RITUAL AND ENCAMPMENT: THE WORLD AS DWELLING ACCORDING TO MIRCEA ELIADE AND BYUNG-CHUL HAN

o mundo como habitação segundo Mircea Eliade e Byung-Chul Han

Abstract

The article analyzes the possible dialogue between Byung-Chul Han and Mircea Eliade through the works The Disappearance of Rituals (2019) and The Sacred and the Profane (1957), investigating the role of ritual in the constitution of human experience. The research, bibliographical and hermeneutic in nature, brings together concepts from the history of religions, contemporary philosophy, and symbolic anthropology in order to understand rituals as forms of producing meaning and stabilizing human existence. It argues that, although situated within distinct theoretical horizons, Han and Eliade understand ritual as a symbolic manipulation for ordering the world. In Eliade, the homo religiosus structures his experience in the world by sacralizing space and time in antagonism to profane space and time. In Han, the concept of homeliness (beheimatung) expresses the human need to transform the world into a habitable space through repetitive practices that provide meaning and a common code to human communities as interpreters of reality. It is argued that ritual, besides organizing actions of collective understanding, establishes a symbolic grammar capable of making the world habitable and intelligible. By rendering time and space meaningful, granting intelligibility to experience, rituals offer continuity in the face of the fragmentation and acceleration characteristic of contemporaneity.