Beginnings In Ritual Studies

An updated primer for the burgeoning field of ritual studies.

This is the most comprehensive collection of articles on ritual ever assembled. The book includes selections by internationally known scholars such as Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, as well as innovative piece s that illustrate the extraordinary interdisciplinary range of contemporary ritual studies. Grimes has drawn readings from the entire range of ritual--encompassing its secular, political and dramatic expressions as well as its religious ones.

Readership: Students and scholars of ritual studies, religious studies, anthropology

Providing a personal, informed and cultural perspective on rites of passage for general readers, this text illustrates the power of rites to help us navigate life's troublesome transitions.

Ritual Studies have achieved prominence since the 1980s, when interest in ritual as an object of inquiry was established, bridging over a number of humanities and social science disciplines. Both connected with religious studies and independent of it; overlapping with social and cultural anthropology, but also with history; related to science and health practices and ranging across the life course to education, Ritual Studies has come to encompass studies of change and dynamism in social life. Rituals are determinate in form, but not static. They enunciate distinctive social values within specific contexts that frame them; and they relate to the wider concerns and issues of their practitioners. Due to this broad and wide-ranging scope, it is often difficult to find a single resource on Ritual Studies, and even more so to find one which moves beyond the beginnings of anthropological theorizing to grapple with the present-day contexts of ritual. Bringing together recent ethnographies of ritual practice and ritualization from across the globe, this Handbook provides case study of ritual in the light of Emotion and Cognition, Identity, Religious Power, Performance and Literature, Ecology and Ecological Disaster, Media, and other topics. While each chapter provides a deep ethnography of a specific society, ritual, or ritualized practice, each also engages with current theoretical and substantive approaches to the relevant topic. The scholars collected here provide original synoptic and indicative pieces as guideposts and pathways through the complex, varied and cross-disciplinary, and vast landscape of scholarship that constitutes Ritual Studies today and points to developments in the future.

This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to a topic seldom written about: the evaluation of rites. Enacting ritual and thinking critically are often imagined as mutually exclusive activities, but Ritual Criticism demonstrates their complementarity by presenting case studies in which ritual and criticism require one another. The cases are drawn from contemporary, urban, North American social contexts in which specific rites are undergoing evaluation, interpretation, or revision. The cases eventuate in essays, more theoretical treatments of critical issues in ritual studies. The rituals studied are as varied as the strategies utilized. The diversity of approaches illustrates the ways criticism shifts as types of ritual vary. One rite is a traditional liturgy; another is invented rather than traditional; a third is a hybrid ritual drama; and in a fourth instance the ritualization is so tacit that some would deny that it is ritual at all. Many of the contexts that provide data for the chapters are typified by syncretism, the eclectic mixing and matching of ritual elements from diverse traditions. Other examples involve attempts to engage in ritual invention and experimentation. The essays are likewise diverse, taking readers into territories traditionally the purview of several disciplines. Drama, literature, education, psychology, medicine, archaeology, anthropology, philosophy, and theology are traversed in this effort to understand ritual, an unusually complex genre of human activity.

Rituals can provoke or escalate conflict, but they can also mediate it and although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping strategies for deploying rituals. This collection of essays emerged from a two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. An interdisciplinary team of twenty-four scholars locates, describes, and explores cases in which media-driven rituals or ritually saturated media instigate, disseminate, or escalate conflict. Each multi-authored chapter is built around global and local examples of ritualized, mediatized conflict. The book's central question is: "When ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or by the ritualizing of media), how do the patterns of conflict change?"

Much ritual studies scholarship still focuses on central religious rites. For this reason, Grimes argues, dominant theories, like the data they consider, remain stubbornly conservative. This book issues a challenge to these theories and to popular conceptions of ritual. Rite Out of Place collects 10 revised essays originally published in widely varied sources across the past five years. Grimes has selected for inclusion those essays that track ritual as it haunts the edges of cultural boundaries-ritual converging with theater, ritual on television, ritual at the edge of natural environments and so on. The writing is non-technical, and the implied audience is sufficiently broad than any educated person interested in religion and public life should find it intelligible and engaging.