The principal intellectual objective of our exploratory workshop is to understand how the concept of “rite “, with its religious connotation of ritus or liturgy, developed during the early modern period into a secular concept of ritual and how it opened the debate on religious pluralism. The change in the meaning of the word is symptomatic of a larger sociocultural transformation in which religion and ethics, piety and morality came to be defined as two separate spheres. Then as today, this transformation was negotiated through a series of “quarrels”. These will be in the center of our inquiry.

An additional objective is to gather together at the same table historians working on rites and rituals from different perspectives and from different area studies in order to chisel out appropriate methodologies for approaching our object in the long and the short “durée”. We will have Sinologists, Indologists, Americanists and Europeanists working from different historical subfields (ethno-history, religious history, social history, cultural history, history of a book, etc.).

Our final objective is to see in which way to expand and enrich our topic of research in order to connect with researchers in other fields such as anthropology, sociology, political sciences, etc. This will be the next stage in our project.