Ritual

Description

This volume consists of a number of carefully-selected readings that represent a wide range of discussions and theorizing about ritual. The selection encompasses definitional questions, issues of interpretation, meaning, and function, and a roster of ethnographic and analytical topics, covering classic themes such as ancestor worship and sacrifice, initiation, gender, healing, social change, and shamanic practices, as well as recent critical and reconstructive theorizing on embodiment, performance, and performativity. In their Introduction to the volume, the Editors provide an overall survey and critical consideration of topics, incorporating insights from their own long-term field research and reflections on the readings included. The Introduction and readings together provide a unique research tool for those interested in pursuing the study of ritual processes in depth, with the benefit of both historical and contemporary approaches. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Acknowledgements Series Preface Introduction PART I DEFINITIONS AND FUNDAMENTALS 1 ‘Variation and Indexicality in the Maring Ritual Cycle’, in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 74–89, 475, 499 2 ‘Ritual Symbols, Syntax, and Praxis: Questions of Cultural Meaning and Interpretation’, in Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 61–83, 281–85, 313–15 3 ‘Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation: Is Religion an Extreme Form of Traditional Authority?’, in Ritual, History and Power: Selected Papers in Anthropology, London: Athlone Press, pp. 19–45, 214, 223–24 4 ‘Embodiment and Communication: Two Frames for the Analysis of Ritual’, Social Anthropology, 6, pp. 237–51 PART II FURTHER THEORETICAL CATEGORIES AND CONSIDERATIONS 5 ‘The Original Significance of Animal Sacrifice’, in Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (3rd edn), New York, NY: KTAV Publishing House, pp. 269–89 6 ‘The Problem and its Setting’, in Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure, London: Athlone Press, pp. 10–17,313 7 ‘Taboo’, in Structure and Function in Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses, London: Cohen & West, pp. 133–52 8 ‘The Symbolic Rite of “Giving Thanks’” , in Symbols, Public and Private, London: George Allen & Unwin, pp. 414–29 9 ‘Liminality and Communitas’, in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, pp. 94–111, 204 10 ‘Oracles Support Divine Justice’, in Leviticus as Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 109–24, 253–54 11 ‘Towards an Integration of Ethnography, History and the Cognitive Science of Religion’, in Harvey Whitehouse and James Laidlaw (eds), Religion, Anthropology and Cognitive Science, Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, pp. 250–61, 274–75 12 ‘Against “Ritual”: Loosely Structured Thoughts on a Loosely Defined Topic’, in S.F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff (eds), Secular Ritual, Amsterdam: Assen, Van Gorcum, pp. 25–35, 283 13 ‘Toward a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual’, in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 55–62, 307 14 ‘The Body as Geometer: Cosmogonic Practice’, in Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 114–24, 222–23 PART III TOPICAL ARENAS AND EXAMPLES 15 ‘The Rhetoric of Transformation in Ritual Healing’, in Body/Meaning/Healing, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 11–18 and 27–38, 285–86, 297–98 16 ‘Shamanic Performances: Issues of Performativity and Comparison’, Journal of Ritual Studies, 22(1), pp. 53–59 17 ‘Shamanic Performance and Cosmological Praxis’, in Ritual, Famham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, pp. 291–300 18 ‘Ritual Communication and Linguistic Ideology: A Reading and Partial Reformulation of Rappaport’s Theory of Ritual’, Current Anthropology, 42, pp. 591–97, 612–13 19 ‘The Gardens of Omarakana: Early Work’, in Coral Gardens and Their Magic: Volume I, Soil-Tilling and Agricultural Rites in the TrobriandIslands, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 93–102 20 ‘The Magical Power of Words’, Man, 3, pp. 185–206 21 ‘Puberty Rites, Women’s Naven, and Initiation: Women’s Rituals of Transition in Abelam and Iatmul Culture’, in N.C. Lutkehaus and P.B. Roscoe (eds), Gender Rituals: Female Initiation in Melanesia, London: Routledge, pp. 33–53, 239–40 22 ‘Female Spirit Cults as a Window on Gender Relations in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 5, pp. 345–60 23 ‘Silent Forms but Natural Symbols?’, in Day of Shining Red: An Essay on Understanding Ritual, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 106–20, 225–26 24 ‘Power and Placement in Blood Practices’, Ethnology, Special Issue, ed. Janet Hoskins, 41, pp. 349–63 25 ‘Pietas in Ancestor Worship: The Henry Myers Lecture, I960’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 91, pp. 166–91 26 ‘Cosmology, Resources, and Landscape: Agencies of the Dead and the Living in Duna, Papua New Guinea’, Ethnology, 44, pp. 35–47 27 ‘Israel, America, and the Ancestors: Narratives of Spiritual Warfare in a Pentecostal Denomination in Solomon Islands’, Journal of Ritual Studies, 15(2), pp. 62–78 28 ‘Blood, Fire, and Word: Luo, Christian, and Luo-Christian Sacrifice’, in The Nature of Entrustment: Intimacy, Exchange, and the Sacred in Africa, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 187–204, 243–45, 253–54 29 ‘Sacrifice and Social Structure among the Kuranko’, Africa, 47, pp. 123–39 30 ‘The Meaning of Sacrifice’, in Nuer Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 272–86 31 “‘Cattle Aren’t Killed for Nothing”: Christianity, Conversion, and the Enduring Importance of Prophets’, in Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 299–312 32 ‘Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example’, in The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, pp. 142–69 Name Index