On the temporal specific of religious ritual

Prilutskiy Aleksandr Michaylovich, PhD, professor, The Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia (St. Petersburg, Russia), alpril@mail.ru

Prilutskiy A. M. On the temporal specific of religious ritual, Religiya. Tserkov’. Obshchestvo. Issledovaniya i publikatsii po teologii i religii [Religion. Church. Society: Research and publications in the field of theology and religious studies], Saint-Petersburg, 2014, vol. 3, pp. 18–33.

doi: 10.24411/2308-0698-2014-00002

Language: Russian

The article focuses on the study of the category of time in the discourse of ritual. In spite of religious ritual being well-studied, its semiotic structure lacks analyzes. Contemporary study of ritual in terms of ethnography and anthropology should be supplemented with the concepts of theology and philosophy of religion. In order to examine essence of internal time of ritual scholars should use not only ethnographical methods, but ones of theology and semiotics. The author argues that internal time of ritual acts not only as a context in which ritual reveals its important elements, but has an independent value. In the text of ritual, as well as in other types of texts, internal time is transmitted through a variety of methods and generated at different textual levels — grammatical, lexical, philosophical and theological. Symbolic language of ritual is also manifested at different levels and can be expressed through a variety of discursive and over-discursive elements. Category of time in ritual can also be expressed symbolically. So, the author states that internal time of ritual is not a single continuum: both linguistic and ontological time construct internal time of the text, which is the product of their dialectical correlation. Ritual builds a unique time model, where sacred past and sacred future don’t correspond with any ordinary or grammatical time.
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Key words: ritual, semiotics, God, religion, literature, text

URL: http://rcs-almanac.ru/prilutskiy-2014-en/

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