The Fallen Hero Writes a Letter to the Future: On Different Voices in Soviet Commemorative Practices of the 1960s

For years, personal and social voices have been the issue of discussion on voice construction in written discourse (e.g., Elbow, 1999; Flowerdew, 2011; Hyland, 2002, 2010a, 2012b; Mauranen, 2013; Ramanathan & Atkinson, 1999; Tardy, 2005). However, there is a lack of an integrated examination of the dimensions which determine voice construction in writing from personal and social perspectives. This article re-examines the issue of voice construction through a critical review of previous literature on identity in written discourse. It is argued that there are five major dimensions for the construction of voice in written discourse. How writers appropriate their voice according to such five dimensions as genre, transition, culture, discipline and audience will be discussed. This paper lends further support to the view that voice in written discourse is both personal and social. As it is known, good writing expresses both personal and social voices. However, based on the dominant dimension(s), voice construction should be adjusted. Sometimes personal voice is boldly expressed; sometimes social voice is; and some other times the boundary between the two is unnoticeable. The study provides an integrated framework as well as pedagogical implications for the teaching of academic writing within L1 and L2 contexts.

The performance of ritual and the ritualisation of performance are the two main theoretical repertoires of ritual study in international politics and beyond. However, they also escalate tensions between those who insist on ritual's ability to operate by virtue of participants’ presence and those who believe that global networks of media call for a representational turn, which must tie participants and audiences across borders. Should we fail to understand how these distinct theoretical repertoires interact, it would be difficult to study international ritual, identify its functions, and trace its effects. Anchored in the sociology of ‘social occasions’, this article weaves ritual's patterns, properties, and resources into a coherent analytical framework. The framework enables us to better to grasp how actors move between/within different worlds (ritual and performance) and to what effects. The comparative study of two post-terrorism ritual occasions (the 2011 Rose March in Oslo and the 2015 Republican Marches in France) illustrates the usefulness of this theoretical proposition and its related framework.

Play is widely discussed within the context of children's education and development. However, play (specifically child-directed play) should also be understood in the context of children's participation. With an argument grounded in theory and research from multiple perspectives, this article encourages readers to consider play as not only a means to an end, but as an essential element of children's current engagement within cultural contexts and the creation of social capital and personal voice. Recognizing the limits of theoretical discussion alone, the authors have developed a practice-based community engagement and training model to support child-directed play across various contexts. Pop-Up Adventure Playgrounds support and celebrate child-directed play in public spaces and help to reframe discussions about children's right to play as part of an ongoing and collective issue of human rights, citizenship, and participation.

To compare Sufi regional cults across different places separated by thousands of miles of sea and land, and by radically different cultural milieus, is in many ways to seek the global in the local rather than the local in the global. Either way, charting difference and similarity in Sufism as an embodied tradition requires attention beyond mystical philosophical and ethical ideas to the ritual performances and religious organizational patterns that shape Sufi orders and cults in widely separated locations. We need, in other words, to seek to understand comparatively four interrelated symbolic complexes: first, the sacred division of labour — the ritual roles that perpetuate and reproduce the cult; second, the sacred exchanges between places and persons, often across great distances; third, the sacred region, its catchment area and the sanctified central places that shape it; and fourth, the sacred indexical events — the rituals — that coordinate and revitalize organizational and symbolic unities and enable managerial and logistical planning and decision making. Comparison requires that we examine the way in which these four dimensions of ritual sanctification and performance are linked, and are embedded in a particular symbolic logic and local environment.

Ritual performance contributes significantly to the artistic power and aesthetic value of Elechi Amadi’s novel, The Concubine. This essay explores the narrative functions of ritual patterns to the plot, characters and themes of the novel. The textual analytic method exposes the researcher to profound underlying meanings associated with each ritual element. The reader-response theoretical framework opens the novel to fresh insight in order to unpack the various intricate significations attached to the ritual symbols embedded in the tapestry of the novel. It helps the research to treat ritual elements as narrative devices thus enhancing their interpretation and unveiling their literary, artistic, structural and aesthetic qualities. It is discovered from the textual analysis that ritual performance can be viewed from three angles. The essay concludes that ritual divination, ritual sacrifice and ritual fortification constitute the triangle of ritual performance and that they contribute to characterizing characters, initiating conflict, arousing suspense, enacting flashback and resolving conflicts. Ritual performance, from the above reasons, functions as narrative techniques in the novel.

Ritual Scenes in the Iliad:Rote, Hallowed, or Encrypted as Ancient Art? Margo Kitts (bio) To analyze ritual scenes in the Iliad, one first must contend with the myriad scenes scholars have deemed ritualistic. These include not only prayer, supplication, sacrifice, and oath-making,1 but also gift exchanges and hospitality,2 speechmaking and taunting,3 grieving and funeral ceremonies,4 and dressings and armings.5 Indeed, the whole performance of the Iliad has been described as a ritualized feature of Totenkult (Seaford 1994; Derderian 2001) or, less comprehensively, a performance of Todesdichtung permeated with themes of lament, lament itself being identified as a micro-ritual with discernible performance features (Tsagalis 2004). Expressly or not, Homerists have attuned their ears to rituals in the poem ever since Parry and Lord discovered the performance-contexts for bards in the Balkans (for example, Lord 1960:13-29). By analogy with those performances, the Iliad represents an artifact of an extensive tradition of ritual performance: the ritual performed was the poem. Although ritual is basic to oral-traditional performance and to many features of Homeric life, one cannot presume that ritual scenes simply reflect lived traditions outside of the poem. Given the likely evolution of the poems, the claim is just too broad. Whose rituals? Which side of the Mediterranean? Which generation of poets? Further, as Katherine Derderian notes of the poem's funeral rituals, they must be at least in part fictionalized (2001:9). We can be reasonably sure that funeral rituals did not occur in hexameter, for instance, or not wholly so. In this essay I ponder to what extent ritual scenes in the poem might reflect actual ritual traditions, by examining those scenes in the light of ritual performance theory. I will argue that ritual scenes are composed with unique constraints that reflect the crystallization of especially ancient ritual traditions. Thus, they reflect compositional pressures beyond those of other kinds of typical scenes. Scenes of commensal and oath sacrifice are convenient for this investigation because they are highly formalized. Sacrifice scenes will be treated as a subgenre of typical scenes with unique performance features and genealogies. The focus, however, is not on the cultural differences between these two sacrificial traditions,6 but on the extent to which their respective typical scenes manifest the features we can discern in ritual performances at large. How to Identify a Ritual To begin we must consider what features identify rituals per se. For the last four decades scholars have viewed rituals typically in terms of communication and performance theory,7 focusing not on enacted myth8 but on the typical features that shape and distinguish ritual communication. Such features usually are non-instrumental (Rappaport 1999:51), superfluous to practical aim, and irreducible to technical motivations (Whitehouse 2004:3). They might include, for example, exaggerated gestures, marked tempos, ceremonial implements, or speech acts in heightened registers or arcane dialects. This is not to say that higher order awarenesses or different affects may not emerge for participants in a ritual (Rappaport 1999:72; Whitehouse 2004:105-36), but merely that, from goose mating dances to a Latin mass, ritual is a distinct order of communication. Identifying features depend on the theorist. Stanley Tambiah identified four principal features: formality, stereotypy, condensation, and redundancy (1981:119). Maurice Bloch observed degrees of formality, patterning, repetition and rhythm (1989:21). Roy Rappaport discerned ritual encoding by someone other than the performers, formality, degree of invariance, and metaperformative qualities, by which he meant the way that a ritual's performance establishes the conventions it enacts (1999:32-50). Valerio Valeri recognized ritual patterns as behaving like poetry: they communicate form over syntax, equivalence over difference, and on a paradigmatic rather than syntagmatic axis (1985:343). Even the evolutionary anthropologists, such as Alcorta and Sosis, have observed in ritual a deep structural grammar, which they claim has an ontogenetic basis (2005:332). Synthesizing all this for a short essay, we can compress these features into four: patterning, rhythm, condensation, and formality. These features overlap but have the advantage of being traceable in the poem. Patterning in Sacrifice Scenes Patterning is probably the most basic feature of rituals and characterized by predictability and...

In this article, for the first time, game folklore ritual games are the subject of special study, their distinctive features from other types of games have been analyzed. Based on the statements of domestic and foreign scientists in relation to game folklore, new conclusions on ritual games have been summarized. The concept of "Game", in the course of its development, has undergone various changes in connection with ancient rituals and religious ceremonies, and as a result formed as a separate channel. The ritual is a complex structure, the essence of the concept of which, as a scientific term, includes the history and the path of development of human knowledge as a whole. In game folklore, in particular in ritual games, the centuries-old life experience and upbringing of the people are concentrated. In this regard, the manifestation of ancient ritual patterns in ritual games is diverse. One of the features of ritual games is the performance of rituals at certain stages of a person's life, such as the birth of a child, seeing off the bride, wedding, seeing off the deceased to another world and treating the sick person.

When the Cemetery Becomes Political: Dealing with the Religious Heritage in Multi-Ethnic Regions

Several of the gold leaves relate the initiate’s underworld journey to obtain a drink from the waters of memory (mnemosyne). Against the influential interpretation of Jean-Pierre Vernant, who argued that memory in the tablets was a departure from early Greek poetry, I contend that mnemosyne in these texts reflects concerns and ideas from early Greek poetry. Focusing especially on texts from Hipponion and Entella, which were unknown to Vernant, I argue that the ambiguous theme of memory was variously adapted by different ritual performers. Two texts reveal developments of communicative memory from poetic diction (with parallels in Hesiod). At other times, memory designates the mystic community as the group that assures postmortem salvation: in this respect, mnemosyne has a significance like that in lyric poetry (Theognis, Sappho). Pindar, whose afterlife imagery parallels the tablets, shows that positive eschatology can be incorporated with other strategies of memory. The treatment of the name and gender show finally that the tablets can be understood as a practice of memory, in which the identity of the deceased was reshaped and remembered according to the priorities of the group.

Collective Memory, Anthropology of

This paper examines a previously unknown anonymous Hebrew letter inserted into a postwar edition of Shem HaGedolim, found in the library of the Jewish University in Budapest. The letter, composed in Győr in 1947, consists almost entirely of passages copied from Tiferet Chayim, a hagiographic genealogy of the Sanz Hasidic dynasty. Although derivative in content, the letter’s form and placement suggest it was not meant for transmission but instead served as a private act of mourning and historiographical preservation. By situating the letter within the broader context of post-Holocaust Jewish and Hasidic memory practices, including yizkor books, rabbinic memoirs, and grassroots commemorative writing, this study proposes that the document constitutes a “micro-yizkor”: a bibliographic ritual that aimed to re-inscribe lost tzaddikim into sacred memory. Drawing on theories of trauma, religious coping, and bereavement psychology, particularly the Two-Track Model of Bereavement, the paper examines the letter as both a therapeutic and historiographical gesture. The author’s meticulous copying, selective omissions, and personalized touches (such as modified honorifics and emotive phrases) reflect an attempt to maintain spiritual continuity in the wake of communal devastation. Engaging scholarship by Michal Shaul, Lior Becker, Gershon Greenberg, and others, the analysis demonstrates how citation, far from being a passive act, functions here as an instrument of resistance, memory, and redemptive reconstruction. The existence of such a document can also be examined through the lens of Maurice Rickards’ insights, particularly his characterization of the “compulsive note” as a salient form of ephemera, materials often inserted between the pages of books, which pose unique challenges for interpreting the time capsule their authors sought to construct. Ultimately, the paper argues that this modest and anonymous document offers a rare window into postwar Ultra-orthodox religious subjectivity. It challenges prevailing assumptions about Hasidic silence after the Holocaust and demonstarates how even derivative texts can serve as potent sites of historical testimony, spiritual resilience, and bibliographic mourning. The letter thus sheds light on a neglected form of Hasidic historiography, one authored not by professional historians, but by the broken-hearted, writing in the margins of sacred books.

This chapter explores the domestic memorialization of the dead through the display of objects and ephemera, and through the performance of rituals within private spaces. It contends that both individuals and families based key memorialization practices in their domestic space. This represented an area they could, to some extent, control, and through which they could grieve. They did so by repurposing photographs, and creating new objects of mourning, such as commemorative plates and ‘disaster glasses’. During the First World War, the fact that this home-based memorialization was essential to mourning was recognized by the government, who ran a competition to find a suitable domestic memorial item. However, this came late in the war, and for many domestic remembrance allowed families to memorialize the dead in a space which was significant to them long before any official public recognition was granted.

In The Spirit of Liturgy, Romano Guardini argued that liturgy is a playful activity. But one may ask, can liturgy really be analysed in light of the experience of play? This question opens up different theoretical problems, which range from a fundamental understanding of play and its celebratory spirit to a consideration of liturgy as an event of the divine Mystery. In this paper, I will therefore explore the nature of Christian ritual performance, drawing on a phenomenological analysis of the connections between play and liturgy in the process, before concluding that the liturgy – from a transcendental perspective – is in fact a playful activity. The argument will thus include a study of the particularity and difference of the original ritual patterns and the universe of play, thereby bringing into focus the interplay between the sense of rite and the experience of play. In such a way, I will show that play provides us with one of the possible ways of approaching the essence of the Christian ritual celebration as a transcendental experience of Mystery, as well as shedding light on the interrelation between homo ludens and homo liturgicus.

Reviewed by: Sanctified Violence in Homeric Society: Oath-Making Rituals and Narratives in the Iliad Elton Barker Margo Kitts . Sanctified Violence in Homeric Society: Oath-Making Rituals and Narratives in the Iliad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 244. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-521-85529-7. One new trend in Homeric studies is oral traditional theory, which, through the study of formulaic utterances, places the Homeric poems in a wider epic cosmos. In her book, Kitts combines oral traditional theory with anthropology to use Homer's Iliad as evidence for the institution of oath-making in the "ancient world beyond epic" (3), and to show how a ritual leitmotif is established "for the devastation of the Trojans as a consequence of their violating a divinely witnessed oath" (3). Her book divides into four. In chapter 1 Kitts sets out various anthropological theories for seeing ritual scenes in epic poetry as symbolic modes of communication, and for examining "the ancient audience's experience of the sticky interface between the actual ritual performance and the poetic ritual scene" (5). Chapter 2 establishes the cultural foundations of Homeric oath-making, using underlying ritual patterns, rather than specific terminology, to identify oath-making scenes. Chapter 3 takes two examples—in Iliad 3 and 19—to illustrate the workings of the oath institution and the possible resonance of oath-avenging with battlefield slaughter. Chapter 4 outlines battlefield theophanies in the Iliad and Near-Eastern traditions "to show a shared Mediterranean imagination regarding the roles of gods on the battlefield" (10). Kitts raises a number of important concerns. First, she challenges conventional approaches to ancient Greek sacrifice, showing how commensual sacrifice scenes in the Iliad avoid mention of blood or the animal's death; those features are true rather of oath-sacrificing ritual. She then explores [End Page 117] how these two types of sacrifice ritual play out differently in the narrative and, in particular, how the description of battlefield deaths "are rendered in such a way as to elicit comparisons with the killing and dying of the animal victims of oath-sacrifice in Books 3 and 19, insinuating a figurative equation of killing in war with killing in sacrifice" (3). The extent to which the audience is invited to regard the scenes of battle as "ritual slaughter" lies at the heart of the argument. As she puts it: "It is intriguing that the victims who die gasping and panting like sacrificial lambs are on the Trojan side, given the Trojan culpability as perjurers of the oath in Book 3" (156). Yet, it is never made clear quite how that thesis might affect our understanding of the Iliad as a whole. Kitts devotes a chapter to Near Eastern parallels, whose war rhetoric often attributes the slaughter of enemies to divine retribution for violated oaths; but whether we should regard the Iliad as a sacred text or how the Iliad's resonances with sacrificial discourse work in its narrative does not receive due attention. One passage Kitts does tackle in detail is Achilles' killing of Lykaon, in which she makes a good case for this scene's resonance with sacrificial discourse. Yet, the analysis is complicated by virtue of being treated on two separate occasions (57–71, 162–70). Furthermore, at its conclusion the reader is directed (168) to a prior treatment (in the Journal of Ritual Studies 13 [1999]), which, incidentally, is a good deal more pointed and highlights the book's lack of clarity. This book represents a significant expansion of Kitts' previous articles (see also Journal of Ritual Studies 16 [2002]), primarily by the inclusion of ritual theory and more detailed case studies; yet, the aim of comprehensiveness diminishes considerably the argument's precision and focus. First, the Homeric scholar may find the introductory chapter on anthropological theory hard-going enough without more references hampering discussion of particular examples. The train of thought is at times bewildering, as typified by the mix of conjunctions used (however, yet, but, but, 104–6) to explain Achilles' throwing down of the scepter. But most telling against comprehensibility is a jargon-rich discourse, which does little to elucidate the analysis. Other problems exist: the utility of...

Dancing Embodied Memory: The Choreography of Place in the Peruvian Andes