Ritualistics: a New Discipline in the History of Religions

Authors

• Jørgen Podemann Sørensen University of Copenhagen

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30674/scripta.67203

Keywords:

Religion -- Study, Ritual -- Study, Ritual -- Definition, Rites and ceremonies

Abstract

The history of Religions is in need of subdisciplines. Those that it has are mostly derived from other academic disciplines such as psychology, sociology, or, to mention a more recent invention, aesthetics. Interdisciplinary studies are in many ways a characteristic, inherent feature of the humanities, and certainly not to be resented or mistrusted. It is, however, worth noticing that the History of Religions has only one discipline entirely of its own: a comparative, cross-cultural, religio-specific discipline sometimes called the phenomenology of religion. The study of ritual is more than just the study of a very broad. It is with a view to the further exploration of the way meaning and form are put to work in ritual, and the way ritual determines and conditions  the form of representations, that ritualistics can be suggested  as a new discipline.