What is a rite? Émile Durkheim, a hundred years later

This paper is focused on the anthropological concept of ritual, starting from ÉmileDurkheim's approach in Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912). Wediscuss three different aspects of the Durkheimian perspective on religion and rituals:a) the sacred/profane dichotomy; b) the concept of collective representations - whichestablishes a substantial continuity between religious and scientific thought; c) a"practical" and performative interpretation of rites as the basis of social bond. Duringthe twentieth century, these aspects have influenced different and sometimes opposingtheoretical approaches (including "symbolist" and "neo-intellectualist" theories andVictor Turner's "anthropology of experience"). We briefly review each of them, arguingfor the importance of reconsidering them into a unitary perspective, centred onreligious phenomena as basically moral experiences and as the language of socialrelations. In the conclusions, we will show how such unitary approach helps usunderstand the transformations as well as the continuities of rituality in theindividualized and secularized societies of what we call nowadays the Western world