Overvloed of deritualisering. Lukken en Grimes over het actuele ritueel-liturgische milieu

Abstract

This article starts with a sketch of the relation of liturgy and anthropology. Liturgy is, as ritual, as symbolic acting a product of human mentalities, passions and needs, and as such linked with varying cultural contexts. Thus liturgy and anthropology bring necessarily and in relation two basic dimensions into perspective: the human and cultural conditions. This perspective causes the so-called anthropological Wende’ and gives liturgical studies the task to persue both an anthropological as well as a cultural analysis of the ritual and liturgical ‘environment’ (in relation!). This analysis is the focus of this article. In the profile of the proposed research design we now can also include that the theology of liturgy, in which more and more the classical systematic-theological sacramentology is embedded, is connected with ritual-liturgically directed roads of analysis. We could very well call this an integral or integrated liturgical study approach, in which anthropology and theology of liturgy held together in a broadly and openly constructed research design, of which the anthropological, ritual, cultural, and contextual analysis is a part. This perspective is thematically discussed by comparing recent work of two authors, Gerard Lukken and Ronald Grimes, in three steps. First the rise of ritual studies in the 70’s from the anthropological ‘Wende’ in liturgical studies in the 60’s is sketched. Subsequently the works of Lukken and Grimes are confronted with each other in a general way. Finally the comparison is focussed towards their most recent studies and upon a diagnosis of today’s ritual ‘environment’.