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.
Tabella dei contenuti
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
Circa l’autore
Galina Lindquist (1955-2008) was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. She received her Ph.D. in 1998, and did fieldwork among neo-shamans in Sweden, among alternative healing practitioners and patients in Moscow, and among shamans and lamas in Tyva, Southern Siberia. She authored Conjuring Hope: Healing and Magic in Contemporary Russia (2006), The Quest for the Authentic Shaman: Multiple Meanings of Shamanism on a Siberian Journey (2006), co-edited four volumes, and published numerous articles in professional journals.
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