Making Place Through Ritual

Indian indigenous societies are especially known for their elaborate rituals, which offer an excellent chance for studying religion as practice. However, few detailed ethnographic works exist on the ritual practices of these societies. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Jharkhand, India this book offers insights into contemporary, previously not described rituals of the Santal, one of the largest indigenous societies of Central India. Its focus lies on culturally specific notions of place as articulated and created during these rituals. In three chapters the book discusses how the Santal "make place" on different local, regional and global levels through their rituals: They reaffirm their ancestral roots in their land during large sacrificial rituals. They offer sacrifices to the dangerous deities of the forest in exchange for rain. And they claim their region to be a "Santal region" through large festivals celebrated in sacred groves, which they link to national and global discourses of indigeneity and environmentalism. Through an analysis of the rituals of a specific society, this book addresses broader issues. It presents an example of how to study religion as a practical activity. It portrays culture-specific perceptions of the environment. And last, the book underlines the potential that lies in choosing place as a lens to study social phenomena in context.

National surveys indicate that most Japanese, while professing no religious commitment, frequently perform rituals: They regularly tend their family home altars, look after family graves, participate in neighborhood festivals, and visit Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Are these rituals mere formalities? Based on fourteen months of fieldwork in Kamakura city near Tokyo, Satsuki Kawano examines the power of ritual and its relevance for modern urbanites. She reveals the indebtedness of ritual to forms that create an elevated context and infuse the mundane with a sense of moral order. By employing acts and environments common to everyday life, Kawano argues, ritual evokes morally positive values such as purity, gratitude, respect, and indebtedness. Rather than objectify morality in a sacred text or religious doctrine, ritual embodies and emplaces a sense of what it means to be a good person and creates moments of personal significance and engagement. In Kamakura, belief is therefore a consequence and not a prerequisite of ritual engagement. Ritual Practice in Modern Japan effectively challenges the widespread assumption that ritual in non-Western societies has little moral significance and that, with modernization, "traditional" practices inevitably disappear. This is a book that will interest scholars and students of cultural anthropology, ritual studies, and Japanese studies.

The book begins by developing a spatial methodology to analyse secular and post-secular religious relations. The spatial approach is then applied to a particular case, that of the left hand. Our understanding of this sinister but intimate 'other' draws on a wide range of ideas, from different religious traditions to alternative paths to salvation and self-realisation ...

Ritual Making Women looks at the way in which women's making of ritual has emerged from the rapidly developing field of women's spirituality and theology. The author uses ethnographic material to explore how the construction of ritual uses story-making and embodied action to empower women. Ritual, far from being a timeless and universal practice, is shown to be a contextual and gendered performance in which women subvert conventional distinctions of private and public. The book combines narrative and case study material and draws on feminist theology and theory, social anthropology and gender studies.

Through her detailed description of a particular place (Kuzaki-cho) at a particular moment in time (the 1980s), D. P. Martinez addresses a variety of issues currently at the fore in the anthropology of Japan: the construction of identity, both for a place and its people; the importance of ritual in a country that describes itself as nonreligious; and the relationship between men and women in a society where gender divisions are still very much in place. Kuzaki is, for the anthropologist, both a microcosm of modernity and an attempt to bring the past into the present. But it must also be understood as a place all of its own. In the 1980s it was one of the few villages where female divers (ama) still collected abalone and other shellfish and where some of its inhabitants continued to make a living as fishermen. Kuzaki was also a kambe, or sacred guild, of Ise Shrine, the most important Shinto shrine in modern Japan—home to Amaterasu, the sun goddess. Kuzaki’s rituals affirmed a national identity in an era when attitudes to modernity and Japaneseness were being challenged by globalization. Martinez enhances her fascinating ethnographic description of a single diving village with a critique of the way in which the anthropology of Japan has developed. The result is a sophisticated investigation by a senior scholar of Japanese studies that, while firmly grounded in empirical data, calls on anthropological theory to construct another means of understanding Japan—both as a society in which the collective is important and as a place where individual ambitions and desires can be expressed.

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?"

The first three centuries of Christianity are increasingly seen in modern scholarship as sites of complexity. Sacred Ritual, Profane Space examines the Christian meeting places of the time and overturns long-held notions about the earliest Christians as utopian rather than place-bound people. By mapping what is known from early Christian texts onto the archaeological data for Roman domestic spaces, Jenn Cianca provides a new lens for examining the relationship between early Christianity and sites of worship. She proposes that not only were Roman homes sacred sites in their own right but they were also considered sacred by the Christian communities that used them. In many cases, meeting space would have included the presence of the Roman domestic cult shrines. Despite the fact that the domestic cult was polytheistic, Cianca asserts that its practices likely continued in places used for worship by Christians. She also argues that continued practice of the domestic cult in Roman domestic spaces did not preclude Christians from using houses as churches or from understanding their rituals or their meeting places as sacred. Raising a host of questions about identity, ritual affiliation, and domestic practice, Sacred Ritual, Profane Space demonstrates how sacred space was constructed through ritual enactment in early Christian communities.