Abstract

Wittgenstein and Winch have suggested that religious rituals could exist in a community without religious speech. Winch imagines a tribe with rituals such as bowing but no recognizably religious talk. If ritual exists in the tribe, however, then the tribal language distinguishes ritual from non-ritual; if this ritual is set apart in a way identifiable as religious, then the tribal language distinguishes religious from non-religious. This distinction in the speech of the tribe is partially constitutive of religious speech. It is not that religious speech is added to religious rituals, but that rituals have their intelligibility within a religious way of speaking