Historically, canonic studies of ritual have discussed and explained ritual organization, action, and transformation primarily as representations of broader cultural and social orders. In the present, as in the past, less attention is given to the power of ritual to organize and effect transformation through its own dynamics. Breaking with convention, the contributors to this volume were asked to discuss ritual first and foremost in relation to itself, in its own right, and only then in relation to its socio-cultural context. The results attest to the variable capacities of rites to effect transformation through themselves, and to the study of phenomena in their own right as a fertile approach to comprehending ritual dynamics.
Table of Content
Preface
Introduction: Why Ritual in Its Own Right? How So?
Don Handelman
PART I: THEORIZING RITUAL: AGAINST REPRSENTATION, AGAINST MEANING
Chapter 1. Ritual Dynamics and Virtual Practice: Beyond Representation and Meaning
Bruce Kapferer
Chapter 2. Otherwise Than Meaning: On the Generosity of Ritual
Don Seeman
PART II: EXPERIMENTING WITH RITUAL: NATIVES HERE, NATIVES THERE
Chapter 3. The Red and the Black: A Practical Experiment for Thinking about Ritual
Michael Houseman
Chapter 4. Partial Discontinuity: The Mark of Ritual
André Iteanu
PART III: RITUAL AND EMERGENCE: HISTORICAL, PHENOMENAL
Chapter 5. Religious Weeping as Ritual in the Medieval West
Piroska Nagy
Chapter 6. Enjoying an Emerging Alternative World: Ritual in Its Own Ludic Right
André Droogers
PART IV: HEALING IN ITS OWN RIGHT: SPIRIT WORLDS
Chapter 7. Bringing the Soul Back to the Self: Soul Retrieval in Neo-shamanism
Galina Lindquist
Chapter 8. Treating the Sick with a Morality Play: The Kardecist-Spiritist Disobsession in Brazil
Sidney M. Greenfield
PART V: PHILOSOPHICALLY SPEAKING
Chapter 9. The Tacit Logic of Ritual Embodiments: Rappaport and Polanyi between Thick and Thin
Robert E. Innis
Epilogue: Toing and Froing the Social
Don Handelman
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
Born in Montreal, Don Handelman is Sarah Allen Shaine Professor of Anthropology & Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester in 1971. He has been a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Collegium Budapest: Institute for Advanced Study, and the Institute for Advanced Study at The Hebrew University, and the Olof Palme Visiting Professor of the Swedish Social Science Research Council. His field research has been in the Great Basin, Newfoundland, Israel, and Andhra Pradesh. He has written extensively on ritual, play, expressive culture, and bureaucratic logic and the modern state, and is the author of Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events, Berghahn Books, 1998; Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Events, 2004; and with David Shulman is the coauthor of God Inside Out: Siva’s Game of Dice (1997) and Siva in the Forest of Pines: An Essay on Sorcery and Self Knowledge (2004).
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