In his ‘Reflections on the February Editorial’ (New Blackfriars, April, 1967) Father Cornelius Ernst suggested that in the context of ecclesiological analysis the notion of institution should not be restricted to ‘its narrower, governmental sense’ of legitimated offices and procedures which, however initiated, are formally constituted, but might be more usefully employed in the wider sense of the term ‘familiar to sociologists and social anthropologists’. If I have understood him correctly, his argument is that to confine the term to formally ‘instituted’ institutions, while denying it to ways of thought and action which although equally established as usages have not been established formally, is to lend countenance to dubious oppositions between the formal and explicit on the one hand, and the informal and implicit on the other. As an example of such an opposition he cites that between ‘institutional Church’ and ‘persons’. He suggests that if such distinctions as this are taken as expressing fundamental dichotomies, they may entail ‘damaging oversimplification’.

In the context of this interesting theme, a brief and inevitably cursory note by a social anthropologist on some of the ways in which the notions of institution and institutionalization have been used in his field may be of some small value.