Participation In Rituals Research Articles

‘We Still Wanted That Sense of Occasion’: Traditions and Meaning-Making in Scottish Humanist Marriage Ceremonies

As a secularising nation in Northern Europe, Scotland has, over the last few decades, experienced a steep decline in religious belonging, church attendance, and beliefs. Ritual participation, which is arguably an understudied dimension of secularisation, follows a similar pattern of decline, with a significant majority of Scottish marriage rituals now being conducted in secular ceremonies. Using data from semi-structured in-depth interviews with 17 married couples, this study examines the decisions that secular Scots make when planning their wedding. Moreover, it places a particular focus on humanist marriage ceremonies, which have seen a noteworthy increase in popularity since they became legally recognised in Scotland in 2005. The secular participants emphasised the role of personal convictions and family expectations in choosing a particular type of marriage ceremony. The narratives also revealed how positive attitudes toward humanist ceremonies, in contrast with civil ceremonies, are centred around their ability to create personalised, nonreligious, celebrations that nevertheless give attention to culture and heritage. Ultimately, the findings suggest that repeating history through cultural traditions are an important aspect of both secular and religious rites of passage.

Rituals and Institutional Maintenance: The Case of the Beating Retreat Ceremony

The present study examines ritual-driven institutional maintenance, or the reproduction of social order, in a case where ritual attendance is not mandated, conformity to the recurring ritual enactment is not expected, and where the ritual assumes meaning only as it is performed in perfect coordination with an assumed rival. The study is based on the case of the Beating Retreat ritual conducted daily at the India–Pakistan border. Findings indicate that institutional maintenance rests on (a) distantiation, which serves to create physical and social distance between collectives as ritual participants gain a sense of self and the “other,” and (b) interpellation, which serves to reinforce institutional ideologies as ritual participants internalize and profess what is valued. I extend implications of present findings for social relations within work organizations.

Practices in search of legitimacy: the contemporary use of ayahuasca, between religious and therapeutic vindications

In recent decades, the growing interest of Westerners in the psychotropic brew ayahuasca and the participation in exotic rituals has led to the multiplication of "shamanic centers" in the Peruvian Amazon. Among these, Takiwasi is a therapeutic community that welcomes hundreds of national and foreign clients every year. This institution, created by a French physician in 1992, was originally intended to propose a therapeutic alternative for the treatment of addiction, characterized by the use of tools of Peruvian mestizo shamanism, biomedicine and clinical psychology. The diachronic evolution of the institution is however marked by the growing use of elements of the Catholic tradition. In this article, I will examine the hypothesis that these transformations can be interpreted as the effects of the globalization of the use of ayahuasca and its legal and political consequences. Thus, the case of Takiwasi underlines the role played by religious traditions and the medical field in the construction, legitimization and maintenance of new and hybrid practices that are multiplying around the use of ayahuasca.

Two Models of Political Leader Cults: Propaganda and Ritual

ABSTRACTPersonality cults of political leaders can be conceptualized in one of two different ways: as propaganda that portrays the leader positively, or as rituals of leader worship. The first model stresses the forms of communication that make possible the transformation of bureaucratic state power into charismatic (extra-bureaucratic) authority, while the second emphasizes the forms of participation that make possible the construction of charismatic authority in micro-interaction contexts. These two ideal types are not mutually exclusive, since leader-focused propaganda and rituals of leader worship can interact and amplify each other. But each of these ideal types has distinctive origins and political consequences. Moreover, each conceptualization leads to distinctive scholarly emphases: on the persuasive aspects of cult messages, on the one hand, or on the diversity of reasons for participation in rituals and the signaling function of such participation, on the other hand. In this paper I argue for a greater focus on the signaling and ritual aspects of leader cults, and show how it pays dividends in understanding these multifaceted phenomena. I illustrate this argument with a case study of the cult of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

Communal coping and rumination in the aftermath of Chile earthquake: Multiple mediation analysis of the relationship between subjective severity and posttraumatic growth

AbstractCommunal coping and collective participation were recently proposed as a potential mechanism that may favour not only individual's capacity to bounce back but also community cohesion and social well‐being and posttraumatic growth in the aftermath of natural disasters. To date, there is a lack of studies simultaneously assessing the effect of communal coping strategies and cognitive strategies on the development of posttraumatic growth. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine the role of communal coping strategies and cognitive strategies such as intrusive and deliberated rumination as potential mediators between subjective severity of the event and posttraumatic growth and positive adjustment in the context of natural disaster. The questionnaire was administrated to 225 people affected by the most intense earthquake recorded in Chile in this century. The results of multiple mediation analysis showed that both cognitive strategies, such as deliberative rumination, and communal coping strategies, such as communal positive reappraisal and participation in spiritual rituals, are potential mediators between subjective severity and posttraumatic growth. Overall, the present work offers researchers and professionals interested in this area of study an interesting approach to analyse individual and collective coping strategies and its interrelation.

Book Review: Ritual Participation and Interreligious Dialogue: Boundaries, Transgressions and Innovations

Book Review: Ritual Participation and Interreligious Dialogue: Boundaries, Transgressions and Innovations

Observant participant: carnal sociology and researcher identity in religious educational spaces

ABSTRACTThe ethnographer’s embodied action during research is a complex of habit, belief, social and institutional positioning, and intention. This article examines what urban anthropologist Wacqaunt calls ‘carnal sociology’ and considers its implications for ethnographers of religious educational spaces. Contemporary ethnographers of education have renewed their interest in religious educational spaces—religious schools, houses of worship, public festivals. In conducting research in the field of religious education, ethnographers often cross familiar and unfamiliar boundaries, engaging in forms of participant observation and practice beyond their own religious categories: we research in religious spaces and with religious communities different from our own commitments. Drawing on interactional data from a multi-year ethnography of an urban Catholic school and parish in Philadelphia (USA), I consider how my own embodied participation in the religious rituals of the school and parish led to a reflexivity on practice, and initiated institutional and youth-driven social positioning in response.

Here, There, and (Almost) Everywhere: Civil Religion and Cultural Competency

Students coming to study in the US know full well that religion plays a significant role in American lives, but they are often surprised to discover not only the pervasiveness of religious sensibility in American culture but also the extent to which an acceptance--and even expectation--of fairly specific religious ideas or practices suffuses American national identity. This paper argues that education about civil religion should be part of cultural competency preparation for study abroad students, whether coming to the US or going abroad from it, and no matter their own religious orientation or lack thereof. In most cases, civil religion represents a fusion of national pride and identity with a historically dominant religion, e.g., Calvinism (why the Dutch don't draw their curtains at night), Confucianism (why vertical rather than horizontal social relations are paramount in Chinese society), or Shinto (why the Japanese emphasize notions of ritual cleanliness and purity). Manifested not by attendance or participation in traditional religious rituals but by generally unexamined everyday actions and situations, civil religious sensibilities and expectations can pervade even a seemingly secular society, rendering certain customs and "habits of the heart" opaque to the uninitiated.

OBJECTS OF DESIRE

This paper is interested in commodity fetishism as a signal of collapsing marital mandates in the genre of lad lit. Instead of focusing solely on its late twentieth-century moment of emergence as a response to chick lit, the paper proposes a longer historical view in order to understand the crisis of masculinity that lad lit lays bare in its protagonists’ inherently queer status as collectors. The analysis puts critical pressure on the collectible object by re-reading the “lad” through the literary figure of the fop, who represents a recurring response to similar crises in gender from the seventeenth-century’s comedy of manners to the novels of Jane Austen. The fop’s overinvestment in style and consequent marginalization is considered in Nick Hornby’s novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, in which the protagonists’ obsessive collecting of objects can be understood as both a dominant feature of their masculinity and the roadblock to their participation in heteronormative rituals of romance. Instead of reading Hornby’s characters as straightforwardly queer, this paper focuses on the commodity as a signal of queerness, and in turn its central role in the creation of, and the challenge to, the lad’s masculinity.

The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness. Anxieties, Hopes, and Moral Tensions in Everyday Life ed. by Becky Yang Hsu and Richard Madsen

Reviewed by: The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness. Anxieties, Hopes, and Moral Tensions in Everyday Life ed. by Becky Yang Hsu and Richard Madsen Gerda Wielander (bio) Becky Yang Hsu and Richard Madsen, editors. The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness. Anxieties, Hopes, and Moral Tensions in Everyday Life. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. vii, 189 pp. Paperback $34.95, isbn 978-0-520-30632-5. It is difficult to escape happiness these days. The term has wiggled its way into popular, corporate, and political discourse with a persistence that has become predictable. Few are the workshops—for academics, managers, and students—that do not reference the h-word, not to speak of the many shelves in bookstores all over the world, including China, that promise ways and formulas to achieve a happier life. Those professing to have the answers, mostly arrived through quantitative data analysis relying on psychology or economics, are the same people who have told us for centuries how to live our lives, namely middle-aged White men, many of them Americans. Happiness as the telos of human existence has been debated since Aristotle, of course, but happiness as subject of scientific and academic investigation has only really appeared in the last twenty years. Attention to happiness surged with the publication of the first World Happiness Report in 2012 in support of the United Nations High Level Meeting on Happiness and Well-Being of the same year. The meeting itself followed a proposal by the Prime Minister of Bhutan, that countries measure the happiness of their people and use this information to help guide their public policies (Helliwell et al. 2015, p. 3). There have since been six further reports, the latest published in March 2019. The centerpiece of these reports, and the one aspect of this complex research reported in the media, is the happiness "league-table" that ranks countries according to their populations' happiness. Wealthy northern European countries have dominated the top end of the league table while China has consistently occupied a middling position, with a slide down to 93 (of 156 countries) in 2019. The main conundrum for scientists eager to measure our emotions has always been the fact that it is difficult to get away from relying on people's self-reporting when asking them how happy they are. Despite advances in neuroscience that purport to show that happiness, as an emotion, is not a subjective feeling but objectively verifiable through a variety of biological and neuroscientific factors, there is no getting away from self-reporting and hence the use of language when asking people to fill in questionnaires. It is here where skepticism surfaces. Do all languages have an equivalent term to the English word "happy" in all its facets? The answer to this will depend on what school of thought one subscribes to in relation to the nature of language itself. This new volume on the Chinese pursuit of happiness, edited by Becky Yang Hsu and Richard Madsen, both sociologists working on China, states from the outset that the English term happiness is inadequate for encompassing how people around [End Page 166] the world feel about a good life. As a research team, they strove to design a more adequate survey aimed at a Chinese middle-class population. They chose the term "blessed happiness" to render the complex meanings of the Chinese characters fu, so ubiquitous in Chinese popular culture (as well as Chinese state propaganda). This volume only partly reports on the findings of the survey (which will be published in more detail in a separate monograph), but mostly builds on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the editors and their collaborators. In its Introduction, Becky Yang Hsu explains the rationale of the project and describes the "blessed happiness survey" that distinguishes itself from other happiness surveys in four ways: social contact questions, emphasis on behavior rather than opinion, its consideration of three aspects of happiness, and its interest in details of participation in rituals remembering the deceased (p. 9). No results are presented in the volume or its Introduction, but the description of the survey design serves as an illustration of the authors' approach to happiness in the Chinese context, making a...

Ritual Life of an Altar-Home: A Photographic Essay on Transformational Places and Technologies

This photographic essay brings evidence of the visible material and invisible spectral changes altar-homes, altar-rooms, and altars undergo, as interactions with them are experienced by ritual participants. Focusing on the visual documentation I gathered while working at the altar-home of Haydée, a Puerto Rican espiritista bruja, I explore the matter-of-fact, almost banal technologies by means of which healers may initiate transformational processes that sacralize their altar-homes, creating spatial proxies of distant sacred places in order to summon and cajole spirits to intervene in human affairs. In sum, this is an exploration of the ritual labor that enters in constituting the ritual life of altars, or how altars "do."

Afrontamiento religioso espiritual del duelo judío

This article analyses religious and spiritual coping of negative and stressful events such as the loss of a loved one. The study cases of a religious jewish man and a woman- who lost a loved one- is part of my Docthoral Thesis (an exploratory and descriptive study done with religious persons of different creeds), where it was verified that participation in funerary jewish rituals, prayers, meditation, healing, and religious support promote positive effects and physical, psychological, mental and spiritual well- being of religious people who mourn the loss of a loved one

Animals, Empathy, and Raẖamim in the Study of Religion

Both classical and contemporary Jewish texts, surveyed here, articulate a religious opposition to hunting for sport. This essay interprets compassion-based rabbinic opposition to hunting as reflecting a pragmatic concern with cultivating a regard and even a reverence for the capacities of empathy and sympathy. In particular, this “redescription” will analyze the rabbinic opposition to hunting in terms of more basic “building blocks” of religion, specifically empathy and sympathy as defined by the life sciences. I conclude that the most complete way to understand compassion-based rabbinic opposition to hunting is as, simultaneously, a society-forming performance, a symbolic statement about human attitudes towards life, and—the focus of the present essay—a vehicle for responding to the “building block” capacities for empathy and sympathy. A concluding section considers the implications of this case study for religious studies, arguing for the value of considering animals as participants in religious ritual.

Cultural and social aspects of animal domestication in Greek traditional society

The study of the ways, perceptions and practices by means of which a traditional society domesticates animals constitutes an important chapter in the understanding and interpretation of the making of its civilization, as the presence of animals can be found in all its facets and expressions. In the present paper which, in its initial form, was delivered as a lecture to the Hellenic Veterinary Medical Society, reference was made to the ways the Greek traditional society uses to integrate animals in its cultural system. This reference, however, was a brief and indicative one, as these ways have not been sufficiently studied from a folkanthropological point of view in Greece. This integration happened in many different ways, through the production and reproduction of the animals in their quality as financial asset, the consumption of their meat during week days and celebrations, their naming, the care to prevent and to cure illnesses affecting them, their participation in the worship rituals of saints as sacrificial offers, both real and symbolic, their position in the symbolic and the imaginary as it is depicted in oral narrative (legends, fairy tales, traditions, proverbs). Special mention is made to the saint patrons (St. Modestos, St. Mamas, St. Minas) of the animals in orthodox Christian religion and in Greek popular beliefs and practices.

Emerging Trends in Pregnancy-Loss Memorialization in American Catholicism

Pregnancy loss (miscarriage, stillbirth, and abortion) is an age-old, and typically hidden, part of women's lives, yet only in recent years has it started to receive recognition to match its prevalence. Based on ethnographic research, this article analyzes liturgical and memorial practices developing within American Catholicism to acknowledge and commemorate pregnancy losses. Growing efforts have emerged as parishes, dioceses, and other Catholic organizations across the country have developed rites and memorials that provide formal ways to attend to grief that often accompanies experiences of miscarriage, stillbirth, and abortion. The memorials range from “miscarriage masses” to public monuments to postabortion ministry retreats. This article argues that these memorial practices seek to change how pregnancy-loss experiences are understood or “known” by ritual participants by reframing them within Catholic narratives of forgiveness and healing, thereby transforming situations of isolating loss into stories of grace, community, and shared sorrow.

Interformation

Under which circumstances should Protestant Christians participate in the ritual of the religious other? And when should we invite the religious other to participate in our own rituals? These questions raise a host of theological and ethical issues. This chapter will analyse several cases of interreligious ritual participation from a variety of analytical perspectives. The discussion is of critical contemporary importance, as people of faith enter into situations of interreligious practice more frequently. Whether attending a roommate’s synagogue, a neighbour’s mosque, a relative’s church, or a coworker’s temple, opportunities to transgress ritual boundaries are numerous. At the same time, the permutations of the various interreligious situations severely complicate any analysis. Nevertheless, the interreligious decisions we make have spiritual implications for the individuals involved, sociological implications for their communities, and political implications for the broader society. Since the decisions are so consequential, we must make them with theological and ethical awareness. This chapter elucidates some theological and ethical implications of interreligious ritual participation. It concludes by offering guidelines for participation in the rituals of other religious traditions, while acknowledging that the variety of possible situations demands a contextual ethic.

The amplified sacrifice: sound, technology, and participation in modern Vedic ritual

ABSTRACTThe amplification of religious sound in public spaces has become a key medium for negotiating identity, difference, and pluralism in societies worldwide. This paper explores the religious soundscape of Hindu traditions in Kerala, India by examining the role of sonic amplification in the sacrifices of Nambudiri Brahmins. While Brahmanical praxis is based on ancient liturgies from the first millennium BCE, the modern performance now incorporates microphones and loudspeakers that amplify recitations well beyond the power of the human voice. This technological shift coincides with significant changes in patronage and participation, as people from outside the Nambudiri community take a more active role in the funding, organization, and celebration of such rituals. In contrast to the private sacrifices of previous generations, the ‘amplified sacrifice’ is now carried out as a public Hindu festival with thousands of attendees and a full suite of marketing and media coverage. In this way, the local, sonic amplification of performance tracks with a regional, cultural ‘amplification’ of Vedic ritual and Nambudiri identity.

Intercultural Ritual Transgression as a Catalyst for Early Christian Theological Reflection — A Consideration of 1 Corinthians 8

Abstract What led to the issues that Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians 8? This paper argues that the missionary expansion of the early community led to a renegotiation of its ritual boundaries, in particular concerning question of ritual participation. Theory concerning ‘ritual failure’ is used in order to analyse the dynamics involved.

Women rights violation through rituals; A comparative study of Dalit and NonDalit women in tumkur district, Karnataka

Women consisting half of our population although since ancient India Women weretreated second division people of society. However biological difference of sex can be seen buton the ground of social construct of gender, inequality is prevalent, male dominated society keepon doing atrocities, exploitation mental and physical abuse against women. Even in culturalpractice like rituals and festivals the worst sort continued. In certain belief system, such asHinduism in India, sons play a special role son preference is mentioned in the Vedas, it issupposed to be a son who lights a deceased person's funeral pyre and brings him or hersalvation. Hindu kinship norms are adhered to more strictly among all castes. On this backdropthis article studied socio-economic background of the women, ascertained ritual participation ofwomen and explored violation of women rights through ritual practices a comparison study ofDalit and NonDalit in rural areas of Tumkur district. For this study researcher has usedDescriptive research design. Samples collected through purposeful sampling with the help of selfprepared questionnaire. The study found systematic inequality prevailed in all forms againstwomen.

Ritual Participation, Sense of Community, and Social Well-Being: A Study of Seva in the Sikh Community

The study examined the impact of frequency of ritual participation on sense of community and social well-being of a minority community in India, the Sikhs. We looked at a unique ritualistic practice of the Sikhs, seva. Rituals are known to contribute toward social solidarity and cohesion as well as physical and mental well-being. In particular for a minority community, rituals help group members establish and maintain strong community networks and a unique group identity. A total of 156 members of the Sikh community (85 males; 71 females) participated in the study. Frequency of ritual participation was positively related with social well-being and sense of community. Furthermore, sense of community was found to mediate the effect of frequency of ritual participation on social well-being. Results are discussed in the light of the importance of studying rituals in minority groups, the frequency of participation in a ritual activity and the importance of addressing social well-being in ritual research.