Tracing the Ritual Body

Abstract

This volume utilizes Catherine Bell’s ritual theory to shed new light on the many rituals reflected in ancient Mediterranean texts. In recent decades scholars of religion have come to realize that ritual and bodily practices are just as important for religion as beliefs and doctrine. With the development of ritual studies in the 1990s there arose a critical framework for investigating ritual and practice. Only recently, however, has Bell’s theorizing been employed to study the rituals portrayed in ancient texts. This cross-disciplinary examination assesses the utility of Bell’s theorizing for studying the textual evidence for rituals of the ancient Near East, the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, and other early Christian literature. The contributors to this volume illustrate a path away from regarding rituals as inert and fixed and toward a more complex and vibrant interactive model of ritual behaviour. In this volume, as each scholar works to recover the traces of long-past rituals in a particular set of materials, these and other concepts are consciously employed to guide or challenge the investigation, pushing beyond previous conclusions about ancient rituals. The contributors’ attention to theory, and especially the social context, practical function, and symbolic interpretation, set this collection apart from studies that consider the rituals in more traditional textual ways. In recent decades scholars of religion have come to realize that ritual and bodily practices are just as important for understanding religions as beliefs and doctrine. With the development of ritual studies in the 1990s there arose a critical framework for investigating them. Foremost among the ritual theorists of the time was Catherine Bell, whose thinking continues to be used widely to study rituals. Only recently, however, has Bell’s theorizing been employed to study the rituals portrayed in ancient texts. This volume utilizes Bell’s theorizing to shed new light on the many rituals reflected in ancient texts of the biblical world and thus differs from existing, more conventional studies of such rituals. Bell’s theoretical concepts, which she presented in two often-cited volumes (Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice and Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions), provide the point of departure for this collection of essays, especially her notions of ritualization and the ritual body. Such concepts direct scholars away from regarding rituals as inert and fixed and toward a more complex and vibrant interactive model of ritual behavior. In this volume, as each contributor works to recover the traces of long-past rituals in a particular set of materials, these and other concepts articulated by Bell are deployed to guide the investigation and move beyond existing understandings of the rituals of the ancient biblical world