Ritual Places Research Articles

Mandala et rituel de confession à Dunhuang

Abstract This is a study of several Dunhuang manuscripts connected with mandalas. A link is established between several sketches of unfinished mandalas and an apocryphal Tantra called Jingangjun jing &ЖШШ , which is an imitation of the famous Jingangding jing ййШМ, a Chinese translation of the Vajrašekhara-sutra, or Diamond Pointed Sutra, supposed to be the basis of the one of the two great mandalas in the Chinese- Japanese tradition, the Vajradhâtu-mandala. The Dunhuang apocryphal Tantra also claims to have been translated into Chinese by Amoghavajra (VIIIe s.), the translator of the Jingangding jing. The Tantras (P. 3913 in the Paris collection, S. 2144 V° in the London collection and dong 74 in Beijing collection) and sketches of mandalas (P. 2012 in the Paris collection) seem to belong to the same ritualistic tradition. The sketches fit well with some of the descriptions of mandalas in the Tantra and the Tantra supplies ritual procedure for drawing the mandalas. Ritualized confession is the basis of these mandalas. Preliminary rites, such as jingdi (purify ritual place), jingjie (purify ritual enclosure), jiejie (delimit ritual enclosure), chanhui (confession), and primordial elements (dhàtu) like feng (wind), shui (water), kong (space), are now the names of Bodhisattvas. The four immeasurable thoughts, dad (great benevolent), dabei (great compassion), daxi (great joy), dashe (great equanimity), also become divine protectors, or Vajrasattvas. These new Bodhisattvas and Vajrasattvas are assigned a place in the mandalas. These Dunhuang mandalas are akin to the mandalas known from Indian, Tibetan and Chinese canonical sources, but with specific modifications. They belong to a local tantric tradition, different from the ones known from India and Tibet and from Japan, which borrowed it from China.

Signposts on the journey: the place of ritual in spiritual care.

An exploration of the nature and function of rituals is undertaken in this paper to consider the importance and relevance of rituals in spiritual care, within the palliative care speciality. Understandings of ritual tend to focus on either their association with religious practices or ritualistic action. However, rituals can still provide a practical and symbolic way to facilitate change for individuals, both within an organisational context and in spiritual journeys within their own lives. Empirical work examining the hospice culture, using a rites of passage framework, illustrates how the presence of rituals within hospice care may be helpful for individuals experiencing the transition from life to death.

Les occupations humaines de la grotte de l'Adaouste (Jouques, Bouches-du-Rhône) [The human occupations of Adaouste cave (Jouques, Bouches-du-Rhône).

On the left bank of the Durance valley, not far from Jouques, the Adaouste Pliocene fossil karstic network was occupied several times during the Quaternary period. Recent research earned out between 1986 and 1991 has brought to light the following occupations: - a short halt of deer and horse hunters (Mousterian type Ferrassie) at the beginning of the ancient Wurm; - two temporary camps of ibex hunters (Upper Magdalenian) at the end of the Boiling to Dryas II; - la succession of Holocene levels with Neolithic occupation, including one Epicardial bunal level, several middle Neolithic levels with use of the site as a place of ritual (human remains with utmarks, intentional fractures, bracelets) end Chassey and Calcholitic levels. A study of the hunted mammals in the lower levels of the site shows for the first time in Provence, the existence of an ibex group caucasica population at the beginning of the last glaciation and an alpine ibex population (Adaouste morphotype) during the final stages of the Wurm.

Ritual Art: a Key to the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead

The Bambara sculpture is a ritual object, in fact one of the dramatis personae of a ritual drama. The Civara, as it is called, is carried on the head during the ritual dance as a token of the presence of the mythical antilope which brought agriculture to the Bambara. Besides the male Civara there is also a female one, and in their dance, the two of them dramatize the fertilizing interaction of sun and soil. Without further exploring Bambara ritual, we may notice that a piece of pictorial art is here an integral part of a ritual. It is a mask, carried during the dance and designating its bearer as the mythical antilope. Also belonging to a ritual are the space and the surroundings in which it is carried out. It is well known how ritual places and temple rooms are often structured and decorated to make out the background and the framework of ritual acts. The place of ritual may be designed as an imago mundi, or it may be chosen or named according to mythical prototypes. Temple rooms may be decorated with mythological and cosmological motifs to identify the ritual acts that take place in them as mythical deeds and cosmologically significant events, exactly as the civara-mask identifies the ritual dance in its mythological and cosmological significance.

Forming a Holy People: Ritual Places

Une assemblee qui a participe aux rites dans des lieux rituels est transformee par ces experiences communautaires; meme la contemplation d'objets rituels ne peut accomplir cette transformation. La mise en place de lieux rituels pour une celebration prodigue des rites d'initiation et de l'eucharistie au milieu de l'assemblee invite a la concentration rituelle. A l'eglise Saint Pie V (Passadenas. Texas), les paroissiens ont reagi avec surprise aux questions qui leur demandaient comment ils osaient celebrer si courageusement

Turin, 1564–1680: Urban Design, Military Culture, and the Creation of the Absolutist Capital by Martha D. Poliak, and: Military Architecture, Cartography and the Representation of the Early Modern European City: A Checklist of Treatises on Fortification in the Newberry Library by Martha D. Poliak

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 185 need results from DeVries’s concentrating on military technology rather than embedding the topic in a broad study of war. Indeed, because this volume focuses on technology rather than war, it forms a useful complement to Philippe Contamine’s synthesis, War in the Middle Ages (New York, 1984). Readers of this book will come away with a comprehensive and useful view of the current state of much of the scholarship in medieval military technology, and the bibliography is a tool they will return to with profit. Unfortunately, minor errors remain unpurged; those who have visited London and seen the four original turrets rising above the White Tower will balk at the remark that the edifice once sported only three (p. 222). E. Malcolm Parkinson Dr. Parkinson, an associate professor of history at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, has written on tournaments in early modern Europe. He is a past president of the board of trustees of the Higgins Armory Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, a museum of medieval and Renaissance arms, armor, and warfare. Turin, 1564—1680: Urban Design, Military Culture, and the Creation ofthe Absolutist Capital. By Martha D. Poliak. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Pp. xxii + 267; illustrations, notes, index. $49.95. Military Architecture, Cartography and the Representation of the Early Modern European City: A Checklist of Treatises on Fortification in the Newberry Library. By Martha D. Poliak. Chicago: Newberry Library, 1991. Pp. xxxvi + 119; illustrations, notes. $15.00 + $1.50 handling (paper). Martha Poliak, in the introduction to her very ambitious book, promises to “synthesize the history of military architecture and urban design” in order to answer two “larger questions: How was the city planned and built? How were its forms endowed with meaning?” (p. 3). She proposes to address issues of the rulers’ gender, the role of ideology and political theory, and the place of public rituals and poetry in the creation of a capital city. Turin is a case study of the transformation of a small garrison town in the often-contested region of Piedmont into a city celebrated for its imposing design. The royal ambitions of the House of Savoy provided the driving force that extended the streets, renewed the fortifications, and adorned the city with palaces and churches while enforcing a regularity of design unsurpassed in its day. The succeeding dukes used every contrivance available to aspiring royalty to effect this change. They brought their family’s most valued relic, the Holy Shroud, to Turin in order to make it a destination of religious pilgrimages. They dazzled the populace and court alike with public 186 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE spectacles. Most important to Poliak is their use of both civil and military architecture to inspire awe in their more powerful neighbors. With evidence garnered from a vast body of archival documents, Poliak documents the ways in which the rulers of Turin attempted to fulfill their ambitions. Of interest to the readers of Technology and Culture will be the extent to which military architects, military strategy, and what Poliak calls “military spirit” shaped the entire city. She argues that the military expression of the dynastic ambition was the overarching principle that united every aspect of Turin’s design through unprecedented “regularity, uniformity, and auster­ ity” (p. 5). Poliak more than fulfills her promise of providing a “coherent narrative history.” I am afraid, however, that many of the themes she wished to explore get buried in layers of description. It is too easy for the reader to become mired in her evidence and to lose sight of her larger goals. As I reached the end of her text I hoped to find a conclusion that might recapitulate the ways in which all the details would fit into the larger picture. Instead, the book simply comes to an abrupt and unsatisfying halt. The level of detail, without a commen­ surate level of analysis and interpretation, only exasperated my impatience with certain editorial decisions. The excessive use of excerpts from the original sources in the footnotes and the reprinting of numerous photographs resulted in a long and expensive volume. Nonetheless, Poliak has provided an excellent description of the process of building Turin. Although...

Producing "Kombination XI:" Using Modern Hardware and Software Systems for Composition

The author discusses two topics related to the realization of his composition Kombination XI: A Ritual Place for Live and Processed Voices . The first is his development of a notation system and a set of software tools based on weighted trees that span the expressive and structural domains of music. The second is his process of realization, in which several different digital signal-processing software and hardware systems were used in consort as one instrument.

Application of microwave heating techniques to the detoxification of contaminated soils

This paper deals with the real–world emissions of particle bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) emitted from different religious and ritual burning practices in India. The emission factors (EFs) of various PAHs were characterized over integrated stages of burning practices including pyrolysis, flaming and smoldering. Sampling was carried out in selected five different types of religious and ritual places: Hindu Temples (HT), Muslim Holy shrines (MG), Buddhist Temples (BT), Hindu Marriage Places (MP) and Cremation Centers (Hindu Funeral Pyre) (CC); where burning practices mostly include natural and synthetic biomaterials in different proportions. Seventy PAHs were analyzed and grouped in light PAHs (LPAHs=25) and heavy PAHs (HPAHs=45) according to number of benzene rings present and respective molecular weights. The average EF of total PAHs (TPAHs) from MP, MG, BT, HT and CC is estimated as 77.04 ± 5.39, 99.09 ± 6.02, 90.35 ± 6.76, 22.78 ± 1.57, and 77.15 ± 6.16 mg kg−1, respectively. Country level emission budget of particulate bound TPAHs from religious and ritual burning practices has also been evaluated to 0.47 Gg yr−1; contributed ~23% of the 2.07 Gg yr−1 – Indian emission budget of PAHs from unknown sources reported earlier.

Ritual and Southwest Asian Pastoralists: Implications of the Komachi Case

Recent studies of southwest Asian pastoral nomads have generally focused on problems other than their rituals. By default this has tended to leave unchallenged the implication, arising from Barth's classic work (1961), that southwest Asian pastoralists have no meaningful or coherent rituals. This paper demonstrates that the Komachi nomads of southern Iran do have coherent, meaningful rituals that highlight significant distinctions in their social order. It suggests that far more data is needed before a final judgment on the place of ritual in these societies can be reached.

Contrapuntal Significations in Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman

Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman has been widely acclaimed as a great example of African tragedy. It is, in fact, the dramatic aggregation of Soyinka's treatise in Myth, Literature and the African World. Hence, the play is most often 'read' in the lights of its 'difference' from western notions of the tragic, the place of ritual in African drama and the interface of myth and history in creating drama, among others. As a result of these, and influenced largely by the author's note on the play, Death and the King's Horseman is rarely considered as a play on the 'clash of cultures', which is usually viewed as a 'reductionist' orientation or reading. This article, however, engages the text from the purview of cultural clash in order to apprehend the very catalyst that sparks the tragic concerns in it. By applying deconstructionist reading upon the text, the paper plies on the horizon of contrapuntality and alterity to reveal significations which hint at the difference in cultural worldviews as the essence of the tragedy that is Death and the King's Horseman. It also suggests that such a reading enriches, rather than reduces, the textuality and significations of the play beyond pseudo-scientific taxonomies.Keywords: Deconstruction, Wole Soyinka, Contrapuntality, Alterity, Significations

Religion and Society Among the Kuria of East Africa

Opening ParagraphThis paper attempts to answer two broad questions. Firstly, what is Kuria religion about? and secondly, what is the relationship between Kuria religious concepts and their social life and what is the place of ritual in this relationship? Neither of these are questions which Kuria would themselves ask—certainly in this form—but they are perhaps the two leading questions which an anthropologist must ask in examining the religious beliefs and ritual practice of another people. Much depends upon the answer to the first, for it is in terms of the answer that one is likely to establish the particular coherence of ‘integrity’ of a people's beliefs, held existentially in the context of their own social life. The answer is relevant too to an issue which has concerned those writing on related peoples of the same area as the Kuria—the problem of the relation between magic and religious beliefs. Thus Wagner, writing on the Bantu Kavirondo, uses the undifferentiated category of ‘magico-religious’ belief. But what exactly is meant by this umbrella term, and does it not itself obfuscate what it seeks to define? The second question considered—the relationship between Kuria religious concepts and their social life—is a continuation of the first in relation to their very elaborate and, in one sense, autonomous system of ritual based in particular on a complex sequence of rites of passage. These rites are a very striking feature of Kuria culture. It is, I think, by considering them in this double context—as expressing religious values on the one hand while controlling social behaviour on the other—that these rites are most fully understood.