The Power Of Discourse In Ritual Performance

This volume focuses on the ways discourse is used in ritual performances as an important medium of power, enabling speakers/actors to construct, redefine and transform interpersonal relationships, cultural concepts and worldviews. The various case studies gathered here, from South Asia, South East Asia, Africa and South America, show that recent developments in linguistic anthropology, ritual theory and performance studies provide new conceptual tools to take a fresh look at these issues. Foregrounding pragmatic approaches to language and discourse, they explore the social dynamics of rhetorical discourse, text and context, normativity and creativity, the poetics of dialogue and speech, as well as the manifold interactions of speakers, addressees and audience. The volume thus embraces both the micro-level of speech activities as well as the macro-level of social and political relationships and brings out the subtle workings of control, authority, and power in situations marked as ritual. The contributions, all based on extensive fieldwork, include many concrete samples of speech and discourse which give an authentic impression of the different voices and make for vivid reading.

Ritual has been long viewed as an indisputable part of tradition with the aim of creating harmony and enabling a tradition's survival. The authors in this collection argue, however, that this view can be seriously challenged and that ritual's embeddedness in negotiation processes is one of its central features.

The thousand-year-old Sanskrit classic the Bhagavatapurana, or 'Stories of the Lord', is the foundational source of narratives concerning the beloved Hindu deity Krishna. For centuries pious individuals, families, and community groups have engaged specialist scholar-orators to give week-long oral performances based on this text. These events have grown in number, scale, and popularity, filling vast public arenas, such as sports stadiums, and attracting live audiences in the tens of thousands while being simulcast around the world. 'In Seven Days of Nectar', McComas Taylor uncovers the factors that contribute to the explosive growth of this tradition.

In this third edition, Peter McLaren engages with some of the latest anthropological thinking and presents the reader with a powerful manifesto for critical ethnography in the 21st century.

A classic question in studies of ritual is how ritual performances achieve-or fail to achieve-their effects. In this pathbreaking book, Matt Tomlinson argues that participants condition their own expectations of ritual success by interactively creating distinct textual patterns of sequence, conjunction, contrast, and substitution. Drawing on long-term research in Fiji, Ritual Textuality presents in-depth studies of each of these patterns, taken from a wide range of settings: a fiery, soul-saving Pentecostal crusade; relaxed gatherings at which people drink the narcotic beverage kava; deathbeds at which missionaries eagerly await the signs of good Christians' "happy deaths"; and the monologic pronouncements of a military-led government determined to make the nation speak in a single voice. In each of these cases, Tomlinson also examines the broad ideologies of motion which frame participants' ritual actions, such as Pentecostals' beliefs that effective worship requires ecstatic movement like jumping, dancing, and clapping, and nineteenth-century missionaries' insistence that the journeys of the soul in the afterlife should follow a new path. By approaching ritual as an act of "entextualization"-in which the flow of discourse is turned into object-like texts-while analyzing the ways people expect words, things, and selves to move in performance, this book presents a new and compelling way to understand the efficacy of ritual action.

Muslim communities throughout the Indian Ocean have long questioned what it means to be a “good Muslim.” Much recent scholarship on Islam in the Indian Ocean considers debates among Muslims about authenticity, authority, and propriety. Despite the centrality of this topic within studies of Indian Ocean, African, and other Muslim communities, little of the existing scholarship has addressed such debates in relation to women, gender, or sexuality. Yet women are deeply involved with ideas about what it means to be a “good Muslim.” In Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean, anthropologists, historians, linguists, and gender studies scholars examine Islam, sexuality, gender, and marriage on the Swahili coast and elsewhere in the Indian Ocean. The book examines diverse sites of empowerment, contradiction, and resistance affecting cultural norms, Islam and ideas of Islamic authenticity, gender expectations, ideologies of modernity, and British education. The book’s attention to both masculinity and femininity, broad examination of the transnational space of the Swahili coast, and inclusion of research on non-Swahili groups on the East African coast makes it a unique and indispensable resource. Contributors: Nadine Beckmann, Pat Caplan, Corrie Decker, Rebecca Gearhart, Linda Giles, Meghan Halley, Susan Hirsch, Susi Keefe, Kjersti Larsen, Elisabeth McMahon, Erin Stiles, and Katrina Daly Thompson

Among the Weyewa of the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba, spokesmen seek to inscribe their traditions and sacred obligations through ritual speaking performances. In a series of lively poetic dialogues, performers use a distinctive couplet style to pursue the trail of their ancestors.