Attention To Rituals Research Articles

Cranial selection in the cremated remains of the Iron Age Golasecca Celtic Civilization (Northwestern Italy, 9‐4th century BCE)

AbstractThe Golasecca Celtic Civilization (GCC) developed in the Italian Iron Age, between the 9th and 4th centuries BCE, and is characterized by the predominant use of cremation as a funerary ritual in the Italian area. Reconstructing the steps of the cremation ritual in archaeology is a complex challenge, as many anthropic actions leave only faint traces in cremated remains. Within the funerary rituals of prehistoric and protohistoric Italy, the skull has received particular attention from numerous archaeological cultures and civilizations. The context of via Marconi 2020 (Sesto Calende, Varese, northern Italy) has allowed hinting at this practice also in GCC, through the anthropological analysis of cremated remains found in two different but spatially close tombs. The analysis of the cremated remains identified the selection of some elements of the skull of an adult individual and the post‐cranium of a non‐adult individual in the first tomb, and the presence of only the skull of the non‐adult individual in the second tomb. The possibility of a ritual attention of the GCC reserved for the skull has been proven for the first time thanks to the analysis of these subjects. This work provides new data on funerary ritual behaviors of the GCC, allowing for a better understanding within the Italian and European panorama.

Grief, mourning, and the body: Ritual attention to the death of victims of the dictatorship in Chile*

This study considers the way in which the recovery of the bodies of those who were detained and disappeared under the Pinochet dictatorship not only enables the social recognition of their deaths and the performance of death rituals hitherto obstructed, but also makes it possible to “attend to” their deaths in multiple dimensions. The research draws upon testimonies and records collected during fieldwork for an ongoing anthropological investigation. We observe the different practices that can be associated with the process of “dignification,” including the physical demonstrations of affection made possible by the recovery of the bodies. We also illustrate how, for family members, the practices involved in “caring for” and “attending to” death may defy or test the limits of standardized processes imposed by professionals and preconceived ideas or practices relating to death.

Body Tubes and Synaesthesia

Los flujos a través de formas tubulares en el cuerpo, en la cultura material y en el medio natura juegan un papel clave en el pensamiento de los pueblos indígenas del noroeste amazónico. Usando ejemplos de la vida cotidiana, la mitología y el ritual, este artículo examina el tubo como un concepto abstracto que une fisiología, sicología y procesos productivos con aspectos sociológicos y cosmológicos más amplios. Las manifestaciones materiales, visuales y acústicas del flujo tubular ("cabello") también plantean los asuntos de sinestesia y nociones fractales de totalización/destotalización. Siendo los tubos equivalentes a la vida misma, la atención ritual se enfoca en regular las aperturas corporales y de otros tipos para asegurar un flujo balanceado y bien temperado. El artículo concluye sugiriendo que la elaboración cultural de tubos y sinestesia en el noroeste amazónico puede estar relacionada con los rasgos lineales exogámicos de la estructura social característica de la región.

Animals in Japanese Buddhism: The Third Path of Existence

AbstractBuddhism is often romanticized for promoting great kindness toward nonhuman animals, but while the tradition grants animals a degree of subjecthood and does not categorically deny them reason, morality, or the potential for salvation, there are also ambiguities and contradictions, even outright anthropocentrism. This overview of recent research on animals in premodern Japanese Buddhism demonstrates that animals shared with humans their status as sentient, living beings and were often attributed with superhuman, if not divine, powers; and yet as beasts, they also had a subhuman status. Because of their simultaneous kinship with and persistent otherness from humans, nonhuman animals were anthropomorphized for didactic purposes, delineating unwholesome and meritorious human conduct and its karmic effects and expressing tensions between competing ritual and religious systems. As spiritually hindered and potentially volatile beings, animals received ritual attention, but the objectives of such rituals often did not consist of bettering the lives of animals in the here and now. Instead, these rituals were often motivated by propitiatory and soteriological concerns and sometimes even served to condone violence against animals despite the persistent antisacrificial rhetoric in Buddhist discourse.

“Bringing back the old ways”: enacting a goddess festival in urban singapore

ABSTRACTThe now-global presence of Samayapuram Mariyamman, a goddess from Tamil Nadu, has complicated discussions about her identity as a “local” deity of limited influence. This article details the contemporary veneration of the goddess in the urban, island city-state of Singapore. For the past thirteen years, her devotees in Singapore have observed a festival in her honor, christening it the “Sri Samayapuram Mariyamman Kul Varppu Celebrations” (KVC). This goddess festival is framed around the core ritual of kul varppu, a “porridge offering” to the deity, anchoring the event firmly within the votive tradition of devotional Hinduism. While this ritual has persisted in households over time, it has now been incorporated into, and stands at the center of a consciously organized, collective, goddess festival in an urban, multicultural, cosmopolitan context, and has acquired a fresh set of meanings. Its guiding principles rest in a commitment to the “ways of the ancestors,” a set of customary religious practices, which have been largely “forgotten” and that are being revived for the “benefit of future generations.” “Bringing back the old ways” is an idiom through which devotees articulate their revitalization efforts, manifest concretely in privileging ritual attention to folk Hindu deities. The article begins by offering an ethnographic grounding for this project, specifying the research trajectory and recording the methodological routes traveled. Next, the article narrates the form of the festival I observed in 2004 and 2005, followed by a turn to its material dimensions, emphasizing the cooking of the porridge, the reproduction of sacred space, and the movement of the deity within this. Coming to the present, the article ends by charting the shifts that have taken place in the festival's enactment over a thirteen-year period and in the organizing group's portfolio and agenda.

Negotiating the afterlife: emplacement as ongoing concern in contemporary Japan

This article analyzes how Japanese handle problematic situations involving the care of the dead. Drawing upon narratives of hauntings, dream visitations, and split-grave internments, and other ethnographic data collected in northern Japan, we show the central importance of ongoing ritual attention and attentiveness to the needs of the dead as a means of maintaining proper emplacement of ancestral spirits. We argue that ongoing concerns about maintaining connections between the dead and their proper loci is a manifestation of concerns about constructing and maintaining social relationships among the living and between the living and the dead, providing a way to physically represent and work through social problems displaying interdependencies. In their emphasis on emplacement as an ongoing process, our informants' narratives reveal a different way of thinking about the divide between the living and the dead, and the possibility of its transcendence through the actions of the living.

Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism: The Foundations of Authority in Gelukpa Monasticism (review)

Reviewed by: Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism: The Foundations of Authority in Gelukpa Monasticism Christian P. B. Haskett Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism: The Foundations of Authority in Gelukpa Monasticism. By Martin A. Mills. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 404 + xxi pp. with 12 black and white plates. In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a type of teaching called a dmar khrid, a "red instruction," wherein the lama brings students through a teaching as a physician might dissect a corpse, pointing out and explaining the various parts and organs and their places and functions. In Identity, Ritual and State in Tibetan Buddhism, Martin Mills has done very much the same thing, with the exception that the body he examines is still very much alive, and emerges, to my eyes at least, as a new and wholly vital entity. Mills exposes the subcutaneous and sanguine body of Tibetan Buddhism, the bones and muscles that make up its structure, the blood that flows through it, and the organs that keep it alive, in "a plain and open manner," just as in a dmar khrid.1 The value of such a presentation truly cannot be overstated. An attempt to catalog the contents of each chapter would be both impossible and counterproductive, as the wealth of theoretical material and ethnographic detail is a large part of what makes this book so powerful. Instead, I will identify several topics, several of the vital organs alluded to, that are either not commonly noticed in the academic study of Buddhism, or that are given fresh perspective by Mills's anthropological and sociological methodology, and that are so crucial to understanding how it is that Buddhism lives in a typical Himalayan village. The latter portion of this review explains why I place such high value on this book and its potential place in Buddhist-Christian studies. Identity, Ritual and State is an ethnography of Kumbum Monastery in Lingshed, Ladakh (the eastern half of the Kashmir valley, located in Jammu and Kashmir, India), but its concerns are much more far-reaching than a single remote Himalayan village. The central question of the work is "how we are to understand the nature of religious authority in Tibetan Buddhist monasticism" (p. xiii), although it might more properly be the religious authority of Tibetan [End Page 187] Buddhist monastics. This answer is worked out in three overlapping areas of analysis: local ritual activity, ecclesiastical structure of the monastery, and the ritual foundations of Tibetan political thought (p. xvii). Mills convincingly asserts that there is a framework within which Buddhism happens in the Himalayas. The starting point of this framework is birth itself, which establishes the embodied person. The very physicality of personhood has several implications. First, the body is embedded in a very specific local space and place, and personhood is thus not only embodied, but also chthonic—intimately bound up with the earth or soil onto which it is born. At birth, persons are injected into a complex matrix of relations between people and various spirits, such as household gods and protectors, nāga, and itinerant demons. For example, Lingshed is divided into seven subterritories, each under the jurisdiction of a local deity whose physical abode and reign are well known to all in the village.2 These deities are associated with features of the local geography, and they regulate and influence local agricultural and social production, so birth in one area or another signifies a relation with the deity presiding over it. The land itself is imbued with a notion of personhood and agency. The human body is also the repository for pollution (sgrib), which comes about as a result of violating the established hierarchy of space and place and from bringing about changes to the local matrix of embodied persons. Both bodily pollution concerns and the need for proper relations with local spirit numina mandate definite, ongoing ritual attention. Rituals are occasioned in response to births, deaths, spirit possession, unintentional pollution of places or household objects, and movements within the monastic ecclesiastical structure, or happen regularly according to an astrologically and agriculturally influenced calendar. Rituals are performed by monks not only because they are trained specialists, but because...

Rituals of Solidarity and Security in the Wake of Terrorist Attack

Conflict produces group solidarity in four phases: (1) an initial few days of shock and idiosyncratic individual reactions to attack; (2) one to two weeks of establishing standardized displays of solidarity symbols; (3) two to three months of high solidarity plateau; and (4) gradual decline toward normalcy in six to nine months. Solidarity is not uniform but is clustered in local groups supporting each other's symbolic behavior. Actual solidarity behaviors are performed by minorities of the population, while vague verbal claims to performance are made by large majorities. Commemorative rituals intermittently revive high emotional peaks; participants become ranked according to their closeness to a center of ritual attention. Events, places, and organizations claim importance by associating themselves with national solidarity rituals and especially by surrounding themselves with pragmatically ineffective security ritual. Conflicts arise over access to centers of ritual attention; clashes occur between pragmatists deritualizing security and security zealots attempting to keep up the level of emotional intensity. The solidarity plateau is also a hysteria zone; as a center of emotional attention, it attracts ancillary attacks unrelated to the original terrorists as well as alarms and hoaxes. In particular historical circumstances, it becomes a period of atrocities.

Older Women as Caregivers and Ancestral Protection in Rural Japan

Ancestral appearance in the dreams of older women is closely related to Japanese tendencies to center responsibilities for taking care of family health and well-being on women. Two points related to women and ancestor veneration are: 1) when confronted with the question of how people know they are protected by the ancestors, many informants turned to discussions of specific dream experiences in which ancestors appeared; and 2) although men report seeing ancestors in dreams and ancestral-dream experiences can happen at any age, the appearance of ancestors in dreams has gendered and age-dependent features. Particularly as they enter into middle and old age, women often become caretakers of the collective well-being of the family and the appearance of ancestors in dreams becomes a signal that something is amiss in the world of the living. Regular participation in ancestor-related rituals and reporting of ancestral dreams is one way in which elderly women, in particular, can exercise their caregiving role by mediating the worlds of the living and dead and conveying the concern of the ancestors to their descendants. (Dreams, ancestors, Japan, gender, elderly women, ritual) ********** Ritual behavior associated with shrine visitation and ancestor veneration in Japan is often organized around what can be understood as a total life-care system that is used to enact worldly benefits and well-being for oneself and one's family (Reader and Tanabe 1998). This life-care system involves reciprocal relationships between spiritual entities and humans that are enacted through ritual to ensure and maintain personal and collective well-being. Rituals associated with ancestor veneration are particularly important in this reciprocal and interdependent life-care system. In terms of reciprocity, the dead and living are linked through social interactions enacted in the context of ritual practice. Just as the living keep the ancestors socially involved in their world through ritual performance and provide for the ancestors through food offerings, often of rice and water, the ancestors are seen as watching over and protecting the people whom they have left behind. As one Buddhist priest from Akita Prefecture put it, There is a feeling of give and take between the living and the dead. The ancestors protect the living in return for offerings of rice. However, this relationship is not simply one of exchange nor is it necessarily symmetrical. Without ritual attention, there is a risk that the ancestors will become muenbotoke (lit., unattached or wandering spirits), not cared for properly by the living. In much the same way as one's children and other family members need love and attention, ancestors, too, need emotional support, which is expressed largely through ritual practice. Ancestor-veneration rituals serve to keep the dead attached to people in the world of the living through a combination of affectively and materially maintained bonds. The ritual obligations associated with care are the basis for an interdependent and complementary relationship between living and dead. Both roles, the living and the ancestors, are structured around ideas of supplication and nurturance that shape many interdependent Japanese relationships, such as the mother-child bond. Ancestors and living not only reciprocate, but also depend upon each other for care (Lebra 1976:240). These characteristics of supplication and nurturance exist simultaneously in both roles. The living and the ancestors depend upon each other for their continued well-being and for their existence: the living would not exist without the ancestors, and the ancestors depend upon the living to keep them involved, as memories, in the world of the living and to provide the love and attention that all humans require. In short, living and dead are mutually involved in enacting and maintaining each other's well-being. Well-being within this framework is often conceptualized as extending beyond the individual to include the prosperity and health of one's stem family (Smith 1974), although there is a rising tendency to celebrate the dead apart from the context of the stem family, emphasizing more the memory of specific deceased rather than the collective ancestors (Suzuki 1998:185). …

Behavior, Belonging, and Belief: A Theory of Ritual Practice

A new model of ritual based on Durkheim's ([1912] 1995) theory is developed. It is argued that ritual practices generate belief and belonging in participants by activating multiple social-psychological mechanisms that interactively create the characteristic outcomes of ritual. Specifically, the distinctive elements of ritual practice are shown to induce altered subjective states and effortful and/or anomalous behaviors, which are subsequently misattributed in such a way that belief and belonging are created or maintained around the focus of ritual attention. These processes are traced in detail, and the resulting model is shown to be empirically credible, comprehensive, and theoretically fertile.

The Dead Must be Fed: Symbolic Meanings of the Shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Area

Long viewed as ‘kitchen middens’, the shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Area have -provided archaeologists of coastal California insight into the subsistence and ecology of precontact native groups. In this article, the authors develop a framework for understanding the cultural significance of these shellmounds which regards them as intentional cultural features, incorporates social context, and builds on earlier subsistence-focused studies of the shellmounds in order to better appreciate the meaning of the numerous human remains interred therein. A structural analysis is then used to show that the concepts of food and ancestors joined together at shellmounds, so much so that ritual attention to the ancestors was very likely regarded as essential to ensuring a continuing supply of food.

The Spider and the Pangolin

In the tarantism cult of southern Italy there are two types of actual tarantula spider with which the spirit spider might be identified, but only one is selected as spirit counterpart. In examining the basis of symbol selection here, reference is also made to Lele pangolin symbolism where there are again actually two species of local pangolin, only one of which is paid cult. Mary Douglas's classic analysis ofanimal 'anomalies' fails to address this problem. In the context ofa comparison ofpangolin ritualisation in other Congolese cultures, the following critique of Douglas's treatment of pangolin 'anomalies' suggests a cosmological solution to this puzzle. Douglas's attempt to correlate pangolin power with exogamy is also shown to be questionable. More generally, it is argued that where two or more related animals are subject to differential symbolisation a satisfactory interpretation should explain why one is selected for preferential ritual attention. I In her seminal essay on Lele religious symbolism, Mary Douglas (1957) rightly observed that, in order to be effective, symbols do not need to be grounded in objectively accurate knowledge and may indeed be based on mistaken information. So, in the case of animals selected to act as symbols, what matters is not actual animal behaviour but rather the characteristics and properties imputed to them by those who employ them as symbols. The famous tarantismo spider cult of southem Italy shows how this dictum may sometimes be applicable at one level while not applying at others. The tarantula spirit spider in Apulia (the region containing the eponymous town of Taranto) has potentially two types of actual tarantula spider (Latrodectus and Lycosa) with which it might be identified, but only one (Lycosa) is selected as the actual counterpart for the spirit. The spider (Latrodectus) which is passed over is, paradoxically, armed with a toxic bite capable of indeed causing the symptoms associated with tarantism. This situation of two similar zoological categories, only one of which receives ritual attention, has parallels in Lele animal symbolism (and is not unknown elsewhere). Douglas bases her famous analysis of the 'anomalous' pangolin on one type (Manis tricuspis) and rather passes over the other pangolin (Manis gigantea) which is also found among the Lele. As we shall see, this raises questions about the adequacy of her anomaly argument and invites further consideration of her data. More generally, where such pairs of related zoological avatars are subject to such differential symbolisation this offers a unique opportunity to test the validity of theories of symbolisation. A fully satisfactory interpretation should be able to explain the circumstances in which one of the pair is chosen at the expense of the other.

The Interpretation of Data: Puberty Rites

SINCE the emergence of anthropology as a systematic study a century ago, accounting for similarities and differences in culture among the societies of the world has been the central concern of evolutionists, diffusionists, and functionalists. Van Gennep's classic work on rites of passage deals largely with similarities. Since the time of van Gennep, various writings concerning a single society or a few societies have considered differences in rites of passage, attempting to explain the presence, absence, or relative elaboration of rites concerned with birth, puberty, marriage and other important events in the lives of individuals. These studies, of which Audrey Richards' Chisungu (1956) is the most recent detailed example, have come to us principally from scholars identified as social anthropologists, and they present interpretations relating the rites to features of social structure and social institutions. No study using this approach collates and compares the scattered group of publications on the subject or attempts to be comprehensive. The idea expressed by Durkheim and various of his followers that whatever is important in social life tends to receive ritual attention seems to form the implicit foundation of most studies of this kind. Their objective has been to state why stable marriages or the attainment of adult status and the like are socially important and fraught with difficulties in one society but less important and less disturbing in another. Of a similar vein is the view expressed by Chapple and Coon (1942) that rites are both an indication of disturbed social equilibrium and a device for restoring equilibrium. Where no rites occur, it appears to be assumed that no social disturbances exist; at least, there has been no systematic observation of individual societies to account for differences in practice. It is with some interest, then, that we see the publication by Whiting, Kluckhohn, and Anthony (1958) of a large-scale, cross-cultural comparison of male initiation ceremonies at puberty that offers a specific interpretation to account for the presence and absence of these ritual events and generalizations on the significance of the rites that presumably apply to all societies.2 Interpretations of individual features of puberty rites have come to us previously from psychoanalysis, notably from Freud (1939), and more recently from Bettelheim (1954). Again, these interpretations do not account for variations in practice from society to society, and they do not attempt to quantify data. The study by Whiting and collaborators compares 56 societies and offers an interpretation, presented in quantitative form, that is derived largely from psychoanalytic theory concerning the Oedipus complex. A close relation is reported to exist between customs fostering intimacy between mother and infant son,