Download or read book Formations of Ritual written by David Scott and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Formations of Ritual was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Yaktovil is an elaborate healing ceremony employed by Sinhalas in Sri Lanka to dispel the effects of the eyesight of a pantheon of malevolent supernatural figures known as yakku. Anthropology, traditionally, has articulated this ceremony with the concept metaphor of "demonism." Yet, as David Scott demonstrates in this provocative book, this use of "demonism" reveals more about the discourse of anthropology than it does about the ritual itself. His investigation of yaktovil and yakku within the Sinhala cosmology is also an inquiry into the ways in which anthropology, by ignoring the discursive history of the rituals, religions, and relationships it seeks to describe, tends to reproduce ideological-often, specifically colonial-objects. To do this, Scott describes the discursive apparatus through which yakku are positioned in the moral universe of Sinhala, traces the appearance of yakku and yaktovil in Western discourse, evaluates the contribution of these figures and this ceremony in anthropology, and attempts to show how the larger anthropology of Buddhism, in which the anthropology of yaktovil is embedded, might be reconfigured. Finally, he offers a rereading of the ritual in terms of the historically selfconscious approach he proposes.The result points to a major rethinking of the historical nature not only of the objects, but also of the concepts through which they are constructed in anthropological discourse. David Scott teaches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.
Download or read book Gender Ritual and Social Formation in West Papua written by Jan Pouwer and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study, based on a lifelong involvement with New Guinea, compares the culture of the Kamoro (18,000 people) with that of their eastern neighbours, the Asmat (40,000), both living on the south coast of West Papua, Indonesia. The comparison, showing substantial differences as well as striking similarities, contributes to a deeper understanding of both cultures. Part I looks at Kamoro society and culture through the window of its ritual cycle, framed by gender. Part II widens the view, offering in a comparative fashion a more detailed analysis of the socio-political and cosmo-mythological setting of the Kamoro and the Asmat rituals. These are closely linked with their social formations: matrilineally oriented for the Kamoro, patrilineally for the Asmat. Next is a systematic comparison of the rituals. Kamoro culture revolves around cosmological connections, ritual and play, whereas the Asmat central focus is on warfare and headhunting. Because of this difference in cultural orientation, similar, even identical, ritual acts and myths differ in meaning. The comparison includes a cross-cultural, structural analysis of relevant myths. This publication is of interest to scholars and students in Oceanic studies and those drawn to the comparative study of cultures.
Download or read book Formations of Belief written by Philip Nord and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, scholars and public intellectuals have been predicting the demise of religion in the face of secularization. Yet religion is undergoing an unprecedented resurgence in modern life—and secularization no longer appears so inevitable. Formations of Belief brings together many of today's leading historians to shed critical light on secularism's origins, its present crisis, and whether it is as antithetical to religion as it is so often made out to be. Formations of Belief offers a more nuanced understanding of the origins of secularist thought, demonstrating how Reformed Christianity and the Enlightenment were not the sole vessels of a worldview based on rationalism and individual autonomy. Taking readers from late antiquity to the contemporary era, the contributors show how secularism itself can be a form of belief and yet how its crisis today has been brought on by its apparent incapacity to satisfy people's spiritual needs. They explore the rise of the humanistic study of religion in Europe, Jewish messianism, atheism and last rites in the Soviet Union, the cult of the saints in colonial Mexico, religious minorities and Islamic identity in Pakistan, the neuroscience of religion, and more. Based on the Shelby Cullom Davis Center Seminars at Princeton University, this incisive book features illuminating essays by Peter Brown, Yaacob Dweck, Peter E. Gordon, Anthony Grafton, Brad S. Gregory, Stefania Pastore, Caterina Pizzigoni, Victoria Smolkin, Max Weiss, and Muhammad Qasim Zaman.
Download or read book Ritual in Its Own Right written by Don Handelman and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Writing of Weddings in Middle Period China written by Christian de Pee and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2008-01-03 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking work that treats writing as a ritual practice and texts as ritual objects.
Download or read book Theorizing Rituals written by Jens Kreinath and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume two of Theorizing Rituals mainly consists of an annotated bibliography of more than 400 items covering those books, edited volumes and essays that are considered most relevant for the field of ritual theory. Instead of proposing yet another theory of ritual, the bibliography is a comprehensive monument documenting four decades of theorizing rituals.
Download or read book Social Formations of Wonder written by Jaap Timmer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can wonder engender in terms of religious, political, and broader social practice? Thinkers from Plato to Martin Heidegger and Cornelius Castoriadis; surrealists such as Andre Breton and Pierre Mabille; and most recently the religious philosopher Mary-Jane Rubenstein have all explored the ways that wonder is not articulated once and for all, but continuously worked upon. This book engages with anthropological explorations of wonder, responding to recent work by Michael W. Scott in order to bring the weight, colour, scent and sound of real ethnographic encounters to new ways of thinking about wonder. The question for contributors is how wonder works as an index of challenges to the known, the moral, the true, and the real. The case studies reveal how probing wonder can bring us closer to understanding the formation of social institutions as various ‘modalities of wonder’ destabilize old forms and articulate new ones. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Religious and Political Practice.
Download or read book Order In Paradox Myth Ritual And Exchange Among Nepal S Tamang written by David H. Holmberg and published by Motilal Banarsidass Publishe. This book was released on 1996 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively account of ritual, religion, and exchange in the Tamang society of Nepal is sophisticated and well written. Holmberg draws on his informative descriptions of Tamang Buddhism for comparativist insights into marriage exchange caste, sacrifice, and the coherence of religious fields..... The study illuminates the diversity of types of sacrifice the study illuminates the diversity of types of sacrifice the interplay of spoken and written ritual languages and the paradox of exchange that differentiates while promising to unify
Download or read book Explorations in Southern African Drama Theatre and Performance written by Patrick J. Ebewo and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In spite of the rich repertoire of artistic traditions in Southern Africa, particularly in the areas of drama, theatre and performance, there seems to be a lack of a corresponding robust academic engagement with these subjects. While it can be said that some of the racial groups in the region have received substantial attention in terms of scholarly discussions of their drama and theatre performances, the same cannot be said of the black African racial group. As such, this collection of thirteen chapters represents a compendium of critical and intellectual discourses on black African drama, theatre and performance in Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, and Swaziland. The topics covered in the book include, amongst others, ritual practices, interventionist approaches to drama, textual analyses, and the funeral rites (viewed as performance) of the South African liberation icon Nelson Mandela. The discussions are rooted mainly using African paradigms that are relevant to the context of African cultural production. The contributions here add to the aggregate knowledge economy of Southern Africa, promote research and publication, and provide reading materials for university students specialising in the performing arts. As such, the book will appeal to academics, theatre scholars, cultural workers and arts administrators, arts practitioners and entrepreneurs, the tourism industry, arts educators, and development communication experts.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Anthropological Ritual Studies written by Pamela J. Stewart and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Ritual Geology written by Robyn d'Avignon and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-11 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set against the ongoing corporate enclosure of West Africa’s goldfields, A Ritual Geology tells the untold history of one of the world’s oldest indigenous gold mining industries: Francophone West Africa’s orpaillage. Establishing African miners as producers of subterranean knowledge, Robyn d’Avignon uncovers a dynamic “ritual geology” of techniques and cosmological engagements with the earth developed by agrarian residents of gold-bearing rocks in savanna West Africa. Colonial and corporate exploration geology in the region was built upon the ritual knowledge, gold discoveries, and skilled labor of African miners even as states racialized African mining as archaic, criminal, and pagan. Spanning the medieval and imperial past to the postcolonial present, d’Avignon weaves together long-term ethnographic and oral historical work in southeastern Senegal with archival and archeological evidence from Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Mali. A Ritual Geology introduces transnational geological formations as a new regional framework for African studies, environmental history, and anthropology.
Download or read book RitualCraft written by Azrael Arynn K and published by Llewellyn Worldwide. This book was released on 2006 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Sabbat events to magick ceremonies to handfastings, ritual is at the heart of Pagan worship and celebration. Whether you''re planning a simple coven initiation or an elaborate outdoor event for hundreds, "RitualCraft" can help you create and conduct meaningful rituals. Far from a recipe book of rote readings, this modern text explores rituals from many cultures and offers a step-by-step Neopagan framework for creating your own. The authors share their own ritual experiences-the best and the worst-illustrating the elements that contribute to successful ritual. "RitualCraft" covers all kinds of occasions: celebrations for families, a few people or large groups; rites of passage; Esbats and Sabbats; and personal transformation. Costumes, ethics, music, physical environment, ritual tools, safety, speech, and timing are all discussed in this all-inclusive guidebook to ritual.
Download or read book Relational Rituals and Communication written by D. Kádár and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-06-27 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a ground-breaking, interaction-based framework of rituals, drawing on multiple research disciplines. It examines ritual as a relational action constructed in interaction through pre-existing patterns and captures the features of ritual phenomena by analysing interactants' behaviour in culturally and socially diverse contexts.
Download or read book Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art written by Paisley Livingston and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through close readings of Bergman's famous and lesser-known films, as well as through study of his early stage productions, untranslated essays, interviews, and scripts, Paisley Livingston elucidates Bergman's rigorous critique of the violence, persecution, and deceit in modern culture. Bergman's focal point is the dilemma of the artist in society, the nature and value of his exchanges with the public. He envisions modern art in terms of its relation to a moribund tradition: in its dependence on destructive and sterile ritual patterns, art has lost the power to influence the development of our lives. Bergman criticizes the vestiges of cult values in both popular and elite forms of art, from the idolatry of the star system to the aggressive primitivism of certain avant-garde experiments. Linking his innovations in film form to an investigation of the processes of social interaction, Bergman is able to confront the artist's relation to both the order and the disorder of culture.
Download or read book Ritual and Archaic States written by Murphy, Joanne M and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2016-08-24 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While ritual and archaic states have both been prominent topics in recent archaeological studies, this is the first volume to combine both subjects by exploring the varying nature, expression, and significance of ritual in archaic states. It compares archaic rituals across many different cultures--Vijayanagara, Swahili Lamu, Venice, Asante, Aztec, Ming China, Oaxaca, Greece, Inca, Wari, and Chaco. The contributors posit that the nature of rituals, the level of investment in rituals, and their sociopolitical significance can vary greatly from state to state, even among societies with similar levels of social complexity, population, and spatial distribution. Highlighting the importance of ritual as an inherent part of a cultural narrative, and demonstrating how the study of ritual enables a better understanding of diverse social groups, this volume shows how the location, frequency, and role of ritual differed significantly across archaic states.
Download or read book The Aga Khan Case written by Teena Purohit and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-31 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Arab-centric perspective dominates the West’s understanding of Islam. Purohit presses for a view of Islam as a heterogeneous religion that has found a variety of expressions in local contexts. The Ismaili community in colonial India illustrates how much more complex Muslim identity is, and always has been, than the media would have us believe.
Download or read book Ritual Embodiment in Modern Western Magic written by Damon Zacharias Lycourinos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Western world, magic has often functioned as an umbrella term for various religious beliefs and ritual practices that seek to influence events by harnessing supernatural power. The definition of these myriad occult and esoteric traditions have, however, usually come from those that are opposed to its practice; notably authorities in religious, legal and intellectual spheres. This book seeks to provide a new perspective, directly from the practitioners of modern Western magic, by exploring how a distinctive mode of embodiment and consciousness can produce a transition from an ‘ordinary’ to a ‘magical’ worldview. Starting with an introduction to the study of magic in the Western academy, the book then presents the author’s own participant observation of five ethnographic case studies of modern Western magic. The focus of these ethnographic case studies is directed towards ideas and methods the informants employ to self-legitimise and self-represent as ‘magicians’. It concludes by discussing the phenomenological implications and issues around embodiment that are inherent to the contemporary practice of magic. This is a unique insight into the lived experience of practitioners of modern magic. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of the Occult and New Religious Movements, as well as Religious Studies academics examining issues around the embodiment and the anthropology of religion.
