Ritual Experience Research Articles

The Archaeology of Religious Ritual

Archaeologists traditionally assumed that rituals were understood best in light of religious doctrines, beliefs, and myths. Given the material focus of archaeology, archaeologists believed that ritual was a particularly unsuitable area for archaeological inquiry. In the past 25 years, archaeologists have increasingly started to address ritual in their research. Some archaeologists with access to extensive historical or ethnohistorical sources continue to see rituals as the enactment of religious principles or myths. Other archaeologists have adopted a more practice-oriented understanding of ritual, arguing that ritual is a form of human action. In emphasizing ritual practice, archaeologists reject a clear dichotomy between religious and nonreligious action or artifacts, focusing instead on the ways that the experience of ritual and ritual symbolism promotes social orders and dominant ideologies.

Dimensão ritual do comportamento de consumo

No dia-a-dia, as pessoas participam regularmente de diversas atividades ritualizadas, seja no lar, no trabalho ou no lazer, tanto como indivíduos quanto como membros de uma comunidade maior. A pessoa média também depende de diversos eventos rituais para marcar os acontecimentos signifi cativos de sua vida, como a formatura, o casamento e a morte. Apesar dessas experiências rituais abrangentes e plenas de significado, a pesquisa sobre o consumidor tem falhado em reconhecer esse amplo domínio comportamental. Este artigo apresenta e elabora o construto ritual como veículo para a interpretação do comportamento de consumo e apresenta os resultados de dois estudos exploratórios que investigam o conteúdo artefatual e psicossocial dos rituais de cuidados pessoais de adultos jovens.

Remembering the Baroque Era: Historical Consciousness, Local Identity and the Holy Week Celebrations in a Former Mining Town in Brazil

This article looks at how historical consciousness has been constructed and sustained through the Holy Week celebrations in Campanha, a small former gold mining town in southern Minas Gerais, Brazil. By drawing on ethnographic and archival material, it argues that ritual experiences play a critical role in shaping conceptions of the past. In Campanha, as in other former mining towns of the region, Holy Week is structured around a highly theatrical, “baroque” template and accompanied by a colonial musical repertoire. The celebration provides the local population with a context for a direct encounter with the town's glorious golden past, and for this reason it has become a major emblem of local identity. Yet in its efforts to implement the directives of Vatican II, the church is striving to eradicate “elitist” practices of the past and this is threatening the continuity of the Holy Week festivities. The confrontations between church officials and the faithful that this situation has generated have heightened local historical consciousness, but they have also drawn attention to the distinct conceptions of history held within the town. Ultimately, these differences rest upon disparate orientations to religiosity itself: while the clergy struggle to instate a “modern”, “popular” church, the local population engage in Holy Week as a source for “baroque experiences” that renew their links with the past.

A Million Shaktis Rising: Pongala, a Women's Festival in Kerala, India

Each spring Thiruvananthapuram the capital city of Kerala India shuts down for a day while more than a million women of many religions communities and classes line the streets with their pots to cook porridge for Attukal Amma (Mother). They are performing a women’s ritual that is deeply rooted in ancient Kerala mythology and cultural tradition and also has powerful meaning for women today as evidenced by its rapid growth during the past twenty years. My research of Attukal Pongala a women’s offering to the goddess Bhagavati at Attukal Temple in Kerala South India brings to the academy some voices of women speaking about their own ritual experiences. This work attempts to place women “center stage” and to present them as “subjects not objects with their own experiences and aspirations.” Although there were differences in women’s ritual experiences based on caste class and religion I attempt to understand what in the experience of offering Pongala each woman found valuable. (excerpt)

Professional Baseball and Fan Disillusionment: A Religious Ritual Analysis

Over the last ten years, Major League Baseball has suffered a significant loss of fan support. The reasons for this are varied and numerous, but an explanatory theory to unite them is largely lacking. This is particularly evident within the field of religious scholarship where baseball, if spoken of at all, is romanticized and rarely analyzed for the problems it faces. Or because of the secular trappings of professional sport and its willingness to adopt the rationalized means of organizing and expressing itself, some scholars argue that religion is largely absent there. Conversely in this paper, I show how baseball has in the past and continues to provide a kind of religious ritual experience for the fan via its use of a life-cycle. Then I will argue that the way in which business and baseball interact today results in a dis-integration of said coherent experience that prohibits many fans from engaging with their sport.

Beyond Belief: Religious Experience, Ritual, and Cultural Neuro-phenomenology in the Interpretation of Past Religious Systems

While there is growing agreement within anthropology and archaeology that notions of ‘experience’ can contribute to our interpretations of the past, this article suggests that there is a need to incorporate insight gathered from the fields of cultural phenomenology and cultural neuro-phenomenology into general anthropological understandings of cross-cultural religious experience. Specifically, this article explores the insight offered by cultural neuro-phenomenology into the relationships between religious symbolism, ritual, power, religious belief, and individual religious experience. In assessing the role that belief, as instantiated through ritually-induced religious experience, plays in the maintenance or alteration of state-level religious systems, this article will outline the ways in which this insight may both help us better to understand past religious experience as well as to interpret the maintenance and alteration of past religious systems. To demonstrate the potential of this approach, this article will conclude with a brief discussion of the fall of the Classic Maya state religious system.

Something to do with Demeter: Ritual and Performance in Aristophanes' Women at the Thesmophoria

LIKE HIS CHARACTER THE KINSMAN, Aristophanes invades Athenian women’s religious space. He puts onstage for the whole city a religious festival restricted to women. He suggests that women use this occasion to drink and plot against men, and he portrays them as carrying on adulterous affairs and duping their husbands. As a result of this negative portrayal of women, scholars have concluded that the play undermines women’s position in the festival and in the city. Elizabeth Bobrick (1997), for example, argues that the play misrepresents women’s experience in ritual. Lauren Taaffe (1993) insists the play shows that women are only men in disguise, that it is not really about women at all but rather uses them to highlight male concerns. And Angus Bowie (1993, 227) concludes that in this play Aristophanes demonstrates that comedy, not tragedy, has the right to “give an accurate and fulsome picture of female villainy.” On the face of it, Women at the Thesmophoria satirizes women’s real ritual experience and does not respectfully depict the Thesmophoria— a very important festival celebrated throughout Greece, which promoted agricultural and human fertility. And yet, despite the Kinsman’s invasion and his mockery of women, the role of women in ritual is not really undercut in this play. The female characters who inhabit the comic stage and protest their portrayal in drama do not aim to redefine their social roles as wives and mothers. Instead, they use the authority of their roles to mount a successful attack against Euripides because he undermines these functions. In fact, the play acknowledges and validates women’s contribution to the fertility of the polis in two different ways. After the Kinsman is unmasked and taken captive by the women, four different strategies for rescuing him are staged. After all these strategies, derived from plays by Euripides, fail, a fifth strategy succeeds. As scholars have noted, the Kinsman’s captivity and rescue parallel the founding myth of the Thesmophoria festival, the story of Persephone’s

Adolescent satisfaction in family rituals and psychosocial development: A developmental systems theory perspective.

Adolescent satisfaction in family rituals and psychosocial development (E. Greenberger & A. B. Sorenson, 1974) were explored in the context of adolescent personality characteristics (International Personality Item Pool, 1999) and family environment characteristics (S. M. Gavazzi, M. J. Reese, & R. M. Sabatelli, 1998; D. H. Olson et al., 1983). Data were collected from 159 female undergraduates with the Adolescent Satisfaction in Family Rituals Scale (D. G. Eaker & L. H. Walters, 1999). Family ritual satisfaction was positively related to late adolescent psychosocial development and mediated the relation between family boundaries and psychosocial development. Furthermore, the relation between personality (measured as discontentedness, an aspect of neuroticism) and satisfaction with family rituals was found to be mediated by family boundaries in preliminary analyses. These results suggest that the relevance of family ritual experiences to adolescent psychosocial development is in part a function of an individual's personality and the family environment.

A community of education: Nepalese children living and learning religious ritual

This paper expands and extends the existing qualitative literature on the relationship between children and the social environment. With reference to a group of Nepalese children I highlight how children learn about religious ritual, and specific rituals in which they engage during their childhood years. I also explore the differences and similarities of children's religious ritual experiences between religious affiliation, castes and gender. Analyses of ethnographic and interview data revealed four important points. First, the children equated religious ritual learning in the forms of daily puja and the coming‐of‐age ceremonies. Second, both Hindu and Buddhist children engaged in these rituals and did not differentiate how Hindu worship differed from Buddhist worship. Third, the children identified their social world—their immediate and extended family and friends—as the primary place where they learned about religious rituals. Finally, children from the low castes, when socialised with children from higher castes, participated in religious ritual more often than children who did not socialise with children from the higher castes.

Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England by Huston Diehl

310Comparative Drama tiated being" (163) despite having ignored Latin American theater. Most egregious is the specious rationale for excluding women: claiming that no female dramatist equals in status the selected males, the authors uphold the very dynamic which they lament: "In any case, the condition of women as the most oppressed of the oppressed has received much less attention in published post-colonial drama than it should have done" (166). This emphasis on published texts putatively permits only superficial mention of workshop productions by such figures as Augusto Boal, though such work was over-valued in the analysis of Fugard. Ironies culminate in the final echo of Said's call "to transcend static notions ofidentity" (168) and in the closing reference to Brian Friel and Samuel Beckett, not in acknowledgment of arbitrary omissions but in validation of the study ofpost-colonial theater as a means to understand our own. The value of self-knowledge notwithstanding, this validation veers perilously into that colonial territory of FirsWThird-World hierarchies which post-colonial theory targets, underscoring the contradictions of a text which could have so fruitfully hit the mark. JANET V. HAEDICKE Northeast Louisiana University Huston Diehl. Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Pp. xv + 238. $39.95. In this important new study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theology and literature, Huston Diehl argues "that Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is both a product of the Protestant Reformation—a reformed drama—and a producer of Protestant habits of thought—a reforming drama." Drawing "on the insights of symbolic anthropologists who believe that religious practices help shape both individual consciousness and cultural forms," and focusing on "what Clifford Geertz identifies as 'the disruptive, disintegrative, and psychologically disturbing ' aspects of religion," Diehl treats tragedies by Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Middleton, and Webster "as one area in which the disruptions , conflicts, and radical changes wrought by the Protestant Reformation are publicly explored." Diehl is "particularly interested in the [Reformation] controversies surrounding the images and rituals of the medieval Church because the issues they raise—about representation, art, theatricality, spectacle, interpretation, and imagination—so clearly pertain to the drama": "By inspiring new kinds of rimais, spectacles, and dramas, the reformed religion, I argue, contributes to the formation of a uniquely Protestant theater in early modern England." In her seven rich and concise chapters, Diehl first "gives a historical account of the Protestant reformers' responses to a pronounced iconophilia in Reformation England," then "demonstrates that early Pro- Reviews3 1 1 testant artists as well as Protestant polemicists like John Foxe employ a revolutionary rhetoric that reinterprets the sacred genres and images of the traditional Church and depicts scenes of martyrdom and iconoclasm as powerful and even spectacular theater." In the remaining chapters Diehl turns "to the tragedies themselves in order to explore some of the ways the Reformation, with its radical critique of late medieval piety, its iconoclastic violence against the devotional images of the Roman Church, and its suppression of the Roman Mass and popular religious drama, stimulates theatrical production." Chapter 3 attempts to show, with a special emphasis on Hamlet and Doctor Faustus, "that Elizabethan and Jacobean drama reflexively address the reformers' inquiry into the legitimacy of the theater, exploring Protestant-induced fears that plays seduce and corrupt their audiences." Chapter 4 tries to "analyze the distinctive habits ofmind that the Roman Mass, on the one hand, and the Reformed Lord's Supper, on the other, induce in their worshippers," and to "show how Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies—with their intense exploration of mystery and representation —rehearse the crucial differences between these competing ritual experiences ." Chapter 5 "argues that early modern tragedies represent a world filled with false and demonic as well as divine signs, engaging their spectators directly in the problem of interpretation." Chapter 6 focuses on "representations of erotic love and marriage in Stuart love tragedies" and tries to show "how they interrogate the fatal identification of images and women in early Protestant culture." Chapter 7 analyzes "the way Webster appropriates a Protestant rhetoric ofwitnessing in The Duchess of Malfi, nurturing in his own spectators a selfreflexivity that can best be understood in...

Prodigal's Progress: Jay Wright's Focal Center

Jay Wright concludes his poem Beginning Again, the last in his first volume titled The Homecoming Singer, with the following lines: And now my ancient rhythm calls me, out of ashes and fraternal death, you, mother Idoto, naked I stand a prodigal lost in your legend ... An aching prodigal, who would make miracles to understand the simple given. The lines cited within the above passage were actually taken from the opening lines of the late Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo's sequence Heavensgate in his first collected volume, Labyrinths. The first poem of that sequence represents an initiate's act of submission as he begins his ritual cleansing and self-dedication to the guiding spirits of his clan. I quote the entire poem: BEFORE YOU, mother Idoto, naked I stand; before your watery presence, a prodigal leaning on an oilbean, lost in your legend. Under your power wait I on barefoot, watchman for the watchword at Heavensgate; out of the depths my cry: give ear and hearken (19) I think that Wright's citation of Okigbo's lines is significant in a number of respects, some of which have to do with the contexts within which he defined his creative agenda. Born in Albuquerque, he grew up there and in San Pedro, California, achieving full maturity in California in the sixties when many African Americans were raising intense questions about who they were and where they fitted within the larger American society. Many of the artists found their answers in the cultural lines of communication that had opened up between African Americans and Africans in the years of the Black Renaissance. Langston Hughes aided the process by editing two anthologies of African writing in the early sixties, thus introducing his fellow Americans to the urgent voices, new and not so new, that were then drawing the attention of the world to the unfamiliar outlooks--and the often fierce sentiments--of peoples gradually shedding the yoke of European colonialism. Christopher Okigbo had published most of his poetry by the mid-sixties. In a style that may have suited the temperament of Jay Wright, he addressed himself in his poems to rather intense questions about the relationship of traditional African culture to ideas and outlooks that colonialism had introduced into his society. Much of his earlier poetry was therefore set within the structure of a ritual experience in which these various influences were brought into a mantic confrontation with one another. At the end of this long, searing mystical experience, in the final movement of the sequence Distances (69-76), the poet re-emerges to declare that, although he cannot pretend to have solved the conundrums raised by the clash of images in his personality, he remains beholden to the protective forces of his community from which he would seemed to have strayed.(1) Wright published The Homecoming Singer in 1971, four years after Okigbo's death while fighting in the Nigerian civil war. No doubt he had encountered Okigbo's poetry well before this publication date, and recognized a certain affinity in both men's sentiments and visions. In appropriating Okigbo's lines into his own inaugural volume, the African American poet would seem to have gained some inspiration from his African counterpart as he sought to articulate his own creative mission. Before Singer, Wright had published a short pamphlet of poems titled Death as History. Roughly half the poems in this collection eventually found their way--with minor revisions--into Singer, among them the piece entitled Destination: Accomplished, the final poem in the former volume. In this poem, we get a sense of the poet's persona reaching a point of determination in which he resolves to get Back to these history books, to my stroking of these beautiful, discarded masks I keep. …

McClenon's "Shamanic Healing, Human Evolution, and the Origin of Religion": A Critique

One central claim in James McClenon's article that the benefits of shamanistic hypnosis caused an evolutionary increase in genes for suggestibility is interesting and seems somewhat plausible. However, the arguments presented neither adequately support it nor the claim that such an increase constitutes the origin of religion. The claim that an increased suggestibility was the origin of religion is complicated by including two senses of origin: as the chronological point at which something begins, and as the cause of that something. In principle, both issues can be addressed simultaneously, but the task is doubly daunting. His essay attempts to locate the origin of religion both chronologically and causally: religion began in an earlier, shamanic, gathering-and-hunting period of human life, and as a consequence of hypnotic sensibility. The claims that shamanism was the earliest form of religion and that it arose among early Homo sapiens may well be true. Shamanism is strongly associated with modern gatherer-hunter societies; and early, physically modern humans doubtless were gatherers and hunters. However, there is no direct evidence about their religion, which is one reason why most scholars of religion have put aside the search for a chronological origin. The second claim about origin, that of cause, is that religion is possible because people are susceptible to hypnotism. Specifically, religious ideas exist to account for feelings experienced during hypnotic ritual. Among other possible benefits, this might answer the old question How are myth and ritual related? The question historically has taken various forms such as, is one of the two primary and the other secondary? Does ritual enact myth, or does myth rationalize ritual? Or is the relationship more complex? McClenon, for the most part, holds that experience precedes belief and thus that ritual is primary. However, the author is inconsistent on this relationship. First, he says religious belief stems from (unformed) ritual experience (McClenon 345). Then, ritual experience is guided by symbols, that is, by formulations of belief (347). On page 347 (as a testable feature of the theory), however, religious experience shapes religious ideology. First, that is, experience causes belief; then belief causes experience; and then the reverse again. It is true that a complex, feedback relationship may obtain; but we are given neither a discussion of this issue nor even an acknowledgment that an issue exists. We get only a circle: experience requires ideas (to justify it) and ideas require experience (as their basis). What exactly religious ideas are, and whence they come, we never learn. The view (first associated with Schleiermacher and later with Otto) that religion consists essentially of unmediated experience now is widespread in popular culture. But it also has been convincingly called into question by Proudfoot (1985), who urges that what we do and undergo becomes experience only upon being interpreted. In Proudfoot's example, a

Art, Music and Religious Experience in Libation Pouring of Akan Religion

The Akans of Ghana are traditionally accustomed to celebrating different rituals which are enshrined in their cultural life. Libation pouring, which accompanies the celebration of great rituals, amidst the subsidence of the sound of music and dance, can display a special art in religion. The primary objective of this paper is to examine libation as a ritual experience, and in so doing to draw attention to its art forms and relevance as regards the psychological significance for the Akan society which practises it. What beliefs connect the pouring of libation in Akan society? What are the occasions for practising this ritual? Are there some distinctions in the artistic prayer of libation? These questions lead directly to the proposition which states that libation is able to generate some forms of religious experience. It is then argued that libation ritual has psychological consequences beneficial to the group and the individual who privately engages in it.

With Dance and Drum. A Psychocultural Investigation of the Ritual Meaning-Making System of an Afro-Brazilian, Macumba Community in Salvador, Brazil

This paper focuses on the Macumba community's way of making meaning in its Afro-Brazilian cultural context. The community's meaning-making system is analyzed through five central points relating psychosocial function to religious ritual experience. In this Macumba community context ritual, through dance and drum, serves as the basic multi-dimensional vehicle for psychosocial and spiritual development in the community.

Ritual experience and its emergence with story: An experience in meaning

The purpose of this research investigation was to understand the essential features and structures of ritual through the perceptions of 36 women's stories of their families of origin and how this may have had impact on their current sense of affiliation and meaning. Various theoretical perspectives were reviewed with a phenomenological lens. The study utilized findings from previous research in the areas of ritual, gender, and meaning. Results indicated a central theme of high ritual perspective affecting high current affiliation perspective. Ritual was a female-centered experience in the families. An experience of affiliation in one's family of origin seemed to indicate the creation of an affiliation template that allows one to recognize and experience a sense of relatedness in current connections.

Coping with Apocalypse in Canada: Experiences of Endtime in la Mission de l'Esprit Saint and the Institute of Applied Metaphysics

This investigation of millenarian activity in two Quebec NRMs addresses the question of why one group failed but the other thrived on the experience of prophetic failure. Within the framework of Festinger et als' five conditions (1956) and the theories of Gager (1975), and Hardyck and Braden (1962), it is postulated that if millenarian activity is approached not as a set of beliefs, but rather as a collective ritual of initiation into a new type of religious organization, then an important factor in the survival of millenarian movements is the quality of the ritual experience. A comparison of Winifred Barton's aesthetically satisfying apocalypse with the unmitigated fiasco that occurred in la Mission de l'Esprit Saint suggests that the prophet who is skillful as a stage manager and group facilitator can avert the crisis of cognitive dissonance and induce in the participants a state of noncognitive consonance.

Drawing the Black and White Line: Defining Black Women's Theatre

Yvonne Brewster is best known in Britain as artistic director of Talawa Theatre, but she has also been active in the theatres of Jamaica, Africa, and America, having worked as a drama teacher, television production assistant and presenter, and film director in Jamaica before beginning her international theatre directing career. Talawa was founded in 1985 by four women, with Yvonne Brewster as director, and with the aim of using ‘the ancient African ritual and black political experience of our forebears to inform, enrich, and enlighten British theatre’. Although Talawa has as yet been unable to give the work of black women writers the attention it deserves, the company is itself primarily female: the artistic director and the majority of employees are women, all the designers to date have been women, and so predominantly are the technical and stage management staff. A medium- to large-scale touring company, Talawa worked without a building base until 1991, when the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre became its home. Yvonne Brewster has directed all Talawa's work to date, focusing primarily on productions of the classics with black performers and on introducing the work of black playwrights to British audiences. Her productions have included The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James (1985–86), An Echo in the Bone by Dennis Scott (1986–87), O Babylon! by Derek Walcott (1987–88), Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1988–89), The Gods Are Not to Blame by Ola Rotimi (1989–90), The Dragon Can't Dance by Earl Lovelace (1990–91), and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1991–92). Yvonne Brewster is also the editor of Methuen's two volumes of Black Plays (1987 and 1989). Here she is interviewed by Lizbeth Goodman, who has just completed her doctoral dissertation on women's theatre in Britain at Cambridge, and is currently working with the Open University.

Guilt and The Internalization Of Fear

Visual and auditory hallucinations in an adolesc ent boy were examined from the frame of re ference of hi s fa ther’s death. Rational counselling strategies were designed to allow him to test his feeling s of guilt and fear as they rel ated to hi s father’s death and to help pl ace those in the context of his present life. Hallucinations stopped following the counselling programme. These observations are discussed in relation to children’s experience of folk lore, religious ritual and belief, and cultural attitudes to death.

Guilt and the Internalization of Fear

Visual and auditory hallucinations in an adolescent boy were examined from the frame of re ference of his father’s death. Rational counselling strategies were designed to allow him to test his feelings of guilt and fear as they related to his father’s death and to help place those in the context of his present life. Hallucinations stopped following the counselling programme. These observations are discussed in relation to children’s experience of folk lore, religious ritual and belief, and cultural attitudes to death.

Religion, Health, and Aging: A Review and Theoretical Integration

Measurement of Religion, Mental and Physical Health Religious Beliefs and Mental Health Religious Beliefs and Physical Health Religious Ritual and Mental Health Religious Ritual and Physical Health Religious Experience, Mental and Physical Health Religion and a Social Stress Model Case Studies The Social Gerontolgist's Perspective by Barbara Payne The Physician's Perspective by Barbara Payne A Ministerial Perspective by Mona Smiley Implications for Clinicians and Avenues for Further Research Conclusion Bibliography Index