Download or read book The Problem of Ritual Efficacy written by William Sax and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-15 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do rituals work? Although this is one of the first questions that people everywhere ask about rituals, little has been written explicitly on the topic. In The Problem of Ritual Efficacy, nine scholars address this issue, ranging across the fields of history, anthropology, medicine, and biblical studies. For "modern" people, the very notion of ritual efficacy is suspicious because rituals are widely thought of as merely symbolic or expressive, so that - by definition - they cannot be efficacious. Nevertheless people in many cultures assume that rituals do indeed "work," and when we take a closer look at who makes claims for ritual efficacy (and who disputes such claims), we learn a great deal about the social and historical contexts of such debates. Moving from the pre-modern era-in which the notion of ritual efficacy was not particularly controversial-into the skeptical present, the authors address a set of debates between positivists, natural scientists, and religious skeptics on the one side, and interpretive social scientists, phenomenologists, and religious believers on the other. Some contributors advance a particular theory of ritual efficacy while others ask whether the question makes any sense at all. This path-breaking interdisciplinary collection will be of interest to readers in anthropology, history, religious studies, humanities and the social sciences broadly defined, and makes an important contribution to the larger conversation about what ritual does and why it matters to think about such things.
Download or read book The Problem of Ritual Efficacy written by William Sturman Sax and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of ten contributed essays explicitly addresses the question of ritual efficacy. The authors do not aspire to answer the question 'how do rituals work?' in a simplistic fashion, but rather to show how complex the question is.
Download or read book Ritual Theory Ritual Practice written by Catherine Bell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1992-01-30 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ritual studies today figures as a central element of religious discourse for many scholars around the world. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, Catherine Bell's sweeping and seminal work on the subject, helped legitimize the field. In this volume, Bell re-examines the issues, methods, and ramifications of our interest in ritual by concentrating on anthropology, sociology, and the history of religions. Now with a new foreword by Diane Jonte-Pace, Bell's work is a must-read for understanding the evolution of the field of ritual studies and its current state.
Download or read book Ritual A Very Short Introduction written by Barry Stephenson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-28 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ritual is part of what it means to be human. Like sports, music, and drama, ritual defines and enriches culture, putting those who practice it in touch with sources of value and meaning larger than themselves. Ritual is unavoidable, yet it holds a place in modern life that is decidedly ambiguous. What is ritual? What does it do? Is it useful? What are the various kinds of ritual? Is ritual tradition bound and conservative or innovative and transformational? Alongside description of a number of specific rites, this Very Short Introduction explores ritual from both theoretical and historical perspectives. Barry Stephenson focuses on the places where ritual touches everyday life: in politics and power; moments of transformation in the life cycle; as performance and embodiment. He also discusses the boundaries of ritual, and how and why certain behaviors have been studied as ritual while others have not. Stephenson shows how ritual is an important vehicle for group and identity formation; how it generates and transmits beliefs and values; how it can be used to exploit and oppress; and how it has served as a touchstone for thinking about cultural origins and historical change. Encompassing the breadth and depth of modern ritual studies, Barry Stephenson's Very Short Introduction also develops a narrative of ritual's place in social and cultural life. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book Ritual Gone Wrong written by Kathryn McClymond and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rituals go wrong all the time - someone does the wrong thing, says the wrong phrase, or shows up late. Crucial ritual items go missing or get broken, or acts of God conspire to undermine the venue. Most of the time, these mistakes are smoothed over with substitutions or procedural adjustments, and the ritual goes forward. However, ritual theorizing has tended to focus on perfect rituals, rituals as prescribed in sacred texts. 'Ritual Gone Wrong' embraces the fact that rituals rarely go as scripted. In addition, it argues that ritual traditions themselves acknowledge this fact and are often prepared for it, sometimes developing extensive ritual literature on how rituals can be disrupted, how these disruptions can be addressed, and when disruptions have gone too far.
Download or read book Knotting the Banner written by David J. Mozina and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2021-06-30 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the hills of China’s central Hunan province, an anxious young apprentice officiates over a Daoist ritual known as the Banner Rite to Summon Sire Yin. Before a crowd of masters, relatives, and villagers—and the entire pantheon of gods and deceased masters ritually invited to witness the event—he seeks to summon Celestial Lord Yin Jiao, the ferocious deity who supplies the exorcistic power to protect and heal bodies and spaces from illness and misfortune. If the apprentice cannot bring forth the deity, the rite is considered a failure and the ordination suspended: His entire professional career hangs in the balance before it even begins. This richly textured study asks how the Banner Rite works or fails to work in its own terms. How do the cosmological, theological, and anthropological assumptions ensconced in the ritual itself account for its own efficacy or inefficacy? Weaving together ethnography, textual analysis, photography, and film, David J. Mozina invites readers into the religious world of ritual masters in today’s south China. He shows that the efficacy of rituals like the Banner Rite is driven by the ability of a ritual master to form an intimate relationship with exorcistic deities like Yin Jiao, which is far from guaranteed. Mozina reveals the ways in which such ritual claims are rooted in the great liturgical movements of the Song and Yuan dynasties (960–1368) and how they are performed these days amid the social and economic pressures of rural life in the post-Mao era. Written for students and scholars of Daoism and Chinese religion, Knotting the Banner will also appeal to anthropologists and comparative religionists, especially those working on ritual.
Download or read book Pictures Making Beliefs written by Camille Wingo and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One question which yet bedevils the study of ritual is this: "How are rituals ever efficacious?" Or, put another way, "How is anyone ever persuaded that a ritual does or makes what it claims to do or make?" This book addresses the question by proposing a cognitive model for ritual as information processors (participants) instantiating information processes (rituals). Ritual participants use cognitive technologies to create cultural objects. A cognitive technology is a change we make in the environment to bolster our native cognitive skills; shopping lists are cognitive technologies to bolster memory. A cultural object is a thing in the world that is what it is by virtue of the combination of what it is physically and a culture's agreement on what it is; biscuits in the U.K. and cookies in the U.S. are cultural objects. Rituals, the book proposes, are effective inasmuch as they make or manipulate cultural objects. Pictures Making Beliefs expands its proposal by comparing rituals to kindred cultural technologies: pictures and make-believe. The premise is that the study of ritual as cognition can be expanded, enlightened and improved by the use of concepts and methods prevalent in investigations of the cognitive underpinnings of these kindred cultural achievements. From these comparisons emerges the idea of worlds as a quasi-technical explanation of pictures, make-believe, the here and now and rituals as information streams flowing through body, brain and environment. Finally, the book situates the cognitive technological model within the wider landscape of religious studies by placing it within a chain of correlations from lower level descriptions (e.g. in neuro-science) to the higher levels (e.g. in sociology) by presenting the objects created and manipulated in ritual as essentially contested. The claim is that, in the performance of rituals, participants structure the world in ways to create boundless and obscure objects whose proper function in the world outside their ritual relies upon their being, in their essence, contestable. This book is part of the Ritual Studies Monograph Series, edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh. "The author writes in a skillful and fluid style, and the book is remarkably accessible given its level of technical and scholarly information. This is not a book about debunking religious faith; it attempts to explain how rituals work, not why they do. Its goal is to describe how people's minds operate on levels from neurobiology to group social behavior. The book is interesting, unusual, strongly researched, and well written." -- Book News, Inc. (December 2012)
Download or read book The Craft of Ritual Studies written by Ronald L. Grimes and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2014 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readership: Students and scholars of ritual studies, religious studies, anthropology
Download or read book Remains of Ritual written by Steven M. Friedson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remains of Ritual, Steven M. Friedson’s second book on musical experience in African ritual, focuses on the Brekete/Gorovodu religion of the Ewe people. Friedson presents a multifaceted understanding of religious practice through a historical and ethnographic study of one of the dominant ritual sites on the southern coast of Ghana: a medicine shrine whose origins lie in the northern region of the country. Each chapter of this fascinating book considers a different aspect of ritual life, demonstrating throughout that none of them can be conceived of separately from their musicality—in the Brekete world, music functions as ritual and ritual as music. Dance and possession, chanted calls to prayer, animal sacrifice, the sounds and movements of wake keeping, the play of the drums all come under Friedson’s careful scrutiny, as does his own position and experience within this ritual-dominated society.
Download or read book Ritual and Its Consequences written by Adam B. Seligman and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2008-02-21 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on examples from many places and times, this work argues for the continuing tension across historical contexts between movements emphasizing ritual and movements emphasizing sincerity. It contends that our contemporary age has, at great risk, downplayed the importance of ritual.
Download or read book Ritual and Symbolic Communication in Medieval Hungary under the rp d Dynasty 1000 1301 written by Dušan Zupka and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-29 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Rituals and Symbolic Communication in Medieval Hungary under the Árpád Dynasty (1000 - 1301) Dušan Zupka examines rituals as means of symbolic communication in medieval political culture focusing on the Hungarian Kingdom under the rule of the Árpáds.
Download or read book Theoretical and Empirical Investigations of Divination and Magic written by Jesper Sørensen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-05-03 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Theoretical and Empirical Investigations of Divination and Magic ten leading scholars of religion provide up-to-date investigations into these classic domains from historical, anthropological, cognitive, philosophical and theoretical perspectives.
Download or read book The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism written by Michael David Kaulana Ing and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Ing's The Dysfunction of Ritual in Early Confucianism is the first monograph in English about the Liji--a text that purports to be the writings of Confucius' immediate disciples, and part of the earliest canon of Confucian texts called ''The Five Classics,'' included in the canon several centuries before the Analects. Ing uses his analysis of the Liji to show how early Confucians coped with situations where their rituals failed to achieve their intended aims. In contrast to most contemporary interpreters of Confucianism, Ing demonstrates that early Confucian texts can be read as arguments for ambiguity in ritual failure.
Download or read book Asymmetrical Conversations written by Harish Naraindas and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideas about health are reinforced by institutions and their corresponding practices, such as donning a patient's gown in a hospital or prostrating before a healing shrine. Even though we are socialized into regarding such ideologies as "natural" and unproblematic, we sometimes seek to bypass, circumvent, or even transcend the dominant ideologies of our cultures as they are manifested in the institutions of health care. The contributors to this volume describe such contestations and circumventions of health ideologies, and the blurring of therapeutic boundaries, on the basis of case studies from India, the South Asian Diaspora, and Europe, focusing on relations between body, mind, and spirit in a variety of situations. The result is not always the "live and let live" medical pluralism that is described in the literature.
Download or read book God of Justice written by William S Sax and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-02 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In God of Justice, anthropologist William S. Sax offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of cursing, black magic, and ritual healing in the Central Himalayas of North India. Based on ten years' ethnographic fieldwork, God of Justice shows how these practices are part of a moral system based on the principle of family unity.
Download or read book The Sacred Self written by Thomas J. Csordas and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1997-05-07 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does religious healing work, if indeed it does? In this study of the contemporary North American movement known as the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, Thomas Csordas investigates the healing practices of a modern religious movement to provide a rich cultural analysis of the healing experience. This is not only a book about healing, however, but also one about the nature of self and self- transformation. Blending ethnographic data and detailed case studies, Csordas examines processes of sensory imagery, performative utterance, orientation, and embodiment. His book forms the basis for a rapprochement between phenomenology and semiotics in culture theory that will interest anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, physicians, and students of comparative religion and healing.
Download or read book Ritual Abuse and Mind Control written by Orit Badouk Epstein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-22 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People who have survived ritual abuse or mind control experiments have often been silenced, accused of lying, mocked and disbelieved. Clinicians working with survivors often find themselves isolated, facing the same levels of disbelief and denial from other professionals within the mental health field. This report - based on proceedings from a conference on the subject - presents knowledge and experience from both clinicians and survivors to promote understanding and recovery from organized and ritual abuse, mind control and programming. The book combines clinical presentations, survivors' voices, and research material to help address the ways in which we can work clinically with mind control and cult programming from the perspective of relational psychotherapy.
