamentally by “the transfer of the notion of purity from the nf@gical ordégto thesa order,” that is, by the transformation of the fault as blemish (miasma) into “sin”—is completely intelligible only if one takes into account (outside of the concomitant transformations of the economic and social structures) the transformations of the structure of the relations of symbolic production, which led to the constitution of a veritable intellectual field in the Athens of the fifth century. The priesthood partially colluded in the rationalization of religion: it found the principle of its legiti i i ich_in feturn, it secured validity and perpetuation, The exegetical work imposed on the priesthood by the confrontation or apposition of different mythico-ritual traditions (until then juxtaposed in the same urban space) or by the necessity to confer on obscure rituals or myths a meaning more in agreement with the ethical norms and world view of the recipients of their preaching and also the values and self-interests of the cultured group tends to substitute for the objective systematization of mythologies the intentional coherence of theologies, even of philosophies. This prepares the transformation of the Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 9 syncretic analogy that is the basis of magico-mythical thought into a rational and conscious analogy of its principles or even into syllogism.” The autonomy of the religious field asserts itself in the tendency of specialists to lock themselves up in autarchic reference to already accumulated religious knowledge and in the esotericism of a quasi-cumulative production, destined first of all for its producers:”* hence, the typical priestly taste for transfiguratory imitation and disconcerting infidelity, deliberate polyonymy and practiced ambiguity, equivocal or methodical obscurity and systematic metaphor—in brief, all the word games rediscovered in all the scholarly traditions and whose source we can find, with Jean Bollack, in allegory, understood as the art of thinking something else with the same words, of saying something else with the same words, or saying the same things differently (“to give a purer meaning to words of the same tribe”).”* 1.3. Inasmuch as it is the result of the monopolization of the administration of the goods of salvation by a body of religious specialists, socially recognized as the exclusive holders of the specific competence necessary for the production or reproduction of a deliberately organized corpus of secret (and therefore rare) knowledge, the constitution of a religious field goes hand in hand with the objective dispossessi find themselves constituted as the /aity (or the profane, in the double meaning. of the word) dispossessed of religious capital (as accumulated symbolic labor) and recognizing the legitimacy of that dispossession from the mere fact that they misrecognize it as such. > Objective dispossession means nothing other than the objective relationship produced when groups or classes occupying an inferior position in the structure of the distribution of religious goods confront the new type of goods of salvation born of the dissociation of physical labor and symbolic labor. This Structure is superimposed on the structure of the distribution of the instruments of religious production, that is, competence, or, as Max Weber would say, religious “qualification.” Objective dispossession does not necessarily imply religious “pauperization,” that is, a process aimed at accumulating and oncentrating in the hands of a particular group a religious capital previously more equally distributed among all members of society.’* Nevertheless, if it is true that this capital can perpetuate itself unaltered, as much in its content as in its distribution, while finding itself objectively devalued in and by the relation that unites it to new forms of capital, then this devaluation will continue, more or less rapidly, the wasting away of traditional capital and, thus, religious “pauperization” and symbolic separation, which expresses and reinforces the secrecy of sacred knowledge and secular ignorance. 1.3.1. Different social formations can be arranged—according to the degree of development and differentiation of their religious apparatus, that is,10 PIERRE BOURDIEU the objective solicitations mandated to assure the production, reproduction, conservation, and diffusi igious goods—according to their distance from two extremes(religious self-sufficiency, gn one hand and, on the other, iplete monopolization, i juction by the specialist. 1.3.1.1, One of the two extreme kinds of structure of the distribution of religious capital corresponds to opposed types of objective (and actual) relations to religious goods and, in particular, to religious competence. This includes, on one side{ practical mastery} of a body of schemes of thinking and objectively systematic action, acquired inthe Tmplicit state by simple plicit state by simple familiarization, therefore common to all members of the group, and put to Work in the prereflexive mode: and, on the other, (fowledgeable- mastery of a_corpus of norms and explicit knowledges, explicitly and deliberatel systematized by specialists belonging to an institution sociall mandated To reproduce religious capital by an expressly pedagogic action. The other extreme OF organization of religious capital corresponds to clearly distinct types of symbolic systems, myths (or mythico-ritual systems) and religious ideologies (theogonies, cosmogonies, theologies), which are the product of a scholarly reinterpretation operated by reference to new functions—internal functions, correlated to the existence of the field of religious agents, and external functions, such as those born of the constitution of states and the development of class antagonisms and which give their raison d’étre to the great world religions with their universal pretentions. The ethical rejection of evolutionism and racist ideologies that are socially interdependent without being the least bit logically inseparable drives certain anthropologists to the reverse ethnocentrism of imputing to all societies, even the most “primitive,” forms of cultural capital that can be constituted only by a determined level of development in the division of labor. Peasant classes call this form of primitivist error the populist error: confounding disposession with pauperization leads to treating the decontextualized and reinterpreted odds and ends of a scholarly culture of the past as the precious relics of an original culture.”* In order to escape these errors, as the A of Weber (which seem little known to anthropologists) suggest, it suffices fo relate the structure of the system of religious practices and beliefs to the division of religious labor, This is what Durkheim does (without deriving from it any consequence. because that is not his objective), when he separates “complex religions,” characterized by “the clash of theologies, variatio, iplis groupings, diversity of individuals,” from “primitive religions”: “Suppose the religion considered is like that of Egypt, India or the classical antiquity. It is a confused mass of many cults, varying according to the locality, the temp Sy the generations, the dynasties, the invasions, etc. Popular superstitions are there confused with the purest dogmas. Neither the thought nor the activity of the e religion is evenly distribi jevers;-accardi h a St Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field " environment, and the circumstances, the beliefs as well as 1 ous OF Ta diferent ways Here Trop ae prise Pre Teg ee hs ys. Here they are priests, there they are monks, elsewhere laymen; there are mystics and rationalists, theologians and prophets, etc. Actually, it is extremely rare for anthropologists to provide systeméti information about the complete universe of religious agents, about their recruitment and training, their position and function in the social structure. They only occasionally raise the question of the distribution of religious competence according to sex, age, social rank, technical specialization, or this or that social variable; at the same time, they never question the relati between the practical mastery of the mythical syste i i i anthropologist acquires at the end ofan analysis based on systematic information gathered by observation and the survey of different informants &osen for their particular competence, Besides, if we know that today, in the name of a naively antifunctionalist ideology, they tend to dismiss the question of the relation between the social structure and the structure of mythical or religious representations, we see that they cannot raise the question (which only comparative studies can answer) of the relationship between the degree of development of the religious apparatus and the structure or thematic of the message. In brief, the intellectual tradition of the discipline, the relatively undifferentiated structure (even from the religious point of view) of societies studied, and the idiographical method used tend to impose on the anthropologist the theory of religion that summarizes the Durkheimian definition of the church, diametrically opposed to that of Max Weber: “Now the magician is for magic what the priest is for religion, but a college of priests is not a Church, any more than a religious congregation which should devote itself to some particular saint in the shadow of a cloister, would be a particular cult. A Church is not a fraternity of priests; it is a moral community formed by all the believers in a single faith, laymen as well as the priests." "It follows that, contrary to the fundamental aim of Durkheim,” who hoped. to find the truth of “complex religions” in “elementary religions,” the limits S\ of validity of the Durkheimian analysis of religion, and of any method that makes the sociology of religion a si imension of the “sociology of ,” stem from begging the question that separates the variations in a legree of differentiation of productive activity and, more dil from the correlative variations jon a gious message.” As Weber remarks correctly, the worldview proposed by the great world religions is the product of well-defined groups (Puritanical theologians, Confucian scholars, Hindu Brahmins, Jewish Levites, etc.), indeed even of individuals (like prophets) speaking for defined groups. Therefore, analysis of the internal structure of the religious message cannot ignore with impunity the sociologically constructed functions that it fulfills first for the groups that12 PIERRE BOURDIEU Produce it and then for the groups that consume it. The transformation of the message, in the sense of moralization and rationalization, for example, can account for at least part of the fact that the Telative weights of the functions that one might call internal grow in proportion to the autonomy of the field. 13.12. The opposition between the holders of the monopoly on_th management of the priests and the laity—objectively defined as profane (ii the body of administrators of the sacred)—is at the heart of the opposition between the sacred and the profane and-correlative ly, between legitimate manipulation (religion) and profane an Profanatory manipulation (magic or sorcery) of the sacred, whether it is a question of objective profanation (i.e. of magic or sorcery as a dominated religion) or of intentional profanation (i.e., of magic as an antireligion or an inverted religion). Because religion, like all s mbolic systems, is a of association and dissociation or, by of a system of practices and beliefs is made to appear as magic ot sorcery-an inferior religion, whenever it occupies a dominated position in the structure of relations of symbolic power, that is, in the system of relations between the systems of practices and beliefs belonging to a determined social formation. Thus it is common to designate aS “magic an ancient and inferior religion, one therefore primitive, or a contemporary and inferior religion, one therefore Profane (here equivalent to vulgar) and profanatory. Thus, the appearance of a religious ideology relegates ancient myths to the state of magic or sorcery. As Weber notes, it is the Suppression of one religion, under the influence of a political or ecclesiastical Power, to the advantage of another religion, reducing the ancient gods to the rank of demons, that usually gave birth to the opposition between religion and magic.” When anthropological tradition calls on the opposition between magic and religion to distinguish social formations endowed with an unequally developed religious apparatus from systems of unequally moralized and systematized religious representations, one has the right to ask if i really has broken with this first and primitive meaning. On the other hand fat the heart of the same social formation, tl itis igi i iction structure of the distribution of cultural capital. his is best seen in the relation between the religiosity of the Chinese working Masses and Confucianism, which was rejected as magic out of the spite and suspicion of the well-educated who. elaborated the refined ritual of state religion and who imposed the domination and the legitimacy of their doctrines and Social theories, despite some local and provisional victories of Taoist and Buddhist priests whose doctrines and practices were closer to the religious interests of the masses.?2 and the secular, between a legitimate or profane manipulation of the sacred OMsl conceals the opposition between differences of opgious competence tied to the GOK a Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 13 Given, on one side, the relation that links the degree of systematization and moralization of religion to the degree of development of the religious apparatus and, on the other, the relation that links Progress in the division of religious labor to progress in the division of labor and urbanization, most authors tend ‘0 accord to magic the characteristics of systems of practices and representations belonging to the least economically developed social formations or to the most disadvantaged social classes_of class-divided societies.” Most authors might agree that magical practices aim at concrete and specific goals, both particular and immediate (in Opposition to the more abstract, more general, and more distant ends that would be those of religion); that they are inspired by an intention to coerce or manipulate supernatural Powers (in opposition to the Propitiatory and contemplative dispositions of “prayer” for example); or that they live enclosed in the formalism and ritualism of do ut des.* This is because all these traits—which originate in conditions of existence dominated by an economic urgency prohibiting all distancing from present and immediate needs and unfavorable to the development of competent scholars in the field of religion—are, obviously, more often found in societies or social classes more impoverished from an economic point of view and thus predisposed to occupying a moe in the relations of material and symbolic power. But there is more:/every dominated practice or b doomed to appear as iftasmuch as, by its very existence and in the absence of any intention of _profanation, i itutes_an_objective contestation of the monopoly over the administrati therefore of the /egitimacy of the n fact, its survival is always a resistance, that is, the expression of a refusal to allow oneself to be deprived of the instruments of religious production. This is why magic inspired by an intention to profane is only the limiting case or, more precisely, the truth of magic as objective profanation: “Magic,” says Durkheim, “takes a sort of professional pleasure in profaning hol things: in its rites it iS contesting the monopoly to its logical conclusion when he redoubles the sacrilege that results from putting a secular agent with a sacred object by inverting or caricaturizing the delicate and complex operations to which the Prisoners of the monopoly on manipulation of religious goods must submit themselves in order to legitimate such juxtaposition, 2. STRICTLY RELIGIOUS INTEREST 2.1. A structured symbolic system functioning as a principle of structuration constructs experience (at the same time as it expresses it) in the name of logic in the state of practice, the unthought condition of all thought, and of the implicit problematic—that is, a system of undiscussed questions setting the14 PIERRE BOURDIEU boundaries of the field of what merits discussion as opposed to what is outside of discussion, therefore admitted without discussion. The effect ofConsecration (or legitimation) exercised by ‘planation also causes the system of Gispositi toward the natural world and U world inculcated by conditions of existence to undergo a change of nature, in Particular {ansmuting the ethos as_a system of implicit schemes of action and a reciation into ethic semi and ational crab a eee eis nos. Thus, religion i Predisposed to assume an ideological function, a practical and political function of bsoluttzation of the relative and legitimation of the arbitrary] It can fulfill this function only by fulfilling a logical and noseological function, which consists of reinforcing the material or symbolic strength that can be mobilized by a group or class to legitimate all that which socially defines this group or class, that is, all the characteristic Properties of one way of life among many, therefore arbitrarinesses, which are objectively attached to it inasmuch as it occupies a determined position in the social structure (the effect of consecration 4s sacralization by “naturalization” and eternalization), 2.1.1, Religion exercises an effect _of consecration in two w. Ss Consecrates by converting into limits of law, through its sanctifying sand the economic an i contributing to the symbolic manipulation of aspirations, whi toensure the adjustment of actual hopes to obiecti iti It _inculcates a s ee system of consecrated practices and representations jose_ structure (structured) reproduces, in a transfigured and therefore misrecognizable form, the structure of economic and social relations in fi ce ina inate social formation. Religion can produce the obj vity that it produc cturing, structure) only by producing (he misrecognition of the limits of the knowledge that it makes possible. Religion therefore adds the symbolic reinforcement of its sanctions to the limits and the logical and noseological barriers imposed by a determinate type of material conditions of existence (the effect of Tecognition-misrecognition), The effect of consecration, which any system of religious practices and Tepresentations tends to exercise (in a direct or immediate way, in the case of the religiosity of the dominant classes; in an indirect way, in the case of the religiosity of the dominated classes), must not be confused with the effect of recognition-misrecognition, which any system of religious practices and representations necessarily exercises through the imposition of a problematic, which is undoubtedly the most hidden mediation by which the effect of Consecration exerts itself. The ways of thinking and perception that constitute the religious problematic can only produce the objectivity they produce by producing misrecognition of the limits of the knowledge that they make Possible (ue, the immediate adhesion, in he Mode of bei ell. to the weak of tradition lived as a “natural world”) and the arbitrariness of the problematic, Ons, Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 15 asystem of questions that is not questioned. Thus, one cannot assign to popular Teligiosity @ mystifying Tunction of displacement of political conflicts while seeing in certain types of religious movements, such as medieval heresies, a disguised form of class struggle, without taking into account, as Engels does not, the effect of recognition-misrecognition, that is, everything that follows from the fact that class struggle can only realize itself, at a given point in time, by taking the form and borrowing the language (and not the “disguise”) of religious war. In brief, religious wars are neither the “violent theological quarrels” that they are most often taken to be nor the conflicts of “material class interests” that Engels discovers in them; they are both things at once because the categories of theological thinking make it impossible to think and conduct the class struggle as such insofar as they permit thinking it and conducting it as a religious war. In the same way that religious alchemy makes “a virtue of necessity” in the Practical realm, or according to William James, “makes that which is inevitable easy and pleasant,” likewise, in the noseological domain, it makes “a reason of necessity” by transforming the’social barriers that define the “unthinkable” into logical, eternal, necessary limits. Thus, for example, it would be easy to show, as Paul Radin suggests, that the representation of the relation between man and the supernatural powers proposed by different religions can exceed the limits imposed by the logic governing the exchange of goods in the group or class being considered.” This occurs as if the “eucharistic” representation of the sacrifice— almost totally unknown in primitive societies, where exchanges follow the law of the gift and countergift, and even in peasant classes that, as Weber observes, tend to follow, in their relations with God and the priest, “a strictly formalist moral of do wt des”—could only develop when the structures of economic exchange were transformed, in particular with the development of commerce and the urban artisanate. In establishing their relationships with customers, the artisans make possible a calculating conception of moral relations between man and divinity. And one knows the effect of consecration that could be exercised in return, not only in the practical domain but also in the theoretical domain. The religious transfiguration turned the ascetic ethos of the nascent bourgeois class into a religious ethic of worldly asceticism. 2.2. The aspect of &ligious interes} that is pertinent for sociology, that is, the interest that a group inds in a determinate type of religious practice or belief and, in particular, in the production, reproduction, diffusion, and consumption of a determinate type of goods of salvation (including the religious message itself), is a function of the reinforcement that the c jidered religion, by its power to legitimate arbitrariness, can bring to the material and symbolic force that can be mobilized by this group or class in Jegitimating the material or symboli is 2 i sition ii social Structure. The generic function of legitimation cannot by definition be16 PIERRE BOURDIEU accomplished without specifying itself in terms of the religious interests attached to various positions in the social structure. If there are social functions of religion and, consequently, if religion is amenable to sociological analysis, it is because laypeople do not—-or not only— expect from it justifications for existence capable of freeing them from the existential anguish of contingency and dereliction or even biological misery, sickness, suffering, or death, but also and above all justifications for existing in a determinate social position and existing as they exist, that is, with all the Properties that are socially attached to them, The question of the origin of evil (unde malum et quare) which, as Weber recalls, becomes a questioning of the meaning of human existence only in the privileged classes—always in search of a “theodicy of their good fortune” is fundamentally a social interrogation of the causes and reasons for social injustices or pri ileges: theodicies are always sociodicies. To those who would judge this theory of the functions of religion to be re luctive, it suffices to indicate that the variations of the functions objectively conferred on religion by the various social classes in various societies and in various eras designate as an expression of ethnocentrism those theories that put the psychological (or Personal) functions of religion foremost. It is only with the development of the urban bour; eoisie, given to interpret history and human existence more as the result of merit or lack of merit of the person than as the effect of fortune or destiny, that religiosity belonging to the essence of all religious ex) rience. Therefore, one may construct the religious fact in a strictly sociological manner, that is, as the legitimate expression of a social Position, in order to perceive the social conditions of Possibility, and therefore the limits, of other kinds of construction, and in particular of the one we might call phenomenological and which, in its effort to submit itself to the lived truth of religious experience as personal experience, irreducible to its external functions, leaves out the performance of an ultimate “reduction,” that of the social conditions that must be fulfilled for this lived experience to be possible. As with virtue according to Aristotle, personal religiosity (and, more generally, any form of “interior life”) “requires a certain ease.” The questions of personal salvation or the existence of evil, of the agony of death or the meaning of suffering, and all the questions situated in secularized form at the border between “psychology” and metaphysics, which are produced and treated by various methods and with different successes by confessors and preachers, Psychologists and psychoanalysts, novelists and marital counselors, not to mention women’s weeklies—all these have for their social condition of Possibility a development of interest in the problems of conscience and an increase in the sensibility to the miseries of the human condition, which is itself Possible only in a defined type of material conditions of existence. The_ representation of Paradise as a place of individual happiness is in keeping with Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 17 the millenarian hope of an overthrow at haunts popular Taith. This expresses the same opposition as the “metaphysical” revolt against the absurdity of human existence and against universal “alienations”—those lege never abolishes totally and that it can even increase by developing the ability to express them, to analyze them and, thereby, to feel them—and the resignation of the disinherited before the common destiny of suffering, separation, and solitude, all these parallel oppositions that originate in the opposition between the material conditions of existence and social positions where these two opposed types of transfigured representations of the social order and its future are born. If the representation of Paradise as a place of individual happiness corresponds better today to the religious demands of the petty bourgeoisie than to those of dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie, as welcoming to the scientific eschatology of a Teilhard de Chardin as to the futurology of prospectivist planners, it is because, as Reinhold Niebuhr remarks, “evolutionary millenialism is always the hope of comfortable and privileged classes who imagine themselves too ational to accept the idea of the sudden emergence of the absolute in history. For them the ideal is in history, working its way to ultimate triumph. They identify God and nature, the real and the ideal, not because the more dualistic conceptions of classic religion are too irrational for them (though they are irrational); but because they do not suffer as much as the disinherited from the brutalities of contemporary society and therefore do not take as catastrophic a view of contemporary history.” ‘32. Given that religious interest has its basis in the need for legitimation of the properties attached to a determinate condition of existence and position in the social structure, the social functions that religion fulfills for a a class of people necessarily a e positi. group or class occupies division of religious labot 2.2.1.1. The exchange relations established between specialists and laypersons on the basis of different interests, and the relations of competition, which oppose various specialists to each other inside the religious field. constitute the principle of the dynamic of the religious field and therefore of the transformations of religious ideology. 2.2.2. Religious interest is based on the need to legitimate the material or symbolic properties attached to a determinante type of conditions of existence and position in the sogial structure and, consequently, it depends directly on this position. Ts religious _message_most_capable_of satisfying the religious interest of wdeterminate group of laypeople, and therefore of exerting upon them the strictly symbolic mobilization that results from the power of18 PIERRE BOURDIEU absolutization of the relative and legitimation carriés a (quasi) system of justification of the Properties that are objectiyely attached to it as it occupies a determinate i i ct This proposition, deduced directly from a strictly sociological definiffon of the function of religion, finds its empirical validation in the quasi-miraculous harmony observed between the form that religious practices and beliefs assume in a given society at a given moment in time and the strictly religious interests of its privileged clientele at that moment. Thus, as Weber observes, “As a rule, the warrior nobles, and indeed feudal powers generally, have not readily become the carriers of a rational religious ethic. ... Concepts like sin, salvation, and religious humility have not only seemed remote from all ruling strata, Particularly the warrior nobles, but have indeed appeared reprehensible to its sense of honor.”* This harmony is the result of a selective reception necessarily involving a reinterpretation whose principle is none other than the position occupied in the social structure; the schemes of perception and thinking, which are the conditions of reception and also define its limits, are the product of the conditions of existence attached to this Position (class or group habitus), That is to say that the circulation of the religious message necessarily involves a reinterpretation that can be consciously performed by specialists (eg., religious vulgarization with a view toward evangelization) or unconsciously effected by the laws of cultural diffusion alone (e.g., the “vulgarization” resulting from their divulging) and which is all the greater when economic, Social, and cultural distance increases between the group of producers, the group of diffusers, and the group of consumers. It follows that the form taken by the structure of systems of religious practices and beliefs at a given moment in time (historical religion) can be quite different from the original content of the message and it can be completely understood only in reference to the complete structure of the relations of production, reproduction, circulation, and appropriation of the message and to the history of this structure.” Thus, at the end of his monumental history of the social teachings of Christian churches, Ernst Troeltch concludes that it is extremely difficult to “find an invariable and absolute point in the Christian ethic” because, in each social formation and in each era, the entire worldview and all Christian dogma depend on social conditions characteristic of various groups or classes to the extent that they must adapt to these conditions in order to master them."’ Beliefs and practices collectively designated as Christian (and which may have nothing more in common than this name) owe their persistence over time to the fact that they change as the functions they fulfill change in the constantly renewed groups that welcome them. In the same way, in synchrony, religious representations and behaviors that refer to one and the same original message owe their diffusion in social space to the fact that they receive radically different meanings and functions in various groups or classes. Thus, the facade of unity of the Catholic Church in the thirteenth century must re Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 19 not hide the existence of real schisms or internal heresies that permitted the church to give an apparently uniform response to radically different interests and exigencies (thereby contributing by to the dissimulation of the differences), 2221. fh a society divided into cl; 2, religious representations and practices belonging to the various groups or classes contributes to the Perpetuation and reproduction of the social order {understood as the established structure Of relations between groups and classes) by coptributing to its consecration, that_is, to sanctioning and Sanctiying it, As soon as It Presents itself as officjally one and indivisible, it organizes itseff in relation to two polar positions| he systems of practices and representations (dominant religiosity) that tentto justif the existence of the dominant~classesas domi classes). This contributes to the symbolic reinforcement of the dominated represeftation of the political world and of the ethos of resignation and renouncement directly inculcated by conditions of existence, that is, the tendency to limit one’s hopes to the Possibilities inscribed in these conditions by means of techniques of symbolic manipulation of aspirations as different (however convergent) as the displacement of aspirations and conflicts by compensation and symbolic transfiguration (promise of salvation) or the transmutation of destiny into choice (exaltation of asceticism). The structure of systems of tepresentations and practices can find a reinforcement of it mystifying efficacy in the fact that it gives the appearance of unity by concealing, under a minimum of dogmas and common rituals, radically opposed interpretations of traditional responses to the most fundamental questions of existence. There is not one of the great world religions that does not present such a plurality of meaning and functions. This is so whether one looks at Judaism, which, as Louis Finklestein has shown, preserves in the opposition between the Pharisaic and prophetic traditions traces of the tensions and economic and cultural conflicts between seminomadic shepherds and settled farmers, between groups without land and large landowners, and between artisans and urban nobility:*' or Hinduism, variously interpreted at different levels of the social hierarchy; or Japanese Buddhism, with its numerous sects; or finally Christianity, a hybrid made of elements borrowed from the Judaic tradition, Greek humanism, and various cults of initiates that were first transported, as Weber observes, by itinerant artisans to become, at its height, the religion of the monk and the warrior, the serf and the nobleman, the artisan and the merchant. The apparent unity of these profoundly different systems is easier to maintain the more the same concepts and practices tend20 PIERRE BOURDIEU to have contrary meanings when they serve to express radically opposed social experiences. For example, for some, “resignation” is the first lesson of existence while, for others, it must be won through laborious struggle against the tendency to rebel before universal forms of the inevitable. The effect of double meaning, which is ineluctably produced and without which it would be necessary explicitly to investigate all the instances when a unique message is interpreted by reference to opposing conditions of existence, is without doubt only one of the mediations through which is realized the effect of logical imposition that all religion accomplishes. 2.3. A religious practice or ideology can by definition exert the strictly religious effect of mobilization correlative to the effect of consecration, only to the extent that the political interest that determines and supports it remains dissimulated both to those who produce it and to those who receive it. Therefore, the belief in the symbolic efficacy of religious practices and representations constitutes part of the conditions of the symbolic efficacy of religious practices and representations. Without claiming to provide a complete explanation of the relations between belief and the symbolic efficacy of religious practices or ideologies—which would require one to take into account the psychological or even psychosomatic functions and effects of belieft’—one may suggest that athe_ explanation of religious practices and beliefs by tl igious interest of the producers or the consumers takes into account the belief itself. Since the very ‘basis of the effect of consecrati ides i i nd_practice fulfill a function of recognition- specialists must necessarily conceal that their srugeles have political interests at stake. This is because the symbolic efficacy that they can wield in these struggles depends on it and therefore they have a political interest to conceal and have to hide from themselves their political interests (or “worldly” [temporal] interests, in “indigenous” idiom). One should perhaps reserve the label Garindyo designate the symbolic properties (symbolic efficacy first of all) that accrue to religious agents to the extent that they adhere to the ideology of charisma, that is, the symbolic power that confers on them the ability to believe in their own symbolic power. If one must deny charisma the status of a sociological theory of prophecy, then any theory of prophecy must make room for charisma as a professional ideology of the prophet which is the condition of the i the extent that it supports the faith of the prophet in his own mission at the same time as it provides him with the principles of his professional ethic, namel inspiration, or mission is the form par excellence of charismatic ideology only because the conviction of the prophet contributes to the operation of inversion and transfiguration that prophetic discourse accomplishes by imposing a Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 21 representation of its own origin; prophetic discourse makes descend from heaven that which it projects there from earth. But this means not only that he who demands to be believed on his word must seem to believe in his word or that he who professes to impose faith by his discourses must manifest in his discourse or his conduct the faith that he has in his discourse, or even that the power to express or to impose by discourse or oratorical action faith in the truth of the discourse makes an essential contribution to the persuasive Power of discourse. Without doubt, the basis of the relation among interest, belief, and symbolic power must be found in what Lévi-Strauss calls “the shamanic complex,” that is, in the dialectic of inner experience and social image, a quasi-magical circulation of powers in the course of which the group Produces and projects the symbolic power that will be exercised upon itself and in the terms of which is constituted, for the prophet as for his followers, the experience of prophetic power that produces the whole reality of this power."* But, more profoundly, how can one not see that the dialectic of inner experience and social image is only the visible aspect of the dialectic of faith and bad faith (in the sense of a lie to oneself, individual or collective), which is the basis of the game of masks, the game of mirrors, and the game of masks in front of mirrors, and which aims to Provide individuals and groups constrained to the interested repression of worldy interests (economic but also sexual) with circuitous routes to an irreproachable spiritual satisfaction? The force of represssion is never as great nor the work of transfiguration as important as in realms where the proferred function and lived experience purely and simply contradict the objective truth of practice. And the success of the enterprise, that iste st rh elief, is a function of the degree to which the group colludes in the individual enterprise of occultation, and thus a Tunction of the interest it has in keeping the contradiction hidden. This is to say that the self-deceit implicit in all faith (and more generally all ideology), can succeed only insofar as individual bad faith is maintained and supported by collective bad faith, )said that society always pays itself in the counterfeit money of itsSream: society and it alone, because it alone can organize the false circulation of counterfeit money that, by granting the illusion of objectivity, distinguishes between madness as private belief and faith as recognized belief, that is, as orthodoxy, right opinion and belief (doxa) and, if you will, belief in the right; apprehending the natural world and the social world as they ask to be apprehended, that is, as externally given lliterally, self- moving—allant de soi—Trans.|. It is in this logic that oné must question the conditions of th 3; which lies precisely at the uncertain border between the abnotmaband Xtraordinary. and whose eccentric and strange behaviors can be admired as ext i as aving common sense.22 PIERRE BOURDIEU 3. THE SPECIFIC FUNCTION OF THE RELIGIOUS FIELD AND ITS FUNCTIONING As a result of their position in the structure of the distribution of capital of strictly religious authority, the various religious claimants, individual or institutional, can mobilize religious capital in the competition for the monopoly over the administration of the goods of salvation and over the legitimate exercise of religious power as power durably to modi i Practices of laypersons by inculcating in them . This religious capital is the generative basis of all thought iOns, ‘and actions conforming with the norms of a eligious representation of the natural and Supernatural world. It is objectively adjusted to the principles of a political vision of the social world—and to them only. On the one hand, religious capital depends, at a given moment in time, o c e eof objective relations between éfigious demanud (i.e., the religious interests of various Sfziout_demany (i.e. Sroups or classes of laity) and-yeligious-sapply.(.e., religious services, whether ‘io offer by virtue of their position in the structure of relations of religious power, ‘that is, as-a function of their religi ital. On the other hand, it governs the nature, the form, and the force of the strategies that these claimants can Put in the service of the satisfaction of their religious interests in the same way as the functions they fulfill in the division of religious labor and thus in the division of political labor.*° Thus, the capital of strictly religious authority of which a religious claimant can dispose depends on the material and symbolic force of the groups and classes the claimants can mobilize by offering them goods and services that satisfy their religious interests, The nature of these goods and services depends, in turn, on the mediation of the Position of the productive claimant in the structure of the religious field, the religiously authorized capital of which he disposes. This circular relation or, better (since the authoritative capital that the various claimants can commit to their competition is the product of past relations of competition), this dialectic is the basis of the harmony observed between the religious products offered by the field and the demands of laypeople and, at the same time, of the homology between the positions of the producers in the structure of the field and the positions of the consumers of their products in the structure of class relations, 3.1. Since the position of religious claimants, institutions or individuals, in the structure of the distribution of religious capital dictates all their strategies, the struggle for the monopoly over the legitimate exercise of religious power over the laity and over the administration of the goods of salvation is necessarily organized around the opposition between the church and the prophet. In order to perpetuate itself, to the extent that it manages to impose the recognition Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 2B of its monopoly (extra ecclesiam nulla salus), the church tends to prohibit more or less completely the entry into the market of new enterprises of salvation, Such as sects or any form of independent religious community, or the individual search for salvation (e.g., by asceticism, contemplation, or orgy). It thus gains or protects a more or less total monopoly over an instructional or sacramental capital of grace (of which it is the trustee and which constitutes an object of exchange with the laity and an instrument of power over them) by controlling access to the means of production, reproduction, and division of the goods of salvation (i.e., by ensuring the maintenance of order in the body of Specialists). It also delegates to the body of priests, the functionaries of worshi iP who are interchangeable from the standpoint of religious capital, the monopoly on instructional or sacramental distribution, and simultaneously an authority (or a grace) of office (or of institution) of a sort which saves them from having continually to win and confirm their authority and shelters them from the consequences of the failures of their religious actions, The prophet (or the heresiarch) and his sect contest the very existence of the church by their very existence, and, more precisely, by their ambition to satisfy their own religious needs without the intermediation and the intercession of the church. They call into question the monopoly over the instruments of salvation and who must accomplish the initial accumulation of religious capital by endlessly gaining and regaining an authority subject to the fluctuations and intermittencies of the conjunctural relation between the supply of religious service and the religious demand of a particular category of laypeople. Because of the relative autonomy of the religious field as a market for the B00ds of salvation, one can see the various historically realized configurations of the structure of relations among the various claimants competing for religious legitimacy as so many moments in a system of transformations. One can also attempt to discern the structure of the invariant relations among the Properties attached to the groups of specialists occupying homologous Positions in different fields, without ignoring that the relations among the different claimants could be characterized in an exhaustive and precise manner only within each historical configuration. 3.1.1. The management of the fund of religious (or sacred) capital, which is the product of accumulated religious labor and the religious labor necessary to ensure the perpetuation of this capital by ensuring the conservation or restoration of the symbolic market on which it is legal tender, can only be guaranteed by a bureaucratic apparatus, capable, like the church, of enduringly carrying on continuous action, that is, the custom or ordinary routine necessary to guarantee its own reproduction by reproducing the Producers of the goods of salvation and religious services (i.e., the body of priests) and the market offered for these goods, that is, the laity (as opposed to the unfaithful and the heretics) as consumers endowed with the minimum24 PIERRE BOURDIEU religious competence (religious habitus) necessary to demonstrate the s; specific need for its products. 3.1.2, A product of the institutionalization and bureaucratization of the prophetic sect (with i of “banalization”), the church shows a number ofbureaucratic characteristic explicit delimitation of areas of competence and regulated hicrarchization of functions, with the correlative rationalization of rewards, “appointments,” “promotions,” and “careers codification of the rules regulating professional activity and extraprofessional life; rationalization of the tools of labor, such as dogma and liturgy, and of Professional training, and so forth. The church. is objectively opposed to the sect as the ordinary organization (banal and banalizing) is to the extraordinary action of contesting the ordinary order. Any sect that succeeds tends to become a church, trustee and guardian of an orthodoxy, identified by its hierarchies and by its dogmas, and committed by this fact to giving rise to new reform. 3.2. The force wielded by th a petty independent entrepreneur of salvation claiming to produce 2mH6 distribute goods of salvation of a type that is new and fit to devalue the old ones, in the absence of any initial capital and of any security or guarantee other than his “person,” depends on the ability of his discourse and his practice to mobilize the virtually heretical religious interests of determinate groups or classes of laypersons through the effect of consecration. This consecration performs the feat of symbolization and explanation, and contributes to the subversion of the established symbolic (i.e., priestly) order and to the symbolic putting to rights of the subversion of that order—that is, the desacralization of the sacred , of “naturalized” arbitrariness) and the sacralization of sacrilege (i.e. of revolutionary transgression). 3.2.1. The prophet 1 of pries independent entrepren office outside of an institution, and thus wi instit rotection or securi conspicuous for the different positions they occupy in the division of reli; ious labor and from which they express the very different ambitions they owe to their very different social origins and training. The prophet asserts his claim tothe legitimate exercise of religious power by devoting himself to the activi by which the priestly body asserts the specificity of its practice and the irreducibility of its competence, therefore the legitimacy of its monopoly (e.g., systematization); that is, by producing and professing an explicitly systematized doctrine, able to give a unitary meaning to life and the world and to provide thereby the means to realize the systematic integration of everyday behavior around ethical principles, that is, practices. The sorcerer responds on the spot Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 25 to partial and immediate demands, using discourse as one kind of cure (of the body) among others and not as an instrument of symbolic power, that is, of preaching or of a “cure for souls.” The prophet renounces profit (or, Weber would say, refuses “the economic exploitation of the gifts of grace as a source of income”) and the ambition to exercise true religious power (i.e., to impose and inculcate a scholarly doctrine, expressed in a scholarly language, and inserted in-an esoteric ‘Tradition, with the corresponding, but strictly reversed, characteristics that define the sorcerer) and submits material interest_and obedience to order (correlative to renouncing the exercise of spiritual domination). Thus, he must in some way legitimize his ambition for strictly religious power by a more absolute refusal of temporal interest—that is, political from the very first— of which asceticism and all other physical ordeals are another manifestation. The sorcerer, however, can openly lend his services in exchange for material reward, that is, explicitly establish himself in the relationship of seller to buyer, which is the objective truth of any relationship between religious specialists and laypeople. And one can therefore ask oneself if disinterest does not have an interested function as a component of the initial investment required by any prophetic enterprise. The sorcerer is linked to the peasant, the man of fides implicita, who is little predisposed, as Weber observes, to welcome the systematizations of the prophet, but who does not exclude recourse to the sorcerer as the only one to utilize, without intention of proselytism and without mental reserve, the sermo rusticus and thus to provide an expression for that which has no name in any scholarly language. 3.3. Conservation of th(monopolysover symbolic powe}, such as religious authority, depends on the abil ¢ institution that possesses it to make known to those who are excluded from it the legitimacy of their exclusion, that is, to make them misrecognize the arbitrariness of the monopolization of a power and a competence in principle accessible to anyone. The prophetic (or heretical) contestation of the church threatens the very existence of the ecclesiastical institution when it questions not only the ability of the priestly body to fulfill its proclaimed function (in the name of the refusal of “institutional grace”) but also the raison d’étre of the priesthood (in the name of the principle of “universal priesthood”). When the relations of force are in favor of the church, prophetic contestations can end only in the suppression of the prophet (or the sect), by physical or symbolic violence (excommuni- cation), unless the submission of the prophet (or of the reformer) —that is, recognition of the legitimacy of the ecclesiastical monopoly (and of the hierarchy that guarantees it)—authorizes annexation by canonization (e.g., Saint Francis of Assisi).26 PIERRE BOURDIEU 3.3.1. A particular form of struggle for monopoly is seen when the church holds a total monopoly over the instruments of salvation. This opposition between orthodoxy and heresy (homologous to the opposition between the church and the prophet) unfolds according to an almost invariant process: conflict for strictly religious authority between the specialists (theological conflict) and/or conflict for power within the church leads to contesting the ecclesiastical hierarchy. This takes the form of a heresy when, in a crisis situation, contestation of the ecclesiastical monopoly by a fraction of the clergy encounters the anticlerical interests of a fraction of the laity and leads to contestation of ecclesiastical monopoly as such. The concentration of religious capital was never more complete than in Medieval Europe. The Church, organized according to a complex hierarchy, utilized a language almost unknown to the people and held a monopoly over access to the tools of worship, sacred texts, and, above all, sacraments. It relegated the monk to second place in the hierarchy of ordinands, made the duly mandated priest the indispensable instrument of salvation, and confered upon the hierarchy the power of sanctification, Making salvation depend more on the receipt of the sacraments and on the profession of faith than on obedience to moral codes, it encouraged the form of popular ritualism that was the quest for indulgences: “the crowds of the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries had faith in the the priest’s blessing for the remission of sins, whether it was absolution in the sacramental sense of the term or the absolution given to the'deceased, indulgences accorded under certain conditions and which put off punishment, pilgrimages undertaken to obtain ‘great indulgences,’ Roman Jubilees, or confessionalia that granted to certain of the faithful spiritual favors in the use of the confession.”** In such a situation, the religious field is coextensive with the field of the relations of competition at the very center of the church. Rivalries for spiritual authority, which establish themselves in the relatively autonomous subfield of scholars (theologians) producing for other scholars and brought by the search for strictly intellectual distinction to schismatic position-takings [prises de position| in the domain of doctrine and dogma, are by their nature fated to remain limited to the “university” world. The transformation of what we will call clerical schisms into popular heresies is perhaps always more apparent than real.” Even in the cases most favorable to the thesis of diffusion (e.g., John Wycliffe and the Lollards, John Huss and the Hussites, etc.), one must in reality deal with a mix of simultaneous invention and deforming reinterpretation accompanied by a search for scholarly authorities and guarantees, All this inclines one to suppose that it is to the extent and only to the extent that the structure of relations of competition for power within the church offers the schismatic the possibility of articulating with a “liturgical” and “ecclesiastical” conflict (i.e., a conflict for the power over the instruments of salvation) that the clerical schism has any possibility of becoming a popular heresy."” Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 27 Religious (and even secularized) ideologists who, in very different states o! the ideological field, designate themselves as heretics (in the sense that the) tend to contest the religious order that the ecclesiastical “hierarchy” aims to maintain), offer as many invariant themes: refusal of institutional grace, preaching by laypeople and universal priesthood, self-administration of the work of salvation, “permanent” eccliastics considered as simple “servants” of the community, “freedom of conscience,” that is, the right of each individual to religious self-administration, in the name of the equality of religious qualifications, and so forth. That is because they always have as their generating principle a more or less radical contestation of the priestly hierarchy that can be exacerbated by denouncing the arbitrariness of a religious authority not founded on the saintliness of its holders and even by a radical condemnation of the ecclesiastical monopoly, such as it is. It is also that, initially produced- reproduced for the needs of internal struggle against the ecclesiastical hierarchy (contrary to most of the purely “theological” ideologies, obeying other functions and therefore belonging to the world of the clergy), they were predisposed to express-inspire, at the cost of radicalization, the religious interests of the categories of laypeople most inclined to contest the legitimacy of the ecclesiastical monopoly over the instruments of salvation. In this case, as elsewhere, the question of origins or, if you prefer, of the heresiarch and the sectarians, is almost devoid of meaning and there is no end to the errors engendered by this false problem. In fact, the theological subfiel itself is a field of competition and one can hypothesize that ideologies produced for purposes of this competition are more or less predisposed to be taken up again and utilized in other struggles (e.g., the struggles {¢ i church) according to the socia/ function that they fulfill for the cers occupying different positions in this field. Besides, any ideology invested with da hivorieal efficacy iy The prod of Wir collective labor of all those whom it expresses, inspires, legitimizes, and mobilizes, and all the various moments in the process of circulation-reinvention are equally origins, Such a model permits us to grasp the role given to groups situated at the Archimedean point where the conflict between religious specialists at opposing ends (dominant and dominated) of the structure of the religious apparatus is articulated with its external counterpart, that between clergy and laity. Such groups include members of the lower clergy, whether ordained or defrocked, occupying a dominated position in the system of symbolic domination. The role allocated in heretical movements to the lower clergy (and, more generally, to the proletaroid intelligentsia) could be explained by the fact that they occupy dominated position in the hierarchy of the ecclesiastical apparatus of symbolic domination, presenting definite analogies, by reason of the homology of position, with the dominated classes. Thus placed in a contradictory position in the social structure, they wield a critical power that allows them to give their28 PIERRE BOURDIEU. revolt a (quasi) systematic formulation and thereby to serve as spokespersons for the dominated classes. Itis an easy step from denouncing the worldly church and the corrupted ways of the clergy and above allhe high dignitaries of the church to contestation of the priest as appointed dispenser of sacramental grace and to extremist claims for a total democracy of the “gift of grace” suppression of intermediaries, with the substitution of voluntary expiation for confession and the compensations that the church alone, holder of the monopoly on the sacrament of penitence, had the right to impose on the sinner; Suppression of intermediaries, moreover, with the denial of the commentators and the commentaries, of the “obligatory ecclesiastical symbols, understood as sources of interpretation,”' and the will to come back to the very letter of the sacred source and to recognize no other authority than the preceptum evangelicum; denunciation of the priestly monopoly and denial of the institution's grace in the name of the equal distribution of the gift of race that asserts itself as much in the quest for a direct experience of God as in the exaltation of the divine inspiration capable of permitting innocence, indeed the stultitia of the humble and of the “poor Christians,” to profess the secrets of the faith better than the corrupt ecclesiastics,” 3.4. The logic of the functioning of the church, priestly practice, and, at the same time, the form and content of the message es and he consequence of the joint action of nd ternal contraints are inherent in the Of a acy msisting, with more or less total success, on a monopoly over the legitimate exercise of religious power over laypeople and the administration of the goods of salvation as the imperative of the economy of charisma, entrusting the exercise of the priesthood, a necessarily “vulgar” activity because it is quotidian and repetitive, to interchangeable officials of worship endowed with a homogenous professional qualification acquired by a specific apprenticeship, and homogeneous instruments, appropriate to support a homogeneous and homogenizing action, External forces assume unequal weight depending on the historic conjuncture, be it (I) the religious interests of different groups or classes of laypersons capable of imposing on the church more or less important concessions and compromises according to the relative weight (a) of the force that they can put at the service of heretical virtualities enclosed in their deviations in relation to traditional norms (and that the Priestly body confronts directly in the cure of souls) and (b) of the power of coercion implied in the monopoly on the goods of salvation, or (II) the competition of the prophet (or sect) and the sorcerer who, in mobilizing these heretical virtualities, weakens the church's power of coercion all the more. This means that there is no adequate interpretation of the message in one or another of its historical forms other than that which relates the system of constitutive relations of this message to the system of relations between the Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 29 material and symbolic forces that constitute the corresponding religious field. The explanatory power of various factors varies with each historical situation, and the oppositions that obtain between Supernatural powers (e.g., the opposition between gods and demons) reproduce in a strictly religious logic the opposition between various types of religious action, that is, the relations of force that establish themselves in the religious field between various categories of specialists (e.g., the opposition between dominant specialists and dominated specialists). The interests of the priestly body can also express themselves in the religious ideology that they produce and reproduce: “Just as the Brahmin priests have monopolized the power of effective prayer, i.e., of the effective magical coercion over the gods, so did a god in turn now monopolize the disposition of this capacity, thereby controlling what is of imary importance in all religious behavior.” The logic of the market of igious goods is such that all reinforcement of the monopoly of the church, that is, any extension or any increase of the temporal and spiritual power of the priestly body over the laity (¢.g., evangelization), must be paid by a redoubling of the concessions granted in the order of both dogma and liturgy to the religious representations of the laypersons thus conquered. In accounting for the properti ious goods (or, today, cultural goods) offered on the market he explanatory value of the feces Paka of production, strictly speaking, tends to decrease the profit of the factors linked to consumers in proportion to the increase in the area of diffusion and circulation of its products, that is, as a class-divided society diversifies socially — I Tollows that when the church holds an almost perfect monopoly, as in Medieval Europe, the appearance of unity given by the invariance of the liturgy dissimulates the express diversification of techniques of preaching and of curing of souls and the extreme diversity of religious experiences, running the gamut from mystical fideism to magical ritualism. Thus, the game of reinterpretations and transactions has made of North African Islam a complex totality where one would not know, except arbitrarily, how to distinguish that which is strictly Islamic from that which is of local origin. The religiosity of bourgeois citizens (“traditionalists” or “Westernized”), conscious of belonging to a universal religion, is opposed on all points to the ritualism of peasants, ignorant of the subtleties of dogma and theology, and Islam presents itself as a hierarchized totality in which analysis can isolate various “levels” (animist devotion and agrarian rituals, worship of the saints and Maraboutism, a practice regulated by religion, law, dogma, and mystical esotericism). Differential analysis no doubt reveal extremely different t igi and ! the Bachelardian notion of an “epistemological profile”)that is, means of Wierarchical integration very differ ese various levels whose relative of existence and the lev -ducatios class considered.30 PIERRE BOURDIEU 3.4.1. Competition from the sorcerer, a petty independent entrepreneur, hired on the spot by the people and exercising his office part-time and without remuneration, without having been specifically prepared for it and without institutional protection (and, most often, in a clandestine manner), converges with the demand of the inferior groups or classes (in particular, peasants) who Provide the sorcerer’s clientele, so as to impose on the church the “ritualization” of religious practice and the canonization of popular beliefs. The Manuel de Folklore francais contemporain by Arnold Van Gennep is teeming with examples of these exchanges between peasant culture and ecclesiastical culture—“folklorized liturgical feast days,” like “rogations,” pagan rituals integrated into the common liturgy, saints invested with magical Properties and functions, and so forth—which are the mark of concessions that clergymen must grant to secular demands, if only to tear away clients from the competing solicitations of sorcery to which an “aggiornamento” would abandon them.” Likewise, Islam keeps its strength and its form, in the North African countryside, by accommodating itself to the aspirations of the peasants at the same time that it assimilates them at the cost of incessant transactions. Whereas agrarian religion constantly reinterprets itself in the language of universal religion, the precepts of universal religion redefine themselves in terms of local customs. The tendency of orthodoxy to consider vernacular rights and customs (Berbers for example) or agrarian religions as reversions and deviations is always counterbalanced by the more or less methodical effort to absorb these forms of religiosity or law without recognizing them.** 3.4.2. Inversely, competition from the prophet (or sect) is joined with the intellectual criticism of certain categories of laypersons to reinforce the tendency of the priestly bureaucracy to submit both liturgy and dogma to a “casuistic-rational systematization” and a “vulgarization,” destined to turn them into instruments of symbolic struggle: homogeneous (“vulgarized”), coherent, distinctive, and fixed (“canonized”), and thereby susceptible to be acquired and utilized by anyone but only after a specific apprenticeship, and thus not accessible to just anyone (in terms of the legitimation of the religious monopoly allowed to education). Proof that the need to defend against the competition of prophecy (or heresy) and against lay intellectualism contributes to Promoting production of “vulgarized” instruments “ of religious practice can be found in the fact that the production of canonical wri ings accelerates when the content of the tradition is itself threatened.”” There is also the worry of defining the originality of the community in relation to competing doctrines that led to the valorization of distinctive signs and discriminating doctrines, both in order to struggle against indifferentism and to make the “transference of membership” to a rival religion more difficult."* Elsewhere, “casuistico-rational systematization” and “vulgarization” are fundamental conditions of the functioning of a bureaucracy _ a | Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field | that administers the goods of salvation in that they permit any agents (i.e..| interchangeable) to exercise priestly activity in a continuous manner by providing them with the practical instruments indispensable to them to fulfill their function at the least cost (to themselves) and with the least risk (for the’ institution), above all when it is necessary for them “to take an attitude [in preaching or the curing of souls] toward the numerous problems which had. not been settled in the revelation itself.” The breviary, the sermonnaire (book of sermons), or the catechism play both the role of pense-bére (memory jogger), and garde-fou (guardrail), intended to guarantee the economy of improvisation at the same time that they prohibit it. Finally, by the refinements and complications it brings to primary cultural foundations, priestly systematiza- tion holds the laity at a distance (this is one of the functions of any esoteric theology), and convinces them that this activity requires a special “qualification,” “a gift of grace,” inaccessible to the common people. It persuades them to abandon the administration of their religious affairs to the | ruling caste, only proportionately to their acquisition of the necessary | competence to become religious theoreticians.” 4. POLITICAL POWER AND RELIGIOUS POWER The strictly religious authority and the temporal force that various religious claimants can enlist in their struggle for religious legitimacy is never independent of the weight that laypersons mobilize in the structure of the relations of force between classes. It follows that the structure of objective relations between claimants occupying different positions in the relations of production, reproduction, and distribution of religious goods tends to reproduce the structure of relations of force between groups or classes, but under the transfigured and disguised form of a field of relations of force between claimants struggling for the conservation or subversion of the symbolic order. Thus, in every conjuncture, the st and the field of power controls the configuration of the structure of relations constitutive of the religious field. This configuration fulfills an external function ‘Of legitimizing the established order inasmuch as the maintenance of symbolic order contributes directly to the maintenance of political order. The symbolic subversion of symbolic order can affect the political order only when it accompanies a political subversion of that order. 4.1. The church contributes to the maintenance of political order, that is, to the symbolic reinforcement of the divisions of this order, in and by fulfilling its proper function, which is to contribute to the maintenance of the symbolic order. It does this by imposing and inculcating schemes of perception, thought, and action objectively agreeing with political structures and grants these32 PIERRE BOURDIEU Structures the supreme legitimation of “naturalization.” It establishes and restores the agreement on Putting the world to rights by the imposition and inculeation of common ways of thinking and by the solemn affirmation or reaffirmation of this agreement in the feast or religious ceremony, a symbolic action of the second order that utilizes the symbolic efficacy of religious symbols to reinforce their symbolic efficacy by reinforcing the collective belief in their efficacy. The church also enlists the strictly religious authority that it has at its disposal to fight off in strictly symbolic terms the prophetic or heretical attempts at subversion of the symbolic order. Itis not by chance that, in an ideal-typical manner, two of the most important sources of scholastic philosophy express in their very titles the homology among the political, cosmological, and ecclesiastical structures that the church serves to inculcate. The two works attributed to Denys the Areopagite, On Celestial Hierarchy and On Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, contain an emanationist Philosophy that establishes a strict correspondence between the hierarchy of values and the hierarchy of beings that makes the universe the result of a process of degradation from the One, the Absolute, down to matter, passing through the archangels, the angels, the seraphim, and the cherubim, man and organic nature. In this symbolic system, Aristotelian cosmology is smoothly integrated with its “prime mover,” who transmits his movement to the heavenly spheres, from which it descends, by successive degrees, to the sublunar world of becoming and corruption, seeming predisposed by some preestablished harmony to express the “emanative” structure of the ecclesiastic and the political world. Being a faithful image of all the others, each of the hierarchies— Pope, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, low clergy; emperor, princes, dukes and other vassals—is in the final analysis only an aspect of the cosmic order established by God, and thus eternal and immutable. By establishing such a perfect correspondence between the various orders—in the manner of a myth that reduces the diversity of the world to a series of simple and hierarchical oppositions themselves reducible each to the others, high and low, right and left, masculine and feminine, dry and humid—religious ideology produces this elementary form of experience of the logical necessity that analogical thought engenders by unifying separate universes, The most specific contribution of the church (and more generally of religion) to the conservation of the symbolic order consists less in the transmutation of mysticism into order than in the transmutation of logic into order. It makes the political order submit to this by the mere fact of the unification of the different orders. The effect of the absolutization of the relative and the legitimation of the arbitrary is produced not only by establishing a correspondence between the cosmological hierarchy and the social or ecclesiastical hierarchy but also and above all by imposing a hierarchical way of thinking that “naturalizes” (Aristotle does not speak of “natural places”) the relations of order by recognizing the existence of privileged points in cosmic (TT onnn—nnann——nanuecuietnt teat SaaS aN Cenesis and Structure of the Religious Field Space just as in political space. Durkheim said that “logical discipline is a spe aspect of social discipline.” To inculcate, by implicit and explicit educati respect for “logical” disciplines such as those that support the mythico-rit system or the religious ideology and liturgy, and, more precisely, to imp ritual observances which, lived as the condition of the safeguard of cosmic or and of the subsistence of the group (natural cataclysm playing in cert contexts the role that political revolution plays in others), tends in fact perpetuate the fundamental relations of the social order, One of the princi functions of ritual here is to make possible the reunion of mytho-logica separated principles, such as the masculine and the feminine, water and fi and so forth. This is to transmute the transgression of social barriers in sacrilege containing its own sanction, if not to render unthinkable the very id of the transgression of borders so perfectly “naturalized” (because internaliz as principles of structuration of the world) that they can be abolished or at the cost of a symbolic revolution (e.g., Copernican or Galilean revoluti on one side, Machiavellian on the other) correlative of a profound politic transformation (¢.g., the progressive dissolving of feudal order). Cosmologic topologies are always “naturalized” political topologies, and, as testified byt place that all aristocratic educations give to the study of etiquette and manne: the inculcation of the respect for forms (even and above all under the speci of formalism and magical ritualism), an arbitrary imposition of an arbitra order, constitutes one of the most efficacious means of obtaining tl recognition-misrecognition of the prohibitions and norms that safeguard soci order. Thus, an institution like the church, which finds itself invested with tl function of maintaining the symbolic order by virtue of its position in th structure of the religious field, always contributes in addition to th maintenance of political order. 4.1.1. The relationship of homology obtai ing between the position of tl church in the structure of the religious field and the position of the dominar fractions of the dominant classes in the field of power and in the structur of class relations and which makes the church contribute to the conservatio of political order by contributing to the conservation of religious order doc not exclude tensions and conflicts between political and religious powe Despite the partial complementarity of their functions in the division of th labor of domination, they can enter into competition. In the course of history they have indeed (at the cost of tacit compromises or explicit concordat founded in all cases on the exchange of temporal force against spiritu: authority) found various types of equilibrium between the two poles constitute by hierocracy (or temporal government of priests) and Cesaropapism (tot: subordination of priestly power to secular power). All this inclines us to hypothesize that the structure of relations betwee the field of power and the religious field governs the configuration of th34 PIERRE BOURDIEU. structure of relations constitutive of the religious field. Thus, Max Weber shows in Ancient Judaism that depending on the type of political power or the type of relations between religious claimants and political claimants, various solutions may be given to the antagonistic relation between priesthood and prophecy. In the great bureaucratic empires such as Egypt and Rome, prophecy is simply excluded from a religious field controlled strictly by the religious Police of a state religion. Conversely, in Israel, the priesthood, which had behind it a long tradition, could not count on the monarchy, which was too weak to suppress prophecy definitively, and found support among people of influence. In Greece, one finds an intermediate solution: the fact that freedom was given to exercise prophecy, but only in a well-circumseribed place (the temple of Delphi), shows the necessity to compromise “democratically” with the demands of certain groups of laity. Moreover, differences in the form of Prophecy correspond to these various types of structure of the relationship between the claimants for the religious field. 4.2. The ability to formulate and name that which symbolic systems vigorously reject in the unformulated or unnameable, and thus to displace the boundary between the thought and the unthought, the possible and the impossible, the thinkable and the unthinkable (an ability that correlates with the high birth associated with a contradictory position in the structure of the religious field and in the structure of class relations) constitutes the initial capital that enables the Prophet to mobilize a sufficiently powerful fraction of laypersons by symbolizing in his extraordinary discourse and behavior that which ordinary symbolic systems are structurally incapable of expressing. The success of the prophet remains incomprehensible as long as one stays within the limits of the religious field, unless one invokes a miraculous power, that is, an ex nihilo creation of religious capital, as Max Weber does in some of his formulations of the theory of charisma. In fact, just as the priest is linked with the ordinary order, the Prophet is the man of crisis situations, in which the established order see-saws and the whole future is suspended. Prophetic discourse has more chance of appearing in overt or masked periods of crisis affecting either entire societies or certain classes, that is, in periods where the economic or morphological transformations of such or such a part of society determine the collape, weakening, or obsolescence of traditions or of symbolic Systems that provided the principles of their worldview and way of life. Thus, as Max Weber observed, charisma may be “produced artificially in an object oF person through some extraordinary means.” Likewise, Marcel Mauss noted: “scarcities, wars, arouse Prophets, heresies; violent contacts broach even the distribution of the population, the nature of the population, crossbreedings of entire societies (as is the case with colonization) necessarily and precisely cause new ideas and new traditions to rise, One must not confuse these collective, organic causes with the action of individuals who are the interpreters more than the masters of them. Constancy and routine can be the making of i} Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 35| individuals, innovation and revolution can be the work of groups, subgroups. sects, individuals acting by and for groups.”* Wilson D. Wallis observes that messiahs arise in periods of crisis, in relation to a profound aspiration for political change, and that “when national Prosperity blossoms again, messianic hope disappears.” Likewise, finally, Evans Pritchard notes that, as with most Hebrew prophets, the prophet is linked with war: “the principal social function of principal prophets of the past was to lead raids on the cattle of the Dinka and actions against various foreign groups in the north.” ‘Todo away once and for all with the representation of charisma as a property attached to the nature of a single individual, in each particular case one must again determine the sociologically pertinent characteristics that allow an individual to find himself socially predisposed to test and express, with of ordinary order have nothing to say, and with reason, since the only language which they have at their disposal is that of exorcism. It is because he realizes mobilize groups or classes that recognize his language because they recognize themselves in him—aristocratic and princely births, for example, in the case of Zarathustra, Mohammed, and Indian prophets: the middle classes, citizens, or countrymen, in the case of the prophets of Israel. in no way excludes that it could have produced the illusion of radical novelty, for example by vulgarizing an esoteric Message to new publics, The crisis of ordinary language calls for, or authorizes, the language of crisis and the criticism of ordinary language. Revelation, that is, to state that which is going those moments where anything can be said because anything ean happen. It is such a conjuncture that C. Vasoli evokes to explain the appearance of a heretical Florentine sect at the end of the fifteenth century: “Especially after36 PIERRE BOURDIEU 1480, one encounters numerous and frequent traces of a strong eschatological sensibility, diffuse expectations of mystical happenings, terrifying prodigies, presaging signs, and mysterious apparitions that announce great upheavals in things human and divine, in ecclesiastical life, and in the fate of all Christendom. The invocation of a great reformer is not rare and it is even more and more lively and insistent that he come to purify and renew the church, to purge it of all its sins, and lead it back to its divine origins, to the purity without blemish of the evangelical experience. ... We are not amazed that, in this atmosphere, clearly prophetic theses also reappear. The successful prophet is the one who manages to state what has to be said, in one of those situations that seems at once to summon and to reject language, because they impose the discovery of the inadequacy of all available deciphering tools. But more profoundly, the very exercise of the prophetic function is conceivable only in societies that, escaping from mere reproduction, have, so to speak, entered into history. As one moves away from the most undifferentiated societies and those most capable of mastering their own development by ritualizing it (via agrarian rituals and rites of passage), the prophets, inventors of the eschatological future and, therefore, of history as movement towards the future, who are themselves the products of history, that is, of the rupture with cyclical time that crisis introduces, come to fill the place heretofore granted to social mechanisms of crisis ritualization, that is, to the controlled exercise of the crisis, which Presupposes a division of religious work conferring complementary roles on those responsible for ordinary order (Brahmins in India or Flamines in Rome) and to the abettors of sacred disorder (Luperci and Gand harvas). We may note in passing that the stylization that the myth effects exemplifies the opposition between the two antagonistic powers, between celeritas and gravitas. This opposition is the basis of any series of secondary oppositions, such as that between the discontinuous and the continuous, creation and conservation, mysticism and religion: “The Brahmins, like the Flamines and the priestly hierarchy they head, represent that permanent and constantly public religion within which—except on one lone day of the year—the whole life of society and all its members is set. The Luperci, as with the group of men the Gandharva seem to represent in mythic transposition, constitute precisely that one exception. Both of these groups belong to a religion that is neither public nor accessible except during that one fleeting appearance. . . . Flamines and Brahmins are the guardians of sacred order, Luperci and Gandharvas are the agents of a no less sacred disorder. Of the two religions they represent, one is static, regulated, calm; the other is dynamic, free, violent. And it is precisely because of its inherently explosive nature that the latter cannot remain dominant for anything more than a very brief period of time, the time it takes to purify and also to revivify, to ‘recreate’ the former in a single tumultuous irruption of energy.” It suffices to add that the Flamines are drinkers and Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 37 ‘musicians while the Brahmins abstain from inebriating liquour and ignore song, dance, and music: “nor anything original or in any way related to inspiration or fancy.” “Speed (extreme rapidity, sudden appearance and disappearance, lightning raids, etc.) is that behavior, that ‘rhythm,’ most suited to the activity of violent, improvisatorial, creative societies,” while public religion “demands a majestic gait and solemn rhythm.””' The Luperci and the Flamines oppose themselves also as juniors and seniors, as light and heavy: the Flamines ensure “a continuous fecundity against interruption and accident”; but although they can “prolong life and fecundity through [their] sacrifices, [they] cannot “revive them’ the miracles of the Luperci“Imakel good an accident and [ reestablish] an interrupted fecundity.” Finally, “Itis precisely because they are ‘excessive’ that the Gandharvas and the Luperci can create; whereas the Flamines and the Brahmins, because they are merely ‘correct,’ can only maintain.” 4.2.1, The relation that obtains between Political revolution and symbolic revolution is not symmetrical. If there is doubtless no symbolic revolution that does not presuppose a political revolution, political revolution does not in itself suffice to produce the symbolic revolution necessary to give it an adequate language, a condition of a complete accomplishment: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes, in order to Present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language." So long as the crisis has not found its prophet, the schemes with which one thinks the world overturned are still the product of the world to be overturned. The prophet is the one who can contribute to realizing the coincidence of the revolution with itself by operating the symbolic revolution that is called political revolution. But if it is true that political revolution finds its fulfillment only in the symbolic revolution that makes it exist fully, in giving it the means to think itself in its truth, that is, as unprecedented, unthinkable, and unnameable according to all the previous grids of classification or interpretation, instead of taking itself for one or the other of the revolutions of the past, and if it is true, therefore, that any political revolution calls on this revolution of symbolic systems that the metaphysical tradition designates by the name of metanoia, it remains that the conversion of the minds as revolution in thought is only a revolution in the minds of those converted beforehand by the religious prophets who, for want of the power to think the limits of their power, that is, of their thinking about power, supply the means of thinking this unthinkable (ie., the crisis), without imposing at the same time this un-thought, which is38 PIERRE BOURDIEU the political meaning of the crisis. With neither the knowledge nor the will. they thereby fall prey to the flight of thought which is given them. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper was translated by Jenny B. Burnside, Craig Calhoun, and Leah Florence. It was originally published as “Génese et structure du champ religieux,” Revue francais de Sociologie, XII (1971): 295-334, The translation appears by permission of Polity Press, and will appear in L. Wacquant (Ed.), Practice, Class, & Culture. NOTES AND REFERENCES |. W. von Humboldt, Einleiung zum Kawi-Werk (VI. 60) as quoted by E, Cassirer in “Sprache und Mythos,” Studien der Bibliothek Warburg Leipzig. V1, 1925), reproduced in Wessen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965, p. 80) 2. _E. Cassirer, Philosophie des symbolischen Formen (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1923-1929), (U.S. ed. R. Manheim, trans. Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955). E. Cassirer, “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics,” Word I(1945); 99-120. Cassirer, who had written an essay titled “Die Begriffsform in mythischen Denken” (Studen des Bibliothek Warburg, Leipzig |1(1992)], takes up in his account the fundamental theses of the Durkheiman school (“the fundamentally social character of the myth is incontestable”; An Essay on Man |New York: Doubleday, 1956; Ist ed., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944, p. 107)) and employs the very concept of “form of classification” as an equivalent of his notion of “symbolic form” (The Myth of the State |New York: Doubleday, 1955; Ist ed., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946, p. 161). 3._E, Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. J.W. Sw Free Press, 1965), p. 31. Hereafter cited as EFRL. 4. “Thus renovated, the theory of knowledge seems destined to unite the opposing advantages of the two rival theories, without incurring their inconveniences. It keeps all the essential principles of apriorists; but at the same time it is inspired by that positive spirit which the empiricists have striven to satisfy" (Durkheim, EFRL., p. 32) S.C. Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962), pp. 48-99 (The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966)); E. Durkheim and M, Mauss, “De quelques formes primitives de classification. Contribution a l'étude des représentations collectives,” in M. Mauss, Ocuvres. Economie II (Paris: Ed, de Minuit, 1969), pp. 13-195. (U.S. ed., R. Needham, trans., Primitive Classification |Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963].) 6. “Lam also particularly grateful to Mr. Ricoeur to have underscored the kinship that could exist between my enterprise and that of Kantianism. It concerns, in summary, a transposition of the Kantian research to the ethnological domain. Instead of using introspection or reflexion on the state of science in the particular society in which the philosopher is placed, one moves beyond these limits by research into what can be common between the humanity which appears to us most distant, and the manner in which our own minds work; by trying, therefore, to disengage fundamental and constraining properties for all minds, whatever they may be” (C. Lévi “Responses a quelques questions,” Esprit II[Nov. 1963]: 628-653). 7. On the relation bewteen Durkheim and Saussure, the two unequally renowned founding fathers of astructuralism, see W. Doroszewski, “Quelques remarques sur les rapports de la sociologie et de la linguistique: E. Durkheim et F. de Saussure,” Journal de Psychologie (January April 1933); republished in Cassirer et al., Essais sur le langage (Paris: Ed. de Miniut, 1969), pp. 99-108. (New York: raUss, Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 3« 8. That is to say, one has reason to suspect a priori all attempts to apply methods that an only the more or less mechanical transposition of linguistic analysis to the products of the culture industry or to the works of scholarly art. Such attempts ignore the position of the producers the field of production and the functions that these symbolic objects fulfill for the producers anc for the various categories of consumers 9. “If men did not agree upon these essential ideas at every moment, if they did not have the same conception of time, space, cause, number, etc., all contact between their minds woulc be impossible, and with that, all life together. Thus society could not abandon the categories t« the free choice of the individual without abandoning itself. If itis to live there is not merely nee« of a satisfactory moral conformity; there is also a minimum of logical conformity that it canno safely do without” (Durkheim, EFRL., p. 30; Bourdieu's emphasis). 10. C. Lévi-Strauss, Siructural Anthropology, trans., C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 207. The admirable texts that Lévi-Strauss consecrated to the problen of symbolic efficacy (ibid., ch. IX and X, pp. 183-226) remain isolated in his work, the mos! significant for our purpose being the chapter of Tristes Tropique titled “The Writing Lesson” “Writing is a strange thing. It would seem as if its appearance could not fail to wreak profounc changes in the living conditions of our race and that these transformations must have been abov. all intellectual in character. . . . If my hypothesis is correct, the primary function of writing, a:| 4@ means of communication, is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings. The use writing for disinterested ends, and with a view to satisfactions of the mind in the fields either 0 science or the arts, is a secondary result of its invention—and may even be no more than a way of reinforcing, justifying, or dissimulating its primary function” (C. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropigques trans. J. Russell [New York: Atheneum, 1964}, pp. 291-293; Bourdieu's emphasis). 11. “That it may go well with thee . . . and that thou mayest prolong thy days upon the earth {Deut. 4:40] (according to the terms of the promise made to those who honor their parents). M Weber, Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of Californi: Press, 1978). Hereafter cited as Economy. 12. Though one can evidently transpose to the body of religious specialists what Engels write of professional jurists in his letter to Conrad Schmidt (27 October 1890): “It is the same, to bs straightforward: as soon as the new division of labor becomes necessary and created by professiona jurists, in its turn a new domain opens up, autonomous, which, while being dependent ot production and commerce in a general way, possesses no less, it as well, a particular capacity of reaction to these domains. In a modern state, it is not only necessary that the law correspon¢ to the general economic situation and be an expression of it, but that it as well be a systematic expression that does not inflict upon itself its own denial by its internal contradictions. And ir order to succeed there, it reflects less and less faithfully the economic contradictions.” And Engels then describes the effect of apriorization which results from the illusion of absolute autonomy “the jurist imagines that he operates by a priori proposition whereas there are however only economic reflections”; speaking of philosophy, he notes one of the consequences ol professionalization that reinforces, by a circular effect, the illusion of absolute autonomy: “Fo: | aa determined domain of the division of labor, the philosophy of each epoch supposes a defined | intellectual documentation transmitted to it by its predecessors and for which it serves as poiu' | of departure.” 13. K, Marx.and F. Engels, Collected Works: The German Idology, vol. 5 (London: Lawrenc: | and Wishart, 1976), pp. 44-45. 14, K. Marx, Principes d'une critique de leconomie politique in Oeuvres. Economie I (Paris Gallimard, 1968), p. 260 (U.S. ed: Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Collecteu Works, vols. 30-34 (New York: International, 1989). 15. Cf. Weber. Economy, 2:1178 and 1:468: “The lot of peasants is so strongly tied to nature so dependent on organic processes and natural events, and economically so little oriented tc rational systematization”, K. Mara, Le Capital, Il, 2nd section, ch, VII, in K. Marx, Oeuvrey40 PIERRE BOURDIEU. Economie II (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 655, (“temporal structure of the productive activity and impossibility of prediction”); ibid. III, Sth section, ch. XIX, ibid., p. 1273 (uncertainty and contingencies), 16. Weber, Economy, 2:1178. 17. Ibid., 2:1179. 18. Ibid, 419. 19. The French here is instances-—literally, entreaties, pleas, solicitations. Bourdieu uses the term (with its legal resonances) throughout this essay to refer to contending organizations of religious practice as they seek (e.g.) primacy and capital. We have usually rendered instances as claims or claimants. Bourdieu often seems to refer to both simultaneously; they are always understood to be in competition, like claimants to a throne. 20. P. Radin, Primitive Religion, Its Nature and Origin (New York: Dover Publications, 1957); Isted. 1937. 21, Cf. A.W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, A Study in Greek Values (Oxford, Claredon Press, 1960) (particularly chap. V), and above all E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957); Ist ed., 1951 22. Cf. Weber, Economy, 1:409-410. 23. As marked as the break between the specialist and the layperson can be, the religious field distinguishes itself from the intellecitual field, strictly speaking, in that it can never devote itself totally and exclusively to an esoteric production, that is, destined for its sole producers, and that it should always sacrifice to the exigencies of the laypersons. “The aéde [priest] also knows the language of the gods ‘who are forever,” he reveals several terms of it, but he is obliged to translate for the men who listen to him and to conform himself to custom” (J. Bollack, Empedocle, |. Introduction @ Vancienne physique |Patis: Ed. de Minuit, 1965], p. 286). 24, One must read the entire chapter titled “The transposition” (ibid., pp. 277-310), where Jean Bollack uncovers the principles of interpretation and reinterpretation to which Empedocles submits Homeric texts and that no doubt could characterize the relation that every scholarly tradition brings with its heritage: “It is in the variation that the power one had over language manifested itself best and most visibly” (p. 284). “From the game of letters {jeu de lettres] to the complex re-deployment of entire groups lof letters or words|, verbal creation rests first on the elements of memory. . . . Variation is all the greater as knowledge is inferior and as it allows the imitated text to appear” (p. 285). On the function of “sacred etymology” and “play on words” and on the search for a “polyphonic” means of expression among Egyptian scribes, one can also consult the work of Serge Sauneron, Les Prétres de V'ancienne Egypte (Paris: Seuil, 1957), pp. 123-133. 25. Durkheim defines social categories of thought as “priceless instruments of thought which the human groups have laboriously forged through the centuries and where they have accumulated the best of their intellectual capital.” And he comments in a footnote: “That is how itis legitimate to compare the categories to tools; for a tool, on its side, is material accumulated capital, There isa close relationship between the three ideas of tool, category, and institution”(Durkheim, EFRL., p. 32 and note 24; Bourdicu’s emphasis). 26. For acritique of this illusion, see L. Boltanski, Prime education et morale de classe (Paris: Mouton, 1969) 27. Durkheim, EFRL, p. 17; Bourdieu's emphasis. 28. Durkheim, EFRL, pp. 61, 62. However, Durkheim noted earlier that one encounters the division of religious labor everywhere (albeit in a rudimentary form); “Undoubtedly it is rare that a ceremony does not have some director at the moment when it is celebrated; even in the most crudely organized societies, there are generally certain men whom the importance of their position points out to exercise a directing influence over the religious life (for example the chiefs of the local groups of certain Australian societies). But this attribution of functions is still very uncertain” (EFRL, p. 59, note 58). Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 4 29. And no doubt, more or less confusedly, of all ethnologists who have a professional interest in rejecting Marx’s thesis according to which the most complex forms of social life contain the Principle of the comprehension of the most rudimentary forms (“The anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape”). 30. One may consult on this point the report of the debate between Claude Lévi-Strauss and Paul Ricoeur (Esprit, Nov. 1963, pp. 628-653), where the question of the specificity of the productions of the priesthood is pilfered away as much by the philosopher, anxious to save the irreducibility of the Bibilical tradition (A), as by the ethnologist who, in recognizing explicitly the religious work of specialists (B), eliminates it from his analysis, (A) “For may part, | am stunned that all the examples come from the geographic area which was that of so-called totemism, and never from Semitic, pre-Hellenic, or Indo-European thought. .. . I wonder if the mythical background to which we are connected—Semitic backgrounds (Egyptian, Babylonian, Aramaic, Hebrew), Proto-Hellenic backgrounds, Indo-European backgrounds—lend themselves as easily to the same operation or more so, . . . they lend themselves surely, but do they lend themselves without reservation?” (p, 607). (B) “The Old Testament, which certainly puts mythical materials to work, takes them up again with another end in mind than was originally theirs. Editors have, without doubt, deformed them by interpreting them; these myths have therefore been subjected, as Mr. Ricocur says very well, to an intellectual operation. One would have to begin with preliminary work, aimed at recovering the mythological and archaic residue beneath the Biblical literature, which can evidently only be the work of a specialist” (p. 631). “From historicized myths we understand much about the world; it is altogether stunning, for example, that the mythology of the Zuni Indians of the southwestern United States had been ‘historicized’ . . . by indigenous theologians in a manner comparable to that of other theologians beginning with the myths of Israels's ancestors” (p. 636). 31. Weber, Economy 1:432-433, 32M. Weber, Gesammelte Aufsaize zur Religionssoziologie (Tubingen: J.C.B, Mohr, 1920- 1921), vol. I, pp. 276-536. 33. Undoubtedly, there is no social form: n that, weak as the development of the religious apparatus may be, ignores the opposition that Durkheim established after Robertson Smith, between institutionally established religion, the patent and legitimate expression of beliefs and common values of the group, and magic as the ensemble of beliefs and practices characteristic of groups or of dominated categories (as women) or occupying structurally: ambiguous social positions (as the blacksmith or the old woman in Berber societies), 34. Weber, Economy 1:423-424, 35. Durkheim, EFRL, p. 58. 36. Radin, Primitive Religion, pp. 182-183. 37. R. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), p.62 38. Weber, Eeonomy 1:472. 39. That is why Max Weber's attempt to characterize the great world religions by the professional groups of classes that have played a determining role in their propagation has above all a suggestive value in that it indicates the principal style belonging to each of the original great messages: “If one wishes to characterize succinctly, in a formula so to speak, the types representative of the various strata that were the primary carriers or propagators of the so-called world religions, they would be the following: In Confucianism, the world-organizing bureaucrat; in Hinduism, the world-ordering magician; in Buddhism, the mendicant monk wandering through the world: in Islam, the warrior seeking to conquer the world; in Judaism, the wandering trader; and in Christianity, the itinerant journeyman. To be sure, all these types must not be taken as exponents of their own occupatinal or material ‘class interests,” but rather as ideological carriers (ideologische Trager) of the kind of ethical or salvation doctrine which rather readily conformed to their social position” (Weber, Economy, 2:512; Bourdieu's emphasis).42 PIERRE BOURDIEU 40. E. Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (Tubingen: Mohr, 1912), vol. I, in Gesammelte Schrifien von E. Troelisch (1922), repub. (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1961), 41. _L. Finkelstein, The Pharisees: The Sociological Background of Their Faith (New York: Harper and Bros., 1949), 2 vols. 42. Cf. C. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, ch. IX and X, pp. 183-226. 43. It will suffice to mention here the prayer that a Punjab religious community, reputed for its piety, addresses to its patron saint: ‘A famished man cannot perform your worship, ‘Take up your rosary again. Task only the dust from the feet of the Saint. Make it that I not be indebted. Lask of you two seer of flour, A quarter of a seer of butter and salt. I ask of you half of a seer of dal, Which will nourish me two times a day. lask of you a fourfooted bed, A pillow and a mattress, ask of you a loincloth for me And then your slave will serve you with devotion. I have never been greedy. Tove nothing other than your name (Radin, Primitive Religion, pp. 305-306). 44, “Quesalid did not become a great sorcerer because he healed the sick, he healed the sick because he had become a great sorcerer” ( Lévi-Strauss, Seructural Anthropology, p. 198). To get a better picture of this dialectic, it would be necessary to analyze the objective relations and interactions that unite the painter to his public, grosso modo, since Duchamp, and which find their archetypal form today among defenders of l'art pauvre or conceptual art, led to “sell” their conviction or their sincerity as the unique and ultimate proof of their claim that any sort of object belongs to the class of works of art or, which amounts to the same thing, to assert their claim to a monopoly over artistic production by the mere fact of producing themselves as artists, that is, by thinking themselves as artists and calling art an object deliberately undistinguished that anyone could produce. 45. Think of one of these prophets about whom Evans-Pritchard speaks, who lived in the bush, eating human and animal excrement, and who ran from the floor of his stable to its summit, or of another, who spent all day crying from the top of the pyramid of earth and debris that he himself had built (E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion |Oxfor wredon Press, 1962, Ist ed.. 19561, pp. 305-307). Likewise in Ancient Judaism, Max Weber describes how the biblical prophets descended into the street to shower the high dignitaries of Judaism with personal invectives, threats, and injuries and manifested all the signs of the most furious passion. Diverse pathological states preceded these moments of high inspiration: Ezekiel beat his kidneys and stomped the ground: following one of his visions, he remained paralyzed for seven days; he felt himself floating in the air, Jeremiah was like a drunk man. Many prophets had visual and auditory hallucinations: they fell into states of hypnosis and launched into uncontrollable discourses. 46. On the distinction between the level of interaction (where the Weberian analysis of relations between specialists is situated) and the level of the structure of objective relations, see P. Bourdieu, “Une interpretation de la theorie de la religion selon Max Weber,” Archives européenes de Sociologie 12(1971):3-21; and “Legitimation and Structural Interests in Weber's Sociology of Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field 43) Religion,” in S. Whimster and S. Lash, eds. Max Weber, Rationality & Modernity (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), pp. 119-136. 47. Weber, Economy 1:244 48. _E. Delaruelle, “Dévotion populaire et hérésie au Moyen Age,” in J. Le Goff, ed., Hérésies et societes dans I'Europe pre-industrielle, Xle-XVIIle sitcles (Paris-La Haye: Mouton, 1968), p 152. | 49. Cf. H. Grundmann, “Hérésies savantes ¢ hérésies populaires au Moyen Age,” in J. Le Goff, Hérésies et societes, pp. 209-210, 218. 50. Greenslade discerned well the determining weight assumed by the “liturgical disputes” in the schisms of the primitive church (Cr. S.L. Greenslade, Schism in the Early Church |New York Harper and Bros., 1953], pp. 37-124), Among the explanatory factors for the appearance of heresies, the structural properties of the priestly bureaucracy, and in particular its greater or lesser aptitude for reforming itself or for welcoming and tolerating in its own midst groups of reformers must be taken into account. Thus, one can distinguish in the history of the Christian church in the Middle Ages periods during which “heretical” tendencies could develop at the same time that they were annihilated in the creation of new religious orders (ie., roughly up until the beginning of the thirteenth century) and periods during which these tendencies could only take the form of explicit refusal of the ecclesiastical order by reason of the prohibition of founding of new orders (CL. G. Leff, in J. Le Goff, Hérésies et societes, pp. 103 and 220-221). One may, following a suggestion of Jacques Le Goff (ibid., p. 144), wonder whether the variations in the frequency of heresy did not maintain a relationship with morphological phenomena, such as fluctuations in | the volume of the body of clerics and the correlative ability of the church to digest heresies by | offering them a mystical escape in its very bosom. $1. _L.Kolakovski, Chrétiens sans église, la conscience religieuse et le lien confessionel au XV He sigele (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 306. 52. The contestation of the established hierarchy which, with Montanism, goes as far as refusal of the very principle of order and of authority, led the heresies of the primitive church to ideological themes fully akin to those of the medieval heresies (cf. S.L. Greenslade, Schism). 53. Weber, Economy, L:411 54. Cf. P. Bourdieu, Sociologie de l'Algérie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, Ist ed. 1970), pp. 101-103. 55. Cf J. Le Goff, “Culture cléricale et traditions folkloriques dans la vicilsation mérovingienne,” in L. Bergeron, ed., Niveaux de culture et groupes sociaux (Paris: Mouton, 1967). pp. 21-32. 56. Cf. P. Bourdieu, Sociologie de I'Algérie. 57. Weber, Economy 1:459-460. SK. Ibid., 1:461 59. Ibid., 1:465. 60. P. Radin, Primitive Religion, p. 19. GI. Ibid., p. 37, 62. “The social system is, as it were, removed to a mystical plane, where it figures as a system of sacred values beyond all criticism or revision” (M. Fortes and E, Evans-Pritehard, African Political Systems |Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 16). 63. Durkheim, ZFRL., p. 30, note 19. 64, Weber, momy, 1:400. 65. M. Mauss, Oeuvres, III Cohésion sociale et divisions de la sociologie (Paris: Ed. de Minuit 1960) np, SOF 354 66. W.D. Wallis, Messiahs, Their Role in Civilization (Washington, DC: American Council ‘on Public Affairs, 1943), p. 182. 67. Ibid., p. 45.44 PIERRE BOURDIEU 68. C. Vasoli, “Une secte hérétique florentine a la fin du XVe siecle, les “oints’,” in J. Le Goff, Hérésies et societes, p. 259. 69. G. Dumezil, Mitra-Varuna, An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 33-34; Bourdieu's emphasis. 70. Ibid., p. 38. a. 2 73. Ibid., p. 45. 74. _K, Marx, “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Collected Works, vol. 11 (New York: International, 1977), pp. 99-197; quote pp. 103-104,